Story Progress

 It's Sunday. I plan to take it a little easy though I've been working a while, focusing on a short story this morning. 

I know where it ends and I'm concentrating on making the "getting there" meaningful for the characters.

I read Joyce Carol Oates's novelette "Night-Gaunts" yesterday in a collection of the same name. It's her focus on the path of a fictionalized Lovecraft.

I have often described discovery writing, which I prefer to "pantsing" to finding my away along in the dark with a flashlight gradually illuminating a little more and a little more. 

Oates uses POV to describe the writing process of the Lovecraft character, Horace Love, this way:

"For the (now-adult) survivor the experience of writing is like making his way along a path by the light of a quarter-moon: he can see enough of the path before him to make his way safely though in fact he is surrounded by shadows on all sides.

"The gift of `weird sight' is that you see just as much as it is required for you to see. Beyond that, you have no need."      

It's a bit more eloquent in the words that fit a Lovecraft character. 

I often writing from an outline or at least a mental outline, but that's still about how it goes. Almost uncanny to have it crop up in a story that way.

I continue editing A Disturbance of Shadows, polishing details but really trying to ferret out any misplaced words or small errors that my brain has glossed over in previous drafts.

I had hoped to be finished with this short novel much sooner but I know I'll thank myself later for being meticulous. 

A Bit of Christmas Microfiction

@willysid #microfiction #horrortiktok #horrortok #Christmas #christmasghoststory #christmasghost #ghost #scary #spooky #flash #YALit #youngadult #youngadultliterature #YA #horror #flash #flashfiction #merrychristmas #holidays #yaliterature ♬ Instrumental Christmas Music - Christmas Music

Halloween Harvest Six Word Horror Stories

 

                                                         Photo Credit: Kelsie Cabeceiras - Pexels

Six word horror stories are fun and strive for a quick, single effect. I thought it would be interesting for spooky season aka Halloween aka harvest season, to do six-word horror stories that stand alone but also can be assembled into a bit of a linked narrative with the concluding installment to appear on Halloween, 2022.

SEE ALSO: Horrortober 2 - Halloween Horror Fiction

Segments area appearing on various social media outlets, and the complete string of micro stories will be assembled here in original order with new six word stories added as they appear on TikTok, Twitter and other platforms. The final entry will appear on October 31. 

FURTHER READING: How to Write an Unforgettable Six-Word Story

The Harvest Horror Six-Word Stories

1. The silent Jack-o'-lanterns know what's coming.

2. Did you see? The scarecrow moved! 

3. Wind parts corn plants. Shadows awake. 

4.  Before writhing shapes, an ancient altar. 

5.  Seven crows cry, serenading dancing silhouettes. 

6.  Black-robed penitents invite materializing figures.  

7. Shimmering shadows detach from darkness, walk.

8. Of course, Harvest Gods are plants!

9. Roots, massive tentacles, reach FOR YOU!

Story Acceptance - Unknown Superheroes vs. the Forces of Darkness

I received a short story acceptance the other day, on my birthday in fact. It's for an anthology to be called Unknown Superheroes vs. the Forces of Darkness edited by Steve Dillon and Will Jacques. Will is also illustrating. Another image here.  

It will be headlined by Jonathan Maberry with a story called "The Collector." The guidelines were pretty generous on the parameters of the heroes, so I wound up writing a tale called "Side-Saddle" about a heroine in Georgian England. 

Themed anthologies are fun because they kind of lead you to pull new things up from the well of your imagination. I don't know that I would have settled at the keyboard and said: "I think I'm going to write a monster story set in roughly Georgian England" otherwise. 

Word on the forces of darkness my hero encounters will just have to wait until the antho's release, but I thought I'd use the old blogspot here to capture a few thoughts before they slip from my mind. I used to be able to remember everything in chronological detail, but I've reached that point where some of the colors fade and some things run together when you look back. 

When I received the invite, my first thought went to a heroine I created earlier this year for a story called "Grand Tour." That was written on invite for an anthology calling for a story with a Hammer Films tone. I'm not sure of the status of that anthology, but if it doesn't see light I'll find another place for that story. 

Research such as the fact that young men went on grand tours for educational purposes in the 1700s or so coupled with an interest I've had for a while in the actual vampire legends of central Europe in the pre-John Polidori "The Vampyre" era. That all seemed to fit a Hammer mode.

Much of early vampire, and to some extent contemporary zombie traits, are seated in Serbia and adjacent regions, and I started thinking about the relative of someone like Arnold Paole, believed to be one of the first vampires in the European scares. 

What if the relative of an early, revenant-style vampire, maybe someone with ties to the Ottoman empire, felt responsible and compelled to track down a vampiric relative and any vampires he created?

I was pleased with how that story turned out, so when the Unknown Superheroes invite came along, I was still in an historical mood. 

I thought at first Andela of "Grand Tour" would be the star of another adventure. I envisioned her riding up to a British estate in a carriage, about the discover some new challenge while she visited. 

Then in research, I ran across Celia Fiennes, a real  young woman who rode across England on horseback in the late 1600s and early 1700s and kept a journal of her travels. 

Suddenly I thought Andela might ride up to an estate on horseback instead of in a carriage. 

But the more I read about Celia the real traveler, the more another character took shape, Cilla Frane, driven to travel and destined to encounter dark forces. 

I put a lot into shaping her story, and happily the tale came together, aided by a lot of research and even casual visits to spots like Colonial Williamsburg, though my tale unfolds on the other side of the pond.

I don't live far from Colonial Williamsburg's living museum these days, so dropping in to see tables spread with Colonial Era meals and visiting Colonial Era-style gardens melded with my visits to London and Scotland in years past. Everything helped to shape Cilla's world. 

It was a lot of fun to spend time in her world. Deets here when the story comes out, and if all goes well Andela and Cilla will ride again into adventures of their own. Or maybe they'll meet one day. 

 

Short Film Based on My Flash Fiction Decoherence

 A few years back, a request came in to the writers Meet Up group Owl Goingback was running in the Orlando area. 

A student up in Gainesville needed a short mystery piece to shoot for a film class. I'd spent a bit of time teaching creative writing by then, gradually emerging from a creative coma induced by 12 years in a marketing job plus one damaging semester in an MFA program with a writing professor who'd go on to break the internet with a column on his harsh outlook on students. (I graduated with an MFA, but I still refer to that semester as The Lost Semester.)

A short time before, I'd written a bit of flash that landed at a webzine called DM du Jour.

To help out a student, I though sure, I can adapt that into a quick script, and I did. 

It was fun to do, but, as happens in the collaborative process, some adaptation of my script transpired for shooting. One character became two, and, partly for logistics I suspect, a moment in the story was reinterpreted. 

It didn't quite do what I'd envisioned in musing about timelines and mysterious visitors. 

I didn't say much about the product, which was mainly for a class anyway. The student got an A for her effort. I didn't think much about it. 

But literally as I was walking this morning, in my current timeline, I thought, maybe the reinterpretation played even more with timelines and many-worlds interpretation. 

So, look above. The short student film from my tale Decoherence can be viewed, and the short-short tale can still be read online as well.  

Mothman and Something for the Dark Illustrations

 

As noted as an addendum on a recent post on Edward D. Hoch's story "Something for the Dark," the tale originally appeared in the June 1968 issue of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine. 

The original illustrations, in the style that appeared in AHMM for the better part of 20 years or more, further evoke the mothman allusions. 

Favorite Short Stories: Something for the Dark By Edward D. Hoch

To identify one sub-category of Edward D. Hoch's fiction is to spoil a bit, I suppose. Hoch excelled at
all varieties of mystery from the locked room to the procedural to the cozy and more. His cadre of sleuths included a cowboy, a spy, a country doctor and the representative of a bureau devoted to apprehensions of fugitives. 

The collection Ellery Queen's Grand Slam (Popular Library 1970) includes a Hoch trifecta divided by mystery technique, whodunit, howdunit, whydunit. 

But there's also a significant portion of Hoch's work that falls in the realm of the fantastic uncanny alongside The Hound of the Baskervilles or the the more recent Scooby Doo. The supernatural is seemingly present in the mystery, but the solution is rational with clues neatly placed along the way to look like phenomena.

Clearly Hoch read widely in probably scientific and technical journals, mining for tidbits to serve his ongoing, incredible output. Thumbprint scanners in their infancy might provide a reason for one of thief Nick Velvet's unique pilfers, for example, and all manner of devices or small details might serve Simon Ark tales and many others.

Ark, alleged to be a coptic priest thousands of years old, tended to be called in when high strangeness seemed at hand. Even with a bit of mysticism sometimes mixed in, Ark's cases always proved to have a logical explanation.

SEE ALSO: Favorite Short Stories - The Judges of Hades by Edward D. Hoch

That same style is on display in what's maybe a bit of an obscure Hoch tale, "Something for the Dark." From what I can tell it appeared only in the Alfred Hitchcock Presents collection Stories that Go Bump in the Night (Random House, 1977), though its roots seem to be the 1960s. That hints it may have been in a magazine earlier. 

The collection's one of a long series of anthologies spawned by the Alfred Hitchcock Presents TV series, offering tales in a similar vein. 

The hero's not Ark nor one of Hoch's many series characters but magazine writer Steve Foley, though he works for Neptune Magazine, which bears the same name as the publishing house for which Ark's unnamed friend and case-narrator works.

Maybe it started out as an Ark tale. (Occasional signs of Hoch's experimentation turn up in mining his cannon. The September, 1959 Double-Action Detective features a more traditional hardboiled private eye named Simon Ark narrating and solving "The Case of the Naked Niece.")

In "Dark," the human-interest angle on reports of a man's encounter with what might be called a strange cryptid piques Foley's interest. While on a camping trip with his wife, the man spied a winged creature sounding a lot like Mothman though described as similar to Lewis Carroll's Jabberwock.

Circulation's lagging at Neptune, and an October issue is coming up, so his editor dispatches Foley to Pennsylvania for details from Walter Wangard and his wife Lynn. 

Sounds maybe a little like Woodrow Derenberger, noted for encounters with alleged alien Indrid Cold in proximity to Mothman sights.

Turns out the creature may have winged away with the couple's dog.

SEE ALSO: Birds, Mice and Frozen Goldfish Bowls

Foley's skeptical, but a trip back to the woods and the spot of the initial sighting gets spooky, and Walt's overcome by something unseen not far from where their dog's found buried. 

For a magazine feature writer, Foley's as attuned to detail as any classic sleuth. As events seem to overwhelm Walt Wangard, Foley pieces together a different interpretation of events, drawing on a bit of science and an inconsistency or two that Sherlock himself might have noted.

It's not a terrifying tale, but it has a creepy factor and a satisfying solution. It shouldn't be overlooked by Hoch fans nor those who enjoy a tale with a few clever twists. 

ADDENDUM

Poking around a bit, I see that "Something for the Dark" appeared in the June, 1968 issue of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine. Mothman sightings and related incidents occurred in 1966 and 1967. See illustrations from that publication here. 

SEE ALSO: Favorite Short Stories: The Emissary by Ray Bradbury

Original Publication Sites: Scars and Blue Murder

I get periodic reminders my memory is not what it used to be. 

My story "Scars" originally appeared in the online magazine Blue Murder. It's in the ebook collection Scars and Candy from Crossroad Press. I read a few flash stories from that collection the other day at the Fantasy/Sci-Fi Focus Facebook group and was reminded. 

I'm not sure the issue number any longer, and shifts from one computer to the other over the years have lost any contributor's e-copy I had.

It's a good lesson on the need to keep good records, I guess. 

The story was first submitted to the Hot Blood series, and it resulted in a freak-out rejection from Michael Garrett, I believe, and not Jeff Gelb, over something implied but not implicitly stated in the story. 

It went to some other mag of the time where it chilled one editor but not the second reader it seemed, who took it in better stride than the HB editors at least.

I don't recall Blue Murder batting an eye. Shows what a crapshoot the whole submission process is, I guess.

Wish I still had a copy of the original. I found a few others around on Planet PDF and discovered several friends in the contents pages, but haven't run across myself.

Maybe it'll turn up. At least the story's preserved in Scars. 

Favorite Short Stories - The Judges of Hades by Edward D. Hoch

I first turned to Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine in the late '70s. They were in the mix and progression of interesting and eclectic things to which I was drawn once the comic books were taken away by the Eckerd Drugs powers that were of the day. 

I met Micahel Morbius on those magazine racks and Doc Savage on the nearby paperback display, so those old Eckerd bean counters nudged my reading tastes, I suppose.

I was unaware of Simon Ark's legacy in that moment. I just started to notice the contributions of Edward D. Hoch in every issue of EQMM and frequently in AHMM. I came to like police detective Captain Leopold and thief-of-obscure-and-worthless-objects Nick Velvet among Hoch's wide mix of characters. 

When Ark came to the pages of EQMM and AHMM a while after, I started reading of him as well. An introduction noted Hoch had written of him for some time, but I just picked up with the newly arriving tales. 

I sadly never ran across the 1971 paperback edition in my used book store dives. I would have snatched it up, of course. Paperbacks sold for half their cover price back then, not collector's prices. I would have snatched up a 1973 re-introduced Weird Tales too that included an Ark story too. It never made it to Eckerd's that I noticed. 

Ark might almost have fit in the original Weird Tales alongside Seabury Quinn's Jules de Grandin, I suppose. As explained by Ark's nameless Watsonesque first-person narrator from the publishing industry,  Ark was a Coptic priest, thousands of years old. But his mysteries, while hinting at the bizarre or the mystical, were of the "fantastic uncanny" school. Like The Hound of the Baskervilles or Scooby Doo, while things might seem ghostly or otherwise supernatural, the explanation was rational.

I enjoyed the Ark stories. My old man, who'd take a turn toward less fantastic tastes later in life, read them as well along with other Hoch stories. "Anything by Edward Hoch is good," he declared. 

 SEE ALSO: Favorite Short Stories: The Hospice by Robert Aickman

He liked the clever twists and turns of Hoch's plots, frequently locked rooms with Dr. Sam Hawthorne and more violent crimes with Leopold.  Often, they'd hinge on technology of some sort. I decided Hoch must read a lot about new developments as well as the inner workings of older devices. He was no stranger to minute details in other realms such as myth and folklore either. 

That hint of the arcane in Ark stories probably appealed to me more as my interest in Stephen King and H.P. Lovecraft grew. The delight when Hoch revealed how a man trapped in a revolving door all alone could perish at another's hand grabbed both my dad and me, however.

Things weren't as accessible in those days as they are now. I had to wait for ebooks to bring back early Ark tales including Hoch's first published story, I believe, "Village of the Dead." In that one an entire village plunges lemming-like over a cliff. 

SEE ALSO: Ray Bradbury's October Game

"The Judges of Hades," probably novelette length, is in the Mysterious Press/Open Road ebook of The Quests of Simon Ark as well. It's nice to backtrack a bit now that so much is at our fingertips.

According to this handy list, the story first appeared in the February 1957 Crack Detective and Mystery. It's fun to have a sense at least of a tale's original trappings. 

The story takes Ark's publishing-industry friend plus wife Shelly back to his hometown, Maple Shades, Indiana. Kids are wont to strip Maple S from local welcome signs, but it seems to be one of those quiet picket-fences places, though the narrator's much happier in the canyons of New York. 

The friend's father, Richard, and sister Stella, have died in a head-on collision, each alone in a separate car. 

The narrator's strict father was a strict local judge as well. He and his brother, Uncle Phillip, also a judge, had been dubbed judges of hades by the local press, inspired by vase depicting the mythological Greek guardians of the underworld.

What made either the Stella or the Richard decide to ram the other? Dad had ruled against the sister's husband, but would that have triggered a dark impulse on her part?  

The narrator persuades Ark to look into the matter and his interest is piqued by the mythological reference. Was supernatural evil to blame? And what's up with the fact that there were three mythological judges of Hades?

Ark's interest grows as the potentially spookier side of things becomes evident.

The solution's wrapped up in fifties small town repression and more character texture than usual. All is revealed as the narrator contemplates choices and contrasts between life in Maple Shades with the glitzy life of the city. 

Are there a couple of stretches? Perhaps, but it's all clever enough and anticipates what's ahead for Ark who's a tall and heavy-set man not yet showing some of the signs of age mentioned in later tales. So is he really who he claims to be?

It should be enjoyable to fans for the likes of Carnacki, though he might have found a ghost or a logical explanation.

And, if we'd have run across it while he was alive, I'm pretty sure my old man would have liked it and held to his Hoch contention. We had our tiffs, but we got along better than Ark's narrator and his dad Richard. 

Playmate - A New Short Horror Mystery Story Now Available in Dark Dossier Magazine

Not long before I left Florida for my current home in Virginia, I went into my kitchen for my morning coffee. Some of you, especially if we're Facebook friends, may know how important that is to me. Let's call it a sacred rite. 

The previous evening, I'd poured out the remaining bird seeds from an old bag onto some paver stones for whoever wanted them, birds and beasts alike. I was in that "everything must go" stage of moving. The furniture was already gone, I was working on boxes for a desk and sitting in a lawn chair. I had one other lawn chair destined for Goodwill. That was for my cat Ollie in the moment.

Anything left in the house was going to have to fit into my car for the trip north, so I was purging.  

I hadn't thought about our friend the opossum as liking bird seeds. But who had pulled up a chair to the paver stones and tied a napkin around his neck but one pale grey marsupial. 

Fair enough, I thought. The seeds were for anyone.

But an eerie sensation crept over me as I sipped and did a partial turn from the window. Something struck me as strange. It was in that uncanny valley of not quite right.

I stared a little longer and realized two possums, as we say in the South, were enjoying a birdseed breakfast and angled so that they were hard to see and distinguish in early morning light.

That brief, eerie feeling of criss crossed bodies, visible limbs and pale faces made me wonder what I'd feel like if I looked out to see a disheveled person crouched among the elephant ears and other semi-tropical plants?

What if it was a person too frightened to communicate, but who would accept food left outside in a Playmate cooler?

A few elements from inside reality and out began to converge along with urban myth, and my story "Playmate" was born.

It's available in the new issue of Dark Dossier magazine, No. 56. You can order from Amazon if you want a Kindle or print copy, or you can read it free on the publication website. 

 

Favorite Short Stories - A Christmas Memory by Truman Capote

I read "A Christmas Memory" first in junior high. 

It was assigned reading in our textbook. I didn't know who Truman Capote was yet. My Weekly Reader neglected coverage of the Black and White Ball and didn't review In Cold Blood. 

It was just another story in the reader back then, but Capote writes in that little tale of an elderly cousin who was a friend to him in his childhood. 

As I was growing up, my grandmother, my mother's mother, lived with my family. She was my babysitter when I was little since my mom was a high school teacher.

The relationship between Buddy, the narrator, and his cousin reminded me of my relationship with my grandmother. 

She was as much a friend as a guardian. She worked hard to keep me from killing myself, but she didn't worry much if the afternoon movie was playing Them or The Incredible Shrinking Man. 

She told me stories of her youth, an early bad marriage, an early widowhood in a second, happier union. She was an ally against my mom who'd inherited a strict approach from a Baptist minister grandfather even though we were Methodists.

My grandmother cooked though she didn't have the inclination toward fruitcakes exhibited by Buddy's cousin. I don't remember a signature dish.

I do recall her liking Delaware Punch, a soft drink. It's all but gone I read the other day. I haven't seen a bottle in years. But at a little grocery store back in the day, we'd slide bottles out from the case-style soft drink machines where the bottles dangled inside and cool air rushed up when you looked in.

The family lore held, since she'd lost a son to a heart attack two months before I was born, that taking care of me revitalized my grandmother.   

She took me to kindergarten on Fridays until I went every day the following year. We took a cab driven by a guy who looked to me like The Skipper from Gilligan's Island. She dressed up for those occasions, wore a hat and waited for me at the bottom of a flight of stairs outside the classroom. 

My grandmother was still alive, still living with us when I read A Christmas Memory for the first time. She'd live three, maybe four years longer. Happily at that time in my life years didn't tick past like seconds and certainly not like the blur 2020 has proved to be.

But even then, in reading, I could see that the world was finite. The story offered a bit of a bittersweet portent, especially when it reached this passage:

"...more and more thirteenths are not the only days she stays in bed: a morning arrives in November, a leafless birdless coming of winter morning, when she cannot rouse herself to exclaim: "Oh my, it's fruitcake weather."

I guess in some ways, the tale prepared me even as it celebrated the relationship of Buddy and his cousin. My grandmother passed away the day after I finished my first year in high school. I always suspected she held on to let me finish final exams.

I picked up the boxed 1966 edition of the story for probably a dollar years later at a library book sale. I keep it around for Christmas re-reads. It triggers good memories. 

Biblioholic's Bookshelf - The Dark Dominion - A Dark Shadows Adjacent Collection

As you're probably aware, the Dark Shadows paperback novelizations were wildly popular when the gothic soap was on the air. Happily those are coming back into print from Heremes Press. 

A few adjacent titles were released in gold editions from Paperback Library. One of those was The Dark Dominion, dated December, 1970, with a vampire looking a lot like Christopher Lee on the cover and a werewolf looking a lot like Lon Chaney, Jr. The tales, maybe classic, maybe obscure, that are included are listed on the back cover pictured below and are available at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database.

SEE ALSO: Comics Catuch Up featuring a Dark Shadows/Vampirella Crossover

A Dark Shadows-licensed collection, The Dark Shadows Book of Vampires and Werewolves, was also released by Paperback Library in 1970. That'll have to wait for another post. 

New Short Story - The Fury - in Sanitarium Magazine No. 3

 

I was excited to receive a contributor's ebook version of the new issue of Sanitarium this morning. It includes a short story from me called "The Fury."

It's a bit of literary horror fiction, I suppose, as well as a tale of suburban revenge. Neighbors can drive each other crazy after all, and frustrations of the job can carry over to other areas of life. 

The mag's actually a hefty volume with 28 authors included, so it's really like purchasing an anthology. Like most books, it would make a great gift idea too!

Order now!

Cat Ladies of the Apocalypse and Tales From My Dark Side

For a while yesterday (April 18, 2020, in the time of quarantine), Cat Ladies of the Apocalypse edited by Lyn Worthen, which includes my story "Witch of Washington Park," had the Hollywood Squares spot right below Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles, and we were on a diagonal from collected stories of Theodore Sturgeon, all in the Science Fiction Anthologies category. Or maybe it was the Zoom spot right below them. Or the Alice below Carol and Marcia.

I know, I know, new things climb into the Top 100 and stay a while, like the fog in a Carl Sandburg poem, and then move on, but it was still a thrill for me anyway. In good ways. Bradbury and Sturgeon are deservedly perennials in those slots. BUT STILL!!!! "...once there was a spot/ For one brief shining moment...Camelot..."

READ ALSO: My Interview with Ray Bradbury

And sorta there's bad in me related to this...
Or a dark side, and the placement soothes an old contusion, I'll confess... When I was a kid in junior high I gave a buck-twenty-five copy of The Martian Chronicles as a Christmas gift at school. It was the cool orange one with the sketch of Bradbury on the cover. You drew a name, you had to buy for a $1 or so in those days. It was a while back.

When my present went to the guy, who was actually happy to get it, a look of disgust crossed this other kid's face. "You always give books," he muttered, spitting the word "books" with about as much contempt of a word as is humanly possible.

READ ALSO: Ray Bradbury - The October Game - Major Spoiler 

Yeah, I gave books, and I still do...
...some of them direct from my brain to yours if you choose. Probably says more about me that I recall that dis, that utterance of contempt. But, uh, I guess I hold grudges sometimes. You know, for, uh, decades. Several decades. So that little thumbnail was fun!

Cat Books Here - Get up to 10 ebook titles featuring cats including the pre-launch Cat Ladies of the Apocalypse

Act Now: https://storybundle.com/cats

For a limited time, you can get Cat Ladies of the Apocalypse via a special pre-launch offer. Cat Ladies includes my story "The Witch of Washington Park" and 9 other titles as special story bundle. Pay what you want for 10 titles with six of them exclusive ebooks.

They all feature cats, which are, of course, a great source of comfort. That's how they serve in my story as a heroine faces a brutal future and works to prepare an urban environment for agriculture in a devastated land.

There's also mystery, horror and suspense in this mix. As I'm writing this, 17 days remain on the offer, so act fast and get some great reading to fill your down time.

See the full cover of Cat Ladies edited by Lyn Worthen here.

Anthology - Cat Ladies of the Apocalypse Cover Reveal

I'm happy to present the cover art for the upcoming anthology Cat Ladies of the Apocalypse.

Plans for this collection edited by Lyn Worthen began last fall, and that's when I wrote my story, "The Witch of Washington Park." Who knew? The Doomsday Clock from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was set at two minutes to midnight.

In January 2020, it moved up thirty seconds, to a minute and a half.

Visit the Camden Park Press Cat Ladies of the Apocalypse page

The submission call read "It’s time to turn the `man and his dog wandering through a dystopian world' trope on its head..."

I wasn't sure at first what I'd do with that. I began with the notion of a former scientist, her name's Cassandra, making her way through a deserted city and finding a frightened boy holding a cat.

She was working to establish a bit of an oasis where food could be safely grown in an urban environment. Most of the world outside, a landscape ravaged by climate and nuclear disasters, but she and her cat named Midnight were holding on.

She'd grown despondent, however. Taking care of the boy, naming his cat Raven, offering him bits of culture and history while teaching him about agriculture began to give her new life.

Yet threats loom, threats always loom.

As always when a story takes off, the writing experience was exhilarating.

The collection includes many other great tales. Cats that eat zombies. Badass librarians, cat ladies battling something like Cthulhu and much more. It's arriving soon, so keep watching your favorite bookseller's site.

See also: Quoth the Raven featuring my story, "A Cooler of Craft Brew."

The Witch of Washington Park,

I'm excited to announce my 8,000-word story, "The Witch of Washington Park," will be included in the upcoming Camden Park Press anthology Cat Ladies of the Apocalypse edited by Lyn Worthen. Think of it as the flip side of A Boy and His Dog.

The story's set in a future where cataclysmic events have created a wasteland beset by predators of human and animal form alike. Of course.

My heroine, Cassandra, once a scientist, is at work attempting to prepare an urban setting to become an agricultural oasis amid the gloom of a post-apocalyptic world, but she's in danger of giving way to despair. Until she finds a young boy who needs her care.

Nothing's easy for them, of course, and the big threat's in the form of... Well, read it and see.

This story was great fun to write. I'd been wanting to do a little more in the science fiction or speculative fiction realm. The title of the anthology really sparked my imagination.

I'll post links when preorder information becomes available. Probably coming about mid-March 2020.

Flash of Fear - Pilgrim Crime Story Reading

Don't know that I'll be maintaining a weekly pace for these, but here's a new installment in my little Flash of Fear series of readings for You Tube.



This time around it's a crime story with horror elements that originally appeared in Heater magazine. It's a dark little tale of a detective called to a brutal crime scene.

Flash of Fear - Custom Scent - Horror Flash Fiction

I'd been meaning to develop some content for You Tube for a while. With me reading, very brief pieces seem to be the best idea.



This is a bit of flash fiction that appeared first in Sanitarium magazine No. 46. It was kind of fun. Maybe I'll do more.

Favorite Short Stories - Terror in Cut-Throat Cove by Robert Bloch

Spoiler Note: This one you can't discuss without spoiling something. Flee if you want to read it without influence.

“Terror in Cut-Throat Cove" by Psycho-author Robert Bloch doesn't sound like a mythos tale. It sounds like a pirate adventure, and it opens like a John D. MacDonald crime-adventure story. Yet it's a fabulous excursion into cosmic horror. It's kind of a shame it's not anthologized more, though it is in Bloch's Mysteries of the Worm: Early Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos.

It appeared first in the June 1958  issue of the digest Fantastic,  which had a bit of a nautical theme and a pirate illustration on the cover, probably making the story's impact even more sneaky to early readers.

It's ultimately a tale that straddles the line that might be drawn through Bloch's work, dividing early supernatural and cosmic horror from the more real-world terrors such as The Scarf and Psycho.

It must have been penned around the same time Bloch was imagining the workings of real-life killer Ed Gein's mind for Psycho which would be published in 1959.

This first-person account comes from a writer,  Howard Lane, living in the Bahamas for the cost-of-living benefits. He's doing his nightly drinking at his favorite bar when he bumps into burly, blond and muscle-bound Don Hanson and his girlfriend Dena Drake, who Lane sees as a Christmas tree angel. She's the beauty perpetually attached to guys like Don, as he sees it.

It's Dena who really leads him to help Don, who has a touch of wealth already and has come to the island of Santa Rita to find sunken pirate treasure including a stunning golden altar. So yeah, it is kind of a pirate story and an adventure story after all.

As SCUBA dives begin, hints emerge that there might be more at the bottom of Cut-Throat Cove than pirate booty. One of Don's employed divers meets a fate not unlike that of Mary Crane's in Psycho, the novel. He loses his head. Divers speak of seeing something with tentacles around the pirate wreck as well.

Soon Lane, which interestingly rhymes with Crane when you think about it, is needed for more than smoothing things over with the local authorities. He learns to dive himself and begins to make his way down to the ship alongside Don. It's there influences slip out to touch his psyche and drive him toward goals far beyond attaining Dena.

The noir themes are many. Dena's beautiful but opportunistic, attached to another while remaining an object of lust.

The crime influences don't stop Bloch from taking things to an interesting place in the cosmic realm however. It's eerie and effective, appropriately mythos yet surprising and extreme.

It may be my favorite of Bloch's stories, as intriguing as "The Shambler from the Stars," "The Shadow from the Steeple" and "Notebook found in a Deserted House."

It's a long read, definitely worth seeking out.