I haven’t disappeared.  I just haven’t had anything much to post on the blog.  But I have been writing a bit, and reading quite a bit.  So I thought that I’d just sort of list some of the things I’ve been working on, and give a couple of shout-outs to books I’ve read as well.

I finished up a 27K horror novella called NEVER ENDING NIGHT.  Actually, it’s been finished for a while, but I finally went back and reread it and formatted it for uploading.  I played with some covers but I’m not sure I like them.

I’ve been writing on a post-apocalyptic tale that started life as a piece being written in Hugh Howey’s WOOL universe.  I finished the first part, about a group of college students who get wind of an upcoming “event” and try to build a shelter to wait it out.  Then, as I wrote that part, one of the college kids up and left without explanation, then so did her boyfriend, so I wrote their story as they are invited to a shelter in Texas.  Then I thought, nothing is 100% fatal except nerve gas, and so I made this one, like, 99.8% fatal, and another story I had started a while ago ended up being a story of some of the few survivors of this biological agent.  I’ve been writing on that one.  It’s been fun to tell these stories.

Also a while ago, I decided to expand ODD MAN OUT into a longer story, perhaps a novella or a short novel.  So I’ve been working on that one somewhat diligently.  I’m around 21,500 words now (the original story was something around 1800 words, I think).

Then I started something set in the fictional upstate NY community of Addison Falls.  The shared world comes from back in the 1990’s when a bunch of us on a Delphi forum called The Horror Discussion Group created a bunch of common characters along with our own original characters in order to write stories set in this world.  Well, the stories (for the most part) died when the forum became inactive after the host (Bookhound) passed away at a very young age.  I have a story in my DIE 6 collection that was written back around that time in Addison Falls (THE GHOST TRAIN), and I thought that it might be fun to write a novel set in that town.  I decided to once again do missing kids, but this time I am going to focus on a math teacher at the high school and his friend/something more(?) newspaper reporter.  I’ve written about 18K words in that story, and I’ve been adding to it a little at a time.  No end is in sight.

Last, I started a story back in the late 1980’s that was also postapocalyptic, set in a small Wisconsin town after a disease claims all the adults.  I decided to expand that one as well, including three more settings, and bouncing back and forth between the four places to tell the story of kids coming together and conflicting in each.  I now call it INHERIT THE EARTH, and I think it’s pretty interesting.  (I tossed out all the boring parts and rewrote most of it.)  I think it stands at something around 20K or maybe a bit more.  No end in sight on this one, either.

Reading:  I’ve knocked out some pretty good books.  I read all of Kate Wrath’s E series, five books in all.  I finished Orson Scott Card’s VISITORS and Paul Draker’s NEW YEAR ISLAND (wish I would have tried that one sooner, because it was really good).  I read William Malmborg’s Halloween homage, SANTA TOOK THEM, and J. Stirling Robertson’s SEPSIS.  Then I finished two or three Robert Crais books, including the non-Pike, non-Cole book SUSPECT.  Lots of good reads in there.  Those are the ones I can remember off the top of my head and skimming the Kindle.

I hope to be a bit more active here in the future.  And I hope to have a new book announcement soon.

Take care.

*****