I haven’t disappeared…not completely, anyway.
I’ve just been busy. And when I’ve had time to write, it’s been mostly spent editing three separate works. And now, all three are very close to being released for Kindle. Here are the titles:
- ODD MAN OUT – a 32K novella which is expanded from the short story of the same name
- NEVER ENDING NIGHT – a 27K horror novella
- RECIPROCAL EVIL – an almost-50K short horror novel
As I mentioned, ODD MAN OUT started life as an 1800 word short story, released as an ebook combined with the short story HOUSE AT THE BEND IN THE ROAD. Both stories can also be found in the collection 14 DARK WINDOWS. I thought that ODD MAN OUT would make a good novella, or at least a much longer short story (sort of how DEAD OR ALIVE, originally a 2400 word short story, became a 7600 word short story on the rewrite). It ended up coming in at over 30K words, and tells the story of how the main character (not named in the short version, but named Paul in this longer version) comes to be…well, maybe I shouldn’t spoil it. Suffice it to say that a weekend retreat with college friends doesn’t go the way Paul wants it to when he brings his fiancee for the first time. His friend Roger wants her, and he’ll go to any extreme lengths to get her.
NEVER ENDING NIGHT was inspired by a Richard Laymon story I read (but can’t recall the title of) where a night goes on and on. I thought about something like that — what if night never ended in a suburban town? So I started writing from the POV of a high school girl (age 15) and it started as a diary kept by the girl where she rambles about her friends and her family and about what’s going on in their neighborhood when the sun just doesn’t come out one morning. Then I interspersed those diary entries through the third person narrative, which alternates between the girl’s POV and some of the neighbors’ POV’s. Bad things happen when the masks of some people in the neighborhood come off when they believe that some sort of apocalypse is coming and the rule of law has broken down…
The last, RECIPROCAL EVIL, is about a college kid, Chris, who experiences a campus murder as a dream, and is surprised to find out that the dream really happened. Why is he sharing dreams with some serial killer? He’s drawn further in when his girlfriend’s roommate disappears. And when the killer contacts him, he learns some things about his own background, about his family, and about his younger sister, believed to be traveling the world and having the time of her life. But is that true? And who is the killer’s next target?
There you have it. Three soon-to-be-released novellas/novels. See, I haven’t been completely idle in terms of my writing!
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