Tag Archives: fiction

DIE 6 now available!

Die 6 Cover Image

It’s live! DEADLOCK PRESS and I are pleased to announce that DIE 6, a collection of 6 short stories, is now available in the Amazon Kindle Store for $2.99.

Here’s the description:

A short story collection that contains:

AN ARTIFICIAL YEARNING – a young man meets the girl of his dreams online, and yearns to take the next step – meeting in person. But the love of his life is not what he expected…

BLOOD TIES – a psychic who is in debt to the wrong people sees a way out if he can talk to the ghost of a bank robber and find the money that was stolen. Of course, it’s never as easy as it sounds…

THE TOOTH FAIRY – Perion, queen of the Dentata, is captured by a boy whose tooth she has come to collect, and tries to make a deal for her freedom, the cost of which is extremely high…

THE FUN HOUSE – Natalie is stuck taking her little brother to the carnival, but when they enter the Fun House, they experience the thrills and chills of their young lives…this Fun House is a little too real…

TIME HEALS ALL WOUNDS – When a woman shows up at Joseph’s door with an unbelievable story, he is left with no other choice but to accept it when agents from the future attack both of them in his time. His only escape – to travel to the future himself and attempt to set things right…

THE GHOST TRAIN – Three high school students in Addison Falls try to solve the mystery of both the strange dreams they are having and the reappearance of a “Ghost Train” passing directly through their mall. The answers are found in the past…

Plus a brief author’s note and a sample of “Rick’s Rules”.

Two SF stories, two horror/ghost stories, and a couple that cross genres…Enjoy!

It’s about 36,400 words of new fiction, along with a brief author’s note (no need to read it if you’re not interested in any backstory on the works), a sample of Rick’s Rules, and links to my other stories.

Please take a look at it, download the sample, and give it a read!  Thank you!

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QUANTUM ZOO is live on Amazon!

QUANTUM ZOO!QUANTUM ZOO was released while I was out of the country, on June 17th, and has already hit number 1 on the Amazon SF Anthology list!

If you haven’t picked it up yet, get it now…it’s on sale for a limited time for $0.99!  It won’t be such an incredible deal for too long!

Here’s the link:  QUANTUM ZOO in the Amazon Kindle Store

There are 12 (count ’em!) high quality stories in the collection, ranging from Egyptian gods to alien zoos.  Even a little supernatural stuff!  And of course my story, PLAYING MAN, can be found right smack in the middle of all this SF/Fantasy goodness!

Grab a copy and read it!  You won’t be disappointed!

Go ahead.  I’ll still be here when you get back….

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QUANTUM ZOO has a website!

QUANTUM ZOO!

If you’re following along at home, you will already know that I have a story which will be published in the indie anthology QUANTUM ZOO, along with eleven other authors.  I was honored and thrilled to be included in their numbers.  Most of them have significant writing credits and credentials; all of them have more of those things than I do.

Anyway, there’s a website!  It contains info about all the authors as well as story excerpts and some other goodies.

There is going to be a Facebook release party as well, though I won’t be able to “attend” due to other commitments.  I’ll post more when I know more.

Here’s the website address:  http://quantumzoo.blogspot.com/

Please check it out!

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The End of the World!

I’ve always been a big fan of end-of-the-world stories.  I don’t know why.  Something about them just tickles my imagination.  Maybe it’s my own buried desire to test myself against such circumstances to see if I would come out on top.  Maybe it’s just that the stories that come out of such situations, the good versus the evil, intelligence versus stupidity, the luck versus the well-planned action, the way the characters react to the changed circumstances and to each other — all of that grabs me and pulls me in

Stephen King, author of what I consider to be the gold standard for post-apocalyptic fiction, once said in an interview, “The Stand was particularly fulfilling, because there I got a chance to scrub the whole human race, and man, it was fun! … Much of the compulsive, driven feeling I had while I worked on The Stand came from the vicarious thrill of imagining an entire entrenched social order destroyed in one stroke.”

Maybe that explains it for me.  It’s just fun!

I’ve tried to write some post-apocalyptic fiction; so far I’ve been unsuccessful.  I think it’s because I put myself into the stories too much.  I’ve tried writing main characters that I can’t really identify with too much, but that’s hard too.  I don’t know if others have the same problem, but I like to sort of “be” the main character.  Not me, obviously, but with enough of “me” in him (or even in her).  It’s hard with post-apocalyptic stories because I tend to think of how I’d react in the same situation and write my character that way.  And I’m a conflict-avoidance type, and you can’t really have a good story without a lot of conflict, or so it seems to me.

I already mentioned that I see The Stand as the gold standard.  That’s my personal opinion, but I have my reasons.  It’s a classic good versus evil story, and I really like the way that the survivors of the superflu separate.  People’s basic nature makes them lean one way or another, but yet there are shades of grey in the good and the bad.  It doesn’t hurt that King wrote some great characters.  Nick Andros, Larry Underwood, Stu Redman, Frannie Goldsmith, even Harold Lauder are all characters that open themselves to exploration and contemplation.  They are all complex with complex motivations.

My second favorite story is Lucifer’s Hammer by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle.  It’s a very different story.  There are no supernatural elements in this one.  It’s all about people.  And it’s probably the type of story I prefer, generally speaking.  In this story, a comet is streaking toward Earth on a near-collision course, and it is first noticed by a couple of amateur astronomers.  The tale follows several different characters whose paths converge on a Senator’s ranch in the mountains.  One of the main characters is a TV reporter who decides to do a story on how to prepare for a possible disaster.  I found his preparations to be a very interesting part of the story.  In the end, it’s a story with a hopeful vision for humanity — the Senator (a good guy; could a story like this be written today?) says with his dying breath, “Give my people the stars.”   Science and technology win out, and I like this vision.  It’s almost opposite of King’s version:  in The Stand technology is depicted as being sought by the forces of evil, even if its purpose is turned to good in the end.

So what prompted me to write about this stuff today?  It was my weekend reading of Bobby Adair’s Slow Burn books.  There are four in all, and I’m about half-way through the third.  It’s sort of a zombie apocalypse.  Take King’s plague and put it with Night of the Living Dead but throw in the self-reliance message from Niven and Pournelle and you have Adair’s vision of the future.  I’ve read a lot of post-apocalyptic fiction, and I have enjoyed most of the sub-genre coming out of indie fiction (especially Edward Robertson’s Breakers series and of course, Hugh Howey’s Wool series), but I’m not a huge fan of the zombie versions.  They’re okay.  I’ve read several of them.  They just aren’t my favorite ways to approach this sub-genre.  they aren’t what I’d choose to write.

But this one is grabbing me more than any of the others I’ve read, including ones by Amanda Hocking, Dan DeWitt, Brett Battles, Scott Nicholson, and others.  Why?  I think it’s the characters.  I really like the main character, Zed.  He reacts like I think I might react (not that I’d get the gun stuff) but the way he latches onto the other characters and hangs on for dear life.  I like Murphy too.  They make a great pair.

But it’s also the situations he finds himself in.  Setting the story in the locations Adair sets it in works for me as well.  Having Zed work his way around the college and then around the suburban homes and such captures my imagination also.

I have a list of “End of the World” stories on Amazon and I think these stories are going to get added to it as worthwhile post-apocalyptic fiction very soon.

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QUANTUM ZOO!

My short story, “Playing Man”, was accepted for publication in the anthology QUANTUM ZOO, which will also feature stories by J.M. Ney-Grimm, D.J. Gelner, A.C. Smyth, R.S. McCoy, Bridget McKenna, and John Hindmarsh among others.

“Playing Man” is about company troubleshooter/scientist Jordem Lun, who is sent to the wildlife reserve planet Earth to find out who is sabotaging the company’s monorails.  He has a hidden agenda, however, and when he meets up with Dr. Alnay Snow, he is given the opportunity to address his concerns, while hearing the concerns of Dr. Snow’s organization.  It’s a lush, beautiful Earth, teeming with native life, carefully managed by Dr. Snow’s Department of Preservation.  So what happens when life is left to its own devices?

The anthology is slated for an early June release date in e-book form, and will be released shortly thereafter in trade paperback.

I will post the cover and a more firm release date as soon as I have them.

Watch for it!

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New Short Story – RICK’S RULES

I’ve released a new short story titled Rick’s Rules , available for Kindle for the low low price of $0.99!

Rick's Rules coverRick’s Rules is the third and final story in the saga of detective Rick Striker and his involvement with vampires.  The other two stories are Night Family and Dead Or Alive .

Here are the links:

RICK’S RULES

NIGHT FAMILY

DEAD OR ALIVE

Please feel free to check them out!  Thank you!

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My favorite wizards…

I’ve been writing a story with my son and one of the little plot devices we’re using is that some of the characters’ names are inspired by our favorite fictional wizards.

The trouble is that my son only knows Gandalf and Dumbledore.  (We aren’t including Harry Potter or the secondary characters as the main wizards of the story.)  So it’s been up to me.  And I’ve come up with a couple from my reading.  So here’s my list so far:

  1. Gandalf.  How can he not be number 1?  He must be, and he is.
  2. Dumbledore.  Almost as awe inspiring as Gandalf.
  3. Belgarath.  From the David Eddings works – The Belgariad, and Belgareth the Sorcerer.  Right up there with the top two.
  4. Harry Dresden.  Jim Butcher’s wizard is as cool as they get.
  5. Marla Mason.  Tim Pratt’s sorcerer has progressed far beyond mere wizard status.
  6. Walter “Wiz” Zumwalt.  The hero of Rick Cook’s Wizardry books.
  7. Max Zadok.  Laura Resnick’s centuries-old wizard in her Esther Diamond books.

Maybe I’ll come up with some more.  If you’re reading this blog, and you have a name, any name, toss it out there.  I’d love to hear it.

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Lit Fic vs. Genre Fic

 

I like watching movies.  And I tend to like adventure movies, you know the type.  The big budget thrillers and sf/fantasy spectacles.  I enjoy the “smaller” movies, the ones that study characters, that use the sense of place as a major part of the story, the ones that explore relationships.  But on the big screen, and often on the little screen, the movies I’ll pay to watch and maybe even buy tend to be thrillers and sf/fantasy.  LORD OF THE RINGS, ENDERS GAME, THE HUNGER GAMES and CATCHING FIRE, and the HARRY POTTER movies are just a few examples of movies I’ve seen and enjoyed in the last several years.

Over the weekend I was watching the first lecture of one of “The Great Courses”, this one on analysis and critique while reading and writing, and how it can make “me” a more effective reader AND writer.  This first lecture sets the agenda for the 24 lecture series, and in it the professor talked a great deal about tone and about word choice.  She gave some examples of “good” writing versus “bad” writing versus “okay” writing.

“Okay” writing seemed to be technically solid but artistically bland.

I thought about that as I read the passages she presented in the lecture, and I agreed with her fully that her examples of “good” writing were far more artistic.  It was like looking at a photo of a weedy pond, then looking at Monet’s Water Lilies paintings.  Both showed sort of the same thing, but there was a richness to Monet’s work that certainly isn’t found in a simple photograph by an “untalented” photographer.

Then I thought about watching movies, specifically, the movies I like to watch.  To me, reading a lot of genre fiction, which is concerned primarily with telling a story, conveying the action that occurs to resolve the conflict, is a lot like watching some of these big budget movies.  They aren’t out to explore the relationships between characters to any great depth, certainly no deeper than needed for the story.  They aren’t concerned so much with exploring the issues that rise up in the story beyond what is needed to serve the story.

Or maybe they are.  Maybe it is simply that they emphasize the story above these other things, while those smaller “films” and literary fiction emphasize the relationships, the characters, the issues, in the absence of compelling story.  They find a way to make the “story’ about these items.  The conflict comes out of them, not out of some larger plot construction.

Does that make any sense?

As I thought about my fiction, I thought that no one is ever going to file my stuff under “Literary Fiction”.  Why is that?  I pay attention to my word choices.  I try to explore my characters’ motivations a little.  But writing like the examples given by the professor does not come naturally to me.  The metaphors and similes, the figurative language, the artistic flair that was evident in the writing in her examples, it just doesn’t flow off my pen (or my fingertips).

I write like I’m watching a movie.  Character A goes here, does this, has this expression on his face (mirroring his mood), Character B and C do this and that, then this happens, and so on and so on.  Like I’m watching and describing action on a screen.  It strikes me that a lot of genre fiction works this way.  I don’t know about romance, but SF/Fantasy, Horror, Mystery and Thrillers all seem to, at least to some degree.

I once wrote a piece about something Laura Lippman had written in one of her excellent mystery/thriller novels, something about how I could never have come up with the plot device that she did.  I know she responded to the article, but I don’t recall exactly what she said.  But I saw it as Ms. Lippman having a literary bent to her crime fiction.  I know a lot of authors have that.  Maybe it’s something that comes with time.

In the meantime, however, I think I’ll be content with “writing the movie”.

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So which am I?

Lots of activity in the blogosphere about self publishers recently.  It seems Hugh Howey had someone do a study about numbers of self published titles in the Amazon best seller lists, and then did some data extrapolation to determine estimated sales numbers and estimated dollar figures for sales, and he found that self published titles were beginning to become the majority of ebooks sold.  Others jumped on his data, and reblogged it, making their own comments about it.

On top of it all is the old “tsunami of crap” argument resurfacing, that as more and more people self publish, more and more “bad” books surface.  Apparently by “bad books” they mean poorly edited, typo-laden works, mostly by self publishers.  Maybe they mean bad stories as well, but mostly they talk about the quality of the craft used to write these books.  In other words, the stuff that a good copy editor will find and presumably correct.

Well, I wonder where I fall.  Am I part of the tsunami or are my works professional?

Here was my hope.  Most of the short stories I’ve published have been through the wringer with readers.  Then I put them through my wringer again as well.  I read them and reread them, correcting turns of a phrase and adding in missing words and fixing typos that generally were something like using “fee” instead of “feel” (in other words, typos that the spell check didn’t find).

So I thought (and still think) I’m putting out a pretty good product, even though I haven’t had anyone “professionally” edit these works.  Am I the best judge of that?  Probably not.  The reader is the best judge.

But maybe the stories aren’t good enough.  Maybe I’m not a good enough storyteller.  Again, I can’t judge.  I think the stories are pretty good; they’re the stories I wanted to tell.  So who does judge?  Readers, I’d guess.

Yes, I made three of my covers.  But I had four of them done for me by a professional who happens to be a good friend, someone who has designed covers for small presses.  Two of them are a little rough, I know.  My latest, for DEAD OR ALIVE, looks pretty decent to me.

I started with these short stories because they’ve been through the wringer, and because my hope was that they’d generate some sales and some income which I could then use to pay professionals for editing and covers on my longer works.  It hasn’t happened yet, but I’ve only got the short stories, a 14 story collection, and a Disney guidebook (under my real name) out there so far.  I don’t do much promotion; I’m not on Facebook every day suggesting that people buy my stories.  I don’t tweet; I have been less than regular with updates to my blog.  I’ve hoped that somehow word will spread and a few will get sold here and there.  We’ll see.

So the question remains:  am I part of the “tsunami of crap”?  Who gets to say whether I am or not?

In my estimation, the only ones who get to make that judgement are readers.  So far they haven’t voted enough to let me know one way or another (all of my reviews are 5 star so far, but there aren’t many of them), but I intend on continuing to plug away until either something happens, or nothing at all happens.

Thanks if you’ve bought one of my stories.  Heck, thanks if you’re even here reading this.  I appreciate any recognition I get.

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New Free Story!

Back in the days of the Book and Candle Pub, we held a writing contest, with the challenge to write a story in the world of Stephen King’s opus, THE STAND.  You could use the characters, the settings, whatever you wanted.

I chose to write a story about a vignette set in my own town.

As I recall, I didn’t win – but I still think the story was pretty decent.

If you look under the “Free Stories” tab, you’ll see it:  CHOOSING SIDES – Fan Fiction set in the world of THE STAND.

Check it out!

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