This is sort of an anticlimax, but the rewritten, novella-length version of ODD MAN OUT will be coming out very soon! And the cover is the same as the old cover for the short story. (It’s too good of a cover to waste on that short story!)
So: Without further ado, here is the cover to ODD MAN OUT:
Thanks to Rich Siegle for the tremendous cover art! It was exactly what I was thinking of when I envisioned an image for the short story, and will work great on the novella also!
*****
I am about to release my longest work to date: RECIPROCAL EVIL.
The story, in a nutshell, is told in the blurb:
There’s a serial killer on the loose. And he might be working for the Devil…
Student Chris Jones is obsessed with finding meaning in his life. Researching the historical existence of evil, he falls down the rabbit hole, becoming deeply affected by the darkness in our world. He forgets about classwork and, most of all, his relationship with his girlfriend Rachel suffers. After a gruesome murder on campus, things get even worse.
Because the night before, Chris dreamed about it.
He dreamed about the rape, the knife wounds, the agonizing cries. He experienced it vividly — from the killer’s perspective. Why is he experiencing this? Is it related to his research? The terror on campus ramps up as Rachel’s roommate goes missing… just as Chris comes face to face with a killer. The killer who died years ago.
What is the entity’s game? How does it involve Chris? And even more frightening: What does this evil being want with Rachel? Chris’s life isn’t the only thing he has to put on the line. He could risk the love of his life. He could risk his very soul…
I sometimes wonder about people writing horror. There’s some twisted stuff out there. Extreme horror graphically describes tortures and mutilations and disgusting acts in an effort to shock the reader. When it succeeds, it can be good. I’ve read a bit of it and thought maybe I could write it, but in the end, I just can’t. I pull my punches too much, I guess. I can’t describe the unspeakable acts that some of them do.
But I don’t assume that the writers of such horror are “turned on” or whatever by the sadistic and grotesque acts they write about. They just tell stories for readers who like that sort of thing.
So how did I write this story? How did I write THE INN and THE CAVE? The latter of those two was about a group of eighth graders who discover a cave and find out that it’s something – more – than a cave. THE INN was about a group of high school kids going on a band trip and staying in a creepy motel where bad things happen. THE CAVE was inspired by Richard Laymon’s novel THE TRAVELING VAMPIRE SHOW, and the THE INN was inspired by William Malmborg’s TEXT MESSAGE. There is a threat, and it involves the kids. I hope they’re scary, but I also hope that my readers connect with my characters. I made them as real as I could.
RECIPROCAL EVIL was inspired by an Edward Lee novel I read a number of years ago called CITY INFERNAL. In it Hell is a real place, called Mephistopolis or something like that, and is powered by suffering. I took that idea sort of literally in this story, too. But I made my antagonist one of the providers of that power for Hell. And I made my protagonist a college student who is studying the nature of evil, and is pursuing this study outside of his normal chemistry and physics classes. It is affecting him; how could immersing one’s self in discussions of the nature of evil not affect someone? But it’s also affecting those around him. It’s drawing something evil toward him, perhaps, and therefore it is drawing the evil into the proximity of his closest friends.
The book starts in a Chemistry lecture that is modeled on my own freshman year chem lecture (except that Chris, my main character is a junior – so it’s not THAT class). The rest of the story takes place in locations that are inspired by real locations at my own college. That’s ancient history, but the library was spooky enough to be used as a location in the original version of FLATLINERS. And some of the dorms and classroom buildings intrigued me (in a spooky way) when I was there. They don’t necessarily figure in the story, but the ambience they lent to the campus is definitely part of what I tried to incorporate.
I didn’t outline the story; I just sort of started writing about Chris Jones, and it sort of just came to me as I wrote. I knew it was going to feature a serial killer, but at first I didn’t know how it would relate to Chris, and I just sort of went with the flow. The end result is the story you can read very soon. I hope you choose to download it, and I hope you enjoy it! Thanks!
*****
I have been doing more reading than writing, though I did get a few thousand words written on my Addison Falls story.
One of the authors I’ve been reading is V.J. Chambers. She is a talented storyteller and a very good writer. I’ve read both of her “Innocence Unit” books, GRAIN OF TRUTH (book 1) and TRUTH AND CONSEQUENCES (book 2). I also read a couple of horror stories by her, first BRIGHTER, about a small town which is very difficult to leave, then RATCATCHER, a modern day take on the Pied Piper mythology, featuring a rock star as the Piper. I also read her female serial killer novel called THE FEMININE TOUCH. All five were worthy reads.
Chambers’ Amazon page is HERE.
I also read Anni Taylor’s THE SIX. It was a thriller about a woman addicted to gambling who is offered a chance for treatment on a Greek island in an old monastery. Not only will she go through some unconventional therapy, she will also be paid as she wins challenges. It goes from something seemingly plausible to something a little more exotic. But it was still a lot of fun to read.
Last, I finally finished up Christopher Moore’s THE SERPENT OF VENICE, which is an irreverent retelling of some Shakespeare stories with a little Poe tossed into the mix. It started a little bit slowly, but once it kicked into gear, I could barely put it down.
Several good reads recently, mostly for my Kindle. (The Moore title was a remaindered hardcover.)
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I don’t know if what I’m experiencing is writer’s block, exactly…but I’m having trouble with moving forward on the stories I have started. I’m just not sure where to go with them.
One is what I refer to as my “Addison Falls” horror story. It features a teacher who moves to the strange town of Addison Falls, with its assortment of odd characters. It’s a town where lots of strange things have happened over the years, and it definitely has a history. And its residents seem to overlook the bad things that are happening in their midst. It’s like, stuff just doesn’t register for them. Even when their kids are disappearing. But it registers with the teacher, and it registers with the young reporter who has been a resident for four years now. So they investigate…
The second is a space opera. I started out just trying to write the opening scenes of a movie. A lone pilot, searching through space for salvageable debris, happens across a derelict spacecraft. It is of alien design, and the pilot boards it and discovers that it isn’t totally empty. It carries within a single passenger, one who is asleep in cryostasis. And some bad folks are looking for this passenger, and they aren’t of this galaxy. Yet they are very human…
Those are the two I’ve been working on. I also have my 90K word post-apocalyptic novel going, but I needed a break from it. Maybe I should try again on that one. And then there’s this college horror novel that I was working on, featuring a girl who has transferred mid-term to a university because of some bad stuff that happened to her/around her at her previous large university. And luckily for her, there is an opening in one of the dorms, because the co-ed was found murdered off-campus. But unluckily for her, her death is linked back to this dorm.
Anyway, I have ideas about how they’re all going to end, but getting past the point I’m at right now seems to be a real challenge. I don’t seem to have the creative juices to move forward on any of the stories.
Maybe writing about them here will help. We’ll see. Stay tuned…
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I wrote this story for a contest back in September of 1996, and found it in my archives a few days ago. I did a very minimal amount of rewriting but didn’t change too much. I’d write it differently today, probably, but I don’t think it’s terrible for flash fiction from my earliest days of attempting to write. If you’d like to read it, click the link at the bottom of the post:
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“If you open your mouth again, I’ll have to shut it for you.” The man in the police uniform spoke in a low voice, intending to intimidate Joe, and the rest of us were too cowed by the badge to interfere. We all watched silently as Joe backed down.
It wasn’t every day that a cop showed up at a party and started hitting on our female friends. No one knew what to make of it. So we had ignored him, for the most part. After all, cops are the good guys. We’d just partied on, like he wasn’t there, or like his presence was a normal thing.
But that was before he’d started hitting on Joe’s girlfriend…
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If you’d like to read the rest of this story, please click here: THE BAD COP
*****
I finished a couple of very good thrillers recently. First was Steven M. Moore’s GAIA AND THE GOLIATHS. This was the seventh Chen-and-Castilblanco mystery, and it deals with eco-terrorism and murder. It takes the reader from New York to Europe and also involves Moore’s Dutch Interpol agent Bastian van Coevorden on that end. It’s a well-constructed mystery that presents a balanced picture of the world of environmental activism along with several little nods to what’s going on in American politics today (the story is set a short time in the future, I believe). As I’ve come to expect from Steve Moore, this is a really interesting, thought-provoking read right from the beginning. Chen and Castilblanco are great characters, too.
The second was Steve Richer’s THE POPE’S SUICIDE. Like Richer’s THE PRESIDENT KILLED HIS WIFE, this takes an unlikely crime involving a world leader and turns it around this way and that way. There are many layers of intrigue going on here, and I found it to be a can’t-put-it-down type of book. When the Pope is found hanging in his shower, suicide is the apparent cause. But of course it can’t be that simple, not to mention the complications that a Pope’s suicide would cause for the Catholic Church. Detective Donny Beecher is going through a rough time of his own, marriage falling apart and teen daughter rebelling and getting into some things that Dad wouldn’t approve of. And he’s assigned as the lead detective for the investigation. Solid plotting and writing make this a top notch read. Now I have to go read THE KENNEDY SECRET.
Last, I read CRYSTAL CREEK by William Malmborg. In this one, a paranormal investigator goes to a small town in Washington State where Bigfoot has been sighted, and a woman has disappeared. Crystal Creek barely exists anymore, but there is still an inn, a police department, a diner, and a newspaper. And everyone left in this little town seems to have a secret of some sort. It’s a great premise and a good story. If I have a bit of a problem with it, it’s that I didn’t care about the characters too much. I don’t know why, but they didn’t make me feel that they were worth worrying about. Everything about the story is well done, and it’s a good, fast read. (As an aside, is it horror? A thriller? Whatever it is, what makes it that?)
So there you have it — three good solid books by indie authors. Check them out!
*****
As you may or may not have noticed, I have not published anything…ANYTHING…in 2016. It’s not for a lack of things to publish. I currently have four works ready to go. They are, in no particular order, ODD MAN OUT, RECIPROCAL EVIL, THE NEVER ENDING NIGHT, and finally, DEAD OR ALIVE. Most are novella-length; RECIPROCAL EVIL is a bit over 50,000 words, while ODD MAN OUT clocks in at about 33,000. I think that both DEAD OR ALIVE and THE NEVER ENDING NIGHT are around the same length: approximately 27,000 words.
I have been writing. I have a YA novel finished called THE SEVEN CITIES OF GOLD: CIBOLA which is about 53,000 words. I am about 68,000 words into an untitled end-of-the-world novel which was inspired by Hugh Howey’s WOOL. I’m working on a longer vampire novel which would follow DEAD OR ALIVE and a horror story set in a fictional town called Addison Falls. I’ve also been tinkering with a series that I started with my son a couple years ago, called THE NINE KEYS. The first of that series is basically finished, and it is something around 68,000 to 70,000 words in length. The second is about 20,000 words at this point and has a long way to go. I also started a space opera novel but that’s stalled out at around 17,000 words at the moment.
Covers are done for three of the four ready-to-go works, editing and formatting are done for all four. So what’s the holdup, you might ask (assuming that “you” are reading this and are interested in reading what I’m writing)?
I haven’t been selling much (okay, I really haven’t been selling anything!) and I need to do something different. One option is to give up. Or keep doing what I’ve been doing, which involves tossing up my writing, offering it for sale, and having no one actually find any of it.
The second option is to try to form a better foundation. So far I have only published ebooks and only at Amazon. So, my foundation is this blog/website, my Amazon author page, and my Facebook page. I have, like, 64 followers on Facebook. Not enough. And depending on Facebook to get the word out is a crapshoot. When I look at how many people view my posts on my Scott Dyson page there, often it’s like 7, or 13, or at best low 20’s. So of those 64 people, only a small percentage even SEE my notifications when I publish. Without paying FB to show the post to more people, I guess that’s about the best one can do there.
I am thinking of doing Instagram, just for my cover photos. I have thought about taking down my collections and publishing the individual works for free on Wattpad, but after looking around there, I didn’t have much luck finding a lot of stuff I wanted to read. I went specifically looking for my friend Steve Moore’s work there, and I didn’t find it with their search functions. So I wonder how effective that will be for what I write.
I try to “network” with other writers as much as possible. I will promote authors’ works (assuming they are something I like and read) here on these pages, with FB posts, and in any other way that comes up, and I have a few author-friends who have helped me out as well. But I don’t think our audiences cross over very much, or at least what I write is not necessarily of interest to their audiences. I read so broadly and across so many genres that I am happy to promote their stuff; even more, I WANT to suggest and recommend good reads to my friends. I think that maybe if I could network with some horror authors, it would work better. I have tried with a couple, but they don’t seem interested in reciprocating.
But the biggest thing I want to do is set up a mailing list. And I don’t really know how to go about it. I mean, signing up is easy. And it seems that putting the widget on the website is not a big challenge either. But most authors I’ve spoken to who use mailing lists effectively offer a free work, and all I have are mobi’s of my works. I’d certainly be willing to offer one or both of my short story collections, or even one of my novellas, for free as an incentive to sign up for the list, but as I have not used any of the software (Vellum, Sigil, Calibre) that apparently can generate ebooks in various formats, I don’t know how to get these files to give away.
As a mailing list builds, eventually you have a ready-made list of people who are interested in receiving information about your releases, and maybe, just maybe, you can sell enough books upon release to push your work into some sort of visibility on Amazon. I think that this sounds like the best way to increasing sales and visibility.
I also plan on giving away both of my short story collections (as they’re both in Amazon Kindle Select and in KU) and I want to try a FB experiment, ask some friends if they’d share the links to the free books, see if I can give away a bunch more than I usually do. Watch this page for announcements about those giveaways, or if you’re a Facebook friend, watch my feeds there.
Anyway, I’m going to try to break the paralysis in the next month or two, and get this stuff out there for anyone and everyone to read. If anyone is interested, that is…
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(I have three new stories ready to go; I’m just dragging my feet on publishing them because I want to get a few other things in place before I start running them out there. One is a long version of my short story “Odd Man Out,” which was published as a standalone (with another short story called “The House at the Bend in the Road”) and as part of the collection 14 DARK WINDOWS. What follows is the Prologue of that story, which is novella-length (about 33,000 words, if I recall correctly). Watch this space or sign up for my soon-to-come mailing list to find out when it is available on Amazon.
ODD MAN OUT
Prologue
Roger Sinclair checked the calendar that hung on the wall over his computer. October nineteenth. Only the nineteenth. It seemed that the thirty-first was taking forever to arrive this year. Time was dragging.
Anticipation had a way of making the passage of time seem very slow.
The Cabin Weekend was approaching, and Roger had big plans for the traditional yearly gathering of his friends.
Friends. That was a laugh. They didn’t like him any more than he liked them. They used him. They always had. Vinnie, Jack and Paul – they hung around with him – no, they let him hang around with them – because he was smart, dependable, and well-off. He made them feel superior – Look at rich, smart, loser Roger, who can’t get a girl and gets shunned by everyone…but us! We’ll take pity on the loser, and we’ll take advantage of his brains and his wealth.
Like the Cabin Weekend. They always went to Roger’s cabin. None of them had cabins. And why spend money on a real vacation when they could just sponge off Roger? Vinnie and Susan, Jack and Nancy, and Paul and whatever hot-looking hosebag he was dating at the moment.
Well, not this year. Paul wasn’t dating a hot-looking hosebag anymore. He was engaged. To Amy Wellington. Amy might be hot, but she was no hosebag. She was the epitome of class. She was the girl of Paul’s dreams, as Paul himself had pointed out.
She was also the girl of Roger’s dreams, but that was beside the point. Paul never cared about what Roger wanted, only what he wanted. He wanted Amy, so of course he ended up with her. That’s how it worked with Paul.
No matter that he had been Roger’s guest at a charity function when he met Amy. Paul had deigned to accompany Roger to the event when Roger’s own date fell through. ‘Fell through’ is sort of misleading. She dumped me on my ass, he remembered. Bitch.
Focus! Roger forced himself to get back on track with his thoughts. This wasn’t about Melissa, the stick-up-her-ass bitch that worked in the IT department of Roger’s family’s company. The point was Paul, and how he met Amy, and how he had practically run Roger over in his zeal to get to her first.
Paul knew that Roger saw her first, that Roger wanted to take a shot with her, but could Paul let him have a chance? No, of course he couldn’t. What Paul wants, Paul gets.
Roger’s fantasy was that Amy would see Paul for what he was and eventually they’d split up. It would be Paul’s fault, of course, and Roger would be there for Amy. He’d be the understanding friend she would need, the shoulder she could cry on, the guy who’d be there for her as she worked through the pain of their broken engagement. Of course it would end Paul’s friendship with Roger, but that was okay. It wasn’t a real friendship, and it had not been one for a long time. Ever since that day at the frat party back in college…
Focus! he told himself again. This isn’t about embarrassment that Paul caused him in college, this is about Amy Wellington. Paul’s fiancee. Roger’s one true love.
And the Cabin Weekend would be the time when things would turn in favor of Roger.
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(To find out what happens at the Cabin Weekend, watch for ODD MAN OUT at Amazon or on these pages…)
Whoa, it’s been almost a month since I posted anything here.
I’ve been writing a little, trying to get my ducks in a row for some sort of concerted effort to release four novellas/novels within a short time. Working on my post-apocalyptic novel, which is part The Stand and part Wool. (There are three ways to survive this apocalypse. 1. Build a shelter. 2. Be immune to this virus. 3. Be invited.) Reworking blurbs for those three novellas and one novel.
But I’ve been reading.
A short time ago, I posted that I’d read, and was impressed with, Ernest Cline’s debut novel, Ready Player One. I finished his second novel, a mashup of alien movie themes and stories, titled Armada. I enjoyed it, not quite as much as the debut, but it was still a lot of fun. Aliens are coming to destroy us, but we’ve known about it for the last forty years and have been preparing for the invasion. And guess what? We train our drone pilots by having them play video games. Does that sound familiar? Maybe something like The Last Starfighter? It borrows, or pays homage, to that film along with 2001: A Space Odyssey and Contact and others. It kept me (and my son) reading once we got into it.
I also picked up another book, one I’ve had sitting on the bookshelves since before Borders closed its doors (it still had the Borders sticker on it) called WWW: Wake by Robert J. Sawyer. I’ve always enjoyed Sawyer’s works, and this one ended up being really good. A blind girl with a very specific and rare type of blindness gets an implant which allows the visual signals to be altered and transmitted through the optic nerve, and it also allows her to “see” the World Wide Web. Through her enhanced awareness of the Web, she becomes aware of something – some entity – lurking in the background of that network, and whatever it is, it’s learning and becoming more aware of itself. Interesting premise, well-executed, with good characters and a setup for future books. I may read in in the three book series at some point.
My ebook reading included Fatally Bound by Roger Stelljes, a thriller featuring a couple of too-good-to-be-true sleuths/agents. I liked it, and it worked on a number of levels as they work the investigation alongside an FBI task force to locate a serial killer who is targeting various women who seem to have no common features or connections between them. Also I read another installment in Boyd Craven’s The World Burns serial, this the seventh story, titled The World Cowers. I have come to know and care about his characters and I want to find out where he’s ultimately going with the tale. Also finished Sleep Tight by Anne Frasier, another serial killer thriller, and also a pretty good read. And I read Edward W. Robertson’s third Rebel Stars book, titled Ronin. Enjoyed it quite a bit. Good space opera.
There are others, but that’s a good summary of some of the books I’ve been reading.
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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:
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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