1 CORPSES The Month of Jul, Mid Year 1169 Theailys An retched and the odor was almost as foul as that of the mangled corpse a few feet from where he knelt. A fantastic way to ring in his thirtieth year, to be sure. His younger self would have been …
The elders say a person’s composure reflects their soul. If this is true, then half our kind are mad. The eclipse is nearly here. I have anticipated it for twenty years, since my first transformation, and I have more or less made peace with my destiny. The moment in between …
Dolos called his dagger “Whiskey.” Most people called Whiskey by her other names, such as “Get that fucking thing away from me” or “Gods, please—no!” But unlike most things and people in Liosene, Whiskey did not discriminate. If you looked like you could do with a drink, she was happy …
PUSS originally appeared in issues 14 and 15 of SANITARIUM MAGAZINE as CRINKLEPUSS and FRANKENPUSS. The story (or stories) were written to suggest the protagonist or POV character as being a bit different than most people. It is still, to this day, the single most unnerving story I feel I’ve …
If Liosene was called the Hand of God, then the South Step slums—in all their shit and grime—were the middle finger. The giant “fuck you” to the people who aspired to go about their days without the fear of being murdered, beaten, raped, or some awful combination of the three. …
As I’m preparing to write the next blog post about my honeymoon in Europe, I decided to pause and share the following: the different opening paragraphs to SHADOW TWINS, starting from the very first draft when the story was titled THE FORGER. When I first started writing this I was …
*Written March 2nd, 2018 I have absolutely nothing against general literary fiction. I have read many fantastic stories in that category (The Silver Linings Playbook, The History of Love, The Hours, just to name a few), but genre fiction is what has always resonated with me. Why? Escapism. The ability to …
*Written January 26th, 2018 Over the last year and a half I’ve received a decent number of rejection letters from agents and magazine editors. The one thing they had in common? Personalization. Information, comments on the story and its characters, especially from editors. There was a consistency in rejection that …
When I was a young(er), ignorant writer I held firm to my belief that self-publishing was simply the “quitter’s path.” Part of my daily fantasizing as a new writer was the idea of my book one day sitting on the shelf in bookstores everywhere, and I believed that self-published novels were…not …
So. If you’re on Twitter or if you follow the publishing industry in some capacity then you might have taken notice of drama that is (was?) The Handbook for Mortals (TL;DR: YA debut scams its way to the top of the NY Times bestsellers list; is quickly removed thanks in …