Howdy!

I’m looking for new recommendations. I just had a blast reading Jeff Strand’s Cemetery Closing (Everything Must Go), his latest Andrew Mayhem book, then dove into Lawrence Block’s Dead Girl Blues. The latter of which gave me interesting dreams.

I remember, roughly 20 years ago, reading a bunch of Jeff Strand’s books for free. Maybe he was published by Tor? Or Baen? I think both of those publishers were offering free ebooks at one time or another. The idea was to discover what that did to print sales. It increased them…the lesson from that was probably something along the lines of obscurity being worse than piracy. Obviously context-dependent. Anyway, I had Strand’s books in a .lit format that probably doesn’t exist anymore on a PDA running Windows CE. And I’d never heard of him. So, 20 years later, here I am loving his stuff. Buying it whenever something new comes out. I guess it worked.

Some of Strand’s stories are a bit more involved. A bit more bizarre. And with, you know, believable characters. That’s not what he does with Andrew Mayhem. This latest had pirates, cannibals, macabre death, and tons of humor: par for the course. As I said, I had a blast. (Strand often plays with a mix of horror and humor…sometimes supernatural stuff, sometimes not, but generally I love it.)

Then, the same day (yesterday) I finally started Lawrence Block’s latest. Oh boy. I want to say a lot about it…but what I really want is to converse about it. It is, in a word, dark. No fantasy/supernatural stuff here, as that’s not what LB does.

Okay, two things I guess I can say without worrying about spoilers, but if you’re not interested in occasionally reading really, really dark stuff maybe you should just skip this paragraph: (1) It reminded me, as far as “feel”/mood, of Donald Westlake’s The Ax, which was a very good book I may never reread, and (2) LB himself dropped this into his newsletter prior to publication…um…in the first chapter, the protagonist rapes and kills an innocent woman. And not in that order.

Hey. I said it was dark.

Anyway, the book is hard to talk about. I guess it’s safe to say it explores the limits of forgiveness and redemption. And left me thinking about just how much more disturbing a sociopath can be, once it becomes clear that he/she/they/it can actually love others. Some others. Clearly a limited offer there.

Still. LB wrote it. I’ll read anything he writes. And it was fun. In its own thoroughly disturbing way.

On the writing front, I’m making some progress. Lots of things have come up and redirected me in the last couple of weeks. Normal, I guess. More of that today, and tomorrow too (going to the river with the kids!). But, still, some progress. Trying some new stuff. More about all that later on.

I’m serious about looking for new authors/books to try out. I tend to read everything by anyone who can hold my interest–something that’s apparently more difficult as I’ve aged. I like to think it means I’m more discerning, but whom do I kid here? My capacity for paying attention has fractured into pretty focus-shards, good for a moment’s diversion but possibly not making me a good candidate for directing traffic. Especially not airplanes.

Ooh! I could write a story about airplanes….

Well, you see what I mean. Let me know if you have any ideas/books/authors to pass along?

And have fun out there!

Well, I screwed up this morning. I started out by checking email, which led me in twelve different directions that weren’t very useful considering that my goal was to write a damn story.

But I finished it eventually anyway. It’s pretty rough at present, so I hope I get some extra time for editing in the next few days. Maybe an hour or two. Still, though? This was sort of like a success. More like a success than anything else, I guess.

The House (the title may change) is a tale of three brothers, two of them twins and the other unrelated. Throw in a potentially haunted house, and a boy whose buddies have always believed him until he tries to tell them something more mundane than usual—but in the end it’s just as terrible as his other secrets. Or, come to think of it…maybe it’s worse.

Here’s hoping tomorrow gets off to a better/quicker start. Either way? I’m pretty excited.

Want to read today’s story? Let me know! I’ll send it out as soon as it gets a bit of editing. I also had technical problems, so parts of it (mostly the ending) are what you get when you transcribe a choppy recording.

Remember: all stories from this month will be available to potential beta readers (no obligation involved, though I do have hopes of feedback) via email, but none of them will be published until next month at the earliest. I may send them to a few places that pay money, or send some of them, or maybe I’ll just self-publish the lot. Who knows? Not I, that’s for sure.

Have fun out there!

Hi!

Yes, I changed the count. This is (or should have been) the second story of my current series of weekly freebies. But it’s also the 19th thing I’ve posted this way…so I decided it’d be slightly more reasonable to just continue the count from where I left off last time.

But it’s not a story. It’s more like Chapter One of something much longer. I didn’t know that was going to happen–and I let it mess me up. See, I’m already working on two novels. So this one wanted to get brain-time too. And I knew I wouldn’t finish it in time to post it on Wednesday, so I kind of gave up on it. Then I decided to post it anyway.

Don’t get me wrong: I like it. I want to write more. But I think I need to spend the next couple of nights writing a few paragraphs of several potential stories, instead of just trying to do a single story from scratch each week. Maybe that way I can try to identify the ones that want to run longer than I need for a weekly-story gig? I ran into the same sort of issue before, too, with “stories” about Marvin and Destiny. They wanted to grow into something larger, and didn’t really fit the weekly-release format.

Which is okay, I guess. Sort of. I mean, I’m writing the Destiny novel now. Finally.

Anyway, this week’s freebie is the first part of something called “The Neighbor” and you can check it out here. Just don’t expect it to be complete! It’s looking like it might turn into something fun, if I get around to finishing it. Which I hope I’ll do.

Or…would it be okay to post chapters as I go? Sort of a serial-novel thing? The problem is, people who missed the earlier chapters would have trouble figuring out the storyline. So maybe that won’t really work.

Next week, I’ll have an actual story. One way or another. I promise.

Have fun out there!

I was an early adopter of ebooks. Sometime I’ll have to tell you the story of the night I tried to con my wife into skinny-dipping with me in what would have been a public place except it was dark. Also there were javelinas, and deer, and strange noises, and she says I danced on an armadillo but the critter’s species wasn’t actually clear to me. It seemed scarier than that, and she’s only saying “armadillo” to embarrass me.

These thoughts are too related. See, that night the only illumination we had–and no, we weren’t lost, though Herself tells the story differently–was my little handheld computing device running Windows CE. On that device, among other things, were some books by Jeff Strand.

See?

Anyway, I’m a fan. His fiction is clever, often disgusting, frequently disturbing, and sometimes even a bit scary. Strictly speaking, I guess this particular book may not count as “indie published.” But I strongly suspect, after my Google-Fu came up short, that it was at least published by a small press. And however this book came to be? I’m glad it happened.

Here’s the description from Amazon:

A man who finds a severed nose on a plate on his dining room table. A bell that can summon Satan (maybe). Casual Fridays at work that get out of control. A cheery outlook on the post-apocalyptic landscape. The final thoughts of a doomed skydiver. A girl punished by having to share a bed with her grandmother’s corpse. Revenge via baking a tarantula into a cake. A romance between two carnivorous genetically enhanced plants. And the lost tale of Fangboy.

These are only a few of the demented stories in DEAD CLOWN BARBECUE, a collection of twenty-nine gleefully macabre tales, seven of which were written just for this collection. There’s even a brand new one about a ventriloquist dummy. Those things creep you out, right? You’ll laugh. You’ll scream. Okay…you probably won’t actually scream, unless you already had issues before you started reading, but you might cringe and get a little spooked.

I’m not going to try to describe the stories, because it’s clearly pointless. I’m not even going to say this is the author’s best work, because my opinion on that varies. Sometimes with the lunar cycles, but sometimes according to…uh…well, something that varies in an eldritch way. There are things like that. Or there should be.

So, if the above sounds cool to you? Go buy a copy. Or buy something else of his. Which suddenly reminded me of another book, and another author, and I have an idea for my next review. Which, right now? Doesn’t help you.

Jeff Strand is damn good at what he does. Also, nobody else does that. Enjoy.

And have fun out there!

(New-fiction word count: 2305. Project I is getting interesting.)