The Old News
08.14.14
My first story this month: suicide blurs with homicide in "Terminal Guy" with Yellow Mama.
This was an attempt to twist the usual hit man crime story into something else. What if there were hit men who were only hired by the people who wanted to be their victims? Of course, the story ends up getting published months after I'd written it. It appears just a few days after the high-profile apparent suicide of a brilliantly talented artist. So it takes on additional meaning. It isn't all unintended, though: in my mid-teens to my mid-twenties, I had considered suicide on a semi-regular basis. Aspects of this story are a part of me dealing with a part of that.
07.31.14
My seventh story on the month just got published yesterday. Another flash horror piece. This one got published at MicroHorror. There had been a good four months between writing the piece (over the course of a half an hour) and finding out that it had been published. When I saw it published it felt a lot like I was reading it for the first time. The piece itself is oddly satisfying. On a purely aesthetic level, I kind of enjoy the fact that I have a stroy called The Cute Thing With Those Big, Adorable Eyes published on a horror website.
07.19.14
Lots of stuff on the horizon as I close out the week. Two flash fictions and a microfiction published this week. Also--I just completed an email interview with Indie Writers Monthly.
Really excited about future bits including a short story in an upcoming British horror anthology called Twisted (from Horrified Press,) a short Frankenstein-inspired story in the second issue of Nonbinary Review in September and a slighlty longer short story for Mad Scientist's Journal next March.
07.14.14
I was kind of expecting July to settle-down for me. Yesterday I got notification of no fewer than TWO short stories that had been accepted for publication that would be published THIS WEEK.
The first one shows up today: Indie Writer's Monthly has awarded me top prize in their first annual Kindle anthology. I WILL BE A JERK had been hanging out with another indie publisher for a while. They had been considering it for publication for a few months when they reluctantly returned it to me unpublished. Now it proudly peers out at the world as the first story in the first INDIE-Pendance Day Anthology from Indie Writers Monthly.
Later on this week: horror in microfiction format.
07.01.14
Here I was expecting a slow July for my stories. In the past couple of days I've gotten confirmation of no less than THREE that will be published this month including a sale to Enchanted Conversations. Very cool.
06.13.14
Sometimes you go for something abstract that you think is really interesting and experemental. And sometimes a few weeks after finishing that fun, little experemental work you look back on it and you realize that it was nowhere near as original as you had previously thought.
I'd written Please Stop and Look Here with the idea of writing a text wherein the driving conflict of the piece was whether or not the reader was going to finish reading the piece. The reader would provide the essence of the conflict at the center of the piece.
I thought it was kind of a cool and original idea. Weeks later I remembered that this was exactly the same idea at the center of Jon Stone's 1971 children's book The Monster at the End of this Book.
...sigh...
Of course, I didn't realize this until AFTER I had submitted the piece to Weirdyear.
06.11.14
My publication with Every Day Fiction got moved up a couple of days. Didn't find out until I got mail in my inbox from a reader letting me know that it was up. Strange. And strange getting such positive reader feedback on it so quickly. Employment Unknown has, as of this writing recieved a 4 out of 5 stars from the 15 readers who have decided to rate it. Cool.
06.06.14
My second End of the World story didn't materialize yesterday, but today I get my fourth story published in four days as Pulp Metal Magazine publishes a brief brutal narrative that I call Rapid Cycling. This one was kind of weird for me. Somewhere between writing it and pitching the idea, it occured to me that it was kind of derivative of bits of Christopher Nolan's Memento and Frank Miller's original Sin City story. (The one that ended up featuring Mickey Rourke in the lead role in the film adaptation.) Being derivative, I figured it wasn't as original as I like my work, but Pulp Metal saw something in it and I worked with it and now it's really something. Exactly what it is I don't know . . . but I know that it's more than a derivative, little genre story.
06.05.14
After a Wednesday of having two stories published involving children, the rest of the week is about the end of the world. Four stories published in three days. These three days represent 1/3 of everything that I've had accepted for publication since mid-March, which feels weird as I am still averaging just over one acceptance per week.
So this is kind of a big week for publication dates for me.
06.04.14
June of 2014 promises to be a very active month for my writing. Things got juggled around a bit and it looked like my first published sale might not go through.
What I had expected to be a month with four of my stories being published has quickly expanded to 7 stories.
As I write this I have over 40 short story submissions active. That's 40 different stories currently sent out to 40 different websites.
I might not have seven stories published in July, but there's more to come in the months ahead.