This is HALLOWEEN! MOTHERFUCKING HALLOWEEN!

...and you know what that means! KINDLE EBOOK SALE! Wait, you were expecting me to talk about Fall, leaves, comfy flannels, fluffy hats, hot pumpkin spice lattes, jack O' lanterns, bobbing for apples, maybe? Hahahahahahah! No! I mean, yes, those things are awesome and part of Halloween. But for the sake of I have limited fucking time right now, I'll have to discuss those at more length another time. Alas, no, today I come to you to talk of sales and schedules and pretty bookly things.

I have free stories and 99 cent deals this month:

ABSO-FUCKING-LUTELY FREE SHORT STORIES, NO STRINGS ATTACHED:

• THE NORTHERN CONTINENT: Today (10-20-17 although actually it started yesterday but I suck at keeping up with things!) through 10-23-17
• 
  
• A LIGHT THAT COULD ONLY SHINE ON THE DEAD: 10-21 through 10-25
• 
  
• WHAT HAPPENS IN VEGAS: AN EMPIRE OF BLOOD SHORT STORY: 10-21 through 10-25
• 
  
• FORCIPULES: 10-21 through 10-25

YOU'VE GOT 99 PROBLEMS AND ALL OF THEM ARE PENNIES YOU NEED TO COME UP WITH TO BUY THE FOLLOWING BOOKS FOR THE FOLLOWING LIMITED TIME:

• MINDLINK: A LIFELINE BINARY (collection/mosaic novel): Today (10-20-17) through 10-26-17
• 
  
• WHERE ALL LIGHT IS LEFT TO DIE (collection): Today (10-20-17) through 10-26-17
• 
  
• LONG SHADOWS VOLUME 1 (long fiction boxset): 10-27-17 through 11-1-17
• 
  
• EMPIRE OF BLOOD (novel trilogy plus two bonus short stories): 10-26-17 through 11-2-17

So, yeah, there you go. If you like cheap/free books, feast ye hungry bibliophile. Now back to apple bobbing and what not!

Dream Static Now Available as an Audiobook!

My latest novella DREAM STATIC is now available as an audiobook through Audible, Amazon, and iTunes. Maye Henley narrated this one and she did an exquisite job of it! Here's the details:

When successful environmental prosecutor Angela Bane goes in for her annual synaptic backup, she's just as reluctant as always. After all it's just a routine procedure. Until she wakes up 22 years later in a chaotic surgery room, disoriented and unable to speak.

As she slowly recovers from the Resus operation and learns about her fate, she struggles to deal with a world that's gone on without her. Her father's dead, her fiancé, Jordan, has become an old man in her "absence", and her body hasn't aged at all since the day it was littered with bullets.

With no memory of her murder and no bearings in this place and time, Angela begins both physical and emotional therapy to try and adjust. Unable to deal with the chasm of time that's opened up between them, she sends Jordan away determined to suffer in solitude.

Then the dreams begin. A dark parking garage, a close colleague, and the obscured face of a man lifting his gun and pointing it in their direction. Could she actually be remembering something that happened after her backup?

"It's called Dream Static. Sometimes the old brain tissue still retains bits of memories and, upon reanimation, those synapses can connect and reincorporate with the ones that were backed up."

Before long, someone comes to visit her in the hospital. A dark brooding presence, Maddox was the original detective assigned to her murder. And now that she's alive, maybe, just maybe she holds the key to bringing the man responsible to justice.

Over time, the dreams bring Angela closer and closer to finding the identity of her killer. As her heart draws her closer and closer to Detective Maddox.

And in the end the killer might just find her....

Again.

Sales and My Next Vampire Trilogy!!!

I intend to post something other than just the typical promotional post about sales and news and blah blah blah, but unfortunately... today is not that day! There are two big sales going on right now and I figured it might be a good time to share them here on the dusty old blog and clue you folks in on some big news for the future.

First of all, right now I'm running a Kindle countdown deal through Sunday May 21st for the entire EMPIRE OF BLOOD trilogy for Amazon.com for only 99 cents! Many of you already own copies of these books and I apologize for boring you and that you weren't able to get in on this deal but it's time the series got a larger readership, and this is one of the only ways to do that now a days. So, please, please, please share the news on your Facebook, your Goodreads, your Twitter pals, with your neighbors, with their dogs, with their dogs' doggy friends, with your dentist (God knows that fucker likes blood!), with your friends who read, maybe even your mailman if you're not too afraid of him shunning you for the rest of existence.

Same goes for the other sale I've got going and many of you DON'T have that one! AND IT'S FREE! Today and tomorrow, you can get my cyberpunk/noir (with a dash of horror/weird fiction) mosaic novel, MINDLINK (includes EXIT REALITY, KOADIE'S MONSTER, SOULSERVE, and SELF-AWARE) for ABSOLUTELY NOTHING AT ALL! I just ask that you share it, read it, and seriously consider leaving a review on Amazon (Same goes for the trilogy for those who have read all three novels, it is in desperate need for reviews!).

Now for the big news! Yay, news!

A lot of development has been happening for several books I've been working on for a while now. I've made some huge leaps for the sequel series to Empire of Blood as well as a couple of standalone novels I've been working on.

First of all, for you Empire of Blood fans, there will definitely be a new trilogy and here's the scoop on that:

Introducing APOCALYPSE OF BLOOD: AN APOCALYPTIC VAMPIRE TRILOGY!

The series will consist of the following three novels:

RISE OF THE PLAGUE: APOCALYPSE OF BLOOD BOOK I (click the link to go to the book's Goodreads page! And maybe if the spirit so moves you, add it to your to read list.)

RISE OF THE DEAD: APOCALYPSE OF BLOOD BOOK II
and
FALL OF THE WORLD: APOCALYPSE OF BLOOD BOOK III

Here's the work in progress synopsis for book one:

Diana's life is strange. She's part human, part... something else. Raised by vampires and sick of her diva twin sister who also happens to be the vampire hive queen, she ran away from home to lead a normal life at the age of twenty-two. 

But the visions followed. Vivid and terrible and recurring since birth, they were bad enough when they were only about her dead father but now...

They show her something new... 

Bodies pile in the streets, hospitals turn away once-human withering husks, their blood all but dried up in their veins. The Blood Plague is born and it hungers. 

And not just for human blood.

Now, for you folks who have never read EMPIRE OF BLOOD, this series will stand on its own. You will not need to go back and read EMPIRE OF BLOOD, though with the sale going on today, it might be time to give it a shot anyway (amirite?!?! ((I fucking hate that one but I couldn't resist using it here!). So there's that.

I'm on course to finish ORIGIN OF BLOOD, my collection of EMPIRE OF BLOOD origin stories in time for a December release and then you should expect a flood of news about APOCALYPSE OF BLOOD. My projection for release for book one is December 2018 but don't be surprised if it doesn't happen sooner as this one is practically already writing itself.

Also, keep an eye out for other new stuff. I'm still working on the sequel to MINDLINK which will be called MINDCORE, though I've slowed drastically on it lately. I've also made gigantic strides with development on a little standalone novel I've been working on the past two years initially called DEVIL'S CREEK, then renamed to BEASLEY HOLLOW, and now potentially about to be renamed to something else entirely. We'll see. Suffice it to say that it will be a massively different novel than my vampire stuff. A supernatural horror/weird fiction tale about crows who are a bit too big for their britches, marital separation, bisexuality, teenage cutting, missing persons, and strange, unearthly phone calls in the middle of the night. So, keep an ear out for more details on that one.

Anyway, I'm really excited about all of these and I hope you are too. With all that unleashed, it's time for me to go and do the day job thing. Take it easy, folks!

THE NESTING PLACE Now Available as an Audiobook!

My 2014 novella THE NESTING PLACE is now available as an audiobook on Audible, Amazon, and iTunes! Scott McDonald did the narration and he did a wonderful job bringing the story to life. Here's the book's description:

When Art Gibson's collie, Ginger, goes out of control, barking and digging at Dead Man's Hill, Art makes a chilling discovery: someone is trapped inside. Alive. Once rescued, the man himself is even stranger. Naked and unable to speak, he is taken to the hospital. As he recovers from an unknown shock, the fate of an entire universe is at stake.

Check out the sample below!

Release day and more!

My newest novella DREAM STATIC is now available for Kindle and in bound together dead tree slices! This one is sort of a sci-fi, noir, romance mashup, a bit of a departure from my typical in several ways and clocks in at about 24,000 words. Here's the cover copy:

When successful environmental prosecutor, Angela Bane, goes in for her annual synaptic backup, she's just as reluctant as always. After all it's just a routine procedure. Until she wakes up twenty-two years later in a chaotic surgery room, disoriented and unable to speak.

As she slowly recovers from the Resus operation and learns about her fate, she struggles to deal with a world that's gone on without her. Her father's dead, her fiance, Jordan, has become an old man in her "absence," and her body hasn't aged at all since the day it was littered with bullets.

With no memory of her murder and no bearings in this place and time, Angela begins both physical and emotional therapy to try and adjust. Unable to deal with the chasm of time that's opened up between them, she sends Jordan away determined to suffer in solitude. 

Then the dreams begin. A dark parking garage, a close colleague, and the obscured face of a man lifting his gun and pointing it in their direction. Could she actually be remembering something that happened after her backup?

"It's called Dream Static. Sometimes the old brain tissue still retains bits of memories and, upon reanimation, those synapses can connect and reincorporate with the ones that were backed up."

Before long, someone comes to visit her in the hospital. A dark brooding presence, Maddox was the original detective assigned to her murder. And now that she's alive, maybe, just maybe she holds the key to bringing the man responsible to justice.

Over time, the dreams bring Angela closer and closer to finding the identity of her killer. As her heart draws her closer and closer to Detective Maddox.

And in the end the killer might just find her…

Again.

Now, for those of you who are down on your luck financially who still want to read this one, I'm actually giving away e-copies in exchange for honest reviews, so if you're interested, simply sign up for my new review copies newsletter here! All I ask in return is that you review the book on Amazon. If you also like to do blog reviews or video reviews, or Goodreads reviews, or elaborate sky-written reviews, or have a review site, even better!

I suppose I should also mention that I finally released a Kindle boxset edition of the EMPIRE OF BLOOD series. It includes the trilogy as well as the following two short stories: WHAT HAPPENS IN VEGAS and THE RESURRECTION OF TOMMY DERRINGER. Now, with the entire series up and looking rather naked on the review end of things... it would mean more than the world to me if any of you out there who have read the series would click the link and head over to the Amazon page and leave a review.

In other news... I just finished the second draft of a new sci-fi novella called The Colors, one I've been working at off and on for about three years now. One I'm very proud of and think might mark a big milestone for my work. Or it might just suck and be the spark that ignites my eventual meltdown. Haha! Hopefully not. I don't really want to give too much away but it is a hard SF novella with some similar and polar opposite parallels to Lovecraft's The Colour Out of Space (a connection that happened quite by accident much like my story FOUR ARCHES recently released in GOTHIC LOVECRAFT edited by Lynne Jamneck and S.T. Joshi).

At the beginning of May however, I'll be doubling down on finishing up ORIGIN OF BLOOD: An Empire of Blood Collection  in order to make sure and have it ready in time for a Christmas day release. The collection will include three character origin novellas, some other origin short stories, as well as some notes, handwritten and otherwise, deleted scenes, and other bonus material.

But after that...

I have two stand alone novels that I'm itching to get back to, MindCore: A Lifeline Binary to finish and I've been developing ideas for the yet to be officially named predecessor/spinoff trilogy to EMPIRE OF BLOOD. I don't want to give away anything just yet but a lot of interesting ideas are churning.

Well, with that, I'm done boring the pants off of you guys. Until next time...

Dream Static

So that novella I mentioned that I didn't know what to do with... The very next morning a mass email went out from Amazon promoting their Kindle UK Storyteller contest (no I'm not from the U.K. The contest is open almost world wide) so I read through all the rules and slept on it and ultimately said fuck it. So low and behold, weighing in at approximately 24,000 words, now available for Kindle pre-order, and releasing in both eBook and paperback exclusively on Amazon, I give you:

DREAM STATIC

When successful environmental prosecutor, Angela Bane, goes in for her annual synaptic backup, she's just as reluctant as always. After all it's just a routine procedure. Until she wakes up twenty-two years later in a chaotic surgery room, disoriented and unable to speak.

As she slowly recovers from the Resus operation and learns about her fate, she struggles to deal with a world that's gone on without her. Her father's dead, her fiance, Jordan, has become an old man in her "absence," and her body hasn't aged at all since the day it was littered with bullets.

With no memory of her murder and no bearings in this place and time, Angela begins both physical and emotional therapy to try and adjust. Unable to deal with the chasm of time that's opened up between them, she sends Jordan away determined to suffer in solitude. 

Then the dreams begin. A dark parking garage, a close colleague, and the obscured face of a man lifting his gun and pointing it in their direction. Could she actually be remembering something that happened after her backup?

"It's called Dream Static. Sometimes the old brain tissue still retains bits of memories and, upon reanimation, those synapses can connect and reincorporate with the ones that were backed up."

Before long, someone comes to visit her in the hospital. A dark brooding presence, Maddox was the original detective assigned to her murder. And now that she's alive, maybe, just maybe she holds the key to bringing the man responsible to justice.

Over time, the dreams bring Angela closer and closer to finding the identity of her killer. As her heart draws her closer and closer to Detective Maddox.

And in the end the killer might just find her…

Again.

The Hopefully Not Forgotten Bob

Wow... first post of 2017... in April... I am a master of consistency!

So, where to start?

We still haven't been able to move. Life has been one big nose to the grindstone in the form of going back to a day job for the past year and a half now with very little to show for it other than NOT BEING HOMELESS. Not that our home is worth calling a home. I'm really not going to just moan and bitch for this entire post. Just bear with me as it's been a rough year and I may need to go off on a raving tangent here and there without warning. You've been warned?

Anyway...

Some good things have also happened and are happening. Most of them have been or are a (glacially) long time coming, but they've happened/are happening nonetheless. There was the release, in December of last year, of GOTHIC LOVECRAFT edited by Lynne Jamneck and S.T. Joshi and including my short story "Four Arches" a Lovecraftian twist on my hometown's version of the goatman rural/suburban legend. For those of you who don't already know, this book has been in the works for some time. I believe it was initially supposed to be released in late 2015 if I'm remembering correctly.

This handsome volume is available, at least for now, in only two hardcover editions from Cycatrix Press (pictured above the previous paragraph, there is a trade edition and a signed/lettered limited trade edition) and as an Amazon Kindle eBook.

I'm quite pleased to be sharing pages with several authors I quite look up to in this collection, including Caitlin R. Kiernan and John Shirley.

So there's that...

On September 6th of last year, SHINING IN CRIMSON's eBook edition celebrated its fifth birthday alone in the corner of an empty room with a used paper plate coned into a birthday hat on its proverbial head... I had intended to have a revised, expanded, and author's preferred edition ready for release on the fifth anniversary of its October paperback release, but alas the nose to the grindstone thing and the obligations of family life have kept me from managing to accomplish this even still. Maybe I'll have it done by the time the tenth year anniversary comes around? Ha! I'll try not to take that long.

I'll try...

Speaking of trying and utterly failing, some of you may remember a collection of Empire of Blood origin novellas I promised to have out some time ago called ORIGINS OF BLOOD. I had initially offered a preorder for it only as a limited hardcover, but seeing as how 99.9% of my audience are Kindle users, it was only ordered by a handful of people and I didn't manage to raise enough funds to cover the cost of putting it together. That said, I agreed to provide special copies to those folks nonetheless while also getting their permission due to the low demand in print of putting out an eBook edition as well. And I still as of yet haven't delivered on that and for that I'm more sorry than I can say. 

The book has proven to be an elusive one for me to finish and while that's no excuse for its extremely tardy delay, I do hope those of you who preordered understand given how little time I've had to write at all the past two years or so. And while I'm throwing out excuse after excuse, there was also a number of months in which I wrote nothing at all because I found myself in that old stupid cliche of writer's block. Had you told me prior to that that such a thing existed I would have laughed in your face. But it happened and I felt myself unable to break free from it until inspired by just the right pair of stories.

All that said, I'm still working on ORIGINS OF BLOOD and I hope to have it finally, once and for all, ready to release before the end of this year!

On the editing front, I'm no longer taking new clients due to the whole day job thing, however, I am back in the anthology game. Last year, I solicited a number of authors whose work I love to contribute to a new cosmic horror/noir anthology for Crystal Lake Publishing titled ASHES AND ENTROPY. So far I've accepted only two stories for it but I should be receiving many more stories soon. Look forward to that one to come out sometime next year!

For those who don't know, Nightscape Press remains currently on hiatus awaiting the launch of our new charity publishing model we've been working hard on for some time now. The idea is that authors and the charity of their choice will receive most of the royalties while NSP will get a meager little bit and then mostly rely on donations/pledges/special projects to cover our expenses etc. 

We've enjoyed doing the "For Good" line of charity anthologies (Horror for Good, Fantasy for Good, with more to come!) and have always wanted to expand on our charity work. Hence the idea to become the first ever (that we know of) charity-driven speculative fiction press. Unfortunately, though, things are moving slow as we still have a couple of books to put out via the old model, but we hope to open submissions later this year for the charity model when we relaunch.

I have a long overdue story yet to come out at some point this year... if it does. I hate to say that, but it was initially slated for a late 2013 release and well... it's been quite a while now. That said, I'm told it should be coming out soon. The story, "Coma," marks a rare departure for me from either horror or more concept-based science fiction. It focuses on the torn relationship between a married couple in the midst of a coming apocalyptic impact from a comet. I'll try and remember to update the blog when it comes out.

Alongside ORIGINS OF BLOOD, I've also been working on a number of other stories, mostly science fiction and/or weird cosmic horror and/or both mixed together. I finished a noir-ish science fiction novella titled Dream Static last year in order to submit it to Tor.com's call for near-future SF novellas last summer. However, upon receiving the feedback of some gracious and inspiring writer friends, I realized it wasn't ready and in the midst of reworking it, I didn't quite make the window for that submission call. I've since not figured out exactly what to do with it. I would prefer to publish it the old fashioned way instead of self-publishing, but we'll see what happens.

One last thing before I wrap this post up: I'm currently going over and marking edit points for the audiobook edition of my 2014 hard science fiction novella THE NESTING PLACE. Scott F. Feighner, under the name Scott McDonald, has done a phenomenal job at bringing my story to life in audio. Look for this to be out very very soon!

Beyond that, I'm sure there are tons of things I'm forgetting to mention since the last time I posted was December and that was maybe one of three or four posts last year... but at the moment, I think this will do. It is what it is. Thank you for having patience with me or maybe even for not forgetting I exist! 

Until next time...