Truths, triumphs, and tragedies of an independent writer.
I’m excited and honored to have a story included in this is new anthology about justice in worlds gone off the rails. My story “Bones of Change,” which you may recall was also in the Halloween bundle, On Hallows Eve, is about the dead coming for some payback. All proceeds from this collection will be donated to the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Human Rights Campaign.
If you’re ready for summer thrills and chills (ones that don’t even require air conditioning), I’m delighted to show off the brand new “Bump in the Night Thrillers” storybundle, which just launched today. Sixteen suspenseful, fun, and entertaining reads. Just click the image above, or go to this URL –> https://storybundle.com/thriller
One of the cool things about being a writer is that sometimes other authors let me play in their sandbox. Aaron Michael Ritchey, author of the Juniper Wars series, a Young Adult story about a family of teenage sisters on a post-apocalyptic cattle-drive, invited me to contribute a story to his world and this was the result. I wouldn’t call this story YA (it’s more like The Hateful Eight meets The Crying Game), but it was a whole lotta fun to write. You can download the ebook and PDF files here.
Audrey Brice Audrey Brice writes paranormal thrillers, mysteries, and horror stories where spirits, demons, and occult practitioners are both heroes and villains. As a girl I was terrified of ghosts and physical manifestations of the spirit world after having numerous strange supernatural experiences. By the time I was twelve I set out to explore the unknown. Aside from delving into the occult and participating in ghost hunts, I began writing about those experiences in both fiction and non-fiction in hopes to confront those fears and make sense of them. In fiction, I like to explore the unknown and the dark,
I love the old pulp masters. I grew up reading Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, E.E. “Doc” Smith, H.P. Lovecraft, and Edgar Rice Burroughs, and those authors made an indelible impression on my creative psyche. I devoured those stories, and they stuck in me down deep in the leaf mold. (See my essay “Cultivating the Fungus”.) The trouble is, if I go back and read those stories, I cannot help but do it with a modern eye, through my modern sensibilities. Unfortunately, as much as I loved it as a kid, a lot of that stuff doesn’t read very
If you’re of a certain age in the U.S., you were raised with Westerns. John Ford and Sergio Leone filled cinemas and TV screens with John Wayne and Clint Eastwood, the dust of cattle drives, the thunder of cavalry, guns, and the war whoops of Indians. By the time of my childhood, Western films were in their declining years, covering ground so well-trodden the genre itself had become cliché, a collection of easily recognizable and increasingly tired tropes. However, the genre never quite made it to the grave. Since the Western film’s heyday, we’ve been graced with some spectacularly good
If you’ve read my “Cautionary Tales for Writers” over on the left hand page of this blog, you know a bit of history about my early forays into writing and publishing. The first novel I published was an epic fantasy called The Ivory Star, back in 1997. For almost twenty years, it languished on my hard drive, untouched. Then Wattpad came along, and it seemed like the perfect venue to introduce my early work to a new generation of readers. So I commissioned a snazzy new cover and put the book out there to see what would happen. Lo and
Tip #1: Play Fewer Hands And Play Them Aggressively There is a limit on how many starting hands you can play before the flop in No Limit Texas Hold’em, even for the world’s best players. If you try to play too many hands, you’ll bleed away your chip stack (unless lady luck is on your side). Developing a solid preflop poker strategy is by far the easiest and fastest way to improve your bottom line. However, while developing solid preflop ranges is relatively easy to do (like by downloading our free preflop charts) having the discipline to stick to them is difficult.
“One writes such a story not out of the leaves of trees still to be observed, nor by means of botany and soil-science; but it grows like a seed in the dark out of the leaf-mould of the mind: out of all that has been seen or thought or read, that has long ago been forgotten, descending into the deeps. No doubt there is much selection, as with a gardener: what one throws on one’s personal compost-heap; and my mould is evidently made largely of linguistic matter.” – J. R. R. Tolkien, on the creation of The Lord of the
Losing weight is hard. And keeping it off? Even harder—almost to the point that shedding pounds for good can feel like a Sisyphean struggle. That’s probably why, according to recent research out of JAMA, that the amount of overweight people in the United States consistently rises while, at the same time, fewer people than ever are embarking on weight loss journeys of their own. But what these struggling souls may not know is that losing weight doesn’t have to be such an arduous slog. In fact, by deploying the right methods, weight loss can be effortless, entertaining, and, most importantly, effective. The first
Something new has appeared in the wondrous–and sometimes helpful–oddities of the internet. A means whereby creative folks like myself can gather their most ardent fans to chip in a few bucks every time the creator does something cool. It’s a new form of crowdfunding called Patreon. I’ve been hankering for a few months to try it, but first I had to do some soul-searching, get some life-changes squared away, and move to another country two hemispheres away from my old digs in Colorado. I’ll be living in New Zealand until mid-2016. I’ve done two successful Kickstarters for the last two
This year, the editor of my Ronin Trilogy gave me an incredible compliment: “In Spirit of the Ronin, every scene does exactly what you intend it to do.” On a day when I was dreadfully worried about whether the newly finished novel draft was any good, this came at the perfect time. I’ll quickly avert my gaze from the implication that apparently I didn’t quite hit that mark every time in previous books. Chalk it up to the learning process. A lot of know-how about writing scenes is packed into this one sentence, and it comes in levels and/or number