Get STABbed!

My latest mini-collection of short stories, STAB: six tales of horror, is now available in e-book form at Amazon for the Kindle and Smashwords for online reading. It should be available for the Nook and other e-reading devices within the next month or so.

The difference between this latest collection and my earlier ones, SEVER and SLICE, is that the six tales found here are all brand new, written specifically for this e-book, and have never appeared anywhere else before now.

The six tales in STAB, and a little information about them are below:

Screaming Right to the End
The zombies have risen, but can three rooftop survivors survive one another?

Born to Bring Trouble
A mage-turned-biker finds himself facing off with members of his own gang.

Where the Baptized Drown
A preacher in 1880s Texas performs his own unique brand of the baptism ceremony.

Midnight in Oplontis
It's 80 A.D., a year after the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, and a couple of treasure hunters go digging in ash.

The Happiest Day of Her Life
A woman's wedding day turns nightmarish when her past comes rushing back.

When the Cows Come Home
A farmer discovers an unusual, ancient artifact out in his field, and suddenly lights are coming in his barn every night.

If you'd like to read short stories in the horror genre, check out STAB at the links below:

STAB for the Kindle at Amazon

STAB for the Kindle at Amazon UK

STAB for online reading at Smashwords

100 Days of Fantasy: Day 35

This is an ongoing series looking at books that influenced me as a fantasy author.

Hellblazer #63
by Garth Ennis

If you like dark fantasy and/or urban fantasy, but you're not familiar with the Hellblazer comic book, you need to kick yourself.

Hellblazer is about a modern-day mage named John Constantine. No, John doesn't go around wearing robes and waving magic wands. The closest he comes to wearing a robe is his trademark trench coat. The closest he comes to waving a wand is by flicking one of the endless cigarettes he smokes. He's also a Brit, and he generally has a fairly bad attitude, but he's also quick witted and smarter than the average bear.

One of the funny things about John is, you never really know how powerful he is. Sometimes he gets his ass kicked by some street thug, but at other times John has been known to go toe-to-toe with the powers of Hell itself and walk away. Of course he never walks away smiling, but that's usually because all his friends have been killed and he's bleeding from internal wounds and maybe he's lost a limb or is haunted by a ghost or demon or something.

All great fun, right?

The series has had a number of writers and artists over the years, but my favorite run on Hellblazer was back in the early 1990s when Garth Ennis was doing the writing and Steve Dillon was doing the artwork. I won't go into all the details about what John Constantine was into at the time, but for a while it involved neo-Nazis, an Irish girlfriend and Satan. But not all at once, and not necessarily in that order.

Issue 63 of Hellblazer has long been one of my favorites. For that one issue, it steps out of the continuing storyline and features Constantine on his 40th birthday. He's alone. His girlfriend is out of town. He wakes up late and pops down to the local store to buy some smoke and a big bottle of hard liquor. He's basically planning to spend his birthday alone and drunk.

Then his friends show up, and people he didn't even know were his friends. There's a priest, a magician, ancient gods, a talking rabbit, even Swamp Thing. Hilarity ensues. Believe me, lots of hilarity.

But between all the laughter and hi jinks, there's a story about a man growing older and facing troubled times ahead. It's actually a touching tale in many way.

This story helped me as a writer in that it taught me not to show all my cards at the table, meaning that as a writer I should only give the readers the information they need at any given moment within a tale. You don't want to cheat the reader by surprising them late in a story with information they obviously should have known early on, but suspense can be built by slowly reeling out needed information throughout a tale. Hellblazer is a great comic book for such, and this particular issues really brought it home for me.

Up next: Kingdom Come

100 Days of Fantasy: Day 34

This is an ongoing series looking at books that have influenced me as a fantasy author.

Captain America #226
by Roger McKenzie

Right off the bat, let me say that I realize comic books are a collaborative art form. The writer is not the only one steering the wheel. Often the artists, inkers, editors, etc. have major influences upon the story. But as a writer myself, I'm focusing on the writing aspects alone for the most part, which is why I only list the actual writers and not the others involved with the work.

Next, one might ask ... comic books? Really?

Yes, really. Comic books had a major early influence upon my young self, but even back then I wanted to be a writer. When I was a kid, I spent hours and hours and hours drawing and writing my own comic books. I wish I still had those comics today, but alas, I do not.

But what was special about issue #226 of Captain America?

A few things.

For one, when I was a very young kid, I had read a lot of the good Captain's early tales, but I had gotten away from reading him. In 1978, when this particular issue came out, I was 9 years old. And I got back into Cap with this issue, and continued to follow him through my early teen years.

What made me pick up this particular comic book?

That's an easy one. The writer lived right down the road from me.

I met Roger McKenzie through a garage sale. His own. He was selling tons upon tons of comic books. Discussing comics was how I got to know the guy a little. We never became best buddies or anything, he was a grown man at the time and I was a kid, after all, but I did get to go inside his house and see his gigantic collection of comics (literally wall to wall) and comics artwork he had hanging on his walls.

Even at that tender age, I knew I wanted to be a writer of some sort, a teller of tales. So meeting an actual writer was like a dream come true, and he lived just down the street from me!

Roger didn't stay in my neighborhood long. I believe he moved away just a few months later. But I always remember him and his run on Captain America.

But concerning the actual story of issue #226? Briefly, the Captain is aboard a spaceship and loses his powers while having to fight a gigantic robot. Simple straight-forward comic book stuff, right? Yes, but there's also lessens to be learned here. The Captain wins, of course, because he's the hero and the comic goes on for hundreds of more issues, but this issue showed me at an early age to kick your protagonist when he's down. Then kick him again. And again and again and again. Then let him work his way out of his troubles with his own skills, abilities and sometimes even just plain old willpower or smarts.

Thus, I was learning about writing at an early age.

Up next: Hellblazer #63

100 Days of Fantasy: Day 33

This is an ongoing series looking at books that have influenced me as a fantasy author.

Hamlet
by William Shakespeare

Most readers are familiar with the play Hamlet; if not the actual play, or the script for the play, then one of the movie versions. The basic plot is: king of Denmark dies, his ghost visits his son and seeks vengeance, madness and bloody chaos ensues as the son goes after his father's killer.

Okay, it's obviously more complicated than that, but I always fear giving away too much for those who don't know a story, especially as great a story as this.

Hamlet has always been my favorite of Shakespeare's tragedies, though MacBeth is a close second and I do have some fondness for Romeo and Juliet. For the curious, my favorite of Shakespeare's comedies is Much Ado About Nothing.

Why do I love Hamlet so much?

As with many such thing, it's complicated.

For one, I tend to like ensemble pieces in which everyone dies in the end. The Wild Bunch. Reservoir Dogs. Those kinds of stories. What sick, twisted side of me is it that likes these tales? I'm not sure. Perhaps it's a darker side of me that is reflective of a certain amount of chaos, futility and banality in our lives. Not to get all existential, and not that I'm a constant downer kind of guy bordering on emo or goth (I'm definitely not), but I do find those aspects of humanity intriguing to study. Maybe I'll even do such a story some day.

Another element I like of Hamlet is the possibility of madness within the main character, Hamlet himself. In the play, after a certain point Hamlet tries to portray himself as insane. But as the story grows deeper and darker, the viewer or reader is left wondering if Hamlet hasn't truly crossed the borders into insanity. Is Hamlet insane, or is he acting? It's a question that can never be answered, perhaps not even by Shakespeare himself. To my way of thought, Hamlet had to be at least a little bonkers just to follow through with many of his actions in this tale.

If you like darker tales, play, or are just a fan of Shakespeare, you need to read this play, or see it performed. I personally love to see it performed nowadays, having read it a couple of times already in this lifetime.

And my favorite movie version? Actually, Mel Gibson's portrayal, though he's obviously 20 years to old to play the lead character.

Up next: Captain America #226

My big disappointment of the year

I had one big goal for this year. I wanted to attend the World Fantasy Convention in Columbus, Ohio, in October.

That's not going to happen.

I love Columbus, and I've always wanted to go to a World Fantasy Convention, but it's not in the cards, mostly due to financial concerns. But I've also got some ongoing health issues with which I need to contend. Such is life.

On the plus side, I'm writing and editing and working on a ton of projects as an indie writer/publisher, as well as sending out a few short stories to publishers.

Maybe I'll get a chance to attend another World Fantasy Convention some day.

100 Days of Fantasy: Day 32

This is an ongoing series looking at books that have influenced me as a fantasy author.

Screenplay
by Syd Field

For this series about books that have influenced my writing, I've mostly stuck with fiction. But I've also been influenced by a good number of non-fiction books.

Screenplay by Syd Field is one such book.

I've mentioned elsewhere how screenwriting, specifically this book, helped me to have some sort of a mental breakthrough about 10 years ago, allowing me to get post something akin to writer's block that I had had for about five years at the time. For that very reason alone, I have plenty for which to be thankful when it comes to this book and Syd Field.

But I think what was the big mind-clicking moment for me was when I realized the basics of storytelling. Not good storytelling, necessarily, but storytelling in general. The basics of how a story works, how it should flow.

The secret? Quite simply, it's this: A story has a beginning, a middle, and an end.

There. That's it. Sounds dumb, doesn't it. But this book engaged my mind by making me realize what actually should come in the beginning of a tale, what should be in the middle, and what should be in the ending.

For me, it was almost like breaking down storytelling into a simple mathematical formula, one I could grasp.

Of course there's more to it than that, really, but it helped me break my writer's block and I've been writing like crazy ever since.

And if you are a prose writer, don't be turned off because this book is about screenwriting. Though Screenplay can be a bit dry in places, it definitely can help with creating characters, plot development and the like. Give it a try if you're looking for something different to read about writing. You'll even learn a good bit about actual screenwriting.

Up next: Hamlet, by Shakespeare

100 Days of Fantasy: Day 31

This is an ongoing series looking at books that have influenced me as a fantasy author.

Cerebus: High Society
by Dave Sim

Cerebus is difficult to explain, both the character and the graphic novels.

I'll start with the character. Initially Cerebus lives in a fantasy world familiar to the tropes of the Sword and Sorcery genre. In other words, he's a barbarian living in a mostly barbaric world. He fights demons and evil wizards, goes in search of treasure, beds wenches, etc. But Cerebus is also a short, gray aardvark. Let me repeat that. Cerebus is a short, gray aardvark.

Yes, you read that correctly. Cerebus is also an expert warrior and a great shot with a crossbow.

Eventually, as the comic series continues, Cerebus the title leans away from Sword and Sorcery and enters the lands of satire and pastiche. Cerebus the aardvark finds himself embroiled in political workings of various city states, and eventually he becomes involved in the religious spectrum, though mostly from a strictly political point of view.

Cerebus even eventually becomes a prime minister. And then a pope.

You can stop laughing now, because while it is all hilariously funny, it also has it's darker sides. But I won't go into all of that for fear of giving away too much.

This comic book originally ran for 300 issues, and it has been re-released in full in graphic novel formals. In my own opinion, and that of many fans of the comic, the first 150 or so issues were fantastic, the last 150 not so much because the author put way too much of his own personal biases/beliefs into the storyline.

Cerebus: High Society is one of the graphic novels, collecting issues 26 through 50 of the comic book. It details the aardvarks entrance into the city of Iest and his eventual, mostly accidental, involvement in the city's politics. It sounds a bit boring, but it's not. It's great fun, and will have fantasy fans (and fans of the Marx Brothers) laughing out loud on almost every page.

As a writer, Cerebus taught me a lot, especially about humor and satire. Plot development, specifically complex plot development, also was a highlight of these books, mostly beginning with the High Society stories.

If you're a fantasy fan and you're in the mood for a good chuckle, you won't find any funnier reading than theCerebus graphic novels.

Up next: Screenplay, by Syd Field