Category Archives: Short Fiction

Bookstore, Fragments, Grim Repo Files, Questioner's Shadow, Shattered, Short Fiction, The Sacrifice of Mendleson Mooney, Zombies Ate My Mom

Bookstore

I’ve been wanting to do this for quite a while, but for various reasons, I never did it. However, over the last couple weeks, I discovered Ecwid, decided to change web hosts, and decided to get rid of some dead weight.

In the bookstore, you’ll find everything I have available—electronic editions and signed paperbacks.

Every electronic edition comes in DRM free ePub, mobi, and PDF formats. You get them all, so if you ever change devices, you’ll still be able to read the books.

Every paperback comes signed. You also get the electronic editions for free with a paperback purchase.

Right now, I’m only shipping paper books to the US. If you are outside of the US, and you really want the paperbacks, email me and I’ll see what we can come up with.

Short Fiction, Writing

My New Writing Experiment

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People write in all sorts of ways. Some people binge write, putting words down at amazing clips until a project is done and taking time off in between projects. Other people write a steady amount every day, or every weekday, or every weekend. It’s all different.

I’ve been trying for the past couple of years to get to the point where I can write steadily. My goal has been to write 1000 words each day. I wrote 2000 words a day while working on Shattered, but I often found I had to push myself for several hours to get it done when it wasn’t working for me. But 1000, I can do that without too much angst if I can stay off of the Twitter and Skype and Messenger (I like my friends).

I have a large number of projects I want to write. If I wrote 1000 words each day, it would take me nearly ten years to complete them all. I’m fine with that, to be honest. Over time, some projects will drop off the list, but I’ll have others that I add to it.

But, I’ve also acquired a bug for writing shorter pieces. There’s a completion high that I get whenever I finish something. It never lasts very long, but I like it. When writing shorter pieces, I get that boost more often.

There’s a problem with that, though. In order to write the shorter pieces in my normal 1000 words a day that I’ve been doing, I had thought it would impact the number of my novel projects that I could write, and I really didn’t want to do that.

So I tried something else this week.

I decided I’d write 1000 words on my novels in the morning, and then I’d write 1000 words on short fiction in the afternoon/evening.

And what do you know, it seems to work brilliantly. For me. For the first three days. I get to work on everything I want to, and I don’t feel overwhelmed by any part of it. I don’t feel overwhelmed by the length of the novel staring me in the face because, well, today is only 1000 words, and I know in a few days I’ll have a short story finished.

It’s been three days. I know there’s a very real chance that this won’t work long term, but in the short term I’m writing 2400 words each day and not feeling stressed about it at all. And if it continues, the novels will come out when I want them to, and I’ll have a bunch of shorts, as well.

Short Fiction, Writing

The Assassin and the Potionist

A couple weeks ago, I went to a workshop where I spent the week writing and learning, along with 20 other incredible writers (and I’m not just saying this to be nice – there were some awesome stories generated there), and during that workshop, I wrote this short story based on the one word theme, Gangsters.

Of course, I couldn’t write about real gangsters. I have a hard time dealing with stories that aren’t at least minimally sprinkled with the fantastic (I wrote one while there, believe it or not, but I have to create a whole new me before I put that one up), so I sprinkled it with a bit of fantasy, and came up with The Assassin and the Potionist.

It’s currently available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Smashwords.

Click through to read an excerpt from The Assassin and the Potionist

Short Fiction

Game Interrupted

Game Interrupted
What is a game designer supposed to do when his net-junkie girlfriend is jacked in at a lavish party thrown by his old partner and is singled out by a woman with red-colored eyes?

I’ve always been interested in the terminology that doesn’t change, even when the technology does. For instance, my girl, she’s over there, sitting on the couch, oblivious to the world around her because she’s jacked in.
‘Jacked in’ used to be the term people used when they plugged their cranial implants into the network. People had jacks in the side of their head and just plugged in. The plug-in would charge the battery at the same time as giving them access.
For the most part, you’d look like a junky when you were jacked in. Your eyes would roll back into your head, and for those that were prone to additional loss of body control, they might drool down their chin, or worse.
That lasted a decade or more until the computer manufacturers figured out two things. The first involved shrinking the computer so that it could run off the electrical energy of your body while still providing the functionality people had come to expect. The second was the invention of a shield that was small enough to put in your head, but was still capable of keeping the radio antennae from frying your brain.
Even after these upgrades to the basic personal computer, people still called connecting to the net ‘being jacked in.’

For the next week, you can read the whole story here for free.