News:

“Smell My Feet” made it into the Halloween-themed Shallow Waters finalists for this month. $5/month tiers and up can read all 20 stories and vote on their favorites at the end of the month.

Next month’s theme is 19th Century Horror, if you’re interested in submitting before the end of June (<1500 words flash fiction).

Works in Progress:

I think I’ve finished up with May Cooler Heads Prevail, but I’ve just discovered the text-to-speech option in Word (not AI), and I’m going to run through it one more time that way to try to catch anything I missed during the proofreading round. Then I’ll put it into Atticus and get it in shape to self-publish. As I wrote in my other social media, I’m so enamored of this little piece that doesn’t quite belong anywhere but is most comfortable among comic book heroes/villains and supernatural abilities. Almost too short to be a novella, not sure if it’s long enough to print.

It’s delightful, it’s raw, it’s too timely and just timely enough, sweet and cold and hot and harsh, frivolous, experimental, occasionally pretentious by design. It just means a lot to me, anxious though I am about putting it out into the world.

This weekend, my goal is to write two short stories (already have one taken care of) and try to put May Cooler Heads Prevail through its final paces.

Books I’m Reading:

Skeleton Crew by Stephen King
Queen Bitch Slay by Patrick C. Harrison III (finished)
It was All a Dream 2: Another Anthology of Bad Horror Tropes edited by Brandon Applegate

Things I’m Listening To:

Miranda Lambert
Let’s Hear It for the Girls playlist
Thorns playlists

Things I’m Watching:

Backrooms
House on Haunted Hill (1999)
Hawaii Five-O series
True Justice series
Elsbeth series
NCIS series
Prodigal Son series
Dirty Rotten Cleaners series (finished)

Poem of the Week: (throwback to June 2022)

jekyll in the streets
hyde in the sheets
stygian in the front
callipygian in the back
two-faced chaos parishioner
dichotomous mordrake