Category: Fiction

“The Toy That Ran Away” in Moonscapes

Don’t look now, but I have another story out:  “The Toy That Ran Away” has appeared in Moonscapes, volume six of the Fiction River anthology series.  It features an intrepid interstellar private detective named Dexter Duff, who’s also appeared several times in other magazines.  When Dexter is asked to retrieve a child’s sophisticated robotic toy from a ravaged moon, he uncovers a disturbing secret.  Think The Fifth Element meets Spenser for Hire and you’ll have the right feel of these stories.  Judging by the lineup of other authors, there should be some fantastic tales in this one.  Here’s the full description of the anthology:

We all look up at the moon and wonder. And maybe dream. For centuries, the moon filled our imaginations. Eleven professional writers took those dreams and set original stories on moons scattered all over the galaxy. Yet, as the dreams of centuries, every story holds a human touch. From a mythical man fulfilling a childhood wish to a fantastic addition to Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s bestselling Retrieval Artist series, this volume of Fiction River allows you to travel to eleven different moons without leaving the comfort of home.

Fiction River is an original fiction anthology series. Modeled on successful anthology series of the past, from Orbit to Universe to Pulphouse: The Hardback Magazine, the goal of Fiction River is to provide a forum for “original ground-breaking fiction of all genres.”

Buy at Amazon:  Print | Ebook

Or for other ways to purchase, including a subscription to the ongoing series, check out FictionRiver.com.

GHOST DETECTIVE: The Haunted Breadbox (Free Short Story)

People might think something’s wrong with me.  I’m blogging twice in one day.  How can this be?

Well, I promise not to make it a routine.  Whenever I spend too much time on the website, it doesn’t take long for me to feel like the effort I put here would be better off spent writing fiction, especially since with a busy day job at a university and all the challenges that come from raising two kids, time is hard enough to come by as it is.  But as I menioned earlier, I’m making a little extra marketing push with the book being published this summer, Ghost Detective. Part of that effort is a short story called “The Haunted Breadbox,” which is not only a prequel to Ghost Detective but was also the inspiration for it.  Here’s a little more information:

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Myron Vale sees ghosts. One hundred billion of them, to be precise.

In a world where everybody dies but nobody leaves, Myron Vale is the rare individual who completely straddles both sides of the great divide. In fact, he may just be the only one. His strange ability the result of a gunshot to the head while serving as a Portland police officer, a few years later he recovers to forge a new life as private investigator catering to both the living and the dead.

His biggest problem? He can’t tell them apart.

In this short story prequel to Ghost Detective, the first novel featuring Myron Vale, a house call to an old farmhouse finds Vale investigating the most unlikely of haunted places — a breadbox. What lies inside? It’s not at all what Vale expects.
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You can read this story for free right now on this website, or download a free copy in any number of formats over at Smashwords.com —  .mobi for the Kindle,.epub for the Nook, even PDF for your computer.  It’s also available for 99 cents on Amazon.com if you want to make it easy to download it to your Kindle.  At the end of the story is an afterword explaining the origin of the story, which then lead to the novel.

This is another great advantage of indie-publishing.  I’ve sold many short stories  to magazines and anthologies, but if I tried to do the same with this one, it could take six months to a year just sending it around (with no gaurantee anyone would buy it), and another six months to a year before it was published.  Then I’d have to wait another three to six months (an exclusivity period) before I could republish it on my site for free.

By releasing this one now myself, I can get it out before Ghost Detective is published, which hopefully will entice readers to pick up the book.  I did this once before, with a short story called “A Plunder By Pilgrims,” which was something of a prequel to The Gray and Guilt Sea, and I know for a fact that many, many readers discovered the novel via that short story.

A novel, by the way, which was published under the name Jack Nolte, and is now being re-released under my own name.  More about that soon.

WOODEN BONES – Now Available!

First, the big news:  Wooden Bones, my dark children’s fantasy that chronicles the untold story of Pinocchio, is now available in both hardcover and ebook from Simon and Schuster.  What happened to Pino, as he came to be known, after he became a real boy?  The answer:  It turns out he can bring puppets to life himself, which gets him into a whole lot of trouble.  Giant hungry wolves?  Dead trees brought to life?  Life-size puppets that march about like zombies?  The book’s got all of that and more.  I hope you check it out.  It’s aimed at the 9-12 age group, but I think adults might like it as well.

It’s been a busy couple of months.  In late July, I co-taught the Think Like a Publisher Workshop with Dean Wesley Smith, where we helped another room full of professional writers learn how to take advantage of all the ways writers can now go direct to readers — even while continuing to work with large traditional publishers, as I am.  It was a great group and always fun to hang out with Dean and all my other writer friends on the Oregon coast.  Hard to believe, but I’ve known Dean over twenty years, ever since I walked into his writing workshop in Eugene, Oregon when I was a nineteen-year-old college student and realized, right away, what a goldmine that workshop was for a newer writer like me.

The first half of August, my wife and I took off for Europe, embarking on a five country, ten plus city Mediterranean cruise, tacking a few days on at the beginning and the end.  In all, we were gone 17 days, and it was quite a trip — Barcelona, Athens, Rome, Venice, Istanbul, I’m still mentally unpacking everything we did on the trip.  It was expensive, no doubt about it, but we have no regrets; it was something we’d been wanting to do for a long time.  And no, we didn’t take the kids.  They stayed with the grandparents (we took them to Disneyland last year, which was the family trip), and had a much better time  than if they’d been with us.  Somehow I don’t think they would have appreciated the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona or the Parthenon in Athens quite as much as we did.

Other news?  Well, I’m buckling down into the writing, working on a dark paranormal suspense novel based loosely on one of my short stories.   More than that I won’t say until it’s finished, but the writing is going well.  I also have a number of new audio books out.  None of them are narrated by me (when I have more time, it’s something I plan to do, but not now), but they’re all excellent reads.  All of them are available for digital download at Audible.com and Amazon, and should be available at iTunes shortly.

With the summer winding down toward fall — I was stunned to realize that the kids go back to school in two weeks — I’m hoping to have a nice, productive stretch of writing for the rest of the year.  Traveling is great, but I truly am a creature of habit, and it feels good to get back in a creative groove.

What I’ve Been Reading Lately:

  • The Hunger Games Trilogy, by Suzanne Collins.  Fantastic read, and fully deserving of all the attention it’s gotten.  Felt a little like Ender’s Game meets The Princess Diaries, in the sense that it’s very much told in the voice of a teenage girl (complete with a makeover!)   but the action and war-heavy themes are there in abundance at the same time.  I’d say the third book was the weakest of the three, but it was also the most ambitious in scope.
  • Now and Then by Robert B. Parker.  Another great book in the Spenser series, touching on infidelity, the meaning of marriage, and what makes two people stick it out through thick and thin.  Not his best book, but then it’s Robert B. Parker, and even a run of the mill Parker is superb.