It’s not a terrible surprise–my name was on the teaser banner for the September 2020 package, and I haven’t been able to shut the fuck up about my new book–but Night Worms, the awesome horror subscription service, revealed over on Instagram that Standalone is officially part of the package. My portion, not counting if my publisher includes bookmarks or whatever, will include signed bookplates and they look legit, fam. We made them look like old school video store rental cards, and that’s just fucking neat.

This is my second time with Sadie and Ashley, and I absolutely love it. Not only do they love horror, but they love curating a cool product and that means I get my books in front of people who truly enjoy the genre. You can’t beat that.

Pre-orders for the September package run until August 8th, I believe, so get on that, gang.

Next, Adam Cesare, the writer of Con Season and Zero Lives Remaining runs the Project: Black T-Shirt channel over on YouTube, where he pairs new releases or reissues of films and then pairs them with a book recommendation. On Wednesday, Adam recommended Standalone, saying, in part, that Standalone “has a lot of heart, a lot of psychological depth, a lot of interesting twists and turns….It’s really good and I really, very much recommend it.”

Check it out below (and, hey, if you like cult films, Black T-Shirt’s channel will hook you up with info):

And then, yesterday, Ben Walker, a BookTuber and reviewer for outlets such as Gingernuts of Horror, Unnerving, and Kendell Reviews, posted this:

…and that just absolutely floored me.

It seems people, as they see the book, are starting to dig Standalone, and, lemme tell ya, I am here for it. I mean, all writers are neurotic messes (don’t believe anyone who won’t cop to it), so people digging the work means I can push my imposter syndrome down a little bit further.

It’s rare, but it’s fun when one of my stories gets the audio treatment. Today, over at The Wicked Library, they have an all-new story, called “The Man at Dealey Plaza” premiering, performed by Graham Rowat. It fits into the half-assed cosmology readers have seen in works like “The Doorway Man” and, more recently, “Hollowness”. I’m not much of a weird writer, say sorry, but I have fun when an idea occurs to me, and Mr. Rowat knocked it out of the goddamned park, friends and neighbors. When asked to do something in audio, I always try to think of some way to utilize the form and work backwards from there. I did something similar (with voicemails) in the story “Where You Find Faith in Things”.

In this instance, it’s a guy talking into his digital recorder and all the sounds digital recorders pick up. Being asked to limit the amount of dialogue helped in that respect, so that the story is less a narrative and more of a transcript. Making the guy a journalist and someone who became blind helped give me a sense of how to tell a story. This was also the first story written when the Covid-19 lockdown hit Virginia and schools went on what was originally called an extended spring break.

You can check “The Man at Dealey Plaza” here. Big thanks to Nelson W. Pyles for asking and the entire 9th Story Studios crew for facilitating, and big-big thanks to Graham Rowat for creating the voice I heard in my head.

And why the fuck now–pre-order Standalone, my upcoming slasher novella, here!

So this got announced yesterday:

My story “Feeling Like a Big Kid at the Beginning of the End” (written during the first few weeks of the Covid-19 lockdown here in the States, when my county decided to extend Spring Break and “see what happens”) will be appearing in Chiral Mad 5, due out sometime in 2021 by Written Backwards and curated by my long-time (and long-suffering) editor Michael Bailey.

This will be the third time I’ve appeared in a Chiral Mad anthology–my story “The Agonizing Guilt of Relief (Last Days of a Ready-Made Victim)” appeared in Chiral Mad 3 and the novella I wrote with Bracken MacLeod How We Broke (which was later released as a limited-edition paperback and hardcover by Thunderstorm Books) appeared in Chiral Mad 4.

What’s different with this anthology is that, much like the first Chiral Mad, 100% of proceeds will be going to charity–this time the Black Lives Matter movement. In 2020, it’s fucking awful that this needs to be done, but it does, and we all do what we can.

To that end, if you wanted to get in on the IndieGoGo campaign for Chiral Mad 5 (there are, as of this writing, 12 days left), go to this link.

So this happened.

This is the second time I’ve worked with Sadie and Ashley and Night Worms–they commissioned a limited edition of How We Broke, the novella I wrote with Bracken MacLeod for Chiral Mad 4 back in March of 2020, working with Thunderstorm Books. I love working with Night Worms and, in general, just love Night Worms. Their monthly packages, of which I have purchased a few in my time, have always been spectacular and have led me to being introduced to new authors, such as Craig Davidson and James Sabata. The last one I was a part of introduced me to a bunch of new readers and I’m excited to see how it goes this time.

You can pre-order the package at the link and, yes, I know, they haven’t revealed how I’m a part of the package, but let’s keeps it real for a sec–what new book of mine is coming in September? (And there’s a whole bunch of stuff working behind the scenes on that, too!)