Soooo, I have been radio silent here,  but things have been afoot!

Namely, this!

My next book, my first standalone book–called, ahem, Standalone–is coming in September from Perpetual Motion Machine Publishing.  It’s about slashers and alienation and the Multiverse.

Here’s the cover copy:

They are killers. They are monsters. They are evil.

They stalk through summer camps, abandoned hospitals, rundown schools, and isolated houses, hunting anyone foolish enough to visit these places, leaving behind carnage, terror, death, and destruction. Sometimes, there are survivors. Always, there is blood.

And they do it to protect and preserve all of existence across the Multiverse.

But now they are the ones being stalked and hunted, and life as we know it hangs in the balance unless they figure out a way to survive.

Sound neat?  Head over to the Night Worms blog to see the cover and the sweet, sweet blurb Stephen Graham Jones gave the book.  (Oh my Christ, SGJ dug my book!)

And then, go here to pre-order Standalone!

So, uh, this is awkward.  Kinda.  In a good way.  I promise.

As a writer who does most of his work in the short form, it’s a matter of sending a story to a market (or turning in a requested story by a deadline), and then, if it’s accepted, waiting around for whenever it comes out so you can promote the ever-loving fuck out of it.  Months and, at times, years may pass between writing and publication.

And then you have those times when, like, a half-dozen goddamn stories all hit the market within two months of each other.

This is rare. Truthfully.

Currently, I have three stories floating around that all came out within the past two weeks, with another two due out before the end of the year.  This is on top of a story that came out at the end of July–“Wants and Needs” which came out in the excellent anthology Suspended in Dusk 2, edited by Simon Dewar, which I just know you’ve already picked up. (Right? Right.  Goddammit.  I got a kid to raise, here.)

But that all means that I haven’t done nearly-enough whoring to satisfy my guilty conscience, which seems to be the only remnant of my Catholic upbringing not washed away by atheism.  So! To make up for it, I figured I’d break down what went in to all the stories of 2018 and where you can find them.  If nothing else, whenever I do another collection (maybe in 2021 if people still like me?), I can just look this posting up.

So!  The stories.

1. Wants and Needs – Suspended in Dusk 2

In 2014, before buying our house (which we had been renting at the time), my wife and I shopped around, having a realtor take us out to various homes to see if anything caught our eye.  This wasn’t us dicking around before buying the house we already lived in–we legitimately thought of moving.

One of the homes we visited was a kit-job on top of one of the mountains that surround the valley we live in.  The way up was a gravelled road, cut down the center by years-old runoff that played hell on the suspension of the Pontiac Sunfire I drove at the time (I already knew, driving up, we were never going to live at whatever house was at the top, just because of that).  One of those multi-unit mailboxes, the kind I remembered from growing up in townhouse complexes, sat at the bottom.

I was a city kid and it was strange enough to live in a small town where the entire population was only the size of my high school population times ten (I’m not exaggerating).  The entire frame of mind needed to living on top of a goddamned mountain was not something I could get my head around.  The realtor said that most of the homes–lavish estates, most of them were–were summer places.  The house we looked at was far more modest and, honestly, nothing like the house that shows up in the story.  Still, the frame of mind to live up there, with hills and forests all around, stuck with me.  What kind of person would want that?  How would they react if tragedy struck?  When I heard of a hunting accident in the news not long after, the story sparked and then caught fire when I did some reading up on the wendigo curse.

The result was a story that could be supernatural or completely in the protag’s head.  I hopefully leave it somewhat ambiguously for the reader.  It seems to be getting a lot of play with reviewers, so that’s nice.

You can pick up either a TPB or ebook of Suspended in Dusk 2 (which you really should and not just for my story; Damien Angelica Walters and Bracken MacLeod have stories in there that will destroy you) here.

Speaking of Bracken MacLeod…

2. How We Broke (with Bracken MacLeod) – Chiral Mad 4

This is one of two novellas I have coming out this year, premiering only last week, at the end of October.

Long-story-slightly-less-long: I’d heard Michael Bailey was doing a fourth go-around with his Chiral Mad series, but with a catch: only collaborations allowed.  I’d been in Chiral Mad 3 (with the story “The Universe Is Dying”–the image for that story is the front page of this very website from Bones Are Made to be Broken), and wanted into CM4 in a big-bad way.

But who the hell could I collaborate with?  I’ve never written something with someone else before.  Moreover, I never even show people my writing until a few drafts had been done.  Collaborating meant showing people a real warts-and-all experience.  I’d have to find someone I trusted, someone whose work I respected, something I thought I could get down with in the idea-tanks.

So I messaged Bracken MacLeod.

I’d read Stranded, of course, and some of his short fiction.  Bracken writes a clear, propulsive line that I often strive for (except he makes it look far more effortless than I), and he writes from a more secular, less supernatural place. I don’t, but I like to, and even when I’m playing with multiple dimensions and folklore monsters, I like to present it with all the flatness of a gritty crime novel.  So, I wanted to work with Bracken.

And, son of a bitch, he agreed.

I have no idea how we came up with the basic framework for “How We Broke”, which is a novella of 20,000 words.  I remember we wanted it to be a novella, we wanted it to be about siblings, we knew we wanted it to be ambiguous as to what if anything was supernatural, and we knew we wanted to talk about the overcoming of trauma and the way past traumas never quite let us go.  When we hit upon the structuring device of Polaroid pictures, the fucker ran because we now had an escalation of tension in place.   We bounced a summary back and forth to each other–more pre-writing than I ever do and far less than Bracken does–then started writing.

I remember Bracken offering to start and me asking if he would mind if I did because I could visualize the first scene perfectly.  After that, we ping-ponged the manuscript for a month until we had a rough draft almost 30K in length.  We took turns cutting and stream-lining, and, throughout all of this, realized we didn’t know where one person’s writing ended and another began.  Like I said, I know I started the story, but we’d both gone over it so many times that I’d have to pull up the very first file to see what I wrote and what ended up being printed.  Bracken’s style and mine wound up merging beautifully together and, while the story is rough for me to read (it goes dark, both literally and figuratively), it’s an absolute blast.

I really need to write more with Bracken.  Like, this is a thing that needs to happen sooner rather than later.  I wonder if he’d be up for it.

Anyway.  You can pick up Chiral Mad 4 in TPB, ebook, and hardcover here.

3. Every Apocalypse Is Personal –  Dark Moon Digest 32/33

This, which came out only a couple of days from when I’m writing this post, was written in one sitting, after I took a day off work for jury-duty only to be dismissed.  It’s an alien invasion generation gap story, basically “what if Generation X kids were really the result of alien-human breeding?” I would joke that this is my sex alien story, but really it’s about the lengths a man would go to in order to keep his adopted family together, even at the end of the world.  Also, rarity of rarities, the story is short–roughly 4,000 words, which is not at all common for me.  (Go ask Max Booth III and Lori Michelle, the editors of DMD who have also worked with me before.)

You can scoop up this story, along with poetry by Josh Malerman and fiction by the likes of Matt Hayward and others, here.

On the subject of aliens (sort-of)…

4. Guardian – Tales from the Lake, Vol. 5

This came out, literally, yesterday.

I had the title long before I had the story.  This happens.  I don’t even know why.  It’s suitable, but “Guardian” isn’t flashy like “Bones Are Made to be Broken”, “The Universe Is Dying”, or “In the Nothing-Space, I Am What You Made Me”.

Still, I started noodling all the nuances of the word.  You think of guardian like a parent or someone who has to care for small children.  But, I thought, aren’t friends guardians of each other, if it’s a true friendship (which, let’s be honest, is rare)?  In the midst of this, I thought of my cat Bender, who passed away from old age (he was 19), and the Harlan Ellison story “The Deathbird” and how Ellison–in that story and others–will break story conventions to deliver the subtext or to shade in some areas.

From this, a story about friendship, the center of creation, and beings from beyond time and space came into being.  With a nod to Harlan, I underscored the subtext of the story with a 2nd-person tangent on Bender the cat–a section that, a dozen or so drafts and copy-editing later, still makes me burst into tears because I miss that son of a bitch so much (moving on; I’m going to start crying again)–much like Ellison did for his dog in “The Deathbird”.

Like “Wants and Needs” this story is getting some play, albeit mixed.  One reviewer enjoyed it even though they admitted they had no idea what the hell was going on half the time, but another reviewer raved about it and a person friend-requested me on social media solely on the strength of the story.

You can pick up Tales from the Lake, Vol. 5 here.

******

So that’s what’s out right now, but before the end of the year, I’ll have two more stories coming out, one of them a novella almost as long as the one I wrote with Bracken:

A. “I Can Give You Life” – Ashes and Entropy

(I love both of these covers.  The one on the left is by Pat R. Steiner, my illustrator for Bones Are Made to be Broken.  The one on the right is by CV Hunt, the awesome writer behind Baby Hater, Ritualistic Human Sacrifice, and Cockblock.  I love both designs.  I wonder if Robert S. Wilson would send me a copy of both…)

Anyway, I feel bad for Robert. He asks me one night if I had anything fitting the theme of “Lovecraftian noir” or if I’d be willing to write a piece for it.  I said, what do you know, I just so do (I’d been asked to write something for another place, and I tried, but I quickly realized I would have to write a novella when the editors only wanted a short piece, so bowed out) and it’s not some trunk piece.  It’s a novella!

You could feel Robert’s heart sink, even through a computer screen.

He asked to read it, anyway, and–he told me later–kept coming back to it.  A lot of strange-god stories operate from the premise of gods being forgotten by the faithful (Ellison wrote a whole collection around it, even). “I Can Give You Life” flips it–what if a god grew tired of the faithful’s devotion and wanted to escape but couldn’t? I got into the world I’d made–a 1950-ish story set in Northern Virginia, when interstates were becoming a real thing that could connect towns and cities greater than ever before.

Ultimately, Robert decided he had to have it and I was legitimately surprised–it is a novella, for fuck’s sake–and delighted.  It’s, as far as I know, the longest piece in the book, and I hope it delivers as much as the stories everyone else brings (seriously, when you pre-order, check out that TOC; Jesus Christ, my imposter-syndrome goes off the fucking charts every time I look at it).

You can pre-order Ashes and Entropy here.

B. “Well, You Asked for a Miracle” – War on Christmas

I blame Bracken for this one.

He’d written a short story called “Can I Whisper It?”, which I had as a chapbook.  I’d never thought to write a Christmas story before and Bracken knocked a crime story set at Christmas that knocked it out of the fucking park.

I wanted to write a Christmas story, as well.  For the longest time, I had no fucking ideas.  And then, an announcement call went up from ChiZine–which, if you like/write dark fiction, you stand to attention–and I thought, “I have to write a Christmas story and I have to get ChiZine to like it.”

“Well, You Asked for a Miracle” is about rent-a-cops and mall Santas and Pagan gods on the hide out.  I wrote it over eight hours one Sunday when my wife and daughter were out of the house.  When I got the notice, a few months later, that Sandra and Craig liked it, I was at my wife’s family reunion, sitting by the pool.  I yelled so loudly everyone turned to look at me.

No pre-order up yet on this one, but I’ll promote the hell out of it when it does.

All right, it’s late, I’m tired, and there’s 51,000 words of new Paul Michael Anderson fiction for you to read–27,000 of it ready to read right now.  So what are you waiting for?

Really fast–go read this from my editor Michael Bailey.  Go ahead, I’ll wait.

…

All right now?

Oh, this is fantastic, friends and neighbors.  I’ve been waiting for this 2nd edition since Written Backwards dissolved its relationship with Dark Regions Press, which had been in the works for a while.  And, now, it’s ready to drop next week, on the 24th?  Jesus Christ, guys.

The edition above, cover included, is how I initially envisioned the book, all the way back in the fall of 2015.  I wanted this type of cover–and illustrator Pat R. Steiner to this day will occasionally still message me new drafts of the cover as he gets inspired by something–with the material within.  Seeing it come out is immensely satisfying for me.  I wanted these stories, in this order, with these story notes and this price.

What happened?  Typical business stuff.  We had to cut spacing for price (which always struck me as odd, given that the book was always priced at the too-expensive $25, but that’s history now), so the story notes disappeared.  My publisher liked a different type of cover and it wasn’t offensive to me–it was the illustration for the story “In the Nothing-Space, I Am What You Made Me”–so we went for it.  The story notes (along with another story called “Grownups”) became part of the come-on for the ultra-fancy limited edition DRP put out and sold out of.

But now the notes are back for the ten people who like to read that sort of thing, the original cover is back, rocking the blurbs from the first round of reviewers, and my man Bracken MacLeod did me the absolute solid of writing an afterword for the book, bookending perfectly with the introduction Damien Angelica Walters had written.  Of the many excellent writers working today, I have a special affinity for Damien and Bracken–in the case of Bracken, it led to him and I writing a novella together (“How We Broke”) for the anthology Chiral M4d this fall.  Both are doing things I envy as a writer and adore as a reader.

And all of it for the much more reasonable price of $14.95 in paperback.  Thank goodness.  (I think the ebook’s also going to be reasonably priced, as well, but I can’t remember the exact number.)

I’m hoping the book does well.  With the first edition, it did all right and got some kind words from people I respect and reviewers I read regularly.  I’m hoping to build on that with this preferred edition.

Hey!

I was a shit for not posting this earlier, but Max Booth III & Lori Michelle, the hosts of Castle Rock Radio: A Stephen King Podcast (and the runners of Perpetual Motion Machine Publishing, who sometimes like me) invited me on to talk about one of the “lost” Stephen King stories, a vignette called “Squad D”.

I wound up not promoting the thing when it dropped not because it was a bad interview or a poor time for all involved, but we wound up talking about writer Harlan Ellison a fair amount because “Squad D” had been written for, and rejected from, the legendarily unpublished Last Dangerous Visions.  I had worked with Harlan on a few things and so Max and Lori brought me into discuss the story and Harlan.

And then Harlan died.  Like that day.  I had to take some time to unpack my thoughts on this man who…

…whatever.  I’ve got my thoughts in a well-enough order, but I’m not going to put them here.

If you want to hear us talking so much shit (I’m a kid who grew up in the 1980s/1990s; I can talk trash, sirs and madams), give it a listen here.

If you like what Max and Lori do, sign up for their Patreon.

If you want a good anthology, pre-order Lost Films here.  (I’m not in it, but was in the first entry of the “Lost” series, Lost Signals.  In spite of this, I’d be willing to put my own cred on the line and say Lost Films is a strong goddamned book.)

Hey!

A bunch of stuff has happened, is going to happen, has been revealed!

1.- This is Horror!

Recently, I was featured on the This Is Horror podcast, a longtime goal of mine and as fun as I’d hoped.  Hosts Michael David Wilson and Bob Pastorella were fun and inviting and we had a blast of a conversation.

You can listen to Part 1 here.

And you can listen to Part 2 here.

(I really want to be on again, so take a listen and tell Michael and Bob how much you loved it, so they’ll ask me on again.)

2. Suspended in Dusk 2!

My story “Wants and Needs” will be appearing in Suspended in Dusk 2, edited by Simon Dewar and published by Grey Matter Press.  This hits July 10th, and will also include stories from Damien Angelica Walters, Bracken MacLeod, Sarah Read, Paul Tremblay, Christopher Golden, Gwendolyn Kiste, and more!   Read more here.

3. Ashes & Entropy!

After some shifting around publisher-wise, the “cosmic noir” anthology Ashes & Entropy will be coming out this December from Nightscape Press!  The name might be familiar because they just released Tim Waggoner’s new collection Dark and Distant Voices.

This anthology, edited by Robert S. Wilson, will include my novella “I Can Give You Life” and will include illustrations by Luke Spooner.  Here’s a sampling below and one of those images is the one for my story.  There’s more going on here with the antho, but I’ll talk about that later.

4. War on Christmas!

This was literally just announced today, June 22nd, but my story “Well, You Asked for a Miracle” will be in the ChiZine anthology War on Christmas: An Anthology of Tinseled Mayhem, edited by Sandra Kasturi and Craig Wolf.  I’m fucking excited about this, gang.  I’m at my wife’s family reunion–big group, big, big group–and when I got the email, I was sitting between two separate conversations and yelled loudly as I checked my phone.  This is good stuff.

5. The Return of Bones Are Made to be Broken!

Slowly, we get closer to a second edition for Bones Are Made to be Broken, which went bye-bye when Michael Bailey’s Written Backwards split off from Dark Regions Press.  I can’t say too much now, except that we’re expecting a mid-summer release, even with the bonus material (including an afterword that was just turned in and oh dear Christ…it’s awesome).

More later.  I promise.

One of my literary soulmates, Bracken MacLeod, posted this morning about his “process” when it comes to writing.  He did in a response to a social media post from his friend, who is, to use the illustrative phrase, a “pantser”–meaning, they get an idea and they just run with it.  MacLeod isn’t a pantser…but I am.

Sorta.

In one of the “definitive” editions to American Gods, writer Neil Gaiman talked about the process of writing the novel, expressing relief after he had written it that now he knew how to write a book.  However, a legendary writer whose name escapes me pointed out to Gaiman that he had only figured out how to write that book.  Every book is different.

This is true.

So, with tongue firmly planted in cheek, here’s as close as I get to a process:

• Gets an idea, usually a what-if.
• Noodle it
• I’m waiting for a title at this point.
• But this title sucks.
• This title is marginal
• Do I have a good opening-scene?
• That one comes too soon
• That one means I would have to do flashbacks.  Fuck flashbacks.
• Start writing.
• “Hey, this is going decently”
• Doesn’t write for two days.
• I hate the first three pages.
• Man, I’m using a lot of passive sentences here.
• Spend the next week imagining how I’m going to fix the one scene I wrote to night.
• Spend the next week imagining how the next scene’s gonna go.
• Finish the first draft.
• “This thing is three times as long as asked for.  Fucking hell.”
• Stare at it for a month or so.
• Print it out, wincing.
• Start reading.
• Cut 40%
• Realize that the sentence structure is choppy as hell.
• Stew about this for four nights and three days.
• Open a blank document.
• Write the entire story over without looking at the original.
• Revise, cutting only 20% of the overall.
• Begin submitting.

Now, this ignores the times when I get a title before a story–“Bones Are Made to be Broken”–or think of a weird scene before I have a conflict–“Baby Grows a Conscience”–but this is fairly close to accurate for a majority of my work.  Sometimes, the idea comes from me noodling a prompt for an hour or so (“In the Nothing-Space, I Am What You Made Me”) or from spit-balling with another writer in conversation (“How We Broke” in Chiral Mad 4, which is forthcoming).

Quick message to those dudes–always dudes because of course it fucking is–who rail against “forced” diversity in trying to get beyond just straight white dudes in the Table of Contents:

To be an editor means to seek diversity so that readers can see/experience different angles or perspectives or viewpoints (or whatever in the fuck you want to call it) on a specific theme.  To not seek that diversity is to be lazy, at best, and morally repugnant at worst. 

Doesn’t matter if you’re a little nobody outfit with an editor whose time passed right around the time Bill Clinton was first elected or a New York Times bestselling author and an icon of your genre.  If it’s a pale sausage party in your TOC, you flat-out fucked up and you offer nothing new to the readers.

Oh, totally and completely off-topic, here’s an incomplete list I came up with in roughly five minutes for no particular reason:

Damien Angelica Walters. Kristi DeMeester. Rachel Autumn Deering. Erinn Kemper. Sandra Odell.  Stephanie Wytovich. Lucy Snyder. Cat Valente. Gwendolyn Kiste. Linda Addison. Nnedi Okoafor. Ashlee Scheuerman. Jessica McHugh. Livia Llewellyn. Rena Mason. Lisa Mannetti. Mercedes M. Yardley. Althea Kontis. Sarah Langan. Tonya Liburd. Meghan Accuri-Moran. Kelly Link. Gemma Files. Amber Fallon.

There are over twenty names on that very incomplete list.  They’ve all been recognized for their short fiction.  Again, I offer it for no particular reason at all.

Oh. Heya.  Popping in for a few minutes of:

1. …Imma gonna have a new story out!

My story “Wants and Needs” will be in Simon Dewar’s Suspended in Dusk II.  It has wendigos, blizzards, and bereft parents, if that’s your thing.  It’ll be out sometime this summer; click the title to see more info/who else is in the book.

2. New interview!

Curtis Freeman over at Cedar Hollow Horror Reviews asked me a few questions and I answered them and managed to fit in references to ASPCA commercials while still plugging Bones Are Made to be Broken, so there you go.  Click the title to read it, if you so wish.

3. More stories–later this year!

So, right now, I have a total of four stories, two of them novellas, showing up at some point this year, most likely late-summer/fall:

• “Guardian” – Tales from the Lake, Vol. 5 (about pets and the center of existence)
• “How We Broke” (co-written with Bracken MacLeod) – Chiral Mad 4 (a novella about the past and trauma)
• “I Can Give You Life” – Ashes & Entropy (a novella about the 1950s and Virginia State Troopers and Elder Gods)
• “Wants and Needs” – Suspended in Dusk II (I already told you about this one)

I’m actually cleared of deadlines at the moment, so turning back to older projects while stories circulate with the editors who requested them.  See if you can guess where my head’s at:

• “Well, You Asked for a Miracle”
• “To-Do Lists of the Possessed”
• “Every Apocalypse Is Personal”
• “A Collapsing Life, but with Free Rentals”
• “The Simple Lives Offered at Rest Stops”

So, how are things with you guys?

Hi there.

At the start of this year, I took on the Goodreads Reading Challenge, putting an insane amount of books I quite simply don’t have time to read if I intend to work, write, parent, husband, eat, or sleep at some point this year.  Still, I’ve kept to it because, fuck, why the hell not?  Some books are better than others.  Some I don’t finish because they’re fucking awful.  Some are fucking great.  And some I absolutely loved. 

Here’s one of those books.

I don’t have the blurbin’ power of Brian Keene, but, for what it’s worth: “Rachel Autumn Deering’s Husk is a stunning, heart-pounding (and heart-wrenching) story that will force you to read one more page, and then one more, and then another, until you take in this entire novella in one sitting.”

In Husk, writer Rachel Autumn Deering effortlessly creates the world and the voice of a veteran suffering from PTSD and forced to rebuild his life after his final tour.  Kevin joined the military when his grandparents died, his last-living relatives.  While fighting, his unit is attacked and his best friend is violently killed right in front him.  Now Kevin’s come home, left with just the broken pieces of his life prior to serving, the pieces of his time in uniform, and not much else.  Worse, he’s begun to see things, out of the corners of his eyes, and those things are growing bolder.

The first thing that strikes a reader when they start Husk is the voice.  Not necessarily the voice of the characters, but of the narration.  This is a story one could imagine hearing told in the oral tradition.  The setting for the vast majority of the novella is in the South, but it doesn’t fall into the pit of stereotype; this isn’t caricature.  More, the narration itself is almost a character, filling in the gaps between dialogue like the side-comments of a trusted friend.

Kevin and, later, Samantha are fleshed-out figures, done quickly in keeping with the overall stories length and when the sense of doom builds, this makes the inevitable all the more impactful.  Even characters with almost no page-time–the receptionist in Kevin’s doctor’s office, Samantha’s parents–breathe freely here, moving throughout the world in a way that the reader senses that, when the scene cuts away from them, they might still continue moving and going about their business.  Deering doesn’t belabor the characterization, choosing key details that will resonate with the reader.  The reader knows someone like Samantha or Samantha’s mother or even Kevin’s best friend in the service.

The novella hinges on one conceit for the reader–is what Kevin seeing real or not?  Honestly, at the end of the day, you could go either way and not get much of an argument from me (Deering, although building some ambiguity, tips her hand a bit, but not enough that to argue one way or the other would be a fool’s game; YMMV).  Because of that seeming-ambiguity, the novella works all the more; it forces you to think of it after the final too-soon page passes through your fingers and you close the cover.

Really, the only problem with Husk is the length.  Deering built a world quickly and threw a ton of plot lines out into the fields; while she ties everything up, you won’t want her to.  Husk doesn’t beg to be a full-fledged novel, but you will.  Easily.

On a more subjective note, I tend to cull my collection of books pretty regularly; only so many bookcases in my house.  Will I reread this?  Have I reread it in the past decade?  Books that answer in the negative get donated.  Still, on the top shelf of my tallest bookcase are my go-tos.  My absolutely favorite novels.  David Morrell’s First Blood is up there, as well as Damien Angelica Walters’s Paper Tigers and Harlan Ellison’s Shatterday and Eddie Little’s Another Day in Paradise, among others.  When I finished Husk, I put it on the top shelf.  It fit right in.

You can pick up Husk here.  Go.  Buy.  Read.

Two brief things of note, gang:

One.

The annual Halloween special of The Wicked Library podcast debuted this week; for it, host Dan Foytik brought back show creator Nelson W. Pyles to resurrect and reproduce a few “lost” stories from the show’s first season, including a production of my story “Love Song for the Rejected.”

Entirely recreated with noted voice actors Mike DelGaudio and Addison Peacock, with music by Nico Vettese, I am absolutely in fucking love with this.  Not just because, hey, it’s my story–everything they did was amazing.  Whenever I reread this story now, it’s going to be in Mike’s and Addison’s voices.

You can listen to the episode here, which also includes stellar stories (and productions) from Jessica McHugh, C. Bryan Brown, and Nelson W. Pyles.

If you’ve been curious if what I write is up your street, you could do worse than listen to this podcast–hell, “Love Song” is in Bones Are Made to be Broken.  The me-centric portion of the program begins, roughly, at the one-hour mark.

Two.

Holy hell–it’s here.  It’s finally here.  Almost a year to the day that the paperback and eBook came out, the deluxe, expanded, slipcase hardcover edition of Bones Are Made to be Broken arrived at the house.

Hoo, boy.  I couldn’t help it–I took pictures.

There are five copies left of the hardcover edition–which includes a bonus story (“Grownups”), as well as story notes–and you can get that here.

If the pricetag for all the bells-and-whistles is a bit much for you, you can pick up the Kindle or the paperback over at Amazon.

As we approach one-year-out since Bones was released, I have thoughts.  I’ll get to them soon.  Gotta noodle some more.  Also, life and deadlines get in the way.

Cheers.