EMBRACE OF THE SPIDER QUEEN and a Dwarven novel

Greetings once more. Excited to announce that my fantasy/horror story 'Embrace of the Spider Queen' will be included in the anthology 'Beautiful Darkness' from Dragon Soul Press, due for release around Halloween. It is a distant sequel to 'Solyn the Scavenger' [All Dark Places 2] and 'Solyn the Slayer' [All Dark Places 3] set decades later and following a different perspective.

I have also just finished the first draft of a novel that takes places just north of the very setting in which the three stories mentioned above take place, but on the other side of the obsidian wall. A subterranean dwarven story. This project got interrupted by another book I'm writing (which was finished but then started getting expanded after a beta read - still some chapters to be written there) so it's good to see it done and, as a discovery writer, finally know the plot. That's how it works for we gardener/pantser types. The first draft is what we use as our outline/plot. So to me, the second draft is when I first feel like I'm actually authoring. The first draft is the process of just pouring subconsciously stored data onto a platform where I can interface with it. The second draft is turning that gibberish into a novel.

It currently sits at just over 77k words, (198 pages in paperback), so I'll likely be adding some muscle and a little fat to that skeleton when I get to the second draft. In the meantime, I have a couple of short stories to write, to cleanse the mental palate, redraft another, and so on... work, work, work.

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2022 - Year in Review

A challenging year, but I'm proud of the work I managed to create. On the publishing front I saw my work appear in fifteen published anthologies. That's one more than last year, which is actually more impressive than it sounds because for the last seven months of this year I also took a day job (because, as fun as it's been to write full time, it's not generating a liveable income just yet – I need to get some full books out there). Casual day work (mostly at night), but that's still anywhere between twelve and fifty hours a week not in front of a computer. Instead standing on my feet, destroying my arches, and making it hard to sit at a computer to write, needing days to recover from the pain. So, with limited time, I still got done what I did, and I'm proud of that. I'm still pumping out short stories because it helps flesh out my worlds. With each new short, I discover something new about that world. It's a journey of discovery. With each new stor

2021 - Year in Review

Well, it's been a crazy year. Frankly, it's been a crazy life. I put off my pursuit of writing so many times, but as the whole country around me was on fire and my job disappeared at the end of 2019, it seemed a good time to focus on it an see what would happen if I took a risk, rolled the dice, and jumped out of the plane without a parachute. It wasn't until it was the only thing that I was doing that things started to happen. In 2020 I got a short story published in a magazine, then two novelettes in two anthologies. It was exciting to see my words on the page in actual books. That got the ball rolling. As I look back now, on 2021 and the works I've managed to get out there, the ball of flaming fear, molten uncertainty, and corrosive anxiety has not gone away, but it's certainly shrunk. I feel a great deal of satisfaction seeing just how much happened for me this year. 14 anthologies housing 14 of my stories (a novella, several novelettes, and a couple of shor

Update: Thieves Tithe

So, I've published another story on Storypony called Thieves Tithe. It was the second short story I wrote after Blacktooth, around mid-March last year. I'm quite fond of it, as it reveals a little more of my world and how things work there, sometimes. I'd appreciate any up-votes there, if you're feeling charitable, or enjoyed it. >>>CLICK HERE TO READ<<< It's been a while since I've posted anything because I'm working on a few longer stories, redrafting novella, a short novel, and regular novel, and have my fingers crossed for a novelette in the short list for a magazine. (wish me luck) (no, don't just raise your brow, say "good luck" damn it) (yes, on the bus, I don't care) While I typically publish here, the non-published entries from the AWC's Furious Fiction competition, directly after the winners are announced, I have not posted the last two 'Destination: Presentation' and 'Upon Reflection

Wyrmblood

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