Coming soon! "Nothing Left But Mud" with Sword & Kettle press

Hello! I have news for you!

A few months ago (March?) I got a story rejection and took to twitter, saying something along the lines of "due to current events, I'm not sure this scifi story is even scifi anymore" and called it a maybe-apocalypse at the Jersey Shore, about horseshoe crabs and stuff. Because I am g r e a t at summarizing things in zippy and compelling ways.

Well, Kayla Allen who owns Sword & Kettle press asked me to send it to her. And then Kayla said "hey, we'd like to publish this, what do you think?" and I said "Yes, please and thank you!"  (further summarizing, of course.

So now, Friday July 31, 2020 is when my short story "Nothing Left But Mud" will become digitally available through Sword & Kettle press, with a physical little book version of it coming sometime after!

Art is by Anna-Rose Schenerman and LOOK AT IT



The title comes from the Rudyard Kipling story "The Crab Who Played With the Sea" (and that crab is not a horseshoe crab, but it was still...thematic, y'know?) and the story is about a pandemic, and being home with your parents at the Jersey Shore, and trying to survive, and trying to maintain hope. I wrote a hopeful store for once, gentle readers! I am very excited for it, and I do hope you read it and enjoy!

 It is now for sale digitally on the Sword & Kettle Etsy store!, and I'll update when the physical copy is available.

April.....fools?

So hi

What's been going on?

I hope you are well

Because. Um. Yeah. Lots going wrong in the world, isn't there?

I'm happy to report, for my part, that while the library is closed, my coworkers and I all still have jobs. Many of us even have job duties that we can still perform from home. This is a privilege that I am VERY thankful for; I feel unbelievably lucky.

And we're seeing now just how much libraries can still do from home. There are digital escape rooms, there are livestreamed storytimes (with many publishers and children's book authors generously saying "yes, it's okay to read my books for these." Many ebook lending restrictions have been lifted, and I know at my library, Hoopla, our newer streaming service, has been wildly popular. Run With the Hunted, et al will eventually be added to Hoopla...Draft2Digital started that process back in like, November, and I think both services were unprepared for how many people were gonna say yes all at once.

One of those work-from-home things is my writing group. We've just had a big email ol' email chain, that I kick off each Saturday with a collection of writing prompts, and people who feel up to it send back what they came up with. I've been working on a short story in this way, bit by bit, prompt by prompt. I'm not really sure how it will end up, but that's taking shape. It's interesting to write in that way, letting people read it as you go, instead of after you've ironed out the wrinkles and tacked down the edges and done things like give people names (....whoops...)


I've been putting the prompts on my Patreon, for free. And I'm going to link the ones I've got so far right here:

Digital Writing Group! Prompts, volume 1
Digital Writing Group! Prompts, volume 2
Digital Writing Group! Prompts, volume 3
Digital Writing Group! Prompts, volume 4
Digital Writing Group! Prompts, volume 5
Digital Writing Group! Prompts, volume 6

In addition to that, I've been working on Run With the Hunted 3: subtitle to be determined, and making satisfactory progress on that. I've even got a coveer in the works! So I'll let you know here, and everywhere, when there are pre-orders for that.

I also plan to do an omnibus that collects the first three novellas under one roof, as it were. I'm thinking hardcover AND paperback for that, which means I'll be wrangling with the Ingram book formatting program. So that'll be a new experience! And then I'll  need a cover for THAT too. So...any suggestions would be welcome!

And last but not least, I've had two short stories published so far this year! The first is "For Thine is the Kingdom", which appeared in Truancy in January. The second is "Black Market Cheerios", which appeared in Lamplight Volume 8, Issue 2, in March.

For news along these lines,  you can subscribe to my TinyLetter, which I send out with slightly more frequency than I blog anymore (I used to blog a lot...I guess now you can tell that I'm writing more!)

Stay safe out there. Stay home if you can. It's a great time for reading, and for writing, if you can. Or baking bread, as so many people are doing. Or cross stitch or doing the plank challenge or binging everything you never got around to on various streaming services.

Until next time!