Writing for the Love

"The Darkness Below" appears in The Colored Lens #13 Autumn 2014 issue. The speculative fiction magazine is $2.99 in the Kindle Store. Prime members and Kindle Unlimited subscribers read for free.  It's like a dream come true. Almost in the literal sense. This sci-fi story was based on a vivid dream I had fifteen years ago. The journey to publication was a long one, but worth the wait. About the story: Captain Erin Waite and her team descend into the depths of a cave in search of an alien, but what they discover is beyond anything they could've imagined. This is my first paid publication. See my name down there? On the cover? Right side? That's me! It's official. Also visit the magazine's website http://thecoloredlens.com . I've decided to give the concise version for this story's publication journey. For full details, click HERE and you'll be directed to the complete explanation. "The Darkness Below" is about 9...

For a long, long, long time, I've been working on an an epic fantasy novel called Livinity . There are older posts on this blog about my past progress. The unpublished manuscript even won an award in 2011. And yet, it still needed work. The latest round of edits involved splitting my 142K word novel into two books. One of the main reasons for that was the fact that I struggled to draw attention from agents/publishers with that huge word count, especially for a first book. With great, often eye-opening, feedback from my critique group, I worked on deepening characterization, adding tension, and enriching the other world setting--just a few of the things that needed work. I spent a lot of time editing, adding content, editing, adding content all while trying to anticipate where to split the novel in half. Something happened in the midst of all that writing and editing. My word count was climbing faster than I expected. I quickly realized that I might end up with a trilogy. Ye...

"Switching," a fantasy short story, appeared on the Dunesteef Audio Fiction Magazine podcast on August 29, 2014. Click the image above or click  H ERE  to listen (it's free). Or see my handy dandy instructions below for listening on iTunes. Subscribe to the podcast while you're there (also free) if you enjoy listening to speculative fiction stories performed with voice actors and special effects (note the explicit warning, episodes are not rated and may not be suitable for children). A brief description of my story from their website: When Crystal awakens in another woman’s body, she thinks she knows what she’s there for, but this switch is different than her past experiences. The hosts of the show, Rish Outfield and Big Anklevich, ran a contest last year called the Triple Word Score Contest. My story was selected as one of the winners. After signing up for the contest, the hosts drew three words out of a hat for every contestant. My three words we...