Monthly Archives: June 2018

My horror novella, We Shadows Have Offended, is now newly available as a Kindle ebook exclusive. If you have Kindle Unlimited, you can get this title for free; if not, it’s just 99 cents.

This work began life as a writing prompt many years ago, probably as far back as 2009 or so. In a writing group, I was given the concept of “shame” to work with, and for the longest time this piece was a story titled “The Beginning of Shame.” The bones of the piece are based in the facts of an obscure court case from the 1950s wherein a young military man was shot and killed by a stranger just outside of Chicago; the stranger was not found guilty, and yet the facts of it were confusing to me and seemed somehow obscured. I love reading about odd true crime tales, but I decided to infuse this one with outright supernatural horror, combining other things like ethnicity and class difference in subtle ways. In a lot of my early horror, I am clearly being influenced by the dialogue acumen of Stephen King, and this is no exception.

The original edition of this novella was released in 2011 by Etopia Press and later anthologized in their paperback horror collection A Touch of Darkness. Both of these versions are now out of print, but this new release is the same text, just now available through my Dioscuri Books imprint. If you didn’t get a chance to read it before, I hope you’ll give it a shot now.

It’s been a long time since I’ve updated this site with my writerly goings-on, and the main reason for that is school. In 2016, I began a new chapter in my scholarly life as a Ph.D. student, which involved a whole lot of coursework early on, new teaching preps, and living part-time in a new city. Fortunately, the coursework phase of my degree is now done, which has allowed me to live back in my primary residence full-time; let me tell you, splitting my week between two homes is not the glamorous, jet-setting lifestyle of the rich and famous, and I’m delighted to be done with it. Currently, I’m preparing for my qualifying exams, teaching online, and writing a lot, including a more regular return to creative work.

Today, I’m delighted to announce a guest post on the blog Unbound, in which I discuss common misconceptions about feminism. I also have some exciting new pieces coming out, including my contribution to Carrion Blue 555’s third volume of fifty-five word short stories, 555 Volume 3: Questions and Cancers. My contribution to that anthology was quite challenging: fifty-five short stories of fifty-five words each. I wrote the bulk of them during my few few terms at grad school, lonely and away from home, and I think that stress shows through (to good effect). I’ve also resumed work on the sequel to my science fiction novel The Curiosity Killers (Dog Star Books, 2016), tentative titled The Girl with Mechanical Wings. Sadly, that novel had to take a backseat to my studies, but I’m delighted to be back in the thick of it, with a goal of finishing a first draft by the end of summer 2018.

In other fiction news, I’m releasing a new edition of my 2011 novella, We Shadows Have Offended, through my own Dioscuri Books imprint. This will be a Kindle exclusive and likely available through both Kindle Unlimited and as a regular Kindle ebook, priced very low. I’m delighted about this and can’t wait to wrap production on it.

In the past two years, I’ve also been doing a lot of scholarly writing and presenting on everything from TV shows (Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Travelers) to paranormal romance novels, women in punk rock, feminist imagery in music video, and Victorian prison design. I love the fact that my degree program (focusing on cultural studies, film and media, and gender) allows me to explore such a diverse array of subject areas, and yet I’m also excited to have the breathing room to do some original fiction and poetry work this summer, too. My next adventure that combines my love of popular fiction and my scholarly work will be to present at a science fiction conference this summer.

Watch this space–I should have an announcement about the new edition of We Shadows in the next month. Until then, wish me luck as I buckle down and do some heavy lifting on preparing the digital copy.