Back in September, I threw myself full tilt into a long overdue redraft of my fantasy/horror novel Trail of Shadows, after about a year and a half of occasionally pecking at it while dealing with obligations related to Clockwork Phoenix 5.

This past Sunday, I finished that rewrite. (Or, more accurately, abandoned it.) And now that this monster of a book is off to market, I’m pondering which of two to four possible large scale writing projects will be the next thing I machete my way into.

In the meantime, things have happened, none of which I’ve reported here.

“Binding,” a surreal and gruesome little #librarotica story-within-a-story, is scheduled to appear in August in Phastasm/Chimera, an anthology of “strange and troubling dreams” from Scott Dwyer’s imprint The Plutonian. The book has a terrific table of contents that includes Livia Llewellyn, Brian Evenson, Matthew M. Bartlett and more. I understand the goal is a book launch at NecronomiCon in Providence.

“Burn the Kool Kidz at the Stake,” an exercise in stream-of-consciousness reality bending that may or may not also be a ghost story, is tentatively scheduled to appear in the October issue of John Benson’s terrific zine Not One of Us.

Speaking of excellent, long-running zines, David C. Kopaska-Merkel’s Dreams & Nightmares intends to publish my poem “The Headless Hero” in September. This is the first poem I’ve sold in many a moon and is likely the last one I’ll have published for a long, loooong time, so I’m glad it’s found a good home.

On the soundfile front, the talented young Brooklynite whippersnappers behind Kaleidocast are making plans to do a new audio adaptation of my horror story “The Blessed Days,” most recently seen in Unseaming. Apparently this involves capturing my soul inside a chibi drawing.

To give a little extra context to that very first item, Trail of Shadows is about 100,000 words set in the same hypothetical world as my short story “The Cruelest Team Will Win.” As with that story, there are spiders. I’m sure that’s a surprise. The novel is an expansion of “The Hiker’s Tale” that appears in Unseaming. Where there are also spiders. If it’s any solace, cats are in there, too.

#SFWApro

Posted in Audio, Clockwork Phoenix, Fiction, Novels, Poetry, Short stories, Strangeness, Writing