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So... May has come and gone without a single blog post. Bad writer.

But June brings a few new publications, including "The Summer I Fell in Love" in Niteblade #28. I've had a few other stories in Niteblade in the past, including "Bait Worms" way back in Niteblade #6... nearly six years ago.

"The Summer I Fell in Love" is a personal favorite of mine, originally written for an anthology of southern zombie tales. Yes, I wrote the "z" word. Dirty, dirty "z" word. Only this story is different. (We--meaning writers--all say that, don't we?)

Spoilers ahead. Please Read "The Summer I Fell in Love" before moving forward (if you are so inclined).

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Still here?

My story is more about a small town's hate and the irrational ends to which people will go in the face of horrible situations thank the "z" word. The narrator, a teenage girl, falls in love with another girl. Some of the details, lipstick tasting of soap, are fragments from my own memory. I dated a girl whose lipstick tasted like soap, but I was a teenage boy. My small town accepted such things (boys and girls together--not the soap-flavored lipstick). Fictional Connelly, somewhat modeled after my own as every other town I imagine, does not accept two girls falling in love.

When things turn sour, when the zombies show up, the town's angry voices need a target. Julie, the narrator's first love, is an outsider, not from "'round here" and therefore an easy mark. The memories and feelings of falling in love are there, even if the words and point of view aren't mine. The narrator's ache is my own.

This story earned one of my favorite titles--a title even more meaningful because the story is easily about the year of the zombie outbreak, the undead plague. But for the narrator, the real story was Julie--falling in love and Julie's sad fate at the hands of the real monsters. It will always be "the summer I fell in love."

I said there would be spoilers, didn't I?

Thanks for reading and thanks to editor Rhonda Parrish for another chance to have my words read. Please consider supporting Niteblade so they can continue to share fiction with the world. You'll find a "donate" button the right side of the site (scroll down a bit).

Have a beautiful summer.  I hope it brings you much love but none of the "z" word.

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E-book ISBN: B007IIXZ0O
Print ISBN-13: 978-0615613291
Print ISBN-10: 0615613292

If you haven’t read my paranormal young adult…

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Three people have to win, so why not you? But as they say in the lottery ads, you can’t win…

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Maybe it’s because it’s spring and that just makes me happy, maybe it’s because the person in the Starbucks drive-through…

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For a limited time only, here are two ways to get my new novel REPLAY for free–one of them…

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I've been thinking about this pirating thing...

Especially in light of the 2011 Book Buying Survey presented at Digital Book World. Check it out. 

Some highlights:

• 64% of "avid" book buyers are female
• 33% of book purchases are for entertainment/leisure

These are only numbers from a single survey, of course, but they are in step with my anecdotal experience as a bookseller (I managed a bookstore back in '98).  Fiction was the single largest space in the store, but we sold less fiction titles (proportionately) than other books combined.  

Why is this important?

I don't have survey results or any scientific data to back this up, but plenty of anecdotal experience and reports from other authors: the vast majority of wannabe writers pen fiction. All of these books--now readily available because of digital publishing--are the too many buckets in my title metaphor. The water? Book buyers.

If only 33% of the purchases made by "avid" readers are for leisure/entertainment (and not all of that 33% must be fiction) and the majority (by far) of authors write fiction... Yesh.

No wonder it's so damn hard to break through.

What does this have to do with pirates?

Well, if most wannabe writers write fiction and it's damn hard to make it, maybe some pirate/resellers are just feeding the urge to put their name on something.

Hell, I don't know.

What I do know is I don't mind giving away my stories if I'm doing it. I'm not going to crawl under a rock and hide from the basement-dwelling morlocks who'd do such things. I'm not going to stop writing because of this crap. I'm not going to change a single bit of my behavior just because other people don't want to play nice.

For the next two days, Echoes of the Dead (the thieved book) is free at Amazon. Take that, J.K. "Fake-Name-If-I've-Ever-Seen-One" Patterson.

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The skull smells like cleaning fluid, the pine oil kind that Mama uses on the kitchen floor. It weighs a little more than the soccer ball Uncle Rego gave me last year for my eleventh birthday. The yellow-white color almost matches the ivory of the old piano in the shed, the one Papa promises to fix up for Mama one day. One day when he works a single job instead of three.

Uncle Rego says the skull belongs to our great-grandmother. He says he brought it back from Sonora on one of his trips. The rest of the bones, he says, had to wait. Too hard to get them across the border, he says. And then the broken leg. And then he stopped going back to Mexico because things were bad in Sonora.
I’ve stolen Uncle Rego’s skull three times now.

The first time I left it on the back porch, assuming it would be gone in the morning. Uncle Rego found it when he came home, stumbling more than usual with the heavy reek of cigarettes and tequila clinging to his clothing. He merely wrapped the skull in the folds of his shirt and staggered to his room in the basement, muttering in Spanish.

The second time, I tried harder. I took the skull into the yard and placed it near the small rock garden Mama loves. She’s the one who found the skull the second time, but a day or to passed before she noticed, possibly because it blended in so well with the stones.

“Mateo,” she said. “This isn’t something to play with.”

This time, I did better. I buried the skull in the soft garden dirt next to Mama’s peppers and tomatoes. I buried it deep—as deep as I could before my arms began to burn and sag like rubber bands. Not that it is hidden, exactly, just deep. Deep enough, I hope.

When Mama comes into my room, I tell from the sour frown and lines on her face she wants to know where it is. Uncle Rego cries out every few minutes from his room.

“Where is it this time, Mateo?” she asks. Her arms cross her chest.

What scares me, more than anything, is how white Mama’s face gets when I tell her about the headless woman who throws pebbles at my bedroom window most nights. I tell her the skull is hers, and she just wants it back. I tell her I don’t think the skull belonged to Great-Grandma, and ask if Rego knows who the headless woman is. Mama just cries, folds me toward her chest, and rocks back and forth, saying, “hush, hush.”

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Okay, you have to act fast on this. My new novel DOGGIRL is available FOR FREE through tomorrow. So if you want it, get it!

You can download the PDF version, or a Kindle or other ePub file here.

Use coupon code KP65S to get it for free. Go!

Technorati Tags: animals, Books, border collie, dachshund, dog books, dog stories, dog training, dogs, ebooks, Free Book, Free eBook, Free fiction, girl and dog stories, great pyrenees, high school, performing arts, pets, Reading, teen fiction, Teen Novels, Theater, Young Adult Authors, Young Adult Fiction, Young Adult Literature, Young Adult Novels

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Here’s a little something for your weekend–some physics, some time travel, a little fish-licking (that part is based on my own dog’s peculiar habit)–give it a try. (The story, not the fish-licking.)

Here’s the link to the story. Use coupon code JR93U to get it for free all weekend long! Enjoy!

Technorati Tags: Camping With Dogs, dog, dog stories, dog story, dogs, fishing, fishing with dogs, Free fiction, Free short stories, free short story, Free stories, free story, Outdoor Adventure, outdoors, pet, Physics, physics story, Quantum Physics, quantum physics stories, science, Science Fiction, Science Stories, Short Fiction, Short Stories, time machine, Time Travel

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Welcome to Sample Sunday...

1: We’re All Liars Here, or The Death of Leonard Jantz

Here’s the truth about growing up in a small town: you tell lies to survive.

I worked at a grocery store during high school, part time on the evenings and weekends. I saw plenty of strange things there: avocados stuffed in a barrel of fresh popcorn left to rot, a coworker who punched holes in the caps of beer bottles with an awl, pies marked “Verda’s own home-baked” which came frozen on pallets with the Sunday dairy truck. I found a body in the trash bin once, but nobody can prove who put it there. No one can prove it was there.

There were too many bodies for a town the size of Springdale. The name of the town is a lie, but the bodies aren’t. All of them. When you find a body lying with the outdated yogurt, wilted lettuce, and cardboard boxes, you make up stories to cope. You can’t process a body in the grocery store trash bin. A trick of the light, you say. The way the shadows fell across certain bits of debris like the coat hanger beast in a little boy’s bedroom. That head of lettuce, there, in the corner, looks like a human hand.

Bodies are bodies.

Dead is dead.

And lies are lies.


We killed a man during the fall of 1992, our senior year. I say we, but BJ did the killing. The rest of us were just there.

BJ was a big kid, six-feet tall, four feet wide, all linebacker. The local team, the Saints, kind of sucked—sucked as in they won seven football games during our four years—but BJ made all-league three times. He managed forty-six tackles for losses during his career and dished out seven concussions. One guy, a lanky kid from Abilene, still gets tingles in his toes when the weather changes. At least he says as much on Facebook. BJ was boiled over anger and clenched fists, and he hated Leonard Jantz.

Jantz had fired BJ’s father from the grain elevator.

Mike, Dan, and Tony were all there when BJ killed Leonard. I was there, too, after my shift at Larry’s Grocery. We were all drunk, either from stolen beer or revved hormones. I’d met them at the Shack after work. I still wore the red polo from Larry’s. Red polo and jeans, the store dress code. The other guys, little Mike with his embarrassing mustache, fat-mouthed Dan, and Tony the liar, had been hanging out at the Shack, telling stories and passing out a battered copy of playboy Tony had stolen from his father’s stash. The beer was his dad’s, too.

Tony lied so well his old man never suspected a single can went missing. The lies came easily, especially after years of practice. By the time he was sixteen, Tony had lied about grades at school, fights, which girl he kissed at recess, and even how Max, the Robertson’s cat, died. That was a big one, but not as big as Leonard Jantz. The big lies he reserved for special occasions, but all of them—big or small—came from his lips with a sliver of magic.

Lies can be a shield, a force field, a special aura of protection.

Lies can keep you from seeing the truth, no matter how grim.

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If you’re interested in children’s stories, specifically slightly-skewed fairy tales, you can check out my story THE MUD QUEEN.

And for the next few days, it’s free! Just use the special coupon code: GD66Y

And don’t forget, for another few days you can also get other free fiction by me. Just go here.

Enjoy!

Technorati Tags: Children's Fables, Children's Fairy Tales, Children's Humor, Children's stories, Fables, Fairy Tales, free children's stories, Free fiction, Free stories

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I'm out of town for the weekend, but leave you, dear readers, with the following debris:

Another installment of The Borrowed Saints and the rip-roaring conclusion of "Black Medicine Thunder and the Sons of Chaos".

Enjoy your weekend.

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Everyone thinks they know what it’s like. Movies. TV. Animated undead violence. The video games with unlimited shotgun shells and reset buttons and blood options labeled red or green or off. Neat if not clean, the head shot works every time.

My son used to wake up in the night in cold sweats, the words, “is there anything scary” tripping from his tongue. I’d put my arms around him and rock and lie with the words, “no, of course not.”

Not anything scary, Davy. Anyone. Your mother, maybe. Me.

But I never thought about my boy dying. I never imagined that particular path, what I’d do if it happened. How I’d be. Which dangerous suggestions became oxygen; which unholy actions became water and food. What a mother does for her little boy, a little boy she remembers on a tricycle on the front drive. A little boy with denim overalls sagging at the knees. I never thought of how far I’d go, what wishes I’d wish, until I did. Until the little boy grows sick and died, and I wanted to tear the world into strips and tear the strips until the fragments melted like snowflakes on a five-year-old’s tongue. But all I had were the memories and the want. The want was a powerful thing.

There were books and wishes and trips to the cemetery. Nighttime trips during which I crawled over the stone wall and caught my pants on the rust-flaked iron spikes. A little blood never hurt. Not for my boy. There’s the book and a new knife and the chicken and the candles purchased at a shop tucked under the big river bridge, the shop without a sign or regular hours. But the love was always there. Even in the cold. Even in the dark when I mumbled syllables I didn’t fully understand and cried because I didn’t have a five-year-old to hold and lie to about scary things anymore.

I didn’t plan on the sound he made when he came home, a slow, scraping sound like a stick dragged across the driveway. I didn’t plan on the way he looked, either. Bloodless. Pale. Not the half-rotten thing of movie-myth. Worse. Too much like my little boy. Enough to bring the fear rising, warm and acidic, in my throat. The smell lacked that repulsiveness I’d come to expect from the myth-makers.

Davy, but wrong.

The head shot killed of course. It killed again, stopped the boy-thing, the mirror to which the real monster was held in the night. There was nothing neat about it. Nothing cleansing. No red or green or off toggle switch for the blood. I know what it’s like when a loved one comes back. I always knew, even at the funeral, even before I brought the book and the knife and the chicken into the cemetery. I’ve lived past that illusion.

You don’t plan these things. I know.

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Nossa Morte, one of the best online markets for short horror/dark fiction, is no more.

I'm glad "Tesoro's Magic Bullet", which I reprint here, made it's digital pages before the end. The inspiration for my story was a little flash by Kim Church simply titled "Bullet". It originally appeared in Painted Bride Quarterly. You can also find it in Flash Fiction Forward. It's one of those brilliant little things that keeps me coming back over and over again.

RIP, Nossa Morte. You will be missed.

"Tesoro's Magic Bullet"

Tesoro comes home with a bullet on a chain around his neck. Not just any bullet, but the bullet, the one that the doctors pried from his ribcage, the one that should have killed him, only it didn’t. It didn’t even look like a bullet anymore. Now, it is a lump of lead, a misshapen mass of grey metal in a small bag dangling above the Marine Corps tattoo on his chest.

“It’s a magic bullet,” he tells his little brother the first night. As he does, his breath reeks of stale blood like the stains on their father’s work clothes after a shift at the meatpacking plant. Saul turns away.

Despite the smell, the ashen hue in Tesoro’s cheek, they are brothers. Saul basks in Tesoro’s machismo and wants to be a Marine one day.

__________

On the mornings after Tesoro’s late nights, Saul sleeps late and skips school. In Garden City, a place of pork and beef processors surrounded by Kansas plains, no one notices, no one wonders about another Latino kid missing school. The teachers lose count of their shifting student body, and Saul becomes less than a number. He sleeps late those mornings. He sleeps easier because the sun is up, warming his bed through the open window. Bad dreams hide during the daylight, so Saul sleeps a black sleep with no dreams.

__________

It happened like this:

Tesoro was on foot patrol in Baghdad. A car exploded, bright flames pushing the sky. The other marines tensed, took cover. Tesoro didn’t move, watching a woman stream from the flames with a tail of smoke. She screamed louder than the bellow of the burning wreck, and the sound solidified his flesh just long enough. Too long. When the bullet broke through his chest, tearing cloth and skin and bone, his ears lost everything: the screaming woman, his sergeant’s barking voice, the fire, and the crunch of his body on the rocky dust. His ears lost everything except the snap of that bullet, the sound coming after it cut into his body.

A moment later, return fire from the Marines sounded distant, like firecrackers under metal cans. The blue sky lay across his dying eyes like a shroud.

__________

In the evenings, after all but Tesoro dine together at the table, their father listens to an AM radio station that broadcasts the news in Spanish. He sits in his chair, worn and tired; lines like wrinkled leather punctuate his face. His finger taps against his lips as he listens.

The radio announcer reads the police reports, and sometimes the father mutters, “Dios mio.” His head hangs as he listens to the report of another body, a dead Latino teen found in a ditch outside of town. The Spanish station alone reports the missing. The only pattern to the tragedy is that the victims have been the children of undocumented workers—killed by a bullet in their brainpans. But the bodies were mauled after death, mangled and partially eaten. He listens and tries not to think of the layer of dust on Tesoro’s truck. He tries not to think o

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