So, October has been a fun month for my very short fiction, you can read the following stories free!

4.5 STARS ON YELP: This is one of those stories that I hadn't sent out much because, while it's creepy, maybe it's not fully horror. It's also got nothing supernatural, so I couldn't even pretend it was magic realism or fantasy. Then I bumped into the Automata Review site and figured this was the perfect spot to give this one a try, and blamo!

GIN HAZE: This story hits some usual horror marks, but it's bleak from start to finish. I'd written it a couple years ago, sent it out a few times, had it rejected, then let it sit. I went back over it, polished it up and changed the ending (which is why I think it works now...stories ain't shit if the ending sucks). Then I was chatting to my buddy Brent Michael Kelley to get the Unnerving Halloween episode ready to go and he said he was looking for scary flash stories and I thought gee wilikers!

NEVERLAND: Now this one I wrote for the Pseudopod Halloween contest last year, but it was rough back then. Originally, I scrunched it right down to five hundred words and it just didn't work that way (still subbed it, because fuck it). When it didn't win, I sent it to the bench. Late August came around and people started talking Halloween on Twitter (horror people are Sears catalogue early on that shit) and I thought hey, maybe I oughta make that fun story right by bulking it up. Then I saw the call from Tales From the Moonlit Path and thought what the hey and subbed.

Not free stories and other news: I also have a story I really like but NOBODY wanted forever, I mean years. I've probably polished it twenty times and it wasn't until I cut it in half that I found a home for it, so you can read DEEP WOODS MURDER in Unfading Daydream #6. That one's about thunderbirds. I also sold a couple more stories that I can't talk about yet, but whichever pays me first will cover the cost of building the final three new bookshelves I've been planning for the living room. So that'll be handy. Lastly, I'm finishing up Issue #8 of Unnerving Magazine (BEST ONE YET!) and doing all the podcast stuff (Caroline Kepnes and Richard Chizmar are next up, most recent guest was Stephen Graham Jones), plus I found time to pop off a good-sized novella last week.