Whether it be a novel or a short story, the opening paragraph is often the deal breaker. If the first paragraph, and especially the first sentence, doesn’t grab the reader’s imagination, no matter how wonderful the rest of the story is, chances are that the reader won’t be there to…

Here’s an early Christmas present for you all.  An unpublished story that will remain on the blog until January 1st.  Enjoy. _______________________________ Times up! I hope everyone who read “The Family Business” during the holidays enjoyed it.  Especially the scary parts. Be sure to check back often for new content…

As a child of the fifties I grew up with the world―or more specifically, the war―of my father, World War II.  I didn’t know it then, but that world and that war was to be the last great victory for the United States. In those early days I was immersed…

He had never done anything like this before. Not once in his sixty years on earth had he ever run away.  He had never even played hooky from high school or cut class in college. Yet here he was, pulling into the parking lot of a strange bar in an…

Okay, so you’re a psychopath. You’ve killed. You’ve raped. You’ve tortured. And you’re good at it. You’ve never been caught. But now your hair is graying. You’re too slow for a knife. And you can’t swing an axe like you did when you were young. It’s time to start thinking…

Seldom is the concept for a story accompanied by a concept for a cover.  Let me know what you think…  With luck the full story will be finished sometime this summer. The Tangled Man Damien Cole is an ex-cop turned private investigator. He is a traditionalist―honest, but pragmatic. He owns…

I’m working on a new intro for my eBook, Any Tomorrow: The Calling.  Would this make you want to know more about the story? Could the world end without you knowing? Could the dead surpass the living without you being aware? Could the desolation overtake the earth without you being…

The worst thing a writer can say is, “Hey, what’s on TV tonight?” The second worst thing a writer can say is, “I’ll just be on the internet for a minute…” And there it goes, the best intentions for starting a new story, editing one of those fifty trunk novels,…

Escape From Camp 14 is the fascinating, if at times disturbing, tale of Shin Dong-hyuk, the only known escapee born in one of North Korea’s concentration camps.  Journalist Blaine Harden’s masterfully multi-dimensional and compelling tale weaves Shin’s experiences in the camp, his escape, and psychological adjustment to the world beyond…

I’ve offered free promotions for my books before and have always used Smashwords.com because it’s so easy to do.  The results, however, have been less than stellar and I’m wondering if Smashwords.com is one of the problems. Do you have a preference about which site you download from? It would…

[Too late! This offer has expired, however the Any Tomorrow trilogy is available now in a single volume, Any Tomorrow Complete.] If you enjoy dark fantasy, here is the chance to download “Any Tomorrow: The Calling” from Smashwords.com for FREE until January 15th. All you have to do is go…

A few weeks ago a friend passed me a copy of “Fire Angels”, a self-published novel by Joseph Richardson. Fire Angels is the story of David and Sara Cooper, and their son Noble, set in Walako, Florida during the period of 1915-1925. In this story Richardson attempts to weave a…

So I was in church the other day. My wife and I help the church secretary get things ready for the service on Sunday. We fold the bulletins, make sure the pencils in the pews are sharp, and that each of the pews is stocked with offering envelopes. Just little…

Looking for an idea for your next epic novel? How about this: What if Jesus came today? But I’m not talking about him appearing in the last days and Armageddon, that’s all been done ad nauseam. What if he never came until today? What kind of a world would he…

Psychopaths and Nazis are fun to write about. I’ve written about both. Henry Turner (Any Tomorrow: The Calling) is a classic psychopath―cold, unemotional, violent, and abusive. Of course, since the Any Tomorrow series is dark fantasy, the trigger for his psychopathy isn’t his childhood or his hatred for small furry…

I have a mental exercise I do as I’m driving down the interstate, rather than simply enduring that all too familiar, all too painful, commute. As I drive I look around me―at the landscape, at the other cars and trucks, at the people, especially the people―and I wonder, as they…

On Amazon there are more than twenty novels entitled  Wednesday’s Child .   And this is one of them. Wednesday’s Child  poses an interesting dilemma for Dylan Brice.  He goes to sleep on Tuesday night, but wakes up on Thursday morning.  He goes to sleep on Thursday night and wakes up…

At sometime during the night she had migrated to his side of the bed.  She clutched what she still considered to be his pillow, although he had not slept on it, had not shared her bed, for more than a year.  It was as if the sheets still held his…

Destiny― the events that will necessarily happen to a particular person or thing in the future. Fate― the outcome of a particular situation for someone or something, seen as beyond their control. In the Any Tomorrow trilogy, destiny and fate are referenced many times and, in fact, destiny is a…

An excerpt from Any Tomorrow: The Curse. He buried her that afternoon in the spot she so long ago had chosen for herself.  He fashioned a wooden cross and marked her place.  If the world ever regains its sanity, he vowed, he would replace the cross with a granite headstone. …

I was coming home from work the other day when I happened to pass a woman driving an old station wagon.  What you would take away from that momentary observation is probably much different than what I did.  For her sake and yours, I hope so.  For the storyteller, inspiration…

Writing for me is a very intimate process.  My stories well up first as images to form a vision.  Sometimes they are intensely detailed and other times mere wisps of idea.  My challenge is to translate the still fresh vision into words that can, hopefully, accurately portray it.  This is…

Well, it’s been almost a year since I published the first volume of my Any Tomorrow Trilogy.  And I must say that the results have been remarkably unremarkable.  I made a decision to break up my 300K word novel into three parts, but my feeling is now that it just…

The weekend following my last post, my wife and I drove over to Largo to see my niece run the mile and 800 meter races in her track meet.  For us that’s like a two and a half hour drive.  Normally that’s okay, we can find things to talk about…

[To the reader: A recent visit to Indiebookspot.com suggests the nature of the site has changed pretty dramatically. The interview referenced is no longer available.] How cool is this.  Indiebookspot.com just published their interview with me .  And if you as my opinion it’s great reading.  In fact after reading…

Although Spam is the subject of one of my favorite Monty Python skits, I would like to make it clear to my readers, whether they read my post on my blog or in other social media (LinkedIn, Gather, Goodreads, Google+, Facebook, etc.) that my posts are not spam.  Lately the term…

The entire Any Tomorrow Trilogy is now available so I’m celebrating by offering Any Tomorrow: The Calling as a free download until March 1st.  If you’re not familiar with the Any Tomorrow series, here’s the lowdown on Any Tomorrow: The Calling: Fraleigh, a former imagery intelligence analyst, artfully crafts a…

The third and final novel of the Any Tomorrow series is in the pipeline for publication at Amazon and Smashwords.  Any Tomorrow: The Culling is available from Amazon and Smashwords now and at other distributors such as Barnes & Noble sometime in the coming weeks. While I was at it,…

Last week the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists announced that the dreaded Doomsday Clock was moved to a minute closer to midnight.  For reasons you can read here, the Doomsday Clock now stands at five minutes to midnight.  Midnight being defined as the end to everything.  We have been closer of…

It’s January.  Those of us with day jobs have returned to work, a valiant effort has been made to get the Christmas decorations packed up in some kind of order, and it’s time to publish the third book in my trilogy, Any Tomorrow: The Culling.  For those of you who…

Okay, so I’m planning to publish Any Tomorrow: The Culling, the final novel of the Any Tomorrow Trilogy, in January.  Everything is ready to go.  The problem is that a few weeks ago I started working on what I thought would be a new novel tentatively called The Last Pope…

Although she regularly reads my blog, my wife, Malette, isn’t comfortable with the horror/fantasy genre.  She likes other things.  One of her favorite writers is Johanna Lindsey.  And that’s okay, different strokes for different folks, as they say. But there are times I’m envious of Leo Tolstoy whose wife, Sofia,…

In my blog over the past year I’ve discussed how the inspiration for a character or a character type is often drawn from real life.  Here is another instance.  At work, for the past few days I’ve been cleaning out filing cabinets, tearing through thousands of paper files, condemning the…

Yesterday I read an article that said that the Voyager I spacecraft, launched in 1979, is now 11 billion miles from the sun.  Eleven billion miles.  That’s 11,000,000,000 miles.  A very long way from home.  Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy adds some perspective: “Space,” it says,…

I am pleased to announce that I have received my first check from Amazon Digital Services for sales of my two novels.  A little celebratory music please! Okay, that’s enough. Now that the music and cheering across blogosphere has subsided, the reality of the first payment sets in.  After more…

We hear a lot these days about the trauma suffered by soldiers who go to war, but is it possible for a soldier to be traumatized by not going to war?  If you think about it, there was a period between the end of the Vietnam Conflict and the Operation…

Turkey Day and Black Friday have passed, typically two days of consumer excess.  By now the good dishes have been washed and put away, the holiday silverware is safely back in the special green felt-lined wooden box tucked back in the buffet. Most of the leftover turkey and sides have…

I admit that the title of this post isn’t original, but I figure that if it was good enough for Bilbo Baggins, it’s certainly good enough for me.  I am now home again after spending almost a month on the road and slowly beginning to pick up where I left…

Since I had a few minutes, I thought I might explain the genesis of “Sock Monkey, Crucified”, a story I wrote for my last post.  The story provides a good example of how simple things observed have the potential to create fiction.  Was the story good or bad?  I’m not…

My Halloween post included part of a story and I posed the question as to where you might take the story, given its various elements.  Today’s post includes one solution for the story.  Certainly there may be others and if you’ve given the subject some thought I certainly hope you’ll…

It’s Halloween and I couldn’t let my favorite holiday go by without a post. Nothing eerie, nothing scary, just a little odd. Think about this. Chester Hendricks was not a superstitious man by any standard definition of the word.  He wasn’t scared of black cats and he cared nothing about…

Yes, literally, on the road again.  No flying this time.  Another business trip, but this time it’s a road trip to South Carolina.  The weather has been superb and I am with same team that accompanied me to Idaho.  We are in a hotel at night (complete with free breakfast…

Very late last night I came dragging in after a number of delightful hours squeezed into spaces barely fit for human habitation, much less flight.  About the only good thing I can say for the experience is that Coke and peanuts are still complimentary and my car was still sitting…

No, this has nothing at all to do with the movie, which by the way I have never seen.  I just like the title.  And it is appropriate because that’s where I am tonight, Idaho.  I’m here on business and I must admit it is different from Florida.  They have…

Whether you’re a writer or a reader, what you read becomes an element of the psychological sum of your parts.  Consciously or subconsciously all the words, images, and emotions associated with what you read become part of you.  They find a niche somewhere inside your mind and wait there, quietly…

It is a wet, awful day here in Central Florida.  But it is the perfect day to get caught up on my blog and the other social media I use to talk about my books and stories.  To tell the truth, I haven’t been very good at exploiting social media…

Update on Any Tomorrow: The Calling : This evening I submitted revised versions of Any Tomorrow: The Calling to Amazon and Smashwords.  There were just a couple of minor corrections, but I needed to update the product descriptions to include some reader comments anyway. Update on Any Tomorrow: The Curse…

The latest on publication:  As I wrote in my last post, my short story, ‘Christmas’, was rejected by eFiction Magazine, but with good reason.  Following the rejection, I submitted the story to the eFiction Workshop and received some very helpful criticism.  The criticism identified a number of technical errors and…

Okay, so I posted a little prematurely that I would have a short story included in the October edition of eFiction Magazine.  Yesterday I got the following email from Doug Lance, the Editor: Hey Kevin! The editorial staff feels that your latest submission “Christmas” could use a bit more polish…

In his 1962 dystopian novella, A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess coined the term “ultra-violence” to characterize the sociopathic ravagings of a young man named Alex and his “Droogs”.  Stanley Kubrick brought it to theatres in 1972.  Exceptionally controversial for the time, I remember seeing it at the Strand Theatre in…