In my files somewhere I have the beginnings of a story about a man trapped in a dead-end job doing meaningless work who sees the walls of his office melt, revealing another world beyond. I wasn’t terribly satisfied with what I developed because it seemed to be turning into another…

I’ve been looking for a new outlet for my longer, full length stories so I thought I’d give wattpad.com a try. If you haven’t been there, wattpad bills itself as a world of unlimited stories. For the reader, wattpad is a place to discover new authors and read some really…

I ran across an article on-line yesterday about a man in Davie, Florida, near Miami, who was pulled through a wood chipper. Not one of the small ones, mind you, but the big industrial kind the professional tree trimmers use. Although it was just one man and local incident, the…

There’s a book on my Amazon wish list that I can’t wait to read. It’s A Serial Killer in Nazi Berlin: The Chilling True Story of the S-Bahn Murderer by Scott Andrew Selby. It’s not fiction and it’s not horror, but it inspires a thought that is appropriate to both….

I thought of this the other day and can’t seem to get it out of my head. Imagine writing a scene where a character intends to commit suicide. He is emotionally at the end of his rope. He sees no other way out. So he makes his way to a…

[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…

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…

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…

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…

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,…