Sneak Peek at All the Paths of Shadow

All the Paths of Shadow is due out in September of this year.  You can't see me right now, but I'm throwing confetti and blowing into one of those New Year's Eve noisemaker things.  I believe announcements about book releases deserve a bit of celebration.


Now I am happy to direct you to the following link, which leads you to a peek at the cover!

All the Paths of Shadow is here, at Cool Well Press site.  The cover is by Anne Cain, the same brilliant artist who did several Markhat book covers (you can see them here and here and here).  I love the way she can capture the mood of the book with her covers, and the way she slips important items from the story into each.

Oh, and if anyone is wondering -- is that brooding rangy fellow in the trench coat and the hat in the Markhat covers me?

Why yes, yes it is.  And when I say yes I mean no, I am lying through my keyboard, because I could wear the best hat in the world and never look that could.  But that's the magic of fiction.

So go, check out the cover for All the Paths of Shadow, and the other books Coming Soon on the Cool Well Press site too.

Time to start saving those pennies!

Hummingbirds and Random Images

The image above is of a mimosa tree bloom.  We have a big mimosa tree in the backyard, and every summer those blooms call every hummingbird from a hundred miles around.

Watching dozens of hummingbirds dart and weave and twist and turn amid the branches of that mimosa tree makes standing out in the heat almost worthwhile.  There must be ten thousand fat lush blooms on that tree, but all the hummingbirds do is fight over the same two dozen blooms.

There's probably a moral or some deep cosmic truth buried in that statement.  Or maybe hummingbirds just like to fight.  It's hot and frankly I don't care to ponder the matter further, but I thought a few of you might enjoy the picture.  That subtle glow that seems to emanate from the bloom's heart?

That's either a glimpse of the very life-force that infuses all living things, or I took the photo with the F-stop set wrong.  You decide.

I sent the edits for All the Paths of Shadow off last week, so I've spent this weekend working on a short story for a horror anthology coming out later this year.

Honestly, I was a little worried that I'm no longer able to even write short stories.  As far as I can tell the last time I wrote an actual short was in 2004 or so, which in writer's years equals 2,752 fortnights, or 12,000 half-penny furlongs.

A long stretch, in other words.

But I'm happy to report that things are going quite well with the short piece, which is entitled The Knocking Man.  I'm halfway done, the story is appropriately creepy and spooky without being overtly gory, and I think no one is going to expect the ending (though by this point the reader will think they've got it figured out, though they don't).  So I'll get my first short piece in years out well before the deadline.  Hopefully it'll be good enough to make it into the anthology.

And then it's back to the novels!  Markhat and Darla are getting impatient.  They heard something about a trip down the Brown River on a luxurious gambling boat and they're eager to get underway.

Me too.