In Case You Haven't Heard, Plus Amorous Frogs!

New Markhat is on the Way!

Just in case you haven't heard, Samhain Publishing accepted the new Markhat novel, and we have a tentative publication date of April 2015.

The book will be entitled The Darker Carnival, and if you think this one might be set in a carnival there's a really good chance you might be right. 

I've always wanted to include a traveling carnival in a Markhat book. Even a perfectly innocent carnival provides a rich and exotic setting for a book, but if the carnival is Evil(tm) -- well, that's just plain good fun.

I did a fair amount of research on turn of the century (i.e., the turning of the 19th and 20th centuries) carnival folk. They lived rough and tumble, hard-luck lives, especially the 'freaks,' but even so carny life was preferable to the alternatives in the early 1900s. Some amassed quite respectable fortunes, for the time, and enjoyed long and hopefully fulfilling lives. 

So in this new book, you'll meet, among others, the Man of Bones, Vallarta the Swamp Witch, Elisabet, Queen of the Elves, and the Living Dead Girl. Oh, and mastodons, because how else are you going to haul your Ferris wheel and carousel across the war-torn wastelands?

I believe I had more fun writing The Darker Carnival than I have any of the others, which is a good sign that you'll enjoy reading it too. 

I can't wait to see the cover. A carnival setting? This one ought to be really good!

But in the meantime, don't forget about the other eight Markhat titles, such as the one below!

Available from Samhain, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and iTunes!

Here There Be, Um, Frogs and Snakes. Mostly Frogs.

© Roman Milert | Dreamstime Stock Photos

Finally, a short bit of audio.

I live in north Mississippi. So do some of you -- but to many of my readers, Mississippi is a far-off land, a strange and exotic place peopled by barefoot hillbillies and over-run with beat-up Chevy pickups.

First, I would like gently point out that I own numerous pairs of shoes, which I wear on special occasions (formal tractor-pulls, court sentencings, the annual We Hope We Get The Lectricity Real Soon Now festival). Also, my truck is a Nissan, and I washed it once. 

We all live in unique settings. Whether you're in New York or Singapore or you're aboard the ISS looking down on us all, your moment is utterly unlike anyone else's. Communicating the differences of our experiences is part of what writing is all about.

I can't replicate for you the aromas of the dining room at Taylor Grocery. I can't describe to you, in more than the crudest terms, what you might see and hear and smell walking around Oxford's pre-Civil War town Square.

But I can record the sounds of night-time here in sleepy Yocona, which is what I've done and linked to below.

My summer nights are filled with a tireless orchestra of creeping, jumping, flying things. Crickets and toads. Frogs and katydids. Plesiosaurs and Sasquatch, probably, since anything could be back there in the dark.

It's only a 30-second clip. I promise it's not a screamer, because I find those things annoying (first rule of being funny: BE FUNNY. Screamers aren't funny and haven't been since 2007). 

Night in rural Mississippi. Enjoy, and mind the water moccasins!

Click here for Night in Mississippi