Reading Time: 2 Mins Another chapter closed and I will be forever grateful for the last fourteen months. We lived in the moment, celebrated life, I was present and I was able to reignite my creative passions that had been dormant for so long. I finished writing a manuscript, my second, and have built a…
The Numbers Game: Coping With Rejection
Reading Time: 6 Mins I received a rejection email last night at 12:38 a.m. for a short story I had submitted to a popular and prestigious magazine. I knew I was swinging for the fences by submitting there. After all, I am an unpublished author and this was also my first real foray into trying…
Review: Beneath The Rising
Reading Time: 2 mins After listening to the audio book for The Annual Migration Of Clouds (reviewed here) I immediately purchased both this book and its sequel. I was not disappointed. Coming of age cosmic horror may be a genre best defined by Stranger Things, but it does not end there. If the genre appeals…
Weekday Woolgathering – 8/15/22
Reading Time: 3 Mins I am here. I have to tell myself this sometimes because the jobs I am applying to, the freelance gigs I have bid on, the agents I am querying and the publications I have submitted have just not been replying to me. I send myself an email just to make sure…
Peaches – VSS Weekly 11 (400 words)
Reading Time: 3 Mins They had been stranded on the small island for weeks and Goran was working Paul’s last nerve. “Take it down,” Paul said, referring to the woven flag Goran had planted in front of their shelter. “Why?” Goran said. “It’s patriotic. This place needs a flag.” The flag had left a tart…
Receiver – VSS Weekly 10 (400 words)
Reading Time: 3 Mins “I don’t know why the gods have chosen to speak through me,” Wally Boylen said to the reporter with a slight hiccup, thanks to the 10 a.m. gin and tonics he’d convinced himself he deserved. “I don’t even pray.” But the signs were hard to refute; Wally knew things. He knew…
Pulp Sci-Fi Month
Reading Time: 6 Mins Last month I stumbled on a treasure trove of old sci-fi books I had somehow inherited from my childhood home. I have a stack of new books on my bedside table waiting to be read but two of these newfound treasures were immediately placed at the top of the pile. I…
Beginnings – VSS Weekly 9 (400 words)
Reading Time: 3 mins “What do you say, can you make one just like it?” I needed this to work and Eddie was my last resort. Potions were more his thing, though everyone knew he was a charmer on the side, if you had the money. Hell, for the right price he’d even dabble in…
Weekday Woolgathering – 6/23/22
Reading Time: 3 Mins Subconscious thoughts have been bubbling to the surface today and it’s a strange feeling to stitch them together to try to get a peek inside your own mind. I often choose book quotes and songs to post about that shine a light on how I’m feeling and today they all fell…
Weekday Woolgathering – 6/20/22
Reading Time: 6 Mins You see, I have these thoughts. Creative thoughts. Ideas. Books, stories, characters, all swirling around in competition for space on the blank page in front of me whenever I make the time to sit down and write. Then there are the things that happen to me in real life; those moments…