FULL BLEED: EVENT RELATED ECHO

No, there's no hyphen. Sure, that's not grammatically correct. That's fair.

It's also the title of a collection of short stories of mine that will be coming out, hopefully around the middle of October. I'm waiting to hear back on the foreword and rights reversions of one of the stories (which shouldn't be an issue, but I'm just crossing the i's and dotting the t's.) As usual, it covers the science fiction and horror territory (and horror's nothing but fantasy tilted towards darkness, soooo...) Here's the cover.

(Yes, that is not a joke. That's the actual cover.)

Here's a list of stories that'll be found within.

The Black Mass Variations

Through the Limbs

Ballgame

Ringer

The Stars So Broken

Chunked

Presidential Feed

Home

Night Song

Two are available from me as single stories, one has been printed by someone else (Broken Eye Books) and a few of the others I've posted on my own site, but subsequently taken down. "The Stars So Broken" and "Night Song" haven't been seen anywhere before, so technically I'm not lying with the "New Stories" thing.

There's an outside chance that a couple other smaller pieces will make their way into the book, but a lot depends on stuff that hasn't been settled yet and whether or not I can use them to lead readers elsewhere. Even so, with all those above, it's totally worth five bucks, which is something you'll tear through before you can finish either of the first two stories in the book. I promise.

And like I said above, this will come out well before BLACK TRACE does. I hope it's an adequate substitution.

Funny, but I did think that I was going to be ending summer with BLACK TRACE, but it didn't turn out that way. I'm trying to arrange some pre-press publicity and such, so it needs a little more lead time. Don't worry. It'll happen before MY DROWNING CHORUS comes out (no, it hasn't been officially announced beyond the Kickstarter statement, but I'm optimistic.)

So, yeah, summer didn't turn out the way I'd expected. Should have expected something radically different, but I guess I was hoping for better. No trip to the state fair with my daughter, which is something I've not-so-secretly come to really looking forward to and enjoying. She's not going to be in the house forever, dig. Time passes. Once it's past, you don't get to visit it again. Sure, you can remember whatever memory constructs or photographs you've taken but those aren't really real. Yeah, no Musk head probe thing is going to work like that because humans don't construct memories and experiences like that. That's pure materialism at work, pure commerce, pure bullshit.

No conventions or film festivals to visit and talk folks into buying books or just saying hello, no excuse to get up to Portland and eat biscuits or go to Powell's and buy too many research books and hang with friends. And that really sucks. These are mighty small potatoes, I know. I'm speaking only for myself and focusing on these because looking at the bigger picture is enough to drive you absolutely freaking mad. You already know what I'm talking about so I don't need to say any more. Summer's almost over.

The blackberry bush is about done making fruit, still producing some smaller ones, still tasty. Another hot weekend coming, so the season is not going to go down without a fight. But still the season will go down. So will these times.

Yeah, sorry, this got heavy. Sorry, sorry.

More next week.