Just in time for Christmas...

A short story of mine has just appeared in a new anthology by Post Mortem Press, entitled New Dawn Fades. A perfect gift for the horror readers on your list -- after all, what says Christmas more than a collection of twenty zombie stories?

Joe Schreiber, author of the Star Wars-zombie novels, StarWars: Death Troopers and Star Wars: Red Harvest, writes the introduction to the volume. He calls my story "Happy Birthday, Joshie" and the other stories of the collection "thrusts, stabs and downright eviscerations on a convention that just won't die."

I had a lot of fun writing "Happy Birthday, Joshie," and I hope it shows. The story does not play with the short fiction form, but it is still haiku fiction in that it looks at the aftermath of the zombie apocalypse through the eyes of a single individual.

Imagine a world where our loved ones need never die. Just infect them with the zombie virus and they stay the same forever. More or less. After many years, Rachel Harding finally knows what to give her brother unnaturally kept at age ten. She just needs to find a way to get her present to him in the zombie Viewing Center.

 
I love horror stories that make the reader wonder, who really is the monster. I hope that I pull off at least raising the question in "Happy Birthday, Joshie." The entire collection deals with the same issue, in many different ways. Again, from Joe Schreiber's introduction: "If I had to pick out a common thematic thread in these pages, it would be this: The zombies in New Dawn Fades hold a mirror up to ourselves."
 
Small stories, big impact is what haiku fiction is all about. I hope that you'll support the small press movement and give New Dawn Fades a try.

I'm My Own Kryptonite released!

I've just had the chance to listen to my story "I'm My Own Kryptonite," recently reprinted in podcast form at Wily Writers. The story was first published in the lamented A Thousand Faces magazine. I hope that the podcast will give the story more exposure.

The story is a superhero fantasy, but I hope with a twist. Here's the teaser at WW:

Kenley Williams’s alter ego is killing him. Literally. Is a painful life in the hospital worth everything he goes through as a superhero? Does he have to sacrifice love along with everything else?

I like to think that my writing is always getting better, but this is a tale I'm really proud of. It fits my ideals of haiku fiction perfectly, for the time at which I was writing it. I play with the tenses of the different sections of the story in a way that I hope creates resonances in the reader (or in this case, listener). This is one of the first stories where I feel that my "haiku fiction" voice is really coming through.

Nathan Crowder does an excellent job reading the story. He even pronounces my last name correctly! LOL Best of all, the podcast is a free download.

Please check out "I'm My Own Kryptonite," and let me know what you think!