Been an eternity since I did this... Exciting news for me. The book I've been writing since the end of 2016 is live and available for free download RIGHT NOW, (7/31/23 - 8/2/23.) It's my first full length novel, clocking in at 92k words which is a significant personal accomplishment because I've been trying to write a 'real book' by my definition for 14 years and this is the first time it feels like I actually pulled it off.
Oblivion Girls is set in 1938 New York State. It's a first person noire-adjacent horror mystery that's shaped by my brief stint living in a secluded cabin in the mountains (when I started writing it.)
Here is the synopsis:
The worst hell is the one you make yourself…
It's 1938. Norman Hewitt is an NYC homicide detective with a haunted past. Still anguishing over the loss of his wife and only daughter, he goes on a pilgrimage to their once frequented lakeside camping spot in the country. But his hopes of finally laying his demons to rest are quickly scuttled when he wrecks his car taking a detour. The only thing around for miles is Juniper Gates, a secluded orphanage for girls, tucked away in the Catskills where time seems to have stopped.
Norman finds himself stranded there indefinitely as the orphanage has no working vehicle, no working phone, and no one seems to ever come by the house from the outside world. Forced to settle in and while away his time at a strange place that becomes stranger by the day, he begins to spend time with some of the less caustic residents. Agnes, a strange girl continually spying on him, shares her account of a cover-up and a girl who went missing from the house, a mystery too enticing to ignore. But as he tugs at the veil of the old orphanage, an insidious conspiracy comes into focus that plunges him into a twisted nightmare of dark memories, horrifying secrets, and worst fears come to life.
If you're a movie person, my new title is like the tragic existential journey of wonderment in 'What Dreams May Come' with the world-bending madness of 'Inception' and the traumatic psychological dread of 'Jacob's Ladder.'
It's dark, provocative and visceral.
Themes include:
Grief and guilt
The fluidity of memory
Empathy and forgiveness and who deserves them
Keeping secrets
Concrete versus abstract thought
Autonomy and consent
The cycle of violence
Self flagellation
Perdition and purgatory
It's is a slow boil that bubbles over and out of control just after you think you've settled in. It's both heart wrenching and heartwarming and you'll feel conflicted about many of the characters.
Here's a Pinterest mood board for the story if you're interested in that.
Here's the Spotify playlist for the story which I guess is also a sort of mood board.
Oblivion Girls is available for download as an ebook on Amazon for Kindle or the Kindle app. It's on promotion for the first three days, (as is traditional,) so you can acquire it for free if you snatch it up quickly.
I've figured it out. I am not writing a book. I've decided to try something different. I cannot quell the torrent of nagging ideas wishing to be written into stories. If I don't get them out of my head somehow, they just sit there festering in it like that soup in the fridge from two weeks ago that you avoid dealing with but will only get worse. The biggest problem with dealing with it has always been holding onto it long enough for it to develop or become absorbed into another story while allowing it to ruin many a night of sleep. Then it takes me forever to type it all out. However, if I don't try to develop these ideas as full blown novels but instead short stories, I can greatly speed up the process of bailing these things out of my brain. Shorter gestation, shorter writing, quicker cathartic release.
Yes, short stories. I've got around a dozen ideas right now and I've already finished writing two of them out fully. It's an eclectic gathering of Sci-fi and horror but mostly magical realism and the absurd. I suppose this means that I'll have to announce the release of a short story collection at some point in the future. And no this does not mean my novel writing days are at an end, merely on hiatus...
Glad this one's finally over. I want to take a break from writing books for a while. Perhaps that sounds funny because I don't consider myself a prolific writer. Six books in eight years and not one of them has broken a 70k word count. I can't type and I have hardly any free time, therefore it takes me forever to write anything. NaNoWriMo blows my mind. How does anyone have the time and mental constitution to write a book in a month? I like writing but it takes so much energy out of me. As a parent of two, I'm already exhausted all the time. Whenever I take on a project, even if it's just something I do on the side for fun, my brain is constantly thinking about it at all times until the project is finished. It's like starting a marathon that you can't quit. Maybe it's naive of me to think that I can "take a break" when so many of my projects are started because my inspiration has reached critical mass and essentially drags me kicking and screaming to the keyboard. And don't think that my brain was in want of more ideas when I hit the publish button for Phylum, because it wasn't. I guess what I'm saying is I want to plug my brain's ears and go la la la la la la la for as long as I can get away with it.
The Phylum: The Bulogan Incident ebook is now available for purchase on Amazon. The free download promotion will begin on February 10 and last through the 14th.
On a secluded island in the northeast Philippines is a hospital with a
covert genetic research wing. When their benchmark experimental subject
escapes into the wild, project lead Leslie Carmichael decides to cover
it up and take care of the situation by his own means. But the subject's
exposure to the outside world yields horrific results no one could have
predicted, a breed which can evolve at will to appease its desire to
feed. People disappear and life in the small island community of Bulogan
becomes increasingly disrupted. When things escalate beyond
Carmichael's control, the real stakes are finally revealed: the
extinction of life itself.
They are what they eat...
The full manuscript of Phylum: The Bulogan Incident is finished. Now all that is needed is a cover to cover read through to assure cohesion and see if there is anything else that I need to change or include. The ebook will be live on Amazon before the end of February. I will also be doing the usual free promotion when it hits.
I just hit 50,000 words while writing my new Sci-fi novel. It's about 80-85% finished. The new book is called Phylum and is set in the present day Philippines. I will update with a proper blurb or synopsis one of these days. Until then here are some appropriate tags: Conspiracy, Island, Jungle, Genetics, Monster, Medical, Hunting, Ocean, Research, Hybrid, Entropy, Evolution, Classification, Isolation, Horror, Action, Thriller.
I've set a date and I'm going for broke. This is the last time this ebook collection will be offered for free. You can download it on Amazon for $0.00 starting on 4/24 and going all the way through 4/28. If you read my book, leave me a review on the Amazon page and/or Goodreads if you have the time. For now, I must get back to work on my latest book. Details to come...
