Sharkasaurus

Greetings Earthlings,

The fine folks at Fossil Lake have released their newest anthology upon an unsuspecting world. Meet the SHARKASAURUS collection. Here's the front and back cover.

It's called Sharka-freakin'-saurus. What more could you possibly want? It's tales of dinosaurs, sharks, and dino-sharks. It's like peanut butter and jelly and dinosaurs. Or supernatural serial killers, rowdy teenagers, and dinosaurs. Perfect combinations, all.

Not only that, but it features my short story "Falling Stars." It's a story about support groups. And were-sharks. And some other stuff. Like dinosaurs.

As I type this, it's available in its physical format. Digital versions should be up and available sometime in the not too distant future. Amazon has it for sale right HERE.

Carrion Shadows

Here's that big news I promised. Severed Press has officially picked up Carrion Shadows: Undead Onslaught for publication. Right now, I'm still waiting for the release date and cover art, but there should be more to show you in the near future.

Let me give you the blurbed synopsis.

After years of working as a big game hunter, Denise DeMarco wants to quietly retire to become a park ranger at a game preserve. However, a doomed expedition into the dark ecosystem that thrives beneath the park’s surface accidentally sends something terrifying bubbling to the veldt’s surface. Something prehistoric. Something hungry. 

Armed with an elephant gun and years of experience, it’s up to Denise to save the blighted park. Swarms of the oozing undead, relentless poachers, and one very angry dinosaur stand in her way. And even if she survives all that, there’s still something trapped underground that wants out. Primeval horrors and ravenous ghouls lurk around every corner as night falls over the park. Denise must use all her skills if she wants to live through the experience. She must become the ultimate monster hunter. 


Carrion Shadows in a standalone sequel to Carrion Safari, my first novel with Severed Press. You can find the first book HERE if you're interested, but you don't need to read it to enjoy Carrion Shadows.

How to Write an Action-Adventure Novel

In the next few days, I’ll have some exciting news. First, I’d like to bring a new feature to this website, though. Occasionally, I’d like to address some aspect of the writing craft. Let’s start with a broad topic today. 

I generally advertise myself as a horror author because my books are full of monsters, mad science run amok, and abominations from beyond the bounds of time. However, I’m an action and adventure writer, too. My characters visit exotic locations, start bare knuckle brawls with hired thugs, and discover ancient artifacts. If they have to fight unspeakable horrors too, so much the better. 

When I started getting serious about writing around 2011, it wasn’t obvious to me what elements went into making the sort of stories I wanted to write. I could identify some of the ingredients by reading the works of my various idols, but it wasn’t obvious what portions to use. Just to be clear, there is obviously no magic formula to writing a great action-adventure story. No one can create a perfect blueprint or how-to manual on the subject. This is more akin to a partial periodic table of story elements with a few key reactions highlighted. 

Let’s start by breaking a novel idea into three broad acts.

The Beginning: 

There’s a few things that any adventure story should stick right up front. These should be pretty close to the first page of the story.

1)     Make your antagonist’s presence felt

Right away, the reader should know that there is going to be serious trouble afoot. The main villain doesn’t have to walk up to our hero and punch them in the nose, but we should know that some sort of confrontation is brewing. This is your hero’s village being razed, your private eye being hired to investigate a gruesome murder, or your suave archeologist discovering something cursed/worth stealing/ready to unleash ancient evil. This rapidly brings us to…

2)   The call to action

This is closely related to the previous point. Your main character is motivated to do something, quite possibly because the antagonist is being a jerk. It need not be as melodramatic as your hero swearing eternal revenge on the forces of evil after her family is killed by thuggish minions, but that will certainly do. It can start out because your hero is simply curious and they bumble into trouble or because they are hired to deal with a situation. These are probably your spies and detectives and monster hunters. 

3)    A hint of mystery

You’ve got an intrepid hero. You’ve got someone he or she is going to ultimately face off against. Good. However, it’s no good if everything is spelled out from the very beginning. It sets the stakes up if our hero’s village was torn asunder and all the residents killed by some evil overlord, but that sets up the middle. We need to provide something for the middle of the story. We probably shouldn’t know the identity of the ultimate bad guy yet, but that can come soon. We’re not writing a full mystery story where the climax comes from unmasking the villain. No, we want our hero to unsure why their village was attacked or why their client was murdered. We know that something dangerous was stolen, but we don’t know what yet. What do these strange inscriptions mean? How did the villain know where to find the sacred thingamajig? What on earth killed the project’s chief scientist and the entire facility’s security team? These are the things that will help shape the middle of your story.

4)   A plan and some progress

By now, our heroes have probably set out to solve the primary issue motivating them. They’re following leads and punching out terrorist lieutenants in back alleys. They’re piloting their starship through the G’rjoux nebula, tracking a trace neutrino field. They’re traveling to the temple of the black crab to recover the magical, evil-slaying dagger that can put an end to whatever is menacing the land. They’re doing the things action-adventure folks do when they’re looking to save the day. The point is, they have some idea of what the end goal is, even if a lot of the pieces of the puzzle are missing. They’re actively working to fill in those gaps, and maybe they’ve already put two and two together on a couple of things, and things are almost going well.

The middle of your story:

Okay, great. We last left our heroes as they proceeded toward their goals. They’re probably still facing overwhelming odds and risking a fate worse than death, but there’s hope. They’re going to make it. The middle of the story is mostly about…

1)    Cutting your heroes off at the knees

That plan that looked like it was going to work? Nah, bro. Your characters find themselves completely and utterly screwed. Those terrorist lieutenants are back as three headed zombies and they just tore your commanding officer in half. There’s a robot uprising in the G’rjoux nebula, and you’ve been framed for starting the war. Not only will the crab priests not give you that magical dagger, but their ancient order has been corrupted and they’re now fully #teamevil. Your heroes are screwed six ways to Sunday. The plan has been completely upended, dashed against the rocks, and buried.

2)      Revelations

This is tied up with the above point and also those mysteries you set up in the beginning of the novel. Resolving one of those mysteries should pull the rug out from under your heroes. Knock the wind out of their sails. Chose the cliché of your choice. I’m reluctant to call this a plot twist because that term almost implies something gimmicky. Ideally, you don’t want the surprise to be something that develops out of thin air. Hopefully, the base elements have been on the radar, albeit in a peripheral role to the main goals. It’s something that should quickly make sense in retrospect without having to devote page after page of explanation. All the better if the revelation is part of what screws up your protagonist’s plans. The discovery should open up a new avenue of threats while providing at least a few more unanswered questions to be wrapped up later. 

3)    Reorganization

The middle of the story is where you screw your characters over at every opportunity. They’re going to spend the middle of the book getting their butts kicked. They should be on the run, consistently under threat, and scrounging up some newer and more desperate plan. It’s time to reorganize. That nice, clean three step plan to save the world everyone had back in act one is out the window. Now it’s time for desperate measures. Most of the middle of the book will involve the heroes alternating between trying to stay one step ahead of impending doom and enacting hasty back up plans. Your heroes should be thwarted over and over again, barely getting through the encounters by the skin of their teeth.

The finale:

Here’s where everything pays off. When I was younger and developing an interest in writing, I thought you basically strung action sequences together until you had something long enough to be considered a book. I thought the plot should be just one long freight train car exploding through wall after wall. If there wasn’t a raging battle in a particular scene, why even bother writing it? Most of the time, this is not the correct way to write a story, even one in this genre. However, the finale is where that model holds closest. Because of this, it will probably be shorter than either the beginning or middle sequences of the story. 

1)   Wrap up the mysteries

Sometime around when you enter the final sequence, you’ll want the audience to understand just how clever you are, you clever thing, you. This mostly amounts to wrapping up your loose ends. You’ve probably been dangling a few tidbits in front of the audience for a while, perhaps even from the very beginning. While thrills and chills are our story’s bread and butter, a few rock solid final twists are what really cement the plot in the reader’s mind. As always though, such twists must be earned. Some writers think that a non-sequitur is the same thing as a surprise ending. It’s not.  

 

2)   The final showdown

Everybody knew this was coming. At long last, your heroes face off against the ultimate danger. Swords are crossed. Laser guns fire. Everything goes out with a bang. 

3)    The staggered finale

This category isn’t always necessary, and it’s something of a trope, but it’s a fun one. Often, it’s a lot of fun to add on just-one-more action sequence. The classic example of this is probably the escape sequence. The villain lays broken on the ground, but they manage to pull the incredibly convenient self-destruct lever with their final ounce of strength. Now your heroes must flee through toxic gasses, crumbling walls, and hordes of released monsters to make it to safety. There are other ways to stagger a finale, such as a nigh undefeatable opponent. The original Terminator film is an especially good example of the staggered finale against a villain who refuses to be taken down. While the staggered finale is optional, it is a classic gem of the genre. It’s a dash of spice on top.

That’s it. Those are some of the key ingredients in your recipe. The essential trajectory follows are heroes as they gain some sort of traction against the central problem, only to be knocked back on their heels, followed by a come from behind victory. There’s obviously as many ways to do this as your fertile little imaginations can come up with, but this is more of a simplified anatomy chart than a step-by-step guide. 

What do you think? Did I completely fail to discuss something? Think one of my points is utterly off base? Perhaps it will be the subject of a future discussion. 

You can find my currently available horror-thrillers HERE and HERE.

 

Live Nude Seances

Despite the boundaries of "good ideas" or concepts like "tastefulness," I have written the first draft of my sixth novel. The working title is LIVE NUDE SEANCES.

Now, you're probably saying to yourself, "That's an odd title. Stop trying to sell me books, you strange man." But wait, there's more. The genesis for this novel actually came from a short story I wrote a couple of years ago for an anthology of steampunk ghost stories. (Link below).

The world of LIVE NUDE SEANCES takes place in an alternate version of 1920s America. Abraham Lincoln has recently been elected for the 17th time, aided by mechanical implants. On nights with a full moon, you can still see the burned out remains of the old international lunar base. And the most important field of science is ethereal engineering, which allows scientists to bind spirits to mechanical contraptions as a source of power. Cheap, plentiful energy, courtesy of the spirit realm and the unrelenting scientific probing into the supernatural, has reshaped the world on a fundamental level.

However, one side effect of this progress has been a certain erosion in the fabric of reality. The bizarre is increasingly common. Roughly one percent of all children are now born as monsters. They're perfectly healthy and intelligent, but marked by horrific deformities. Segregated into monster districts away from the rest of the population, they make their living on the fringes of society.

When an extremely powerful piece of ethereal technology goes missing, the Department of Ethereal Sciences must rely on three of these monsters to get the item back. Thurgood, Persephone, & Nicolette, a trio of local bootleggers, must now retrieve to project. From a Pacific resort city to an abandoned ghost town to the slaughterhouses of Chicago, they'll have to face down a cult obsessed with success, traitors within the Department of Ethereal sciences, and a violent anti-monster gang. And those are only the human challengers they'll face if they don't want the project to blow up in their faces.

Anyhow, I'll start shopping it around once it's been edited. Hopefully, it'll be coming to bookshelves near you at some point in the future.

For those of you curious about the original steampunk ghost story project that spawned this, you can get a little peek at some of the novel's world HERE.

Toxic

A little while ago, I submitted a story to an anthology called Toxic. They wanted tales about real world poisons and (surprise!) toxic materials.

I wanted to do something a little different than usual. You know those "cozy mystery" books? The ones that usually feature a busybody amateur sleuth going about some quaint township and solving a dastardly murder at the local cookie shop? Other staples of the genre include helpful animal sidekicks, often a big, fluffy cat, and an extra quaint pun in the title that makes you want to vomit knitting yarn and freshly baked cookies. I'm pretty sure that it's legally mandated that all grandmothers have a few cozy mysteries sitting around.

That's where my story "Miss Blinkers Solves the Case" comes in. It starts out as a super cozy mystery. However, some fun facts about strychnine means this journey on the Orient Express derails somewhere in the deep, dark woods south of Ookyspookyville.

It's available for purchase in physical format here. So far, that's the only place and format it seems to be available in.

Here's the official blurb for the book straight from Migla Press:

Beware what you eat, beware what you drink, yes, even what you touch. Danger can lurk where you least expect it. All it takes is one mistake and what awaits is an agonizing death. One sting, one bite from the most innocuous creature and before you know it your breathing becomes shallow, your heart erratic. Your mind clouds, everything becomes feint. Death is the result, you lowered your guard. This is the epitome of these covert substances which exist within the world. Whether in nature, or made by man, toxins exude the mystique of danger, of a silent horror which can infect and destroy from the inside out. However the real question is whats to fear more, the substances themselves, or those willing to use them?

 

 

 

 

Private Eyes, Monsters, & the Egregious Misuse of a Steam Shovel

Hey there boils and ghouls,

Guess what? WRONG. Also, wrong. Wrong and kind of weird. Are you even trying?

My novel, SUBSTRATUM, is now out courtesy of the fine people at Grinning Skull Press. It's currently available on the Kindle and Kobo, with hard copies and other formats coming out soon.

With fine cover art from Jeffrey Kosh

This is a special book to me. It's the first novel  ever wrote, after cutting my teeth on short stories for a few years. I wrote it in 2013, during my second year of law school, finishing it on December 7th. Three years and a week later, here it is. Getting it to print was a considerably journey.

Here's the official back of the book blurb:

Deep beneath the streets of Detroit, someone — or something — is picking off the miners of the Detroit Salt Combine. The company appears to be more concerned with the protection of their equipment than with the safety of their employees, so the miners take it upon themselves to approach the Attican Detective Agency to find out what's happening to their co-workers. Jasper O'Malley, an agent with a reputation for getting things done (at great cost), is assigned to the case.

Teamed with Sadie Dupree, a geological expert, and Amelia Rio, an ace driver for one of the Organized Crime families, Jasper ventures underground to investigate the fate of the miners. But there's another factor operating within the labyrinth of tunnels, a factor that would kill to keep its illegal operations undiscovered. And still another factor has infiltrated the hired detective's own group. Yes, there's a Judas working with Jasper, a traitor who knows the secret of the mine, and who will stop at nothing to keep the mine's secret. Can Jasper track down whom or what is responsible for the miners' disappearances, or will he and his one true ally suffer the same fate as the unfortunate workers?

Fun fact: A lot of the story takes place in the Detroit salt mines. These are, in fact, a real place. Before the city of Detroit became a massive manufacturing hub in the early 20th century, one of its main industries was salt mining. Massive shafts dropped 1,200 feet below the city's surface. I took some liberties with their layout, but the mines are a fun little piece of lost history and a great setting for monsters to stalk our protagonists. Until recently, you could even take tours of the mines. Check them out.