In case it’s not excruciatingly obvious, I’m an indie author.

I have a family and a full-time job, and since my last update here I got swallowed up in the incessant swells and squalls on the high seas of life.

But now I’m back on dry land, saddled up on the great word machine, and grinding along towards vague milestones that retreat ever deeper into distant horizons—the writing process sure is fun, ain’t it?

Here’s what’s cooking …

A Vampire Novel

Yep, that’s right.

Ugh! Not more vampire fiction! you might be thinking.

Hang on! Hear me out …

I’m over 50,000 words deep into my debut novel, The Shrouded Sun. I’m really in one hell of a flow state with this story. The edge of my Word cursor is white-hot (well, most of the time). The characters, setting, and events are literally exploding in my mind’s eye like IMAX on speed.

That doesn’t mean it’s going to turn out absolutely brilliant, but it’s in that rare condition of writing itself; works born from this spooky action tend to be better than a convoluted, dog turd of a story, on average.

I won’t reveal too much about The Shrouded Sun just yet, but I’ll say it’s a vampire story like none you’ve ever read before (I promise). It disrespects the hell out of genre conventions and bucks so many of those tired bloodsucker motifs.

There’s no room in the hellscape of The Shrouded Sun for pallid, pretty boys that glitter in the daylight, or for dainty foo-foo’s sobbing in their caskets, crippled by endless ennui (seriously, no shade to the legendary Anne Rice, I love her vamps.) Nope, our exsanguinating hero must tap into an abyssal wellspring of sheer brutality in order to navigate a shattered world in which a creature of the night is far less horrifying than the gangs of desperate humans that rove the land.

You’ll be reading plenty more about this book as I draw closer to a launch.

Dark Fantasy Short Story Collection

There are also about five-thousand galaxy clusters of short stories floating around my hard-drive, many of them alarmingly close to being at first drafts.

I’m equal parts horror and sci-fi fan, hence why I market myself as a “speculative fiction” author. The beauty of being an indie writer is that I can dip into all sorts of zany ideas, and no one can bloody stop me! HA HA HA!

Along the spectrum of my weird, genre-hybridizations, I have concocted a number of “horror” stories over the years. However, my “horror” digs a little bit closer to the bone than howling ghosts, cosmic monsters, or evil dolls.

Human nature scares me more than any of those things.

The stories in my upcoming collection, entitled Bestiary, will cleverly juxtapose well-known folkloric monsters, cryptids, boogeymen, and other creepers with the darker side of us homo sapiens, and leave it to the reader to decide which is more reprehensible.

I’m targeting a release date of Q1 2024, so stay tuned!

The First Novel in a Series

Lastly, for the past two years I’ve hacked away at what will be the first in a series of novels centered around the occult. Set in Victoria’s England, you could say it’s something like Sherlock Holmes meets Penny Dreadful, with some element to its DNA provided by my unwavering love of Batman ::shrugs::.

It has been slower going than both The Shrouded Sun and my short stories, requiring more research and dialing in, so the progress has been piecemeal. Nonetheless, it’s turning out to be wicked good. It’s a perfect blend of suspense and spookiness, action and affect, if I might say so me’self.

That’s all for now. Back to work!