It’s 2025 now and I should be looking forward to what’s coming ahead this year and beyond because it’s some great stuff and I’m really excited about. But I’m going to have to wait to talk about that, and you’ll have to wait to read about it because I want to take a look back at 2024 one more time.
The last few years I’ve released three books and they have been spaced out evenly throughout the year with a spring release, a late summer release and a late fall or early winter release. This year was different and for the first time in a while, the first half of the year saw no releases from me. While you didnt see much new work from me, except for the short story “Dead Drunk Friends” in the charity anthology Dismemeber the Coop edited by Bert Edens, I was hard at work. (Side note: that short story is one of the favorite stories I’ve written, things take a different direction for me and I laughed a lot writing and editing that one, so if you haven’t picked up that anthology you should do so. Plus, the proceeds go to a great cause.)
Okay, so for the first three or four months of the year I was busy writing and then editing the third and final installment of the Mr. Nightmare series. This book is coming in June of 2025 (see there I go looking forward again) and it’s the longest book in the series by a lot. I really enjoyed getting into the minds of these characters again. The bulk of this story lets you see Mr. Nightmare from a completely different angle and really wraps the story up in a way I’m happy with.
While I was writing and editing Mr. Nightmare 3, I was also putting together, editing and submitting my second short story collection HELL IS EMPTY, ALL THE MONSTERS ARE HERE. This collection is also coming to you in 2025 (I know, I know) and is something I’m really proud of. While novels take a lot more work and let me as a writer—and you as a reader—get close to the characters, there is something different and more personal about a short story collection in my mind. If a novel is a snapshot of where the writer is at a certain point in time, a short story collection is lots of little snapshots of where the writer was over the course of, in this case, many years. When I was editing and reading through those stories I could really see the different types of stories I was writing at different times. Hell is Empty, All the Monsters are Here is going to show many different sides of me as a writer.
Once Mr. Nightmare 3 and Hell is Empty were turned into their publishers, it was time to start digging into the next book. And I actually, completely by accident, started digging into two books at once. The first, An Unsafe Darkness, is the most personal and emotional book I’ve written. There were parts of it had I to stop writing because it was difficult to put the words down. I may have cried during one scene in particular. It’s a post-apocalyptic story involving aliens, but the alien creatures take a back seat to the humans in this story. I’ve never been more excited for a book to get out into the world. An Unsafe Darkness is coming, but not until 2026.
On one of those days when I needed and emotional break from writing An Unsafe Darkness, I started typing an idea out on my phone for another novel I’d been thinking about. I quickly realized that not only did I love this idea, but I had to get it—a large chunk of it—out of my head and onto paper. So for most of July, August and September I was writing two books at once. This second book is tentatively titled Thicker Than Water and since it’s not finished yet, I don’t want to write too much about it but I will say it’s heavily influenced by by the Robert Eggers film The Lighthouse.
Along with all of that writing, came the three new releases I mentioned earlier. Two novellas: And Then I Killed All the Ghosts-a fast paced mystery/superhero horror book that was a blast to write and Phobia-the third installment of my Contact series. And one novel—The Gods Among Them. I’ve had a lot of great feedback on all three with The Gods Among Them appearing on several “Best Of” lists for 2024. I’ve talked about each of those books on here quite a bit already so I won’t go on too much longer about them, however I do hope people will continue read and review or leave rating for each of them because those rating are really what helps drive sales on Amazon especially.
And that’s pretty much all there is to talk about for 2024 from a writing perspective. I did do some looking ahead but I’ll be back with a bit more in depth look at my writing goals for 2025 and what you can expect from me in the future early next week. Thanks for reading.
Until next time…
(I’ve been signing off these blog posts with that line for over a year now and no one has mentioned the movie reference so if you know it—and if you know me it shouldn’t be too hard to figure out—drop me a comment on FB or IG or wherever you happen to come across the link for this.)
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