Excerpts from down the road

I have decided that I will be putting out collections from my other series.  Probably will do them on a bi monthly basis.  In other words, every other month or so there will be a collection of my short stories from one of my series coming out. Some of them will have new, unpublished stories in them and some of them won’t. All of them will have editing done to clean up what I can.

I got an email telling me that I needed to do a lot of editing on my Death Walks Through collection to bring it up to snuff.  Now some things, yes I agree with but not all of them. The biggest problem is since I am not yet making any real money off my writing. Less than $200 in two years of publishing does not lend to being able to afford a real editor.  I am looking into editing programs like Grammarly but so far most of them will only do up to 20 pages. This makes editing a wee bit difficult when you are talking over 100 pages. Hopefully I will find a way to afford this some day soon and my work will come up to the level of the better of the authors out there.  I know I have great characters, fun dialogue, interesting worlds and tales but I need to make as clean a story as I can.

But back to the excerpts I promised. Echoes of Elder Times is the next collection I plan on.  So here is a tiny bit from the only unpublished tale that will be a part of this collection:

***

The winter settled in and seemed like it would never let go. While those who lived in the far north knew that winter could linger long into what was supposed to be spring, since the brief war of Gods and Giants, old Mother Winter had not released her grip in almost two years.

 The day of Ice, as the war was known, had lasted for an unknown time. Man and all the lesser creatures had been frozen in place, with only those special few still moving about. When the war was done and the ice slowly withdrew the world had changed. Most of those living in the big cities did not survive the thaw. Of those who had, fewer still survived the uprisings.

***

Yup another little tale to go with Ice. That particular short story has two spin off shorts so far and this will be a third.  I never thought when I wrote Ice so long ago that it would have spin offs but there you go!

Next I will probably put out Mythos of Love as a collection.  My fantasy love stories are sweet, IMO and they deserve to be read by more than the occasional fan right? This tale is titled Four Dragons Valley and should be interesting I think:

***

The valley between the peaks wasn’t deep but it held secrets. A place not easily found unless you knew the way. It was kept secret by wind, water and snow. Sara cried herself to sleep most nights. In part it was a release from days of her work, only deep inside did she admit that the other part was loneliness so deep the nothing filled the gap. This far from the big cities she lived alone but not totally. Years ago she started taking in stray animals.

First it was a pair of dogs, left in a park, tied up, as their master drove away. When she found them they were ragged, starving and frightened of everything. She patiently calmed them down and cut them free. It only took a week of healthy food and loving attention and they were happy dogs again. She tracked down the owner from the tags; using a few simple programs she had him blacklisted at every pet store and breeder in his state. He would never again own a pet. Over the years she had made many trips into the forest about her valley. This led to trips into the city at the foot of the mountain.

The storm echoed about the mountaintops. Thunder roared so loud that the smaller animals shook in their dens, the larger huddled together for protection. Sara drove her old truck across her valley. She only went out because she needed to check on the denning greyhounds, the newest of her rescue dogs. She had them a bit away from the others. Greyhounds were always a bit high strung, race rescues more so.

***

Ah but you are probably thinking where is the fantasy and romance in this one.  Oh it is there and it will be a fun one for me to finish.  If I can just get my fingers moving!

Finally the Worlds Apart series will have a collection too.  The stories in that collection are some of my older pieces but they are odd and good.  The tale that I plan on putting in this collection that is in the works is titled Down the Rabbit Hole. It was inspired by one of the google groups I joined and it sorta went off on its own:

***

Sitting back with a cup of tea before her, Crystal watched the world pass her by. The sun was filtering down between the branches of the birch tree, the fine buds of spring just starting to cover the branches. Spring was late but as always happened it arrived. The glory of the coming leaves was worth the wait in her mind. As the days grew longer you could feel the world waking up. Everything stretching and shaking off the sleep of winter.

The winter had lasted longer than anyone had expected. Storms came down right until Beltane and they came in places no one thought they could. Crystal knew better but then she was the eldest in the community of survivors. She had lived through more winters than all the rest combined if the secret was known. For Crystal was the first through the Rabbit Hole.

The Rabbit hole was the name for the gate that lead to this valley. A dark tunnel that twisted between one reality to the next. From time to time new comers would fall from the sky and land with a splash in the river. Those who were strong and could swim the powerful tide started their new life, those who were not strong enough washed out to the sea that was miles away.

 Crystal had tried to save some of those who had fallen after her. She learned early on that the powers who ran this world would not allow rescues. Those who came through had to reach the shore on their own. If they got their feet under them then they could find those waiting to give them a helping hand.

***

If I am a good little writer, I will get these all done and published before the year is up.  It seems to keep getting my work in front of readers I need to put out new titles every month. Makes it hard when you are working on a novel but I will do my best to keep putting out work for my readers to enjoy.

Working under a pen name

As a writer of fiction of all kinds I decided that when I put out my true life stories that I would not put them under my current author (married) name. It is not that I am ashamed of the nonfiction tales i will be putting out but that I don’t want things that are a dark part of my soul to be mixed with the children of my mind and heart that is my fiction.

Over the weekend I posted up my first memoir/letter under my pen name. It is not something I expect to sell but it was something I needed to put out there to the ether. Over the next few months I plan on doing a series of letters titled of course as Letters to the Dead. These are very personal things that I yet to decide if I will put up on Amazon. The first, Goodby, Daddy is the letter I wrote the night of my biological father’s death. It was something I needed to do and as I put it up I realized that I have a number of these letters in my head. There have been a lot of people who have passed from my life. Some of them were friends, some co-workers and some were family. Some of them saddened me greatly but others left a dull place that I feel I need to explore. If these letters touch others who have been stuck in their grieving process then I am content.

This is the only time i will let people know of the upcoming letters. They will be under the pen name LA Mason, which is my birth name.  I will be using a different pen name when I start up my children’s books. Thankfully as a self published author I can do this and not worry.

Here is the stark and simple cover I made for this letter.

I’m back with a new release

The horrible summer bug got me last week. I was down with the cough, fatigue, aches and all around sleeplessness for a week and a half. I just could not come up with a new word to put into any of my works in progress or the drive to even think. Thankfully I am on the mend now and I managed to finish the cover for Death Walks Through, collection one. It went live on Amazon, Google Play and Page Foundry yesterday and is of course working its way through other sites as you read this.

A collection of 14 previously released short stories and one unreleased one. If you like my ghost stories but haven’t had a chance to get them all, here it is.

Making the smoke on the cover come out right needed the special touch of the artist who is my hubby. I just could not figure it out but it seems to work.

While I was ill I pondered other works. I have submitted a flash fiction short story to an anthology from one of the writers groups I am part of. We had the theme of Hot Summer Nights and I think it will be a very good collection. The variety of authors is, in my opinion, some of the better o the indie authors out there today.

Also I am working out another short story concept for a different group’s anthology. This one is about clowns, any and all kinds. I am going for the sacred clown from native American mythos. Should hopefully be good. Thirdly I have been asked to come up with of all things an epitaph for a collection of epitaph poetry. Weird right? It did have me thinking though.

You see a lot of these all over cemeteries of course but have you read them? Many of them are really good and longer than you expect. So we will see what I will come up with.

So a new month, if half over, and lots of new ideas. Lets see what I have up my sleeve.