October was Made for This...

Here in northeast Kansas, October is truly the finest month of the year. The air cools, the leaves began to fade into their fall pageant, and Halloween looms at the end of the month. Joy!

October also brings one of the best perks of being an English teacher. One of my classes will read The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, I'm putting together a reading packet with stories by Poe, Lovecraft, and Derleth, and I need to write sentences for vocabulary words like morbid, emaciated, grotesque, and pestilence. What fun!

Issue 4 of Necrotic Tissue is out, a super-duper double-sized whopping of horror, featuring my story, "Catalog Sales".

Macabre Cadaver #3 is also available, with my horrid little resurrection, "Dinner".

Bon Appetit!

Raising a Story from the Dead

I wrote a piece of flash last February titled "Blood Will Have Blood". It was a little 600 word drabble about some very hungry ants. Nothing special. Really. The story proceeded to take a boot to the rear from a number of publications, first paying, then non-paying. It landed squarely in Mr. Polson's trunk file. I must say, it deserved to languish there. It sucked.

Well, I dusted it off on Monday. Inspired by an additional burst of black humor and memories of a special delivery to my neighbor, the entomologist, I revised. (He had a box of bees delivered to his house once, UPS.) I changed past tense to present (present tense added a sense of urgency). I included a little bit about a disgruntled, sloppy, delivery van driver. I added a hungry and self-centered husband. I changed the title to "Dinner". And I sent the piece to Macabre Cadaver yesterday. (Its a 4theluv publication with nice aesthetics--just look at the cover to issue two. The stories are quality, too. Check out Natalie L. Sin's "Beyond the Garden".)

And (poof) my dead story has new life, appearing in Macabre Cadaver #3, due next month.

This isn't my biggest sale or my best tale, but it was fun raising the dead.