Welcome to my Blog

So, 2016 has opened very kindly for me. I have a story (The Only Good Clown is a Dead Clown) in TJ Weeks' anthology Painted Mayhem. All proceeds go to help soldiers afflicted with PTSD. It's a condition that has affected me personally (though not from war) and one that affects a lot of my friends. I have three other anthology invites that I am so freaking excited about. One of them involves some really frigging sweet scream queens from the 80s. Can I get a hell yeah? The other is a much requested collab between Lisa Lane and myself. That's right, Jane and Bob are hanging out and going to the mall. This ain't your average mall but, what could go wrong at a Super Market? The third is one I am beyond excited about because it involves my most favorite authors and one of my favorite creatures of all time. Yes, I'm talking zombies! *Snoopy Dance* and, man, this collaboration is pretty sweet. It has me working with someone I hold in high regard and consider a...

I spend time at the beginning of each year to do some reflecting on my life. I find that it helps me to stay grounded and grateful to the people and the good things that come into my life. thinking over on last year brought a lot of both back into the forefront. 2015 was a good year for my career but it was a difficult year for my family in terms of rebuilding. We had to reconstruct our family around the loss of Chris' brother, Evan. My mom's side of the family had to adjust to its first full year without several of our beloved members. While we rebuilt our lives without our loved ones we also rebuilt our living room, too. It is now solid as a rock and should last a few hundred more years, God willing. Little by little we will make sure the rest of this grand house is lovingly restored. 2015 also brought me some of the most amazing opportunities of my career. First came the Revelations series; Cast in Blood, Cast in Fire, and Cast in Shadow, where I got to w...

Today, I'm turning my blog over to the awesome Richard Schiver to talk a bit about his new release, All Roads Lead to Terror. Enjoy! Who inspired the characters. I grew up watching westerns every Saturday morning. Some of you may remember the old black and white weekly television shows featuring characters like Roy Rogers, Tom Mix, and the singing cowboy Gene Autry. Did you know Gene Autry was awarded the Medal of Honor for his actions in WWII? I’m full of odd little tid-bits of information like that. As I grew older my tastes matured, yet my love of Westerns remained strong. I became an early fan of Clint Eastwood when he appeared in the Rawhide series. I know, we’re getting into ancient history here. I’ve followed Clint’s career through the spaghetti westerns of the late sixties early seventies, his Dirty Harry phase, “Make my day.” And beyond. In my mind his best western will always be The Outlaw Josey Wales. “Hell is coming to breakfast.” But what does all this...

This week we had a pretty full schedule. We had twenty six people for Thanksgiving dinner on Thursday, followed by our awesome niece's birthday party Friday, then a really lovely baby shower for my wonderful sister in law on Saturday. Seems like no big deal, a normal all-the-family-is-in-town-so-let's-do-it-all-at-once kind of event. Everybody has these times in their family. Unfortunately, I have missed so many of these times. Until last year, when my doctor put me on Plaquenil, I wouldn't have been able to handle three functions in a row. In fact, this year was the first Thanksgiving in three years I haven't been too sick to eat with the family and it was damn good, baby! I was able to get everything cleaned on time and we had a delicious dinner courtesy of my husband and our family. I have so many things to be thankful for this year and I really don't have time to list them all, but rest assured you are probably on that list if you're reading th...

Happy Thanksgiving everyone. I figured I'd give you guys a bit of a turkey day treat with a free short story I wrote last year.  CLICK HERE TO READ THE STORY

So, I thought I'd do something I haven't done in awhile and give you a small story to read, just to thank you guys for all you do. I wrote this shortie a long time ago when I was really interested in the goings on in mob controlled New York during the Great Depression.        1932                    “ 1932 was a pretty good year for me. For the rest of the country it was the height of the Great Depression but, for me, business was good. I’ll never forget that year. It was above and beyond any others.           “Jack Benny aired his radio show for the first time. Gas was ten cents a gallon, you could grab a cup of coffee for around 2 cents and a movie ticket cost a whopping twenty-five cents.           “Dwight Eisenhower ran for President and you couldn’t go near a radio without hearing Happy Days Are H...

Hiya, folks. Today I've turned over my blog to an absolutely wonderful author whom I had the pleasure of meeting in person at the 2014 World Horror Con in Portland. I hope you enjoy this post as much as I did. *** Hello, my name is… Loren Rhoads My mother was a librarian, so I grew up surrounded by books.  Once she showed me where the science fiction shelf was, I’d sit down and work my way through it. It didn’t take long for me to notice all the writers (in those misty, far off days) were men.  Even the few women wrote under male names: Andre Norton, C.J. Cherryh, James Tiptree Jr., and the ambiguously gendered (to me) Leigh Brackett and Marion Zimmer Bradley. The message I took from it was that women were welcome in small numbers, as long as they passed socially as men.  It was a message I had already internalized. I never felt like my given name fit me.  From an early age, I called myself George – long before I knew that was the nickname of Nancy ...