New ghost story publication and a Year-End Sale!

I’m excited to announce my short story “Ghostwitch” will be published as a free read on the site of publisher Rooster Republic on a Monday in 2023 – which Monday is yet to be determined, but announcements will be coming out in January and February. And then, you’ll probably want to catch all of the series of Two Thousand Word Terrors, which begins Monday, February 6 and will run for the next 45 weeks.

While you wait for next year, there’s also the Smashwords End of Year sitewide sale to check out.

Rooster Republic is a publisher of Bram Stoker Award-winning and nominated horror fiction, including, under their woman-focused Strangehouse imprint, one of my more memorable reads of 2022, Hailey Piper’s Queen of Teeth. It’s gross, action-packed, more than a little romantic and surprisingly satisfying!

My own “Ghostwitch” does not include vagina dentata – sorry to disappoint – but I’ve aimed to pack a lot into the two thousand words: a woman with a haunting secret, a collector of strange tales (who might be a woman, or might not: I had fun writing a protagonist without any definite gender markers, to leave it up to you, the reader), revenge, loss, magic, the rules of ghosts, the call of the sea…

She sits across from me and inhales the steam. Behind its rising veil, her eyes are bright. “I never speak to him,” she says. “Never see him. I don’t think I can. We only meet them once, I believe, alive or dead … So no, I didn’t become a ghostwitch so I could speak with my husband again.”

            “I’ll be sure not to write that.”

            She nods. “Still, I know why it’s said. Things like these, people like to have a tidy explanation.”

            “Yes,” I say, thinking of the sea.

-from “Ghostwitch”

Meanwhile, on Smashwords, thousands of titles – both those originally published through them and those, like my short story collections, published through the recently acquired Draft2Digital – are on sale for 25-75% or even 100% off from now through January 1, 2023.

All of my books are 50% off in the sale:

The Astrologer’s Telling may be a good way to whet your appetite for “Ghostwitch” – a collection of tragic, horrific, haunting, and darkly thrilling tales of apocalypses on terraformed planets, an Earth where the air is too painful to breathe, and a universe whose stars are somehow, for some reason, going out. All too human characters must decide how to pay the price of survival, whether in body or soul.

For somewhat happier stories, John Kosichev and Other Heroes gathers four stories of dystopia and resistance to it, where that resistance comes through building an ornithopter, creating a marriage of convenience, or simply telling the truth.

“The Halcyon in Flight” is a long short story about sorcery, loyalty, and many of the themes already mentioned, not least loss and resistance and the choices people make to navigate both.

I hope the remainder of your year is cozy (or, for those of you in the southern hemisphere, comfortably cool) and you find some time to curl up and read – or write – to your heart’s content!