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Welcome back for another installment in my latest short, The Storm in Her Smile. In the first two chapters, we met our (anti)heroine, a mysterious mercenary known as the Queen of Smiles, shortly after her arrival in Mobile, Alabama. She’s already killed one of the three brothers who run that city’s biggest crime gang, but her primary target, Arturo Melendez, remains alive and well. Worse, he’s now set a trap of his own down by the bay.

Rather than spend weeks canvassing a city she barely knows, the queen has decided to just go trigger the trap and see what happens. After all, given the violent things she’s capable of in this post-apocalyptic, superpower-driven world, what could go wrong?

That’s what she (and we) are about to find out.

Happy November, everyone!

As promised in my last post, it’s story time once again! 2018 has been a fairly unproductive year for fresh writing–I’ve been mainly occupied with editing, revisions, and the always entertaining query process–but I have managed a couple of short stories. I posted one, The Stars That Sing, earlier this year, and was happy to get some great feedback on it. Now it’s time for a new short story, The Storm in Her Smile.

Yes, I know; it’s actually November now. In your timeline, anyway. In my timeline… okay, it’s November here, as well, but given that I didn’t have a status update last month, this one is going to have to suffice! For those of you playing along at home, you may remember I had big plans for…

Happy Halloween! I’ll have a larger update on Friday, full of thrills, chills, and sadly unrealized potential, but in celebration of Halloween, I wanted to share a small, somewhat spooky snippet from See These Bones. No context… no backstory… just a simple case of boy meets girl that isn’t so simple at all. As always,…

  If it feels like this so-called Summer Wrap Party has been dragging on for weeks, that’s because it has. Thankfully, (for you, me, and the bent-but-not-yet-totally-broken laws of physics), today’s post is the final installment. Cue the trumpets and fireworks! Then, segue into sad trombones, because the only thing longer than this wrap-up is…

The 5 R’s In Part 1 of this impromptu Summer 2018 Wrap Party, I talked about my participation in #SFFPit, and the queries that resulted. Several of those queries swiftly became rejections, but the last turned into that most rare of things. No, not an offer of representation–there’s rare and then there’s just plain fictional–but…

  I’m happy to report that the mountains of boxes referenced in my last post have been successfully reduced to hills, and that the topography of our temporary townhouse’s interior has greatly improved as a result. After the world’s briefest status update, it seems only fitting that we now go to the opposite extreme. That’s…

It’s been more than a month since I posted the final installment of my short story, The Stars That Sing. Now that the dust has settled, I thought it would be fun to do a quick retrospective. What went well? What went poorly? What is the sure-fire secret to overnight internet fame and success? I…