I have a short fiction collection coming soon

“The Calendar Factory” from Anxiety Press

In the rural districts, among the vestigial farms and crumbling factories, families undergo disorienting torque and strain as the menfolk struggle to contain inner demonologies of anger and guilt. Meanwhile, in plain sight, obsessed criminals plot the next opportunity for shocking violence. Sixteen stories from a dark, gritty landscape.

THE CALENDAR FACTORY collects sixteen short stories, most of them published in the past four or five years at little web publications around the way in the cyber-vicinity of where I live. One of the stories was actually in print somewhere, can you imagine? I got paid with a gift card to Amazon.co.uk which I couldn’t redeem. The amount of money was so small and pitiful it wouldn’t have covered enough postage to send a book from the UK to the Orkneys. But gratitude is the attitude.

Along with my novels BLOOD TRIP and THE TATTLETALES, The Calendar Factory is something of a throat-clearing as I settle down into trying to write the next thing “beyond crime fiction.” I’ve always been into seeing how genre can mutate into something else, something more particular. I don’t think I’m there yet by a long shot, at least if the things in my head are any kind of template or blueprint for the kinds of books I want to write.

I hope some of you who know me, or my new followers (the substack is growing all the time), will take a chance on the collection when it gets published. The publication date isn’t nailed down yet but it’s growing closer. All that needs to happen is some blurbs need to be collected and the layout and publication put underway. The image you see above is the cover art, which is taken from a painting I did called “Medea Plays Tetris with AR-15 Parts.” Anxiety Press EIC Cody Sexton was nice enough to allow me to use my own art for the cover. It’s not perfect, a little rough, but so are the stories. Many of them are crime-based but it also gets into what might be considered that strange genre known as “grit lit” about my region of upstate NY, the Catskills. I’m looking forward to seeing the book take shape and the challenges of trying to promote it and get people interested. They probably won’t be, but I have to try. I just want to get the book published and see how it, like my other books, takes on some kind of life, albeit a spare one. Please consider buying a copy when it is published. When that day arrives, I’ll have to do something special to get the book into the hands of my substack subscribers. We shall see.

One of the stories in the book was recently published at Mande Literary which is a new publication started by Kate Oden dedicated to writing and art from bipolar people, which I happen to be. The story is called “4 am Infomercial Seen Through Tears” and can be read here. (I hope that worked.) It’s an autobiographical story about certain experiences during and after hospitalization at a psych hospital.

Another recent piece of writing that was published is a prose poem at Scaffold Literary Magazine (also new) called “A Memory Intrudes Between Them” and can be read here.

I’ve discovered the fiction of Denis Johnson which I’ve been horribly tardy in reading. I so far have read Jesus’ Son and Angels. Both incredible and I want to keep going. I wrote reviews on goodreads but I won’t link them here, if you’re curious what I thought you should go check that out for yourself.

Likewise I am trying to make my way through the writings of Franz Kafka. I started with his diaries, which were amazing and I think I might have spoken about them elsewhere in the substack. Then I read practically all the works in his Complete Stories from Schocken Books. The introduction from John Updike was especially helpful. Most recently I read The Castle; it was so good to finally tackle this book and see what the fuss was. Next up is The Trial which arrives next week.

Also next week, around Wednesday or so, I’m told that a fragment of my spy novel Fear is a Hollow Verb will be appearing at Tragickal which is a website that puts out what I would call cutting edge conceptual writing as well as publishes some exciting books such as the Lizard Brain horror anthology which came out recently. Go get a copy of that.

I’m also looking forward to people in a month or two reading my very favorable review of David Kuhnlein’s book Bloodletter published by Texas publisher Amphetamine Sulphate. That review along with other reviews I’ve written of Kuhnlein’s books will be packaged together and will appear at X-R-A-Y coming soon. I’m pretty happy to be appearing at that website, and to be talking about David’s writing which I think is some of the best coming out right now. Bloodletter is a showcase for some extremely “above average” prose as a craft that many aspiring writers could learn from. His career trajectory is not very long so far but it’s promising to extrapolate it into the future, as I hear more books are coming.

Other interesting books for me to explore are The Bacanora Notebooks by Mather Schneider, The Primal Screamer by Nick Blinko of Rudimentary Peni fame, and Gabriel Hart’s novel On High in Red Tide from underground publisher Pig Roast Publishing which is coming in September I believe.

Books, books, and more books! I think I’d die without reading and writing books.

I don’t watch much TV or many movies but I want to finish the Netflix series Ripley. I’m listening to a lot of jazz and country music as usual, no YouTube videos to link this time. I’m trying to buckle down and work on my writing and I’ll share more of that with you in the future.

Thanks for reading.