It’s been a while since I’ve written a post. Busy times–have to prioritize, and blogging hasn’t been high on the list. I’m working on a new short story that required quite a bit of research, but also trying (as always) to get my desk clear so I can devote time to working on a novel. The perennial chase for time.
Keeping busy with Flight or Fright-related stuff, too. Scribner will be publishing the anthology in trade paperback next June. You can see all the details here, including their cover. New edition means more proofing, etc., which I expect will land on my desk shortly.
I’ve done a few interviews lately, including one that was translated into French for Club Stephen King (English and French versions available here), a long podcast interview with Eddie Generous for his Unnerving Magazine podcast (available here) and an interview with Justin Hamelin for Mangled Matters’ 50 Days of Halloween (online here).
Anthology readers continue to take me up on my suggestion that they send me photographs of the book on airplanes. The most recent one was from a pilot who snapped a photo of Flight or Fright in the cockpit of an A321. He assured me that he didn’t read while flying the plane. Here’s a slideshow of the images people have sent me so far. Keep ’em coming!
Speaking of Halloween (which I was, a couple of paragraphs back), Amazon has put together a series page for last year’s Halloween Carnival eBooks, edited by Brian Freeman. Volume 4 contains my story “The Halloween Tree,” and ’tis the season, after all.
A week from today sees the launch of Fantastic Tales Of Terror: History’s Darkest Secrets, edited by Eugene Johnson for Crystal Lake Publishing. The theme of the anthology is that there supernatural events occurred around many of our most famous incidents and people. My story, “Ray and the Martian,” reveals that Ray Bradbury had a close encounter with a Martian in Roswell, NM (he really did live there, briefly, long before Area 51) that inspired his fascination with the red planet.
For the past several weeks, I’ve been participating in the Citizen’s Police Academy offered (for free) by the Montgomery Country Sheriff’s Office. Each week we get presentations from all of the different divisions that are part of MCSO. Most recently, we heard from the Homicide and Violent Crimes division. On other weeks, we heard from Crime Scene Analysts, Narcotics and Organized Crime, Livestock Division, and we spent one evening touring the county jail. I’ll write more about this adventure in my next post: tomorrow we are spending the day doing shoot/don’t shoot scenarios where we get to play the cops and the cops get to play the bad guys. We’ll be using toy guns that should pellets, but these toys look like the real thing, with magazine and slides and safety switches and all that. Should be fun. Then we’re off to see Patton Oswalt in Houston. Other than the time we went to a driver’s ed class run by Laugh Stop, I think this is the first time I’ve ever gone to a live comedy show.
