Today, I’d like to give you a brief description of my featured works for Halloween. You’ve probably seen the social media posts for these novellas and long stories, but here’s the story behind the story for these pieces.
Quarantine was the first fiction story I wrote and was inspired by, of all things, flu shots. I’ve always likes mysteries that take place in remote or secluded settings, and I wondered what would happen if somebody used the shots to cover up a crime in a small town. It seems the hospital near our home was starting an expansion effort at the time I wrote it, and those news stories also inspired my muse to create a story about a mystery on a small hospital in a small town. I was actually offered a publishing contract for Quarantine back in 2009, but the publisher went under so the contract wasn’t fulfilled. It’s hard to place a shorter work (under 50K words) with a publisher, and I was burned by that failed contract. so I decided to self publish it in 2012 instead of going through the struggle of finding another publisher willing to give it a try.
Resonance was a story I wrote on a slow day after reading a story in our local newspaper about a multi-million dollar estate going up for sale near our home. That estate has always seemed mysterious to me, as it’s sprawled in a remote area behind an elegant iron fence. Soon after that, I saw an episode of Supernatural that mentioned haunted paintings. The two ideas combined into this short Halloween story about college students that unknowingly buy a haunted painting from a woman who’s desperately trying to get rid of it.
What readers haven’t noticed is that this estate is the same setting for the Kerner family homes in The Earthside Trilogy. In fact, I do sneak a mention of the Resonance story into it during a discussion between two characters reminiscing about a childhood Halloween where they couldn’t trick or treat due to bad weather, and their parents told them the story about the haunted house that was supposedly at the back of the estate long ago.
The Eleventh Hour is a compilation of short horror stories I wrote for various contests or writing prompts. Obviously, none of them were picked up for publication, so I decided to combine them into their own book and self publish as a “side project” while I was working on The Earthside Box Set. The other short stories I wrote were combined in another short ebook titled Lost and Found, which are more general and character-focuses stories.
All three of these books are $0.99 and can be read in 90 minutes or less. I hope you’ll give them a try as a seasonal treat for your Kindle.
That’s all today. Take care, and have a great rest of the week.
Bye!