Two New Stories Up

Here's a quick update on a couple of stories that went up recently. 

First is "Hell is Chrome," published in The Airgonaut, which specializes in surreal, fabulist, and just plain weird flash fiction. This is another story that I'd been tinkering on for a few years. I'd pretty much given up on it when I decided on a whim to dust it off and give it another round of revisions. It was already fairly short, but I cut it nearly in half during final revisions, and I guess sometimes less is more. 

"Hell is Chrome" started as an attempt to write a quote-unquote science fiction story, picking up on the age-old trope of alien invasion, and from there it morphed into an exploration of the overwhelming sadness of the world. It also takes a few jabs at internet culture and social media. I don't write a great deal of overtly political stories, but this is probably the closest I've come to doing so. This one is important to me because it's the first story I've published that isn't included in the upcoming anthology I Have Always Been Here Before, which drops in early 2020. For that reason, it seems sort of like turning the page on an era of my writing life. 

Speaking of turning the page, I've started working on a novel. Year of the Possum rose from the ashes of another novel manuscript I finished several years ago. That first novel was self-indulgent and forced (seriously, y'all, it was bad) but I really liked a couple of the characters, so I gave them a whole new story to inhabit. That new story is a Southern Gothic in which old secrets erupt into violence as a massive hurricane bears down on the South Carolina low country. You can read an excerpt of it at Malarkey Books, where it kicks off a new series called Free Samples featuring novel excerpts that don't necessarily work as stand-alone stories. 

Thanks for reading.