Turn Around Where Possible

Hmm. The village is called Grave. Maybe not a good sign?

Last October, I tried to write a Halloween-themed short story. Except, me being me, I disregarded the theme and instead just tried to write a scary story of the "don't go in the woodshed" variety. The rough draft I came up with was entirely silly, but I had a lot of fun writing it. And it turned out okay, I think.

Okay enough that I subsequently spent some time rewriting it. Even though it's not my usual kind of thing - I prefer psychologically unsettling stories to those with axes and blood - it came out well enough, I thought, to submit to One Buck Horror in the hope of actually selling a story to a publication. I know - ground-breaking!

One small snag though. OBH have a 3,000 word limit. Try as I might, I couldn't get the story down below about 3,500, and that was with hacking it to the bone. Since their word limit is completely inflexible (presumably because they pay by the word), that was the end of that little plan.

What to do with the story then? Why, give it away, of course. Because it's not my usual kind of story, I don't see too much point in holding it back for a future collection - I doubt it would fit in too well. Far better to make it freely available, in the vain hope that it helps to draw attention to my other works. Well, it doesn't hurt to dream, does it?

Turn Around Where Possible is available as a PDF right now, for nothing, from Lulu and Smashwords. I recommend the Lulu version - it handles the fonts better. Please do have a read, and maybe let me know what you think. Plus, if you can see a way to cut another 532 words, feel free to suggest how!

New cover art for Dark Steps

Dark Steps has new cover art!

The third edition of Dark Steps features the new design, shown right, which hopefully will help the book stand out a bit more.

To ensure a bit of continuity from the artwork from previous editions (which you can see here), I've stuck with a broadly similar palette of colours, and have used the same story from within the book (Waiting Room) as inspiration for the picture, specifically the EARN YOUR PLACE slogan.

So what do you think? Better? Worse? Hopefully the former, as the new cover will start filtering through to various outlets from today, and is already live on Lulu. Experience suggests Amazon will be next, and then all the channels that are fed by Smashwords.

P.S. In case you were wondering about the second edition... it fixed a solitary typo.