The Thing in the Woods Only $0.99 5/22-29

My debut horror novel The Thing in the Woods will be discounted to $0.99 May 22 to 29 as part of my first BookBub deal. BookBub is a service where you discount your book, pay BookBub a certain amount, and they'll include your book in their newsletter. Around 15M people subscribe to BookBub in total, although it's divided up by genre so not everybody gets the same recommendations. I'm a member of the 20 Books To 50K Facebook group and I've heard a lot of good things about how sales go if you get a BookBub.

(And I got a BookBub the first time I requested one too, which is pretty cool.)

Although the BookBub e-mail won't go out until 5/24, I have set the discount to begin two days earlier and are letting you, my awesome readers, know about it before I start sharing the discount around on social media. Enjoy!

Also, fellow Atlanta Horror Writers Association member Jeff Strand, a veteran BookBub user, gave me some very important advice about how to get featured deals set up. If you like horror fiction with strong doses of humor, check him out.

I haven't been writing nearly as much as I should these last few months, but I have lately made some progress and figured you should be informed.

Firstly, over my Spring Break in April I completed my first new short story in many years, entitled "Run, Hide, Feed." It's a horror tale that I wrote for that Humans Are The Problem collection after the publisher wrote me asking if I had any stories that would fit. I don't know it's been accepted yet, but the maximum word count is now 5,000 (thanks Kickstarter!) and "Run, Hide, Feed" is just under the original word count of 3,500. Hopefully its relatively short length will be a point in its favor. At $0.06 per word, a sale would be most welcome. I think I'll know if they want it or not by 6/15.

Secondly, I've made more progress on Serpent Sword: Battle For The Wastelands #2. Ch. 7 featured an airship battle that was kind of glossed over to keep the focus on a character's strategizing, but members of my writing group convinced me to show rather than tell. After all, people read steampunk for cool airship stuff. Still working on it, but it involves the naval technique of crossing the T. For writing group on 5/16, I completed Ch. 8, advancing the main character's story and relationships a good bit...on top of trench warfare featuring a barber's chair being used as part of a defensive line. For Ch. 9, I also shifted a different character's scenes around to make their actions more plausible and give them more agency and make the villain smarter. Total word count at present is just over 44,000 words. If Serpent Sword comes out to be the same length as the original book, I'm about half-done.

Fingers crossed I can get this out by the end of the year. The cover art is already made, which is a big factor in getting things done faster.