VAPORWARE Is Back!

Ten years ago I unleashed my video game ghost story VAPORWARE on the world. It’s the tale of a video game project that gets cancelled – but doesn’t want to go away. The cover is by the amazing Lynne Hansen, who did a great job of capturing the personality of the book!

VAPORWARE was actually born at Necon in a late-night discussion with, among others, best-selling author Douglas Clegg. He riffed on the idea of writing what you know, and what did I know? Video games, and how they’re made. But I was tired of stories where either A)the video game monster gets loose and starts eating people or B)the hero gets trapped in a video game and something starts eating people. I wanted to do something different, to write a story about the real horrors of game development, the toll it could take on the people making the game and the passion and love that went into the process.

Thus, VAPORWARE was born.

It originally came out in 2013 from JournalStone. I ran a wacky promo called People Doing Terrible Things To My Book, wherein I posted people doing awful things to copies of VAPORWARE. There were chainsaws. There were knives. There were copies of TWILIGHT and milkshakes and many other things. And it was a lot of fun.

But that was ten years ago. Now it’s back, and I hope you enjoy it.

 

A Meeting In The Devil’s House and Other Stories

Big news! Coming in July from Twisted Publishing is my second short fiction collection, the diabolically titled A MEETING IN THE DEVIL’S HOUSE AND OTHER STORIES. The cover is by the vastly talented Errick Nunnally, and the foreword by the legendary James A. Moore. It’s a dozen and a half stories about magical pirate rabbis, cosmic vending machines, zombie frogs and more, and it will be available soon!

Speaking of that cover…

Nevermore RPG Stretch Goal

My old White Wolf running mate Ian Lemke is Kickstarting a tabletop RPG of American Gothic Horror called Nevermore. You can find the details here. And among those details is a stretch goal whereby yours truly will be writing some short fiction for the game. So if you’re a role-player and love horror, check it out!

Firefly Rain News

Once upon a time, I published a novel called Firefly Rain. It was my first original novel – I’d published four previously as tie-ins to a couple of White Wolf games – and I was and am very proud of it. It came out as the lead title for the short-lived Discoveries line from Wizards of the Coast, and garnered some good reviews, most notably a starred review in Publishers’ Weekly and a Booksense pick. It even sold reasonably well, but Wizards shut down Discoveries before we could do a paperback edition. Gallery Books was kind enough to pick up the rights for a paperback edition, and that was that.

Until now.

As of today, I have the rights to Firefly Rain back. With luck, that means I’ll be doing something with those rights and putting out a new edition. I don’t have a timetable, but for the first time in a long time, it feels like things are moving in a good direction.

Like I said, I’m proud of the book. It’s a personal story about the promises one makes to family and the price of not keeping those promises. If you’re looking for blood and guts, you’re not going to find them here, but if you want a slow-burn ghost story, you might enjoy it. The book was inspired by a trip to my ex-wife’s family farm and a moonlight walk, where the line of shadow at the property line was sharp enough to cut with. From there I got the image of a farm bereft of fireflies when all the land around was lit up, and that turned into the novel.

So wish me luck. I’ll keep you posted.

Cosmic Horror Monthly #23

Like your horror cosmic? Want to check out my story “In the City of the Idol”, which is me doing my best Clark Ashton Smith impression? Then check out the May issue of Cosmic Horror Monthly, available now at their website. And look, they even put my name on the cover!