Welly Welly Well! So after a long absence of nothing but Scalp Collectors, I finally finished my book of short stories, Stories We Tell Our Dead. With a grand total of 7 stories, it is really fucking surprising it took me 18 months to release it. (18 months from my first novel) I guess I just wasted my time, but with good and bad reasons…..
Fresh off the heels of my first book, I wanted to do a story collection of ones I have not released or no one has really seen. I wrote a couple already, a fantasy story for a friend, and a horror story for a contest (I didn’t win) so I went with those and dove into more elaborate long stories with complex plots and lots of characters….then I realized I was writing a novel. At the time it was called The Glass Spider, but it was topping out around 30,000 words and was still very far from the ending….so after a couple months of working on it, I hit a writers block and put the book away that I may one day go back to.
The next set back was once again another horror story called Blood of the Scarecrow. I really liked it, and wrote a sequel story to it, that became its own chapter, and then I was balls deep into 5 chapters before I hit a block and placed that on the back burner. My confidence level was dropping at a fast pace, clouds of depression slipped into the cracks of my skull, and I fell out of motivation.
I began drinking at impressive levels, blowing what little money I had on whiskey rather than going to the grocery store. Of course being drunk and dealing with a hangover every day while working a full time shit job really gets a big ZERO in the writing world….but then something happened…..
Scalp Collectors. Never meant to be anything serious, just a free online series I was doing for mental relaxation and for fun. A dark comedy set in a strange apocalypse world. Instead of focusing on back story or reasons and questions…I focused on the lead characters and how they interact…and I felt so relieved. However, every single day I worked on those chapters…I felt a voice in the back of my head….
So, I came back to it, not long after I ended most of my hard drinking. I stopped wasting my money and ruining my health to work, edit and focus on new stories. The ones I brought on board did much better, the new edits of old stories I felt confident about….and so everything seemed great….
But I fucking hated it. We loath the things we create…its a curse, and I feel unsure on a few things, but I did my best to make it look pretty (almost pretty) so I felt positive about that overall, but I was and still am confused.
I am not sure how good it is, but I will let you decide that. For the next couple of days you can get the digital copy for free, so give it a shot!
In The Spider's Web 