News of an Upcoming Self-Publishing Project, and Other Things...

After years of self-doubt, uncertainty, apathy borne out of depression, and other nasty things, I have managed to drag myself free from the mire of creative paralysis and dedicate myself to publishing a collection of my short stories. I even have an artist in reserve for the cover, which I've been told is something quite rare for those who travel down the pathway of self-publishing.

These stories are mostly new, having been written within the last year and over the next few months. However, some of the ideas popped into my mind years ago and have sat in a sort of file box in a dusty corner of my brain ever since. It never hurts to horde ideas, but it would damage the integrity of the ideas less if one were to act on them while they were fresh instead of letting them sit unattended, to deteriorate with time.

If you were to attempt to categorize the stories which will be collected you could assign them to the genre of horror, though some fantasy might creep in, depending on the tale. It has felt most natural to write about the horrific and to meditate upon darkness, and in a way it always has. This isn't because of the ridiculous state of the world, as I'm sure most would shallowly assume or declare. It is due to the fact that my interests in literature have always tended to lean toward the dark and macabre.

I'm not some self-labeled goth, or aspiring edge-being, who's trying to express some contrived dark persona through excessively grim and cliched writings. I'm just a person who has always enjoyed the stories of the supernatural, mysterious, chilling, and unfathomably horrific, whether I read them myself or heard them spoken aloud by the people who influenced me most in my formative years. Considering the exposure I have had to horror throughout my childhood, it's actually not at all surprising that I would naturally end up outputting tales like these.

I will chronicle any and all developments here, on my now nearly decade-old blog. So, please look for the updates and blurbs I deposit about the experience. It is possible, depending on the publication and plans for marketing the book, that I will set up a separate site and blog for it, but until then, this is my home for writing my mind on the vast and unsettling Internet.