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New Anthology Release: BAH HUMBUG!

11/28/2016

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Just in time for Christmas, Matt Shaw has called upon some of the biggest names in horror to put together an anthology of Christmas horror! This anthology, the proceeds of which will go to a different charity each month, includes work from:

Terry M. West (poem)
Daniel Marc Chant
Mark West 
Kit Power 
Wrath James White (poem)
David Owain Hughes 
Lisa Lane 
Kealan Patrick Burke
Billie Sue Mosiman 
Jaime Johnesee 
J.R Park 
Duncan Ralston 
Gary McMahon
Michael Bray
Duncan P. Bradshaw 
Mark Cassell 
Jack Rollins 
Mason Sabre 
Matt Hickman
Jim GoForth 
Charlotte Bond 
Sam West 
Andrew Freudenberg 
Matt Shaw 

Over 100,000 words, more than 400 pages, and only 99c/99p! Grab a bargain, support charity and get to know new and familiar authors! Available now at Amazon.

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THE NETTLE TREE Blog Tour

10/9/2016

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Greetings! I hope you're having a fantastic weekend. Today, I'd like to share a little about a weird western anthology I recently contributed to, edited by Clayton Bye and Kenneth Weene. The Nettle Tree has an exciting and eclectic lineup, opening with bizarro great Jeremy C. Shipp. Here's what Readers' Favorite recently had to say about The Nettle Tree:
The authors of The Nettle Tree had a challenging assignment indeed, to breathe new and strange life into a genre that all but the enthusiast may consider a bit overrated, trivialized or overdone, and they did so brilliantly. While my taste in Western fiction runs more in the lines of prospectors trudging through deserts looking for mythical gold caches and scouts surveying new lands, I found a number of stories in this collection that had me re-evaluating the Western and its possibilities. Phil Richardson's The Sheriff of Hog Waller is clever and convincing as outlaws, the townspeople, and the law conspire to make a killing off the bounty system. Christopher Wolf's zombie story, Tears on the Prairie, is poignant and intense. But I would have to say the title story, The Nettle Tree, with its transporting energy fields, captured my imagination and kept it close at hand throughout the story, and Leigh M. Lane's trickster in Valley of the Shadow deftly ramped up the suspense and atmosphere. There's bound to be something for just about any reader in this collection of original short stories. The Nettle Tree is most highly recommended. (5 stars)
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The lineup:

Jeremy C. Shipp, Phil Richardson, Casey June Wolf, John Rosenman, Christopher Wolf, Leigh M. Lane, Richard Godwin, Salvatore Buttaci, Tonya R. Moore, Kenny Wilson, Jim Secor, and contributing authors Clayton Bye and Kenneth Weene.

About the editors:

Clayton Clifford Bye is an eclectic writer whose body of work spans a period of more than 20 years and includes such classics as How To Get What You Want From Life, The Sorcerer’s Key and The Contrary Canadian. His more recent work involves too many ghostwrites to count and some great anthologies from his publishing house Chase Enterprises Publishing. The Speed of Dark, a strangely different collection of horror short stories, won four awards and solid 5 star reviews. To check out Clayton’s work, visit http://shop.claytonbye.com.

Ken Weene: “The best part of being a writer is the endless opportunity to do life over. The worst part is knowing that I still won’t get it right.” With that motto in mind, Kenneth Weene offers an ongoing stream of books, short stories, poems, and essays. Visit http://www.kennethweene.com to find more of his work.

Title: The Nettle Tree
Publisher: Chase Enterprises Publishing
Editors: Kenneth Weene and Clayton Bye
ISBN (print): 978-1-927915-10-3
ISBN (eBook): 978-1-927915-11-0
Format: Trade Paperback and eBook
Pages: 166
Genre: Speculative western
Price: $17.95 (print) $3.95 (eBook)

The book and PDF eBook can be purchased at: http://shop.claytonbye. Also available at Amazon and Smashwords.

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RECOMPOSE and "Triple Threat"

9/29/2016

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I'm pleased to announce my flash fiction story "Triple Threat" is now available in Recompose Magazine, Issue #2.

About the story:

Tammy's the odd girl out, the fraternal triplet to identical twins. They think they're smarter and prettier than her. They call her "retard" sometimes when they think-talk. They don't know she's been able to hear them all these years, and she's a lot smarter and far less innocent than either realizes....  

About the publisher:

​Alliteration Ink has a reputation for publishing stories that break boundaries and push the imagination—stories that take chances. This project not only pursues two passions of the publisher—a new appreciation of poetry and a deep love of transgressive short fiction—but also provides an opportunity to pay authors and poets professional rates for their work.

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New Release: TERROR TRAIN

6/14/2014

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Published through James Ward Kirk Publishing: Terror Train, edited by A. Henry Keene and Krista Clark Grabowski. Check out my creepy reprint, "Enter the Corruption," along with forty-one other horror shorts.

About Terror Train:

The Terror Train rides, from city to city, from village to village, through states, across rivers and mountains. If only it could tell its tales of grisly murder, of demonic pacts, black holes into different dimensions and portals to other realms where the ghosts of train robbers hunt in perpetuity for that elusive bullion filled carriage that cost them their immortal souls. Behold the terrors the train has witnessed, see firsthand the horrors it has lived through and when you get on board, pray, pray you've entered the right one, on the right track, the one that does not lead to oblivion... 

Terror Train contains stories by new and established authors, with a guest story by William F. Nolan. All aboard!


Now available on Kindle. Coming to paperback soon!
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Here's the lineup:

Roger Cowin: "Departure"
Charie D. La Marr: "Shuffling Off to Nowhere"
Roger Cowin: "Midnight at the Train Station"
Michael Thomas-Knight: "Steel Deliverance"
Roger Cowin: "Ghost Train"
Mark Rigney" "Customs"
Stephen Alexander: "Night Train"
Mike Jansen: "Right On Track"
Justin Hunter: "The Willing"
Mary Genevieve Fortier: "Midnight Train"
Jeremy Mays: "Midnight Rendezvous"
Murphy Edwards Strunke: "City Derail"
Dennis Banning: "The Devil's Chariot"
Brigitte Kephart: "Summer Train"
Brian Barnett: "Haikus"
Mathias Jansson: "Last Train from Hamlet"
Abdul-Qaadir Taariq Bakari-Muhammad: "The Ordeal of Mary Rogers"
Aaron Besson: "The Gloaming Sisters"
Stephen Alexander: "Piano Music Flicker Show"
Jim Goforth: "Training the Unfortunate"
Dona Fox: "The Morpheus Special"
Tony Bowman: "Night Train"
Rie Sheridan Rose: "The Night Train"
Dale Hollin Bells: "Over Red River"
David S. Pointer: "River Run: Katy Trail Missouri"
Stuart Keane: "Fool Aboard"
William Cook: "One Way Ticket"
Shenoa Carroll-Bradd: "Live Tracks"
Stephen Alexander & Roger Cowin: "Circus Train"
A. P. Gilbert: "The Meat Wagon"
Shane Koch: "The Velvety Tones of Colobo Neema"
Roger Cowin: "Psycho Train"
William F. Nolan: "Lonely Train A'Comin'"
Teri Skultety: "The Juliet Express"
E.S. Wynn: "Through The Land Of Shadows"
Lori R. Lopez: "Death's Viper"
Dona Fox: "Daddy's Train"
Thomas M. Malafarina: "This Train"
Roger Cowin: "Hell Train"
Leigh M. Lane: "Enter the Corruption"
Lori R. Lopez: "Fate"
Alex S. Johnson: "Futurail"
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Love the Atmosphere!

10/23/2013

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One of the aspects I love so much about Halloween is the ambiance that comes with it.  I adore the cotton spider webs, the glow of Jack-o-lanterns, the witches, the goblins, and everything else that makes my favorite holiday so dark and spooky.  It goes without saying that this is the time of year when horror authors shine their brightest.

I remember going all out one year in my outdoor decorations, making gravestones out of floral foam, buying dry ice to put in a cauldron on the porch, covering the entire front of the house with spider webs and plastic spiders, carving terrifying faces on the pumpkins, and compiling a track of midi horror songs.  The display was so scary I answered the door to more than one parent who had to come to the porch in place of his or her child, who watched from a safer distance with friends or other family members.

When it comes to my choice in Halloween movies, I want just as much atmosphere.  Give me Gothic castles, full moons, rolling fog obscuring dark nights, creepy music, and supernatural monsters.  There’s something about watching Bela Lugosi’s Dracula, Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein, or a good, old-fashioned Hammer film that really sets the mood.  I also enjoy the themed episodes of my favorite television shows and the spirit of the horror authors’ community coming together to supply the unsuspecting reader with thrilling new stories to read.


This year, I’m happy to help Coffin Hop Press promote its Halloween benefit anthology, Death by Drive-In, the proceeds of which will be donated to the literacy program Lit World.

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While I’m not a contributing author, I support the cause and am happy to be a part of this year’s Coffin Hop.  Nearly a hundred horror authors are banning together to support Death by Drive-In and make your Halloween especially creepy, giving away books and other goodies—and giving you all sorts of chances to win.  Go to www.coffinhop.com for a list of other participating authors.

For my part, I’m offering one reader a signed copy of my Gothic horror novel, Finding Poe, and another an electronic copy of Death by Drive-In, so make sure to leave a comment for your chance to win.  I chose Finding Poe because I feel it's the embodiment of all I love about Halloween: it’s atmospheric, dark, creepy, and twisted.  Inspired by the best works of Edgar Allan Poe, the story speculates how his own writing—most notably, his unfinished, untitled short story most of us know as "The Lighthouse"—may have contributed to his untimely death.
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More about Finding Poe:

When reality and fiction collide, there's no telling what horrors might ensue. 

In the wake of her husband's haunted death, Karina must sift through the cryptic clues left behind in order to solve the mystery behind his suicide—all of which point back to the elusive author, Edgar Allan Poe.  

Karina soon finds that reality, dream, and nightmare have become fused into one as she journeys from a haunted lighthouse in New England to Baltimore, where the only man who might know the answers to her many questions resides.

But will she find her answers before insanity rips her grip on reality for good?  Might a man she's never met hold the only key to a truth more shocking than even she could have imagined?

Finding Poe was a 2013 EPIC Awards finalist in Horror.

What do you enjoy most about Halloween?  What are your favorite movies to watch and books to read during the spookiest month of the year?


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THE SPEED OF DARK BLOG TOUR: Kenneth Weene

4/26/2013

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People love to ask a writer, “So how did you come up with that idea?” Let me share a partial answer. The story is called “The Hansom Dove” and is one of the mysterious stories to be found in The Speed of Dark, an anthology from Chase Enterprises Publications and my name is Kenneth Weene.

 What happens when a love story runs aground on the writer’s subconscious Freudian shoals? The answer is “The Hansom Dove.” When I first imagined Quince Humphrey, he was a lonely but successful author in need of a quiet place to write what he was sure was going to be a great novel. Obsessed with his work, Quince would not notice that he was falling in love, at least not until the beautiful Miss Dove had won his heart. The story was going to reveal the awaking of the artist’s sexuality and his deepest emotions. Love would awaken his emotional capacity, and Quince would escape from the chains of intellect and art. 


As for Miss Dove, she, too, would be freed—freed from the oppressive demands of her father, the shuffling and contrary old innkeeper, and from the stultifying life of Port Harbor Island. After all, isn’t that the goal promised in all love stories: the setting free of the individual so that he or she can live a richer and more fulfilled life?

But something went wrong. In my enthusiasm to celebrate love and to allow my characters to revel in their sexual desires, I had forgotten the other side of humans, the side that Freud called Thanatos. If Eros drives us to seek pleasure, it is Thanatos which compels us to avoid pain.  It is dark force that urges us to take refuge from life’s storms, to hide our angst in the arms of Morpheus and ultimately in the even safer arms of death. Without my willing it, perhaps even without my awareness, “The Hansom Dove” moved into the world of darkness. Desire became not the vehicle for freeing Quince but for immuring him.

Then, as if to taunt me as author, a symbol forced its way into the story, the narwhal tusk. Often confused with the mythological horn of the unicorn, a well-known if nonexistent aphrodisiac, the narwhal tusk, which is in fact a tooth, is one of the most delightfully phallic appendages of any animal. If the tusk implies sexuality, then we have to also remember the species’ name; narwhal is derived from the term “corpse whale.” The creature also reminds us of the necrophilic part of the Freudian dichotomy. There we have it, libido and the death wish in one symbolic animal.

This having been explained I must, with all due embarrassment, say it was during a dream that I first imagined room 627 and its strange decoration.  Yes, dear Dr. Freud must have been guiding my creative process. Once I understood that the story was not only about love and libido but also about death and imprisonment, the tale took rapid shape. In the end “The Hansom Dove” is one of my favorite short pieces even as it makes me want to flee my own words. But there I am, trapped—as trapped as Quince is from the very beginning of the tale, queasy, wretched and caught on that horrible ferry which will take him to the island and to his fate.
Hunched in his brown tweed suit, the one he had purchased to let the world know he was a true Bohemian, Quince Humphrey tried not to think about his queasiness. Never before had he understood what it meant to feel green. He tried to reassure himself that the lurching and swaying of the small ferry would someday provide him an idea for a story. That was his strength as a writer – turning misery into plot. It just hadn’t been his plan to be miserable this particular Thursday evening. 

Isn’t this just the place you’d like to join us? If you would, Mr. Dove will be waiting: 

The old man stared at Quince, and the younger man stared back. Never before had Quince seen such a pitted face – grooved and furrowed by time and no doubt the unpleasant island weather as well. Quince took in the paleness of the innkeeper’s complexion, the stringy white hair that hung beneath the ridiculous cap, the thinness of his wrists and angles as they emerged from his nightshirt, the boniness of his hands and bare feet.


“May I come in?” Quince asked reaching to pick up his suitcase. He was struck by the weariness in his own voice. “I could use a drink. Do hope you have a gin and tonic?” He tried to make the request sound light and friendly. 

“Mugget sent you, did he?” The old man swayed but did not move from the doorway. The lantern, which he was carrying, swayed with him casting dancing shadows on the nearby walls. 

There was another pause as the man seemed to study Quince’s words. Finally he said, “Didn’t expect you till morning. Not a night fit for ferrying.”  

Be ready for a charming encounter, but watch out for the beautiful daughter.

Perhaps you’d like to learn more about my writing and me. Please visit me at my website.  You can purchase my books here.
 
In case you’re wondering, I should say, “Yes, I am trained as a shrink, a PhD in psychology.” That said, “Hansom Dove” is certainly one of the most Freudian pieces I’ve written. 

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Want to purchase The Speed of Dark?  Stop by here for more info.

A New Englander by birth and disposition and trained as a psychologist and minister, Ken Weene has worked as an educator and psychotherapist.

Besides writing, Ken's earlier interests included whitewater rafting, travel, and playing paintball.

Ken's poetry has appeared in numerous publications - most recently being featured in Sol. An anthology of his writings, Songs for my Father, was published by Inkwell Productions. Two of his short stories are soon appearing in Legendary. His short play, The Right Number, was recently workshopped with great laughter and success by Stage 55 in Phoenix.

Ken's novel, Widow's Walk, has just been published by All Things That Matter Press.

Now in semi-retirement, Ken and his wife live in Arizona. There Ken has been able to indulge his passion for writing and enjoying life.


Check out the rest of the blog tour:

April 25 Micki Peluso at James Secor’s blog

April 26 Ken Weene at Lisa Lane’s blog

April 27 Clayton Bye at Micki Peluso’s blog

April 28 Lisa Lane at John Rosenman’s blog

April 29 James Secor at Ken Weene’s blog

April 30 John Rosenman at Clayton Bye’s blog

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THE SPEED OF DARK is Available for Pre-Order

2/4/2013

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Publisher description: The Speed of Dark is a 334 page horror anthology. These short stories are strangely different and disturbing. 27 stories written by 19 talented authors from around the world, this was a by invitation only anthology. It is sure to provide the horror fan with hours of fantastic reading.

Includes stories by E.J. Ruek, Cynthia Ainsworthe, John B. Rosenman, Ken Weene, Clayton Bye, Micki Peluso, Lyn McConchie, Eduard Garcon, Marion Webb-De Sisto, Tonya Moore, Tim Fleming, Casy Wolf, James Secor, Tony Richards, Mary Firmin, Minna van der Pfaltz, Megan Johns, Gerald Rice, 
and yours truly.

You can pre-order The Speed of Dark here.

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MIRAGES Just Received a Great New Review!

2/2/2013

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Mirages: Tales from Authors of the Macabre just received a lovely new 
5-star review on Amazon.  Reader Dave-Brendon says, 
I'm really glad that I got an opportunity to read this anthology, because it's one of the best collections of dark, unsettling tales that I've ever read. I won't say that it was a pleasurable read -I'm not sadistic or masochistic- but it was definitely an eye-opener, and supremely memorable.
And here's what he had to say about my contribution:
The Descent Upstairs by Leigh M. Lane is a tale that I'll probably remember for a long time - I certainly wouldn't want to be pushed as far as the poor woman in this story was. Sort of makes me think that the fantasies we have regarding how to deal with people who irritate us and enrage us could be dangerous fantasies to have...
You can read the full review here.
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Please Welcome Guest Author John Paul Allen

12/24/2012

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I've been so fortunate to have some great guests over this past week, and today I'm proud to feature author John Paul Allen, who recently contributed to the Fresh Blood Old Bones anthology.  Here's what he has to say about the new release:

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“He who knows others is wise; he who knows himself is enlightened.” – Lao Tzu

A couple months ago my newest story, "Little Miss," was released as part of the Fresh Blood Old Bones anthology – a project developed by Kasey Lansdale with Biting Dog Publications presenting works by well-known writers (Old Bones) mixed with several who are new to the market (Fresh Blood). How exciting it was to be included with names like Neal Barrett Jr, Nancy A. Collins, Joe Lansdale and others I have enjoyed since getting turned on by the horror genre and after reading the works of my fellow newbies I realized what an honor it was to be part of this collection. To paraphrase a review, “there’s not a weak story in the lot” and added to the enjoyment of each tale the editor shared with the readers how she became connected with each writer. I like stuff like that – the inside info of how things come to be so before reading the seventeen stories and one poem I read these mini-intros first. 

OK, I read the one about me first and then the others. Hey, I like it when someone says something nice about me, so I clicked through the pages until I got to my name and read that I am … “a great writer but a bit quirky”. The words belonged to Dave Dinsmore of Biting Dog – someone in the business who knows me better than most. Still I had to see how the other writers were described. Let me share:

Juan Perez is “selfless” - Tim Bryant “has a unique skill” - Neal Barrett Jr. is “one of the greatest writers” - “This girl is good” describes Sara Brookes - Rhonda Eudaly is called “talented and good folk” – Nancy A. Collins is “extremely talented” – Stephen Mertz is “a fan favorite” – Folly Blaine is “a talented up-and-comer” … on and on it goes, all descriptions perfect fits and after reading them I returned to my own – John Paul Allen is “a bit quirky”. 


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I shared the above with Lisa, my girlfriend and three friends at work. Their reactions were the overused DUH. Two of the three added, “You did write Monkey Love.” Thus I have no defense, but I do have a better understanding of who I am and what I do – what writers do. We take the obvious, add a twist, then extended it with a “What if”. 

Fresh Blood Old Bones anthology is full of What If stories – tales (and one poem) all wonderfully entertaining by some of the best writers I’ve had the honor to work alongside. This is a winner without my story in it and well worth your time. I highly suggest you add it to your reader or app.

Note: I’d like to thank the following: 

Free Book Dude (freebookdude.com) for putting together this book tour and for all they’ve done to help writers promote their works. Check out their site.

Biting Dog Press/Publications (Bitingdogpress.com) who puts out some damn good stuff.


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