Brick & Mortar & Me & You & Short Stories & Maybe Legal Advice

I am extremely pleased to say that I will soon be breaking into the realm of actual, physical bookstores! Atomic Empire will be carrying a few copies of Perishables and Tooth & Nail in their local authors section as soon as I get over there to supply them with copies. Atomic Empire (and before, when they were SciFi Genre) has been my regular gaming store for many years. I adore them and I will be experiencing a little extra thrill every time I walk in there from now on!

What a strange route to take to wind up on a store shelf, too: from novels written for my own entertainment to a contest won with a not-actually-totally-complete-yet novel to self-publishing as an experiment and now producing physical copies. Yikes!

I’ve also reached out to Bean Traders, which is where I wrote them, and I’m going to be contacting the Regulator, Chapel Hill Comics, Flyleaf Books, Malaprop’s and possibly Wyvern’s Tale or Quail Ridge Books. When it’s all said and done, I’d like to be in a bookstore in at least every town where one of the novels is set. That could be tricky, especially with the fourth novel (it’s set on the Outer Banks), but we’ll see. I might know just the store in Beaufort, actually…

So, updates: my story is going to be one of those featured on the cover of the first Theme-Thology anthology of short stories this autumn. The theme is “Invasion” and my story is titled “The Several Monsters of Sainte-Sara-La-Noire”. I can’t say more than that, but I can say that much and that I am extremely excited!

I submitted my short story “Daddy Used to Drink Too Much” to Sekhmet Press for consideration for their upcoming anthology of vampire short stories.

I’ve signed on to write a short story for the second Theme-Thology. Its theme is “Day I Died” and my story will be titled “Haunting the City of Angels”.

Once that’s done, which should be mid-July or maybe late July, I’m going to start working on editing and revising Deal With the Devil. I currently have to decide whether to pay $50 to spend an hour talking to an attorney (through a referral program the NC Bar runs) about whether or not I should pseudonymize Duke University or their Blue Devil mascot in Deal With the Devil or if I can use that concept without running afoul of their trademark. The novel features someone wearing a Blue Devil mascot uniform and I’m trying to decide whether I should revise my fictional Durham to be the home to, I dunno, Blake University, home of the Green Devils or something like that.

I hope to have Deal With the Devil edited and into formatting by early October, which means in September I will need to get on the stick about a cover and all that jazz.

Whew.

In the meantime, I am planning to try to do NaNoWriMo this year. We shall see!

(Featured image by Richard Cocks and made available under a CC-BY-SA 2.0 license.)

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