Author: ccone
The Nest to Appear in Shrieks and Shivers
(photo credit: Julie Falk)
I am extremely happy to announce that my story The Nest has been added to the incredible line-up for the upcoming anthology Shrieks and Shivers from The Horror Zine. Jeani Rector of The Horror Zine is partnering up with Post Mortem Press to bring the anthology to life in early 2015. Check out the exciting table of contents below.
Shrieks and Shivers from The Horror Zine
COVER ART by Martin de Diego Sadaba
FOREWORD by Bentley Little
A WORD ABOUT ZOMBIES: Slow Zombies, Fast Zombies and Zombies that Play Trombones by John Russo
Fiction
TAPEWORM by Martin Rose
OLD HAUNTS by Nathan Robinson
“I’LL BE WATCHING” by William F. Nolan
NAILS IN YOUR COFFIN by Rachel Coles
PETE’S BIG BREAK by Joe McKinney
THEM by James Marlow
STASH HOUSE by Shaun Meeks
THE SAMPLE by Ray Garton
HARD RAIN by Bruce Memblatt
SQUATTERS by Elizabeth Massie
I STILL LIVE by Wayne C. Rogers
CENTER STAGE SIDESHOW by Christian A. Larsen
STALKER by Tim Jeffreys
FOR SHE IS FEARFULLY AND WONDERFULLY MADE by Tim Waggoner
RAMPART by Amy Grech
SOMNIPHOBIA by P.D. Cacek
FUNERAL MEATS by Kristen Houghton
TRANSPOSITION by Jason V. Brock
THE LAST BOTTLE by Dean H. Wild
THE WOODS by Nicholas Paschall
THE HOTEL SAN DIGOT by Joseph Rubas
DADDY’S GIRL by Lisa Morton
BLURRED by Matthew Nichols
THE HOUSE by Jonathan Chapman
THE NEST by Cory Cone
REFLECTOR EYES by Garrett Rowlan
WHAT HAPPENED IN VEGAS… by Rena Mason
PRIVATE FRANKS by Gary Robbe
ONE LAST TWEET by Eric J. Guignard
BECAUSE WHAT IS MINE IS MINE by Tom Piccirilli
CHICKEN by Geoff Nelder
I’ll post again when the book is available.
Is There Anybody Out There?
It was so quiet this morning, a level of sheer silence unheard of in Baltimore City. My wife had already left the house to go on her morning jog and I could smell the coffee downstairs she’d prepared before leaving. I got up, dressed, and went down to the kitchen for a cup, and still I couldn’t get over how quiet everything was.
My wife and I rarely cross paths in the A.M. She returns from her jogs long after I’ve walked to and boarded the southbound light rail to work. I left her a note beside the coffee, as I usually do (Love ya!) and headed out the house toward the light rail stop.
I passed no one on the sidewalk, and no cars passed me. I checked the date on my phone to see if today is a holiday—it isn’t. Resigned to this eerie coincidence, I continued on toward a favorite coffee shop of mine for a breakfast sandwich.
The coffee shop was open but no one was inside. I waited ten minutes, and when no one appeared I continued to the light rail stop.
This time in the morning there’s at least a dozen or more riders waiting for the train. Today? Only me. I bought my round trip ticket at the machine and took a seat. Opened a book and read for a while, feeling pretty damn sure no train was coming.
I couldn’t focus on the book so I sent a text to my wife: Hey honey…you doing okay? It wasn’t likely she’d answer, and she didn’t. She was still on her jog.
I was about to close the book and head home to wait for her to return when I heard the railroad crossing bars begin to ring their alarm bell. A train was coming! It was, after all, just some enormous, strange coincidence. I laughed at my paranoia and already had an idea or two for stories about it in mind when the train rounded the bend toward the stop.
But this wasn’t the light rail. This was an old fashioned steam locomotive. It was exhaling enormous clouds of black smoke from the engine, chugging along. What a sight! Truly unreal to see something like this coming along the light rail tracks.
Then it slowed. Stopped. The engine was right in front of me. I could feel the heat coming off of the steel. It was far too tall for me to see inside, and it filled me with a strong urge to run. I felt that whatever was in there, perhaps, was something I didn’t want to see. Suddenly the entire situation—the lack of people, this old-school train—made me shiver.
I turned to run back home just as an object was flung from the window of the engine. It spun and fluttered toward me, slapping the pavement. Then the engine bellowed with a deafening wail and began to move once more.
The cars it pulled were passenger cars and from the windows the faces of those on board turned to look at me. Each and every eye aboard the train met mine and I felt like they all stole a little piece of my soul as they passed by.
I recognized many of them. Among so many others I swear I’ve seen somewhere before there was Beth Cato, C.S. Magrath and Pete Aldin, Sara Cleto and Alexis A. Hunter and Alexandria Seidel. And between two ghoulish figures who, I swear it, appeared to have wings, I saw Rhonda Parrish. Over the cries of the train I could hear her cackling. Before I knew it the final car was winding into the distance. From the back window one last familiar face watched me, her hand lifted in a somber goodbye. My God…
She looked like my wife.
I knelt and lifted the object that had been thrown from the train. It’s a book: A is for Apocalypse. I wonder if perhaps it’s a manual of some kind? A guide to what must be our new world? I don’t know, but if you’re out there, whoever you are, reading this now, perhaps if we read it we can find a way to survive. Pick up a copy as soon as you can! Together, we can find a way to stop save all those souls on the train!
A is for Apocalypse! OUT NOW in print and e-book! Featuring stories by 26 amazing authors!
Available on Amazon (Kindle) | Smashwords (epub, mobi, pdf, rtf, lrf, pdb, txt) | Createspace (paperpback)
Smashwords 10% coupon through August — PJ67Q
Createspace 10% coupon through August — TY6D2CWD
& stop by the Facebook release party, going on all day TODAY!
~ Brenda Stokes Barron ~ Marge Simon / Michael Fosburg ~ Milo James Fowler ~ Beth Cato ~ Simon Kewin ~ Suzanne van Rooyen ~ Alexandra Seidel ~ Sara Cleto ~ Kenneth Schneyer ~ KV Taylor ~ Gary B. Phillips ~ BD Wilson ~ Ennis Drake ~ C.S. MacCath ~ Michael Kellar ~ Cindy James ~ Brittany Warman ~ K.L. Young ~ Pete Aldin ~ Cory Cone ~ Damien Angelica Walters ~ Samantha Kymmell-Harvey ~ Lilah Wild ~ Jonathan Parrish ~ Alexis A. Hunter ~ Steve Bornstein ~
Two Story Sales!
(Dreaming Robot Press Logo)
July has been a good month. After a year of no story sales, I received two acceptances in as many weeks! One of my main goals for 2014 was to make my first professional sale, and I am so excited that one of these two sales was to Dreaming Robot Press’s new anthology, the 2014 Young Explorer’s Adventure Guide! I don’t know the release date yet, but I will update when I have more information. They will be hosting a Kickstarter soon as well, which I will be sure to link to.
I’ve also sold a story to T. Gene Davis’s Speculative Blog. I’m so thrilled to be including among the many wonderful stories T. Gene Davis has published this year. Will update my blog when it is released.
In other news, I’ve decided to dive into another LitReactor course. I enjoyed Talking Scars so much that when Writing the Weird, taught by JS Breukelaar, popped up, I couldn’t resist. The first lecture has already been amazing, and I look forward to seeing where the next 3 weeks will take the class.
Other than that, The O’s are in first place in the AL East, The Strain on FX is pretty damn good, I’m enjoying The Leftovers on HBO, and what I’ve seen so far of the Fargo TV show really impressed me; I just wish it had stayed on On Demand long enough to catch the whole first season. Hopefully it’ll hit Netflix soon.
Three Things I Don’t Write, and Three Things I Do
(photo credit: Shandi-lee Cox)
I’ve never been tagged in a blog hop before, but I thought this sounded like a great topic for a post so I am happy to have been tagged by Mike Revell. Mike is an extremely talented writer. I had the pleasure of working with him in Jack Ketchum’s Talking Scars class, where I was first introduced to his excellent work via the assignments in the class. Most recently, Mike has signed on with Quercus in a two book deal. His debut novel will be released in Spring 2015.
All right, here are three things I don’t write.
I’ll admit, narrowing down things I don’t write makes me feel a little bad. Why don’t I write them? Maybe, sometime soon, I’ll go ahead and prove myself wrong.
Other-world Fantasy
When I first began to take myself seriously as a writer, I drafted a few traditional fantasy stories, complete with their own worlds, politics and magic systems. I never brought any of these to completion, and I’d wager the main reason was lack of drive. My heart wasn’t in it, and before long I accepted that it just wasn’t what I wanted to write. It was my first experience of loving to read a genre, but simply not wanting to write in it.
Second-person POV
Again, something I tried and just couldn’t get to work. I’ve read some amazing stories written in second-person, among them an absolutely outstanding story by Jay Lake called The Cancer Catechism, which I have mentioned before on this blog. For me, that story works so well because it could not be told in any other way and remain as crushing a read as it is. Maybe one day I’ll have a story to tell that might work in second-person POV, but as far as I’m concerned, if I can tell it in first or third, then that is how it belongs.
Poetry
Almost didn’t include this one because I feel a little embarrassed about it. Truth is, poetry intimidates me. I’m sure I’m not alone in that. I’m not very familiar with poetry and not nearly as well read in it as I am in short stories or novels. It’s an alien world to me, and one I hope to explore more with time. The most recent poetry I read would be Joe R. Lansdale’s poems in his newest collection, Bleeding Shadows. I enjoyed them. His notes about them were helpful to see his process, though I don’t feel any closer to truly understanding where poetry will fit in with my current writing. It’s something I hope to change.
So, as a challenge to myself, I plan to write a traditional fantasy story, a second-person POV story, and a series of poems. We’ll see how they go!
Three Things I Do Write
Horror
I began submitting my work in 2012. 2013 saw my first seven published stories, and all seven of them are horror in some fashion. I have written, and submitted, stories that are science fiction and fantasy and even one detective story, and while there are a number of great reasons why these have never found homes, the one I latch onto is that my heart simply wasn’t in them. I enjoyed writing them, but there is nothing like sitting down to a project that I know is going to be dark and hopefully a little frightening. I write horror because the stories that stick with me the longest, that burn images in my mind that I’ll never forget and that sneak up on me at times I least expect, have always been horror. That final scene in Joe R. Lansdale’s masterpiece, Night They Missed The Horror Show, disturbs me still, even years after first reading it. More recently, the entirety of the events at Mr. Dark’s Carnival in Glen Hirshberg’s story of the same name had me curled into a ball as I read them. Terror in fiction moves me in a way that no other genre can; those last two words in Richard Matheson’s story, Dress of White Silk, the sense of dread that seems to hover over every sentence in the works of Robert Aickman, that search for hope in a hopeless situation at the climax of The Autopsy by Michael Shea. The list could go on forever.
Love Stories
This one was a bit of a revelation for me last year. Love is a powerful emotion, and one that drives most–if not all–stories in some way. In many of my own stories, it’s a character’s love for a person, an idea, an activity, something, that drives them to do the things they do. And even if those things aren’t particularly wholesome (Compassion, During and After the Fall), or if they are the product of loss and devotion (Dusty’s Pint), it’s love that brought all the events of the story together. When a story of mine isn’t working, or isn’t hitting the right note, I find it’s usually because I’ve left some important detail of the character out, some piece that needs to be added, and nine times out of ten, that piece is love. I may love horror, I may love to be creeped out, but give me a cheesy romance any day and I’ll take it.
Monsters
Vampires. Zombies. Ghosts. Weird, unclassifiable things. While not all of my stories have an actual monster in them, of the beastly or supernatural form, you can bet that there’s a monster to be found somewhere, and if it’s not some creature calling out for attention, then it’s likely the twisted narrator who is taking you through the story. I’m a big fan of telling the story through the lens of the monster, getting into their head as best I can. And while monsters you can see are all very great, the ones you can’t (or maybe didn’t realize you did) are even better. For a great example of this I point once more to Joe R. Lansdale and his story On a Dark October, which can be found in the collection Bumper Crop. There are a lot of monsters in that story, that’s for sure. In fact, that entire collection is filled with excellent monster stories: Shaggy House, Chompers, The Dump. All original, all bizarre, and all worth your time.
I’ve invited two other writers to follow after me in this blog hop. Be sure to check out their blogs and work as well! They are Rhonda Parrish and Milo James Fowler.
Rhonda Parrish is a writer and editor extraordinaire. Most recently, her work has appeared Mythic Delirium, edited by Mike Allen. Two recent anthologies she has edited are Fae and Metastasis. Check out her blog and list of publications.
Milo James Fowler is the incredibly prolific author whose work includes the Captain Quasar series of short stories. Recently, his story Soulless in His Sight, originally published in Shimmer magazine, was picked up for reprint in Wastelands 2, edited by John Joseph Adams. His first Captain Quasar novel is coming soon at Every Day Novels. Check out his blog as well as his gargantuan list of publications.