Comes The Dark on Kindle, a few additional stories, and collaborations, oh my!

A lot of things have been happening lately in my writing and personal life, and it feels like I am finally able to take a breather for a moment before I dive back into the chaos.  Most of what has been going on has been good, though there have been a few trials as well.  I am going to just talk about the good things here, and try to keep it brief.

First off, the Kindle version of Comes The Dark has been ‘fixed’.  By this, I mean that a few formatting errors that occurred in the transfer to the kindle have been rectified and the new and improved version looks terrific.  For anyone who bought the original version, they can re-upload it and will get the new, clean version.  I was told by the folks over at Kindle that anyone who has any problems with that process can reach out to them by via the contact button at www.amazon.com/kindlesupport.  Hopefully, that won’t be necessary and it will just be a click of a button on your Kindle.  Of course, that also means for anyone who hasn’t bought it already,  the Kindle version of my book is back up and running.  At $2.99, its a terrific price, so check it out!

Second, I wanted to announce that I will be posting a few stories here under the category “Dark Stories” that I had originally written with the intention of including in Comes The Dark or in one of its sequels.  There were several reasons why that did not happen, including space limitations.  As I have mentioned in more than one interview, I originally wrote about a half a million words for what would become this trilogy.  The final word count of the trilogy is around 170,000, give or take a couple thousand.  That doesn’t mean the 330,000 words that were sliced in the editing process was pure gold…or even tin for that matter, but some of it was decent back story on characters, including flashbacks as well as parallel stories happening at the same time as events in the novels.  With a little more editing, I am hoping to present a few choice bits here on my blog that will give readers of my trilogy a bit extra about characters like Megan, George, and others that are introduced in the sequels to Comes The Dark.  I hope to post the first story within the next week or so.  After that, there won’t be a set schedule, but I will try to post some more after Horror Realm, which is two weeks from now.

Third, I have been working on Chapter 12 in the Collaboration of the Dead novel that nineteen writers agreed to take part in several months back.  Each writer gets to write two chapters, one in the first half of the book, and one in the second half.  Since 11 chapters have already been written, my responsibility leans more toward character development rather than introducing new characters-at least that is how I see things.  I realize that others have been adding new characters all along and will probably continue to do so, but I am focused on stirring the pot with what is already there.  All I can say about this process is that it is tougher than I had expected.  I was nervous about it from the get go, given that so many other talented writers would be counting on me to avoid screwing things up at the very least and maybe even doing something a bit better than that.  Now that I am actually writing this, I find that I am putting more pressure on myself than I would have for something I was doing for myself.  With that said, it is still a blast, and a learning experience to boot.  Here’s hoping that I don’t get stoned when I submit my chapter, or worse yet, asked not to write the second chapter I’m supposed to write down the line!