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Print copies of Cindy’s Story are now available through CreateSpace, Barnes and Noble, or your regional Amazon.com.

The print copy is $14.99.  It’s a 6×9 paperback with 387 pages.  I just ordered three for myself to start with.  It’s pretty exciting to finally have something in book form rather than just e-books.

I was considering making print copies of the Unseen Things series, but I honestly don’t know if I’d ever sell enough to make it worth the work it would take to do that many books.  I guess we’ll see what happens in the future.  The next series book may well be the final book in the series, so after that I’ll decide what I want to do.

I’m very happy to announce that after months of delays, Cindy’s Story has finally been published.  This is the first book I’ve written outside of the Unseen Things series, and it’s an entirely different genre.  This one is more of a private detective comedy / romantic comedy / drama / mystery.  I know, that’s a lot to get into one book, but I really focused a lot on the comedy in this one, and there are several scenes that include some of the funniest stuff I’ve ever written.

I’m really proud of how this story played out, and I can’t wait for people to read it.  You can get it online at Smashwords, Amazon, Google Play, OmniLit, and soon at most of the other online retailers as well.  You can also get it here on the official site.  There’s a print version coming soon as well from CreateSpace, but I still have to work on the cover for it.  I’ll post a separate announcement when it’s available.  A new trivia section has been added for my standalone novels in the Books & Author Info section of the site, and the trivia for Cindy’s Story has been added to it.

Synopsis: After walking out on yet another convenience store job, Cindy needed to find herself a new job as quickly as possible, otherwise she was going to end up broke and living on the street.  Her apartment manager informed her that his brother, a private investigator, was looking for an assistant, so he offered to make a call for her to see if he could arrange an interview.  With no other prospects, she jumped at the chance for not only quick employment, but also a new career that would get her out of the convenience store business once and for all.

As it turns out, being a private detective isn’t as glamorous as they make it look on television.  It comes with certain indignities and moral issues that she’d never really considered before she applied for the position.  Not only that, but Frank, her boss, seems to delight in pissing her off.  The only thing he seems to enjoy more than pissing her off is complaining about how horrible her coffee is, yet for some reason that she can’t quite seem to figure out, he goes out of his way to help her succeed in any way that he possibly can.  Then she’s got his sister Kayla to deal with.  She’s like a nightmare on wheels with no empathy and no filter whatsoever, so you never know what’s going to come out of her mouth next.

The one thing Cindy’s got going for her is that she’s got a super high aptitude for the job, so all she needs to do in order to succeed is to learn how to control her temper, work hard, and most importantly…learn how to make a decent cup of coffee.  The first two are relatively simple, but the third…not so much.

After massive delays due to severe sleep deprivation, among other issues, the first draft of Cindy’s Story is now complete! The editing will take a bit longer on this one since it’s a longer book to start with. It came in pre-edit at 113K words, and it includes an epilogue, which is the first time I’ve done one of those.

This one will take longer to edit too because this is the first one I’m going to do print copies of, so I really want to make sure it’s the best it can be before I put it out there.

Anyway, I blew through the last two chapters and the epilogue since yesterday morning, so my brain is tired now.  I’ll rest this evening and get started on the editing tomorrow morning.

I just did a little restructuring here on the website. Nothing major really, but I did want to make note of it. Here’s what I did:

Renamed “Series Info” to “Series & Author Info”
Renamed “Bonus Scenes” to “Bonus Scenes & Short Stories” and moved the short stories from the Series Info section to this section instead where it’s more appropriate.
Renamed “Fan Forums” to just “Forums”
Renamed “Purchase Online” to “Buy Online”
Renamed “Purchase Here” to “Buy Here”
Made one small modification to the “About the Author” bio to note that we now have two dogs, Buddy and Rusty, instead of just Buddy.
Restructured the interview links in the “Press” section of “Series & Author Info”

Part of the reason for all the renaming is that the link bar at the top doesn’t sit right if its got more than one row of links in it, so when I expanded the names of those first two, I had to shorten the others to compensate. The other part of it was just for clarity.

I finished chapter 13 yesterday. Three more to go. I totally can’t wait to finish this book so I can get it out there. I’m really excited about it!

I just posted another piece I did for a writing prompt in my writers group that I attend weekly.  It’s called Night of the Clown, and you can read it here.

I also noticed that my last post involved a funky dream I had.  Well, I had another one last night.  This one involved Holly Holm, Reese Witherspoon, a zombie apocalypse, an ostrich, my old ’69 Camaro SS that got totaled, and an underwater military base.

Yeah…it was one of those dreams.  I woke up trying to figure out how you could avoid getting a severe vitamin deficiency and related conditions when you’re living in an underwater military base and all you have to eat is fish.  Seaweed was an option I thought of in my barely lucid mental state, but I don’t know how much that would help.  The long and the short of it is, thinking about it woke me up, so I got up and wrote another scene in Cindy’s Story.  I have three more chapters to do after this one, and then I’m going to go through a rather harsh editing process, because this will be the first book I’m doing a print version of, so I want to make sure it’s as good as I can possibly make it before it gets printed.  I really can’t wait to release this one.  There’s lots of great humor in it, and to be honest, I’m quite proud of how it’s all coming out.  I love the characters and I’ve had a hell of a lot of fun writing them.  It’s sad that I’ll have to say goodbye to them all after it’s over since this is just a standalone novel, but that’s all I ever intended it to be.

Anyway, that’s it for now.  If you haven’t read the other short story I wrote yet called The Tree, be sure to read it.  I’m extremely proud of that one.  It was something way different for me and I’ve been told it’s a real tear jerker.

So I just woke up from a pretty weird dream. This time I was in some town in the old west, only it looked like it was on some other planet or something. The dirt was all a deep, reddish brown, there was no vegetation and the buildings all had a similar coloration to them as well. The sky was a rich, reddish orange color as well. It was the sort of a color that you can see in the sky around sunset now and then, only for some reason I knew this was the natural color of the sky in that particular place.

I felt like the town was abandoned, but I was in a saloon where I think there was a bartender or something, though I don’t recall seeing anyone else. Anyway, as it turns out, the people were all just hiding because the Grim Reaper was coming. He’d been there before and everyone was afraid of him. Not realizing this, I went to the door of the saloon to look around outside. Straight out from the saloon the ground made a long slope up into a high hill, and atop the hill was another building. I feel like it was a store or a post office or something, but I couldn’t tell.

Just then, the Reaper came floating in along side of that building and then came shooting down the hill, directly at me. He wasn’t carrying his usual scythe. It was more like a spade of some kind that looked too big to wield, and it had marks all over it, as though it’d been ground into shape and sharpened on some huge grinding wheel.

I ran back into the saloon and closed the door, but it was no use. The reaper came up to the door and knocked it open like it was nothing. I stood before him and he simply stood there staring at me with an invisible face that was hidden by the cowl of his hood.

Resigned to my fate, I followed him outside. Once out there, I asked him if I might have just a few more days to put my affairs in order. I wanted to finish my latest book, say goodbye and all that sort of stuff, but he simply stood there and shook his head at me silently. He then turned and motioned for me to follow him.

Letting out a heavy sigh, I followed him as instructed. Where the ground started to slope up, there was like a large pond at the base of it off to the side, and around the pond the ground rose up into an embankment. As I turned my head to look at the pond, I saw something fly down out of the sky. It was a head on some sort of a plate, and it had small wings protruding from the back of the neck, though it wasn’t using them to fly.

It swooped down in front of the Reaper and landed on the ground, forcing him to stop. It looked up at him and said, “This is wrong. You were supposed to take the one who tends the bar in that place, not him.”

The Reaper seemed frustrated by this, almost like he wanted to argue, and that’s when I woke up. I figured I better write it all down before I forgot it. I do remember there was a dog in that town somewhere around the saloon, and I feel like there was a bartender in there somewhere, I can’t remember exactly.

Anyway, that’s it.  It’s also the reason I woke up again at 3:45am. 😛