Tim Waggoner's Blog, page 10

Stepping Up to the Plate: The Art of the Pitch

Pitching your work to editors and agents at conferences is nerve-racking as hell. Writers tend to be introverts, so it’s hard for us to market ourselves and our work in person to someone. And it’s a major pain trying to distill an entire novel into a short synopsis that you can deliver verbally to someone else. But pitch sessions are a great way for writers to make a first connection with an agent or editor, and even if the idea of giving a pitch makes you break out in a cold sweat, you should do it as often as you can. So here are some tips on the art of the pitch.Know pitch sessions for what they, and what they aren’t. You aren’t selling your work at a pitch session. You’re trying to get someone interested in taking a closer look at your work. You want to intrigue them, entice them. Give them a delicious taste so they want more.Research the people you’re pitching to ahead of time. Read editors’ and agents’ bios on the con website. Google them to see if you can find print or video interviews with them. See what other clients they have/books they’ve published. Not only will this research enable you to shape your pitch to their needs, it’ll show that you’re a serious professional. Your work must be complete. No agent or editor is interested in your ideas by themselves. They’re only interested in work that you have finished and can send to them tomorrow. If you don’t have anything finished, you’re wasting their time and yours.Put yourself in the other person’s shoes. A pitch isn’t about you. It’s about the person listening to your pitch. Agents and editors want to know who a book’s target audience is and how they can best market it to that audience. They don’t care about your inspiration for writing the book, how much time you put into it, or how much in love you are with your own world and characters. Writers can – by necessity – be very self-absorbed when it comes to the creation of their work. But when it comes time to market it to others, you have to forget about yourself and think about the other person’s needs. How will your book fulfill those needs? How will it do that better than another book?Be able to categorize your book and its audience. No one likes to put labels on art as if it’s a can of peas, but that’s exactly what has to be done in order to market a book to readers. Even literary novels are categorized to market them: “An insightful coming-of-age tale set in the Great Depression.” What genre (and subgenre) does your book fit into? How long is it? Who do you envision as the audience for it? What makes your book different from all the bajillion other books out there?Here’s a pitch formula I ran across a while ago that I find useful: Write one sentence about the character, one sentence about the conflict, and one sentence about the cool concept.Make damn sure you talk about the conflict. The most common complaint I’ve heard about listening to pitches from agents and editors is that writers will say a ton about their characters and world but never mention what the conflict is. Conflict is drama. Conflict is story. If you make certain to talk about the conflict in your story, you’ll be far ahead of many of the others pitching at the con.Don’t tell everything about your story, character, or world. Pitches are supposed to be short. They’re supposed to deliver an intriguing taste of your work, and nothing more.If your book is part of a series, mention that, but don’t go into detail about the other books at this point. Agents and editors only want to know about the first book. Knowing there’s series potential there is good, but their focus is solely on the current book.Prepare. Don’t wander into a pitch session and wing it. Prepare first. That will help you take maximum advantage of the short time you have to pitch, plus preparation is the best way to head off nervousness. If you can get a look at the space where the pitches will be held ahead of time, do it. Familiarizing yourself with the room will give you some idea of how noisy or quiet it will be, how loud you’ll need to talk, etc. It’ll also help decrease your nervousness.Practice. Go through your pitch several times before your scheduled meeting. Practice on you own, or with family and friends. Video yourself and see how you did. You can practice before your pitch, too. I often see people practice pitching to each other in the hallway before their scheduled meetings.Time yourself when you practice. You want to make sure you get your entire pitch in during your meeting, but you also want to leave some time for the editor or agent to ask questions. Time yourself in practice so you don’t go over time – or too far under time – during your meeting.How should you dress? Editors and agents don’t really care how you dress. Writers tend to be casual people anyway. Plus, agents and editors are often the only people dressed in business attire at a con, so writers tend not to dress very formally. But you want to look professional, and more importantly, you need to be comfortable. Tight, uncomfortable clothing will only exacerbate your nervousness. I usually wear a polo shirt, jeans, and sneakers. A turtleneck or mock turtleneck if it’s wintertime. Business casual is a good look to go for, but honestly, agents and editors are far more interested in what you have to say than what you have on.Write your pitch down and read it during the meeting if you have to. I always bring print-outs with my pitches on them to pitch meetings. I usually don’t have to read the print-outs, but they’re there if I need them. And if you’re extremely nervous, it’s okay to read from your print-out. It’s best if you can speak without notes, meet the other person’s eyes, etc. But you have to do what you need to in order to get through the pitch, and if that means reading your notes, so be it.Don’t booze it up, over-caffeinate, eat a big meal beforehand, etc. Have fresh breath. Bathe. You need a clear head, so avoid alcohol. You don’t need extra nervous energy, so avoid caffeine. Plus, both alcohol and coffee can give you dry mouth – and they’ll make you feel like you need to pee, especially if you’re nervous. Eating a big meal can make you uncomfortable and your nerves might cause an upset stomach. Brush your teeth beforehand, eat a mint, chew some gum so you have fresh breath. (Just don’t chew the gum during your meeting.) Make sure you’ve bathed and are wearing deodorant. It’s easy to let some of your hygiene standards slide a bit when you’re super busy at cons. Don’t. You don’t want agents and editors to remember you as that person with the terrible body odor and horrible death-stench breath. You want them to remember your work.Only bring water if you think going to have serious dry mouth during the meeting. Having water is a temptation when your nervous. You’re tempted to play with it because your hands need something to do. You’re tempted to sip it periodically because you’re nervous. Both of these are distractions during your meeting. You may feel like you have to pee if you drink too much, of course, but worst of all, you might spill your water on the table, the floor, and maybe even on the agent or editor. Only bring water if you will physically be unable to get through the pitch without it.Don’t speak too fast. When people are nervous, they tend to speak faster than normal. That can make you hard to listen to. Plus, your nervousness will make the person you’re pitching to feel uncomfortable. You want the agent and editor to focus on your work, not on how nervous you are. Practice will help you speak at a normal pace during the actual meeting.Don’t oversell yourself or your work. Yes, we have to market ourselves, but it’s often difficult to know how much and how far we should push. Billing yourself as the next Stephen King or saying that your novel will be a huge bestseller and change the genre forever will only make you look ridiculous. Be enthusiastic about your work, talk about why you think readers will like it, yes, but don’t act as if you think you’re the greatest writer since Shakespeare. You’re not. Me neither. Remember, a pitch is about your story, not you.Leave a little time for questions/conversation. Don’t take up the entire meeting talking about your story. Leave some time for the agent or editor to ask you some questions or for you to ask questions of your own. If you’ve researched the agent or editor and can ask questions directly related to them and the places they work, you’ll come across as far more professional. Plus, a pitch meeting goes both ways. You want to know if this agent or editor is right for you.Ask how they like to work with writers. This will give you a good sense of what the editor or agent’s working style is like. It’s important that you feel this is a person you could work with and hopefully develop a good business relationship with.It doesn't hurt to bring some material -- say a synopsis and three chapters of your book -- to a pitch meeting, just in case an agent or editor asks to see it right then. But most agents and editors don't want to carry paper around with them at the con or schlep it onto the plane when they go home. If they're interested in your work, they'll most likely ask you to email it to them later.You can pitch even if you already have an agent. It doesn’t hurt to meet editors and get a sense of who they are and how they work – and to give them a sense of who you are. Your agent can follow up with them later if they’re interested in taking a look at your work. In my case, I often pitch to movie and TV people looking for literary works to adapt. My agent follows up with them afterward.Hallway pitches. If you can’t get a formal meeting with an agent or an editor, you can always approach them after a panel, in the hallway, in the bar, etc., and ask if you could pitch to them. They may listen to your pitch right there or they may make an appointment with you to pitch later. Be courteous when you do this. Don’t bug them while they’re eating, having a conversation with someone else, or sitting on the toilet. Being assertive is one thing. Being rudely aggressive is another.Be yourself – or at least the best version of yourself. I said earlier that agents and editors are primarily interested in your story, and that’s true. But they also like to get a sense of who you are as a person and what it might be like to work with you. Do your best to be yourself, but it’s okay to be the best version of yourself. Be more outgoing if you’re an introvert. Be more calm if you’re usually a spaz. If you normally swear like a sailor, tone down your language. The main thing is to treat a pitch like it’s a conversation between two people, because in the end, that’s all it is.
DEPARTMENT OF SHAMELESS SELF-PROMOTION
Just Released!


My tie-in novel, Supernatural: Children of Anubis, is now out!
Sam and Dean travel to Indiana to investigate a murder that could be the work of a werewolf. But they soon discover that werewolves aren't the only things going bump in the night. The town is also home to a pack of jakkals who worship the god Anubis: carrion-eating scavengers who hate werewolves. With the help of Garth, the Winchester brothers must stop the werewolf-jakkal turf war before it engulfs the town – and before the god Anubis is awakened...
I had a lot of fun writing the werewolf family in this book, and it was great to invent a new monster species – the jakkals – for it as well. This the fifth Supernaturaltie-in I’ve done, and I think it’s my best one yet. I hope you check it out and see for yourselves!
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Supernatural-Children-Anubis-Tim-Waggoner/dp/1785653261/ref=tmm_mmp_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1545154711&sr=1-2
Cover Reveal!


To celebrate the fortieth anniversary of Alien’s release, Titan Books revealed the cover to Alien Prototype, my forthcoming tie-in novel set in the Alien universe.
When an industrial spy steals a Xenomorph egg, former Colonial Marine Zula Hendricks must prevent an alien from killing everyone on an isolated colony planet.
Corporate spy Tamar Prather steals a Xenomorph egg from Weyland-Yutani, taking it to a lab facility run by Venture, a Weyland-Yutani competitor. Former Colonial Marine Zula Hendricks--now allied with the underground resistance--infiltrates Venture's security team. When a human test subject is impregnated, the result is a Xenomorph that, unless it's stopped, will kill every human being on the planet.
What the official synopsis doesn’t reveal is that the Xenomorph is born from a host who carries a deadly virus inside him – a virus that mutates the Xenomorph, making the creature even more deadly than its kind usually are. Part horror, part science fiction, and part action, this novel was a blast to write, and I hope people will enjoy it!
Release Date: Oct. 29. 2019
You can preorder on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Alien-Prototype-Tim-Waggoner/dp/1789090911/ref=tmm_mmp_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1553652742&sr=1-1
Coming Soon!


My next horror novel for Flame Tree Press, They Kill, is due out in July, but you can get a review copy now at the NetGalley site: https://www.netgalley.com/catalog/book/164287
Here’s a synopsis:
What are you willing to do, what are you willing to become, to save someone you love? Sierra Sowell’s dead brother Jeffrey is resurrected by a mysterious man known only as Corliss. Corliss also transforms four people in Sierra’s life into inhuman monsters determined to kill her. Sierra and Jeffrey’s boyfriend Marc work to discover the reason for her brother’s return to life while struggling to survive attacks by this monstrous quartet. Corliss gives Sierra a chance to make Jeffrey’s resurrection permanent – if she makes a dreadful bargain. Can she do what it will take to save her brother, no matter how much blood is shed along the way?
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/They-Kill-Fiction-Without-Frontiers/dp/1787582558/ref=sr_1_1_twi_pap_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1545154608&sr=1-1&keywords=tim+waggoner
My story “Voices Like Barbed Wire” has been selected to appear in Year's Best Hardcore Horror Volume 4. It’s my third appearance in this series! Available now in both print and e-editions.
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Years-Best-Hardcore-Horror-4-ebook/dp/B07P88L9CT/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=best+hardcore+horror+4&qid=1553653884&s=books&sr=1-1-catcorr

The Truth About Tie-Ins

I’ve been writing and teaching for a long time. Because of this, I get a lot of people who reach out to me via email or social media asking for advice about this or that. I’m always happy to help if I can, but one of the most common questions I get runs something along these lines: “I’ve got a great idea for a Supernatural novel. Can you hook me up with an editor that I can pitch it to?” The answer, no matter how gently I try to phrase it, boils down to “No.” And even if I was able to hook these writers up with an editor, it likely wouldn’t do any good. So I decided to write a blog entry about how writing and publishing media tie-ins really works, if for no other reason than the next time somebody asks me how to do it, I can provide them a link to this entry and say, “Read this.”
First, a little about my background writing tie-ins. I’ve published over forty novels. Twenty of them have been tie-ins. I’ve also written a number of short stories that are tie-ins as well. I’ve written tie-ins based on roleplaying games, videogames, movies, and TV shows. I’ve done original stories using licensed characters and I’ve written novelizations of films. I’ve written articles on how to write tie-ins for magazines like Writer’s Digest. I’m also a member of the International Association of Media Tie-In Writers. I’ve had work nominated for the association’s Scribe Awards numerous times (still haven’t won yet, though), and several times I’ve served on juries for the awards (never in the category I have work nominated in, of course). I think it’s fair to say that I have some experience in this field, yes?
Here’s how tie-ins work. A publisher decides that they would like to produce some tie-in novels (or a tie-in anthology). They approach whoever holds the IP (intellectual property) rights. For example, I just finished writing a novel set in the Alien universe. Fox holds the rights to that property. The publisher says we would like to produce five books based on your IP. The IP rights holder says okay, it will cost you X amount of dollars. The publisher says cool beans. Now the publisher has five books to find writers for. The publisher approaches writers they’ve worked with before and says, “Pssst. Wanna write a book for us about this IP?” and the writers say yes. (Or no if they’re busy with other projects or if the advance offered isn’t enough for them or if they’re not interested in the IP or uninterested in writing tie-ins in general.) If the publisher has specific story requirements for the novels, they tell the writers. For example, my Alien novel was set between two Alien comic series featuring a specific character. So my story had to feature that character and take place between the events of the two comic series. The writer comes up with some ideas and pitches them to the editor. The editor picks one for the writer to develop into an outline. Once the outline is ready, the editor sends it to the IP holder to approve. The IP holder may say yes, no, or request some changes. If necessary, the process continues until the IP holder approves an outline. The writer writes the book, the editor reads it and suggests changes, the writer makes revisions, the book goes to the IP holder for review, the IP holder makes changes, and this process continues until both the IP holder and the editor are happy. Then the book is finally approved. The writer will have to make more changes during the copy-editing phase, but then the process is finally finished, and eventually the book is released.
So given the overall process above, here are some realities of tie-writing and publishing.
Publishers aren’t seeking tie-in pitches in general.
You can’t simply have an idea for a tie-in and pitch it to a publisher. The publisher has to decide they want to publish tie-ins, seek out a license, get it, schedule a certain number of books, and then – and only then – are they open to pitches. You don’t approach a publisher with a tie-in idea. They approach writers only when they have tie-ins already scheduled and they need someone to write them.
Tie-Ins are not a market for new writers.
Publishers need writers who have proven themselves in traditional publishing already. They’ve written a number of books – usually in a genre or style similar to that of the IP. They’ve proven they can write to deadline and produce a finished novel on time. They’ve proven that they can work with editors and are open to revising their fiction as part of the editorial process. In short, publishers of tie-ins are looking for experienced professionals with a proven track record of publication. And, of course, past experience writing tie-ins is a huge plus. Simply put, writing tie-ins is not an entry-level job.
Publishers don’t care if you’re a fan of the IP.
If you’ve already written novels based on that IP, that’s awesome. I’ve written a number of novels based on the TV series Supernatural. This makes it more likely publishers will ask me to write more of these. Otherwise, publishers only care about what I said in the paragraph above.
Publishers won’t make an exception for you.
They can’t afford to take a chance on someone without a proven track record when it comes to tie-ins. Writers often have only a few months to write a tie-in novel. A few as in three months. You might have been less time than that. You have to be able to do the job and do it well under these time constraints. Publishers can’t afford to gamble when it comes to this, hence their seeking out experienced professionals.
It does matter if you’ve been traditionally published.
I am by no means knocking indie writers here. But self-publishing isn’t the same as having experience with the process of traditional publishing. Tie-ins are always traditionally published. I suppose an indie writer could seek out an IP holder and pay to acquire a license to produce a tie-in, but who has that kind of money? Plus, IP holders are very careful about how their brands are portrayed in other media. They trust publishers with proven track records. I doubt they’d trust their IP with individual who isn’t affiliated with a traditional publisher.
Experience writing and publishing short stories is nice, but publishers want experienced novelists.
Short stories and novels aren’t the same thing. When I say publishers want experienced writers, I mean experienced novelists.
Small-Press credits are nice, but tie-ins aren’t small-press projects.I believe I’ve only written one tie-in short story for a small-press publisher. Otherwise, all my tie-in credits are for larger publishers. Tie-in publishers want writers who’ve published with larger publishers like them. That said, depending on what sort of novels you’ve written for small-press publishers (similar to the IP you want to write for) and how well they were received (sales and reviews), they might still make a good calling card when you approach a tie-in publisher.
So, given all of the above, how can you gain the necessary experience if you want to write tie-ins? Keep reading.
Write and publish original novels with (relatively) large traditional publishers.
You need to establish a track record in order to be considered for a tie-in writing gig. This is the only way to do that. It’s possible to get a track record in other ways, such as writing comics or videogames. That can show you have experience working with other people’s IP’s. It doesn’t, however, show you can produce quality novel-length fiction.
Get an agent.
Good agents regularly check with publishers to see what they’re looking for. If a publisher is looking for tie-in writers, agents can suggest one or more of their clients for the gig. An agent can vouch for your skills and abilities if your publication record is on the thin side, so you might not need as much experience as if you were going it alone. As far as I know, no agents special in tie-in fiction. It’s just one of the types of fiction they handle.
Network.
Networking will not, repeat NOT, replace having experience and a track record. As I said in my introduction, people ask me for advice on writing tie-ins all the time. Few, if any, have landed any tie-in writing gigs afterward. That said, it doesn’t hurt to follow tie-in writers and editors on social media to learn more about the ins and outs of tie-in publishing. And if you do have significant publishing credentials, then speaking to tie-in editors at conferences or asking advice from tie-in writers might well be of benefit to you.
Continue working on becoming the very best writer you can be.
Despite what some people think, tie-in novels aren’t a lesser type of fiction produced by second-rate writers. You have to be a damn good writer to land a tie-in gig. So the more you do to make yourself a damn good writer, the greater chance you’ll have.
So, does all this mean that it’s impossible to break into writing tie-ins? Of course not. I did it. My first tie-in novel, Dark Ages: Gangrel, came out in 2004. Here’s a picture of an inscription Mike Stackpole wrote in his 1996 Star Wars novel Rogue Squadron.
I’d been trying to break into tie-in writing for several years before I talked to Mike about it at an Origins convention, and it still took eight years after that for my first tie-in novel to appear. In the meantime, I kept writing and selling my original fiction, honing my craft and gaining experience. And if you’re really serious about writing tie-ins, that’s what you should do too.
DEPARTMENT OF SHAMELESS SELF-PROMOTION
Speaking of tie-in novels, my next Supernatural novel, Children of Anubis, releases later this month. And my Alien novel, Protocol, is now available for preorder. Linkage below.
Supernatural: Children of Anubis
Sam and Dean travel to Indiana, to investigate a murder that could be the work of a werewolf. But they soon discover that werewolves aren't the only things going bump in the night. The town is also home to a pack of jakkals who worship the god Anubis: carrion-eating scavengers who hate werewolves. With the help of Garth, the Winchester brothers must stop the werewolf-jakkal turf war before it engulfs the town - and before the god Anubis is awakened...Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Supernatural-Children-Anubis-Tim-Waggoner/dp/1785653261/ref=tmm_mmp_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1545154711&sr=1-2
Alien: Protocol
When an industrial spy steals a Xenomorph egg, former Colonial Marine Zula Hendricks must prevent an alien from killing everyone on an isolated colony planet.Corporate spy Tamar Prather steals a Xenomorph egg from Weyland-Yutani, taking it to a lab facility run by Venture, a Weyland-Yutani competitor. Former Colonial Marine Zula Hendricks--now allied with the underground resistance--infiltrates Venture's security team. When a human test subject is impregnated, the result is a Xenomorph that, unless it's stopped, will kill every human being on the planet.
Release Date: Oct. 29. 2019
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Alien-Prototype-Tim-Waggoner/dp/1789090911/ref=tmm_mmp_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1553652742&sr=1-1

Writer's Block? We Don't Need No Stinkin' Writer's Block!

Inevitably, in every creative writing class I teach, one of the students asks me how to deal with writer’s block. Sometimes they ask if I ever experience it, and if so, what I do to deal with it. I’ve been writing seriously for thirty-seven years, and while there are times I produce more writing and times I produce less, I never consider myself blocked. I do, however, find the writing part of my brain getting sluggish from time to time, and the words don’t come very easily. When that happens, I try to change up my writing routine. So whether you believe in writer’s block or are just looking for a way to recharge your creative batteries, here are some tips on changing up your writing routine.
·         Write in a different location. Try writing in a different room in your house. Go out somewhere to write (I often write at a Starbucks). Write in nature. Write where there are a lot of people. Write in solitude. Try as many different locations as necessary to get those words flowing.·         Use different tools. If you usually type on a computer, change the font and color of the text. Write by hand. Use different pens and pencils. Use colored pencils or markers. Use a legal pad instead of a notebook or vice versa.·         Write at different speeds. If you normally write fast, try forcing yourself to write slow. If you write slow, write fast. See which way helps the words come this time. ·         Meet a friend for a writing date. I’ve never tried this, but I have friends who get together at a restaurant, coffee shop, or bar. They chat for a bit then spend the rest of the time writing.·         Write at different times of the day. Your biorhythms can vary over time, and the time of day when you’re at your most productive can change as well. If you normally write in the morning, try the afternoon, early evening, or late at night.·         Write at different lengths. If you’re stalled on a novel, write a short story, or a piece of flash fiction. Write a paragraph. Write a sentence.·         Try a different genre. If you normally write fiction, try nonfiction, poetry, or scriptwriting. If you write serious, try writing humor. If you do mystery, try fantasy, romance, etc. The old saying “A change is as good as a rest” applies here.·         Write something that’s not for publication. Write something that you know you’re not going to submit to an editor. This can relieve the stress that can come when you’re overly conscious that there’s a reader – hopefully a lot of readers – on the other side of your words.·         Challenge yourself. Write a story that’s exactly one hundred words long. Fifty. Twenty-five. Ten. Write a two-sentence story. A one sentence story. Write a story without using the letter E. Write a story in a different form – a resume, a newspaper article, a series of bumper stickers . . . anything that you can think of that will be a fun and energizing writing challenge for you.·         Use a pseudonym. Stephen King says that using the Richard Bachman pseudonym not only freed him of the expectation publishers and readers had of him, but those stories tended to come out differently. They were leaner and meaner, with a darker sense of humor. Sometimes pretending to be someone else, even in a small way, can help us get outside of our own expectations of ourselves and help us discover something we didn’t know was in us.·         Write the thing you’re most afraid to write. If you’re afraid to go there, go there. See what happens.·         Write the kind of thing you think you’d be terrible at.If you think you’d be a tremendous flop as a poet, try writing a poem. If you think you could never write a play, try writing one (or at least a scene). Not only will you be getting out of your routine, you might discover that you’re better at this other kind of writing than you ever thought you’d be.·         Write the thing you hate. If you can’t stand literary fiction (or romance or action-adventure or whatever) try writing it. Engaging in forms of creative expression we personally dislike can be illuminating as well as energizing. (And you might gain a newfound appreciation and respect for the thing you hate, whatever it is.)·         Rewrite an old story of yours (or a novel excerpt or a poem, etc.) from scratch. This gives you something to work on that you don’t have to create whole cloth. It already exists. You’ll hopefully be able to get started on it fairly easily, and your creative energy will flow better because of it. Plus, you might gain some interesting insights into your growth as a writer.
DEPARTMENT OF SHAMELESS SELF-PROMOTION

I’ve got a couple books available for pre-order.
My next horror novel for Flame Tree Press, They Kill, is due out in July. Here’s a synopsis:What are you willing to do, what are you willing to become, to save someone you love? Sierra Sowell’s dead brother Jeffrey is resurrected by a mysterious man known only as Corliss. Corliss also transforms four people in Sierra’s life into inhuman monsters determined to kill her. Sierra and Jeffrey’s boyfriend Marc work to discover the reason for her brother’s return to life while struggling to survive attacks by this monstrous quartet. Corliss gives Sierra a chance to make Jeffrey’s resurrection permanent – if she makes a dreadful bargain. Can she do what it will take to save her brother, no matter how much blood is shed along the way?
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/They-Kill-Fiction-Without-Frontiers/dp/1787582558/ref=sr_1_1_twi_pap_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1545154608&sr=1-1&keywords=tim+waggoner
My tie-in novel, Supernatural: Children of Anubis, is due out in April.
Sam and Dean travel to Indiana, to investigate a murder that could be the work of a werewolf. But they soon discover that werewolves aren't the only things going bump in the night. The town is also home to a pack of jakkals who worship the god Anubis: carrion-eating scavengers who hate werewolves. With the help of Garth, the Winchester brothers must stop the werewolf-jakkal turf war before it engulfs the town - and before the god Anubis is awakened...
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Supernatural-Children-Anubis-Tim-Waggoner/dp/1785653261/ref=tmm_mmp_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1545154711&sr=1-2
Want to check out stuff I already have out? Here's my author page at Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/Tim-Waggoner/e/B001JP0XFM?ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_2&qid=1554723574&sr=8-2
Want to sign up for my newsletter? You can do so here:
http://timwaggoner.com/contact.htm

What's the Sitch?

I recently had the opportunity to pitch story ideas to an anthology editor, and I began the part of the short-story-writing process I hate the most. I mean hate.
Coming up with an idea. In this case, a couple ideas.
Sometimes I base a story on something weird I’ve seen out in the world. Sometimes I choose an experience from my past. Often, I combine the two. I keep a list of ideas on a notepad app file on my phone, and I read over it – and over and over and over it – hoping one of the ideas there might suddenly reveal itself as the most brilliant idea for a story ever conceived in the history of the human race.
Sometimes – a lot of times, actually – I make lists. I’m not sure why this helps me think, but it does. But this time when I started making a list of potential story ideas, it quickly morphed into a list of general story types and situations. I figured what the hell and continued writing the list to see where it would lead, and somewhere along the way it occurred to me that my creative writing students might find such a list useful for generating story ideas. And my next thought was maybe I should post the list on my blog for any other writers who might find it useful.
There’s no order to the list, no rhyme or reason, and it’s certainly not complete. Feel free to copy it, pass it around to others, and add to it. And if you would like to make suggestions for additional items in the comments, I’ll add them to the list.
So, here it be: STORY SITUATIONS
·         Missing child/family member/friend·         Lost love, obsessive love·         Robbery·         Salvage·         Hiding from past, trying to forget past·         Childhood bogeyman, childhood fears·         Abusive parent, spouse, lover, friend – physical, emotional, sexual·         Seeking revenge or justice·         Trying to escape (physical place or situation)·         Murder/assassination·         Seeking boon from powerful force·         Seeking to end one’s life·         Dying of illness, other dying of illness·         Sick, wounded, disabled·         Contracting disease, fighting it, one person or group·         Hiding secret, trying to uncover secret·         Confronting past, escaping past·         Trying to remember, trying to forget·         Seeking to atone, seeking to condemn·         Helping another, hurting another·         Trying to start a business/run a business/save a business·         Trying to save someone physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually·         Trying to have a child·         Seeking peace, seeking war·         Negotiating·         Trying to find something, trying to get rid of something·         Trying to find identity, a community, a home, a place·         Seeking to understand·         Seeking to deceive·         Seeking to overcome evil, seeking to spread evil·         Seeking power, domination, control, seeking to escape power, domination, control·         Creating chaos/establishing order/reestablishing order·         Seeking riches, losing riches·         Serving a higher power, seeking a higher power to serve·         Seeking truth, concealing truth·         Protecting a secret, uncovering a secret·         Addiction·         Illness: seeking health or relief, causing illness.·         Exploring·         Establishing law, abolishing law, destroying law·         Preserving culture/tradition, changing it, disrupting it, destroying it·         Quest·         Protecting others, harming others·         Survival, self-preservation·         Settling a new place/taming environment·         Enslaving, freeing·         Reconciliation·         Seeking advancement, growth, evolution, enlightenment, apotheosis·         Seeking to remember, seeking to forget·         Seeking to obtain, seeking to get rid of·         Creating, destroying·         Seeking knowledge, forbidden knowledge, imparting knowledge·         Seeking artistic expression, censoring·         Persecuting others·         Earning a living·         Being an outcast, wanting in a group, wanting out of a group·         Protesting, supporting·         Practicing religion, escaping religion·         Colonizing, repelling colonizers·         Seeking to entertain, seeking to repel or repulse, seeking to shock·         Seeking approval·         Seeking allies·         Establishing/destabilizing/abolishing government·         Preserving the past, breaking with the past·         Revelation of something wonderful, revelation of something awful, realization of a profound or terrible insight·         Trying to get home, leaving home·         Facing the end of the world·         Invasion·         Espionage/intelligence gathering·         Celebration, ceremony, memorial, anniversary·         Entrapment, imprisonment, escape, seeking freedom for self or others·         Making things the way they once were, making things new·         Fulfilling an obligation, escaping obligation·         Trying to determine what’s real·         Seeking to overcome fear·         Testing one’s self·         Raising children, establishing a family·         Feud, estrangement, reconciliation·         Seeking love·         Seeking sexual fulfillment·         Facing the end of life·         Facing disgrace, reestablishing honor·         Exile, isolation, lost, stranded·         Rescue·         Hunting·         Competition·         Becoming leader, conspiring against leader, overthrowing leader, killing leader·         Dealing with disaster, dealing with death·         Death of loved one·         Seeking renewal·         Seeking fame, seeking power·         Manipulating individual or group·         Seeking sanity, seeking to drive someone mad·         Starting relationship, ending relationship·         Getting married, getting divorced·         Starting school, graduating·         Entering military, leaving military·         Moving, changing locations, changing homes, changing jobs·         Seeking a job, losing a job·         Building, tearing down·         Leave-taking, reunion·         Transformation·         Changing history, preserving history, concealing history·         Finding one’s purpose·         Seeking meaning·         Rejecting civilization, living in the wild, back to nature·         Going into hiding·         Becoming involved in a scandal, being disgraced·         Delivering something of vital importance·         Purposefully or accidentally breaking a taboo·         Dealing with trauma
DEPARTMENT OF SHAMELESS SELF-PROMOTION
Out Now!
My new creature-feature novel Blood Island was recently released from Severed Press. Blood Island isn’t a sequel to my previous novel The Teeth of the Sea,but they take place in the same world and there’s a bit of overlap. Here’s synopsis:The Mass, an island-sized creature formed entirely of mutated blood cells, has drifted across the world’s oceans for millions of years. It uses sharks – the most efficient predators the planet has ever produced – as extensions of itself to gather food. For the most part, the Mass and its Hunters have avoided contact with the human race, but now it’s entered the waters off Bridgewater, Texas, where a film crew is busy shooting a low-budget horror film called Devourer of the Deep. The Mass is about to discover something called human imagination, and the humans are about to learn that battling a monster in real life is a little harder than fighting one on screen.
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Blood-Island-Tim-Waggoner-ebook/dp/B07M6FX6JM/ref=sr_1_fkmrnull_1?crid=2SYWSQS6OSAS7&keywords=blood+island+tim+waggoner&qid=1552148159&s=gateway&sprefix=tim+waggoner+blood+island%2Caps%2C235&sr=8-1-fkmrnull
Coming Soon
I’ve got a couple other books available for pre-order.
My next horror novel for Flame Tree Press, They Kill, is due out in July. It’s also not a direct sequel to any book, but it does take place in the same universe as much of my horror fiction, including my previous Flame Tree release The Mouth of the Dark. Here’s a synopsis:
What are you willing to do, what are you willing to become, to save someone you love? Sierra Sowell’s dead brother Jeffrey is resurrected by a mysterious man known only as Corliss. Corliss also transforms four people in Sierra’s life into inhuman monsters determined to kill her. Sierra and Jeffrey’s boyfriend Marc work to discover the reason for her brother’s return to life while struggling to survive attacks by this monstrous quartet. Corliss gives Sierra a chance to make Jeffrey’s resurrection permanent – if she makes a dreadful bargain. Can she do what it will take to save her brother, no matter how much blood is shed along the way?
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/They-Kill-Fiction-Without-Frontiers/dp/1787582558/ref=sr_1_1_twi_pap_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1545154608&sr=1-1&keywords=tim+waggoner
My latest tie-in novel, Supernatural: Children of Anubis, is due out in April.Sam and Dean travel to Indiana, to investigate a murder that could be the work of a werewolf. But they soon discover that werewolves aren't the only things going bump in the night. The town is also home to a pack of jakkals who worship the god Anubis: carrion-eating scavengers who hate werewolves. With the help of Garth, the Winchester brothers must stop the werewolf-jakkal turf war before it engulfs the town - and before the god Anubis is awakened...
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Supernatural-Children-Anubis-Tim-Waggoner/dp/1785653261/ref=tmm_mmp_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1545154711&sr=1-2
That’s it for now. Keep writing!

Literary Citizenship

At Book Expo America 2018 with members of my literary community: Hunter Shea, Jonathan Janz, Don D'Auria, and John Everson

February is Women in Horror Month, a time dedicated to recognizing and promoting women in the horror field. In both publishing and film, women creatives of horror have often been seen as producing less intense work than their male counterparts because of their softer feminine emotions. And that’s if women horror creatives are even recognized at all. All too often they’re invisible in the industry. If you want to learn more about Women in Horror Month, here are a couple links:
https://www.womeninhorrormonth.com/
http://rawdogscreaming.com/who-needs-women-in-horror-month/
Every year on social media, some idiot male posts a variation on this comment regarding WIHM: “When is it going to be MEN in Horror Month?”
(The answer is “Every fucking month is Men in Horror Month, jackass.”)
And sure enough, this happened on my Facebook feed the other day, and I’ve since seen other men complaining about WIHM (the poor fragile things). These men weren’t being good literary citizens, and while there’s no requirement that writers have to notbe assholes, there are many good – and even selfish – reasons to be the best literary citizen you can be.
So what is literary citizenship? It means thinking of yourself as a member of a literary community as opposed to a lone writer who’s in a Battle Royale-type competition with every other writer out there. Writing and publishing guru Jane Friedman explains it thusly:
“For those unaware of the term, it’s widely used in the literary, bookish community to refer to activities that support and further reading, writing, and publishing, and the growth of your professional network. . . . It operates with an abundance mindset. It’s not about competition, but collaboration. If I’m doing well, that’s going to help you, too, in the long term. We’re not playing a zero-sum game where we hoard resources and attention. There’s plenty to go around.”
Here’s a link to Freidman’s full blog on the subject: https://www.janefriedman.com/limits-literary-citizenship/
(And if you don’t regularly read her blog, receive her newsletter, or read her books about publishing, you need to fix that. She’s an expert in up-to-the-minute information on changes in the writing and publishing world.)
What’s great about the literary citizenship model is that it works whether you’re a person who believes in helping others or if you’re a self-centered, heartless bastard out only for yourself. The phrase “a rising tide lifts all boats” applies here. And I believe this is even more true in these days of constant social media interaction, where we have countless ways to connect to – or alienate – an audience on a daily basis. Regardless of whether or not you’re an asshole, practicing good literary citizenship makes you seem like you aren’t one. It’s an essential professional survival skill in a world where so many thousands of books are traditionally or indie published each year, and it gets harder and harder for any one book (or author) to snag readers’ attention. It would be nice if all we had to do was sell our product, but we need to sell ourselves, too. That’s the social aspect of social media. It’s just as important to consumers who they are buying from as what they’re buying. Maybe more.So here are some tips to becoming a better literary citizen:
1) Accept that you’re part of a literary community – and figure out which one it is.Of course, you don’t have to be part of anything if you don’t want to be. Bentley Little’s first novel was published in 1990, and he’s been publishing books regularly ever since. He’s famous for being something of a recluse. He has no online presence of any sort, and he doesn’t attend conventions. Has this hurt his career? Damned if I know. My guess is he’d have more fans and more sales if he didn’t keep to himself so much, but his career is his, and if he’s happy with it, then good for him.Being part of a literary community is a way to more effectively network. Networking is more than just being known by writers, editors, agents, and publishers. It’s not about what others can do for you. It’s what members of a community can do for each other. To put it in starkly transactional terms, helping others is how you pay for the help you receive from them. Networking is how you learn about publishing opportunities, sure, but it’s also helps you mentally and emotionally survive the all-too-often crushing up and downs of an artistic life. I’d argue that this last part is the biggest and most important benefit of literary citizenship.
And while it’s easy to identify the basic literary community where you’d best fit – science fiction, fantasy, mystery, horror, romance, literary, children’s, YA – there are subgroups. Horror can be separated into literary, weird, extreme, realistic, supernatural, bizarre, and more. There’s a lot of overlap between the subgroups but discovering to which subgroup you belong can help you more effectively target an audience who’ll enjoy your work and build a network of like-minded writers. It also helps you better target your social media posts and commentary.
You can belong to more than one community. I identify as a horror writer, a media tie-in writer, a fantasy writer, a short story writer, a novelist, a writing teacher, and someone who writers about writing. In horror, I identify as a writer of weird, pulp, literary, and extreme fiction. Would it be more effective in terms of the business side of writing if I focused on one subgenre? Maybe. But I love exploring different types of horror, and that’s not something I plan to change anytime soon.
2) Be a contributing member of your community.Given the caveat that none of us can spend all our time posting online or mentoring others (we have to get our own writing done sometime), do what you can to contribute to your community. Join a writers’ organization, post on their Facebook page from time to time, contribute occasional material for their newsletter or blog. Engage other writers and readers on social media and talk about topics that are of interest to the community – without constantly promoting yourself and your work. Interact with the people of your community as a human being. Engage in conversations that aren’t about writing and publishing. Support other members of the community when they’re going through a hard time. Celebrate their accomplishments and cheer their victories.
3) Start conversations instead of making statements.Instead of making empty, thoughtless pronouncements on social media – “I just saw Hereditary, and my dudes, that ending SUCKED!!!” – try to start quality conversations. “I just saw Hereditary, and while I enjoyed the film for the most part, I’m not sure about the ending. What do you all think?” (For the record, I loved the ending.) People want to talk, not be talked at. In many ways, all Art is a conversation between creators and audience (and that audience includes other creators). Learn to listen as much – if not more – than you speak.
3) Promote others (and by doing so promote yourself).Promoting the work of others benefits you in a number of ways. It makes you seem like a positive force in your community, you add to the conversation about art that I mentioned above, people like reading recommendations for books and films that they should check out, you build good will among members of your community, and you don’t seem like a 24/7 self-promotion machine. Honestly, no one gives a shit about your self-promotion, and if that’s all the social media content you have to provide, no one will pay attention to what you have to say. Promote others a good portion of the time, and people will be more open to occasional sales messages from you.
4) Share resources, insights, and advice.People want to know what you can do for them. Share links to submission calls, share your experiences with writing and publishing – what’s worked for you and what hasn’t – and provide advice on writing and publishing (without coming across as a know-it-all). Not only will this build your audience, other writers will share their tips with you. Give your readers a behind-the-scenes perspective into your own work as well. Talk about where you got the idea for your latest story, what your inspiration for a fan-favorite character was, etc.
5) Try to be positive.While there will always be a certain number of people who love it when writers shit-post, hate-watch (or hate-read), stoke controversies, engage in literary feuds, or just plain bitch about whatever’s irritating them at any given moment, these behaviors drive away more people than they attract. And while there’s no way to prove whether the people who thrive on negativity will respond to your sales messages, my guess is they won’t. Supporting a writer is a positive thing, and people who thrive on negativity online aren’t there to be positive. They’re deeply cynical (or at least come across that way), and cynical people are most likely to resist a sales message simply to prove how cool they are. (And I admit I may well be grossly oversimplifying and stereotyping here. I’m just sharing my impressions for whatever they may – or may not – be worth.)
Being positive doesn’t mean you have to agree with everyone or everything in your community, of course, but you can do your best to disagree civilly, without indulging in personal attacks. And if you think you can’t, you can also just keep your mouth shut. You’re not required to comment on every damn thing that comes across your social media feed.
6) Don’t be afraid to call out bad behavior.See a publishing scam? Warn other writers. See a writer harassing someone? Tell them to cut it the hell out. See someone posting racist, sexist, homophobic horseshit? Call them out. You can try to engage these people in the hope of helping them understand why what they’re doing is destructive, but it’s not your job in life to educate assholes. If you choose to engage, you can choose to disengage when interacting takes too much of your time and mental and emotional energy. Part of what a community does is build consensus on what it means to be an effective, contributing member of that community. These standards are fluid and can change over time, and this is a normal, natural process. But this consensus-building can be destructive when it becomes a mob mentality, an excuse merely to exclude or castigate others, or tribal Us vs Them behavior. Try not to be too quick to judge. Someone exhibiting bad behavior might be uniformed, ignorant, young (in terms of being a member of the community if not in actual age) or they might have been told that being “edgy” is the best way to get attention in an over-crowded marketplace. But while community-building is about making connections and offering support, yes, this doesn’t mean you have to put up with any shit you don’t want to. Trying to be understanding doesn’t mean giving everyone a free pass to be an asshole. You decide where the line is drawn and act accordingly.
7) Volunteer/Do pro bono work/Mentor.It’s important for us to serve our community, and while we can’t spend all our time doing so (remember that writing thing we need to get done?), there are all kinds of ways to serve, not all of which require massive effort or investment of time. Volunteer to help out in a writers’ organization or at a con. Contribute an article to a writers’ organizations newsletter or website. Serve as a mentor to other writers, whether you simply answer questions they ask about matters of craft and publishing, provide feedback on their work, offer to blurb their work, or introduce them to members in your professional network. Do as much as you have time and energy for, and as much as you feel comfortable doing. Don’t make the mistake of allowing volunteering to become your life. Your writing and your career come first. The more successful you are, the more knowledge and experience you gain, the more you have to offer others.
8) Be kind.When in doubt about saying or doing something in your literary community, ask yourself a simple question: Is this kind? Does it make a positive contribution? This doesn’t mean always being nice. If you block a racist on Facebook, they can no longer post on your threads, which prevents other people from having to read their racist comments, which ultimately is being kind to those people. If someone asks you to read a story of theirs and it has a lot of problems, you need to be honest in your feedback. It might not be pleasant for the writer to hear about those problems, but it’s ultimately kind. At the very least, try to think like a doctor: First, do no harm.
9) What about politics, religion, etc.?You have to do you, and if you’re passionate about ideals and causes, and you want to use your platform to champion them, go for it. You may gain a following of like-minded people, but you may drive away people who don’t agree 100 percent with you. Not only might this decease your overall audience – and sales – but it might further foster divisions within your literary community. In the end, you’re only going to be talking into an echo chamber anyway. You’ll be preaching to the choir. There will be no one of differing points of view listening, so there will be no minds to change. I’m not conservative or religious, but I don’t unfollow people on Facebook who are. I do, however, unfollow people who are cruel to those who don’t share their points of view. For example, the author Larry Correia is a well-known conservative who, by all accounts, is a lovely man in person but who is savage on social media to people who aren’t conservative. I used to follow him on Facebook, but I got sick of his constant tirades and belittling of non-conservatives – including personal attacks against people – and I stopped following him. I also have no intention of supporting his work or his career. (He has such a gigantic following that I doubt he’d lose a second of sleep over this.) Am I hurting myself professionally by cutting out a potentially useful contact from my network? Maybe, but I don’t give a damn. I can’t stand vitriol and personal attacks, and that’s that.
I tend not to be an aggressively political person anyway, so I don’t post many political messages on social media. There was a time when I tried to post messages in support of women writers and writers of color, but several people sent me private messages saying that while they appreciated the effort, I was merely talking into an echo chamber. Besides, talk is cheap. You want to help us? Then help actual people. Introduce them to editors. Blurb their work. Mentor them. I’m grateful for those people reminding me that activism is about taking actual, substantive action, not about simply posting ultimately empty messages on Facebook. They helped make me a better citizen of my literary community.
Being an effective literary citizen takes time, thought, and effort, but the payoff can be huge. Not only will you be helping your own career, but you’ll be helping the careers of others and having on impact on the overall health and growth of your genre. To me, this is at least as important a legacy as the number of works I publish before I die, and in the end more meaningful.
DEPARTMENT OF SHAMELESS NON-SELF-PROMOTIONIn the spirit of this blog’s topic, I’m going to promote work from people other than myself, AND since it’s Women in Horror Month, I’m going to feature work from my sisters in darkness. They are all wonderful writers, and I urge you to check out their work.
Alma Katsu’s The Hunger was one of the best novels I read last year. Highly recommended!Evil is invisible, and it is everywhere.
That is the only way to explain the series of misfortunes that have plagued the wagon train known as the Donner Party. Depleted rations, bitter quarrels, and the mysterious death of a little boy have driven the isolated travelers to the brink of madness. Though they dream of what awaits them in the West, long-buried secrets begin to emerge, and dissent among them escalates to the point of murder and chaos. They cannot seem to escape tragedy...or the feelings that someone--or something--is stalking them. Whether it's a curse from the beautiful Tamsen Donner (who some think might be a witch), their ill-advised choice of route through uncharted terrain, or just plain bad luck, the ninety men, women, and children of the Donner Party are heading into one of one of the deadliest and most disastrous Western adventures in American history.
As members of the group begin to disappear, the survivors start to wonder if there really is something disturbing, and hungry, waiting for them in the mountains...and whether the evil that has unfolded around them may have in fact been growing within them all along.
Effortlessly combining the supernatural and the historical, The Hunger is an eerie, thrilling look at the volatility of human nature, pushed to its breaking point.
https://www.amazon.com/Hunger-Alma-Katsu/dp/0735212511/ref=pd_sbs_14_6/147-4770402-3800527?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=0735212511&pd_rd_r=196c4b23-2d4d-11e9-91c7-79eddbe046cc&pd_rd_w=4o6el&pd_rd_wg=ghpqW&pf_rd_p=588939de-d3f8-42f1-a3d8-d556eae5797d&pf_rd_r=98CN00R4CEBA2Z6JWNZ9&psc=1&refRID=98CN00R4CEBA2Z6JWNZ9
I just picked up Melanie Tem’s gigantic collection Singularity and Other Stories. Tem’s an amazing writer, and you need this collection in your life!
Singularity gathers award-winning writer Melanie Tem’s most important short fiction, highlighting her diversity and mastery of her art.
The sixty stories collected here range from "Sitting with the Driver," a western with a dark woman at its center, to "Little Shit," a contemporary tale of a woman who uses her deceptive appearance and psychic power to trap those who prey on the helpless. The child in "Corn teeth" longs not only to become a part of an alien family, but also to become an alien. And in the title tale, a man studies singularities and strin theory to both understand and blind himself to the truth about the woman he loves. Although the story is not science fiction, its exploration of physics is as rigorous as that found in the best sf. Here you will find no triumphant warriors, no powerful and beautiful protagonists, no monsters from beyond the dark cold void or madmen bent on conquest.
Tem's characters are mothers and siblings, orphans and lonely seniors. Her stories are often about family, and always about relationships. Even though Kelly is the only character in "Iced in," the bitter truth that lies at the story's heart is that she is doomed by her failure to maintain relationships. Melanie Tem's stories are often haunted by ghosts and monsters, ghosts and monsters revealed as all too human. In Singularity, she explores the love and terror that lie deep within all of us.
https://www.amazon.com/Singularity-Other-Stories-Melanie-Tem-ebook/dp/B07B4SMWQP/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1549812947&sr=8-1&keywords=melanie+tem
Lucy A. Snyderhas an excellent new collection out called Garden of Eldritch Delights.
Master short story author Lucy A. Snyder is back with a dozen chilling, thought-provoking tales of Lovecraftian horror, dark science fiction, and weird fantasy. Her previous two collections received Bram Stoker Awards and this one offers the same high-caliber, trope-twisting prose. Snyder effortlessly creates memorable monsters, richly imagined worlds and diverse, unforgettable characters.
Open this book and you’ll find a garden of stories as dark and heady as black roses that will delight fans of complex, intelligent speculative fiction.
https://www.amazon.com/Garden-Eldritch-Delights-Lucy-Snyder-ebook/dp/B07HHF34TD/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1549812810&sr=8-1&keywords=lucy+a+snyder
Lee Murray’s latest novel, Into the Ashes, is a fantastic dark fantasy/adventure tale. Coming soon from Severed Press.
No longer content to rumble in anger, the great mountain warriors of New Zealand’s central plateau, the Kāhui Tupua, are preparing again for battle. At least, that’s how the Māori elders tell it. The nation’s leaders scoff at the danger. That is; until the ground opens and all hell breaks loose. The armed forces are hastily deployed; NZDF Sergeant Taine McKenna and his section are tasked with evacuating civilians and tourists from Tongariro National Park. It is too little, too late. With earthquakes coming thick and fast and the mountains spewing rock and ash, McKenna and his men are cut off. Their only hope of rescuing the stranded civilians is to find another route out, but a busload of prison evacuees has other ideas. And, deep beneath the earth’s crust, other forces are stirring.
You can check out previous books in the series here: https://www.amazon.com/Lee-Murray/e/B0068FHSC4/ref=sr_tc_2_0?qid=1549831943&sr=1-2-ent

Gaby Triana recently released City of Spells, the latest in her popular Haunted Florida series.
When a mysterious old gentleman enters Queylin Sanchez's trendy new age shop, she hopes he'll buy incense, sage, maybe a nice rose quartz pendulum for his wife. Instead, the man enlists her help getting rid of La Dama de Blanco, a ghostly woman in bloody white dress who's been haunting his 100-year-old Palmetto Bay estate.
But Queylin's rituals and spells uncover terrifying secrets hidden in the walls of the estate when she realizes La Dama de Blanco is only the beginning of the haunted home's evil legacy.
https://www.amazon.com/City-Spells-Haunted-Florida-Book-ebook/dp/B07HFKCY3J/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1549813633&sr=1-1&keywords=gaby+triana
Tori Eldridge’s kick-ass novel The Ninja Daughter in available for preorder.
The Ninja Daughter is an action-packed thriller about a Chinese-Norwegian modern-day ninja with a Joy Luck Club family issues who fights the Los Angeles Ukrainian mob, sex traffickers, and her own family to save two desperate women and an innocent child from a violent land-grab scheme.
After her sister is raped and murdered, Lily Wong dedicates her life and ninja skills to the protection of women. But her mission is complicated. Not only does she live above the Chinese restaurant owned by her Norwegian father and inspired by the recipes of her Chinese mother, but she has to hide her true self from her Hong Kong tiger mom is already disappointed at her less than feminine ways, and who would be horrified if she knew what she had become.
But when a woman and her son she escorted safely to an abused women’s shelter return home and are kidnapped, Lily is forced to not only confront her family and her past, but team up with a mysterious―and very lethal―stranger to rescue them.
https://www.amazon.com/Ninja-Daughter-Lily-Wong/dp/1947993690/ref=sr_1_7?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1549816642&sr=1-7&keywords=tori+eldridge
J.H. Moncrieff’s creature-feature novel Return to Dylatov Pass is recently out from Severed Press.
In 1959, nine Russian students set off on a skiing expedition in the Ural Mountains. Their mutilated bodies were discovered weeks later. Their bizarre and unexplained deaths are one of the most enduring true mysteries of our time.
Nearly sixty years later, podcast host Nat McPherson ventures into the same mountains with her team, determined to finally solve the mystery of the Dyatlov Pass incident. Her plans are thwarted on the first night, when two trackers from her group are brutally slaughtered.
The team’s guide, a superstitious man from a neighboring village, blames the killings on yetis, but no one believes him. As members of Nat’s team die one by one, she must figure out if there’s a murderer in their midst—or something even worse—before history repeats itself and her group becomes another casualty of the infamous Dead Mountain.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07BF48WP5/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_tkin_p1_i3
P.D. Cacek’s novel Second Lives is available for preorder from Flame Tree Press.
When four patients unexpectedly wake after being declared dead, their families are ecstatic and the word “miracle” begins to be whispered throughout the hospital. But the jubilation is short lived when the patients don’t respond to their names and insist they are different people. It is suggested all four are suffering from fugue states until one of the doctors recognizes a name and verifies that he not only knew the girl but was there when she died in 1992. It soon becomes obvious that the bodies of the four patients are now inhabited by the souls of people long dead.
https://www.amazon.com/Second-Lives-Fiction-Without-Frontiers/dp/1787581578/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1549813947&sr=1-1&keywords=pd+cacek+second+lives
Autumn Christian’s new novel Girl Like a Bomb is available for preorder from Clash Books.
Autumn Christian's third novel is a dark journey of self-discovery. An existential labyrinth of love, sex, and self-actualization where the only way out is through.
When high schooler Beverly Sykes finally has sex, her whole life changes. She feels an explosion inside of her that feels like her DNA is being rearranged, and she discovers a strange power within. After chasing that transcendent feeling and fucking her way through the good, the bad, and the dangerous boys and girls that cross her path, Beverly notices that all of her ex-lovers are undergoing drastic changes. She witnesses them transcending their former flawed selves, becoming self-actualized and strong. Beverly gives herself over and over to others, but can she become who she is supposed to be, with the gift and curse that nature gave to her?
https://www.amazon.com/Girl-Like-Bomb-Autumn-Christian/dp/1944866191/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1549814472&sr=1-1&keywords=girl+like+a+bomb
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Sun's Getting Low

I’m currently in Virginia, visiting a childhood friend of my wife’s. The woman’s husband died unexpectedly in September, leaving her with three young children, and we’ve come to do what we can to help her get through the holidays. My wife and her friend are about the same age, and they both married divorced men a decade-and-a-half older than they are. And the friend’s husband and I share the same birthday, just one year apart. My two daughters are adults, and my current wife and I have no children together, so the parallels end there. I can’t imagine what my wife’s friend is going through, and I know that while she appreciates us being here, we can’t really do anything to relieve her pain or shorten grieving. So given the situation, you can understand why mortality is on my mind.
I read on Facebook recently of the death of author Paul Dale Anderson. He was in his seventies and suffering from advanced cancer, so his death wasn’t entirely unexpected, but as I read the various tributes to him that people had posted, I began thinking about what it means to have a literary career – and what, if anything, becomes of that career after we die.


If you’re not familiar with Paul or his work, you can check out his website here: http://www.pauldaleanderson.net/
I saw Paul at a couple conventions over the years, maybe was on a panel or two with him. I can’t remember. I know we didn’t spend much, if any, time in private conversation, so I can’t claim that he was an acquaintance, let alone a friend. I first became aware of Paul through an article he wrote for Mystery Scene magazine in 1989 or thereabout. In those pre-internet days there were no author websites or social media accounts to follow, so if you were an aspiring writer like me, you had to read essays by and interviews with authors in print media. Mystery Scene, as you might guess from the title, covered the mystery field (and still does to this day), but back then it also covered the horror genre, although to a lesser extent. Paul’s article dealt with how he found his authorial voice. He’d published a supernatural horror novel under a pseudonym – I can’t recall the book’s title – but he’d recently taken a turn toward writing about human monsters, novels that were as much psychological thrillers as horror. The first book in this new direction was Claw Hammer, and it would eventually become the first volume in his Instruments of Death series.


After finishing the article, I decided to check out Paul’s work, so I bought Claw Hammer and its follow-up, Daddy’s Home. I started to read Claw Hammer, but I couldn’t get into it, so I put it aside, figuring that I’d give it another try someday. I didn’t even start Daddy’s Home. I never got around to reading either book, and eventually they went off to a used bookstore during one of my I-have-too-many-goddamned-books-in-my-house purges. I didn’t hear anything about Paul for years. It wasn’t until we were at a con together that I learned he was still writing and publishing with the small press. I was glad to discover he was still in the game, but I was a bit sad the new direction he’d taken with Claw Hammer hadn’t resulted in a bigger career for him. When I learned of his death, I bought the ebook version of the re-release of Claw Hammer from Crossroad Press and started reading it. So far, it’s a decent piece of entertainment, and I’m enjoying it.


There’s a large used bookstore in the town where I’m currently staying, and last week I decided to check it out. They have a huge horror section, but they didn’t have any of Paul’s books. They did have a few of mine, and I of course dutifully signed them. Perusing the books, I was struck by how many of their authors I’d gotten to know in real life over the years, and how many of them had died since I began writing in the early eighties. And then it occurred to me that the shelves were a graveyard for dead fiction, with the books themselves serving as their stories’ headstones.


Occasionally in interviews, I’m asked how I see my legacy as a writer. Sometimes I say I hope that I’ll have contributed to the genre I love in some small way. If I’m in a snarky mood, I say I don’t expect to have a legacy. Once I’m gone, I don’t expect anyone to remember me or my work. Both answers are true. Any artist would love for his or her work to outlive them, for people to continue enjoying it long after they’re gone, for it to maybe change the art form itself. But the used bookstore tells a different story. So many of those books have been forgotten – if they ever made any impact at all – and they’ll remain on the shelves, unbought, until eventually they fall away to dust. And yes, I know digital versions of books can theoretically exist forever, but that doesn’t mean anyone will actually read the damn things. The files may be archived somewhere and never accessed again.
So for the vast majority of writers, the best we can hope for is that a few people will read and enjoy our work when it comes out, and we might get a few dollars to pay a couple bills as well. Our work is as temporary as that of an ice sculptor. When you’re younger, it’s easier to ignore the impermanence of things. Young writers are focused on honing their craft, finding their voice, reaching an audience, on making it. But when you’ve been writing and publishing for almost forty years – as I have – you are quite aware that time is passing at hyperspeed, and there aren’t as many years ahead of you as there are behind. You’ve probably settled into a career, the same way you’ve settled into the rest of your life, and you know it’s far too late to be a wunderkind, that you’ve likely had whatever impact you’re going to have on the field, that you’re not going to be getting larger advances, and you damn sure won’t become a bestseller. Not only is it too late to become an overnight sensation, it’s too late to become a sensation of any kind. If you think too much about these kinds of things, it can make it damn difficult to start a new project. After all, you already know the end result of writing a book: a moldering collection of yellowed pages resting on a used bookstore shelf somewhere, forgotten. Not exactly a motivating image, huh?
I used to wonder why so many writers stopped producing work as they grew older. I thought maybe they’d simply lost the energy and drive – the hunger – of youth. Or maybe they’d decided to make more time in their lives for family, friends, and other interests. All of this might be true, but I also suspect that many writers realize that they’ve taken their writing as far as they can, and once they know this (or at least think they do) it becomes hard to keep going. What’s the point of attempting to continue a journey when you know no matter what you do or how hard you try, you’re unable to take another step forward, and may, in fact, start taking steps backward?
Pretty fucking depressing, right?
But as much as I’m tempted to quit writing some days, I’m a stubborn sonofabitch (it’s a Waggoner family trait), so what can I – or you – do when the mid-to-late career blues start getting you down?
1. Get (or stay) involved. Share what you know. Volunteer.
Paul Dale Anderson didn’t just write. He was an active member of HWA, SFWA, the Authors Guild, the International Thriller Writers Association, and Mystery Writers of America at different points in his career. He taught creative writing at the University of Illinois and for Writers Digest School. He also attended conventions and served on panels. And from the Facebook tributes I’ve seen, Paul mentored younger writers as well. Not everyone is a joiner, of course, but as with many things in life, it feels good to be part of something larger than yourself. It helps create meaning in our lives, and meaning is what keeps us going.
I have a full-time teaching gig at a community college. When I retire (ten years from now, but who’s counting?) I’ll find other ways to work with writers. Maybe I’ll volunteer as a writing tutor or start teaching my own fiction-writing classes online. Maybe I’ll become more active in the writers’ organizations I belong to. I already mentor writers through HWA’s mentorship program as well as informally. I plan to keep this up and hopefully expand those efforts. You don’t have to do a ton of things, and you don’t have to wait until retirement to get started. Just get involved somehow.
2. Try something new. Challenge yourself.
I majored in theater education for my undergrad degree. I wrote a couple plays back then, but I hadn’t written any since. The last several years I’ve felt an itch to write a play again, and I finished a short one-act horror play called The Chaos Room a few weeks ago. I’m not sure what to do with it yet, but hopefully I’ll figure out something. But even if The Chaos Room is never staged, the challenge of writing it – the fun – recharged my creative batteries. Write a poem, an essay, an article, a song. Write for kids, write erotica, write comedy, write whatever. Try experimenting with different narrative techniques. Collaborate with someone.
3. Make a BIG change.
If you’re a fiction writer, try focusing on nonfiction for a while. If you write horror, try writing a thriller, a romance, a mystery, or tackling that dream project you haven’t gotten around to yet. Maybe you’ll end up with a whole new career. John Jakes and Dean Koontz wrote SF before going on to write historical fiction and hybrid horror/suspense respectively. Thomas F. Monteleone also wrote SF before moving on to horror/dark fantasy. Lawrence Block started out writing soft-core porn and lurid pulp crime novels before creating the various mystery series he’s famous for. It’s okay to change lanes when you’re an artist. Reinventing ourselves from time to time can keep us creatively young, if not literally so.
In the end, the doing of our art, the now of it, has to be enough, and the connections we make with others through our art – with audiences, peers, students and mentees – have to be enough. What we learn, how we grow by making our art and walking in the world as artists has to be enough. Because those are the things that we have control over. The only ones that are (more or less) guaranteed to be achievable. And if you want to get more abstract, know that by writing and sharing your work, you’re participating, even if only in a small way, in the great conversation that is Art. Know that your actions in the writing community – however you define that community – can create ripples that spread out into the world, affecting many others. And your words will create echoes, which in turn will inspire more voices to speak. In this way our words can, in a sense, be eternal.
Author Lawrence C. Connelly once told me that the world will decide how we’ll be remembered. We all create a legacy, whether we know it or not, but that legacy is not ours to control, at least not entirely. So focus on today’s writing, plan for tomorrow’s, and let Time and the World sort out the rest.
DEPARTMENT OF SHAMELESS SELF-PROMOTION
Coming Soon
I’ve got a couple books up for pre-order.
My next horror novel for Flame Tree Press, They Kill, is due out in July.
What are you willing to do, what are you willing to become, to save someone you love? Sierra Sowell’s dead brother Jeffrey is resurrected by a mysterious man known only as Corliss. Corliss also transforms four people in Sierra’s life into inhuman monsters determined to kill her. Sierra and Jeffrey’s boyfriend Marc work to discover the reason for her brother’s return to life while struggling to survive attacks by this monstrous quartet. Corliss gives Sierra a chance to make Jeffrey’s resurrection permanent – if she makes a dreadful bargain. Can she do what it will take to save her brother, no matter how much blood is shed along the way?
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/They-Kill-Fiction-Without-Frontiers/dp/1787582558/ref=sr_1_1_twi_pap_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1545154608&sr=1-1&keywords=tim+waggoner
My latest tie-in novel, Supernatural: Children of Anubis, is due out in April.
Sam and Dean travel to Indiana, to investigate a murder that could be the work of a werewolf. But they soon discover that werewolves aren't the only things going bump in the night. The town is also home to a pack of jakkals who worship the god Anubis: carrion-eating scavengers who hate werewolves. With the help of Garth, the Winchester brothers must stop the werewolf-jakkal turf war before it engulfs the town - and before the god Anubis is awakened...
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Supernatural-Children-Anubis-Tim-Waggoner/dp/1785653261/ref=tmm_mmp_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1545154711&sr=1-2
I’ll also have a new creature-feature novel called Blood Islandcoming from Severed Press in 2019, but I don’t have an official release date yet. In the meantime, here’s a synopsis:
The Mass, an island-sized creature formed entirely of mutated blood cells, has drifted across the world’s oceans for millions of years. It uses sharks – the most efficient predators the planet has ever produced – as extensions of itself to gather food. For the most part, the Mass and its Hunters have avoided contact with the human race, but now it’s entered the waters off Bridgewater, Texas, where a film crew is busy shooting a low-budget horror film called Devourer of the Deep. The Mass is about to discover something called human imagination, and the humans are about to learn that battling a monster in real life is a little harder than fighting one on screen.
Here's a link to my author page over at Severed Press in case you want to keep an eye out for Blood Island – or buy my previous Severed Press novel The Teeth of the Sea. Blood Island isn’t a sequel to The Teeth of the Sea, but they take place in the same world and there’s a bit of overlap: http://www.severedpress.com/authors/tim-waggoner/
Short Stuff
I have several short stories and an article that have appeared in anthologies lately.
“The Gray Room” appears in Ashes and Entropy from Nightscape Press: https://www.amazon.com/Ashes-Entropy-Laird-Barron-ebook/dp/B07H9B25LF/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1545155154&sr=1-1&keywords=ashes+and+entropy
“In the End There is a Drain” appears in Tails of Terror: Stories of Cat Horror from Golden Goblin Press: https://www.goldengoblinpress.com/store/#!/Tails-of-Terror-Digital-Format/p/116311665/category=14026709
“Voices Like Barbed Wire” appears in Tales From the Lake Vol. 5 from Crystal Lake Publishing: https://www.amazon.com/Tales-Lake-Vol-5-Horror-Anthology/dp/1644679671/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1545155537&sr=1-1
“The Deep Delight of Blood” appears in Fantastic Tales of Terror: History’s Darkest Secretsalso from Crystal Lake: https://www.amazon.com/Fantastic-Tales-Terror-Historys-Darkest/dp/164467968X/ref=sr_1_1_twi_pap_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1545155651&sr=1-1&keywords=fantastic+tales+of+terror
My article “The Horror Writer’s Ultimate Toolbox” appears in It’s Alive: Bringing Your Nightmares to Life again from Crystal Lake. (Those guys love me!): https://www.amazon.com/Its-Alive-Bringing-Nightmares-Weaver-ebook/dp/B07L3XX2QY/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1545155707&sr=1-1&keywords=it%27s+alive+crystal+lake
If you haven’t signed up for my newsletter yet, you can do so here: http://timwaggoner.com/contact.htm
Until next time, keep writing!

You Never Forget Your First

 This March will mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of my first professional fiction sale. My story “Mr. Punch” appeared in the anthology Young Blood, edited by Mike Baker, and published by Zebra Books in 1994. Before that, I’d placed a half dozen stories in small-press magazines, but this sale was the biggie, the one that by the standards of both the Horror Writers Association and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America counted as my first pro sale. I’ve published over 40 novels and 150 stories since then – with more to come, the dark lords willing – but whenever I’m asked in an interview which of the stories I’ve written is my favorite, I always say “Mr. Punch,” and while there are many reasons why that tale is so near and dear to my shriveled black heart, the fact that it was my first pro sale is a big one.
I was twenty-nine when I wrote “Mr. Punch.” I’d first started writing seriously with an aim toward professional publication when I was eighteen, and the fact that ten years passed before I wrote “Mr. Punch” should tell you something about a writer’s learning curve (or at least mine). I’d written a ton of stories and maybe a half dozen novels, and only a few of the stories had seen print at that point, and those in small-press markets. During this time, I didn’t write horror exclusively. I wrote fantasy primarily, and humorous fantasy at that. I wanted to be the next Piers Anthony, author of the long-running Xanth series. But horror was my first love – I’d been a horror fan since I was a child – and I explored the genre in my short fiction now and then. I’d begun to think that maybe I should focus on my horror more, but it wasn’t until I read Ramsey Campbell’s excellent collection Alone With the Horrorsthat I felt I was beginning to get an understanding of how to write a really good horror story.
I’d been trying to develop a style of fiction that was mine and no one else’s – trying to find my voice, in other words – for several years by that point. Now I was ready to let go and follow my artistic instincts wherever they might lead me. My future ex-wife and I had recently gone to a small renaissance fair held on the Ohio State University campus, and we’d watched a Punch and Judy show, the first one I’d ever seen in real life. An idea popped into my head: what if there was a serial killer who thought he was Punch? I liked the idea, so I did some research into the history of Punch and Judy shows and read various scripts for them. One of the versions of Punch and Judy ended with the Devil coming for Punch, but Punch kills the Devil and then says, “Now we can all do what we please!” I was fascinated with the idea of Punch being pursued by the Devil, and so I began writing.
The writing went well at first. Better than well – it was the best I’d ever done. I could feel it. And that’s when I choked. I became afraid that I wouldn’t be able to pull off this story, that if I kept writing, I’d ruin it. So I stopped about three quarters of the way through. I didn’t stop for long, though. I told myself to suck it up and get back in there and finish the goddamned story. (Quick aside: I’ve since discovered that other writers have had the same experience when they wrote their first professionally published stories. It makes me wonder how common this experience is for writers, and how many of them never find the courage to return to their stories.)  
I was in a writers’ group at the time with professional writers Dennis L. McKiernan and Lois McMaster Bujold, and I also regularly exchanged stories for critique with a friend from college. I mailed a copy of my story to my friend (email wasn’t a standard thing in those days), and I read my story to my critique group. Lois had moved to Minneapolis by then, but Dennis was still there, as well as a number of would-be writers, of whom I was one. The story ended with a strangely surreal twist that felt right when I originally wrote it, but which I’d since come to doubt. When I finished reading the story, I immediately said, “Okay, what’s wrong with it?” And everyone said, “The ending.” They weren’t sure what to make of it and suggested I try rewriting. I went home and did just that, writing a new, more realistic ending that sucked bigtime. I knew how bad it was, so I said to hell with it. I was going to trust my instincts and go with my original ending, even if no one else understood it. Hell, I didn’t understand it. I just knew it was right.
I’d read a submission call – probably on the old computer network GEnie, an early precursor to social media sites like Facebook, but I don’t remember for sure – for a horror anthology called Young Blood. The premise of the anthology was that all the stories in it had to have been written by the authors before their thirtieth birthday. The name authors who would appear in the book – Poe, Howard, Block, Campbell and King – had been under thirty when they’d written their tales, but the rest of the anthology would feature new young writers. I’d figured this was a great market to try. I was under thirty, and the age limit would cut down on the competition, right? I’d already written and submitted a piece of shit called “Yggradsil,” about a murderous tree, which the editor Mike Baker had rightly rejected. I decided to try “Mr. Punch” on the editor, printed out a fresh copy, popped it in an envelope, and headed to the post office. Baker accepted this story, and as you might imagine, I was thrilled. And I felt more than a little smug that my story had succeeded with its original ending. I felt smug again – and more than a bit sad – when not long after this my friend from college sent my manuscript back to me with red ink on every page and told me my ending was terrible and that I had to change it. That was the last time I sent him a story to critique, and when Dennis moved to Tucson soon after, our writers group fell apart, and I’ve never used one since.
When Young Blood came out, I didn’t want to wait for my contributor’s copies to arrive, so my wife and I went to a Little Professor bookshop to buy a copy. I still remember seeing the book on the stand, remember what it felt like to touch it, what the damn thing smelled like. I opened the book and looked at the table of contents to see the title of my story and my name listed alongside legends like Poe, Howard, Block, Campbell and King, and alongside names I recognized from small-press magazines or from the message boards on GEnie. There were a lot of names I didn’t recognize, though, and that was cool, too. I couldn’t stop grinning as we walked up to the counter and paid for the book. I still remember the little brown paper bag the clerk slipped the book into, and I remember the feel of that bag, with the weight of the book in it, as I carried it outside to the car. I’d done it. I could now legitimately call myself a professional writer.
“Young Blood” got mentioned in several reviews of the book, and I was pleasantly shocked when Ellen Datlow chose it as one of her Honorable Mentions in the next edition of The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. Ellen has chosen a number of my stories for honorable mention in the years since, but none was as special as that first time.
My first pro sale wasn’t an entirely positive experience. Mike Baker never paid any of the contributors, a fact I kept to myself when I listed “Mr. Punch” as one of my three qualifying sales to apply for full membership in both HWA and SFWA. I decided to forget about the money and move on, but years later I met another contributor at a World Fantasy Convention who was still upset at never having been paid for his story. There was supposed to be a Young Blood 2, but for whatever reasons it never happened. Mike Baker died before I could meet him. I have a vague memory that some disease took him young, but I’m not sure that’s how it happened.
When I look at the table of contents now, it’s a bittersweet feeling. Young Blood was supposed to make a statement: Here’s the future of horror! But it didn’t really have that kind of impact. It came and went without making much of a splash, as I recall. Some of the authors are still writing a quarter of a century later. Pamela Briggs writes the extremely popular Mercy Thompson urban fantasies. Barb Hendee (who with her husband J.C. published some of my first stories in their small-press magazine Figment) has published a number of fantasy novels, some in collaboration with J.C., some solo. J.F. Gonzalez went on to publish many horror novels – including the classic Survivor – but tragically, he died in 2014, a victim of cancer. Killercon has recently established the Splatterpunk Awards for extreme horror, including the J.F. Gonzalez Lifetime Achievement Award, and author Brian Keene is working hard to keep his legacy alive. Gordon Van Gelder went on to edit The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and is now its owner and publisher. Brian Everson has gone on to write many well-regarded literary novels of dark and speculative fiction. Christa Faust went on to write crime and media tie-in novels, and while Poppy Z. Brite doesn’t write much these days, her work is still considered vital in the genre and continues to be reprinted and read to this day. And then, of course, there’s me.
As for the rest of the authors . . . I don’t know. I haven’t seen most of their names recently, and some I’ve never seen except in Young Blood’s TOC. Are they still writing? Are they creating in other literary genres? Did their lives take them in different directions? Have any others passed away in the last twenty-five years? I could Google them, and maybe someday I will. But maybe I won’t. Maybe I’m afraid of what I’ll discover. Or maybe I’m afraid I won’t discover anything about them at all.
I’ve continued to write the kind of bizarre, surreal horror that I first explored in “Mr. Punch,” and although I’ve written urban fantasies and media tie-ins, it’s this kind of horror that I think of as Tim Waggoner Stories. “Mr. Punch” allowed me to find my voice and its publication confirmed that I had what it takes to be a professional writer. And for that, I owe a great debt to Mike Baker.
Below is the table of contents for Young Blood. There are still used copies of the book floating around out there somewhere if you’re inclined to read it. If you’d like to read “Mr. Punch,” it appears in my first short fiction collection All Too Surreal, which you can currently purchase in ebook form from Crossroad Press: https://www.amazon.com/All-Too-Surreal-Tim-Waggoner-ebook/dp/B00UCGXOXM/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1537661961&sr=8-1&keywords=tim+waggoner+all+too+surreal
You can also find “Mr. Punch” in the collection Cemetery Dance Select: Tim Waggoner, along with story notes for each selection: https://www.amazon.com/Cemetery-Dance-Select-Tim-Waggoner-ebook/dp/B071Y8929X/ref=sr_1_12?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1504388605&sr=1-12&keywords=tim+waggoner
Young BloodMike Baker (Zebra 0-8217-4498-4, Mar ’94 [Feb ’94], $4.50, 349pp, pb)
Introduction · Mike BakerMs. Found in a Bottle · Edgar Allan PoePigeons from Hell · Robert E. HowardThe Skull of the Marquis de Sade · Robert BlochCold Print · Ramsey CampbellThe Mangler · Stephen KingRattle Rumble · Michael Scott BrickerLittle Black Bags · Clark PerryAn Eye for an Eye, A Tooth for a Tooth · Lawrence SchimelThe Weepin’ Tree · Tia TravisHysterical · Pamela BriggsSpooge Monkeys · Wayne EdwardsBringing Home a Stranger · Barb HendeeAnything for You · Lorelei ShannonFixing Mr. Foucher’s Fence · Todd MecklemMr. Punch · Tim WaggonerPlaying the Game · J. F. GonzalezPieces of Prison · Jak Koke & Jonathan BondPaper Animals · Christopher A. HallSomething More · Gordon Van GelderJudas Window · M. Francis HamillStorm Warning · James C. BassettHébé Kills Jerry · Brian EvensonTo a Mr. R. J. Guthrie, Edinburgh · Adam Corbin FuscoCrawlspace · H. Andrew LynchArmadillo Village · Terry CampbellPayday · Sean DoolittleMomentos of an Only Child · Dominick CancillaDepths · Marc PaolettiSaved · Poppy Z. Brite & Christa Faust
DEPARTMENT OF SHAMELESS SELF-PROMOTION
The Mouth of the Dark
My most recent horror novel is The Mouth of the Dark from Flame Tree Press, and it’s been getting some great reviews:
“Waggoner is imaginative and original, and The Mouth of the Darktakes readers to an entirely new world of monstrosities. It’s easily one of the most fantastic books I’ve read this year.” – The Ghastly Grimoire
“An eclectic assembly of everything macabre and terrifying, The Mouth of the Dark is a riveting read you’ll keep reading long after the sun has gone down.” – Splattergeist
Here’s a synopsis:
Jayce's 20-year-old daughter, Emory, is missing, lost in a dark, dangerous realm called Shadow that exists alongside our own reality. An enigmatic woman named Nicola guides Jayce through this bizarre world, and together they search for Emory, facing deadly dog-eaters, crazed killers, homicidal sex toys, and — worst of all — a monstrous being known as the Harvest Man. But no matter what Shadow throws at him, Jayce won’t stop. He'll do whatever it takes to find his daughter, even if it means becoming a worse monster than the things that are trying to stop him.
The Mouth of the Darkis available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats. https://www.amazon.com/Mouth-Dark-Fiction-without-Frontiers/dp/1787580113/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1535477069&sr=1-3&keywords=tim+waggoner
Dark and Distant Voices
My latest collection Dark and Distant Voices is available from Nightscape Press.
"Hell is other people," Jean-Paul Sartre tells us. "Especially the one we see in the mirror," implicitly says Tim Waggoner. Both give us the theme of Waggoner's splendid Dark and Distant Voices. Our children we don't quite recognize, colleagues not all that collegial, ghosts who silently speak the Truth ... They're all here and more in Waggoner's brilliant story collection. – Mort Castle, author of Strangers
"This is every card in the horror deck, played by someone who knows the game better than most of us ever will." – Stephen Graham Jones, author of Mongrels
They come to you at night.
The voices.
Spinning tales of blasphemous wonder, terrible wisdom, and unspeakable truth.
You try to shut them out, but you can’t.
For the voices you thought were coming from so far away come from inside you.
And they won’t stop screaming.
Ever.
Nineteen stories of the bizarre and fantastic from the mind of Bram Stoker Award-winning author Tim Waggoner, “horror fiction’s leading surrealist” (Cemetery Dance Magazine).
https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Distant-Voices-Story-Collection-ebook/dp/B07C1CCWLM/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1524620933&sr=1-1&keywords=tim+waggoner
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Website: www.timwaggoner.com

On Dark Fantasy

My latest horror novel, The Mouth of the Dark, is out Sept. 6th from Flame Tree Press. Advance reviews have been good, but I’ve been surprised by how many readers refer to the book as a combination of horror and dark fantasy, or simply as dark fantasy. The term dark fantasy has been used in a lot of different ways over the years. Michael Moorcock’s Elric novels were considered dark fantasy, although that subgenre is referred to as grimdark these days. Charles L. Grant called his brand of quiet horror dark fantasy, and Thomas F. Monteleone uses horror/dark fantasy as a genre term. Dark fantasy was what urban fantasy was called before a separate designation was created for it, and when the horror boom of the 1980’s became the horror implosion of the 1990’s, writers began calling their fiction anything but horror to avoid using the dreaded H word: dark suspense, dark thrillers, supernatural thrillers and – you guessed it – dark fantasy. So dark fantasy has never seemed to me to be a term that referred to one identifiable genre. But what pleasantly surprises me about seeing the term applied to The Mouth of the Darkis that when I first started writing seriously thirty years ago, my goal was to create a fusion of horror and fantasy. It was, not to be too precious about it, my artistic vision.

I’d loved horror as a kid, but when I hit my teens, I started reading fantasy novels and comics. Horror was still part of my creative diet, but no more important to me than fantasy and science fiction. Comics were the first medium that showed me how different genres could be combined to make something new. One month Spider-Man might foil a mob boss, the next he might battle an alien, and the next fight a vampire. When I started writing fiction with a goal of making a career out of it, I wrote novels and short stories, trying my hand at different genres. By this point, I’d become sick of reading quest fantasy and starting reading what was called contemporary fantasy at the time. Charles de Lint and Robert Holdstock were two of my favorite writers of contemporary fantasy, and I especially liked how they used elements of horror in their work. But I was also frustrated by how the fantasy and horror weren’t completely blended and kept separate from the real world. I thought fantasy should allow writers’ imaginations to run wild, but most fantasy writers were very conservative in terms of the genre elements they used. The same for horror writers. The supernatural should’ve given them the opportunity to create highly imaginative stories, but their tales were just as conservative as those of fantasy authors. It seemed to me that these writers were missing out on an opportunity, and I began thinking of ways to create a true fusion of horror and fantasy.
I didn’t focus on this idea overmuch in my writing, though. I kept writing more traditional fantasy novels because I thought they were more marketable, but I had no luck getting them published. From time to time I mulled over my notion of fusing horror and fantasy, but when I finally began thinking about writing a horror novel, the horror boom died, and there seemed to be no point in trying my hand at a horror novel. But there was a strong small-press scene for horror short fiction, so I began writing and submitting those. My writing continued along these two tracks for a while. I kept focusing on fantasy for novels and horror for short fiction. Then I wrote the first story where I felt I had found the horror/fantasy fusion I’d been searching for. “Mr. Punch” became my first professionally published story, appearing in the anthology Young Bloodfrom Zebra Books in 1999. (You can find it in my first short story collection All Too Surreal.) The first novel where I explored this horror/fantasy fusion was The Harmony Society, which came out from Prime Books in 2003. (Dark Regions has since republished it, in case you want to check it out.)  Since then, I’ve written numerous horror/fantasy novels and stories, and I’ve become known for writing such tales. When I refer to myself as a type of writer, I usually say I’m a horror writer just because it’s easiest. Still, seeing the term dark fantasy applied to my work pleases me and makes me think that maybe – just maybe – I’ve reached the goal I set for myself so long ago of taking full advantage of both horror and fantasy in my writing.
So what advice do I have for those of you who would like to try writing this kind of dark fantasy?
1. Don’t limit yourself to genre expectations.
Fantasy implies otherworldly forces – magic – and other worlds. There’s nothing in the term that says your story has to be set in a version of medieval England and follow the pattern of a quest adventure. Horrorimplies an emotional reaction to something awful that’s beyond the reality we know. This doesn’t have to be confined to one unnatural element invading the normal world – a ghost, a vampire, a serial killer, etc. Try to combine the core of both concepts – otherworldly/unnatural forces and imaginary worlds. These worlds might be separate from ours, overlap ours, exist as hidden parts of our world, etc.
2. Use nightmare images and logic.
Nightmares are individual to each of us, and they contain images and events that are often different from the usual tropes of horror and fantasy. Old, worn-out tropes have no power to affect readers, but images drawn from your nightmares – or your darkest daydreams – can be more original, and in their originality lies their power. The way events proceed in nightmares can make us feel out of control because we can no longer tell what’s real and what isn’t. We can’t trust our own senses and minds. Try to develop story situations that will create this state for your characters, and in turn, for your readers. 
3. Make the inner world outer.
Characters’ psychology – their fears, desires, obsessions – can be reflected in the unnatural presences or environment they contend with. For example, in my Bram Stoker Award-winning novella The Winter Box a married couple whose relationship is rocky is haunted by the ghosts of their dead love for each other, and the couple experiences nightmarish scenarios based on their shared past. In short, make your characters’ nightmares – their interesting, original nightmares – become real for them.
4. Look to the real world for inspiration.
Every day I see strange things in the world around me that seem to hint at a sinister, hidden aspect to existence. I know this is just my imagination at work (at least, I hope it is!), but I use these odd little observations in my fiction all the time. For example, I once followed a Kia Soul whose owner changed the logo on the car to read SOULLESS. The vehicle had a personalized license plate that read CUTTER, and the driver ended up in the parking lot of a restaurant called The Chop House. I haven’t used this in a story yet (so don’t steal it!), but if and when I do, I’ll ask myself what larger weirdness could that driver be connected to? What hidden part of our world – or perhaps another world – could he or she be part of?


5. Focus on your characters. They're the story.
All the weirdness of dark fantasy is fun, but it's meaningless unless it's shown through the perspective of your characters and has an impact on them. I write with a close point of view to keep the story grounded. The world and events my characters are confronted with may be surreal, but I make my characters very real. It's this balance that I think (at least I hope) makes my dark fantasy effective.
DEPARTMENT OF SHAMELESS SELF-PROMOTION
As I said earlier, my dark fantasy novel The Mouth of the Dark is out in hardcover, trade paperback, ebook, and audiobook, and reviews so far have been overwhelmingly positive. If you want to see how I write dark fantasy, it’s as good an example as anything I’ve ever produced. Check it out!
 Hardcover: https://www.amazon.com/Mouth-Dark-Fiction-Without-Frontiers/dp/178758013X/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1535751538&sr=1-1
Trade Paperback: https://www.amazon.com/Mouth-Dark-Fiction-without-Frontiers/dp/1787580113/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1535751538&sr=1-1
Ebook: https://www.amazon.com/Mouth-Dark-Fiction-Without-Frontiers-ebook/dp/B07GSF5L3D/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1535751538&sr=1-1&keywords=tim+waggoner
Audiobook: (Link to come)

Keep It Brief: Writing Short Stories

Dark and Distant Voices, my fifth short story collection, has just been released. All told, I’ve published over 150 short stories in the thirty-six years since I began writing seriously at the age of eighteen. But when I started writing, I had no special fondness for short stories. I preferred reading novels, and that’s what I wanted to write. But I figured if I wanted to become a professional writer, I should be skilled at writing different types of fiction, so I decided – somewhat grudgingly – to begin working on short stories as well as novels.Short stories didn’t come easily to me then, and after all this time, they still don’t. They make my brain hurt when I write them. My imagination feels cramped and constrained, and it’s an uncomfortable experience. But you know what? The limits of the short story help focus my imagination and keep it controlled. My imagination – like that of so many artists – is a wild thing that wants to run as fast as it can in all directions at once. Short stories keep it from doing that. And the focus I’ve learned from writing short fiction has helped me write more focused scenes in novels. Plus, short fiction allows me to experiment, to try different narrative approaches and explore different themes, both of which sometime find their way into my novel-length work.I think it’s fair to say I’ve learned a few things about writing short fiction over the years, both from doing it myself and teaching others how to do it. What follows is an overview of what I think are the most important considerations when it comes to writing short fiction. Whether you’re a beginning writer or you’ve been doing this for a while, I hope you find something of value below. (And I’m quite aware that there are exceptions for every bit of advice I give. As I tell my students, “The only real rule in writing is that you have to use written language to express ideas. Everything else is simply custom, ways of doing things that in general work most of the time for most readers.”)  Some Basic AdviceLength: As a rule of thumb, short stories tend to be around 1000-5,000 words (4-20 pages). They of course can be shorter or longer, but this is a solidly marketable range, as well as a good range for beginners. It’s long enough to practice the basics but not so long that writers are too intimidated to revise.Keep it Simple: Keep your ambitions in check when learning to write short stories. Avoid massive research or worldbuilding. Elaborate research and worldbuilding can make a story so complicated that you can’t properly tend to the basics of characterization, dialogue, etc.Story Content: Use violence, sex, politics, profanity, religion, etc. when necessary to serve the needs of the story. Don’t try to shock readers with naughty words and sexy scenes or beat them over the head with political or religious messages. The story is what’s most important. But follow market guidelines, too. If a magazine says that it will not publish a story that portrays violence against children, don’t submit that story to that particular market. Editors say beginning writers ignore their guidelines all the time, and it’s a sure way to receive a fast rejection.Short Time Frame: One way to keep a short story under control – as well as to maximize its intensity – is to limit the events to a relatively short amount of time: minutes, hours, maybe a day or two at most.Limit the Number of Characters: Only have two or three main characters, and don’t add too many supporting characters. There’s not a lot of room in a short story (obviously), and because of this, you don’t have the opportunity to fully develop more than a couple characters, and there’s only enough time for readers to become emotionally invested in one or two. If you have too many characters in a story, it makes the story too complex for its length and makes it difficult – if not impossible – for readers to connect emotionally.Limit the Setting: Another way to maintain focus in a short story is to confine the action to one setting. This can be as limited as one room, one house, one street, one town, etc. The fewer settings there are in your story, the fewer times readers’ imaginations will be yanked from one setting and plunked down into another. Such transitions can be jarring for readers, and unless you’re looking to create a such jarring effect, keeping the setting limited works best. Point of View: In general, stick to one character’s point of view in a story. As I said above, too many shifts in a story can be jarring for readers. Readers need to time to attach to a point of view in a story, and while novels have plenty of room for readers to become attached to multiple viewpoints, a short story doesn’t.Simple Story Problem: Stick to one main story problem. Again, novels have room for multiple – and major and minor – story problems. Short stories do not. Stay focused on one story problem, and your story will have more impact on readers.Scenes: In general, try not to have more than two or three scenes in a short story. Again, for the same reason I keep mentioning: short stories don’t have a lot of room.Obstacles: Avoid having too many obstacles (because . . . you guessed it: short stories are short). There’s room for a number of simple obstacles, such as a locked door or a character who momentarily doubts another. There’s less room for major obstacles such as an earthquake or a kaiju attack.Begin Close to the End:One way to keep a story short and focused is to begin telling it as close to the climax as you can. If I was writing a story about a person trying to defuse a bomb, I’d begin with the character already in the process of defusing it, and then I’d work in whatever backstory was needed, probably in the form of short snatches of memory that pass through the person’s mind, distracting him or her while working. Not only is this a great way to keep your story focused, it can maximize story tension as well.CharacterShow Don’t Tell: Don’t tell us your character is an angry person. Show us who the character is through the character’s actions and thoughts, as well as the dialogue of central and supporting characters.Who Cares About Their Hair?:Describe the physical aspects of characters only when necessary. Again, there’s not a lot of room in a short story, and unless it’s important what color eyes a character has or what sort of clothes he or she is wearing, these details may not only be unnecessary, they may slow the pace of the story.Background Check: Limit the amount of background information you present on a character’s past. If it doesn’t matter to the story if a character had a poodle named Bitsy as a child, then don’t mention the damn dog.The Most Important Aspect of Character:A character’s personality – his/her psychological make-up – is the most important thing for a writer to know. How does a character meet obstacles, try to obtain goals, react to people, places, changes, challenges, etc.? What is this character like under stress? If you know all these things, then you’ll know what your character will do in a given situation, which will help you plot your story.Vivid FictionSensory Detail: Beginning writers usually rely on sight and sound in their stories for two reasons. One is that these are the strongest senses humans possess, and therefore we pay the most attention to them. The other reason is because all our visual media is made up of sight and sound, and that’s how we’re used to experiencing stories. No matter how much you read, you’ve probably watched far more movies and TV shows, and played more video games, than you’ve read fiction. So don’t forget to evoke the other senses – taste, smell, and touch – in your fiction. And here’s an important tip. Since taste, smell, and touch are weaker senses for us, we have to be in close proximity (sometimes veryclose) to whatever it is that we smell, taste, or touch. This means that these three senses are far more intimate than sight and sound and have a greater emotional impact on people. They’ll do the same for your readers.Don’t Hide What’s Inside:Visual media can’t get inside a character’s head, but written fiction can and should. To make your fiction more vivid and help readers more deeply identify with and attach to your main character, portray his or her internal world, their thoughts, feelings, physical reactions, memory connections. Also use psychological comparisons: similes and metaphors. When your main character watches the sun rise, does he or she mentally compare it to anything? “Bob thought the sun rose like a giant orange lollipop in the sky.” That’s a terrible simile, but it tells you something about how Bob perceives the world.Anchors Aweigh!: We experience the world as an ever-shifting deluge of information that comes from both outside and inside us. To create a sense of this for your readers, use what I call Anchor Points. Use a blend of different techniques – a sense, a thought, a bit of dialogue – to help anchor a scene in reality for your reader.ConflictConflict = Story: Characters can directly deal with conflict, indirectly deal with it, try to avoid it, try to ignore it, but they are always reactingto it somehow.Conflict = Plot: The character dealing with conflict is what gives the story its shape and forward momentum.ExpositionUse Only as Needed: Don’t let your stories become bogged down with too much unnecessary information. Include only pertinent background information. Try to blend exposition in smoothly, in different places, using varied techniques, and avoid expository lumps. If you’re unsure how to do this, write your first draft without any exposition at all then have someone read it. Ask them to mark places where they have a question about something. Any place they marked is a place where they need more information. Add the least amount of information necessary to answer that question and no more.DialogueStraight to the Point:Dialogue must be purposeful, and each line of dialogue should advance the story. Not just the plot; dialogue should advance our understanding of each character. Keep It Real: Remember how people really speak – in fragments, simple words, slang, and they interrupt each other.He Said, She Said: Keep dialogue attributions simple and to a minimum. Bad: “Look out!” he articulated with great passion. Good: “Look out!” he shouted.Lights, Camera, Action!:Avoid having action and dialogue take place simultaneously. Bad: Good: “Look out!” Bob said. He fired six shots then hid behind a dumpster. He reloaded, stood, and fired again.Format: Start a new paragraph whenever you switch speakers. Use italics and no quotation marks for internal dialogue. EX: “Hi, Sandra!” God, I can’t stand this woman!Event-Centered PlotThe event-centered plot is the classic and most commonly used plot design (but this doesn’t mean it’s always the best).It begins with a character who has a goal.Character takes steps to reach the goal.Character encounters obstacles on the way to reaching the goal.Obstacles force the character to work harder to meet the goal.Obstacles get worse; the character works even harder to overcome them.At the climax of story character either . . .Achieves the goal completely.Fails completely.Succeeds or fails partially.Succeeds or fails in an unexpected way.The classic plot design is useful for novels because it allows for expansion. Keep the goal relatively simple the obstacles fewer in a short story.Character-Centered PlotIf the story is intended to focus on a character, then the purpose is for readers to get to know the character and gain insight into that character. Create the character first, then write detailed character notes. Look for aspects of character’s life that will show character at his or her best and/or worst. Search for problems and crisis points. Use these problems and crisis points to develop a plot that reveals character through story action.Organizational PatternsChronological order:This is an obvious one, and as I said earlier, consider beginning close to the climax. Also, it’s okay to skip stuff that’s not important. You don’t need to show your characters arguing for twenty minutes about where to go out to eat. You can just say: Jill and Sam argued for twenty minutes before finally deciding to get pizza. Or can end a scene and begin the next one with Jill and Sam already at the restaurant eating pizza.Flashbacks: These can be overused. If you’re a beginning writer, I’d suggest keeping them to a bare minimum or leaving them out entirely. But one or two in a short story can be a good way to present exposition in a dramatic way instead of through dry narration.Alternating Timeframes:I’ve used this technique a lot over the years. I’ll have a present-day story that alternates with a past story featuring the same character which provides insight into the present-day story. Sometimes the pattern will be fifty percent Present and fifty percent Past, and sometimes it’s more like seventy-five percent Present and twenty-five percent past. Whatever seems to work best.Snapshot Technique: If your story covers a long time period, you can’t cover every moment. So instead, choose several key moments of the story to dramatize in detail. It’s like pictures in a photo album. The album might be labeled Christmas 2017, but it doesn’t have pictures of every single moment of how you celebrated the holiday. There might be ten photos that, taken together, create a collage that communicates what the overall experience was like. At a guess, you might have anywhere from three to five scenes like that in a short story written in this manner.Point of ViewGenerally Speaking:Stay in the same person/point of view for a short story. Point of view shifts within a scene break the illusion of reality for readers. While it’s of course possible to alternate point of view in a short story, such back-and-forth shifts tend to be jarring in a short piece.Emotional CoreI Heart You: At the heart of a story should lie a strong emotional core. This emotional core is what connects an audience to a story; it’s what makes a story matter to them – and writers neglect this all the time (and often leave it out entirely). For short fiction include an important emotional relationship between two characters and use this relationship as a foundation upon which your story rests. The emotional core doesn’t have to be between two people. In Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea the emotional core is right there in the title. Can the fisherman still do his job – can he still master the sea – or is he too old and weak? The man’s struggle to catch a swordfish and bring it back to land is only the surface action. The story is the emotional core: the man’s physical, mental, and emotional struggle against mortality and Time itself.Hopefully you’ve got a few new tools, or at least a different perspective, on writing short fiction. Now go out there and write short fiction that will knock readers on their asses and make them say, “Damn! Now that was a story!”DEPARTMENT OF SHAMELESS SELF-PROMOTIONMy latest story collection Dark and Distant Voices is now available in both print and eBook editions. Here’s what people have been saying about the book:"Hell is other people," Jean-Paul Sartre tells us. "Especially the one we see in the mirror," implicitly says Tim Waggoner. Both give us the theme of Waggoner's splendid Dark and Distant Voices. Our children we don't quite recognize, colleagues not all that collegial, ghosts who silently speak the Truth ... They're all here and more in Waggoner's brilliant story collection. – Mort Castle"This is every card in the horror deck, played by someone who knows the game better than most of us ever will." – Stephen Graham JonesTim Waggoner's Dark and Distant Voices is quite the short story collection. Bizarre, weird, and utterly intriguing, the stories found here will get under your skin. – Horror Novel ReviewsAnd now that you’re dying to get the book, here’s some Amazon linkage:Kindle: https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Distant-Voices-Story-Collection-ebook/dp/B07C1CCWLM/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1528062901&sr=8-1&keywords=dark+and+distant+voicesTrade Paperback: https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Distant-Voices-Story-Collection-ebook/dp/B07C1CCWLM/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1528062901&sr=8-1

Try, Try Again

Some writers know exactly what sort of stories they want to tell right from the start of their careers. The love romance novels, have read a shit-ton of them, want to write romances, and they never want to write anything else. And if that makes them happy and leads to a fulfilling career – however they define fulfilling – that’s fantastic. But even if you have a strong preference for writing a certain type of thing, I’m here to suggest that maybe you’ll learn more, and perhaps stumble onto a wildly satisfying career writing stuff you never imagined you’d write, if you spread your wings a bit and try something new from time to time.
Writers are bombarded constantly with advice on how to market their writing, and often this advice begins with the “proper” selection of what to write in the first place. Romance sells more than any other type of fiction. So if you want to increase your chances of publication, you should write romance novels. Nonfiction earns writers far more money than fiction or poetry, so if you want to make money, why would you write anything other than nonfiction? Even if you’re determined to write in a genre you love – in my case, usually horror – you’ll be told to write this kind of horror and not that kind of horror if you want to get published and gain a readership.
This advice is awful from an artistic standpoint, but it makes perfect sense from a business point of view. But regardless of whether you’re aesthetically or monetarily-minded (or like most of us, some combination), trying new genres, new techniques, reaching out to new audiences, experimenting with new ways of getting your stories to people not only can add new and different skills to your writer’s toolkit, you might very well discover a type of writing that you not only enjoy, but plays to your strengths in ways you never imagined.
Consider Ramsey Campbell and Robert Bloch. Both started out writing Lovecraftian fiction, but they also wrote other types of stories until both of them evolved into their own type of writer. Hell, I’d argue that they even became their own subgenres of horror and suspense. Their subject matter and styles are so distinct, it’s quite possible to write a Campbellian or Blochian story. John Jakes started out writing science fiction but became famous for his novels using American history as the setting. Lawrence Block started out wanting to write the great American novel, ended up writing softcore porn in the 50’s and 60’s, and eventually became one of the best mystery and suspense writers around. Tom Piccirilli first gained success writing horror, but he tried mystery and westerns, too, before finally coming to write award-winning noir fiction. A colleague at the college where I teach, Rebecca Morean, visited by Writing to Publish class the other day, and she spoke about a friend of hers who was a fiction writer who eventually found success writing narrative nonfiction – a genre he didn’t even know existed before he stumbled into it. If these writers had stuck with what they were doing when they started out – stuck with what they knew – they never would’ve had the chance to grow, and readers would’ve been the poorer for it.
At twelve or thirteen, I wrote and drew my own superhero comic. At eighteen, I began writing fantasy and science fiction (more of the former than the latter), although I did try a few horror short stories. From eighteen to thirty, I tried writing medieval fantasy, humorous fantasy, humorous science fiction, urban fantasy (before it was called that), contemporary fantasy, absurdist fantasy, mystery (serious and humorous), suspense, romance (only one proposal that an editor didn’t buy), young adult, middle grade, nonfiction, humorous nonfiction, articles on writing, and more. None of the books I wrote during this time were accepted for publication. My short stories tended to stick to fantasy and horror, though, and I sold a number of these by the time I was thirty, and I sold a few articles, too.
I started selling short stories regularly to anthologies Marty Greenberg edited. These anthologies were usually themed, and I got to write stories about Merlin, alien pets, elves. Civil War fantasy, and so many more. I could’ve written stories about any of these topics on my own, but it never would have occurred to me to try until I read the submission guidelines and thought, “I wonder if I can write something like that.”
I tried writing media tie-ins, too. I had success with writing for Wizards of the Coast and White Wolf. I started writing horror novels and had success publishing them with Leisure Books. My horror novels grew out of the subject matter, themes, and approaches I explored in my short stories, and that’s how I developed my horror “voice” – by trying stuff. Media tie-ins have led me to write a choose-your-own adventure book, a couple “nonfiction” books set in the Supernatural TV show universe, and three novelizations of films.
Not everything I’ve tried has worked out, though. I’ve tried to get gigs writing Star Trek novels several times over the years, pitching to three different editors. No go. I’ve tried to get gigs writing Star Wars. Same result. I’ve tried writing for the Warhammer game setting, but it didn’t happen. I tried establishing a couple urban fantasies series, but the publisher discontinued the series after only a few books. I’ve tried to get other publishers interested in bringing out the series, but I’ve have had no luck. I’ve tried to get a fantasy series going as well as a supernatural thriller series. Both were failed attempts. For whatever reason, series success eludes me.
I tried to sell proposals for Mack Bolan novels for men’s adventure publisher Gold Eagle, but they were ultimately rejected. I did get a two-book contract with Gold Eagle to write adventures in their spy series Room 51, but the line was canceled before my books could come out. I was allowed to keep the rights to the books – if I changed the details Gold Eagle created – but I haven’t been able to get them published. (Yeah, I know I could self-publish them, but I like the challenge of traditional publishing. Maybe one day I’ll jump into self-publishing, but right now, this blog is pretty much the extent of my self-publishing ambitions.)
Would I have liked all the above failures to have been wild successes? Hell, yeah! But there’s no way for me to know which things I try will work or how well they’ll be received by readers. But if I don’t try, I don’t grow, and trying all kinds of different things increases my chances for successes. So don’t be afraid to write outside your comfort zone or try that story you’ve always wanted to write but have been afraid of. You never know where it will take you, and you may end up becoming the best writer version of yourself possible.
Just for fun, I’ve included the two chapters for my proposed Mack Bolan novel below. For those unfamiliar with the series, Bolan is an ex-cop and ex-soldier known as the Executioner who fights bad guys as a one-man army. I’ve filed the serial numbers off the chapters, meaning I’ve changed some details so it’s now a Curt Macon the Warlord story (because I don’t want to get sued). But before you read it, it’s time for . . .
DEPARTMENT OF SHAMELESS SELF-PROMOTION
My prehistoric monster action thriller THE TEETH OF THE SEA is still available. It’s a good example of me trying something different. I’d never written a monster-chomps-people book, but I enjoyed them as a kid, and I thought it would fun and challenging to try my hand at one. Reviewers seem to think I did a good job, so why not buy a copy and see for yourself?
https://www.amazon.com/Teeth-Sea-Tim-Waggoner-ebook/dp/B07652R299/ref=sr_1_11?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1517533881&sr=1-11&keywords=tim+waggoner
Crossroad Press has been bringing out new e-editions of some of my horror books. If you haven’t read them before (or even if you have), check them out:
EAT THE NIGHT: https://www.amazon.com/Eat-Night-Tim-Waggoner-ebook/dp/B078R1MWB9/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1517533959&sr=1-3&keywords=tim+waggoner
BROKEN SHADOWS: https://www.amazon.com/Broken-Shadows-Tim-Waggoner-ebook/dp/B078WYL6H3/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1517533959&sr=1-2&keywords=tim+waggoner
THE LAST MILE: https://www.amazon.com/Last-Mile-Tim-...
And now, without further ado . . .
DEATH GAMESBY TIM WAGGONER
CHAPTER ONE On a pleasant autumn Saturday at precisely 12:37 pm, Death came to Grigsby, Ohio.Ironhorse Park was located on the south side of town, a ten-acre stretch of land surrounded by upper-class suburban neighborhoods where dentists, lawyers, architects and their families lived the good life. The park was home to baseball diamonds and soccer fields, oak trees and swing sets, even a meandering creek that ran through the middle of it all. The grass was always neatly trimmed and parking spaces were plentiful. Good thing, too, for this Saturday afternoon every soccer field was in use as the Grigsby Soccer Association’s five to ten-year-old divisions battled it out in the season-ending tournament. All the parking spaces were filled, and more than few mini-vans had been pulled onto the grass by parents who refused to park on the street and walk all the way back just to watch their little Johnny or Susie kick a white ball up and down the field.But there was one person who didn’t mind walking. He strode across the parking lot, his open black trench-coat billowing in the late autumn breeze. He was in his early twenties, with short brown hair moist from styling gel. He wore a Slipknot T-shirt under his coat, faded jeans, and worn tennis shoes. The young man’s face was devoid of expression, but his gaze was clear and sharp, and his eyes gleamed with anticipation. He carried a pump-action shotgun in his right hand, and his coat pockets bulged with extra shells. More than he’d need probably, but it paid to be prepared. As he set foot on grass still damp from last night’s rain, his lips stretched into a cold smile.Showtime.The first person to notice the gunman was Gayle Simmons. She was a radiology tech and a single mother, and though she always came to her daughter’s soccer games, she got bored quickly and spent most of the time sitting in her canvas chair yakking on her cel phone. Today she’d gotten her daughter to the park just as her game was about to begin, and so she’d been stuck setting up her seat down by the goal, as other parents had already claimed the better spaces alongside the field. This meant that Gayle was the closet person to the parking lot, and the closest to the gunman as he made his initial approach.She was talking to her supervisor – who also happened to be her lover – when she caught a black flash of movement out of the corner of her eye. Without pausing in her conversation, she turned to see a man in a trench-coat raise his right arm and point something that looked like a long metal tube at her. At first, what she was looking at didn’t register because it was so far removed from her everyday reality. But somewhere in the back of her mind, an alarm went off and adrenaline flooded her system. But it was too little, too late. The gunman squeezed the trigger, the shotgun roared, and Gayle Simmons no longer had a face.Gayle’s blood sprayed nearby spectators, along with shreds of meat and shattered bits of cel phone. Her body slammed into an overweight mother sitting next to her, and the woman screamed as the impact knocked her onto the ground. The gunman ejected the spent cartridge, aimed, fired, and silenced the fat woman forever.A moment of quiet followed as children stopped playing and adults stopped watching them. All heads turned toward the gunman and then panic flashed through the crowd like wildfire. Parents leaped out of their seats and ran onto the soccer field to get their children, some of who were already running in the opposite direction. Many children stood frozen, though, staring at the man in the black coat who had just killed two women – two mommys – before their uncomprehending eyes.The gunman began firing at will. He aimed for adults, but not because he was reluctant to kill children. Meat was meat as far as he was concerned – young, old, what was the difference? He fired upon adults out of simple pragmatism: they were larger, slower targets. The gunman continued walking forward, firing and pausing to reload as necessary. He tried to keep track of his kills as he went, but with all the people running, screaming, and sobbing around him, he lost count. It wasn’t important, though. The entire country would eventually know his final tally, and that meant his friends would too. That was what truly mattered.A couple of men came at him, obviously intending to play brave husband and Daddy and take him out. But this wasn’t the movies, and all their attempts at heroism got them was an early and very messy death. He had just finished putting down the last would-be hero when he heard a man shout.“Freeze, you sonofabitch!”The voice came from the gunman’s right, and from its commanding tone, the man wasn’t merely another hero wannabee. He was probably an off-duty cop come to watch his kid play soccer, just another devoted parent who happened to be at the right place at the right time. The gunman grinned. A cop meant extra points.The gunman whirled and fired off a blast from his shotgun. In the same instant he caught a brief image of a man holding a pistol – a 9 mm most likely – just before a sledgehammer blow slammed into his chest. The impact spun him sideways and knocked him off his feet. He fell to the grass and landed hard on right side. He hadn’t heard the cop fire his weapon, but he knew that’s what had happened.The gunman rolled over onto his back and lifted his head to look down at his chest. There was a hole in his T-shirt directly over his heart. His chest hurt like hell, and he was having trouble catching his breath, but he saw no blood and assumed his Kevlar vest had stopped the bullet. He had to admit it had been a damn good shot, though. His realized his right hand was empty, and he knew that he must’ve dropped his shotgun as he fell. He turned his head to look for he weapon as he started to rise.“Don’t move, or I swear to Christ I’ll blow your goddamned head off!"The gunman turned toward the cop. He got a better look this time and saw the man was in his forties, balding, with a bushy black mustache and a burgeoning pot belly. He was dressed in a yellow polo shirt beneath a blue windbreaker. The left shoulder of the coat was a ragged, bloody ruin, and the gunman was gratified to see that he’d at least wounded the cop. But wounded or not, the man still had hold of his 9 mm and the barrel was trained on the spot directly between the gunman’s eyes.He looked around and saw clumps of people gathered around the prone bodies of his victims. Some attempted first aid, while others simply stood and cried, unable to believe their loved ones were gone.The gunman smiled. Not bad for a day’s work.Ignoring the cop’s warning, he propped himself up on his elbows until he was in a half-sitting position. The cop kept his pistol trained on him the entire time, and though the man had to be hurting from his shoulder wound, his aim never wavered.The gunman stared into the cop’s eyes for a moment before speaking.“This is just the beginning.”Then the gunman nodded once, and a split second later the top of his head exploded. As he slumped to ground, the cop could only stand and stare at the corpse in confusion, for the final shot hadn’t been fired from his weapon.

CHAPTER TWO
At the same moment the trench-coated gunman’s heart beat its last, Curt Macon was driving west on Interstate 80 in central Pennsylvania, trailing a black Jaguar. The overcast sky and heavy rain rendered visibility poor, but that made little difference to Macon. Though the Ford Acura rental he drove was hardly built for speed, all he had to do was keep the Jag in sight, and Macon had done so for close to a hundred miles. So far the Jag’s driver had been scrupulous in following the speed limit. The man obviously didn’t want to draw the attention of any state troopers, but Macon knew the driver’s caution had nothing to do with the large highway signs posted alongside the road detailing the various fines for speeding.Ninety minutes ago the two men in the Jag had paid a visit to an eye, ear, nose and throat doctor who office was located in the well-to-do Philadelphia neighborhood of Chestnut Hill. There’d been nothing remarkable about either of the men. Both were Caucasian, in their thirties, trim instead of beefy. But just because they weren’t muscle-bound didn’t mean they weren’t dangerous. They carried themselves like pros, scoping out the area with practiced eyes as they headed for the entrance to the ENT’s office. Both wore leather jackets – one black, one brown – and the coats were roomy enough to conceal shoulder holsters. Macon had no doubt the men were armed, and he wouldn’t have been surprised if they had more hardware in the Jag.They two had gone in empty-handed, but when they came out ten minutes later one of them carried a brown briefcase. Macon had been parked at the curb watching the office, and when the two men got back into their Jaguar and pulled out, the Warlord followed. He’d been tailing them ever since.If the intel Jack Solomon had passed on to him was correct – and it almost always was – the briefcase contained a half dozen vials of a genetically engineered superflu virus that would make the global pandemic of 1918 look like a case of the sniffles.The ENT’s wife worked in a medical research lab at the University of Pennsylvania, where she’d either created or stolen the samples – it wasn’t clear which – and then passed them on to her husband. The husband had in turn made some discreet inquiries of drug companies via the Internet hoping to find a buyer for his deadly wares. A pharmaceutical company could make a fortune by studying the virus, developing a vaccine for it, then releasing it into the general population. The fact that thousands, perhaps millions might die in the process would simply be a few broken eggs on the way to making one very tasty omelet.The doctor had received multiple offers, but the high bidder was an outfit calling itself Pharm-Tech Industries, based out of upstate New York. The cyber-warriors at Garrison HQ constantly monitored the Net for the slightest hint of terrorist activity, and Pharm-Tech was on their watch list. The company was a front, but for whom was as yet unknown. A corporation that wished to remain anonymous? Terrorists? A private buyer? Hence the reason for Macon’s road trip on a rainy Saturday afternoon. It was his job to follow the errand boys back to their boss, discover the buyer’s identity, and find out what he, she or they wanted with a genetically engineered virus. And if the Warlord left a few bodies along the way, that was just par for the course. After all, he knew how to break eggs, too. In fact, he was an expert at it.Instincts honed on a thousand different battlefields warned Macon that something wasn’t right. He glanced at the Acura’s rearview mirror and saw flashing lights behind him. A state trooper’s vehicle, he guessed, approaching fast.Thoughts raced through Macon’s mind as he shifted from surveillance to combat mode. Neither he nor the delivery boys in the Jag were exceeding the speed limit, and there was no way local law enforcement could’ve gotten wind of the deadly cargo the Jag carried. Outside of the Garrison, Macon doubted that a half dozen people – the President included – were aware that a genetically engineered superflu virus was being transported across the great state of Pennsylvania.Macon looked in the rearview again. There was no vehicle fleeing from the statey, so that left only one possibility. The trooper was responding to some emergency that had nothing to do with Macon and the virus. He just hoped the men in the Jag really were pros, because if they were jumpy, they might overreact at the sight of a patrol cruiser coming up fast on their ass with lights blazing. And if that happened – Macon never got to finish his thought. The patrol car had almost drawn even with him now, and that was too close for comfort for the delivery boys. The driver of the black Jag tromped on the gas and the high-performance sports car surged forward, rear fishtailing on rain-slick asphalt. For an instant Macon thought the driver was going to lose control and go skidding off the road. The man managed to keep all four tires on blacktop, but unfortunately he overcorrected in the process, and the Jag slid into the left lane – directly into the path of the speeding police cruiser.It’s a simple principle of physics that two objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time, and Macon was about to get a first-hand demonstration.The trooper tried to avoid hitting the Jag, but it was too late. The cruiser struck the left side of the Jag’s back bumper and both cars started to swerve. Macon swore and took his foot off the gas. He knew better than to slam on the brakes in rain this heavy. The Acura dropped back as the cruiser’s rear spun around to the right, and the Jag’s front end swung left. It looked as if both cars were going to collide, but despite his earlier jumpiness, the driver of the Jag proved he had some skill behind the steering wheel. He momentarily let off the gas, swung the Jag’s nose back toward the front, then stomped on the pedal again. Once more he Jag fishtailed as it leaped forward, but it cleared the spinning cruiser and roared off down the interstate.Macon had been conducting his private war on evil for more years than he liked to count. And during all that time he’d held tight to one inviolate principle: civilian casualties were unacceptable. He’d failed to prevent them far too often, but he was only human. He hadn’t forgotten the names and faces of those honored dead who had fallen along the way, though, and he never would.But as much as he didn’t want to see any harm come to a cop who’d been simply trying to his job, he couldn’t afford to let the black Jag and its lethal cargo get away. He pressed down on the Accura’s accelerator and yanked the steering wheel to the right so that he could pass by the spinning patrol car. Still, just because he couldn’t stick around didn’t mean that he couldn’t give the statey a quick hand.As Macon’s Acura drew near the out-of-control police vehicle, he edged left and with split-second timing tapped the car’s right front fender with his bumper. The nudge helped turn the cruiser forward again, but the maneuver proved to much for the trooper to handle, and he swerved toward the grassy strip of land that served as the interstate’s median. Macon continued driving and watched in his rearview mirror as the patrol vehicle slid to a halt in a shower of mud and flying sod. Satisfied the trooper was unharmed and relieved that the man would no longer by part of the pursuit, Macon focused his attention on catching up to the Jag. The car hadn’t gotten very far ahead of Macon in the few moments it had taken him to give the statey a love tap. The red glow of the Jaguar’s taillights was still plainly visible, although receding fast. Macon would have to haul ass if he were to have any hope of catching them.Time was of the essence now, for the trooper was undoubtedly already radioing in to headquarters and reporting that a black Jaguar had run him off the road. Before long the interstate would be full of police all looking to serve up some payback for their fellow officer. Macon needed to intercept the Jag before that happened.The rain was still coming down hard and heavy, so much so that the Acura’s wipers could barely keep the windshield clear. But in one way that worked to Macon’s advantage. The errand boys in the Jag would be looking for the flashing lights of state troopers – not a Ford Accura that was hard to spot with visibility so poor. Especially if he made it even harder for them to see him. He flicked off his headlights and the road ahead of him went dark. The interstate was a straight stretch here, and there was no one between him and the Jag. All he had to do was keep his eyes on their taillights, keep the gas pedal pressed to the floor, and try not to hydroplane himself into oblivion.The Acura’s engine whined loudly and the car shuddered as if it were in danger of shaking itself apart any moment, but Macon didn’t slow down. The thought of what might happen if whoever took delivery of that flu virus decided to use it spurred him on. He’d catch the Jag or end up crushed in a makeshift coffin of twisted metal, but he wasn’t going to back off.Luckily for Macon, the Jag began to slow down a bit. Most likely the driver had either witnessed the statey ditching his vehicle in the median, or perhaps he’d simply noted the absence of flashing lights in his rearview mirror. Either way, the Jaguar was still moving at a good clip. The delivery boys had to know other officers would soon be looking for them, but it seemed they’d calmed down enough to decide not to risk driving all-out in this weather if they didn’t have to. That gave the Warlord the chance he needed.The Jag was driving in the left lane, and as Macon came up on the vehicle’s tail, he switched to the right. The incident with the state trooper had convinced him that the errand boys were too erratic for him to simply follow anymore. Macon intended to stop them and retrieve the briefcase full of death before it could cause any harm. Solomon wouldn’t be happy, and the people in Washington he reported to would be even less thrilled, but that didn’t matter to Macon. He was a soldier, not a politician. He did his duty as he saw it, consequences be damned.With his headlights still off, Macon pulled even with the Jag. He thumbed the button to lower the driver’s side window, then drew his Beretta 93R from its shoulder rig. A quick glance in his rearview mirror showed the road behind him was clear, at least for as far as he could see. No need to worry about anyone else becoming involved in what was about to happen.As soon as the window was two-thirds of the way down – cold rain pelting him in the face like bullets of ice – Macon aimed the Beretta at the Jag’s passenger window and fired a three-shot burst. Safety glass exploded inward as the 9 mm Parabellum rounds penetrated the Jag’s interior. The vehicle swerved violently to the left and its driver’s side tires went off the road and caught hold of the grassy median. That was more than the driver – assuming he was still alive – could compensate for, and the Jag whipped around, flipped into the air, and came crashing down on its top.Macon hit the Acura’s brake, sending the car skidding, but he managed to keep the vehicle under control with only one hand on the steering wheel, and brought the car safely to a stop on the shoulder. Still holding onto the Beretta, he threw open the driver’s door, grabbed a metal object shaped something like a soup can from the canvas bag on the passenger seat, and then plunged out into the storm. He ran to where the overturned Jag had slid to a halt, tires still spinning, wipers slapping back and forth. Macon was soaked to the skin by the time he reached the car, and he saw that the driver – the errand boy in the black leather jacket – had already managed to crawl halfway out of the shattered driver’s side window. The man’s face was covered with blood, either from one of the Parabellum rounds, as a result of the crash, or both. The specifics didn’t matter to Macon. All that mattered was that the damage had been done.There was no sign of the man who’d been riding shotgun, but Macon wasn’t foolish enough to think that meant the man was no longer a threat. A kill was only a kill once it was confirmed. Until then, a smart soldier assumed all unfriendlies were still alive and dangerous.Macon drew a bead on the driver with his Beretta.“Give it up! The race is over, and you lost!” Macon had to shout to be heard over the wind and rain. “Fuck . . . you.” The man’s voice was weak, and Macon had to read his lips to make out what he was saying. The errand boy waggled his right hand then, and Macon saw that he held a glass vial sealed with a rubber stopper.The man called the Warlord knew he was looking at a killer far deadlier than he could ever be. The fluid inside the vial was clear, but Macon didn’t delude himself into thinking that meant it was harmless. The most effective killers always came silent, swift, and unseen.“Stay back or I’ll . . . break it.” Bloody froth bubbled past the wounded man’s lips, and Macon knew he was near death.Macon had no idea whether breaking the vial would release the superflu virus, but even if it did, the rain should keep it from becoming airborne. But Macon hadn’t survived as long as he had by taking chances. He lowered the Beretta and brought the thermite grenade up to his mouth. He bit down on the pull ring and yanked the grenade away. He spit out the metal ring, crouched down, let go of the release lever, and quickly tossed the incendiary weapon past the dying man and into the Jag’s interior. As he did so, he caught a glimpse of the other man inside, still buckled into his seat, blood-stained body limp. If the man wasn’t already dead, he soon would be.“You sonofabitch!” the driver said, loud enough to be heard this time.Macon straightened and started running back toward the Acura. He thought he heard the sound of the glass vial breaking, but he couldn’t be sure. He felt a wave of heat roll over his back as the thermite bomb ignited, but he was far enough away that he wasn’t burned. He stopped and turned back around to watch.The crumpled remains of the Jaguar were engulfed in white-hot flames. Rain hissed as it was instantly vaporized by the 4000 degree heat. The fire would only last for 30-45 seconds, but during that time it would burn hot enough to reduce the car to molten slag – assuming the gas tank didn’t blow first. Regardless, the samples of superflu virus would be completely destroyed. And as for the two men inside the car, as far as Macon was concerned, when you played with fire, you got burned.The Warlord holstered his Beretta, then turned and began running toward the Acura as the Jag’s gas tank exploded with a sound like the thunder of final judgment. His work here was done.