Jeff Strand's Blog, page 9
July 22, 2022
July 22
The paperback edition of Freaky Briefs is now available. Get it HERE.
Heard back today about a story I’d sent (on request) to an anthology. They loved “Blowing Off Steam” but had a completely understandable concern about it. I say “completely understandable” because the story involves a virtual reality environment where you can beat the shit out of a certain public figure with a baseball bat, and that public figure is named throughout.
I did a quick rewrite and all is well.
July 21, 2022
July 21
Oooooh! Here’s the Freaky Briefs cover, by Lynne Hansen!
The book itself is in the final stages of formatting. Should be available very, very, very soon…
July 20, 2022
Welcome to Gleefully Macabre!
Welcome to my website! Whether you were brought here by interest in my work or a Google search gone terribly wrong, I encourage you to hang around and start clicking away!
Freaky Briefs: 75 Short Absurdities, is now available in a Kindle edition! Paperback coming soon.
I won a Bram Stoker Award!!! My novella Twentieth Anniversary Screening won in the Long Fiction category at StokerCon 2022! Available in Kindle and paperback editions!
Deathless, the sequel to Pressure, is now available in paperback and Kindle editions!
My first non-fiction book, The Writing Life: Reflections, Recollections, And a Lot of Cursing, is now available in Kindle and paperback editions!
(P.S.: People who leave reviews on Amazon deserve great big hugs!)
Friend me on Facebook !
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Join my Unofficial Fan Club on Facebook!
Friend me on Goodreads!
Subscribe to my newsletter at MailChimp! A brand new story in every issue!
July 19, 2022
July 19
While searching to see if some book news had been announced (it hasn’t, as far as I can tell) I found this article. It’s hilariously generic (apparently generated by a bot) and factors in criteria like “durability” and “warranty,” but the overall assessment is that my novel I Have a Bad Feeling About This is the very best book that you can buy for a 13-year-old boy, so I’ll allow it.
Best Books For 13 Year Old Boys Review & Comparison
Finished a story called “Blowing Off Steam” yesterday. It was by invite, but I’ll share the anthology when/if I get the formal acceptance. (Being invited into a project doesn’t always guarantee that they’ll use the piece.) All I’ll say for now is that the story is very unlikely to appear anywhere else…
I’m going to write a short comic book horror/comedy version of The Taming of the Shrew for the bonus comic book included with the anthology Shakespeare Unleashed. The Kickstarter campaign is fully funded several times over, but if you want the perks, check it out right HERE.
July 17, 2022
July 17
Okay, Freaky Briefs is done!
I kept wavering on “Corky & Snorky,” which was always meant to be divisive. I’d decided to cut it, much to one test reader’s dismay, but decided to move it to the end of the book, after the acknowledgments, as a bonus story. If you quit reading too soon, you’ll miss it!
And then I decided, what the hell, and threw in a second bonus story, “What’s On Second?” which I wrote for Freaky Briefs late one night and cut early the next morning.
Of course, those two don’t count in the official tally (the book’s full title is Freaky Briefs: 75 Short Absurdities) so I needed #75. The poem “Impressionable” didn’t make the final list, but I still liked the concept, so I reworked it into a short story.
I don’t have a publication date yet, but you won’t be kept waiting very long…
July 16, 2022
July 16
So, what have I been up to recently? Well, I finally caught COVID!
My symptoms overall aren’t THAT bad. I did have a fever for a couple of days, but it’s gone now. It does mean [cue primal wail] that I had to cancel Necon this year. Necon was cancelled in 2020 and 2021, so this suuuuuuuuuuucks. This was also the year I’d taken over Necon Update, so those jokes will have to wait until 2023.
Meanwhile, Freaky Briefs is almost done. It’s really just missing the foreword.
Here’s a sneak peek at the table of contents. Stories in bold are new to the collection; everything else originally appeared in my newsletter. It’s not entirely out of the question that I might still drop and replace a story or two, but I’m pretty sure this is the final lineup:
The Douchebag Who Reneged on the Death PactFresh FishClicking the HeartThe Wrong DentistThe Skull WithinCraniumVisionHeadspinOh No! Don’t Eat Me! (A Chocolate Bunny Tale)Thrill RideThe First CannibalsWhat’s in the Box?Jock Magnum, Manatee HunterBernieBeaksThe Guy Who Didn’t Want to Murder Anybody With a HammerBummer Tarot ReadingPull My FingerCrazy’s Ralph’s Used Car EmporiumHome With a FutureThe Tell Tale Heart II: AftermathA Story I’m Writing While Being Devoured by a LionMake a WishLong SleevesFast Zombies Vs. Slow ZombiesScrape and ScoopHow’s My Driving?Granny’s Got an Ice PickA Story for the Dude on the Plane Who Keeps Looking at My Laptop ScreenAnd There Was a Metal HookBox of ChocolatesThe Frostbite MovieBreakthroughTen Little BabiesGreasy Grimy Gopher GutsThe Night I Realized Halfway To The Pavement Below That I Was Not, In Fact, SupermanHelen Gets Permanently TraumatizedA Real HauntingVegan TrainingGuillotineSherlock Holmes and the Murders at Camp Crystal LakeChickQuicksandIt’s Drabble Time!The Most Entertaining Man in the ElevatorWrongful Death PaydayJigsaw PuzzleThe Satisfying Crunch of Bones Beneath My FeetLaundry DayAll The Cheese In The WorldNot Enough CoinsCorky & SnorkyBelow DeckThe Cat Who Was Super Smart For A Cat But Pretty Dumb By Human StandardsThe Blind Men And The Elephant: A ParableBradley Goes CrunchDustedInterventionTelemedicineThe Soupville Stabber Practices Social DistancingBunny EarsThe Tragic Tale of Slappy McWankervilleAbner Wederman, Ribald OstrichLast One InToo Meta 2 LiveStepsSanta Claus Kills 2020Yak AttackJob ReferenceThe Man Without NailsComebackThe Last EggSix Cents a WordEncoreMaking the Most of ItAfterJuly 5, 2022
July 5
My hair has been freshly shorn, so I can look all hawt when I go to Imaginarium this weekend.
I’ve added two new stories to Freaky Briefs: “The Skull Within” and “Dusted.” The latter is fan fiction that stops short of copyright infringement. I think somebody should hire me to write a full-length tie-in novel based on this premise.
Last night I wrote “What’s on Second?”, and this morning I vetoed it for the collection. Do people still know “Who’s On First?” What’s the cut-off age to be familiar with Abbott & Costello?
I have terrible luck with air conditioners, and ours broke, so the upstairs is currently 98 degrees. Fortunately, this house has one for each floor, so while the upper floor is uninhabitable, downstairs is not hell on earth. I’ll be sleeping downstairs on the couch tonight, though.
July 4, 2022
July 4
The formatting tedium of Freaky Briefs is over. By which I mean my role; Lynne Hansen will handle the actual formatting for the published version, but I had to at least get it into a state that I can pass over to her without her head exploding.
A couple more stories lost their lives. (RIP “Evolution” and “Grouchy McGrumpyPants Hates April Fool’s.”) So though I wrote a new one, “Encore,” I now have six left to write to get the count up to seventy-five. Nobody is MAKING me include seventy-five stories in this collection, but I think it’s a nice impressive number that will look good on the cover.
Meanwhile, I’m off to Louisville, Kentucky this coming weekend for Imaginarium! Will YOU be there?
July 3, 2022
July 3 (continued)
Added some more stories to Freaky Briefs: “Scrape and Scoop,” “Below Deck,” “Beaks,” “Comeback,” and “Sherlock Holmes and the Murders at Camp Crystal Lake.”
“Below Deck” is an existing story that had never been published in English. (It appeared in an Italian website and then an Italian anthology.) I tweaked the ending a bit. “Scrape and Scoop” I started last night. “Beaks” is a story I’d started for the anthology These Broken Battered Bodies but then I switched to “Cherry Tree.” So it’s not like I wrote five complete stories today, but still, not a bad day of work.
At least two have been cruelly cut from the lineup, though. “Gross-Out” (a transcript of my 2019 KillerCon Gross-Out story) was fun to include in my newsletter but contains too many inside jokes and references to the actual performance to be an appropriate inclusion in an actual book. “Impressionable” is a poem. It’s okay. It’s kind of amusing. Nobody will mourn its loss.
The fun part, by which I mean the “not fun” part, is that these stories were formatted for my newsletter. Single spacing with breaks between paragraphs. To format them for a book, I have to manually remove all of those paragraph breaks. Yay.
