Cameron Lowe's Blog, page 15

Regarding my mailing list

There appears to be some technical troubles affecting people trying to sign up for my mailing list. If you don’t receive a confirmation email when you sign up, please drop me a comment below and we’ll get you sorted. You can also PM me via Twitter or Facebook with your email address and I’ll add you manually.

I’ll have more details soon, but newsletter subscribers will receive exclusive access to a free short story/novella titled Beast. Set in the Rankin Flats universe, the story follows Becc...

Legally Blind #3 – Tools of the Trade

My vision’s affected every part of my life. That pretty much goes without saying when you’re staring down diopters in the -30 range (my vision doesn’t even really work with the 20/20 scale, that’s how bad it is), but the truism of it doesn’t really hit you until you start to see the minutia of what I do on a day to day basis that might be different from your own life.

Let’s start with the most obvious stuff as pertains to just writing. Larger fonts on PCs are an absolute must, but by and larg...

Legally Blind #2 – What the Heck is Wrong with Me?

I’m not particularly shy about talking about my eyesight and the problems I have because of it. But I very rarely ever go into the actual specifics of what’s gone on with my eyes unless people specifically ask. It’s one of those things I’ve lived with for so long that I tend to be oblivious when it comes to people’s curiosity. That I’m kind of oblivious about people in general anyways doesn’t help matters much.

My mom and dad tell this story about taking my brother and I to the airport when w...

Legally Blind #1 – Fighting to Stand Up

Today, I opted out of receiving SNAP food benefits for the first time in several years. I’ve been receiving public assistance through Social Security and various government programs since I lost my job locally back in 2009. That’s a frustratingly long time, but these programs have allowed me to maintain some degree of dignity by providing me with a roof over my head, heat in the winter, and food in my admittedly enormous belly.

It’s also afforded me a rare opportunity to try to hone my writin...

First (very rough) chapter of Band of Fallen Princes

While I’ve put Excision on hold for the moment, I’ve begun work on the fifth Rankin Flats novel. Here for your viewing pleasure is the very first chapter, unedited and raw. Keep in mind, I haven’t checked this for errors and some scenes will undoubtedly change, especially that school chase. That said, you can see what I’m going for here. Enjoy!

Chapter 1
1985

The two boys snuck into the hospital room like a pair of thieves, as though the squeaking of their sneakers would break their friend ev...

Excision progress report

Hey folks! Sorry the website’s been a bit dead. For a few months there, it felt like I was always hitting the ground running with the business end of this thing. Now that all four of the first Rankin Flats novels are out on paperback, I’ve been able to breathe, settle in, and do some serious writing the last couple of weeks.

Excision, the first in my post-post-apocalyptic series Animus, is shaping up nicely. This is a much larger novel than anything I’ve done before, both in terms of scope an...

Bone Carvers is out now on Kindle!

…and you can get your hands on it right here!

When Garrett’s former FBI ally Shannon Oliver goes rogue (not to mention insane), she decides her months-long fight with the Legion needs to come to a close in a spectacular fashion. Knowing she can’t do this alone and believing Garrett wouldn’t help her, she comes up with a cunning, dark plan – kidnap the woman he loves and turn themselves in to the cannibalistic Legion.

Locked in a brutal race against the clock, Garrett must find Hamber, a town...

The story behind Bone Carvers

It’s weird being done with Bone Carvers, because that story has been rolling around in my mind for fifteen years. My mom and I were driving from Montana to Missouri and came across the creepiest little town (which will remain nameless, because I’m sure the people there are great and I don’t want to get murdered).


 


Almost all the buildings looked terribly damaged or unkept, but in really fascinating ways. They seemed normal, but once you got a closer look, the foundations were cracked, the paint on the walls was almost non-existent, and almost no one had maintained their lawns in weeks, if not months.


 


We stopped at a gas station to get sodas or whatever, and almost everything inside was out of date and dusty. We eventually got so weirded out we just decided that whatever we needed could wait until the next place.


 


That real story became a novel I actually wrote in… mmm… 2009 or 2010. It was a miserable piece of garbage, but it had some good elements in it. In that version, a widower and his daughter flee the memories of the wife he felt he had to kill. she’d developed brain cancer that had left her wild, vicious, and more than a little abusive to their daughter, so rather than watching his wife and daughter both suffer, the man killed her in her hospital bed.


 


When they fled across the country, they wound up in a small town – Hamber – where the man’s daughter disappears after he goes in to get food and gas. His search for her is aided by an assassin on the run from the law (who later became the foundation for Garrett Moranis, the protagonist of my novels), but as they peel back the layers of Hamber, they realize the place is under the thumb of some great and terrible demon half-trapped in their world and looking for a human host in the daughter.


Most of these elements didn’t make it into the final product some seven years later. Obviously the leads changed to Garrett, Brianna, and Murphy, the heroes of my Rankin Flats series. But there are definitely elements of that original story that bleed through the paper, so to speak. The gas station plays a pivotal role in introducing the weirdness o Hamber. As mentioned, Garrett has roots in one of the characters in that novel, but Kyo was a much more brutal, strange character and badly written in every regard.

In a way, finishing  Bone Carvers helps me tie a bow on a period of my writing that went unfulfilled. I can now move on to other stories, fresher ones, and can bank that one in the win column. At least I hope it’s a winner, anyways. It’s far more brutal and horror-centric than the prior novels, but I like it regardless. It has teeth.

Lots and lots of teeth.

 

Shifting Furies is now available on paperback

While I’m in an updating mood, just a quick note that you can buy the second book in the Rankin Flats supernatural thrillers on paperback here. I’ll be doing a book signing this Friday at the Meagher County news office in White Sulphur Springs, Montana. Swing by if you want to snag a copy!

For All the Sins of Man is now available!

Heya, folks! You can now pick up a copy of For All the Sins of Man for only $2.99 on Amazon here. I’m very proud of this one. It explores some dark themes, such as spousal and child abuse, which might not be to everyone’s tastes, but I really do hope you give it a shot. I look forward to introducing you to Sloan and Rowen, two of my favorite characters to date.