Holiday Freebies--the Kattomic Energy Edition

I will be participating in my colleague Dale T. Phillips' holiday book give-away. I'm offering three different books--Toxic Reality, The Poisoned Teat, and 12 Nights of Christmas. All you have to do is post a comment, letting me know which book you'd like and I'll pick winners on December 20!  Be sure to leave me a valid email address.
And bop over to Dale's site to see who else is participating and what else you could win! Tis the season and how better to celebrate it than with some dark fiction?

Judging a Book By Its Cover

Last year I released Twelve Nights of Christmas, a collection of dark stories themed to the Christmas song "Days of Christmas." Some of the stories had originally been written for the Dark Valentine website promotion for the season, some were written especially for the book. I was pleased with the collection, especially my story "Birds of a Feather," which was my version of the "turtledove" stanza.
Sales were whatever the opposite of "brisk" is. 
(And is there a direct opposite of "brisk" the way "inept" and "adept" are linked?)
I've decided to put out a version 2.0 of Twelve Nights of Christmas (now called The 12 Nights of Christmas)  this year and I'm going to change the cover. the current cover is intriguing but isn't getting it done.I've done that before--the original cover of Toxic Reality was elegant and dark, but when Indie Author Services came up with a more "in your face" image, sales picked up. (Briskly.)
One of the beauties of epublishing is that you can change things up with relative ease. I've edited and revised the copy, I think the new cover more accurately reflect the kind of stories I write.
The new version features an image by Linda Bucklin, with design stylings by (again) Indie Author Services.
I've pulled the book from Amazon's "Select Program," and as soon as the time period of that runs out (mid-September) I'll debut the new version. I'll be very interested to see how it does with the new cover. Thoughts?

Judging a book by its cover--Toxic Reality

Sometimes you can just be a little too subtle. I was happy with the cover of my book Toxic Reality, but despite great reviews, it just wasn't selling. Over the weekend, Joy Sillesen at Indie Author Services whipped up a new cover for me and within minutes of it going up on Smashwords and Amazon.com, I'd sold more copies than I had since I first published it. 
Being able to swap out a cover in minutes is one of the reasons I love indie publishing. You can do A/B cover tests. You can goose sales with a new cover. You can play around with multiple covers the way magazines sometimes do. (I remember TV Guide testing covers with Star Trek captain covers--clearly meant to entice collectors.)
I admit it--I'll pick up a book because I'm intrigued by the cover. (But I'll also buy a book that intrigues me even if the cover is awful. And if you were an early reader of Laurell K. Hamilton's Anita Blake novels, you know just the ugly covers I mean.)
I like this new cover. There's nothing subtle about it. But then, the stories aren't subtle either.

Toxic Tidbit: Birds of a Feather

Here's another story from Toxic Reality, my upcoming story collection.  Birds of a Feather is my foray into the Lovecraftian world.

Birds of a Feather

Algernon didn’t really understand his wife’s fondness for birds. She had come into their marriage with a parrot that had belonged to her grandmama and it had lived in a cage in the drawing room where it had moulted and shed and screeched and squawked. Algernon had loathed the parrot. One day when his wife was out making calls, Algernon had poured a dose of Godfrey’s Cordial down its feathered throat and that had been the end of the feathered nuisance.

Eleanor had been quite upset but as the bird had no mark on him, she could only accept the explanation that it had died of natural causes. If she had noticed the marks on his hand where the bird had pecked him (pecked him quite hard in fact), she had not mentioned it.

Algernon had suggested that Eleanor have the infernal thing stuffed if she missed it so much but his suggestion had been met with a stony glare and a glacial silence. Algernon had often told Eleanor that sulking did not suit her. Unlike a beautiful woman whose allure was only enhanced by a pout, a sullen expression simply magnified an ugly woman’s unappealing looks.

The First Taste is Free

My new collection of short fiction, Toxic Reality, will be available shortly and as a teaser, I offer this story, "Finders Keepers."  It began life as a 450-word response to one of the Clarity of Night fiction challenges. Hope you enjoy it.

FINDERS KEEPERS

When my husband and son came home early from a camping trip, hauling a big footlocker in the truck bed and grinning like fools, I got a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach.  For one thing, Deke hadn’t called ahead to tell me they were coming home early so when I saw the 5150 pull into the drive my first thought was that something had happened to Andy. 

I’d been upstairs when the truck pulled in and had practically levitated to the front door.  Andy had launched himself into the house, throwing his arms around my knees and crowing, “We found a treasure mama.”  I looked up at my husband and he nodded excitedly, his expression somewhere between ecstasy and fear.  It was his O-face and I’d never seen it in broad daylight.

Deke brought the tarp into the living room and laid it down on the rug before humping the footlocker into the house.  It was one of those olive-drab ones you see in war movies, rusting at the corners and the latches, the paint peeling off the metal.  With the dirt and mold clinging to it, I couldn’t help but think that it looked a lot like a coffin.

“Open it, darlin’, go on,” my husband urged, and I felt a physical wave of revulsion.  I didn’t want to touch it.  I had the irrational thought that if I never touched it, I could deny the reality of it being in my living room, sitting there halfway between the sofa and the plasma television I’d bought Deke for Father’s Day.

Eager to show me what was inside,  Andy darted forward and sprung the latches.  He couldn’t quite manage the heavy lid, so Deke reached past him and pulled it open.

Inside the box was packed with small boxes and velvet pouches and bags and rolls of silk and satin.  Deke grabbed the first sack and pulled it open, pouring the contents into my hand.  Diamonds.  Each one as big as a walnut.  They were cool, like the earth they’d been buried in, but each one flashed with a fire that scalded me.

“They’re real,” Deke said.  “We tested them.”  He and Andy exchanged a conspiratorial giggle as they reached for more sacks, poured more jewelry onto the floor.  One box held tangles of gold chain heavy enough to anchor a yacht.  Another yielded what looked like a Celtic cloak pin.

“Look Mama,” Andy said, rummaging through the plunder and pulling items out willy-nilly.  “A crown.”  He put a bejeweled golden circlet on his head.  It was so big it slipped down his head and over his eyes.  Deke took it off him and put it on his own head.  “You’re a king, daddy,” Andy said, laughing.  Then he dived back into the sacks and boxes to see what else was there. 

A short story for Thursday--Kaidan

I am putting together my second collection of short stories, Toxic Reality (due in September), going through them one last time before turning them over to my editor Joy Sillesen of StonyHill Productions.

I'm enjoying the process, although weeding out stories that ... aren't quite there ... has been like killing my children. I wrote this story for Dark Valentine's "Dark Water" fiction frenzy in the spring. I still like it.

KAIDAN

They made a mistake when they took Chika.

Her name meant “near and dear” and so she was to Akihiro Tsukimoto. They had known each other since childhood and now, when both were in the winter of their lives, she remained his most trusted confidante, his closest companion, and his only friend.

Unlike Hiro, whose bones were brittle and whose hair was iron gray, Chika seemed ageless, as supple in her tenth decade as she’d been as a fry. And she was beautiful, her coloration still vivid. She was black, red, and white, a Showa Sanshoku, one of the first of her kind and given to Hiro’s father by Emperor Showa himself.

His father had given Chika to Hiro on his tenth birthday, the same day he’d taken his life in the old samurai way. A gift given for a gift taken away. Only Chika had seen Hiro cry and she kept his secrets.

It would not have been easy to abduct Chika. She was large for her breed, nearly 60 centimeters in length and heavy. Hiro hoped they hadn’t hurt her when they took her from the pond that had been her home for nearly a century. He was sure they’d been tempted to just club her over the head but knew they hadn’t because they’d sent him video of Chika swimming in a tank that was filled with murky water and much too small.

The ransom demand had come with the first video. The kidnappers wanted money and nothing more, which told Hiro he was dealing with amateurs and not a rival. They had to be skilled amateurs to have circumvented his state-of-the-art security system but their lack of imagination and ambition struck him as pathetic. It had been a bold move to take the only thing on earth Hiro loved and if the thieves had followed up their strike with a decisive blow, he would have respected them.

They would still have had to die, but he would have given them a swift and honorable death. Their own cowardice had sealed their doom and earned them a much more unpleasant fate.

Akihiro Tsukimoto was one of the most powerful “senior advisors” in Tokyo’s biggest crime syndicate. He had many “younger brothers” who would be happy to earn a favor from him. It was only a matter of time before Chika was back home and the thieves were in his hands. And then…and then there would be vengeance.

Koi are omnivores. He would feed them to Chika one bloody chunk at a time.