Welcome to the Campfire. Did you ever go camping as a kid and sit around the fire at night listening to scary stories? Creepy Campfire Quarterly features horror fiction from the most talented writers across the globe. Dark, disturbing, dramatic, or just down right creepy, these stories will entertain you. And perhaps the next time you are around a campfire, you’ll find yourself recounting a few of these haunting tales…
Now available for your reading pleasure at:
I feel like I’ve leveled up, despite the fact that I’m sitting here on the shoulder of I-75 waiting for a police officer to show up. It’s pouring down rain, lightening occasionally streaks across the sky, a long line of brake lights builds to my left, and the people who hit me on this imposing night sit in a darkened vehicle behind me. It’s not exactly the most enjoyable place to be blogging, but honestly I have nothing better to do.
Despite this turn of bad luck, I do believe things are getting better. When I sold my short story, “A Slippery Customer”, to Creepy Campfire Quarterly, I qualified to become an Affiliate member. Hence the new fancy icon on the sidebar over there. I now have access to their resources and their expertise to help me climb the slow and steady writing mountain.
To be honest, I’m still pretty floored about it. A membership like that felt like an impossibility a few years ago, back when small horror presses like Pill Hill Press and Wicked East Press were disappearing. Horror felt like an impossibly tough nut to crack, but now it appears the tides are turning – which is good news to the horror fans out there!
I took a moment earlier today to thank Jennifer Word, the editor of the upcoming anthology, to letting her know that as a writer I really appreciate her work. I think it’s because of small presses like hers that the horror genre is slowly coming back to life.
* Note: Most of this was written on the side of the road, but since the police showed up, I had to cut it off mid-draft and finish it the following day.
Whew, now that all the excitement from Dragon*Con has passed, I think I have time to give another horror story announcement, jam packed with far more monsters than I saw at the con. (I did see a ton of War Boys and Jokers though! We also passed a gaggle of assassins from Assassin’s Creed and saw a bazillion amazing Deadpools.)
Their numbers were legion…
Just as I’m still reeling from having one horror story picked up for Creepy Campfire Quarterly, I find out another one has been picked up!
It’s quite a dark tale with many feathers and unforgettable characters. “Tiny Necks” will soon be published in Not Your Average Monster Volume 2, set to tentatively be released around the end of February 2016. *Cue the confetti!*
I’ve always been a fan of monster stories. I think a good chunk of that is due to my mom, who I have many memories of getting ready for work in the morning with some strange monster flick on TV. As such, monsters have a way of creeping into my imagination, and show up in all sorts of ways in the stories that I write. When I saw this anthology was being put together, I knew the exact story I wanted to toss into the hat!
If you want to see the full list of stories set to be included in Volume 2, check out the full listing.
And if you can’t wait that long to get some good old fashioned monster horror stories in your hands, don’t worry. Volume 1 will be having a cover reveal soon, which I’ll be sure to post here too don’t worry.
For now I’m going to try to remember how to live in the real world again post-con.
If someone asks if gore is allowed, you say YES. (Sorry, I couldn’t resist!)
You know, it’s been a while since I’ve had a horror story get published. Scary horror stories are especially tough to find love for, am I right?
Well don’t worry, come January you’ll have some gruesome, disturbing, creepy stories to keep you up at night.
I’m proud to announce that my gruesome short horror story, “A Slippery Customer”, got picked up by EMP Publishing. As you can guess from the title, it leans toward the weird. It’ll be included in their first publication of Creepy Campfire Quarterly, an anthology series set to be published 4x/year. Curious about what it’ll be about? Here are a few of my favorites from their call for submissions:
NO straight-up comedy. Levity is great, but we don’t want any full-tilt horror comedy, we want serious stories, designed to frighten, disturb, shock, or otherwise entertain readers.
NO YA. Remember, this Quarterly is subtitled (for Grownups).
Is Gore allowed? –Seriously? You asked us THAT?! Leave this website now. It’s a HORROR publication!
Seriously, what is not to love about this? I’ll post more details as they come in, but if you want to stay abreast of the coming bloody tides, here’s a link to the Creepy Campfire Quarterly Facebook page. Give it some love to show that there is support for these kinds of horrific anthologies!
The copy is much bigger in print than I thought it would be! I have to say that the page quality is excellent too, in fact the whole print job is wonderful. It did take a while for it to show up when I purchased it from Amazon, but it was definitely worth the wait!
And a close up of the cover. Took a bit to not get any glare.
When I last looked, they didn’t have any more copies available on Amazon, but they’ll probably be ordering more. For links on how to get a copy, click on the picture to the right.