A Green Squirrel? Or a Herald Bringing Tidings of Great Joy?

I’m not going to tell you just yet. First a little recap. It’s been a good long time since I’ve shared an update on my writing stuff here. Almost half a year. which seems crazy, but there it is.

You may recall (but if you don’t, don’t worry ‘cuz I’m saying it again right now) that back in April I was saying that the follow-up to my famous and amazing short story collection Ashes to Ashes, Oranges to Oranges was going to be a full-length novel that I was already starting then. Well, I wrote that book, and it’s in the thick of the editing process now.

It doesn’t have a final title yet, but here’s the premise:

A particularly rich person buys a shopping mall in Florida at full retail price, including all of the merchandise, all of the fixtures, everything.  This person invites some people she knows, and the twelve of them move into the mall (each into his or her own store) to form their own Utopian society, called A Better Place. Their plan is to have no contact with the outside world for five years. This book covers the first twelve days of the experiment, and (spoiler alert?) will not have a sequel. It’s like Dawn of the Dead without the zombies. And funny.

Sounds cool, so what’s the release date? I don’t have one. I’m planning to have it out before the end of the year, but I’m just going to put it out as soon as it’s done.  Of course, I’ll let you know here when it is. If you want to really make sure it’s not out today,  go ahead and check my Amazon author page, but then don’t stay there, come back, I’ve got some more stuff to talk about.

I wrote the introduction for Five of Cups, the new book by Barrymore Tebbs, and that’s out (not as an ebook, only in print) right now. In the interest of full disclosure, I’ll let you know that Barrymore is a friend of mine, but we became friends because I love his writing so freakin’ much. So I’m like the kid who hung around the field so long I finally got asked to play. My introduction is pretty good (you can read the whole thing on the Amazon product page if you click “Look inside”) , and the five novellas in Five of Cups are really amazing. If you have even a passing interest in horror or gothic fiction, I’d recommend you pick it up.

And that brings me all the way up to date, to our friend at the top of this post. It’s not a squirrel, by the way, it’s a green Easter Bunny outfit with the ears cut off. Also, it is a herald bringing tidings of great joy. This little bunny is the first public glimpse of a project that’s going to be taking up a lot of my time (and hopefully a lot of yours) in 2015. It’s an epic novel that I spent several years working on before I dipped my little toe in the publishing waters with Ashes to Ashes… earlier this year. I’m not spilling all the beans right now, but I will tell you that it’s coming out in 2015, it’s going to have an unconventional release, and that it is THE next big thing (after that other next big thing, but this one’s bigger) looming on the horizon. Watch this page for further details!