Excerpt from the Trump Story.

The following is an excerpt from my short story in progress, "The Greatest Story Ever Told, let me Tell You" which is an increasingly not-as-satirical as I'd originally thought tale of Donald Trump for an anthology that will probably decide it's too on the nose. Feel free to give me any feedback that doesn't involve insulting me for daring to parody your great leader:

"You wanna know how I became the Almighty? Simple: I’m a winner. Show me somebody

without an ego and I’ll show you a big, fat loser. Like that Chinese guy, what’s his name? Buddha. What a loser. He’s not a god, he’s not a superhero. He’s nothing, this guy. Pathetic. And fat. What? Skinny? We talking about the same guy? Well, whatever. He’s nothing, this chump. Less than nothing.

    But God, now there’s a real man. I first sat down with Him after my VP arranged a meeting and we had a wonderful meeting. He liked me and we had a very productive meeting. I’ve made more deals than just about anybody in the world and I can tell you the deals we worked out were the best every made by anybody ever, But He was old and it was time for a new approach. I mean, he had his time. It was a wonderful time, a really, really good time. He’s a smart guy. The best. Just not as smart as me. We can laugh but it’s true.

    So my predecessor, He was down in the dumps because of the losers and haters in the world. My VP thought we could cheer Him by showing Him how we were doing His work on Earth. You know, changing the abortion laws, military marches, regulations that favor bankers so they can safeguard our money. My list of accomplishments is too long to go over in one place. It’s the longest list! I’m not saying it’s longer than the Almighty’s, but I couldn’t help noticing how small his hands were."

I've been Indexed.

I'm not sure what it means, but two of what I consider my best short stories are listed on the Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Weird Fiction Magazine Index. They are:

Killing the Creation- A tale of a grieving father's quest to get answers for the untimely death of his daughter directly from the source of all creation, and

And What's Left of the World's a Better Place for it- In which a young scientist discovers the building she has lived in all her life is not the whole world after all.

click here for the links.

The Secret to Writing Donald Trump as a Short Story Subject.

It's really simple to write about Donald Trump in a fictional context because, ultimately, he is a living work of fiction. Nothing about him is genuine except his unerring propensity for absolute, unadulterated self-promoting horseshit. So really, he is the very essence of a caricature of a real person. The problem lies in knowing how to handle this knowledge. He's such an easy target that one could be accused of taking unfair advantage or going for the cheap shot with practically every sentence. He isn't a protagonist I would normally attempt in my writing except I happened to read about an anthology looking for parotic tales starring his royal orange majesty.

How did I figure out what to do? I decided to let the man speak for himself. Only a first person narrative could come close to capturing his word salad, nonsense diatribes. I also decided it was better to avoid turning Trump into a parody since he already is one. To try and take a ridiculous character like him and make him more ridiculous would be...well, you know.

So, it works better to let Trump be Trump and make the situation ludicrous or impossible. Directly quoting him is a good method as well, but it's also fun to write new dialogue that sounds enough like him to fool people into wondering whether or not he actually said it. I first cut my teeth on that one by using the Fake Trump Tweet app. Only the ones that insulted me as a writer were obvious to people.

The story is clipping right along and will probably be finished soon. Then the beta reader(s) get to read it and tell me how much it sucks so I can do a rewrite or two or twelve. Then I'll send it to the anthology and hope for the best. If it's rejected, I'm going to do something I don't normally do and self-publish it since it's far too specific to send elsewhere. That's why I rarely send to anthologies that want such particular submissions, but this was too much fun to pass up.

"Darkness Internal" The Five-year Anniversary

Five years ago (give or take a couple months) Voluted Tales Magazine Publisher Mark Turner approached me about editing a special issue of his magazine called "Voluted Dreams." I told him I was, of course, interested but I didn't want to compile yet another typical supernatural horror publication. Instead, I wanted to publish what I considered horrifying, namely the internal world of the damaged human being. To my delight, he agreed and a special project was born!

I was stunned by the amount of submissions I received, but even more so by how many of the authors understood what I wanted. Refusing to believe this was merely a case of my incredible guidelines writing, amazing as it is, what I uncovered was a pervasive hunger on the part of many authors whose work was getting ignored in favor of the common TV/movie tropes of the horror genre. These authors wanted to tell the types of stories I wanted to read, and it was difficult to say no to most of them. That's why Mark authorized a second edition for the overflow. And apparently he liked what he saw enough to go ahead and have me do a third special edition.

From there, I started editing a bi-monthly ongoing edition simply called "The Darkness Internal." I've grown nostalgic for those not-too-long-ago days and I'm pleased to see the issues are all still available to be read.

Click here if you're interested~