The Journey Part 1: Novella Thoughts

For those who are new to the blog, or who will be, let me introduce myself.  I’m a man of wealth and…wait that’s the Devil, not me.  I’m Brent Abell, newbie author and general pain in the ass to most who know me.  I like my books bloody, my music heavy, and my movies scary.  Right now in my DVD player is The Devil’s Rejects, my computer is playing Mastodon, and I’m reading J.F. Gonzalez’s Fetish and Armand Rosamilia’s Dying Days 2.  I drink my beer and I like my rum and Jameson’s.  My mouth gets me in trouble and if you are my friend, I wouldn’t be able to bail you out of jail because I’ll be sitting next to you in the drunk tank.  Job?  Not happy right now, but who is?  What do I want to do?  I want to write.

I started small, thinking that is how you start off.  Beginning with short tales of dread, I believed I had to slave away making next to nothing just to get my name out for the public.  I was right and I was wrong. 

I needed the short stuff to get a sense of what I wanted to do.  When I was in high school, I loved to write and would come up with stuff I would read to a group of friends when the mood took us.  After school, I stopped and never picked up a pen, pencil, or mouse to write fiction for a long time.  Two years ago I picked it up and it’s been a hell of a ride since then.  I have 14 stories in 12 anthologies, most of which have come in the last 9 months.  I thought I was doing right…

…Until it came to the novella.  I decided it was time to move up in length and I wrote my first novella.  It was a labor of love that brought many disagreements to my house, but I wanted to tell the story I wanted to tell.  I wrote and re-wrote until on the advice of James A. Moore at Horrorfind, I sent it off.  

Without giving too much away, the story revolves around a woman and how a deadly choice she makes brings her and her loved ones on a collision course between two entities, one natural and one supernatural, on missions of revenge.  All choices have consequences and the clock is running out.

The novella is being work on with an editor now.  I’m not going to go into details because the project is very early in the process.  I’m going to update the trail of the novella here on the blog as I go through the steps of getting it published.  Tonight I spoke a little about the story to set the  stage for the rest of the Journey.  When I have some news, I’ll be sure to share.

On March 21st I will have a guest blog by author Armand Rosamilia on his tour promoting his new novella Dying Days 2.  He has a great interview and there will be a contest tied Armand’s tour, so stop back by and check it out.

Lastly,I leave you with the cover of Wicked East Press’s Chained in the Attic anthology with my story “Amos’s Song” the first of the White Creek cycle.

 That does it for tonight.  If you’re new please join the conversation by following here, Facebook, and Twitter.  It was a pleasure meeting you and I hope you’ll come back and hang again.

Goodnight…

Voice in the Wilderness

Busy, busy, busy…

I have signed and sent in the contracts for the Chained In The Attic and Undead Tales 2 anthologies, the novella is out there being looked at, and I really want to throw someone under a bus still.  That last comment is because I had another story accepted, but the way you communicate with an author over your uptight idea of a signature is not to insult a signature made by a mouse in Adobe.  Seriously, how many signatures are legible any way?  Not that damn many judging by the ones I’ve seen so I pulled the story.  Anyway, the story was the first non-flash fiction piece I ever wrote and I thought it wasn’t great, but I was trying to prove a point to myself.  It did however connect to the novella and introduced the best watering-hole in White Creek.  Will the tale ever come out?  I’m not betting on it, but I might put it up sometime so that you can see how far my work has progressed.

The new projects pile is four strong right now.  There are still shorts, but the four things are going to take a lot of time away from the shorts.  First, I’m researching  for a novella sequel to the story “Stonewall”.  The tale is still one of my favorites and there is more story to finish what I started with that one.  The second two are a series of shorts.  One focuses on the town of White Creek and introduces you to the wicked that reside there.  The other is the continuation of the Dark Frontier concept I’m playing around with.  A short intro to it was published in Pill Hill Press’s Daily Flash 2012, but things have changed a tad.  The center piece story is almost complete and then I’ll start fleshing out the rest of the humanity’s downfall.  Lastly, the outline for the novel I want to write first is complete and right after you meet White Creek, I’m going to kick it in the ass.  The town is a place of myth and legends and of hurt and pain.  Ground paid for in blood and protected by betrayal can’t be safe forever as they find out on March night.

Overall, I know everything sounds ambitious, but I think the walls I set up around me in the past few months have finally tumbled down.  My head is clear and my motives are clean so I’m ready to lace ‘em up and kick ass.

Goodnight…

Come and Hear “Amos’s Song”!

This afternoon, I received word that “Amos’s Song” was accepted to Wicked East Press’s Chained in the Attic anthology.  It is my fourth story with WEP and I would like to thank Jessica A. Weiss for her continued faith in my work.

Now a little about the story for the newly titled “Why Did I Write It?” segment…

Last year while working at a booth at our local Fall Festival the idea magically appeared.  The booth was next to the stage and I worked during the amateur hour competition.  The way I portray the tap-dancing acts is spot on and they gave me the biggest headache.  In typical form, I started to kill them in my mind and this little tale about revenge came from my experience.   There are some things spoke of that might not make sense…yet.  Fear not because all will be explained (please keep reading).

This is also the first published story taking place in my town of White Creek.  The town was created because I hate having a series of stories set in a real place.  I didn’t feel like I can destroy a town properly while a reader thinks about the real place.  With that in mind, I decided to go the new town route and create my own stomping ground.  Currently, I am working on a group of stories to introduce the town and its main characters.  There will be many tales that interconnect in some way, but can still be enjoyed on a story by story basis.  One of these is the completed novella and three other stories round out the group so far.  My goal is to put it together as a collection and introduce the world to the most cursed place on Earth, White Creek.

In closing, I feel odd.  The story is my 13th and I hope it proves to be lucky for me instead of a portent of things to come.  It is also the third story accepted this year already and I hope to have many more.  I will leave you with one last thought,  beginning authors don’t have a lot of name recognition yet.  Do something nice for a new author, go to Amazon and check out their author page.  Once you read about them, like them and pick up some books they are in to show support.  Like those books, review them, and follow them on Twitter and Facebook, or follow their blogs.  We aren’t doing this for the money, we are doing it for our love of storytelling and we want to know our work is not falling on blind eyes.  Go and like the hell out of some starting authors and make their day (including me .

Goodnight…