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Category: books/publishing

Jolabokaflod – wait, what?

I’ve seen that meme about Christmas Eve in Sweden – or is it Finland? – where traditionally everyone gets a book on Christmas Eve and they all snuggle up under blankets, drink cocoa and read. It’s called Jolabokaflod, meaning “Christmas Flood of Books” which doesn’t sound nearly as cool in English.

This is a holiday I can get behind, folks.

In the spirit of Sweden-or-is-it-Finland, I’m offering Setting Suns at $2.99 and Infinity and Gethsemane at 99c for the month of December. Check them out at the links! And remember, you can give these to others via Amazon and even delay the delivery so they arrive on Christmas Eve in a timely fashion.

What, you want dead-tree versions for yourself or to give at the holiday of your choice? Yes, you can order them through Amazon, or you can order directly from me and indicate you want them autographed in the comment on your order. You can also email us at kyates@donaldmedia.com and we’ll make sure they get personalized. 

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New story pending…

I’m happy to announce that my short story “Azrael” has been picked up by parABnormal Magazine (Hiraeth Publishing).

“Azrael” is a funky little story with a weird genesis. I was sitting in one of my favorite coffeehouses, happily typing away with a cup of caffeine beside me. A young man walked up to my table and I looked up at him.

“You die now,” he said. Then he turned and walked out of the shop.

After a few blinks and “what the hell was that?” I started writing. Because that’s what we weirdos do.

“Azrael” went through a few iterations (and titles), was workshopped extensively in the MFA program. Eventually it was included in my MFA thesis portfolio, and I told the tale of its inspiration at my MFA jury. I’m so delighted that it will see print. Many thanks to editor H. David Blalock for picking it up, and I look forward to working with him.

It’s slated for the December edition of parABnormal, and I’ll let everyone know when it’s live so you can snag a copy. I will try to get a batch myself for sale at events and signings. (Such as this Saturday in Martin, Tennessee! Click here for details.)

So thank you, strange young man whom I’ve never seen again. Your inspiration is much appreciated.

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River Bluff Review

They didn’t tell me! The annual release of River Bluff Review is live, and I didn’t know. I was honored to see one short story, two poems and a photograph accepted for publication in my final year, and you can see them all here. 

“Tiny Monsters” has extra weight for me, as it is not only one of very few stories I’ve seen published with no speculative-fiction or supernatural content, but also draws a great deal from my life in the past. I found that the more I delved into literary fiction, the more I was exploring parts of my life and self, some of it deeply uncomfortable. Fiction shouldn’t be therapy – or at least it shouldn’t be only therapy, or you get bad fiction. But I was surprised by how much of myself and things I buried deep came to the surface as I experimented with this kind of writing.

Likewise, I hadn’t written any poetry since I was seventeen, because everyone writes poetry when they’re seventeen. My youthful poetry is buried at sea where it can’t get loose and hurt anyone. But then I took an advanced poetry workshop a few semesters ago, and two of those poems appear in River Bluff Review. That makes them the very first poetry I’ve ever had published. 

Finally, if you click “visual art” in the header, you’ll see my photographic depiction of “Edgar” among the other art accepted for the issue. It’s interesting that it goes live now, because I’m finishing my presentation on Edgar Allan Poe and “The Raven” I’ll be giving next week, and I’ve got Edgar on the brain.

Well, now I’ve got something to put in this month’s newsletter…

In other news, I’m signing at Writers of the Riverbend on Saturday, so if you’re local to Maeva’s Coffee in Alton, Ill., come by and see us 11:30 to 4 p.m.! 

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Books of 2022

I really wanted to hit 60 books in 2022, more than my usual goal of Harlan Ellison’s “a book a week.” As it is, I fell short by giving up on Stephen King’s Fairy Tale shortly after Jan. 1. Sorry, Uncle Harlan.
Don’t worry, I’m not going to give you a synopsis of every book I read this year. I wouldn’t do that to you. I will, however, give you my top choices, with the understanding that as with the last four years, 2022’s reading list is heavily influenced by my courses of study. Six months to go, folks.
Best story cycle: The Women of Brewster Place by Gloria Naylor. Honestly, every story cycle I’ve read so far has been amazing, but this one really blew off my head. (A story cycle, if you’ll recall, is a novel comprised of interconnected short stories and a form I find fascinating.) I knew of Brewster because they made it into a movie, but I’d never seen it. Thus I was unprepared for its beauty and horror, and the writing is on point.
Best nonfiction: Wordslut by Amanda Montell. Billed as a feminist guide for taking back the English language, I was prepared for a dull examination of etymology, a word I always have to look up so I don’t mix it up with the bugs. Instead it was accessible, hilarious and thought-provoking as it examined the misogyny behind some of our language evolution and how the language continues to evolve.
Best re-read: Imzadi by Peter David, now available on Amazon as Imzadi Forever. I’m not sure why, because it turns out to be pretty much the same book as the amazing novel I first read as a teenager. I got the chance to ask Peter  about it on tour umpteen years ago – we were both signing in a dead hallway at an eerily quiet con – and he said it was still his most wildly popular book, which was more than a little awkward since it’s a love story he wrote when he was with his first wife. Regardless, it’s an incredible story and one that I always wished would become one of the movies.
Biggest disappointment: The Wastelands by Stephen King. Look, folks, I keep trying to get with the Dark Tower series and we’re past book three at this point and I just don’t think it’s going to happen. At what point does it stop being a slog and start becoming “the most amazing thing he’s ever written”? 
Biggest turnaround: Sula by Toni Morrison. I read this book first for a class on “Nasty Women,” an examination of female characters whose behavior is considered wrong or foul by society but would be lauded if they were men. Kind of. From that standpoint, I really disliked Sula, and found that her behavior would never have been lauded even if she were a man. I think I even wrote an essay about how she didn’t deserve to stand with the rest of the nasty women. But I re-read the book a semester later in the context of a class all about themes in Toni Morrison’s work, and I began to see Sula in a new light. Eventually it became my favorite of Morrison’s work, with the full knowledge I still have some of her works to go. 
Best Book Overall: Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens. Stephen King once called it “the hole in the paper,” that moment when you fall into a book and forget who and where you are. The older I get and the further in my career, the harder it is for me to find that hole, whether it’s a book I’m reading or a book I’m writing. But there’s nothing like it, like Alice’s fall into the rabbit hole, so easy when I was young and every book was a new world. Crawdads was that book. I picked it up at the library and started reading it that afternoon, and could not stop save to refill my tea until I finished. The language paints a stark picture of the Carolina marsh and a central character that was amazingly compelling. I have mixed feelings about the ending, but that stems from the high emotions raised by this story. 
 
Full list:
Bastard Out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison
My Evil Mother by Margaret Atwood
The Secret to Superhuman Strength by Alison Bechdel (graphic novel)
And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie
The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson by Emily Dickinson, duh
The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. DuBois (nonfiction)
Outlander by Diana Gabaldon
Howl and Other Poems by Allen Ginsberg
A Time to Kill by John Grisham
The Fifth Avenue Story Society by Rachel Hauck
Things Left Behind by Brian Keene and Mary SanGiovanni (collection)
Feeling Very Strange ed. by James Patrick Kelly (anthology)
Billy Summers by Stephen King
Fairy Tale by Stephen King
Firestarter by Stephen King
On Writing and Writers by C.S. Lewis (full column pending)
A Day Like This by Kelley McNeil
The New Thanksgiving by Diane Morgan (nonfiction)
The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination by Toni Morrison (literary analysis)
Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
The Fan by Bob Randall
The Old Guard vol. 2 by Greg Rucka (graphic novel)
Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness by Kristen Radtke (graphic novel)
The Shapes of Night by Mary SanGiovanni
King Lear by William Shakespeare (play)
The Sweet Science of Bruising by Angelia Sparrow
Make Art Make Money: Lessons From Jim Henson by Elizabeth Hyde Stevens (nonfiction)
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
At the Quiet Edge by Victoria Helen Stone
Creative Writing in the Community by Terry Ann Thaxton (textbook)
Flash Fiction International ed. by James Thomas (anthology)
 
Novellas:
Ten Days in a Madhouse by Nellie Bly
The Great Silence by Ted Chiang
The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Jerusalem’s Lot by Stephen King
Inventory by Carmen Mara Machado
Recitatif by Toni Morrison
Sweetness by Toni Morrison
The Telltale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe
Sea Oak by George Saunders
The Man Who Lived Underground by Richard Wright
 
So what was the best book YOU read in 2022? Time to fill up next year’s list – and I will get to 60!
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Did you miss Blackfire? Because it’s back…

 

As I announced in my newsletter, the contracts are signed and the deadlines are etched in stone (gulp), so it’s time to talk about my four-book contract beginning in 2023 with Falstaff Books – and the return of Sara Harvey!

Not to be confused with brilliant writer Sara M. Harvey, a dear friend who kindly loaned me her name for the heroine of a novella I wrote mumblety years ago and probably didn’t imagine she’d then be featured as the heroine of a series. The real Sara has never been a Marine or fought zombies and monsters. As far as I know.

The Blackfire series began with a short novel titled The Cold Ones, originally published through Sam’s Dot Publishing, but its origins actually go back to my first publisher, New Babel Books. The amazing Frank Fradella, then owner of NBB, was putting together an anthology of novellas by the Sleepwalkers, a wonderful and sadly defunct writers’ group of midlist beginners, each tasked with writing a conventional monster in a nonconventional way. I thought Frank was going to stick me with vampires, because I was just coming off the success of the Nocturnal Urges series, and I wasn’t all that keen on trying to find a new take on vampires since I’d already done that. He gave me zombies, and I said, “But I’ve never written zombies.” Exactly, Frank replied.

I decided to try for zombie fiction that wasn’t extreme body horror, that didn’t aim for the gross-out. Not that there’s anything wrong with that! But that was the conventional zombie take, and I aimed for something else: a psychological horror stemming from some of the original legends rather than the more American takes stemming from Romero films. 

I thought, “What is the scariest part about zombies?” It’s not the brain-eating or shambling or the rotted corpses chasing you. It’s the time between being bitten and turning, knowing you will die and it can’t be prevented, and worse, you will become the monster yourself. You will become a threat to everyone and everything you ever cared about. So I did it to a warrior, and let wackiness ensue. 

It seemed to work out pretty well. We premiered the first book at Archon in 2009, and offered a free “zombie bite kit” with every purchase. We sold out the entire print run in 48 hours, and by the end of the weekend the publisher wanted a sequel. That was Blackfire, which came out in 2011, and was followed by short stories in literary magazines after Sam’s Dot closed and the books went out of print.

The latest was Yanaguana, a prequel set in San Antonio published by Crone Girls Press in 2020 as part of Foul Womb of Night, a ebook trilogy of military horror stories and later released in print as a limited-edition chapbook. 

Yanaguana coverEvery time I do a public appearance, readers will ask me when they’re getting more Blackfire. I did kind of leave them on a cliffhanger, with another book planned… and now it seems there will be even more of them.

Also pending as part of this Falstaff deal: Banshee’s Run. A blockade runner in a time of plague is pursued by a bounty hunter who believes she is responsible for the death of his wife. Wackiness ensues. I’ve played in space opera before, but this is a much bigger scope than any of those short stories and I can’t wait for you all to see it. Note: I was writing this tale of space leprosy long before COVID, but you could be forgiven for thinking it’s a COVID novel…. stupid virus. 

I’m delighted to be working with John Hartness and the fine folks at Falstaff Books, self-described as the misfit toys of speculative fiction. That definitely describes my work, and I hope you will enjoy these books as much as I’m enjoying playing with them. It is also a great way to re-enter novel publishing, as I’ve kind of set aside novels in favor of short stories and novellas all through my grad school experience. With graduation looming in May (!!!), it’s time to get the novels rolling again.

The first Blackfire release will be a compendium of all the previously released stories, including the really rare ones, and a new novella bringing the story forward to Phase 2 (see? just like the MCU!). Look for that in 2024, with Banshee’s Run to follow. 

 

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Five cups of tea for Nocturne Infernum

Kimberly Richardson of Viridian Tea House gave a smashing review of Nocturne Infernum on her YouTube channel this week!

“I flew through this book,” she says, and declares that the erotica scenes gave her hot flashes. “A couple of times my boyfriend asked, ‘Are you going to be okay?'” She gave it five out of five cups of tea. 

Check out Kimberly’s review of Nocturne Infernum and another vampire novel by Kurt Amacker on YouTube!

“This is one hell of a book.” — Kimberly Richardson, Viridian Tea House

Now I want some tea… 

 

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Twenty years of fever dreams

Harlan Ellison once asked me, “How many stories have you sold?” Nervous, I flubbed the question, because the answer certainly was “far fewer than you, sir.” 

My first short story published for pay was “Vertigo,” a weird Twilight Zone-esque piece set in the middle of a campus shooting. It appeared in DogEar Magazine in 2002, and while I’d played around with the freebie sites beforehand, it was the first time someone paid me money for my fiction. 

Three years later, the amazing Frank Fradella founded New Babel Books and came to me with an idea for a collection. Setting Suns collected all my published short stories and a handful of new ones written just for that volume, and it won the Darrell Award for best short story and stayed in print for more than 15 years. 

I’ve had several books go out of print over the years, and some have been reissued by other presses, while others have quietly gone on into obscurity. But Setting Suns is a book that many of my readers continue to cite as their favorite, and I have a particular fondness for the old girl. It was not my first book – that distinction belongs to Nocturnal Urges, an ebook released in 2004 by Ellora’s Cave Publishing – but Setting Suns was the first time I opened a box of books and saw my own name on the cover. Ask any writer about that moment, and see the look in their eyes when they answer.

While I was thinking about this, I realized I was coming up on my anniversary: it’s been 20 years since my first paid fiction sale. That’s a nice round number, and I wanted to commemorate it somehow. 

Thus was born the anniversary edition of Setting Suns, to be released this spring. It includes a bonus short story and a new afterword from me reflecting on the last twenty years and how damn lucky I am to have the career I have. After all, Harlan didn’t ask me how many stories I thought about, or plotted in my notebook, or even how many I managed to scribble out over the last 20 years… he asked how many I sold, and that ever-changing number is due to your support and continued willingness to plunk down your cash for my fever-dreams.

I’m very pleased to be able to offer this book, with my thanks for the past twenty years. I hope you’ll enjoy it as much as I enjoyed walking through its garden of shadows. 

To add to the fun: I’ve recently gotten a handful of books back from a store that had them on consignment, and to my delight, there are three out-of-print rarities among them! I now have two copies of Dreadmire and one each of Setting Suns (original edition) and Blackfire to find homes.

So we’re running a contest! To get an entry, you should: 

Sign up for my newsletter!

Subscribe to my Patreon!

Preorder Setting Suns!

Each of these gets you an entry in the contest, and three winners will be randomly selected to receive one of the out-of-print rare books, signed upon request. Spread the word!

Setting Suns Anniversary Edition

Setting Suns Anniversary Edition

$15.00

Buy now

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Now at Spine Books!

I’m happy to report a selection of my work is now available at Spine Bookstore and Cafe, a neat new concept in south St. Louis!

Spine carries solely the books of local independent and small-press authors, which allows our work to be featured in a way we usually can’t get in a traditional bookstore. Owner Mark Pannebecker has operated the St. Louis Indie Book Fair since 2015, and plans to continue hosting the fair at his new business as well as monthly author events. 


I’m delighted that Spine will be carrying my in-print titles, and look forward to discovering a lot of new voices from its shelves. Drop by and check it out on Arsenal Street!

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“Fever” is published!

I wasn’t expecting the annual publication of the River Bluff Review until early spring, so it was a pleasant surprise to find that it’s already live on the interwebs!

River Bluff Review is a student-edited literary magazine, and only recently made the transition from print to all-digital. I was honored that they selected my short story “Fever” for this year’s edition. It’s a weird little piece, one that reads like a COVID story but was written the month before the pandemic began.

I remember it well, because I had been very ill that February – a flu that simply knocked me on my ass.* I recovered in time to go for a weekend getaway at Valentine’s Day with my husband, at a hotel we adore called the Cheshire Inn. Each room at the Cheshire is named and themed after a famous British writer – the suites are for the big boys like Robert Louis Stevenson and William Shakespeare, and the smaller rooms get the lesser-known authors. We were booked in the Romeo & Juliet suite, and after Jim fell asleep I was restless.

So I sat at the little desk in our suite and considered myself lucky to have kicked that nasty flu in time for this trip… and started writing. I wrote the tale of a woman so ill with fever that she hallucinates a monster in her house… or does she?

The entire first draft was written in the wee hours of the night in that hotel room, refined over several weeks and workshopped in my MFA program before submitting to magazines. I’m delighted that it was picked up so quickly, and I hope you enjoy it and the other fine stories included in this year’s River Bluff Review.

 

 

* Yes, it has occurred to me that it might actually have been COVID Original Flavor, before we knew much about it. My doctor said that “we may not have seen COVID before, but it’s probably seen us.” No real way of knowing, except I’m still alive and kicking.

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Farewell, old friend.

This wasn’t exactly how I’d intended to christen my new website, but here we go: as of July 31, my oldest title Setting Suns will be going out of print.

Setting Suns wasn’t my first book, but it was the first to appear in paperback. Way back in the dawn of the ebook era, my first novel Nocturnal Urges came out from Ellora’s Cave Publishing, but they only published in ebook (two years before there was even such a thing as a Kindle!). If the ebook did well, they released it in paperback later. 

Nocturnal Urges came out and it sold well, won awards and the publisher demanded a sequel despite all the people insisting, “I’ll wait until the real book comes out.” I kept yelling, “It IS a real book! Ebooks are real books!” Now people look at my paperbacks and say, “I’ll get the ebook,” and I want to yell, “Where were you in 2005??” 

I was working on that sequel when Frank Fradella, founder of New Babel Books, came to me with the idea of putting my short stories into a collection. I’d published a handful of short stories in horror and science fiction magazines that had a disturbing habit of going out of business right after they published me. I was the Typhoid Mary of the small press in the early 2000s. Frank suggested collecting those stories and writing another half-dozen or so just for the collection, and thus Setting Suns was born.

It wasn’t my first book. But it was the first time I opened a box of books and saw my name on the cover. Ask any writer about that moment, and see the look in their eyes when they remember. 

Setting Suns has been in print for 15 years, give or take, and that’s one hell of a good run for a small press collection. It won the Darrell Award for best short story for “Wonderland,” a weird little Frankenstein riff told entirely in emails and online chats that gave Frank apoplexy in layout, and contains two of my most popular short stories: “Sisyphus,” a tragedy exploring toxic grief and lost love; and “Jesus Loves Me,” known as the Evil Teddy Bear story.

The Evil Teddy Bear still exists, here in my office. And there were T-shirts. 

But there are other stories that didn’t get as much attention. There’s “Prisoner’s Dilemma,” a literal funhouse horror piece that looks at the different kinds of love a person can have for the people in her life, plus crazy man with gun. 

There’s “Silent,” which was one of my very first short stories to be published for money, that smacks of a haunted house as told by The Twilight Zone. There’s “Deep Breathing,” a future-world submarine scarefest involving a monster several readers have referred to as “Cthulu-esque” which was funny because I’d never read Lovecraft at that point. 

There’s “Memory Lane,” another escapee from Twilight Zone about a husband’s desperate search to find his missing wife, and the dark secrets that come to light. That one began as my first attempt at a short-film screenplay, rewritten as a short story for Setting Suns.

There’s “Gauntlet,” an action-flick of a science fiction story set in my Sanctuary universe that only reaaaaally dedicated readers know about, since it’s had a couple of stories published but the novels remain in the trunk until I get them to not suck. Three of the Setting Suns stories are set in Sanctuary, but “Gauntlet” is my favorite.

There are even two stories that would qualify as “literary” with no SFFH elements whatsoever, though entering an MFA program and exploring literary fiction was the absolute last thought on my mind in the waning years of my twenties. 

After 15 years, Setting Suns is still the “entry drug” for Elizabeth Donald fiction. Long-time readers sometimes tell me it’s their favorite of my titles (which is a little humbling since I’ve published maybe thirteen books and novellas since then, give or take a few). 

I’m gonna miss the old girl.

I want to thank Shane Moore, publisher of New Babel Books, for working with me to put Setting Suns out of print with grace. It will be available through July 31 if you haven’t snagged the ebook yet, and we still have a few in stock if you want the print edition

I also want to thank Frank Fradella, who is no longer with New Babel Books, for his contributions to making Setting Suns what it was. The book was Frank’s idea, and his editing, layout and design coupled with the cover art from Darren Holmes made a wonderful book that I was proud to call my first. 

Thanks also go to Jason R. Tippitt, who co-authored one of the stories with me (“I Live With It Every Day”) and served as sounding board and inspiration through much of the book’s development. I very rarely work in partnerships – I don’t play well with others – and it is a testament to Jason’s patience and skill that our story turned out well. The book was dedicated to Jason, who is a fine writer and I hope you’ll hear more from him in times to come. 

It’s been a terrific run for my first “real” book, at least as far as I’m concerned. I hope you enjoyed the ride.

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