I’ve not been very good on keep up with the blogging this year – it’s already been a long summer! I wanted to break cover and provide a few updates (most good, one sad) before easing into the World Cup for the next few weeks.

Since I last did one of these in February the slow progress of The Fall continues. We’re to the point that my writers group has only one more round to go with it (the final chapter and epilogues – yes, multiples!) so it should be good to go for a final revision by the time the World Cup is over. 2027 release is still the plan, although I’m not sure precisely how I’m going to do it yet.

As promised, I have started on the next book in the Paranormal Appalachia series. It’s still inspired by the tale of the Greenbrier Ghost and still doesn’t have a title, but it’s got near 13k words and a lot of character details waiting to be worked in. Among other things, in this one Ben gets a love interest – who you’ve met if you’ve read “A Pool of Tears” in the Lesser Cryptids of Appalachia anthology from Brood XIV Books.

Speaking of the fine folks at Brood XIV, they’ve got another anthology on the way, Undead Appalachia.

I took a break from the new Ben Potter book to write a story for it, “The Breaker Boy.” It’s set in a West Virginia coal town after the end of World War I and was inspired by the lietuvēns, a being from Latvian folklore that is the spirit of a dead child. Eagle-eyed readers will notice some familiar place names from Moore Hollow, although the story is not, technically, a Paranormal Appalachia story. More as the we get closer to the release of the anthology.

Finally, on the writing front, the folks at The Henlo Press are readying their third volume of their journal, Old Bones, for publication. I’m happy to say this one will have another one of my stories, “OOPS Is In Effect.” It’s more of a science-fantasy kind of story, inspired, amazingly enough, by bureaucracy at work. As with “The Breaker Boy,” more details when it’s published.

On a sadder note, I’ve occasionally talked about our dogs, which my back-of-the-book bio calls the “two cutest Chihuahuas the world has ever seen.” I even wrote way back in 2018 about how they refused to wear clothes. Well, a couple of weeks back, one of them – Zaria, the younger of the two, left us. She was sweet, silly, and snuggly and we’ll miss her a great deal.

That said, onto the World Cup – see you after!