What’s Coming in October

The dark, doom-pocked behemoth we call 2020 seems to have given me a reprieve for October… lucky for me because it’s one of my busiest of the year.

What a great month it will be—by the second full moon of the month I should have two new books out, Ryan Aussie Smith’s first book, a handful of short stories in various publications, a poetry workshop for teens wrapped up and the most fun (surprise) social distancing Halloween I can think of.

For those of you that have access to the Horror Writer Association’s newsletter, I have my monthly Monster Marketing column. This month I talk about ways to re-create your promotional opportunities in spite of all the conventions taking a pause this year. I also have two poems contributed to the Poet’s Gallery for the holiday, including Happy Neewollah! which was written specifically for this project.

At this moment, my husband’s (Ryan Aussie Smith) first book of dark fantasy, Shadow’s Lament is ready to be born. As soon as the last issue of Space and Time was uploaded I launched into work on this. It’s been in the final production stages for awhile, but life (and COVID) sidelined it until now. I’ll be announcing all the exciting book launch details here and on social media as soon as it’s available.

On October 7th, National Dark Poetry Day, I plan to finally have Altars and Oubliettes released. This is the poetry collection I planned to publish a few years ago, scrapped the whole thing and began again. Needless to say, I’m much happier with the work in this collection… and I better publish it before I change my mind and scrap the whole thing again. I’ve already started working on Post Consumer, the next chapbook.

October 10th is the date planned to launch A.F. Stewart’s annual October Frights Blog Hop. Until the 15th, I will be doing my best to support the inky dark arts with giveaways, shares and posts here.

The same day I will have the extreme pleasure of teaching a workshop on poetry performance to Kansas and Missouri teens at the MCPL’s Talk Book to Me event. I’ll be sure to recap how it went here.

October 15th is the day I plan to launch Suite and Sour, the second book following Bitter Suites (my Stoker finalist!). That will be followed by the third book in January if all goes according to plan. Which it probably won’t.

Finally, to celebrate Halloween I’m putting together a safe but fun social distancing way to celebrate. More on that as I gather participants. Warning: alcohol and shenanigans will be involved.

Between all that, I think I have stories coming out for Weirdbook, Wicked Library, Retro Horror either in October or November. All details will be posted here as they come to light.

So, for now…