The last scene of “War Springs Eternal,” was a dream and in the dream, the main character was Ernest Hemingway.{I had been reading a biography.} The dream was so vivid, that when I woke, I grabbed my cellphone, opened my memo app, hit the microphone icon and immediately dictated the details of the dream. I […]
via Ernest Hemingway Claims The World Breaks Everyone — Short Story Scribe
Please go to amazon.com/author/philslattery or Goodreads or any other social media to leave a review.
Jack Thurston is a retired professor of medieval literature and history. He is also a widower and father and a retired sorcerer who has returned to the black arts to exact revenge for the death of his wife, daughter, and brother. He has an intriguing position in the universe at a focal point of life, the afterlife, logic and reason, anger and hatred, the ancient and the modern worlds, grief and his attempts to escape grief through self-destruction. Though he wants to have the peace he once found with his wife, Agatha, he is pulled in many directions by circumstance and by his powerful negative emotions.
I am a fan of the old school horror practiced by such authors as H.P. Lovecraft, Poe, Edward Lucas White, and Arthur Machen. I endeavor to make a story as terrifying and suspenseful for the reader as possible without resorting to gratuitous blood and gore for a simple shock or quick feeling of disgust.
This collection of three short tales is perfect for those who have only a few short breaks to escape into the hidden world of horror, black magic, sorcery, and anger-fueled revenge.
You can find this and other works at my Amazon author’s page: www.amazon.com/author/philslattery.
Currently, Jack has a Twitter account (@jthurston666), where he has attracted a small following and where it has only recently been revealed that he is fictional. Jack has his own blog at jackthurstonblog.wordpress.com (a work in progress) and his own e-mail at jackthurston666@gmail.com.
Information on more social media accounts and other characters (as they are developed) can be found at: philslattery.wordpress.com. Please interact with him at any of his social media accounts as you would with a real person.
Show your appreciation for these stories by leaving a review on Amazon, Goodreads, or other social media.
If you enjoy horror, check out my collection of horror short stories A Tale of Hell and Other Works of Horror: Stories of wizards, werewolves, serial killers, alien worlds, and the damned, which includes these stories.
My wife and I discussed the Shadows and Stars cover tonight. Here is her idea of what it should be. Let me know what you think. I like them both. Hers is really good, I think.
I have been searching for royalty-free, public domain images that I can use in my works, particularly Shadows and Stars. Here’s my first idea for its cover using something from Pixabay. Let me know what you think. Of course, the proportions are for an e-book on Kindle, and I would have to modify it for a standard 6″x9″ cover, which I might do tomorrow. But you get the idea of what it might be like.
On Friday, November 22, and the following Friday, November 29 (Black Friday) I will have four of my works free on Amazon Kindle: Click; A Tale of Hell and Other Works of Horror; The Scent and Other Stories; and Nocturne: Poems of Love, Distance, and the Night, a callous and disinterested lover.
I am doing this primary as an experiment in marketing and publicity. Yesterday, I offered the same four books as free and I got more takers than usual.
If you noticed, I have new covers for three except The Scent and Other Stories. I hope to have a new cover for it by Friday the 22nd, however. This is another marketing tactic. Because I love black and white photography and often find it captivating and powerful, I have used it for most of my covers, trying to express something I see in each book. But I see that most, more experienced authors use full color, flashy covers to grab the buyer’s attention. So I decided to give that a shot and see if sales pick up. I tried to make each cover grab the attention of a passing buyer by making it not only in full color, but also expressing something powerful and exciting about the experience I hope to get across in my book. I would like readers, not to judge my books by their covers, but maybe get a taste of
my books from their covers.
Anyway, I have included the three new covers in this article. If you would like to find out more about each, please go to my Amazon author’s blog. You can sign up for updates there or go to philslattery.wordpress.com and follow me there.
Oh, by the way, if you’re wondering where I got the covers, I downloaded some royalty-free public domain images from Pixabay (and maybe Pexels) and manipulated them in Pixlr. Each one took a few hours to make.
Hasta luego.
I am sitting here right now (Saturday night, 8:47 pm CST, at home in Arkansas Post, listening to Carlos Nakai. It sort of makes me homesick for New Mexico. Beautiful, slow, peaceful, Native American flute music that sounds like it’s coming across a mesa or from some Anasazi ruins. If you ever need to seriously relax I recommend listening to Carlos.
Check out John Greco’s list of his favorite movies set in New England. These are some excellent flicks. I haven’t seen all, but the ones I haven’t seen, I have heard good things about and the ones I have seen are dynamite. John has primo taste in movies.
I am closing in on finishing the first draft of Shadows and Stars. It’s time for me to start (probably late) some of the peripheral tasks of producing a book. I think I will start designing a cover for one thing. I hope to have Shadows and Stars published by a big, traditional publishing house rather than self-publishing, but in any case, I will need at least an idea of what my vision of its cover should be, if, for no other reason, than to give the cover artists a starting point. I will go with whatever looks the best and expresses the emotional impact the best. At least that’s my initial thought. Any comments or suggestions? I am open.
As I develop ideas, I will probably post them here for comment. Of course, I won’t make a hard and fast decision until all is said and done.
I will probably need an agent as well. I should start checking the Internet and researching how to find and select an agent. I learned a little about this in the Farmington Writers Circle, but I need to get serious about it now.
I am not planning any parties until a publisher accepts it. I am just going to intensify my research in the final stages of producing a novel.
Hasta luego.
As I often do, I am having trouble sleeping tonight. So I have been surfing the net and going through my electronic files looking for some flash fiction that I recently wrote and that I would like to submit somewhere. However, in the process of doing that, I ran across some early works, one of which I thought I would share here. I have not published it in any of my collections. It was originally published in the online magazine “Six Sentences” over ten, maybe fifteen years ago. The main requirement for stories to be published in “Six Sentences” was that they had to be six sentences or less in length.
The story is entitled “Warehouses and All”. It is based on a true story told to me in 1989 by a woman who had been an assistant agricultural attache to the US embassy in Somalia. At the time, I was working in the Defense Attache Office in Cairo. One weekend, I decided to take a trip to Luxor to see the temple and Valley of the Kings. The lady and I shared a horse-drawn carriage for several minutes. I forget our destinations. In the story, I changed the narrator to an American ex-pat working in the Somali oilfields for various reasons. Otherwise, the story is very close to the story she related to me. As you can see, it was quite a challenge to reduce her story to only six sentences, but I believe I pulled it off well. If Six Sentences is still up and running, you may be able to find the original story. I received several compliments on it.
By the way, while I was in Luxor, I stayed at the Jolie Ville Hotel. Apparently, it is still doing well. I recommend staying there if you are ever in Luxor.
Warehouses and All
I met the world-weary expatriate American at a garden party in Egypt in ’89, several months after he had left the Somali oilfields. He remembered that outside his barracks near Mogadishu there had been warehouses full of rice donated by foreign charities to combat the perpetual famine. The impoverished, inept government had no trucks to distribute the rice and fighting among factions within the government insured none could be arranged while their arcane laws kept them from simply opening the doors. So the rice sat as starving women tried to glean the few grains they could from what had fallen off trucks hauling it in or from what had leaked out through cracks in the walls. One night he awoke to commotion and found that the warehouses were in flames. “The rice had sat so long that it had rotted, so the government burned it―warehouses and all,” he said with a look that spoke volumes about his exasperation with the world.
Hasta luego.
Here’s a neat review. So long as you don’t take them seriously, these cheesy, older flicks can be fun in an MST-3000 sort of way.
I live in Florida and every year for six months starting on June 1st and going through November 30th we are inundated us with hurricane preparation news and fears by our local weather gurus. They beg us to prepare, know your evacuation routes, have plenty of water, food and be sure important papers are wrapped in plastic bags, all just in case. While tracking hurricane paths has improved tremendously Mother Nature has a way of doing its own thing. Preparation is important, but six months of it is emotionally draining. We’re now in November and the season is almost officially over. By November you can start breathing a sigh of relief for six months before it all starts again. This hurricane season Cat. 5 Dorian devastated the Bahamas and just last season Hurricane Michael massacred the Florida Panhandle. The point is, hurricanes are not to be taken lightly.
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On Friday, November 22, and the following Friday, November 29 (Black Friday) I will have four of my works free on Amazon Kindle: Click; A Tale of Hell and Other Works of Horror; The Scent and Other Stories; and Nocturne: Poems of Love, Distance, and the Night, a callous and disinterested lover.
I am doing this primary as an experiment in marketing and publicity. Yesterday, I offered the same four books as free and I got more takers than usual.
If you noticed, I have new covers for three except The Scent and Other Stories. I hope to have a new cover for it by Friday the 22nd, however. This is another marketing tactic. Because I love black and white photography and often find it captivating and powerful, I have used it for most of my covers, trying to express something I see in each book. But I see that most, more experienced authors use full color, flashy covers to grab the buyer’s attention. So I decided to give that a shot and see if sales pick up. I tried to make each cover grab the attention of a passing buyer by making it not only in full color, but also expressing something powerful and exciting about the experience I hope to get across in my book. I would like readers, not to judge my books by their covers, but maybe get a taste of
my books from their covers.
Anyway, I have included the three new covers in this article. If you would like to find out more about each, please go to my Amazon author’s blog. You can sign up for updates there or go to philslattery.wordpress.com and follow me there.
Oh, by the way, if you’re wondering where I got the covers, I downloaded some royalty-free public domain images from Pixabay (and maybe Pexels) and manipulated them in Pixlr. Each one took a few hours to make.
Hasta luego.
I am sitting here right now (Saturday night, 8:47 pm CST, at home in Arkansas Post, listening to Carlos Nakai. It sort of makes me homesick for New Mexico. Beautiful, slow, peaceful, Native American flute music that sounds like it’s coming across a mesa or from some Anasazi ruins. If you ever need to seriously relax I recommend listening to Carlos.
Yesterday, I received an e-mail from a gentleman in Spain. In my response, I discussed my marketing strategy a bit. I thought that it might be of interests to others, so I am posting it here, with the gentleman’s name and other data omitted, because I do not know what personal information of his I can share.
“I try to post most important articles at 0800 EST. I researched the time zones where the most people read in the US and, unsurprisingly it is the Eastern Time Zone. The Eastern Time Zone has the most universities, major cities, publishers, and greatest concentration of population. So I post things at 0800 so people will see them when they rise,arrive at work, etc, I also post things to hit other time zones across the world. A few of my posts are on this. One thing I do is what I did with offering the four books as free on the same day, which I am doing this week and next. It’s my most recent article. I post an advertisement or announcement one hour later each day for 24 days, so that I can hit all the time zones. This seems to be gradually gaining me a larger audience. For example, on November 2, I had views from the US, UK, Canada, Austria, Jamaica, the Czech Republic, Italy, Jordan, Spain, and Romania. Recently, I had views from Uruguay and Nigeria.
via Horror!
Check out this excellent, wonderful article above on A Tale of Hell and Other Works of Horror as well on my website and my life! Thank you Charly Priest!. I will be reading your works very soon and I encourage everyone else to do so as well.
On Friday, November 22, and the following Friday, November 29 (Black Friday) I will have four of my works free on Amazon Kindle: Click; A Tale of Hell and Other Works of Horror; The Scent and Other Stories; and Nocturne: Poems of Love, Distance, and the Night, a callous and disinterested lover.
I am doing this primary as an experiment in marketing and publicity. Yesterday, I offered the same four books as free and I got more takers than usual.
If you noticed, I have new covers for three except The Scent and Other Stories. I hope to have a new cover for it by Friday the 22nd, however. This is another marketing tactic. Because I love black and white photography and often find it captivating and powerful, I have used it for most of my covers, trying to express something I see in each book. But I see that most, more experienced authors use full color, flashy covers to grab the buyer’s attention. So I decided to give that a shot and see if sales pick up. I tried to make each cover grab the attention of a passing buyer by making it not only in full color, but also expressing something powerful and exciting about the experience I hope to get across in my book. I would like readers, not to judge my books by their covers, but maybe get a taste of
my books from their covers.
Anyway, I have included the three new covers in this article. If you would like to find out more about each, please go to my Amazon author’s blog. You can sign up for updates there or go to philslattery.wordpress.com and follow me there.
Oh, by the way, if you’re wondering where I got the covers, I downloaded some royalty-free public domain images from Pixabay (and maybe Pexels) and manipulated them in Pixlr. Each one took a few hours to make.
Hasta luego.
I am sitting here right now (Saturday night, 8:47 pm CST, at home in Arkansas Post, listening to Carlos Nakai. It sort of makes me homesick for New Mexico. Beautiful, slow, peaceful, Native American flute music that sounds like it’s coming across a mesa or from some Anasazi ruins. If you ever need to seriously relax I recommend listening to Carlos.
On Friday, November 22, and the following Friday, November 29 (Black Friday) I will have four of my works free on Amazon Kindle: Click; A Tale of Hell and Other Works of Horror; The Scent and Other Stories; and Nocturne: Poems of Love, Distance, and the Night, a callous and disinterested lover.
I am doing this primary as an experiment in marketing and publicity. Yesterday, I offered the same four books as free and I got more takers than usual.
If you noticed, I have new covers for three except The Scent and Other Stories. I hope to have a new cover for it by Friday the 22nd, however. This is another marketing tactic. Because I love black and white photography and often find it captivating and powerful, I have used it for most of my covers, trying to express something I see in each book. But I see that most, more experienced authors use full color, flashy covers to grab the buyer’s attention. So I decided to give that a shot and see if sales pick up. I tried to make each cover grab the attention of a passing buyer by making it not only in full color, but also expressing something powerful and exciting about the experience I hope to get across in my book. I would like readers, not to judge my books by their covers, but maybe get a taste of
my books from their covers.
Anyway, I have included the three new covers in this article. If you would like to find out more about each, please go to my Amazon author’s blog. You can sign up for updates there or go to philslattery.wordpress.com and follow me there.
Oh, by the way, if you’re wondering where I got the covers, I downloaded some royalty-free public domain images from Pixabay (and maybe Pexels) and manipulated them in Pixlr. Each one took a few hours to make.
Hasta luego.
I am sitting here right now (Saturday night, 8:47 pm CST, at home in Arkansas Post, listening to Carlos Nakai. It sort of makes me homesick for New Mexico. Beautiful, slow, peaceful, Native American flute music that sounds like it’s coming across a mesa or from some Anasazi ruins. If you ever need to seriously relax I recommend listening to Carlos.
Phil Slattery, Writer, Publisher 