Glossolalia: Psychological Suspense Novel is Released

This high octane thriller explores the brilliantly dark side of the secret agents who are vital to maintaining the country’s status. Like the sensation, Stranger Things, this suspense novel references MKULTRA and other government mind control program history and speculation.

A magkical child named Emily responds to the Elizabethan spy code, Enochian, and when she plays Enochian chess, it’s an international event. She has a special relationship to Reverend Terry Crank’s church. Crank’s entire life is an international event. And he wants to make sure Emily’s remains that way too.

Nancy wants to stop a crime she sees in progress, and that takes her down the rabbit hole of political intrigue, money laundering, drug running, the collusion of church and state, and surprises galore about people around her, including her own reflections. Glossolalia turns the traditional spy thriller on its head and shakes it down. When Nancy looks down at the mirror on the floor where the evidence has shaken out of the pockets of the agency, she starts to understand. And it’s shocking.

Until amnesia overtakes her once again. She must break through the mirrors on the ceiling and the floor to see outside the box they’ve created for her, and out of her.

Angela Ageless wishes she could have sex one day for its own sake, not for her job. But she’s core to the conspiracy. How could she be anything else?

What would you do if your subconscious determined the fate of nations?

Read the release Composed by Press Release Distribution, at Inside Bay Area, Aug 4 2016

Reading/Answering Questions Live Today

Today at 1:00 PM Pacific Time, at THIS LINK, I’ll be one of three authors in the NovoPulp Volume III Launch Party Google Hangout.

I’ll read some pages from my SF story about the same topic that’s in my Psychological Suspense series, The Agents of the Nevermind — social engineering by Intelligence agents.

If you’re interested, you can watch and ask questions of any of us.

Story in Triangulation: Parch –a little more about it

“An anthology of Short Speculative Fiction” from Parsec Ink. I’m thrilled by the literary quality of this tome. A little more about it:

The slick cover I think looks much better in person than the online image suggests.

The theme is dehydration.

Parsec Ink is a paying market.

The editor is Stephen V. Ramey. Here he blogs about Parch. He’s been published in places like Apocrypha and Abstractions, Every Day Fiction, Cease, Cows, Literary Orphans, Glass Eye Chandelier, Gone Lawn, TJ Eckleberg Review, Polluto, JukePop, The Speculative Edge, Connotation Press, and many others.

Some of the other authors are Fruma Klass, Tinatsu Wallace, Chuch Rothman, Jetse DeVries.

The Mask of Sleep is Horror. It begins:

The man inside the mask can no longer see through the eye holes as the mask’s eyes droop into the last increment in the horrible progression of a month toward closure. It sleeps its wood, paint peeling off the edges of the visible world. He hates the darkness encroaching day by day. He hates the movement toward nothingness, the mask-blindness that makes him think continually about what he did to his tribe. He should never have released the strange perpetually thirsty animal from the wooden pen and let it fly. Once in the air, the creature widened, became soft and white, and turned into a cloud that grew larger and larger and ate all the other clouds in the sky. No rain fell for months.

Story in Axolotl Magazine

Secret in the Desert is available online now for your spooky pleasure.

I have so many publications on a regular basis, it’s hard to chose which ones to include in this blog, which is for people wanting to read my work, who aren’t necessarily interested in Literary, Experimental, or that side of the Interstitial styles as much as pure straightforward Genre. Pulp. Speculative. You got it.

This story is Paranormal.

It begins:

In the line to get into Parch, we drove past signs along the pale road which ran through the dried-up lake bed that reminded me of a canvas carried through the dust, spat on by the gods, and wiped off with robes made of thorn. In fact, it was just those gods we were each paying five thousand dollars to see. We hoped they would give us a fashion show some time during that week without water, hoped our very eyes would turn to dust enough that we could blink when the dust storms cleared, and we would see the truth.

I didn’t believe in truth.

One sign said: WHAT IS IN YOUR HEAD IS IN THE GROUND.

The next: OPEN YOUR EYES.

YOUR PUPILS GO STRAIGHT TO YOUR BRAIN.

YOU TURN YOUR WORLD UPSIDE DOWN COMPLETELY WITH YOUR BRAIN.

We knew Parch would turn everything we had ever believed on its head.

Speculative Stories

If you’d like to read any of my relatively straightforward SF, Paranormal Fantasy, and Horror stories, many of these below are free to read at online magazines, and others are in anthologies for purchase at these links.

Partly because I like to think outside convention, I’m a lover of Weird Fiction, which originated before genre rules set in. I’ve picked my most traditional Speculative fiction for this post, but still, some of the stories below are on a bit the edge of their genres, and could be labeled Weird as well as the designations I have given them. I have a couple hundred stories published in magazines and anthologies, and a lot are in Interstitial styles, between Speculative and Literary, with elements of both, such as Slipstream, Magical Realism, Surrealism, New Wave Fabulism, and Weird: I link to over 80 of the Interstitial ones HERE. Looking through them might be useful for people wanting to understand those genres better, to get a sense of what they’re like.

I only write to be read, never just for my own enjoyment. A story isn’t a thing until it’s completed by the readers. I always feel gratitude for my narratives’ completion in readers’ brains’.

Ocularity SF

The Coveted General Anzel Smile SF

Origami Mafia Story Unfolds SF

Breaking the Seal SF

Printed People Eaters SF

Eye Poison Horror

Mask of Sleep Horror

Two-Faced Horror

To Explain the Sasquatch Sitter Paranormal

Mirror Tattoo Paranormal

Projection Theater Paranormal

My SF story nominated for Pushcart Prize

My SF story, “Printed People Eaters,” was chosen as the narrative from the Conspiracy themed print and e-book anthology, Redacted Story, to be nominated for the Pushcart Prize. This is my 6th Pushcart Prize nomination.

The great Ashley Parker Owen‘s KY Story publishing house brings Appalachian authors to print. My mother’s family homesteaded on Sand Mountain, rural northeast Alabama, and I spent a big part of my life living there, loving the land, animals, trees, relatives, down-to-earth ways. My Great Grandparents moved there after Sherman destroyed their farm in Georgia. Some of the family stayed in Georgia (and eventually gave birth to Jimmy Carter, my third cousin.) My Grandparents both died young, leaving Mama and her siblings orphaned as children, raised by their aunts and uncles, most of which remained single all their lives. I was there a year and a half recently for the end of Papa’s life, but we lost the land due to theft by a con artist, which broke my heart. It will remain in my heart. I keep a piece of my friend– one of the old oak trees that was there when it was homesteaded — by my bed.

The anthology has a 5 star rating on Amazon. I have a second story in it as well.

KY Story’s other publications’ nominations: Appalachian Voice: John Vanderslice, “Escape to Ash,” John Sparks, “Fishing with Abraham,” Tom Sheehan, “Sixty Years Later at a Mid-Earth Pub.” Motherlode: “Oren Hammerquist,” “Desert Daddy,” Treg Isaacson, “Growing Up or Not.”

KY Story is current taking submissions about Bullying for an anthology, deadline Feb. 25th 2015.

Origami Mafia Story Unfolds

Though the American Psychological Association reported in 2008 that the Zero-Tolerance policies set into motion in 1994 do not contribute to making schools safer, in 2013, children began being suspended and arrested for imaginary guns. Some of the offences included pointing a breaded chicken finger at a teacher, playing cops and robbers with a paper gun, throwing an imaginary grenade while pretending to be a soldier, owning a pink toy gun that blows soapy bubbles, writing about killing a dinosaur using a gun, threatening other kids with a toy gun of rolled-up paper, drawing a picture of a gun when the teacher said to look up at the clouds and draw what they saw, twirling a pencil in class, chewing a strawberry Pop Tart into the shape of a gun, molding a pastry into what a teacher decided looked like a gun, and talking about toy guns to classmates.

SF story, Origami Mafia Unfolds, as News from the Future, at The Subtopian.

Eye Poison

Weird Horror story, Eye Poison, in No Sight for the Saved Anthology, print and e-book. “”Surreal journeys through landscapes of the angry and abandoned, the lost and lonely and the weak and wounded. These are the realms of the Dead End Collective.” The horror art of Niall Parkinson is used for inspiration for the short stories and poetry included in this anthology. This fully illustrated anthology is a wonderful collection of horror fiction inspired by horror art. Seeing is believing, and horror awaits.”

In the story, the family’s repressions begin to take shape.

To Explain the Sasquatch Sitter

Hi, there,

I know you probably feel this is not the usual way of going about things. I know it probably does not fit with the usual paper work. But you have to understand that I had no choice, really, but to think outside the box. There was just no one other than me to take care of my father. If I was a healthy girl, a pretty girl, someone who could get a husband, that would be different. But that’s not who I am, and God has dealt the hand He saw fit. There must be some reason for me to exist. Maybe it’s because I have a lot of love to offer.

Paranormal story, To Explain the Sasquatch Sitter, was at 10 Thousand Monkeys.

Projection Theater

Hannah and her friend Lewis crept toward the abandoned university theater through the tall grasses that slid against their skin, knocking spores into the air that stank of reproduction. They rose up to look for faux dangers, and bent back down, grinning in anticipation of the wondrous auditorium they’d heard about from the art school where they taught. They’d never talked about the place to anyone who had gone there, but had over-heard collages of conversation in the hallways. Hannah and Lewis thought they’d seen a photo of it on a bulletin board at the school, a clipping from the college paper, but could never agree on what it looked like. They wanted to paint it to enter a contest that would take one of the multitude of people who entered far away from that place to a new life. Or, at least Hannah really wanted to win it. Lewis was more interested in having a fun day with Hannah than winning the contest that would take the winner across the world from Knoxville, Tennessee to a career in London.

Weird SFF story, Projection Theater, at Lorelei Signal.