Well, it’s been about nine days since Frostwalker was released. So far, the book has been well received and I offer my sincere thanks to each and every one of you who have been kind enough to purchase a copy either in ebook or paperback. Your support is greatly appreciated!

For now, I wanted to do a quick post to mention a few things about the book. If you follow me on Facebook, Twitter, or Google+, you may have already heard about some of this, but it doesn’t hurt to mention these bits of info again!

First, I’d like to invite you all to enter the Goodreads giveaway that is going on right now and will end on June 15th. To enter, you just pop on over to the Goodreads Frostwalker Giveaway page, and sign up. If you don’t have a Goodreads account, it’s quick, easy, and free to create one – and you’ll probably love the site! I’m giving away three paperback copies, so you have three chances to win!

Second, I want to offer a special thanks to book blogger Laura Thomas who was kind enough to do a review of Frostwalker on her blog, FUONLYKNEW, as well as inviting me for a very fun interview! She has high standards, so I was very happy to see that Frostwalker got five stars from her! She has also done a review of two of my short pieces, Out After Dark and The Card. You can see those reviews on her blog as well!

Lastly, I want to mention that while the paperback edition of Frostwalker is still only available through CreateSpace and their parent company Amazon, the various ebook versions are popping up at lots of different sites. So far, the ebook is available at the following retailers:

Smashwords | Amazon | Kobo | Sony | Diesel | Versent | iTunes

As I’ve mentioned before, you can read the first third of the book for free at Smashwords.

Thanks again to those who have purchased the book. I hope you enjoy it immensely! Please feel free to give me your thoughts on the book, good or bad, by either leaving a review where you purchased it, or on Goodreads, or by dropping me a line using the form on my Contact page here on my blog.

Thank You!

The book is available in both paperback and ebook formats. Here’s where you can get it:

Paperback (240 pages) – $7.99:

CreateSpace | Amazon

Ebook/Kindle – $3.99:

Smashwords | Amazon | Kobo | Sony |  Diesel | Versent | iTunes

More retailers will be added as the book filters out into the distribution system.

To learn more about the book and to read excerpts, visit the Frostwalker page here on my blog. Also, if you’d like to read the first third of the book for free, visit the Smashwords link above to view the sample.

Reblogged from fuonlyknew:

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In preparation for the launch of his new release, Brandon R. Luffman has stopped by for an interview.

I've had the pleasure of reading some of Brandon's work and I'm thrilled to have been given the honor of reading his ARC Frostwalker, a supernatural horror story.

I'll be posting my review on his Release Day which is coming soon!

~

Read more… 3,355 more words

Speaking of how close the release is, if you haven’t gotten your free copy of The Card yet, but are interested in doing so, you can still sign up for the Frostwalker Release Notification and get it. Obviously, once Frostwalker is released, that offer will be ended – get it while you can! Free reading material is almost always a good thing, right? To sign up and get your free copy of The Card, just pop over to the Frostwalker page here on my blog and sign up at the bottom of the page!

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Deputy Mike Fallon was bored. Presently, he was lounging on an avocado green vinyl couch in what the Roderick County Sheriff’s Office referred to as their “bull pen”. Little more than an open room full of desks, Fallon had the room to himself.

He was trying to alleviate his boredom with a dog-eared copy of a Louis L’Amour western. Usually, the graveyard shift at the Sheriff’s Office was as silent as a tomb. However, tonight, Deputy Fallon was having trouble concentrating on his book due to the amount of background noise.

One disturbance was the occasional frustrated grumblings coming from Sheriff Breslin’s personal office. The door was closed, and the sheriff was catching up on paperwork. The past few days, the search for Daniel Tucker had been all Breslin had worked on. Apparently, filling out the paperwork involved a great deal of swearing.

However, the worst distraction came from the hallway in the back of the office. Along one side of this hallway stood the three cells, normally empty, used for detainees. Tonight, the center cell was occupied by Angus Sommerset, aged fifty-seven, who snored loudly while sleeping off his public drunkenness charge. Angus was a bit of a fixture in the Sheriff’s Office, and the deputies often called him Angry Otis when he was out of earshot. Unlike Mayberry’s lovable tosspot, Angus had the temper his Scottish ancestors were famous for.

Suddenly, Deputy Mike Fallon had plenty to occupy him. First, the radio crackled to life. Dropping his book on the couch, he wove his way between the desks to answer the call. It seemed that a house was burning in the Briar Creek development. From the sound of it, it might have been arson. The reporting deputy mentioned an apparent fistfight ongoing in the yard of the next house down.

The Wynn Volunteer Fire Department had a small station down the street. Mostly, it was a large garage which held their two trucks and a smallish barracks area in back where those on overnight duty slept. While he began relaying the call on a handheld radio unit, the phone rang.

Snatching up the phone with his free hand, Deputy Fallon said, “Sheriff’s Office,” into the receiver, dividing his attention between the phone and the static-filled response coming from the radio in his other hand.

The voice on the phone was a woman, clearly in hysterics. She was screaming into the phone, and shouting could be heard in the background, as well as the growls and snarls of a dog that sounded enraged.

“He’s killing Earl!” she screamed into the phone, and Fallon yanked the phone from his ear in reaction to the volume of her cry.

“Ma’am, who’s killing him?” he asked.

Glancing at the screen of the computer that served as Wynn’s 911 emergency call center, he saw that the call was coming from the residence of Earl and Edna Cox of Thunderbush Lane. A small map had popped up, highlighting the location of the calling number and listing any pertinent information.

“I don’t know! The man just broke in our house! Please hurry!” she screamed.

Fallon keyed the microphone on the handheld radio, quickly giving the address of the fire and informing them that he was taking another call. Ignoring the reply, he said into the phone, “Okay, ma’am, we’re sending a car out there right now. Help is on the way. Just stay on the line with me, okay?”

“Please hurry!” she wailed again. The dog had stopped barking.

Picking up the microphone for the Sheriff’s Office radio, Fallon began calling out the situation. Immediately, a deputy on patrol responded. Though the roads were foul and growing worse, they had chained their tires and continued to run their routes as best they could. The deputy said he would head that way, estimating his arrival in ten minutes. This sounds like it’ll be over long before then, Fallon thought, but didn’t say. He knew wishing it so wouldn’t get anyone there any sooner.

Turning back to the phone, he said, “Ma’am, a deputy is on his way now. He’ll be there as soon as possible, okay?”

There was no answer. The line was still open, and he could hear faint shuffling sounds, like something brushing against the mouthpiece of Earl and Edna Cox’s phone.

“Ma’am?” Fallon said into the phone.

There was no response.

“Ma’am?” he asked again, again getting no reply. “Shit! Shit! Shit!” he raged as he grabbed the microphone for the radio again.

Changing frequencies, he began to notify the local rescue squad. They would be busy, with both a fire and an apparent assault to deal with.

Deputy Fallon didn’t know just how busy things were going to get.

——-

Welcome to Day Fifteen of the Gateway to Reality Blog Tour! Thanks so much to Brandon for having me on his blog. Read on to hear more about this New Adult novel that merges Urban Fantasy and Science Fiction, and be sure to to enter the giveaway below for the chance at one of three awesome prize packs!

I’m thrilled to announce that Gateway to Reality is now available at Amazon US, Amazon UK, and Barnes & Noble.

Gateway to Reality

Here’s a little more about the story:

Talented artists shouldn’t be waiting tables, scraping by, and living mediocre lives. But that’s exactly what art school graduate Wes Teague is doing.

Then he wakes from a bizarre dream, haunted by the sense that his life isn’t real. A harrowing truth presents itself—the real world lies in his dreams, not when he’s wide awake.

The dream world he enters each night is rich and vibrant. Chicago appears the same on the surface, but chaos runs rampant as gravity, physics, and other laws of nature become fluid, changing unexpectedly. There, Wes’s parents, brother, and sister are strangers. His girlfriend Emily doesn’t recognize him. Wes longs to return, to unlearn the truth about his dual reality.

Wes would sacrifice almost anything to get back to blissful ignorance in a false world.

But now he has feelings for the real Emily.

Excerpt

Today I’m giving you a peek at a short excerpt to give you a taste of what it’s like for Wes to discover that the real world is the one he visits when he dreams.

“Wes turned full circle, scoping out his surroundings. This place resembled the Chicago he knew, and yet little things were off. He took a few steps closer and was startled by the human reflections in the Bean. They made faces back out at their matches, sneering or laughing. The expressions didn’t match the people looking in.

It’s a dream. It’s just a dream. The thought helped to steady his footing. Nothing to be worried about. I’m just here for a bit, then I’ll wake up …

The colors of the world before him were vibrant—brighter than he was used to. Here, he saw—felt—what had been missing the day before. The air was sharper, crisper. Smells wafted past, not all of which he recognized, or that belonged in this park. His vision was clear, focused. Not like getting a prescription adjusted. More like taking off shades that shrouded reality. All of his senses seemed more alive here.

How could a dream feel more real than his own life?”

And Now for the Good Stuff—A Giveaway

I’m giving away several prize packs to celebrate the book’s release. (Want to see the prizes? Go here to have a look!)

The Grand Prize is a Chicago-theme prize pack and it includes:

• An autographed paperback of Gateway to Reality
• A journal with an artistic representation of Chicago on the cover
• A Cloud Gate button
• A Gateway to Reality button
• Three postcards: Gateway to Reality, Cloud Gate, and Crown Fountain

The Second Prize is:

• An autographed paperback of Gateway to Reality
• Gateway to Reality postcard

The Third Prize is the full Becca J. Campbell ebook library (your choice of Kindle or ePub version):

• Gateway to Reality ebook
• Foreign Identity ebook
• Not the Norm (Sub-Normal #1) ebook
• Unmasked Alloy (Sub-Normal #2) ebook

The Scavenger Hunt Blog Tour: Your Fifteenth (and Final) Clue

Wes visits many worlds in the Existence. Here’s your challenge in this scavenger hunt:

Collect the names of the fifteen worlds in Gateway to Reality (one will be revealed each day).

Following the schedule below, collect a world name at each stop, and when you have them all, plug that list of 15 worlds into the giveaway below to win a BONUS TEN ENTRIES.

HERE’S YOUR FIFTEENTH WORLD: Grim World

If you haven’t collected the other clues yet, be sure to check out this schedule and grab the clue for each day of the tour.

Good luck!

April 1^st Paranormal and Urban Fantasy Reviews

April 2^nd The Peasants Revolt

April 3^rd Catharsis of the Bogue

April 4^th The Pen and Whisk

April 5^th Write for Life

April 6^th S.M. Boyce

April 8^th Paranormal Lounge

April 9^th Lisa Is a Bookworm

April 10^th Jade Kerrion

April 11^th Paper Book Princess

April 12^th Now is Gone

April 13^th Worlds Away Book Blog

April 15^th FU Only Knew

April 17^th Sarcasm and Lemons

April 18^th Brandon R. Luffman

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a Rafflecopter giveaway

——-

Where to find Becca

Twitter | Facebook | Goodreads

Author Blog | Pinterest | Amazon

Get Gateway to Reality now!

Meanwhile, preparations continue for the release. The cover art is being finalized and formatting is underway. Work is also being done on the media kit, as well as various other supporting efforts. Stay tuned – it won’t be much longer now!

For now, enjoy this excerpt, and feel free to post your thoughts below!

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It was a cold night, but not so cold as to be unbearable. Late fall nights in North Carolina are mild, even here in the low mountains of the northwestern part of the state, and with his jacket and constant movement, Jake Marsden remained warm.

His lungs pulled the cold air in steady breaths, and his nose and cheeks were red with the chill, but he was unaware of these. Jake took constant, even strides and progressed through the darkened field. His footsteps on the fallen leaves slipped from time to time, but he did not fall. A cloudless sky sparkled above the rural darkness, but he did not see it.

Jake was thinking of the Light. It was out there, in the woods somewhere, and he meant to find it. This is becoming unhealthy, he thought, but quickly dismissed the idea. He’d made this trip many times, and while he was unnerved by recent events, nothing truly dangerous had happened. That’s not why it’s unhealthy—it’s obsessive behavior, part of his mind nagged.

It was obsessive, he had to admit, but he put such thoughts aside. He’d been dreaming of the Light for weeks now, and he knew it was out there, waiting for him and no one else.

When the dreams first began, they were like most any other dream he’d had: disjointed, unfocused and rarely remembered upon waking. Soon, he realized that he’d been having the same dream night after night, and the dream was becoming more and more clear.

After a week, he’d pieced together enough to have an idea of what it was. It was a glow in the woods and someone or something calling to him. He never heard the words, and the glow was sometimes green, sometimes orange, sometimes something he couldn’t name, but the dream was always the same: The Light, and the imperative that he must come to it.

A recurring dream isn’t unusual, of course, but Jake was gripped by this one like no other. Within three weeks, he was sure of two things: first, that the dream was more than a simple nocturnal flight of fancy—it was too vivid, too right for that. The other realization was that he knew those woods.

The woods were on a fairly open bit of land his father had given him. Henry Marsden had been a cattle farmer who dabbled in tobacco, soybeans and a number of other crops. He’d been successful, but beef prices fell and land prices rose. It was time to retire anyway, and farming wasn’t the life it once was. Over the years, Jake’s father had accumulated a good-sized farm, mostly pasture and fields, but also a few tobacco curing barns and other assorted outbuildings and equipment. These were sold at auction, fetching enough to see Henry and his wife Eliza through their retirement and a move to Florida, cliché though it might be.

While Jake had his own apartment in town, and had been quite happy there, Jake intervened at the last minute and asked his father to save a small plot for him. He wasn’t sure why at the time, but owning land is never a bad idea. Henry was happy to oblige his only son and gifted Jake with a dozen acres and the home place that had stood on it for some thirty years.

Moving in, Jake had found himself at a loss. There was so much room in the house—space he didn’t remember from his childhood or visits as an adult. His parents’ home had been lived in, and it represented the collected possessions of over sixty years of two people’s lives. Now, divested of their belongings—the knick-knacks, his mother’s doll collection, his father’s books—the house echoed like a tomb.

That was a year ago, and after a week of sleepless nights, the old place finally began to feel like home again. Now, a year later, Jake didn’t even feel at home in his own body.

What he was doing now was the reason why. For the past two weeks, he’d found himself awake in the middle of the night. Sometimes it was two in the morning, other times it was after four. Every time, it was after the same dream, and he felt that he had to find the Light.

At first, it was simple curiosity. Once he became aware of his familiarity with the woods in his dream, he wanted to see them, but he brushed such fanciful thoughts away and went back to sleep. However, it soon became something more. It was a yearning—an itch in his mind that demanded he go to those woods and find the Light.

So it was that, by the end of the fourth week of the dreaming, as he’d come to call it, he found himself dressing in the dark beside his bed. After slipping on his clothes from the previous day and tying on the hiking boots that normally never traversed more difficult terrain than the stairs to his second-floor office in town, Jake would head downstairs. From there, he’d cross the kitchen to the back door.

Once, he’d stopped to consider taking a flashlight, but some instinct told him not to. Maybe the Light would be too faint to see in the glare of artificial light. Perhaps whoever called to him would be frightened away. For whatever reason, he traveled by the light of the moon and stars alone.

Nightly, Jake would step out the back door, cross the screened-in porch, and head down the steps to his back yard. The fence, now gone, had still left its mark across the yard like a shadow. Much of the original pasture, purchased at auction in 1973, was his back yard. It was mowed and manicured as well as any large country yard could be. Still, that line remained, like a ghost. The outbuildings were gone or converted, the equipment long since removed, but that fence line still proclaimed that this was farmland, cattle present or not.

In the first nights, the dew quickly covered his shoes and soaked the cuffs of his jeans. As the nights progressed, the dew became frost, and the grass was covered in the fallen leaves of the maples that dotted his yard.

Crossing the fence line, Jake found himself in the old pasture. The land opened up, and the smooth grass, mowed weekly by Billy Henshaw down the road, was a gently sloping sea of gray in the moonlight. In the gray light, the pasture looked to Jake like a tarpaulin, stretched taut, but large enough to bow down into a shallow bowl by its sheer size.

Across the old pasture, perhaps a quarter mile distant, the tree line waited. These weren’t the woods from his dream, but that copse lay within the same forest. Jake walked the pasture, looking ahead rather than watching his footing. He was sure of his steps the way a horse is, his eyes locked on the trees ahead.

Each night, it had been the same. For two weeks, since that night in late November when he’d first given in to the need to see the Light, he had walked the old pasture, and each night he’d met the same end. He would mount the rise, approaching the tree line. As he neared, the shadow of the forest made an inky blackness of the grass ahead. The demarcation of the trees’ shadow was as clear to his dark-adapted eyes as a line of yellow police tape around a crime scene.

Jake would approach that line, the terminator between starlit pasture and forest-shadowed blackness, and his step would falter. Each night his stride was confident, almost joyous, in his acquiescence of the urge to find the Light. However, at this point, reaching the shadows of the forest, he was always stopped. The chill air would become frigid to him. It was almost like waking up all over again, though he’d done just that only minutes before.

On the fifth night, Jake had pushed himself. He had stood staring at the shadowed line, the rounded tops of the trees, full of dead and dying leaves, etched in shadow on the smooth grass. “Why stop here? Why stop now?” he asked himself. His voice seemed too loud in the darkness, the clatter of leaves in the trees the only sound other than his breathing.

He stood at that line, unsure why he had stopped, unsure why he was so frustrated by it, making the decision to cross it—and cross it he did. It had taken him five minutes to work up the courage to do so. Why he was so fearful, he couldn’t say. He’d walked this pasture and in those very trees a hundred times as a child and as a teen, helping his father mend the fence or chase stray cattle that had wandered through a broken strand of barbed wire. Now, he couldn’t even walk to the trees, couldn’t enter their very shadow.

Jake had balled his hands into fists, clenched his eyes shut, and stepped over the line of shadows. The instant he crossed into that blackness, he had been gripped by terror. His knees had felt like water, and his bowels had clenched. Panicked, Jake had dove back into the moonlit grass. Crawling on his knees, soaked with sweat and dew, he had retched, and the remains of his dinner lay steaming on the grass before him.

But he had been relieved, so relieved, to be in the light again, however faint it might be. He didn’t know why or how, but crossing into those shadows had brought an indefinable terror that he couldn’t explain and never wanted to face again.

Since that fifth night, Jake hadn’t tested the shadows again. However, the shadows had receded. Now, in the middle of December, the trees had shed most of their leaves. The shadows had changed. No more were they the rounded shapes of trees in full leaf. They were now scabrous lines like claw marks of some massive beast that had ripped at the earth. They were still dark, still filled with that inky blackness, but their new form was gapped and skeletal, and pathways between the shadow trunks approached the tree line itself.

Jake no more wanted to enter the shadows in their new form than he had in their earlier shape. Yet, when his steps began to fail and he found himself stopped at the edge of darkness, he would probe deep between the shadows and very nearly into the woods themselves.

The woods he didn’t fear, but the darkness between the trees was hard for him to look at. When he stood there in the dim light, he would peer into the darkness. He found himself looking away, almost without thought, his eye settling on some brown and frost-shriveled weed or a fallen tree limb nearby.

Tonight, as before, Jake turned for home. The spell was broken, and whatever called him from the Light no longer drew him. He was cold and tired. The weeks of lost sleep were taking a toll.

Also, you can still snag your free copy of my latest short story The Card by signing up for the Frostwalker release notification email. Remember, that’s not a mailing list and your email won’t be used for any other purpose, or sold or given away to anyone else.

Enjoy!

———————————-

Beyond the wall of thorny underbrush, Jake and Eric found the trees closely spaced. The trees here were old. Mostly oaks, with a few other species among them, many grew so large that they would have been hard pressed to reach around them with both arms. A few trunks the two could not have encircled together with joined hands.

The darkness was almost a palpable thing, and it felt to Jake as if the low branches above were bearing down on them. There was a totality of silence here that seemed otherworldly. By comparison, the meadow and the forest beyond was a cacophony of birds, squirrels, and other noisy creatures. When they spoke, it was in whispers.

“This place is creepy as hell,” Eric said.

Jake nodded. Looking around, he took a few steps into the darkened grove, stopping frequently to listen for any hint of danger. Eric followed him as he moved farther in.

They had gone perhaps as far as ten feet into the trees. Looking back, Jake was stunned to see that the snowy meadow they had crossed was already out of sight. All that could be seen was a sliver of white that seemed to glow in the dimness around them.

What light there was filtered down through the densely interwoven branches of the massive trees above them. It gave a sickly gray cast to everything, and when he saw Eric’s face, it looked ghostly. As Jake turned back toward the deeper darkness further within the grove, Eric drew his pistol.

“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” Jake asked, his whispered voice like a hiss.

“I’m not likely to shoot you or myself. I’d rather have it ready,” Eric replied. His eyes darted from shadow to shadow, and a thin sheen of sweat beaded his brow. Still, Jake thought he looked calm, despite his tense posture.

They continued farther in, careful to note where they’d come from. It wouldn’t be good to get in and find nothing to fear, only to be lost, wandering in circles trying to find their way out. The thought of such an outcome gave Jake chills.

Soon, a faint odor made him think of wet moss and molded food. As they continued, the smell grew stronger and the air seemed to brighten. He turned to Eric and crinkled his nose, the question in his eyes. Eric nodded. It’s not just me; he smells it too. Stepping around a large, leaning oak, Jake came to an abrupt halt. Eric stepped to his side, looking for what had caused the sudden stop.

Beyond the tree, a great wide hole had swallowed the forest floor. The massive oak beside them leaned drunkenly toward the pit, many of its enormous roots protruding out into open air.

The hole was easily twenty or more feet across, almost perfectly circular. It was dark inside and impossible to tell how deep it was. Around the edge, Jake could see where roots hung in the air, and the ground sagged in places, threatening to collapse farther into the abyss. The smell seemed to be coming from inside, and it was very strong here. Wispy streamers of steam rose into the cold air, and a wet heat rose from below.

“What the hell is this?” Jake asked.

“Beats me, but I don’t like it.” Eric had raised the pistol into a two-handed grip, holding it up by his face.

A low growl rose behind them. Turning, Jake saw a large black dog. It was of indeterminate breed, a mutt that perhaps had collie or German shepherd ancestry, among other breeds. It was tall, the top of its head rising perhaps to the height of Jake’s waist, and it had long, black fur. The shaggy coat was matted and splattered with mud. The black of its hair faded to a dark brown where it had lain in the muck. Snarling, the animal was baring its teeth at them. Thin strings of saliva flicked from its jaws as it snapped and growled.

Eric spun about. Bringing the pistol down, he sighted on the dog. As he began to squeeze the trigger, the beast leapt at him, snapping at his face and neck and slamming bodily into his chest. The pistol’s report was deafening in the previous silence of the grove, and Jake clearly saw the slug tear its way out of the animal’s back as it crashed into Eric, knocking him back.

Eric’s grip on the pistol had been strong, holding it with both hands. But with the recoil of the shot and the animal charging into him, he had lost his hold on it, raising his hands instinctively to protect his face. The pistol fell to the ground, and Eric stumbled back.

The dog fell to the ground and turned toward Jake while Eric wheeled his arms in the air, searching for balance. Flailing, he went over backwards into the pit. As he fell, his left arm struck a large protruding root. The woody snarl lodged in Eric’s armpit, and he clung to it, his feet dangling over the blackness below. Eric’s fall had stirred up the fetid air from below. Jake felt like it was a living thing, forcing its way into his nostrils. He could taste wet moss.

Jake’s heart was racing, and his bladder threatened to release. A thin stream of black fluid dribbled on the ground between the creature’s front legs from where Eric’s shot had struck the animal. It didn’t seem to notice. The dog snapped once, froth flying from its teeth, and then launched itself at him like a missile. He tried to dodge away to his right, but his foot caught on a root, and his ankle twisted painfully. He went down—hard—and his right arm went numb as it struck the ground, elbow first.

The dog passed by him, airborne, its snapping jaws reaching for his face but only finding his shoulder. The teeth caught in the flesh of his shoulder, and fire lit the muscles there, then the animal was gone, carried past him by its momentum.

Jake scrambled to turn over, not wanting to lose sight of the creature as it landed and turned to finish him. Something hard and sharp dug into his ribs. Glancing down, he saw the grip of the pistol sticking out from under his body.

Rocking back and bending his left arm under him, he snatched the pistol up. It was upside down, and he had no idea if it was cocked or otherwise ready to fire. The last two fingers on his left hand were looped through the trigger guard, and his thumb was flexed over the butt of the handgrip. He pointed the pistol at the dog as best he could. His arm shook with terror and the pain that flared in his shoulder as he extended it.

The animal came at him, and Jake squeezed the trigger with all his might. He closed his eyes tight, and the gun twisted in his tenuous grip—but the gun fired. It kicked violently, ripping itself from his hand and twisting his wrist painfully. The slide cracked against the bones of this wrist, abrading the skin there.

Hot droplets of something unpleasant spattered Jake’s face. He lay with his eyes still squeezed closed, the shot ringing in his ears, for some time before chancing a look. The dog lay on its side, unmoving, and a sizable portion of its snout and head were gone. Fighting the urge to vomit, Jake turned away.

“Hey! Help me up!” Eric called. “I’m starting to slip!”

Jake scrambled on his hands and knees to the edge of the black void his friend was dangling over. Extending his hand, he grasped Eric’s reaching arm and pulled. Eric worked his way along the massive root he was hanging from until he was close enough to reach the edge of the pit. Grabbing a root that was firmly in the ground, he heaved himself up over the side.

Lying on his back, gasping for breath, Eric gave Jake his thanks. It wasn’t verbal, but the sort of “thank you” close friends share with a nod. Once he had recovered, they stood and walked to the body of the dog, stopping to pick up Eric’s pistol.

The dog’s shattered head had spilled much of its contents. The brain—what was left of it—was clearly visible and was a greenish gray color. Maggots crawled among the chunks of tissue.

“My God. What the hell?” Eric asked.

Jake could only shake his head. He was still trying to recover from the ordeal, and his legs still felt like water.

“We should go,” Eric said, glancing around them at the darkness between the massive trunks.

Jake nodded and started back the way they came. As they walked from the grove, Eric patted Jake on the shoulder and said, “That was a hell of a shot. I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes.”

Jake replied, “You’ll have to tell me about it sometime. I didn’t see a thing.”

Ruby: A Mystic Stones Jewel is now available! Ruby is a short story companion to the novel Obsidian: Mystic Stones Series #1 and can be read before or after the novel. The story will be listed at $.99, but I will be offering FREE copies for anyone interested. First, I’ll post the blurbs for Ruby and Obsidian, then a little teaser from Ruby and last but not least, 4 ways to get Ruby for FREE!

Ruby: A Mystic Stones Jewel

Attraction pulls Ava Tanner to her client Tom Walker, but her professionalism prevents her from making any moves.

Tom wants Ava in more ways than one and his desires are almost too much to keep inside. He needs her, but he doesn’t want to scare her away for fear of angering the council.

Will the spark between Ava and Tom turn into something more, or will Ava allow it to fizzle out?

Available Now

Amazon

Smashwords




Obsidian: Mystic Stones Series #1

Ava Tanner finds herself in a world without satellite technology in a time of GPS, Smart Phones and Tablets. When she discovers that a corporation headed by vampires with a sinister motive is to blame, her world is turned upside-down. After a narrow escape, she learns a mystical secret about herself that could aide her in her fight against the vampires. Unfortunately, the vampires see her either as a valuable asset or a target for destruction.

When the world is on the brink of complete social and technological devastation, one must ask themselves: Would I give up my blood for the modern ideal way of life, or will I wage war with the overlords of chaos?

Available Now

Amazon

All Available Formats (Martin Sisters Publishing)

 

Here is a  little teaser from Ruby:

The metal elevator doors glided
open to the luxurious seventeenth floor of the Herrick-Peyton building. Fresh,
colorful hibiscus flowers welcomed Ava as she stepped into the reception area.
She glanced around and made eye contact with the man she was looking for: Tom
Walker. His face lit up when he saw her, and his handsome grin made Ava’s own
smile spread across her face.

“Miss Tanner, what brings you up to
the seventeenth floor?” Mr. Walker asked.

“Well, it’s been almost a year
since you signed your last lease, and since you seem so comfortable up here, I
thought I’d bring up the renewal papers,” Ava said as she looked around the
lobby.

“Wonderful! Let’s step into my
office, shall we? I’ll sign them right away. Otherwise, they’ll get lost on my
desk.”

Ava nodded and followed Tom to his
office. He stopped short and let her enter first as he gently placed a hand on
the small of her back. Butterflies erupted in her stomach.

He closed the door behind them and
gestured at one of the guest chairs while taking the packet of papers from her.
She could smell his cologne as he approached her. It reminded her of rain and
fresh cut grass. He took a seat behind his large desk, which shined in the
sunlight from the window behind him.

“So the papers would get lost on
your desk, huh?” Ava asked.

“Well, I might have exaggerated a
bit,” he replied. Silence followed as he flipped through the pages of the
lease.

He cleared his throat, “So, since
I’m signing papers—”

“Oh, no. Let’s not start that, Mr.
Walker. You know I can’t work for you,” Ava said, before he got the question
out.

“How did you know?” He grinned.

“You ask me every time we see each
other.”

“I wish we would see each other
more often. Then maybe I would wear you down.”

“I just don’t think I’d fit in at
Psytech, and I like where I am now,” Ava replied.

Tom sighed. “I know you do. I just
can’t figure out why.”

The pen dragged on the last page of
the renewal papers as Tom signed his name with a flourish. He stood and rounded
the desk with a predatory look on his face. It was one that Ava had seen often.
She couldn’t convince herself it was only the look of a man who wanted her to
work for him. To her, it sometimes seemed that he wanted so much more. She took
a deep breath as he came closer. She was about to stand, but he surprised her
by sitting in the guest seat next to her.

“I hope that one day you will say
yes to me. Psytech could really use you—I could really use you.”

There are four ways you can get Ruby for free and these offers will stand for an UNLIMITED TIME. Here is how to get Ruby for free:

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About the Author: Kayla Curry

Kayla Curry, author of Obsidian: The Mystic Stones Series, lives in North Platte, Nebraska with her husband and two children.

She likes spending time with family and friends when she’s not writing or marketing.

Her other hobbies include reading and arts and crafts. You can visit her website at http://sites.google.com/site/kaylacurryauthor/ to keep up on her progress in the Mystic Stones Series.

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As I’ve mentioned recently, Frostwalker is coming along nicely. The editing is finished and the remaining work is mostly supporting efforts, such as lining up promotional materials and finalizing the book content aside from the story itself.

By the way, I’m still giving away a coupon code to get my latest short story, The Card, for free if you sign up for the Frostwalker release notification email. To do that, pop over to the Frostwalker page here at my blog and sign up at the bottom of the page.

Anyway, for those of you who want to get a sneak peek, here’s a short excerpt from Frostwalker for your enjoyment!

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Jake was dreaming again, but at least it was something different. He knew he was dreaming because he was sitting among a large group of people around a large fire. Looking around, he saw that they were all Native Americans. Many of them wore paint on their faces and bodies, and those that didn’t were still covered with tattoos of a style he had never seen before.

Looking down, he saw that his arms were covered in tattoos as well, bearing stylized animals and stars as well as angular, bladelike swoops in tangled tribal knots. Much of the body art was covered in paint, red and white and blue being predominant.

The people around him were chanting in low voices and swaying rhythmically in unison. He found himself joining in. He didn’t know what the words meant, or how he knew them, but he chanted and swayed nonetheless.

A man walked to the fire from the darkness. As he did so, he chanted as well, his words different, forming a counterpoint to the rest of the group. He was old, elderly even, and he wore a colorful wrap about his body. It was made of soft leather and marked with symbols that Jake couldn’t describe. His eyes watered when he looked at some of them for too long.

Nearing the fire, the old man sat down on the edge of what appeared to be a large deer hide. The fur on the hide was a silver color, made orange and crimson in the firelight. The hide had also been marked with strange symbols and patterns.

The shaman, for this was certainly what the man was, swayed with the group, continuing his chant. As he did, he produced a long clay pipe from his wrap. It was painted with reds and whites and blues, and from it dangled fetishes of beads and feathers. The shaman held the pipe in his left hand, the long stem resting on his upper arm and shoulder. It was a purposeful pose, but Jake couldn’t fathom what it meant.

With his other hand, the old man reached again into his robes. This time he extracted a piece of leather wrapped into a bundle around something. With a twist, the bundle fell open, exposing what appeared to be the severed tongue of some animal. With a shout, the shaman tossed the pink tongue deep into the fire.

Bending forward, the old man carefully extracted a bit of tinder from the fire, its end a glowing coal. This he used to light the pipe, puffing with his cheeks until the bowl held a large cherry.

The shaman lifted the pipe over his head, looking up to the sky. Jake followed his gaze and saw that fat flakes of snow fell down above him, melting as they neared the fire. Behind the group, the trees and fields were smothered with a thick white blanket.

The old man returned the pipe to his mouth, holding it with both hands. He drew deeply, a long and powerful pull, puffing out his chest until his face strained, then he slowly bent forward, his wrinkled chin nearly touching the fur of the hide he sat upon. As he did so, he extended his arms forward so that the pipe was at his eye level, just above the fur.

Slowly, with a restraint that made Jake’s own throat burn with the need to cough, the old man exhaled, the smoke flowing out from his mouth in a broad fan and spreading out over the fur. The streamers of smoke continued for some time, passing through the hair of the hide and curling around like an ephemeral gray sheet, until the shaman blew empty air.

Then the old man slowly sat upright again, cradling the pipe in his lap with both hands, palms upright, staring at the smoke as it crawled across the fur.

The hair on Jake’s neck stood on end. The smoke had continued to move, but it didn’t rise, and it didn’t drift away on the breeze. The draft from the fire had no effect on it. Instead, it continued to undulate across the hide, slowly rotating like a hurricane seen from space.

The smoke formed thick patches, gathering into bands of gray and rising into tendrils and ethereal structures. Soon, a shape coalesced. Four legs and a long body appeared, topped by a head with a long snout. From the head sprouted a forest of antlers, and now a stag appeared as solid as any animal, but formed of smoke. It cavorted about the hide, dancing here and there among the bushes and trees of smoke that had risen up around it. It stopped and sniffed at the smoky ground, then lifted its head and snorted, puffs of smoke drifting from its nostrils.

The world filled with the vision transpiring on the hide. Like tunnel vision, everything seemed made of smoke until the stag turned its head and looked at him. Now it felt real. More, it didn’t bear the gaze of an animal, but a knowing look of sad wisdom and grim determination. Without warning, the stag charged at him. His body tried to recoil, tried to back away from the vision in gray.

The stag grew enormous. Its antlers could easily exceed the reach of his outstretched arms and those of another man as well. He was gripped by anxiety, but not true fear. The stag’s eyes held his own, and he perceived a message of hope and strength as it bore down on him. In a flash, it was on him.

Also, enter for a chance to win an autographed paperback of his book!

—————————————-

Hey y’all. I wanted to take a moment and just say thanks for letting me come by today. My name is Will Millar, and I’m the guy who wrote Infernal Machines. A lot of people who read my stuff end up asking me why I write Horror. It’s a question that’s asked of Horror writers more than most genres, when you run into somebody who pens, let’s say Westerns, or Sci-Fi the question is usually “Where do you get your ideas?”

But for Horror it’s more often than not the Why, rather than the How. I think a lot of the time this question is a politely worded variation on What the hell is wrong with your brain? While I can’t answer for other writers, the answer in my case is: I don’t know, but this might have something to do with it…

When I was a kid, on holidays my Mom and Dad would pack me and my little brother into their 1983 Buick Roadmaster station wagon — you’re probably imagining one with wood paneling and that weird roof rack thingie that served no ostensible purpose whatsoever, and you’re totally right — and drive us the 7 or so hours from Long island to New Rochelle to our Aunt Abbey’s house. I say house, but manse is probably closer to it. It was one of these sprawling 200 year old numbers with a basement that looked like a set piece straight out of one of the Saw flicks.

No matter which holiday it was there would be several traditions we would perform each time we went. For example, the dinner served was always turkey, no matter what. Easter — turkey. Christmas — turkey. Thanksgiving — well, you get the picture. A lot of families get together and gossip about each other, and I guess we were no different, but I’ve noticed looking back it wasn’t quite gossiping so much as it was story-telling. The difference may be marginal, or a matter of semantics, but here it is, anyway:

The stories were usually the same, and they involved the people who were already there, usually they were the butt of some joke or other due to either too much alcohol, or having had some sort of emotional outburst, and the stories got better the more times they were told due to various embellishments or tweaks, which I now think of as “edits”. Whoever told each story over and over had a way of refining them over the years until they had the oratory command of a field general and the timing of a stand-up comic.

Of all the story-tellers in my family, the most gifted was my Uncle Robert. He was also the one who got me to love Horror without ever once taking me to a movie or even telling me a ghost story, that I can remember.

There’s other stuff, too — if I’m going to look back and try to find whatever drove me into my life’s work, I’ve got to be at least somewhat fair about it. I saw Salem’s Lot when I was 5 years old, and to say that it had an effect on me is like saying Georgia O’ Keefe might have had an interest in flowers that looked kind of like vaginas. I used to tape crucifixes to my windows and sleep with a stuffed snake wrapped around my neck as some sort of fang shield. I broke into abandoned buildings in my neighborhood and searched for “Evidence of the Paranormal”. (What that evidence might have looked like, who’s to say, but I always envisioned some crudely spray-painted message, like: “Vampyres Here!” with a downward slanting arrow pointing to an otherwise hidden root cellar.)

I watched movies like Dawn of the Dead, Friday the 13^th, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre when I was probably way too young to process them in a healthy way, but I loved every minute of them. I dug the classics, too — everything from the 1950’s BEM movies like This Island Earth and The Angry Red Planet to the Atomic Age cautionary tales like Them. I watched the Howard Hawkes version of The Thing at least a dozen times before John Carpenter’s masterful remake even existed. I dug, even at a young age, the moody surreal tension in Fritz Lang’s M, and don’t even get me started on the Universal Pictures classics like Dracula, Frankenstein, or The Creature from the Black Lagoon.

You’ll notice I’m just talking about movies here, and not books. That’s because I saw all this crazy shit when I was maybe 6 or 7 years old. Which leads us to the question why would I have started watching horror flicks — at least that many horror flicks — when I was that young? Again, we’ve got to go back to my Uncle Robert, and that fucking basement.

Man, I loved that guy. He passed away about 3 days before my 22^nd birthday. I was still in the Marine Corps at the time, and I didn’t hear about it until the whole thing was over and he was buried. I never got a chance to tell him how much he meant to me…

The basement was scary enough without any of his help. The house was built on a tract of land right next to a power plant, and there was a rail station less than a quarter mile away, so it always seemed like that basement was breathing. There was a central hallway painted an institutional green with crimson trim, and it hadn’t been cleaned up since god only knows when. The house itself had been built some time at the turn of the 20^th Century. There may have been 6 rooms, or 8 — three or four on either side of the Hallway from Hell. To my 4 year-old eyes, it looked about as long as a fucking football field.

This was the other holiday tradition — exploring Aunt Abbey’s basement — it was like a rite of passage for us kids to go down there, usually at some fabricated request the first few times and then as we got older, just because.

The bloody axe is the one that I remember, even if it was the tamest by later standards. This was when we were still so young that Uncle Robert had to escort us down there. I don’t know how much time he spent thinking up new ways to scare the shit out of us, and maybe the axe was the 1^st stunt he ever pulled. I don’t remember a single thing I got for Christmas when I was that young the way I remember that axe.

Robert was leading us — me, my little brother and my cousin Michael — down Bram Stoker’s favorite hallway, opening up each doorway like one of those chicks on The Price is Right, saying in a low, sing-song voice “Nope, it’s not he-ere…”

Each room proved to be empty until the very last one, and I saw that axe. Laying in a single strip of muted lamplight, covered in blood, Uncle Robert screaming at all of us “Run!!!” and I don’t even think my feet hit a single step on the way back up the stairs, I swear all of us kids fucking levitated our way out of the basement by sheer force of will only to see our parents actually chuckling at our expense in the living room.

A few minutes later, Robert calmed down our hysterics by showing us the ketchup bottle, and my Mom and Dad confirming that it was in fact, a prank. Okay, so you might be thinking that’s kind of a fucked up prank to pull on a bunch of kids, but from then on every time we went to Aunt Abbey’s house the trip to the basement was as integral a part of the whole thing as the turkey dinner.

The reason I write the stories I do is because my family taught me that, sometimes, love means scaring the shit out of little kids and then having a good laugh about it afterwards.

Infernal Machines

Paulie and Stoner aren’t bad seeds; they’re just a little too smart for their own good. They stole their first car in kindergarten, and as for the homemade rocket launcher in Stoner’s garage … well, it’s best just not to ask.

With 9th grade just around the corner, Paulie and Stoner find themselves on the wrong side of some real bad kids, an older band of white supremacists that go by the name of “Twisted Cross.” When a rumble at a high school keg party turns fatal, it sets off a chain of events that test the limits of Paulie and Stoner’s friendship, and their very sanity.

Welcome to Chapel Harbor, a town where everybody buries their secrets deep, and nobody is quite who they seem. A town where the ghost of a serial killer known as The Junkman is rumored to stalk the woods at night, and where an unassuming magic shop and its mysterious proprietor, Arthur Cardiff, may possess the key to an ancient and terrible evil.

Packed with hairpin turns and twists that will keep you guessing until the very last page, Infernal Machines is a blood drenched, adrenaline fueled, roller-coaster of a horror story that’s at once a paean to the Pulp Horror classics of the early 80’s and a meditation on the enduring power of friendship.

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About Will Millar

Will Millar was raised in Commack, a quiet and unassuming town close to the northern shore of Long Island. As a kid, his primary passions were horror and hell-raising. As he tended to cultivate the latter to a greater extent than the former, by the time he was 17 years old, the whole town decided they’d had quite enough of his antics, and would he please just take his act on the road, thank you very much.

He enlisted in the Marine Corps, where his penchant for fire, explosions and general mayhem were tolerated, if not somewhat approved. At this point, Will also discovered the writers of the Beat Generation and began to write more consistently, submitting his less profane poems to underground ‘zines and belting out the more terrible stuff to unsuspecting audiences at various open mike nights throughout the Pacific Northwest.

Throughout the last 15 years, Will has worked as a writer in various mediums, though horror continues to remain his favorite. He sometimes contributes articles to Cracked.com, and his short stories are available in several different anthologies. Infernal Machines is his first novel.

At the present, Will lives in Phoenix AZ. He is a father of four, owns two dogs and has a wonderfully understanding girlfriend, all of whom somehow manage to put up with all of his crap.

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