Flash #Halloween #Kindle #giveaway

Happy Halloween everybody! A few things:
First, today only I’m running a giveaway where you can enter to win a free ebook version of each of my books, Little One and When the Watcher Shakes. This is how you enter: Follow me on Twitter (if you already do, you’re halfway there!), then retweet the tweet below:

I will randomly select a winner from all those who have retweeted before 12:00 AM on November 1st 2017, and then I will send that person a direct message via twitter to work out emailing the ebooks. If you are a nook reader instead of Kindle, don’t worry, I can send you an epub instead.
Second, a big thanks to all those who sponsored and attended the West Virginia Book Festival last weekend. I had a blast, met some great people, and got to see some favorite writers speak. I also managed to sell a book or two! I didn’t take a lot of pictures, since my phone was kind of busy being used as a credit card swiper, but here are some photos from the event:

I forgot to bring my phone to Joe Hill’s talk/signing. I also forgot to bring my Joe Hill Special Issue of Cemetery Dance Magazine for him to sign. Kicking myself for both, but mostly the latter.
Anyways it was a lot of fun, and I’m looking forward to the next one. Happy Halloween!
Oh and of course, here is this year’s Jack-O-Lantern from me and Emily to you!

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Happy Halloween!

See me in Williamsburg!

Hey, I’m back! In case you missed me, my wife and I spent most of September hiking the Allegheny Trail, a 330 mile route from the PA to the VA border of West Virginia. It was a challenging and unforgettable trip. Eventually Emily will put a trail report up on the internet, and I’ll link to it for anyone interested.
But now I’m having to readjust and get back to business. Coming soon (this Saturday!) is the Williamsburg Book Festival in Williamsburg, VA.
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It is October 7th from 10 am to 4 pm at The Stryker Center. And guess what—it’s free to attend!!! Come by my table and get your own personalized signed copies of Little One and When the Watcher Shakes.
Don’t miss it! Click the image below to view and download this year’s program.
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Keep up with news at the Williamsburg Book Festival Facebook Page

Leaving for the Allegheny Trail; also, some pictures from this summer

I want to let everyone on here know that I will soon be away from the internet, for most of September. For our fifth wedding anniversary, Emily and I are using up all of her paid vacation days to attempt a thru-hike of the Allegheny Trail.
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Not to be confused with the Appalachian Trail or the Great Allegheny Passage, the Allegheny Trail is a 300 mile hiking route that stretches from the PA border of West Virginia to the VA border. We plan to finish in three weeks. I will be bringing my phone primarily for emergencies, as well as a section where the trail isn’t finished that I might need to call someone nearby to drive us from one section to the other, unless we decide to walk the gap. I might turn my phone on in a non-emergency setting during our scheduled resupply days at certain towns, but if I do that, the most I’ll probably do online is delete junk emails and perhaps post on Instagram—but don’t hold your breath. If anyone comments, tweets at me, emails, or whatever, don’t expect a prompt reply. In fact, though we plan on getting back for the last week of September, my inbox will probably be so swamped (mostly with junk) that it will take me a while to get back to anyone who has tried to contact me. If you email and don’t hear back after the second week of October, try contacting me again (I might have lost your message in all the junk email I’m sure to get, and accidentally deleted it).
For more information on the trail Emily will be backpacking, peruse these websites:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegheny_Trail
https://www.wvscenictrails.org/
Emily and I also went to the WV State Fair this summer and I got some cool pictures. Some of them are kinda creepy so I thought somebody out there might like them.

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This one is my favorite. I waited a while for crowds to disperse so I could get a clear shot of this creepy blackface clown trash can. Why would anyone make this thing unless they are trying to creep kids out???





I love the lights of the carnival, and stuck around until dark primarily just to see it. A raptor specialist came to show off his birds. Owls are my favorite animals (and the novel I’m working on features a pretty creepy barn owl), so this was the highlight of my day. There was a tiger show, but it was so crowded (and I’m not a very tall person), that I missed most of it.
I’m excited but nervous about the trip. I’ve still been feeling some pain from an injury I got cross country skiing last winter. But most likely, a trip like this is now or never, so I bought myself a brace and have been wearing it for a couple days and it does seem to help. Pray for me and my leg, as we need to average fifteen-mile days to complete the trail in time.
Here are some parting pictures for you, of my chickens and the camp’s goats this summer:

 
Going “radio silent” (or internet silent, I guess?). Later.
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Literary festivities in America’s Coolest Small Town

Over the weekend I signed and sold my books at one of my favorite events, the Lewisburg Literary Festival. Lewisburg is up at the top of my favorite places in WV, and a big reason for that is their appreciation for books expressed in this fun annual event. (Re: the title of this post, Lewisburg was named America’s Coolest Small Town by Budget Travel in 2011). I took a few pics and thought those of you who weren’t there would want to see what you missed out on. Continue reading

Coming up for fresh air and sunlight, and winning a #NGHW challenge

Well hello! Didn’t expect to see you standing there next to my hole! Wow, doesn’t the sun  hurt your eyes up here? So bright… I’ve been down there for so long, tunneling away…
I’ve been making good progress on my WIP. Today I passed the 50,000 word mark! And there is still plenty left in the story. I’m happy to be so sure that this will be my longest novel yet (When the Watcher Shakes is somewhere around 60,000 words, and Little One is around 55,000). At the beginning of this, I was really hoping that I would be able to make it to 80,000. Right now, I’m feeling that goal could become a reality in as little as a month! (And I still don’t have a good title! That’s okay, I usually don’t come up with one until after the story is finished anyways.)
But the real goal is not necessarily to reach a certain word count, but to tell a good story at a good pace.
In other news, I’m still competing in the Next Great Horror Writer Contest over at HorrorAddicts.net. I can’t say that I’m really doing great overall, at least so far, but I am glad to finally say that I won the most recent challenge, which was to create a short spoof radio commercial script for a fake horror-related product. The judges really liked mine. You can read the script here: https://horroraddicts.wordpress.com/2017/05/22/nghw-winner-of-commercial-spoof-timothy-huguenin/
If you want to read the top eight spoof commercials, here’s the link for that: https://horroraddicts.wordpress.com/2017/05/21/nghw-top-8-commercial-spoofs/
Alternatively, you can listen to their recent podcast episode, and hear my commercial acted out at the end!
Well, back to digging. I’ll see you again sometime soon, I hope.
 
A reminder to those interested: Little One will be released in July! You can mark your calendar and hope to remember—or you could just sign up for my email newsletter, and make sure you don’t miss it or any future publications!

Macbook being worked on, but still trying to continue with life

Well, a quick update, since I’ve been pretty quiet lately here on WordPress (and if you’re a mailing list subscriber, you may notice that I’m a little late with my monthly update as well).
I’ve been pretty busy; last month I finished the first draft of my next novel, then the last couple weeks I’ve been going over the manuscript getting ready for the first rewrite. However, my Macbook has a rare but worrisome problem with the hinge of its display, so while it’s still under warranty it is at the shop in Jackson. But the tech there is out of town for a week so it’s going to be even longer before I get it back 🙁 Until then I can’t really work on rewriting my manuscript, even though I have a marked up version ready to type back up.
I’m using a computer at my “office,” a.k.a. the Sublette County Library, to write this. It’s rough and hard to get things done without my own computer but I figured it’s good to let you guys know what’s up. Unfortunately my mailing list subscribers will be updated later than normal because of this, too.
I just got back from the Boise Book Fest, which was super fun. I met lots of great writers and readers. Unfortunately I forgot to take any pictures, so just imagine how great it was! You can do it, I believe in you. Thanks to Priya for organizing this great event, and thanks to all the great writers I met and to the people who bought my book.
While I was editing my manuscript, I also got a rough draft of another short story done! Still letting it sit a bit before I go back to it for editing. It was a story that I had started months ago and felt like it wasn’t going anywhere. When I came back to it at the beginning of this month, somehow it all just kind of came together, and the end came to me pretty easily. That’s such a great feeling when that happens. The moral of the story here is that if your fiction is going nowhere, don’t toss it out! Maybe all it needs is for you to forget about it for a while and then come back to it with a fresh mind.
Mailing list subscribers, don’t lose hope! I’m going to try to get a new newsletter up as soon as possible! And thank you, my loyal blog followers; sorry that I’m not the greatest blogger. But I do what I can.
I’m really excited about my new novel. I have a great designer working on the cover, but I’m going to keep that a secret for a while. I will be looking for a few more beta readers soon, so if you are interested, click on the contact link and let me know! I can’t promise to let everyone who contacts me do this, since I am looking for certain kinds of readers, and I already have a good handful selected, but I could use one or two more. So give me some info about yourself and what you like to read and stuff and I would love to get back with you about whether or not you could help me in this way.
My apologies for being such a recluse when it comes to this social media stuff. I still love you guys. I’m just really not a great blogger or Facebooker. But I’m doing my best here. I’ll try to blog again more regularly when I get my computer back, and I promise that I’ll be getting that newsletter out soon.