This is the second installment in my behind the scenes series I’m calling Inside the Christmas Cabinet. Let’s open up that box and see what’s inside! Warning: potential spoilers in the following post! If you haven’t yet read it, but still want some more information, go back to the original announcement which includes links to purchase the digital magazine in which my story appears. The first part of Inside the Christmas Cabinet would be fine to read beforehand, but you probably want to read (or listen) to the story itself before reading this one.
Continue readingport crayon
Inside the Christmas Cabinet: Port Crayon, West Virginia
Those who have followed my short stories are familiar with Augustus Valley, my fictional southern-WV town, once a thriving hub of the mining industry, “now a blip on a long detour you’ll never take, the coal having run out there, as is its way” (as I describe it in the prologue to my unpublished novel, Schafer). Wind up the mountain along steep, narrow backroads and you’ll find High Point, where the Yellow Carousel secretly turns, where Mr V reclines in his fire-lit library, where some have reported seeing a black horse with glowing embers for eyes galloping through the night.
Readers of my new story, “The Christmas Cabinet” (appearing in the Summer 2026 issue of Assemble Artifacts Short Story Magazine) are introduced to a new mysterious, small mountain town: Port Crayon, West Virginia.
Continue reading40,000 words into my new horror novel
I haven’t updated you guys on my latest writing project until now because whenever I start something intended to be a novel, I’m afraid that I won’t be able to remember how to write again, or I’ll get to the end and it won’t be long enough, or it will turn out to be an incoherent, unpublishable disaster. Well, I’ve been deep into a project I started this spring, and I’m relieved and excited to go into this weekend having crossed the 40k mark! What’s more, I think it might resemble something you may actually want to read.
