Challenges
May 03, 2025 5:01 pm
May has arrived!
And I'm so glad because the last part of April was madness. Tech issues, taxes, and elections kept me hopping, on top of finishing the edits and writing my poem a day for National Poetry Month. Fingers-crossed this month slows down a bit.
Things to report:
Murder, Magic, and Maple Fudge goes to the editor at the end of the month, and should be available for preorder at the end of June, with the launch in July (probably July 17th).
Here's is little pre-edited snippet:
The bakery opened in five minutes, half-a-dozen things needed finishing, and of course my employees were late on a morning when everything had gone wrong. I misplaced the pecans and wasted a half-hour searching for them, almost burned a batch of cupcakes, and I was fairly sure I had flour smudged over my nose. Normally I could handle minor chaos, but after last night…It was enough to make me want to resort to a magic spell to speed things up.
I worked a little on Heyward and Andersen #5, Adventures at Reichenbach, but will be diligently writing that story this month in hopes of finishing the first draft.
I'll also be editing Tales of the Norse Gods and getting that done in the next couple of months.
Plus, I've been working on new designs linked to my books and will be uploading them to my Fourthwall shop this year. I'll give you a peek when they're available.
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The Shadows and Ink Podcast
April's podcast episode is an interview with author John Ward where we talk about his middle-grade horror series, Scareville. Check it out at the link below.
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Giveaways and Books To Browse
FREE Sci-Fi and Fantasy for May 2025
Ends May 31st!
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HORROR
The Loudest Silence by Kate L. Mary
After living the apocalypse for nine years, Regan thought they’d experienced every kind of loss and terror imaginable. But when a new group starts wreaking havoc in the Oklahoma wastelands where they live, Regan and Kellan are faced with a new set of horrors.
When they cross paths with a teenage girl, offering to help seems like the right thing to do. But Regan and Kellan soon discover that lending aid to the girl very well could lead to their undoing.
Book One in the Oklahoma Wastelands series
Dead by Morning (Rituals of the Night #1)
by Kayla Frederick
No one learns that better than Luna Ketz, a pessimistic high school senior. Caught between her parents' intentions for her life and her own plans, boys are the last thing on Luna’s mind. This fact doesn’t deter the mysterious Chance Welfrey from trying to gain her affection.
Luna doesn’t think twice about him until girls at their high school begin to disappear. Girls who tended to hurt her. Girls she wished would disappear.
When she receives a call from a long-lost friend, normalcy goes out the window as she’s plunged into the paranormal. There’s a world beneath the surface of the unconscious mind, and a murderer who knows how to navigate it.
Luna is in danger and although she can avoid the killer in reality, she cannot avoid him in her dreams.
Paranormal Jelly (Director's Cut) by Zwahk Muchoney
Step into the bizarre world of Paranormal Jelly, where the strange lurks just beneath the mundane.
Albert, a middle-aged author from Spokane, has built a wildly popular website dedicated to eerie tales—cryptids, eldritch horrors, cigarette-smoking ghosts, and secret cults. His readers eagerly devour each new story, convinced that the world is full of hidden horrors. But Albert? He’s a skeptic. To him, it’s all fiction—entertaining, profitable, but nothing more.
That is until the strange begins creeping into his own life.
At first, it's small—odd coincidences, whispers on the wind, shadows where there shouldn’t be any. Then the events grow impossible to ignore, until Albert finds himself questioning the very fabric of reality. Is it just his imagination, or has he spent years documenting the truth without realizing it? As fact and fantasy blur, Albert is drawn into a mystery far more terrifying than anything he's ever written.
Blending dark humor with an eerie atmosphere, Paranormal Jelly is a chilling and compelling descent into the unknown. Perfect for fans of The X-Files, Twin Peaks, and Gravity Falls, this story reminds us that sometimes, the truth is far stranger than fiction.
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My Merch Stores:
Vintage and artsy designs on a variety of products
Scifi, fantasy, and horror designs on a variety of products
Writer and reader-based designs on a variety of products
(with new Canadian designs)
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Find me on:
Website | Facebook Group | YouTube | BookBub
Instagram | BlueSky | TikTok| My Amazon page
Lemon Squeezy Store | My Books on StoryOrigin
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That's it for this edition. And I'll return next month with more updates.
