A week-long Mother's Day special

In honor of Mother's Day, I'm putting all my novel-length works on sale this week.

Beginning on on Saturday, May 11 and lasting until Saturday, May 18, my novella and short story collection THE ALCHEMIST & OTHER DARK TALES will be on sale for just 99 cents -- that's a full 67 percent off the normal price.

My inspirational/religious novel written under my pen name John Peter Blankenship, CHOICES, will also be 99 cents -- again a full 67 percent off regular price. And yes, I know, that's an odd combination for a writer -- a horror collection and an inspirational novel. See my post, Can a Horror Guy do Inspirational/Religious Writing from December to see how I managed to do that.

My romance thriller, CLAIMING MOON, is on sale for $1.99, a full 50 percent off the normal price.

What are the books about?

THE ALCHEMIST & OTHER DARK TALES is, as I mentioned, a collection of stories. Some are reprints of work I've had published in such fine markets as Horror Library Vol. 1 and the Stoker-nominated Horror Library Vol. 3; Dark Recesses (sadly, now defunct); Midnight Echo; Night Terrors 2; and elsewhere. Some of the works have never been published before.

The centerpiece is my novella THE ALCHEMIST. Here's a little synopsis of that tale and others:

Every day they file into our nation’s schools – tens of thousands of children, and teens – innocent, bright-eyed, looking forward to their future. But something is wrong in our nation. Bullies ruin lives. Killers sometimes walk those halls. The Good Old Golden Rule Days seem to be a thing of the past.

What if you could stop the violence, protect the innocent? What if you had the ability to separate the good from the bad, the innocent from the evil – like the alchemist of olden days, who could seemingly fuse a strange, dark magic with everyday items and make something new and precious?

Would you use this power? Could you control it?

Denny Harris possesses what we all wish we had – the ability to help those in need, the power to protect the weak.

As a high school teacher he is uniquely positioned to use his gift. In the classroom he sees the worst in humanity – drug users, bullies, criminals in the making – and their hapless victims, kids who are ridiculed, stolen from, even beaten.

Descendant from an ancient race, born with the ability to harness a supernatural power for his purposes, Denny has the ability to protect the innocent, if he can tell who really needs his protection.

Easy, right? Maybe not, for sometimes life isn’t as it seems.

A lesson Denny learns too late in the novella The Alchemist.

Other stories in this collection examine issues we like to hide away in a dark corner: How strong is a mother’s love, and can a mom go too far in protecting her child? What if you could end all death in the world – would you? Are all barbers nice guys? Is eternal youth worth any price? What happens if a whole town turns out to be not quite of this world?

These and other questions are all examined in THE ALCHEMIST & OTHER DARK TALES.

***

CHOICES is a novel I wrote after several experiences over the years -- spending some time with several homeless people for a couple of articles I wrote years ago, seeing firsthand how those with plenty often run right over those with little, and watching people with a deep and strong faith in God working, daily, to live that faith and help those in need.

Here's a little bit about CHOICES:

It’s Christmas and Joey Reagan has been presented with a unique gift – the opportunity to wash away two decades of hurt, a chance to forgive the source of that pain, a shot at peace and contentment.

Accepting that present isn’t as easy as it seems. For 20 years Joey has carried the scars of abandonment, the bitterness of being left by his father and, as far as he can tell, the God his mother so devoutly worshipped.

Making choices hasn’t always been the strength of the Reagan men. Joey’s father made a series of poor decisions years ago, choices that cost a life, split their family, and left Joey with an emptiness that’s never been filled.

Now Joey has to make a few choices, and what he decides will affect his life, the woman who loves him, and a series of people he hasn’t yet met.

Can Joey overcome the past and make the right decision? That’s the question, and the answers can be found in CHOICES, a novel written under my pen name John Peter Blankenship.

***

And finally, my novel CLAIMING MOON. This was my testing the waters a bit as a romance and suspense writer. Along the way, I found a few characters I really liked, so I most definitely will be doing a sequel to this one. Maybe even a whole series. For now, though, CLAIMING MOON wraps up quite nicely as a self-contained story while also leaving an opening for more.

Here's a little bit about the work:

People are dying in Southwest Virginia, their bodies ripped open, a vital organ missing.

Clearwater Police Detective Frank Taliaferro has served in larger departments, advised the FBI, even worked international cases for The United Nations, but now he’s back where his career began, in the small town of Clearwater, Virginia. And he’s never seen anything like these killings.

Frank finds himself forced to participate in a charity bachelor auction as a public relations move for the police department.

Cassandra Kincaid, a rising star at the Daily Dispatch who has her sights set on moving to one of the larger dailies – New York, Washington, maybe Los Angeles – is forced into participating in the auction as a bidder so she can write a feature piece on the whole process.

Although she is none-too-fond of police, Cassandra ends up winning a date with Frank. Surprisingly, she finds the detective charming, definitely attractive, and enjoys their evening together until the date is interrupted by a gruesome murder.

That’s when things get complicated. The two find themselves drawn together in an uneasy yet passionate relationship while they both race to uncover what is behind a series of macabre murders.

Cassandra’s probing also uncovers a dark secret from Frank’s past, one that drives a wedge of mistrust between them, yet Cassandra finds she can’t get the detective out of her mind.

In the end her feelings for Frank may not matter because the two find themselves in a deadly face-off with the killer. Only then do they learn there is an ancient evil behind the grisly murders, but that discovery may be too late to save either of them.

***

I believe there's a little something here for every taste. Heck, you can get all three now for the normal price of CLAIMING MOON. So go ahead, buy your mom one or two, or three, of my works. Heck, buy some for yourself.

THE ALCHEMIST & OTHER DARK TALES is available for download to your Kindle right here and to your Nook right here. Don't have either? No problem, you can get a free Kindle reading app for use on your computer or mobile device right here.

CHOICES is available for download to your Kindle right here and to your Nook here.

CLAIMING MOON is available for your Kindle here and for your Nook here.

Thanks for stopping by, Happy Mother's Day and happy reading!

Can a horror guy do religious/inspirational writing?

It was a spring day in 1990 and I was sitting on the courthouse steps in the tiny town of Stuart, Va., talking with a young colleague named Melody. Her desk and mine faced one another in the newsroom of the paper where we worked, some 30 miles away. It was unusual for our newspaper to send a reporter to Stuart, yet today there were two of us -- Melody to report on some controversial school board action and I to cover a trial. Her board was in closed session, my jury was deliberating, so there we were sitting in the pleasant spring air of the Blue Ridge mountains, under the watchful eyes of a statue of Civil War hero J.E.B. Stuart.

Although I would not seriously pursue writing fiction for many years, even then I dabbled a little in horror. Melody knew that. She also knew I had attended Liberty University. You know, Jerry Falwell’s school, the college the good Dr. Falwall had said would become to fundamentalist Christians what Notre Dame was to Catholics. It was right wing conservative central at the dawn of the modern conservative social and political movement. Naturally Melody, and most everyone else I knew back then, thought folks coming from Liberty University were clean-cut Bible-thumping, right-wing clones of Jerry Falwell.

So, the first guy she meets from Liberty is me, someone who dabbles in horror writing as a hobby. A religious guy who writes decidedly non-religious work.

“How do you reconcile your beliefs with what you write?” she asked me that afternoon.

I don’t recall exactly what I said. I mumbled what was probably a long-winded series of words that sounded good but in truth gave no real answer.

In some ways I guess that’s a question I’m still trying to answer.

I was raised in an ultra-conservative home, at the northern tip of the Bible Belt of the South. Whatever the preacher said on Sunday was right, everything else was wrong, and there was no room for gray areas between the two. From the sixth grade through college my formal education took place in Christian institutions – first a Christian middle and high school, then Liberty University.

I’ve spent most of my adult life in the field of journalism, with a brief time out when I was executive director for a suicide/crisis hotline. I have seen some of the worst in people along the way – crimes people commit against one another; businesses that chew up and spit out their employees while lining the pockets of top executives; and worst of all churches where preachers and “leaders” just pound away at some in their congregations until they have literally broken those people.

Through the years I’ve questioned many of those beliefs ingrained in my psyche when I was young. Quite frankly, some of them just don’t measure up in the cold hard light of critical examination. They’re myths, in best cases half-truths passed down through the generations and followed blindly by those who don’t know better, in worst cases they are dogma intentionally used by church leaders to keep others in line – to emotionally enslave them.

Some of those beliefs, though, stand up to rational examination. At the very worst they make for a solid set of principles by which to live, and at best they show that there may very well be more to this life than we can glimpse, that there is something larger than we are, something we can belong to, become part of. Something – or someone – we can place our faith in.

Which brings us back to that question, maybe from a different angle, these many years later. How does a guy who writes horror suddenly come out with a book that’s best described as Christian/inspirational?

I’m not sure. I do believe it’s a travesty to pigeon-hole a writer, to say he’s written horror so everything he pens must be horror, or she writes romance so all of her work must be romance. Those neat little genre tags have by-and-large been developed by the publishing industry – more specifically by the marketing arm of the publishing industry. Books, at least ones submitted to the major publishing houses, aren’t so much judged on quality of writing or story-telling as they are along one simple principle – is there a potential big market for this? Will it sell? Might it sell big?

So the publishing industry selects what it thinks might be big sellers, and packages them in neat little categories that make for easy marketing – inspirational, horror, science fiction, romance, and so forth. I understand that – publishing is a business, and its sole purpose as a business is to make money for its owners. That’s the way of the business world.

As writers, and readers, we’ve allowed that marketing vernacular to take over the way we define what we write, what we read.

And that brings me back to that original question: Can a horror guy write religious/inspirational work?

The answer to that is no.

But a writer who just happens to pen horror can. A writer can, or should, challenge himself, write in the different genres, tell the stories that are on his heart to tell. Most of my work is horror. I don’t know why – I’m wired that way. To those of a more religious nature, who believes God made everyone specifically as they are, that everything is controlled by God, I can only say this is the way I was made.

But not all of my work is horror. I’ve got a murder mystery novel (CLAIMING MOON) with a bit of romance in it, I’ve written and published erotica under a pen name (and no, I’m not telling you the name), and I now I have a religious/inspirational novel on the market called CHOICES.

So how does a horror guy write a religious/inspirational work? I don’t know. I’m no longer just a horror guy. I’m a writer, and CHOICES is the work I have to offer today. It’s a story about second chances, about bitterness and forgiveness, about homelessness and death and family and, I suppose, redemption, and how belief in God affects all of that.

I hope you decide to download the book. More importantly, I hope you enjoy it, and tell others about the novel. You can download CHOICES to your Kindle here, and to your Nook here. If you don’t have either, you can download a free Kindle reading app for your computer or mobile device right here.

Thanks for stopping by.

The Next Big Thing

Author Kate Aaron last week tagged me in her blog post, which means she passed a series of questions to me that I'm supposed to answer on my blog, and then tag other writers who do the same on their blog.

Slip on over to Kate's blog for a few minutes, peruse her answers, then come on back here and see what I have to say about my next work (I shift gears quite a bit from my horror and thriller work for this one).

And now, on to the next big thing!

What is the title of your next book?
Still working on that, although the tentative title is CHOICES.

Where did the idea come from for the book?
It's hard to pinpoint one event or idea. Over the years I've come to realize the natural results of many choices I've made over my lifetime. Some turned out okay, others were bad choices that still have an effect not only on me, but my entire family. Unfortunately, I think many of us make more bad choices than good along the way. It was that theme I wanted to explore.

What genre does you book fall under?
Inspirational/religious.

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?
Oh, that's a though one. For my main character, Joey Reagan, I see John Stamos, although he'd need to be about 25 years younger. His sister, Amy Martin, would be played by Sarah Lancaster and his would-be girlfriend, Jessica, I think would be played by Zooey Deschanel (with a different color hair – you'll have to read the book to learn what color). As for the father, Jack, I think I'd like to see Gene Hackman play that role – not necessarily because he fits, but I can't think of a better actor.

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?
(Okay, I'm cheating on this and using two sentences). A series of bad choices cost Jack his family and career, and left his kids growing up alone. Years later he and his son, Joey, are faced with a chance to put aside a lifetime of hurt – can they overcome their past, or will they each make another bad decision with life-long, maybe even eternal, consequences?

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agent?
Self-published.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your novel?
About six years. Okay, maybe not quite that long, but it was a good long time between the beginning and the finish. I started the novel several years back, got a couple of thousand words into it, then put it aside. Once I came back to it and decided to finish, it was really about a month of writing time.

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?
“The Christmas Box” by Richard Paul Evans or perhaps Donna VanLeire's series of Christmas novels (“The Christmas Promise,” “The Christmas Hope,” and a few others).

Who or what inspired you to write your book?
Oh boy, I hope you have some time on your hands.

Three separate events, separated by 17 years.

The first happened when I was a young reporter, way back in the dark ages (1989, I believe), three local homeless men died in a fire. The three had taken shelter in a vacant building on a particularly cold winter night, built a small fire to stay warm and some time during the night while they slept it went out of control and burned the building down. I was the reporter who drew the assignment of spending a couple of days out on the streets, talking with various homeless people, local shop owners who may have known them, trying to figure out who these guys were, what they were like, what led to this end. Turns out one of them had plenty of money in the bank – he wasn't rich, but he had close to $40,000 there. You could buy some small houses in that city for that amount of money back in those days. His family said he just got tired of life one day and left, and had been living on the streets for years.

The second event happened in 2006. I was group publisher of some newspapers and various other publications, making good money for the company, when I was asked to do a couple of things I found unethical, which I couldn't do. Pretty soon the firm I worked for decided it was time to “change things up” and “go a different direction.” My job, along with a few others, was eliminated. Up to that point I had been paid reasonably well, but I was the sole bread-winner for a family of seven and it didn't take long for us to find ourselves in pretty bad shape. For two years I did a combination of part-time work, freelance writing, selling some fiction here and there, taking a job for a small weekly publisher who ended up stiffing me on quite a bit of pay, all the while flirting with losing our rental home. Even after I found a decent job and moved to a new place, we struggled with – and to a degree continue to struggle with – some of the repercussions of those two years. True confession time here: There were times during that period when I just didn't care, I didn't see any end. I worked and worried and did what I had to do to keep my family fed and under a roof, but for me, personally, if no one else was involved I would have just walked away and ended up homeless. I came to a point where I understood what that gentlemen from years ago must have felt – sometimes, it's just easier to walk away, even if that literally means living on the street. I think readers will see some of that in CHOICES.

The final part of the “inspiration” came when I read “The Christmas Promise” by Donna VanLiere. As a writer and editor I have a terrible, awful tendency to sometimes read work by someone else and say “oh heck, I could do that,” or think “that's not really all that good.”

I don't know Ms. VanLiere and have no reason to think she would ever read my blog, but if she does I hope she'll forgive me for this next statement. When I read “The Christmas Promise” my first thought was “Eh, kinda nice, but a best-seller? No way.”

Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed the book, but I kept thinking it was too simple, maybe too much of a formula. Then I decided to write my own Christmas novel and found out it wasn't so simple. I went back and read “The Christmas Promise” again, and a third time, and realized Ms. VanLiere had done a really wonderful job of building a novel, of setting various plots in motion and bringing them together later in the work. I read her novel a fourth time, then drew upon those other two events in my life and ended up with CHOICES, although it's a bit darker than some holiday novels.

What else about your book might pique the reader's interest?
Wow, I've already gone on way too long. Hopefully by now you're ready to read! It'll be available on Amazon.com soon – sometime between Thanksgiving and Dec. 1. You can sign up and follow my blog for more details, or sign up for my e-mail alert list by sending an e-mail to johnpeterswriter@yahoo.com Put “reader alert” in the subject line. I won't give out the address, or spam you – I'll just send out the occassional e-mail when I've got new work available.

Now it's my turn to get tagging. Carry on following the hop by checking out the authors below to find The Next Big Thing! (I'm supposed to have five writers, but it seems most of the ones I know have already been tagged, except for one writer who, ahem, seems to have misplaced his blog – if you'd like to be one, I can still add you!)

J. Heather Leigh
Stephen Mark Rainey
Michelle Garren Flye
A.J. Brown