The smoky cover to OUT WHERE THE SUN ALWAYS SHINES. Illustration by Danielle Williams.
First, let me share today’s actual book birthday with you: Out Where the Sun Always Shines.
This noir spy love story was my first-ever published story, put up on Amazon long before Pixelvania Publishing existed! Without any magic spells, horror scenes, or sci-fi scenery, it’s become the odd man out of my body of work. I mean, maybe if you stretch, you could say it’s alternate history. But it’s really in the background.
It’s definitely refreshingly different, especially if you’re looking for something short, hardboiled, and dramatic. And, being set in Europe, reading it is kind of like going on holiday. (I also had a lot of fun illustrating its second cover.)
Get your copy of OUT WHERE THE SUN ALWAYS SHINES
The bat-focused cover to GROWING SHADOWS IN THE DESERT. Photo illustration by Danielle Williams.
Next, we have Growing Shadows in the Desert. Its book birthday was actually last Tuesday, the 6th, but my day was really busy and I didn’t get around to posting about it.
But I wanted to talk about this short story because it’s becoming another oddball in my library, starring a vampire who, in my world, has, like, over 100,000 words of a three-part origin epic completed. And it’s not just words, right? I mean, in those words, I discovered he’s got a dragon mom and sister, a bunch of magical people he must learn to lead, a crush on this pretty doctor faerie, and a really dangerous world to live in.
But to readers, he’s only been seen in a handful of scenes in Steel City, Veiled Kingdom. If you backed SCVK’s sequel The Guests of Crooked Neck, you’ve maybe seen his name once during that adventure (CN will be releasing wide in November). So that’s a big, like, perceptual gap, between what readers know about him and what I know about him. Just one of those things about being an author, I guess.
It probably needs a new cover, but that’s way down on the priority list.
Anyway, if you’re in the mood for a short, weird west one-off with a fashion-forward vampire, you might like this piece!