Hi folks! Apologies for the recent silence. 2022 has been a tough year. Crafty was diagnosed with epilepsy in November and we’ve had a rough time with his cluster seizures. Getting through a wave right now. Meanwhile, my boyfriend has been trying to get his mother into Hospice and a nursing home. You wouldn’t believe the setbacks. I could write a book. Don’t want to, but my first thought is a reboot of Stephen King’s Misery in the Times of Covid.
I hope to do a mid-summer eBook sale on all three Haint books, and will definitely do a blitz for the Christmas book this autumn.
I haven’t started another Monkey book though I have ideas for another one. It will be more like the first one, Monkey Mind. Scruffy Nobthatcher the cryptozoologist is found dead at a Cryptid convention and Haint’s new love interest, Buster is the prime suspect.
Meanwhile, I’ve been working on short stories including a ghost story set in the Gion district of Kyoto, Japan in the early 90s (when I lived there.) It will be dropping on Kindle Vella –maybe as soon as September.
What does Jiko Bukken mean? Well, there’s a practical concept in real estate wherein if a property has had a troubled past, violence, lingering illness, death–well, let’s face it, most folks wouldn’t want to live there. So special property agents will rent or sell the property at a deep discount hoping that the new tenant will last a while. Once the new tenant moves on, the property is no longer listed as “stigmatized.” So there is a whole market for property with “history”.
I also got a funny true story picked up on a podcast called Pillow Talk–as soon as I hear when that is going live, I’ll share it.
Big news of this year for me was getting a short story published in the anthology The Book of Carnacki. William Hope Hodgson created Thomas Carnacki, the occult detective at the turn of the last century. It so happened that I had just finished reading the stories and thought, “I ought to write a humorous pastiche of this, with a twist.” I did. And not two weeks later, there was a call for submissions for, of all things, Carnacki stories. Mine was accepted.
Truly, a beautiful book.
Haint's Retreat 