Works in Progress

For anyone that's interested I thought I'd give a quick overview of some of the things I've been working on lately.

Recently finished two short stories WHERE THE DEAD THINGS GO and SKIN. Letting them sit for a bit before I go back through them.
In WHERE THE DEAD THINGS GO a young boy learns of his brother's death in Iraq. Fleeing his sorrow he becomes lost in the forest and discovers a secret place where all the dead gather.
In SKIN a tattoo artist tattoos an angel and becomes obsessed with her unnatural beauty.

I'm still working on my novella ENTER NIGHT. Had finished it and was about to send it out to a couple of people who offered to be first readers when I realized the approach was all wrong. I'm a perfectionist by nature so I've opted to hold off a bit longer on sending it out, I'm gonna fix the problem first. The story stands well as written, I just find the opening catalyst a bit contrived so I want to try another approach that to me feels more natural.

My novel REPRISAL is still in the editing stage. I work on it as time permits. At its core the story is about vengeance. The main character Susan, is a young widow who moves to Porter Mines with her daughter a year after her husband's death in Iraq. Porter Mines, like many other small towns across the country, has its share of secrets and local legends. One legend in particular centers on a witch who had been burned at the stake in the late seventeen hundreds. With her dying breath she cursed the inhabitants vowing that with each generation she would take her due. From that point on, every thirty five years, seven children vanish.
The house Susan purchased has its own secrets. One is a closed tunnel in the basement that had been used by bootleggers during prohibition. The other secret is the ghost of a young boy who shot himself after being haunted by the ghost of his sister's best friend who befriends Susan's daughter Christine.
There's a lot more going on in the story but I don't want to reveal too much, too soon.

I'm starting work on a sequel to SHADOWS OF THE PAST,  a series of books that will detail the alien take over of the planet, starting small and spreading to engulf the entire world's population. I'm interested in the air war of world war two, the aerial dogfights between piloted aircraft where skill was a determining factor in whether a pilot lived or died. Where it was necessary to maneuver close to achieve victory and I've always thought it would be neat if it were necessary to do so again. I've worked out a plausible reason for mankind to have to revert to pre-computer weapons systems to defeat an alien invader. With this series I can introduce the Armageddon Air Force. Everything's in the planning stages right now. But book two will be titled BRETHREN.