I’m very pleased to say that I’ve just sold my short story, Crossroads & Carousels, to The Red Penny Papers. It’ll be out in October in their fall issue, and available online from here: http://redpennypapers.com/ If they sound familiar, they should. Apart from the fact that they’re awesome, they also published my supernatural noir novella, The Darkest Shade Of Grey, which is still available online or in all ebook formats. Click the cover in the sidebar for more details on that.

It’s been a funny old year for me with publications. I’ve had two gluts of releases with an arid desert of nothing in between. Between February and April this year I had five original stories published and one reprint. Obviously, those things were written and sold across a wide spread of time. The wait from sale to publication can vary massively. For example, I’ve sold a story that has taken more than a year to see publication, and sold another story months later that hit print within weeks. Publishers and editors all work to a wide variety of schedules. It usually means that things come out spread neatly across the year, but not in 2012. After one rush of publications in February, March and April, nothing of mine has seen print (or pixel) since.

Until now, where I’ve got three things coming out within a few weeks of each other. My depression-era story based on the Tiny Dancer lyric, “Jesus freaks, out in the street”, which is part of the Shadows At The Stage Door anthology, is being launched at Conflux this weekend (be there – a post about that is forthcoming).

Then my story, Cephalopoda Obsessia, is coming out in the Bloodstones anthology in time for Halloween. It’s a great line-up in that book, so I’m excited to read it.

And now Crossroads & Carousels is coming out in The Red Penny Papers Fall edition, due around the end of October. I’m really pleased this story has a home. I’ve always wanted to write a Devil-at-the-crossroads tale, and this is it. I’ve also combined that idea with an homage to one of my favourite songs, so I think I’m pretty clever and you can’t tell me otherwise, so shut up.

Publications like buses, nothing for ages, then three come along at once.

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