Who doesn’t love a great potluck? The anticipation of who’ll bring what? A smorgasbord of decadent gluttony just a scoop away. Those that love to cook often bring the best dishes. Mainly because those that love to cook also secretly aim to impress. Everyone benefits and there’s always something you can’t wait to dig into. Guests wander by, checking out the countless offerings on the table while hiding their drool behind a sip of wine. Where to begin? The most appreciative are the first to grab a plate and start down the line, taking a little of this, a little of that, knowing that if they taste something delicious, a return trip can always be in their future.

Anthologies are no different. We pick them up because we can sample so many different writers and stories in one place. Some of the authors you may have sampled already and love their writing. Others may be new to you and under any other circumstance, you might have passed up their work without a second thought. But with so many different authors and samples of their storytelling, you can be confident that you’ll come across a gem or two, or more.

I’ve written this post to commemorate the launch of Wicked Ink Books’ inaugural anthology, TICK TOCK: Seven Tales of Time. Check out my novella, Duo’vr and all the other wonderful stories by fellow Colorado authors by picking up a copy on Amazon[ BROKEN LINK ]. If you like what you taste, chances are you’ll sample our other dishes. After all, you will have discovered what great cooks we are.

This has been a busy year! Not only have I added the third book to The Weir Chronicles series, SLEIGHT OF HAND, I’ve also branched out and have collaborated with an awesome group of speculative fiction writers! We’ve formed Wicked Ink Books, dedicated to publishing anthologies on a common theme. Our first novel is, drum roll please . . . TICK TOCK: SEVEN TALES OF TIME

A serial killer returns years later to finish what was started.

A coffee shop offers a respite for the cursed.

A hangover masks the horrors of the previous night.

A princess’s wedding gift comes with a price.

A locked apartment door hides a chilling secret.

A girl wakes up in an asylum and must survive her perilous environment and escape.

A young woman must protect the past to thwart a thief from the future.

All it takes is a second . . . a minute .

. . an hour . . . for everything to change.

Visit our website at www.wickedinkbooks.com for the inside scoop on the authors, our extensive library of novels and a peek at what makes us tick (pun intended!). Sign up for our newsletter and be entered into a contest for a chance to win a $100 gift certificate and your very own copy of Tick Tock, autographed by all of the authors!

Just in time for the holidays!

From November through December 4th, 2015 you can pick up a free ebook copy of FADE TO BLACK, Book One: The Weir Chronicles at Goodreads Giveaways.

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Ian Black is an illusionist with a talent for keeping secrets. College student Rayne Bevan has a gift for uncovering them. She suspects the popular performer’s skills extend beyond the stage and that he’s the area’s mysterious and elusive defender of the innocent.

In her efforts to uncover the truth, site she is swept into a hidden world of the Weir, a magical race who struggle to prevent Earth from self-destructing. Her inquiries expose Ian to those who would kill for his connection to the planet, find and as he fights to keep Rayne safe, they discover a force behind the Weir’s raging civil war – a traitor bent on launching Earth’s Armageddon.

Read the latest chapters from the novel, available on Wattpad or pick up a copy anywhere books are sold!

ISBN # 978-0-9905628-0-1 for paperback

ISBN # 978-0-9905628-1-8 for hardback

Happy Reading!

Ian’s the one with the tricks, but Patrick’s got a treat for you!

Use coupon code PG86U from now until midnight, October 31, 2014 to get a free ebook of Fade to Black, Book One: The Weir Chronicles.

Happy Halloween from everyone at Fade to Black Productions 🙂

I’ve come to appreciate that crafting a tasty meal doesn’t mean as much if it’s consumed by only the cook and no one else. 

The effort isn’t as satisfying when leaning against the kitchen counter and eating it out of the pot it was cooked in. Using a plate doesn’t add that much to the ambiance. The whining, begging pet at your feet may count as a companion, but is a far cry from a dinner guest. Face it, the drooling mongrel would devour anything short of cardboard, and consider it a feast. I’m not looking for praise, although it’s nice to hear, but there’s something worth the energy when your cooking gets them off the couch, lifts their noses from their cell phones, or prompts a friend to slip shoes on and drive over.

Self-publishing your first novel is like inviting the in-laws to your first Thanksgiving-cooked dinner — only worse. Mashing potatoes like a pro didn’t prepare me for baking my first turkey any more than my website blogs have prepared me for my first novel release. I was realistic when I created the website and posted some of my favorite pieces. My visitors would be few and those that did show up, would be kind. I knew where most of them lived. But self-publishing a first novel is so, so different. I’ve put more blood, sweat and energy into it than all the combined holiday meals one can squeeze into a lifetime.

But it’s time to stop eating alone in my kitchen. I’ve psyched myself up and I’m ready to send out scores of invitations, as scary as it is. We all have fear of throwing a party and no one comes. I’ll treat it like a perpetual Open House. Leave the door open for anyone who wants to steer up my walk and take a peek in the door. I might get a few stragglers dropping by, others over time, but in the end appreciate serving someone a scrumptious meal of my own creation.

There’s a reason I recently traveled from a temperate, pleasant environment to a hell-couldn’t-be-hotter location. Family.

Getting on an airplane with the outside temperature is at a lovely 76 degrees and stepping off to a blast of 108 degrees is a shock to anyone’s system. To be fair, every place you go is air conditioned. You lose count of the backyard swimming pools on your plane’s decent! Comforts are boundless, well, except for parking lot cars. To get inside a vehicle with closed windows baking in the sun for longer than five minutes is not for the weak. Especially when you keep in mind that you have exposed thighs thanks to shorts being the only garment of choice at that time of year. Needless to say, after a wonderful and swimming pool-filled week, I looked forward to returning home to my twenty-degree cooler lifestyle.

Murphy broke into my home in my absence. I stepped into a hot, muggy house. Snickers sauntered up to greet me with a “don’t even think about snuggling” attitude and too parched to waste her breath to bark in protest. I checked the air conditioner. The motor hummed, the fan blew, but no cool air rose from the vents. I checked circuits just to cover all tracks and I focused on batteries in the thermostat, cotton clogging the outside unit, anything to explain the absence of comfort. Nothing was out of sync.

With a week of 90+ degrees and suffering from allergies my attic fan sucked in every night, I broke down and called the recommended source to make a house call I couldn’t afford. Unable to come for a few more days, he ran over a list of what to check. My self confidence soared as his list confirmed my own known remedies. That is, until he asked if I checked my furnace filter. Murphy’s snicker rang in my head. I rushed home, pulled out a blacker-than-the-inside-of-my-chimney filter and exchanged it with one from the unopened, dusty pack nearby.

Cool air blew and my adrenaline-relieved energy had me dancing around the house. Murphy reluctantly supplied the music.

Driveways have life’s best views. The parade of cars that my father purchased over the years went from two-doors to four-doors to station wagons and back to four-doors.

One year our driveway saw his pickup truck transform into a truck-plus-camper overnight. 

It delivered on the promise of wonderful family excursions. I lovingly remember campfire stories amidst musical chair/logs to avoid the plume of breeze-driven smoke and the comfort of sleeping bags snuggled together.

Driving lessons in the nearby high school parking lot morphed into a slew of cars that came and went during our nearly two decades of teen years. My parents scrutinized, enjoyed, tolerated and ultimately survived six-dating daughters and our endless line of suitors.

My father’s truck grew smaller and more compact as the parade of teenager cars dwindled. A behemoth appeared along with a boat around the time my father retired and my parents weekend trips grew longer as the responsibility at home diminished. The gargantuan RV was eventually replaced with a fancier, expanding model and their absences extended into entire months or half the summers away from that driveway.

Now life has turned a corner for my mother and father and their days of traveling in their RV are behind them. The monstrous vehicle went the way of his boat this year and their driveway is once again all but bare. Although the vehicles have come and gone, I’m thankful that their car continues to leave and return once in a while. Even if the driveway is only empty for an hour or two to pick up groceries or to run a quick errand, life at my parent’s house still goes on.

Happy Father’s Day, DAD.

Any good cook knows that what ends up in the bottom of your frying pan or what’s stuck and dangling from a carcass holds the most flavor. If you don’t gag at the sight of gristle or turn away from stuck-on onion and blackened meat tendons, you’ll make an awesome chef.

My mother taught me that the drippings from searing and browning the outside of a roast is what makes gravy so delicious. Juices brimming with the seasonings you added while cooking that roast in the Crock-pot all day could end up as broth for the Jambalaya later .

Exhausted as I am after Thanksgiving dinner, I painstakingly pick at the turkey bones, but I won’t carve off everything I find. A stew pot the size of my last electricity bill will take care of that. A day-long process that works best when the slight chill in the house begs for the warmth of a gas stove sputtering at low heat all day long. As the turkey carcass enjoys its time in the hot tub, its flavors create the most tantalizing broth while the last of its tender morsels swan dive into the juicy water. A good strainer will allow you to pick out the unwanted particles. A painstaking process but so-worth-it in the end.

Such is editing. 

If you have a first draft the size of Montana, I’m betting your fingers still twitch in your sleep. Fattened from that gargantuan meal, you need to take the time for it to settle. Get up, stretch, take the dog for a walk, do the dishes or, in my case, ignore them until the smell forces you to deal with it. Take that well deserved break. Then, and only then do you sit down in front of what you have. See what stands out, get rid of the gristle and trim the fat. Steep the bones. The process requires patience and a willingness not to lift the lid too often because if you do, some of the flavor will escape and you might not get it back. Take your time. Keep focused, imagine the outcome and strive for it. You’ll be left with a great base of drippings that you can then turn into mouth-watering gravy. If you’re lucky, you might have something leftover that you can use for a second or third dish.

My lawn looks like crap. I was going to say I blame myself but it’s in part,  Murphy’s fault. It’s true. 

I swear. Oh, I admit that I forgot to notify the sprinkler guys to come and turn it on until after Mother’s Day. My mistake. I know. Why didn’t I just turn on the system myself, you ask? I knew there were likely cracks, splits in the line, broken heads, you name it. That’s the other reason I’ll share the blame. I remembered too late to have the system blown-out last fall. I called. No one answered. I left a message. No one called me back. I suspect they couldn’t stop laughing hysterically at my request to get an appointment. It was the first week in December, about the time I remembered to cover the oh-so-sensitive-don’t-let-me-get-chilled copper pipes that some idiot designed to go above ground for my sprinkler system. It’s Denver, Colorado for heaven’s sake! Who puts pipes above ground in Denver, Colorado?

That is where my culpability ends, however, and where Murphy takes over. Between Mother’s Day and when the sprinkler guy came out, ninety-degree weather. Did I mention its Denver, Colorado? It’s not supposed to get that hot for at least several more weeks. It didn’t stop at one ninety degree day. No there were several ninety or near ninety-degree weather days in late May! It fried my parched lawn. The fertilizer finished the job. It wouldn’t have, but it was put down in anticipation of the sprinkler guy coming and, not just turning on the system, but also repairing it – at the same time – the same day. Which didn’t happen because he didn’t have the right parts. When he returned later (I was out of town by then), it was raining. For some reason he thought that was an excuse for not finishing the repairs. Lightning and copper pipes might have been in his equation. Enough rain to scare him away but not enough to give my lawn a decent drink.

When I came home two days later and realized what happened, I got out of bed every two hours to move my old sprinkler and too-short hose around my lawn in the middle of the night. My lawn would not go down without a fight!

The next morning I called about the unfinished sprinkler job. They wanted to reschedule two weeks in the future. I informed them my lawn was on its last blade of green and would not survive another day much less fourteen. They sandwiched me in and he returned today to finish the repairs. He ended up replacing a major valve, eighteen-inches of copper pipe, one major sprinkler head and three minis in my garden. I thanked him profusely and turned on my system to give the yard all the water it wanted. Not five minutes after he drove away, another sprinkler head blew and Murphy spit a continuous stream of water twenty feet into the air just to make sure I, and the rest of my neighborhood, noticed.

I didn’t curse. I didn’t throw myself on my lawn to kick and scream. I wasn’t going to give Murphy the satisfaction of a reaction. I’m praying for rain.

I’m feeling more patriotic then usual this Memorial Day. Perhaps it’s because I made my first trip ever to Washington, D.C. last June and researching pictures for this blog post gave me an opportunity to relive that amazing experience. It’s one thing to study about our country from books and broadcasts. It’s quite another to walk the streets at the heart of our nation’s capital where they breathe the rich history. I especially loved the war memorials and tears still form months later as I look at pictures depicting Arlington Cemetery, the taking of Iwo Jima, the Korean war memorial, the World Wars memorial and the Vietnam Memorial. Walking among them drove home how our country was built, not simply on the democracy of what our nation stands for, but the blood and sacrifice it took to make, and guarantee it.

If you are, relatively speaking, a normal human being then you despise war. Many resent that it has happened, does happen or, god forbid, will continue to happen in the future. I stand among you. Yet, I embrace how it changes us. The inner strength that tragedy brings in its aftermath, enlightenment to what matters in this world, neighbors bound in worthwhile and common goals, profound respect of the tremendous cost to others, rekindled appreciation of what the sacrifice has bestowed upon us, and hopefully, wisdom. This Memorial Day,  may the vicious circle be broken as the age of technology rises ever higher and we, the world, learn the true power of communication.