The Blog to End all Blogs??  -or- Killing the World, One Day at a Time…

Starting today, as one of my more ambitious New Year’s resolutions, I’m beginning a new blog that I’d initially envisioned as a short story: flash fiction pieces that might have appeared on a hypothetical page-a-day desk calendar.  You know–those mini-calendars you might buy on the cheap during after-holiday sales.  But instead of Possessed Cat Pictures or Peanuts cartoons, my imaginary calendar would present holiday-themed apocalypse scenarios.  I would pick the “usual suspect” holidays, and write a doom-filled flash entry for each, and the story would be titled “Excerpts from The Apocalypse-a-Day Desk Calendar.”

But as I got going, researching which days to try and drafting a few entries, I decided to take the challenge further.  Why not actually attempt the entire desk calendar?  365 entries…

And if I posted the entries on my website, at a dedicated page, it would be even cheaper than the 75% discount for a Literary Quotations calendar I bought last year…

I’m probably out of my mind for trying this.  365 stories is a lot.  I’ll probably repeat myself.  Life, and other writing projects, will get in the way.  I could have technical difficulties with my website.  It’s going to be really tough to keep up.

But *all* New Year’s resolutions are ridiculous and ambitious.  That’s not going to stop me from trying.

And, just to cover my bases, I’m keeping the original title:  “EXCERPTS from The Apocalypse-a-Day Desk Calendar.”  Whatever happens, I’ll still be sharing a lot of free fiction! 🙂

Check out the first entry here (appropriately titled January 1: New Year’s Day), and please keep coming back for daily updates:  http://normanprentiss.com/category/apocalypse-a-day/

Or click the bleak image below, or try the banner on the right column of the website.

(Oh dear, I hope it’s not a leap year…)

Now available in Trade Paperback, my horror/LGBT roadtrip adventure novel, ODD ADVENTURES WITH YOUR OTHER FATHER:

*only $12.99 at Amazon

*and at Barnes and Noble

[Note:  the ebook version is available exclusively at Amazon, for only $2.99]

“It’s rare that I can truly say that I’ve never read anything like this before, but Odd Adventures with your Other Father is a unique creature. Norman Prentiss has given us a tale that’s funny, surreal, touching, magical, and heartbreaking, and we’re in the hands of a master storyteller from beginning to end.” — Jeff Strand, author of Blister, Dweller, and I Have a Bad Feeling About This

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Also, for a limited time, my Bram Stoker Award-winning novella, INVISIBLE FENCES, is being offered FREE at Amazon U.S. and Barnes & Noble. Be sure to get a copy!  (Any posted reviews at retail sites would be greatly appreciated!!)

“Cemetery Dance’s short novel program yields another gem with this sobering story about the imaginary barriers of fear we place around our life circumstances as we grow up… Carefully crafted prose… a lucid reflection on life’s inevitable burden of fear and fractured memory.” — Booklist

Sign up for the Norman Prentiss Newsletter and get TWO eBook collections for FREE!

Click a cover below to get started:

IN THE BEST STORIES… is a mini-collection of my 4 best tales: “Glue Traps,” “In the Porches of My Ears” (Bram Stoker Award-winner for Superior Achievement in Short Fiction), “In the Best Stories…” and “Four Legs in the Morning.”

QUEER PANICS contains 5 gay-themed horror stories: “The Shell (A Zombie Approximation),” “Interval,” “The Transfer Student,” and “The Well-Adjusted Child,” along with a never-before-published haunted house tale, “Panic.”

Each collection includes detailed notes about the composition and/or publication history of all the stories.

I’m participating in a Kindle Unlimited Swap Meet this month with over 20 other authors. ALL of our books are available to read for free through the Kindle Unlimited program. If you’re not already a KU member, you can sign up for a month-long free trial and read as many books as you want — for FREE!

I decided to discover a new author this month, and the book I chose is AWASH IN TALENT by Jessica Knauss, which shares some of the fantasy elements I explore in my own ODD ADVENTURES WITH YOUR OTHER FATHER. (And if you haven’t read my book yet, you can also read it for free this month through Kindle Unlimited.)

Jessica’s book is a smart and original fantasy about people with special powers (telekinesis, healing, firestarting, mind-reading). I especially admired the novel’s unique structure, presented as a series of three interlocking novellas. One of the joys of the book was finding connections between the different parts, as the narrator of a new section crosses paths with the previous speaker–the technique keeps readers on their toes as they work to recognize the subtle threads. It’s all done very cleverly, and the final novella ties things together nicely.

I was interested in the book’s structure, since in OTHER FATHER I attempted another variation on a novel comprised of linked stories. So I contacted the author to get more info. about how she put her book together, and here’s what she said!

“When I began the first novella, Hope & Benevolent, I thought it was a short story. Over the course about two years, I kept going back to it to see where the out-of-control narrator would take it next. I should add that at the time, I was writing my first novel, SEVEN NOBLE KNIGHTS, a medieval epic that weighs in at about 120,000 words (after trimming!). Writing something briefer was a nice break once in a while. When the first novella was finished, I realized that the characters in AWASH IN TALENT had still more story to tell. It felt right to tell it from a different perspective, and thus the second novella, WaterFire, came about. A year later, Friendship Street came along to finish the story of the two special sisters. The different perspectives and additional characters helped give my alternate-reality Providence more depth. 

“The first inspiration for WaterFire only allowed for it being a story about a Providence native. When Kelly revealed her main challenges, I realized only Beth from the first novella could help her. Beth becomes a key character by the end of WaterFire, and its events help to tell her story.

“Friendship Street brought focus back to Emily. I wondered what would happen to Emily once her sister, Beth, sort of hit it big. I knew she would be in court-ordered therapy, and who more appropriate to treat her than a psychic who can read minds? I found Patricia the psychic’s story to be just as compelling as Emily’s, and in the end their fates are intertwined. So much so that both Emily and Patricia are demanding a sequel. I’m not sure I should humor them, because if I do, they may never stop demanding more stories.”

Thanks to Jessica for answering my questions, and for writing such an engaging book. Here’s hoping those sequels happen!

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Feel free to check out ALL the books in the Swap Meet this month. Many of them are up to 70% off, and there is something for everyone, from fantasy, to mystery, to romance. And be sure to enter to win a $100 Amazon gift card! You can enter by helping to spread the word about these great Kindle Unlimited books.

Cemetery Dance Online recently posted an interview with me about my new book, Odd Adventures with your Other Father.

The interview was conducted by Blu Gilliand, and he did a fantastic job getting me to talk about why I published via Kindle Scout, how the supernatural elements of the book helped me explore LGBT themes, and how the various genre elements of the book interact.

Click the image above to visit the interview, or click this link to learn more about the book at Amazon’s product page: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01EG5NGPA