Announcements

Hey all!

Three pieces of news!

1) I have broken 200 pages on my new novel, City of Dreams!  Look for sample first draft excerpts to be coming soon!

1a) Of course, excerpts from my older works will continue to be posted.  Watch this space.

2) My author interview is up at Booksgosocial!  Go and have a look!

3) And finally, the book trailer for Dreams of the Boardwalk is complete!  Have a look!

Looking The Other Way is Available for Free Download Now Through Friday!

Every time you go down into the New York subway, you take a chance that you won’t come out again. That’s just the way it is. Usually, the only thing to fear is your fellow passengers. But there are other things waiting down there in the dark below the City, and sometimes the only way to stay alive is to look the other way.

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Reviews Praising Looking The Other Way:

Netanella

September 27, 2015

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

 

 

The Dreams of the Boardwalk Giveaway Is Coming to a Close

Just one more day to go in the Dreams of the Boardwalk giveaway!  To give you a taste of what you might be missing, here’s an excerpt:

I knew the exact moment that they realized I was on to them, because their faces…split.  Huge grins stretched much farther than a human mouth could open, almost literally ear to ear, and they were grinning mouthfuls of fangs.

I don’t think they expected me to react as quickly as I did.  Greaser grabbed for me as I spun away, but gave a cheated shriek as his fingers just skated across the back of my shirt, and then I was off and running.

Usually in nightmares like this, it’s like the world goes into slow motion.  No matter how hard I try to run, I don’t get anywhere.  Or maybe the boardwalk would stretch into forever in front of me, so no matter how far I ran, there was no escape.  Or no matter where I ran, the monsters would always be there in front of me.  But none of that was happening.  I was booking it, and it was a good thing, too, because Greaser’s shriek brought more shadowy figures pouring out of the darkness.  They appeared out of the pools of shadow near broken streetlights, they climbed up through the gaps in the boardwalk, they came up from the darkness beneath and crawled and skittered over the railings, a horde of street thugs from all ages of New York City.

(And I do mean all.  There was someone who looked like he’d stepped straight out of Gangs of New York running beside Scary Punk.)

I vaulted the railing and dropped down to the sand.  I don’t know why I did that; it was crazy.  In the waking world, the sand was level with the boardwalk, but here, it was a fifteen-foot drop, and if I’d broken my leg, I would have been helpless.  Trapped prey.

But I didn’t.  And I didn’t let myself think about it.  I hit the ground, let myself fall, let myself roll, let the sand take the shock, rolled all the way back to my feet and I took off.

Or tried to.  Coney Island beach sand is deep, and running in it is hard.  I think I surprised them, going over the rail (but how do you surprise the monster in your nightmare?), but I wasn’t gaining enough ground.  Worse, I was tiring out again.  That first run had taken a lot out of me, and a second burst of adrenaline wasn’t going to carry me far.  Not far enough.

I looked over my shoulder, and oh god, they were swarming.  Swarming down off the boardwalk, leaping like insects, swarming up from underneath like cockroaches.

I floundered and struggled across the sand, my legs and my chest burning, trying to squeeze out that one last ounce of speed.  Why had I even done this?  Where was I going?

Then the West End jetty came into sight, and I understood.  Sometimes in dreams you know you desperately have to get somewhere, you don’t know why, you just do.  And that unconscious knowing was leading me right to my tide pool.  I had no idea why, how it was supposed to save me from a horde of monsters in street gear, but –

Oh god, what if it wasn’t there?  It was a tide pool!  I might be making a desperate break for a stretch of damp sand!  And with the heat and the endless run sucking the life out of me, where would I go from there?  How much further could I push on before I just collapsed in the sand?

But no, the tide was high, washing syringes and garbage high up on the beach.

I buttonhooked around a fence and there it was, free of garbage and shining like the Moon.

Now what?

Stand in knee-deep water and hope that helps?  It wouldn’t even be enough to save me from the heat!  Why did I come here?

I turned around and looked back.  They were coming – howling and shrieking and laughing that high, insane laugh, halfway across the beach now.

I had to wake up.  I had to wake up!

I spun around, shut my eyes tight, and dug my fingernails into my arm, hard enough to draw blood.

Nothing.  It wasn’t working.  I couldn’t wake up.  I couldn’t wake up!

That was the breaking point.  I was too tired to run any further, and there was no place to run anyway.  This terrible dream just wouldn’t end, and I couldn’t even wake up.  Exhausted and beaten, I dropped to my knees in the sand.

“Damn you, Dream Boy,” I whispered as the first of my tears dripped into the pool “Where are you?  What good is it to have a dream boyfriend if he’s only there to dance and eat cotton candy and screw?  Where are you when I need someone to fight for me?  Fight like Justin never – “

“You need to give him a name.”

“Who said that?” I looked around wildly, but there was no one.

“Over here.”

I looked at the tide pool, and it was like looking through Alice’s Looking Glass.  On the other side of the tide pool’s surface, it was a bright, sunny day.  Standing there on the other side of the pool was a young man – maybe thirty – with a black goatee.  He was wearing sunglasses, a top hat, and a black bathing suit, the old-fashioned kind with the shoulder straps.  In his hands, he held a big Key to the City that read “Coney Island”.

Help!” I screamed into the water. “Please, you’ve got to help me!”

“I’m trying,” he answered. “But you’ve got to listen.  Your dream boy – you need to give him a name.  You can’t call him without a name.”

I looked over my shoulder.  They were so close, they were coming around the fence now, and this guy was talking about names.

“What?”

Listen!  Your dream boy can help you, but you have to call him, and in order to call him, he needs a name.  You already know it – you dreamed him, he’s your perfect teenage boyfriend, all you have to do is let yourself realize it.  What is his name?

And that was when I realized he was right.  I’d known Dream Boy’s real name all along.  It was a name that none of the actual boys I’d known when I was a teenager had worn, but it had always seemed to me to be the name of restless teenage ride-on-the-edge funtimes, of hot summer nights, leather jackets and cheap wine.

“Jimmy,” I whispered.  Ripples began spreading across the tide pool, and the image of the man on the other side disappeared.  Somewhere, I knew, Jimmy’s hair had just turned a lighter shade of blond, and a spray of freckles had appeared across his nose and cheeks, as was appropriate for a Jimmy.  And those things would stay; he was more real now, more solid and defined.

And he was coming.  He was on his way.  He just needed –

JIMMY!” I screamed.

And then he was there.

Want to know the rest?  Head on over to Amazon and pick up your free copy of Dreams of the Boardwalk.  Promotion ends today!

Dreams of the Boardwalk Now Available for Free Download!

Lost in the Dream of the City.

Sarah Brannigan’s life has fallen to pieces at the age of forty-five. Her fairy tale marriage has ended, her job history has been a downward spiral since 2008, and she’s paying way too much rent to live in a tiny room in an apartment that she shares with five roommates.

To escape it all, she walks the streets of New York City, seeking out the hidden wonders of the City. And like many before her, she falls in love with Coney Island. Then one day, she falls asleep on a boardwalk bench after a long walk in the hot sun, and she falls into a dream. A dream that seems to reach into Coney Island’s past. A dream of everything she wished for when she was young. A dream whose effects linger even after she’s woken up.

Soon the dream begins to take over as Sarah uses it again and again to seek escape from her failed life. She’s getting everything she ever wanted: youth, love, and adventure. But as she goes deeper into the dream, she gets ever closer to nightmare.

Sound good?  Head on over to Amazon and download a copy!  Absolutely free, today through Tuesday October 16! 

And for the love of God, would somebody please review this thing?

 

 

Dreams of the Boardwalk Promotional Art

So with the promotional giveaway of Dreams of the Boardwalk coming up, I decided it was time to share a few pieces of artwork I commissioned for the story.
Continue readingDreams of the Boardwalk Promotional Art”

Opening the Ocean at Coney Island – 2018

I had a mystical experience at the shoreline of Coney Island yesterday.

I’m sorry I don’t have any pictures or movie clips for you.  But when you’re in the midst of an experience like that, you can only break it by trying too hard to remember it.  My choice was to record it or be in it, and I chose to be in it.

For the record, my general spiritual beliefs can best be described as “heretic”.  Enough to make my religious friends worry about my soul, while at the same time making my irreligious friends worry about my reason.  In my mind, traditional religions can’t bear the weight of their own history and sins.  Even so, I’ve felt power and truth in a lot of places, like an empty chapel in the silence of the night, a room full of Irish people praying the rosary at my grandfather’s wake…and what I experienced yesterday.
Continue reading “Opening the Ocean at Coney Island – 2018”

Coney Island, June 3, 2017 – Scenes from Dreams of the Boardwalk

A few weeks ago, I was visiting Coney Island on a lovely spring day, and I got some great pictures of locations that happen to be important in Dreams of the Boardwalk. I’ve set them up on their own page in the Media Archive. Check it out!

An Excerpt from Neighborhood Witch

Neighborhood Witch is still available for free download through Thursday! If you haven’t downloaded a copy yet, here’s a taste of what you’re missing:

“Dios mio, nena,” Celia gasped as she surveyed the wreckage of her daughter’s living room. “What happened here?”

“I was hoping you could tell me,” Aracelli answered as she righted an overturned bookshelf. Celia didn’t envy her the task of picking up and re-organizing that big stack of books.

“Me?” Celia asked. “How would I know?”

“When I got home, Brian was lying in the middle of the floor,” Aracelli said as she picked up a few books and put them on the shelves. “He was burning up with fever and shaking like a leaf with the chills.”

Celia made a sympathetic noise, but otherwise said nothing. Aracelli liked to build her case and present all the evidence before she said something that was hard to believe. It was part of what made her a good cop.

“He was delirious, too. Talking about how he’d been seeing things, hearing things…even smelling things.” She paused and took a very deep breath. Her face looked calm, but Celia could see that she was gripping the book in her hands so hard that her knuckles were turning white. It was one of Brian’s books, something about darkness and monsters. Strange that such a gentle soul enjoyed reading about violence so much.

“Do you know what he said to me, mami?”

Celia shook her head.

“He said ‘God, love, I’m so scared. I’m so scared. How bad is it if I’m hallucinating?’ That’s what he said.”

Then she took another deep breath, relaxed her grip on the book, and put it on the shelf.

“After that, he went all delirious again, and he started raving. Talking about seeing faces in the mirror and shadows moving in the corners. About things flying around the room and sticking in the walls and food rotting in the fridge.”

That caught Celia’s attention.

“The food?” She asked.

“We got some nice steaks last night for our anniversary,” Aracelli answered. “They’re maggot meat now. The vegetables look like they’ve been in the fridge for a month, and the milk is green.”

“You would’ve just ruined it anyway,” Celia said as she started to look around the room. “The things stuck in the walls?”

Aracelli put a hand on her shoulder and, when she looked back, pointed up.

Celia followed the finger.

Then she blinked.

Stuck in the ceiling were a butcher knife, a screwdriver, a variety of tableware, and a nail file.

“Connnnyo,” Celia breathed.

“When I got home, Brian was too weak to stand,” Aracelli said. “He was much too sick to, I don’t know, take the stepladder and pound those things into the ceiling with a hammer or something.”

Celia nodded in agreement. That was not what had happened here.

“Can you think of anything you mighta done to make the spirits mad at you?” she asked.

Aracelli shook her head. It might have been strange to some of her fellow cops to see her talking so matter-of-factly about spirits – that’s why she didn’t talk about it with them – but she’d seen her mother at work often enough that it wasn’t a question of belief or doubt for her: magic and spirits were as real as handcuffs and perps. She just didn’t want to carry on the family business, which was something else they fought about.

“I thought that might be it,” she said. “I was trying to think of what we could’ve done…but then I saw the mail.”

Okay, this “building the case” business was starting to get annoying. “The mail?” Celia demanded. “What about the mail?”

“Here,” Aracelli said, picking up a package from a nearby table. “Take a look at this.”

Celia looked at her doubtfully as she took the package, then turned her eyes to the package itself.

Then her eyes went very wide.

She started to shout “conyo”, then corrected herself to “Ay, Dios mio!” It wouldn’t do to swear with this thing in her hands, and calling upon God might help.

She threw the package to the floor (something inside screeched in outrage), snatched a vial out of her purse and poured the contents all over it. Billows of blood-colored steam rose from the package, and the thing inside it squealed and died.

Grimly, she turned to Aracelli, who was staring wide-eyed.

“Imp,” she said. “This was like a magical letter bomb.”

Aracelli went pale. “I could tell something bad was in there, but…wait. What was that you poured on it?”

Celia held up the small, square glass bottle, which had crosses carved on all four faces. “Holy water,” she answered.

“You carry holy water in your purse?”

“And this is why.”

“Good point.” Aracelli sighed and turned her attention back to the sodden package. “So how do I get some? Do you have to buy it, or can you just take some out of the font, or – “

“Don’t worry, I got a bulk supplier.”

Aracelli looked at her quizzically. “There are bulk suppliers for holy water?”

“I have coffee with Padre Sandoval every Wednesday, and he’s always glad to – “ She noticed that one of Aracelli’s eyebrows had gone up. “…what?”

“Coffee?” Aracelli teased. “Is that what they’re calling it these days?”

Coffee,” Celia snapped. Aracelli immediately raised her hands in surrender, her face a picture of “if-you-say-so” innocence.

“I’m not sayin’ I wouldn’t do it,” Celia continued, mollified. “When he was young, he was a real Father What-A-Waste. But he likes to follow the letter of the law, tu sabes? Probably just as well. Might mess up the holy water if he broke his vows. Besides…” she gave a lecherous grin. “I like ‘em younger. Nice young stallion, to ride all night.”

Aracelli made a face. “Ew, mother!”

“You started it. Now…” Celia turned her attention back to the package. “Who did you piss off, that they would send you something like this?”

Aracelli just looked at the package and shook her head. “I’m a cop, mami. I piss off people every day, most of them from this neighborhood.”

“And any one of them could have hired a bruja,” Celia finished. “Conyo.”

“Well yeah, but how many brujas even are there? Real ones, I mean. There can’t be that many.”

“Es verdad.” Celia rubbed one of her medallions as she thought. “Hmm. It has to be someone en el barrio. Someone who could get Brian’s hair or something – that’s the only way this could be hitting him so hard. And it has to be someone who’s either smart enough to know that you’re too strong and too protected…or just plain mean enough to want to come at you through him in the first place. Maybe both. Hmm.”

It must’ve been in the way she “hmm”-ed. Her daughter knew her too well.

“You know who it is, don’t you?” Aracelli accused.

“I got some ideas.”

“Good,” she said, turning toward the bedroom she shared with Brian. “Let me just get my – “

“No!”

Aracelli looked back. “No?”

“No gun,” Celia said. “You shoot somebody, you maybe go to jail. That’s not winning.” Her face split in a broad and wicked grin. “The whole point of magic, when a gun is so much easier, is that there’s no way to test for it. Now: did the attack ruin everything in your kitchen?”

Hurry on over and pick up a free copy before it’s too late! And as always, while you’re there, check out the rest of the library!