Welcome Coffin Hoppers and other friends! I’m excited to announce that the e-book for my dark humor short story Hell Hole is now available for sale.

Strike that. The Hell Hole e-book is available for free! For the next three days! (After which, the price will be 99 cents (or your country’s equivalent).)

Here’s the blurb.

Whoever said, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again,” probably shouldn’t have said it to Dent Bergman. For twenty years, he’s been trying to beat Peter Gaston—at golf, women, anything. Peter always wins. But today, that streak is about to end. Or is it? 

As a special bonus, I’ve included JW Manus’s short The Devil His Due, plus a sample of my dark urban fantasy thriller, Valknut: The Binding. (I’m still trying to figure out how to hyphenate “dark urban fantasy thriller,” or whether I even should. Opinions?)

Hell Hole first appeared in The Anthology from Hell, edited by Julia S. Mandala. The guidelines for this anthology said submitted stories were to have hell clichés for titles. I chose Hell Hole because I felt had loads of potential.

And then I got brain lock.

I tried writing stories about a kid’s messy bedroom, a disreputable bar, an outhouse…. I even tried to write one about mole hills, which were sprouting up in our yard at the time. All attempts died timely and well-deserved deaths.

The deadline grew near. I grew desperate.

“I don’t know what to do,” I told my husband. “Coma patients have more imagination than I have. What is this story about?!”

“It’s a golf story,” he said.

Dope slap.

My first draft was finished in about two days.

Now go forth and hop for Coffin Hop 2013!

***

Special thanks go to JW Manus, without whom this e-book might not have been built until the year 2020. She is a meticulous and creative builder of e-books. Check out her website, where she gives great advice for building better e-books. You can also hire her services, if you don’t want to get your hands dirty with all that HTML.

My thanks also go to Glenn Sixbury, who encouraged me to write a story for Anthology from Hell: Humorous Stories from WAY Down Under, and to Julia Mandala, who bought my story for the anthology. If you enjoy a bit of dark humor by people like Mike Resnick, Robert Sheckley, Spider Robinson, and Lawrence Watt-Evans (…and me), you can pick up the Anthology from Hell e-book from Amazon or Smashwords. Or you can order a print version from Yard Dog Press or Amazon.

***

Leave a comment any time by the end of Halloween and you’ll be entered in the weeks’s grand prize drawing for the TESSpecFic Pack of five e-books, pictured here, plus e-books of my short stories Rose in Winter and Hell Hole. If you want to know more about Coffin Hop, click here.

The Corridors of the Dead, by Jonathan Allen
Stolen Climates, by Aniko Carmean
100 unfortunate Days, by Penelope Crowe
The Imaginings, by Paul D. Dail
Valknut: The Binding, by Marie Loughin (Me!!)