Sportuary: Free from Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday

What a year! This Thanksgiving, I want to express my gratitude to all the longtime readers and new-found friends who have read my work, attended a reading, come to a booksigning or posted a note online over the past year. You stoke my flames and I really appreciate it. So starting on Thursday, Nov 27th (at Midnight, Pacific time)through Black Friday and ending Cyber Monday on Dec 1st, you can nab a copy of my ebook, Sportuary, absolutely free exclusively on amazon.com. Tell all your friends -- it's a perfect season for sporting with the damned! Just head to my…

AVENGER – my Peter Gabriel-inspired crime poem for 30 Days of the 5-2

AVENGER I know something about opening pimpers and whores I know how to kill quietly and mop up bloody wooden floors I know how to hide body parts behind my cabinets and drawers Clipping the strippers Clipping the strippers of their spinal cord wires Their stunned paralysis inspires Inspires me I like laughing at lap dancers when they're tied to chairs I like listening to harlots when they make their final prayers I like watching while they clutch their throats for air Avenger's happy in the dark Avenger's come Avenger's come to take away your mark, devil's mark devil's mark…

AWP14 Seattle

Last weekend, I attended the 2014 Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference (aka AWP14) at the Washington State Convention Center in Seattle. The AWP website boasts that with over 12,000 attendees and 650 exhibits it is "now the largest literary conference in North America" -- and it certainly was the largest I've been to in my life, with a shopping-mall sized number of tables (featuring colleges, writing programs, presses and publishers) at the bookfair and plenty of superhuman writers as guests (Sherman Alexie and Ursula LeGuin gave readings, for example). Seton Hill University had a table for our MFA…

Onward Christian Scanners

Imagine if Cronenberg had written and directed The Exorcist. In it, Father Damien Karras is not a psy- chiatrist but a psychic, capable of reading thoughts and moving objects with merely his mind. This superpower, he believes, is the Power of Christ, and it compels him to study the art of exorcism under Father Merrin, who trains him to become a "Scanner" -- a psyche-soldier in the Christian Army, capable of not only sensing a sinner's guilt and truly knowing the nature of their crimes, but also able to circumvent confession altogether and directly absolve them, should they genuinely regret…