June has already started off to be a busy month. The biggest thing so far (besides buying a new car) was the release of Love Curse, my first solo young adult novel. I wrote this one soon after Carrie and I finished the book that became After Obsession. Her agent at the time had me do a couple of rewrites on it, then decided he didn’t want to send it out for me. By that time I’d moved on to other things, and this one, once called The Girls Nobody Wanted to Date, was pushed aside.

But now it’s out there, available. I think it’s a good book. A fun, easy book. I know I enjoyed writing it. I even enjoyed rereading and fixing it up for release by MoonHowler Press. It was five years ago I finished it. I’d only been teaching for five years at the time. The book incorporates a lot of “refined” material I’d picked up on the job at the time. I don’t think any of those kids will recognize themselves. haha

Love Curse is available now in paperback and most forms of e-book. There was a problem with a couple of formats of e-book, but I’m hoping those are fixed now. Here’s the Amazon.com link to paperback and Kindle versions. SmashWords has other formats. Unsure if you’ll like it? There’s still a free sample available for you to try out.

On the same day, the audio of the new expanded edition of Call to the Hunt went live. Theo Holland did a fantastic job narrating each story (my favorite is “Okie Werewolf Seeks Love”). You can buy it at Amazon or Audible. There’s a sample for you to listen to at either place.

I have a huge list of promotional codes for free audio books. If you’re willing to use them on any of my titles and write a review, let me know, give me an e-mail address, and I’ll send you a code.

And if that isn’t enough, the campaign to put all my short fiction out as individual e-books continues. I got four more uploaded today to Kindle and SmashWords and its partners. The stories so far are “Elijah”, “Nocturnal Caress”, “Grandpa Frost”, “A Drink from the Springs”, Phaethon Alive”, and “Reunion.”

With the Fine Tooth Press version of Darkscapes finally out of print, I plan to upload all the individual short stories (no werewolves) from that book, plus those published in magazines and anthologies after the FTP Darkscapes. The stories are going for 99 cents each. I’ll continue to do some little collections like I did with Unholy Womb and a couple of others. In the end I may do a new omnibus edition of Darkscapes.

Other than that I’m working on edits for Orphan, my first Western novel. Here’s a first look at the cover for it. I’m not completely in love with it yet, as it seems kind of plain. What do you think?

The story is about a Civil War vet who went to prison for robbing a bank after the War. When he gets out he finds that his parents are dead and his sister is working as a prostitute in Little Rock. He has a deadly confrontation with one of her customers, who happens to be the son of a state congressman, and takes off. The story picks up in Kansas, where he has to gun down a man cheating at cards. The man’s nephew, Jack, decides Ramsey will be his new traveling companion. Meanwhile, Les is a line foreman at a Chicago meatpacking plant and he’s gotten himself into a sticky situation with a senator’s daughter. His boss sends him West to use his old Pinkerton training to find his grandson who ran off from his aunt’s house because he is in love with the stories from dime novels. Of course, the three all come together and … You’ll see. There are several references in the book placed as tributes to my old friend and mentor Johnny Quarles.

Barring other issues, Orphan will be released later this summer.

And finally, there’s Shim and Shay’s Wish, a children’s picture book I wrote over 23 years ago when Kim was pregnant with Alex, our first kid. I never really made much of an attempt to get it published, but read it to all four kids when they were very young. Now that I’m about to triple my number of grandsons, I thought it would be a good time to have it in print. And one of my 2016 graduates is an incredible artist who was perfect for this project. Here’s a sample page with the art from S.E. Wiles.