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?

 

 

Heroines of Hometown: Vicki Powers

This post is a re-run, leading up to a new post in the same series coming either later this week or early next week. Sort of a “Previously on Hometown promotional art. If you want the archived versions of all of these articles plus more, check out the Promotional Art archive. Just keep your eye out for that new post, coming soon!

Victoria Powers (the redhead on the right) is the only child of Brenda Powers, a single mother who lives in a trailer park on the edge of Belford (the town where Hometown is set). In 1994, at the time Hometown begins, Vicki is just shy of eighteen years old. Brenda is thirty-five.
Continue reading “Heroines of Hometown: Vicki Powers”

Dreams of the Boardwalk Promotion Announcement!

Hey all!

I’ve got a birthday coming up next Friday, and I’ve decided that a gift I want to give myself and all of you is a free giveaway of Dreams of the Boardwalk.  It’s been more than a year since I first published Dreams, and I never did get around to giving it a proper promotion because…well, reasons.  There was always just one more thing I needed to do before the conditions were just right.

Well, I’ve waited long enough.  I want Dreams of the Boardwalk to be read and circulated.  It’s time to do what I should have done when it was first released: starting next Friday, October 12,  and running through Tuesday, October 16, Dreams of the Boardwalk is available for Kindle download absolutely free.  Get one.  Read it.  Review it.  Tell everyone about it.

More to come.

Heroines of Hometown: Angelina Santos-de la Cruz

This post is a re-run, leading up to a new post in the same series coming either later this week or early next week. Sort of a “Previously on Hometown promotional art. If you want the archived versions of all of these articles plus more, check out the Promotional Art archive. Just keep your eye out for that new post, coming soon!

Angelina Santos-De La Cruz (seen on the left above, with the leg injury) was born in late February of 1977, nine months to the day after her parents’ June wedding. At the time the Hometown begins, in the fall of 1994, she is seventeen.

Angelina is just a Good Kid in pretty much every dimension: she’s a shoo-in for valedictorian, she’s an athlete (captain of the field hockey team), she’s in the school choir, and she’s in all the school plays. The eldest of seven children, she got used to taking on responsibility early on, and she helps out a lot at home – once all those school activities are done, of course. She’s also an active participant at her family’s church, though she’s maybe not quite as devout a Catholic as they are (more on that later).

What’s more, she doesn’t fall into the trap of many a Good Kid and become self-righteous. She has friends among all strata of Belford High School society, and she doesn’t judge people for having a different life than she does. Many of the school’s bad girls – including Vicki – have waited for quite some time for the slut-shaming to begin before they realized it wasn’t going to.
Continue reading “Heroines of Hometown: Angelina Santos-de la Cruz”

The Art of Hometown: Angelina and Vicki At The Last

This post is a re-run, leading up to a new post in the same series coming either later this week or early next week.  Sort of a “Previously on Hometown promotional art.  If you want the archived versions of all of these articles plus more, check out the Promotional Art archive.  Just keep your eye out for that new post, coming soon!

The brave young women you see before you are Angelina Santos-de la Cruz and Vicki Powers, the heroines of my novel Hometown. I can’t tell you exactly what they’re facing because, well, that would be telling. This scene is from the end of the novel, and Angelina and Vicki are facing the final horror with nothing but a flathead screwdriver, an injured leg, and their indomitable wills.

The thing they’re facing might be in more trouble than it thinks.

For more information on Angelina, see here.

For more information on Vicki, see here.

Thanks to the talented MJ Barros for this marvelous interpretation of my two heroines.

And if you want the whole story of Angelina Santos-de la Cruz and Vicki Powers, just pick yourself up a copy of Hometown at Amazon.

What An Idea!

So I was reading this post on the BooksGoSocial Writers Blog, and it made a suggestion that should have been blatantly obvious, but which I have managed to miss in nearly ten years of blogging:

Want to use your blog to promote your writing career?  Then blog about your books!

This should not have been as much of a revelation as it was.

I’ve posted about my work before – mostly the odd excerpt or giveaway notification – but I’ve mostly been pretty shy.  I think I had the idea that I needed to draw people in and entertain them with other material, then give tantalizing glimpses of the fiction.  Kinda like ads and previews in a magazine.

Well, there will certainly still be other material.  I’m not going to stop being a movie buff or having Thoughts after all.  And a great deal of material still needs to be imported from my old blog.  But in the days to come, you’ll see a lot more about my fiction and its inspirations.  Hope you find it as moving as I do.

Toronto Terrorist’s Motivations Start To Become Clear

So it turns out that Alek Minassian, the man who drove a van into a crowd in Toronto yesterday, killing ten people (mostly women, as was his intention) was indeed a terrorist of sorts. No, not Muslim, not Christian, incel:

Toronto Terrorist Deliberately Targeted Women

Incel Terrorism: Alek Minassian, Alleged Killer Of Ten In Toronto Van Attack Was Inspired By Elliott Rodger

Incels Hail Toronto Van Driver Who Killed 10 As A New Elliott Rodger, Talk Of Future Acid Attacks And Mass Rapes

For those who didn’t follow that first link, “incel” means “involuntarily celibate”. Yes, there’s actually an online movement of people who feel oppressed because they can’t get laid. Why yes, they’re almost all white men. Why do you ask?

Incels have built up an elaborate alternate reality where they themselves are hideous (when you see pictures, most are pretty ordinary-looking. They just have ridiculous standards – there are whole conversations about wrist thickness), and thus doomed to never have sex ever, because society is prejudiced against ugly white men more than anyone else. This would just be ridiculous and pathetic if they didn’t spend all of their time working themselves up into a frothing hatred of “Chads” (sexually-active men) and “Stacies” (sexually-active women, also known as “Femoids” and “Roasties” [known as such because labia allegedly look like roast beef], who are assumed to deliberately deny incels the sex they deserve out of spite), hero-worshiping Elliott Rodger and planning their revenge on the world that has so cruelly cast them out.

Because Alek Minassian is a white man, the media will try to fit him into the “mentally ill lone wolf” narrative. And he may indeed be mentally ill, but that’s not why he did this. He’s a terrorist. But because his goal – his and his movement’s – is primarily to terrorize women, he won’t be called that.