#hank garner

Hank Garner over at Story Crafter's Cafe had a conversation with Roger Clark and authors Jaime Castle and Rhett C. Bruno, whose most recent work includes the successful book (and audiobook) Cold As Hell.

In this highlight, they discuss how writing can be a difficult task and what motivates some to keep going.

To all my writer peeps, I hope this can serve as a source of motivation. As Roger said, "all writers go through that", so if you are staring at your notepad or screen and are having a hard time coming up with ideas, rest assured it's all part of the process and it STILL counts. Whether you are a fanfic writer or a full professional writer, I hope this can help you in some way.

Available for free download right now is this book, Event Horizon 2017, an anthology collecting 75 Campbell-eligible Award authors and their works. This is my second, and final, year as a Campbell-eligible author, and my short story of Lovecraftian sci-fi, Black Site, is included!

You can download Event Horizon for free at Book Funnel. 

Speaking of Black Site, this story originally appeared in last year's CLONES: The Anthology project. The ebook edition of CLONES: The Anthology is currently on sale for only 99c on all available digital platforms. You can find the relevant links here.

In addition to housing my Campbell-eligible story, it was nominated by readers for the best anthology of 2016 in Preditor's and Editor's Readers Poll. On Amazon, it's currently sporting a 4.4-star average out of 5, with 115 reviews.

Several of these reviews even point toward Black Site as among the reader's favorites - always a good feeling, especially when I'm surrounded by (and propped up by) a number of excellent indie authors. Here's a few quotes from those reviews:

"A true tale of horror and science untethered, successfully cultivating your sense of dread and raising your apprehensiveness. All of that spine-tingling tension eventually climaxes into an explosive, senses-shattering finale."  -- Amazon Reviewer Chris F. "There's some time travel, there's some genetic experiementation, there's some out-of-body experience, and there is some plain old gut-ripping, face-twisting, vomit-inducing horror. I'm looking at you, Black Site, you gory sonovabee you."  -- Amazon Reviewer Brent J. Meske "4 STARS: Black Site by Michael Patrick Hicks. Gross. Sooooo deliciously gross. The graphic descriptions are exactly what I needed to get the complete imagery of this story. I'm gonna slap a mature audience warning on this one. Much darker than the other stories."  -- Amazon Reviewer ltg584 "I'm quite a fan of this author and Black Site is a wonderfully dark and descriptive tale - a thrilling marriage of sci-fi and horror."  -- Teri Polen, author of SARAH

Black Site will be getting a stand-alone release later this year. I'm currently waiting on cover art to come through, and then I'll be posting the story for my Patreon supporters to download prior to giving the story a wide release. 

#Podcast review: Geeks of a Certain Age on THE KATY blog!

As a person who works in an office setting for the time being, I listen to a lot of music. It helps break up the office silence punctuated by coughing and the printer starting up. However, sometimes I desire conversation. Not conversation that would mean me physically speaking to people, but other people talking about a topic I enjoy. Podcasts. I haven’t gotten into podcasts until recently and I…

Every so often something comes along which will make careers and change the world. My news-sense says AW is mine and I’m proud to be a part of the Tier One team, creating and then breaking a brand new world. Created by Nick Cole, Michael Bunker and Tim Grahl:

Apocalypse Weird is a fully realized, weird, apocalyptic world produced and directed by Wonderment Media, Inc.

For more information, you…

Behind the Scenes of Apocalypse Weird

I’ve mentioned before that I’m lucky to be involved with Apocalypse Weird (awesome experience, lovely people, brilliant exposure and a real once-in-a-lifetime opportunity) and it’s a super exciting project. Hank Garner, whose podcast I was on last week, has just posted a special report in which he chats with Nick Cole about our little metaverse project. I certainly learned some stuff I didn’t…