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It's a short story about a werewolf! More specifically, it's a story about a sixteen-year-old boy called Christian who's about to get an unexpected birthday present. I also added in the first chapter of WILD as a bonus for those who may not yet have been tempted by my magnum opus. *ahem*

THE BARKING OF DOGS is available this very minute for the Kindle - just $1.13 on Amazon.com or a ludicrous 70p at Amazon.co.uk.

Sharp-eyed and elephant-memoried readers of my blog may remember Christian as a character from Ill-Met By Moonlight, the novel that landed me my first agent. Since I plan to re-work that novel in the near future, I figured Christian might like to get out there in the public and show himself off. In an ideal world, I would send grown-up Christian off on adventures with Ethan Banning and there would be hi-jinks and drinking contests and Christian would go home with the girl Ethan fancied. Because Ethan always goes home alone.

So I've had a couple of advance reviews for WILD which I think I tweeted about but didn't blog about. Rabid Reads thinks it's "the start of a promising trilogy," and Book Goggles thinks it's "a joy to read" and "damn near pefect." That makes me feel pretty good! I don't have a release date scheduled yet, but it's looking more like June than May now, so I hope people will still be interested by then!

I've been thinking a lot about the second book in the trilogy, Caged, today. I haven't started writing it yet, but it's in my head, and I've got a nice clear idea of where Lizzie's going next. I'd love to be working on it right now, but I'm starting to overwhelm myself with projects again, and I really do want to finish Halflife this year, once Night Breed's first draft is done (hopefully by the end of August). I think if I manage to wrap up Halflife by the end of this year (which seems impossibly far away but really isn't), then in 2012 I'll start on Caged. I also think reader reactions to WILD will end up dictating my non-contracted stuff and what I focus on, but we'll see. I'm just going to let the currents drag me around for a while. I feel like I waste so much energy worrying about things beyond my control; maybe it's time to just go with the flow.

In other news, I probably mentioned somewhere that Serve in Heaven, Reign in Hell is closed to submissions. I'll be getting to work on the edits this weekend. There are some really wonderful stories in there, and I'm excited about seeing the final product. At the same time, I've seen a fair view submissions where it's clear the authors either A) don't understand basic rules of grammar and punctuation or B) don't understand what a short story is.

This baffles me, but maybe I'm a snob? I don't see why anyone would submit a story somewhere if the grammar and punctuation was wrong. You might not catch every mistake, but if you're at the level where you're considering publication, you should know that this is wrong:

"What happened." Asked Bob.

And this is right:

"What happened?" asked Bob.

(That's just a made up example, but it's also the most common mistake I saw in reading through submissions. People don't know how to punctuate dialogue!

The other aspect, that people don't understand what a short story is, is I guess more complex. I'm not talking about obvious things like word count, but more how a short story differs from novels and flash fiction. I want to write some more indepth posts about this, but I'm worried about coming across as a know-it-all twat. I don't know it all, but I spent my entire degree writing short stories to very strict rules, so I think I know enough.

So I'm wondering if anyone would be interested in a few such posts?

So a few years ago I wrote a short story called Painless, which was published in Midnight Times ezine, which is now defunct, I think. It's about a professional thief who can't feel pain as a result of a childhood incident. I really loved the character, Theo Kane, and the world I touched on, and for years I thought about making it into a novel. Never got round to it though.

Then recently I submitted Painless to a Static Movement anthology, Weird City, which should be available soon (and apparently Caitlin Kittredge is going to be reviewing it, which makes me a bit giddy and fangirly). And there's going to be a Weird City 2, so it seems clear to me that I should write a sequel to Painless. I left Theo's story pretty unfinished, and since I don't think a novel will ever materialise, I've decided on a different tactic. I'm going to write a bunch of short stories set in Theo's world, about her and her cohorts, and then publish them as a collection. 

I'm not planning to do them all at once; Halflife and Blood and Bones are still my priorities, but obviously short stories aren't as time-consuming as novels or novellas, so I see no reason why I can't aim to have a good collection out later in the year. They should make for nice side projects. Huzzahs!