Includes my first accepted short story, “Summer Assignment.”
June has finally arrived which means that approximately a year has passed since my first publication. I don’t remember it like it was yesterday (I can barely remember yesterday), but I do remember opening an email from Denise Brown of May December Publications. I was braced for another rejection. Instead, I was met by the words, “your short story has been accepted into our anthology, Chivalry is Dead.” Of course those weren’t the words exactly, but you get the gist. I got my first acceptance in March of 2011 and I was a published author that following June. I may not remember that day well, but I do recall being very excited. I rejoiced silently to myself because my girlfriend was in the next room and I wanted to wait for the right moment to tell her the good news. Although, when you see a grown man prancing happily around the house, its not hard to figure out what’s going on. So I told my girlfriend, I told my mom, and I told my brother, Darryl. My brother was the only one who seemed genuinely happy for me. My mother and girlfriend lost interest when I told them that there was no monetary compensation. And they wonder why my first book wasn’t dedicated to them.
Anyway. Since my first publication, I have had a butt load of short stories published in numerous anthologies. Some are very good stories, then there were those that didn’t translate well from my imagination to the computer. I had a short story nominated for a Pushcart Award. It didn’t win, but I was extremely honored that the editor thought it was good enough to submit. I also had a very good short story accepted into an anthology that will feature a renown bestselling author. That anthology, Songs of the Satyr, should be coming out soon. My latest and greatest acceptance was a poem that’s scheduled to appear in a Hallmark book entitled, Thanks Mom. Then there are those that I was embarrassed to see in print. Needless to say, I won’t elaborate on those. But all the success I did have started with a short story called, Summer Assignment. It read like a middle grade story while being filled with adult innuendos. The story was all humor and no horror, but it appeared in an anthology that has a wicked cover and some gruesome tales. I’m a comedic writer who likes to write tales for the young and old alike. Not everyone likes the stories I have to tell, or the way I tell them, but those people are usually the mentally depraved. They’re not happy unless you’re hacking someone’s head off, or spilling their guts. I can do that, I have done that, but I’m more at home with tales like: Summer Assignment…Frightening Clichés…The BoogeyMann. I rather have fun and make people laugh than scare the crap out of them.
And with that being said, I would like to thank Denise and Todd Brown at May December Publications for accepting a childish and silly person such as myself. They specialize in speculative horror, and yet they gave me my first short story acceptance — which was anything but horror. They also published my first young adult novel. They’re not the most perfect independent press, and the edits have not always been to my liking — I’m sure my lack of formatting didn’t help matters — but my work was published in a timely manner and the contributor copies always made their way to my doorstep. As a writer, I have grown and so have my aspirations. I don’t submit work to the smaller presses like I use to (mainly because I don’t have time to write like I use to), but I will never forget that I started out with a press called May December Publications. Terrible name for a horror press, I know, but would a zombie by any other name be less likely to crack open your skull and eat its innards? Nope. The results would pretty much be the same.
–The Ravings of a Madman
The Ravings of a Madman 