Richard Cody

Next on the interview schedule is Richard Cody, a poet and master of short, dark and generally cross-genre fiction who is also the author of The Jewel In The Moment, Darker Corners and This Is Not My Heart.

E.S.: First of all, tell us a little about yourself.

R.C.: The basic facts about me are simple. All are true, and yet none describe me:

I’m white, of French descent on my father’s side. A very typical Pisces, for the astrologically minded. 40 something already! Politically, leaning so far to the left that I’ve fallen over and rolled off the chart. Music and books, more than I can ever read or hear, are important to me. I am happily married, for many years now. Though sometimes nearly consumed by cynicism, I do believe in Love. I write poetry and fiction, and have been writing, or drawing, something for most of my life. I take pictures, too, these days! Horror movies and comic books remain a couple of my favorite things. Poetry, too, of course. On certain occasions, I might say that few things are better than a good ghost story. I know there is only one person here. Chocolate chip cookies, fudge Pop-Tarts, and M&Ms are, perhaps, weaknesses. I want to tell you a story.



E.S.: And we're all about stories! Very nice. So tell us about your books, Darker Corners, The Jewel in the Moment and This Is Not My Heart.

R.C.: I’ve been published, off and on, in the small press field for some 20 years now. I’d long considered compiling my work into a book. Staying away from professional publishing houses and eschewing even the suggestion of a vanity press kept any book I’d considered solely in the realm of thought. I realized, with the advent of Print on Demand sites like Lulu.com, that I could publish my books without the interference of editors and without the stigma of the vanity press. So, I like to say that my three current books are the results of the “Print on Demand Revolution”! The books themselves are composed of older and newer material.

The Jewel in the Moment is a modest collection of 80 or so of my best experiments with the Haiku and Tanka forms. I refer to my efforts with this Japanese form as Haikuish, since it is my belief that any Haiku not written in Japanese is, strictly speaking, not Haiku.

Darker Corners, my second book, is a collection of stories I consider dark fiction as opposed to horror; funnily enough, though, I think the stories tend to alter, transcend and transmute such genre definitions! I believe on the back cover of the book, I refer to the stories as “strange”, and that’s as good a description as any.

This is Not My Heart, my third book, is a collection of poetry. I can only say about this book that those who enjoy modern poetry in its many forms, and those who think they don’t like poetry, will enjoy this collection of poems, which span a number of years in my life and a number of styles!


E.S.: I see. Where do you think the future of the written word is going?

R.C.: That could be a tricky question. And one with many answers. Certainly the written word will evolve, or devolve as some might say, along with e-mail and texting technologies. I mentioned the “Print on Demand Revolution” above, and that is a term I use seriously. The Print on Demand model of publishing is changing the publishing landscape right now. Of course, certain crafty, literate people will always enjoy making books. And that’s good because the technologies of the present, and the social structures which support them, may well not make it into the future. In any case, wherever there are people there will be stories. I can tell you that.


E.S.: What advice do you have for other writers, especially those who are just getting started?

R.C.: I don’t think I have any advice that hasn’t already been given to aspiring writers to the point of cliché. Nonetheless, the advice I have to offer is true. First, write it down. Everything. Anything. Write it down. Also, read - this may be a given as I believe that all writers are readers, but it should be said that writing and reading go very much hand in hand. And, for the sake of your deity of choice, don’t try to imitate other writers. Find your voice and say what you mean.


E.S.: Where can our readers find more of your work?

R.C.: My work is scattered across the web in various virtual journals, ‘zines, and literary sites. Also throughout various print publications in the 80’s, 90s and now! My books, mentioned above, are easily available at Lulu and Amazon, urls below:

http://stores.lulu.com/rcodywrites

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B003BHJ95G

You may also join me at my Facebook page, Richard Cody – Poetry and Fiction. Here’s the url:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Richard-Cody-Poetry-and-Fiction/124477884238938

Think Fractal

Today marks the launch of Thunderune Publishing's latest online addition: FRACTAL NOVELS.

Fractal Novels is a collaborative art project, which means everyone is encouraged to submit!

Read the stories, find a spot that inspires you, then tack on anything (anything– paintings, pictures, words, fragments, found art, sound, anything as long as it is your own creation) and take that spot in a new direction! It's a community canvas just waiting to be painted!

Submission Guidelines

Get Promoted!

As Editor-in-Chief of Daily Love, Weirdyear and Yesteryear Fiction and all the other publications of Thunderune Publishing, I believe in the power of the written word. As such, I make it my duty to provide services which give new and established writers a leg up on finding new readers and customers. I’m always looking for new ways to promote emerging writers, so check back here often and take advantage of these awesome promotional deals!


$9.95
Grab a product-oriented interview by Author E.S. Wynn which will be featured not only on his official author blog, (www.eswynn.com) but also on literally dozens of other high traffic sites. If you're looking to get your work out there where people can see it and buy it, this service is a must!

Order here >>






$25.00
Get your book reviewed by Author E.S. Wynn and see it featured not only on his official author blog, but also on literally dozens of other high traffic sites. I pride myself on my speed and my ability to provide a thorough review that is fair, honest and powerful. Is this a great deal? Heck yes! You'd be paying $150 or more for this same service anywhere else!

Order Here >>




$65.00
Your purchase guarantees you to up to 3,000 words of material (no more than ten individual pieces) transcribed to audio by a professional voice actor (me) and featured not only on my official author blog, (www.eswynn.com) but also on literally dozens of other high traffic sites. Note: I don’t do pornography, bizarro or other forms of offensive material.

Order Here >>

Amanda Firefox

Today, it is my pleasure to interview Amanda Firefox, author of Shadows of Light on Tomorrow’s Mirror. If you haven’t read her book, I highly recommend it!


E.S.: So Amanda, tell us a little about yourself.

A.F.: Ooh, that is always a fun one. A little about myself? Well, I’m five-seven, dark hair, brown eyes. I have a dog, I am a hopeless romantic and I enjoy long walks on the beach.

E.S.: Excellent! And how long have you been writing?

A.F.: Not long. About a year or so now. I have been doodling little bits and pieces of poetry for as long as I can remember, but only writing seriously for about a year.

E.S.: What can you tell us about your book?

A.F.: Well, it is a collection of flash fiction and poetry pieces, first of all. Second of all, it is about love, desire, and the beauty of the human experience. Oh, and sex. Everything I write has some steamy sex element to it. That is just how I am.

E.S.: Excellent! What do you think the future has in store for the written word?

A.F.: Honestly, I don’t know. I really believe that people will still be writing and reading in the future, but I like to think that maybe the internet will lead to a world where people read more and enjoy longer pieces, like novels.

E.S.: As a published author, what kind of advice would you give to other writers, especially those who are just getting started?

A.F.: Don’t give up! That is it, really. Write from the heart. Write what you like, and talk to people about it everyday!

E.S.: Excellent. Thank you, Amanda! Anything else that you’d like to add?

A.F.: No, but thanks. ^_^’


Amanda Firefox on Daily Love
Amanda Firefox on Hubpages

Get Inspired!

Looking to get inspired?

On this disc, you will find 11 tracks of writing goodness to get you inspired and writing! Writer's block? No worries! Let the muses of E.S. Wynn's Audio Creative Writing Prompts tantalize you into your next project!

Only $6.95!

Click here to order >>

New Audio!

Featuring classic literature read aloud by author E.S. Wynn, this disc is a definite must-have for lovers of lit as well as instructors looking to give their material more "pop" in the classroom.



Track listing:
1. The Windhover (Hopkins)
2. Dulce Et Decorum Est (Wilfred Owen)
3. Tyger (Blake)
4. Kubla Khan (Coleridge)
5. Azathoth (Lovecraft)
6. Chimney Sweeper (Blake)
7. Charge of the Light Brigade (Tennyson)
8. Meeting at Night (Browning)
9. Ozymandias (Shelley)
10. Lady of Shalott (Tennyson)
11. Childe Roland To The Dark Tower Came (Browning)
12. From Beyond (Lovecraft)

Get your copy today! ($8.99) http://www.lulu.com/product/cd/classic-literature-read-by-es-wynn/11477923

ITSG resources


Some fresh, free resources are out for the Cygnus War ITSG and available for download on Thunderune Publishing! Check them out today!


Coralate and Seindrive counter-sheets (ITSG)

Pilot record sheets (ITSG)

Rig Reference sheet (ITSG)

Calling All Writers!


Yesteryear Fiction needs you! We are currently accepting submissions in the following genres!

  • Fantasy
  • Steampunk
  • Modern Magic
  • Magic Realism
  • Gothic Fantasy
  • Weird West
  • Historic Fiction
  • And many more!

Check us out online and send in your best!

http://www.yesteryearfiction.com


- - -

After Two Years:

The Cygnus War:
An Immersive Tactical Strategy Game


Easy to learn, set up, and fun to play, The Cygnus War: Immersive Tactical Simulation Game has everything you need to play pretty much whenever you want, wherever you are. (Just add pencils and a pair of ordinary dice.)

Based in the thrilling universe of The Cygnus War, the ITSG puts you in the cockpit and on the line between humanity and brutal annihilation at the hands of the shadowy, swarm-like Cygnan Coralate! Play as Terran or Blueskin, test your mettle by flying classic scenarios or challenge your friends to a fast-paced free-for-all in the cold, cruel interstellar killing field of deep space. Everything you need is here, including hex maps, sheets and counters that you can pull right out of the book!


The ITSG also features original fiction not seen anywhere else-- even on this site!

Order your copy today (PDF or Paperback): $9.95
http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/the-cygnus-war-itsg/11391076

New release!



Several months ago, I released the monstrosity that is A Modern Creative Writer’s Workbook. At 708 pages, it’s intensive, a commitment in paper and ink that can be daunting to pick up and page through.

That’s where this book comes in– think of it as a “light” version of the larger book. It’s smaller, easier to carry, less expensive and the only difference is that you have to break out your own paper when it comes to writing. I prefer to use my own paper when I write anyhow.

Both books utilize an approach within the “modern” context of writing as it evolves over and through the digital medium into its eventual future as opposed to working to further the archaic and overdone forms which, while useful in their own right, haunt and pull at the heels of our modern writing like so many forgotten ghosts clustered in haughty bookshelves. Words are a medium for meaning. Whether or not they follow a specific prescribed set of arcane rules is immaterial. What matters is the feeling within the words, the way a writer uses the paints of his or her vocabulary to craft a masterpiece of ink and paper that blossoms in the mind with all the colors and sound of a traffic jam in a field of wildflowers.

The modern writer has to be everything. You have to be the diplomat between ideologies and words, the interdimensional painter who breathes light into papyrus with musical notes and the knowledge of strains and refrains. You have to be the teacher and the student, all within the same poem or story, and you have to do it through the eyes of every culture, ethnicity and as yet non-existent viewpoint. It isn’t easy, but it isn’t hard either. Like anything, it just takes practice, and that’s exactly what this book is meant to give you. Lots and lots of powerful and meaningful practice in making true, boundless art.

The prompts in this book come in all shapes, sizes, lengths and formats to give you the maximal amount of leeway and possibility for creative expression. Many of them may seem disturbingly vague; some are even just a collection of words and phrases. That’s intentional. The idea is to get you thinking and creative while allowing you the maximum amount of room possible to create something truly unique, instead of just another machine-molded workshop piece. Most of these prompts are specifically designed to have multiple meanings and to mean as much (or as little) as you want them to mean. Your imagination is the key to your reality. Discard all limits and craft your way to the ends of the sky and back.

And remember– the electric age ushers in shorter and shorter attention spans and, like any other artist, we as writers must adapt. Rules are meant to be broken. Every word is sacred. Thus ends my introduction. Short and realistically sweet.

Get the book here.

The Indigai




People think that California is a state built upon beaches, a place all pavement and movie stars, gangs, porn and sunshine. They forget that this is where the gold rush happened, that there are dark places and thick, unchartable woods in California where men like Leonard Lake lick the charred remains of human bodies tainted by pain and leather. They forget about Charles Manson, The Zodiac Killer and the vampire of Sacramento. When they hear the name, California, their minds never cross into the rural pockets where time has gone still and left the patterns of the past relatively unchanged– but even these tiny, forgotten vestiges of a colonial past that lurk on the edges of civilization pale in comparison to the horrors that shiver and spawn in the deeper hills, the dark places between the slopes and canyons where black, viscous, twisted things shift and surge, where the trees and the night are so thick that whole families are taken sometimes in the darkness without a word, a sound, a scream.

There are tales from these tiny, tree-choked mountain towns that itch through the blood like ice when they unfold, tales like those told about the sudden abandonment of Soulsvale, a sleepy little village lost in a stretch of woods crouching thickly beside a long, quiet highway that curves wide off toward Nevada as fast as it can go. There are dark places worn into the fabric of reality within such rural pockets, darkened basements and hidden places, thickets and unseen vistas where the veil between alien realities stretches thin and those of twisted mind and warped heart worship and call forth ageless, nameless things into the glistening blackness. There are tales of the night which speak of cultists beneath the only church in Soulsvale, restless in their darkened basement as they paint naked and rippling flesh with freshly spilled blood, howling and growling the words of impossibly ancient chants, reveling, glutting themselves with the sacrificial flesh of a family of unlucky tourists. Faster and faster the words of their ritual come, until the words are spoken on reflex, the glyphs their lips and tongues tangle through taking on a life of their own in the air around them. Swirling, fiery runes from some unknown tongue flit viciously across the shining borders of dark diagrams, designs drawn from the dreams granted by some unspeakable power and by its will carved into the basement floor, each sigil edged with human bone. Eyes catch movement, hands reach into the haze that burns between realities, meet other hands that reach back, seize fat, rough fingers with shattered grips of edged bone and wet talon.

All at once, the chanting rises to a deafening crescendo, then falls apart in a fiery clap that kills every light with a wind the color of night and indigo. In an instant, the narrow basement fills with bodies, and all gathered know intimately the evil now unleashed, know the surge and wash of pungent flesh that follows, crushing, devouring everything it touches. Through reality’s tattered gateway, the Children of the Indigai surge forth, the eager, angry bodies of twisted flesh and unseeing eyes pulsing in the darkness like wet fire, howling in an inhuman hunger. Bodies slick with thick, otherworldly ichor slide over and through one another in writhing knots of tortured flesh, reveling in the sweat and rot, stirring together in masses, in endless living mountains of orgiastic shadow and blue-grey duskiness. Like leviathans built of swarming, surging bodies, they stretch between this world and the next in a desperate, sinuous haze, rising out of the nothingness in a putrid, quivering birth full of questing hands, questing tongues, the flex of flesh on flesh, muscle and skin surging with quiet, unharnessed potential.

There is a cry among the trees, the shattering of glass and wood as the basement of the hollow, corrupted church where the Indigai find their bubbling birth is consumed with the surge of bodies, of thin and dusky, eyeless children who compose a singular, sexless beast. Gorged on the corpses of thousands caught and slain in unholy rituals by those cultists mad with the sickness of the woods, the Children of the Indigai cry out as one, and the sound chills every soul in the little town that crouches against the ancient church as if for simple warmth in the night. The sound is maddening, a howl which rises and falls with an alien tone that frightens both dog and beast so completely that they stir from broken dreams and hurl themselves away from the town with maddening speed, breaking chains, shattering glass, hammering down doors, gates and fences in their wild escape. But their frantic animal flight does them no good; as the Children of the Indigai swarm through the streets like a tide of liquid putrescence, those who flee become only the first to be devoured.

Moving in rubbery, viscous gouts that pour from the shattered church like the spurts of some unholy fountain and surge thickly into the tiny town, the sea of bodies washes up against the walls of houses like the waves of a pulsing, crawling tide of wet flesh, sliding between trees and moving slick across glass. Doors and windows creak from the press of bodies, the force building as the wash of flat-pressed hands and whispering faces spews on and on into the streets, becoming thicker and thicker, a flood of flesh and flex that eventually overwhelms every tortured door, every cracking window, and surges into every house and store, a tide so quick that those within are swallowed before they can even scream.

By morning, the Children of the Indigai have gone and the town has been left little more than an empty husk of shattered doors and yawning windows. What is left of Soulsvale’s only church now stands alone in the midst of the abandonment like a cracked and broken tooth, stone foundation gaping and ragged, floor a mouth of vicious, edged boards. The forgotten basement hangs wide and dark even in the dawning sun, impossibly deep, with only the scuffing and scratches in the smooth stones lost within the oppressive black to mark the passage of the sea of flesh and the forgotten rituals of the cultists whose chants tore open the walls between dimenses where the Indigai lay in surging knots, waiting and hungry. They say that sometimes at night, when the layers between this world and the next thin on the waning of the moon, the Indigai surge back into the ruins of Soulsvale, wash through every house and abandoned store, slickly shiver up and across trees, walls, searching, hunting.

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