Despite what the lack of recent posts may indicate, I am, in fact, alive. I was definitely not slain in battle with a necromancer and subsequently reanimated to offer you this reassurance, all in the hopes of gaining your trust so that my master might infiltrate your society and spread his dark agenda. Anyone who would make such slanderous accusations is an obvious traitor and/or library-talker.

Even though it’s been a while, this post is going to be rather short–and it’s not because I have decaying, corpselike fingers that make typing difficult. Rather, it’s because I had a new story published today, and in the event that anyone clicks the link in my author bio, I don’t want them to come here and find the website equivalent of a dilapidated barn.

The story in question is “For Love, I Tear,” a flash-fiction piece which I wrote in January of 2018. It’s finally found a loving home at Metastellar, and you can check it out here.

I’ve also had another story published since my last post, which I would have mentioned if I hadn’t been so busy with perfectly normal mortal affairs that were entirely unrelated to the ancient Bone Scrolls of Kaz’gatahr. It’s a horror piece called “The Sand Knows,” which was inspired by a camping trip to Washington state’s Cape Disappointment. (An obvious misnomer, as anyone who’s visited the park will tell you.) You can find the story in the Cemetery Gates anthology Places We Fear to Tread.

And that’s about it, for updates. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to consume my daily vitality draft from its silver chalice, so that I might command the legions of my dark lord with the strength of a thousand men. (Vitamins are important!)

-Z

P.S. Now that I’ve finished this post and started digging through the ruins of this clearly neglected site, I’ve realized there are a few other announcements I missed during my totally normal and in-no-way-related-to-the-amassing-of-an-undead-army absence. Here’s what you may have missed:

1. In October of 2019 I won my local library’s inaugural “Terrifying Tales” short-story contest, with a flash SF/horror piece called “To the Brim, Old Dark.” It’s currently not available anywhere, unless you happen to be a KCLS librarian who swiped the display copies off the shelf after Halloween.
2. “The Woman With the Long Black Hair,” which originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, has been reprinted at Frozen Wavelets. This is especially significant to today’s post, because I’ve always thought of “For Love, I Tear” as a sort of spiritual successor to “The Woman With the Long Black Hair.” Check out the latter here!
3. “The Final Chapter of Marathon Mandy,” originally published in The Binge-Watching Cure, has been reprinted in one of Flame Tree Publishing’s gorgeous Gothic Fantasy volumes: A Dying Planet.