The Afterlife of Tanya Madera by JM Scott FREE Until February 14, 2017

Hey all, The Afterlife of Tanya Madera is FREE  in  all markets until February 14, 2017.

I wrote this story four or five years ago and it is still one of my favorites. I have had this idea for awhile, what if someone wanted to die a violent death because they wanted to come back as a ghost to inflict harm on others. But that's all it as

Then one day I was walking in the woods with my husband. It was this gorgeous spring day. Then I saw it, the pink flannel that you see in the book cover. And all of sudden, that little idea exploded.  I saw the characters and found the story.

If you will, here is an excerpt from the book....

Bill met Danny O’Brien at the hospital. He had the same spiky hair he had on TV but he wore black plastic glasses. His crew consisted of two other guys. One chunky guy with his pants falling around his ass and a super skinny one.

“Bill,” Danny said and shook his hand. “I’d like to see your wife first and then if you want, you can come along with us and talk to the girl’s mother and friends. I’m sure the mother will talk to you since you found her.”
.
Upstairs, Stacy slept on a chair beside Jackie. Stacy opened her eyes when Bill and Danny came in.

“Oh my god your Danny O’Brien from Spook Nation!” Stacy exclaimed. “Bill you didn’t tell me you believe in ghosts.”

“I don’t but I don’t believe Jackie went crazy either. Maybe this guy can help. He said Jackie is in trouble.”

Danny went over and touched Jackie’s skin. “She is very cold as if she were dead. That means I am positive Tanya is with Jackie right now. Make sure the nurse brings a lot of blankets.”

Stacy nodded and went to find the nurse to get more blankets. Danny opened Jackie’s eye lids and took some notes.

“What color are Jackie’s eyes?” Danny asked.

“They are brown with flecks of green,” Bill replied.

“Come here and take a look.”

Bill looked into his wife’s eyes, they were no longer brown with flecks of green but an ashy blue that looked vacant, lost- dead. Stacy came back with more blankets.

Danny looked at her, “she isn’t going to wake up right at this moment. Tanya has her right now. Before we can fix this, we have to figure who Tanya is and why she is holding onto Jackie. Bill, you want to come along?”

“Bill, I want to stay. I feel like this is my fault. I took Jackie back to the house,” Stacy said.
Bill nodded and told Stacy, “I’ll give you a call later.”

Rachael Madera lived in a small townhouse just outside of the Meridian Borough. The townhouses were all white. There were cars parked in front of each unit. Danny pulled into an open space. His camera crew got out and turned on their cameras. Danny knocked on the door with Bill behind him.

“Miss Madera, I’m Danny O’Brien, I talked to you last night.”

“From Spook Nation. Tanya loved that show. Come in.” Her eyes were red and sunken into her skull. The living room just had a couch and a tv with a coffee table. She scooped up some pills and put them back in the bottle and tried to hide the bottle in the sofa.

“You think Tanya is a ghost? Why isn’t she visiting with me?” Rachael asked.

“I don’t know. Do you know this man?” Danny asked about Bill.

Bill didn’t know her but recognized her as a waitress at the truck stop where he and Jackie went to dinner several times.

“No, not really. I’ve seen him and his wife at the restaurant I work at.”

Danny gave her a picture of Jackie, “how about Jackie did you know her. Or did your daughter know her?”

“I’ve seen her around. I don’t know if Tanya knew her or not. Her only friends were that girl Lucy and that guy Mike. I don’t know she would be hanging out with someone older than her but you never know teenagers. Maybe Tanya was into drugs.”

Bill went for Rachael and grabbed her shirt, “my wife doesn’t sell drugs. We are the ones who found her. And now your ghost daughter has my wife trapped in a coma. I don’t want to lose my wife.”
Danny pulled Bill away. Rachael looked at him with her wide, red eyes, “sorry I was just offering a suggestion. But you guys found her, so maybe it was your wife all along. Come on, you guys just happen to find her, doesn’t it make you guys look suspicious?”

Bill lunged for her but the camera men held him back.

“Bill, keep cool. We will find the truth. Miss Madera, focus on anything you might remember from when she disappeared. Anything at all.”

Then Rachael broke down in tears. “I’m a horrible mother because I don’t know what she was doing before she disappeared. When she was at home, she was either alone or with Mike. She spent all her time in her room. I thought she was just going through a phase. How would I know? I treated my mom the same way. I don’t know. Tanya and I were never very close. I worked a lot, I drank a lot and the damn doctor put me on pills that make me sleepy. Tanya was the one to take care of me when she was around. It should’ve been the other away around.” Danny went over to her and gave her a tissue. He put his skinny arm around her and hugged her against his skinny chest. After several minutes, Rachael calmed down.

“Can we see her room?” Danny asked.

Rachael sniffed her snot and nodded, “top of the stairs, last door on the left.”

Tanya’s room was bare. She had a twin bed under the window. There were two book cases filled with books with a cd player on top of the one book case. There was a computer on her desk. Her clothes lay in piles on the floor. The camera men videoed everything. Danny opened her drawers and pulled out a worn journal. He flipped through the pages.

“I think we have something to finally work with. Its Tanya’s journal,” Danny said aloud and rolled the journal up and put it in his coat. Bill flipped through the Meridian High School yearbook. She put a heart around a guy named Brett Adams.

“Looks like she had a crush on Brett Adams. I heard of him. He was fast tracked to the NFL then on the day of his try out, he went to kick the ball and it seemed like he pulled a muscle but he went down hard. According to the doctors, he dislocated his hip. He never played football again,” Bill said.

“Anything else in there?” Danny asked.

Bill flipped through the pages and then pointed out pictures of Danielle and Cameron with horns coming out of their heads. Bill flipped more and showed Danny pictures of her two best friends Lucy and Mike.

“Who should we start with?” Danny asked.

“Mike Hawkins,” Bill said, “he talked about her disappearance but then he didn’t say anything at the candle light vigil in her honor. To me it seems weird. How can someone say he cared about her so much and then didn’t say anything at the vigil?”

“I agree, I think he might know something,” Danny replied.

“I wonder if the police are doing anything?” Bill asked.

“I hope so. But I know they will make it look good and try to do something but they don’t have the resources to find out what happened. Unless someone comes forward and admits it.”

***

Grab your free copy to read more and if you feel so inclined let me know what you think.

Till next time...

DayQuil, Dreams and Me

Without DayQuil (really the Family Dollar knock-off because it is so much cheaper) I would not be able to write this blog post. Though I am feeling much better today. Monday was the worst between fevers and chills, a migraine and constant napping. I felt like I had a head cold last week but it was going away. Then Bam- my kid gets sick and has to come home from school. Two days later, I have it.

One of the worst things about being sick are the dreams. Normally, my dreams are already bizarre and vivid. When I am sick they are magnified a 100 times which means I wake up more because my dreams are even more disturbing. I get many ideas from dreams. One of my notebooks in One Note is labeled "Story Ideas" and when I remember an exceptional nugget I write it in that notebook. I also have another notebook labeled "dreams" and this is where I place dreams or fragments then look up symbolism on the web- as if I am trying to either figure out if I am psychic or learn more about myself.

Over the years various bits of dreams made it into a story. The giant bronze sun sculpture in Seaspring Briar that turns into a deadly saw blade was in a nightmare years ago. In that dream, the sun sculpture chopped off my brother's head.  Parts of Havana, WV, my novel in progress, were taken from dreams such as the town of witches, the mischievous dark- haired witch,  and the people who live in dumpters.  And in Gone Before Dawn, well there is a story to that one... where the entire novel was based off a dream in a way.


Do you that moment in between wakefulness and REM Sleep is called hypnagogia. According to Wikipedia (I know not the most scholarly, but it is sufficient for this purpose), Hypnagogia is a transitional state which features lucid thought, lucid dreaming, hallucination and sleep paralysis.  One thing that is weird about my sleep patterns is that I can go into REM quickly. There are times when I doze off, have a  fucked up dream, wake up because the dream was fucked up and only a half hour or 45 minutes passed. Anyway that time between wakefulness and dreaming is a fascinating place to hang out. There are some really great things that can be found in hynpagogia. Anyway back to Gone Before Dawn...

I was 17 or 18 and I was in bed almost in REM sleep, probably in the hypnagogic state when all of a sudden someone's voice, a young woman, screamed "someone please help me." She was in distress. And it felt so real, so real in fact I sat straight up in bed. And it unnerved me. I could never forgot it. Nothing like that happened before then and nothing like happened after that. It was like we shared brain waves for that fleeting moment. I still think about it and I can still hear her voice in my head. For years afterward I kept thinking about that moment in my life and eventually Gone Before Dawn was born. In it, Delta screams for help and there is someone that gets the message, Moira Ponds, who can hear voices- voices of those who go missing. Sometimes I wonder if what I heard what was real or not.

One last thing, in Gone Before Dawn, The Puritans are a right-wing,  ultra religious  group of leaders that are in power all over the world three hundred years from our present. I wrote this novel in 2014 as part of Nanowrimo. And during a nap on March 2, 2015 I had this strange dream, "was arrested in Lake Harmony (in Pennsylvania) by Donald Trump who happened to be a cop for bad driving and smacking into a couple of cars."

I think I'm onto something or maybe it is just the DayQuil talking.

Till next time...

I Love Santa Clarita Diet

Last night, I binge-watched Santa Clarita Diet  and I loved it.  And I am really hoping for a season two. What is not to love?

Zombies- check
Drew Barrymore- check
Drew Barrymore munching on dead people- check
Dark humor-check.

But then it got me thinking, sure I love zombies, who doesn't?  There was something more. Something about Sheila and Joel's characters, how they curse all the damn time, and how they act. How the  music is stuff I heard when I was younger. And then it dawned on me- I related to the characters.

And then I realized, damn I middle-aged. When the fuck did that happen? Weird thing is even though Joel and Sheila are middle-aged, they didn't act middle aged (aside from the killing and hiding dead people). You know like middle-aged like how our parents were long time ago. It's like there was whole secret world that gets opened up when your middle-aged. Seriously, you want to drink beer and watch Spongebob, no one  gives a shit. All while your kid is just trying to hide. It's like you spend your twenties raising small children and then boom by the time you are in your mid-thirties your kids are older and things are different.

Sure, there are a lot of people who hate getting older. This July I will turn 37 and I am looking forward to it. I will be only 42 when my kid is 18. That is still middle aged with plenty  more to go.

How do you feel about getting older?
Till next time...

Good-bye Poetry Journal

Today, I have to retire one of the two poetry journals or notebooks or workbooks- whatever you want to call it. I have this weird thing where I write poetry on paper with pen. Not that I don't write poetry on the computer because I do just that is not the norm. This sweet little notebook has no lines and is spiral bound and cost me two bucks at Wally-World.

The no lines are important and hard to find. Unless of course, I want to shell out a bunch of money for a sketchbook. I bought this notebook two years ago and there are three empty pages and it is time for retirement. Yeah that is another weird thing, I never completely finish a notebook. I always leave a few pages because I always like to make sure the same poem is in the same notebook. In the time I had this I have written poems for a National Poetry Month challenge, two poetry classes, various poems because I wanted to write a poem, notes on chapbook creation, poems for my Halloween book

My handwriting is pretty bad. It is a mixture of cursive and print. I swear the older I get, the worse it becomes. I kid you not, I even have a hard time reading what I wrote. These pages here are the first draft. There are some pages with arrows, scribbles and  words in the margin.

When I was younger, I wrote poems on whatever was handy- napkins, paper plates, scraps of  paper, margins in school notebooks. Over the years, many of those are long gone. I think I may have one in a shoe box but that is probably degrading over time.

Sometimes, when I am looking for something else, I come across one of these old journals. I find myself rereading it. Then BOOM, I lost an hour or two.  But rereading those old notebooks, I learn something. I learn about how much my writing has improved over the years. I can visibly see the progression.

Anyway, should I ever become famous, these will be valuable to some scholar writing their dissertation and looking for insight. That is if they can read my handwriting.

Before signing off, I just want to share with you that I have gathered all the stories for my upcoming short story collection Sanctioned Shadows. I am going to start final revisions tonight. Once they are done, I will decide the order and begin preparing the book for publication. I am shooting for February or March of this year.

Till next time...

Syringe

The black cat with the white diamond on its forehead wobbled through the rain soaked street. The smell of blood brought him to a dying man beside a green dumpster.  Vertigo needed the blood. Birds, mice, and human blood all made him sick. He would just take a little bit to take the edge off but even that was too much sometimes. The man reached out and tried to stroke his wet fur.  Vertigo backed up and stepped on a syringe. A tiny bit of warmth spread into his paw. His hunger subsided a bit.

Vertigo watched the life vanish from the man’s eyes then  crept over to the four inch gash in his stomach and licked once.  It flooded his system, everything inside woke up. The itches started;  his eyes watered. His throat flared up and breath became harder to come by.  He collapsed beside the dead man.

Vertigo awoke with bright lights surrounding him. A woman in bright pink scrubs with a jovial cat and dog heads  stroked his fur, “Don’t worry, we are going to get you better and find you a new home soon.”

She accidentally touched the wound on his neck. Vertigo  hissed, howled then sunk his fangs into her wrist. Beautiful, wonderful, delicious blood filled his mouth. She screamed. Vertigo’s throat swelled shut, and he collapsed.

The smell of rot roused him awake. His dead heart pumped his dead blood through his veins once again. It was dark with only a sliver light coming from above. He looked and saw dozens of cats, dogs, and even bunny rabbits decomposing in some kind of pit. Weren’t these animals supposed to be burned? At least that is what he read somewhere or saw on the idiot box.

How long has it been since he turned? Ten years and he went in anaphylactic shock everyday. And everyday he would die then wake up.  He has walked onto busy highways and was hit fives times and then come back fresh as a daisy several hours later. He pestered known cat haters in the neighborhood. They would shoot him with some large deer rifle and he would die and then come back a little while later.

He was done with it. But how, how does one die when you are a vampire cat?

Vertigo looked for a way out and saw a rat dart into a crack in the wall. The syringe, he stepped on it. Was there only a drop of blood? It was almost enough. He followed the rat through the sewer and back out into the world, his hunger brought his world out of focus once again.

The cat wandered the streets until he got to the abandoned state hospital just outside of Philly. People groaned and growled inside. A skinny bum wearing a ratty coat was propped up  against the wall. His cracked feet poked through worn sneakers. Jackpot! In his arm was a dirty syringe. Dirty or not who cares? The man had his eyes closed.

With his mouth, Vertigo pulled the plunger and until the syringe was full and then yanked it out. Blood squirted out and dripped down his arm. The cat took the syringe and placed it sideways so the plunger was against the wall and needle outward. Taking his paw, he forced the blood through the needle. His mind and senses became sharper. He waited for a reaction. There was none.

Like a junky, he lay on the ground with pleasure and listened to the faint heartbeats of the humans in the building. He was free and ready to live  the eternal life his old mistress had given him before she was staked all those years ago.


***
Hey all, It's been awhile since I posted a story (okay I posted one at Christmas). This is flash fiction and is only 617 words. I took a free flash fiction writing class and this is one of the stories I wrote for that class. What do you think?

Global Warming? Tuesday in January

This is how our winter has been- we get a little snow, then within in the week it is gone. For this winter season we may have had maybe 6 or 8 inches of snow all season. Yesterday it was in the forties in the morning and then it rain, sleeted and I woke up to quite a bit of snow this morning. I saw a report somewhere it was about three to four inches for my town. Right now, it is almost forty with the snow already melting. Tomorrow should be close to fifty. I have lived in this part of Pennsylvania for almost sixteen years and it is cold and snowy (not Alaska snowy but enough snow to look like winter). The last two winters have been mild. Although, I think this January was even warmer.

Enough about the weather.... (and politics for that matter, I think I need a break.) I decided to hide Suburban Vampires until further notice. With this gone, I took the adult content warning off. I am hoping to have more web traffic as a result. What am I going to do with it? I still love the idea and I should finish it (that and fifty other projects I've got going on). I also thought maybe I should turn it into a screenplay and sell it to the CW or Netflix. For some reason I just never have this drive to write a screenplay. I know how to write a screenplay but maybe I need some motivation. On one hand, I am not sure if I want to be a screenwriter. In one way. it would be pretty awesome and in another way, I just don't think I am cut out for it.

I think about screenplays a lot. It is more like I daydream about screenplays. Sometimes though it does seem like my stories may actually fit better for the screen. Like the Gerry Meyer stories (the demon chick) they seem like they would fit nicely on TV because there is a lot of ways it could go.

Speaking of writing, I am working on all sorts of self improvement habits to help stay focused as a writer. One them is revising by last novel, I wrote. I am slowly working on completing stories for Sanctioned Shadows and the other day I actually wrote- not a blog post, school work or anything else but an old story that needs to be finished. I am trying to focus more on writing projects than doing stupid stuff like playing Candy Crush or wasting time on Facebook. So far so good, but then again I have been really trying for the last week. You should ask me in a month how that's going.  I plan on posting a new story here this week! So that is something to look forward to.

That's about all. Till next time...

Jet Star Jockey by JM Scott FREE until Jan 26 2017

Hey all, I wanted to let you know that Jet Star Jockey is FREE on all markets until January 26, 2017.

I can't believe the book has already been out a year. Some of my older ones have been out for three. I am still proud of this book as it was a year long project that really explored both art making and poetry making.

And I won't make another one like it. I am, however working on a poetry calendar that I should have ready sometime in the fall.

Slowly, I am working on finishing Sanctioned Shadows. I have written some new stories for it. I am still revising those stories and then I have to move the final planning stages of the book. When I first started working on it, I didn't feel like I had enough stories. It's not like there is a set rule or anything, it just didn't seem right to me at the time. Like it wasn't plumpy enough.


Well that's about for now, please enjoy the following sample from Jet Star Jockey. Till next time...