Story Sale Announcement: The Game of Games!

I’ve made my second professional rate sale!

My short story “The Game of Games,” a fantasy ghost story loosely inspired by Pascal’s Wager and the Deck of Many Things from D&D, will be appearing in the anthology “Pirates & Ghosts” from Flame Tree Press. Here is a link to the announcement over at Flame Tree’s blog.

The anthology will be released on October 15th, 2017 and should be available from most major retailers (I’ll throw up a shopping link on here on release day). The license to Flame Tree is non-exclusive, and I’m currently shopping it around to various podcasts as an audio reprint. Hopefully that works out. If not, I’ll publish it on the Stories page like I did with “Her Silver Chains.”

I really enjoy this story. It’s got moments of humor, and also a couple of spooky chills (if I do say so myself). I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of magical gambling, be it the Deck of Many Things or the games that Fiddler and Hedge played with the Deck of Dragons in Malazan, but I’d never seen a story that focused in on the psychology of the risk vs. reward calculus that a person would have to contemplate before playing such an absurdly high-stakes game. So I wrote one!

A few fun facts about “The Game of Games” and its path to publication.

*This story was going to be my submission to the third quarter of Writers of the Future 2017. I found out I won the first quarter the day after I finished editing it, just before getting ready to send it in.

*The call for submissions to the “Pirates & Ghosts” anthology went out the same day that I got a rejection from a different venue for “The Game of Games.” It was serendipity, I tell you! Especially since this is the only nautical-themed ghost story I’ve ever written.

*There’s one moment in the story that I’m particularly proud of as chilling piece of cosmic-ish horror. I’ll let you read and find out what it is, but I’ll say this; it isn’t the ending, and only one of the characters even notices it.

Hopefully you get a chance to read “The Game of Games!” I think it’s a lot of fun.