Monday, April 28, 2008

"Box" / Coach's Midnight Diner 2 (Spring 2009) & Relief Journal (Summer 2008)


Honorable Mention in Ellen Datlow's Best Horror of the Year, Volume 1!

Fellow writer Michelle Pendergrass, who is co-editing this anthology, a follow-up to the successful Coach's Midnight Diner, invited me to write a story. CMD is an interesting mix of Christian themes with horror, not soft or sanitized, no rules, hard horror but which deals in some way with faith. I did some free writing, word association, came up with the image of someone living in a box, and went from there. Personally, though the subject of the story is rather grim and serious, I have to admit it was one of the most enjoyable writing sessions I had with a piece. Also, all humility aside, I think it's one of my best stories in a long, long time. Special thanks to Holly Wang, who works with my wife Janet, who got hold for me phonetic translations of selected lines of dialogue from English to Mandarin Chinese. This dialogue adds a lot to the story, on many levels.
The stories in this anthology are tremendous! "Box" was also featured in Relief Journal 2.2, as a way of promoting the anthology (it was this appearance that garnered the Honorable Mention above). Relief is a tremendous (and refreshingly-liberal) Christian literary magazine.