Well, I guess I have a secret to share. Sometimes, my mind wanders off the beaten path, into places where blood drips from the overhead vines, and the darkness envelopes everything with a sinister edge. In short, I write about those places on the occasions when my thoughts veer… into the black.
My first ‘dark’ story was about a serial killer and his motivation. I was 10,000 words in and then, one day on social media, in a writing group, twenty other writers said they were writing serial killer stories. Sigh. I put it in my vault and pasted a ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign on it. That was in 2015. I dusted it off in late 2019, and I looked at it. It still had the bones to be a full-length novel, but I have other novel projects on my plate. In the meantime, I pasted the first chapter of ‘My Calling’ unto a document of its own and named the story ‘Popping My Cherry.’ I put the rest back in the vault and reapplied the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sticker. I’ll pull it out again one day, and we’ll see what it becomes.
This collection is some of the darkest stuff I’ve ever written, and I’m proud of it. It became a collection when I was cleaning out my ‘vault’ with the idea to create one collection. However, that collection would have been about 200,000 words. Yeah, it’s that many stories in my vault. So, I separated my stories into four different collections based on genre and intent. I was going to release ‘Aces Up My Pants’ first, but at least seven of those stories are under contract with various publishers, and the fine print says I have to wait a certain amount of time to publish them. I put it aside and went to the next one, ‘Painted Horses,’ a Western collection. I pushed it aside because I have a Western series of novels being released. That one could wait. Then I thought about why we don’t let our feet dangle off the bed, or why we sleep with the closet door closed, and my decision was made.
Welcome to the dark corners of my mind, where things do go bump in the night, and women clutch at their pearls and crucifixes, and the dead body under the sheet reaches out its cold, clammy hand towards you… I hope you enjoy this and thank you.
Marlon S. Hayes
10/20/2019
P.S. Try it out. It’s available on Amazon and the audiobook is on Spotify and other listening platforms.
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