Curse of the Five Pennies

It is not the big story that I have been promising, but it is something to hold you over in the meantime. And, it ties into The Curse of the Five Pennies, too.

The story can be found over at Fictional Musings. Kelly Parra posts a lot of flash fiction stories that writers send to her. If you have something around 700 words or less, you should consider submitting it over there. Anyway, here's the link to my story.

Unfortunately there were no monkeys and my story, Curse of the Five Pennies, is not going to be finished in time.

After reading my rough draft, I was very unhappy with the basic story arc as well as most of the writing and decided that it needed a pretty big rewrite and I did not get enough time over the weekend to make that happen.

I will post the story when I get around to finishing it and hopefully it will turn out to be a better story with the rewrite.

For those of you who are spitting mad that I teased you all along and now have nothing to show for it, I have a story that will be showing up tomorrow I thing on Fictional Musings. When it goes up for sure, I will mention it again with a direct link.

That's all. Carry on.

This is just a little teaser for the Curse of the Five Pennies which is due to come out on October 31st. None of the teaser stories will actually be part of the official story. These are all just side stories around the events that happen in the story. This one takes place one day after Curse of the Five Pennies ends.


Aftermath

The head football coach walked into the locker room. The team quieted as Coach stared at the floor.

"I just got some bad news." Coach struggled for his next words.

"Is Tyler sick? If so, we'll be fine. These guys suck."

"No, Randy. Tyler isn't sick," a tear rolled down Coach's face. "Tyler is dead."

The locker room exploded with questions. Coach waved his hands to try to silence the team. One of the assistant coaches whistled to get the locker room back under control.

"Nobody knows anything right now. Something bad seems to have happened. The game is canceled and there is going to be a city wide curfew tonight affective immediately. You all need to head straight home. Now before you guys get all macho and go sneaking around, it appears that somebody is running around killing people, really butchering them up. This is no joke and you all need to get home."

The assistant coaches took over hurrying the kids into their street clothes, coordinating transportation, and creating checklists to keep track of which kids called when they got home. Coach drove through the small town to his neighborhood on the outskirts. The newer subdivision with fresh siding and small trees contrasted with the small ranches throughout the rest of the town.

Coach grabbed a beer and stood on his back porch staring at the woods behind his house. Small towns were not supposed to have problems like this. But, then again, the woods were not supposed to have some of the sounds he had been hearing recently either.

I just updated the sidebar with a semi-official title for one of the stories. The Curse of the 5 Pennies.

Whether I finish it in time or not, I'm writing it in response to the E-book Challenge of at Paperback Writer's blog.

I'm hoping to finish it on time. The story is a campy horror story with lots of action and a fair amount of violence. There are only 6 characters and 1 monster so there can't be that much violence, eh?

And it takes place between a dirty, run down gas station and a creepy, old, abandoned bridge with evil looking drawings on it. On Halloween, of course.

And there's a monster that just can't possible exist...right?

The stories in the challenge don't need to be creepy or have anything to do with Halloween, but with an October 31st deadline, how can I resist.

No matter when I finish, and it better be before October 31st, I will publish the story over here in PDF format. I'm working on getting in touch with an artist friend to make a cover that will make downloading the story worth while on its own. He's good and can do creepy with the best of them.

So far, I have finished doing an extremely quick and dirty run through of the plot. It has sentences for everything that needs to happen from start to finish. Now, I need to go back and fill in all the details, dialogue, and killings. Oops, did I say that out loud.

Are you planning on entering the challenge? If so, how is your story coming.

I was riding back from the Iowa - Iowa State football football game on Saturday. We stopped at a gas station in Rochelle, IL for potty and snacks. I walked into the tiny, slightly dirty bathroom and noticed about 4 flies buzzing around which just made the whole room seem a little creepier than it should have been.

There were 4 pennies sitting on the back of the toilet bowl and 1 on the ground next to the toilet. 5 lonely pennies in a dirty bathroom in a medium sized town in the middle of nowhere.

As the flies buzzed around and I made room for another Pepsi, I realized what those 5 pennies were doing in the bathroom. Scary, scary stuff. I was smart enough to leave the pennies where they were.

One of the characters in a soon to be written by me story will not be so smart. He and his friends are sure going to regret that decision.