Free Lies

This is where you get the free stuff. Spurred on by Cory Doctorow and others, I'm going through the backlist and not-exactly-giving-it-away. Here are some old stories, and some newer pieces too. So look, show them to your friends, stare at your screen and marvel at the amount of time you're spending reading about things that never, ever happened and probably won't, ever. 

Free lies. Get 'em while they're hot.

• The Sloan Men. This story's got gams. Originally published way back in 1993, in Don Hutchison's Northern Frights 2 anthology, the story was picked up by Ellen Datlow for The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 8. Then it was picked up by the folks at Telescene, as an episode of their smutty horror anthology series The Hunger (Margot Kidder played Mrs. Sloan - how cool is that, Superfriends?). Then it was picked up again by Don Hutchison for Wild Things Live There: The Best of Northern Frights. More recently, it was picked up by a bunch of 4th Year York University students and bashed around the lecture hall for a late-semester seminar in Canadian horror taught by Cecil Street writing workshop compadre Allan Weiss. And most recently, it's been subject of an excellent podcast by the folks at Pseudopod. You can listen to it here.
  
• The Pit-Heads. Can't have a horror writer's website without a free vampire story. The Pit-Heads is that: it's also about art and death. It's also, sort of, about my dad (although he'd kill me for saying). My dad is Canadian landscape painter Lawrence Nickle. He's not the kind of Canadian landscape painter who has a website of his own, or I'd just link there; soon as I get the okay, I'll put some of his work up on the website.*  In the meantime, go read the story; it's informed by some of the oil painting trips he and his pals used to take up to freezing cold rocks in the Ontario north, capturing some of the same scenery the Group of Seven did. The vampires are my own contribution.
• Fly in Your Eye. Some of my stories are very long. Not this one. It was published in a stout little volume from Barnes and Noble called A Horror A Day. Stories had to be less than 750 words. This one fit the bill, and was published next to 364 little screamers. So you could read one of them a day and fill up a year. Of course, you can't ever have just one...
  
• Swamp Witch and the Tea-Drinking Man. You don't get to read all of this one, and there's no creative commons license attached to it either. So don't go copying it, please. You can read the whole thing in Tesseracts Eleven, edited by the aforementioned Doctorow and Holly Phillips. So go have a look. If you like it, buy the anthology. If you don't - well, buy the anthology anyway. There's a story by my pal Madeline Ashby in it that beats snot out of Swamp Witch.
• Wylde's Kingdom. NEW! This is another copyrighted (NOT Creative-Commons'ed) sample, of a much longer story that will be available in Tesseracts Twelve -- out this fall from Edge Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing. This sample's an identical cut to the one appearing in the T12 sampler, available here: a short introductory tale of lassitude, liposuction and lousy, lousy weather.
  
• Merry Christmas, You Ungrateful Bastards. This one's not a lie so much as an embellishment: an article Karl Schroeder and I wrote for On Spec, about collaborating on a Christmas story for kids. Not Creative Commons'ed either - so read it here and link to it, please.