Presenting THE KREEP SHEEP – a grim fairy tale

In every land, to every story, there is a beginning and even in a world of magic and hope there is a past, there is a shadow, and there is a story as to how the world came to be. Welcome back to the Kingdom of Man in a time before there were Meep Sheep, before there were Bumble Kitties, and when there was much darkness in the world. These are the stories of the lands, the people, and the places of legend and song. These are the tales of how the world came to be, what made the Great Thicket such a dangerous place, how the Lady Hush first spread her evil and so much more. Here are stories of great darkness but at the heart of all darkness is light and there is much light here as well, such as the light of the love between mother and daughter, husband and wife, and two sisters pitted against a grim foe. If you yearn for a return to the lands of magic where the sky is filled with flying sheep, the hills alive with magical creatures, and where Love is still stronger than all that it opposes then friend, welcome back, welcome back to the Kingdom of Man. This is but a door. You are the key. Welcome, welcome home.

The Kreep Sheep is available for $10.

Also available as an e-book.

The Kreep Sheep – 146 pages.

A Kreep Sheep teaser…

Here is a small little slice of a story from The Kreep Sheep entitled ‘The Festivals’. This is a rougher form of the story, it has since been edited but you get a feel for things.

The Kreep Sheep will be released in May.

- The Great Loof smiled and held the Winter Globe up and shook it and as he shook it the wind picked up and with it the air was filled with flecks of white and slowly, so slowly, the ground began to fill with snow. Away down the hill Loof heard the ringing of bells in the human Kingdom and in his own the candles were lit and the streets were filled with light as the Pandas made their way to the Square. Satisfied, the Great Loof wiggled his bottom to get the snow off of it, dropped back onto all four paws, and made his way down the hill and home. It was the first night of the Renewal and a wonderful night indeed but it was tomorrow that had his stomach filled with bees as tomorrow he would make the journey to the Human Kingdom to see how they celebrated things, and to see his old friend Manda. Loof started laughing and charged down the hillside, anxious and excited like a young cub, and ready for a season of new beginnings. -

Join the  fun.

www.meepsheep.com

The Kreep Sheep approaches

Finished the writing for The Kreep Sheep and am on to the editing, sometimes the most fun and arduous part of the whole process. Editing is always interesting because you get to refine the story and re-discover it and make sure it woks. With this book it’s a matter of making sure the facts match up with the already established mythology I set up with The Meep Sheep and making sure this has its own life to it. This is more of a history of the world, it’s people, places, things, but also has some of the other stories of this place and what makes it what it is. The fun, and weirdness of this book is that while the stories stand on their own this is truly a follow up to The Meep Sheep and works better in tandem with it. I can’t say I would ever do a book series outside of this but this is definitely fun. It’s really interesting to be able to re-examine this place and to tell new stories here. Having said that…this is the end of the line of this stuff for the foreseeable future. A day may come when more stories are told having to do with this place and these people but after The Kreep Sheep I am moving on to the novel and will begin working on getting that ready for publication next year. And after that…who can say?

 

For now I am simply happy to spend this time in the Kingdom of Man with the Pandas, the Kreep Sheep, the Queen, the Bumble Kitties, and all the rest and hope you’ll come along for the journey this Spring.

c

For Meeping on the Go…

I love books. I will always love books. I mean, I am a writer for goodness sake so it’s clear I am gonna dig me some books. The thing is though that the book is now becoming the ‘book’. We are still getting stories told by amazing storytellers but the way the stories are being conveyed is evolving and there’s little to do but to accept that. This doesn’t mean we need to stop making and producing books but more should move toward ways to print on demand. We are a culture of waste and unfortunately our practices of consumption are rather shameful. There is no reason to produce a million copies of a book until you need that many. I mean, what happens to best sellers that don’t sell? They make their ways down the food chain until they are finally on the discounted table and then what? Discarded. Yikes. Something has to change.

As much as I love books, I really do like the idea and the promise of e-books is pretty exciting. My hope is that in the future I can start taking full advantage of all that this new tool offers but, for now, I just want to make my current books (save Back From Nothing, which is too old to really be able to covert without more work than is reasonable) to be available on the new technology. Not everyone is willing/able to sit down and read a traditional book so I want to make sure my books have every opportunity out there to find an audience.

The first big step here is in making The Meep Sheep available as an e-book. I regret that all the art in the book had to be excised but fully intend to rectify that in time. For now though readers with newer tech get the opportunity to discover this exciting fairy tale world of the Meep Sheep and will get the same joy that the book has brought everyone else.

So, dear reader, I invite you to discover The Meep Sheep anew and share this world with those you love. Click on the name of the book and you’ll be able to order the book for just $6 .

thanks,

C

Have You Seen Me?

Exapansion

Of late I have been having some fun on my Tumblr blog with some untold stories and histories of the Lands of Man and the Lands of the Animals that I wrote about in The Meep Sheep. The point of the new stories is to get all you good folks interested in the world of that book and interested enough to pick up the book. I mean, a guy has to eat, right, or at least tell you he has to eat so he can spend all his millions at casinos and on robots. Bwahahaha (all writers have to have an evil laugh. It’s part of  the guild rules).  Anyway, I started the blog and writing the stuff there to let people know about the book and get them interested in it. You know, that PR stuff that, while you may not have to do it yourself, you have experienced in your life. The thing is though that I am loving doing these side stories. I love The Meep Sheep and that world but more than just wanting to write in that world, these stories allow me to flesh that place out and to broaden it and fill in some shade and color. A book is like seeing one country of a world map and unless the book is part of a series that is all you will see of that world. And as a writer it is always tempting to see what lies just off the map, and what stories might be hiding there. For me, I am writing ‘prequel’ stories, which is silly to say but I imagine that’s what people would call them. What they really are is a way to explore that world without the baggage of an existing universe. It frees me to talk of a time when Man had not yet conquered that land and when it was still a very wild world. And really, the stories amuse me. I love finding ways to discover what this is, who that is, or what happened at this moment in history, and when you make it all up along the way it’s even more fun. My hope is that people who read the stories and have not read the book will want to know why these places and people are so important and will want to read more. And for those that have read the book I hope it’s like finding out how their favorite magic tricks were done while still maintaining the magic behind it all.

Now, what happens with the stories is up in the air. Time will tell, I suppose. For now though, I love writing them, and love expanding on this fun little world where magic is still very real and very active. And until that magic wears off for me, I am happy to keep visiting that place as often as I am able to explore more of its places, people, and things.

c

The Players and the Play…

In my newest book The Meep Sheep the story focuses on four people who are brought together in the hopes of pulling their Kingdom from the brink of forever darkness. The theme of darkness is as old as Mankind itself and is familiar card for those who have ever done any reading. The idea of darkness takes us back to childhood fears and to a time where anything might lurk there waiting to gobble us up. Now we think of people when we think of darkness and of WHO might be lurking there and not WHAT as we once did. It was my hope that in summoning a familiar ‘foe’ like darkness that I might capture a universal fear that seems palpable and real. And in a valley Kingdom where the clouds are in far greater supply than the sunshine, the darkness is very real indeed.

The darkness though is not the enemy here, no, the darkness is but a tool of the enemy, because this enemy is far too clever and too wily to not know that sometimes the oldest and simplest weapons are the most fearful.

But what is a story of villains without the heroes? And thus we return to the players in this piece. When this all began with Messy and the Meep Sheep I had but one character, our intrepid queen out to bring back the sunshine to her Kingdom but as the scope of that world grew I found that I was adding characters, creatures, and was creating not just a place but a world. A world is not a world though without people to connect you to it, and it is these people that kept me connected to the work as a whole.

Queen Messy is a young woman conflicted. Faced with knowing that for generations the women in her family have been the Queens and Mistresses of Magic in the Kingdom of Man is a heavy burden to carry, a burden made even heavier by her not wanting to be like the others. She longs to be an artist and to focus herself on those pursuits, not on ruling a land and its peoples. The Kingdom of Man once faced the ravages of war and while those days are long in the past the shadows of that war run long and still hold sway over the people and the land. Miss Messy must face her own fears and self doubts if she is to be able to find happiness in what she does because if she cannot find happiness in herself, she will never be able to spread happiness to the rest of the Kingdom.

Next comes Ashley Pickles, a young man who wants only the simple things from the world – a song on his lips, a guitar in his  hands, and someone to play to. Now, this wasn’t always the case with young Master Pickles, who as a young man had a voice which could charm the animals from the trees and could warm the coldest of hearts, but when he was taken as an apprentice by a man touched deeply by Ashley’s songs  it was only then that he began to find his true talent and his true voice. Ah, but every great gift has its price, and will Ashley be able and willing to make the sacrifices it takes to truly find his path?

Miss Amanda is a budding reporter in the Kingdom of Man but has yet to land the big story. When something comes between her and something special in her life though she becomes the center of negotiations with an ancient race and Kingdom that was once allied with the Kingdom of Man but which finds itself alienated and opposed to their one time friends. Can this young woman overcome her fear and face the wrath of this old and honored race? Can she bridge the divide once more between her Kingdom and theirs?

Finally there comes No One, the only character not inspired by someone I know. No One was a character that came to me when I was starting to put the first ideas together for what I thought would be the final story of the book (which, it wasn’t, but he IS in the final story as well so it worked out). No One is a man set with one of the gravest and most dangerous of all the jobs in the Kingdom of Man, watching something that is rightfully feared. But as dire as his job is, he knows that if something should happen to what he guards then his Kingdom and indeed all Kingdoms may be lost. But can he hold back a rising tide of fear that comes with fire to face the very thing they have been warned away from all these generations?

The Meep Sheep is a story for all ages, a fairy tale novel made up of several short stories that stitch together to form one narrative.  There is no overt violence, no foul language, but there is darkness here, in theme and actuality. But all good fairy tales confront the darkness and it is only by confronting it that we can conquer it. The book is twelve dollars but is something that can be passed from parent to child, from friend to friend, from teacher to student, and on and on. And once you’ve read it I think you’ll agree with me when I say it’s a story you won’t see, or ever forget.

c

So Why A Fairy Tale?

    As any writer, I loathe labels. Sure, it makes it easier to homogenize what you are doing, and gives you a buzz word to sell the work but jeepers, it seems so limiting to just say ‘oh, it’s a ______’. Nothing is every that cut and dried. Mysteries have an element of terror to them, romances have tragedy, and horror often features romance. It’s all so confusing to my poor brain. Alas, the world is the way it is so, for lack of a better term, The Meep Sheep is a fairy tale. Series of fairy tales. Whatever. But why?

    I have a hard time classifying what I write, probably because I am too invested in it all and am too close to it. Again though, for lack of a better term, I generally write ‘dark fiction’, which is to say fiction that is a close neighbor to horror but not necessarily. I love scary stories, and love horror but the stories I want to tell are not always set in that world and, well, you tell the stories you have to tell. I feel as if I can show more of the world and say more in that sub-genre. When the first ideas came to me regarding Meep Sheep and Bumble Kitties and stories that might be about the two it was my childhood that called more strongly than my teen years where I discovered a taste for the macabre. These were creatures from a world where magic still existed and where fairy tales were real. I loved both creatures because I wanted them. So for a long time I thought about the flying sheepies and kitties and the slowly but surely the stories formed. And as they formed, what they were became more clear to me. The stories became clearer and as they did I started to put them down. Little did I know at the time that I was writing a fairy tale that would lead to several. You see, I wanted to write the story of the Meep SHeep, whatever it was.

I guess what I am slowly getting at is that these were not written as fairy tales but just simply were fairy tales. There’s where the magic of writing comes in – when you can let yourself go and just let the story take you where it will. It is natural, really, when I look back at it because these were flying sheep and flying kitties after all. There are few genres that they fit in easily, and where they’d make sense. I have always loved fairy tales, and that these stories fit into that niche seems, well, perfect. There is a pervasive darkness to fairy tales but within that darkness there is ever the glimmer of hope, no matter how distant it is. And that’s what drew me, as the stories beyond Messy and the Meep Sheep came together. I wanted to tell the story of a land that was scared to death of the dark (figuratively and literally), a place that had known a lot of such things but had found a way back into the light again. I wanted to tell the story of people searching for themselves and for their dreams. People who wanted to find peace within. I wanted to tell the story of a dark soul that was old (my version of the wicked witch, I suppose) beyond belief and who wanted nothing more than to herald in an age of chaos. And in the end, I wanted to tell a story that reminded me of the stories that inspired and scared me as a kid. I wanted to try to catch that magic in a bottle. Now, there are twists to it all, there are nods to my own writing interests but, at its heart, The Meep Sheep is a fairy tale.

    Why do I love fairy tales? Because they are the pre-cursors to horror stories. I love them because they are a link to our childhood where there really were monsters in closets and under beds; and a world where any and every dream was possible. Plausible. This book is my gift to the world, for what it’s worth, and to the child in all of us. There is plenty for adults, trust me there, but there is a gentleness here, and in the air there is the faint scent of Spring flowers and the ground feels of soft grass. And if you look real hard, you might see a flying sheep flitting through the clouds.

c

MEEP SHEEP – First Proof In Hand

    So here is me holding the first proof of The Meep Sheep in hand and it’s a dream come true. I have been dreaming of Meep Sheep and this world for the better part of a decade and to have the book in hand, even the first proof of it, is pretty amazing. This is only the first of what should be two proofs, but this is a huge step forward. Next up is the final copy edit for the book, a couple interior tweaks, and then it’s done, done, done.

I owe so much, to so many people, and I can never repay any of them but hopefully, once they have read the book, that will be a small way to pay them back.

c

The REAL THE MEEP SHEEP Cover And Other News…

    Oh April Fool’s Day, I can love you so sometimes. I took this day to play a little trick on you, dear friend, and for that I am…heck, I am not sorry in the least. My fear though is that mine was a joke that either no one got, or didn’t care about. What I had tried was to release a false ‘bad’ cover to the book and back cover and then wrote a bunch of nonsense about what the book’s stories have to do with. I was hoping someone would fall for it, and well, did you?

Hmm.

    Oh, anyway, why we’re here NOW – this is the for reals cover to The Meep Sheep and I do honestly love it to pieces. I liked it quite a bit until my friend Marcus found the perfect font and then tweaked the cover image to make it pop more and now I absolutely adore this cover. THIS is what the book is about. To me this cover is the book. The book consists of several short stories that follow several people as they discover who they are and their places in the world and what they find is that they have destinies far greater than they had ever imagined. As I have said before, this is a book of fairy tales but which are not the kid stories they began as. These are closer to the Grimm’s version of fairy tales, just with less violence and less bodily dismemberment.

The Meep Sheep will be priced at $12 because it is about 100 pages longer than This Beautiful Darkness but you can buy both books for $20 if you catch me at any of the conventions I am doing this spring. The book clocks in at around 276 pages, give or take a few, and will have some art in it by me. The art is sketchy, but shows some of the many critters you’ll find in the Land of Man. Amanda did an amazing job laying the book out and I think you’ll like what she put together. The book is in Proof mode and I have yet to get the first proof in my hands. My friend Billy is reading through the book right now and correcting grammar and finding any loose ends and as he does that I shall fix the book and we should have a finished book by May, if not a touch earlier.

As for plans for the Spring they are –

Downtown Flint Comix Con on April 17th in Downtown Flint, Michigan at the Masonic Temple.

Motorcity Nightmares which will be April 23 – 25th in Novi, Michigan at the Sheraton.

Motor City Comic Con which is May 14th – 16th in Novi, Michigan at the Rock Financial Center.

I am going to do a book signing with Flint authors Glen Birdsall and Dangerous Lee as well at some point. And am going to try to get into at least one art festival during the summer.  

Anyway, that’s all the info I have, and now you have it. So, without further ado, here is the front and back cover for The Meep Sheep.

   

lemme know what you think!