Gordon Highland's Blog

Visitors to my Music page know I’ve produced many tracks for multimedia. Theme songs, spot cues, drops/bumpers, etc. However, the closest to a complete score that I’d recorded was for my 2006 short film Featurette, clocking in at a mere 19 minutes. Then came an opportunity to compose for a new serialized horror podcast called LARKSPUR UNDERGROUND. We’ll get down and nerdy in a bit, but first the story.

In late January of 2014, the Colorado Sheriff’s Department investigated a call of a strang...

This anthology contains my short story “‘Burgatory” originally published at Solarcide a few years ago, but which has been offline for a while. It’s about a life-insurance salesman facing his mortality as planes of the multiverse collide.

From the publisher:

Visions, plagues, angels. A different view of the miracle of birth. Bestiality farms, departing souls, talking cold sores, and of course, elder gods. All of this and more. Edited by Martin Garrity and Nathan Pettigrew, this is a collection o...

You may have noticed that I read a lot of four- and five-star books. That’s not me being generous with my ratings, it’s because most were prequalified recommendations from those whose tastes I trust. Neo-noir, crime fiction, southern gothic, literary fiction: these are my preferred genres. I have little interest right now in young adult, sci-fi, fantasy, bizarro, alt-lit, or most of the speculative fictions involving creatures. Exceptions exist, and have certainly provided some eyebrow-raisin...

Remember my debut novel from back in 2009? Ever wanted to cut out the eyeball middlemen and have the author’s voice streaming between your ears handsfree?

Of all my fiction, Major Inversions made the most sense for an audiobook treatment because:

• it’s written in first person, so the entire narrative is “in character”

• the character’s voice is basically my own (though not his assholic persona)

• he’s a jingle writer, and I couldn’t not include those, right?

• I was between projects




7h 27m, 192...

The rise of self-publishing means more authors are taking on unfamiliar roles, with mixed results. To put it kindly. I’ll leave the marketing/promotion advice to others, but one aspect I can speak to with some authority is design. I’ve designed all three of my own books, assisted with several others, and worked on a ton of print jobs in a (miserable) former agency life. My first novel interior was created in Microsoft Word—which I don’t recommend—with decent results. Everything since, I’ve us...

I managed to consume 32 books this year. Most came from small presses, and were quite good. Plenty has already been said about the big titles, so I focus on reviewing the underserved authors worthy of your attention. Because I’m lucky to get my book recommendations from readers with similar tastes (and because my to-read pile numbers in the hundreds, allowing little patience for lousy reads), it’s time well-spent, with a high signal:noise ratio. These are the books that got me talking this ye...

I’m the focus of this month’s Community Spotlight over at the excellent LitReactor, profiled by Jessica Taylor. The main topic is Submission Windows, my shorts collection, but the interview also delves into the art of sequencing compilations, poetry, and the differences between writing for the short versus long form.

LitReactor is one of the most popular book/writing sites out there, with columns, interviews, online courses, and an enormous community forum (I’ve been active since day one), who...

Author of the Dead series and Zomblog series, TW Brown also contributed a story to The Booked. Anthology, having been a fellow former guest of the podcast. I answered some writerly questions on his blog, wherein I managed to insult my philistine friends, skewer traditional publishing models, and share my method for producing one entire page of fiction per day.

Read: Being sick sucks, don’t trust flavored NyQuil, and a man named Gordon

Prison bars. Stained church glass. Deadlines precursing rejection. These are Submission Windows: vantage points for peeking in on—or out from—surgeons, killers, priests, perverts, inmates, athletes, musicians, and more than a few celebrities past their prime. Most clinging to frayed ropes of their own making, desperate for redemption, love, or merely an enduring pulse. For others, it’s their ambition on display, destined for humility.

These voyeuristic and vicarious vignettes include 26 short...

A couple of years ago, I read Andrez Bergen’s excellent post-apocalyptic sci-noir novel Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat, and began a correspondence with the author, interviewing him for The Velvet and keeping in touch all friendly-like, as we do. A few books later, he re-approached Goat‘s publisher, Another Sky Press, about releasing an anthology of stories by other authors that he compiled (along with co-editor Guy Salvidge), all set within the well-developed universe of that first novel. I im...