Die Booth's Blog

Happy new year and I hope that 2026 is treating all you good folks kindly so far.

In case you missed it when it aired live, you can now watch me talk about my story ‘Chester’ (with a bit of local folklore) on the Ruadán Books ‘Spring in the City’ Second Launch video, now available on Youtube.

‘Spring in the City’ is an anthology of tales set in the spring and themed around what lurks beneath the veneer of normalcy in real cities around the world.

It’s that time of year again where I do my annual writing wrap-up post.

2024 was an abysmal year for me, in writing and otherwise. Despite gritting my teeth and finally making my biggest push ever to do the level of social media engagement and promotion that I, as an indie author, am ‘supposed’ and ‘expected’ to do, I had my worst year for sales and acceptances since I’d started professionally writing. 

I was determined to do things differently in 2025.

The year started, again, with hospitalisat...

I’m a day late with the release announcement, but please forgive me due to time zone! Yesterday 16th December saw the release of ‘Poisoned Soup – for the Macabre, Depraved and Insane’ wonderfully edited and tirelessly promoted by the talents of Wendy Dalrymple and Grace R. Reynolds and with a cover by Alison Flannery.

This is a unique anthology of nostalgic horrors, combining sip-sized short stories, poems and essays all evoking the atmosphere of formative horror. I’m really honoured to be inclu...

‘Spring in the City’ is out now from Ruadán Books – an anthology of tales set in the spring and themed around what lurks beneath the veneer of normalcy in real cities around the world. It features my story ‘Chester’ which is a take on the local urban legend of ‘Belinda’ from my own childhood.

Ruadán are also donating 50% of profits on any of their books sold between November 1–December 23, 2025 to the Greater Boston Food Bank, with CEO R.B. Wood personally matching the donation too. This include...

My little literary story ‘Shipwrecked Out in Tonopah’ is now featured in the December 2025 edition of ‘The Razor’ magazine.

It’s a queer ’90s road trip tale about Brits in America and you can not only read it for free online, but also enjoy some truly dreamy illustrative artwork by Daniel DuBoulay and a reading by the beautiful accent of voice artist Ryan Gray.

If this puts you in the mood for more of my writing,...

It’s that time of year again. I really don’t love Black Friday and its induced FOMO and encouragement to overconsume, but it is what it is, and it is at least a great opportunity to take advantage of Lulu’s biggest discount of the year. So, behold – from now through December 1st you can get a whopping 30% off my print books with code BOOKGIFT30

And of course, every copy of one of my books sold goes directly to an indie author (me!) rather than to a big brand. This is the biggest discount Lulu do...

If you’re at a loose end this coming Sunday November 23rd 2025, then you can always log on to your choice of social media and listen to a bunch of authors (including me!) read from our Darkness Most Fowl stories and have a chat.

This is the ‘Euro author’ time zone session, so it begins at 6pm GMT/ 1pm EDT.

I’ll be on first, so get there early if you’d like to hear me read from ‘Little Gibbet’! Our awesome editor Elaine Pascale will be hosting. Line-up is – me, Zac, Leen, Selah, Kristy and Rob, f...

I’m a bit late, but still want to wish everyone reading this a happy Halloween! 

I was honoured to have a little guest article published on the almighty Ginger Nuts of Horror website on Halloween, discussing why The Lost Boys is my enduring favourite Halloween film, and why it’s still so relevant today.

Halloween also saw the official release of Darkness Most Fowl, a new anthology of dark, bird-themed stories edited by Elaine Pascale and conceived by Kristi Peter...

Just in time for Halloween season, two new anthologies are out!

Mmeory, the upcoming anthology from Air and Nothingness Press features my story ‘A Moment on the Lips.’

This is a limited edition release of only 250 numbered copies, so if you’d like one, don’t sleep on it!

Mmeory is “An anthology of memory manipulation stories: magic spells, cyborg memory edits, very unreliable narrators, time travel gone horribly wrong. (AaNP)” and my little folk horror story o...

I’m going through one of those (loooong) patches where I’m struggling to read, but it’s not through lack of wanting to, so short stories are a great way to read new authors when I’m low on time.

I’ve also been meaning to read some Matt Neil Hill for a while, and he’s got a few stories online that you can read for free, so I’ve started with those and written up a little review for them.

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