Chris Capps's Blog

A short story I wrote a while back appeared in Bewildering Stories issue 637. "Hands From the Sky" was redone and republished as a reprint, and the folks at BWS are hosting it so it can be read online.

http://www.bewilderingstories.com/iss...

Bewildering Stories has a lot of good stuff in general, so I'd recommend checking them out. I've read a few stories there and had a grand old time doing it.

http://www.bewilderingstories.com

Hello,

I'm Chris Capps. I wrote the science fiction horror thriller "Our War with Molly Nayfack" featuring the small and isolated town of Cairo and its struggle for survival as they discover a dreadful conspiracy in the familiar alien landscape of the world they inhabit.

I also wrote a book trilogy which I'm calling "The Ebon Chronicles," which follows the crimes of Ebon the Waste in a world struggling to recover from a centuries old nuclear war. The third book of that series has been written, but while it has been proofread, I'm overhauling sections of language because it's narrated by a [spoiler redacted.] When you meet the narrator of that story in "Rustbaby Wonderland" it will become apparent why so much additional editing was necessary.

Meanwhile, if you've read the first two books of the Ebon series (Adon Still's leg, AMIRIGHT?), or you're thinking about getting into them, I've made a half-hour long bit of audio fiction that follows the decline and collapse of civilization.

https://soundcloud.com/chris-capps-1/...

That will eventually be edited into an actual video presentation and put up on youtube as a supplementary multimedia piece.

I've also written two books in a serial called "Calefactory" which is somewhere between a parody of traditional horror fiction and an outright descent into the "Weird Tales" worlds of people like Henry Kuttner and (more recently) the emerging tradition of online Creepypastas and authors like Jason Pargin (Cracked writer David Wong. If you haven't yet, check him out. He's funny and he knows the genre.) and other contemporary horror parodies like Johnny B. Traunt's Fat Vampire series. Calefactory is something I want to shop around and get some feedback on from beta-readers familiar with the genre before releasing it. Comedy ain't always easy.

Addendum: I'm not comparing myself to other authors when I mention them. I'm just trying to be straightforward with my appreciation for what they do.

So that's what I'm working on. Who am I? I'm a nerd from Southern Illinois who grew up reading the typical stuff nerds from Southern Illinois read, and then I never stopped. When I ran out of Lovecraft stories I went into Derleth and Kuttner and the others who contributed to that mythos. I like Robert E. Howard enough to name my cat Thulsa Doom. He follows me to the grocery store sometimes (Thulsa, not the ghost of Robert E. Howard.) He's pretty cool.

I'm pretty good friends with author Zachary Seibert, author of the Vast Land series, and I hope some day to write a contribution to his richly imagined world. I will occasionally (possibly erroneously) claim some small fingerprint in cosmetic developments in the Vast Land, but these mostly happen in competitive Olympic conversations where everyone talks at once and greyhounds flow like the effluent from the nuked glaciers of Novoya Zemlya. Zach's a good writer. Check out his stuff. Do it.

I have a blog called puppets on the wall at www.puppetsonthewall.blogspot.com.

I am committed to never waste the time of my readers. I always, always fact check and I get my stuff edited to the best of my (and my editors') abilities. Because I'm an indie author, I feel it's that much more important to produce things that people will like. I also follow the rule that I never write something that I wouldn't like to read. If it's horror, it needs to scare me. If it's action, it needs to make me feel like the stakes are high. I always spend at least twice as much time editing as I do writing a piece. Last year I wrote six pieces, including five slim volumes and a novel. This year I hope to do the same.

If you're interested in contemporary indie fiction, I can tell you I read a lot and I like to read nearly as much as I like to write. Drop me a line, ask me for free stuff or updates on emerging work, or ask me questions about the feasibility of a walking city or self-replicating printers or antisenescence in a hard sf environment or whatever.

Also, have a good day. And if you're looking for a place to start, my blog has a ton of free fiction on it.
www.puppetsonthewall.blogspot.com

Thank you for your time.