Author Archives: Keith West

“A Sprig of Mistletoe” by Keith West and G. Addison Blaine

Today’s Christmas ghost story is a little different than the ones I usually focus on.  Let me explain.

Gayle Blaine is a friend and also an aspiring writer who has chosen to write under the name of G. Addison Blaine. What she aspires to write isn’t fantasy, however.  It’s romance, although she isn’t opposed to fantastic elements in her work. She just isn’t at the point where she’s comfortable including those things in what she writes. (I have Gayle’s permission to share this, in case you were wondering.)

So when she approached me to inquire if I would be interested in collaborating, I quickly agreed. We discussed plots and characters, as well as who would write what sections. Then we set to work. I think the result is something neither of us could have produced on our own.

For those who are curious as to who wrote what parts, Gayle focused on the primarily romance parts, meaning the historical portions as well as some of the contemporary sections. I wrote the ghost stuff. Then we each made a pass through the other’s work to make the style more consistent.

The result was a 13,000 word novelette. Because of its length, I’m going to post part of it today and the remainder tomorrow.If you don’t want to wait to read the conclusion, here’s the purchase link.

NOTE: Unlike the other two Christmas ghost stories I posted and the conclusion to this story, I didn’t take the first part of this one down. Call it a sneaky marketing trick. Continue reading

“The Carolers”

I’m going to try something a little different for the next week and see what happens. I’ve got some Christmas stories I’m going to post, some by me alone and a couple that are collaborations. This is going to be the first one. I’m going to post a link where you can purchase the story if you wish to read it on a device such as an ereader rather than a web page. I’ll remove the stories from the blog sometime between Christmas and New Year’s. The links to purchase will stay up after the stories are removed.

This s the first one, about a group you don’t want to go caroling with.

Here’s the link to purchase.

This story is no longer available for free.

“A Ghost Story for Christmas”: M. R. James and the BBC, Part 2

This is part 2 of John Bullard’s guest post.

This is the second part of a look at the ghost stories by M.R. James that the B.B.C. adapted for their series, “A Ghost Story for Christmas”. In part 1, we looked at the stories and films of “The Stalls of Barchester”, “Lost Hearts”, “The Treasure of Abbot Thomas”, “The Ash Tree”, and briefly at “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad”. Now, we will examine “A View From a Hill”, “Number 13”, “The Tractate Middoth”, and take a deeper dive into the original 1968 version of “Oh, Whistle …” and its 2010 remake. There will be major spoilers for these last two films, and minor ones for “A View From a Hill”. Continue reading

“A Ghost Story for Christmas”: M. R. James and the BBC, Part 1

This is the first of a two-part essay on M. R. James by John Bullard.

Being close to Christmas time, and Keith having established his annual ritual of looking at Victorian Christmas Ghost stories, I thought I’d help him out this year with a look at the second biggest person to uphold the tradition of a good ghost story for Christmas after Dickens, M.R. James, and how the B.B.C. ran several dramatizations of his stories for years for Christmas. We will look at nine of the ten stories that were adapted, starting with the first five. Continue reading

A Report on NaNoWriMo and a Glimpse of Things to Come

Thank you to everyone who purchased “Pickman’s Exhibition” or boosted the signal on it. I greatly appreciate it.

I’m going to be releasing more fiction over the next few weeks and into 2022. I participated in NaNoWriMo this year. I was behind most of the month until the last few days. I finished with a final word count of 50,006. Instead of a novel, I decided to try to write as much short fiction from scratch as I could. By that I mean everything had to be started during NaNoWriMo. Nothing I had worked on previously. It all had to be fresh. That was the goal I set for myself. I had hoped to have ten pieces of short fiction completed by the end of November. I finished with nine completed stories and six in various states of completion, ranging from a few pages to Oh-Lord-this-isn’t-short-fiction-it’s-a-longer-work.

I’m calling that a  win. The genre varied somewhat, although not as much as last year. That means I didn’t write any detective or crime fiction. I did write a few Christmas ghost stories, though. I’ll be trying to put them up over the next few weeks. I’m still figuring out what I’m doing with self-publishing, so I’m not making any promises about how many I’ll actually get up.

In the meantime, John Bullard is working on some M. R. James posts. The first will go live tomorrow.

And I haven’t forgotten I still need to do a post for Leigh Brackett.

“Pickman’s Exhibition” Now Available

While things have been rather quiet here on the blog, that doesn’t mean I haven’t been working on other projects.

I participated in NaNoWriMo this year, focusing on short fiction.  I completed nine short stories, and have made various progress on six more. I’ll talk more about them in tomorrow’s post.

My plan is to publish some of them as stand-alone short stories. I’ve not self-published anything before, so I’m still working my way up the learning curve.

So for practice and to try and figure out what I’m doing, today I published “Pickman’s Exhibition“. It’s a 5900 word story. If you are at all familiar with H. P. Lovecraft, you’ll understand the title.

Leigh Brackett Birthday Post Placeholder

Today, December 7, is the birthday of Leigh Brackett  (1915-1978). I’ve read a couple of her stories, but I’m not up for a post tonight. I’ve spent the evening finishing grading final exams and responding to student inquiries as to why their lab grade isn’t an A. (“You have multiple zeroes. Try attending all the labs next time. “)

I’ll post something of substance sometime in the next few days. But I didn’t want this day to pass without mentioning it.

Black Friday, Adventures Fantastic Style Extended -Bloch and Kuttner

I’ve wished for a long time that someone would publish some electronic collections by Robert Bloch. Or print collections that don’t just reprint the same handful of stories that are in most of the available collections.

My prayers have been answered. Sort of. The two stories I’m going to look at today come from a recently published collection entitled The Best of Robert Bloch, Vol. 3. There’s a volume 1, but as far as I’ve been able to find, there isn’t a volume 2.  This is a different book than the single volume of the same title that was published by Del Rey back in the 1970s.

(I’m not sure just how legitimate this book is. It and the first volume were published in October of this year, volume 3 just over a month ago as I write this. I’m not sure if Bloch’s estate authorized these books or receive any proceeds from the sale. The photo on Robert Bloch’s Amazon author page is someone else.) Continue reading

I’m Thankful for Poul Anderson

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. One of the things I’m thankful for today is Poul Anderson (1926-2001). It being his birthday (November 25), and all.

For today’s post, a few days ago I had decided to review Anderson’s “Son of the Sword”. It’s a straight historical adventure set in Egypt. Anderson did from time to time write historical adventure without any fantastic elements. This is one of those stories.

I didn’t do my due diligence on this one. “Son of the Sword” was originally published in 1951 in Adventure Magazine. The only reprinting was in A Light in the Void, back in 1991. It was this book where I read it. The copyright page in the book didn’t give any further detail than what I stated above, and the ISFDB on lists A Light in the Void under the story’s publication history.  If I had realized that, I would have found a different story to feature today. Continue reading