My new short tale Kiss and Tell will be available for free read for a limited time very soon over at Wattpad.
Kiss and Tell is a marked contrast the normal stuff that I write and although this story has a creepy edge to it, I’ve gone a little off road from mainstream horror, here. A kind of send up/mash up of Fifty Shades of Grey and Tales of The Unexpected, Kiss and Tell is a story themed on an obnoxious femme fatale who bites off a little more than she can chew after accepting a ridiculous bet from a couple of work colleagues. Like many authors I know, I often find the process of writing fiction draining, sometimes emotionally exhausting, even though the impulse to write is compulsive and something I just can’t control. Kiss and Tell however, was fun to write. And I don’t get to have a lot of fun in this vocation, so it was a welcome feeling. I’ll post more on Kiss and Tell nearer the time of it’s release.
Turning to my novel Dark Places, I have periodically released little WIP snippets of the novel as teasers, although many might not make the final cut. They are designed to give a little indication of what’s to come. My sincere hope is that Dark Places will be finished this year, marking the end of an exhausting two year project and my debut novel. Below is another teaser.
On other news, I also have a few more short tales in the mix and my hope is to try and find homes for these in anthology publications or magazines. For now, I’ll leave you with the following extract from Dark Places….
Jonathan
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“The meeting was an impersonal affair and in a busy franchise coffee bar, I don’t remember the name. I just remember the noise and the crappy mugs and plates, scarred from years of repeated use and being scalded to oblivion in dishwashers.
Mark Swinson unzipped his soft tashe case across the table from me and slipped an envelope over, his face bland and neutral. Detachment was an art he probably had to learn for this job, like a doctor delivering bad news to desperate family camped out in a hospital waiting room, hanging on his every word on the fate of a loved one. I guess to him, it was all in a days work.
I opened the envelope as Swinson guided me through the dates and places of each picture. Black and White images, Ray and another woman, arm in arm, hand in hand in a variety of different locations.
I remembered that it wasn’t the confirmation that flattened me, it was after all why I’d hired Swinson in the first place. To confirm what I already suspected, what I already knew. It wasn’t even the pretty blonde
girl in the picture with the pencil skirt and low cut top, ten years my junior and a figure I didn’t even have ten years ago. Although that was bad enough.
It was the look in Ray’s eyes. The black and white pictures captured him well, they made him look thinner and more attractive. He was smiling in all of them, relaxed and unaware of the snapping camera hidden from view, recording these secret moments.
He was holding her shoulders in one, his fingers hovering tenderly over her bare skin. He looked more relaxed and content than he had ever had with me, even in the early days. He looked alive, ignited by the attention of a younger, prettier woman. The elixir of youth all flattering, the most coveted tonic of the older male ego.
The tears I shed as Swinson looked on slightly uncomfortably were not at the betrayal, but the sadness of what I had been reduced to. My partner was cheating, yes. But the overwhelming emotion that began to brew inside me was not anger. It was jealousy. Jealousy that I couldn’t make Ray look or feel that way, maybe I never had. I was jealous of the sheer unadulterated intimacy these photos bled onto the shit coffee table of this shit coffee house. Intimacy I craved myself.
And with jealousy, I knew what followed next. Rage. Pure, unmitigated rage.”
Jonathan Wood 