I love the the month of October – the colder weather that usually accompanies Fall, a plethora of horror movies on TV, Halloween, and discovering new authors on Bad Moon Rising!  Our first author has several titles under his belt and is here today with his most recent release, The Playground.  Welcome, Craig!

Thanks for inviting me, Teri, and for letting me kick off Bad Moon Rising. I hope I set the bar high enough. I’ll be hitting those Twitter buttons all month, and I hope your visitors will too.

I’m here to tell everyone about my newest novel, The Playground.

The hottest new toys of the Christmas season are the Playground Network dolls. They contain a worldwide social network for children. Except the network is controlled by a ruthless businessman with dreams of power.

To reach his goals he turns to the occult. Will our children make up his personal army? Could we have an enemy soldier in every home?

Gina Greybill is a cancer survivor who stumbles into her own brush with the paranormal. She wants nothing to do with it, but may be the only one who can bring down the Playground Network. To do it she’ll have to embrace her new situation, and recover the next generation of Playground software.

There is competition for the software in the form of a brutal thug named Clovis. He’s bigger, more ruthless, and more experienced. To top it all off, he has a head start.

The Playground is suitable for mature readers, due to violence and mature themes.

I had a lot of fun writing this one, and wrote it in a style similar to a Frank Miller or a Tarantino piece.

 

What’s the first story you ever wrote?

The first story I ever finished was a post apocalyptic/steampunk story called Rule Pacifica. It isn’t suitable for human consumption, but I learned so much from writing it that I keep a copy around. Even the act of finishing brings training and learning.

Which fictional character would you most like to meet and have a drink with?

Don’t you think it’s kind of cruel to limit it to one? A nice party with a dozen, or more, would be more fun. I’ll try to pick one most people wouldn’t think of and say Harry Dresden. Harry has some great adventures and seems like a fun guy to have a drink with.

In the spirit of Halloween, what scares you?

Actually, not much – in the spirit of Halloween. In the real world, cancer scares the crap out of me. Economic meltdown, family financial collapse, etc.

Favorite hero and villain in a book/movie?

This is another one where I could go on for pages. So many of them could be considered both these days, like Marv from Sin City. I grew up in a era of John Wayne movies. (Yes, I saw them in the theaters.) I like my heroes to be larger than life, so I’ll pick Conan. I read a ton of his books as a young guy, and he was always larger than life. As far as villains are concerned, again there are a bunch. In the spirit of choosing someone unique, I’m going to go with Khan from the Star Trek universe. I owe it to everyone else to leave some of the low hanging fruit, since I’m first up.

What do you consider the hardest part of writing?

I love drafting new material. When it comes to editing and proofreading, that’s the part where I start cleaning the garage and pruning the trees.

What are you working on now?

I’ve adopted a new habit of working on a couple of things at once. I never thought I could do this, but I can make progress on one novel and some short fiction at the same time. The novel is called The Yak Guy Project, and involves a lazy spoiled young man who is plucked from his world and plunked into another world where he has to grow up fast. My short fiction is called The Enhanced League. This will be a collection of short stories set in a baseball league where anything goes, this includes performance enhancing drugs and a bit of science fiction. Expect corporate corruption, drug side effects, and emerging heroes.

Author Bio

I was born in a town called Elko, Nevada. I like to tell everyone I was born in a small town in the 1940s. I’m not quite that old, but Elko has always been a little behind the times. This gives me a unique perspective of earlier times, and other ways of getting by. Some of this bleeds through into my fiction.

I moved to Idaho right after the turn of the century, and never looked back. My writing career was born here, with access to other writers and critique groups I jumped in with both feet.

I like to write about things that have something unusual. My works are in the realm of science fiction, paranormal, and fantasy. The goal is to entertain you for a few hours. I hope you enjoy the ride.

Craig

Where to find Craig

This is the link to my Amazon Author Page. You can find all of my published work there. Beyond The Playground, some other titles have Halloween appeal to readers. These include Panama, Will O’ the Wisp, and both Experimental Notebooks. I hope you’ll take the time to check them out.

You can also find me in the following social media:

My blog: Entertaining Stories

Twitter

Goodreads

Facebook