So, I’ve been waiting to announce this.
As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a moderator on the forums at HollysWritingClasses.com. I can whole-heartedly recommend her classes for any aspiring writers out there who’d like some help learning the craft.
Since Holly passed away last year, her daughter, Rebecca, has taken over the classes and forums. Through her hard work, she is keeping them alive and online to honor her mother’s legacy.
Earlier this year, Rebecca posted in the forums that she wanted to do an anthology. Holly did several anthologies before, collecting stories from students on the forums. (You might even find some stories from me in a few of them.)
The theme for this collection is ‘haunted by Tarot’. Each story revolves around a different Tarot card, the author using the card as a main element in their story. As you would expect, the stories are mainly horror stories.
As I’ve also said before, I’m not really a horror story kind of guy. I don’t read horror novels or watch the movies. I’ve read and watched a few as cultural touchstones so I’d know what people are conversing about. I don’t get horror most of the time. I find most of them annoying and irrational. The wife writes horror and this is more her type of challenge.
I wasn’t originally going to do a story for this anthology. But at the time I hadn’t been writing regularly, my Muse and I were kicking around ideas for the supernatural soap opera, and I felt like I needed to get something written. I looked over the guidelines for submitting a story, saw that they were taking flash fiction stories, and figured that would be a good length to get the writing muscles pumping again.
I don’t know a lot about Tarot cards, beyond there are Major and Minor arcana, and people believe they can tell the future by consulting the cards. I’m not sure what type of spreads are used or how the cards are to be interpreted. I’ve never really wanted to own a Tarot deck aside from one I saw once at a bookstore. It was an Asian themed deck and it had some truly beautiful artwork. I nearly bought it just for the artwork but I didn’t. I’ve never seen the deck again.
Rebecca put a link to an online tarot card deck, which would pull a card and tell you what it meant. I didn’t have any ideas for a story so I went to the site to see if it could generate some inspiration. It drew a card (one of the Major arcana used commonly in movies) which I thought was kind of ironic. Then I read the text about what the card is supposed to mean. My Muse perked up and said “I can work with that”. A short while later we had a story.
I submitted the story and Rebecca deemed it worthy for inclusion in the anthology.
Now, the anthology has been released. I present to you the Haunted by Tarot Anthology, which includes my story Devil’s Chains.
All proceeds go toward supporting HollysWritingClasses.com. I’m not making anything off the sales of the book but I encourage you to pick up a copy, hopefully because you want to read my story (and all the others by the amazing authors in the collection) and to help support the HWC site.
If you do buy a copy, and if you like it, please leave a positive review on Amazon. Also, if you can buy a copy as soon as you read this it will help boost the book in Amazon’s algorithms, which will help it get more exposure and do be better in sales.
I hope you get a copy and I hope you enjoy it, my Hordeling.
If you’d like to support my efforts, why not buy me a chocolate chip cookie through my Ko-Fi page? https://ko-fi.com/jhusum