I’ve now received fully a dozen LJ comments and emails from people who attended my reading at Penguicon, and although each and every one has tickled me pink, I’m tired of answering them individually — so here you go.

Because the Friday night reading was hypothetically a reading/discussion that was spread out across three people and merely one slim hour, I only read the first half of a short story of mine that was recently published in Apex Digest — the story about the super-sized Tennessean good-old-boy who hunts monsters. Apparently, this was bad form on my part.

So if you simply MUST KNOW what became of the werebeast-menaced goats in the second half of the story, then by all means allow me to direct your attention to this link right here.

That link will take you to an ordering page at Apex Digest, where you may purchase a copy of the issue containing the whole story. It’s called “The Heavy.”

To be perfectly honest, I’m downright astonished by the response. I wrote this tale as a light, somewhat funny and casual one-off a year or so ago; and since it appeared in print I’ve received far more mail about it than any other short piece I’ve ever written. Hell, when I did the interview with Jim Hall for his show Cult Pop, Jim spent fully a third of our conversation wanting to know if Kilgore Jones (the protagonist) will live on and enjoy further adventures. And I’ll tell you now what I told him for broadcast: the answer is “yes.”

Once I’m finished with The Boneshaker,* I fully intend to return to Kilgore and give him his own book — or at least his own collection of stories. I’ve already got some 25,000-30,000 words written on this project; and even though I was compelled to set it aside a few months ago, I do plan to pick it up again.