I used to play Dungeons and Dragons…and one time when I was the DM two of the characters (my brother Jay’s and his best friend Nick’s) became far too powerful for effective gaming. It was a rookie DM mistake, letting them get that overpowered, but once it was made I had to find a way to take them out of the game.

My story, There’s Always a Catch, which is now available at Sorcerous Signals was inspired by that expirience. It is not a retelling by any means, because the fictionalised version is a better story I hope you enjoy it.

Today is the day. Sister Margaret is now available as a Coffee Break Selection from Eternal Press. Yay!

>> Click Here to read an excerpt and see how to order <<

Sister Margaret is a short story about a vampire hunter and a half-incubus swordsman who are hired by a priestess to take care of an undead pimp. It’s been called ‘…a gritty tale of cross and double cross’ by one reviewer and received several glowing recommendations from others.

I am so very proud of this story, I hope everyone who buys it loves it and I’ll be watching my Fictionwise ratings (when it becomes available on Fictionwise in a few days) with avid attention. Despite all the good reviews its received I’m very nervous on behalf of ‘Sister Margaret’. Keep your fingers crossed for me that it’s well-received LOL

To celebrate the launch of Sister Margaret I am giving away a free copy to one lucky subscriber to my Newsletter. I’ll be announcing the winner later on today or early tomorrow. I will also be guestblogging over at Fang-tastic Books today and giving away a copy to someone who leaves a comment there. It’s going to be quite a day.

I have some pretty exciting news, but I’ve decided to wait and share it first on my newsletter (which comes out on the 15th). Does that make me bratty? I don’t mind if it does, I just thought I’d check So if you haven’t signed up yet and you’re intrigued the url is here >> Rhonda’s Newsletter <<. Don’t forget that this month I’m giving away an Amazon gift certificate to one random subscriber.

In other news, that I’m willing to share today, I had a short prose poem published on Outshine today, which is a Twitter zine. Twitter is a very cool thing that I fail at remembering to update or read…but I think having a Twitter-based magazine is a very cool idea. I’m not sure how to link directly to my poem but Outshine’s twitter page is here.

As for the poem. I think under most circumstances I would have written it as a three line poem, but on Outshine you can’t have line breaks and they only publish prose poems. So does having it there and minus line breaks make it a prose poem? I don’ t know, you tell me.

So first of all, the new issue of Niteblade is out This one is full to bursting with awesome-ness. Seriously. The cover piece is a poem called “Sentry” by Greg Schwartz, a deliciously evil poem that I just adore. There are also poems by Sarah Wagner, Brian Rosenberger, Sheryl Nantus, R. J. Walker Miller, Suzanne Sykora, T. J. Trancell, Lucien E. G. Spelman, Cathy Buburuz, Joshua Gage and Howie Good.

In addition to the poetry, there are great stories by Christian Roberts, Ty Fanck and Emily Mah, Tai Dong Huai, Brandon Satrom, Gregg Winkler, Beth Cato, Kristine Ong Muslim and Lynette Mejia.

I’m not going to review the issue here now because, obviously, I’m biased, but I really think it’s worth checking out. If you read it I’d love to hear what you think. What were your favorites? Which your preffered illustration? (Mine is the picture for Chasing Rabbits I think ).

In other, completely unrelated news, my erotic short story is in this month’s erotica issue of Sonar 4 E-zine. The Legend of the First Reptar is a story I wrote as an expiremental attempt to successfully combine erotica and fantasy. I really like the story, but agonized over whether to publish it under my real name or not. In the end I did, mostly because the story deals with Reptars which are a race of lizardmen who figure very prominantly in my Aphanasia stories. Because of the nature of this story it’s not suitable to be read by anyone under 18 or who is easily offended. If you enjoy it great, if you’d rather not read it I won’t hold it against you

My poem, Daddy, is up at Every Day Poets. The comments have been very positive, which is, as you can imagine, wonderful. It’s especially nice in this case because the poem is (as you may have guessed from the title) quite personal and pulled out of my ‘real life’.

I was estranged from my father at the time of his death, in fact, I didn’t even know he had died until several years later when the public trustee contacted me about his estate. This poem, in part, came out of that.

If you’re looking for something a bit different, there is also a great haiku there by Steve Goble and several other great poems as well

Eep! Dude, it’s like the 14th already. How did that happen?

I’m working on my newsletter and I think I may pull it off on time this month (yay!). There’s still time to sign up if you haven’t already –> Newsletter <– . It’s pretty fun. I include one piece that hasn’t been published before, snippets of my works-in-progress and a poem as well as just updates and such. C’mon, all the cool kids are subscribed

In other news, on the 11th my poem, Ballerina, was published on Every Day Poets. I’ve been published by their fiction site too and I have to say I really enjoy the format. I love the fact readers can comment and rate pieces — feedback from strangers is good. Good I say!

Right, I need to stop procrastinating and work on the newsletter or I won’t have anything to mail out tomorrow.

Sometime last year I set out to prove that the idea of ‘stealing ideas’ was silly. I wasn’t talking about plagiarism, mind you, but ideas. My point was that even if you gave two different writers the same story synopsis and set them to writing they would come up with two different stories. To test my theory I created a NaNoLJers writing exercise where people swapped synopsis’ and wrote stories.

I participated and the resulting story, “One Day on Earth” is now available at Poor Mojo’s Almanac(k). I know the guy whose synopsis I received said this story was nothing like the one he’d originally envisioned. I found his synopsis very challenging to work with because it was totally not my style, thus this story is one I’m rather happy with. I hope you enjoy it.

I’ve got a couple fulls out to agents right now, for both Swamp Story and Shadows, and I’m kinda going insane I think. I don’t want to get my hopes up too high because if things don’t work out it will be quite devastating, but at the same time, it’s very hard not to. Please keep your fingers, metaphorically crossed for me. I am not going to go into any more details just yet, I don’t want to jinx myself LOL

I do have some news I can go into details about though. My funny little flash piece, Swapped, is included in the current issue of Mississippi Crow Magazine. Rumor has it you can get a copy of the .pdf for free, if you check it out I’d love to hear what you think

And please, send good thoughts my way re: agents and staying sane.

I’m currently at the World Fantasy convention in Calgary and I’ve got to tell you, it is SO full of awesome. I would like to go into the reasons for my saying that (in case they aren’t obvious) but I can’t. I can’t, because if I start I won’t be able to stop and that’s really not what this post is meant to be about. So I’ll talk about WFC later, but for right now I want to talk about Skitter Skitter.

Skitter Skitter is a story I wrote and it’s just been published in Issue #4 of Shiny Magazine.

This is cool for lots of reasons. One of which is that Shiny is a YA magazine, in fact, I think this may be my first YA-specific writing credit. That makes me happy. The other, more important reason, is that I like the story behind Skitter Skitter. It’s dark and creepy and was a whole lot of fun to write.

In fact, it was so fun to write that I wrote it two different times LOL The original format of the story was a transcript, all dialog, no description. It worked (in my not-so-humble opinion) but it was too short, so I re-wrote it with description.

Now, it’s a pretty great mix, even if I do say so myself, and I hope you’ll check it out at Shiny and let me know what you think.

Not so long ago there was an anthology dedicated to retelling the story of Little Red Riding Hood. I wrote and submitted a piece for it called Axe.

Axe is, without question, the most disturbing story I have ever written. I’d just finished reading a bunch of articles about pushing yourself and testing your limits when I wrote it, and I think it shows. Axe tells the story of Little Red Riding Hood from the perspective of the woodsman’s axe. It wasn’t accepted for the anthology I originally wrote it for, but it did find a home in the DemonMInds Halloween issue. That issue is available at Amazon now and DemonMinds have put up a little teaser too. So if you click here you will be able to read the beginning of Axe for free.

Remember though, it’s not for the faint of heart…really. It’s really, really not.