My latest short story "The Night the Lights Came On"

Friday, September 27, 2013

Brian Rathbone's "Call of the Herald" free, then the Audio Book is $1.99! Get your copies now!



Word to the wise: If you consume audiobooks like crazy and also like reading eBooks, this is a steal! How cool was it for the author to tell me about the deal too?! Really cool. I hadn't even remembered that I already bought the eBook for Call of the Herald, which holy crap is FREE right now, so I can get this audio book for a steal! 


So go get the eBook and read it, or better yet - then go get the audio book for $1.99 and you can switch between reading the eBook at home and the audio book while in the car!

Tuesday, September 24, 2013

I've Been Away, in Disneyland!

I haven't posted in quite a while. I didn't really get on any social media last week either. Why the silence? My family and I went with my in-laws to Disneyland! It was really fun. We had five days at the Disney parks. We got hopper passes so we were able to go to both Disneyland and Disney's California Adventures. One of the coolest rides was the new Radiator Springs Racers in Cars Land in California Adventures. You get to ride through Radiator Springs, see the characters talk to you, and race a car full of other visitors to the park. We were a little bummed out our 2 and 3 year olds weren't tall enough to go on the ride but now we know why. Those six passenger cars go really fast and bank some hard turns. It's more of a thrill ride than we were expecting which was awesome and made for a really fun ride. Cars Land itself was awesome too. It's like walking into the movie. You get to walk down the road that Lightning McQueen fixes in the first Cars movie. Everything is there including all the shops of the different characters.


Another awesome thing in California Adventures was the Disney's Aladdin - A Musical Spectacular. We went because the kids like the movie, but it was actually really entertaining and surprisingly funny. The actor playing the Genie was cracking funny jokes time and time again and you even got to see the villain Jafar turn into a hugh snake and the famous flying carpet scene. Two actors sing as they are flown overhead on a carpet swinging from wires. It was impressive. Also, there's a water and light show called World of Color. This was a pretty amazing show at half an hour with smoke, fire, and fountains of water with color and scenes from favorite Disney and Pixar movies playing out on them at huge sizes. It was a sight to see. So was the fireworks show in Disneyland as you can see in the first image in this post. But the best part of all of this was being there with my family. It proved difficult at times standing in line with a 5, 3, & 2 year old but many special memories were made. Leading up to our trip we watched a ton of Disney movies and so going through Fantasyland in Disneyland was fun too, were you can go on rides like Peter Pan, Alice in Wonderland, Pinocchio and ride through classic Disney films. 

I'm sure many of you have been to Disneyland so I wont keep listing all the fun rides and shows we got to experience as a family, but it was really fun. We're all exhausted now but glad to be back home. Now I need to get back to writing, blogging, and podcasting. My Workflowy is full of tasks for these things. I have another flash fiction story to podcast, a novel to finish, and a novella to revise once I get some notes back from a few alpha readers. I'm way off track now for my word count on finishing my novel before NaNoWriMo starts, but I'm hoping for some epic sprints where I splash thousands of words on the screen and get back on track. It would be so awesome to start a new novel right on the heels of finishing one. Well, that's what I've been up to. Time to get back in the saddle. What projects are you working on? Thanks for stopping by!

Thursday, September 12, 2013

Short Stories of DanDanTheArtMan 12 - Death of a Salesman's Boss

Download the .mp3

A podcast flash fiction story written and read by Dan Absalonson inspired by the flash fiction challenge on Chuck Wendig's website. Here were the rules for writing this story: 

I’m going to give you ten words. Your job is to work all ten of these words into a flash fiction story, ~1000 words in length. That’s it. End of mandate. The story’s due in a week: Friday, August 30th, noon EST. Post at your online space. Link back here.

The ten random words are as follows:
FUNERAL, CAPTIVATE, DECEIT, BRIMSTONE, CANYON, BALLOON, CLAY, DISFIGURED, WILLOW, ATOMIC

Music Attributions:

Pilot Error by Kevin MacLeod

SFX Attributions:

cf_fx-sounds
cf_FX_batch_jingle_glock_N--kloing.aif by cfork

Tuesday, September 10, 2013

Boyscouts of the Apocalypse by Michell Plested
Book Cover


I had the privilege to produce the cover for Michell Plested's awesome novel "Boyscouts of the Apocalypse." This cover was really fun to work on. I did the sketch in pencil, inked it with a Sharpie Pen - Fine Point, and all the coloring and typography was done digitally in Gimp (like Photoshop but freeware).

You'll be able to read it for free on Wattpad soon and I'll make sure to come back and add the link. For now you can listen to an audio version of it at www.actionpackpodcast.com.

Monday, September 9, 2013

New Progress Meter, New Goals

You may have noticed there's a new link above my top progress meter on the right side of my site. This is probably only exciting to me but I found a cool site called Storytoolz where you can track your daily word count like the NaNoWriMo bar graph. This is perfect because it came to my attention yesterday that NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month, is just around the corner and I would love to start a brand new project on November 1st for NaNo. The problem is, I'm about 30% through a novel right now. So I decided I'd better figure out how many words a day I need to write to be able to finish the first draft of my current novel, Zombie Super Powers, to be able to start a new one for NaNoWriMo. Turns out it's just under 900 words a day, so a bit less than the 1,666 words required for NaNoWriMo's daily word count to get 50,000 words in 30 days during the month of November. I need to get about 42,000 words in 52 days. So I should be able to do it. That would be really exciting. I guess I'll stop doing short stories again for the time being and really focus on finishing this novel - which you can read for free on Wattpad as I write it .

Also, you can click on the NaNoWriMo icon to the right above my progress meters and add me as a NaNoWriMo writing buddy if you're doing it to. I love seeing my friends project meters go up and seeing our word counts skyrocket together, and maybe giving each other a hard time on Twitter about how many words I've written that day compared to them. It's a fun community of writers in November you should really think about doing it if you haven't before. Join us in the fun on November. Thanks for stopping by!

Thursday, September 5, 2013

The Staring Stranger
A Story for Chuck Wendig's Flash Fiction Challenge

Chuck Wendig runs a weekly Flash Fiction Challenge. This is my second time trying it out and came out to 961 words. Go check out his post! Write your own! Here are the rules for this week:

FLASH FICTION CHALLENGE: CHOOSE YOUR SETTING
You know the drill: Random number generator or d20. Roll it. Grab a setting from the list below and go forth and write yourself around 1000 words of fiction set in that location.
The list, then, is:

  1. A Starbucks during the Apocalypse
  2. The gates of Heaven
  3. A slaughterhouse
  4. A library on an alien world
  5. Satan’s palace, Pandaemonium
  6. Inside a giant creature
  7. On a pirate beach
  8. In a penal colony built by elvish astronauts
  9. Route 66 during a tornado
  10. On a crashing plane
  11. Inside the virtual reality landscape of a robot’s mind
  12. The NYC subways
  13. Ancient Sumer
  14. A monster brothel
  15. A shopping mall in Arizona
  16. In a police department during an epic blizzard
  17. In the base of the Moon Nazis
  18. In a serial killer’s nightmare
  19. A distant island far from home
  20. Lost in New Jersey
Here's my story:


The Staring Stranger, A Short Story |  © Dan Absalonson 2013

There he was again, the bum who always stared at me on the subway. I hated everything about him: his white hair tucked behind a purple bandana, his ratty black tank top hiding none of his Rambo physique, his stonewashed denim cut offs that were much too short for anyone's comfort and his bare feet with their too long toenails tap dancing around on the dirty black floor. Every time I looked at him he was staring right back, like he had been waiting all day just to lock peepers with me. I turned my back to him, but I could feel his eyes, like cyclops or superman shooting a hot red laser into the back of my skull. It made me itch. I waited for a long time, hoping he would get off before my stop but he never did. No matter what time I was riding or what stop I got off at, he was there right behind me following me out.

I looked over my shoulder for a brief second to see his unmoving eyes looking right into mine. Had I ever even seen him blink? It sent a chill straight through me. I faced forward and shivered despite the warm subway car. I felt the subway slowing. My stop was much farther down the line but I had to lose this guy. I waited until the last second, knowing the timing of the doors well, and shot out of my chair sprinting out to the terminal just before the doors closed. I looked at the spot the bum had been sitting. He wasn't there. 

I looked behind me, but did not see him. I looked to my left, and there he was just settling down on a bench. It was the first time I had seen him without his eyes staring right back into mine. I darted to a column and edged behind it out of view. As far as I knew he had not seen me and now would not know where I was. I waited for the next subway trying to be patient, but I couldn't help it. I leaned over the least amount possible to catch a glimpse and see if he was still on the bench. He was, staring right back at me. How could he possibly know where to look to pierce me like that with his gaze? I tried looking at him from the other side of the column. Again his face was locked in place, directing his vision right to me. I slid back out of site.

The subway came to the stop and again I waited until the last moment and sprinted inside. The doors shut just as I got both feet in. I looked out the window and saw that he had left the bench, but I didn't see him anywhere in the car. I found a seat. Before long the itch was there again. I didn't want to look, but I had to. Sure enough he was there staring me down this time his eyes so wide that I wondered if he was in some sort of pain or something. His ugly feet tapping away as if he was in the best of moods just riding along in the subway while his bulbous eyes were aimed at me like a rifle.

I didn't look at him again. I just waited. Once the next stop came I jumped up and flew out the door. Then just before it closed I jumped back inside. I looked and saw the bum outside of the subway car. Finally I had won. Finally I could sit in peace until my stop came. I found a seat at sank into it letting out a deep breath.

I had almost fallen asleep when I felt his eyes on me again. I looked up, my eyes jumping around the subway car. There he was sitting in the seats across from me at the other end. I'd had it. If he wanted to play games, I could play games. I stood up and found an empty seat directly across from his. His gaze followed me with every step. I sat down and stared right back at him. I already knew everyone else in the car was staring at us too so I gave up all worries of being embarrassed. In a booming voice I did my best impression of Will Ferrell as Robert Goulet in a Saturday Night Live skit and yelled at him.

"Look at you. You're hungry. You don't even blink do you? Quick staring contest, me and you now!"

We stared at each other. The car was silent. I was through with this guy, if he wanted to try and weird me out, I was going to do it right back to him. I opened my eyes as wide as I could and leaned in towards him with the maddest grin I could spread across my face. Then I blinked.

"You win, you always do. That's why I come up here. Nature! Goulet."

Everyone went from looking at the two of us to looking at him. I had won. Now all eyes were on him. Every passenger was giving it right back, staring him down as he had done to me so many times. To my great surprise the man's face flushed red and he blinked. The subway slowed. For the first time he looked away from me at all the others. He shrunk back in his chair. The doors opened, he glanced at me one more time with an angry frown, and then ran out of the subway car. The familiar ding dong sounded and the doors closed, and for the first time I rode the rest of the way home in peace.

THE END