Friday, January 17, 2020

Guest Blogger: Rick Bradley

Very seldom do I connect with someone over social media the way I have with Rick Bradley. Rick is cut from the same jib as most of us indie writers. New to the fold, Rick has grabbed the reins with both hands and held tight. There are many people who claim they want to be a writer, but where they have spun in their tracks afraid to dive in, Rick has taken the plunge. In a very short time he has went from saying he wants to be a writer, to being a being a full-blown author. He's written a short story published in a newly released anthology, to writing his first book, to be released soon, but let's let Rick tell his story of why he chose to join the ranks of the literary insane. In closing, I know Mr. Bradly is going to do amazing things, and I can't wait to see what comes next for him.  


I’ve had a love of books for as long as I can remember. My sister would read to me every night and the one I requested many times was Charlottes Web. It is still one of my all time favorites. When I was able to read for myself I had my nose in a book often. Well, when I wasn’t making up stories of He-Man and Optimus Prime fighting Mum-Ra with my action figures. Even as a kid I had stories to tell. 

In Junior High I got my first Dungeons and Dragons Boxed Set. After learning the rules with the pre-made adventure I set about making my own stories. My elf mage, Alsim, along with a friend’s character, Logan, went on so many adventures. Eventually we got a couple more friends in the group and even expanded to other worlds, Marvel Super Heroes (a still fun TSR RPG game that came out in the 1980’s), Vampire the Masquerade, Robotech, Chill, and more. 

I usually was the Storyteller in the games which I did not mind. I loved crafting worlds and getting reactions from my friends. One of my favorite compliments came while I was running a game of Farscape (if you have not watched the show do it now!) and around that time Firefly had come out. I had not seen any episodes yet, but a friend accused me of ripping it off. After I convinced them I hadn’t watched it yet (don’t worry that has since been remedied many times over), they said I was a Joss Whedon of RPGs. 
In High School I took a creative writing class and loved every minute of it. I still have a couple of the stories from then that I’ll be fixing up to publish. In college my English teachers would always wonder what madness my next paper would entail. 
I wanted to write books and have them published, but I had no idea how to do it. Getting a publisher back then was pretty crazy impossible and self publishing was nothing like it is today. I still wrote RPG stories for my friends but that was about it. I had many novels bouncing around in my head, but none on paper. 
Flash forward quite a few years to today. I have a 15 year old son who wants to be a graphic designer and animator, a 1 year old daughter who is the apple of my eye and loves music, and a beautiful girlfriend that is so very supportive. My little town has a Comic Con every year, Burg Con. There was a writing seminar and I decided, why not I’ll check it out. I cannot stress how thankful I am that I did. 

The seminar was ran by Brian K Morris of Rising Tide Publications www.risingtide.pub, Amy Hale of www.authoramyhale.com, and Cathy Jackson of https://m.facebook.com/AuthorCJackson. I had about a million and one questions I wrote down and was not able to get through them all of course. I asked if I could friend them on Facebook and my life changed. Those three have been just amazing. If I had a question they answered it or showed me where to find the answer. Brian has a weekly Facebook Live Show called Clever Title Pending on Tuesday nights at 7pm EST and took one show to allow me to ask anything I wanted. For over 2 hours he and his writer/artist friends answered question after question.  

I now feel like I have an extended family of some of the most creative people on the planet and I must say I am one happy guy. I even have my first story published in a horror anthology, The Nightmare Collective. Which you can get on Amazon. https://www.amazon.com/dp/1651014485 All it took was one decision to put myself out there and try. It’s never to late either. I’m 41 and am going after my dream. 
Thanks for reading my ramblings. I hope you enjoyed it and if you’d like to see more of me please go like my Author page on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/rbradley42/

Wednesday, January 8, 2020

Flash Fiction


This is something new here on the blog. I've not done a lot of flash fiction, or short stories for that matter, so every now and then I'll create something special for the blog.

This story features a character from my New Pulp series The Captain Hawklin Adventures. and the following event takes place after the 1937 adventure "the Shadow Men". Watch for book 7 "the Lost Land" to be released 4/14/20 

OZ
By Charles F. Millhouse

August 25, 1937
There were three things Oz Lyman liked more than anything. Burgers, baseball and beer. That’s why Huffington’s Pub had been his favorite place to go since he discovered it back in nineteen-twenty-eight.
The woosh, woosh, whoosh of the four ceiling fans worked overtime amid the mixture of chatter, and the Crown City Captains’ game coming over the radio on Huff’s counter. The pub was bursting at the seams with baseball fans – men and women alike, though there were more men than women. Cheers came, when the game announcer exclaimed, “He did it again, Captains fans... Jimmy, the Dozer, Donovan has his eighth homerun this season.
Oz tipped his frosted mug toward the radio and took a long draw from the glass. He sat alone in his favorite corner booth at the back of the establishment and watched the other patrons. Oz didn’t have many friends besides Steven Hawklin and Hardy Miller. There wasn’t a lot of time for any others, and Oz had always thought people would only want to be his friend, if they knew he worked for Captain Hawklin, so he refrained from telling too many people. With work, and the occasional adventure, Oz had barely enough time for himself, let alone entertaining more friends.
When a plate of food slid in front of him, Oz focused on the heavenly aroma of Huff’s famous steak burger and house cut fries. He pulled the plate to him and reached for a bottle of ketchup.
“Oz, look at your hands.”
Oz glanced up at his waitress, Mindy, and then back at his stained hands. “They’re clean,” he assured her. “Just stained from working with a new type of oil we are developing at...” he stumbled over his words and said, “the garage.”
“Maybe you should develop something to get your hands clean,” Mindy smiled. “What you need is a woman to come home to, she...” Now Mindy stumbled over her words. “She could look after you.”
Oz cleared his throat, and coyly looked up at Mindy. Mindy was around his age, maybe in her late thirties with dark brown hair and beautiful rustic eyes. She had lost her husband to cancer back in nineteen thirty and Hardy had been trying to find the nerve to ask her out for several years now. But he considered himself not much to look at and kept any idea of a romantic relationship out of his head.
Oz was a short man. He’d been called apish by some, and an imp by others. He had a bulldog face that always had a scruffy five o’clock shadow. He primarily wore green work pants, a grey button down and his dirty green ball cap. No woman finds me attractive, he often told himself. But looking up into Mindy’s eyes, just for an instant he wondered what it would be like to come home to her.
Oz had never loved a woman before, not that he’d given himself a chance to. The last thing any woman would want would be a dirty little guy like him – he wasn’t a price package, and he didn’t have much to offer anyone besides a room at a boarding house, that he didn’t live in. he spent his days and night toiling in Captain Hawklin’s Silver Bridge apartment, not really a place to offer a potential girlfriend or wife. Oz choked on the first bite of his burger with that thought and gulped some beer to force down the hunk of meat lodged in his throat.
Mindy repeatedly slapped Oz on the back, grabbed the cloth napkin on the table and wiped his mouth. “You alright?” she asked with a thin smirk.
Oz reached for the napkin, and grazed Mindy’s hand with his. They both stopped and looked at one another for a couple heartbeats, and then quickly recoiled from one another. Mindy smiled with her eyes and picked up his half-filled mug.  “I’ll get you a refill... on the house,” she said.
Oz watched Mindy as she crossed the room and stopped at the bar. She peered back at him demurely and batted her eyes as she waited for Huff to refill the mug. The crowd cheered again as the announcer shouted from the radio and drew Oz’s attention back to the game.
The new mug of beer arrived at the table, he thanked Mindy with a silent stare and took a deep drink cleansing his palate. Mindy opened her mouth to say something but closed it when someone from a nearby table shouted, “Waitress!”
Oz watched Mindy for another moment or two and then went back to his food, his final thought as he bit into the burger, Who, would want a scruffy guy like me?

Oscar, Oz Lyman appears in the New Pulp series, The Captain Hawklin Adventures.
Signed copies can be found at this here, or you can obtain copies or Ebooks on Amazon.com

Monday, January 6, 2020

Guest Blogger: Introducing Stormgate Press's Newest Author, Kellie Austin

This has been a long time coming. After many years of building my brand, I'm excited to announce the first new author to enter the pages of Stormgate Press. I've known Kellie for nearly thirty years, she is a fantastic pulp writer, and I know those who enjoy well thought out characters and adventures in the New Pulp line will dig what she has to offer.

Kellie's first book is "The Rembrandt Stratagem: From the Paranormal Cases of Bishop Kincaid" It's a strong character driven, story set in a world not our own, where the supernatural runs amok and only Bishop stands in their way. There will be more on that in the weeks to come, but first I'd like for you to meet Kellie – so without further ado, take it away Kellie.


Hello, my name is Kellie Lynn Austin. I was born in Detroit, Michigan, but have been living the good life in Kentucky, for over Forty years.
I'm a fifty-year-old woman with a degree in criminal justice, including studies in, film, television writing elective courses. Other studies include some psychology and basics at Morehead State university. Like most, I went to study nursing, but as fate cries out, I had to leave that program and move on. Hence, it all came back to what I loved the most. And never thought that my passion for writing would ever come to fruition, but for many of us, our life passions don't hit us early in life.
I was first introduced to writing in my seventh year of school. with a dreaded assignment of writing a one-page story about my family life. I ended turning in an eleven-page story about a nine-year-old space cadet named Astro Andy and his trusted sidekick dog Rover Ray.
My family study quickly turned into a subtle nightmare as the teacher later called my mom concerned that I had something wrong with me. My neglect in discussing my mundane family life turned into an exercise in what I call "Nervous Nelle". As I sat there in the chair bored to death, my mother had to assure the school that I was normal and just had an overactive imagination.
 So – I thought? What's wrong about dreaming to fly in a rocket ship, eat cake with Martians, or race around the moon. My writing bug actually began a little earlier with the invention of PBS. The trusty old black and white TV. My eyes would squint at the little screen each weekend as I first became enthralled by the old Republic Movie serials being shown again on that local station. There they were, zombies from other planets, rocket men fighting moon monsters, champions of truth, masked marvels, and evil empires seeking robots from Atlantis to unsuspecting land dwellers.... well, you get the idea. My life was heavily influenced, being mostly my love of anything golden age.
Comic books, 1950 alien invasion movies and I couldn’t get enough of. Those republic serials. Fifteen minutes of mayhem and murder, conspiracy and greed. Boy, it was all there. Those feelings of adventure spilled out not only in my real life, but also in the worlds I have built up in my imagination ever since. My comic book stories and characters, science fiction and even horror, have their roots in those early smash'em up good-vs-evil stories. For anyone who has ever picked up an old pulp magazine. The touch of the cover, the smell of the pages, and the intense, old fashioned storytelling...... it’s a feeling one can't make up of imagination until it happens.
Those named Doc, those who cloud men's minds, or white-haired avengers wearing grey attire. It's magical, and it's entertaining. The morality has embedded itself into my heart and I am now sending my adventures to those people who enjoy sitting down in their favorite chair, covered up with a blanket and a glass of milk. All of what made me and the works that I do... are not just for my personal joy, those stories are for you.
My mind's imagination is coming to those people who crave the excitement, the heart wrenching minute by minute, mouthwatering pages that will make your weekend reading one youll never forget. Boy, I love writing, and now that I’m at Stormgate Press, you will soon get a pleasant taste in your mouth and I hope you will want to come back for more.......stay tuned, your about to get hit in the face reliving yesteryear by the seat of your pants, and I’m proud to bring it to you.
Stay super awesome, stay connected, this girl's outta here





Wednesday, January 1, 2020

The Look Ahead... 2020.

Over the next several weeks I will be scheduling upcoming events and setting publications dates (plus I hope, some other exciting news involving STORMGATE PRESS).


Upcoming show appearances.

- Pulp Fiction Convention June 14, 2020

- Akron-Canton Comic Con July 12, 2020 

- Buckeye Comic Con July July 19, 2020 

DETAILS TO FOLLOW... 










The Next Captain Hawklin Adventure: The Lost Land release date is 4/14/2020