A beautiful thing has happened. Lost in the Shadow is now available in paperback, meaning you can now hold a copy in your own hot little hands! I’ve cradled it against my own cheek, and I have to admit, it’s a beautiful book full of deliciously intriguing and twisted tales that let the reader wander down the paths of their own imaginations. I’m really proud of this one, and proud that I could put this out there with the help of one of my bestest buds.

We all know I love ideas, and I think it’s time to stop being afraid of them. When they’re confined to fiction, they can open up whole new worlds and ways to solve problems. Imagination is not a dirty word, and I think we’re at a point in society where it’s almost become that. If you can make money off of it, sure, it’s fine to imagine, but if it’s not a billion-dollar franchise, for some reason people don’t quite know what to do with things. We’ve become a group of people who are so focused on the frustrations of the everyday, we forget that it’s perfectly natural to feel, to think, and to dream. Hopefully this book engages people and makes it okay for stories to not have to have every little detail cemented down. I want readers to have to think and wonder, and hopefully come up with some of their own answers. This book is good for that, and I’m really proud to share it with the world.

Do you dare to get lost with us? You may not find your way out, after all…but then again, do you want to?

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Welcome to the Shadows:

Journey with authors Selah Janel and S.H. Roddey to a world where every idea is a possibility and every genre an invitation. In this collection of forty-seven short stories, lines blur and worlds collide in strange and wonderful new ways. Get lost with the authors as they wander among fantasy, horror, science fiction, and other speculative musings.

Shadows can’t hurt you, and sometimes it’s all right to venture off the path.

Kindle      Amazon Paperback

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To entice you, how about a little smidge of an excerpt? This comes from a piece of mine titled Animusity. It’s probably one of the more personal things I’ve ever written, and I still feel a little exposed putting it out there for the world to see. Still, creativity is about taking chances, so I’m willing to roll the dice with this one. This is one of those pieces that defies form and type and begs the reader to make up their own mind on what’s really going on. I mean, I have my own ideas, but to tell you would be cheating…

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I’d been walking so long it was hard to remember where I was heading. As it was I could barely remember where I started from. Somewhere deep in my gut I knew that I’d fallen asleep one night. It was the only explanation for having suddenly appeared in a house that wasn’t my own. Plus there was the little fact that I hadn’t found the need to sleep for three months now. No, it had to be a dream, but the longer I sat in the house that wasn’t mine and waited for something to happen, the more I began to doubt my sanity. I did the only thing that I could: I let myself out of the unfamiliar house, shut the door I’d never seen before, took one last look at the suburbia that didn’t resemble my downtown apartment one bit, and started walking.

There was no destination in mind, no plan beyond a need to do something to get the dream started. If something happened, then I’d be that much closer to the end. Amazing that it only took me three months of sitting around to figure that one out.

Forward seemed like a good way to go and there didn’t seem to be a convenient place to stop. Somehow, somewhere between the borders of Indiana and Illinois, I stepped not from one state to the other, but through a crack in the road and into everything that lay Between.

I probably had every right to be terrified, but all my emotions were muted, as if I was a third party watcher to my own life—one more bit of proof hopefully everything was happening inside my head and not for real. This Between Place, this Land Between the Cracks was a delicate and unusual place cloaked in comfortable darkness and filled with decorated booths and raucous music that was strangely muffled.

All around me, taking up the entire world, was a scarcely-populated nighttime street carnival, though overall it lacked the
chill so often found on the pages of genre books. Had it been night when I’d tried to cross states? Had I just now fallen into this place or had my walking taken up more time than I realized? Was I at the mercy of magic or my own mind?

I wandered, accepting the blurred colors in my peripheral vision that melted into velvety obsidian when I turned to face things straight-on. There were people around me, but they were painted images, part of the scenery rather than part of the place. Inky pavement blended with the indigo-black sky and the dabbed-in acrylic black of carnival booths in an obsidian palette.

Then there was me: out of place, unknown, passing through unafraid and unsuspecting. If something was going to happen, what could I do to stop it? It was going to happen, so I might as well let it. Maybe if I let enough things happen I’d suddenly wake up. It was a flimsy hope, but my mind always woke me right when a dream was getting good. I could only hope that it would come through for me now.

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Intrigued? Want more? Care to see how Animusity ends (and stacks up against the other stories in the volume)? Well, you’ll have to grab a copy of the book to find out…