Exciting news two days in a row! I’m extremely eager to announce that my short story (if you consider 15k words short) “Dead Men Don’t Scream” has been published in Beautiful Darkness: A Dragon Soul Press Anthology, for sale now on Amazon.
I wrote Dead Men Don’t Scream a few years ago. It started as a fun monster story but quickly transformed into a wild tale akin to John Carpenter’s The Thing crossed with Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful 8 and The Lighthouse by Robert Eggers.
This is the longest story I’ve gotten published to date. Coming in at around 15k words (I estimate it’s 50-70 pages long), and I’m probably more proud of this story than anything I’ve written thus far in my career. Due to its length, I had a hell of a time finding a publisher for this story. So much so that I filed the story away as something that wouldn’t see the light of day until I put out my own collection.
Fast forward a few years and I stumbled across Dragon Soul Press who generally publish stories up to 15k words. Of course, the initial version of Dead Men Don’t Scream was a bit longer (and messier), so I had to make some edits before submitting. Those edits took me weeks and the final product is so much more polished than the original manuscript. Anyone who read the original version would suspect this one was written by a different writer entirely. I’m serious, I put so much work into this story on the second go around.
I hope everyone likes this story as much as I did writing it. Few times in my life have I had such fun editing a piece. It’s truly remarkable to see how far a story can come when given the proper attention.
Caleb James K. 