Mav Skye's Blog

Two years ago on my 40th birthday, the fam and I had picked up lattes and was driving through university district in downtown Bellingham when an old Victorian house caught my eye. It was on a side street. The landscape was ancient and immaculate, but the house was old. The white paint was peeling. The windows were dark with that slight oily mirage look that only century old windows have. I got the chills. I wondered what ghosts wandered in those halls. I wondered if the owners ever felt...

Signed copies of Wanted Single Rose will be in the Dark Softly Tales store when it opens soon! Signed copies will be blood free, though other arrangements can be made. ;-DMav

Hey Everyone!It's been long overdue for an update. You may have questions and I know I’ve got answers…What happened to your mavskye.com website?First off, if you've tried to go to my old site www.mavskye.com and kept getting the warning that something to the degree “this site is trying to imitate another site and may be trying to steal your financial info or infect your computer with a virus…blah, blah, blah” that is because I shut down the mavskye.com website and am going with darksoftlytale...

I'm about 10k into a new ghost story/novel. The idea for the novel hit me like a jolt of lightning on my birthday (no kidding!) as I was driving past an old victorian house near the university. It had a "For Rent" sign hanging in the window. The ideas and characters came to me as if the story had already been written, and it was being handed to me. Pretty bizarre! I feel pretty much consumed with writing it, which means, yes, you'll probably get a novel in October if I can keep plugging away...

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sleep?Rick Deckard wants a real animal with all his heart. It doesn't really matter what kind it is—sheep, horse, ostrich, goat...as long as it is a coveted variety and it is as real as he is. Animals are rare in Deckard's world, and carry a hefty price tag. He previously owned a sheep whom he loved, but after it died from tetanus he had an electric unit put into his sheep's body so the neighbors wouldn't know that he didn't own a real sheep, but *he* knows it a...

So, I went to the Viking parade in Poulsbo, Washington this weekend. I lived in the area until the age of ten, and the Viking parade was no doubt one of the highlights of every year. It's pretty much were my obsession with vikings and pirates come from. What struck me as soon as the procession started was this... the viking parade is the inspiration for the Harvest Festival parade in my book,Clown Apocalypse. Replace vikings with clowns and bam! You've got total anarchy. The similarities were...

So, I haven't written a blog post in a really long time, so long I don't even want to go look and see how long. Back in the day, I would blog when I received a story acceptance at a mag, an interview, or a book review, but just as a river changes as it flees down the mountainside, so have I over the years. I don't sub short stories to magazines anymore. I'm not circulating in horror/crime writing groups like I used, and the last two years I've read more non-fiction than fiction, and writing n...

I joined a reading group at goodreads called Insane in the Membrane. ;-D It's reading focus is centered on pyschophaths and villians, naturally that is why I joined. So here was the book of the month. When I started reading The Collector I didn't know what I was getting into. I knew it had a theme of psychopaths and that the main character collected butterflies. What I didn't expect was the amazing philosophy behind the story which is told first by the kidnapper, Frederick, then the second

Dirty Water by Marc E Fitch Published by 280 Steps Pres Having read Burning Paradise earlier this year, I was looking forward to Dirty Water. Fitch doesn't disappoint.He stirs a perfect storm, a compelling to read from start to finish.The story is fast and dirty with characters you love to hate and hate to love. It doesn't get grittier than this, folks. Beware the sharks in Dirty Water. Fitch writes dark and cheeky with a startling amount of heart. A crime writer to watch out for. Fans

Grim and Grisly Shades of Red by Angel Zapata Intriguing, bump-in-the-night spine-tingling terror is what you’ll find in this collection of horror stories. You’ll find serial killers, witches, the boogey man, zombies, zombie babies, hologram pumpkins, trolls, frightening fairy tales, and raining octopuses (yes, I said octopuses). There are several stories that stand out for me, such as Neighbors.A voyeuristic couple is intrigued by their neighbors' kinky bedtime habits, and decide