Stories, Stories, Stories! · 11:14pm Oct 4th, 2022
So:
I've got the new Pony story here, an old semi-Pony novel that's part of a special "story bundle" this month, and a new non-Pony novelette that's being published next month in an anthology from Simon & Schuster.
The new Pony story's thanks to FanOfMostEverything's "Ancestral Tribute" contest. I'll link this blog post to the story, so that'll be easy to find.
The old semi-Pony novel is called Neighbors, and when I self-published it 8 years ago, I described it like as follows:
You can choose your friends, but you can't choose your neighbors.
For a full quarter of his life, twenty-year-old Gus Lancer has been a resident patient at Haven Space, a sanatorium and rehab clinic formerly isolated in the chaparral of southern California but now surrounded by the suburban sprawl of inland Orange County. The peculiar degenerative condition shredding his nervous system has paralyzed him from the waist down and robbed him of all but the most strangled attempts at human speech, but he has recently discovered that he can apparently understand and communicate with the various animals he meets.
Rolling his wheelchair out under the care of El Brujo, one of Haven's therapy cats, he becomes more and more involved in the lives of the humans, dogs, cats, crows, squirrels and others forced into the close proximity of the neighborhood. And when some of these neighbors begin acting in a most unneighborly fashion, Gus finds that he might be the only one capable of keeping events from spiraling completely out of control.
It's "semi-Pony" because Gus uses the name AugieDog for the My Little Pony fanfiction that he writes. He's completely fictional, though, and I think I manage to avoid using the phrase "my little pony" throughout the entirety of the novel just to make sure nobody's lawyers might take notice. You can find the story bundle that it's a part of by following the link earlier in this sentence. There are eight other "furry" novels in the bundle, so if you enjoy talking animals, you'll find 'em all over the place here.
The new non-Pony novelette is still kind of a piece of fanfiction, I guess. The anthology's being put together by Neal Shusterman, a guy I've known for maybe 20 years and who's had a number of novels hit the best-seller lists. From 2016 to 2019, he came out with a trilogy called "The Arc of the Scythe" set in a semi-utopian future where, since everyone lives forever, certain people are trained to become Scythes with the job of going out and killing others to help the overpopulation problem.
The anthology's called Gleanings, and it'll be published next month.
There's always so much going on! 
Mike
someone's sure been busy! :D
5690382
Since I dropped:
My Daily Grind webcomic from five days a week to three and changed the format so it's more an illustrated story than an actual comic, well, I've needed something else to fill up my time, haven't I?
Mike
Whenever I need something to fill up the time, my wife is right there with a list. We're putting in vinyl plank flooring in the kitchen this fall, and my we, I mean me with supervision and criticism.
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I'm the only one:
Of the four kids in our family who never married, and as I'm now of the same age as Heinz has sauces and have only ever been on two dates, a change in my status is looking increasingly unlikely...
Mike
Thanks for the great tip - I bought the bundle! I've been really enjoying your short story collection, must hunt down more of your books.