An unhealthy and unwarranted look into the twisted life and dubious career of Shane Simmons – dark writer, morbid historian, obsessive collector and sick mind
With another Samhain nearly upon us, and rain in the forecast, it might be healthier to stay in and curl up with a book instead of pursuing pneumonia trick-or-treating for candy corns and type 2 diabetes.
The ebook of Necropolis is free for the occasion, with the sequel Epitaph reduced to $0.99, and my perennial Halloween-nostalgia adventure, Hot Pennies, also in giveaway mode for those unwilling to commit to more than a short story.
In other news, the final MX collections of Sherlock Holmes stories have been released. That amounts of 52 volumes, and more than 1000 stories in total. Thirteen of those are mine, which is more than enough for a single-author collection. If only I can get through the final pages of one last tale that is holding me up… My inability to adhere to self-imposed deadlines is starting to put me in George R. R. Martin territory.
Finally, two of my horror short stories have also been placed in new anthologies. I’ll announce them once they’re both out and I have covers to show. Hopefully they’ll both be published before the next Halloween rolls around.
It was a traditional Christmas, starting with Midnight Mass.
Followed by some light holiday reading.
And leading into a new vampire movie that opened on Christmas day, like all good fucked-up movies should.
The last time I went to see a new release on Christmas day, it was Sherlock Holmes, which came out six years before I started writing my own Sherlock Holmes stories. News on that pending. Good news at last!
In truth, I’ve been baffled for the last couple of weeks. 2023 was weird, 2024 promises to be weirder still. But what has really set my head spinning is my book sales.
I haven’t been running a lot of promotions this past year (something I hope to remedy shortly). Mostly I’ve been letting my bibliography sit around on Amazon, waiting for readers to discover my work on their own. Despite this, there’s been a steady trickle of sales and page reads through the Kindle Unlimited program.
Necropolis, Epitaph, and Longshot Comics remain evergreen. Also in the mix, deep down the list, are a few standalone short stories I published as a dry run for bigger books. Carrion Luggage, Choke the Chicken, and Hot Pennies are convenient giveaways that serve as advertising each quarter. I set them for free, in accordance with Amazon’s exclusivity rules, and let random people grab copies in the hopes they might want to read more and buy a full-length novel or collection.
I’ve considered unpublishing them in the past, just to clean up my digital bookshelf, but they serve a purpose, so I’ve left them alone thus far. It costs me nothing to let them persist, and the occasional sale or read-through can put a few more bucks in my pocket once in a while.
But there’s one more short story sitting in my Amazon-author management page I’ve never told anyone about. Unlike the others, I didn’t design a physical paperback, and I’ve never promoted it beyond making it a freebie for a few days back in 2016/17 in order to see how that system worked.
It was, unofficially, the very first book I published on Amazon.
And it is smut.
Don’t go looking for it on my author page, or even asking me what the book is called. I put in out under a pen name I never used again, and it was meant to be practice for formatting an ebook and making a cover image. I disavow it, and will never admit to being its author.
So why did I write it at all?
The explanation goes back over thirty years, to my earliest days as a professional writer. Frustrated with the submission process for magazines and anthologies, I got it in my head that I might make some quick money writing pornographic fiction for girlie magazines. It seemed like low-hanging fruit back in the pre-internet of magazine shops and stroke rags.
So I wrote one. Just one.
Okay, technically two. I had also written a parody of a Penthouse Forum letter for Angry Comics that was meant to be hilariously grotesque rather than titillating.
But this other one… Well, it was meant to get the job done.
Satisfied (not that way), I started sending it out to the various dirty magazines that existed in those days and filled their non-pictorial pages with sexy stories.
Naively, I thought it would be easy to place my attempt at erotica, if only because the caliber of writing was elevated from what they usually printed.
Needless to say, when I heard back (if I heard back at all) it was rejection letters across the board. That’s when I had my epiphany. Why would I waste my time writing this garbage when I could be writing proper literature that will be just as readily rejected?
So I never attempted another of its ilk and went back to being ignored by reputable publishing houses.
Decades later, this embarrassing little manuscript was still taking up a few bits and bytes of hard-drive space. With my venture into Amazon publishing about to begin, I dusted it off, gave it a quick proof read, and threw it online, waiting to see if its fictional author would get any traffic. Or money.
The answer was nope. Which was fine by me, because I didn’t really want my failed erotica to generate any money that might tempt me to write more.
The story has sat untouched since, with no one reading so much as a single page since September of 2017. It was a dead book, like so many on Amazon, never to be discovered by even the deepest of wank-material spelunkers.
In fact, I had it on my to-do list to finally unpublish it with the arrival of 2024, officially erasing it from existence.
And then that baffling thing started happening.
Six years dead as a doornail, thirty years after it first spilled out of the tips of my fingers, my silly bit of smut started to get read. A full copy sold. And then page reads happened. This wasn’t some random Kindle Unlimited masturbator stumbling across it by chance. Multiple readers had to be behind this much movement. It was getting pages read every day, to the point it was my fourth best-seller in December. As of the first couple of days of this year, it’s the only one of my books that’s had any traffic so far.
Thousands of spaces down the Amazon erotica list, with not a single review to its name, people are finding it.
I was able to hold my head up after writing sexually frank stories like Sex Tape and some of the rather extreme ones that appear in Petty Crimes and Vindictive Criminals and Raw and Other Stories. But I guess now I’m officially a pornographer, even if it amounts to far less than one percent of my total output. I am suitably ashamed of myself, but I have to let it run to see how long it takes to die out again, and how many bucks it’s going to passively earn me so long after the fact.
Day One of the year was a real banger. Day Two picked up, but in all the wrong ways.
The first hefty chunk of my steampunk epistolary espionage novel is available for free on my Patreon page. Subsequent parts will roll out for subscribers at regular intervals until the entire preview edition is posted in PDF form. From there, I’m another few read-throughs and micro-edits away from the version that will be published on Amazon.
The original plan was to bank at least three books in the series before dumping them in bulk, all at once, in order to manufacture momentum. But if the last few years have taught me anything, it’s that everyone and everything around me tends to drop dead, so I’m not making plans that depend on personal longevity. Marketing strategies be damned, once a new book is done, I don’t want to sit on it indefinitely while I work on sequels.
A pulpy adventure yarn, The Iron Zephyr of Peril is the first story of the Winters/Moreaux account. The nefarious gentlemen spies, Professor Hollister Winters and Mister Kiarfax Moreaux, remain a controversial subject best not discussed above a whisper, and only ever between trusted associates.
Crisis Actor has been out for over a month, but I haven’t done much of anything to announce or promote it until today. After grappling with a weird PDF glitch on page ninety-six of the paperback for too many rounds of proof copies, I just wanted to wash my hands of the whole project for a while before facing the prospect of running ads for it.
And then I had to put down Inheritance Dog because he’d evolved into one gigantic cancerous tumour that looked like the Husky monster from The Thing.
I was in the mood for a break. So much of a break, my entire creative-writing output for the month of April was twelve words. Twelve. I know, I counted. Twice.
Getting over a hurdle of grief and atrophy has become routine, but fuck me it’s been a lot of those hurdles in a row. I keep hoping I can get back up to speed for a good stretch, but I haven’t been able to get six months down the road before tripping over another disaster.
So…speaking of relentless personal tragedy, who wants to pick up a copy of a brand-new funny book full of wacky conspiracy theories and shenanigans?
Yeah, not my best segue to sell you something. So how about I just give it away for free?
Today and tomorrow only, Crisis Actor is a free ebook on Amazon. It’s currently at the top of the charts for satire fiction, political thrillers, and conspiracy thrillers. All you have to do to be a best seller in any given category is give away a thousand copies of your book in the first few hours of a promotion and voila! Admittedly, doing that eliminates the “seller” aspect of “best seller” but if that’s the term Amazon uses to describe my book, who am I to argue?
That only leaves one outstanding bit of unfinished business. What the hell is this Project S.E.E. I’ve been on about?
All will be revealed very soon. So soon, I might as well tell you what my ridiculous acronym stands for and what the absurd new genre I’ve come up with is.
Project S.E.E. stands for Streampunk Epistolary Espionage.
Well well well, look who’s ALL-THE-WAY in the public domain now.
I’ve been waiting years for this moment. Forgive me for basking in it.
As an author of (so far) fourteen Sherlock Holmes stories appearing in a variety of publications, I’ve been watching this glacial development closely. The character of Sherlock Holmes, in case you were wondering, has been in the public domain for quite some time. But it was only as of January 1, 2023, that the very final stories, published in 1927 and collected in The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes, crossed the threshold in all remaining territories and jurisdictions.
So why is this important, considering Sherlock Holmes movies have been made and new stories published with impunity for years? Because it stands as the final vestige of a copyright still clung to by the litigious Conan Doyle estate. They’ve been guarding the last scraps of Sir Arthur’s work jealously, even though he’s been dead since 1930 and the remaining descendants are distant at best. Nevertheless, they took every opportunity to use their diminishing copyright as a cudgel against anyone who wanted to print new Holmes material. Their excuses for this behaviour were thin at best, but many publishing houses considered it easier to throw them a few grand as a token tribute, just to make them go away.
That is, until one stood up to them, took them to court, and had a judge tell them to knock that shit off.
Since then, they’ve become pretty quiet. But that didn’t stop them, a couple of years ago, from trying to shake down Netflix for some bucks for the first Enola Holmes movie. Their claim was that since Sherlock Holmes shows some emotion in that film, that content falls under the copyright for The Casebook. Because Holmes never showed emotion before that book.
Complete bullshit. And the judge saw right through it. Case dismissed.
Which brings me to my tenuous connection to the estate.
I started writing Sherlock Holmes material largely by accident in 2015. What began as a simple recommendation from one editor to another led to an enormous amount of material that will one day be collected into three different volumes.
Ridiculously ambitious, but that’s a debate for another time.
The second story I ever wrote for MX Publishing was called The Adventure of the Cat’s Claws and filled in the backstory for The Veiled Lodger. I’ve discussed it here before. Suffice to say, The Veiled Lodger is one of the dreaded (some would say dreadful) final stories from 1927. Conan Doyle was nearing the end of his life and was sick of Sherlock Holmes, so he was phoning it in at this point. And because my story heavily referenced it, it butted up against lingering copyright.
I got away with it though. Largely because the anthology was for charity, raising money to restore Undershaw, Conan Doyle’s old house. As such, it got the official seal of approval from the estate. Said seal even appears right on the cover of the book.
Here’s where rights issues get murky.
My position was that since the estate had already given my story a de facto rubber stamp, I should be clear to reprint it without issue. Nevertheless, I was cautious, and didn’t want to get into a legal entanglement that could cost me thousands. So I contacted the estate directly and asked, ever so politely, if it was okay if I reprinted Cat’s Claws in a collection sooner rather than later.
I heard from someone in legal, who assured me they’d get back to me about that.
Never did. Stonewalled.
And why not? There wasn’t a buck to be made.
So I waited. And waited. And waited. Until today.
Today is the day that all rights to The Adventure of the Cat’s Claws unambiguously revert to me. I can continue to explore some of those characters from The Veiled Lodger (and I will) and nobody can say shit.
Not that the first volume of stories is ready to go just yet. I still have a couple more I want to complete, concerning Sherlock Holmes, Mycroft Holmes, and Wiggins of the Baker Street Irregulars, before I focus my full Sherlockian attention on volume two, and what everyone got up to during World War I.
But I feel a hurdle has been jumped, and I’m always relieved when the rights to any of my work come home to roost at last. There they shall remain, under my protection, until the moment I flatline.
At that point, the rights to all my work I still own immediately enter the public domain. No protracted wait periods lasting decades. No greedy corporations camping on an associated trademark. No ne’er-do-well second cousins twice removed trying to profit on the work of a distant relation they never even met.
Public domain. All of it. As soon as I assume room temperature and it’s medically confirmed I’m not coming back.
Because H. P. Lovecraft got it right.
Die alone and unloved, with no one who gives two shits about anything you ever wrote, and no heirs trying to lay claim to royalties. Go to your grave a failure, never live to see your influence and success in subsequent centuries. Everything goes copyright free, for anyone to reprint and exploit. Immortality assured.
And then be glad you’re too dead to give a damn about everyone losing their minds over the racist crap you wrote in cherry-picked passages when you were alive.
It was another one of those years. I’ve come to expect nothing less.
More deaths, more heartbreak. My months-long absence from blogging says much about how I just wasn’t feeling it this year.
On the bright side, my cancer scare turned out to be a non-event. Apparently Inheritance Dog is my Picture of Dorian Gray when it comes to malignant tumours. At this point, he’s more tumour than dog, but he just keeps persisting. And so I continue to walk him, day and night, in a Sisyphian effort to empty his bladder and bowels. Two years of this now. Sleeping in shifts, going out regardless of the weather, regardless if I’m sick or injured.
I’m tired, and my lacking word count for the year shows it.
Even so, I can now announce that I’ve finished two new novels that will be coming out in 2023. One is a stand-along thriller, the other is a pulpy bit of fiction that invents a whole new genre. I’ve referred to that one as Project S.E.E. for some time. Explanations will be forthcoming, but it launches a series that I plan to roll out in instalments on my Patreon page.
I was originally hoping to serialize it on Amazon’s Kindle Vella program, but two years later they still haven’t opened it to non-U.S. authors. So Patreon it is. Editing continues, but I should be able to post the first chunks soon.
As for the thriller, it’s of the political-paranoia variety, and I’m excited to finally get it out after dabbling with it for years. I’ll have a cover and title reveal shortly.
I’m slowly getting back up to speed, and there are plenty of projects pending. I tend to work on a variety of different books at once. It’s made for a long stretch of no new publications, but the dam must eventually break. And that’s when the flood arrives.
Here’s a recent screenshot of my computer screen to further tease something I mentioned here before. No promises any of this side gig sees the light of day in 2023, but tens of thousands of words are already on the page.
“May I degrade and humiliate the simpering cretins in the audience? Shatter their illusions, and sap their wills to continue the struggle to sustain their worthless existences?” the fish asked hopefully.
Tom considered the request.
“Just the hecklers,” he said. “Wait until one of them starts calling out stupid shit and then have at it.”
“I look forward to robbing another such heckler’s life of all hope and meaning. I can already taste his sad, lonely suicide in the parking lot of Guffaw’s Chuckle-Shack!”
“Another?” I asked.
“There’s no evidence the last one had anything to do with us,” Tom claimed.
Finally, the sordid tale can be told!
This is my first release of the new year and it’s now up on Patreon.
Want to read it for free instead of paying for a Patreon subscription? Join my newsletter on the sidebar to the right before the next issue goes out. That should be sometime tomorrow, so click fast!
2021 was the new-new newest worsty-worst year ever.
The suck that’s been running roughshod over my life since 2018 didn’t slow down, and continued to trample me throughout this last year of relentless personal tragedy. Rest assured, I’m waaaaaay past suicidal thoughts at this point. Now I stick around purely out of morbid curiosity to see what could possibly go wrong next. Fingers crossed for a rare and brutal form of cancer in 2022. Bring it on, bitches!
It was sometime last winter I was sitting alone in a hospital, wearing a pandemic diaper on my face, watching my mother die a miserable death only four months after my father died an equally miserable death, that I got to thinking: most people don’t have to deal with this much shit all at once. I mean, seriously, how many broken homes and deaths and illnesses normally strike one person all at the same time? Okay, sure, The Black Death. But I mean, since the middle ages? Probably not nearly this much statistically. If I’m going to beat those sorts of odds, I would prefer to win the lottery. Or get struck by lightning.
Meanwhile, I’m supposed to be running this vast publishing empire known as Eyestrain Productions, and I haven’t released a new book since November 2019.
Clearly I suck.
And yet, somehow, I’ve managed to place another bunch of stories in various anthologies throughout 2021. I guess it helps to have an editor or two badgering me for new Sherlock Holmes stories. At least somebody still loves me.
The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories – Part XXIII: Some More Untold Cases (1888 – 1894) focuses on Holmes mysteries that are mentioned in the original canon, but not elaborated on. My story, “The Adventure of the Forgotten Brolly” fleshes out the disappearance of James Phillimore, which has been the subject of much speculation for over a century now. I’m not the first to have taken a stab at what was so bloody important about that umbrella he left behind, and I won’t be the last.
Sherlock Holmes: Stranger Than Fiction is a Belanger Books collection of stories featuring Holmes interacting with various other era-appropriate fictional characters including, in my case, the Frankenstein Monster. “The Adventure of the Stitchwork Man” is one of several stories I’ve completed this year that will not be a part of any of my future Sherlock Holmes collections. It will, however, one day appear in a whole other collection built around a certain human construct who also exists in the copyright-free public domain.
After the East Wind Blows: WWI and Roaring Twenties Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Part One (1914-1918) is one of a three-volume set from Belanger Books that deals with the post-retirement mysteries of the first world war and beyond. Apparently Sherlock Holmes got up to a lot more than beekeeping in his later years. My story, “The Intrigue of the Kaiser Helmet” reunites Mycroft, Wiggins, and Sherlock to solve a case that threatens British morale during the height of the clash of empires.
The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories – Part XXX: More Christmas Adventures (1897 – 1928)features my second dip into The Great War. “The Intrigue of the Red Christmas” is set in the devastation of no-man’s-land immediately following Armistice and asks the question: does the death of one man still matter after millions were killed in the most terrible conflict mankind has ever known? I suppose it does if he died under mysterious circumstances wearing a Father Christmas costume.
That brings us to The Nefarious Villains of Sherlock Holmes, a two-volume set delving into the histories of various evildoers within the Holmes universe, including Tonga, the blow-dart assassin of The Sign of Four. It turns out his killing spree had an even worse legacy in “The Adventure of the Dozen Deadly Darts” which rounds out volume one. These two books have currently met their goal on Kickstarter, which is a good place to get your advance copies. Better back it now, as I’ve negligently left mentioning it until the tail end of the campaign.
I have one other non-Sherlock story that will be release exclusively for newsletter subscribers and Patreon backers. Hit that subscribe button in the right-hand bar or pledge me a buck at Patreon and you’ll get access to the first Necropolis-rated story in a while. Since I didn’t come out with the third book in the series this year as originally planned, I’ve tried to make up for it in some small way with the story “Last Laugh at the Chuckle-Shack.” It elaborates on an incident mentioned in the pages of Epitaph and features a couple of the supporting characters killing it at a comedy club.
Last year, Google street view captured me staring down Inheritance Dog in Lachine during the narrow slot of time between parental deaths. Little did I know at the time that dog ownership was just around the corner, much to the delight of my cats.
Eyestrain Productions 