Blight Digest (Winter 2015) Releases

We are pleased to release our second edition of Blight Digest featuring thirteen tales to tantalize and terrorize the senses.

Table of Contents Features:

Farewell, Again by Matt Andrew
Burrow by Paul J. Garth
The Hunger, The Thirst by W.P. Johnson
How Little Sleeps by Angel Luis Colón
On Dark Wings by Tony Wilson
The Door by Joe Powers
Regular, Normal People by Grant Jerkins
The Hungry Ones by John Leahy
Parts by Jacqueline Seewald
Running on Dead Leaves by John Steele
Dreaming of Honey by J.M. Perkins
Cats for Ginger by Mathew Allan Garcia
Serving Justine by Eddie McNamara
and a farewell foreword by Bracken MacLeod

Blight Digest is a three season magazine featuring 10 or more stories every 4 months that will feed just about any horror lovers tastes with a twist. The magazine welcomes new and established writers, and readers of all walks of life. The first two editions were edited and crafted by Bracken MacLeod, Jan Kozlowski, Ron Earl Phillips, and Frank Larnerd. Cover art by done by Dyer Wilk.

Be sure to pick up your copy today. And if you haven’t read issue 1, Blight Digest Fall 2014, it’s only 99 cents on the Kindle.

Fear is Spreading

Hellos and Goodbyes

One Eye Press is marching into a busy season with the release of Blight Digest: Winter 2015 on March 9th, followed closely by the release of Knuckleball by Tom Pitts on March 24th and Shotgun Honey Presents: Locked and Loaded (Both Barrels Vol. 3) in April. These projects are a labor of love not only for the writers but the editors behind the scenes, and at times the things we love conflict with our real world issues. There is only so much time, isn’t there?

With that thought, I want to give my humble thanks to Jan Kozlowski who worked diligently on issue 1 of Blight Digest and was critical to the selection of issue 2’s lineup, and to Chris Irvin who has helped steadfastly for the last 2 plus years select and edit stories for Shotgun Honey and it’s anthology series Both Barrels. Jan is a talented writer and a tremendous editor who knows not only horror, but genre fiction. And Chris, who has been more than an editor, a contributor, a spark, but a sounding board and a friend. Both will be missed going forward. Best of luck with your current and future endeavors.

Thankfully, there are those who have stepped in to help keep the ships on course. I am please to welcome Frank Larnerd, a writer and editor, and former contributor, who has jumped in to help finalize the upcoming issue of Blight Digest. Frank will be working on Blight Digest until at least issue 4 which is the Fall 2015 edition this coming October. Filling the vacancy by Chris Irvin will be past Shotgun Honey contributor Angel Luis Colón, and author of the upcoming One Eye Press Single The Fury of Blacky Jaguar. Angel sidled in well, and reading your submissions like a champ. A little warning, Angel is a harsh critic, so bring your A game!

Currently, in hiatus land is The Big Adios Western Digest. I hate to leave it’s fate open ended, but sometimes things just do not work out or reach the needed audience. We are hopeful of a summer release, with the possibility of doing an annual summer anthology.

Not to leave things on a negative note, One Eye Press is negotiating an ongoing character series that we look forward to announce and schedule for the second half of 2015. It’s a little PI, a little horror, a little sci-fi mash-up. Fun stuff that falls right into our wheelhouse of short fiction that packs a punch.

Blight Digest Winter 2015 Reveal

BLIGHT DIGEST Winter 2015 is expected to release the last week of February, and includes 13 all new tales to tingle and terrorize.

Our Table of Contents:

Grant Jerkins
Mathew Andrew
Eddie McNamara
Angel Luis Colón
Paul Garth
Mathew Allan Garcia
Jacqueline Seewald
Tony Wilson
John Steele
J M Perkins
William P Johnson
John Leahy
Joe Powers

Our editors are Bracken MacLeod, Jan Kozlowski, Frank Larnerd and Ron Earl Phillips. Jan who was an invaluable asset for the Fall 2014 edition lent a notable hand in the selection process. Frank Larnerd steps in for final production and will assist on the summer and fall editions. Bracken MacLeod will provide the foreword.

Our cover, “Praying with the Serpent,” is a masterful digital painting by Dyer Wilk. Wilk provided the art for our inaugural Fall 2014 release.

At this time, stories for the Summer 2015 edition are still under review.

Meet the Editor: Jan Kozlowski

Jan Kozlowski is one of the submission editors behind BLIGHT Digest, our new quarterly dark fiction and horror magazine. We’ve asked her five questions for you to get to know her a bit more. If your interested in passing the gauntlet to publication in BLIGHT Digest, you might find the keys to passage within her answers.

What was your first introduction to Dark Fiction and Horror?

My childhood sucked in most ways, but the one positive thing I can say for my parents is they really didn’t care what I read, as long as I was reading. Being a smart kid, I figured out pretty early on that disappearing into books was the closest I could get to physical escape, so I read omnivorously. I haunted the tall, squeaky, metal bookracks at the local grocery & department stores and since paperbacks were usually under a buck I could talk my mother into slipping one or two into the cart. One day in 1975 one of those books featured an etched black cover with a single drop of red blood on it. It had a weird title, ‘Salem’s Lot with the extra apostrophe and was by some guy from Maine named King. That was it, I was hooked.

What is the scariest real life moment you experienced?

Hmmm…tough to pick just one. Dad was an abusive SOB who liked to play with guns, so the 17 years I spent at home were pretty much one long fright fest. Then there was my urban EMS career, which consisted of 12-hour over night shifts that often went from grinding tedium to sheer terror in 3 seconds flat. I’ve been shot at, had too many knives pulled on me to remember and could count on being assaulted on a regular monthly basis by a 300lb drug addict who liked to direct traffic naked. And then there are those normal white knuckle life moments like getting married, buying a home, losing loved ones and, most recently, becoming a post menopausal woman in a pubescent obsessed world.

To paraphrase The Princess Bride’s Man in Black- Life IS fear Highness, anyone who says differently is selling something.

Stephen King or Robert McCammon?

As far as novels go, I will not choose and you can’t make me. For short stories Night Shift by King, hands down. I will ALWAYS love Grey Matter and count it as one of the creepiest stories I’ve ever read.

What are five books that have most influenced you as a writer, any genre?

The books that have made me say, “Damn, I want to be able to write like that one day” are, in no particular order:

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Holes by Louis Sachar
Chinese Handcuffs by Chris Crutcher
The Pine Deep Trilogy by Jonathan Maberry
‘Salem’s Lot by Stephen King
Whispers by Dean Koontz

My top 5 books about writing, also in no particular order:

Bird By Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King
Zen in the Art of Writing: Essays on Creativity by Ray Bradbury
Starting from Scratch: A Different Kind of Writers’ Manual by Rita Mae Brown
Telling Lies for Fun and Profit: A Manual for Fiction Writers by Lawrence Block

What are you looking for in a good horror story?

Like every fiction editor, I’m looking for a compelling plot, memorable characters and a satisfying ending, but beyond those things, I want to be transported. I want to be sucked into your story so completely that when I finally close your story file and look at the readout on my treadmill desk I am shocked to find out that minutes and miles have passed while I was immersed in your world.