My new book "Something's Gotta Kill You" is officially getting published

My first collection of short fiction is coming this year from GenreBlast Books

This image went out yesterday on social media:

It’s been a long road to finally get here. I started typing up the story and it ended up longer than I expected, but I guess that’s why I have a Substack in the first place. So here’s the long, winding story of how this project came together. It’s basically two stories that eventually intersect.

When I self-published my first novel back in 2011, I was already thinking about a short story collection. As a kid, I loved short stories. I loved all sorts of fiction, but there was something about a story that you could read in one sitting, and maybe retain in your memory well enough to tell around a campfire with friends or family. I always wanted a book like that with my name on it. But in my self-publishing days, I was improving as a writer at a pretty quick rate, and if I wrote a short story, I usually hated it within a year or two. That made it hard to build up enough stories for a collection.

In 2017, I was sitting on a lot of writing (screenplays and short stories) that were gathering dust. I made myself a goal of getting 100 rejections that year. I had spent my whole creative life as a self-starter type, so I had rarely submitted anywhere, but there was now a mountain of writing that I didn’t know what to do with. I submitted screenplays to competitions and festivals, and I submitted short stories to anthologies and magazines, collecting rejections on a spreadsheet to try to meet my goal.

Two key things happened that year. The first was that I sold my first three short stories, to three separate anthologies. The second thing was that I discovered GenreBlast.

Researching places to submit screenplays, I learned about a young film festival called GenreBlast that was in its second year. It sounded like they had a good sense of humor and a love of schlock, so I sent them a horror-comedy screenplay called College Beach Party Massacre 4. Word came back that it was nominated for Best Unproduced Screenplay, and booked a ticket to Winchester, Virginia to attend.

The experience was borderline life-changing.

It wasn’t the first film festival I’d ever been to (I think it was the third), but it was the one that made me fall in love with the experience. I watched every single movie on the lineup (40 hours of film in 4 days, or thereabouts) and I still think back on many of the crazy things I saw there. The theater and the hotel were walking distance from each other and there was nothing else to do in Winchester, so attending filmmakers could either watch movies or hang it out in the bar. Both were great choices. I didn’t really have a group of creative friends anymore, so it was a jolt of creative energy I didn’t realize I was starved for. I am still friends with many of the people I met there.

As icing on the cake, at the end of the festival, they held their awards ceremony and College Beach Party Massacre 4 won Best Unproduced Feature (GenreBlast remains the only festival to have given an award to that crazy script). I was given the first trophy of my life.

I vowed that, for as long as GenreBlast existed, it would be on my calendar. There have been years since then that financial hardship made me miss it, but as long as it exists, it will always be on my radar, and I will always be there if there is any way I can.

(What does any of this have to do with your new book, Greg?)

(I’m getting to that.)

A year later, I came back to GenreBlast with two scripts — a feature called The Patience of Vultures and a short called The 4th Floor. Both were nominated, and I was given a bonus award called the Nuclear Pen, which GenreBlast gives to writers who earn multiple nominations in the same year.

Having a sense of ritual, I decided that from that moment forth, I would sign every writing contract with my Nuclear Pen. Every contract since has been signed with that pen, and the pen is never used for anything else.

By 2018 I was selling short stories left and right, breaking out the Nuclear Pen every couple of months. I was back to thinking about a short story collection.

One difficulty of a collection is that when you sell a short story, part of what a publisher is paying for is a window of exclusivity. It is usually in the contract that, after they publish it, you cannot print it anywhere else for an agreed-upon period—usually a year or two. So every year or so, I would think to myself, “I have enough for a collection here. I just have to wait another 9 months for the exclusivity windows.” Then I would write a new story I loved, sell it to somebody else, they would ask for 18 months, and I’d have to ask myself, “Do I want to publish a collection knowing that one of my best stories is missing? Or do I want to wait a few extra months?”

Meanwhile I kept going back to GenreBlast. They kept giving me more trophies. They asked me to judge their screenplay competition. They asked me to be part of a panel called “How Not To Suck At Screenwriting”. I started to feel like part of the GenreBlast family.

Then, Nathan Ludwig, the creator of GenreBlast Film Festival and an author himself, started GenreBlast Books. We talked a bit about how it would be cool if we could do a book together, and I asked him if he’d be open to a collection. He said he might be, and I sent it along.

In 2025, I was inducted into the GenreBlast Film Festival Hall of Fame and performed there as a standup comedian (a new experiment for the festival, and one that I think went really well). While I was there, Nathan pulled me aside and told me he wanted to publish my collection.

Yesterday, I received the contract, and signed it with my Nuclear Pen. It felt like a full-circle moment to use the GenreBlast pen to sign a GenreBlast contract for the stories I’ve been writing since I joined the GenreBlast family.

Once there’s a cover reveal and a release date, I’ll go into a little more detail about what’s in the book, but I’ll tease a couple things now:

• I mentioned earlier that in my pursuit of 100 rejections the same year I ended up at GenreBlast, I made my first three short story sales. Two of those — Bad Hair Day (which appeared in “Monsters of Any Kind” from Independent Legions Publishing) and The One About Maggie (which appeared in “Ashes and Entropy” from Nightscape Press) appear in the new book.

• The short screenplay The 4th Floor that was nominated at GenreBlast the year that I won the Nuclear Pen? It is a short story now, and it will be published for the first time in the new book.

• Another short screenplay, Deprivation, was nominated for Best Unproduced Short at GenreBlast in 2019. It has also been turned into a short story and will be published for the first time in the new book.

• My 2020 short story The Morbs was published in “Halldark Holidays” from Cemetery Gates Media. I liked it so much that I adapted it into a feature-length screenplay, which won Best Unproduced Screenplay at GenreBlast in 2022. The original short story will appear in the new book.

• Another 2020 story, Summers with Annie, is probably the best-reviewed story I have written to date. It appeared in “Worst Laid Plans” from Grindhouse Press. GenreBlast Films, a film production company from the creators of the festival, adapted Worst Laid Plans into an anthology film. While Summers with Annie was not one of the adapted installments (it would be a tough one to film), but it’s yet another connection between GenreBlast and this particular set of stories.

That’s 6 of them. There are another 12. A total of 18 stories—11 reprinted and 7 brand new. A couple of the new ones have been driving me nuts for years because I know they’re great and I haven’t been able to find the right home for them. I should have known when they did find a home, it would be GenreBlast.

I never thought it would take this long to finally put together a collection, but I really didn’t want my first collection to be so-so. I wanted it to be something special, and I think it is. I’m also glad I waited as long as I did, so that it can be a GenreBlast project.

The cover (which is gorgeous) and release date will be revealed soon.