Just submitted three short stories for Bloodshot Books' 'Not Your Average Monster Anthology.' To give you an idea of the kind of monsters you'll be seeing if any of these stories get published...

Lord...

RED RIDING HOOD: Grandma what big ears u have, what big teeth u have BIG BAD WOLF: Wtf kid I'm all self-conscious now. Ur grandma's dead btw

— pat tobin (@tastefactory) April 28, 2015

In a perfect world, I could write the actual story as fast as I write the outline for it.

I know this is a cover, but God, this song...

I have a plethora of playlists I use for when I'm writing. Here's part of one that's easily become my favorite.

Cool beans!

Got home from the gym tonight to discover that my short story "The Comedown" has been accepted for publication at Jitter Press as a reprint. This is neat.

Spent a couple hours reading over submissions for BI/BSF today.

17 submissions, to be exact. I rejected 16 of them.

Were I not heading out in a bit, I could use a nice stiff drink. Maybe when I get back from the gym, where I'll no doubt look like this Sandshrew:

Hopefully going to get some work done on my Wendigo story, too. I'd like to get at least 1,000 words down on paper before I pass out from exhaustion. Working three jobs can be tough sometimes.

But I digress. Can't stop staring at this GIF while I'm typing, hahahaha. That's all for now, then.

This post is so accurate that I almost want to cry.

http://thescalexwrites.tumblr.com/post/116938607022/writing-a-book-is-so-easy

Unrelated GIF is unrelated.

Writing a story about a Wendigo for an upcoming monster-themed anthology. Stoked. Think I'm going to have a lot of fun with this one.

A preview of a story pending review with Sanitarium Magazine. Check it out!

Beyond Redemption

By Craig Steven

“As greed of gain has drowned all temperance, there's nothing left to stem the rising blackness.”

-Marcus Bischoff

             I bundled my coat tight, fighting for its warmth, shivering violently regardless. The wind whistled around me and the temperature wavered around zero, threatening to freeze me where I stood. The tall chain-link fence surrounded me and the tennis court on which I stood, empty but for the blood that'd been spilled on it just hours before. Four separate blotches on the green cement conjoined to form a warped Rorschach test, though the clean-up crew had done a good job of ridding the site of most of the blood. Three victims I'd never met, and a fourth, the man that'd turned the gun on himself after murdering three others; my younger brother, Christopher.

Probably the funniest tweet I've seen.

"I'm the only cop on the force who can play the bassoon dammit" "Not anymore" New cop in sunglasses walks in, just killing it on the bassoon

— pat tobin (@tastefactory) September 30, 2012

This song, man.

I love listening to stuff like this while I'm writing. The instrumentals, the atmospheric voice, the content of it. Great listening.

A blog post on my new blog. Neat beans.

But what in God's name do I write about in this blog post? I suppose I can start with a controversial statement that I made on Facebook a few weeks back;

To Hell with Wattpad.

You read that right. Wattpad is the literary dumpster of all literary dumpsters. I tried it out for a few weeks, but I quickly noticed that the content on the site is more than dreadful. I'm not hating on fan-fiction, but when there's Harry Styles stories at every turn, or Twilight rip-offs, Hunger Games rip-offs, Walking Dead rip-offs... You're starting to get my point, I think. The originality that should be thriving on Wattpad, a site where anyone can read numerous stories for free, is dead, maybe having never existed at all. While there are some gems on the site, very few of them pertain to anything original and/or well-written.

That being said, if you're on Wattpad and I've offended you, send me your link, and I'll let you know if you've proved me wrong.