These days, most of my writing time is tied up in freelance work and nonfiction of various stripes. Speaking of my nonfiction writing, you can find some of it in the latest issue of Castle of Frankenstein magazine, notching a lifelong goal of mine off the list.

Way back in the day, Joe Dante used to write for Castle of Frankenstein before he became a director. Now, I’ve got a byline in the same place that he once did.

“There Were Giants in Those Days: Jack Kirby and Full Moon” represents the culmination of a whole bunch of research into the various connections – there are more of them than you might think – between Jack Kirby and Charles Band’s Full Moon Entertainment (or Features or whatever it’s called these days).

I’m very proud of this one. I worked hard on it, pulling together stuff that, as far as I know, has never before all been published in one place. If you have any interest in either Jack Kirby or Full Moon – or just somewhat sketchy intellectual property practices – give it a read! You can actually still buy Castle of Frankenstein on what passes for newstands these days, including at Barnes & Noble.

As I said, I don’t write as much fiction as I used to, but I still pen spooky stories when I get the chance, and in the last few months, a couple of those have gone live in places where you can read (or, in one case, better yet, listen to) them for free.

Back in July, I somewhat unexpectedly sold “Please Turn on Your Magic Beam” to The Dark, a publication I’ve written for before. I wrote a little about that at the time, how the story was inspired by elements as diverse as Lamberto Bava’s Demons 2, 40s horror movies, and the artwork of Richard Sala.

Just today, another story went live, this time at Pseudopod. The inspiration for “The Ghost of a Flea” is pretty obvious. I had seen William Blake’s miniature painting many times and always found it weird and haunting, but I had never heard the story behind it before. When I did, the rest of this story more or less fell into place.

Pseudopod has long been one of my favorite places to work with and, as always, they have done an amazing job rendering my story into audio form. If you don’t like listening to stories, you can also read it right there on their website, but I do recommend the audio version. It is top drawer.

I’ve written for Pseudopod many times before, going all the way back to “The Worm That Gnaws” in 2009. Because Pseudopod is both a market for reprints and originals, however, many of the stories I’ve sold there have been ones that appeared somewhere else first. Not so in this case. From the moment I finished writing “The Ghost of a Flea,” I thought it would fit perfectly as a Pseudopod original.

I still think so, if I do say so myself.