At the Spinal Dread event, I'm delighted to sign my award-winning book, Born of Dirt & Dust, a collection of speculative fiction filled with psychological horror, urban dread, dark fantasy, and a bitter taste of sci-fi. Bite-sized stories you can sink your teeth into again and again.

Whew! I hope you enjoyed reading the above excerpt from my current novel in progress -- a haunting thriller with the main character's toddler brother as the primary victim of a questionable death.

Author Renee Coloman reads an excerpt from Emergency Exit, a short story from her book, Born of Dirt & Dust. The story is quite meaningful to Renee, as the premise is based on an article she read in a digital newspaper; a factual event about young lives taken for granted in our real world ... all in the hope of finding someone to love them; whereas, in this reality, that unusual someone isn't the kind of person who knows how to love.

Tick, tock, tick. There's a countdown clock inside my brain. Play the game, play the game, I tell myself. But I can't let him win. Not when it comes to my memories, to what I know about my brother's death. I can't let him win. Can't let Dad gaslight me. Again and again and again.

I wrote ROBBY's Come to Play, a light sci-fi short fiction, in early 2024---a gut reaction to waking up alone in bed one pre-dawn morning and feeling a crazed urge to smash apart my phone and terminate its screeching alarm.