Blog Archives
Memorable Moments
Paperbacks & Baguettes is a novella-in-flash set in a bookstore and café where baristas, booksellers, and customers create a community through small, repeated encounters. What was the inspiration behind this collection of stories?
For years, I managed a bookstore café, and if you had asked me then whether I was collecting stories, I would have said no. I was making coffee, shelving books, helping customers, and trying to keep the day moving.
Looking back, I realize I wasn’t remembering the busiest days. I was remembering the people who kept coming back.
There was the customer who always wandered the shelves before ordering. The bookseller who remembered what someone had enjoyed months earlier. The regular who glanced around the room before sitting down, hoping a familiar face was already there.
Over time, people who had arrived as strangers began expecting to see one another. If someone hadn’t been in for a week or two, someone else would ask about them.
It wasn’t a dramatic story. It was an ordinary one. But I came to realize that familiar places can change us simply by becoming part of our lives. That’s where Paperbacks & Baguettes began.
Many of the book’s most memorable moments come from small gestures rather than dramatic events. What attracts you to writing about those quiet, easily overlooked moments of everyday life?
I’m interested in the moment someone realizes they’ve been remembered.
A barista starts making a drink before the order is placed. A bookseller sets aside a novel because they think a frequent customer will enjoy it. Someone clears a chair because they know another regular usually sits there.
From the outside, those gestures don’t seem like much. But they say something we all hope to hear: I’m glad you’re here. I noticed you.
Those moments stay with me because they’re easy to overlook while they’re happening. Looking back, they’re often what we remember most clearly.
Recurring objects—books, coffee cups, umbrellas, playlists, and scarves—create a sense of continuity throughout the collection. How did you decide which details would reappear to tie the stories together?
I never made a list of things that should come back. They returned for the same reason they do in real life.
Spend enough time in a place and certain things become part of its rhythm. The mug someone always reaches for. Umbrellas gathering by the door when it rains. A scarf left over the back of a chair while someone wanders the shelves. The same song that somehow seems to find its way back every few weeks.
Those details reminded me that the café wasn’t starting over with each story. Life had been going on before the reader arrived, and it would keep going after the story ended.
I wanted the café to feel lived in, not simply described.
What do you hope readers carry with them after spending time in the world of Paperbacks & Baguettes?
I hope they think about the familiar places that have become part of their lives.
Maybe it’s a bookstore, a coffee shop, a library, or a neighborhood restaurant. Places where people begin to recognize one another, not because they’ve shared their life stories, but because they’ve shared enough ordinary days.
We’re often part of each other’s lives long before we have words for the relationship. We know someone’s usual table. We notice when they haven’t been around. We hope they’re doing well.
If the book does anything, I hope it’s simply this: that the next time readers walk into one of those familiar places, they notice the people who have quietly become part of their own story.
Author Links: GoodReads | Amazon
Some places hold you longer than you expect.
Paperbacks & Baguettes unfolds in a bookstore café – paperbacks, coffee, food; early mornings and late closings; regulars who linger and staff who notice what others miss. Exchanges begin to matter: a scarf left loose, a mug still warm, a playlist quietly shared. Closeness forms – not through grand gestures, but through attention. A love story told sideways, shaped by presence rather than plot, and by care rather than drama. It belongs as much to the room and its people as to any single pair.
Paperbacks & Baguettes: Stories Between Us
Michael M. Brownstein’s Paperbacks & Baguettes is a novella-in-flash set inside a combined bookstore and café, where baristas, booksellers, managers, regulars, and passing customers create a community through small, repeated encounters. The book builds its story through brief scenes: an umbrella left by a shelf, a playlist shared across the counter, a scarf catching on a book, a warm cup waiting for someone who may return. Familiar people and objects reappear, so each vignette adds another layer to the ones before it. By the end, the bookstore café feels less like a backdrop and more like a living presence that notices, remembers, and quietly connects everyone who enters.
Brownstein’s writing is at its best when it pays attention to gestures that usually disappear before anyone thinks to name them. A hand pauses above a mug. Two people adjust their grip on the same box. Someone straightens a book on a shelf that doesn’t belong to them. These details carry much of the book’s emotional weight, especially in the gradual relationship between the woman with the scarf and the man behind the counter. Their connection develops through music, books, glances, and unfinished sentences, which makes the final scenes feel earned without turning the romance into the only reason to keep reading. The larger story is also about work, belonging, and the ways shared spaces become meaningful through ordinary care.
The book reminded me of Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, though Brownstein works on a smaller and gentler scale. Both books use linked stories to show how individual lives overlap within a community, and both trust accumulation more than dramatic revelation. Strout often moves between sharply defined characters and exposes the private tensions beneath public behavior. Brownstein stays closer to atmosphere, letting recurring sounds, smells, objects, and routines provide continuity. His characters aren’t always named, but they become recognizable through their habits. That approach gives the book an intimate, almost musical structure, with images and phrases returning like variations on a melody.
The repeated descriptions of light, warmth, steam, shelves, and things left unsaid can feel carefully patterned, but that pattern is also central to the book’s appeal. Paperbacks & Baguettes asks the reader to slow down and notice how affection often appears before anyone calls it affection, and how a room becomes a home through repetition. It’s a warm, observant book with a strong sense of place and an unusual confidence in quiet moments. Readers who enjoy linked fiction, understated romance, and stories about the hidden emotional life of everyday spaces will find plenty to linger over here.
Pages: 172 | ASIN : B0H4BFVS7H
Two Destinations
13: Stone Corners and Other Stories is a collection of ghost stories rooted in memory, family, guilt, faith, and the strange comfort of being scared on purpose. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
I used to split my time between writing lyrics, and songs, and stories. My songs were well-received (the other bandmates liked them, and a few got on the St. Louis radio). So, I wondered what the difference was between my songwriting and my failed fiction writing. There were a few reasons: the lyrics were concise, had a good rhythm, and hit with emotion, whereas my fiction meandered and often didn’t connect. The goal was to make my fiction more like my songwriting: to the point, playful with the rhythm, and to pack an emotional punch.
Adding to that goal would be what to write or which genre to explore. As a teen and a young adult, I had tried fantasy (which was derivative and boring) and science fiction (which wasn’t very plausible). In college, I tried creative writing and realized I had a lot of maturing to do in order to write convincing fiction, so I gravitated to alternative rock and roll music, which gave me immediate satisfaction and feedback. However, that lifestyle wasn’t too healthy to maintain without serious deliberating habits.
In my first try at sobriety at age thirty-five, I decided to write a ghost story and use the lessons learned in my songwriting. I made a Ghost Emotion list, which would be the kind of things that might linger after death and feed a ghost: lust, murder, betrayal, despair, coveting, guarding someone or guarding against something, etc.
“Night At the Black Orpheum” was my first ghost story and the first story I wrote that I thought was publishable. From there, it was finding the seeds for a ghost story and mixing the reality with something weird.
At some point, I decided to name the collection under the umbrella title of 13 and all the connotations that number brings, though, for me, the number thirteen has some personal connections.
Are any of the locations featured in your book inspired by places you’ve known in real life?
Several, as it turns out. Some are first-hand experiences, such as ghost tours in the Crescent Hotel in Eureka Springs, Arkansas. That is the weirdest and most haunted place that I have been to. At the Meridian Coffee House in Alton, Illinois, I experienced orbs (quite a lot of that activity) and saw second-hand evidence of other manifestations. A nightmare about my grandparents’ huge basement inspired “A Sort of Homecoming.” In this dream, there were secret doors in closets that led to secret rooms that I had never explored. Taking the house as a metaphor for the mind, I used it to make a story of hidden secrets. “Blue Harvest” was a second-hand story told to me by my band-mates who all went to a haunted barn where there had been a mass killing by a deranged father (I had to leave early that night and was not present). Two of my bandmates gave me some details, but the third refused to talk and quit the band soon afterwards. A little later, I went to his house, and he told me his version of the events, which provided the climax for the story. He had been so upset by what he had seen that he eventually became a Christian preacher.
Faith is woven naturally into many of these stories. How important was it to treat spiritual belief as an active part of the supernatural rather than simply a background detail?
My upbringing in a Christian home instilled a belief in an afterlife with two destinations. As a history student, I read a lot about the Egyptian and Greek beliefs and depictions of the afterlife. As a reader, I discovered that the best ghost literature hinged on one important fact: the people in the stories believed in the phenomena happening to them in order to understand it, combat it, or resolve it. At some point, after watching ghost documentaries, reading nonfiction accounts of hauntings, and watching debunkers, I came to the conclusions that there could be four assumptions: one, it’s just in our imaginations (but if I can project ghosts, I wish I could learn how to project so many other things like money and gold); two, it’s all real like people say they’ve experienced (which tends to make people very uncomfortable); three, it’s not real, but seems real due to magnetic fields or some kind of local force in the environment that acts upon our brain and causes the projection to manifest; or four, this phenomena is real and can only interact in our section of reality by using certain electrical wavelengths or light spectrums and has other attributes beyond our knowing.
I am open-minded to the phenomenon. I can’t explain away everything I’ve seen, or heard, or felt other than it’s beyond me. Even as a believing Christian, can a spirit be seen, or is it actually the spirit of the deceased or something nastier? There are such stories in the Bible. Jesus was a demon hunter. They sure didn’t like it when He came to town.
Are there other haunted places or family stories waiting to be explored?
Yes, I am working on a companion collection of tales for a future 13 collection. One other tale that I posted on Substack involves a visit to the St. Augustine Lighthouse. My wife wanted to visit; I’ve never been to a lighthouse, and I love historical places. But I had no idea of the ghost activity there and only learned about it when two workers told me about it. A third worker knew their stories but was a skeptic. He said, “I’m only a skeptic because I have never seen a ghost. I would love to see a ghost and be proven wrong.” Well, there you are: that became the seed for a story.
Author Links: GoodReads | Facebook | Website | Amazon
13: Stone Corners and Other Stories
13: Stone Corners and Other Stories is a ghost story collection built around houses, basements, churches, bars, old stages, graveyards, orchards, and the emotional leftovers people carry into those places. Jeffrey Cummins frames the number thirteen as personal, spiritual, and spooky, writing in the foreword, “It haunts me pleasantly enough. It is nothing to fear.” That line fits the whole book: these stories are frightening, but they’re also deeply interested in memory, family, guilt, faith, and the strange comfort of being scared on purpose.
The collection has a strong sense of place. “A Sort of Homecoming” turns a grandparent’s house into a map of the mind, with rooms, closets, and basements holding old dread. “Lethe Home” returns to that basement in a tighter, sharper childhood nightmare. “Stone Corners” expands the book’s world through Kelley and Mercury Branscombe, whose supernatural sensitivity turns an old home into a spiritual battleground. The stories often feel like someone telling you what happened late at night, after everyone else has gone quiet.
Cummins’ horror is very physical. Floorboards wobble, doors slam, beetles crawl, shadows gather in corners, and the dead don’t stay politely symbolic. At the same time, the supernatural usually points back to something human: a mother’s fear in “Tearing at Holes,” a town’s buried violence in “Haunting My Hometown,” temptation and bravado in “Blue Harvest,” or grief and music in “Night at the Black Orpheum.” Even when the book goes big, as in “The Day the Ghost Walks,” with Shakespearean theater and old debts among actors, it still comes back to the same question: what do the living owe the dead?
Faith runs through the collection in a direct and sincere way. Scripture, prayer, forgiveness, and spiritual warfare aren’t decorative here. They’re part of how characters understand fear and how they push back against it. That gives stories like “Ghostproof” and “Church of the Holy Spook” a distinctive personality, where the haunted house story and the testimony sit side by side. Cummins also has a fondness for rough-edged, conversational narration, mixing dread with jokes, domestic detail, and working-class memory.
What makes the book engaging is the way it treats ghost stories as something close to home. These aren’t just tales about apparitions. They’re about places that remember, people who can’t quite shake the past, and fear that keeps looking for a door back in. Near the end of the foreword, Cummins writes, “All I really have to do to find one is fall asleep.” That’s the book in one sentence: intimate, haunted, personal, and always listening for something moving in the dark.
Pages: 467 | ASIN : B0FLB6NHNP
Violations of Natural Order
Eros and Order: Love That Creates and Destroys explores the fragile boundary between love and control through literary stories of marriage, obsession, rescue, crime, immigration, and moral consequence. What drew you to the idea of examining love as a creative and destructive force?
Actually, the only story written specifically for this collection is “No Good Deed.” All the others had their independent inspirations, with three of them—“Perfect Girl,” “I Am Zico,” and “The Story of Aunt Jenny”—being derived from actual events. The unity of the collection occurred to me later as I began to assemble the collection from stories I had previously written. Then, finally seeing that the unity of the stories consisted of love’s changeable nature, I wrote “No Good Deed” as a commentary on that theme. The story’s character, Nora, has experienced a lack of normal parental love and, to compensate, has retreated from life into a Gothic cult. She has become so distrustful of what most of us regard as normal life—and love—that she hesitates to recognize it, let alone accept it, when it materializes in the character Ronnie, who is attempting to save her from herself.
The title story has a strong classical sensibility, with ideas of vows, order, betrayal, and consequence. How did classical themes influence the collection?
The ancient Greeks had a keen sense of order, which we shared in a Christianized version from the Middle Ages until it was shattered by the horrors of World War I. The Greeks also recognized that erotic love could, if allowed, challenge and even destroy that order in individuals, even if done unintentionally. Consider the myth of Oedipus, who kills his father and marries his mother, without recognizing their true identities. Nevertheless, a plague descends on Thebes, the city Oedipus rules. And to lift that plague, the double sins that Oedipus has committed must be expiated, which he accomplishes by blinding himself.
Collectively, the stories in Eros and Order deal with violations of natural order: a woman who deserts her husband and young children in the title story, a father who imposes unnatural restrictions on his daughter in “Perfect Girl,” a girl who grows up without parental love in “No Good Deed.” Once the natural order is broken, it must be restored. The fact that the rebalancing does not occur immediately may deceive us into believing that we can escape it, but just as Sandra Patterson eventually learns in “Eros and Order,” we cannot.
A wonderful source for studying the evolutionary history of love in Western culture is C. S. Lewis’s The Allegory of Love (1936).
Several stories explore the danger of confusing love with ownership, rescue, or control. Was there a particular moral question you wanted readers to wrestle with?
Yes, just what constitutes a beneficial, healthy relationship that we can recognize as love? The answer waits at the end of the collection in “The Story of Aunt Jenny,” a folktale about the Underground Railroad in the Mid-Ohio Valley of what became the state of West Virginia. Aunt Jenny risks her own freedom to help other escaped slaves, for West Virginia was still part of Virginia and therefore the Confederacy during most of her lifetime. Her actions are in sharp contrast to those of Sandra Patterson in the story that opens the collection. Sandra seeks complete personal freedom and so abandons her responsibilities to her husband and children. Aunt Jenny risks her personal freedom to help others achieve it.
Ruggiero Bellafatezza, the crime boss father of Serena in “Perfect Girl,” very well illustrates the dangers of attempting to control others as he imposes unnatural restrictions on his daughter’s romantic life for the benefit of his criminal activity by pledging her in marriage to his underboss, Ricky Lanza. Serena rebels by having a different beau for each day of the week in order to flaunt her independence until tragedy results.
“No Good Deed” offers hope while still questioning whether love can truly save someone. What do you think love can realistically offer people in moments of despair?
Well, if nothing else, the collection shows that love has a variable and elusive character, but it can be decisive in saving someone. In “No Good Deed,” Ronnie attempts to do just that for Nora, whom he has just met, despite warnings from his coworkers and quite strongly from Nora herself that he shouldn’t. But he emphasizes to her that to lift herself out of a life that at times has involved homelessness, she must create a change in herself; he can only help her do that. Thus, at the story’s resolution, Nora must decide whether she will try to change, with Ronnie’s help, or remain in her adopted family—a Goth tribal cult. Thus, for love to succeed, it must involve a commitment by both participants.
Author Links: GoodReads | Facebook | Website | Amazon
A teen fashion model who plots revenge against her father for the murder of her lover.
A Detroit factory worker who falls for a Goth girl who warns him not to.
A Moroccan immigrant who dies in the tough streets of Napoli.
A married couple mired in a Babel of their own making.
A folktale about a heroic woman and the Underground Railroad in West Virginia.
¿Me Dolerá el Corte de Pelo?
¿Me Dolerá el Corte de Pelo? narra la historia de un niño que le tiene pánico a cortarse el pelo e imagina todas las maneras posibles en que podría dolerle: desde vendas y puntos hasta picaduras de abeja, moretones y tirones dolorosos. A través de una conversación amena con su madre, el niño poco a poco deja atrás el miedo y la resistencia para dar paso a la curiosidad, fijándose en las divertidas sillas de la peluquería, los amables estilistas y el hecho de que nadie parece estar llorando. Al final, el corte de pelo deja de ser una amenaza para convertirse en un valiente primer paso.
Me pareció que la lógica emocional de este libro infantil reflejaba con gran fidelidad la forma de pensar de los niños pequeños. Los miedos del niño no son tanto «tontos» como vívidos y sinceros; y agradecí que la historia permitiera que esas preocupaciones ocuparan su espacio antes de ofrecer consuelo. Como padre, reconocí al instante esa espiral de asociaciones: las tijeras significan cortes, el zumbido significa abejas, el tirón de pelo significa dolor. La escritura es sencilla, repetitiva e infantil, un estilo que funciona a la perfección porque refleja la ansiedad dando vueltas una y otra vez en torno a la misma pregunta.
Las ilustraciones tienen un estilo artesanal, como si fueran hechas con crayones y lápices, lo que le da al libro una sensación íntima. Las expresiones de preocupación del niño, el cabello alborotado, las heridas imaginarias y las escenas en la peluquería se sienten inmediatas y personales. Algunos dibujos son divertidos de una manera peculiar y memorable, especialmente las escenas con cabellos exagerados y las imágenes de la maquinilla de afeitar. Las ideas cobran mayor fuerza cuando el libro se mantiene cerca del mundo interior del niño, donde los objetos cotidianos pueden volverse enormes y aterradores, para luego encogerse lentamente una vez que un adulto cariñoso les ayuda a ponerles nombre.
Me pareció que ¿Me Dolerá el Corte de Pelo? es un tierno libro ilustrado sobre el miedo, la imaginación y la paciencia que los niños necesitan al enfrentarse a algo desconocido. No presiona al niño para que sea valiente de inmediato —algo que me gustó—, y su calidez emana precisamente de ese desarrollo paciente de la historia. Lo recomendaría a niños de preescolar y de los primeros años de primaria que se sientan nerviosos ante los cortes de pelo, las visitas al médico, el aseo personal o cualquier nueva experiencia sensorial; especialmente si se lo lee un padre o una madre que pueda hacer pausas para conversar sobre cada temor con delicadeza.
Pages: 35 | ASIN : B0D49KCH5P
An Imprint of Evil and Other Hauntings
Stephen Tallevi’s An Imprint of Evil and Other Hauntings is a compact collection of ten horror stories built around cursed objects, old sins, hungry gods, occult bargains, and people who make one terrible choice too many. The book has the feel of classic ghost and weird fiction, with each story rooted in a specific time and place, from Manchester in 1831 to the Florida Keys in 1964, Chicago in 1905, and Muskoka Lakes in 1929. That historical spread gives the collection a pleasing variety, while the tone stays consistent: polished, eerie, and quietly wicked.
I enjoyed how often the horror grows out of desire. Mary’s longing in “Love is Blind,” George’s greed in “Pearly Whites,” Cathers’s ambition in “The Death God,” and the community’s bargain in “The Barn” all lead characters into darkness with their eyes wide open. These aren’t random hauntings so much as moral traps. Tallevi has a knack for letting people talk themselves into the unforgivable, then watching the supernatural world meet them halfway.
The stories also move at a brisk, readable pace. Most begin with a familiar situation, such as a reunion, an expedition, a country visit, a carnival, or a marriage under strain, and then tighten the screws until the final turn lands. “Idol of the Deep” is especially effective as an adventure story that slowly becomes something stranger and more fatal, while “Hands of Fate” adds a detective-story rhythm to the collection. The line “There is no death god in this cave, only death” captures the book’s taste for irony, where the supernatural and human cruelty often blur into one another.
Tallevi’s best moments come when he lets a simple image do the work: a wax doll, a black idol, stained hands, a scarecrow in a storm, a barn door that won’t open. The prose is clear and atmospheric without getting bogged down, and the collection has a campfire-story quality that makes it easy to keep turning pages. Even the brief “Summer Blood” has a playful bite. That story’s mix of menace and dark humor showcases the author’s personality.
An Imprint of Evil and Other Hauntings is an entertaining horror collection with a strong affection for old-school supernatural storytelling. It’s full of cursed inheritances, cruel bargains, and endings that snap shut like a trap. Readers who enjoy concise, atmospheric tales with a macabre sense of justice will find a lot to enjoy here, especially in the way Tallevi turns ordinary human weakness into something ghostly, grotesque, and strangely satisfying.
Pages: 132 | ASIN : B0G5LVNKF6
Depths of Introspection
Honor: A Sci-Fi & Fantasy Anthology gathers twenty-two independent authors together in one project. What was the most rewarding part of building a collaborative collection like this?
It was really rewarding seeing how twenty-two different authors interpreted the theme of honor in such wildly different ways across sci-fi and fantasy stories, with their own styles and voices. Not to mention, the authors have our own group where we’ve been able to connect and grow together over time, bouncing ideas and strategies off of each other. It really grew into something quite sweet.
The editor’s note describes honor as “a multifaceted and beautiful enigma.” What aspects of honor interested you most while assembling the collection?
I was most interested in the gray areas of honor—where personal obligation clashes with societal expectation. It’s where the best conflict comes from. And I was most curious about how the other authors would formulate their narratives.
The range of settings is enormous, from grounded fantasy landscapes to distant planets and political sci-fi. How did you balance tonal variety while keeping the anthology emotionally cohesive?
Even if the setting is a distant planet, the core emotion—the struggle with honor—is universal, which ties everything together. I think with the theme being so interesting, it required depths of introspection by each of the authors that made all of us dive into the emotional side.
The anthology also features original art throughout. How did the visual element shape the reading experience, and how did you work with the artists to capture the tone of individual stories?
We really did work with some great artists for this anthology. I gave the artists specific emotional beats or imagery from specific stories to capture, rather than just a scene description. I thought it made the visual elements feel integrated, not just decorative.
Author Links: GoodReads | X (Twitter) | Facebook | Website | Amazon
ALL FOR HONOR!
Honor is an exciting new anthology from Golden Griffin Press, featuring twenty-two SF&F authors. Each of them is a rising star in independent publishing in their own right, but we brought them all together to create this beautiful anthology.
Clocking in at nearly 200,000 words, Honor is packed to the brim with 22 new SF&F stories for readers to enjoy and maybe even discover a new favorite author–or twenty-two!
Not to mention we hired some amazing artists to fill this anthology with awe-inspiring sci-fi and fantasy art!
