Celebrate MLB’s Opening Day with a Baseball Short Story!

Greetings! Today is the day baseball fans have been waiting for: Opening Day! As a huge baseball fan, I’m stoked to watch my Cubbies get back in action (sure, we had the two games in Japan last week, but now baseball will be back for good). To celebrate the occasion, I’m publishing a Redux version of my 2018 baseball tale, “Scapegoat”, initially penned under the pseudonym Neal Vandar. It was only available as a free PDF in the past, but as of today, it’s now available on all Amazon markets on Kindle at the low price of $0.99 US / $1.42 CAD. I hadn’t read it since I first wrote it in 2018. Not to toot my own horn, but I’m just as proud of it now as when I wrote it. In fact, I’d say “Scapegoat” is one of my Top 3 best short stories. I polished it a bit and gave it a brand-new cover from a photo taken by yours truly at Chicago’s Wrigley Field. And it’s not just for baseball fans; I can promise you that even if you don’t know anything/or don’t care about baseball, if you like suspenseful time travel tales, then you’ll get a kick out of it. Here’s the official synopsis:

SCAPEGOAT is a short fantasy tale about baseball, the curse of the Cubs, time travel, and a whole lot of nostalgia. Sam Burke is a die-hard Chicago Cubs fan. He has a special gift—or curse—depending on how one looks at it. If he concentrates hard enough and if the circumstances are just right, he can time-shift to transport himself to a different time and location for a few brief moments. More often than not, he fails and nothing happens. One afternoon at Wrigley Field, he attempts to time-shift to a fateful Cubs game in October 2003. To his surprise, he succeeds, but something goes wrong and he seems to be stuck there. He’ll soon realize that he’s in way over his head after he tries to change History. Will Sam be able to fix things and return to his own timeline?

You can purchase it through this link on Amazon.com for folks in the U.S.

Or you can pick it up via this link on Amazon.ca for my fellow Canuck readers.

Enjoy “Scapegoat” and the 2025 baseball season! I’ll keep you posted in the weeks to come on more updates about my sci-fi short story, “Anomaly”, including some artwork reveal. Until next time, happy reading! 

And Now for Something Completely Different!

AMOK THE POWERFUL has been out for three months already. Have you purchased your copy yet? If you’re into cinematic, dialogue-driven Sword & Sorcery tales with no extra fat, then this is the book for you. You can scroll down to the previous blog entries to read the book’s synopsis or if you want to jump in right away, you can download the entire first episode of the book as a 30-page PDF right here. Or if listening to audiobooks is more your thing, then you can head over to YouTube to listen to me do a live reading of the first episode. The book is available exclusively through Amazon on Kindle and in print. Again, scroll to the previous posts for all the links to buy.

And now for something completely different! I’ve had an idea for a cool sci-fi short story ever since last summer but wanted to be done writing and promoting Amok to give it my full attention. I jotted down a plan for it back in January, including a short outline with detailed character bios and got started writing last weekend. The story is titled ANOMALY and is about a recon ship on a mission to salvage a vessel on an expedition to collect samples that’s crashed on an ice planet. I won’t divulge any more for the time being, but I’m hoping to be done writing it by early May to make it available as a Kindle tale on Amazon. It’ll most likely be within the 30 to 40-page range. It’s strongly inspired by the Alien and The Thing films, so fans of those movies will get a kick out of it. This will be my first published sci-fi story; I’d begun writing a sci-fi novel in 2010 but lost inspiration for it, abandoning it for good after several months of hitting a wall and 60-something pages penned.

That’s it for me. I’ll keep you posted as ANOMALY progresses in the weeks to come and I’ll reveal the cover art for it at some point. Until next time, happy reading and Long Live Amok!