Guest Blog with J.E. Cammon

Precious Mettle

Hello everyone, and thank you for stopping in. Firstly, I want to thank Roxanne for letting me come by and write words; the more I learn about the industry, the less I take for granted, and opportunities like this are rare.

It’s funny what the mind chooses to keep sometimes, how its substance determines its character. I remember vocally musing in the computer room years ago with my roommates. The computer room is what we called the space where we crowded our machines together and communally gamed like madmen. Roommates is what I was blessed to call my best friends back then. None of us had yet to graduate, them with their technology degrees and me with my literature, so we all delved with equal veracity into the nooks and crannies of our desks for the dusty piles of copper and nickel when it was time for a food run. But I remember thinking how things would change for them when they started making their sizable salaries. I remember wishing out loud that my future had as nice and defined a road.

“You’re lucky,” one of them said in argument, “all you have to do is write one good book, and you’re set.” And I know that he doesn’t remember saying it, and I guess it’s a bit foolish for me to have held onto to such a flippant sentiment, tossed over a shoulder haphazardly as it was. But I did.

I guess I’ll learn if the statement was even true, but whatever it is revealed to be, its simple conviction affected the fire which forged my thoughts. There were other things said to me over the years which I kept, too, “You write well enough to do this for a living,” and “You just need to decide what to write, and you’ll be fine.” I stamped these into the precious metals and hung them on nails hammered into my synapses. In the night when I dreamed, the little electric currents skipped across that iron and made the words glow, back lighting my fantasies and my terrors.

I’m happy that this is my first release, a narrative treatise on friendship and trust, and all the ugly, hopeful things that people allow others to burden them with. I’m happy because it is friends, and it is friendship that has gotten me this far. Were I living under a rock, never having met any of the amazing people I know, it’s likely that I would still think about stories, but I probably wouldn’t have bothered writing any of them down, toiling over them line by line, hammering and smoothing them until the reader knew what I felt.

So here’s a blurb from a novel dedicated to friends, my release Where Shadows Lie: Bay City. I hope you read it, and find at least some of the good and true left there for you.

“A star fall's light briefly uncovers the obdurate mask of evening over a world that looks suspiciously like our own. What it illuminates is the underbelly of an eastern US seaport, and the creatures hiding beneath in an effort to understand, belong, and simply exist. Who is David, and why is he so far away from his clan? Before Nick, his only friend was a vampire named Jarvis, however Nick's only gift seems to be a curse: to bring change wherever he goes, so maybe he isn’t much of a friend.

“Where the three disparate souls find secrets, and answers to their questions, they also find a volume of yet more mysteries and it's possible that by story's end, all of them will have wished they hadn't been present on the evening when everything changed irrevocably forever. Is it worth trading everything to the darkness to know anything? After all, shadows lie, but what's a supernatural creature to do when where shadows lie is home?”