Five Tales from the Workshop at the End of the World with Kris 'n' Dean

Professionally published writer Alistair Ainscott presents five tales of mystery and the fantastic: Trinity of the Sands, Season of Black, The Ferro-Erotic Roaches of Kiki, Captain Disaster and the Twin Terrors of Unholy Matrimony, and The Thriller Writer's Workshop, interspersed with essays on writing, including How to Write Literary Masterpieces of Sheer Gilded Genius by Dumpster Diving.

These stories were all penned in the context of the Short Story workshop taught by award-winning professional writers and editors Kristine Kathryn Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith. The workshop was held in Lincoln City, Oregon, which is as about far west as you can go in the continental United States without dropping off into the abyss of the Pacific Ocean.

Call it the workshop at the end of the word.

The collection includes the assignments that prompted each story, and short non-fiction essays on the craft of writing that comment on some of the things that Kris and Dean said that resonated with me. From tales about one man's quest to atone for nuclear holocaust, aliens with bizarre sensory perceptions, a superhero who drives a rusted-out International Harvester Scout and saves a solo Dad from the clutches of his own twin toddlers, and a tale of a thriller writer's workshop gone very, very wrong-- every story touches on elements of mystery and the fantastic.

The collection also features an excerpt from the novel "The Flies Dropped Dead."

Professionally published writer Alistair Ainscott writes tales of science gone haywire, men gone mad, oddballs gone even odder, twin toddlers run amok, cats doing the things that cats are given to do, and other nefarious goings-on of the mysterious and the unknown.

His fiction has appeared in the professional-paying Penumbra magazine of speculative fiction from Musa Publishing, and he has also studied short fiction with Kristine Kathryn Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith.

* For more information about his work, visit alistairainscott dot wordpress dot com.

If you liked this book, you might also like these other stories by Alistair Ainscott:
* The Flies Dropped Dead : A Short Novel
* Occupy Stinking America
* Why Oranges Are Apples
* Tailor Maidens
* Maiden Voyage of the Pink Plastic Ponies
* Assailing the Void