“The Wallace House of Pain” Short-Listed for a CIBA Award

My novelette The Wallace House of Pain has made it onto the “short list” for the 2023 Shorts Book Awards competition sponsored by Chanticleer International Book Awards (CIBA). “Shorts” encompass short stories, essays, novelettes, novellas and short story collections.

From here, finalists are named, and then the winners will be chosen.

About The Wallace House of Pain

This 45-minute read offers “a great study in character and relationships” according to book review blog A Little Book Problem. An Amazon reviewer wrote that the story is “Disheartening. Familiar. It will ring true to many. Subtext and subtleties that keep you thinking.”

But my favorite feedback is from a Gen X-er who thanked me for writing the story because it struck home for them. (See that review on Amazon.)

The Wallace House of Pain is available in ebook and paperback formats on Amazon and Bookshop.org. Libraries and bookstores: it is also available through Ingram.

What is Chanticleer? (CIBA)

In their words, “The Chanticleer International Book Awards program discovers today’s best works. The Short Story Awards discover the Best New Shorts in Fiction and Narrative Non-Fiction.” The CIBA program was started 13 years ago and is going strong today.

Sneak Preview

Xander, Terrance, Sunny, Jess, Charley and Buwan, who you’ll meet in The Wallace House of Pain, are also the main characters in my forthcoming, full-length novel Beautiful and Terrible Things. Black Rose Writing will publish Beautiful and Terrible Things in July 2024.

So if you like The Wallace House of Pain and want to spend more time with the characters, watch for the Beautiful and Terrible Things release. The novelette, by the way, is not an excerpt of the full novel. There is no overlap between the content of the two works.

To be notified when Beautiful and Terrible Things is available, sign up on the right to receive my very occasional e-newsletter.