New Melange Author Glenn Parkhurst

Lets welcome a new author to Melange Books family!!
As with every author, they each have their own story and what brought them to Melange.
As well as upcoming stories, let's see what Glenn tells us about himself. :)

Welcome Glenn!

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Hard to believe that I began by writing poetry, some pretty bad. As a school student, I always believed grammar was the first part of a cinnamony cracker that was often used with chocolate and marshmallow. It got worse in high school. So where did writing come from? 

Back in 1997 my sister, Linda, was in the final stages of her battle with cancer. I dealt with it by writing poems, brother and sister poems, goodbye poems, I love you poems. After her death, I kept writing, some for her, some for me, and some just as a release. 

In 2000, as a way to try to pay back to society for a misspent youth, I quit my job, sold all I had, and made a trip to every state in the United States and did volunteer work, spending several days working as a cook, a cleaner, a repairman, and a baby sitter. As I traveled, I kept notes, determined to write a book about the trip. I wrote the book and with the help of Marie Shelly, I re-learned grammar and more. But being a novice, I didn’t understand that you get the publishing contract first for non-fiction, so the book sits.

Even as I wrote the first, an idea for fiction came to me. After the completion of the trip and the first book, I wrote a second, my first fiction attempt. The book was about John Barnes, a manager of security at a nuclear weapons plant, who crosses paths with terrorist. This thriller winds its way through several countries and contains multiple characters. You can read chapter one on my blog, graytale.blogspot.com.

In the midst of all this, I wrote a true but embellished humor story about a hunting trip gone wrong. I sent it to Outdoor Life. They bought it immediately. This will be easy, I thought. I continued to write both serious fiction and humor. I have links on my blog for much of my short humor. It took 9 years to sell another story. 

I managed two at once, short stories, Christmas themes. These stories can be found at Melange included in ChristmasCollectibles. Six months later I sold my first full length fiction novel Bled Out (see all the wonderful reviews on Amazon).  Bled Out is a supernatural thriller about my hero Ken Arthur who gets an assignment from God to stop an unearthly plague. Without direction or help, Ken starts out. Soon he is broke, tired, and hungry. When a pint of blood he sells for food money, cures a patient in the middle of an operation, the hunt is on. Ken for his plague carrier, the world for Ken.   Currently, I am pushing 2 novels, one supernatural thriller that I use a hero afflicted with Downs and the first book I wrote mentioned above. 

I use Facebook phurstone@msn.com for friends and graytale@gmail.com for my writing fans and my blog Graytale.blogspot.com as an avenue to do free writing where I start a story and post a few pages a day. My fans follow along and comment on spelling and grammar. They also offer other advice as I write not knowing where the story will lead or how long it goes. 

My website laughathorror.com is one place in addition to my blog where interested readers can find links to my writing, both humor and thrillers. I also have written romance and some sci-fi.