Updates and New Release/Contest

Okay, I think I'm getting organized...ish. I'll have new blog installments up Wednesday and Friday. Meanwhile, The Jasper Soul is available now!


The Jasper Soul Pride Pub

The Jasper Soul Amazon

The Jasper Soul Barnes and Noble

An ancient evil stalks the earth, seeking to finish what it started…

Matt Callaghan is pretty sure he’s just an average guy. His tragic past haunts him, and the only comfort he finds is something he’s not willing to explain to anyone else. The jasper stone he found as a child had been with him for over half his life, and he can’t be parted from it.

There’s more to the stone than Matt knows. Thousands of years ago, one man, the last of his people, was cast into the stone, his soul protected when his body could not be saved.

The evil that hunted him is still alive, still waiting for a chance to destroy the jasper stone.

I'd add the cover image but Blogger isn't letting me >:(

If you'd like a chance at winning an e-copy of The Jasper Soul, comment below with preferred format, ePub, Mobi, PDF. I'll choose winners on Friday evening! Good luck! 

Sneak Peek at more of The Jasper Soul

I promised another excerpt, but I don't want to give away too much for those who haven't read the blog story. Maybe this bit will entice y'all to give the story a chance :D This is also an example of the two different POVs. There's a reason one's 1st person and one isn't; it worked for me with the characters and the situations they were in.

Anyway! I hope y'all enjoy this peek at The Jasper Soul.

Copyright 2019
Bailey Bradford

Chapter Ten

So close. So close and yet…And yet he didn’t know whether he was relieved or disappointed. He’d been held in stasis, enclosed in the jasper, for so long he wasn’t even certain who he was anymore. Or if he was even real.

But there’d been a pull, a tug he couldn’t resist, and he’d been yanked from the stone. It had been incredibly painful and terrifying. He had no idea why, or what had happened, except the next moment, he was standing, staring at a man, unable to look away from him.

Vaguely aware of the music, he continued to wait, watch, held in place by some unnamed force. He wasn’t exactly whole, yet he was…something, something real enough to hold up clothes that were on him, something realenough to draw attention of other men.

But not the man he wanted to see him.

Until someone pointed, and as badly as he wanted to stay, to meet the guy calling to him, he had to turn around. His body—what there was of it—was not his own.

If he could have stayed there in that alley, and let himself be bared to the man, would he have?

It was a question he would never have an answer to. The jasper encased him before he could do more than wonder what was happening.

 **********************************************************************

I think I passed out. That wasn’t something I was admitting to anyone, either. I remember chasing the guy in the hoodie, and the particular feeling that I had to see him, to speak to him. Then there was the whole weird thing with me not being able to catch him when I should have done just that.

After that, the alley, shivers racing over me, goosebumps as I reached for him—

I sat up in the alley and rubbed the back of my head. It ached, but there was only a small knot. The fact that I was, or had been, lying in an alley? Good God on speed, that’s disgusting!

After I scrambled to my feet, I immediately regretted moving so fast. I was dizzy. Without really thinking about it, I reached for the stone in my pocket.

It wasn’t there.

“No, no, no,” I muttered, more panicked than ever as I shoved my hands into my pockets. “No, no—”

I don’t know how I found it. Someone must have flashed a light somewhere—maybe a headlight?—and the stone picked it up just enough to sparkle.

“Oh, thank God,” I said as I grabbed it. I clasped it hard and held it to my chest. Weird, but whatever.I couldn’t lose the stone. “No more of that.” It didn’t matter who or what I was talking to. More than anything, I just needed to hear my own voice. No one else was going to pop in and say, “Wow, Matt! I am glad you found that stone!”

Snorting, I put the jasper back in my front right jeans pocket. “No more escaping on me.” I left the alley, noticing that I didn’t feel like I’d hit the ground back there. A touch to the back of my head and I could tell the knot was almost gone.

Maybe having hallucinations wasn’t a bad thing if they came with rapid healing? Or was I hallucinating that I was injured, or healing, or…

Too much to think about. The sidewalk wasn’t crowded now that I was off Sixth Street. In fact, I didn’t see anyone else around. My phone was still in my back pocket, but when I took it out—well, what would you expect would happen to an iPhone not in a case if you fell on it? Yeah, it was wrecked.

“Great.” That’d make getting hold of my friends or calling for an Uber difficult. I’d just have to hoof it back to the club. It really wasn’t far.

But the heat and humidity grew more oppressive and I felt more and more uncomfortable, until I was almost certain someone was watching me, maybe even following me. I kept looking back and never saw anyone. It didn’t make any difference. The sensation only grew stronger.

Fuck it.I wasn’t made to be some brave, dashing, selfless hero. I took off running, knowing if I hit Sixth Street, I’d probably be safe.

I made it there, and back to the club, where I found Artie and the others. When they asked me about the mystery man, I just told them I hadn’t been able to find him.

But the rest of the evening, I couldn’t shake the feeling of being watched by something bad, evil. I don’t know. Maybe it was a portent. All I did know was danger seemed to be hovering around me and I didn’t have a clue as to why.

Cover Art/Blurb/Excerpt for The Jasper Soul

I don't know if y'all remember the blog story I was working on when the death-knell of my marriage sounded, and before I left him for the last time. It was the fall of 2016, I was working on The Jasper Soul. I concluded the final climactic scene, but I didn't finish the story and give the guys their HEA.

I finally got that done, and I changed Aklink to Andulin (mainly because I kept hearing "Boom, boom, ack-a-lacka-lacka-lacka courtesy of Was Not Was every time I tried to finish writing the story. My mind...can be an odd, odd place). Pride-Pub has made a pretty cover for the book, and it'll be released soon!

This is also the first story I've written that is in 1st person POV, or partially in it. I'm excited for it to hit the presses :D

Available Feb. 26th at Pride-publishing: https://www.pride-publishing.com/book/the-jasper-soul
and April 9th at all third-party retailers :D

An ancient evil stalks the earth, seeking to finish what it started…

Matt Callaghan is pretty sure he’s just an average guy. His tragic past haunts him, and the only comfort he finds is something he’s not willing to explain to anyone else. The jasper stone he found as a child had been with him for over half his life, and he can’t be parted from it. 

There’s more to the stone than Matt knows. Thousands of years ago, one man, the last of his people, was cast into the stone, his soul protected when his body could not be saved.

The evil that hunted him is still alive, still waiting for a chance to destroy the jasper stone.

Reader advisory: This book contains scenes of violence and physical assault.

General Release Date: 9th April 2019

Excerpt:

Rocks have always fascinated me. When I was a kid, I wanted to grow up to be a geologist. Every time I found a rock that interested me, I’d pick it up and take it home, then crack that sucker open with a hammer as soon as I got the chance. Despite a few injuries—I’ve got a couple of small scars on my cheeks and one on my chin from rock chips flying off as I banged away—I never stopped doing it.
But I didn’t become a geologist, or even go to college. Life happens, as the saying goes. That’s never used as a positive statement. It always indicates a rough or bad time in someone’s life, which was true for me. I had neither the money nor the grades to get into a decent college, and it seemed like too much work, when I’d stopped dreaming of a better life.
I didn’t want to go there right then. Instead, I just wanted to sit in the early morning sunlight streaming through the breakfast nook window and study the one rock I’d never been tempted to break.
Holding the piece of jasper up to the sun made the greens and golds shine brilliantly. That stone always seemed to pulse with some kind of mystic energy. I know that’s crazy, and it’s just a piece of jasper polished from hundreds, no, thousands, of years on this planet. That I found it in the first place was stupendous luck.
I’ll never forget it. Me, Timmy and Erin had been best friends practically since birth. I was just beginning to suspect I wasn’t quite like them. All their talk of girls and what they wanted to do with a girlfriend if they ever got so lucky as to have one left me cold and, to be honest, a little queasy. It was nothing for them to throw around words like ‘queer’ and ‘faggot’ as insults. I was guilty of it, too. Maybe more so than them, because I was afraid of things I just didn’t understand, and I didn’t want to examine why I was confused about stuff like not finding girls attractive. Our church was a small one, all hell-fire and brimstone. Honestly, I never understood how anyone was ever going to make it into Heaven. It sounded like an impossible task, even with Jesus interceding for us.
Well, I’m rambling off-course. I couldn’t tell my friends what I suspected, even though we’d been best buddies all our lives. There was too much hatred when they said those words and though I tried to emulate them to defer suspicion, it only worked for so long.
That wasn’t what I wanted to remember today. I focused on the stone, the smooth, warm surface of it. Sometimes I fantasized that it was an ancient, sacred relic. Really, it was just an oval, smoothed over by the river and rocks where I’d found it. It held a glow that made it look polished, and who knew? Maybe someone had tossed the stone in the river not long before I found it. That was the most likely scenario.
Even so, I’d kept the stone a secret. When Timmy and Erin and I were out hiking in the wild of the beautiful Texas Hill Country, camping out for a few days because our folks figured we were old enough to do that then, we talked mostly about girls and sex and, of course, jerking off. I’d heard stories about boys doing that together all the time but still being straight. There was none of that for us. No one was going to whip out his dick and start stroking it around the other two. If masturbating was going to get us sent to Hell, then doing it with another guy—or two—would probably have gotten us the worst level of Hell.
It was our second day out, and the heat was getting to us. The river wasn’t too deep, the current not very strong. There were some rapids that were fun to go over in inner tubes but not so much on just our ass.
We didn’t care. We were kids, hot and excited about playing in the water. We stripped to our briefs and jumped in. We had to watch out for cottonmouths and such. There was nothing quite like shooting down rapids and having a snake zip along with us. Talk about water pollution. We caused many cases of it when someone pissed themselves in fear, and rightly so. Cottonmouths could be deadly if they got enough venom in someone.
Timmy hit the rapids and yee-hawed at first, then screeched that there was a snake and Erin and I were scrambling to our feet in a rush. Timmy’s blond hair was almost white, and so was his normally tan face when he shot out of the river, clawing at the bank and dragging himself up onto dry land. He was a mess of scratches, but Erin and I weren’t in much better shape. Both of us lost our footing and went down the rapids ass over teakettle, bumping and half-drowning ourselves in our stupidity.
As I grabbed for something to hold on to, my head under water, body bent like God only knew what, I opened my eyes. In that second, everything slowed. I saw the jasper stone, sunlight hitting it through the water. The beauty of it, the perfect shape, the colors—I couldn’t worry about dying just then. I snatched that rock up and before I knew what was when, I was standing up and walking to the riverbank, where Erin and Timmy lay panting.
I was bruised and scratched, but I felt calm, not breathless or fearful. I tucked the rock into my briefs, and I don’t know why I did that. I never told them about the jasper. I never told anyone and when the trailer I grew up in caught fire, the dryer having overheated and lit a shirt that had fallen behind it, the only thing I grabbed was that stone.

Stay tuned for an additional excerpt this week! 

Friday Inspiration

Thank y'all for the birthday wishes. <3

I will have an installment up tomorrow, but for today, while I'm doing edits on The Jasper Soul for Pride, I could use some inspiration, so of course it's time to share!

Photo by Scorpio Creative on Unsplash

Photo by Ol Klein on Unsplash

Photo by Darcy Delia from Pexels

Photo by VINICIUS COSTA from Pexels