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Hunterdon Library Short Story Competition Entry: God’s Teeth (Excerpt and Full Audio Edition)
I'm entering a short story competition for the first time in many years. It's being held by the Hunterdon Libary System (LINK HERE), primarly through the main branch where I conduct workshops. I also run an adult writers group at the Clinton, NJ, branch. I don’t think it’s appropriate to share more than an excerpt before the competition (and I’m honstly not invested in winning – this is just me doing something I haven’t done since my 40s or earlier). You CAN listen to the audio version at the link above.
It’s called ‘God’s Teeth,’ and it’s about a woman who’d had a lifelong belief in God, only to see it shaken after the death of her husband. It’s one of my favorite stories, and I hope you’ll enjoy it. Once the contest is over in November I’ll offer the entire piece.
GOD’S TEETH
Miriam had always believed in God. His presence in her life had been a fact since she was a small child barely able to speak. She remembered looking up from her crib—she could not have been more than a year old—and seeing his face shimmering in front of her as he looked down and smiled, showing his magnificent teeth. She’d made the mistake of telling a friend about it once in high school, and the girl had laughed at her, saying it was her dad or her uncle or big brother she’d seen. There could be no other explanation. Miriam said, No, it was God, and her friend asked how she would know the difference when she was only a baby then.
“I just knew,” she said. “I knew my father’s face, and my uncle’s face and my brother’s face, and this was not it. This was bright and . . . what’s the word? . . . luminous, self-luminous, illuminating. It made its own light, his face, and the smile was so big I was part of it, like it covered me, and I reached up —”
“This is pretty detailed for a baby’s dream,” the friend said.
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For Your Listening Pleasure – Eleven Reader App Offers a Library of Sound (Including Mine!)
See my profile on the Eleven Reader App
I’ve been using Eleven Labs to create audio editions of my blog posts, articles, and some fiction for the past several years. I also use it as the platform for my own Wondervox venture, offering AI/synthetic audio production for clients who want that.
Before going further … I embrace technology. I consider AI a tool that can be used to make my work less time-consuming, and to make my writing available to more people. I always wonder: how many people who criticize, if not hate, AI have insisted on using taxis instead of Uber or Lyft because of the toll those services took on taxi drivers and their families? How many of us refuse to use self-checkout because of the toll it has taken on cashiers? There are dozens of ways in which we take advantage of changing technology because of the convenience it provides us. As an author and artist, I personally do not consider what I do to be of some higher-level than the rest of humanity. A taxi driver or cashier is every bit as valuable as I am, and whatever my creative endeavors are. Writers are not special, as much as we like to think we are.
As another practical matter, I cannot afford to hire human narrators for everything I write. I’ve hired several over the past 15 years and paid them, sometimes substantially. I simply can’t do that anymore. I also can’t hire graphic artists to do book covers, let alone the flow of images I use on my websites. So the idea that I’m putting anyone out of work when I could not have hired them anyway is just not a strong argument.
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Workshop Survey: Which 2-Hour Workshops Would You Be Interested In?
I’m inviting people to let me know which workshops they might be interested in taking, then I’ll arrange them online via Zoom, or in person. I have a wonderful workshop space available to me in Lambertville, and I’m more than happy to offer these in other venues (libraries, private spaces, and even homes!). If you’re interested in one or more workshops, just fill out the survey, provide your name and email, and look for something as soon as October. – Mark
Fiction Writing Essentials
They’re Alive! Creating Vivid Characters
Self-Publshing with KDP (Kindle Direct Publshing)
2-Hour Autobiographical Journaling Introduction -
One Thing or Another: Life, Aging, and the Absurdities Of It All – Found At Sea
I’m currently updating these columns to publish as a 2nd edition this year, as a handout for my autobiographical journaling participants. They can all relate.
By Mark McNease
While I’ve always been a river person much more than an ocean person, my fondness for large bodies of water remains. Humans seem to share this, or at least many of us. There’s something about water … Is it where we came from? Does it remind us of the first nine months of our lives? We’ll be going on another cruise soon, and my favorite part of it is always the sea days. Someday I’ll be as the drop of water returning to an infinite vastness of it. Until then, I’ll be drawn to the streams and the lakes and the rivers and the oceans.
BODIES OF WATER HOLD A fascination for many people, as well as providing an indescribable comfort. I grew up in an Indiana town with two rivers, and I live just a mile from the magnificent Delaware flowing slowly between New Jersey and Pennsylvania. For me there has always been something about the movement of these vast waterways that felt like home, as if I really am a fish out of water longing to jump back in where I belong and swim away.
Oceans are like that, too, multiplied a million times. Oceans are adventures without end, journeys we can only take with our minds. Even if we sail out on them in boats or cruise ships, they’re so much bigger than we are that it makes us aware of our true size. Oceans and rivers, lakes, and even streams, cannot be argued with. They are the masters of us, not us of them, and their indifference is acute. An ocean doesn’t care what I think about world events or political developments, loves lost or triumphs enjoyed. Like its celestial counterpart spread across the night sky in a trillion tiny lights, it doesn’t even know I’m alive, reminding me that I needn’t be so consumed with own existence. I’m here. So what? I’ll twinkle like a star, leap like a fish in the shallows, break like a wave, and then I’ll go away. I think of that as peaceful, not sad.
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The Twist Podcast #303: Vacation’s a Drag, Cracker Barrel Crack Up, and Emma Zoe Lyons Reviews ‘Coming Out Under Fire’
Join co-hosts Mark McNease and Rick Rose in this post-Provincetown recap. We talk drag, the Cracker Barrel uproar nobody cared about, and enoy another great review from Emma Zoe Lyons.
This week’s survey: Which animal friend would you most like to share your life with or already do? Mulitple answers okay.
CatsBirdsFishI don’t like animalsOther (list below):Which animal not listed would you like to share your life with or already do? -
Exploring Literary Genres: Horror, Mystery, Thriller, Biography, and Autobiography
Narration provided by Wondervox.
By Mark McNease
I’ve written in several genres, formats and mediums over the years. Each has its own requirements, expectations and parameters: short stories, novellas (generally under 40,000 words), novels, poetry, screenplays, television scripts, and stage plays. For now let’s focus on some working definitions for genre fiction, nonfiction, and biography/autobiography.
For that past 15 years I’ve written primarily mysteries, thrillers, and some horror/supernatural fiction. I’ve also written countless blog posts, columns and articles, but that’s for another day and would require more words than most people want to read on this, so let’s narrow it down. Note that a lot of these apply to the genres in any form: movies, stories, TV shows, books and more.
Horror
Horror is designed to evoke fear, dread, and a sense of the uncanny. Horror as a literary and cinematic form explores the boundaries between safety and danger, reality and the supernatural. There are also degrees of horror, from the everyday to the gruesome, from blood splatter to something simple but startling. We can be horrified without being repulsed.
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NEW! Three Online Workshops in October
FICTION WRITING ESSENTIALS
Thursday, October 2 10:00 AM – 12:00 PM Via Zoom
REGISTER HERE: 2 Hour Fiction Writing Essentials October 2 | October 02, 2025THEY’RE ALIVE! CREATING REALISTIC CHARACTERS
Thursday, October 9 10:00 AM – 12:00 PM Via Zoom
REGISTER HERE Character Creation: They’re Alive! Creating Realistic Characters | October 09, 2025SELF-PUBLISHING WITH KDP (KINDLE DIRECT PUBLISHING)
Thursday, October 16 10:00 AM – 12:00 PM Via Zoom
REGISTER HERE 2 Hour Self-Publishing Workshop (with KDP / Kindle Direct Publishing) (copy) | October 16, 2025 -
The Dreaded Writer’s Block: Definitions and Strategies
Narration provided by Wondervox
By Mark McNease
I’ve always had a stubborn refusal to admit experiencing this dreaded thing called writer’s block. I worry that confessing to it reveals a certain creative weakness, even though I know that’s not the case at all. It sounds too much like a wall, or some obstacle I can’t overcome. I’ve preferred to use words like “stuck” to refer to the state I find myself in when I can’t get past the next plot point, or figure out where to take a story, or what the central building blocks are of something I’m writing.
At the same time, when I take out my trusty egg timer, set it to 45 minutes and start typing, something always comes out. It could be the outline of a next chapter, or story notes, or even working on a character biography in an attempt to understand why someone is killed in service to the story, and who killed them! Lately that’s been one of my biggest problems: until the last couple of books I always knew who the killer was and why the murder was committed. Now I find myself repeatedly stuck. But is this a self-fulfilling prophecy? Am I unable to move forward because I tell myself I can’t? And how do I get out of it? Let’s take a look at this thing called writer’s block, this goblin, this bogeyperson who always seems to be lurking in the doorway waiting to keep us from walking through.
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A House in the Woods 2: The Devil’s Due, Audio Edition (Chapters 13-15)
Today’s episode continues ‘A House in the Woods 2: The Devil’s Due.’ This story was inspired by an old house along the road where we live. It’s since been torn down—too many ghosts hanging around, possibly—but every time we walked by it when it was empty I kept imagining something evil behind the old faded door. It helped that we live in the woods, providing a read-made title. We called it the spooky house. It soon became the center of two books: A House in the Woods, and A House in Woods 2.
Now you can enjoy the entire audiobook purchased directly from me! You’ll receive both a single MP3 file with the full book, and a zip file with individual chapters. Click here to see it on my PayHip storefront.
A House in the Woods 2 picks up where A House in the Woods left off. Laurel Calloway is still in the mysterious town of Strickland, New Jersey, where nothing is as it appears to be. Two years have gone by, and they’ve been good to the Calloways. Laurel and her husband Jeremy have a new house, and a new family with baby Isabel about to celebrate her first birthday. Everything seems perfect, until Laurel begins to have dreams. Bad dreams. Something tells her these dreams could really be memories. But of what? Of whom, and of when?
Did she really run over a woman in the road at night? Had they once had a dog? Why are these things trying so hard to surface, swimming slowly up from her subconscious? The more she begins to tell the people around her about these dreams, the more convinced she is that they’re part of it, and that these nightmares aren’t really dreams at all. Page after page, the pace escalates as Laurel begins to learn the truth and plot her escape. But will she succeed? The Devil is in the details. Narration provided by Wondervox.
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Act 2 Books Hosting Scary Story Fest September 13 – Look for Me Among the Tombstones!
I’ve attended Act 2 Books‘ Flemington Book Festival twice in the past few years, and this year they’re offering something special: Scary Story Fest, for authors in the horror and supernatural genres. I’ve written a few books myself under the name M.A. McNease (it’s my initials, not really a pen name), and I’ll have a booth among the tombstones. I’ll also be able to promote my writing workshops, as well as the audiobooks for A House in the Woods, narrated by Daniela Acetelli, and A House in the Woods 2: The Devil’s Due, narrated by my own Wondervox
It’s been a nice boost, too, for finishing Spellbound, the second book in my duology that began with I, Warlock: The Warlock Wars Book 1.
It’s my favorte time of year, in one of my favorite locations, offering books in my favorite genres (after mysteries, of course). Hope to see you there!