Michael Picco, Author

When I tell someone that I'm an author, usually the first thing they ask me is: "Have you published anything?"  Of course, the easiest way to check my publishing credentials is  HERE Or, if you prefer the longer way around… Award-Winning Essayist: Odd Fellows and Rebekahs Pilgrimage for Youth (Colorado Winner), 1986. Anode II Publishing: “ The Vampyre’s Last Dawn” (poetry), 1990. Mountain Thought Review: “ The Vampyre’s Last Dawn ” (poetry),  “Perspectives (A Politically-Incorrect Short Story)”, 1992. Western State College: “Nemesis” (playwriting). Performed by WSC Honors Theater Group, 1992 (Directed by Theresa Hicks). Mile High Poetry Society: Olympus : “Charnal Love” (poetry), 1993. CTales Publishing: Fraser: The Disappearance of Michael Pitts (novel, written with Mark Clodi), 2014.  Get it here Bloodshot Books:  Not Your Average Monster Anthology, Vol II . Editor: Pete Kahle. “The Esurient Hyrst” (short story), 2015.  Get it here Wolf Singer Publica...

Some works in progress, posted for your amusement...

I felt that this story would've been a good capstone to Scenes… but, due to deadlines and space, I didn't quite have time to squeeze it in. Like the story All of Yesterday's Yesterdays , it deals with the unaware dead and the afterlife — particularly as it relates to the notion of the Bardo {from Wiki: “Used loosely, the term "bardo" refers to the state of existence intermediate between two lives on earth. According to Tibetan tradition, after death and before one's next birth, when one's consciousness is not connected with a physical body, one experiences a variety of phenomena. These usually follow a particular sequence of degeneration from, just after death, the clearest experiences of reality of which one is spiritually capable, and then proceeding to terrifying hallucinations that arise from the impulses of one's previous unskillful actions.”}.  I found the idea of the Bardo similar to the Christian idea of Purgatory, except that in th...

I was trying to estimate just how many hours I spent putting this collection together. I thought maybe a couple of hundred at first, but then calculated that amount to be only a couple of months! This project took YEARS to complete...many thousands of hours, I suspect. Great to finally have it FINISHED and in hand!

{Author's note: although this story won't find its way into Corpse Honey (I simply do not have the room for it), I was happy with how it turned out, that I just had to share it. I think my regular readers will find it delightfully twisted and macabre. My thanks to Rob Mosher for inspiration and collaboration on the piece. } The ones who screamed the longest were the first ones to die.  Cimarron, the stone mason’s daughter, had been the first to go. Her desperate pleas had changed to cries as the wheel turned. Those cries steadily dissolved into ragged screams as she was lowered down, into the trough. Sebastian could still hear her even after she was plunged under the murky black waters. Even now, days later, he could still hear her gurgling screams as she had thrashed and strained against her lashings. He’d watched her go under that first time. Watched as she had closed her eyes, her tears running down, over her forehead, falling down into the basin. Sebastian remembere...