Writer
Robert J. McCarter 
There’s are best practices for writing a series and then there are… what I did with this series. It has been an education on what not to do. My wife once jokingly called this story (in a different form with a different name) my “white whale.” She cast me as Captain Ahab on a quest to exact my revenge on Moby Dick. It wasn’t quite that bad, but it was a struggle. An unusually difficult …
Back in 2017 when I was doing my Short Story Marathon, stars kept coming up thematically. Or, more specifically, that feeling I get when I look up at the Milk Way on a cold clear night. Over and over stars appeared in those stories. There was this feeling I wanted to convey, this thought, this concept. And while a lot of the stories benefited from the idea, I knew it wasn’t quite there. Until I …
While things are starting to open up here and there, self quarantining remains in place for many, so time for another Stir Crazy Story. This time it’s my first and best reviewed novel, Shuffled Off (4.8 stars with 35 reviews as of this writing). This book will always have a special place in my heart. It was hard, it took a long time, but so many parts of the project was quite magical. There is …
Hey, it’s release day! Hard Times: Neutrinoman and Lightningirl: A Love Story, Episode 5 is out. I’ll have the blurb below, and yes, it’s on sale, but as this release has been approaching I’ve realized something strange. Even though I wrote this book several years ago (I’m really behind with this series) and planned its release last December, it’s a book for this moment. For those not familiar with this series, it’s a boy-meets-girl kind …
We past five weeks of staying home here this week and 2020 is not at all the year any of us thought it would be. I’ve got a lot to be grateful for. I have plenty of work to do and can get into the forest with the dogs, but boy is strange. This far in, I’m able to read fiction again and have been enjoying one of Jim Butcher’s Desden Files books. Very entertaining. …
Coronavirus. Worldwide pandemic. COVID-19. It’s everywhere and lots of folks are doing what they can to help out. I’m doing my part. Staying isolated (not that hard for an introvert that works from home), keeping up on the news, keeping busy with the day job as the company I work for tries to adapt to these circumstances, but it doesn’t feel like enough. Not being in the healthcare field, it feels like I can’t do …
It’s release day! The Blood of Carterville is out today and I am so excited. I know, we are in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic and things are crazy out there, but I think of this as me doing my part. I’m not a medical professional or part of the many professionals directly needed right now, I am a writer. And I do believe entertainment is vitally important. We all need to escape. The …
If you haven’t heard about this series yet, Walter Anchor is a ghost detective. He’s from the same graveyard as JJ Lynch and the ghosts in Shuffled Off and the rest of the books in that series. In fact, he and his sidekick Emily have a cameo in the 2nd book in that series, Of Things Not Seen. I love these stories. Walter was a struggling actor, and then a dentist, and now he’s a …
Okay, so I’m bit of a romantic (okay, okay, a big-ole romantic) and I love certain types of superhero stories. Most of the time, those that are on the fun side of the spectrum. So my series Neutrinoman and Lightningirl: A Love Story is not really a big surprise. The first episode, Meteor Attack! came out in 2012, and Protocol X in 2014. The idea for the big whopping epic story came to me early …
Creatures Featured Starting in 2016, I’ve been releasing a short story collection every other year. I haven’t exactly been planing it, it’s just turned out that way. 2020 starts with a collection of my stories, and the theme this time is creatures. There’s a few stories from my other collections, some more from the anthologies I’ve contributed to, and a bunch of never-before-seen stories. I’m very proud of these stories and they run the gamut …