Joseph Mazzola, a former UMass Boston student, left after three years when he thought the university taught him everything he could learn as a writer, and it seems that he might have been right.
Mazzola stumbled upon a Craigslist ad back in early October which led him to the site Libboo.com, a small Boston-based company offering to publish the top five stories they could get on the subject of their choosing; in the most recent cases, those on the topic of vampires, werewolves, and zombies.
Mazzola’s story, officially titled “Wrath to the Least” was published in the short story collection, “In Delirium Bloom”, after becoming one of five stories to become the top rated in a peer review process on Libboo’s website, thus becoming one of the five featured in the Bounty Collection.
“I’d just been kicking around this one idea; it’s sort of like my homage to all those old Robert Howard fantasy things which is just this one character over a bunch of stories,” Mazzola said. One-Eyed Ryan, Mazzola’s character from “In Delirium Bloom”, came from an idea he had of using the Furies – creatures found in Greek mythology.
“In Greek mythology, they were the embodiment of people’s conscience, but I had to water them down for this, where they were just ghosts of people with anger issues; [that] would be the easiest way to explain it,” Mazzola said. In order to fit the zombie theme required of Libboo.com, Mazzola entertained the thought, “Well, what if these ghosts could possess a dead body and reanimate it?”
Despite there being seemingly conflicting concepts in the story, Mazzola’s ideas came through. “It all just came together as soon as I saw that there was a topic,” he explained.
Libboo’s concept was to mix traditional publishing with self-publishing. They took the best of both worlds in a mission to “get exposure to people who are trying to get published on their own, especially now with the Internet and eBooks,” according to Mazzola.
The next Bounty contest Libboo is hosting is entitled, “Holiday Mayhem” which Mazzola said is “pretty much strange vacation stories and road trips.” Mazzola added that this type of story collection is something that Libboo tries to do every month, but sometimes every two months.
“In Delirium Bloom” can be found on Libboo.com, and as an eBook on both barnesandnoble.com and amazon.com. The book costs 99 cents with 10 percent of the royalties going to the writers themselves. Make sure to check out In Delirium Bloom, and to keep an eye out for the upcoming “Holiday Mayhem” collection, which Mazzola claims he is “winning.”
