Look for Before the Hunger: Blood, Salt, Dust at Marissa’s Bookstore and Gifts

If you are out shopping around and have that need for books, go take a look at Marissa’s Books and Gifts in Salt Lake City Utah and while you’re there, grab a copy of my book, Before the Hunger: Blood, Salt, Dust from their local authors section (it is back by the religion area, go figure, haha!).

This collection was shaped by an ache, the strange beauty of what remains in absence, and the terror it may bring.

Before the Hunger is In Marissa's now!

Or, you can buy it online here –

https://www.lulu.com/shop/jared-conger/before-the-hunger-blood-salt-dust/paperback/product-rm62npw.html

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Merch store is open!

A couple of limited release t-shirts are available now as well as a hoodie and some stickers. On demand printing so that I don’t have to sit on a bunch of boxes at home but I will have some extra’s around in case you don’t want to pay for shipping and live nearby.

Cheers!

>> Start shopping <<

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It’s Alive! Purchase your copy of Before the Hunger

My first collection of dark fiction, Before the Hunger: Blood Salt Dust, is now available in print through Lulu. Five haunting stories bound in ritual, dream, and decay… each one meant to linger. If you’ve been waiting to hold something strange and beautiful in your hands, now’s the time.

https://www.lulu.com/shop/jared-conger/before-the-hunger-blood-salt-dust/paperback/product-rm62npw.html

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From the Dark Wood – listen on Tales to Terrify

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tales-to-terrify/id492711030?i=1000734363952

I was a first runner up in the @talestoterrify halloween flash contest, give a listen!! (On your podcast app)

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Writing Update: What’s Coming Next

The first short story collection is nearly done.

It’s been a long stretch of blood, ghosts, and late-night edits. But, it’s almost ready to walk on its own legs. Keep an eye out here soon for a chance to grab a paperback copy.

While that’s getting buttoned up, I’ve already started the next batch five or six stories that twist in darker, stranger directions. Each one’s shaping up with its own brand of chill. They don’t follow the same road as the first collection, they just haunt nearby.

In the meantime, I’ll be creating some fresh individual stories to send out into contests each month. Part to hone the craft. Part to let these characters slip out into the wild and see what the moonlight does to them.

Once this next set is finished, I’ll circle back to a longer piece. The ones with more teeth. Still deciding which world to open up again:

  • A werewolf tale that started in the mountains,
  • The love story that tries not to die in the apocalypse,
  • The wild west antihero story soaked in blood and redemption,
  • A WWI trench nightmare,
  • Or maybe a return to Whispers, an earlier tale that came to life just as I began dabbling in a style change that has been very satisfying to grow with so far.

What do you think, what bone pit should I dig into next?

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Why Customer Messaging Needs an Air Traffic Controller

Every marketer knows the customer journey should feel seamless. But the truth? Most of the time it’s chaos. You have emails firing like stray bullets from five different teams. Followed by in-app prompts that collide like drunks in an alley. Lastly, your campaigns trip over each other in the dark.

Whether you’re building lifecycle flows for a SaaS platform, trying to make storefronts feel personal to millions of shoppers, or pushing adoption campaigns to enterprise leaders, the need is the same: clarity in the mess.

Here’s what I’ve learned:

Lifecycle marketing is about the orchestration. Less noise.
Onboarding, activation, adoption: these aren’t one-offs. They’re chapters in a single story. Strong customer marketing is about making the rhythm tight enough that people don’t even notice the seams.

Segmentation works best when it feels human.
When you get it right, personalization feels like the site knows you. Lock step as you dive more deeply. But get it wrong, and it feels like someone is breathing down your neck and eyeballing your screen for weeks at a time. The difference is building experiences that simplify, not suffocate.

Persona marketing is empathy scaled.
You can’t just bucket “Customer Success” and call it done. Leaders are under pressure. They’ve got numbers to hit, fires to put out. Persona-led marketing means telling the story they need to hear at the exact moment they are ready to hear it.

At the end of the day, the job isn’t just pushing messages for the sake of pushing messages out. It’s being the air traffic controller, sequencing what matters, keeping the sky clear enough for the customer to land where they need to.

When you do those things, even at a minimum, your lifecycle marketing stops being noisy. It becomes narrative.

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