I Aten't Dead

My goodness, it's been six months since I blogged. I didn't intend to stop, but the current work in progress is very consuming. As well as my Patreon. Once a week is a pretty serious schedule. In addition, the blog is not getting nearly as many hits as it used to, once I took down a post that was likely being used in some sort of spam scheme. My initial post about Kong: Skull Island received 444 hits since 3/11/17. The full DVD review, posted 10/15/17, has thus far received 90. And that's a little discouraging.

For those of you waiting for more essays about Swamp Creatures in the comics, I plan on more. The next essay for the Pasko-Yates Swamp Thing is about half way done. For those of you waiting for my discussions of Pacific Rim: Uprising, Rampage or, God help you, Altantic Rim: Resurrection, those are also coming. But it's more difficult to justify writing something that doesn't pay and doesn't get much exposure.

Something else that has come up is the publication of my collection of short stories. Here is is, Dark Draughts, available in e-book and paperback from the fine folks at Crossroad Press. Yes, that's a Stephen Bissette drawing. Dream one achieved: to have a book published. Dream two achieved: Have a cover by Stephen Bissette. I mean, the man was part of the comic that changed me in profound ways. So there's that.



So there is more to come, and I will be posting to this blog more regularly.

I bit the bullet...

After literal months of agony and wishy-washiness, I pulled the trigger on my Patreon page. If you enjoy my writing, you can get previews of my books there, before they come out.

If you haven't yet read my work, you can mosey over to the page and read the first chapter of my fantasy/noir novel Necromancer for Hire. Only the first one is free. But if you support me at $2 or higher, you can read a chapter a week until it's finished. Support me at $5 a month, and you will get a copy of every book I publish, as my way of saying thank you.

I intend to change the contribution level names and images, but not the actual rewards as I go on with this. A hypothetical steampunk airpulp story will likely have levels that have to do with biplanes. Right now, it's all about the bodies.

And a huge thank-you to Darrell Grizzle, who joined within an hour of me posting the initial link. There are days when I doubt my ability to write a compelling, marketable story. Darrell killed that doubt for the next month. Thank you Darrell!

The Horror Show with Brian Keene, Episode 54

Yeah, OK, it's been a month, but it's been a busy month. In February, I was a guest on The Horror Show With Brian Keene. Link on the image:



Huge thanks to Brian Keene and Dave Thomas for making me sound like I'm not a fumble-mouthed crazy-person, and also the wonderful people at Tia Sophia's who supported the episode.

Terrible, Wonderful Things

It's out. I have a copy in my hands. My second novel, I Do Terrible Things, published by Thunderstorm Books.



Cover art by Caroline O'Neal

Here's the back cover blurb, which sums the novel up pretty well:

Donna doesn't know the old man with the sad face and yet there she is, beating him to death with a shovel. Is suppressed rage making her murder people in horrifying ways, or is she some sort of latent psychopath? The more people she kills, the more desperate she becomes to stop herself. Can she find the key before she commits yet another gruesome murder?

Here is is on the back of the book:



What I really cannot convey in this blog post is the quality of materials. The cover is gorgeous, the hard cover under the dusk jacket is beautiful. The end papers have been printed with metallic ink so thickly that it's textured. Here's a picture, but it certainly doesn't to the book justice.



This is a gorgeous book, and I am ridiculously proud to have Thunderstorm publish it. I can't believe I wrote something that received such wonderful treatment. But I open it up, and there are my words. Here's the header for Chapter 4: Gas Grill.



Only 64 copies of the book have been made. And I am proud and humbled and excited that Thunderstorm Books actually put this out. Thank you to the Thunderstorm team who made this a wonderful, quality book.

Do You Even Blog, Bro?

Oh, hi!

It's been one of my blogless seasons. I have a new job, and I have a deadline. So I've basically shoved my head directly into the mincer. But with the news that Ann Hathaway will be starring in a Kaiju film, My Year of Monsters will be around for some time.

It's been difficult to remember what blogging was like before the two years of going through a monster film every Thursday. What the hell else did I talk about? The new job is in a bookstore, and has much less fodder for funny stories, (thank Cthulhu).

My video gaming is down quite a bit, owing to the deadline. I'm back on Rise of Flight, and readers can go here for an accurate summation of what that's like. I really should post some pictures, because posts with pictures always have a better read rate than posts without them. So here's your bandwidth-consuming picture of what I'm doing when I'm not writing.

It's The Day

My book is available for order from Thunderstorm Books. I have been informed that as of 8 this morning, it is 70% sold out.



This is Hag. It has a cover by Wayne Miller, and an introduction by Laird Barron. And you can buy it at the Thunderstorm Books website. I would write more about this, but I've got that combination of excited and terrified that combines into queasy.

The Most Exciting Two Hours of My Writing Career

Have I mentioned that my debut novel will be coming out from Thunderstorm Books? No? Well it is. This month. In a limited, signed edition. With this cover:



What's it about, you ask? Here's the back cover description:

“All David wanted was to rest and get better. He moved from Vermont to Boston to beat his cancer. Even before the boxes are unpacked, he and his best friend Sam notice an eerie presence in his new apartment building. The emaciated haunt is a roiling storm of fury with black iron claws and jagged metal teeth. She attacks David without reason or pity, and just when he thinks he knows her limits, she tears through them. Hag is a dark, brooding novel set in a blighted personal landscape. A story of deathless rage and enduring hatred.”

Writing is not very exciting. I sit alone, wrangle with myself, and hammer words onto the page. It's not, overall, a thrilling procesds to watch, and it not very exciting to do. Even the activities surrounding writing contain precious few moments of excitement. Short story sales aren't that thrilling any more. Signing contracts is de rigueur. Appearing with someone I like or respect can be neat, as is the opportunity to sit down and talk with fellow writers. But neither of those is all that electrifying.

But this video is pretty exciting: me signing sheets that will be bound into my book. Above the signatures of Laird Barron, who wrote a fantastic introduction, and M. Wayne Miller, who produced the hauntingly beautiful cover above. This is the first part of my book I have touched, the first time it's come home to me that I have written a book that will be bound and that people will read. And yes, each one of the books is signed by me, Laird Barron, and M. Wayne Miller.



Hag will be part of Thunderstorm Books Malestrom Wave V, released as a set with Apocrypha by Brian Keene, and King of the Bastards by Steven Shrewsbury and Brian Keene. If you don't know who Brian Keene and Steven Sherwsbury are, go out and find them right now. They are excellent writers, and I am pleased and humbled to be with them in this set. Maelstrom Wave V will cost $135 for all three books, and they cannot be purchased separately. If you find the price is steep, remember that these are limited editions, and the craftsmanship of Thunderstorm Books is very impressive. I am working on finding a paperback publisher, so Hag will be back in print some time after this rare collectors' first edition has sold out. But you'll have to hand me the book to get it signed.

Talking Sin, Blood, and Hammers

I received a shout-out in the Amazon review of Anthology II: Inner Demons Out. It's a great review of an excellent anthology. I reccommend it.



My own story is called "A Poor Sinner's Hands," and this blog entry is about the background of this story.

To begin with, there aren't a lot of protagonists of color in horror. Especially in Lovecraftian horror. The image of the tweedy professor of anthropology or folklore is almost inevitable of a white guy. Elizabeth Bear's Shoggoths in Bloom is a rare outlier. And I like treadiny my own path, but I also want diversity in what I read. A single perspective is boring and repetitive. What would be a working-class perspective on the Cthulhu Mythos? What would they find in it? Lovecraft posits a lot of lower-class people being part of the Cthulhu Cult in "The Call of Cthulhu." But he did so for reasons of racism, implying that anyone would worship Cthulhu had to be in some way subhuman. But I look at people's motivations more than Lovecraft did. So my cultists need a reason to rebel, a reason to go against established social order.

I originally wrote this for a fifties themed Mythos anthology. I wanted to make a paralell between the very human cruelty of racism and the very unworldly horror of the Mythos. Others have done so before, specifically David Drake's "Than Curse the Darkness" (available in the Book of Cthulhu, which I love. But one idea doesn't make a story. But when two bounce off each other, the engine starts to warm up. So I had the idea for a black character, in the fifties, encountering the Mythos. But how?

You know those Facebook memes with "Do you have a moment to talk about our Lord and savior Cthulhu?" Thinking about that, there are problems. The Cthulhu Cult is necessarily secretive, but they have to be in some way evengelical. How do they recruit? And what if they ran into someone who was exactly the wrong person? A murderer perhaps?



But I didn't want to make someone who was just a psycho. "Just a psycho" is boring. Why does a person need to kill? That's more interesting. Someone who doesn't want to kill, but has to anyway? That's interesting. How do they maintain a semblance of a life when they commit murders? How do they think about it? This idea combined with the racism to come up with a very interesting character, Eli Taff. Taff is a veteran of World War II who came home to farm in Louisiana. With a lot of discussion coming up recently about PTSD in veterans, I thought this would make for an interesting psychological stew for a character.

With these elements, the story practically wrote itself. And I'm pretty happy with it. It's a smaller, more intensely human story than most stories that borrow Lovecraft's ideas. But my tack has has been to be more human than Lovecraft was, to explore the way otherworldly horrors erode and distort a person. Someone that could be us.

Mummies, With Some Insight into My Story "In the House of Millions of Years"

It's hard to love mummies. Mummy fans have precious little to read or watch. Anne Rice's Ramses the Damned is probably the most high-profile mummy book, and it's one of Rice's least well-known books. And there really are only three well-regarded mummy films: Karloff's 1932 film for Universal, the 1959 Christopher Lee/Hammer production, and the 1999 Universal reboot. All of these films spawned franchises, but the follow-ups were poor in comparison. A lot of mummy films that are just cheap horror, with poor writing, terrible acting, and zero production value.



Karloff's mummy Imhotep was only bandage-wrapped for twenty minutes. After that, he transformed into the urbane, sophisticated, magically potent Ardeth Bey, who could pass for human. The follow-up mummy in the Universal series, Kharis, featured in four films between 1940 and 1944, was a stiff-limbed, bandage-wrapped strangler that Jason Voorhees could outrun. And yet, at the core of every mummy film, there's something about the preserved individual from thousands of years past that captures my interest. Unlike the vampire, it does not require sustenance. It is animated purely by magic. Unlike the zombie, the mummy is at least partially sentient. It understands the world around it. My favorite mummies are the Imhotep from the 1932 and 1999 films. A mummy with a mind, who can pass for human, and and no longer fears death because it has already died.



Imagine how terrifying it would be as a mummy? How would the passage of time feel if there was no longer an endpoint? What would it be like to lack biological processes? A mummy, animated by magic, no longer needs to eat or sleep, breathe or excrete. These small things mark time for us. Our stomach tells us time has passed because we're hungry. More time passes, and we get sleepy. What happens when those indicators of the passage of time no longer mean anything, when therer is nothing to break up the day? Ask any insomniac. Sleepless nights are long, without relief. So little is going on, the insomniac is left to wile away the night hours, reading if they can concentrate enough, or watching terrible late-night TV. Yes, I've been there.

What must have been like, to have insomnia before television? Before recoded music? Before inexpensive lighting? Imagine sitting in the dark for long, black hours, unable to sleep while everyone else does. Time crawling by, with the knowledge that the next night, and the next, and all conceivable nights would be as unending as this one. That's the endlessly long dark that I gave to Pharaoh Intef (Horus name Seheratawy, 'Maker of Peace in the Two Lands') as the heart of “In the House of Millions of Years.” How excluded, how alienated the mummy must feel. How long could someone maintain the illusion, to themselves, to others, that they were still human?



In most mummy films, one element carries over from the old life. Desire. The mummy falls in love with the woman of his past, whether she is reincarnated, or a lovely target of opportunity. This is where I departed from other mummies of film and prose. Without organs, with a dried, withered body, would it be possible to love? To feel affection? Or could that depart as quickly as the feeling of humanity? What are you if you cannot feel these emotions? This is what I explore in my story, the inhumanity of someone who no longer feels, no longer has those small moments that mark time. Someone who was human, but no longer is.



Undead and Unbound, which includes magnificent stories by Cody Goodfellow, Damien Walters Grintalis, Peter Rawlik, Glynn Owen Barrass, Willie Meikle, Mercedes M. Yardley, and many wonderful others, is available directly from Chaosium, from Amazon, and your local bookstore.

About Fear...

Last month, I wrote about fear.  Fear of embarrassing oneself is often a hitch factor in creativity.  "What if this idea is no good?"  "What if people laugh at this idea?" are pretty common ones, and that sort of fear can be paralyzing. 


But it's also exceedingly common.  It takes a long time to overcome that fear of failure, that fear of not being good enough.  Many people, and I'll add that many successful people retain that crippling fear that what they make is not fit for public consumption, and that makes them hesitate. 


Which is not to say that creation is easy, or that everything that we make is fit for public consumption.  Nickolaus Pacione has taught me that, if nothing else.  But I'll never get anywhere if I don't start.  I'll never develop good ideas if I don't work through the bad ones, and have enough of each to recognize a bad one when it presents itself.  More importantly, if I hadn't cycled through a bunch of ideas, I'll never get comfortable with the concept that ideas are easy to come by.  Ideas are cheap.  Good ideas are plentiful.  Being willing to discard mediocre ideas means that I spend less time wrangling them. Because experience has shown me that if I wait five minutes, a better idea will come up. 


Is also seems that, after five years, I'm going to hit 20,000 views of this blog.  I'm aware that the majority are Google search hits, and that I have yet to break a thousand hits in a single month.  But thank you to everyone who has read this strange personal/writing blog.  

"You Only Fail If You Stop Writing" --Ray Bradbury

I came close to failing.  I haven't updated my blog in close to two months, it took me those two months to write a 3,000 word story.  I had stopped working on my novel, and was considering getting out of the writing game. 

Writing is work.  It is not fun.  It is the terrible opportunity to sit down in front of a mirror and look at yourself.  For hours.  On the other hand, I feel better after I have written.  I find myself with greater clarity, a greater capacity to concentrate, and overall have a sense of accomplishment I fail to get from my work life.

I love reading.  Writing seems, in some ways, to be my self-medication.  The problem is when I don't have the motivation to do it, I fall apart without that activity which centers me.

I used to try to count the number of attributes someone needed to be a writer.  I've lost count.  Someone needs an ability with words, good ideas, that special dedication that lets them pump out words on a daily basis, a thick skin that doesn't take rejection to heart, an ego that believes it needs to be heard, a compliant enough personality that allows others to mess with their manuscript, a cheerfulness that is undampened by hours spent alone with only their own words for company, the tireless energy it takes to self-promote, even when the publisher is doing so.


Some of these things come naturally to some people.  Others must work on several aspects.  I'm still working on several.  But I'm back.  I'm working on my feelings of isloation by having a Pathfinder group meeting at my house.  I'd say it might cut into my writing, but I'm barely getting any done at the moment.  And it's nice to have people in the house.  They're a good group, and they make a pleasant change from the social interaction I get at work.

I've sent some short stories out, "A Poor Sinner's Hands" to Atomic Age Cthulhu, "No Small Dreams" to Aetherial Publishing, "Nicaragua 1986" to Anthology II (which I didn't get in to) and "Between Two Living Gods" to Epitaphs 2.  But I've also got a number of stories basically sitting around and I need to get them back into circulation.  I also need to finish my novel, because I'm having ideas for the next one, and that's the most fun I've had for a couple of months. 

So Happy Halloween.  May scary things happen to you, and may you enjoy them.  I'm starting to, again. 

Challenge Failed...

I didn't manage to get the story written by Sunday.  I've got the nugget of a first draft, but it needs to be about a thousand words longer to get into the anthology I'm aiming for.  But I've got the storylinwe down, I just need to fill it out, and possibly add another scene. 

I Challenge Myself to Write...

I challenge myself to write my Atomic Age Cthulhu story, provisionally "To the Hogs" in a week.  To be done by Sunday, September 2^nd.

I say this here, so that people will know, and I will pressure myself to do it.  Anyone who reads this and is curious has my permission to ask me how the story is going. 

Sale!

I'm proud to announce that my mad airships, steam biplanes, and a world without royalty story "Pain Wears No Mask" as been accepted into Glynn Barass and Brian Sammons' Steampunk Cthulhu.  I'm in some pretty awesome company here: 

Those Above – Jeffrey Thomas

Blackwold Horror – Adam Bolivar
No Hand to Turn the Key – Carrie Cuinn
The Reverend Mr. Goodworks and the Yeggs of Yig – Ed Erdelac
Carnacki – The Island of D. Munroe – William Meikle
Pain Wears No Mask – John Goodrich
Before the Least of These Stars – Lee Clark Zumpe
The Promised Messiah – DJ Tyrer
Unfathomable – Christine Morgan
The Flower – Chris Geeson
Tentacular Spectacular - Thana Niveau
Fall of an Empire – Glynn Owen Barrass & Brian M. Sammons
The Baying of the Hounds - Leigh Kimmel
Mr Brass and the City of Devils – Josh Reynolds
The Source – DL Snell
Happy Birthday, Dear Cthulu - Robert Neilson
The Strange Company – Peter Rawlik
Steel and Bones – Lois Gresh

 

Cover coming soon.  

Click

Click

click click click


That is the sound of me setting my sights a little higher.  

I'm A Horror Writer, What Do I Fear?

It's been a turbulent couple of weeks. First of all, my brother and sister-in-law came up, and we went out to play with birds again:



Which was really fun.

As for the writing, well there's a story. One of the things you're told never to do is put a story/novel/whatever down, because it's difficult to pick back up again. And there's a certain amount of truth to that. My current novel has been put down and picked back up a couple of times. Last week, I got wind of a very attractive anthology, and I had a good idea. Unfortunately, the idea does not work within the tmeframe of the anthology.

Which leaves me with a dilemna. Do I want to try another story (I've already got an idea) or do I want to go back to the novel?

The problem with going back to the novel is that it scares me. I'm almost done, at which point I'll have to revise my previous novel, and start on my next one. And begin looking at publication options (you know, that stuff from my last post). And yeah, I've got that feeling in my stomach, that I'm once again stepping into unknown territory, and I don't want to do the wrong thing.

The funny thing is that I didn't feel this nervous, or I don't remember feeling this nervous, last time I finished a novel. But it might have been that I had less expereince with trying to get a novel published, or that publishing wasn't in quite so much turmoil.

And I don't blog well when I'm all confused about stuff. Sorry. But hey, NECON at the end of the week. I'm hoping for some good advice.

It's Been a Week! What Have I been Up To?

Who's a bad blogger who hasn't updated in a week? Yes, that would be me.

That said, I got both short stories off, (one has already been accepted, but it's Sekrut until I am given the green light). With those done, I was thinking about writingt a story for Cthulhurotica II, but I've just been itching to get back to the novel I put down a year and a half ago. And yes, it's bad to stop writing a novel, but I was back in school and all of my time and much of my brain was eaten by Chemistry.

I love writing this novel. I started it because I overall dislike its genre, and decided to find a way to make it my own. Could I write a novel about something I didn't love? The answer, at 57,000 words, is yes. And novels give the writer a chance to breathe, to expand on their ideas, keeping an eye on the pace, but without the intensive crunch and relentless word-counting of short stories. I still like writing shorts, but there's a liberty to a novel that lets me really develop character and plant foreshadowing and become very complex. Of course, I'll have to sell said novel, and that'll be a good indicator as to whether I was successful.

I've been having fun (and a bit of frustration) with the 20-year old Red Baron game. My reviews of pre-1990 WWI flight games are all done, and I'm wondering if I should blog them, or just make a new section of my website. Unfortunately, playing and writing about premodern flight sims is scratching my nonfiction writing itch, which is cutting into my blogging.



I've just torn through a novel, the first time I've done this for some time. Three Cheers for Me is the first of a series of comedy novels about a Canadian flier in WWI. The Bandy Papers series is sort of a combination of Wodehouse's Bertie Wooster and W.E. Johns' Bigglesworth, goofy social novels, uniquely Canadian, with the protagonist flying about in a Camel. I plan on getting the next couple of novels (until the end of the Great War) at least.

And it's time, past time, to get my shorts back out on the market. I've got a number of shorts that have not sold, that I think can sell, but haven't had the time or inclination to put out there. I'm thinking about saving "Nicaragua 1986" for Shroud magazine, partially because I want to appear under the same cover as Brain keene. But "Three Dreams" "Too Short For an Angel" and "Ultra-Fast Delivery" all need to get sold.

We Will Only Pass This Way Once...

If you've got sharp eyes and pay attnetion to details, you will notice that there's a story in the 'published' section of this blog that is not on my web page. "Death on the American Family Farm" was sold to Undead Press's anthology Book of the Dead, one of several presses run by Anthony Giangregorio. Anthony has been at the center of some controversy recently, and I think it's time I weighed in on this.

The critics, including Brian Keene, Nick Mamatas, and several people who Anthony has bought stories from, are right. Undead press and Anthony Giangregorio are ignorant, unethical publishers that I wouldn't to go near if they offered ten cents a word.

Ultimately, this is my own damn fault. I was just starting out, I was looking for a sale to boost my ego, so I sent a story off to a penny-a-word publication. And I got in. And that was the beginning of my trouble.

Giangregorio called me. On the phone. Helpful hint to gentle readers; if you have Brooklyn accent, people will already thing you're a used-car salesman. Trying to hustle them by asking if they have any other stories is a big put-off. So when he asked, I said I didn't. Which was a lie, but I felt like I was getting hustled. Which, it turned out, I was.

The Book of the Dead was published, and immediately came under attack. In those days, I hung out at the Shocklines forum, where a lot of horror professionals (and a few schmucks) talk shop. John Skipp, co-edtor of the seminal 80's Book of the Dead objected to Undead Press's use of his title. Like a real pro, Giangregorio got defensive, pointing out that you cannot copyright a title, and was really rude to the person he claimed the anthology was an homage to (See Nick Mamatas' documentation of this on his blog.

A few days later, it came to light that Giangregorio had used characters from the Dawn of the Dead, which is an enormous copyright no-no, and also completely frikking stupid.

I don't think that the illustrious Mr.Giangregorio messed with my story, but by the time I had one in my hands, I was already too embarassed to read it. I have a single copy, and it's not even in my personal collection of my work. I won't give him a blessed dime. It seems like he's getting worse, no longer content to merely suck, he's inserting bestiality and bad grammar into stories he's bought. See Brain Keene's blog for this sack of crap.

Be smart. Know your publisher, and if somethig smells fishy, it probably is. The reek of something like this is very hard to wash off, even if everyone else has forgotten about it.

Now, let's never talk about this again.

Deadlines!

Not one, but two deadlines looming. I won[t be blogging much for a little while.

On The Need to Write Quickly (With Name-Dropping)

I've been solving one short story for about two and a half months. It's been a difficult struggle, but I finally put the first draft to bed last week. I have to write faster. Part of the reason I'm updating this blog more regularly (which is to say, regularly) is that I need to write every day, even on the days that I don't peck away at a story.

Because I have changed. I'm not the same person I was in February when I started this story. Allowing the process of the story to drag on so long means that the story will likely be weakened, thematically. I will no longer have the same passion for the plot and the themes that I did when it was fresh in my head. I have stared at it and been sick of it because I've been thinking and reading the same damn thing for the past two months.

Robert Asperin once said "I'm not a slow writer, and I'm not a fast writer. I'm a half-fast writer." And I have to avoid that. I'm not going to support myself with short stories, even if I write one a week. Because even at professional rates, that's (.05 x 5,000=$250 per story x 52 weeks=) $13,000 a year. Which is not liveable. But if I can learn to hammer out the prose with the short stories, I'll be able to sustain my attention for longer when I'm writing a novel. After my current story, "Tribute Band", I'm back to my novel. Which will be finished by NECON so I can ask James Moore (because hey! James Moore!) to read it, and then I'll move on to my next novel as I'm passing the current one around for publication.

A working mid-list novelist needs to sell at least two novels a year. The advance on the average mid-list novel is less than $10,000, so two novels a year is pretty well required unless I'm going to bet that I'm going to be huge. And while I can hope I'm going to be huge, I'm smart enough that I don't think I'm going to bet on it.

I've set the first draft deadline for the latest short story at the 27^th. I need to get faster about my stories, because I need to ace deadlines when I'm asked to write something. Being early, and even better, getting a reputation for being early, can be an enormous asset when editors are thinking about who to invite into their anthology.

Special Thanks to Brian Keene and Walter Jon Williams for some hard truths that made this post possible.