A YEAR AGO AT THIS MOMENT, I was sitting in my home office listening to the final hour of my favorite radio station ever, AuralGasms.com. After a lifetime of musical obsession and two decades of hearing just about everything released as a music critic, during the last half of the 2000’s, I found something I never expected to find — this online radio station that perfectly matched my personal tastes — and I listened to…
I’VE ALWAYS BEEN IN LOVE with the trappings of Christmas. Over the years I’ve made Christmas caramels to give away, written and recorded Christmas songs to play for friends and family and, yes, even penned Christmas stories. You should see the lights strung around my house. I love this season! And this year, I finally put together a short collection celebrating it. Christmas Tales, a short collection that can be read by the entire family,…
I LEARNED TODAY that one of my favorite directors of all time died this week. Jean Rollin, whose French films of the ’70s and early ’80s — Living Dead Girl, Fascination, Grapes of Death, The Escapees, Two Orphan Vampires, The Iron Rose, Fiancee of Dracula, Demoniacs, Night of the Hunted, Lips of Blood, Requiem of the Vampire, The Nude Vampire, and so many more — revelled in sensuality, horror, sadness and the surreal passed away…
SO THIS AFTERNOON, at our company Christmas party, I found myself playing keyboards in a “staff band” after just a couple practice sessions. We played a handful of holiday carols — including a take on “Blue Christmas” with “Santa Elvis” at the mic to sing. We even managed to stumble through renditions of Van Morrison’s “Gloria” and Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing”. The kazoo solos by the audience, (who were all provided with budget instruments to help…
I’M THANKFUL FOR a lot of things this year… it’s been a twisted but fulfilling ride in so many ways. I’ve been so many places and gained so many things. I’m thankful for those gains and adventures, but most of all, I’m thankful for the love of my wife, my son, my family and my friends. And I’m thankful too for the support of so many people who have touched my life even if they…
DEADLY NIGHTLUSTS A Collection of Forbidden Magic (Blasphemous Books, November 2010) $2.99 (e-book short fiction collection) MY FIFTH SHORT fiction collection has just launched the new imprint Blasphemous Books! This collection began as a quick ebook “two-fer” download of a couple of my older stories that I really liked but had never previously been collected. Somehow it grew to become a seven-story collection with a brand new tale, “Green Apples, Red Nails” written specifically for…
PEOPLE SURE DO love a sale! To capitalize on the Halloween season, my publisher, Leisure Books put the e-book edition of my latest novel Siren up for sale for a few days at $2.99 over at Barnes & Noble. That book took an instant vault in sales and just missed breaking into the Top 100 list there last week. This week, Leisure has the e-book version of my first novel Covenant on sale for $0.99…
RIGHT NOW, my first novel Covenant is in the Top 10 sellers on Amazon’s Kindle rankings for Horror/Occult. Now there’s a Happy Halloween for this horror author! Currently my publisher, Leisure Books has Covenant on sale across all the e-platforms for Halloween, so hopefully a lot of new readers will discover the book. Certainly a bunch have checked it out at Amazon over the past couple days: Covenant on Amazon Kindle Bestsellers Covenant is also…
THIS WAS A GOOD week for books! While I was up in Canada for a business trip, I met editor James Roy Daley, who gave me a copy of the new anthology Best New Zombie Tales Vol. 2, which includes a story of mine (“Camille Smiled”, that originally appeared in the Cold Flesh anthology). Then last night, my copies of the limited hardcover edition of my fourth novel Siren were waiting for me when I…
HORROR WRITERS ARE a strange, rare and wonderfully twisted breed. Ten years ago, I attended my first World Horror Convention in Denver — a total newbie. I didn’t have a book released, and didn’t know anybody in the genre, really, except through e-mail. But I met people there over the course of one weekend that I still call friends today. I think I first met Sephera Giron there. I met Gord Rollo at a World…
