IT’S BEEN SOMETHING of a whirlwind week for me – hard to believe that a week ago I was just getting home from the Milwaukee Massacre at the Wisconsin State Fair Park grounds. That’s because just a couple days later I hopped a plane for San Francisco for a business trip, and tomorrow we’ll be driving a few hours north to take my son to the Wisconsin Dells for the first time (Actually, it’s my…
Burbank, California April 12, 2008 I HAD A BUSINESS TRIP planned to Los Angeles this weekend, and so a few weeks ago I called up Del and Sue at Dark Delicacies Bookstore and asked if they wanted me to come down for a signing… they ended up setting up a “mega-signing” around my schedule (which is embarrassingly cool!) which featured Amber Benson, Del James and Jose Prendes for 5 p.m. on Saturday, April 12. I arrived in LA later than…
LAST YEAR, FOR NO good reason, Bill Breedlove and I decided to roadtrip to WHC in Toronto. It was a great time, and somehow we didn’t kill each other over the music selections for the trip. So this year, when we decided our press Dark Arts Books was going to run both a party at World Horror and a Dealers Room Table, we opted to road trip again… despite the fact that the trip was…
SO, AT SOME POINT, this year’s World Horror went from a standard annual convention to… a Road Trip (capital R). Initially I thought… what the hell. It’s an 8-9 hour drive from Chicago, right? I can listen to a lot of good albums at full volume during that time, and honestly, if I flew, door-to-door from home to hotel was probably 6 hours anyway, right? And then there were all those worries with customs. I…
UNLIKE LAST YEAR, this Halloween season I didn’t focus as much on doing readings and appearances, though I did drive up to Milwaukee on Oct. 20 for a Barnes & Noble author panel (more on that below), appeared on Oct. 25 for the third year in a row as the “Halloween” guest in The Writer’s Chatroom and on Halloween night, I’ll actually be doing my one live fiction reading for the month — Bill Breedlove,…
THE LAST TIME I posted, it was May…and it doesn’t seem that long ago. So where have I been? Well…after I got back from the World Horror Convention a few weeks ago, my wife and I put our house up for sale and decided we were off to bigger and better things. Only trouble is….we haven’t gone anywhere…it’s a dead house market in the Chicago burbs right now, and we’re still sitting at the same…
BAD BOOKENDS So, on my way to the airport on Wednesday morning, there’s such a ridiculous traffic jam, that I almost miss the plane (even though I left early) and at 6 a.m. on Thursday, the first morning of the con, I’m woken up by my wife who tells me that there’s an emergency back home. Then a couple days later on the way home, my bags decided to take a vacation in St. Louis.…
WELL IT WAS STARTING to get a bit ulcer-inducing there, but today at 3 p.m., I finally picked up the first project of my new publishing imprint, Dark Arts Books. You can read more about the formation of the imprint at www.darkartsbooks.com. But the key point is, Candy in the Dumpster, a four-author anthology of Chicago horror authors featuring work from me, Bill Breedlove, Jay Bonansinga, Martin Mundt and an introduction by Mort Castle at…
I WROTE THE original story “There Were No Bullets in the Gun,” eventually retitled Failure, three summers ago now. In the fall of 2004, after Delirium Books agreed to publish it as the debut volume in a new “hardcover chapbook” series, I also created cover art for the book, using a wild mix of photos I took when I was in Philadelphia a year ago, some bullets and a gun from my dad’s, a bit…
IT’S ACTUALLY New Year’s Eve as I write this on my laptop on the couch, watching the “return of Dick Clark” New Year’s Eve countdown show (there’s a zombie movie inherent in Clark’s return, isn’t there?) As I watched all the “top moments of the past year and the past decade” shows tonight, I had to reflect back on my own experiences over the past 12 months. And 2005 was a year of amazing personal…
