2023: Where Did The Time Go?

THIS WAS ONE action-packed year for me. Seems like every year slips by faster than the one before these days, but 2023 really cooked! A big part of that was my son Shaun starting college. He’s a music major focused on percussion, so the first quarter of the year we went to several schools so that he could audition. We visited Butler University, VanderCook College of Music, Illinois State University, Northern Illinois University, University of…

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2022: A Very Giallo Year!

IT WAS A GOOD YEAR. I won’t say a VERY good year, but 2022 wasn’t bad. While things started returning to normal after the worst of the pandemic was over in 2021, this year, while masks were still very much in evidence, we all kind of went back to travel and concerts and… DOING things. The difference was, you worried way more than ever in the days leading up to a concert or a party…

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Goodbye 2021. Or really, Goodbye 2020 Part 2.

NOBODY IMAGINED TWO YEARS AGO that we’d spend the past 21 months wearing masks and closeting ourselves in our homes whenever possible to avoid a frequently deadly virus. Or that temporary telecommuting would turn into a permanent situation. It has for me… and I’m loving it (not a lot of upsides to a pandemic, but that’s been one for me!) Certainly when we began 2021, we all hoped to be “back to normal” with the…

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Goodbye 2020. No, really… Goodbye. Get lost.

NORMALLY, AT THIS TIME on New Years morning (it’s 1 a.m., an hour after the ball dropped as I start to write this), I pull out my notebook or keyboard and reflect upon the victories of the past year. I relive all of the things that happened that I know helped to shape the me I am today a year later than the last time I did this. Travel to various other cities, vacations, concerts,…

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At the end of a decade… 2019

2019 WAS A VERY GOOD YEAR. From an amazing Muse concert to Horror and Pinball conventions and High School Marching Band competitions, it was action-packed. And, for the first time in my writing career, something I wrote appeared on TV (how cool is that?) At the start of December, V Wars launched on Netflix and included two characters – Danika and Mila Dubov – and adaptations of the stories that I wrote about them in…

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2018: A lot of Birds, a Beach, a bit of Pinball & a House book tour!

THE BALL HAS dropped. The family’s in bed. 2018 is over. As I write this, I’m spending the first hour of 2019 with The Marx Brothers and a movie they made 87 years ago (Horse Feathers). There are some things that stand the test of time. And many, many more that are forgotten. I’m going to reflect here on a few things I’d like to remember about the past 12 months. I will definitely remember…

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A Year of Transitions: Looking back on 2017

IT’S 1:30 AM on the first day of 2018 as I start to write this and think back on all the cool things that happened in 2017 (like this photo with my friends from Synapse Films). It was truly a year of transitions for me. The DVD of the Grateful Dead Farewell Concert at Soldier’s Field in Chicago is playing a few feet away on my big screen TV right now — watching that seemed…

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Goodbye 2016… Hello old age?

HERE WE ARE AGAIN. As I begin writing this year’s “summation” blog, there are 15 minutes left in the year. It will be well into the new year by the time I finish. But there’s a Twilight Zone marathon on, so I can go all night. Goodbye 2016! Damn… how did we get here so fast? I’ve seen a lot of posts this week about “good riddance” and “can’t wait til it’s over.” Certainly there was more…

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Hey, it’s 2015. Nevermind… now it’s gone!

THE TITLE ABOVE kind of says it all for me. Wow… 2015 went fast. On the fiction front, Samhain Publishing released my 4th full-length (and longest) fiction collection late in 2015 — Sacrificing Virgins. I also had new stories appear in Dark Discoveries Magazine and the Eulogies III anthology. Plus, the German translation of The 13th was released in November, and audiobook editions of Failure and my short stories “Fish Bait” and “Eardrum Buzz” appeared.…

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Happy New Year… already?

EVERY YEAR ON NEW YEAR’S EVE, I sit down to contemplate the past 12 months. I used to do this in a paper journal, but the past few years I’ve done it here on my blog. It’s a great way to remember and document where I’ve been, take a deep breath, and get ready for a new merry-go-round. Over the past few years, I’ve traveled a lot for the dayjob, and on my end-of-year blog…

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