It’s Happy Month

Artwork for the Abominable Dr. Phibes movie.

Oh, my fellow babies and compatriots for this thing called life– it’s the happiest month of the year. For me. Cause. Halloween.

Pumpkins. Pumpkin patches.

Ghosts and goblins and ghouls, oh my.

Creaky vampire movies with capes and crosses.

American Werewolf in London time!

The weather cooling the frack down.

The Halloween baking competition with its black garlic cupcakes and four-layer oozing lime basil cake with Italian buttercream something or other. Make entire scary scenes from cake, pumpkins, rice crispy treats and sugar work!

Oh yes, oh please, amen.

I have pumpkins about ready to be plucked. I have gourds. I want to make bread.

I feel energized and ready to watch scary movies with all the lights off.

I have the original Night of the Living Dead tucked away. There’s a compulsion within to find the DVD and WATCH IT the old-fashioned way. On my television through a DVD player. No streaming. No computer involved. Old-fashioned out the disc in, push play when prompted. With a big cup of ho-cho in hand.

Of course, it’s still rather hot here in the day. The nights have cooled off a bit. I now need at least a blanket. Kitters has even taken to napping a bit on me so it must be getting cold outside or she misses me as I’ve been working. I call my cat Kitters, though her official name is Jaws. As she showed up with a broken jaw a couple Halloween’s ago.

So. I hope TCM shows horror movies I’d like to watch. I hope hope hope they show the Abominable Dr. Phibes, with Vincent Price. Where he speaks only through a record. It’s so acid-trippy, weird and satisfying. I’m so glad no one has ever tried to remake this one. Why would you? It’s perfection. From that first scene with the bats to the bitter, bitter end. Dang. And there’s sequels, which I hear, are not as good but still. I will also probably watch the silent Swedish made up documentary on witches, because it’s just so good. Haxan or something like that. 1923 or hereabouts. It’s on Youtube. As are a lot of silent horror movies. Like M or the Cabinet of Dr. Caligaleri. [Spelling?]

Halloween month. It’s the happiest month of the year for me. From baking to horror movies I’ve seen a gazillion times already to new horror films I might discover. I do like discovering some offbeat, nobody’s heard of it, frightfest. Like the Blood on Satan’s Claw [Satanic children, 70’s] Or even something like Only Lovers Left Alive, with Tom Hiddleston as a mopey vampire. It’s a gorgeous film, by Jim Jarmusch, and also boasts a sparkly performance by Tilda Swinton. It’s as slow as frozen molasses and it’s not so much a horror movie as a test of your patience but hey, it might hit a sweet spot or two.

Hey, speaking of Halloween and spooky stuff and scary things…I have two recent novels out that deal with zombies and cannibal bikers. Yay!

Aftermath: Boise, Idaho— where Hannah kills herself to escape death by zombie horde only to wake up in a world run by sentient zombies.

There’s also The Remarkable Women of Brokenheart Lane, where three elderly sisters hiding out in a small Nevada town after a catastrophic world war nuclear event, become embroiled with the decimated cannibal biker gang that’s limped into Fallon.

There’s also Oregon Gothic. The opening tale, Bailey, is about what a real vampire is like and the costs of thwarting that vampire’s will. There’s also the necrophilia-smeared love story of Prince Charming Finds His Sleeping Beauty, which will be in an anthology coming out this year.

Halloween month. Pure joy filling my soul right now. Just pure happy wonderful joy.

Remarkable Women

Good mornin’! It’s chilly here in East Oregon. Wind’s blowin’. I am considering a run to town but I’d have to take a shower, find my town clothes, put on real shoes. Ugh! But we are out of lettuce.

Anyhoo.

Hey, Remarkable Women of Brokenheart Lane, my dystopian cannibal biker versus elderly sisters in what’s left of Fallon, Nevada novel, can be read for FREE ON KINDLE at the moment.

Basically– three elderly sisters, Lily, Violet and Laura, are squatting in Lily’s house in Fallon, Nevada. They’ve made the house look abandoned as there are human monsters roaming about in what’s left of the world and they’re just trying to survive another day, another day after that. The Werewolves, a cannibal biker gang that’s tangled with the Glitterbugs, yet another cannibal biker gang, limp into Fallon and possibly their Waterloo. It’s Laura, the silent sister who discovers her voice and then some, who pushes the other two into a possible showdown with the actual forces of the universe itself or maybe she’s gone completely crazy, cooped up in a moldering house living on boiled pee and deformed mice or whatever Violet can scrounge from the surrounding area. But the actual threat might very well arrive in the form of church ladies on bicycles– the legendary Snitty Ratballs. This apocalyptic threat has managed to make it over the booby-trapped Rockies, intent on law and ordering the remnants of the Old West. Who will survive??! Why is there a lion? Will the sisters join the Werewolves? Will Gut Bucket ever make it to Utah? Can Amy Octopus ever be believed?

Find out all this and more in THE REMARKABLE WOMEN OF BROKENHEART LANE

If you do read it, hey, leave a review.

Ain’t too proud to beg for reviews at this stage of my utterly barffling life. I added an ‘r’ to ‘baffling’. I think I’ll let it stand.

Blurbing

Monday. Here’s the blurb to go along with novel number five, the Adventures of Grumpy Odin and Sexy Jesus:

In The Adventures of Grumpy Odin and Sexy Jesus, Odin and Newbie Jesus team up, uneasily, to take on God in a power struggle that might rip the known universe apart. Click and Clack might be something other than your normal minion scum. Maggie, who has the hots for Odin, finds herself in the middle of an actual holy war. Zadkiel begins to think for himself a bit, which is rather rare for a batboy. Poor Suzi discovers that loving minion Minette lands her in strange places yet allows her to help everyone but herself. Swiss Charlie’s, under the stellar management of Stella Lou, seems the place to be for karaoke and intrigues gone very wrong!

The Adventures of Grumpy Odin and Sexy Jesus is a fantastical fantasy adventure story that has a lot more jokes in it than any holy scriptures and makes the bible seem like a fairy story!

A Cheerful Holiday Note

from great big canvas

It’s the holiday season. I posted a mournful scream a few days ago. Now I’ll balance that with something a bit more cheery.

We are expecting snow here along the floors of the Eastern Oregon/Western Idaho valleys. A covering of white over the mud. Yes, please! Even if I have to drive in it for work, it doesn’t seem right if the end of the year doesn’t have that blanket of snow or snow falling or some sort of snowy snow happening or already happened. If that makes sense. I have a bit of Fireball whiskey in my coffee. A droplet, really.

My cat goes in and out, restless as a mini tiger. What a joy she is. I am so very glad I decided to keep her. I am grateful for this loving little beast who seems to utterly adore me. She went from slowly dying homeless refugee to cosseted spoiled lovebug. Stop and help an animal if you see one in trouble or distress.

I have stories placed here and there. That’s a nice feeling. That my work is ‘getting out there’. That slowly, so slowly, but surely, I am making some inroads writing-wise. There’s City Full of Rain, Gladys, Pig Bait, Elbow and Bean, Seffi and Des, Blood and Bread, Witch of the Highway, the Fish Whisperer, Everything You Need, Jimmy’s Jar Collection, Let There Be No Memories…I am forgetting one or two or several, but what a list for 2021. Submit, submit! is my battle cry for 2022.

I also put a novel out– The Remarkable Women of Brokenheart Lane, which is 99 cents over on Amazon through tomorrow, btw. Ahem, hint. I loved writing this. I love those three sisters I created– Lily, Violet and Laura. I adore the bikers that took shape in my head and oh yes, on the page. From Gut Bucket and Rosecheese to Amy Octopus and poor doomed Bluebird. I think the version that made it to final edits is the version closest to the one originally in my head. Sort of lighthearted doomsday fairy tale fare. Whee, indeed. I did have a very heavy, dense, savage version, but I think this go-around works so much better as a story and as a reading experience.

I do have a novel from last year I’ll blip about as well. Aftermath: Boise, Idaho. Yeah, it’s zombies but they’re sentient ones. Most of them are, anyway. It’s also 99 cents over on Amazon through tomorrow!! Ahem, ahem. This is Hannah’s tale. She kills herself rather than succumb to the zombies about to break down the door of the place she’s trapped in. But she wakes up in an office setting, with zombies for bosses, in some parallel existence, where she’s at a loss and disadvantage. However, being scrappy, pragmatic and mostly realistic, Hannah navigates somewhat successfully until she doesn’t. Her alter ego, the Hannah of the world she now finds herself in, seems to be some sort of spy for the resistance. There’s always a resistance. She messes up by killing her for-show boyfriend/one of the leaders of the resistance and it all snowballs from there, until Hannah finds herself fleeing the scene of many crimes, heading off into the Idaho wilds to take her chances.

Again, another novel I had such fun writing. I enjoyed making up slang and inventing this NWO as run by conservative zombies in pearls and business attire. I also toyed with explaining why Hannah fell through the time cracks, so to speak, but…it got clunky and stopped the story colder than a bowl of congealed brains. I also fiddled with several endings but decided on the one now as it seemed fair to Hannah and true to her character of a tough person just trying to survive the unimaginable.

Okay, I’ll keep this short. Happy holidays, however you celebrate or don’t. Don’t let what’s happening in the world or on your doorstep rob you of any joy or hope. Not just yet. New year comin’. Gird the loins, sharpen the knives, battles are comin’, woot woot.

“Listen to the mustn’ts, child. Listen to the don’ts. Listen to the shouldn’ts, the impossibles, the won’ts. Listen to the never haves, then listen close to me… Anything can happen, child. Anything can be.”
― Shel Silverstein

October

It’s a new month. I got a graveyard job. Been writing. Thorough avalanche of rejections, a few acceptances. So, yeah, the usual. How are all of you? Great! Glad we had this chat. Let’s do lunch.

Snow Expected

The sky this morn

There’s snow forecast for my tiny neck of the woods. The sky appears appropriately cloudy. I hope it does snow. We need the moisture here. The local mountains have been hit pretty hard with the white slippery pretty stuff but nothing, so far, where I am. Boise got snow! Damn it!

Well, the celebratory mood, gone. Fizzled. God damn fucking orange coddled fuckwaffle. If this were any other person who’d just lost a major election, then refused to vacate…none of what’s being tolerated and shrugged off now would be tolerated or shrugged off.

If Obama had pulled this crap, Fox News and the GOP would have lined up to take turns hanging him from whatever tree they could find. If Hillary had dug in her lady  heels and gotten all hysterically I won I won gimme gimme…oh boy. Oh boy, would that have been something to behold in America.

Now, Biden won. He won. He and Harris will take over no matter what’s thrown at them…unless there’s an actual damn coup by Barr, orange fuckstick, McConnell and the rest of the toady GOPers. That’s being tried now. The voter fraud conspiracy!

I must focus on, oh, writing.

Oh that.

This all, too, shall pass, this current rotted pumpkin madness.

I am reworking the ending of my Odin and Jesus novel. To give it more of a punch, a kick, a boom. I want to write and work on this! WHAT THE HELL? I seem to be shaking off, a bit, of this strange not wanna write nothing spell some malignant demon flung at me on its way to whisper conspiracy hints in some broken-brained QAnon’s decaying skull organ.

I but jest. Sort of.

If you don’t know what QAnon is, please. Go and look it up. It’s a cult that’s growing, born from a hoax. No, the person behind all this admitted it was a hoax. And yet…here we are.

Writing! I’m supposed to be shilling my writing to those who might be interested and even those who slow down to gander at this train wreck of a blog.

So yes, reworking the ending. I think I will just pick a spot, start a new doc, see what happens. I have the ending, the last bit I am keeping for suresies. I think. Oh dear. Or am I ruining my tight little novel with…oh dear!

Yes, I would like to see how medieval cheese was made, Youtube. Yes, I would!

I found this channel on historical cooking and I LOVE IT SO MUCH. You get history and recipes! Score score!

Yes, I’m fine, I’m okay.

Waiting for the snow. Writing a bit and holding my breath as my country TREMBLES on some precipice akin to the Civil War or…something equally savaging. I do think…I don’t know, actually. I am just as lost as anyone else here, even those throwing out pat predictions this will all be fine or it will all be a clustermess of the highest order, grab your minivan and head for Canada.

I really like moose. I can learn to like hockey more than I do. I’d like to live on Prince Edward Island. Eh!

Excerpt from Aftermath: Boise, Idaho

Excerpt time. Aftermath: Boise, Idaho

From: Part Three- Miss Gray and Mr. Harrison.

“Ahem. Miss Gray?” A low voice, of authority, banking and Wall Street matters. The low gritty voice of a walking corpse. Zombies don’t talk, damn it. They grunt and try to eat you. Everyone knows that. Everyone! The zombie in the bright canary suit. She faced him, having been caught staring out the big window.

“Yes? Um. Sir?”

“Are you okay? Is that letter done? We don’t have it yet and we’re late getting the invitations out. We’ve had to deal with the PR for all that FF nonsense. Honestly, what do those people want? Such hysterical overreactions on their part all the time. Every little thing magnified a thousand times. Of course, that can be made to look very bad! We need to get back on track, Miss Gray.” She nodded. His smell … ripe decay hidden by some powerful men’s cologne. Old Spice can’t fix everything, she thought.

“I’m doing it now.”

“Great. And did they tell you cheese and crackers tomorrow? Havarti.” His eyes held red bulgy veins. “Jodi’s bringing her potato salad, it’s a last minute decision. She enjoys making things with eggs these days. Humor her, I say.” Hannah blinked, her mind just going blank for a long, long time at this random, weird spate of information and office politicking. Fuck the potato salad, we’re going in, boys! Oh the strange things that ran through the brain tissues at times.

“Okay. Fine. Havarti.” She was not even sure that was a cheese. Was it?

“Can you come into my office, Miss Gray? I have another matter I wish to discuss with you, if you have a moment.” Canary zombie actually let his eyelid droop a bit. A wink. A wink! She clenched her hands. Alone with a zombie. But he was just one. She could kill him if she had to.

“Uh … sure.” Hannah followed the zombie into his big, square office, which had a large framed print of a … yes, nuclear explosion that graced an entire wall by itself. Bikini Atoll read the caption. A gigantic black metal and oak desk, a Mac, a printer on a small table, and a nameplate that read Harrison P. Squack. Squack. Was that a real name? He closed the door and she spied three things to use as weapons. A letter opener, a glass sculpture of a naked baby—a cupid?—and the picture itself of that nuclear explosion. The frame could be broken and turned into a stabby. Glass shards could be jabbed into face or body. She had learned, she had learned, oh yes, to make weapons from thin air. Yep.

“Have you told Kevin? About us?” He spoke as if they were dear friends, more than friends. As if they knew each other. Really, really knew each other. What had the giant zombie canary just said?

“What do I tell Kevin, Harry? About what?”

“You know I hate being called Harry. Ah, baby. Sweetie! I know you’re angry. I’m not good at this. I’m not a relationship sort. I know you said we could make it work… I’m working on that, okay? But you gotta break it off with Kevin. I’m old-fashioned. And he’s trouble and no good for you. But you girls seem to like that type. I don’t get it.” Harrison sat on the edge of his desk, saying these absurd, soap opera words to her, in an office run by zombies. She had died and woken up in hell, for sure.

Aftermath!

On the highway going toward Baker City, Oregon. The Powder River

Hi, everyone. How’s it goin’? Well? Badly?

You’re drinking at six in the morning, already done with the day’s shenanigans? Is that just me??

I am super-awful at self-promotion, which is what modern authors need above all. Or maybe, always?

So. Hence the drinking. But! I will nonetheless post about my BOOKS and such, regardless of the sick sharp feeling of dread and embarrassment combining into a probably gut-slicing set of Ginsu knives in my innards.

I will persist even if I start puking up blood over trying to do my own sales anything, in other plainer words.

What is Aftermath: Boise, Idaho about, one might ask.

Native Idahoan Hannah Gray kills herself, as the zombies scratch at the door of the apartment she hides within. However, she wakes up in an office, in Boise, Idaho. Hannah has no idea what she’s doing here or what she’s supposed to be doing in this workplace full of women busy with superficial tasks. To her horror and confusion, the boss seems to be an actual zombie or, in this new reality, called a Fecto. To her further disgust, the Hannah who belongs in this world seems to be having an affair with one of the other Fecto bosses, who goes by the name Harrison Squack. The other Hannah was apparently a double agent in this bizarre new plane of existence. A strange society where zombies are in charge of everything versus the humans who have to just grin and bear it. Or else these naughty humans get sent to Salt Lake City for ‘retraining’, wink wink. Or just disappear or get featured on the news as suicides or as going against the nice Fectos who just want a better society for all. There’s, naturally, a rebellion afoot! The local Fectos seem all over that! Hannah plays along but she soon sets off a chain of events that leads to some wacky, wild and, ultimately, tragic events. 

Aftermath: Boise, Idaho

My third book, AFTERMATH: BOISE, IDAHO, is now available as an e-book, with the paperback due in a bit. Enjoy!

My Juntura Serpentine

Hello, September. 

With that out of the way and as we await the murdering land sharks with frickin’ laser beams to show up…I’ll post a short one with pics. 

Was traveling through the teeny town of Juntura, Oregon. My car seemed a bit…funny. Making this weird little noise, but otherwise running okay. I stop, powder my nose at the café there– there’s just the one– and head off toward Christmas Valley, which is way and away on the other side of Burns. You are welcome to look up these places. Notice the DISTANCE between them. Notice that a lot. 

I am perhaps ten miles or so out of Juntura when the car goes berserk. 

Overlooking Juntura, from Shumway Road

Battery light comes on. No power steering. Temp gauge goes through the roof. I smell singed rubber-burning rubber. Whoa now, baby, what’s wrong? I have no idea. So I turn a giant ass U-ey on Highway 20 and hope, hope, hope I can make it back to Juntura…which has the one café and a motel and…nothing else. I do get there, I manage to get the hood up and…have no idea what to do other than check the radiator and the fluids, which all seem fine. I don’t see steam rising from the radiator, either– having had a car that overheated all the time way back when, know that one and how to get back on the road when it does so. 

Also? The town mechanic, the only one between Harper and Juntura. which is a fifty mile stretch, is, um, gone for the day. I can’t make this shit up. 

But. Two guys wander over, discover it’s the serpentine belt that’s gone bye bye. One even fished it from around the fan. So now I can tell those at home what it is and hey, hey, it’s an easy fix and I didn’t blow the engine. 

So finally got a message through at home. My poor brother has to drive up, put the new belt on, then drive back. 

And of course the car drives beautifully after that. Ugh a bug. I lost a day of work but the belt is no longer a ticking time bomb. I just think about being in the actual middle of nowhere and…yep. 

I sprinkled pics of Eastern and Southern Oregon throughout this sad little tale. That’s in and around the Great Sandy Desert and Juntura, of course. Christmas Valley has a lot of hay fields and not much else. I did see lots of wildlife there. Antelope, rabbits, coyotes. 

Okay! I do have a third book about to hit. I’m getting rejections back. Woot woot! And dread to see where work will try to send me tomorrow. 

It’s forty miles back to Highway 20, which is Riley and some spendy gas. 

 

Christmas Valley, OR. Salt Flat Lane. You can see the two antelope at the very tip-top. I could not get any closer without spooking them