Month: July 2016

From the Cutting Room Floor

Slasher Final

The picture you see above was the first attempt at a page header for The Grindhouse (coming soon!  To a theatre near you!).  I commissioned it from The MASMan, who I found at Deviantart, and all I asked for was: 1) a badass Final Girl, who was 2) protecting her boyfriend, who was wounded and cowering from 3) a Slasher who was at least a little different from your stereotypical masked machete-swinger.

I think I got what I wanted.  Our Heroine is badass, the slasher is distinctive…but as much as I liked it, I decided it wasn’t quite what I was looking for.  Our Heroine here is in a defensive posture, and I wanted it to be 100% clear that our slasher has messed with the wrong Final Girl this time, and is about to get his ass kicked so hard that there may not be a sequel.

So I commissioned another drawing, and that was everything I could have hoped for.

Coming soon to a theatre near you…

 

Coming Attractions: The Grindhouse

As my friends and family will tell you, I don’t always have the best of taste.

When it comes to literature, I love J.R.R. Tolkien, Bram Stoker, H.P. Lovecraft…and R.A. Salvatore, Stephen King, and even Edward Lee (do not Google unless you have a strong stomach).  At the theatre, I love a well-done Shakespearean, but I also loved a staged reading of H.P. Lovecraft stories, a musical comedy about the Hopkinsville Goblin Incident, and a little independent comedy about beer and zombies called Brew of the Dead.  And its sequel.  Movies?  The Lord of the Rings and The Maltese Falcon share space on my shelves with The Return of the Living Dead, the entirety of both the Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street series, and of course, Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s Grindhouse.  Visual arts?  I acknowledge the greatness of the Old Masters, but I can’t help but prefer Joseph Michael Linsner and Michael Whelan.  As for music…heh.  I guess this is where my taste is entirely lowbrow.  Loud and bombastic, Epic Rock and Country – Garth Brooks and Bonnie Tyler, Journey and Meat Loaf, and every note that Jim Steinman ever wrote.

What I’m leading up to with all this is that my Novels and Novellas page and my Short Stories page are where I put the things that I take seriously: horror and fantasy where I try to tell some sort of truth, to make myself heard, to build something with the art and craft of writing.

But I also need to feed the other urge.  That’s what the Grindhouse Page (coming soon to this very theatre!) is for.

The Grindhouse page will be the uncensored version, the back room of the video store, the grindhouse theatre on 42nd street in the depths of the Seventies getting ready to start its midnight show, the director’s cut where all of the scenes that were cut to keep the rating at R instead of NC-17 are put back in.  It will be where I have fun with boobs and blood, all the graphic and gratuitous sex and violence that would be a distraction in the serious stuff.  There will be sleaze and slashers and even outright erotica.

Coming soon to this very theatre…

 

Another Fine Portrait of An Awesome Character

Dubiousbyhabit of Sartorially Smart Heroines has posted a new portrait of Queen Viarraluca, the protagonist of Dubious’s upcoming fantasy novel, First Empress.  Once again, the portrait is the work of the talented MJ Barros.

Queen Vi is looking particularly imposing in this portrait.  As Dubious explains on Tumblr:

The scene here is where she confronts a nobleman who conspired to pay an assassin to take her out. The confrontation doesn’t go well for him.

It doesn’t go well for the assassin, either.  Somehow, we’ve developed this cultural idea of assassins as the ultimate death machines, but we forget: assassins don’t have opponents, they have victims.  If an assassin is fighting anyone, they’ve already screwed up.  And if they’re dealing with a warrior, a warrior who sees them coming…well.  In that case, it tends to be the warrior who has a victim instead of an opponent.

PS – I recommend you check out “Portrait Four”.  It’s just as NSFW as Dubious warns, but it’s also beautiful.

It Was Taking Too Long

Hey, all.

For the last few weeks, I’ve been rolling out my old short stories one at a time, each complete with their own product page and a promotional post on the blog.  But like the title says, I decided that was taking too long.  Those stories were published before.  There was no point in drawing things out.

So now, all previously published stories are once again available at Amazon.  All are also enrolled in KDP Select, so if you subscribe to Kindle Unlimited, they are available there for your reading pleasure.

Product pages coming soon, as well as new stories.  And keep your eye out for promotions!