Posted on

Halloween with the Horror Writers Association

For about the last two months, I’ve been working on a special project for the Horror Writers Association: HWA Halloween Haunts.

Thirty-one special blog posts for the thirty-one days of October. Horror writers blogging about Halloween and the HWA, about the nuts and bolts of writing, about their books and projects, all to celebrate Halloween and horror writing for the month of October. I’ve been working with a great group of writers–novelists, short fiction writers, poets, screenwriters, non-fiction writers–all of whom have generously donated their time, words, pictures, and in some cases books and e-books that we’ll be giving away throughout the month. It launches today on the HWA blog, Dark Whispers.

The first post is mine, The Dead Have the Best Candy, a true Halloween story.

With posts and interviews from people such as Bruce Boston, Ellen Datlow, Gabreille Faust, Don D’Auria, Nancy Holder, John Hornor Jacobs, Jonathan Maberry and Janice Bashman, Nick Mamatas, Lisa Morton, Weston Ochse, Norman Prentiss, Anne K. Schwader, Matthew Warner, and many others, Halloween Haunts will be the scariest thing going on the Web this Halloween. I encourage you to drop by, check it out, and enter for a giveaway.

 

Posted on

I Was a Weblog Dropout

Welcome to my new website and blog!

If you visited my old website more than, say, half a dozen times, you probably noticed that I didn’t update it often. That’s because it was a lot of work! Whenever I had time to spare, getting some real writing done usually trumped wrestling with my .html editor to update my site. I’d built the thing clunky and hard to maintain, and through multiple computer switches and software changes, it only became more difficult to work with.

Not so this new, spiffy site built using WordPress!

Click around a bit and you’ll find plenty of information about my published and forthcoming works, such as The Engines of Sacrifice, soon to be published by Dark Regions Press. It’s already getting some great reviews that I’ll be posting here soon. There are also lots of free stories and excerpts to read and even a video. And as time goes by, I’ll be adding some new features and content.

The biggest change, though, is probably the addition of a functional blog.

This is not my first attempt at blogging. That came circa 1997. Since Webster’s officially dates the first known use of the term weblog or blog to 1999, that makes me a genuine Internet pioneer. Heck, I was blogging before there was a word for it. Back when I was running www.shadowhouse.com to support my comic book Shadow House, I was making regular posts to the website and soliciting comments from readers. That’s blogging, right? Of course, that was all pretty much over in 1998, which means I’m also an Internet pioneer at quitting blogging!

I was so ahead of the curve I started blogging then quit before there was even a word for it. I should’ve been a dotcom millionaire, but I gave it all up to write fiction and comics.

What can I say? I needed more face time in my life.

But that wasn’t the only time I quit blogging, either. Nope, here’s my last post, from 2010 for my oft-neglected Blogspot blog. That went a little better, running about three years.

So what makes this latest blogging attempt different?

Well, that’s the question, isn’t it?

Stick around and find out.