John Everson's Blog, page 9

Goodbye to the clown prince of our flock. R.I.P. Boomer.

SEVEN YEARS AGO, we brought him home from the pet store in a small box with holes for air in it. My son Shaun had fallen for him and so our house was soon filled with the happy warbles of a parakeet for the first time in many years. My first bird, Beebs (short for Zaphod Beeblebrox), was a blue parakeet that I got while I was in college. He lived in a handful of places with me for his eight years, and died in my hands from a large tumor on his chest. Boomer brought back lots of memories of my first bird, with his constant energy and personality.

Today, Boomer died in my wife’s hands, from a similar ailment as my first bird. And tonight, I found him a much nicer box to go out in than what he came to us in.

I’ll miss this little guy so much, though he was never “my” bird. I take care of the two cockatiels and the cockatoo we have.  Boomer was always my wife’s and son’s bird. They spent lots of time with him, while I was at work or sitting in my office with the rest of our “flock.” Boomer could never come into my home office with the rest because he was too rambunctious and would quickly have all the other birds riled up and flying around the room. So I became something of his rival — the guy who shut him out. The guy who kept him from his favorite, Stormy, our youngest cockatiel. Boomer was obsessed with Stormy, and spent hours every day sitting on top of her cage talking to her.

Sometimes, to get Stormy from her cage in the family room and into my office to sit with me and the other birds, I’d have to pick her up and literally run through the kitchen with her cupped in my hands while the parakeet chased me across the room trying to get to her.

Sometimes he bit me because I wouldn’t let him hang out with her. But mostly, he just chirped and warbled and made everyone who met him smile. He ran up arms and sat on shoulders and sometimes, landed on heads.

During his last month, I had to be the bad guy, and give him his medicines twice a day, which he hated. But he didn’t struggle too much when I did it; it was almost like he knew I was just trying to help him.

But the medicines the vet gave us to try to thwart his tumor didn’t have any impact in slowing the tumor’s growth. I first noticed it about a month ago. Three weeks later, it was so large it was making it almost impossible for him to fly. And this afternoon, it stole his last breath away.

I’ll miss his beady eyes and animated ways. But I’m glad he blessed our lives for the years that he did. I hope he enjoyed us as much as we did him.

Rest in peace, Boomer. Fly high and free at last.

 

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One crazy week… anchored by a Meteor

SO LAST WEEKEND, I got home late Saturday night from a work trip to Vegas. But I didn’t stay put for long. After a one-day rest, on Monday, I rented an SUV and drove four hours to Ann Arbor, Michigan.

The reason?

Meteor.

Meteor is a pinball table that I’ve been looking to add to my basement mini-arcade for the past couple years. There were a lot of them produced back in 1979 by Bally — over 8,000. And there is a strong secondary market for pinball machines, so if you know where to look, you can find them for sale. I’ve seen several Meteors for sale on the pinball forums I frequent over the past couple years but the problem has been they were either too far away, or too beat-up looking to consider.

Then, a couple weeks ago, a guy in Ohio put one up for sale that looked pretty good! And after going back and forth on email for a few days and looking at various pictures of the glass and playing field… we made a deal. He had to pick up a game in Ann Arbor, which was a least an hour and a half closer to me than where he lived… so we made an arrangement to meet at one of my favorite places in Ann Arbor — the Jolly Pumpkin Brewpub.

I got there early so I could enjoy lunch and get a little writing time in.

 

 

And a couple hours later… we transferred the machine from one vehicle to another and I was driving home with a nice example of one of my favorite old-school pinball games!

That night, my friend Chris got pressed into service to help me unload it, get it down the stairs to my basement and put the legs and head back on. But there are a lot of wire harnesses that need connecting in the top and bottom of the game when you separate the head and the base to move it, so the next night, the guy who sold the game to me Facetimed with me and guided me to connect all the right things to the right places. And we were up and running!

Chris came over and helped test it out, as well as drain the growler of a sour pale ale I’d grabbed at the Jolly Pumpkin.

 

Moving on…

The week ended with more moving and traveling. And a continued pinball theme. Our good friends Brad and Sandy Czernik (Brad got me into the pinball hobby) are moving about 45 minutes north of here to the edge of Chicago, so on Friday we had dinner with them at a favorite local haunt and then on Saturday… we helped fill and unload their moving truck.  So it’s been a crazy busy week, and today I feel muscles today that I haven’t felt in years.

Maybe I’ll just spend the afternoon playing pinball!

It’s hard to shoot a video and play pinball one-handed, but here’s a glimpse at the table in motion!

http://www.johneverson.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Meteor-2018-03-11-12.33.mp4

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Vegas – a short working return with brief respites of IPA

I HAD TO GO to Las Vegas for a couple days this week to work at a meeting for my dayjob.  I’m not a gambler, so Vegas doesn’t hold the allure for me that it does for many, but it is a fun place to wander around in. You can’t help but enjoy the lights and energy of the place.

I went to see the Zombie Burlesque show the last time I was in Vegas (it’s hilarious), and didn’t see much else in terms of shows playing this time around that I needed to see (sadly, I was there a week too early to catch Roger Daltrey) so… I basically worked 10-12 hours a day and just had a couple good dinners and walked around a little at night. On the first night in (Wednesday), I just went to the rooftop bar at Twin Peaks, where I did some writing the last time I was in town.

Thursday – a visit to Beer Park and Sin City Brewing

I stayed at the Paris, which has a rooftop bar and grill called Beer Park, so on Thursday night after a long day working, I had a burger and sampled a couple IPAs there. Nothing crossed my beer radar to write home about, but the 10 Barrel Joe IPA was decent. It was a pretty cool venue with lots of taps, so I did a little writing there.

 

I also stopped back at Sin City Brewing, a spot I discovered the last time I was there. They’ve got a solid IPA and a great attitude.

Friday night – a long walk to Emeril’s and Beerhaus

On Friday night, I took a long walk down the Strip and took most of the pictures that I have from the trip. I had a steak and jambalaya dinner at Emeril’s in the MGM Grand, wandered into the New York, New York and enjoyed the themed walkways there (all of the restaurant and bar facades are meant to look like places in New York). There was a packed Irish bar there and a dueling piano bar in full swing.

I closed out the night with a shot of Johnny Cash courtesy of a live Americana roots music band and a Joseph James Citra Rye Pale Ale at Beerhaus! The Citra Rye turned out to be my favorite beer discovery in Vegas.  Here are some pictures from that night:

          

 

Saturday – a goodbye from the patio of Cabo Wabo

On Saturday, I had just enough time after the meeting closed for lunch at Sammy Hagar’s Cabo Wabo, which is next door to the Paris. I had a couple margaritas and people watched for an hour before heading to the airport.

Here are some pictures from Cabo Wabo, as well as of inside the Paris:

     

 

 

 

 

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Cover reveal: The House By The Cemetery

LAST MONTH, I got a peek at the cover for The House By The Cemetery, my 10th novel overall, and my first for Flame Tree Press. I’ve been itching to share it ever since, but had to wait for a final version from the publisher. And at last… here it is!

What do you think?

The House By The Cemetery was the very first book signed for Flame Tree Publishing’s new Flame Tree Press imprint (my editor told me it has the very first ISBN number of the bookline!), and I cannot wait to hear what you think of this story. It was a fun novel to write, because it takes place in a “haunted” cemetery near where I grew up — Bachelor’s Grove. And I got to drop in lots of references to some of my favorite cult horror movies, since it takes place in a haunted house attraction, and the house designers borrow heavily from classic horror. Two of the characters even go by the names of Italian horror directors — Argento and Lucio.

Genesis of the story

I’ve actually written about Bachelor’s Grove before; the story “Remember Me, My Husband,” originally published in Terminal Frights magazine in 1994 (and now available in Cage of Bones & Other Deadly Obsessions) is set there. And a couple years ago, I wrote a story called “Driving Her Home” for the Cemetery Riots anthology, which is also set there. In fact, it was the writing of the latter story that inspired me to really take on Bachelor’s Grove with a full, book-length tale. The story begins with a down-on-his-luck carpenter getting the job to rehab a falling down house next to the infamous cemetery, so that it can be opened as a Haunted House attraction in the fall.

Here’s a quick teaser which may be part of the back cover synopsis:

Rumor has it that the abandoned house by the cemetery is haunted by the ghost of a witch. But rumors won’t stop carpenter Mike Kostner from rehabbing the place as a haunted house attraction. Soon he’ll learn that fresh wood and nails can’t keep decades of rumors down. There are noises in the walls. Fresh blood on the floor. Secrets that would be better not to discover. Because behind the rumors is a real ghost who will do whatever it takes to ensure the house reopens. She needs people to fill her house on Halloween. There’s a dark, horrible ritual to fulfill. Because while the witch may have been dead…she doesn’t intend to stay that way.

The first releases of the new Flame Tree imprint will appear in September, featuring my old Leisure and Samhain labelmates Ramsey Campbell, Tim Waggoner, Jonathan Janz and Hunter Shea.

The House By The Cemetery anchors the month of Halloween haunts — it’s scheduled for release on October 4th, 2018. Let the countdown begin!

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Devil’s Dare Chili

THERE IS NOTHING better on a cold January weekend than a belly-warming bowl of chili. But not everyone can handle the same levels of heat. So when I make chili for my annual winter chili and ale fest for a bunch of guys from the neighborhood, I make a really big vat of it. After the initial base preparation, I separate the chili into three or four different crock pots to simmer for an afternoon with the “heat” ingredients divided among them to make one “kid-friendly” batch, and at least one true “Devil’s Dare” pot.  In my book, a true Devil’s Dare version of the chili includes Ghost Pepper. But the beauty of this recipe is that you can really hedge your bets and try various heat levels. If you’re not interested in having more than one variety, you can easily halve this recipe and choose a single path. But here’s how I do it:

 

Devil’s Dare Chili
Prep Time: About an hour

Cook Time: 4-5 hours

 

BASE INGREDIENTS:

7 lbs hamburger
6 pieces bacon
6 garlic cloves
3 Large Sweet Vidalia Onions
6 green onions
4 Green Chili Peppers
3 Poblano Peppers
1 Green Bell Pepper
1 Red Bell Pepper
1 Yellow Pepper
8-10 Garden Tomatoes
2-3 medium Roma Tomatoes
2 Mild Chili Beans in Sauce (40-oz cans)
2 Dark Red Kidney Beans (15-oz cans)
2 Light Red Kidney Beans (15-oz cans)
1 Hot Chili Beans in Sauce (15-oz cans)
1 Crushed Tomato Sauce (26 oz can)
1 Puree Tomatoes (26 oz can)
1 can Ro-Tel Diced Tomatoes and Green Chilies
5 Tablespoons Salt
2 Tablespoons Black Pepper
1 Tablespoon Mild New Mexican Red Chili Powder
3 Tablespoons Paprika
3 Tablespoons Sugar
Corn Meal (add 1 tbsp per pot to thicken at end of cooking if needed)
1 Tablespoon Mexican Oregano

HOT INGREDIENTS:

3 Jalapeno Peppers
1 Serrano Pepper
1 Fingerhot Pepper
3 Habanero Peppers
2 Ghost Peppers
1 Tablespoon mild New Mexican Red Chili Powder
2 Teaspoon hot Red Chili Powder

I typically start making my chili just before noon because it takes me a couple hours to get everything browned, chopped, sauteed and simmering – and then after the base cooks on the stove a couple hours, I separate it into three-four crock pots and create the different “hot” mixes which will then simmer in the crocks for another 2-4 hours.

DIRECTIONS:

On the stove, fry up the strips of bacon until mostly crisp. In a separate frying pan or electric skillet (which is what I use) brown the hamburger meat.
As the hamburger browns and bacon fries, chop up the onions, garlic and peppers into two bowls.
Remove the bacon from the pan and set aside to cool.
Sautee the onions and garlic in the bacon grease until the onion is starting to turn golden brown.
Drain the grease from the hamburger meat and then mix in the sauteed onions to the meat.
You could simply add the peppers to this mix, however, I typically brown them a little at this stage with any leftover bacon grease or a tablespoon or two of vegetable oil.
Dice the tomatoes, and add these and the diced poblano and red/yellow/green bell peppers to the hamburger and onion mix. I find it convenient to use a large electric skillet to brown the hamburger in and then mix everything in, but you could combine the ingredients in a large soup pot as well.
Dice up the green onions and add these and the seasonings (salt, pepper, oregano, sugar, paprika).
Mix in the Ro-Tel and the crushed and pureed tomato sauces, and then the mild chili beans and dark and light kidney beans. I typically pour in most of the liquid in the cans with the beans, with the intent to boil it down over the afternoon.
Once all your ingredients but the hot peppers and hot chili beans are mixed together, I pour it all into two large pots. I used to put it all into one giant soup pot, but you run the risk of burning the bottom with that method, since it’s harder to keep it well stirred.
Add the hot chili beans to one of the two pots.
Dice up 2 Green Chili Peppers (Hatch chilis are the best), 2 Jalapenos, 1 Fingerhot and 1 Serrano and add to the pot with the “hot” chili beans – this pot is now your “medium hot” base.
Add 1 tablespoon mild New Mexican Red Chili powder to the medium hot pot.
Cover both pots and simmer on the stove for a couple hours, stirring frequently.
After simmering for a couple hours, divide the base chili pots into 3-4 Crock Pots. I like to use four, to create a mild, medium, hot and “Devil’s Dare” selection of Chili. (If you have too much “mild” mix, just mix some in to the “medium” pot).
To make the “Hot” pot, use the “Medium” base and add 2 more diced green Chile Peppers, 2 diced Habaneros, and 1 teaspoon Hot Red Chili Powder.
To the Devil’s Dare pot, add 2 diced green Chili peppers, 1 diced Jalapeno, 1 diced Habanero, 2 diced Ghost Peppers and 1 teaspoon Hot Red Chili Powder.
EXTRAS: I smoke pork roasts a lot in the summer and frequently will freeze some of the leftovers. You can make a really flavorful mild chili by adding some diced smoked pork to it. Diced zucchini can also add a little texture. I often use that in the mild pot.
Cook your divided chili in the Crock Pots on the High setting for another two hours or so. When it gets near serving time, siphon off the liquid on the top of each pot, so that you don’t end up serving “watery” chili. It also eliminates some of the oil and fat from the mix.
Stir and grab the serving bowls!

Serve with Sour Cream, Oyster Crackers and grated cheese (I prefer Mexican Chihauha/Quesadilla cheese, but you can use Mozzarella or Colby Jack as well) to top it off. Some people like to add grated raw onion as well.

Make sure you have plenty of cold beer and ice water to wash it down!

 

 

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Sleepy Sunday Pork and Chicken Stew

SOMETIMES, ON A WET or wintry Sunday, I walk into the kitchen after my morning coffee and say, “this feels like the perfect day for a stew.”

A good stew fills the house with rich savory scents that can warm up the most dismal day! A good stew is always somewhat unique, depending on what happens to be in the fridge and freezer at the time. But the keys are meat, potatoes, onions and carrots.

The last time I walked into the kitchen and said “feels like a day for stew”… I found a package of country pork ribs in the freezer that I never got around to grilling in the fall, and a package of chicken breasts. They formed the basis for an awesome stew. Here’s what I did with them:

 

Sleepy Sunday Pork and Chicken Stew
Prep Time: About an hour

Cook Time: 5-6 hours

 

INGREDIENTS:

1 Sweet Red Pepper
6 cloves of fresh Garlic
2 extra-large Sweet Onions
1 package of baby-cut carrots
6-8 small to medium potatoes
6 strips of bacon
3 large chicken breasts
6-8 pork country ribs (or cubed pork stew meat)
3-4 tablespoons Vegetable Oil
3-4 cups of Cream Sherry
1 teaspoon Mexican Oregano Leaves
1 teaspoon Basil
1-2 teaspoons Onion-Onion Seasoning
1 teaspoon salt
a sprinkle of black pepper

VARIANTS: You can add yellow and orange Bell Peppers, chunks of zucchini, mushrooms or other vegetables as your refrigerator allows!

 

DIRECTIONS:

On the stove, fry up the strips of bacon until mostly crisp.
As the bacon fries, chop up the onions, garlic and sweet red pepper on the side. I don’t dice the onions too small – they’ll mostly dissolve in the stew regardless.
Remove the bacon from the pan and set aside to cool. Add the onions, garlic and pepper to the bacon pan and use the grease to saute them until the onion is starting to turn golden brown.
As the onion is cooking, dice the loose meat of the pork ribs into bite size chunks (or, you could just use pork stew meat already cubed by the butcher).
Put 2 tablespoons of oil into another pan, and brown the pork chunks (and any bones that still have some meat on them) in the pan. Sprinkle the oregano, basil, salt, pepper and onion seasoning mix on the meat as it browns.
Remove the pork from the pan once lightly browned and pour into a large crockpot.
By now the onion should be nicely golden/slightly browned — pour that over the pork in the crock.
Using the empty pork pan (which should still be lightly greased – add a little more oil if needed), repeat the browning process with the chicken, also sprinkling the meat lightly with oregano, basil, onion seasoning, salt and pepper.
While the chicken is browning, start cubing your potatoes. I like to wash them good and cut up the potatoes with the skins on — they are loaded with nutrients and fiber. If you have finicky eaters who won’t want to see skins on their potatoes – cube some of the centers to give you some bare potato chunks for them… but throw the rest of the pieces in too with the skins!
When the chicken is lightly browned (or whited, which is more accurate!) pour that into the crockpot.
Finish cubing your potatoes and add those to the crock.
Pour in your bag of baby carrots.
Stir up the contents of the crock and then pour in enough sherry to bring the liquid volume up close to the top layer of meat and vegetables (3-4 cups). You now should have a full crockpot that looks something like this:
 

Give it another sprinkle of seasonings, cover and cook on high for 5-6 hours.
Stir about once an hour over the course of the afternoon.
Some people prefer their stew in its natural broth, but I like mine a little thicker and creamier. To accomplish this, in the final hour of cooking, with a spoon or measuring cup, siphon off the oil and fat that has accumulated on the surface and pour into a bowl or large cup.
Mix 3-4 tablespoons of flour into the oil until you have a loose paste, or roux.
Stir your roux spoon by spoon into the liquid of the stew. Once you’ve added it all, make sure to turn the stew over with a large spoon a few times and then cover it and let it cook for another 30-45 minutes. It’s hard to crockpot a stew for too long over an afternoon — so don’t worry about overcooking.
When you’re ready to eat… pull out your big spoon and plates (or bowls!) and dig in.  Your tastebuds will dance!



Extra Credit: My family loves it when I use some of that afternoon slow cooking time to pull out some flour and yeast and knead up a loaf of homemade bread… but that’s another recipe!

 

If you liked this recipe, try my other culinary concoctions!

 

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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 an appropriate way to end the old year and begin a new one. And I’m enjoying the can of Revolution Deth’s Tar (bourbon barrel aged stout from my favorite brewery) which I bought three weeks ago for just this night.

Who the hell starts blog entries at 1:30 in the morning, you might ask?!

Well.. I’ve been writing a “look back” kind of journal entry for most of my life on the night of New Year’s Eve — in high school, I used to do it in a notebook — and so… here I am.

Again. And honestly glad to still be here to do it. Just me and the Dead and my Deth’s Tar as the rest of the house sleeps.

2018 started great — after our traditional family dinner at the original Aurelio’s Pizza in Homewood, IL, our friends Brad and Sandy Czernik came over to ring in the new year with us… and counting down the new year with other people is actually something we haven’t done in a long while. Usually, just Shaun and Geri and I greet the new year together. But 2017 was a year of transitions.

For all of us.

Our friends are moving in a few weeks, thanks to changes that happened for them in 2017.  That’s their story to tell, but I know that we won’t grow far apart even if the miles separate us.

We had plenty of transitions ourselves in 2017. After years working for a tax firm, Geri switched jobs to go back to working for a grade school. The job in her life that was always her favorite was back when she was working for a high school, so this was a good thing for her.

I had my own career changes too — after 8 years as a dept. director in the same role at my dayjob, I moved to another division to start a new business unit… a fairly major transition for me. Ironically, the new role is in the same Communications division that I started at in the business 24 years ago… so it was kind of a coming home. That change really took a lot of my mental energy for a lot of my year, but I can honestly say it was a good change. That happened a few months into the 2017.

But…2017 started with another major change for me.

The end of Samhain….

In the first week of January, my publisher of the past five years — Samhain Publishing — closed its doors.  That wasn’t a big surprise, as they’d let go Don D’Auria, the horror line editor a year earlier. But it still was traumatic. I was left to decide what to do with the four books that they’d published of mine in fairly short order. Self publish them? Give them to another press to reissue?

While I had some good offers, ultimately, I decided in DIY fashion that if the books were in my hands again… this time around, I’d do what I wanted with them rather than farm them out. So I spent a large part of the first quarter of 2017 developing new covers, recreating the e-books and paperback editions and republishing them myself under my existing Dark Arts Books imprint.

 

I wrote a Back In Print blog about that in April, and the process was ultimately rewarding… but it was a creative/transition process that took up a solid chunk of time in 2017.

 

The launch of Redemption

At the same time as I was relaunching my last four books, I was also launching my first 100% self-published novel, Redemption. The finale to my Curburide Demon trilogy begun in my first two novels Covenant and Sacrifice, it was a book that I knew was likely to be homeless from the start of the writing — because there was no publisher invested in having a sequel.

While most of my books have been sold to a publisher based on the outline — and then I’d write them once sold — with Redemption, it was different. The current publisher of Covenant and Sacrifice is currently 47North, and they bought those books as part of a large auction of 1,000 other titles from Leisure Books in 2011. So they had no real stake in the novels. And they would not contract an “end-of-series” book title based on an outline. I had to write the whole novel and submit it to get them to respond about it… And as I expected, when I finished and submitted the book, they said “hey, great novel that we’re sure your fans will like but… we’re not really publishing much horror these days so… good luck.”

With the publisher of the other two books uninterested, and my current publisher, Samhain in the gutter, I decided the best way with that book was to issue it under my own Dark Arts Books imprint. So I spent December of 2016 editing the book and January of 2017 finalizing the layout, printing and shipping it to everyone who had pre-ordered it. You can read more about that process in Redemption, at last!

It was an exhausting first quarter, given all of those things together!

But by the summer, I got back on the horse, and began to really work on my latest, 10th novel — The House By The Cemetery. It was a book that I’d written an outline and sample chapters for a year earlier. I had an editor at Kensington interested in the book in 2016, but when he left the publisher, the project stalled.

I put it aside for a few months to finish Redemption and relaunch my Samhain books, but began to work on it again in June 2017. And then in August, I heard from Don D’Auria, my old editor from Leisure and Samhain. He was helping to launch Flame Tree Press, a new horror imprint for Flame Tree Publishing to debut in 2018… so I sent the sample material his way to look at. A few weeks later, I had an offer and began frantically working on finishing the book that I’d outlined so that it could be one of the first releases for the new imprint. THAT process ate up some of the 3rd and much of the 4th quarters of 2017.

So… 2017 to me was a lot about changing jobs and changing publishers.

Changes and Renovations

But there were some other changes and upgrades in my life, too. In the summer, we completely redid Shaun’s room — he was still sleeping in the bed that he’d had as a toddler (he’d had a wood crib that converted to a full bed — so he was in the same bed really for 12 years!) We bought him all new furniture and repainted the room. That was a project I hope never to do again. Though it turned out nice — I think he has a pretty great room for a soon-to-be teen now.

We also spent several weeks reorganizing/redeveloping one of our three basement rooms. It is the space I’ve always wanted to be strictly “the game room.” Thanks to my pinball friend Chad, we had the opportunity to add a 3rd machine (Fireball Classic) to the basement, so it became an imperative that we had to change the layout of the middle room of the basement to accommodate.

That sucked up a lot of September/October, as I pulled down shelves that had been on the walls for decades (and filled with our crap for the last decade!), built a new cabinet, installed a new stereo system,  and repainted and switched the whole room around. But I’m happy that it’s now one of my favorite rooms in the house.

   

2017 Travels…

With the new change in my job, I won’t be traveling like I used to — which will mean a lot fewer “food pix” posted. But I did get to go to a few locales for work this year – the first half of the year was busy! Between work and family trips, I visited eight cities outside of Illinois:

San Francisco
Providence, RI
New Orleans
Kalamazoo, MI
Grand Rapids, MI
Milwaukee
Door County, WI
Indianapolis
Orlando

2017 in Music

Highlights in music this year for me included new albums from Matthew Sweet (his best in a decade), OMD, Kesha, Styx, Erasure, and the debut of Dua Lipa.

It was a big year for me in concerts. I saw nine concerts — some with and some without my family, including:

Neil Diamond
Dennis DeYoung
Lyle Lovett
Goo Goo Dolls with Phillip Phillips
Collective Soul
Garbage & Blondie
Alison Moyet
Goblin with Morricone Youth
Kansas

 

Something every month…

In January, I presented at a work conference in San Francisco for work, and got to visit 21st Amendment Brewery, enjoy some super spicy chicken at Z&Y and close my trip with some amazing crab at the Fog Harbor Fish House.

  

 

At the start of February, I visited Rhode Island for the first time and enjoyed some chowder and a Citra Ass Down IPA at Union Station Brewery and an awesome lobster at Hemenway’s Seafood Grill & Oyster Bar.

 

And Geri and Shaun and I went to the Chicago Auto Show at McCormick Place, and drooled over the new Mustangs, as we do almost every year.

 

In March, I visited New Orleans and got to have shrimp and grits at an Emeril restaurant (NOLA) twice in the same week. And I visited my old faves Coop’s Place and Redfish Grill for some jambalaya and gumbo.

  

 

In April, Shaun and I drove to Kalamazoo, Michigan and had dinner at Bell’s Brewery’s Eccentric Cafe before hanging out with the Czernik’s for a couple days to attend Pinball at the Zoo. We saw lots of our pinball friends there, including Chad and Mike (who hosted an awesome after con party at his own pinball haven.)

 

In May, thanks to a contact I made at Pinball at the Zoo, I drove up to Grand Rapids, Michigan and bought a custom arcade game setup — there’s a guy up there who takes empty whiskey barrels and installs arcade game systems in them. Shaun loved the game setup at the ‘Zoo and I thought it would be awesome in the room with my basement bar — so you can now hang in my basement and play Galaga, Pacman, Phoenix, Q-Bert, DigDug and hundreds of other games… on my whiskey barrel!

On the way home from that trip, I stopped at Founders Taproom and had some taproom-only ale — Centennial IPA cask-conditioned with bourbon-soaked oak — which was amazing.

For Geri’s birthday that month, we went to a Cubs game at Wrigley, and Shaun got the opportunity to actually run the bases, which was cool.

Afterwards, we all got to pose with the Cubs’ 2016 World Series Championship trophy.

 

In June, we did a daytrip to Milwaukee — just because — and visited the Mars Cheese Castle, the Milwaukee Zoo and had dinner at the Milwaukee Ale House along the waterfront.

Then in July, in the midst of doing Shaun’s room renovation, we took a short vacation to Door County, Wisconsin, which was wonderfully relaxing.  We also managed to see a slew of concerts that month — it’s when I caught Dennis DeYoung, Lyle Lovett, Goo Goo Dolls, Collective Soul, Garbage and Blondie!

   

 

August/September is con season for me, as I always have a table at Flashback Weekend and Chicago ComicCon in Rosemont, IL, and at HorrorHound Weekend in Indianapolis. I hung out with Brian Pinkerton, caught up with Jay Bonansinga and Jeff Jacobson and spoke on author panels again at Comic Con, thanks to Genese Davis, who put together the author program. I always have a great time catching up at these cons with so many friends and readers, especially Jerry Chandler and Don May from Synapse Films who I always make sure to have my booth next to. And in Indianapolis, we always get to have a reunion with our friends Troy and Diane Horn (this year joined by Lon and Amy Czarnecki!) And this year, Shaun got to meet three actors from one of our favorite movies, Better Off Dead (Curtis Armstrong and Amanda Wyss at Flashback and John Cusack at Comic Con).

Usually I do big blog travelogues with pix about those cons, but I never had time this fall to write them last fall… so here are a few pictures from all three events:

Flashback Weekend 2017

 

Wizard World Chicago Comic Con 2017

        

 

HorrorHound Weekend 2017 – Indianapolis

    

 

My final travel location for the year was Orlando… but I basically never left the convention center except for dinner, so it’s really not worth posting photos! Most of my nights after work I holed up at The Pub, and worked on The House by the Cemetery.

 

Concerts in the Fall

I saw Alison Moyet play in September at Chicago’s Park West which was amazing — I fell in love with her voice in high school when she was with Yaz and have followed her solo career ever since… but never had the opportunity to see her before.

And then in October just before Halloween, I went to see Goblin — the band that scored several Dario Argento movies, including Suspiria.  It was the first time I’d been to Chicago’s Thalia Hall which is a great venue. And Morricone Youth opened the show with a great set. Here’s a clip I recorded of Suspiria (posted on my YouTube channel):

Then in November, we took Shaun to see Kansas, who were still touring their 40th Anniversary Tour of Leftoverture that I saw last year. Shaun proclaimed it the best concert he’d ever seen!

Winding down 2017…

Things finally slowed down in October and November. Geri and I actually put on a costume (the Reaper, natch!) for the first time in decades and went to a fun Halloween party at Lon & Amy’s house.

Shaun and I went to Pinball Expo in Wheeling, IL, with the Czerniks as we have the past few years. But I didn’t travel any more, except to take my dad downtown for an overnight birthday celebration in Chicago with my stepbrother Jim (we took dad to see Blue Man Group and House of Blues Gospel Brunch, as well as to a couple blues clubs.)

Basically as the year began to wind down, I just worked on finishing The House By The Cemetery, my 10th novel. I turned it in to Flame Tree Press the first week of December… and then spent the rest of that month redesigning and relaunching my website. Over Christmas break, we took Shaun to see his first real musicals — Wicked in Chicago and Elf, The Musical in Aurora, which were both great.

And here we are. The first day of 2018.

I experienced and enjoyed so many things in 2017, but… it was kind of a manic year. I’ll be honest — I hope this year is quieter!  I’d like to have more time to read a book or two, and enjoy the new basement game room.

Time will tell.

Happy New Year!

 

 

The post A Year of Transitions: Looking back on 2017 appeared first on John Everson.

JohnEverson.com redesign: New Website for a New Year!

IT’S BEEN LONG overdue, but I’ve officially launched the JohnEverson.com redesign!  My site has had a few different looks over the years but the last time I gave it a full redesign was August 2008. The web has changed a lot since then, so JohnEverson.com really needed a facelift.

The last design was my longest-lived look, thanks to the design help of Alina Ciejka Gonciarz and the awesome artwork from Travis Anthony Soumis (repurposed from the bookcover he did for my collection Needles & Sins).  I loved the look of that site! But… in the age of mobile devices, the site needed to change. While it didn’t actually look too bad on a phone, it wasn’t responsive. And my old blog was increasingly difficult to edit in an outdated, modified WordPress theme.

I basically spent all of my free time in December — including my two weeks of holiday time off work — designing the new site and pouring the old one into the new framework. I’d guess there is more than 100 hours invested in this design and transition, so I hope it lasts as long as the last one did! It actually quietly went live a few days ago. But today I put in 301 redirects on most of the old site’s main landing pages to point to the new site.  So… I’m relieved to finally be able to say: JohnEverson.com Mach 2018 is officially LIVE!

Site History

My site has been on the web for 21 years now (it’s legal!)  I started it in a directory on AOL back in 1996, and eventually moved it to its own domain and hosting on GoDaddy. Originally it had a width of 800 pixels. The 2008 redesign expanded the site to from two to three columns and the pixel width hit 1024. But in the age of wide screens, even that was looking thin in 2017. The new site boxes out at 1200 pixels. The really big change for the new site though, is that it is now completely driven by WordPress. In the past, my site was HTML with CSS design, and the blog mimicked the design but really was independent.  I wanted to combine the whole site so it was seamless to work in and edit. So I recreated the full site in WordPress. But that has also meant moving over blog posts one by one to put all the eggs into one basket. I’ll probably still be back filling older blogs for the next month or two… but the past four years are all moved over.

One of the nice things about the new site is that I now have unique pages for all of my books, as well as book review pages for each. In the previous site, I did not have that.  All of the book info used to be glommed onto a single page and reviews just ran in scroll fashion on the left side of the home page. So now I have a much better architecture for maintaining information on all my releases. (Of course, that also meant creating about 40 pages that didn’t used to exist on my site!)

Here’s a look at JohnEverson.com through the years:

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Beauty in Ruins tags NIGHTWHERE as a Top Read of 2017

THE BEAUTY IN RUINS review site gave my 6th novel, NightWhere, a glowing review earlier this year on its associated blog WTF Are You Reading?, and this week, the site listed the book as one of the top reads of 2017 calling it “a work of erotic horror that delivered on both fronts.”

Check out the full best of the year list from Beauty In Ruins.

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Merry Christmas!

I can’t believe it is Christmas Eve already! Here’s a little song to help make your holiday merry. I wrote “Show Me Christmas” 20 years ago and recorded it at my friend Mark Konzen’s house with my friend Lexi Zehren at the mic. Turn it up!

And while you’re listening, here’s an original Christmas fantasy story that I wrote a long time again for family and friends that you can read:  It’s called, “Christmas, The Hard Way.”

Have a wonderful Christmas!

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