R.C. Mulhare's Blog: Notes from a Grocery Clerk With a Too-Big Imagination, page 3

Burning Up the Keyboard

I've had the best intentions to post something in this writing blog every week, but things keep interfering with my punctuality. This past week, I had a perfectly good reason: First, our phone line got broken by the road crew outside our house. Again. And this time, due to some crossed wires of a different variety, it took a few more days than before to get the wire fixed (thankfully, Verizon replaced the line, much higher and therefore out of the way). Just as well that I got knocked offline, as I had a deadline on Sunday, July 29th that I scorched my keyboard to meet (and did so with 14 hours to spare). I had that haunted apartment story to finish drafting and type up in the space of two weeks. Goodness knows I've written more in less amount of time, but the results pleased me and I hope that it pleases the editor. I wrote this tale more or less for my mother, and several small details relating to her turned up in the details of the tale. Also, fir a change of pace, I set it in the spring, rather than the autumn, as so many of my stories end up, though it has an odd, autumnal feel to it.

After I finished this story, I decided to give myself a break of a day or two, reading books and do some work around the house, including some cleaning and helping my dad run his hydraulic log splitter to break up some firewood for the winter. Does that make me a lumberjane for a day??

The rest has me recharged to address the stories I have in my work docket, which include, but aren't limited to:

-Two horror-comedy stories, one involving zombie chickens (inspired by a conversation with my mother. I have no idea....), and the other a half-finished work involving ghosts providing air conditioning in a bed and breakfast.

-Polishing a flash fiction involving peculiar things on a cruise (which I plan to post on my Patreon page)

-An especially ambitious story for an anthology set in the universe of Jon Black's Bel Nemeton, dealing with "Lost Books"; I'm taking the Lovecraftian tack (of course!) and writing a tale involving a book that I referenced in my "The Handmaid of the Key", published this year in Weirdbook #38. A plot has finally presented itself to me, and I've started jotting down a few paragraphs and things.

Wending My Way From My Writing Desk Back to Providence

A lot has gone on since I last posted here. I've been beavering away at typing untyped stories, clearing away some of the backlog sitting in various journals. Im the process, I discovered a cut scene from my "Grand Staircase to the Yellow Court" (the published version of which appeared in Secret Stairs: A Tribute to Urban Legend a bit in which Matherton and Stamos, the pair of FBI agents who first appeared in my story in "Bite ME", arrive on scene to take custody of the incriminating copy of the King in Yellow. I'd removed this scene since it slowed down the pace of the story, But I kept it and decided to post it on my till-now disused Patreon page, as a patrons-only exclusive, So! for a small donation each month, you can read it and the rest of the stories that I will be posting in the near future Over Here This is just the first of more stories you'll soon find over there, so watch that space...

I've also scared up more new to me markets to send other, longer stories for consideration, including but not limited to a Gothic tale, a kids' story involving a creature I'd seen in a nightmare, and another tale of the Reanimator. The more stories I send out, the greater my chances of something fitting a particular market and appearing in print for your delight - and terror.

Also, I thought I would take a break from straight-up horror this summer, but my brain had other ideas. A market for haunted house stories opened and I discovered I had a tale involving a haunted apartment complex sitting half-written in a journal, begging me to finish it and send it out. Wish me luck on this one and the rest of my works in progress.

Most importantly! I will be wending my way back to the eldritch hills and haunted byways of Providence, Rhode Island, for the bi-annual H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival. I'd planned to attend the last time (2016) but chickened out at the last minute and I've kicked myself ever since. No self-kicking this year: I've arranged for my accommodations and paid for my tickets. Any of you planning to attend, feel free to say hello to me.

First I got an Interview! Then My 'Net Went Down...

Bit of a crazy week: got a rejection letter at the start of the week, and am looking around for another potential home for it, But more importantly, I finally sent off my fishdude tale, and now starts the waiting game regarding this new tale's destiny, One thing I try to do: for every rejection, I send out another story for consideration to a new or at least a different market.

Also, changes are being made in the neighborhood of the not-so-gambrel-roofed house in East Manuxet: our street is being raised as part of a flood prevention plan. When it's finished, it's supposed to form a barrier against the Shawsheen River back-flowing into the Heath Brook. The downside is that some of our trees got cut down, though the town has promised to replace the trees, And when the crew was taking down one of the trees, the arm of the tree truck hit our telephone pole and knocked the line right off it. So, for a day and a half, I got forced offline, Not a bad thing, as it gave me a chance to catch up on some typing. I got a small Halloween sketch typed and ready. Come October, it may turn up on the long-neglected Patreon page, along with a few more tricks and treats.

But most importantly, before all that (and thankfully before my 'Net went kablooey) I had an interview with a Deadman, Jesse Dedman to be precise, editor provocateur of Deadman's Tome and publisher of two of my stories,
"Something Eating at You" in
and "The Horror in the Stable" in . We had a great chat, on antiquing, Star Wars, CockyGate and
Erin Crocker's , the Salem Witch Trials and more odd things. You can have a listen over Here on Youtube" and Here on Spreaker. Get yerself a cool glass of something and sit back for a listen!

Summertime and the writing is a bit up and down

A warm week and I'm still running edits on my fishdude tale: I now have a working title that has shaped up to final title level. If it seems like I've taken this slowly, it has everything to do with my day job eating more of my time and energy, Barbecue season has launched, and this means barbecue stuff for me to bag up. But those three-foot long bamboo skewers meant for toasting smores look like they could double as vampire protection...

The pre-order for Erin Crocker's "Cocky Tales", which I discussed at length in my previous entry, goes live this week! You can here her talk more about it on this lovely live video, in which she's wearing *THE* most awesome hat for summer, ever (Erin, where did you find that cool thing??).

I've also been tinkering with a few ideas for tiny shorts: I've got a fantasy story involving wee monsters in a library, that I'm penning (pencilling?? as I use pencils to draft my MSS) to submit to a children's ezine. And a random throwaway joke involving undead hens. I have no idea how that got into the conversation (maybe just a case of Conversation with a Horror Author), but my mother asked me, "Has anyone ever written a story like that?" I honestly couldn't tell her yes or no, but I regard "originality" as a canard that begs refutation. You can copyright the presentation of a plot, but you can't really copyright a concept (tell that to the weird woman who tried to sue James Cameron and the Wachowskis for supposedly "stealing" the concept of a robot revolt. No word on whether or not the estate of Karel Capek - he who invented the word "robot" in the first place - put the legal bite on her. I doubt they would, or if her work even crossed their path). I won't say I'm taking a break from horror fiction, but after some emotional set-backs I've had, I've decided that some lighter works might do the trick to boost my spirits.

Too Long in Coming on this

I've had a lot on my plate lately, hence the lack of an update (even though I'd vowed to post more often). My emotional and mental health have been shaky, due to some abrupt changes taking place in my life (Nothing I'll go into detail recounting, as it's personal and nothing you dear readers need to worry about). But the writing life has been nothing if not busy.

- "Write What You Know (and You Know More Than You Realize)" could not have gone better. The folks at the Wilmington Memorial Library could not have been a warmer or more engaging crowd. I only wish I could have come up with slightly more material than what I thought would fill my slot, but we filled the time with good conversation, which is what I'd hoped for. I want my talks, wherever I give them, to be more of a guided dialogue, as it were, since I feel a bit self-conscious going on about my craft and I want to be the sort whom my listener can find resonance with, sharing ideas and realizations they may have had but barely dared express. One of these days, I'll post the notes I made for this evening, as I had some good material there that I'd love to share with all of you.

- Guising Night, Book Two in the Dreamer of Providence series, has been released by Off the Beaten Path Press, and I think it's shaping up to be a bigger book than the first. I'd planned this as a Halloween treat last year, and then hoped for it to be a late Walpurgis Nacht treat, but life had a lot of interesting plans for us on the production end of things, But, as it came out the week before my birthday, I offer it to you as a reverse birthday treat: Halloween is my favorite holiday, and Lovecraft is one of my favorite writers, so consider this tale of a shy writer and his spirited Irish colleen on the spookiest night of the year as my gift to you all.

- I've also sold another tale, to be released sometime later this summer (All release dates projected): If you've been following the weird tale of the writer who claimed she's copyrighted the word "Cocky", and you're annoyed by this person's hubris, you are not alone. My friend Erin Crocker, whom I met through FunDead Publications, and with whom I share four of their tables of Contents, decided to launch a rebuttal of sorts, in her anthology "Cocky Tales". The one stipulation for this anthology, beyond the tale being between 1K to 5K words, was that you had to use the word "Cocky" in the title. I wanted to help out with this, as I'd followed the news, and all of it made me cringe hard enough to desire taking a whack at this nonsense through the thing I do best. But for the life of me, I couldn't come up with a story premise that I liked, even with the submission deadline looming up before me.

And then I went shopping with my mum, and as we stood in the entryway of the store, sorting through our bags, my gaze happened to catch on some gumball machines, one containing little figurines of zombies, and next to it, one containing figurines of mermaids. Naturally, my strange little mind latched onto this and got to thinking: "Zombies and mermaids... Mermaids and zombies... Mermaids fighting zombies. Why are mermaids fighting zombies, and what are zombies doing in the mermaid cove anyway??" (If you've ever wondered what my writing thought process entails and where I get my ideas, this is a good for-instance...) I immediately got the mental image of a cocky merman and his mermaid back to back fighting zombies. I had to write that story the minute I got home. Which I did, scribbling down an 1,800 word fantasy-horror piece in one day, typing it up the next day, editing the third day, and sending it out the fourth, with a day to spare before the submission window closed. To my amazement, Erin loved it enough to include it in her anthology. I'll post more information on the release when it becomes available.

- Works in progress at the moment include typing up the story involving a half-Deep One and some weird fans at a Lovecraft convention. I'm also shuffling between a few other projects, including a tale involving the back story on a Lovecraftian grimoire that has appeared in one of my tales already, the "Book of the Ways" by Rh'as-awl-Aliq, a disciple if not a direct student of our old friend Abdul Al-Hazarad (Why yes, that's a riff from the name of a Batman villain. It may have been intentional...) and the present whereabouts of one of the last known copies of the fearsome little book. A hotshot collector of antiquities and a priest sent by the Vatican to locate the book before it falls into unsuspecting hands will be involved (and yes, elements of it came from me getting annoyed with the cliche "suppressed by the Vatican" trope one finds in some thrillers, as I'm writing this for an editor who feels the same way about this trope: that it's overdone unless one is willing to Do Your Homework and Avoid Lazy Writing). Also, I may be returning to my science fiction roots and I'm setting the groundwork for a novel that I hope reads like literary fiction from a future that involves androids that easily pass for humans. I can't say more as I've only got a premise and a few characters jotted down.

Writing What I Know and What I Need to Know

I had every intention of getting this up within seven days of the last entry, but I've had a busy week of writing: I've tapped some of the outstanding submits that I hadn't heard back about in several months, and heard back on two of them. Life got as interesting for some editors as it got for me this winter; the wheels of the publishing process sometimes turn oddly.

I've also been been typing and editing a story for an anthology of horror stories involving... pizza. So I have a plucky Genre Savvy delivery girl walking with trepidation and hope that it's just her overactive imagination into a weird house.

Also, I've been working on two stories: one is a back story on Irena Stamos, the Salem Psychic who appears in "The Witch Who Blew In On The Storm", in which we find out about the tea room she used to work in as a fortune teller back in the 1920s (I ditched a previous draft and started a new one, since the previous one just wasn't working for me, but the new draft is working very well), and the other is a somewhat ambitious project which I mentioned in the last entry, ie. the Frankenstein/Reanimator crossover, which is taking shape. It's currently as much of a golem as the Creature, but I'm enjoying it immensely (and I've getting close to the big turning point in ye story).

Most importantly, on Tuesday, I took part in a writers' group meeting at the Wilmington Memorial Library, in part to attend a guest talk given by three local writers who meet regularly at the Dracut Public Library, who've put together their own little anthology, Tales From the Locals. A very informative talk, as I'm planning (hoping, knock on wood, light candles for the appropriate saints) to put together a small collection of my own stories and self-publish them, hopefully (please God) sometime later this year.

I'll also be guest speaking for this group, on May 22nd. I'll be posting more information as it becomes available, but I'll be speaking on the subject "Write What You Know (And You Know More Than You Realize)", taking that hackneyed piece of writing advice and putting a new slant onto it. I've always felt it's the stories that we only just know about that we need to tell, that we need to find out what happens next in, and then share it with the world, and I hope I can share that with these fine folks.

Knowing When and How to Pace Yourself

I've recently learned that it's wise to post in your writing blog every week, to keep folks in the loop, and... I've been seriously remiss in this, something I intend to rectify, starting today. The problem is, I've been a bit... not burned out, but after my last marathon of writing and revising, I've been taking it easy. Add to that, I had some minor health trouble over the weekend (nothing serious, just over-tiredness from two very busy days on top of That Time of the Month), and so I decided it was best to lay down my pen for a few days and take it easy. No shame in that, though it's something that I sense a lot of writers struggle with. We're compelled by our inner drive to create and share our creations with our readers, and at the same time, we are compelled by forces from without (read: deadlines, etc.) to produce as much as we can in the time we have. Nothing wrong in and of itself, but the problem emerges when it goes on too long, when one tries to produce when you haven't quite enough energy to write well. Sure, one can revise things, but I've had it happen that when I've written while I wasn't feeling well, it can make a story especially wonky, and results in Things That Don't Work Very Well, something which dismays me and, at times, has lead to me questioning my creativity. I admit it, creative anxiety and a touch of imposter syndrome plague me from time to time, to say nothing of my general health which can be rocky at times due to chronic conditions.

But despite this, I keep plugging on. Sometimes I suspect the weird wiring in my head and elsewhere in my self causes me to be defiant, to find ways around all the obstacles that my health throws at me and Keep On Writing. That's lead me to have three active projects going at this very moment:

- A back story (or part of it anyway) for Irena Stamos, the larger-than-life earth momma witch who appears in "The Witch Who Blew In On The Storm", in FunDead Publications's One Night in Salem

- A kind of tongue-in-cheek take on Lovecraft fans and the ones who have a thing for Deep Ones... and what those fishfolks make of it (spoiler: some of them are creeped out by the more aggressive would-be fishkissers)

- A crossover between Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and H.P, Lovecraft's Herbert West: Reanimator which you can find in Legacy of the Reanimator: The Chronicles of Dr. Herbert West, which I'm setting after the events of ye Lovecraft story.

And I've set up a new shelf containing the books that feature my work, this time in our living room, right over a chair where I usually sit when I'm having a quiet evening with the folks. Here there are, bookended, literally, the work of H.P. Lovecraft:

New Release Link-a-palooza!

March, the month in which the Old Gentleman From Providence left this world for another, is roaring like a lion of new releases:


-After two years of me shopping it around, Weirdbook picked up my "The Handmaid of the Key", a shivery little sketch inspired by H.P. Lovecraft's "The Dunwich Horror", in which Lavinia Whateley ponders her place in the world of her weird little twins, as she tucks them into bed one wintry night. I've had a soft spot for this strange lady, and so I thought to take a peek into her head and her heart, and mind you, said heart is a motherly one which genuinely cares for her half-Elder God kidlets (hey, they might be weird creatures, but she loves 'em, dangit).

The print and Kindle versions can be found over here


- My "Something Eating at You" has at last found a place for it to lurk, in Deadman's Tome's "The Ancient One II" anthology. The germ of the story came from "The Colour Out of Space", crossed with an incident at the Topsfield Fair, when I spotted some really odd looking vegetables on display in the Fruits and Vegetables show building. Not sure if they were supposed to look like that, but I mused that they might have gotten exposed to the contents of a strange meteorite that fell into the kitchen garden. In a spirit of "Well, why not write it?" - something that's spurred on a lot of my writing - I took on this story, and found just the right venue for it.

Pre-orders are available Over here! The book drops April 1st, just in time for Easter (I ain't foolin').

Climbing the Stairs in the Forest

But first, a book trailer...

Somewhere out in the woods, they stand alone, a set of stairs, usually stone. Some are slightly weathered, some look as though they were built yesterday. They lead up... into the middle of the air, no destination in sight, but walking up them may affect you. It could lead you to an unusual dimension. Or it could invite something to follow you down.

I first encountered the Internet legend known as the Staircase in the Woods, or the Staircase in the Forest through the Youtube creepy story community, ie. young folks reading true creepy stories or creepypastas (nothing to do with scary Italian noodles, but rather... the Internet's answer to campfire scary stories, shared copy-paste - or copy-pasta - style, originally through emails, now through forums and even wiki pages). One involving a park ranger discovering the Stairs while on a rescue mission grabbed my attention and wouldn't let go. I live a town over from a Massachusetts State Forest, one I've hiked in with friends and with my dad, and naturally, my vivid imagination imagined one of these eerie staircases lurking in the shadows under the trees there.

I hope this doesn't take some of the mystery out of the legend, but I've wondered if it might have its roots, or one strand of said roots in reality, or at least a very strange reality. In a public forest/nature reserve in Chesterfield, New Hampshire stand the ruins of what the locals call Madame Sherri's Castle , the home of a fascinating woman who'd moved up from New York City back in the Jazz Age. After she had to move out of the house once she'd grown too old to live in it alone, it allegedly burned a day or two following her departure (or so the story goes).

Then last spring, I discovered a call for submissions to an anthology inspired by just this Internet legend. Here was my chance to take a stab at a story that had intrigued me - and this time, I'd put a Weird Fiction twist on the legend: perhaps the stairs served as a secondary conduit for the King in Yellow? Perhaps the manifestation of the stairs had everything to do with someone performing The Play of the King in Yellow. Then the male protag of "The Witch Who Blew In On the Storm" in One Night in Salem turned up in this new tale, fitting, as he's a news photographer and thus a great seeker of mysteries. I won't say this story wrote itself, but it flowed from my mind to the pencil to the page pretty quickly. If I remember rightly, I had it finished and submitted shortly before I wended my way to NecronomiCon Providence.

It wasn't until the end if January, when I'd almost given up hope on this (I'd even considered withdrawing it to put it into a chapbook of KiY stories that's been tickling at the back of my mind) that I heard back on the fate of this tale, and that it had been accepted into this ambitious project. Now, at last, my story "Grand Staircase to the Yellow Court", is in print alongside thirty-three authors' takes on this Internet myth. You can find it On Amazon, where it hit #1 in Horror Anthologies , and even appeared in the Kindle Store's featured Horror selections! My third time getting into the top ten on Amazon and the first time I've seen a book with one of my stories rank this high!

Women in Horror Month: Why Horror? Why Not??

A common question I get, after I tell people I'm a published author is, "what kind of stories do you write?" Which I reply with an honest answer "Oh, mostly dark fantasy and horror." The next question, on a few occasions, has been - with varying degrees of concern, and in a couple of instances the interloper taking a step back - "Why horror?"

I've taken what my mum calls "the Irish Answer", namely answering a question with another question, by asking "Why not?" I've felt drawn to speculative-type fiction (fantasy, science fiction and horror, with weird fiction as an amalgamation of all three, with room for hybrids of the three facets) for as long as I can remember. Stories dealing with realism, barring fiction dealing with realism in historical times, bored me as a kid. But fairy tales, fantastical tales, tales of wonder and adventure delighted me and raised my spirit. I was, if you will, an escapist even then. C.S. Lewis's 'Chronicles of Narnia' opened a door into the marvelous when I was eight, and when I was twelve, his 'Space Trilogy' blew open a window that looked out onto the universe itself, helping me to see possible futures that technology could reveal to her, if only we are brave enough to use the creativity that we are endowed with (by God, the universe, however we choose to define this).

Horror, the third side of the spec-fic triangle, as it were, eluded me, or more accurately, I eluded it. Wonder, whether at the marvelous but unlikely or the marvelous but likely, seemed a safer thing to embrace than fear. Life felt scary enough to a child growing up at the end of the Cold War in a conservative but reasonable home. It wasn't until I entered adulthood that the bubble burst - if that bubble existed at all - when a catastrophically failed relationship, an assault attempted on me, and the events of 9/11 blasted my world open to the fear that had lurked beyond the walls I'd set up. I could no longer use fiction to escape the horror of reality, when reality had come roaring into the safe space of firelight I though could never burn out. Victorian ghost stories, anthologies of stories featured in the classic 'Weird Tales' magazine, the odd Stephen King novel and perhaps most tellingly, the late William Peter Blatty's "The Exorcist" helped train me to process fear, not just as an emotional response to unexpected threats, but as a storytelling device and process, serving, as it were, a vaccine to boost my creative response.

Even still, I kept tinkering with science fiction. I was optimistic that machine intelligence could help us to develop a brighter, wiser future. But I quickly found that the kind of stories I had drafted didn't quite keep step with the technology that had rabidly developed. Fantasy seemed a possible course, but given the rise of the grimdark school and the way my mind kept falling back on the JRR Tolkien school of fantasy (I'd later adopt a tack similar to Neil Gaiman and Charles de Lint, in a kind of magical realism). While I appreciate the work of the young adult dystopia novelists, I couldn't help feeling the world I knew was edging into the kind of world depicted by this school of writing, and thus it wasn't something I felt capable ot taking on. Too close to reality.

But a thought kept nagging me: technology might outpace our sense of wonder, and wonder itself might keep evolving with our changing world, but one thing remained a constant that haunted us: fear. This very thing that stops us in our tracks also spurs us on to find new ways to push back against it, to find the sources of fear and contain, if not defeat it. H.P. Lovecraft's dictum that "The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear" seemed especially telling. And so, rather than run from this thing that I'd so carefully avoided, I started running toward it. Cosmic horror in particular fascinated and continues to fascinate me: the problems which loom large and terrible pale in comparison to the immensity of time and space, and our petty squabbles over who owns what infinitesimal nook in that space looks like nothing compared to a change in the stars that might knock our little rock out of orbit, precipitated not merely by the forces of entropy, but by the effects of entities more vast than we can imagine that, wittingly or unwittingly, could change our world for the worst and not even notice that they'd affected us, just as we might not notice how our actions have affected the tiniest creatures in our environment, and not for the best,

I decided this was where I needed to write, in a genre where humanity's significance got lost in the shuffle of the universe, and where humanity had to rise above its own pettiness, in order to at least go down swinging against the eldritch entities that at best ignored us, at worst decided our sanity might taste good with ketchup (or whatever the Elder Gods use for ketchup).

I was also keenly aware, thanks to knowing about something dire that had happened to someone close to me in their distant past continued to haunt them, and this, along with my general fondness for history, prompted me to mine the past for tales of hauntings and dark doings. Ghosts, besides being the souls of the unquiet dead, might also signify the shadows in the past that continue to affect the present for good or for ill. Also, very often - far too often, one might even say - elements straight out of a horror tale color the narratives of women's lives. Since I'd lived through some things that had shaken me to my soul, it seemed beholden on me, my duty even, to address the darkness, the shadows that haunt us... dare I say, the cthonic entities in human form that damage people's worlds and drive them to madness?

If you notice a hint of melancholy in this essay, it comes with a good reason. I'd set out to write a completely different essay, but some personal matters that I'd rather leave unelaborated and the events of the school shooting in Parkland, Florida have shaken me deeply. For the time being, I've considered taking a breather from tales of fear. It's hard to write about fear when it's too much with you in your life outside of writing. It may be therapeutic to make your fears supply the grist for the idea mill, but that doesn't quite feel like the material I need at the moment, though this may change as i recollect my wits. It may be time for me to write about something else: there is a chapter in my life that I've meant to put to paper, a time when I faced one of my deepest fears (namely losing my steady job), which I eventually put behind me, which helped me face another fear (rejection), and face it by sending stories out to be considered for publication. Stay tuned for more word on that...

Admittedly, some part of me can't help but consider the question 'Why Horror?' a lot more seriously, that the persons asking this question might have a valid concern, rather than an apparent knee-jerk reaction. It's not enough to turn me away from a genre that has worked well for me (though a lot of my work might best fall under the header 'weird fiction'), but it does have me considering what lead me to it in the first place.. And I think it's a matter of embracing the brokenness that the horrors cause, in order to be able to write it better. A line from Joe Hill's "Heart-Shaped Box" popped up on someone's blog, almost like a note from above "Horror was rooted in sympathy … in understanding what it would be like to suffer the worst." Some people seem to think, perhaps from a mere surface reading of horror, that we who create it are doing so in order to exploit the sufferings of others, Rather, its because we've experience horrors, first hand or from seeing it up close, or we have strong enough imaginations that we can play out the scenario in our own minds, and we feel compelled to process it through fiction, through distilling it into a tale for our own and our readers' contemplation