R.C. Mulhare's Blog: Notes from a Grocery Clerk With a Too-Big Imagination, page 4

Write Like a Girl Revisited!

Been a bit of a tricky month for me in my personal life, but I have a few things to share with you folks:

February started off with a bang: I took part on FunDead Publication's second annual Write Like a Girl event at the Witch House in Salem, and also had my first ever interview as a writer, with the lovely Kristen from the Life After Midnight: Strange History, Salem Style podcast which I have been listening to since I met her at the first Write Like A Girl, last year. You can view the interview over here on Facebook

I've managed to get some things written and sent out: the anti-Valentine's Day story has been sent out and I'm waiting to hear back on it. I've also finished the cruddy rough draft on the Gothic tale, which is now in revisions and which I've started typing. More about that shortly...

Also, in a spirit of being a procrastinating writer procrastinating, I went through all the dead tree journals I have things written in, and took stock of the unfinished stories and the untyped but completed stories. As of this posting, I have 43 unfinished stories and 14 untyped ones, not counting all the typed and either published or unpublished tales that I have to my name.

Would you like to help me promote the next book featuring one of my stories? Now's your chance! Silver Empire is looking for a few good reviewers to help promote their "Secret Staircase". ARCs (advance review copies) are available Over Here This will give you a sneak peak of my new story featuring Carton Tillinghast and an encounter with a mysterious staircase and how it relates to a cursed play...

Also, I have a writing resource to recommend: 4theWords.com, a combination writing incentive and game. You type words and put them toward fighting cute-weird monsters. Type 444 words each day and you build up writing streaks that help you earn cool items that help your character's quests. If you'd like to check it out for a free trial, use VLZVA67102 to earn cool perks for yourself and, well, for me too! So far, I have a writing streak of well over a week and I've gotten work done on several writing projects that were languishing in dead tree journals, and I'm off to a running start on some of my works in progress including the above-mentioned Gothic tale, which I hope to send in some time in the beginning of March...

New Year's Resolutions Gone Awry

My New Year's Resolution (or one of them, anyway) was to post here more often. But as you, patient readers, can tell, that's already been a hard one to keep, due to various reasons, including but not limited to: work at the day job, a mild lower respiratory infection, and thankfully, working on writing new tales to send out for consideration. Already, I have roughly four thousand words of new fiction written, and three submissions sent out, including what I hope to be another reprint of a previously subbed tale.

Currently, I have a few works in progress on the work docket, including but not limited to:

-An anti-Valentine's Day story, involving witchly potions, body horror, spells literally blowing things up in people's faces, and a Valentine's Night gone horribly wrong in a "What if Brian Yuzna wrote a rom-com?" sort of way?

-A cozy murder mystery featuring a middle aged librarian lady, her clever Maine Coon cat, a spooky book of spooky magic, a haughty professor, a humble horror writer and some weird patrons looking for that spooky book of spooky magic. Quite literally, it's a cozy riff on the library scenes in The Dunwich Horror. If Guillermo Del Toro could write a romance for a Deep One, why not a cozy tale for Wilbur Whateley?

-A historical Gothic tale told from the PoV of a middle-aged Irish chambermaid noticing some odd doings about the master of the house and a locked room in the basement.

And then my Internet connection died, due to the router at home going kaputt quite unexpectedly. While the new router shipped, I had to rely on the connection of various local Dunkin Donutses (Dunkins Donuts? Any idea on the proper plural here??), and one day, while I sat in the Possibly Haunted Dunkins In Lowell, I discovered I'd received an email regarding the fate of "Grand Staircase to the Yellow Court", which combines the modern folktale of the Mysterious Staircase in the Forest with the mythos of the King in Yellow. I'd almost started to lose hope on this one, but lo and behold, but Silver Empire has accepted it for their "Secret Stairs" anthology, slated for release in March of this year.

Also, on February 3rd I will be reading a portion of "The Witch Who Blew In On the Storm", at the second "Write Like a Girl" event at Salem's Witch House, an event that Amber Newberry and the folks of FunDead Publications launched last year, to benefit Safe Child Africa, a charity that aids children falsely accused of witchcraft in several African nations. Already, the event has sold out - proof of how popular we've gotten with the darkling folk of Salem!

Christmas Surprises

It's late on Christmas night and early in the morning on Boxing Day, and I'm awake, putting out some holiday cheer for you and yours. I hope you all had a good Christmas, or Yuletide, or Hanukkah, or whichever festivities you celebrate!

If you're still looking for a late present for the Lovecraft fans on your gift list (especially if you're like my family and you give each other a present a day for the twelve days of Christmas), or if you were keeping an eye out for the new link to The Wings at His Window, you're in very good luck: it's now back in e-print, and available on more platforms before, including iBooks, Nook and 24 Symbols.

Get it here!

And in excellent news, the lovely folks at Macabre Maine, who published a story of mine in their Lovecraft ME and Bite ME have picked up my story "A Visit From the Yule Cat", in which a vain celebutante has an encounter with a not so friendly Yuletide critter from Icelandic lore. This tale will appear in their "Spirits of Yuletide" anthology, slated for release in December of 2018. Something to look forward to, next Winter Holiday season!


The Yule Cat, not exactly bringing holiday cheer (or maybe getting their idea of holiday cheer...)

The Case of the Disappearing Lovecraft-Inspired Novella...

So if you've recently tried to order the first in the Dreamer of Providence series, "The Wings At His Window", you've likely hit a dead Amazon link. There's a reason for this: Off the Beaten Path Press pulled it from circulation for the time being. Pronoun, the distribution service that my editor was using, is folding in January, and so OtBPP has had to seek out a new service to process and distribute their tales. I've signed on to have Wings and the rest of the series distributed through the new service: it'll soon be available on a wider range of electronic platforms, and perhaps even dead tree format.

Watch this space: things they are a changing, and changing for the better!

Forgotten Fic Found and Linked: "Right Turn"

Back during the wackiness that was October, I submitted a piece to a small online 'zine called "With Painted Words", which offers a new piece of artwork every month to inspire writers to write and submit a piece inspired by that artwork. Thus this artwork:



inspired me to write this piece Right Turn, featuring Special Agents Blake Matherton and Dante Stamos, who previously had a cameo in "Food Substitution" in Bite ME, find themselves in a shaky situation out in the middle of flyover country. In the madness that was the end of October. and the ensuing Thanksgiving craziness, I forgot I had sent this in. But what to my wondering eyes did appear, when I went to see this month's image, but they had posted my story! Consider this one a Christmas/Winter Holiday surprise!

Christmas Craziness and Writing Hiatus

December is upon us, and that means the Christmas/December Holiday craziness at my day job is creeping up on me. That means I'll have less energy for the writing (already I'm starting to feel some of the pinch). So, that means I'll be hiatusing from the writing, or at least prepping things for publication. I do have one tale in the works, though, which I'll be plugging at with a goal to get it out in the first two weeks of the month. Said tale being a thing I only half-jokingly describe as "The Dunwich Horror meets Edith Wharton's Age of Innocence". Operating words being "half-jokingly", since I came up with the phrase late one night and thought, "Hah, that's a good way to pitch the thing." Also, I sent out a suburban fantasy, in which a college student is invited by their werewolf high school chum to join her pack for Thanksgiving dinner in the family den. This went off to a fantasy anthology looking for stories inspired by Tumblr posts discussing potential fantasy plots; I got mine from a back-and-forth post involving folksy werewolves.

I'm also waiting with baited breath to hear back on some stories still out for consideration, including a Christmas story for a charity anthology (my first time doing one). Prayers, positive energy, yelling at the universe are wanted/needed/very much appreciated at this point. As my semi-coworker Faye put it "Go for ten stories this year!"; let's hope some of the editors out there reading my stuff make this come true!

And most importantly: Deadman's Tome Cthulhu Christmas Special: Other Lovecraftian Yuletide Tales went live on Friday, December 1st, featuring eleven Lovecraftian Christmas tales, including my "The Horror in the Stable", in which Herbert West has an anything but silent night one snowy Christmas Eve. I've started reading an early draft of it and hoo! This is gonna be a Santa's bag of eldritch delights and mad holiday surprises. This, next to O Horrid Night, which I just finished reading, is shaping up to be the read of the season! Also (hint, hint), with a newly minted paperback edition, it will make a great stocking stuffer for the Lovecraft fan in your life (or something to put on your own wish list).

Finding the Road to Camelot

Originally written with the intent to post it on the publisher's blog, as part of the promotion for Tales of the Once And Future King

The road to Camelot opened up to me when I was stuck in bed with a bad sinus infection for the better part of a month, during the winter that I was eight, and my dad brought home a vintage set of children's classics he'd found at an indoor flea market. Titles included the usual fare of 1940s classic literature for children: 1001 Nights (carefully sanitized), Treasure Island, Tom Sawyer, and the one that jumped out at me King Arthur and His Noble Knights. The cast of characters and the range of them fascinated me, and the scope of the tale impressed me, like the biographies of great men and women we were reading as part of the homeschooling course my mother had enrolled me in. To say nothing of the virtues and qualities embodied by King Arthur's court: Merlin with his wisdom, Lancelot with his bravery, Gawaine and his loyalty, Perceval with his innocence. In that moment, I wondered if King Arthur could have been a real person (imagine when I first heard about the archaeological sites linked to Arthur and the growing body of evidence that backs up the reality behind the stories). I wanted to be a page in King Arthur's court. Not a court lady in training, but a knight in training, and if that wasn't possible, I'd prefer to be Merlin's apprentice (I'd even be nicer than Nimue/Vivian: no magicking him into a tree).

Alas, but schoolwork and outside/extracurricular activities kept me distracted from pursuing the road to Camelot in earnest. But the gates to that road would reopen in a big way, the late winter into spring that I was in the 10th grade, when my literature text book covered several extended selections from Alfred Lord Tennyson's Idylls of the King, which my mom read alongside me via a copy I'd scared up at a yard sale some months before. One of the great things about homeschooling is the way it allowed us to go at our own pace, and that meant I could focus more on something that caught my interest and build my own unit studies, with the help of the good folk at our town's library.

At that time, I'd started listening to a lot of classical music and opera, and that included listening to the Metropolitan Opera through the local classical radio station, and I had the luck to catch a performance of Wagner's Parsifal. I was hooked. As lengthy and ponderous as the opera might be, it left me wrapt, and when it ended, when the final curtain rang down, I felt as though I had come down from the top of a holy mountain. The German script might be beyond me, but the music and the singers' acting helped carry the spirit of the tale; with a good performance, you almost don't need a translation in front of you. Later, through the library, I'd find a recording (with translated libretto!) of Parsifal and immerse myself even further. It captivated me just as much as that first hearing, and I found myself relating to Perceval (or Parsifal, in this Wagnerian incarnation): innocent, well-meaning, bungling, but still managing to land on his feet quite often. His quest, which he barely expected to become a part of his life and his previous quest to find his destiny, reminded me of my own: a young person with a somewhat sequestered upbringing, venturing out into the world, finding their way, finding their strengths and weaknesses, making mistakes, learning from them. I had to read more, I had to learn more about this quest, I had to find an answer to my own version of Parsifal's question, “Wer is der Graal? (Where is the Grail?)” I had to know what this thing was, that brought King Arthur's knights on a quest to discover it. The road to Camelot took me onto an interesting detour.

And of all the detours to choose, I came upon a very winding one, leading into some interesting territory. I read everything I could lay hands to that dealt with the lore of the Grail, past and present, from the pre- and proto-Christian origins of the Grail motifs, to the legends associated with St. Joseph of Arimithea, to some at-best questionable takes on the Grail lore (I admit it, I've read Lincoln and Baigent's Holy Blood, Holy Grail, and while there's some interesting concepts in it, the alleged history seems a bit too well-crafted to be credible). A family friend who had been a college English literature professor at the University of Massachusetts, Fortunata Caliri, guided me to some of the best primary sources, giving me a copy of Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur, which I kept on my night stand to be read every chance I got. My mother loaned me her copy of T.H. White's The Once and Future King, which I also read studiously. I pored through second hand bookstores looking for a copy of Jessie L. Weston's From Ritual to Romance, after I learned about via the end notes on T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land (which I wrote a book report on, in my next year of school). I found the writings of Charles Williams, a friend of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis (and a member of the Inklings), in particular the novel War in Heaven and his poetry cycle Taliessin Through Logres, which used the Grail as a unifying concept for the entire King Arthur mythos.

After finding all these threads, I tried my hand at weaving everything together as a Unifying Epic Poem, a blank verse poem that eventually filled two thick loose-leaf binders, which I credited to one Ekkehard von der Nachtigall, a supposed medieval minnesinger (something between a knight and a minstrel). Needless to say, I bit off more than I could chew, and I never really completed all the ideas I'd come upon. The manuscript, now yellowing, still sits on my desk; I haven't the heart to discard it.

And again, life would move on, and I would move on to other things. Learning about my Grandfather Mulhare's role in the European theater of World War II would lead me to explore that probably darkest chapter in human history.

But the King Arthur legend hadn't finished with me. In Britain, during the darkest hours of the Blitz, the British people grew fascinated once again with the legend of Britain's most mysterious king, and some even wondered if Sir Winston Churchill, then Prime Minister of Great Britain, might not be the manifestation of their Once and Future King, come back to lead Britain through her darkest hour.

I knew I wanted to write a tale that rose from this twist on the legendarium, but I wasn't sure how to frame it. I'd started writing and submitting my tales for publication. Most of my tales were horror or dark fantasy (very often borrowing from another, much darker mythos, devised by fellow New Englander H.P. Lovecraft), but once in a while, the darkness would fall away and a lighter idea would offer itself for consideration.

That's when the idea came to me: why not retell the Grail quest in reverse? There were allegations that Adolf Hitler, with his fascination for the occult, had sent several Schutzstaffel officers in quest of the Holy Grail, but they never found it. I knew I wanted to tell a story like that, but Stephen Spielberg and George Lucas, in their Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, had beaten me, as it were, to a tale of Nazis targeting the Grail and the Allies, or someone aligned with them, protecting it. I decided I wanted to tell a tale involving the Grail being already found and needing new Knights of the Grail to guard and protect it and bring it to safety. The book The Monuments Men gave me an idea that I knew would work. I even found a way to weave in a character inspired partly by Sir Galahad and partly by my grandfather as the teller of that tale. A potential market for the tale presented itself, but again, life got in the way: I moonlight in grocery retail when I'm not writing, and due to how busy the store I work at gets between Thanksgiving and New Year's Day, I wasn't able to get the tale typed before the deadline. The story went back onto the virtual shelf.

Until a listing came up for another call for Arthurian stories. I jumped at the chance and sent it off.

And to my surprise, it was accepted and woven into the tapestry that is to be these Tales of the Once and Future King. You, dear reader, are probably on your own road to Camelot: perhaps you've followed the road for a number of years, or perhaps you're venturing the road for the first time. I hope that my story and the rest of the tales in the soon-to-be available volume inspire you to continue the journey, or that it becomes a fond path, as it were, on that quest.


"The Damsel of the Holy Grail" by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

A truckload of treats and not too many tricks

I had every intention of posting a Halloween entry, but October was a crazy month, which extended into early November:

- Wicked Haunted, from New England Horror Writers Press, which features my story "The Stranding Off Schoodic Point" went live in October and ended its first day of sales as the number one horror anthology on Kindle, edging ahead of a collection by Stephen King. How is that possible?? Granted, I do know the answer - lots of marketing, lots of promotion on Twitter and Facebook, lots of curious reader - but I'm still blown away by this result.

- The NEHW's book sale at Haunted Happenings in witch-haunted Arkham - I mean, Salem, MA. We officially launched Wicked Haunted in carbon-space on the last weekend in October, and this year, I got to be one of the people signing copies of our haunting ghost anthology, aka, playing "Pass the Book", as I playfully called it.

- The Tewksbury Public Library hosted their annual Authors' Fair on November 4th, with a group of authors from Tewksbury and Wilmington, among them ...me! Since I'd gotten the nudge to get into publishing at this very library where I'd met the New England Horror Writers, I felt as though I'd come full circle. I got the chance to chat with some curious local folks who'd stopped by to check out the selection, sold and signed several copies of my books, and the library bought copies of two of my anthologies, to be added to a collection of the works of local authors. And I get to be one of those authors!


A view of my table, featuring my books for sale, also my swag which included my shiny new bookmarks and a handout of my flash fic "Pumpkin Patrol", which I'd previously posted on Sweek.com for a Halloween contest.

- Somewhat tricky news: for personal reasons, I had to withdraw two Lovecraft-inspired stories, "Horror on the Buffet Table" and "Something Eating At You" from being published. I'm looking around for other potential markets, with some luck, though I could use some prayers and nudges as to places to send them, to find them homes on the printed page (though I may go the self-publishing route some time next year).

- Bite Me, from Macabre Maine, dropped just after Halloween, fitting since a windstorm delayed trick or treating in my town: this toothsome book includes vampire themed poetry and fiction, including my "Food Substitution", a tale I wrote when I wanted to put vampires in a grocery store.

- Deadman's Tome bought my "The Horror In the Stable" for their Cthulhu Christmas anthology, slated to drop in December, just in time for the holidays. In this tale, Herbert West, he of reanimating things fame, learns the true meaning of Christmas. No really, he tries to give some Dickensian urchins a better Christmas than being dead in a stable. Or something.

- And at the moment, I am drafting rewrites on a Christmas tale involving the Yule Cat, on top of writing two stories during the start of this busy holiday season: one is a kind of retelling of Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market, set in a modern coffee shop, while the other is a reverse Beauty and the Beast, in which a young socialite in the Gilded Age marries a man she thinks is a prince, but who may be a beast instead. Any and all thoughts and prayers and shouting at the universe of all kinds sure could help at a time like this (as well as reading and reviewing my fiction that's in print).

An embarrassment of writing riches

The business of writing has been keeping me typing like a typing fiend: a hard deadline and a soft one at the end of the month have been keeping me busy. I can't say much about one, but the other involves the next volume in my "Dreamer of Providence", which involves a wild Halloween night for a young HPL and his high school sweetheart.

Also, on the last day of September, two books featuring tales of mine will be released:

-Firstly, One Night in Salem, which features my "The Witch Who Blew in on the Storm". This Halloween-themed collection features a wide range of tales set in Salem on Halloween night across four hundred years of history. Set against the backdrop of the "No Name Hurricane", it's a gothic tale of human cruelty and bravery, protecting family and finding home.

-And secondly, Tales of the Once and Future King, an anthology of tales of the King Arthur mythos, set within a framing story. My offering, "Sacred Cargo", features a group of Allied soldiers given the mission of transporting a mysterious relic across France at a turning point in World War II. This one is especially personal to me, as I based the PoV character on my grandfather Leo F, Mulhare and some elements of his experience in Europe during the war wove into the plot. You can find a book trailer for it here, in the form of a bardic song:

Click here to listen!

An Event-full Summer

Summertime and the writing's been busy! Now that we're almost to the unofficial end of summer, with Labor Day weekend about to begin, I finally got a few minutes to write a blog post. Best to get your drink of choice, because I got a lot going on to write about:

- came out at the beginning of August to a standing-room only crowd at the Witch House in Salem, MA, when a bunch of us poets read some of our poems there. Couldn't have been a more wondrously spooky evening, and after reading ye book, I can't more highly endorse it! The selection of poems is eclectic and fascinating, with poems that range from the Witch Hysteria of the 1690s to Haunted Happenings in the modern time and everything Salem in between.

- My historical ghost story "The Stranding off Schoodic Point" was accepting into the New England Horror Writers' up-coming anthology "Wicked Haunting", slated for release at our book sale at Salem's Haunted Happening's street bazaar, the last weekend in October, 2017. I'm over the moon with delight, and I now feel like a full-fledged member of this wicked awesome band of spookily-creative folks. Also! For you folks who like to review books, we could use some of you to review ye book and boo-st the news. Click here if you'd like an advance digital review copy!

- Necronomicon 2017! Wow!!! If I had a blast at this eldritch gathering of weird and wondrous folks in 2015, I had an even bigger blast. This time, I was working the other side of the NEHW folks' table in the dealer room, signing books and chatting with people, though I also found time to take in some author readings, including stories from James A Moore (he of Deeper, my beach read of last summer). Peter Dudar, Barry Lee DeJasu, Kij Johnson, and so many others, also two shows by the merry band of madpeople of Dark Adventure Radio Theatre, the brainchild of the H,P, Lovecraft Historical Society, had dinner with the folks of the Lovecraft eZine, and most importantly, took the bus tour of Aitch Pi El's Providence and visited his grave:



I left the gold amusement park token visible on the lower right hand side of the base: I found ye token somewhat randomly on the sidewalk outside my house about a week before the con, and had it tucked away in a pocket of my bag. Realizing I still had it and seeing the other tiny trinkets and tokens folks and fans had left, I decided to place it there. Maybe a reference to the gold trinkets from Innsmouth?

- Just before I left for NecroCon, I got an acceptance letter from The H,P. Lovecraft Lunatic Asylum picked up my "The Horror on the Buffet Table", a tale inspired by "At the Mountains of Madness", in which the protagonist's brush with some gelatinous beasts from beyond has left him panicked at the sight of gelatin mold salads...

- And last but not least, the Kindle pre-order of "One Night in Salem", an anthology of historical and vintage Halloween tales from FunDead Publications has just gone line. Among the dozens of tales from the 1630s to the present day, is my "The Witch Who Blew in on the Storm", set in 1991, the year of the No-Name Hurricane, also known as "the Perfect Storm"

-Also, wish me luck as I submit a zombie story in which I did *not* use the z-word to a zombie fiction anthology. This was a tale I wrote for the heck of it, and since zombie fiction is as thick on the ground as Walkers in The Walking Dead, I had shelved it, thinking I might not find a home for it. But keep me in your thoughts, prayers, rage to the heavens or fist-shaking at the void, as I put this one out there for consideration.

I believe that's all the writing news that's ready to post, but no doubt, if I missed anything, you will hear about it soon.