Jeff Strand's Blog, page 66

Productivity Tracking!

So I’ve got this big cork bulletin board. It’s covered with index cards representing To-Do items, and also books in progress. Underneath the book titles are long columns of colored pins. Each pin represents 1000 words. When I write those 1000 words, the colored pin is replaced with a wooden pin. When all of the colored pins have been replaced by��wooden pins, the book is done!

The cork board isn’t going anywhere, but I spent a little bit of time this weekend researching iPhone apps that allow OCD tracking of writing productivity. Any suggestions?

My World Horror Convention 2015 Schedule

The tentative 2015 World Horror Convention (in Atlanta!) programming schedule has been posted��right HERE. The convention is May 7-10, and all of the cool kids will be there. Here’s my official schedule:

THURSDAY, MAY 7

8:00 PM:��Reaching The Teen Audience.��I’ll be moderating this panel discussion on young adult fiction. Panelists include��Courtney Alameda, Jake Bible, John Dixon, Alethea Kontis, and Jonathan Maberry,

9:00 PM:��Gave Up The Ghost screening.��Yes, it’s your chance to see��Gave Up The Ghost!��Preceded by a screening of��Chomp,��and followed by a screening of��Jizzly Bear.

FRIDAY, MAY 8

11:00 AM: Reading.��What will I read??? I don’t know yet. Something cool, though.

6:30 PM: Mass Signing.��A huge room full of authors! Buy books! Bring books from home to get signed! Ask me to sign your souvenir program book! Or get nothing signed and just walk over to say hi. The choice is yours!

SATURDAY, MAY 9

4:00 PM:��Macabre Metamorphoses: From Werewolves to Skinwalkers to Shapeshifters.��As the author of��Wolf Hunt��AND Wolf Hunt 2, I’m hopefully qualified to be on this panel with��Bill Bridges, Brick Marlin, Kami Garcia, Stephen Graham-Jones, Brad C. Hodson, and Tim Waggoner.

7:30 PM:��Bram Stoker Awards Banquet.��I’m Master of Ceremonies for the seventh time. Have I run out of jokes? You’ll find out! As always, there will be live streaming video of the event if you want to watch in your pajamas.

Be there!!!

Print It

I can unlock my new phone with my thumb, but it doesn’t say “SCANNING…SCANNING…IDENTITY VERIFIED.” What good is that?

Eye Phone

I upgraded my phone yesterday. I’m no longer using 2010 technology like some godless primate. Things that were SORCERY a few years ago are now all lame and stuff (“Waaahhh! It’s taking too long to load my tweets!”) but now I’m caught up with 2014, where I will remain until 2020.

The weekend after next (April 30-May 3) I’ll be at the Sunscreen Film Festival in St. Petersburg, Florida. Chomp will be screening there three times. WHO’S GOING?

The weekend after that (May 7-10) I’ll be at the World Horror Convention in Atlanta, Georgia. WHO’S GOING?

10 Questions With Me!

The lovely and talented Carl Alves sent me 10 questions, I sent him back 10 answers, and he posted the whole thing on his blog for your reading enjoyment. If you can only work up the emotional investment necessary to read the first ��7 or 8, that’s cool, no offense taken. Click on the handy link below.

http://www.carlalves.com/blog-post/10-questions-with-jeff-strand-2/

Anything But Zombies

A while back, I mentioned that I’d written a story called “The Sentient Cherry Cola That Tried To Destroy The World.” You probably thought I was making it up. At the very least, you didn’t think it was going to be in an anthology published by Simon & Schuster.

But, coming May 26th, it’s��Anything But Zombies, tales of non-zombie apocalypse. If you’re the pre-ordering type, you can pre-order it right HERE.

Have Some BAD BRATWURST on May 4th

Yes, coming May 4th from the fine folks at White Noise Press, it’s my chapbook Bad Bratwurst!

Klaus has made the finest bratwurst in Germany for thirty years, but his shop has fallen upon hard times. He needs��to��try something new. Something innovative. Offer a product his customers can���t get anyplace else.

The answer may or may not involve human flesh. We���re not going to spoil it right here in the description. Sure, this is a tale of MIND-BENDING HORROR, so you���d be justified in thinking that bratwurst made from people may be somehow incorporated into the narrative, but maybe that���s not it. It could be something completely different.

Look, if you enjoy stories about cannibalism, we���re not going to steer you away. There may indeed be somebody eating meat that used to be a living, breathing human being. We won���t completely discount that possibility. We���re simply saying that it���s not the ONLY possibility.

Okay, fine, this story is about eating bratwurst made from human flesh. Are you happy?!?

From Jeff Strand, the author of PRESSURE, DWELLER, and DEAD CLOWN BARBECUE, comes the ultimate in cannibalism themed chapbooks. Don���t lick the pages. You don���t know what they used to be.

Gasparilla Film Festival Recap

Last weekend I went to the ninth annual Gasparilla Film Festival, where I saw fourteen (!) movies, and that’s if you count blocks of short films as a single movie. There were way more hits than misses, and though it’s usually enough to just see one movie where I want to run around screaming, “OMG! OMG! You have to see this!!!” this festival had three of ’em:��The Last Time You Had Fun, Spring,��and��Call Me Lucky.��But there were plenty of great movies even beyond those three!

I was primarily there to see the short film The Wallet, because one of the stars is Susan O’Gara of Chomp fame. She plays a psycho��lady in Chomp, and I’m sure you’ll all be very disappointed to hear that in The Wallet she does not discuss zombies, pick up a chainsaw, or lock anybody in a garage. It’s actually a touching film about lovers reconnected after decades. A chainsaw would’ve been superfluous.

On to the features. Because I don’t want any filmmakers to read this and say, “Yeah, well,��Gave Up The Ghost��wasn’t so great either, jerk!” I will only discuss the stuff I liked, which is almost all of it…

The Last Time You Had Fun��– I really just wanted to see this one because it had stand-up comedian Demetri Martin in it. Turns out, it’s the funniest movie I’ve seen in at least a year. A morose, sweatpants-wearing father is convinced by his friend to go out to celebrate his official Divorce Day. Meanwhile, a pair of sisters are also out for an evening of attempting to force some fun into their lives. The two pairs meet at a wine bar, decide to continue the evening together, and wacky hijinks ensue…but not TOO wacky, since this is primarily a character piece. Though the more over-the-top elements (including an extended effort to herbally enhance their night) are hysterically funny, the movie also earns its slightly more serious moments. The kind of crowd pleaser that really deserves a wide theatrical release. I enjoyed every second of it.

Spring –��One of my very first film festival discoveries, many years ago, was an extremely obscure shot-with-a-camcorder movie called The Robert Cake. So it was very cool to see the star of that movie show up in a supporting role early in this one. Spring��is a romantic horror film…well, actually, it’s a love story with horror elements. And it’s also a dark comedy. Brilliantly written, brilliantly acted, and one of the best movies (not just horror) I’ve seen since…okay, I guess��Blood Punch from the Nevermore Film Festival (which I have yet to recap because I suck) wasn’t that long ago, but trust me,��Spring��is fantastic!

Call Me Lucky –��A documentary by Bobcat Goldthwait about comedian Barry Crimmins, who was one of the first comedians to do deep political humor. (As opposed to, as the film states, “Gosh, Dan Quayle sure is dumb!”) Halfway through, the movie takes a sharp left turn into very dark, disturbing territory. One of the best documentaries I’ve ever seen, and Bobcat Goldthwait (who was there) seems to have a great sense of humor about the fact that most people still know him as the screeching guy from the Police Academy movies.

Ben’s At Home –��Tired of the club scene, Ben decides that he never wants to leave his house��again. This makes his life significantly better. Then it starts to mess things up. An extremely funny movie with a charming cast, if you’re willing to suspend your disbelief and accept that he wouldn’t just decide to��leave his house less often instead of altogether. A Canadian film that was part of the World Showcase programming, making me think of the South Park movie: “It’s a foreign film! From Canada!”

Milwaukee – When a��group of friends (three couples and a single guy) get together for a weekend, they’re convinced by the newcomer to the group to go with a “everybody has the freedom to do whatever they want” approach, with “Milwaukee” as the safe word for if somebody is uncomfortable. It ends up, oddly enough, not��being a free-for-all of happy unrestrained hedonism. Yet another very funny film with a charming cast that works in its serious moments as well as the humorous ones.

Posthumous��(the feature, not the short film with the same title that also screened here) – An unappreciated-in-his-time artist fakes his death (well, doesn’t correct the mistaken belief that he is dead) and the value of his work skyrockets. Much less a satire than a romantic comedy, but it gets points for not��having what Roger Ebert called “The Idiot Plot,” where all of the problems would be immediately solved if the characters weren’t idiots. In this case, key characters figure things out pretty early on. A fun, light, entertaining movie.

Wildlike – A teenaged girl living with her uncle in Juneau, Alaska (I grew up in Fairbanks) runs away for a very justifiable reason. She latches onto a middle-aged man who is beginning a��long-distance hike. The acting and writing are excellent; the girl’s reaction to the abuse shows up in believable ways, the hiker is a very nice guy who wants to help her but is also trying to enjoy his vacation, and the uncle never stops being a surface-level pleasant guy, even though he’s a monster. And the movie gets the Alaska stuff right. Remember 30 Days of Night, where apparently Alaska just suddenly goes from normal-length days to a month of all-darkness? Hee hee hee!

Error in the Menage –��I actually saw this back in December at the Tampa Bay Underground Film Festival (which I have yet to recap because I suck). The fact that I went to see it again is an indicator of its entertainment value. A guy’s ultimate fantasy is about to come true, but before the title of the movie even appears on the screen, it goes awry. A dark comedy/thriller with plot twists galore.

Eadweard –��The tale of Eadweard Muybridge, a turn-of-the-century (not Y2K) photographer who became obsessed with sequential photographs capturing movement, and then decided that everybody in his pictures should be naked.��So if you’re thinking, “Aw, I don’t want to see a historical drama about a man slowly driven to insanity over his obsession with sequential photography!” note that there are plenty��of nekkid��people in it.

The Well –��It stopped raining years ago. So almost everybody is dead. At the time I watched this, I was on my sixth movie of the day, and it was midnight, and I hadn’t gotten that much sleep the night before, and I was kind of thinking, “Okay,��The Well, you’re welcome to end any time now!” A week later, fully rested, it’s a perfectly good post-apocalyptic flick.

X/Y – According to the program, this was X+Y, a movie about kids at a math competition. As a volunteer helpfully informed the audience before the film began, this was actually X/Y, a very, very different movie. In this one, the characters have lots of sex and there is no discussion whatsoever about mathematics.

I also went to one of the parties, but by the time I got there it was pretty much over, which was nice because I don’t like parties.

Overall, a spectacular selection of films and a fantastic weekend.

And, yes, I’m still going to recap the Nevermore Film Festival. I’m not on a book deadline right now, so I have no excuse.

Welcome to Gleefully Macabre!

Welcome to my website! Whether you were brought here by interest in my work or a Google search gone terribly wrong, I encourage you to hang around and��start clicking away!

The hardcover limited edition of Wolf Hunt 2��is now available for pre-order! Get it from Dark Regions Press��or the paperback edition from Amazon. Or get it for your Kindle!

My new novel, Kumquat, is now available! Get the Kindle edition��or the print edition��from Amazon!

My new young adult comedy,��I Have A Bad Feeling About This, is now available at the brick-and-mortar bookstore or online retailer of your choice! Being a young adult is not a requirement to read the book.

(P.S.: People who leave reviews on Amazon deserve great big hugs!)

Friend me on Facebook ! Follow me on Twitter ! Like my Facebook Fan Page! Friend me on Goodreads!

Trio

Whoa! Suddenly I’m working on three novels at once! All of these titles are subject to change.

Flop Sweat: About��a filthy stand-up comedian.

The Odyssey of Patty: Kind of a fantasy novel, sort of.

It’s Alien Invasion Time!: A young adult comedy about ALIENS!!!

Once I’m done with three sample chapters of��Odyssey��and Invasion, those will probably go onto the back burner while I focus on��Flop Sweat.��You may never hear from them again. Stay tuned!