Orrin Grey's Blog: Shovel Murders & Monologues, page 13

Here Be Dragons

Due to an unrelated project, I recently fell down a rabbit hole relating to depictions of western dragons in film. For creatures so ubiquitous in the rest of popular culture, they’re surprisingly thin on the ground in the movies – especially prior to the 21st century.

This led to a Twitter thread in which I explored the early history of dragons in cinema. Oddly enough, the first dragons in film don’t look much like what we’ve come to associate with the term here in the west. 1924 saw, as far as I am aware, the first two dragons ever to grace the screen – certainly in a feature-length project.

One was in the Douglas Fairbanks version of The Thief of Bagdad, which I initially forgot about while making the tweet thread, while the other was in the first half of Fritz Lang’s diptych Die Nibelungen. Both looked more like dinosaurs than the winged dragons we’re familiar with from D&D. In fact, the first winged dragon that I know of didn’t show up on film until 1936, where it made its debut in an unlikely spot: a 16-minute Popeye short called Popeye the Sailor Meets Sindbad the Sailor.

Popeye Meets Sindbad was bundled with two other shorts, also inspired by the Arabian Nights, and released as “A Popeye Feature.” Ray Harryhausen would later acknowledge that the cartoon was a major inspiration for his 7th Voyage of Sinbad, which also features a dragon of its own, albeit again, a wingless one. As in 7th Voyage, the dragon is far from alone in the Popeye short. Sindbad’s island is also home to loads of other monsters, including a roc, an ettin, and more. It’s dragons we’re here to talk about, though…

Even though the short was combined into a feature, it doesn’t really count as a feature film. In fact, for a winged dragon to make its debut on American screens in a feature, we had to wait until 1959, when Disney introduced one of the screen’s most iconic dragons. The House of Mouse had already put animated dragons on screen before that, notably the eponymous character from the mixed live-action/animation oddity The Reluctant Dragon, in 1941. But in ’59, they gave us the dark fairy Maleficent in Sleeping Beauty, who took the shape of a massive black dragon who breathes green flame.

Maleficent wasn’t actually the first winged dragon to hit screens, though. The Russians had beaten America to that punch, with the three-headed Gorynych, who showed up onscreen for the first time (that I know of) in Ilya Muromets in 1956. That flick made its way stateside as The Sword and the Dragon in 1963, where it was eventually skewered by the crew of the Satellite of Love on Mystery Science Theater 3000.

Since then, dragons on screen have increased in frequency as the years have rolled on and these days they’re relatively commonplace, by comparison. Early on, though, dragons on film were as rare as they often are in the earliest stories about them – beasts both singular and strange, representing humanity’s desire to subdue a chaotic world. Which, in this case, takes the form of creating elaborate special effects to represent big, magical lizards.

Kick! Punch! It’s All in the Mind!

In the month of January, I watched eleven Shaw Bros. movies. This is noteworthy for a number of reasons, not the least of them because, prior to that, I had seen… one? Maybe two, depending on whether you count their joint production with Hammer, Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires. It’s possible that I have seen others without remembering or realizing it, over the years, but the number is small, is the point, and over the last month I have certainly much more than doubled it.

This came about because I received a review copy of the very nice Shawscope Vol. One box from Arrow Video, and I have been trying to work my way through it for an eventual piece. I’m not quite there yet, either. There are two movies left to go – there’s a lot of movies in this box – but I’m getting close.

Interestingly, at the same time, I also watched a few of the latest Marvel movies that I had missed because there was a plague on. Now, those who have followed along for a while here know that I am, broadly speaking, a person who enjoys Marvel, and Marvel movies, and, more to the point, not someone who likes to rag on modern movies and go on about how movies were better “back in my day,” notwithstanding that every movie in this Shawscope set was made before I was born.

And yet, it bears mentioning that, with the exception of Mighty Peking Man, which really didn’t do it for me, the worst movie in this Shawscope set is at least several notches above the best offering from the latest batch of Marvel films. (The new Spider-Man possibly notwithstanding – I haven’t seen it yet.)

I’m not really here to rag on the recent slate of Marvel movies, though, as much as I am to just say what a joy it’s been to dig through all of these old Shaw Bros. pictures. I’ll have more coherent, and hopefully thoughtful, thoughts on them in the eventual piece (likely at Unwinnable) that will come out of all this, but it’s just been a lot of fun to get a much fuller view of a slice of cinema that I’ve long been aware of but have rarely seen.

That said, I’ll admit that these flicks (which are all kung fu pictures, with the exception of the aforementioned Mighty Peking Man) are not necessarily well-suited to binge-watching. Like any other very specific sub-field, even my beloved Hammer gothics, they get a bit same-y after you mainline enough of them all in a row. But thus far that hasn’t hampered my ability to appreciate the distinct pleasures each one offers, nor dimmed my enthusiasm to put on the next disc in line.

The other thing that makes it noteworthy that I watched all these movies in the month of January is that it’s vaguely miraculous that I managed to make time to watch anything at all. Chalk it up to basically not being able to leave the house because of the plague, I guess, but I’ve been incredibly busy in the month of January, working on a semi-secret licensed tabletop gaming project that is not terribly hard to guess the particulars of for anyone who has been following along at all.

It has eaten up pretty much all of my time that hasn’t been devoted to watching people kick one-another, and I’m looking forward to being able to discuss it at greater length hopefully very soon. In the meantime, you can read my weirdo thoughts on Matt Wagner’s Grendel and the Saw franchise in the latest issue of Exploits, if you’re so inclined…

Tremorsense

I’m not here to talk about nuScream (2022) but I’m going to have to, a little, so here we go: I hated it. First Scream-branded thing ever that I didn’t enjoy. But I also seem to be alone in that – as I am in hating the new Halloweens – so if you loved it, I am legitimately happy for you.

(Also, it didn’t have time travel, as per the gag in Scream 4, and so it is dead to me.)

Because we’re going to be talking about nuScream, January has been Scream Month at the Horror Pod Class, where we’ve covered Scream 4 (my actual favorite) and Scream 2 and, as such, there’s been a lot of talk about the franchise, including which ones are best, worst, etc.

And here’s the thing, when I say that Scream 4 is my favorite, which is absolutely true, I always feel like I need to caveat that with the acknowledgment that the original is still probably the best, for any number of obvious reasons. But there’s another layer to that. Scream (1996) is not only the original, the standard from which all the others must deviate, it is also fundamentally different from the others.

The original Scream is a number of things, and while the vast majority of the ink that gets spilled over it is about how metafictional it is, that’s only one small part of what makes it work. Ultimately, though, metafictional or not, Scream is a deconstruction of – and love letter to – slasher tropes.

The sequels pay lip service toward being the same thing, but they aren’t. Because they can’t be. Because they made a decision that other slashers didn’t, and they stuck to it in a way that few other horror franchises ever have. Scream is not, fundamentally, a franchise about Ghostface. He may be the face (no pun intended) of the series, but it’s always someone different under the mask. What stays the same, movie to movie, is Sidney and, to an only slightly lesser extent, Dewey and Gail.

Rare indeed is the horror franchise that runs this long while keeping its focus so squarely on the survivors, rather than the killer. As a result, groundbreaking or not, after the first movie, the series is no longer about what the first movie was about – both lampshading and upending the cliches of the slasher genre. Instead, it’s about these three survivors. About what this does to them, about what they do in response. About how they come together and what pulls them apart.

The metafictional elements may have been what made the first movie stand out (we can debate that; for my purposes here, though, it doesn’t matter) but after that, what makes the series unique is its dedication to those three characters. That’s why I love Scream 4 and hated Scream 5, even though they are, on paper, practically the same movie.

4 understood what this series was really about. 5 doesn’t – at least for my money.

There’s another thing that happens as a result of this focus on the survivors – another aspect of the Scream franchise that we rarely get to see play out in horror films, at least in this way. There is an organic growth to the scale of the film’s central mythology. Sidney is a celebrity, even at the end of the first picture. By the opening of the second, there is a movie-within-a-movie that parallels the events of the first film. By the third, they are in Hollywood, on the set of a movie about their lives, with actors who are playing them.

This is a franchise where the world knows what happened, and has changed as a result. In small ways, sure, but still. This isn’t supernatural evil or whatever, so the changes don’t have to be big. But they’re still there. Other franchises have often gestured in similar directions, over the years, but few have ever been as committed to the bit.

Scream wasn’t the first place I saw this kind of storytelling, though. Another of my favorite horror/comedy franchises does this too – perhaps even one better. As with Scream, the original Tremors (1990) is a self-aware horror movie that at once pays loving tribute to and lampoons a largely-defunct (at the time) subgenre of horror – in this case, the giant monster movies of the ’50s.

It’s also easily the best movie in the series. But the first of its sequels do something that, at the time, I had never seen any other horror movie do: they present a world in which the public is aware of what happened in the first movie. There’s a Graboids-themed arcade machine, and the survivors of the initial film are minor celebrities who appeared in a Nike commercial.

That sensation, of allowing the world to expand organically with the events of each prior film, is something that many franchises struggle with, and it is that, as much as anything else, that helped both Scream and Tremors remain something special into sequels that couldn’t replicate what the original had accomplished, and so chose to accomplish something else, instead – at least for a while.

“The Year of Dumb Shit”

Well, 2021 sure was a year, huh? I guess it was better than 2020, all things considered, but I think we all also hoped to be someplace better than this by the time we bid 2021 adieu, yet here we are. I have a lot to be thankful for from the year gone by, and a lot to look forward to in the one to come, but that doesn’t mean that getting here was exactly a cake walk.

I’m not really here to rehash everything that happened in 2021. It was a lot. I stayed pretty into tabletop gaming, in spite of mostly not being able to actually play. I wrote a bunch more stuff for Privateer Press, including the contents of a couple of very successful Kickstarters, with another on the way. I didn’t publish a ton of stories, but I had a few come out, and I’m proud of them all.

I kept a daily aesthetic thread on Twitter every single day for the whole year. For the entire month of June, I wrote a tweet-length “story” about a giant monster every day. I got lampooned by the Midnight Society. I largely quit using Goodreads. I read a lot of old comic books and watched a lot of movies, and occasionally wrote about both. I read fewer books than either of those other things, but not none. I did a presentation for the Johnson County Library and peer-reviewed a book for a major university press. I wrote regular columns for Signal Horizon, Unwinnable, and Weird Horror.

It’s been a lot, is what I’m saying.

But a lot of it has been good. My freelance work has kept my nose to the grindstone for much of the year, but I can’t really complain. In all, things in my life have been pretty great, even as the world around me doesn’t always come out looking so rosy.

I said I wasn’t here to rehash the year, though, and I’m not. I’m here to do my usual roundup of things that I watched and read. If you want something more like a proper end-of-the-year list, you can find me writing up a few of these items in various places online, or listen to me chatting with Tyler Unsell about them at the Horror Pod Class.

Now, let’s do the numbers. In the course of 2021, I watched some 270 movies. Of those, 173 were ones that I watched for the first time. Of those, roughly 19 were actually released in 2021. My busiest month was October, at 40 movies. My least was May, with only 13. The first movie I watched in 2021 was Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (2020), the last was Zeiram (1991).

As I’ve done for a couple of years now, I kept an ongoing Twitter thread of my favorite new-to-me movies of the year, as I watched them. Of those, the highlights not released in 2021 included (in the order that I saw them) Nightmare in Wax (1969), Night of the Devils (1972), Anguish (1987), Opera (1987), Death Ship (1980), City of the Living Dead (1980), Shadow of the Cat (1961), The Spider Labyrinth (1988), The Boneyard (1991), Possession (1981), Frankenstein 1970 (1958), The Snake Girl and the Silver-haired Witch (1968), and Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? (1972).

My favorite books that I read in 2021 include Jonathan Raab’s The Secret Goatman Spookshow, Stephen Graham Jones’ My Heart is a Chainsaw, and Richard Sala’s (sadly posthumous) Poison Flowers & Pandemonium.

My favorite movie released in 2021 (of the 19, remember, that I saw) was Malignant, which also gave us our Monster of the Year, that thing I do frankly sporadically because I don’t always remember to, what?

Gabriel is one of the best parts of a bonkers movie that I absolutely loved and that was definitely the best time I had in a theater all year – and I’m so glad I managed to see it in a theater, because damn.

There were a few other good monsters this year, to boot, many of them in horror movies. I also dug Antlers more than most people seem to have, and it had a great monster designed (at least partly) by Guy Davis. There are several other movies with promising monsters that I haven’t yet seen, including The Night House and The Green Knight. (Everyone else absolutely loved Raatma in V/H/S ’94, but it didn’t do that much for me, even though it looks a lot like a Trevor Henderson creep.)

Monsters also showed up in a lot of the big-budget movies of the year, too, with Starro from Suicide Squad deserving of a special mention, even though I haven’t actually seen Suicide Squad just yet. There’s stuff I’m looking forward to in 2022, but a lot of it isn’t necessarily new releases. Toward the end of the year, I got Severin’s All the Haunts Be Ours boxed set of folk horror movies, so I can’t wait to check those out, along with Arrow’s massive Shawscope boxed set. Plus, October of 2022 should see the release of my next collection from Word Horde, not to mention some other stuff that I can’t talk about just yet.

And that’s basically it for closing out what I inadvertently dubbed “the Year of Dumb Shit” over at Unwinnable. Here’s to hoping that shit in 2022 is maybe a little less dumb, even if the movies can stand to stay this dumb, that’s totally fine.

Fast Away the Old Year Passes

I said last time that you might not hear from me until it was 2022 and, well, we’re pretty close. But I just needed to pop in and say a few things about what’s been going on around here since my last post, perhaps most notably to point out the culmination of that last surprise I mentioned back then.

My latest story went live at Pseudopod on Christmas Eve. Unlike most of the others that I’ve had performed there over the years, this one is an original that has never before been published anyplace else. It’s the result of my attempt to write something like a traditional “ghost story for Christmas,” one that takes place – or, at least, culminates – on Christmas Eve.

Except that this is me, and so it isn’t really a ghost story, in the proper sense, and is more of a monster story, about a weird bug that just keeps getting bigger and bigger. As always, Pseudopod has done a dynamite job of producing the audio, and Alasdair, as always, manages to tease out the themes of the story so elegantly in his intro and outro that I don’t really have anything to add. So, if you missed it, check out “The Humbug” at Pseudopod now.

If you don’t do audio fiction, no worries. You can also read it on their site and it’ll be in my next collection, which is due out from Word Horde in 2022. Aside from that, I haven’t gotten up to much since I last posted here, save for holiday stuff and the usual work. However, as the candle of 2021 gutters and burns its last, the days of Best of the Year lists have begun.

Due to the weirdness of the Plague Times, I once again won’t have the usual installments at various places, but that doesn’t mean that you won’t hear about some of my favorite things of the past year at Signal Horizon and Unwinnable. In fact, one has already appeared, as I wrote about Jonathan Raab’s The Secret Goatman Spookshow, which was my favorite read of 2021, among a bunch of other contributors over at Unwinnable.

To see the rest (including my favorite new movie that I saw in 2021 – I’ll give you three guesses), just keep an eye on my social media and until then, I’ll see you in the future!

Advent

One week from today, it’ll be Christmas. A week after that, it’ll be 2022. It feels surreal to type that, just as it feels surreal for it to be true. I’m not really prepared for either, but these days, who is?

I’m typing now because there’s a very real chance that I won’t get much else added here until the New Year. I’m coming out of several months of high-intensity work, and staring down the barrel of at least one more. In the course of January, I’ll be writing close to 50,000 words on a project that has to stay somewhat under wraps right now but if you know what I’ve been working on and skim this article, you can probably guess.

Tuesday night, I’ll be recording an end-of-the-year episode of the Horror Pod Class with Tyler Unsell, where we’ll be talking about some of our favorite things from this extremely weird year. I actually saw some new stuff this year, albeit not as much as I would in a more normal year. I’d love to pretend that next year is going to be better – I hope that it will – but with Omicron barreling down on us and everyone just deciding that they’re done acting like we’re in a pandemic, I guess, I don’t know how realistic those hopes are.

Even while I wasn’t necessarily going to theatres very often, I still spent the year watching plenty of movies, playing plenty of board games, and writing the various columns that I now tuck under my belt every month or so. I reviewed The Spine of Night over at Downright Creepy and a couple of different first-run movies for Signal Horizon, not to mention the usual host of retrospective movie reviews at Signal and Unwinnable.

Speaking of Unwinnable, they’re doing a special holiday subscription drive right now, and if it’s successful, we get to do a Gremlins-themed issue! So, go subscribe, is what I’m saying. And all that’s in addition to my column on Friday the 13th: The Series at Signal (which wraps up this month, to be replaced with Tales from the Darkside in 2022) and my recurring board game column at Unwinnable – check out the latest installment of that here.

I haven’t published a ton of stories in 2021, but I’m proud of the ones I did. A jokey flash piece called “The Last Day of Doctor Tillinghast” showed up in Curtains, an anthology to benefit Save Our Stages, while the extremely weird “Anum’s Fire (1987) – Annotated” was in Beyond the Book of Eibon, a tribute anthology to Lucio Fulci – both of which had covers by none other than Trevor Henderson. “The Robot Apeman Waits for the Nightmare Blood to Stop” was published in Tales from OmniPark, edited by Ben Thomas, while “The Cult and the Canary” appeared in the King in Yellow-themed anthology Y from Stygian Fox. And last but certainly not least, my timeloop giallo “Chanson D’Amour” broke into Nightmare, while my story “Screen Haunt” was podcast at Pseudopod.

There should be one more surprise coming this year – even though there is precious little of this year left – so keep an eye on my social media for that, when it comes.

I’ll probably do some sort of post-mortem of the movies I watched this year sometime in early January, but I’ve also been keeping (as is my new habit) a Twitter thread of movies that I loved that I watched for the first time in 2021.

We put up decorations and all that jazz, but the holidays feel… odd this year, and not only because it was 70 degrees in the middle of December the other day. Blame it on the Second Year of the Plague, I guess. I am one of those people for whom the holiday season is always bittersweet, at best, anyway, but there are certainly things I’m looking forward to this year and hoping for in the year to come.

Until that moment arrives, here’s a Yule Cat:

Comics Go to Hell

A few days ago, I posted to Instagram photos of the cover of an issue of Satan’s Six, a short-lived 1993 comic from Topps that – like so many other comics rolled out and just as quickly dispatched during that oft-unfortunate era – bore the name of Jack Kirby, if little enough else of the King remained in their pages.

I was dimly aware of the title prior to picking up the entire run on a lark at my friendly local comic shop, spurred on by that cover. But I had never investigated it any too carefully. As I said, such things were a dime a dozen at the time, and, as one person pointed out on Facebook when I posted the picture, Topps comics of its ilk, “were so hard to get rid of for a while that my neighborhood comic shop in the 90s gave one free away with every purchase.”

When I posted the picture, the comics were all still sealed in the bags that Topps comics of that era came in – accompanied by collectible cards that, likely, no one collects. However, curiosity is what had driven me to buy the comics in the first place, and it also drove me to open them up and read what was inside.

So I can safely say that the comics themselves are, in a word, terrible. Puerile and jokey while also attempting to be edgy and hip, the ’90s have much to answer for, and no touch of genuine wonder can be found within their pages. What few contributions Kirby does bring feel dated and at odds with the tone of the rest of the book and John Cleary’s art, while certainly matching the aforementioned tone, is decidedly chaotic and difficult to follow from a storytelling standpoint.

Which all serves to obscure something delightfully strange: the subject of that cover, tacked onto the fourth issue, that prompted me to buy the comics in the first place, and to post the photo that I did.

First, a little background: Satan’s Six, for those who would prefer to be spared looking the series up, concerns a quintet of characters all consigned to limbo who are trying to earn a place in either heaven or hell – and who have been employed by Satan to do the latter. (The sixth is rounded out by Frightful, a genuine-article demon sent to keep tabs on them.)

At the beginning of the fourth and final issue, their demonic master – not Old Scratch himself, but a middle manager – arrives to chastise them for not doing a better job, and brings along a little muscle in the form of none other than Jason Voorhees. Y’see, for those who haven’t already done the math, this was the same year that Jason went to hell in the ninth installment of the Friday the 13th franchise, and the comic seems to be after a little cross-promotion.

In fact, Jason’s demonic sponsor is about to utter that film’s title when he gets cut off with a glib, fourth-wall-breaking, “I can’t let you use this comic for such a blatant plug!”

So, not only does “ol’ dead-face himself” show up for a pointless brawl that has nothing to do with the rest of the plot, he also crops up in the bullpen at the back of the issue, where then-editor-in-chief Jim Salicrup advertises not just the movie (which New Line claims will be the “very last, ain’t gonna be no more, no way, no how”) but the Topps comic adaptation of same.

Here’s the thing, though. This issue of Satan’s Six was released in July of 1993 – a month before the film hit theaters, and the same month as the first issue of the Topps adaptation. Meaning that this is, as near as I can tell, basically Jason’s first appearance in a comic book – even if they do manage to misspell his name.

So that’s something, anyway.

“Goblins all over the place.” – Frankenstein 1970 (1958)

Not that long ago, I wrote about the original Universal Mummy sequels of the 1940s for Unwinnable. Specifically, I wrote about the odd fact that they are (inadvertently) set in the future. You can read the beginning at that link and buy the issue to get the whole story, but the short version is that the first sequel is set contemporaneously, and then the subsequent ones jump ahead by about a generation every movie or two, meaning that, by The Mummy’s Curse (1944) it would be around 1995.

I love that shit, so imagine my surprise when I discover that there’s a movie from 1958, that’s set in 1970, starring Boris Karloff as an aging descendent of the original Baron Frankenstein, who was tortured and disfigured by the Nazis during World War II and who is now continuing his deceased forebear’s experiments. Now compound that surprise with the fact that the movie’s plot concerns a film crew who are shooting a TV special to commemorate “the 230th anniversary of Frankenstein,” and who are using Karloff’s castle so that he can afford to buy an at-home nuclear reactor, which is definitely a thing we had by the ’70s.

If that sounds like a lot, well, you’re not wrong. Crammed into 83 minutes, fully 40 of which are Karloff flipping switches and looking at dials, Frankenstein 1970 feels, at times, like three or four screenplays, none of which were even remotely finished, all jammed together into one movie and then still not finished. I loved it.

What the hell is Karloff’s character’s plan? It is unclear, at best, and he never seems to have even the beginning of an endgame. At one point, when his creature doesn’t yet have eyes, he apparently sends it out to fetch somebody for him, and is then disappointed when it brings back the wrong person.

“You fool,” he says, or something to that effect, “I sent you to bring me Row.”

“Boss,” I wanted the monster to reply, “maybe you forgot, but I don’t have eyes.“

Several times in the film, there are what seem to be missing scenes that might illuminate some of the confusion, but unlikely anywhere near all. The 1970 conceit is meaningless outside the existence of at-home nuclear generators, and, frankly, so too is the film crew conceit. Any excuse – up to and including the old saw of their car breaking down in a storm – to get some fresh bodies into the Baron’s castle would have served as well.

Yet, the film crew thing is great, and not just for the metatext of it all. There’s a nicely-shot cold opening that could only ever end with the director shouting cut, in-movie. As for the 1970 idea, it could have been any year at all, including 1958. In fact, working titles for the film included Frankenstein 1960 and Frankenstein 2000.

As it stands, everything looks just like 1958 – or, rather, like 1958’s idea of what an old castle would look like, using sets mainly leftover from John Barrymore’s house in Too Much, Too Soon, the biopic of his daughter Diana, adapted from her memoir.

Karloff, of course, steals the show, reminding us of his range as he is as sadistically sinister here as he has ever been warm and grandfatherly in any other picture. Under some impressive facial makeup and performing a dramatic limp and hunch, he oozes just enough charm to allow you to maybe buy that people wouldn’t just run screaming, while still casting a long, dark shadow over every scene he’s in.

And as for the monster, it’s the coup de grace. Before I even knew that this movie existed, I had seen a shot or two of the monster, and that’s what ultimately made me dig up the further information that was more than enough to justify a purchase. Played by 6′ 8″ actor Mike Lane – who also plays the actor playing the monster in the movie they’re making within the movie – the monster looks a bit like the mummy of an astronaut.

Always depicted in head-to-toe bandages, wrapped around a piece of headgear that makes it look like a robot, the monster is very different than any other Frankenstein monster you’ve ever seen. Lane’s considerable height, towering over even Karloff, certainly helps. Also helping this along is that the Baron apparently just lets it wander around, eyeless, which seems like a very poor way to keep your elaborate secret.

But then, see above about the Baron not being really amazing at planning.

“We got some goblins that’ll kill you, man.”

JoCo Writes

It’s NaNoWriMo and, for the first time in a year or two, I am not inadvertently participating simply by dint of having so much freelance work on my plate that I write well over 50,000 words in the course of the month – though I do still have a lot of work, so I may crack that number without breaking a sweat anyway.

Instead, I am going to be talking about writing some. Specifically, I will be talking about writing licensed fiction and work-for-hire stuff and how to take inspiration from the movies over at the Johnson County Library Writers Conference. It’s my first time as a presenter at said conference – and my first time presenting online pretty much ever – so I’m more than a little nervous, but you’re all still welcome to come check out one or both lectures/workshops. Plus, there’s lots of other cool stuff going on!

The conference is all online, so you don’t have to be local to the Kansas City metro, and it’s totally free. You can learn more at this here link, and if you want to stop by for my sections, I’ll be talking about writing licensed fiction TOMORROW at 4pm CDT and doing a longer workshop on how to write from movies, rather than for them on Saturday starting at 3pm CDT and running until 5.

The former will be a pretty straightforward talk about how I got into writing licensed fiction (primarily for Privateer Press), its relationship to fan fiction, how it differs from my regular work (and how it’s similar), and what my experience with it has been. The latter will be a more in-depth discussion of both the similarities and differences between film and prose, and how the strengths of one can be adapted to fit the other.

Anyone who has read much of my fiction knows that I draw a lot of inspiration from film, and I at least seem to do an okay job of it. But translating film to prose isn’t a one-for-one process, and knowing how to borrow is perhaps more important than knowing what to borrow.

Both sessions will be recorded and available on the library’s website in the future, if you can’t make it this weekend. In the meantime, I dunno, wish me whatever the Zoom equivalent of “break a leg” is…

Hallowtide

The last few days of October found me – perhaps unsurprisingly – very busy, but I had a good month and, ultimately, a good birthday and Halloween, despite some setbacks, and the fact that we are now in the Second Year of the Plague. Even though I was frankly incredibly busy, I managed to watch a lot of movies during the month of October, with an average of just slightly more than half of them being first-time watches for me. Highlights from those include Antlers, Last Night in Soho, The Boneyard, Sweet Home, Fatal Frame, Possession, Seance, and the various Fear Street flicks.

Just in time for Halloween, my story “Screen Haunt” went live at Pseudopod. I’m proud of this one, which was originally published in It Came from the Multiplex by Hex Publishers. And, as always, the folks at Pseudopod did a bang-up job producing the story, with Alisdair Stuart pulling together themes maybe more eloquently than I ever could have in his outro, and Lalana Dara doing a perfect job on the narration.

Over the preceding month, we had a successful Kickstarter for the latest installment of the Iron Kingdoms RPG, for which I wrote… a considerable amount. And we also had a rousing subscription drive for Unwinnable (technically still going through the end of the day), where we unlocked not only a “monsters” themed issue (which I am, to no one’s surprise, thrilled about) but also a Doom issue and more. In fact, we’re only a tiny handful of subscribers shy of the final goal, so if you’ve been on the fence before now, go toss in a few bucks. It’s more than worth it.

On my birthday, in what I can only assume was a gift meant directly for me, my publisher opened an honest-to-Godzilla brick-and-mortar store selling all the best stuff in the world, including big piles of my books. Sadly, it’s all the way out in Petaluma, California, so I haven’t been there yet, but I am sure I will go someday.

For Halloween itself, I had a relatively quiet night with my adopted family, handing out candy, scaring trick-or-treaters, watching House on Haunted Hill, and playing Campy Creatures. On the drive home, I listened to ghost stories read by the mellifluous voice of Vincent Price himself. It was a good night.

Among those who share my predilections, the day after Halloween can be a somewhat dismal prospect. It is, after all, the longest possible time of the year before more Halloween. And yet, we would all do well to remember that Halloween is not the end of the spooky season; it’s the beginning.

We stand now at the gateway of a season in which the days are short, the nights are long, and spirits or branches or spirits that we tell ourselves are branches scratch at the windows. From now until the spring thaw, we are deep in ghost story weather. And we shall all remember Halloween, and keep it in our hearts all year long.