Susan Abel Sullivan's Blog, page 2

Star Wars Anticipation

Hello, my name is Susan and I'm a huge Star Wars fan.

I saw the original Star Wars movie the summer of 1977.  I was only fourteen and had to beg my mom to take me to see it since I couldn't drive yet.  Seventeen Magazine had featured the film in their movies column with a photo of C3PO.  Horror movie lover that I was, I thought he was some sort of metallic skeleton and wanted to see the movie on the basis of that alone.

Boy, were my assumptions ever wrong. 

Back in 1977, movie theaters were still huge.  The "Big Screen" was literally a BIG screen.  Gargantuan, actually.  Most movie houses only had two large theaters that could probably seat a thousand people or more.  Lines would often form outside the theater and worm down the sidewalk to wrap around the theater for the most popular movies.  You couldn't buy tickets more than half an hour ahead of time and the internet wouldn't be reality for twenty more years, so if you wanted to guarantee yourself a seat in a popular movie, you had to show up ahead of time and wait in line to buy your ticket.  The age of multiplex theaters with numerous small-screen theaters was still a few years away. 

Seeing a movie on such a big screen was literally a larger-than-life experience.  You felt totally immersed in the world of the film you were seeing and for me, I'd "fall" into the world I was watching, something that doesn't tend to happen with smaller theaters or when watching a movie on TV because I'm constantly aware that I'm watching a movie instead of feeling that I've fallen down a rabbit hole into a different world.

The original Star Wars absolutely blew me away in every respect: film making, story, special effects, music, costuming, and acting.  I was totally gaga for Luke Skywalker and could relate to bossy Princess Leia. 

Star Wars influenced the first novel I ever wrote when I was in college and made me a life-long fan of movie-music composer John Williams. I used to disco dance to Meco's Star Wars at school dances and Big John's Teen Disco in Pensacola, Florida.  My high school marching band played the Star Wars theme in one of our half-time shows.  I choreographed a baton-twirling solo to "The Throne Room/End Credits" music from the movie's soundtrack.  I had a Star Wars movie poster on my bedroom wall, as well as a Star Wars calendar.  Even now, at the age of 52, I have an official Star Wars light saber that looks and sounds pretty darn real when you turn it on. 

So yeah, you could say that I'm ridiculously excited about seeing The Force Awakens this weekend at the movie theater.  The early reviews are touting it for an Oscar nomination and the prediction is that it will be the biggest box office turnout of the 21st century.  When I heard that the Disney company had bought the rights from George Lucas, I did a happy dance with high hopes that they'd do the next three films right.  Based on the early reviews, it sounds like they have and will.  All I can say is I can't wait for the weekend to arrive.

"May the Force be with you!"

Halloween Hangover: Not What You Think

​Halloween has come and gone once again, but my favorite holiday tends to hang over until Thanksgiving in the form of a miniature Halloween Village that seems to grow each year like the Blob.  

What began as a single ceramic haunted house in 1999 has expanded into a rather large display requiring the hubs to build three special tables to house the entire collection.  I'd leave it up all year if the hubs didn't need the space for his Christmas village. Not to mention the cats like to play Godzilla and leave a swathe of destruction in their path when they jump up onto the village.  Every morning I have to right knocked down fences, trees and tombstones.  And the little darlings very often steal pieces during the night and leave them on the floor for the dogs to chew up.  That's not really something I want to deal with 365 days a year.  

Check out the YouTube link below for a tour

American Horror Story: Jack-o-zombie!

  From the looks of this sad, pathetic pumpkin you'd think it had been sitting out on the front porch for more than a month.

Nope. This jack-o-lantern turned into a jack-o-zombie in only four days.  Eeeeeee!

I grew up in the little town of Gulf Breeze on the humid Florida Gulf Coast and I don't ever recall a carved pumpkin rotting so damn quickly.  But down here in the most southern part of coastal Georgia, jack-o-lanterns apparently become jack-o-zombies in mere days rather than weeks.
And we haven't even had the torrential rains in the past month that we had all summer.

Next year I'll know to hold off on putting out the jack-o-lantern until three days before Halloween.  

But in the meantime, I've got another jack-o-lantern to carve.  Fingers crossed that it doesn't become a zombie until the day afternoon Halloween: November 1, The Day of the Dead.
​ 

The Halloween Countdown is On!

What's Halloween without a cute pair of Count and Countess Dracula salt & pepper shakers to adorn your dining room table?

I found this adorable couple at an antique store in Yulee, Florida a few years ago.  At a $5 price tag, they were way too awesome to pass up.  

The Count reminds me of the character of Grandpa from the TV show The Munsters and the Countess reminds me of Grandpa's daughter, Lily Munster.  

So what cool or novel Halloween decoration do you have and do you display it year round or only in October?  Inquiring minds want to know. 

But You're Too Cute to Write Horror

 There's a funky misconception that horror writers look weird, creepy and/or sinister.  While it's true that many writers of horror will never make People Magazine's "Sexiest Man/Woman Alive" list, most writers of horror and paranormal look no different than your sweet grandmother or your fun-loving Uncle Joe or your nice-looking co-worker who loves romantic comedies and fluffy kittens.

"But you're too (cute, sweet, normal) to write horror," people will tell me.  

This comment used to make me go hmm, but my standard response now is to make a little joke referencing the Mel Brooks' movie Young Frankenstein, "Hey, normal on the outside, Abby Normal on the inside."

And speaking of normal on the outside, by all appearances I am the All-American Girl Next Door.  In high school, I was a blonde, straight-A Honor Roll student, majorette captain, and member of the Honor Society. In college, I was in a sorority, the marching band, dance team and dance theater.  I'm still blonde, teach Zumba Fitness, and love kittens.  

Two weeks ago, I attended the 2nd Annual Gulf Breeze High School (Florida) Alumni Band reunion where I had the opportunity to twirl my batons again with the current high school band during their Homecoming game.  (The video clip above is from the game.)

Abby Normal, indeed. (Heh!)

She's Got Moxie!

Moxie's Shelter Ad The Universe has a way of laughing at our carefully laid plans.  

My sister emailed me this animal shelter ad in February of 2007.  "I found you the perfect dog," she wrote.  "Just look at the spirit that dog has."  

"Why did you send this?" I wrote back.  "You know I don't want any more dogs."  My cocker spaniel of 14 years had died of old age the month before and the hubs and I had decided we didn't want any more dogs.  


Dogs were expensive.  They required training, couldn't be left home alone like a cat, and needed more attention than a cat.  They tended to have accidents in the house and chewed things.  Plus we had six cats and a snake.  Why would we need any more pets?

"But just look at that face," my sister fired back.  "She's been in the equivalent of doggy jail and yet look at how happy she looks."

I couldn't argue with that.  The dog really seemed to have a great outlook despite being in a shelter.  But she was an American Pitbull Terrier, a breed I'd said I'd never have due to the bad publicity over them.  Many cities had even banned pitbulls.

But I couldn't get the ad out of my mind.  Just for the hell of it, I decided to drive the 2.5 hours south to Wetumpka, Alabama where the shelter was located one town over from where my sister lived.  

My sister met me there.  I'd like to be able to say it was love at first sight between me and this dog, but that wouldn't be true.  In fact, she wanted to play with her tennis ball more than she wanted to interact with us.  But she did know obedience commands and performed them for us.  That was a plus.  And she wasn't a puppy.  Also a plus.  In fact, she'd been found with a litter of week-old puppies.  All of the puppies had been adopted.

To make a long story short, I did not adopt Lyla that day, but couldn't get her out of my mind.  Two months later she was still at the shelter, her stay of execution extended until we made a decision (the shelter was county-run and could not afford to keep unadopted animals indefinitely.)  The hubs and I brought her home and she has been the BEST dog we've ever had.  We renamed her "Moxie" because she was loaded with it.  

She's an old girl now, but she stays in shape with swimming in your backyard pool during the warm months and walking outdoors and on a treadmill during the cold months.  She gets along fabulously with our other pets and always charms visitors and veterinarian hospital staff.  She even inspired me to write a humorous paranormal mystery titled The Weredog Whisperer about a pitbull terrier bitten by a weredog who becomes a teenaged girl during the full moon.  


And she's still chock full of moxie.

Monsters in my Closet

What kid doesn't think there aren't monsters in their closet or under the bed?  I was absolutely convinced of both when I was young.  I'd leap onto the bed at bedtime.  No way did I want my foot to linger too long where a hand could dart out and grab my ankle!  And forget about opening the closet door after lights out!  

After reading Stephen King's The Shining in the 8th grade, I was positive that vampires were lurking outside my bedroom windows at night. I even asked my dad to go outside and check--that's how scared I was.  

But I never did ever actually find any monsters outside my window or under the bed or in the closet until a few months ago.

I was cleaning out my home office closet in preparation for a major relocation from my Victorian home in Alabama to a newer, smaller house in Georgia.  I opened a box that had been on the top shelf of the closet for years.  And that's when I discovered the monsters.
A sheet of old postal stamps featuring the classic monsters from Universal Studios that I'd packed away and forgotten about.  What a great find! There was Frankenstein, The Mummy, Wolfman, Dracula and The Phantom of the Opera as portrayed by Boris Karloff, Lon Chaney, Jr., Bela Lugosi and Lon Chaney.  I don't collect stamps, but I decided to frame and keep these since they're just too cool to use.  


So I really did have monsters in my closet.  And they're now displayed on my writing desk as a reminder of the monster movies that inspired me as a kid. 

Attack of the 50-Foot Crawdads

For the past two months I've been quite curious over what kind of critter has been creating these mounds in our yard.  I ran through a list of potential possibilities.  Were they piles of armadillo poo?  I saw an armadillo in the yard one afternoon, but their back ends are awfully low to the ground to leave such a tall deposit.

Well, perhaps a larger animal left these mounds behind.  But upon closer inspection, they appear to be made out of wet dirt.  They certainly don't smell like scat.  The mounds are made of little scoops of moist sand stacked one upon the other to form a sandcastle.  I'd need a melon-ball scooper to build something like this.  

So I finally turned to Google and typed in "mounds of wet sand in my yard."  And guess what came up?

Crawdad chimneys.

Crawdads, also known as crayfish, crawfish, fresh-water lobsters and mudbugs, burrow down into moist sand near standing water, ditches, rivers and lakes and leave their diggings behind in the shape of a mound or chimney.  At night they come out and creep about in search of dead leaves to munch on. During times of drought, they plug the holes to their burrows to keep the water from drying out because they breathe through gills like fish.  


But now that I've solved the mystery, I can't get the image out of my head of all those crawdads crawling out of their mounds at night and creeping through my yard, lobster-pinchers clacking like something out of a Roger Corman movie.  I can see it now: Attack of the 50-Foot Crawdads--Coming to a Theater Near You.

Moving to the Funny Farm

View from the Funny Farm In the 1988 movie Funny Farm, Chevy Chase and his wife move to the quaint little town of Redbud in upstate New York so that he can retire and write the great American novel.  Of course, nothing goes as planned, crazy hijinks ensue, and Chevy spends more time looking out the window at a squirrel than he does writing.

I can so relate to this.

The hubs and I relocated to the southeastern tip of coastal Georgia last month.  We're still unpacking.  

A major move is one of the top four most stressful events a person can undergo, even if it's a desired relocation. I can attest to this personally. I had grandiose expectations of getting the house completely unpacked and organized in a week upon returning from two back-to-back conferences: World Horror Con and the International Aquatic Fitness Conference.  

Yeah, that didn't happen.

What did happen was the internet service that was supposed to be installed never was.  And then the major plumbing line from the clothes washer started backing up into the house and a pipe under the sink burst and we had to get a plumber out pronto! And the heat pump on our A/C froze up because the previous owners never changed the filter and THAT had to be fixed.  And the state of Georgia sent me a threatening letter that I better go get my vehicle registered with the state or they'd sic the police on me.  And our year-old puppy broke house training and I was constantly mopping up pee puddles around the house.  And one of my ball pythons got burned on the heater in his temporary habitat and I had to spend quite a lot of time just finding a veterinarian within a 60-mile radius that even saw reptiles.  

And meanwhile through all of this, I couldn't find what I needed when I needed it because all of our stuff was in boxes.  I'm tellin' ya, it was enough to drive a person to the funny farm.  

But somehow over the past six weeks, we've gotten mostly unpacked and my office is now set up and I was able to go through all of the beta reader comments on my YA novel and began an outline for the 2nd round of revisions.  

I'm far behind the original plan of having 2nd revisions completed by mid-June, but there was really nothing I could do about it.  Unpacking and organizing takes time.  Lots of time. Certainly more time than I ever anticipated.  

Now if I can just get that squirrel to quit playing in the tree outside my home office window, maybe I can get some writing done.  Ha! Yeah, right. 
My new office: a bigger room and a larger desk!

World Horror Con 2015

Charlaine Harris, author of the Sookie Stackhouse Southern vampire novels, on a con panel at WHC '15 World Horror Con 2015 has come and gone and I'm left with memories of a fantastic conference, two successful pitch sessions with agents and an awesome print of artist Bob Eggleton's Pennywise the clown from Stephen King's IT. (see photo below)


As a first timer to WHC, I wasn't quite sure what to expect, but the four-day conference blew me away with panels, readings, an art show, a mass author book signing, and a costume ball.  I even had the opportunity to lead a group of horror poets in a Fried Zombie Dee-light sing-along! 


One of the highlights was getting to meet author Charlaine Harris whose Sookie Stackhouse series inspired the HBO show True Blood.  I've read the entire series (love it!) and just started watching Season 2 of True Blood on dvd.  I also had the pleasure of meeting several other guests-of-honor, such as Dacre Stoker, the great-grand nephew of Bram Stoker who wrote DRACULA--one of my favorite books of all time.  Kami Garcia, co-author of the BEAUTIFUL CREATURES series was an absolute hoot and so entertaining, as was poet Linda D. Addison who was an absolute delight in all ways.  


A large percentage of attendees were women--something I was pleasantly surprised to see! The general public often thinks horror appeals more to men, but I'm here to tell ya that the ladies love horror, too.


The one thing that actually scared me at the con was having to pitch my latest novel face to face with not one, but two agents.  Even though I've pitched and sold two novels and a short story collection to a professional publisher, it was all via email query where I could edit and polish my pitch until it was as perfect as I could get it.  But when you're in person and have 3-5 minutes to sell someone, anything can go wrong!  But I didn't get tongue tied, didn't stammer, and didn't put my foot in my mouth.  And both agents want to see my manuscript.  Pitch day also happened to be my birthday and getting two MS requests was the best birthday gift ever.


I left World Horror Con 2015 in high spirits and would love to return again next year.  

Bob Eggleton print of Pennywise the clown