Sumiko Saulson's Blog, page 35

Mocha Memoir Press Women in Horror Month campaign

www.mochamemoirspresss.com

Trilogy of Terror: Southern California Tour

Crystal Connor, one of the other women in the compilation of biographies and interviews 60 Black Women in Horror, has put together a signing with myself and fellow horror author Lori Titus that will take place in March, when we are all down here for the AstroBlackness 2 Sci-Fi and Fantasy Expo over at at Loyola Marymount University…March 12-13, 2015.

We will be signing at Dark Delicacies, 3512 West Magnolia Boulevard in Burbank on Saturday, March 14 at 2pm.

We also have a reading the following day, Sunday, March 15, at $10 or Less Bookstore. 9054 Tampa Avenue, Northridge, CA 91324 at 5pm – 7pm..

The sequel to Happiness and Other Diseases, Somnalia, comes out March 12 so I will read from it at this event.

Somnalia: Turmoil consumes the Underworld when the death of a god leaves a power vacuum. Phobetor, the stern and ambitious god of Nightmares seeks to fill the gap at any cost. Murderous nightmare daemons escape to the mortal realm, placing all of mankind in peril. In the midst of the unrest, star-crossed lovers yearn for one another across the void, one disempowered and bound to the earth, the other trapped in the land of dreams by a grave sacrifice. Will love conquer all, or will earth’s salvation come with an iron fist?

Lori Titus is from Los Angeles, and started writing stories when she was nine. Titus never stopped writing, but it was a hobby, and pretty much a secret of hers for a lot of years. Titus started submitting short stories, and quite a few of them got published. One editor wrote her back about a short story that she had written for his site, wanting to know if she would like to serialize it. The serial eventually became the basis for her first novel, Hunting in Closed Spaces, about a young girl named Marradith with extraordinary powers.

These days she is always in the process of writing or editing projects, if not both. Titus has always loved horror, but also enjoys paranormal (anything with psychics, telepathy, telekinesis, etc.). Her mother and sister were both horror fans, so she credits them with her early love of anything frightening or outside the realm of the ordinary.

“We used to say that books and movies were supposed to be an escape, so why watch or read something without a sense of imagination?”

http://flashesinthedark.com/2009/01/21/hunting-in-closed-spaces-by-lori-titus/

Washington State native, Crystal Connor loves anything to do with monsters, bad guys (as in evil-geniuses & super-villains.  Not ‘those’ kind her mother warned her about), rogue scientific experiments, jewelry, sky-high high-heeled shoes & unreasonably priced handbags.

When she’s not terrorizing readers she reviews indie horror and science fiction films for both her personal blog and HorrorAddicts.net

She is also considering changing her professional title to dramatization specialist because it so much more theatrical than being a mere drama queen. The End is Now is the 5th book that has been unleashed by Connor’s awarding winning imagination.

Download your free copy of …And They All Lived Happily Ever After! audiobook and see why the name Crystal Connor has become “A Trusted Name in Terror!”

http://podiobooks.com/title/and-they-all-lived-happily-ever-after/

Book tour update

This has been a busy week. I am in Los Angeles, both because I had a book tour stop at $10 or Less Bookstore in Northridge, California – and because I needed to finish the work I started back in November in terms of setting up distribution for Happiness and Other Diseases (and 60 Black Women in Horror)…

As of this writing, Happiness and Other Diseases is being carried at both BookSoup located at 8818 Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, CA and Small World Books, located at 1407 Ocean Front Walk on the Venice Beach Boardwalk in Venice, CA.

Small World Books also carries 60 Black Women in Horror.

Speaking of 60 Black Women in Horror, Crystal Connor, one of the other women in the compilation of biographies and interviews thus titled, has put together a reading with myself and fellow horror author Lori Titus that will take place in March, when we are all down here for the AstroBlackness 2 Sci-Fi and Fantasy Expo over at at Loyola Marymount University…March 12-13, 2015.

We will be reading at Dark Delicacies, 3512 West Magnolia Boulevard in Burbank on Saturday, March 14.

The sequel to Happiness and Other Diseases, Somnalia, comes out March 12 so I will read from it at this event.

Somnalia:

Turmoil consumes the Underworld when the death of a god leaves a power vacuum. Phobetor, the stern and ambitious god of Nightmares seeks to fill the gap at any cost. Murderous nightmare daemons escape to the mortal realm, placing all of mankind in peril. In the midst of the unrest, star-crossed lovers yearn for one another across the void, one disempowered and bound to the earth, the other trapped in the land of dreams by a grave sacrifice. Will love conquer all, or will earth’s salvation come with an iron fist?

Live Appearance in Northridge, CA Jan 9, 2015

Live Appearance in Northridge, CA Jan 9, 2015.

Lover

Putting all the cards in your sweet little hands

Committing the lines of your face into memory

Waiting as women are wont to do

Woefully willingly wanting you

To hold you, to touch you

To pay the cost, knowing

Time is a tapestry of love and loss

There is nothing in me that can make you mean less

Or diminish your perfection in memory

Carve your name into my old weary heart

Love is a game made of risk and false starts

You half-change your mind as you walk out my door

I fear that I’ll never see you again

You hold me and kiss me and promise me more

But love is a game and you don’t always win

Sometimes we just can’t make a thing work out

You hesitate, I hesitate… we both have our doubts

In search of a certainty we’ll never know

Having you, holding you and letting you go

I still remember how you gave yourself to me

Generously and completely

Leaving me tenderly with kisses and promises

You just couldn’t keep

Weeping incessantly, eyes swollen shut

Grasping and reaching for I don’t know what

I am a fool

I am your fool, indeed

I don’t want you to leave

And I want to believe

But love is a game of holding

And letting go

Sometimes these things happen

Quickly and sequence

Now if letting you go

Is the best I can do

I just want you to know

This is me

Loving you

Indie Author Appreciation Month-Review of Sumiko Saulson’s “Happiness & Other Diseases” & Literary Tea Feature

Sumiko Saulson:

Another blogger/press review of Happiness and Other Diseases, from A Bibliophiles’ Reverie

Originally posted on A Bibliophile's Reverie:

Amazon/Barnes & Nobles/Kobo/Goodreads/ Author Website/ Author Facebook Fan Page

Sumiko Saulson’s devilishly clever new indie fiction mishmash of horror, paranormal romance, and psychological intrigue is, indeed, a pariah, maybe even an anomaly in the mainstream publishing world. It is a very unconventional book that offers a supernatural dimension to the mysterious, sometimes mind-bending world of psychological pathological conditions, psychosis,  and disorders. The story is set not-so mundanely in a mental rehab center of sorts (mental hospital is considered a politically-incorrect pejorative at this point, which makes finding the right term a difficult task).    Sumiko’s writing is infused with a rich psychological dimension, allowing her writing to seamlessly take place in two multiple dimensions of sorts: both the ethereal dimension where spirits or immortal beings dwell that have no predilection or intimate knowledge of human emotions, or mortals themselves that are almost enfeebled…

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Storyline

Sometimes I wonder if I made a mistake by pulling it all out and writing it down in the first place. I wonder if I would have been better off leaving all of my girlish notions about what love is in the back of a drawer full of dusty things that you know you’ve grown too old for.

But we do what we do when we deconstruct and reconstruct all of our cumulative life experiences and all of the things we’ve read and seen, the stories we were told, and who we believed we could be when we were still young and the world hadn’t broken our hearts.

Those of us do who write.

We do these things to construct a character.

So you find yourself opening some locked-away room in the back of your mind and bringing out dozens of old photos of love and loss you’ve kept hidden in some musty chest in your cerebral attic. You remember some person you used to be, some passionate person who was so easily affectionate and so entirely unafraid. Then you wonder if you are still that girl. And you wonder what you can do to protect that girl from becoming a dusty old woman who makes safe choices and is afraid to dream.

You wonder where the intersection is between staying safe and dancing barefoot in an empty street skating around the detritus left behind by easy lovers and broken glass, the shattered remains of empty beer bottles and boys that you loved who are now just friends. And boys you loved that you hate now. And boys who became men, sometime long after you kicked them out of bed. And you wonder, could it have ever been different?

But then you look in the mirror, and you know that you’ve spent too long in your worlds. You’ve spent too long with your own words. Now you find yourself alone, holding your own hand. You have finally arrived, to save yourself. To love yourself. To comfort yourself. To reassure your body that you still do and always will love her, and remind her you will probably be the last lover she ever knows. You listen to your stories, and you laugh at your jokes.

This goes back and forth for sometime, until you’ve written a book. It’s a love story you told yourself. You cry when you crawl back out of your world, and you enter the everyday world where you are no one special. You are not its writer, and you do not solely determine its outcomes.

And you’re falling, and you’re hoping, and praying, you’ll land somewhere. Somewhere soft, with a friend.. who knows, and understands.

And you wake up so grateful for both of your fans.

Indie Author Appreciation Month- December, 2014 on “A Bibliophile’s Reverie”

Sumiko Saulson:

Very excited that Justin plans to review H&D for A Bibliophile’s Reverie!

Originally posted on A Bibliophile's Reverie:

Recent Release of the Third “World of the Vampire” book by Dani Hoots (contributor to blog), which I helped edit.

Below, you will find some very exciting details, as well, about the unveiling of my new audio-book services for self-published writers!!

Hopefully, all my awesome, dedicated blog readers had a wonderful, relaxing Thanksgiving, yet you’re probably clamoring to see more book-related posts here on this blog. Feeling cagey by the woeful lack of posts during the whole of November on this blog space, you were probably wondering whether this blog were vanishing into an internet void of some kind.

Fretting would be futile at this point, as I have not deserted this blog. To the contrary, I have been working hard on a number of projects, including writing a full-length novel, editing several works by blog contributor Dani Hoots (and open to editing and formatting more self-published works), slaving away on Paralegal…

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So wow… this totally happened.

Anne Rice totally plugged my Amazon page on her Facebook page right now. I’m like, dying here. In combination with someone (Amy Bellino) calling me their favorite horror writer (/collapse, fan self, on) and Graveyard Shift Sisters mentioning me in the same tweet as Taranative Due, this is like, my most exciting week ever. Its even more exciting than that time I met Bruce Campbell at a book signing. Or stood around babbling nonsense at Con-Volution because the Pinis addressed me by my first name. It’s even (slightly) more exciting than when Anne Rice’s freakishly tall gay son Christopher gave me a hug and probably a cold and sold me some bisexual pornography, or that time Taletha Wagoner stood in front of me screaming while Morgue tortured himself in front of a live audience at Venice Beach Freakshow… and we were like two feet away… but, I digress.

This reminds me that it’s Black Friday and you can totally buy books on sale at Amazon, and other places, like Barnes and Noble where they are 20% off, or Lulu where they are 35% off, and there is a sale at Laurel Bookstore in Oakland which, like these other places, totally carries my books – and books of actual bestsellers, like Anne Rice. So go forth, and foist books upon your friends for the holidays.

Graveyard Shift Sister: Sumiko Saulson

Sumiko Saulson:

I am so happy to be featured on Eden Royce’s Dark Geisha blog!

Originally posted on Eden Royce - The Dark Geisha:

I’ve been frantically reading to get out the next installment of Black female horror author spotlights and interviews on the Graveyard Shift Sisters blog.

Next on the list is Sumiko Saulson, author of Happiness and Other Diseases, The Legend of the Luna, and most recently, Ashes and Coffee, a short horror tale featuring a homeless Black woman as protagonist.

Ashes and Coffee, a horror tale with a gritty look at homelessness in modern day California. But is Death any better?

I first heard of Sumiko Saulson’s work during a 2013 Women in Horror Month (WiHM) event when she was an ambassador and interviewed twenty-five women for her WiHM blog series.  I noticed she was a horror blogger as well and I didn’t at the time know of many Black women running such a blog.

Not long after, she interviewed me for her non-fiction book 60 Black Women…

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