Halloween In Retro

            I love Halloween. Like any of y’all thought there was any doubt. Even when I was a little kid, I loved it. Except for when I was six and my mother made me dress as Cat in the Hat. I’m not sure about the rest of you, but most six-year-old boys don’t think that Dr. Seuss is particularly fantastic. Still, I would almost take it over the bland and dark Halloween night I’m spending.

            A few jack-o-lanterns are flickering on porches (including mine), and some Halloween decorations adorn houses, but as I drove through Oklahoma City at night, I was overwhelmed by the distinct lack of Trick-Or-Treaters or anyone else ready to celebrate.

            I spoke to my dad on the phone, and in my hometown they had already entertained two hundred or more candy seekers, with more continuously showing up.

            It was disheartening to say the least, even if I had my traditional Halloween food and movies to comfort me, even a new writing project to edit and submit (I missed Bloodshot Books call last year, but I had one waiting this time), but I always reminisce around this time and wonder what it will be like to eventually raise children in a place that doesn’t seem to celebrate the spookiest night of the year.

            Hopefully I’ll sell enough books or get a sweet Netflix deal to move me to a nice Halloween-loving town.

            Man has walked on the moon; anything is possible I guess.

            Still, I’ve had many good Halloween memories and costumes over the years, so now I get to lead you on a less-than-exciting road trip through the years of costumes and events that made up Halloween.

            I watched a lot of Action League Now when I was a kid and for those of you who can’t remember what that is, it was a sketch on old Nickelodeon shows such as All That (SNL for Kids) and KaBlamm! It revolved around a group of incredibly crappy superheroes going about their lives. Naturally, I thought that the Lab Guy side character was cool. He was a mad scientist type, so for First Grade that’s what I went as, a mad scientist, test tubes and all. I broke every single one of those test tubes before the day was done.

            Fast-forward a year and my teacher put a moratorium on our costumes: we could only dress up as a character from a book. This put a damper on my plans to be Godzilla.

            I wish I had pictures of this costume that I could show you, but alas they are all Polaroids. It was papier-mâché mostly, but it had a tail, a Godzilla head helmet, and spikes down the back. Pretty much the only thing it didn’t have was the ability to breathe radioactive fire. This was in the days before commercial Godzilla costumes, so all of this was homemade.

            High and low I searched through bookstores (my parents often dropped me off at Books A Million, knowing I would never leave) and I was triumphant in my search. It was picture book called Who’s Afraid of Godzilla?

            I marched into my class on Halloween day, slapped that bad boy down on my teacher’s desk, and proceeded to roar and destroy miniature imaginary cities everywhere.

            It was Third Grade and onward that I really began to take Halloween as my own, on account of a werewolf mask that I had purchased from Wal-Mart. This was the mask that I would wear every single Halloween until I graduated from high school. I had furred gloves and used army fatigues from a surplus store. I looked pretty scary for a four-foot-something werewolf. My friends and I would continue to Trick Or Treat like this for the next few years until we were finally too old to do it anymore.

            Our first year of ceasing Trick Or Treating operations was in the Sixth Grade, but for a bunch of pre-teens still obsessed with getting candy we put our collective heads together and came up with a better candy-acquiring enterprise. We decided that there were plenty of smaller kids out going door-to-door; we just had to scare their candy sacks away from them. And that is how we began to traumatize small children by putting on an impromptu haunt in my front yard.

            Cody Copeland (one of my very best friends) made a harness that would allow him to jump off my parent’s balcony, pretending to hang himself. Patrick Grissom provided a fog machine that turned the whole forty yards from the road to the house into a murky nightmare. Chris Kile dressed up as a stuffed scarecrow and sat beside the front door, motionless and ready to strike. Daniel Crumpler (another one of my very best friends), Will Brittain, Joshua Clements, Patrick Fruge, Grant Hogan, Tony King, Stephen Smith, and a whole host of others became foot soldiers that were more than eager to scare kids out of their hard-earned candy.

            Naturally, none of this came with waivers, liability forms, or anything that probably would have made this legal or at least lawsuit-free. No one ever got seriously hurt, but if I did the same thing today you’d better believe I’d have enough forms to keep my butt out of the fire. After all, one year we actually did use a few burning fires to direct kids into the path we wanted.

            For years we did this, with people regularly drifting in and out of our cast of characters and costumes. We’d obtain loads of candy; turns out toddlers and young kids scare easy, but sometimes it resulted in injuries.

            There was this one kid who was dressed up as a knight, and when I jumped out from behind a rock and scared him, he swung that sword directly into my face. I went down hard, blood pouring out of my nose and mask as that little kid went on a rampage, whacking everyone who came near him to get to the front door.

            To this day, I can still hear his battle cry.

            “MUST HAVE TRICK-OR-TREAT!”

            He punctuated every word with a swing of his sword and left me with a cracked nose, blood all over my mask, and a big smile on my face.

            We did this for years: scaring kids, eating food, and watching scary movies, before turning in and going home (unless Halloween fell on a weekend). They were good times, but good times end, and ours were put to a stop when we all went to college.

            It’s ten years to the day since we last scared kids in the yard, but my dad still tells me that for years afterward kids would ask about us.

            “Where are the boys who would scare us?”

            Kid, we are grown up, have families, and a mortgage.

            I still think about getting in touch with the guys each Halloween, getting us back together to scare the crap out of some kids. A few of them even have kids of their own now. It’s a pipe dream, but like lots of things, you never know what could happen.

            I’ve taken time off next year for Halloween; it’s on a weekend, giving me a good amount of spare time to spend in my hometown.

            Maybe I’ll give the guys a call.

Current Projects

            I’ve been hard at work finishing my western, The Magpie Coffin,forthcoming from Death’s Head Press. I’ve really enjoyed working on this character and on the ways in which he dispatches his quarry. I reached into some disturbing places and situations in order to kill some fictional people. It may not be a “horror western”, but I’m certain that it hits dark places and grabs the appellation of “splatter western” by the horns. At my current progress, I should be finished mid-November with a release date in February.

            After that is finished, I’ll be concurrently working on two projects, one of which is a secret project for a publisher that I can’t talk much about yet. Looking at a tentative release date of early 2021 for that project.

            The other is, of course, the Clickers project.

            A brief history lesson: J.F. Gonzalez (an author that has heavily influenced my work) wrote the first Clickers novel with Mark Williams in 1999. A seminal work of horror, it spawned three sequels (all co-written with Brian Keene) and a tribute anthology (that I was honored to be a part of).

            I never got to meet the man, he died in 2014 from cancer, but his work and legacy has had a lasting impact on me and several others. Which is why I was honored and incredibly excited to be asked to co-write the next wave of Clickers novels.

            As all of the previous novels were co-written, these new Clickers novels would also be co-written by authors from the next generation. Stephen Kozeniewski and I were asked to tee off with the first one. This will be our second collaboration (look for the Perfectly Fine House from Grindhouse Press next year!), and we’ve been eagerly brainstorming ideas and settings for our project. The stories aren’t beholden to old canon, which has offered up plenty of new avenues to explore.

            Our brainstorming sessions have produced some good ideas so far, even a setting, but it has also produced my chief annoyance in life: The Flying Clickers.

            People asking me, “Will it have Flying Clickers?” has started to become my, “What about the ending to the Rising?” Time will tell if this variation of Clicker stars among the other ones that we have cooked up.

            Besides that, there are a few other less definite things: a submitted novella to Bloodshot Books, a comic book pitch, and the occasional short story.

            Busy, busy, busy, but it is a good problem to have.

            

Other Announcements

            Catfish in the Cradle has sold well, but it can still do better. Luckily, there are places you can acquire it from.

            If you like the internet and being able to make extravagant purchases from the comfort of your couch (like me), then it is available on Amazon at the following address: https://www.amazon.com/Catfish-Cradle-Wile-Young/dp/1950259021/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=Catfish+in+the+Cradle&qid=1572648628&sr=8-1

For everyone else, there are a few businesses that have chosen to stock my debut novel. Atlanta, Texas folks can go to Grandma’s Attic run by Ted Brabham, a fantastic store for antiques and other knickknacks. It was also the first place I had a signing. I love the shop and Ted has been most gracious in letting me sell there.

            In Uncertain, Texas (setting of Catfish in the Cradle), you can find them in the Shady Glade Café, my favorite lake eatery. I can’t tell you all the times I’ve eaten there with my father and grandfather.

            Jefferson, Texas plays host to the Taste of Caddo Café, an offshoot of Shady Glade and also a proprietor of my book. Todd, Becky, and Malayna Arnold have been wonderful in stocking them and serve some of the best food in East Texas.

            That’s all for now. I’m back to working on the Magpie Coffin and maybe my main character will see a roadrunner.

STOKERCON 2019 Recap

                          STOKERCON 2019

             

            Hello all.

            It has been a long time since I wrote anything nonfiction, especially for this blog. Of course, it’s a new day, with new possibilities on the horizon and new adventures into absurdity to talk about.

            This past weekend was Stokercon 2019, held in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Last year I was unable to attend due to weather conditions at the venue location in Providence, Rhode Island.

            Plane travel; it’ll screw you over every time.

            Grand Rapids is a thirteen-hour drive and you lose an hour going across the border into Michigan. I decided that this year would be different from last. This wasn’t some twenty-five hour pilgrimage; it was a thirteen-hour jaunt, no big deal. So with much confidence, I planned to drive.

            My loved ones tried to talk me out of it, to instead get a plane ticket, but I held fast… And was thrown a curveball when my father decided to make the drive with me.

            For those of you who haven’t met him, my father grew up in East Texas, is a Green Bay Packers fanatic, and hasn’t watched nor read anything in the horror genre in nearly forty years.

            And here I was going to a horror convention.

            Shrugging my shoulders and with a devil-may-care attitude, I decided that this was a grand idea. We hadn’t been on one of our father/son adventures in a long time and I thought it would be nice to spend some time together.

            And so our journey began.

           

Hour One

Dad and I loaded up the car, started the engine and gave a modified quote from one of my favorite movies:

           

Dad:  There are 948 miles to Grand Rapids, we have a full tank of gas, half a pack of jolly ranchers, it's dark, and we're wearing sunglasses.

Yours Truly: Hit it!

           

I’ve been a rabid fan of the Blues Brothers since I was twelve. I laugh every time and here we were nearly living it. On the road, with a goal.

You see, I had signed up for several pitch sessions at the convention where I would present my work to prospective publishers and hope they had interest. Just like the titular brothers, I was on my personal mission from God.

Hour Five

            Time on the road is a little screwy; you find yourselves reminiscing as well as noticing the most off-the-wall bizarre things on the highway.

            For instance: the overabundance of Lion’s Den Adult Superstores in the Midwest. Every twenty miles like clockwork there was another billboard advertising the establishment, followed by the next iteration of the franchise. All of them happened to resemble a place where a man would ask if you wanted a back-alley kidney transplant.

            I expected nothing less.

           

Hour Nine

            Going through Chicago, we encountered a traffic jam that lasted an hour. Little known fact (or massively known, I prefer to think “little”) about me… I HATE TRAFFIC JAMS.

            How do they happen? It doesn’t make any sense to me. Just drive! Do the thing you were literally doing five minutes ago!? My temper usually flares, but I was having too much fun to let myself feel it this time. Still, by the time we actually exited it, the sun was down and Michigan was dark.

            Illinois Traffic Jams, I hate Illinois Traffic Jams.

Hour Fourteen (Time Zones Are Witchcraft)

                So we arrived at Grand Rapids in the middle of the night; around midnight, but closer to one. Dad got in bed, I went to my own, though I lay awake for a while… thinking about reunions and what the day would entail. I was ready for reunions, but I was very ready for pitches.

            To quote the film again, albeit modified: “I had a pitch good enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.”

Stokercon 2019

            We awoke the next day and immediately headed over to the hotel where the convention was taking place. We received our passes and went about trying to find someone I knew. In short order I ran into Michael Bailey, a fantastic author as well as editor. I hadn’t seen him in two years and it was a wonderful reunion. After that we proceeded to a panel moderated by the lovely Linda Addison.

            When I first came into this world about three years ago, Linda was one of my first friends. I try to attend a panel she is on or moderates at every convention that we’re both present at. She is a fantastic poet and great friend.

            Dad was ecstatic to finally meet her, even getting a picture.

           

            We talked and I updated her on the goings on of life, because, like Michael, I hadn’t seen her in two years. Reuniting with old friends brings me joy.

            Also of note, I met Gabino Iglesias in person. I’ve known Gabino online for a while now and we had a great chat before the panel. If you’re not reading him, you need to be.

            We then attended a panel entitled, “How To Conduct A Reading”. This was especially helpful and informative considering I’m performing my first reading at Scares That Care Charity Weekend in August.

            I also met up with good friend Wesley Southard, a phenomenal writer and attender of Bachelor Party 2018, an event hosted and attended by some of my best friends in this business.

            Here is a link to his Amazon page: https://www.amazon.com/Wesley-Southard/e/B005HFH8JY%3Fref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share If you haven’t pre ordered One For The Road, you need to. That book is going to be fantastic.

            Wes and I proceeded to hangout for about an hour, catching up and just generally yapping about recent goings-on in the genre as well as shoptalk. After that I asked if we could go find Brian Keene (mentor, ne’er do well, and all around outlaw author) and found him in his room interviewing Jonathan Janz.

            Jonathan Janz is not only a prolific writer with much success, but he is also one of the nicest individuals that I have the pleasure of knowing. It was incredibly heartwarming to be able to catch up with him.

            It was at this point that Dad managed to get on the podcast when Brian asked who he was… Needless to say, “I’m Connor’s Dad” caused me to lightly groan and put my head in my hands, but Janz and Brian both took it in good stride. After introducing Dad to Brian, as well as engaging in a little shoptalk, we parted ways and headed out to lunch.

            It was a good time; Dad and I found a small sports bar up the street and we proceeded to talk about what he had seen and learned. Good to have some feedback from a man who was unused to the business, even better to hear that he was enjoying himself and finding the whole process of the convention fascinating. He retired back to the hotel afterwards while I returned and mentally prepped myself for the three pitches that I had.

            Unless you have done it before, there isn’t quite a way of describing what it is like, waiting for your name to be called for a pitch. There are usually multiple publishers but you only get to pick three at this convention and so you want to pick the ones that are closest to what you have to pitch. Sometimes you have to pick ones that aren’t quite what you had in mind.

            Needless to say, you sit there and you contemplate the important questions: How will I pitch it? What should I say and not say? Will they like it?

            But then they call your name and it‘s Showtime.

            Even though my track record for pitching projects is flawless (I’ve never had a publisher not ask to see what I pitched them), I still get incredibly nervous, though I have to shove it down when game time comes around. Go big or go home.

            My record remained intact; all three publishers asked to see the projects I pitched them.

            After that, I joined Brian, Wes, Rachel Autumn Deering and her fiancé, Ashley, for dinner. It had been a while since I had seen Rachel and it was nice to catch up with her as well as get to know Ashley. As usual, when writers gather for dinner, jokes were exchanged, gossip was shared, and we left happy.

            Rachel and Ashley decided to go to the bar while Brian, Wes, and I ventured to the hallway outside of the ballroom where they would be hosting the Award Ceremonies (Brian would be presenting the award for Best Graphic Novel).

            We avoided the banquet in exchange for hanging out in the lobby and talking to various authors and convention goers. Brian headed off to present the award while Wes and I snuck back up to the hotel room and watched hockey.

            Brian eventually returned, chastised us for watching the last 30 minutes or so of the awards ceremony on our phones, and swept us off to the after party.

            For those who have never attended a writer party, there is a mess of alcohol, a whole lot of meeting new people, and deep conversations between people who know that they are only truly understood in the world by each other.

            Brian has stated publicly that writers are like a tribe and that you feel most at home around each other. Even if you only see each other every few years, you feel like family.

            That was what it was like as I looked around and saw friends engaged in conversation and antics, photos flashing, people hugging; a little slice of paradise for people like me.

            Brian at this point came and grabbed Wes and I so that we could be guests on Scott Edelman’s podcast Eating the Fantastic. Scott is a comic book writer from the 70’s as well as a fantastic editor. He’s most famous for his work on the Captain Marvel series.

            Scott hosts his podcasts in lobbies and restaurants, conducting his interviews over a meal. In this particular case he had us choose a donut from a menu, then we got handed a random one.

            It was supposed to reflect our personalities, I think.

            I chose the Simply Susan and to anyone who knows my food choices knows I’m a fan of the simple and plain. I thought it was apropos.

            Anyone who wishes to listen to the interview can do so here: http://www.scottedelman.com/2019/05/14/dare-to-eat-donuts-with-a-dozen-horrific-creators-during-the-stokercon-donut-spooktacular/?fbclid=IwAR04YdQSGmADcNtsSSzeE5sDzSCFK23f8yhOn2xEvnmzFiLwKC7AVJJwJO4

            Wes and I went back to the party after the interview, where I learned that my dear friend, Sara Tantlinger, won her first Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in Poetry. I congratulated her. She is quite well deserving of the accolade.

            The evening wore on and eventually it was time to leave. I said my goodbyes and prepared to leave, but not before Brian introduced me to Josh Malerman. I’ve been a fan of Malerman’s work for years, and for all of you who have watched Bird Box but have not read the novel, you need to go amend that swiftly. It’s one of the best I’ve read in years. Here is a picture of the two of us.

           

            And just like that… I left the convention and my dear friends behind, heading home with renewed vigor and drive. A definite feeling that I belonged came with me.

The Return Journey

            Like most return journeys, after the climax there isn’t much to tell here. It was much the same as the trip up except for one detour… Dad and I went to visit Old Joliet Prison where scenes from the Blues Brothers were filmed.

            To my father and I this was the equivalent of visiting holy ground, and the fact was not lost on us. We proceeded to snap pictures of the prison and where the esteemed Jake and Elwood Blues characters stood. We slung quotes back and forth and I even had Dad take a photo of me in front of the gates just so I could feel like Jake Blues when he exited.

       

            Sweet Home Chicago, indeed.

Other News

            Things have gone back to normal after the weekend, and for those who are curious about what comes next, I have good news. I’m putting the final edits on the project that I pitched to be sent out to the publishers who requested it. It’s a novella, but one of my favorite projects I’ve ever written, and now with less of an acid trip ending after its rewrite.

            Besides that, I have two novels: one for the same publisher above and another for a different one. Those will begin after the above edits are finished.

            Another project that I can’t say much about is in the works for the end of the year, a novella. The guidelines are different from my usual fare, but I like a challenge.

            Last, but certainly not least, is Stephen Kozeniewski and I’s project. The edits are underway and hopefully will be done soon.

            A lot of irons in the fire and a lot of roadrunners to chase. Just because I caught one doesn’t mean there aren’t plenty of others out there.