Apparently some authors feel it is their publisher’s duty to publish them. And when something happens they don’t like, though the fault may lie with them, they decide to criticize and denigrate that publisher in public forums and expect this passive aggressive ploy to endear them to that publisher and therefore get them their way.It’s a risky tactic unless you are somebody like Stephen King or Stephanie Meyer. And it makes said author look like a bitter sniveling curmudgeon... Read Full Story

It’s Western Wednesday on Dark Bits. As most of you reading this are aware, I write westerns under the penname Lance Howard (the latest of which, Coyote Deadly, Amazon is at last carrying) as well as the horror/westerns under my own name. So it’s only fitting I dedicate a day to the genre and hopefully we’ll be getting that going next week with a new initiative from western writer Terry James (Joanne Walpole) involving excerpts and blog linking on various themes.A lot of fol... Read Full Story

Taking a leaf from friend actor/writer Gary Dobb’s highly successful Wild West Monday initiative on his excellent Tainted Archive blog, I have decided to try something of the same sort for horror fans on Dark Bits. I’m calling it Terror Tuesdays. Gary encouraged all western fans to do something to help promote and proliferate the western genre, such as visiting local book stores and requesting a larger western section, buying a western book, or anything else they could think of t... Read Full Story

Orbs. Those fuzzy wuzzy wittle glints and glunts that are supposed to represent members of the spirit world working on their auditions for the Lawrence Welk show. They appear on video and film and pirouette, flutter and vanish. The technical term for it is backscatter or near-camera reflection. Legit ghost hunters tend to discount an awful lot of them as moths fluttering by the camera, dust specks on the lens or other perfectly rational explanations.It’s more common with smaller digita... Read Full Story

So Chris Brown gets no jail time for beating the crap out of Rihanna. Am I the only one not surprised at this? Or that in other comparable cases the term was anywhere from three months to two years, yet the rich celebrity got what, now? Oh, yeah, nothing.I would like to pick on California for this, where the case went to court, but hitting another person isn’t taken very serious in any state or by the authorities. Unless you are Perez Hilton, then you can whine your flamboyant little a... Read Full Story

A couple blogs back I talked a bit about speed-dating. I was, of course, being tongue-in-cheek for the most part, but in yesterday’s paper here in Southern Maine I came across an article about a speed-dating style thing for writers with agents. I think I felt a cold chill slither down my spine and instantly knew why I am starting to be turned off by some writer’s organizations (though there are myriad other reasons, but if I go into them I’m likely to piss off a lot of peop... Read Full Story

Blue is my favorite color. I love its calming nature. Some folks think of it as a bit cold but I see it as warm, tranquil. It’s the color of a summer sky or Caribbean sea.Blue, however, gets stuck with a bad rep when attached to other things, unlike other colors. Well, maybe red has a few less than pleasant connotations, like red herring, which means a false lead, and “I see red”, which means you’re pissed off. Nobody picks much on yellow, though. Yellow is always the... Read Full Story

I make no apologies about being old school influenced when it comes to my horror writing and horror influences. I have little interest in slasher/blood gore stuff and the more reality-based type horror, like Saw and Chain Saw Massacre. They don’t scare me. They either sicken me or gross me out, and neither feeling is one I particularly cultivate. I like supernatural horror, spooky stuff, and try to write that, mixed with a bit of mystery, suspense and even western.Probably a good deal o... Read Full Story

I have to admit, even before I became a horror writer I was interested in things supernatural and investigating whether they exist. As I’ve mentioned, my uncle was a “psychic minister” and for a short period reigned over the Church of I See Dead People or something or other. He also worked on a number of alien abduction cases as a hypnotherapist and age regression “expert.”So as much as I would like to state outright this stuff exists I really am not convinced b... Read Full Story

What are your limits? Do you impose those limits, consciously or subconsciously, on yourself? Do you let others put them on you? Do you automatically tell yourself, “I can’t do that”, or convince yourself others are luckier, more skilled or talented?Self-esteem is a weird thing. Some say it is the result of our environment, an unnurturing parent or bad past. Yet there are those brought up in perfect homes with June Cleaver mothers and Fred MacMurray fathers (and for those o... Read Full Story