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Hi Gang!
Pant pant pant...okay, my Octobers are usually pretty frantic, but this one's been the frantic-est ever, I think. Book deadlines, Halloween interviews, speaking engagements, out-of-town friends, my mini-yard haunt, fires and high winds to deal with...I love this month, but I'm ready for a break!
It's all been great, though, and I'm so pleased to be able to announce that my Ghost Stories co-editor Leslie Klinger and I have just delivered a new book for Pegasus: Weird Women: Classic Supernatural Tales by Female Authors, 1852-1923. I couldn't be happier with how this book turned out, and I can't wait to share the cover and the table of contents. We did a real deep dive to come up with some rare gems for this one.
I wish I could tell you that the other book I have due - the one on the history of seances - was done, too, but...well, the deadline is the middle of this month, so I'm going to rush off now and get back to work.
Have a great November!
Lisa
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Still Life
In which I rhapsodize about favorite movie photos from my collection
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Frankenstein...always worth a revisit, right?
I pulled out this still (which is actually from Bride of Frankenstein) to compare to the Madame Tussaud's figure of the creature (see below).
Yeah...Tussaud's nailed it.
Our guide at Madame Tussaud's, Helen Larimore, told us that the figure of the monster had been at the New York museum along with the Mummy and Dracula figures also in the horror area. Astonishingly, when Helen came on board at Tussaud's in Hollywood a few years ago, they had no horror section! She got the New York figures to start it up, but discovered when they arrived that they looked awful, so the L.A. team put considerable work into cleaning them up, resculpting, and refinishing.
It worked, because all three figures are brilliant now!
About the Still: Likely a reproduction, but still a lovely vintage shot from the 1933 classic.
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The Halloween Spirit
Tips for keeping it going all year 'round
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I love doing paranormal investigations.
I recently got the opportunity to participate in one held in Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum in Hollywood. I was there with the whole team behind the Ghost Magnet podcast, including Bridget Marquardt, and paranormal photographer and investigator Craig Owens. We arrived just as the museum was closing down, so it was just us, the wax figures, and some spirits.
Did we find anything spirit-wise? Well...other than one mysterious bang on a pipe, no. And that's fine, because when else would you get to clown around one of the world's great wax museums without the public around?
That's one of the things I love about doing these ghost hunts: I've been inside the Stanley Hotel, the Queen Mary, the David Oman House, and Madame Tussaud's Hollywood when they were closed to the public, and I've gotten to go behind the scenes and see places you can't usually visit. I love the fantasy of being in these places late at night, whether spirits pay a visit or not.
The above photo was taken by Ghost Magnet producer Rob Cohen, of me and Madame Tussaud's Frankenstein monster figure. Their horror figures are extraordinary; the whole museum is pretty great, really.
And what better way to keep the Halloween Spirit going than a paranormal investigation inside a closed wax museum?
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Strange Fruit
The weirdest thing I've recently uncovered in my research
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Mrs. Guppy.
It's a silly name, isn't it? But in 1860's and 1870s England, Mrs. Guppy was anything but silly; she was one of the most popular spiritualist mediums.
Each "superstar" medium had their own expertise, and Agnes Guppy was the queen of "apports"; "apports" were things that suddenly appeared out of nowhere during her seances. The spirits might, for example, produced fresh flowers, or snow; during one seance, the medium asked the sitters to name their favorite fruit, and the spirit obligingly produced each guest's requested fruit.
Some of her apports were even stranger: one sitter reported a live eel abruptly appearing in his lap.
Her most famous apport of all was...herself. During a seance held by the mediums Herne and Williams, someone jokingly requested that the spirits produce Mrs. Guppy...and a few moments later they heard a thump in the dark, turned on the lights, and discovered the medium standing in the middle of the table, still holding a quill pen and an accounts book, saying that she'd just been at home working on her bookkeeping.
That seance became so famous that magician and famed debunker J. N. Maskelyne even chose a drawing of it as the cover for his book Modern Spiritualism, with the caption "A Moonlight Transit of Venus" (a snarky reference to Mrs. Guppy's large girth).
Mrs. Guppy's apports, by the way, have never been completely explained.
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Afterword for The Haunted Library of Horror Classics
(to appear in each of the first six volumes of HWA's Haunted Library of Horror Classics)
I write a lot of introductions/forewords/afterwords, so I thought it might be fun to talk a little about how I approach those.
One thing I will never do: use an introduction to describe the story or stories you're about to read. To me, that's like watching one of those DVD audio commentaries where the supposed expert is saying things like, "Now the camera pans left..." I can SEE that the camera pans left - unless you're telling me why that's interesting or important, I really don't need to hear that.
Presumably, someone who is asked to provide supplementary material to a book has some special knowledge of it - either an area of expertise, or a personal connection. The intro/preface/afterword is there to give you a little extra insight into the meaning or making of the book.
With HWA's Haunted Library of Horror Classics, I was asked to provide an afterword that explained a little about how the entire series came about, because I was one of the principles involved in it. As HWA's President, I spent years trying to make the series happen, so I can certainly offer a unique look from the inside out about the history and goals of this exciting series.
And btw, Nancy Holder has provided a killer introduction to the first volume, which is The Phantom of the Opera.
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I was just chatting with a dear friend yesterday (the editor Stephen Jones) about how many writers enter the literary field nowadays via self-publishing, and may not be aware of how things work in traditional publishing.
This, of course, is a pretty broad topic, but I wanted to mention one thing I recently saw done online, just to clarify this point for now:
If you post a piece of writing anywhere online - and I'm not talking a short excerpt, but rather a complete work - it is considered published. Why does this matter?
Because you can't sell that piece now as an original story; you can only sell it as a reprint. Reprints generally pay considerably less, and many editors won't consider them at all because they want new, never-before-published pieces.
If you want to self-publish a short story (or post it on a blog, or a social media forum), sure; but just be sure you understand that you've just killed the ability to sell that story as a new original piece.
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WIP It
My current works-in-progress
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It's been a crazy month of interviews and podcasts and appearances, so here's a list:
This month's Nightmare Magazine features my interview with author Lois Gresh. It's currently only available to subscribers, but will go public on November 27th. Lois is amazing, so this is well worth a read!
Interview with me in The Wall Street Journal.
Here I'm quoted in interview with local NBC station's 'The Why Guy':
Interview with Michael Mink at Spooky Things Online.
Me quoted in Washington Post article on Halloween haunted attractions:
Mentioned in Mental Floss list of Halloween fortune-telling rituals:
Mentioned in NBC Denver's article on Halloween
Mentioned in Atlanta news site's article
PODCAST INTERVIEWS:
Weird Christmas:
Fascinating Nouns
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Ghost Stories: Classic Tales of Horror and Suspense
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Co-edited with acclaimed anthologist and genre expert Leslie Klinger, this anthology gathers classic ghost stories from Edgar Allan Poe, Edith Wharton, Charles Dickens, M. R. James, and more!
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Includes my historical dark fantasy story "Etain and the Unholy Ghosts".
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Includes my story “The Gorgon".
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Terrifying Tales to Tell at Night
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Includes my story “The Chemistry of Ghosts".
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Trick or Treat: A History of Halloween
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My award-winning history of Halloween has just been re-issued in a new less-expensive paperback format!
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Has my story "What Ever Happened to Lorna Winters?"
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A Secret Guide to Fighting Elder Gods
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Includes my story "Holding Back".
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Weird Tales is reborn! The first issue in this new run features my story "A Housekeeper's Revenge".
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The 5x5 Anthology project is a co-op between five of the horror genre's finest, award-winning authors: Eric J. Guignard, Kate Jonez, Rena Mason, John Palisano, and me. We each traded stories to create five themed mini-anthologies (each branded as part of the Strange Tales of the Macabre series), and all available in affordable e-book format. Stormy Weather, Post-Apocalyptic, and Gothic are available now (click on the covers to order); Ghosts and Haunted Journeys are coming soon.
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It's an Advance copy (what's known in the trade as an ARC) of the first volume in HWA's Haunted Library of Horror Classics, The Phantom of the Opera. Just click the blue button below to enter, and good luck!
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