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Hi Gang!
Hope your holidays have been everything you wished for!
Mine have been a tad more stressful than usual. As many of you know, I'm the caregiver to an 87-year-old parent with vascular dementia; for some time now I've been hoping to find her a new home that would provide her with more activities to stimulate her mind than she's currently getting at her board and care, and a few weeks ago I found the perfect place. Unfortunately this has entailed endless paperwork and medical tests over the holidays, along with a higher-than-usual amount of TGW (Things Going Wrong) on top of the usual holiday overwork...but the good news is that it should all lead to an excellent 2020.
My editor at Reaktion Books and I are currently working through illustrations for my forthcoming seance history book, and I'm writing away on a number of short stories I owe various places.
The big news otherwise is that I will have my first "greatest hits" collection out this year, but the publisher and I are still trying to come up with the perfect title, so I can't quite tell you much more about that yet. Soon...!
Thanks for hanging in with me during the 2019 trip around the sun, and I can't wait to share more with you in 2020, which promises to be a spectacular year. Hope you're all staying healthy and warm!
Lisa
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Still Life
In which I rhapsodize about favorite movie photos from my collection
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Long before Buffy, there was Captain Kronos.
In 1974, Hammer Films, the venerable English studio behind classics like Horror of Dracula, The Curse of Frankenstein, and The Devil Rides Out, released an oddity called Captain Kronos - Vampire Hunter. The film starred an unknown named Horst Janson as a hunky ex-solder who now travels the countryside with a hunchbacked assistant hunting down vampires.
What makes the film so interesting is that it's the only movie directed by Brian Clemens, who also co-produced and scripted. Clemens was the genius behind The Avengers, the brilliant British spy series that gave a whole generation of little girls (including me) a role model in Emma Peel (Diana Rigg).
Captain Kronos - Vampire Hunter is a delightful, action-horror film full of eccentric characters, sex appeal (bombshell Caroline Munro co-airs), cool ideas (Kronos flips his sword around so the hilt becomes a cross) and genuine scares. Hammer intended the film to be the first in a series, but they were in financial straits at the time and the series sadly didn't happen.
But the first film now holds cult status and is widely considered to be one of the best of the Hammer movies from the '70s. If you've never seen it, do yourself a favor and track one down.
About the Still: This is an original 8"x10" lobby card showing Kronos with one of those flipped sword hilts.
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The Halloween Spirit
Tips for keeping it going all year 'round
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My yard is haunted all year long.
I love to work outside, and it delights me no end to look around my garden and see little touches of Halloween. I've got Dia de los Muertos skull planters, glow-in-the-dark bats and witches in the trees, and these cool little Halloween-themed solar stake lights. At night, it's fun to glance out a window and see these little beauties twinkling in the dark.
Okay, truthfully...there may also be a plastic skull or fake spider or two lurking in the yard somewhere...
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Strange Fruit
The weirdest thing I've recently uncovered in my research
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The story of William Crookes and Florence Cook is one of the strangest in the history of seances.
Crookes was a brilliant scientist who would later be knighted for his contributions to spectroscopy and the creation of the vacuum tube. Crookes was also a devoted spiritualist.
Florence Cook was a medium who was the toast of spiritualist England in the 1870s. Cook claimed to have a spirit guide named "Katie King". In 1870, when Cook was a pretty 15-year-old, Crookes began a long investigation into her mediumistic abilities. During the course of their work together, Cook routinely manifested Katie King as a full-bodied spirit that could physically interact with the seance sitters. Crookes shot about 40 photographs of Katie King, including one showing him arm-in-arm with the spirit.
It seems patently obvious to a modern viewer that "Katie King" was simply Cook in a white robe which she secretly put on in the dark at the beginning of the seance. How is it possible that a man as scientifically astute as Crookes could have claimed that this was all completely real? He even published articles (and the famous photos) in scientific journals, causing his peers to gasp at his gullibility.
The likeliest explanation is that Crookes and the teenage medium were having an affair. Crookes later destroyed the photos, so that all we have left are duplicates of those published in the journals.
The photo of Crookes and "Katie King" persuaded more than just the famed scientist; Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes and another devout spiritualist, called it "the most remarkable picture in the world."
How did men as rational as Crookes and Conan Doyle allow themselves to believe such nonsense? That question is central to my forthcoming seance history book, Calling the Spirits.
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"The Best Cookie Dough Ever" from the forthcoming Christmas Horror Volume 3
So, when you're invited to contribute a story to a Christmas horror anthology...where do you even start?
I've already written several Christmas horror stories, and read many more, so the first thing I do is think about horror devices I've already written or read about. Victorian Christmas ghost stories? Done that. Satirical comment on Christmas consumerism? Check. Family cracking under the psychological stress of the holidays? Been there, done that.
Once I've eliminated the things I know I don't want to write about, I start thinking about things I do want to describe in a Christmas horror story. When I was a kid, my mom made Christmas cookies from an old family recipe every year; we had these ancient cardboard shapes we used to cut the cookie dough.
And wow, did I ever love that dough! I'd try to sneak so much of it that my mother started telling me eating it raw would give me worms. I don't know if she believed that or not, but it worked to deter me from eating quite so much of the dough.
So I decided to write a Christmas horror story about cookie dough...and maybe even that thing Mom used to tell me to get me to stop eating it raw. I wanted the story to be fun and crazy, so I adopted a style for it that's a bit different from my usual.
I think it turned out...well, tasty. Ho ho ho!
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Sometimes the answer to boosting your writing productivity is as simple as finding the right tool.
Some writers I know work right at a desk, some write their first drafts in long-hand, and some (like me) sprawl with a laptop.
My main Christmas gift this year (which I'd asked for) was a case and bluetooth keyboard for my Kindle. I often use a Kindle to play music while I write, and I'd become intrigued by the notion of actually using the Kindle as a mini-word processor.
I'm pleased to say it all works. The bluetooth keyboard is a little cramped and takes some getting used to, but it interacts seamlessly with my Kindle Fire 7 and doesn't suffer from any lag. The case holds the Kindle upright, like the top half of a laptop, and has a magnetic grab if I want the keyboard to sit right below the Kindle.
I downloaded Writer Plus to the Kindle to use for the word processing program; it's free and easy to use. Once I'm ready to save the document I'm working on, I can share it with myself via e-mail (and probably other means as well, although I haven't investigated those yet).
While I'm not sure I'd want to use this on a regular basis (although I might!), I think it will be ideal to travel with, saving me the bulk of having to pack a full-sized laptop.
What's your best writing tool?
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WIP It
My current works-in-progress
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As mentioned above, I'm now working through the illustrations on Calling the Spirits: A History of Seances. The first round of edits has been completed (it was thankfully quite light!), and next up should be indexing.
I'm also putting finishing touches on a "best of" collection that will include twenty reprint stories and one new story.
I owe short stories to a few places, and I'm also working on a few other long-term projects. I should have a lot of new work out in 2020...and beyond!
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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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This new non-fiction anthology of writing tips includes a reprint of my essay "Focus!: How Writers Can Improve Their Productivity."
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The Lovecraft Squad: Rising
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The final volume in this incredible "mosaic novel" includes a chapter by me.
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Christmas Horror Volume 3
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My story "The Best Cookie Dough Ever" appears in this great exclusive from Dark Regions Press.
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Weird Women: Classic Supernatural Fiction by Groundbreaking Female Writers 1852-1923
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My Ghost Stories partner Les Klinger and I have re-teamed to dive deep for this anthology of amazing, terrifying stories by early female writers.
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Miscreations, which includes my story "Imperfect Clay", is the featured book in the January Night Worms box!
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Tales of the Lost Volume I
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Includes my story "Unity Endangered".
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My story "Family" is in this incredible anthology, coming in June.
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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 either e-book or print.
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I finally got around to creating print copies of my 5x5 anthology Strange Tales of the Macabre: Ghosts, so this month's giveaway will find one lucky winner getting a signed print copy! Just click the blue button below to enter, and good luck!
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