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Hi Gang!
I hope you're all continuing to stay safe and sane as this strange history we're living through crawls on. I've rewritten this little welcome introduction a couple of times, because it seems as if the world changes every day.
Like most of you, I'm watching what feels like a new civil war unfold in this country. It's been coming for a long time, and the events that have led up to it scream for a massive reset. As a writer, I go back and forth between thinking my job is to comment on it, and feeling that I can best serve my fellow human beings by providing pure, entertaining stress relief. I usually strive to find a middle ground between those two.
And then there's that virus that's now killed over 100,000 of my American kin, put millions more under stress, and created an economic disaster that we'll be years in recovering from, if ever.
A month ago, I was wondering if my day job was over for good, which would leave me without both that income and health insurance. Then I got the call to return to work, to assist with remodeling the bookstore that employs me. That went on for a couple of backbreaking weeks, but it was gratifying...and then we re-opened to curbside pickup, and this week we'll be opening to limited in-store shopping.
Don't get me wrong: I love our customers and I believe selling books is a sacred calling, but...are we ready? Will everyone be willing to peacefully observe masking and social distancing? Several bookstores - including the nation's oldest independent science fiction bookstore, Uncle Hugo's in Minneapolis - have already been destroyed or damaged in the civil unrest. Are bookstores being targeted by some group out there?
Yeah, I'm a little anxious about this week. But I still have a roof over my head, a wonderful partner, and a plentiful supply of chocolate. We'll get through this together, with the aid of books and art and justice and common sense and masks and luck.
Lisa
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Still Life
In which I rhapsodize about favorite movie photos from my collection
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Sometimes you find gems when you revisit a great director's more neglected works.
Roman Polanski's personal life aside (and yes, I freely admit that I separate the artist from the man), there's no denying that he's one of the greatest filmmakers of all time. His streak of films that runs from 1962's Knife in the Water to 1979's Tess is, IMHO, the greatest run of movies from any filmmaker ever. Repulsion, Cul-de-sac, Rosemary's Baby, The Fearless Vampire Killers, Chinatown, Macbeth...all masterpieces of suspense.
One movie that sometimes gets lost in that run is The Tenant, from 1976. I remembered loving it when I first saw it as a teenage film student at UCLA, but I hadn't seen it since, so I watched it again when it recently appeared on one of my streaming services.
If anything, I like it even more now. In many respects it's a variation on Rosemary's Baby: both are about a young person (or people) moving into a large apartment complex where something strange has happened, and both explore suspicions that the younger characters harbor about the elderly (undoubtedly a holdover from the cultural milieu of the '60s). Also, like Rosemary's Baby, The Tenant has an incredible, perfectly directed cast, including Isabelle Adjani, Shelley Winters, Melvyn Douglas, and Jo Van Fleet.
The most interesting actor in The Tenant, though, is Polanski, who cast himself in the lead role of Trelkovsky, a Polish immigrant living in Paris. Polanski was great fun in the comedic role of Alfred, assistant to the vampire slayer, in The Fearless Vampire Killers, but here he plays it serious, capturing Trelkovsky's descent into madness. I'd love to know how he did it, how he managed to both direct and star in the film.
If you like dense, strange, psychological horror, check out The Tenant; I think it's deserving of wider recognition.
About the still: a classic 8"x10" from the original release, featuring Polanski and Adjani. This one even has the little paper tag on the back with the cast list.
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The Halloween Spirit
Tips for keeping it going all year 'round
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It's time for the annual pumpkin planting!
I haven't had a great pumpkin crop since 2015, and I can't quite figure out why. Every year I try a few things differently, so here's what I'm doing this year:
I'm only using brand new seeds, all purchased from Harris Seeds. Over the last few years the only pumpkins I've had much luck with were grown from Harris seeds, so I decided to go with them exclusively this year.
I'm trying three varieties: the Gladiator, which is a nice-looking slightly bigger than usual pumpkin, perfect for jack-o'-lanterns; the Specter, a white variety; and the Warty Goblin, a bigger version of the Mini-Warts I've successfully grown over the last few years.
The pumpkins have good, fresh soil to grow in, and I'm planting now to give them a month to get established before Southern California's really serious heat kicks in.
Here's to a pumpkin-happy Halloween!
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Strange Fruit
The weirdest thing I've recently uncovered in my research
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Among the many unique characters in the history of seances was Albert von Schrenck-Notzing.
First, you gotta love that name, right? It gets better: he was also a Baron.
Schrenck-Notzing was a German psychical investigator who became obsessed with photographing mediums and their materializations. Schrenck-Notzing, who died in 1929, spent several decades before his death photographing such famous mediums as Eva Carrière and Willi Schneider. In many of the photographs, the mediums are producing "ectoplasm" (or, as Schrenck-Notzing referred to it, "teleplasm"), thought to be a material derived from spirits.
Now, of course, we look at these photos and wonder how anyone could have been fooled by them. They plainly depict mediums (usually women) coughing up cheesecloth or a magazine photo (although "ectoplasm" gathered at the time also proved to be toilet paper, egg white, and - in one particular grisly case - a cow lung).
Here's where this gets personal: for my book Calling the Spirits: A History of Seances, I really wanted to include some of Schrenck-Notzing's photographs, but finding good quality copies of them (print standards for a book rule out most online images) proved almost impossible. My publisher finally found something that was barely usable.
Then, two weeks ago, I was cleaning out a shelf of rare metaphysical books at the bookstore where I work, and what should I find, shoved behind the other volumes, but an original 1925 French edition of Schrenck-Notzing's book, with page after page of great photos. *Sigh*
And yes, I promptly bought that book. Hey, maybe there'll be a second edition of the seance book, right?
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"Virus Verses", originally from Dreamforge Magazine May 1995,
recently reprinted in the charity anthology Infected
When I was recently asked if I might supply a reprint to the charity anthology Infected, I immediately thought about a story of mine called "Virus Verses", which was one of my first prose sales.
It's been a quarter-of-a-century since I'd read that story, so I pulled it out with some trepidation, since I like to think I'm a better writer now. Would it even be worth reprinting?
Fortunately I not only didn't hate it, I almost thought it was more appropriate to 2020 than 1995. The story is told in the form of blog entries by a wealthy man who has survived a pandemic in a custom bunker. It's a rather (ahem) scathing look at both the breakdown of society and the entitlement of the very wealthy.
I confess I did a brief rewrite on it before I gave it to Infected; hey, when I wrote the story we barely had PCs, let alone mobile phones! It was an interesting experience to revisit something I wrote nearly half-a-lifetime ago. If you read the story, I hope it will be an interesting experience for you as well.
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Have you ever thought about screenwriting?
I'm betting that you've watched at least one movie that was so bad you thought, Heck, I could've written something better than that. And then maybe you decided to really give it a serious shot...and stalled out.
Here's the first thing to know about screenwriting: unlike nearly every other form of writing, which can be carried out with nearly any word processor (I've typed entire stories into Microsoft's basic Word Pad utility), you MUST use special programs to write a screenplay. FinalDraft is the standard these days, but I've also used Movie Magic Screenwriter. I've heard there are some free apps out there, but I've never tried one so can't vouch for 'em.
When I first started writing and selling screenplays, we didn't have these programs yet, so it was all done through Microsoft Word; but those days are long gone. Plus, these dedicated programs really DO make it a lot easier. They give you all the basic building blocks of a script and even remember character names and locations. They also come with lots of extras, like outlining a script using a virtual version of index cards.
If you're thinking about trying to write a screenplay, I'd recommend that you start by getting some real screenplays and studying the form, then dive into buying one of the programs mentioned above. They ain't cheap, but you'll need them if you want to take a real stab at the craft.
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WIP It
My current works-in-progress
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First, I'm so excited to share this blurb I just got for Calling the Spirits: A History of Seances from one of my favorite authors:
“An impressive piece of research . . . a must-read for anyone fascinated with Spiritualism.” Alma Katsu, author of The Deep and The Hunger
I just realized I have a bunch of short fiction in the pipeline! Here's all the stuff that's been sold (in some cases these go back several years!) that's still forthcoming (the top two are projects I can't quite officially announce yet):
- "Night Terrors", to be announced
- "Summer of the Horned Man", to be announced
- "The Deals We Make", Tales of the Lost Vol. 2
- "The Garden of Dr. Moreau", It Came from the '80s, Plaid Dragon Press
- "Pickled Punks and the Summer of Love", Midnight Under the Big Top, Cemetery Dance
- "Family", Final Cuts, Anchor Books/Blumhouse
- The Screw Turns Again", Gaslight Ghouls, Cycatrix Press
- "Antonia and the Stranger Who Came to Rancho Los Feliz", Spec L.A., Akashic Books
- "The Sextant of the Madagascar", The Dagon Collection, PS Publishing
- "The End of the World Man", Shocklines, Cemetery Dance
- "Etain and the Unholy Ghosts", Sisterhood, Chaosium
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Calling the Spirits: A History of Seances
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Coming in September in the UK and October 14 in the US as an illustrated hardback. My comprehensive survey of the history of spirit-calling looks at necromancy, Spiritualism, modern ghost-hunting, and more.
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Miscreations, which includes my story "Imperfect Clay", is available now in hardback, paperback, and e-book.
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My story "Antonia and the Stranger Who Came to Los Feliz" will be in this fabulous new anthology, forthcoming from Akashic Books in February 2021.
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In League With Sherlock Holmes
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My story "A Seance in Liverpool" appears in this forthcoming anthology edited by Leslie S. Klinger and Laurie King.
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Includes my poem "Meeting the Elemental".
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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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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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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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My story "Family" is in this fabulous anthology, coming in June.
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Infected Volume 1: Tales to Read at Home
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This wonderful charity anthology includes a reprint of my story "Virus Verses" and will contribute to Save the Children Coronavirus Response.
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Are you listening to the free Ghost Magnet with Bridget Marquardt podcast? Each week I provide a "Ghost Report" in which I talk about some cool little bit of history. Plus, there are great guests, and Bridget's a wonderful host!
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This month, I'm going to take one of my cool little branded USB sticks and fill it with stuff! The winner will get some e-books, some stories, and hey, maybe a surprise or two...and a really solid little thumb drive to use for your own stuff, too. Just click the blue button below to enter.
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At this point...who knows?
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