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Hi Gang!
In case you hadn't noticed, this month's newsletter is a few days late. That would be due to the craziest October I've ever had! Fortunately it was crazy in a good way, but I did so many interviews, panels, and presentations that on some nights I went to bed hoarse. It was fun to jabber so much about Halloween and seances and ghosts and writing, but I'm glad it's all done now so I can get back to the business of actually writing.
I can also now announce a big piece of news I've been sitting on for months: my story "What Ever Happened to Lorna Winters?" has been chosen for Best American Mystery Stories 2020. I'm still pretty floored by that.
The other big news: I finally got to reveal that I've been working on a podcast called Spine Tinglers that will feature brand spankin' new short stories from me every week, performed by celebrity readers. Spine Tinglers will be produced by the team behind Ghost Magnet with Bridget Marquardt, so it'll be a quality show. I can't wait for it to start airing every week! In the meantime, you can get a sneak peek by checking out the video link under the WIP It section.
I do hope you're all staying healthy, safe, and sane, and have a peaceful and plentiful Thanksgiving.
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Still Life
In which I rhapsodize about favorite movie photos from my collection
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The Universal monsters movies are my cinematic comfort food.
I'm writing this on Election Day, so I figure we can all use as much comfort as we can get today. Here, then, is Bela Lugosi in Dracula.
About the Still: It's probably a reproduction of an original, but it's still an incredible image.
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The Halloween Spirit
Tips for keeping it going all year 'round
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We went virtual this year.
On Halloween night, Ricky and I did a Facebook Live event from our yard haunt. Now, we're no technical wizards, we'd never done this before, and we used a Kindle Fire as our camera...but it turned out surprisingly well, and we had so much fun doing it! If you'd like to relive our Halloween, you can check out the recorded video at Facebook or just watch below.
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Strange Fruit
The weirdest thing I've recently uncovered in my research
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Mission Control.
When I was a kid, my dad worked in the aerospace industry so we watched television coverage of every NASA mission and I was always fascinated by the stuff showing Mission Control. Look at all those men in suits crouched over monitors!
I recently wrote a short story about a space-themed haunting so I needed to learn about modern Mission Control. I was delighted to find that NASA has a number of materials out there to help with this, including the incredible video above that I watched about four times.
I was also pleasantly surprised to discover that Mission Control is no longer populated entirely by men in suits. Look at all those women guiding the astronauts - woohoo!
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"What Ever Happened to Lorna Winters?"
(Originally published in MWA's anthology Odd Partners, reprinted in Best American Mystery Stories 2020)
A few years back, the Mystery Writers of America put out a call for their next anthology, Odd Partners. The theme was exactly that - odd partners. The guidelines noted that the partners didn't necessarily have to be human - one could even be an object.
I liked that idea, especially since I figured most submissions would feature two cops or two detectives. My partners would be a human and something that human was so passionate about that he thought of the object as an actual partner. What kind of object would inspire that kind of dedication?
An old movie, starring a legendary actress.
I decided that right off the bat, and then thought about what my protagonist should be. I didn't want him to be a private detective, but someone who had to solve a mystery because it meant something to him personally. While thinking about this, I heard a story about a film school grad who'd taken a job transferring home movies to digital, and I knew that would be my protagonist.
I also wanted the story to serve as a sort of love letter to the great noir movies of the '40s and '50s. I love the female stars of those movies, women like Gloria Grahame and Veronica Lake, so my version of them became Lorna Winters, a great noir star who mysteriously vanished after a short career.
The story turned out well, apparently, because Odd Partners bought it...and then I got one of the biggest shocks of my life when an e-mail arrived one morning telling me the story had been chosen for Best American Mystery Stories 2020. For someone who has never thought of herself as much of a mystery writer, this is nothing short of flabbergasting.
I guess i need to think about writing more mystery stories.
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Bad writing habits.
We've all got 'em. Wanna know mine? Homophones. When I'm really in the groove, I type so fast that I don't even realize my brain has stuck in sound-alikes instead of the right words. "It" becomes "out", "accept" becomes "except", stuff like that.
Fortunately I'm aware of this habit and I've tried to train myself to read closely when it comes to follow-up drafts and polishes, but even then these pesky homophones sometimes sneak in.
Being aware of your bad writing habit is the first step to fixing it. What's yours? Maybe it's punctuation or grammar or spelling...but those are all nuts-and-bolts things that can often be fixed even by software. Here are the three most common bad habits that I've seen as an editor:
- Shifting tense. This is probably the single most common bad writing habit, and certainly one I've been guilty of. Although this usually spreads over paragraphs, I've even encountered it within a single sentence. Here's a really obvious example: As she runs up the street, she turned and looked behind her. Tense can be especially difficult if you're trying to write in present tense. A less obvious example of tense breakdown would be: As she ran up the street, she had turned and looked behind her. You've just moved from simple past tense to past perfect. Oops.
- Shifting point of view. The most obvious way point of view breaks down is an abrupt move from, say, third person to second person: John ran down the street. You never know when something might be behind you. I most encounter this in works told in first person, where the author will forget and slip into third (moving from "I" to "he/she/they").
- Moving away from your protagonist. This one can get tricky. Let's say your protagonist is John, but he's accompanied by his best friend Pete. Your story is moving briskly along, you've done a great job of putting us inside John's head to feel everything he's feeling, and then you slip this in: Pete saw the cemetery and felt a jolt of dread. You've pulled us away from John with no warning and stuck us instead inside Pete. This tends to be jarring to a reader, so even if you're intentionally using multiple protagonists, be cautious of the pitfalls here.
So, what's your bad habit? And more importantly: how will you fix it?
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WIP It
My current works-in-progress
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Now that October 2020 is behind me, what will I be working on next? Well, I owe a few short stories to various books, and after that...uhhhhh...it looks like there's at least one more nonfiction book in my future, and maybe two....because I'm still waiting to hear back on one proposal as I craft a second. In the meantime...
My interview with Alma Katsu is in the November issue of Nightmare Magazine. It's currently available only to subscribers, but will go live for everyone on 11/25.
Here I am discussing HWA's Haunted Library of Horror Classics along with Leslie Klinger, Eric Guignard, and librarian Daryl Maxwell.
The Magonia Review of Books gave a lovely (and very detailed!) review of Calling the Spirits, noting, "The fascinating history of séances is filled with mystery, deception, self-deception, genuine belief, scientific enquiry and personal transformation, which is well described in this extremely interesting and readable account."
My piece on Ouija boards closed out HWA's 2020 Halloween Haunts.
For The Book Fest, I did a reading of another one of the stories from my upcoming Spine Tinglers podcast.
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Calling the Spirits: A History of Seances
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Coming September 26: my comprehensive survey of the history of spirit-calling looks at necromancy, Spiritualism, modern ghost-hunting, and more. Illustrated and fully indexed. You can order a signed copy from Dark Delicacies.
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Includes my story "What Ever Happened to Lorna Winters?"
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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 "We Live Through This."
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I did the foreword for this graphic novel collection of the first four issues of the superb Mary Shelley Presents.
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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. You can order a copy signed by Lisa from the Iliad Bookshop.
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Trick or Treat: A History of Halloween
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My award-winning history of Halloween has been re-issued in a new less-expensive paperback format! You can order a signed copy from the Iliad Bookshop.
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My story "Family" is in this fabulous anthology, coming in June.
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Great British Horror 5: Midsummer Eve
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Stephen Jones completes his "Art of Horror" trilogy with this beautiful volume, and I'm honored to have been included in all three books.
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Past the Glad and Sunlit Season
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This charity anthology includes a new story by me, "The Deals We Make".
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I did the introduction for this wonderful collection of short stories by Loren Rhoads.
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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's giveaway is a signed hardback of Calling the Spirits: A History of Seances.
Just hit the blue button below to enter the contest, and good luck!
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November 8, 4 p.m. - Women in Horror discussion with Alma Katsu, Jo Kaplan, and Kathleen Kaufman. E-mail for Zoom link.
May 20-23, 2021: I'll be a Guest of Honor at StokerCon in Denver, Colorado.
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