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Hi Gang!
Can you believe 2021 is almost gone? Another strange, frustrating, and sometimes exhilarating year.
I just returned from a trip to Texas to guest at the wonderful Preserve Halloween Festival, and it was the first time I'd flown in nearly two years. The flights turned out to be just fine, but for someone from Los Angeles - where masks mandates are strictly enforced EVERYWHERE - seeing all those smiling and maskless faces took some getting used to. But the event was a delight, capped off by a spectacular behind the scenes tour of the famed Dark Hour haunted attraction in Plano (see the "Strange Doings" section for more).
I'm also pleased to announce the collection of Robert Chambers stories I edited for Borderland Press's "Little Book" series, A Little Yellow Book of Carcosa and Kings. I put this book together during lockdown in 2020, and deep-diving into the life and work of Robert Chambers kept me preoccupied and sane during that unsettling time. I hope my introduction and annotations will help to shed some light on Chambers and his extraordinary "King in Yellow" stories.
May your holidays be filled with joy, peace, and good health, and here's to a better 2022 for all of us.
Lisa
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Still Life
In which I rhapsodize about favorite movie photos from my collection
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I have a terrible confession: I don't get musicals.
You know how some people don't like horror because they say monsters aren't real? That's how I feel about most musicals: People just don't burst into song and dance. I recently tried to watch the highly-acclaimed new musical Tick, Tick...Boom, and sure, it was a fine film, but...I couldn't even follow it. Why are these people singing? Is this the movie, or a movie within the movie, or a fantasy, or...what? Where's the monster?
That's probably why my favorite musical is Brian DePalma's Phantom of the Paradise - it's got a monster (two, if you count both the Phantom and Swan, aka the Devil), and it's about the staging of a rock musical, so the singing and dancing makes sense. It's also got style to burn, great performances (including Jessica Harper's debut), wonderful songs by Paul Williams, a wry sense of humor, and even a smidgeon of gore.
Phantom of the Paradise came out in 1974, a few years before The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and somehow it kind of got lost in the cult success of that other horror musical...but Phantom is easily the better movie (sorry, Rocky Horror fans, but it's true).
About the still: it's a nice glossy color photo I picked up at some point in my misspent youth.
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The Halloween Spirit
Tips for keeping it going all year 'round
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We all know about the Charles Dickens classic A Christmas Carol, but did you know that some of the greatest ghost stories of the Victorian era were written to be told at Christmas?
Take, for example, Elizabeth Gaskell's "The Old Nurse's Story", which was written for a special Christmas issue (in 1852) of Dickens's magazine Household Words. Although it doesn't specifically mention Christmas (winter plays a significant part in the story, though), it's nevertheless considered one of the greatest 19th-century Christmas ghost stories.
Another classic that readers might be surprised to discover does mention Christmas is Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, which begins with a group gathered on Christmas Eve telling each other ghost stories, and one of them relates the tale of the governess sent to Bly Manor.
M. R. James - possibly the greatest ghost story writer of all time - wrote some of his terrifying tales to tell to students at Christmas when he was teaching at Cambridge.
In fact, it's not too much to say that we wouldn't have our marvelous history of ghost stories without that tradition of gathering around the hearth on Christmas Eve to scare everyone silly.
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Strange Doings
The weirdest thing I've recently uncovered in my research
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Have you ever wondered what goes into running a major haunted attraction?
Okay, maybe that's just me...but for years, I've hoped to get a behind-the-scenes tour of one of the big shows, and I got it during my mid-November trip to Texas.
Dark Hour, located in Plano, is usually ranked as one of the ten best haunts in the nation, and it's easy to see why. Although the haunt shut down at the end of October, I was able to get an exclusive "lights-on" look at it.
I don't think I'll be giving any secrets away by telling you a few facts about this remarkable 30,000-square-foot haunt (the main haunt takes most visitors 35-40 minutes to go through!). I'm guessing that most of these little bits would apply to any major haunted attraction:
- Even though the haunt does most of its business in October, it employs a crew year-round (although the number of crewpeople has been cut back since the pandemic hit). Regular employees include carpenters, moldmakers, artists, and promotional experts.
- The massive warehouse that contains Dark Hour includes two haunts (the main one, and a smaller one), a VIP lounge, a merchandising area, costume and prop storage, a gigantic make-up room, individual dressing rooms, a lab for running foam latex and producing masks, a floor-to-ceiling compressor that powers all the hydraulics in the haunt, a small kitchen, a sound booth, and offices.
- When the haunt is running, it always has multiple EMT and police/security officers on staff.
- Because people get so startled that they constantly bang into the walls of the haunt, the paint job has to be touched up daily.
- The haunt produces almost everything from masks to costumes to props to videos right on the premises.
- Some of the costumes are not only incredibly heavy, but are worn by actors who are also performing on stilts.
- Because they've had to scale back due to the pandemic, they're going to offer smaller, safer escape room experiences.
If you'd like to see a videotaped behind-the-scenes experience from Dark Hour, they've got a three-part series available to watch on YouTube.
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"In the House of the Elemental"
(from Humans Are the Problem: A Monster's Anthology)
When the editor Willow Dawn Becker invited me into this anthology, I thought first about what sort of monster I wanted to do. I seem to have developed a minor obsession with elemental spirits, so I decided on that for my creature. Elementals are nature spirits that never had physical form, and they are usually described as the most frightening of entities. Upon following that train of thought, I came to this: if you were a nature spirit, wouldn't you be furious at what mankind is doing to your home?
Now that I had my creature and its raison d'etre, I wrestled with the idea of telling the story from the elemental's point of view...and there was just no way to do it. If such things existed, their way of thinking would be so different from ours that we'd barely be able to communicate at all. No, I needed to create a human protagonist who would be strongly connected to the elemental.
Lastly, because I wanted to up the ante on what was at stake in this story, I decided to set it in the desert just a few hours to the east of my hometown, Los Angeles...right, in other words, where major fault lines are buried deep in the earth.
That gave me my characters and setting. To find out what I did with the plot...well, you'll have to read the story!
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Are you a pantser or a plotter?
If you don't know those terms, allow me to explain: a pantser is someone who just makes stuff up as they go along, diving right into a piece of writing without a clear idea of where it will go; the writer, in other words, is flying by the seat of their pants. A plotter, on the other hand, plots out a story and knows all the major beats before they write a single word.
I'm a total plotter. With short fiction, I don't make notes, but I go over and over the story in my head before I settle in at the laptop. With longer works, though, I make outlines.
There are a lot of fantastic tools out there to help writers create outlines, both software and books. Me, I just go with a boring old written outline; I often use a bullet-point list to help separate each bit of action.
Your outline should help you find the major turning points in your story and fine-tune around those. You might start with the first scene and build from there, or you can go in reverse - start with the last scene, so you know what you're building to.
If you've reached a certain point in your career, you may be asked to create an outline to show a publisher before they decide to proceed with your book. In that case, you'll probably be asked to break the outline down by chapter. That's not a bad way to do it anyway.
Once you've got your outline, just remember that it's not carved in stone! If you're halfway through the story and realize it's starting to deviate from the outline...that's great, because your story has become its own, organic thing! At that point you might consider revising the outline...or you can become a pantser the rest of the way. Whatever works for you is the right answer!
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WIP It
My current works-in-progress
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I'll be appearing on Sunday, December 19th, at the Season's Screamings Convention in Pasadena, where i'll be overseeing a presentation of Christmas ghost stories. Joining me to read from some of these classic tales will be Richard Grove (Army of Darkness) and Patti Negri (Ghost Adventures).
I'm one of the talking heads in Shock Docs: Demon in the White House, now streaming on Discovery + (that's me blabbing at the end of the trailer, below).
My interview with Lisa Kröger and Melanie R. Anderson, authors of the fabulous book Monster, She Wrote, is now a free read at Nightmare Magazine.
I just placed a mystery story with a wonderful anthology, and Crystal Lake Publishing announced that I will be writing a novella for a new series. My novella will be in a book alongside novellas by Lucy Snyder and Kate Maruyama; I'm having a wonderful time writing long fiction again (first time in four years).
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Night Terrors & Other Tales
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This, my first major non-themed collection, is now available. Includes twenty reprints plus one new story, "Night Terrors", written for the collection.
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Haunted Tales: Classic Stories of Ghosts and the Supernatural
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My Ghost Stories partner Les Klinger and I have re-teamed for a new anthology of more classic horror tales. Coming in August 2022.
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A Little Yellow Book of Carcosa and Kings
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I edited this collection of the four stories that make up "The King in Yellow" cycle by Robert Chambers. Includes my introduction and annotations throughout. Limited to 1,000 copies signed by me.
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Classic Monsters Unleashed
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Coming in 2022...includes my Headless Horseman tale, "Hacking the Horseman's Code".
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Humans Are the Problem: A Monster's Anthology
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Includes my story "In the House of the Elemental".
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Calling the Spirits: A History of Seances
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Now in a second printing: my comprehensive survey of the history of spirit-calling looks at necromancy, Spiritualism, modern ghost-hunting, and more. Illustrated and fully indexed.
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Weird Women Volume 2: 1840-1925
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Coming September 2021: a new volume of Weird Women, with stories by George Eliot, Edith Wharton, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and more!
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Includes my story "The Garden of Dr. Moreau".
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Includes my short story "A Plague on the House".
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Professor Charlatan Bardot's Travel Anthology to the Most (Fictional) Haunted Buildings in the Weird, Wild World
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Includes my short story "The Gulch".
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This month, I'm giving away not one, not two, but FIVE prize packages! Each one will include:
- An actual honest-to-goodness vintage Christmas postcard (these are NOT reproductions, but the real deal!)
- A Night Terrors promotional chapbook
- Halloween Treats, with a little Halloween fiction and nonfiction
To enter, just click the blue button below. I'm going to close this contest at 11:59 pm on December 9 so I can get these prize packs out in time for Christmas, so don't wait to enter, and GOOD LUCK!
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December 12, 2021 at 3 pm: I'll be signing December Tales at Dark Delicacies along with editor JD Horn & contributors Eric J. Guignard, PJ Manney, and Kate Maruyama.
December 19, 2021 (time TBA): I'll be at Season's Screamings at the Pasadena Convention Center.
March 10-13 2022: I'll be visiting ChillerCon UK in Scarborough
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