Hey all. This is kind of last-minute, but I am attending a couple of events in the central Ohio area and I wanted to make sure you all knew about it. Especially since one of them, people outside of the Columbus area will actually be able to attend this one.
A Night of Horror with the Ohio Horror Writers Association
Some of you may remember that two years ago, before the pandemic, me and my fellow members in the Ohio chapter of the Horror Writers Association had an event at the Bexley Public Library. We couldn’t do anything with them last year, but this year is entirely different. And this Wednesday, October 13th, 2021, we will be having another event with them from 7-8 PM. We’ll do some reading, answer some questions, maybe sell some books while we’re at it.
And guess what? You can now attend it remotely through Zoom. You’ll need to register and sign up to attend, whether you’re in person or not, but that means anyone who wants to can attend. I hope a few of you reading this will show.
On October 16th, I’ll be attending a local author festival at the Licking County Library at their downtown Newark location. From what I hear, they’re going to be having a ton of authors of all stripes and stories across two floors. And I also hear that the horror authors may be getting their own area. I’m going to have to wear a great costume. And I don’t mean my human form.
Anyway, hope you can stop by. It’s at 101 W. Main Street in Newark, Ohio and the festival is from 10:30 AM – 2 PM. Please stop by and support your local authors!
That’s all for now, my Followers of Fear. Lots of exciting stuff on the horizon, so I’ll keep you updated. Even when I’m on vacation and can’t blog as freely. Until next time, good night and pleasant nightmares!
Let’s face it, every creative out there (especially those who weave stories together) has put themselves into their work. Often, they do it more than once, and the resemblance to themselves, accurate or in their own heads, varies from self-insert to self-insert.* HP Lovecraft loved to put himself through cosmic horror and dreamlike ordeals as Randolph Carter (does that count as masochism?), and Stephen King’s The DarkHalf is obviously him having fun with a fictional version of himself and his pen name Richard Bachman.
And don’t forget, Dante Alighieri made himself the star of The Divine Comedy, where the poet Virgil and later Beatrice, the dead girl he crept on when she was alive, led him through Hell, Purgatory and Heaven.
You know, now that I’m typing this, I realize that a lot of self-insert characters get to go on the biggest, most grandiose adventures. I mean, Dante traversed the afterlife and recorded it in detail! And remember Lani Sarem, the lady who conned her way to the top of the New York Times bestseller list? Her novel’s protagonist, who from the cover art is basically her under a different name, was a witch who basically became the delight of the Las Vegas entertainment scene using her abilities.
There’s an article to be found in this, I’m just not in the mood to research and write it right now.
Anyway, where was I? Oh yes. Self-inserts. I’m no exception to the rule. Throughout my writing career, I’ve included different versions of myself in my stories. One or two have even been included in published stories (I’ll let you guess which ones those are). And once more, I’m inserting myself into the story I’m currently working on. Only this time, this might be the most obvious and blatant self-insert since Dante!
Okay, that’s an exaggeration. But it feels like it! My character is basically what I hope will be me in a few years: a full-time writer with his own home, hosting costume parties in his living room and able to focus on creepy tales as a living. His last name is an anagram of my own and his first name also begins with an “R.” So yeah, pretty obvious self-insert.
Still, I’m having fun with it. The story’s focus isn’t on my character, he’s just a good way to get this story going. And since I can focus on telling the story and not making my self-insert seem like the bee’s knees to readers, I can get a little ridiculous and have a ton of fun with it. Whether that will lead to a decent ghost story (because of course I would put myself into a ghost story!) remains to be seen. But perhaps with some edits…well, we’ll see.
Anyway, I’ll get back to this story soon. And I’ll likely have a post or two for you all very soon, so keep an eye out. And in the meantime, check out this book trailer for The Jewish Book of Horror that was uploaded to YouTube last night. It’s really cool, and you can even see my name listed beside my story, “The Divorce from God,” at one point. Give it a watch and consider getting a copy of the book when it releases.
Until next time, my Followers of Fear, good night and pleasant nightmares.
Wow, what a week it’s been! First I got that double acceptance on Sunday, and then I get this piece of news on Tuesday. Who knows what’s going to occur over the weekend? But I digress, because “Natural Predators” is being published in the anthology Dark Nature from Macabre Ladies Publishing!
So if you didn’t know, “Natural Predators” is a story I wrote back in June about a pandemic hitting a summer camp. Surprisingly, it’s not based on any of our current events. No seriously. It was actually inspired by my own summer camp days. Back when I was a teen, the sleepaway camp I was at, as well as the surrounding communities, was hit by a nasty stomach virus. Over the course of a weekend, the infirmary was filled with kids and adults throwing their guts up. And I was the first in my year to get it, as well as the one who probably got the rest of my year sick.
Years later, when watching an episode of Family Guy where the characters were trying to write their own horror movie, I imagined the character Joe, who is disabled, drawing on his own personal experience to write a body horror tale. Somehow that combined in my head with the camp epidemic, and a story was born: “Natural Predators.”
Of course, I didn’t write it until this summer, when I had the right stimulus. Dark Nature is an anthology around the idea of Mother Nature getting back at humanity for centuries of abuse. As long as nature was depicted being the revenge, anything went. The idea spoke to me, so I decided to write “Natural Predators” around the theme. And it worked pretty well, too.
That being said, I honestly didn’t think it would get in. It’s a pandemic story, after all, and there was such tough competition. And I thought the other submissions would be so much better than mine (humility is a good quality to have as a writer, I find). But somehow, out of a hundred submissions, mine was one of the ones chosen!
Apparently there’s still a market for pandemic fiction. Even in the middle of a pandemic.
Being serious now, I’m really grateful the editors at Macabre Ladies Publishing liked my story and I’m so excited to work with them. Thank you as well to my beta reader Monica, whose advice was probably instrumental in making the story as good as it is. And congratulations to the other people who got in with me. We all faced some tough competition, so I’m glad we were able to get in together.
I hope you’re as excited as I am about this story being published as I am, and are interested in reading Dark Nature once it comes out. Which, according to the publisher, should be some time this month if all goes as planned. I’ll post links as soon as I can, and I look forward to hearing what you all think of “Natural Predators.”
That’s all for now, my Followers of Fear. At the time this is publishing, I’m off using my dreams to plant dangerous, mutated arthropods in the homes of people who deserve it. So with that, I wish you all a good night, pleasant nightmares, and welcome to October! Truly the most wonderful time of the year.*
Read the book by Max Booth III last month. Finally got to see the movie, the screenplay of which was penned by Booth as well and which was directed by Sean King O’Grady, this evening. Let’s get reviewing.
As I said, We Need to Do Something is based on the novel by Max Booth III and follows Melissa and her family as they pile into the master bathroom during a violent storm (no basement). However, they soon find themselves trapped in that bathroom with no way to get out, and it’s unlikely anyone’s coming for them. Hunger, fear and their own dysfunction soon lead to tension, terror and their own personal ride to Hell.
Okay, first off, the bathroom in the movie is both bigger and tackier than the one I had in my head. Seriously, there’s plenty of space, but has that bathroom not been remodeled since the 1970s?
Enough silliness. Onto the actual review.
The film was made during the height of the pandemic and O’Grady said that the movie and current events sort of mirrored and mimicked each other. And you can see it in the film: all four of the main cast are trapped inside a small space due to events in the outside world and can’t leave. They grate on each other rather quickly and events make things worse and worse. Add in some crazy, ambiguous happenings to heighten the atmosphere and the situation further deteriorating, and it makes for a great analogue to the pandemic.
Not only that, but the ambiguity in the novel is translated very well into the film. It’s more heavily implied that what’s happening outside the bathroom (which we never see) might actually be real rather than a side effect of cabin fever or anything. But it’s still quite mysterious and leaves you with just as many questions as the novel did.
Finally, the cast does a great job as their characters. As Melissa, Sierra McCormick is brimming with hurt and pathos, while Vinessa Shaw (Allison in Hocus Pocus, if you can believe it) does a great job as the mother tired of living a friction-filled marriage. And while Pat Healy’s take on dad Robert is written the tiniest bit more sympathetic than in the book, he still comes across as a mega asshole you love to hate.
Oh, and guess what? Ozzy Osbourne is apparently in the film. I’ll let you guess which character he is.
On the downside, the flashbacks with Melissa and her girlfriend Amy do feel kind of lacking without a lot of the context the novel gave them. While the score reminds me of the best of Colin Stetson’s work, it does have a few moments where it doesn’t work too well with what’s occurring in the movie. And in certain moments, the snake does look laughably fake.
But all in all, this is a great translation of the novel to the screen. On a scale of 1 to 5, I give We Need to Do Something a 4.5 out of 5. If you can’t make it to a theater playing it, you can find it on YouTube, Apple TV and Amazon, among other sites, so go give it a watch. You’ll be reminded that, as bad as your pandemic experience with your family has been these 19 months, at least you weren’t trapped like these guys!
That’s all for now, my Followers of Fear. Tomorrow I get to work on new stories, but right now, I’m going to hit the proverbial hay. Until next time, good night and pleasant nightmares!
You know, I meant to get this out earlier, but a lot has happened today. My apologies on that.
So, as you can tell from the above title, I had two acceptances for publication! And get this, the confirmation emails came this morning after I woke up! How about that? Nice thing to wake up to, all told. And it gave me something to tell people when I was out seeing people I hadn’t seen in a while earlier today.
Anyway, the first acceptance is from House of Stitched magazine, the same magazine that published my article on the character trope of the broken child (links below). It’s another article with them, but this time it’s a review of Stephen King’s first Richard Bachman novel, Rage. Yeah, it’s an old novel, but it’s out of print nowadays and as far as I’m aware, no one from the millennial generation, my generation, has ever written a review of it. Thus I read the book and wrote one. I’m interested to hear what people think of my thoughts of the one book King let fall out of print.
The second acceptance is from the Dublin Creative Writers Cooperative. No, not Dublin, Ireland, though that would be cool. Dublin, Ohio (you may recognize it as having been mentioned in my novel Rose). Anyway, last year I co-wrote a short story with my fellow author and Member of the Tribe Richard Gerlach called “The Hanukkah Massacre.” The story follows a pair of feuding Jewish families whose rivalry suddenly escalates one Hanukkah. The anthology we wrote it for originally passed on it, but we kept looking, and now it’s being published in the anthology Dead of Winter from the Dublin Creative Writers Cooperative. We’re both very excited for everyone to read the story.
Man, what a year it’s been. I still can’t believe how many of my stories and articles have been accepted for publication. And there’s always a chance that more stories will get accepted.
It’s funny, but just the other day, I decided to make my writing goal for the rest of the year to ensure I get a few more acceptances before 2022. And now I have two. That was fast! I didn’t even have time to agonize how close the end of the year was coming and how little progress I’d made! I’m sure the brooding would have been epic.
That’s all for now, my Followers of Fear. I’m probably going to watch and review a horror movie soon, so keep an eye out for it. And, of course, I’ll be working on new stories and letting you know if there are any pieces of big news to share. Or random thoughts. Plenty of that, too.
Until next time, my Followers of Fear, good night and pleasant nightmares!
So, for the past several days, I’ve been working on the outline for Crawler, the mummy novel I’ll write after my upcoming vacation. And it’s coming along very well. I think I could be done with the outline by the middle of the week. That being said, more fun than writing this outline (and believe me, it is fun), is the characters themselves.
Some of my favorite Stephen King novels are those that have, along with a kick-ass premise, a really memorable cast of characters. IT has the Losers Club, as well as bullies, a mother with Munchausen’s by proxy, a budding serial killer teen, plenty more nasty parents and a few horrible lovers, and so many more. Salem’s Lot has Ben Mears, his girlfriend Susan, the professor, the priest, the teen boy with a fondness for horror, the real estate agent, Susan’s controlling mother, Susan’s asshole ex-boyfriend that her mother loves for some reason, the teen mom who takes her rage out on her baby, her lousy husband, the woman having an affair, her husband and her lover, the hunchbacked man and so many more. Not to mention the vampire Barlow and his familiar Richard Straker.
And I could write a whole blog post about the characters of Needful Things, one of my favorite King novels ever. There’s Leland Gaunt himself, as well as Sheriff Pangborn, his girlfriend Polly Chalmers, the town drunk, the crazy first selectman, the preteen boy obsessed with baseball and his speech therapy teacher, his mom and her best friend who think they’re having affairs with Elvis, Ace Merrill, Polly’s housekeeper Nettie, local angry bitch Wilma Jerzyck (what else would you call her?), the various members of the Catholic and Baptist churches who hate each other’s guts, etc. They’re all part of the fun that make this and the previous two novels, which wouldn’t be as impactful without them.
And I’m willing to bet that for King, a lot of the fun he had writing those novels probably came from these characters. Maybe even moreso than the stories themselves, let alone the horrors within.
By the by, I’m pretty sure Salem’s Lot will be especially influential on Crawler. I’ll have to work hard not to let that influence make the novel read like a King ripoff or pastiche.
Anyway, as you can probably guess, I’m having a ball with this outline, and a lot of the fun comes from the characters. Remember my blog post about wanting to include Jewish characters? Well, I made my leads Jewish. And while I didn’t need to, it actually adds an interesting dimension to the struggle of the novel. After all, they’re facing an Egyptian-style mummy. Play the Prince of Egypt soundtrack! Plus, they each have aspects to them that people will like or identify with.
It’ll probably help that I modeled their appearances after Rei Hino/Sailor Mars from Sailor Moon and Dean Winchester from Supernatural (if there’s a movie version someday, can we get Jensen Ackles as the male lead?).
I would love to have a novel with a cast compared favorably to either of these novels.
I’ve also been able to add a bunch of characters that I think will be fun to write. For instance, there’s my antagonist, whom I think people are going to find terrifying and yet relatable. There’s also a troublesome mother who thinks she’s entitled to things when she’s not; a police dispatcher with a very big secret; a drug dealer; a preteen with a heart of gold who ends up caught up in the meshuggas around town; a true crime blogger who’s kind of awful; and more. They’re going to be great to write.
Of course, there’s a good chance I could screw it up by not writing them well enough before they reach their final fates, whatever that might be. Still, I gotta try. And I’m sure if I focus on making these characters memorable and somewhat likable while also making sure they play the parts needed for the novel…maybe the cast will turn out as well as the casts of the above novels. Or close enough to it. Balancing acts in writing like this are often a matter of practice, trial and error.
Anyway, that’s where I’m at right now. I look forward to giving you further updates on this novel and the other projects I’ll be working on in the near future. Until next time, my Followers of Fear, good night, pleasant nightmares, and it’s 42 days till Halloween. Have you decided on your costume yet? I have. It’s going to be a killer.
I can’t believe it’s been nearly a year since I did one of these! No kidding, the last one was December 4th, 2020. What a gap. Thanks to my friend and fellow writer Iseult Murphy for reminding me this is a thing and to do it again.
So, if you’re unfamiliar with #FirstLineFriday, this was a meme I used to do quite often as a way to get people’s opinions of opening lines for stories (opening lines can be the hardest part of writing fiction sometimes). Here are the rules I usually went with:
Create a post on your blog called #FirstLineFriday, hashtag and all.
Explain the rules like I’m doing now.
Post the first line or two of a potential story, a story-in-progress, or a completed/published story.
Ask your readers for feedback and try to get them to try #FirstLineFriday themselves on their blogs. Tagging is encouraged but not necessary.
This time, however, I’m doing it with a twist. I’ve been lucky enough to have a bunch of publications recently, including two novelettes and a novel. So, I’m going to give you the first three openings of each of these works! Triple Publication Edition! Woo-hoo!
First, we have “Cressida,” my mermaid horror story, which was released in Into the Deep, from Jazz House Publications. I’m really proud of this story and think it’s some of my best work. And my dad, who just read it recently, agrees. Enjoy:
Mark Honig drove the rental car towards his uncle’s beach home. On the driver’s side was a great cliff face dappled with green moss, while on the other side the ocean lapped against the cliff face dappled with barnacles and mollusks.
“Cressida,” Into the Deep, July 2021.
It’s a quiet opening, but at least it paints an image in your head. Enough to make you keep reading and get to the good stuff, I hope.
Our next story is “Blood and Paper Skin,” which is being serialized in Issues 8-10 of The Dark Sire. The story is about a bunch of teens that end up trapped in a jail-like room in someone’s basement for a dark purpose. I’m looking forward to how people react to the conclusion. For now, though, here’s the opening:
Grey held onto the side of Mark’s Chevy Tahoe for dear life, cursing his supposed best friend for making him endure the chilly winds whipping around the car. How the hell did I end up in this situation? he wondered for the millionth time.
“Blood and Paper Skin,” The Dark Sire Issue 8, July 31, 2021.
A guy hanging onto the side of a car. What a way to open a story. I had fun with that. And guess what? It was inspired by something I saw last year on my birthday.
And last but definitely not least, the opening of my novel The Pure World Comes. This was published on the Readict app, run by VitaleTek Inc. The novel follows a maid in Victorian England who goes to work for a mad scientist. It’s my love letter to Victorian England and to Gothic literature.
A stream of shit and piss fell from the second floor of the Avondale house to the street below, where it mixed with the piss, shit and mud that already littered the avenue. From the second-floor window of Mr. Avondale’s dressing room, Shirley Dobbins put down the chamber pot belonging to Mr. and Mrs. Avondale and picked up the one belonging to their daughter, Miss Lucinda.
The Pure World Comes Ch. 1, August 2021
How many novels start with piss and shit? I don’t know, but this one does! And it sums up Victorian living in many ways.
But what do you think of these openings? Did anything catch your eyes and make you want to read more? Let me know in the comments below. And if you want to read the rest of the stories, I’ll leave the links for them below.
And as for who should do this next, I’m going to tag Priscilla Bettis, Allen Huntsman, and Brian B Baker. You don’t have to, but it would tickle me if you did. And I hope you’ll tag back here if you do the challenge.
That’s all for now, my Followers of Fear. It’s past midnight, so I’ll see all your comments in the morning. Until next time (which should be soon, believe it or not), pleasant nightmares!
Have you ever written part of or an entire novel, and then nothing has happened to it? Maybe you edited the hell out of it and tried to find a publisher. Maybe you got some feedback from a beta reader that made you hesitate to put it out in the world. Or maybe you realized that, as much as you loved it and as much work as you put into it, it’s not very good and you’re better off moving on. So this project you’ve worked months or even years on gets put away, stored in a box or on a shelf or in a file drive to gather dust and likely never see the light of day.
If you have one of these novels, you have a “trunk novel.”
What are trunk novels, you may be asking? Well, trunk novels are as I said above: novels that were put away because, for one reason or another, they weren’t suitable to be released or marketed. Prior to computer storage, you might literally put them in a trunk so nobody ever saw them but you. Hence the name.
At least, I think that’s how it got its name. Tracking down the origin of the term was kind of impossible.
In any case, it happens more than we like to admit. We write a story and no matter how hard we try, it doesn’t get past the first draft or never leaves our computers. We may have thought it was the next big thing, or something that could have been published and been a small success, or at least could have gotten a publisher or agent interested. But in the end, it just doesn’t cut the mustard in one way or another, so it gets stowed away somewhere. You may say you’ll work on it again someday, but rarely does that happen.
And it happens to all of us. Really. Even Stephen King has them. He wrote four novels before Carrie was published. Only one of the previous three, Rage, was ever published (and King kind of regrets that). I did a poll in one or two horror writing groups I belong to, and all of the people who answered have trunk novels somewhere in their pasts.
I have several from my younger years, finished and unfinished, that are trunk novels. And one of the novels I wrote in college, Laura Horn, which I am still really proud of, is pretty much a trunk novel now. Why? Several reasons, but the fact that some of the events in the book resemble events that occurred in recent years might have something to do with it. Putting the book out given what’s happened in the last five years just feels wrong.
And I guess you could consider the Reborn City books trunk novels, even though I previously self-published them before taking them out of circulation.
And you know what? That’s alright. Yeah, our feelings towards our trunk novels may sometimes be complex. And we may regret at times that the stories never saw the light of day. But they are still important milestones in our career. They are the results learning to become writers, to learn what works in writing fiction and in learning the discipline of writing. They are the foundation of becoming us. Of becoming the authors we were meant to be.
So, as much as it sucks when a novel goes into the trunk, don’t regret it or feel too bad. It’s just another foundation stone in what is becoming your career.
Do you think I should get one of these and put literal manuscripts inside?
All that being said, I hope none of my completed, as of yet unpublished novels go into the trunk. I’m still shopping around River of Wrath with the hopes of finding a publisher for it, and I plan to work on Toyland again someday soon in the hopes of shopping that around too. What will happen to them? I honestly don’t know. But if they do end up in the trunk? Well, at least I had a hell of a time working on them and honing my skills with them.
Do you have any trunk novels? Would you mind talking about them with me? How do you feel about them? Let’sdiscuss.
That’s all for now, my Followers of Fear. I still have time left in the evening and I have only one story left in the collection I’ve been editing, so I’m going to get to work on that. Afterwards, I have a couple more short stories to edit (including one with dragon bats in it), and then…well, I’m not sure. A couple of new short stories? Perhaps a new novel? I’ve certainly been itching to get into something longer. And now that The Pure World Comes is out (check it out on the Readict app), I think I can afford to put together another sixty thousand-plus word story of terror and woe. We’ll see what happens.
Until next time, my Followers of Fear, good night, pleasant nightmares and–OH NO! MY TRUNK NOVELS, AS WELL AS MY TRUNK NOVELLAS, TRUNK NOVELETTES, AND TRUNK SHORT STORIES, HAVE BEEN COMBINED TO FORM A GIANT MONSTER MADE OF PAPER! Excuse me while I get the boom stick and fight it off. Ta ta!
After so many years of writing and networking, I’ve had the pleasure of making many friends who also enjoy a good scary story. Recently, one of those friends had a collection of prose poetry, Oblivion in Flux, released, and I had the opportunity to sit down and talk with him. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to Rami Ungar the Writer my fellow HWA Ohio member and creator of the Cyber Gods, Maxwell I. Gold!
Rami Ungar: Welcome to the show, Max. Tell us about yourself and yourcareer as a writer.
Maxwell I. Gold: I’ve always had a passion for storytelling and believe it or not, poetry was not my first love. Growing up I read mostly literary fiction and fantasy (Robert Louis Stevenson, Dante, Victor Hugo) and was only exposed to weird horror and cosmic fiction much later in my post-graduate years. I didn’t begin my career, not my favorite term, as an author until 2017 when I had my first prose poem Ad’Naigon published in Spectral Realms from Hippocampus Press. Since then, I’ve published over 100 poems and short stories in both print and online formats.
RU: For many readers, prose poetry is something they’ve never heard of before. The name itself sounds kinda contradictory. Can you tell us a bit about what prose poetry is and some famous examples?
MIG: Prose poetry is not a new art form, I’m merely another creator who’s attempting to shed some light on this exquisite act of poeticism. A lot of confusion that arises when reading prose poetry is people tend think there must be a narrative, and there certainly can be, but it’s not a requirement. For me, when I am writing a new piece sometimes, I imagine brief snippets of a memory possibly forgotten, or a broken dream. All jagged pieces of something bigger that connect in a mad Escherian jigsaw puzzle.
A few famous and favroite examples of mine are Clark Ashton Smith’s Memnon’s of the Night and Arthur Rimbaud’s The Drunken Boat.
RU: Look those up if you’re curious, folks. Now tell us how Oblivion in Flux came to be.
MIG: There’s no fluid answer to this question as it arose out of a few serendipitious conversations with editors, and I wanted to have a collection of prose poems that painted a broad picture of the vivid world where the Cyber Gods dwelled.
RU: Great segue, actually. What are the Cyber Gods you feature in your work and how do you come up with them? Andis there any influence from the Cthulhu Mythos?
MIG: Strangely enough, this has been a continuously evolving question and that was purposeful. The Cyber Gods began as a thought experiment, like something meant to be beyond the scope of human reason still borne of our own confused, deranged, and quietly destructive philosophies. Something worse than any Elder God or Old One. I was not directly influenced by Lovecraft’s pantheon of gods as much as I was by this concept of cosmic nihilism, that no matter the value placed on a thing or a valued system of things we’re still like mites scrambling to justify meaning in a world we’ve either doomed to oblivion or worse.
As for the Cyber Gods themselves, they aren’t esoteric as much as they are conceptual. This doesn’t mean they aren’t personified in my stories or poems. For example, Hazthrog is a cosmic virus, but appears in one story as a literal ball of sludge that consumes the planet. Ad’Naigon, the first Cyber God, exists 14 billion light-years away at the edge of known space as a yellow neutron star. This is because at the time I created the character the farthest humans could see towards the edge of known space was 14 billion light-years.
RU: What is it about prose poetry and dark fiction that draws you to them?
MIG: As I mentioned previously, I enjoy creating terrifying moments sometimes more than writing longer pieces of fiction.
Oblivion in Flux by Maxwell I. Gold
RU: What are you working on now? Any projects in the near future you can tell us about?
MIG: I’m currently working on a collaborative book of poetry with Bram Stoker nominated author Angela Yuriko Smith, titled Mobius Lyrics. I’m also working on a novella titled The Unspeakable: A Cyberland Tale.
RU: Cool! What are you doing when not writing?
MIG: Watching too many shows on Netflix or reading or playing the piano.
RU: I know two out of three of those way too well. What is some good advice you would give to another writer, regardless of experience or background?
MIG: Never stop writing. I know that sounds cliché, but it’s true, persistence pays off in the end. Always write when you can, and always try something new when you can.
RU: Final question: if you were stuck on a desert island for a while and could only bring three books with you for the duration of your stay there, which would you pick?
MIG: Craig L. Sidney’s Sea Swallow Me, John Langan’s The Wide, Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies, and Matt Cardin’s To Rouse Leviathan.
RU: Thanks for joining us, Max. It’s been a blast!
And finally, if you’re an author with something coming out soon and want to talk about it, hit me up at ramiungar@ramiungarthewriter.com. If I’m not too busy, we might be able to make some magic happen.
That’s all for now, my Followers of Fear. I’m sure I’ll have more to talk about soon. Until next time, good night and pleasant nightmares!
There’s a phrase about opportunity and knocking on doors, but I can’t think of what the exact phrase is. Oh well.
So, I recently found out I’m going to be a guest author at the Licking County Local Author Festival in October. For those of you who aren’t familiar, Licking County is one county over from Franklin County, where I live and work. It’s a decent drive, but nothing too strenuous. Anyway, I heard about the festival a while back and signed up. Today, I found out I’m going to be among the authors there. And I hear they may have a special section just for those Halloween-loving, terror-propagating writers such as myself.
Plus food stalls (yum!).
Anyway, if you want to stop by, it’s Saturday, October 16th, 2021 from 10:30 AM – 2 PM at the Downtown Library at 101 West Main Street in Newark, Ohio. I hope you’ll stop by.
And as you already know, we’re just over three weeks away from the Indie Author Book Expo in Aurora, Illinois. That’ll be on September 11th from 10 AM – 3 PM at the Prisco Community Center in Aurora, about an hour west of Chicago. I look forward to driving out there and seeing you there.
Heck, I hope to see you at both events. Authors from all over the place and a variety of backgrounds will be at the book expo and the author festival. We’ll all be meeting readers, helping you find your next great read, and maybe making friendships and connections to last a lifetime along the way. So please, come on out!
And if you can’t make it out but still want to support me, you can always find my stories online (the stories of the other authors are another matter entirely). I’ll provide links below. And if you decide to read one of my stories, please let me know what you think. Positive or negative, I love reader feedback, and it helps me in the long run. Not just by giving me encouragement to write, but by letting other readers know whether they should check out the stories as well.
What will you choose, I wonder? A quick tale about King Arthur or a recluse forced out of his home in a hurricane? The story of a young woman turned into a human/plant hybrid (and that’s just the start of her problems)? A collection of creepy tales that has been scaring audiences for over eight years? Or the tale of a serial killer hunting members of New York’s most powerful mafia family? Whatever you pick, I hope you like it!
That’s all for now, my Followers of Fear. I’m off to get shit done. Until next time, good night, pleasant nightmares, and only 75 days till Halloween! Are you excited? Because I am.
Rami Ungar The Writer 