Free Candy and Puppies if You Read This

Hi.  I'm sure at some point you'll ask yourself how in the hell you got here. 

You're here because I want to be one of the Cool Kids and have a blog of my very own.  I resisted this urge for a while.  My last blog was notorious and inflammatory.  My last blog got me some attention from the local police department. 

My last blog was something you read at work to your fellow workers when the boss wasn't around.  You whispered and tried to hold down the laughter.  And to be completely honest, I'm genuinely shocked and amazed my last blog didn't get me arrested, or least visited by any number of alphabet soup agencies. 

You're not supposed to say the stuff online that I said and you're not supposed to have as much fun doing as it as I did. 

But that was then.  I live in a nice town now and I haven't had the police visit me once.  Nobody has shot at me, threatened me or requested to be shot in the face.  In fact, I don't even have half the arsenal I used to have.  My friends would be amazed to know I no longer have my .44 magnum Ruger SuperBlackhawk.  God, I loved that pistol!  I had custom rounds loaded for me.  Super heavy hollow-point bullets with extra-low grain of powder. 

The fucker shot pumpkins that would lift a sumo wrestler off his feet. It was shit at distances greater than forty feet and after a while it was like shooting artillery.

But damn it was fun!

So no, I don't have the toys I used to have.  And while I still have the opinions I once did and I'm still active in various groups and movements, I'm keeping it out of this blog.  There's already a whole bunch of that done and I can't imagine myself contributing anything different.

Nope!  This blog is about horror.  Horror literature, perhaps some movies and television, but mainly about books.

And my feeble attempts at trying to be a published fiction writer.

I used to write a bunch but it wasn't very good.  I was young and it sucked.  Good writing takes living and if you ain't lived, your writing will show it.  Mine sure did.

When I was in college, a small state university, I took a creative writing class.  It was grad level.  Poetry.  The professor hated me, which is fine, because I hated her fake British accent.  I was a Midwestern Redneck/Bubba.  And her favorite student, a white girl who wore African kufi despite never having been to Africa, totally hated me.  She was from my hometown and remembered my op/ed column in the local paper.  If you think I'm a troll now you should have read that thing.  Holy Shit!  I was an OT (Original Troll).

So I didn't have much of a chance.  The professor used to hold my work up to the class for ridicule on a regular basis.  Afterwards she and her favorite student would go into her office and laugh about it.

And so I stopped writing.  I let it get to me.  Sure, I was young and impressionable, and my self-esteem was someplace around Death Valley. 

But I let it get to me.

As you can probably guess now, I write with both middle fingers, and I claim to not care who likes and doesn't like it.  I say "claim" because come on, you and I both know somebody has to like it enough to publish it, or to take the time to actually read it. 

And that means I have to care. 

So yes, I do care what you think, and I'm very much interested in what you have to say.  Drop me a line.