If you missed the last issue, I zombied-it-up with potential covers for the upcoming Unbecoming Remains and provided a sample of the would-be voice talent to narrate it. Flip back for a good time.

Today, like a munchkin dipped in chocolate, I shall be short and sweet. Come out to the Poetry Reading in your neighborhood, wherever you are. If you're on the ISS, read something aloud. We're having one Saturday night at the Kansas Oil Museum at 6pm.

Hope you can come!

My writing, going on a Podcast

That's right, my short story Die Happy has been selected for the Spooky Stories for Grownups program and will be featured on an upcoming episode of Read, Return, Repeat. They'll be reading that story live this Friday, October 23rd at Wizards Alley (114 North St. Francis), and the event begins at 7:00 PM. My colleague Samantha Barrett will also have work read there.

Narrow to the Marrow

I am continuing to simplify, sometimes at the peril of lopping off seemingly important limbs. Eh, it's no big, really, we're bilaterally symmetrical. Generally speaking, we've paired organs. We could likely do without this and that.

The cuts don't run quite that deep just yet. Here's my laptop's wallpaper. I think you'll get it just from this image:

I'm sharing this, not because it should be your operating system, but by way of explanation as to why I retracted from a road trip to Eureka Springs to their annual ZombieFest, why I even pulled out of Author Nation in Las Vegas early November. All such things would have had big dividends but also high fiscal and opportunity costs. Right now, I have to reign in my attention (and my purse strings).

Probably not the cavalier wine and caviar life of a writer you'd rather imagine. Just the facts, just for me, just for now.

Stay in Touch

People laugh at me because I still jump at every horror movie jump scare. I've watched one or two of these films a week with my son for well over two years. Conservatively, I've seen more than a hundred. So why do they still work on me?

Because I stay in touch with that part of myself. I don't cauterize my emotions. There's no hard shell over my nerve center. I haven't outgrown that childlike fear, and wow, has it paid off lately.

Tuesday morning, around 2 a.m., I woke with a terrific little sound effect in my head: the unmistakable clink of a pop can being set down on a table...in a quiet, dark, supposedly empty house.

Nothing supernatural or spectacular, just one perfectly ordinary sound where no sound ought to be. A plain, domestic noise of someone making themselves comfortable could be more frightening than all the crashing and snarling of an obnoxious monster.

Yikes. We're not alone.

Stay in touch with your senses.

Don't wait to come to them.