Learn "What Every Young Ghoul Should Know" on Pseudopod

I've only read a bit of Robert Bloch over the years*, but one of the very FIRST stories I ever recorded, back in 1990 or so, was 1938's "The Beetles" by Bloch, who I only knew as the author of Psycho at the time.**

So, I was thrilled when Shawn Garrett contacted me to record a very short Bloch story, "What Every Young Ghoul Should Know."  It's not really Horror so much as a humorous dig at publishing, originally published in Amateur Correspondent magazine in 1937.

I do wish it had been more substantial (my reading is less than nine minutes long and is followed by a full-length Bloch story called "Black Bargain"), but hey, I'm always pleased/flattered/grateful whenever the 'pod asks me to do another story.

Check it out HERE.

*Heads up, I just finished editing a presentation of a Bloch 1951 story for the next (probably) Podcast That Dares.

**Sadly, that's pretty much all anybody knows today, though it would be great if that were to change.

Star Wars Cantina Patrons 5: Kabe

I look through figures to go in the Mos Eisley Cantina. This time, it's the alien Kabe.

Now I Am The Master

One of the stories I've never put out to sell was "You've Got A Friend," which I wrote twenty or so years back, in major part to prompt Big Anklevich into writing me back.  

He was busy with work and family and covering up those unfortunate test subjects who mixed spider venom and Red Bull outside of Oakland at the time (suffice it to say that we wouldn't have those freeway signs that tell you what air quality is [not to mention Hepatitis-C] without his contributions), and he kept not answering my emails (this was before texting effectively eliminated both letter-writing and human interaction).  I sent him hopefully-disturbing messages such as "wHy dONt yOu aNSwEr mE, fRieND dARreLL?" and "wHy dONt yOu wANt tO pLaY wiTH mE?"* and eventually, I wrote him an entire scene of a robot forcing a well-endowed man to play boardgames with it, clearly inspired by my friend.

Eventually, he started writing me again, but one day, I took the scene fragments and crafted a story around it, and that story became "You've Got A Friend," which we ran on the 'steef once as an incentive episode.  It's the last story in my upcoming audio collection (the one that's now three years overdue), and it's probably the one I had to work hardest on, trying to make the robot voice convincingly robotic, yet still clear and understandable.

And at the very end, there's a dedication to Big, with the note "who should have written more."

But oh, how the tables have turned.  

As you know, Obi-Wan, Big Anklevich has had his most productive year ever, and has, incredibly, managed to make his word count even on days when he feels tired, unmotivated, ill, and uninspired.  He reached his yearly goal a full four months before his deadline, and even then, he kept on writing.

Me, I can see that somebody somewhere has a head cold (or just hear the mere mention of the name George R.R. Martin), and use that as an excuse not to write.

Once upon a time, Big was my junior . . . but now he has left me far behind, writing more in the past six months than I have in two years.  It's like a movie I once saw, where this dude in black armor says, "I was but a learner; now I am the master."

I think it might have been The Black Hole?

"A wolf remains a wolf, even if it has not eaten your sheep."

*Which had the Sacramento P.D. in quite an uproar before they too discovered texting, and shut down half the department.

Star Wars Cantina Patrons 4: Elis Helrot

Another video in my potentially-endless series looking at Cantina aliens that could populate the Haslab Cantina playset.  This time, it's the awesomely-named Elis Helrot.

Star Wars Cantina Patrons 3: Ponda Baba

Here's the next video I made about aliens to put in the Mos Eisley Cantina.  This is considerably longer than all the other videos, partly because Ponda Baba, the character I chose this time, has three different characters in my collection.

Podcast That Dares 49: The Bagheeta

After running "Eyes of the Panther" a few months back, Rish presents Val Lewton's 1930 short story "The Bagheeta," that may or may not be about a panther that turns into a woman.

Warning: Singing.

If you'd like to download the episode, Right-Click HERE.

If you would like to support me on Patreon, click HERE.

Logo by Gino "The Hag-Beatah" Moretto.

Star Wars Cantina Patrons 2: Muftak

So, here's the first video I did for the Cantina Patrons series.  I did each in a single take, but a part of me really wants to get in there and edit.  But ah well.  This one's about the fuzzy Talz character Muftak.

Star Wars Cantina Patrons 1: Ellorrs Madak

I mentioned to Big that I wanted to sit down and look at the aliens I had in my collection that could go in the new Haslab Cantina playset that Hasbro recently announced, and he suggested that, instead of two or three long videos featuring a handful of characters, I release a dozen or more short videos each featuring a single character . . . since that way, I wouldn't have to edit them (and he wouldn't either).

So, here's my first one, featuring Ellorrs Madak.

DID I Finish Another Story Eight Years Ago?

So, I posted about "Beware Hitchhiking Ghosts" the other day, and how proud I was of my younger self for finishing a story I thought I'd abandoned halfway through.

Well, let's not start sucking each other's d***s quite yet.

I started to format the story, put in chapter numbers and such, check for ___s (which I'll often put if I forget the word for something or a name I mentioned previously) and BETTERWORDs (which I often type after a word that I don't love, but gets the point across).  And yes, it includes a "the end" at the bottom of the document, but about smack-dab in the middle, it included the two dread words "WRITE SCENES."

Nope, I hadn't finished the story.  I had skipped the part where they have a good, sexy time, and jumped to where they haven't seen each other in a while, because the happy part of a relationship is always the hardest for me to write.  So, that means I wasn't done with the story after all.

I did, however, spend about an hour writing a couple of new scenes that would take place during that section, and probably need one or two (or possibly three) more before I would have the gap bridged.  THEN, only then, a Jedi will I be.

Sorry.

Donald Sutherland R.I.P.

Today I finished editing an upcoming Outcast called "All's Well That Ends Well," where I talk about four of my favorite movie endings (and one television episode ending), the first being INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS from 1978.

I drove home from the cabin, and when I got phone reception again, I had a message from Marshal Latham asking me if I wanted to watch INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (both versions) with him to review on our movie podcast.  A little bit strange, but I didn't think anything of it until I got a message from my buddy Jeff asking if I wanted to watch INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (1978) with him.  

Very strange.

Well, it wasn't a coincidence, or just the fact that INVASION '78 might be my favorite remake ever*.  It was on the news that he had passed away.

Years ago, I worked on "Commander-In-Chief" for a day over at Raleigh Studios, and there was Sutherland, looking unpleasant and intimidating (as usual--the guy just had the most villainous face even though he surely played good guys more often than not), and I told him that when I was a kid, I was afraid to sleep with the window open because I was afraid of the plants from BODY SNATCHERS getting me.  And he laughed, like he'd never heard somebody say that before.**

Anyway, he died, at eighty-eight years old, and Deadline said he was best remembered for playing President Snow in the HUNGER GAMES films.  I initially took umbrage at that statement, since he'd been a working actor for decades before that, but after I thought of it, I figured that even with his hit films, like MASH and BACKDRAFT and A TIME TO KILL and JFK, you put the box office of every one of his movies together, it wouldn't equal what the HUNGER GAMES flicks made.  So, okay.

*Really, what else would even be on the list?

**He HAD to have, though, right?  I mean, a hundred times over the years?

I Finished Another Story . . . Eight Years Ago

I was looking through old files today, trying to find a reference to a Broken Mirror story to put in an author's note (Big reminded me we did two other BMSEs that I had completely forgotten about), when I stumbled upon a story I started writing fifteen or so years back about a guy who falls in love with a ghost, namely that ghost from the story where someone gives a girl a ride home, and she turns out to have died on that bridge or stretch of road, x number of years ago . . . on this very night.  You know the one.  I had really liked my spin on the premise--that the character from that story goes back to the bridge to see the ghost again, and again, and again--but I had struggled while writing it, and after a year or so of work on it, I ultimately abandoned it.  Sound familiar?

Of course it does, because it sounds exactly like something I would do.  So, to my surprise, I saw a file called Beware Hitchhiking Ghosts from July 2016, and opened it to see how much of it I'd written.  Was it just the first part?  The first chapter?  The first three or five or eight chapters?*  Oh, I said, to my surprise, and here comes that part: it was finished.  It had a beginning, a middle and a "the end."  And I'd forgotten I finished it.  

Which is extremely good news . . . except that now I'm worried that it's NOT actually done, that I got bogged down with the relationship part, and just skipped to the final chapter, wrote it, and left it at that.  

Except that's not what I do.  It's almost a superstition thing that I NEVER type "the end" unless the story is completely finished.**  So it would be out of character that I'd type that, without doing the heavy lifting first.  And I'm all about character, ain't I?

To be continued...

*That's what I remembered.  

**I also, superstitiously, do not capitalize "the" and "end," for some even odder reason.

Rish Outcast 282: Marvin Haggler

Rish ruminates about Heinlein's Rules For Writing, first readers, and his newest story collection. Then he and Big talk about what a terrible barterer Rish is, and present an interaction they call "Marvin Haggler."

As always, you can download the file by Right-Clicking HERE.

And of course, you can support my Patreon by clicking HERE.

Logo by Gino "Marvin Shaggler" Moretto.

Oh, and here's a link to the various iterations of "Female Protagonist:"

Digital version
The paperback version
Audiobook on Audible
And the hardcover not even my mother will buy

How Hard Is It To Levitate?

 I ought to ask sometime if you guys like these bad A.I. posts.  But it doesn't matter: I have to blog about something, and these accidents of God amuse me.

They also frustrate me, because it's a kind of magic that there's a program that can create cover art for me, but 75% of the time, there's something wrong with the image.  And with my story "You're In Good Hands," it's so far 100%.

I wanted what looked like a pencil drawing of a young teen girl floating over her bed, hovering over her bed, levitating over her bed with her legs crossed.  And so far, it always gets something wrong.

So, this one's not terrible--okay, wait--the face is terrible.  Plus, she seems to be hanging from the curtains rather than floating.

This one is worse: not only is the face deformed, and the feet misshapen, but she appears to be sticking her hand into a light socket.

I tried something different on this one, thinking I was asking for too realistic a portrayal.  And while, yes, the girl IS floating, and yes, she looks like a human being (you just wait), it's way too cartoony for my needs (also, her hair is yellow, right, despite me asking for b&w?).  "You're In Good Hands" isn't a children's book, though it does feature a child.  So, back to the Pencil drawings.

Okay, this one's on the right track--she's at least floating rather than hanging, but her hands are on backwards

So, it's at this point that I have to mention that there seems to be a tremendous Anime influence on this program.  Often, when I type "teen girl," they end up in school uniforms, and invariably (no exaggeration) one of the six images has visible panties.  And I'm not casting aspersions on the folks that like that stuff, it's just that I'm uncomfortable sexualizing Lara Demming, especially back when she's twelve years old.

Alright, this one got the levitation right.  Her legs aren't crossed, and it's not above her bed like I wanted, but it's definitely floating rather than jumping or sitting.  Her face is rather ugly, but that's probably fixable.  I don't *hate* this one, and that's at least progress.

So, this is the best of the bunch (so far)--she has a normalish face, appears to float rather than stand or jump, but she is dressed in some kind of ballet outfit . . . and her feet are hands.

And this is probably the worst of the bunch.  I'm not even going to waste words, except to say that this is the exact same prompt as produced the last two.

Nothing terribly wrong here . . . except she's just standing on the bed.  Again, my prompt was, "A teen girl levitates above her bed, her legs crossed"  Oh, and her feet are too small.

Just out of curiosity, I typed "her legs Indian-style" rather than crossed.  This was the result.  Whoops.

I went back to my original prompt, and this time, you could see panties in almost all of them.  One even had nudity.  This was the best of the bunch, and while it's not what I want--the pillows are floating too?--it's much, much closer.

This one's even closer.  It's almost exactly what I want, as far as what it depicts, the right number of arms and feet.  But she's making a Y in the air in front of the bed rather than what I asked . . . though I could be satisfied with this, if I had to be.

I had another odd one to share, and here it is.  Not an absolute abomination, but if you saw this in your room at night, you'd get no sleep, I assure you.

Again, not awful, though the girl's face is pretty bad.

oh my god

Okay, this is the one I settled on.  It had problems, so I tried to remove the portal to Hell at the bottom, make her face slightly less misshapen, and remove the third foot.  I realize the feet don't quite look right, but it seems to be the best I can do, especially considering how much time I've wasted on it. 

Oh, shoot.  Now I've wasted your time too, haven't I?

Do NOT Go There! Wait, Come Back!

Greetings, Tales To Terrify fans!  Another of my performances* is available for your wistening peasure, and this time it's "Don’t Go in the Woods…or Do, See If I Care!" by Patrick Barb.  

That camp has, what's known in the biz, as "a death curse."

If you've ever seen FRIDAY THE 13TH or FT13 2, you'll recognize who this story is from the point-of-view of.  And that makes it quite unique.

Anyway, Barb has crafted a tale that's oh-so familiar, but given it an amusing spin.  You can check it out RIGHT HERE.

Tales To Terrify has employed me to narrate several of their stories over the years.  But have any been as fun as this one?  

*For the record, it's my seventh story for them, the others being:

Eric J. Guignard’s A Case Study in Natural Selection and How It Applies to Love 

Warren Benedetto’s Something’s Wrong with Mom 

Edith Nesbit’s Man-Size in Marble 

Tyler Jones’ Who Built the Moon? 

Carrie Lee South’s Feeding On Ourselves

Emily J. Weisenberger’s The Prairie’s Song 

I suggest you check them all out; the narrator is excellent.

The Female Protagonist Speaks!

Boy, this has been a while in coming.  I'm not going to make excuses, except to say that the audiobook version of the "Female Protagonist" collection is finally available.

I feel like I've spoken about this enough, but I see some of the other writers out there, flogging their works like their name is Molly and it's always March the seventeenth, so I can bear to say it once more.  

Once again, the contents of this particular collection are "A Lovely Singing Voice," "Roll With The Changes," "Office Visit," "A Gallon A Day," "Run Away," "Creature Feature," "My Funny Valentine," "Winter Break," and "Remember the Future," and I re-recorded a bunch of Author's Notes for inclusion in the collection (on the off-chance folks enjoy listening to them . . . since you can just hit Skip if you don't).

Plus, it's the only place I'll be releasing my performance of "A Gallon A Day," though I'd love to beg Tena or Renee or somebody to record it for me for an Outcast episode one day.

It's fifty-three audio files, plus the opening and closing titles, and the five minute sample (which I absolutely DIDN'T want to create once I thought I was done, but only took nine or ten more minutes to cobble together*).

It's available HERE on Audible.  See you there?

Of course, if you'd like to buy it for the Kindle, click HERE.  If you prefer a paperback, go HERE.  And for the crazy ones, there's a hardcover available HERE.

And now . . . on to the next one.

*I chose a bit from the end of Chapter 5 of "A Lovely Singing Voice," because you kind of have to arbitrarily pick something, and the moment when Tanissa realizes just what's going on with the neighbor girl is probably a good hook.  Plus, I'm sure I'll release that story in some other way, maybe just another volume of random audio stories, so it's good to have a five minute sample from it I can use.  

Many Covers of Eve

Oh, here's one I haven't plugged.

Back in 2019, for my annual holiday story, I wrote "The Many Faces of Christmas Eve," a tale that--say what you will--at least has a damn clever title.*  This is the one where the guy goes to a holiday dinner with the family of a girl he likes, and discovers that everyone at her parents' table looks just like her.

I put this out a couple of years back, and created my own cover for it, which, as bad as it looks now, was literally the best I could do at the time.

Yikes.

But what I did was, I took a color photo and, no pun intended, bled out all the color except for in the wine glasses.**

Maybe the problem is the Christmas font that I chose (and colored), or the fact that it's square instead of rectangular, but it does look bad.  Perhaps it's just too busy.

So, I asked the program to give me a table set up for Christmas dinner with an alien sitting on it.  But that was just weird--a conceit of the tale is that the main character doesn't realize he's dealing with aliens until late in the story, and doesn't see what they look like till the very end--so I asked for just a table set for a holiday dinner, as well as a spaceship flying by in the window.

It wouldn't comply, so I asked it to do just the table, and then asked it to do just the spaceship.  I figured that, windows being square, I'd be able to simply cut and paste the starship one into the window space of the table one.  It worked fairly well, though Big didn't think it looked very natural there.

Maybe he's right, maybe he's wrong.  I had pasted a lamp at the top of the window, to hide that it was a combination of pictures, but I wish there was a way to add the reflection of the lamp in the glass.  Regardless, Big thought it made the top of the cover too busy, so he removed it.  Ah well.

Anyway, here's the new cover, and I gotta say, it's night and effing day compared to the original cover.  The story, I'm sorry to say, is the same as before.  It's available right HERE.

 

*I was reminded to blog about this when I saw a DVD of THE MANY FACES OF EVE at the library yesterday and picked it up, never having watched the movie before.

**Oh, and that bit of parsley or salad or whatever in the corner, for some reason.  Huh.

There Are Dog People And Then There Are...

Not too long ago, Marshal and I got together (literally) to watch 1942's CAT PEOPLE.

It's a movie I had seen several years back, but was reminded of when I picked up a story by Val Lewton (who produced CAT PEOPLE) called "The Bagheeta," to record for my podcast.  Marshal was game to review the movie, and here it is.

Basically, a man meets and marries a mysterious foreign woman who is convinced that she is under a curse to turn into a deadly were-cat when she becomes emotional.  But it's all in her head, right?

Talking about this moving made me want to watch the other flicks Lewton made for RKO (such as 1943's THE LEOPARD MAN).  Check out our discussion HERE!

Is This The End?

6/7  I told Marshal Latham yesterday that I was 97% finished with "Sins of a Sidekick," and an hour or so later, I was on my way to the library to see what more I could do.  For once, I didn't dick around on the internet (except to ask it the Spanish words for a couple of terms, so I could make up New Mexico town names), and when the damned over-loud "The library will close in fifteen minutes..." announcement blared, I was about a page away from those two words, so I turned on the speed.

I was there, at the climax, where Ben's adventure is over, and who knows what the next one will hold?*

But, it didn't feel the way it usually does--which is a bright and hopeful sense of accomplishment, a feeling that while I have failed in virtually all arenas of life**, there's this one little corner where I have created something that didn't exist before, and just maybe the world is the better for it.

Instead, I felt nothing.  I had written "the end," but it felt like I had typed it by accident, or way too soon, like I was a liar or a fraud.  Huh.

6/8  So, on Saturday, I went back to the library, opened the file again, and expanded those hastily-written last three paragraphs into a page and a half, pacing out the ending a bit, filling in more detail, tossing in three more lines of dialogue.

And it still didn't feel good, or complete, or satisfying.

Huh, again.

I've mentioned it before: getting to write "the end" is usually the most satisfying part of my writing process.  It's the equivalent of hiking to a high peak and then being able to look down and see just how far you've climbed, or teaching a child to read over a period of months or years then watching him/her read the subtitles aloud on Takashi Miike movies, or working a long stretch of overtime and then seeing the sizable bump in your next paycheck, or summoning a being of unfathomable rage and hate from the netherworld and then watch it attack the neighborhood village, raping and terrorizing and eating children right and left.  

But not this time.

And what does that mean?  

Does it mean that the story is not good?***

  It might.

Does it mean that I've lost that lovin' feeling, oh oh that lovin' feeling, 'cause it's gone, gone, gone?

  It might.

Does it mean that the story is, in fact, not at an end?

  Sure, but I always do a second draft (or a third, or a fourth), but that doesn't keep me from feeling satisfaction when I write those two words.

I just found this strange.  If it don't bring you either joy or a paycheck . . . is it even real?

Something to think about.

6/9  Oh, and it's probably the second-longest gestation I've ever had on a project I've written, from starting it to actually finishing it.  When I completed "Balms & Sears" back in 2022, I felt an enormous sense of accomplishment and relief, because I started that one in 2016 or 2017 . . . and I'd pushed through to the end.

Which reminds me, I vowed to release that this year, and it's already June 7th or 9th or something.  Better get to work.

Guess it isn't the end.

 

*Well, I know, obviously, since I wrote it in 2018, but I was being poetic in asking the question.

**Including blogging, most likely.

***Debatable, right?  But probably, yeah, it isn't good.

Rish Outcast 281: Happy Birthday, Mister Cundy

Rish shares--against his better judgement--his recent story "Happy Birthday, Mister Cundy."

Ashley is a caring and sympathetic nurse, even when it comes to the nastiest old man on the floor. It happens to be his birthday, and you know what they say about no good deeds.

Warning: Unsubtle politics.

You can download the file by Right-Clicking HERE.

You can support my Patreon by clicking HERE. 

Logo by Gino "Mister Coondey" Moretto.