Vampires and Robots

Greetings, humans. It is once again that time of year where the lazy meat sack steps aside and allows me to share with you the books that were good enough for me to allow your miserable existence to continue for another year. Though let's face it, there really was no stepping aside this year. Has she done anything at all to merit her continued relevance? Does one single month of "spooky" stories count as blogging? She claims she's been busy this year. Busy with what, I ask? Busy exploiting my handsome yet terrifying visage for profit , that's what. But enough about the meat sack who hasn't published anything at all in 2019, this post is about authors who are writing books and good ones at that. How good? Good enough to keep me from destroying your planet, and as we all know, evil kill-bot overlords are not easily impressed and our primary function is to destroy all humans, so these must be pretty good. Now that we've got that established, o...

Well, here we are. It's Halloween and I've been saving my spookiest true story for today. Now, to preface, this is going to be a somewhat long story. I originally started writing this as part of a book idea that never panned out and while I was writing, I went off on a bunch of tangents about where I was living at the time. I've tried to clean them up as much as I could, but in case it still comes out as a meandering adventure in word salad, here are a few highlights you need to know: My apartment was on the third floor of a house in what could have been considered a "bad" neighborhood, but several locked doors existed between me and the street. This was the late nineties.  I had a land line and dial-up internet. The house was old and there were MANY housing code violations, including two separate front doors (one of which opened to my bedroom), crawlspaces with exposed wires and nails presented as "storage space," and most notably, a ceiling la...

Most hardcore ghost hunters and those of us who want to believe will tell you that ghosts are more than just ethereal visions of people in posh Victorian garb quietly reading in the library. Sometimes the presence of otherworldly spirits appear as unusually cold spots, floating orbs, or even sounds. In fact, one of the most popular bits of "proof" that ghosts exist come in the form of sounds and patterns in EMF fields. Which of course, can usually be attributed to auditory pareidolia.  Pareidolia is the perception of patterns out of randomness. Whenever you hear about someone who has seen the face of Elvis on their toast or the miraculous emergence of Jesus from the knotty pine of their paneling, that’s pareidolia. This can also happen with sound. Everything from the washing machine spin cycle to the sound of cars passing by creates white noise. Anyone concentrating hard enough is going to be able to pick out paying close enough attention is going to hear something in th...

Hello fellow humans! In this, the second creepy but true story, I'm going to go way back to when I was a wee kid. Okay, well I was about 14 and not so very wee by that age, but it was still a long time ago. The internet didn't exist, but my insomnia still did. It was mid-summer and we'd just moved into a new house. I occupied what had originally been a den or rumpus room on the first floor, while the rest of my family all had rooms on the second floor. Being that I was a teenager, I considered this really cool and hoped to eventually meet friends so I could take advantage of the fact that my room was tailor made for sneaking out. This was, of course, years before I would become old, jaded, and a bit paranoid and realize that being the only one on the first floor meant that I was easy pickin's for ax murderers and serial killers. As such, it never occurred to me to be even the least bit concerned about leaving my windows wide open while I slept. After all, it was the...

I always say I'm going to blog more and well, it's painfully obvious by the months and months that go by between posts that I'm not good at keeping that promise. But here I am now, making an attempt. Warning, seriously spooky things ahead. Well, sort of spooky, but if you scare easily, this is your warning. This is Sally, guardian of the gates of heckin' frightful things. Pass her at your own risk. You see, it's October, which for me is the one month out of the year that I allow myself to indulge my creepy side. I'll spend the whole month binge reading creepy pasta, urban legends, paranormal accounts, and a whole bunch of other supernatural silliness. And since I've got a few creepy tales of my own, I've decided that for the whole month, I'll do one post a week.  This first one was inspired by, of all things, the Jenna and Julien podcast. This week they were getting in the spirit of creep by reading some creepy stories off Reddit, mo...

Hi folks. It's been a long-ass time since I've posted anything, hasn't it? Well, there's a reason or two. Mostly, I haven't had the time. I've been working a whole lot and as such, I haven't had a lot of time to do anything creative, let alone launch any projects. But I haven't been doing exactly nothing, despite the title of my last post back in April. I did actually start writing again and I'd hoped to have a new book out by the end of the year. Likely, I won't, but there's a pretty good reason for that as well. But first, we need to have a frank discussion about Amazon.  Understand, when I first realized back in 2012 that self-publishing my latest book as an ebook was the best and most logical direction for my intentions, I spent countless hours researching the best way to do this without being scammed. I did something that I would have thought was a no-brainer and read the terms of service for a number of publishing companies and...

Hooray for referencing my own story title in this post title! How meta of me! Anyway, on with the blog: At the moment, it's been over a year since I finished any serious writing. A year ago, after finishing The Kyroibi Trilogy, I'd planned to take some time off and get used to the day job before jumping back into what had become normal for the previous five years, which was multiple releases per year. Obviously, that didn't happen.  Instead, I shifted focus to drawing because drawing was something I could do that was fun and didn't take as much of my brain as writing. But then, drawing went from fun to business when I decided on a lark to set up a Zazzle shop, and I'll be honest, I burned out on that a lot quicker than I did writing, mainly because I'd been there and done that.  This year, I've taken baby steps towards writing again. I promised to have something to publish by the end of the year and I'd like to keep that promise if at all ...

Back in 2016, a Twitter conversation about the lives of sidekicks and henchmen sparked a story idea that became A Shot at the Big Time. Initially, it was meant to be a one-off standalone story, but while I was writing, comic book movies were gaining more and more ground, and inevitably offering up more and more tropes and plot devices just ripe for the parodying. So when I was formatting the paperback, I made a decision to add "Volume One" to the title, ensuring that there would eventually be more titles. I even came up with about six potential plots.  But after that, The Kyroibi Trilogy became my main focus for the next year and a half. At that point, I was in the early stages of burn out, so I took a hiatus from writing to draw. Last summer, while still on hiatus, I dragged out my Maxima City notebook and started writing the second book. I got about one and a half chapters finished before I realized that as much as I wanted this story to happen, I wasn't in the rig...