Sometime while I wasn’t looking my muse climbed in an unguarded window and set up shop in his old office. The nerve of this guy, right? Gone for a year and a half then sneaks onto the job site and pretends like he’s been here all along. If he thinks for one minute that I’m going to put up with this sort of behavior… He’s absolutely right!

For the past week I’ve been plotting, planning, weighing options, and recording characters and locations in my notebook, things I’ve always loved and thought I would never do again. Welcome back, you crusty old sod. It’s about time you started putting out a product again! And what a product it promises to be.

Inspired by a mid-fifties British literary form known as the “Kitchen Sink Drama,” stories of working-class folks in the British Midlands struggling to make their way in tough circumstances, what I’m hoping to do is move that gritty, backs-to-the-wall feel to a fictional southern California beach town quite similar to the one I grew up in during the 1960s before developers discovered the gold mine that is beachfront property. Hippies, sailors, surfers, counterculture kids with pickup jobs and rich folks from the overlooking hill mingled in an odd sort of gestalt that was rare and wonderful. It was a fantastic time and place to be a teenager, and I have high hopes of being able to work up some riveting stories against this backdrop. What, you may ask, does this have to do with horror? Well, there’s more horror out there than just Dracula and the Wolfman. You take a bunch of kids from broken homes in the turbulent sixties, drop them into a free-living beach environment with drugs on every corner and shady characters down every alley, and I submit that there will be plenty of horror to be found without even looking too far.

And that brings me to my next point: Venue. I am not getting any traction at all with Vella. I neglect the stories… Goose eggs. I promote like a Mad Man… Goose eggs. Horror, see? So I’m not going to waste any more effort in that area. My new stories are going to be writing.com exclusives. I won’t get paid over there (much like I don’t get paid anywhere else), but I get read to the tune of a dozen a day on average, and that’s without any stories to offer. It can only get better when new material starts posting.

There may a way to set this up so non-members can read them by requesting a “passkey” from me. If there is, I’ll pass it along here. If not, well, you can still read my blog posts! And that’s all I’ve got this week. It’s very exciting news to me, at least, so should anything positive develop, I’ll keep you up to date. Meanwhile, keep safe, look out for one another, and be here next Thursday for another great post from David Lee Summers. Ciao!