Category: Personal Experience
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Conspiracy Theories
How do these things get started, anyway? I suspect they begin with a grain of truth… Back when I was working for the navy, I was the Contract Compliance Inspector for the fuel operation at the big naval air station in the middle of San Diego Bay. We had a number of satellite facilities around…
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An Appalling Lack of Discipline
“I’m not a big believer in disciplined writers. What does discipline mean? The writer who forces himself to sit down and write for seven hours every day might be wasting those seven hours if he’s not in the mood and doesn’t feel the juice. I don’t think discipline equals creativity.” ~ BRET EASTON ELLIS The…
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Depression
The artist builds his picture line-by-line, just as the writer builds his story word-by-word. Both are slow processes that grow in the construction until they often, likely most often, don’t resemble what the artisan set out to create. Art is not always a display of talent, but is often an expression of emotion, a story…
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The Horror Of Talking To Other People
For all of my life, I’ve thought of myself as an introvert. I’ve been described by others as shy, reclusive, socially awkward. I remember a conversation with my mother, when she diagnosed me as “high-functioning autistic,” which at the time I thought was funny, until I later shared her diagnosis with friends and family, who…
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To Stephen King: I Agree
And to anyone else who might share in the sentiment he shared in an interview recently, that overall, the most frightening horror film has to be, for me, the original Night Of The Living Dead. “There has been an epidemic of mass murder, being committed by a virtual army of unidentified assassins,” said the news…
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Epiphany
“A hack is on the constant hunt for ‘ideas’ for his plots, or ‘new angles.’ The real writer is haunted by a plot which he must write out of inner necessity. He is impervious to suggestions.” ~ EDMUND BERGLER Today’s post is a bit of a personal journey, one that will be of interest, I…
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Horror vs Picture Books (or Good vs Evil)
When my old friend Jack Tyler invited me to join Threads That Bind, I hesitated. The truth is, it’s been a while since I’ve written horror. My writing career began with dark fantasy, dark steampunk, and gothic horror. I later edited the dreadpunk anthologies DeadSteam and DeadSteam II, contributing short stories to each. But since…
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Is it worth investing in audiobooks?
Shortly after I published my last book, I was talking to a friend who told me he was going to wait for the film to come out. Not long after, another friend told me the same thing. Commenting to my brother about this, he told me that he knows a lot of people who think…
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WRITING AS CATHARSIS
Hey! I publish horror shorts about fictional Valmar here on Threads because my lovely author fam is nice enough not to toss me out yet. My latest one Monday involved a teenage boy and a machine, and a search for the Unknown. It goes wrong, though. It’s horror. Sorry. it’s how the machine works. I…
Threads that Bind 