Back in the Saddle Again

“The truth is that coming up with ideas is easy; it’s making up the stories that grow out of them that’s hard.”

             -Terry Brooks

It’s been awhile since I posted in my blog. I’m really going to try to get back to posting at least every week. I finally am feeling well again after having the flu for the last two weeks or so. I’ve been getting some writing done lately, trying to get some stories finished and writing the occasional poem here and there. I’m still working on the dark fantasy/sword & sorcery novel. I’ve been trying to figure out some things on the paranormal romance novel that I’m attempting. I still think I may need to read more in that genre in order to write it better. Luckily my wife has an extensive collection of them so I can borrow them for “research.”

I took a break from writing to ride my mountain bike since it was such nice weather today. It has been too long since I’ve been on the bike. That’s another thing I’d like to start doing every week again because it is so much fun and such good exercise. My usual riding spot is at River Legacy Park in Arlington. The Dallas Off Road Bicycling Association (DORBA) has built a really awesome single track trail there that goes for miles and even has several expert sections that split off from the main trail. I managed not to crash which is a good thing and only had to take my foot out of the clip-in pedals twice to “dab” so I wouldn’t lay the bike down when the back wheel slid out. I got off the trail almost right at dusk and it did get a little chilly at the end as the sun started going down.

Convention season is coming up and I will be a guest author panelist at ConDFW February 21-23 and All-Con March 13-16. This will be my third year as a guest and I always look forward to it. It’s great to meet up with all my fellow writer friends and fans who I usually only see at conventions.

Also, I’ve been asked to be an auxiliary crew member of the Seadog Slam who are performers of pirate poetry, music, and stories. I have been doing poetry readings at their events the third Wednesday of every month at the half Price Books flagship store on Northwest Highway in Dallas. Dressing up as a pirate and reading and listening to poetry is an awesome way to spend an evening. I was introduced to the group by a mutual friend and was asked to speak at their Steampunk event that they do the first Wednesday of each month also at the store.

I am also co-hosting the radio show Dangerous Minds on internet radio station www.tmvcafe.com on Monday nights at 9:00 PM CST with EW Bradfute and Renee Marie. We talk about strange and funny news headlines and it is really a lot of fun. Be sure to tune in and check it out sometime.

That’s about it for this week. Thanks for reading my idle musings. I’ll leave you with this pithy quote:

“Ordinarily he was insane, but he had lucid moments when he was merely stupid.” –Heinrich Heine

 

Special Guest Tonight on TMV Cafe Internet Radio

“I love talking about nothing. It is the only thing I know anything about.”

Oscar Wilde

I will be a guest on the TMV Cafe internet radio show Free Pie Night, tonight, at 9:00 PM Central Standard Time. There is also a chatroom on the website where you can interact with the fans, guests and hosts of the show. Go to www.tmvcafe.com to join the fun.  I will be talking about how I got my big break of being a published author, and about my experiences writing for the shared world anthology series Heroes in Hell, created and edited by Janet Morris and Chris Morris. My story “Remember, Remember, Hell in November” was published in the book Lawyers in Hell, in 2011. I have a story, “Ragnarok & Roll”  in the latest book, Rogues in Hell, which will be published this Summer in 2012.

Also I will try to mention some of the other anthologies I have been writing for which will be published in the next few months, like Sha’Daa Pawns, created by Michael H. Hanson, and What Scares the Boogeyman, a horror anthology created by John Manning. I also have a poem called “The Shadow People”,  that will be published in the collection A Book of Night, created by Richard Groller, which will be my first poem to be published in a book. I had a couple of poems that were printed in a collection of art and poetry contributed by students, that Grapevine High School created during my senior year, but this will be the first time my poetry is released by a real publisher.

I have been busy working a lot of overtime hours at my day job, trying to pay the bills, so I haven’t had much time or energy for writing lately unfortunately. Some of my works in progress though include a fantasy novel, a fantasy adventure short story, and a story for the next book in the Sha’Daa series. I am also working on ideas and an outline for a story to submit for the next Heroes in Hell book, tentatively titled, Dreamers in Hell. My goal is to have a story included in all of the new books in the series, so I am hoping this one will get the stamp of approval from Janet and Chris. I am thinking this will be a much more  introspective sort of story than my last two. I’m bringing in a new main character, noted psychologist and spiritualist, William James, who is going to psychoanalyze Anton LaVey for his post-life identity crisis of finding himself in a hell he never believed existed, serving a fallen angel that he denied even being real. Guy Fawkes will also return again from my first two stories, and try to blow things up as always, including possibly the pearly gates of Heaven itself.  It will be a fun story to write, and I hope, to read also.

I’m behind on my blogging about the various conventions I’ve attended as a guest  in the last couple of months, so you can expect my report on ConDFW, All-Con, and The Nightmare Machine, at some point when I get around to writing those. They were all loads of fun and I met so many awesome people, as I always seem to do at cons. I really enjoyed being on the discussion panels and doing the story readings and it was an honor to be part of those events.

That’s about all that’s going on for now. I hope you will all tune in tonight to listen to me on the radio show. Also the show that airs before it at 8:00 PM CST, After Rot, is hosted by a friend of mine, who goes by the name Zombie Zak. He and his co-host Jazzy talk about all things to do with comics, movies, superheroes,  zombies and all kinds of other random stuff. It’s always a fun show, you should check it out.