HorrorCon Gets Reviewed
July 23, 2008
Just wanted to point you all to a review for my novella HorrorCon on Bittenbybooks.com. They’re nice folks who do a tremendous volume of reviews for “all types of paranormal fiction, urban fantasy and horror”. So if you’re interested in reading it, click here. You can also order it there, or by clicking “Order” up in my menu.
Let me also take this opportunity to say that I hope those of you who have been reading the entries for sWitch are enjoying them. It might be worth noting that the excerpts I’m publishing every Tuesday and Friday are basically brain dumps to a loose outline. When I go back to them, I’ll flesh them out more, adding more dialog and other fun details. My idea was to do a sort of “live” writing experiment, and show my work a bit. The exercise has also been terrific for keeping me on schedule, and I hope to have the entire “treatment” completed by the end of next month, with a first draft of the full length novel ready for Halloween.
So mark those undeadlines on your calendars, and feel free to comment on how you’re finding it so far.
Break in the Action: Joshua Hoffine
July 2, 2008
Seriously, how fucking cool is this guy’s stuff? He uses friends and family (how game is pigtailed little precious, eh?) to pose for his fake movie still designs. The only Photoshopping he does is a little color correction here and there. Everything else is as you see it: creepy fog, killer clowns, baby eating wolves – it’s a friggin’ brochure for paradise, if you ask me.
What I like the most is his approach. “I think of my photographs as pieces of candy.” And they are – beautiful and irresistible, even if deep down inside you know they’re not good for you. You can purchase his stuff from his website, and I swear if I didn’t need every penny right now I’d be buying these up for family and friends. Okay, and maybe one for myself.
More than just great looking, creepy photos, Hoffine is clearly a fan of horror. You can tell by the little touches he adds that bring home the chills – the human hand, the framed portraits, the classic domestic settings – they all scratch at our vulnerability. He says himself that horror is attractive in the way that it “tells us that our belief in security is delusional”. Placing his monsters in the “security” of our family homes shows no mercy to our fragile existence, but he does it with such Technicolor panache, it’s forgiven. I’ve always thought that great horror is beautiful. And Hoffine seems to agree.
In my stories, I try and give my sources of dread and doom as much respect as I would give my leading man and lady. I think it’s essential to getting inside my reader’s mind and under their skin. I do my best to “light” the bloodiest wound as carefully and lovingly as I would the most glamorous close-up, and I think it works.
You can click on the pics for an enlarged version. Oh, and read what is spelled in the blocks. Sweeeet. >:^)
