Or so goes the first line of HorrorCon, my very first online serial novella. I probably would have started with something else if I had intended at all to do one of these (they exist, right?). But I was only planning on doing an exploratory narrative to help find my characters, so this all came as a surprise, really. As I kept typing, I started having fun, so I kept going and going and going. I’ve never written anything of any real length that wasn’t a screenplay, so an eighty-nine page story with actual punctuation and stuff was kind of a major deal for me. I’m fully aware that it could suck, and that’s cool. It’s my first one, like I said, and I can’t get sued for writing it unless there’s someone reading this right now whose name is Eliza Lowell (played today by the precocious Anna Paquin, the second youngest actress to win an Academy Award) and she actually does work the Dealers’ Room at various horror conventions and is a bit of a pill head. If that’s the case, please email me right away and I promise to cease and desist. And seek some help, sweetheart. Cause if what you got coming is the same as my character, you may not want to go that route so consider these words to the wise.

I should also give a shout out to good buddy Trent Reznor (I can’t stop creating spontaneous fiction!) for his recent instrumental record Ghosts I-IV. Were it not for those thirty-six tracks, I may not have finished. In fact, if you do end up reading HorrorCon, I encourage you to download the album ($5.00, a bargain) and hit play at the first sentence – which you now know cause I put it up there, see? When you run out of songs you can just start over, or you might want to try a little Nox Arcana, specifically tracks from Transylvania, Necronomicon, Cantar De Procella, and Dark Age of Reason. It’s beautifully spooky stuff and it fits the story like a custom made coffin. Oh, yes.

Anyway, I’m going to give the story another polish this weekend, check my facts cause it’s loaded with bullshit that sounded good at the time, and research some online publishing companies. I think it would be cool to have it printed as a real book with pages and a cover and maybe even a short bio on the writer that would be a blank page – as would the page with all the blurbs about how great it is. Hey, I know: if any of you read it and want a comment in the book, post it and I’ll put it in. It’ll be rad. I’ll put your real names and everything and you can be a published critic! See, dudes and dudettes, I’m looking out for y’all. This tide rises all boats, is what I’m sayin’. So stay tuned.

That’s it for now. The next blog entry you hear will be the first installment of HorrorCon, also called Lost in Transfusion by no one in particular, but I think it would be a cool pitch. I’m not sure how many pages I’ll post at once, or how frequently, but I’m thinking perhaps ten pages a week. It’s a pretty easy read, I think, but a lot of it takes place in the heads of the characters so that might get tedious. If ten is too much or too little, do let me know, children. I think of you all as my children, you know? That doesn’t mean you can ask for keys to the car or anything, but I think it means I can come into your rooms at night tanked to the bejesus on Irish whiskey and play The Pogues on the guitar really loudly. Or something.

Have a great weekend, and I’ll see you in a couple of days.