Halloween Week – Day 6 – Bonus Zombie Material

( Because I haven’t mentioned zombies at all this week and that just seems wrong. )

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Halloween Week – Day 6 – Family Fun

I love Halloween for lots of reasons, but the fun factor is high on the list.  In the past week: My 5-year-old and I went on a daytime haunted hayride at a local farm. My in-laws, sons, and I went to a Haunted Mini-Golf course. My wife, sons, and I went pumpkin picking. My wife, sons, [...]

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Halloween – Day 5 – Christianity and Halloween – Faith Friday

Halloween is on a Sunday this year.  And yet I don’t seem to have been invited to be a guest preacher anywhere.  If I had been, I might have begun from a simple question: How does one reconcile Halloween with Christianity? Since Halloween has its origins as a pagan holiday, and since the church (read: [...]

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Halloween Week – Day 4 – Haunted Houses

( Yeah, yeah.  This was supposed to be published yesterday.  Sue me.  Wait…this is America.  People sue for anything and everything.  Please don’t sue me.  Just whine and complain instead. ) Look around the Halloween landscape and there’s haunted everything.  Haunted hay rides.  Haunted corn mazes.  Haunted schools.  Haunted barns.  Haunted outhouses (You don’t want to [...]

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Halloween Week – Day 3 – Jack-O-Lanterns

Who doesn’t love Jack-O-Lanterns?  Ok, someone probably doesn’t, but what do they know? A brief history of Jack-O-Lanterns, via The History Channel’s website: People have been making jack o’lanterns at Halloween for centuries. The practice originated from an Irish myth about a man nicknamed “Stingy Jack.” According to the story, Stingy Jack invited the Devil [...]

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Congrats to Wily Writers

Just received the happy news from Angel McCoy that Wily Writers has been named one of the Top 75 Online Markets by Writer’s Digest in their November/December 2010 issue.  They say: Not so long ago, having an online publication credit might have been considered the same as—or even worse than—not publishing at all. Many writers and readers [...]

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Halloween Week – Day 2 – A Brief History Lesson

If I still had The History Channel, I’d watch their special on the origins of Halloween and how it morphed from pagan celebration in Europe to major American pop cultural circus tent pole.  But I don’t.  So I can’t.  And I went off looking for something else covering similar terrain and found this National Geographic [...]

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Halloween Week – Day 1 – “Windy Nights” by Robert Louis Stevenson

Not a Halloween tale or poem or image, per se, but evocative of the season and Robert Louis Stevenson was one of the writers who made me sit up and take notice when I was a kid.  Enjoy. Windy Nights Whenever the moon and stars are set, Whenever the wind is high, All night long [...]

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It Is Begun

I’m on Day 2 of writing the first draft of what will, I hope, turn into my first novel.  As I was saying to my Father-in-Law earlier today, “I think it’s got a prologue, four parts, and an epilogue, so it must be a novel.”  But the book is the boss, as Alfred Bester used [...]

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RIP Realms of Fantasy

Realms of Fantasy, a long-running, highly-prestigious publisher of fantasy and horror just folded for the second time in three years.  Guess that means I can take the story I sent them last month and send it elsewhere. It’s just another headline for speculative fiction fans in a long line of significant publishing news.  Feels negative.  [...]

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