World Horror Con, Part Two

(with the delightful Aric Sundquist and a bit of EJP bling
--photo credit Charles Day)

Salt Lake City is a beautiful destination, nestled in the palm of a snow-capped mountain range, filled with energy and newness and a hip urban vibe.  I woke early the next morning, Friday, feeling some of that energy and newness despite long flights and a longer drive to attend World Horror Con 2012.  Showered. Dressed. Moseyed downstairs to the hotel's restaurant with my Italian leather valise and plenty of projects to work on.  Ate a monstrous breakfast buffet and then set about integrating into the wildness that was WHC.

Throughout the course of the day, I manned the EJP booth, where I got to meet fellow scribe and Evil Jester Digest luminary Aric Sundquist.  We talked the writing life while such famed bylines as Joe R. Lansdale and John Skipp wandered the Dealer's Room aisles.  Aric is super-passionate and our enthusiasm for the writing life is clearly cut from the same cloth.  Also had a nifty chat with Ryan Daley, senior contributing writer for the big, bad Bloody Disgusting-dot-com, a Web-based horror news giant that routinely attracts a million monthly readers.  Wrote some more.  And then some.  By the afternoon, I seriously needed a nap and indulged.  When I woke up, my roommate, Charles Day (EJP owner and all-around awesome guy) reminded me that I and the gang were due to flock to one of the city's eateries, the Blue Iguana.  We set off on foot on a sultry late afternoon, eventually found the restaurant, and waited to be seated -- a running theme in SLC's downtown due to the aforementioned vibe and enthusiasm.

(with Aric and, right, the talented Hollie Johani-Snider at the
Blue Iguana Restaurant, Salt Lake City)

Back at the hotel, preparations for an EJP book party that would have included Muse were kyboshed by weird scheduling and a different sort of party atmosphere.  Local SLC media, alerted by me to the convention's presence, expressed great enthusiasm for my book and the con in general (most were unaware -- seriously, WHC, you need to make better efforts at publicity).  Even so, Muse made the local papers.

Saturday morning, I woke up feeling refreshed and focused.  Another big breakfast downstairs and then I set about working on my new novel, The Zoo, and more of the ancient novella exhumed from my card catalog, "Golden Skull," which was proving to be delightful.  Spent part of Saturday snuggled in bed with tons of pillows behind my back reading through my fresh copy of Muse and feeling every bit the proud parent.  While the Bram Stoker Awards unfolded downstairs, I ordered perhaps the best cheeseburger in history from the hotel restaurant and spent the night in bed writing and watching a movie on the room's flat-screen TV.  Sunday, I met filmmaker David C. Hayes for breakfast and we had ourselves an old-fashioned Hollywood pitch session over my script, "Bully." David's panel on screenwriting at ten that morning was fantastic.  I left both it and the panel on writing groups hosted by Henry and Hollie Snider invigorated and inspired.

Early Monday morning, Peter Giglio and I packed up for the long return drive back to Lincoln, Nebraska.  While motoring out of Utah was a dream, the moment we hit Wyoming serious trouble in the form of prairie snow challenged our progress.  By the Green River (setting for my western romance "Incident at Yellow Rock"), the conditions degenerated to near white-out and well past dangerous.  Buttes hovered out of focus like giant ghosts.  We passed three horrific crashes, including an eighteen-wheeler hanging precariously over the edge of a steep precipice.  The going was slow and tense; eventually very late that night, we rolled into Lincoln.  I passed out, woke up to a sunny travel day home, and departed again for New Hampshire.

With six copies of Muse in my luggage, it felt like I was carrying bricks.  Clearly, the TSA thought something was amiss, too, as I discovered that they'd searched my bags and left me a 'Dear John' letter on top of my neatly-folded undergarments.  I returned to family and home -- and an enthusiastic muse despite his never leaving my side during my adventure to the wild, wild American West.  The jet lag was worse than anything I had ever experienced during the years I routinely flew to one event or another, but I came back with three new story ideas, an invitation to submit to a magazine, a short story anthology, and interest in my screenplay. I also came home ready to write -- and have written nonstop!

Evil Jester Digest V. 1

I have three wonderful events to report.  The first is that the digital version of my monstrous collection of stories long and short (blurbed by the magnificent Kate Mulgrew of Star Trek: Voyager fame), The Fierce and Unforgiving Muse: Twenty-Six Tales from the Terrifying Mind of Gregory L. Norris has been released and is available for purchase.  The second is that this little blog, begun in protest less than seven months ago but a forum that has grown very near to my heart, is a few clicks shy of notching its 10,000th read, for which I am both proud and humbled.  And the third, far from least, is the launch of Evil Jester Digest Volume One, in which editor Peter Giglio has gathered ten tales by the cream of the genre's crop, names that pop with recognition and others that demand to earn the reader's thirst for more.  My original short story, "Lone Wolf," is one of the ten stories contained within the gorgeous covers of EJD V.1, now on sale in e-book format (print book due within the next two weeks).

"Lone Wolf" came to me fairly in the order in which the story is presented, start to finish, in a vivid dream in December of 2010, perhaps the darkest month of my life.  It follows a group of civilian survivors shepharded by a soldier who attempt to survive a brutal new reality.  As horrific as the setting is, the story is really about finding hope and love in a loveless, hopeless time.  The longhand draft was written in a day; the story was accepted first time out at the anthology Zombiality 2, only to become available again after that project was cancelled in October of 2011.  I'm beyond thrilled to have it find such a great forever home!

My EJP Digest fellow scribes were kind enough to share with me the origins and anecdotes behind their brilliant stories.  

Hollie Johani Snider on "Widdershins":  I originally wrote this story several years ago, after trying to get through HP Lovecraft's "At the Mountains of Madness," I still haven't finished reading that one yet, though I keep trying, and decided to try my hand at the Lovecraftian sub-genre.  Instead of the arctic though, I decided to go warmer. I put up a map of South America, pulled out a dart and let Fate hand me a location. Lo and behold, Peru ended up the target, but I knew I had to get the Sumerians and Babylonians in there because I am fascinated with those cultures. Thus, "Widdershins" was born. I'm thrilled it finally found a home too, after being rejected once, then accepted only to have the anthology canceled, then rejected again. I guess, for this orphan story, the fourth time's a charm.

Eric Shapiro on "Look Behind You":  I was playing with pure emotion, trying to go for a legitimate spooked-out feeling. Sometimes we writers get caught up in the language; my story was an attempt to bypass the words and go straight for the nerves.

Aric Sundquist on "The End of Autumn":  "The End of Autumn" was originally written as an exercise in language.  I wanted to write something with bold colors and surreal imagery, similar to the works of Neil Gaiman and Ray Bradbury.  This is what came out.  It is my first dark fantasy piece, and remains one of my personal favorites.

Tracy L. Carbone on "The Girl Who Drowned": About fourteen years ago, a local girl drowned in a pond. She stayed alive, albeit comatose, and her parents brought her home, hooked up to tubes. Suddenly there were reports of statues of Jesus and saints dripping oil. They may have dripped blood; I can't remember. The church was all over it and the parents built a viewing room in their home. A glass partition separated crowds of people who came to pray by this Miracle Girl, from the comatose child in the sterile white hospital bed. I had the fortune/misfortune of seeing her one day, and her image has been in my head ever since. 

Gary Brandner on "Dust Devils":  Driving from Las Vegas to LA, I ran into a dust storm not quite as scary as in the story, but it sandblasted my car and imprinted itself in the Story Idea file of my memory bank.

Dave Dunwoody on "Sharpe is Extraordinary":  "Sharpe is Extraordinary," though a standalone tale, also serves as a follow-up to my novel Unbound and revisits my favorite character, Emil Sharpe. He's an inhuman being of strange origin who seems to be a magnet for other oddball characters - God, in the case of this story. The story's also about writing (sort of) and Slurpees (heavily) and I think it's found a perfect home in EDJ.

John F. D. Taff on "Dust at the Center of All Things":  For years, I wanted to do a mummy story, but didn't want to walk down the same path as the standard B-movie Egyptian mummy.  I've always loved the ancient Mayan/Incan/Aztec/Toltec/Olmec cultures, and saw a National Geographic piece on mummified children left as sacrifices high on mountains in South America.  That struck a spark in me, and the story came fairly easily.  Incidentally, I try to spend a lot of time on titles, because I think they're important to a story.  In my estimation, a title should point like an arrow toward the secret heart of the story.  The title of this piece is one of my favorites of all my titles.

Phil Hickes on "A Gentleman's Folly":  I’ve always been drawn to the foggy streets of late Victorian/Edwardian London, where beneath the veneer of gentility, one imagines a tenebrous warren of secret occult societies, obscure bookshops and sinister opium dens. This was my humble attempt at an homage to that era in both style and subject matter! 

Rich Hautala on "GPS":  The genesis of GPS is easy to remember. I had helped a friend drive his household belongings from Maine to Florida ... We were driving using a GPS, driving along some highway in Georgia (or maybe South Carolina). The driver of the car in front of me did something stupid, and I immediately thought: "What if he has a GPS, too, and after he pulled his bonehead move, his GPS said: "You see that truck behind you? The driver thinks you're an asshole." ... It all came together after that.