by john | Mar 24, 2017 | Evolution, Guest Blogs, Writing
Nicole Givens Kurtz is awesome on so many levels. She’s a mother, a writer, and a publisher, and an all-around cool person. She sent me an awesome essay – so I’m very happy to run this as the first Evolution post.
Weird Westerns are a sub-genre of speculative fiction. I was first introduced to this sub-genre when I lived in the Southwest and attended MilehiCon. While there, I met David B. Riley and his publishing company, Science Fiction Trails. He and Laura Givens were working on an anthology of weird westerns. Excited by the idea of creating a diverse populous in the old west, I went home and wrote a short story. I submitted “Justice” to them and it was accepted. The story appeared in Six Guns Straight from Hell.
It is from those stories in Six Guns that I fell in love with weird westerns. I was won over by the dynamics of steampunk, aliens, and of course, magic in the west. Will Smith’s turn in The Wild Wild West movie conjured up all the western episodes from my past. The fact of a black man in the west, saving it from destruction, stuck to me, despite its silliness. For once, the hero wore my color skin and he was doing it with guns and a dark, black hat—no white hat heroes here!
Recently two of my short stories have appeared in Wolfsinger Publication’s diverse weird western anthologies, Lost Trails Volumes I and II. Most of my southwest stories are weird. I write often about my time in the Four Corners area, but also focusing solely on people not commonly represented, Native Americans and African Americans.
My love affair with weird westerns extend beyond my stories.
I’m a huge fan of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower and anime favorite, Cowboy Bebop. Other weird westerns favorites include Trigun, Samurai 7, and Samurai Champloo. What I enjoy about each of these titles are the diverse casting, the way the west was interpreted, and the dynamics—desperation–between all of the characters.
I’m just as big a fan of original westerns as I am of the weird kind. My mother used to spend Saturday evenings watching Clint Eastwood movies. While some people love The Magnificent Seven, I enjoy The Outlaw Josey Wells and others. Still, Unforgiven, is perhaps the one I love the most. I always cry when Ned dies. Yes, there are subtle commentary about the black cowboy dying in the film, but it’s Morgan Freeman’s portrayal of Ned that really drives my emotional attachment to him. It’s also Eastwood’s grief-stricken agony that tugs on my heart strings when he orders the town people to ‘take care of Ned.’
And the threat that if they don’t, he will come back for them.
Look for my weird western stories in two upcoming anthologies. One if Baen’s Straight Outta Tombstone and the other is Lawless Land available from Falstaff. Both anthologies have some of the best writers in speculative fiction are contributing! Gail Martin, Misty Massey, and John Hartness to name a few. I’m lucky to discover weird westerns on this side of the Southwest. There are great rewards for those who haven’t contributed. So stop by and boost the signal with a great big YeeHAW!
If you’re weird too, you can find me online at @nicolegkurtz (Twitter), http://www.facebook.com/nicolegkurtz (Facebook) or at Other Worlds Pulp, http://www.nicolegivenskurtz.com
Nicole
by john | Mar 10, 2017 | Guest Blogs, Writing
Free Publicity for Writers!
I’m gonna start a new feature on this here website, entitled “Evolution.” This will tie into my Writer’s Journey podcast, except here writers will be able to talk about where a story came from.
So if you’re a writer with a published book or short story, self-published or otherwise, you can send me an essay, no more than 1,000 words (500-800 is preferable) about where a story came from.
Please email the essay, along with a bio, photo, buy links, and cover image (don’t make those photos huge!) to john AT johnhartness.com. I’ll start running these every Friday, so go ahead and shoot me content
PS – your buy links will be so much easier if you use Books2Read.com – they compile all your buy links into one universal link, so no matter how people want to buy your crap, they don’t have to dig through a ton of links.
This is intended for professional writers, or people working towards becoming professional writers. As such, I will enact some quality control. If your essay is a pile of error-riddled crap, I won’t run it. If your cover looks like it was created by an epileptic three-year-old, I won’t run the essay. If you are a dick, I won’t run the essay. Have a nice day. 🙂
by john | Feb 18, 2015 | Evolution of Evil, Guest Blogs, Writing
Monsters, Trailer Parks and Truck Stops
By Gail Z. Martin
People who aren’t from Pennsylvania picture two cities: Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. If you’re from PA, you know that the state’s whole center is farmland and nearly uninhabited forest (drive across I-80 sometime and you’ll see what I mean). Where I grew up, in the top corner near Lake Erie, not only do most people have a taxidermist on speed dial, but I’m pretty sure the car dealerships not only sell pickup trucks with gun racks as standard equipment, but I think the guns may be part of the package. Schools and businesses officially close for the first day of Deer Season. Most people I knew could field dress a deer with a pocket knife.
This matters because there’s urban horror and then there’s rural horror. They play off different kinds of fears. Urban horror plays off the anonymity of the big city, the strangers, the manmade caverns of concrete and the trackless tunnels underneath, dark alleys and seedy neighborhoods. Rural horror is a little more primal: wild animals, crazy loners holed up in caves or cabins, the brutal Darwinism of the elements and the fear of what you find in the vast, empty darkness, far away from street lights or cell phone signals.
My story for Big Bad 2 was inspired by getting lost in rural areas, and unexpected inspiration at a truck stop.
We’ve still got family in Northwestern PA, even though we’ve been in North Carolina for nearly 20 years. So we have worn a groove in I-77 and I-79 North over the years, heading nearly all the way up to the shores of Lake Erie. We’ve got the drive down to a science, and we trade off drivers every two hours at our favorite places to stop. One of those is a Flying J truck stop in Fort Chiswell, VA. It’s one of those restaurant/gas station/convenience store/gift shop kind of places, and one day, as I was getting a huge cup of coffee for the road, one of their t-shirts caught my eye.
“Mess with me, and you mess with the whole trailer park.” The guy depicted on the graphic looked like someone out of Cabin in the Woods, not the shell with the most gunpowder, if you know what I mean. But for some reason, that statement of backwoods solidarity got me thinking. What if the trailer park was full of monsters? Hmm.
Getting lost in a city can be scary if you end up a bad neighborhood. Getting lost in rural areas means you’re not in anybody’s neighborhood. Three 
situations made an impression on me. In one case, it was late at night, we were back home in what should have been our stomping grounds, and we missed a turn on a rural road. No problem, we had a pretty good idea of where we were, and we took the next left, expecting it to cut across. The blacktop road went from two lanes to one lane, then became a gravel road, then a dirt road. This was before GPS. I thought our odds were good of ending up in front of someone’s barn, facing a big German Shepherd and the business end of someone’s shotgun.
Now we probably would have been OK. We were on home territory, and that meant we could have played the “Do you know my parents, aunts, cousins, cousin’s sister-in-law’s aunt’s neighbor” verification-by-relative game. But it’s a scary thing bouncing down a road without street lights that isn’t on the map and where there are no signs to tell you which road you’re on if the mile markers aren’t enough for you to know. There’s a whole lot of dark emptiness out there.
Another time, we had to get off I-79 onto a detour in West Virginia because of road construction and we somehow lost the detour. This is a bad thing if you’re not from there, and we aren’t. See, there are what’s called “hollers”, or mountain valleys. There’s the front of the holler and the back of the holler. First rule: you don’t go into the holler if you don’t belong there. Second rule: you don’t come out of the back of the holler if you go in there and you don’t belong there. It was a ‘paddle faster, I hear banjos’ kind of moment.
Then there was the time I was taking my daughter back to Penn State, which is in the middle of the state and the middle of nowhere. We missed a turn (ok, maybe I shouldn’t navigate), and said ‘that’s OK, we’ve got GPS’. Yeah well. Instead of four-lane highway, we took a charming scenic detour through increasingly smaller hamlets on one-lane roads that were wavier than pan-fried bacon. I was fine with it—it was daylight, we had a full tank of gas, and it wasn’t like we were going to run into cow gangs from the wrong side of the tracks. There were even places where the cell phones kinda worked.
But my daughter, raised in Pittsburgh and Charlotte, got more and more nervous the farther we got from ‘civilization’. When I stopped for gas at a no-name station in a tiny one-traffic-light town and had to pay inside (horrors!) she actually locked the car doors until I came back. (Just because everyone in sight is wearing camo does not mean you’re in danger. Up there, they sell camo lingerie and camo baby onesies, just sayin’.) But her nervousness outside her comfort zone got my writer brain working on what makes us afraid.
Put it all together, and you get “Old Nonna,” my story for Big Bad 2.
About the Author:
Gail Z. Martin is the author of the new epic fantasy novel War of Shadows (Orbit Books) which is Book Three in the Ascendant Kingdoms Saga; Vendetta: A Deadly Curiosities Novel in her urban fantasy series set in Charleston, SC (Solaris Books); and Iron and Blood: The Jake Desmet Adventures a new Steampunk series (July 2015, Solaris Books) co-authored with Larry N. Martin. She is also author of Ice Forged and Reign of Ash in The Ascendant Kingdoms Saga, The Chronicles of The Necromancer series (The Summoner, The Blood King, Dark Haven, Dark Lady’s Chosen) from Solaris Books and The Fallen Kings Cycle (The Sworn, The Dread) from Orbit Books. Gail writes two series of ebook short stories: The Jonmarc Vahanian Adventures and the Deadly Curiosities Adventures and her work has appeared in 20 US/UK anthologies.
Find her at www.AscendantKingdoms.com, on Twitter @GailZMartin, on Facebook.com/WinterKingdoms, at DisquietingVisions.com blog and GhostInTheMachinePodcast.com, on Goodreads https://www.goodreads.com/GailZMartin and free excerpts on Wattpad http://wattpad.com/GailZMartin.
by john | Feb 17, 2015 | Guest Blogs, Writing
Welcome back Selah Janel to talk about Women in Horror Month! For more Selah, check out her website.
Although I grew up something of a scaredy-cat, admittedly I’ve always been drawn to the horror genre. I was the one always begging friends to tell me blow-by-blow details of the movies I wasn’t allowed to see, the one reading the descriptions of horror movies off boxes in video stores when my parents weren’t looking, the one who may or may not have run an underground library for R.L. Stine titles and urban legend collections out of my locker in Junior High. I think we take for granted that women seem to be designated as chainsaw fodder or final girl in the genre, when there are truthfully a lot of other roles if we keep an open mind and are open to a lot of different titles. I also don’t think it’s that unusual that women make awesome horror authors. I could give you the standard answer of how we’re emotional creatures and at the end of the day we always have to be aware while walking down the street, when we’re meeting someone new, when we have to walk away from a table and leave our drink unattended, when protecting our children, etc.
However, I think there’s another reason women of my particular generation are drawn to horror and happen to be good at it. It’s a little thing I like to call the 1980’s.
Stay with me here. Yes, the eighties were time when slasher films ruled and women’s roles tended to be reduced to victims for the most part, but that’s not what I’m talking about. To really get why my ilk are into the genre, you have to go to a whole other medium entirely: children’s cartoons.
Eighties nostalgia has gotten a lot of flak over the years. Yeah, a lot of the cartoons were made off toy lines and they weren’t always drawn very well. A lot of the Saturday morning installments didn’t even last all that long, if a whole season. What they were, however, is utterly, completely, cracked out.
Let’s just take a look at some of my early influences, eh? The first Care Bears movie features a book that could be considered a riff off the Necronomicon. Heck, the second movie contains shapeshifting demons and a variation on possession. Yes, the villains are either dealt with or reformed, but can you imagine that even existing in a theatre for four-year-olds these days? My Little Ponies had gateways to other dimensions and a dark ooze that nearly destroyed Ponyland. Rainbow Brite had her color drained on at least one occasion, a Lady Lovelylocks villain went into a deep coma-like sleep and nearly died. One of the Misfits in Jem nearly died from strange plant scratches. She-Ra was repeatedly kidnapped, drained of her powers, almost-tortured, and who knows what else. The Ewoks were forced into slavery on their cartoon at certain points, and one of the girl Ewoks learned quickly not to try to play magic to her advantage. Villains and sidekicks alike nearly had their souls sucked out in a few franchises and it was just another Saturday for all us little girls watching. For the puppet crowd, Jim Henson’s The Storyteller featured devils and heroine-beating trolls, and the Skeksis of The Dark Crystal haunted our nightmares for ages because of their soul-sucking abilities and we loved them for it. Disney regularly played cartoons from their vaults, including things like where Pluto dreams he’s been sent to hell and is tortured by a bunch of animated cat devils.
The Real Ghostbusters just plain existed. Seriously, this show was amazing for how bizarre it was until it was dumbed down for little kids. I still remember an episode where the ghostbusters got sent to another dimension where ghosts hunted people and their ghost counterparts chased them down like criminals. It was intense, mind-bending stuff. In short, beautiful.
The nineties tried, but by then everything was either taking existing franchises and turning the characters into children, or trying slightly different variations of the same ol’ same ol’. It was always strange to me that people got so freaked out about Tales from the Cryptkeeper, when things like that had been a part of my entire tender youth, and no one had complained because “they were just cartoons based on toys.”
My point is, those things were considered normal for little girls or for girls and boys alike. I admittedly question some of the gender divide, though, because I knew a lot of boys who collected She-Ra figures along with He-Man and quite a few little girls who could quote you episodes of The Real Ghost Busters. Along with all the sparkly, we regularly got our dose of freaky, otherworldly danger. In some cases, it was like Lovecraft was reincarnated as an animator. Whether this was people groping for a plot or just throwing something out there, who knows, but it gave us permission at a very young age to let our weird out and not be apologetic about it. It was okay to be villains who did whatever was necessary, to be heroes who were kind, yes, but still had to go to great lengths and nearly lose their souls to get their way. Adventures were better the more elaborate and the darker they became.
Yes, there were gender divides in the toy aisle, but in a lot of ways, girly cartoons were pretty subversive for their time, more so than a lot of the things I’ve seen these days. The plots were not always great, the art was eh, true, but the weird factor was amazing. I’ve talked to a lot of women in my age grouping who laugh and remember a lot of those episodes fondly, either because they loved them or because they were traumatized by them and now find it amusing. Some have even passed things like the original two Care Bears movies onto their own daughters. A lot of these girls graduated to appreciate Stephen King and Anne Rice alike, to not just want to be the chick who hangs out with vampires, but who had ambitions of maybe, someday, becoming the head vampire.
These days, yes, women write horror from a female standpoint at times, but I think we don’t take into consideration that that isn’t the only way we can write horror. Maybe, if we started letting our girls get a dose of weird early again, there wouldn’t be such a barrier for them to the genre. It would be just another day at the toy aisle, just another Saturday of cartoons. For those of us already grown up, yes, we definitely have different takes on the genre, and some of them will inevitably have to do with gender. However, we also have a huge universal appreciation for the dark and the bizarre. Why? Why not? After all, we were brought up that way.
