I’ve known Loren Rhoads for years online and I don’t know if I’ve ever told her that cemeteries fascinate me. Today, she tells me how she fell in love with this macabre subject.

The first time I visited a cemetery on vacation was an accident. I’d discovered a lovely book of cemetery photos — who knew such a thing existed? — in the bookshop at London’s Victoria Station. My husband Mason decided he would rather see beautiful, overgrown Highgate Cemetery than the Tower of London. Once we were there, surrounded by angels clothed in ivy, I fell in love with cemetery statuary.

One of my friends in San Francisco recommended I stop by the Rand McNally store and pick up a cemetery guidebook (my first!) called Permanent Parisians. At her suggestion, we’d already planned to work Pere Lachaise Cemetery into our trip to Paris, because Jim Morrison, Oscar Wilde, Chopin, and so many other famous people were buried there. Permanent Parisians led us to the cemeteries of Montparnasse and St. Vincent and the Paris Municipal Ossuary. That was an amazing trip!

After that, I simply stumbled across cemeteries everywhere I traveled. My mom saw a sign for the Pioneer Cemetery in Yosemite while I was looking through the anthropology museum. Jack London just happened to be buried at the State Historical Park that bears his name. A friend was touring St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 in New Orleans and encouraged me to come along.

Other places had such an impact on history that I wanted to see them for myself. When Mason and I went to Japan for the first time, I wanted to see Hiroshima and the Peace Park. When my mom took me to Honolulu, I went alone by tour bus on Easter morning to see Pearl Harbor and the USS Arizona Memorial. I ducked out of a family trip to Washington DC to visit Arlington National Cemetery.

Then I started to get a reputation. Japanese friends took us to the old capitol of Kamakura to show me a monks’ graveyard. A friend who’d grown up in Westchester County said I shouldn’t miss the Old Dutch Burying Ground in Sleepy Hollow. Other friends gave us a private tour of the Soldiers National Cemetery and battlefield at Gettysburg.

By the time Mason and I went to Italy in 2001, we built our vacations around cemeteries. In Rome, I targeted the Protestant Cemetery, final home of Keats and Shelley. In Venice, I wanted to see the island set aside as a graveyard, where Stravinsky is buried. In Florence, we managed to score an hour alone in the English Cemetery, where Elizabeth Barrett Browning is buried. That cemetery had the most amazing iconography: hourglasses and ouroboros and a life-sized skeleton with a scythe.

Despite the occasional death figure, I don’t find graveyards at all frightening. As far as I’m concerned, there’s nothing better than sunshine and birdsong, green grass and trees, cemetery statuary and epitaphs. Especially these days, we could all use a moment alone with our thoughts, remembering what is important. As I always say, every day aboveground is a good day. Cemeteries help me keep that in mind.

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Loren Rhoads is the author of 199 Cemeteries to See Before You Die and Wish You Were Here: Adventures in Cemetery Travel. She’s also the editor of Death’s Garden Revisited: Personal Relationships with Cemeteries, an anthology of 40 essays from tour guides and travelers, genealogists and geocachers, horror authors, ghost hunters, and pagan priests about why they visit cemeteries. Death’s Garden Revisited is funding on Kickstarter from March 17-April 14, 2022.

Today, Rusty Zimmerman tells me what it’s like to put together a collection of game fiction that was written over many years. It’s a walk down memory lane.

Down These Dark Streets is a Shadowrun first-ever; a collection of a writer’s short fiction, gathered up from across all the various sourcebooks, setting books, rule books, magazines, and where ever else it first showed up.  A lot of Shadowrun fiction is spread out in intro pieces, short, punchy, stories that separate big chapters in sourcebooks, and that sort of thing, and The Powers That Be took a shot at gathering mine all together between one set of covers.

Readers can follow along as a handful of threads and characters weave from story to story, a sort of universe-within-a-universe that started with my very first piece of Shadowrun work, intro fiction for Attitude, two editions and *mumble* years ago.  The protagonist of that short piece shows up as part of a team in some later intro fics I published, that team shows up alongside Jimmy Kincaid in Dirty Tricks, Jimmy Kincaid’s entangled with Ms. Myth and the Shadowrun Fifth Edition crew in his novels, their nemesis Rook first showed up in some adventure intro fic, etc, etc. 

I’ve long felt like Shadowrun works best when the shadows feel small, tangled, and reputation-centric – everyone knows everyone, word gets around, and when you’re looking for reliable talent, the odds are good they’ve worked together before.  I wanted that feeling, and a sense of continuity, even in my seemingly-unrelated pieces that were initially scattered across books (and even editions).  Getting to see them all side by side in this book was a lot of fun.

What else was a lot of fun?  Writing intros!  In addition to a sappy love letter to Shadowrun that kicks off the whole collection, each and every piece has a small writer introspective from me.  In them, I talk about what the original pitch for the story was, I talk about cover art (sometimes changing cover art!) that inspired the piece, or I just share my thoughts on how it came together and what I think about the finished product.  Having the chance to open up and ‘chat’ with readers was a lot of fun, and I hope I’m not too cringe-worthy when I talk about what fun, and what an honor, it’s been to get to do what I do.

Also included among the already-published sourcebook and Game Trade Magazine-exclusive pieces are four brand new, never before published, short stories.  Some of them spun out of the ‘enhanced fiction’ line before finding a home here instead, but the largest story in the collection was written just for this book.  It’s a novella-length Jimmy Kincaid story, set as an ‘in-betweener’ in his novel trilogy, fitting in there any place before his latest novel, On The Rocks.

Assembling this collection was a good time, and the short walk down memory lane for the dozen years, now, I’ve been writing Shadowrun stories.  I was very excited to get to share a little bit of the creative process with readers, I was excited to hear there are paperback and hardback versions available right off the bat, and I’m excited for the future, to hear what fans think of the whole kit and caboodle. 

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Russell Zimmerman got started in writing as a freelancer for wargames like Warmachine, and since then has contributed to dozens of projects including fan-favorite fiction in Shadowrun and writing the international award-winning PC game Satellite Reign. His most noteworthy work has been for the Shadowrun role-playing game and associated properties, but he's spilled some ink in the universes of Vampire 20th Anniversary, Earthdawn, Wrath & Glory, and Mutants & Masterminds, and more!

Kat Richardson is a friend of mine and I could not wait to pre-order her new fiction collection. Today, she tells me why no writing ever goes to waste.

I’d been thinking about putting out a collection of short stories for a couple of years, and all my previously-published pieces had reverted to me, so late in 2020 I got in touch with  John Hartness, who owns and operates Falstaff Books, about the idea, and he said “Yeah! Throw it at me!” Et voilà!

Well, not quite. See, I shut down the Greywalker series in 2014 partially because I was tired (which turned out to be cancer) and the characters were at a good place to pause. And the sales numbers were falling, so it seemed the timing was right to do something else. So, after the cancer thing, I sent out a big, fat SF novel that got published and won an award, and then sold so badly that the potential series was dropped by the publisher. Note: Don’t change pseudonyms when the old one still works. Whoops...

So, back to the drawing board, which produced another novel—historical dark fantasy crime (there’s a strange beast...)—that is doing the rounds. But I kept coming back to the idea of a collection of shorts, partially because I had two I really liked that had never been published, and several good ones that had come out in small, obscure volumes that are now out of print. I figured there wouldn’t be a better time, so I put all of the shorts into a file and sent a note to John, who graciously agreed to look over all fifteen. He chose ten—including the two that had never been published before (“Shatter,” and “Single-Edged”) and one that had only been on my website (“Reindeer Games”). Interestingly, one of the stories he didn’t take was in an out-of-print anthology that got re-released on audio in October, so that was a really smart call on John’s part, since that would been a problem contract-wise. (I think John is secretly clairvoyant. He’s also incredibly funny and a good writer, but that’s off-topic.)

Through the Grey is a pretty eclectic collection—science fiction, high fantasy, crime, fairy tales, urban fantasy, dark comedy, maybe a touch of magical realism, some comic satire, three stories from the Greywalker universe, and my usual mashup of mystery-plus-spec fic. I want it to do well, of course, not just because it’s my stuff, but also because John’s been a joy to work with, took a chance on this collection, and I want that to pay off for him, too. And, you know, after a while, I forgot that I’d written some of these, and it’s been fun to go through my old work and discover it’s still pretty good stuff. I hope other people think so too.

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Kat Richardson is currently wandering loose through the mountains of Western Washington in a trailer with two dogs and a husband. It's even her own husband. Along the way she has been an actor, singer, costumer, Renaissance Faire performer, dancer, writing instructor, seller of beanie babies, and a freelance editor. She is the author of nine bestselling novels in the Greywalker series, one award-winning SF novel, and a few unspeakable things that live in an electronic trunk. Trust me, it's better that way....

Cat Rambo tells me all about how even old writers can learn new writing tricks. In this case, it was about writing fast. No. Faster than that. And now double it. There you go, you get the idea…

One of the things I learned from this book is that writing fast, and doing so in a (mostly) chronological fashion worked beautifully for me, and paid off so much when it came time to edit. But man, it was hard work.

I wrote You Sexy Thing over the course of a month, in which every weekday I got up at 5:30 AM, went to the gym and worked out while thinking about what I was going to write, and then came home and wrote furiously in half hour sprints that were a mix of rapid typing and sometimes dictation when the words were coming too quickly for my fingers to put them down. And—this is a key point—I did not allow myself the Internet in any form till I was done. No checking email, no looking at social media, nothing in virtual space until the words were done, which was usually sometime between noon and one.

I averaged 5-6 thousand words each day, and every day I amazed myself by being able to hit my target. I did give myself the weekends off from writing, since I teach most Saturdays and Sundays, and the respite was welcome. I made myself go out to enjoy the world.

It was exhausting. I snagged more than one 15 minute nap midway through mornings when my energy flagged. It wasn’t a pace that would be sustainable for me on a daily basis, but I used a similar process to write the second book, and I know I’ll do it again with the third. I have an inchoate idea, a vision of a blue and steel installation hanging in space, and once I am done jotting down notes and embark on my journey, I’ll find out what the crew is doing there.

Something about that pace helped me hold the book in my head much better than happens when I’m writing slower, picking various scenes to focus on according to my interest rather than where they fall in the text. That’s what I’ve done with the Tabat books and they are a much harder edit, pulling out repetitions and echoes, removing places where I’ve contradicted myself.

It is perhaps that immersion in the book that happens with this process that has enabled something to happen with these characters than has with other, past ones. These characters live in my head and express their opinions much more readily—and frequently—than any other cast I’ve dealt with, and I love them for it. I know these characters, but they also have plenty to tell me in forthcoming books, and that is truly exciting.

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Cat Rambo lives, writes, and teaches somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. Their 250+ fiction publications include stories in Asimov’s, Clarkesworld Magazine, and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. In 2020 they won the Nebula Award for fantasy novelette Carpe Glitter. They are a former two-term President of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA). Their most recent works are space opera You Sexy Thing (Tor Macmillan, November, 2021), as well as an anthology, The Reinvented Heart (Arc Manor, February, 2022),  co-edited with Jennifer Brozek.

Today Kris Katzen talks about what it is like to discover you share a Table of Contents with one of your favorite authors.

Dreams, Fantasies, then Beyond...

To quote my bio, I wrote my first ‘novel’ (seven handwritten pages!!) at age seven. As a kid, the only thing I did more voraciously than write, was read. Ok, maybe they tied. Either way, I lost myself in books. Drove my mom nuts. She’d be standing literally right beside me and I would not hear her calling my name until the third time. Drove. Her. Nuts.

So I read. Tons. And among my most favorite authors, Andre Norton loomed large. I favored science fiction and fantasy even then and loved her wonderful novels.

The older I got (and the more I learned about the publishing business) my idea of making a living as a writer…shifted. But that didn’t bother me. I write for the love of it and always will. Sales count as an added bonus. If whimsical thoughts of the New York Times Bestseller list moved from dream to fantasy, that never dulled my love of writing.

Another added bonus: all the wonderful writers I’ve had the pleasure and privilege of meeting. They fall on every part of the spectrum, running the gamut in what they write, why they write, where they are in their careers, and what they aim to accomplish. Some are even on that New York Times Bestseller list. Many are acquaintances; some are close friends. I’ve learned a great deal from all of them.

Also the older I got, the more I realized Andre Norton’s standing in the history of science fiction. It made perfect sense to me that I wasn’t alone in absolutely adoring her stories. As time passed, I found many, many new authors I enjoyed, but I always retained a special fondness for and admiration of Norton.

Which brings us to present day. Most of the time, I write my own novels and short stories. Some end up in anthologies, which is always fun. I’ve even collaborated on a few novels, which completely changes the process of writing. I enjoy the change of pace. Basically, though, I write in my own worlds. That works just fine, seeing as I make most hermits and recluses look like extroverted party-animal social butterflies.

I’ve had the good fortune to band together with a bunch of incredible authors in the form of a StoryBundle. I jumped at the chance because I’m a huge fan of the other writers. Even better, one of the volumes included is a cat anthology. My own beloved swarm of felines approves!

So I knew the StoryBundle included the anthology. After a day or two, I got around to checking out the table of contents.

One of the names leapt out at me!

ANDRE NORTON!

Wait, what??

Andre Norton!

A novel of mine is in a collection that includes Andre Norton.

When I say “Dreams, Fantasies, then Beyond”, I truly mean beyond. I never imagined this, never even conceived of it, that my writing would ever in any universe in any timeframe have any association—however ephemeral—with that of Andre Norton.

The seven-year-old ‘novelist’ in me is gleefully, joyfully dancing among the stars.

The present-day author is too.

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Kris Katzen wrote her first novel—all of seven! pages!—at age seven and hasn’t stopped since. Now with more than twenty novels and eighty short stories published, she writes mostly science fiction and fantasy. Occasional forays into other genres include action, romance, historical, and even a hockey novel. Her most recent novel Escapes is book one in the Interstellar Exiles series. Other series include Tales of Mimion and Sorcery & Steel. Visit www.BluetrixBooks.com/bibliography for a complete list of titles including those under all her pen names.

Today, Aaron Rosenberg tells us how he allows research to inspire his writing in other people’s worlds without getting bogged down in it. And how it inspires his original works.

I love research. Maybe it’s the failed academic in me (I have a Master’s in English Lit and had finished all my PhD coursework before I left the field) but I do, I love getting stuck into history and mythology and language and culture and clothes and so many other things you can read about and learn about. And of course the Internet makes that all so dangerously easy, you click on just one link and it leads to a dozen others and pretty soon you’ve spent the past three hours reading about some obscure headgear and the rites associated with it and your eyes are killing you and you’ve completely missed dinner.

This is both a good thing and a bad thing. Not the eyestrain and missing dinner part, that’s all bad. But falling down the research rabbit hole. Because it can lead to so many amazing story ideas.

That’s even more true when you combine it with my favorite way to come up with stories in an existing IP (or intellectual property), which is to “mind the gap.” When I start thinking up ideas for an IP, I like to look around, see what’s where, and see where the spaces are, the little chinks between the big bricks of worldbuilding and history and character development. Those chinks are missing material, spots that weren’t necessary to create the setting and the main story—but they often contain fun little moments a writer can exploit, throwaway mentions you can tease out into an interesting tale that helps fill in the space and make the wall that much more solid and believable. And fun.

Most of the time, I only use that technique for tie-in writing. After all, if it’s my own world I’m the one creating those big blocks in the first place.

But that’s not how things went with Time of the Phoenix.

When Steve Savile and I first had the idea, we just had the one setting, Elizabethan London, and the playwriting scene there in particular. But we knew we’d want more. So we started looking at history, and especially at major literary figures.

Hence the rabbit hole.

What we found initially, and what I found later as I continued the project on my own, were lots of little gaps, the kind that occur naturally all the time—a person’s life documented here and there but nothing between those two moments, a single brief mention of a strange incident with little context and no follow-up, a bit of folklore wrongly attributed but now indelibly linked to that person. All those fun little gaps that can lead to exciting, amazing stories that both fit into real-world history and are wholly original fiction at the same time.

I wonder if I should go back and thank my old professors for getting me hooked on that? Maybe I should just send them some of my books instead. They’re clever, they should see what I mean.

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Aaron Rosenberg is the author of the best-selling DuckBob SF comedy series, the Time of the Phoenix historical dark fantasy series, the Relicant Chronicles epic fantasy series, the Dread Remora space-opera series, and, with David Niall Wilson, the O.C.L.T. occult thriller series. His tie-in work includes novels for Star Trek, Warhammer, World of WarCraft, Stargate: Atlantis, Shadowrun, and Eureka. He has written children’s books (including the award-winning Bandslam: The Junior Novel and the #1 best-selling 42: The Jackie Robinson Story), educational books, and roleplaying games (including the Origins Award-winning Gamemastering Secrets). You can follow him online at gryphonrose.com, on Facebook at facebook.com/gryphonrose, and on Twitter @gryphonrose.

Loren Rhoads tells me where her morbid sensibilities come from and they led to her memoir.

Putting together a memoir is a very strange thing. There are so many stories from you that have to pick though and choose which to tell. A book by its nature seems to indicate some kind of thread to tie them all together—but you have to decide which thread you’re going to follow. My thread is summed up pretty well in the title: This Morbid Life.

It took me a long time to own up to being morbid. I discovered horror movies on TV as a kid and spent my Saturday afternoons watching the old black & white Universal monsters. Eventually my mom, who’d been a ninth-grade English teacher, pointed out that a lot of the monsters I loved had started out as characters in books. That led me to Dracula, Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, and Frankenstein.

That led me to writing. I wrote short stories for years to escape from the farm where I lived, the small town where I grew up, the dying city where I went to college. Nothing about my life seemed interesting enough to write about until I moved to San Francisco in the late eighties.

Before I really got settled, I met the owners of RE/Search Books just before they released Modern Primitives. It’s hard to recapture that time now. Before Modern Primitives was published, very few people had tattoos. Most tattoos weren’t artistic. Body jewelry was limited to the S/M underground. RE/Search didn’t create the movement, but they documented it at exactly the right moment. And I was there, standing on the fringes, watching.

The first essay I ever wrote about my life was about accompanying my friend Christine to get her labial piercing. Christine had been my roommate when we attended the Clarion Science Fiction Writers Workshop. She introduced herself by asking me to shave her head and touch up her mohawk. She was brave and fierce and I was honored when she asked me to come to her piercing. The experience was so amazing that I had to record it.

Once the essay was written, I sent it to a zine I loved called File 13. The best part of File 13 was the editor’s introductory essays, which were smart and honest. He inspired me to risk sharing my life with the world. To my amazement, he accepted the essay. He even featured it on the cover of the next issue.

I wrote for other zines after that: Cyber-Psychos AOD and Tail Spins, Gothik Voluptuary, Chaotic Order, and Zine World. Each one had its own focus, but they all allowed me to record and examine my life from facing my best friend’s HIV diagnosis to the days I spent exploring a cadaver lab to dealing with my dad’s catastrophic heart attack to my thrill at donating blood.

I started my own zine in 1996. The only name I ever considered for it was Morbid Curiosity. It collected first-person confessional essays from contributors around the world. It also gave me a platform where I could follow the inspiration of File 13’s introductions and talk about my own life.

My memoir This Morbid Life collects all those essays and more. It opens with a piece I wrote for Gothic.Net about taking prom pictures in two cemeteries in Flint, Michigan. It explores what it was like to publish Morbid Curiosity. It goes on to celebrate following my curiosity wherever it led.

In the end, being morbid is the thread that stitches my life together. It’s the element that brings joy to the darkness. It makes every sunny day that much sweeter. Every day above ground is a gift, which is exactly what This Morbid Life is about.

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Loren Rhoads is the author of a space opera trilogy, a duology about a succubus who falls in love with an angel, and a collection of short stories called Unsafe Words. You can find out more about her work at https://lorenrhoads.com/

Elizabeth Guizzetti has been a friend and peer for years. Today, she tells me about her love of language, how it shifts over the decades, and how she keeps slang of the past alive in her vampire books today.

Thank you for having me today, Jennifer. I’m so excited to talk about one of my favorite types of research.

As an author, I love all historical research, but one of my passions is idiomatic phrasing and slang. As everyone is aware, slang changes generationally and within generations. Sometimes a word slides through several groups and is dropped within a year. Idioms tend to last longer but still follow fads and expose a period's morality and generational fears. For an author, idioms can make handy shortcuts to depict the inner thoughts and even a character's personality.

One of the biggest pitfalls that an author can run into while using idioms and slang is the human habbit of classifying speech by decade or era. An author must still be careful to research when a word is actually coined if your novel has a definite place and time.

My latest novel, Accident Among Vampires or What Would Dracula Do? is set in 1951-52. I did quite a bit of research on Seattle and Issaquah during these years, but I also researched the post war era as a whole and previous generations as the book is about vampires. I chose phrases that they would say (or write in their journals as this is an Epistolary novel) which defines their true characters.

For example: for the character of Agata, I ensured her idioms are primarily religious in nature and very old-fashioned because she is deeply religious and was born in 1478 and Reborn in 1509 in Moldavia (Currently Romania).  An idiom she uses often is she "knows her offspring/husband/whoever like the Lord’s Prayer.”

Derrik, a vampire born in 1824/Reborn 1851, uses religious phrasing too. They are more active, violent, and stereotypically curses of the Victorian Era. The idioms tend to appear when he is stressed or angry as literal curse words such as "Go to Blazes" and "Damn your eyes." He does not use the mild versions of these words, however, he does use “Blazes” as a filler word.

He also has a few secular phrases which he directs towards Norma, specifically, meaning nonsense. “Moonshine over water” and “All my eye.”

Now  the protagonist of the novel, Norma, is a 1950's teenager who is culturally Christian but does not have deep religious beliefs.

To show the innocent part of her personality: she uses childish versions of known idioms such as "Mind your beeswax," which became popular in the 1930s but were still used in the ’50s. She speaks politely to adults. As period-appropriate, she calls adults: "Sir" or "Ma'am" and after she is a vampire, "Honored Individual."

But her slang has Beat Generation roots. The Beat Generation began as a literary group that included: Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs II, Allen Ginsberg John Clellon Holmes. "Beat Generation" was coined in 1948, but the movement started earlier.

This means by 1951, Norma would have thought the Beats were cool. She would have likely appropriated from movies and detective stories based out of New York, such as Broadway is my Beat (aired 1949 – 54) or Inner Sanctum (1941 – 52). (The LGBTQ relationships were often coded while drug use and Jazz were obvious threats.)

Some examples of Norma’s slang includes referring to the police as “The fuzz.”

She refers to adults who annoy her as “duds” or “squares.” She also calls certain vampires “pretend squares” since outwardly, they appear to conform to societal rules, but their personal lives do not conform.

As an aside, this also means she would never use a word like “Beatnik” because the word did not exist until 1958, but even if it did, it started as a derogatory word.)

My goal is to always give readers an idea of who the character really is and the life which they have lived. Some people might say a bookish, radio, and movie-loving teen girl from a 1950s farming town would be shocked by activities between consensual adults in a vampire coven. No, the shocking thing was vampires existed. And suddenly she was a full-blown telepath and ached for blood.

Here is one of her reactions which she writes in her diary:

“I tried to question Bill about the vampires of the Paper Flower Consortium and other covens. He would barely speak of them, except Derrik. Yet, sometimes I had visions of Bill with them. Sometimes I think I dreamed them.

Many vampires, Bill included, exist openly in ways that would have been hidden or simply not allowed if they were humans in Issaquah. I am not sure if that’s why vampires love the city or if we can exist in ways we wish because we’re vampires. At any rate, Mom would tell me to be polite, mind my beeswax, and don’t show my onions.

(I bet Derrik wants me to do the same.) ...”

 If you want to use idioms in your work, some of my favorite online sources:

• The Free Dictionary: https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com
• Online Etymology Dictionary: https://www.etymonline.com
• YourDictionary: https://grammar.yourdictionary.com/  (Lists of decade-based slang)
• My favorite reference book: The American Heritage® Dictionary of Idioms by Christine Ammer

Of course, sometimes you just can't find the perfect turn of phrase you want, so I also occasionally make my own versions of expressions such as "hide your onions" or "don’t show your onions," which is something Norma's mother and her vampire father, Bill, say, based off the 1920s idiom, "You know one’s onions," which just means someone is knowledgeable about something.

ACCIDENT AMONG VAMPIRES (Or What Would Dracula Do?)

Issaquah, Washington, USA, 1951

My name is Norma Mae Rollins. I’m fourteen and an illegal vampire. I miss my mom, but new ghoulish appetites force me to remain with my creator. Bill didn’t mean to transform me. At least, that’s what he claims. His frightening temper, relentless lies, and morbid scientific experiments makes it hard to know what to believe.

However, someone snitched about Bill’s experiments to a nearby Coven. Now both of our corpses will burn. Bill won’t run. He is curious what happens to a vampire after final death. I don’t want to die again. It hurt so much the first time. Bill thinks his vampire boyfriend might shelter me. I must brave an eternal existence with elder vampires and other monsters who don’t think I ought to exist. Oh and figure out who I am allowed to eat.

A vampire’s reality is nothing like the movies.

Available on Kindle and Paperback: https://www.amazon.com/Accident-Among-Vampires-would-Dracula-ebook/dp/B08ZFQRYQS/

Signed Paperbacks can be found on my website: https://www.elizabethguizzetti.com/product-page/accident-among-vampires-paperback

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Elizabeth Guizzetti is an author, podcaster, illustrator, and a collector of dragons — the ceramic kind. She loves writing about vampires. Elizabeth lives in Seattle with her husband and dog, Walnut. Visit her at Instagram or Twitter at @E_Guizzetti, FB Author Page:  /Elizabeth.Guizzetti.Author or https://www.elizabethguizzetti.com

Lisa Morton is a friend of mine, a good editor, a better author, and an all-around spooky kind of gal. I love working with her. Today, she tells me why it took her 30 years to put together her first short story collection.

My first professional short fiction sale happened in 1994, when I sold a story called “Sane Reaction” to editors Stephen Jones and David Sutton for a British anthology called Dark Voices 6. Since then, I’ve sold more than 150 short stories, to magazines, anthologies, and online venues. My short work has won awards and a lot of nice reviews, it’s been frequently reprinted, and I’ve reached the point where I get a lot of invitations into new projects.

So why did I wait almost thirty years to put out my first real collection?

Well, first of all, there have been other collections. My first was a themed collection called Monsters of L.A., which put twenty classic monsters in the middle of the SoCal metrosprawl; but that collection included only original stories, and was not a “greatest hits” sort of book (it was also nominated for the Bram Stoker Award for Collection).

I was honored when Cemetery Dance included me in their “Select” series, which were small books that collected just a few stories from each author; mine included four reprints.

In 2017, JournalStone put out a collection of my Halloween-themed stories (as a Halloween expert, I’ve written a considerable amount of both fiction and non-fiction about the holiday), The Samhanach and Other Halloween Experts. That one was a substantial collection of reprints that also included novellas.

But never a more general collection, until now. Why did I wait so long, especially when so many authors put out collections as soon as they have enough stories to create something that’s acceptably book-length?

There are a couple of reasons. First off, I think too many authors rush into collections too soon; I see new authors self-publishing collections all the time, and I wonder how they’ll get people to buy a book full of short stories by an author they may not know yet (collections and anthologies are both notoriously tough sells).

Second: as a kid growing up, I loved mass market paperback collections. When I had a few weeks’ worth of allowance saved up, my mom would drive me to the local used bookstore, I’d peruse the science fiction and horror sections, and come home with stacks of paperback collections by authors like Theodore Sturgeon, Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison, H. P. Lovecraft, and Robert E. Howard. I probably learned the art of short story writing from absorbing those collections, so of course I always dreamed of having one of my own. Unfortunately, the mass market paperback story collection is largely a thing of the past now, kept only for the major bestselling authors and not the midlist masters and mistresses.

I still wanted a traditionally published book, although I’ve self-published some mini-collections, mainly as giveaways to my newsletter subscribers. I talked to a few publishers over the years, some expressed interest, but nothing ever came of it.

Cue Kate Jonez. Kate is the owner of a wonderful small press called Omnium Gatherum. A few years ago, while we were working together on assembling StokerCon™ 2017, Kate mentioned to me that she’d love to publish my collection.

And that’s how I landed here, with my first major retrospective collection, Night Terrors & Other Tales, being published by Omnium Gatherum. The collection includes twenty reprint stories, chosen by me, and one new piece written for the collection (“Night Terrors”). Kate did a wonderful job with the book, hiring my friend Greg Chapman to create the creepy cover art, and I couldn’t be prouder to have this big slice of me finally coming out into the world.

To quote the Grateful Dead…what a long strange trip it’s been.

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Lisa Morton is a screenwriter, author of non-fiction books, and prose writer whose work was described by the American Library Association’s Readers’ Advisory Guide to Horror as “consistently dark, unsettling, and frightening.” She is a six-time winner of the Bram Stoker Award, the author of four novels and over 150 short stories, and a world-class Halloween expert. Her recent releases include Weird Women: Classic Supernatural Fiction from Groundbreaking Female Writers 1852-1923 (co-edited with Leslie S. Klinger) and Calling the Spirits: A History of Seances; her latest short stories appeared in Best American Mystery Stories 2020, Speculative Los Angeles, and Final Cuts: New Tales of Hollywood Horror and Other Spectacles. Forthcoming in 2021 is the collection Night Terrors & Other Tales. Lisa lives in Los Angeles and online at www.lisamorton.com .

Marsheila Rockwell and I share a TOC for the forthcoming Turning the Tied anthology that will benefit the World Literacy Foundation. Today, she tells me her thoughts on how Ozma connects her the Ojibwe.

The story I have in IAMTW’s upcoming Turning the Tied anthology is called “A Prisoner Freed in Oz” and features Ozma of Oz. For those not familiar with her story (as detailed in L. Frank Baum’s The Marvelous Land of Oz), Ozma was born a girl, but as a baby was magically transformed into a boy named Tip, and lived as a boy until her teens, when she was finally transformed back into her true self. Modern readers will no doubt see a parallel to the transgender experience, although the book was first published in 1904, before that word was coined and well before it was an acceptable experience to write about in a children’s book.

Many people mistakenly believe that gender variance is a new idea, perhaps born out of the Sexual Revolutions of the 1920s or 1960s. But the character of Ozma hints that gender variance has existed for much longer than that, though perhaps not as openly expressed as it is today.

I am a reconnecting Chippewa (Ojibwe)/Métis (I’m not changing the subject, I promise). Broadly, ‘reconnecting’ in this context refers to an Indigenous person who was denied access to their tribe’s culture and heritage while growing up and is trying to rectify that situation as an adult, without the benefit of parents or grandparents to bridge the gap. Part of that effort (at least for me) includes trying to educate myself about and become active in Indigenous causes. It was during that process that I learned that many Indigenous tribes/nations recognized and accepted the concept of gender variance long before colonizers ever set foot on Turtle Island.

Specific beliefs and terminology varied from tribe to tribe—for instance, the Navajo called such people nadleeh and the Lakota used the term winkte. Gender variants included feminine woman, masculine woman, feminine man, masculine man, and sometimes both, or neither. Roles for such individuals varied depending on their tribe/nation, as well. Being Chippewa, I’ll focus on those beliefs.

According to Anton Treuer (Ojibwe), professor of Ojibwe linguistics at Bemidji State University, “the Ojibwe accepted variation. Men who chose to function as women were called ikwekanaazo, meaning ‘one who endeavors to be like a woman.’ Women who functioned as men were called ininiikaazo, meaning, ‘one who endeavors to be like a man.’” He goes on to say that the part played by these individuals, “was considered to be sacred, often because they assumed their roles based on spiritual dreams or visions.”

Today, ‘Two-Spirit’ is used as an umbrella term to try to capture the Indigenous gender variant experience. The word was coined in 1990 to replace the anthropological term berdache, which had traditionally been used to identify gender-variant Indigenous individuals. The etymology of that word, however, stems from the French bardache, which can be taken to mean “male prostitute,” and is patently offensive. While no experience is universal to all Indigenous people, and one word cannot possibly be used to frame an experience which differs across 574 federally recognized tribes, ‘Two-Spirit’ has, as its Wikipedia article notes, “generally received more acceptance and use than the term it replaced.”

So, long story short (ha!): Gender variance has been part of humanity for probably as long as there have been humans. Sadly, Ozma and the Ojibwe notwithstanding, acceptance of gender variance has been around for a much shorter time. But I look forward to the day when acceptance of all our differences will be the norm. Maybe my story will help with that. I hope so.

#TurningTheTied

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Marsheila (Marcy) Rockwell is the author of twelve SF/F/H books, dozens of poems and short stories, several articles on writing and the writing process, and a handful of comic book scripts. She is also a disabled pediatric cancer and mental health awareness advocate and a reconnecting Chippewa/Métis. She lives in the Valley of the Sun with her husband, three of their five children, two rescue kitties (one from hell), and far too many books.