Category: News

Detonation #26: Nom-de-plumage

~ Noggy
Boom!

I’m going come straight out and admit I haven’t been furious enough to write one of these in a dog’s age. Why, you obviously ask, given the world spiralling into an Idiocracy shaped dystopia with enough meat to gorge even hot dog muncher Joey Chestnut? Two words: Rage fatigue. Plus, all the good stuff has been extensively detonated by better monsters than me. Case in point, pick up a copy of Enshittification by Cory Doctorow. Boom! That man knows his professional fulmination.

And I’ve already bashed the literal shit out of all significant low hanging fruit. Social Media? Meh. The Pandemic? Old news. AI? It’s hard to believe I raged against AI three goddamn years ago, a veritable eternity in Anthropic usage tokens, when it was new and somewhat intriguing. Unlike now, where it’s ubiquitous and devouring the world faster than Logi in a Jötunheimr eating contest. I could follow that up. I really could. But meh, who the hell wants to read that? I certainly don’t.

Then again, as Lola is quick to point out, I am petty in ways that defy sanity.

So, it’s time to fight lesser crusades. Not saying I’m ready to scrape the bottom of the barrel and go after people who wear mismatched socks or rock porn staches or leave wads of curly hair stuck to the shower wall. I could. I should. But not today. Instead, I’ve found a juicy morsel wriggling around in my noggin, consuming valuable neurons, that requires a random detonation.

Pen Names are for cowards.

There, I said it. Not taking it back either. Look, I know there are some instances where an author needs to keep their identity hidden or requires an alias. For instance, if you fear for your life. Or know your livelihood could be comprised. Or you were a woman and couldn’t get anything published in man’s literary universe (which was the norm until amazingly recent times). Or, most importantly, your name is Chuck Tingle. He’s probably a hideous freak under that pink sack he wears on his head in public, but personally I really want to know and stalk the genius behind such classics as Pounded In The Butt By My Book “Pounded In The Butt By My Own Butt” or I Have No Butt And I Must Pound. So much pounding. I bet he’s a riot at parties.

I personally know LOTS of authors with pen names, nom-de-plumes, or pseudonyms (yes, I know these are synonyms, consider the thrice repetition my version of rocking a porn stache). Fine, maybe if you’re writing twenty romance books a month and carpet bombing your fans you can make a possible case for it. Or, if you’re a genre hack and want to use a first initial instead of your first name when you write trauma and grief strewn literary award bait. But damn, that’s all so cowardly.

Stand behind your work and take responsibility for it. Doesn’t matter if it’s god-awful or goddamn amazing. You wrote it. Be proud that you did. Let others be proud you did. But Noggy, I don’t want my mom to know I write spicy romantasy – she’s Old Colony Mennonite and will drive her buggy over to whip my britches. Coward! Take it and be happy you had some drivel published.

Besides, given how hard it is to build an audience these days, why the hell would you want to promote yourself beyond a single banner? I can’t imagine having to maintain multiple Facebook, IG, X, TikTok personas. One is bad enough. And don’t get me started about writing partners who pick a ‘joint’ name. James S. A. Corey? Please. You’re saving cover space having two names? You think it’s clever? You can’t decide whose name should go first. Or receive prime billing? It just means your fans need to jump through hoops, probably using AI, to find out who the hell you are and want to read deeper into your backlist. Which goes for anyone who writes under multiple names. You don’t want people to read ALL your books? You’re probably just insulting their intelligence.

And mine.

Boom! You’re welcome.

Detonation #25: The Confidence Game, Part 2

~ Lola

When revolution is not possible, we have involution. Searching our innards for that seed of confidence and providing what it needs to sprout and flourish. So, what’s going on inside you? Creatively speaking.

The muse is a capricious tart. When they shine on you, it is glorious indeed, but they’re not reliable enough to fuel our creative output. So what then? Develop good habits that together form a robust writing practice. Art is work. It’s your work, so get your tush in the chair and do your job. And I absolutely subscribe to this advice because in the end, no one is going to write for you, unless you’re using generative A.I. in which case you are not actually a writer and you can see yourself out.

Now you’ve set aside a consistent time and place to write, you’re logging your progress, and the muse occasionally dips in for a romp, leaving you in dishevelled bliss that fades all too quickly. You take classes, learn, improve. You grow as a writer and you do feel good about that, so why can’t you finish your novel? Why does every sentence feel like an episode of sleep paralysis with all its accompanying demons? Why was it so much easier in the early days when words flew through your brain faster than your fingers could take them down and the idea of running out of ideas was laughable.

I’ll tell you why. It’s because you know too much. It’s easy to be confident when you don’t know what you don’t know. Sadly, students of the craft invariable reach a tipping point. You’ve learned enough to know that you don’t know anything. This is why most artists are clinically insane. Most scientists too, for that matter. And don’t come at me for making light of mental health issues. This is the writing life, and we didn’t choose it because we’re tactful, well adjusted normies.

The question becomes: how do we develop confidence along with craft? Because from where I’m standing it’s an inverse relationship. All that learning only seems to make me better at spotting bad writing, and that bad writing is usually my own. And that leads us to confidence building step one.

Ditch the binary. Calling your writing bad is reductive, lazy, and utterly unhelpful. Your work deserves a more nuanced critique and you’d never comment on anyone else’s work that way. You’d identify a clunky sentence with a sublime word choice. Or an interesting image that needs only a little clarity. No piece of writing is merely good or bad. We aren’t toddlers, and our study of the craft has taught us discernment, which I’ve learned is one of the most important skills a writer can develop. And this brings us to step number two.

You are not entitled to perfection. Especially in early drafts, but fucked if that’s not exactly what we expect. The only perfection to be had there is in its 100% success rate as a self-defeating strategy. We get so hung up on this. And honestly the literary gatekeepers aren’t helping with their stern warnings not to waste their time with anything that isn’t perfect. Who wants to read something perfect anyway? We’d all kill ourselves. The good news is that if you’ve managed to see any piece of writing, an essay, poem, or story, through to completion, you already have what it takes to overcome your sense of entitlement and accept your writing as a beautifully flawed work of art.

Embrace the suck! It’s the only way to let those moments of brilliance fly unfettered onto the page along with all the nonsense (like most of this essay). Learn to enjoy writing badly. The more you let go of the pursuit of perfection and wallow in the muck, the better your writing will get. You’ll realize it’s actually hard to write as badly as you think you do. Is it perfect? Will it ever be perfect? Hell, no. But it will get better, I promise you that.

And on that note, we have step three: for the love of Christ, stop editing as you go. Yeah, I called you out. I called myself out. We all know who we are. The anxious little goblins who write a page one day and edit for the next three because we think we’re saving time on the back end. I don’t have to tell you this doesn’t work. But Lola, how else is it going to get better, like you promised? Fix it in post, baby. Only when you’ve completed a draft are you properly informed to go back and revise. Who gives a shit if the language is passive, the pacing is off, and your characters are flat as a runover raccoon? Throw in a few [TK]’s if you really need to and move the fuck on.

Do I know everything? No. Do I know anything? Shockingly little, but I’m pretty sure about this. Imagination and creativity are wild things with wild impulses and trying to reduce them to ones and zeroes, or extrude them through your perfectionist birth canal is asking them to be what they fundamentally are not. The page will never mirror what’s in your head so release yourself from that expectation. Write your story. Then rewrite it. Rewrite again. Tell your story as best you can. My sweet duckies, this is the real secret: confidence doesn’t come from being perfect or even pretty good. It comes from joyfully embracing all that magnificent and endless room to grow.

~ Lola

Detonation #25: The Confidence Game, Part 1

~ Lola

Greetings from the hinterlands of Purgatory! Noggy and I have been on sabbatical, but slowly making our way back to the suburban hellscape of the Tower with its many amenities, including Nihilist Arby’s, the Office Depot District, Starbucks, and Factory Prime 1-day delivery. We fled to the wilderness to nourish our own creative hatchlings. It’s been a fertile season and on our return to The Seventh Terrace, we find ourselves with new perspectives and fresh grievances.

Today I want to discuss a particularly malodorous platitude that makes its way through the creative miasma in one iteration or another:

“You just have to believe in yourself!”

Meaning anything is possible, if you’re confident enough.

I’m sorry, but even I, Lola, a privileged white woman, have been bashed on the rocky shores of life one too many times to accept that. So I can’t imagine how sickening this affirmative rot feels to someone without my unearned advantages in life.

Believe!

You can print it in calligraphy across a rustic piece of wood and hang it next to your collection of Rae Dunn mugs in your farmhouse modern kitchen with the sliding barn door, but that doesn’t mean it’s true.

Except it is kinda true.

Not in the sense that the playing field is level, and if you fail at your authorial endeavours it’s purely due to a lack of determination, because hard work is always rewarded with success, right? What a snow job. I blame White Jesus, but whatever. What I mean is that on some level, there is a relationship between belief and success. Only it’s an inside job.

Externally, there’s a lot that’s out of your hands: the circumstances your were born into, your family and work obligations, financial stress, and let’s not forget the myriad ways society kicks you in the nads based on race, ability, gender, sexual orientation etc. because apparently you can’t “win” unless someone else “loses”. Once again we can thank the unholy trinity of patriarchy/capitalism/white supremacy. The giant thumb that may benefit the few over the many, but ultimately keeps us all down, and then tells you it’s not oppression, but your own flawed character.

Annnnnd this essay is turning into something a lot bigger and thornier than I intended. While I’m blaming things, I also blame my stubborn streak of justice and fair play. As the Goblin King says, “I wonder what your basis for comparison is?” But like, why can’t life be fair? Who is being hurt by fairness? If life were fair it would be a lot easier to believe in ourselves and use our gifts to their fullest and best. Yes, Lola is full of contradictions today. Bitter cynic and pie-eyed idealist all at once.

One thing we can agree on, I hope, is that it’s a privilege to be able to write in the first place, to have the time, resources, support, and mental bandwidth to do this thing we do and then whine about how hard it is. And it is hard. But we don’t need to make it harder by being the loudest voice in the chorus telling us we’ll never amount to anything.

Come back for Part 2 of the Confidence Game where I’ll be less ranty and more useful.

TTFN!

~ Lola

When Word’s Collide 2023

~ Noggy

Where we’ll be next weekend!

When: August 4-6th, 2023
Where: Delta Hotels by Marriott Calgary South, Calgary, Alberta
What: A literary festival like no other!
Why: We will be judging the Urban Fantasy Slush, participating on a Collaborative Writing panel, and taking pitches. And no doubt getting into mischief.
Who: When Word’s Collide

Between Two Flames with Laird Ryan States and Someone Else’s Story

~ Noggy
Someone Elses Story

BETWEEN TWO FLAMES WITH THE SEVENTH TERRACE

Thank you for joining your hosts Lola Silkysocks and Noggy Splitfoot for another installment of Between Two Flames — where we place authors in our hot seat for what surely must feel like an eternity of environmentally unfriendly gas grilling.

Today we welcome Laird Ryan States, author of Someone Else’s Story, a queer body horror globetrotting adventure you can read in an afternoon and have bad dreams about all night. Please tell us a little about yourself in exactly forty-two words.

LRS: I am smart enough to be aware of my failings. which are that I’m lazy, cranky, fantasy-prone, arrogant, mopey and out of shape. Unlike most magician/writers, I’m not a degenerate addict or sexual creep, so I’ve got that going for me.

TST: And you love animals, and that’s something special! And now, let’s get to your story. You’ve begun a grand setting with Sleeping Underwater (and Silver Bullets) and now Someone Else’s Story which you describe as your Sel Souris Cycle. How did this setting come to be? What inspired it?

LRS: I discovered a previously unknown half-brother who lived there.  He contacted me, because he discovered he was carrying a hereditary disease, and felt like he should track down our father’s many MANY children and share that information so we could get tested.  I’m not a carrier, but what an amazing thing to do for people.  

He’s an entomologist, and Sel Souris is a really interesting place for an entomologist to be for reasons which you’ll know if you’ve read Sleeping Underwater.

Like most people, I’d never heard of it, but after I started researching it, I found the island has had a HUGE impact on our culture through its influence on artists. The island inspired a lot of things in the work of, for example, William Burroughs (who appears in Someone Else’s Story), the song Purple Haze, Frank Herbert, and the name of the freaking Beatles.  And yet, nobody talks about Sel Souris.  

It felt to me like a place the world was trying to point us a way from, a place with a kind of cloak drawn around it.  As a magician, that sort of thing is catnip to me. I started poking at it, and never stopped.

Sel Souris was a huge part of my work as a practicing magician, right until it unfortunately collapsed into the sea altogether.

Since then, I’m also finding fewer and fewer references to it on the internet, except for me.  Eventually, I suspect that people are only going to see my stuff, and assume I made it up.

I didn’t.  I’ve been there.  I have pictures.

And I’ve been very sad that it’s gone…but I know that it happened for good reasons I can’t really talk about just at this time.

TST: We’ve heard a rumour that you are enamored by the writing and worlds of Philip José Farmer, another illustrious universe builder able to entwine historical figures and places with his imagination to create something amazing. True? If so, what makes him so compelling? 

LRS:Would that rumor be my NEVER shutting up about him for 10 minutes at a stretch?  Phil Farmer had an imagination as big as the moon, and he was brave as hell.  He was the first writer to bring sex into science-fiction, for example.

Now, Phil’s prose varies widely from workmanlike to awfully good.  He’s like Philip K Dick, in this way.  You aren’t there for the prose, you come for the ideas.

His Riverworld series posits an artificial afterlife for humanity.  A race of benevolent aliens created artificial souls so that all living things can survive death, and live again to ethically improve until their artificial soul becomes part of a detected and unknowable over mind made up of the souls of all who have moved on in this way.

After the end of humanity, every person who ever lived is resurrected on the banks of a million mile river to start again, and build a new culture?

It’s a CRAZY ambitious idea.  He doesn’t quite stick the landing, but who cares?

What really got me onto his work was his biography of Tarzan, Tarzan Alive, which reveals that the fictional Tarzan was based on accounts of a real man raised by very rare hominids in Africa. His research into the real life of this extraordinary man was a huge influence on me.  He later wrote a sequel called Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life, which discussed the real man Patrick Clarke Wildman, on whom the classic pulp adventurer was based.

He led me to look more deeply at the secret history of the world, which is a FAR more interesting place than most people truly realize.

TST: Frankenstein and Islamic folklore is a heady blend we don’t think we’ve seen before. And one of the many reasons we are Laird Ryan States fans. How did that happen?

LRS:Well, I was inspired by Michael Crichton’s Eaters of the Dead.  His work in that book pointed me at some of the primary documents about the black stone discussed in Someone Else’s Story.  Despite the fact that Crichton turned out to be kind of an asshole, his work on discussing the Andromeda Strain and the InGen incident that most people think he made up for Jurassic Park was another rung on my ladder to more secret history.

TST: What’s next for Tom, is he going to be popping up again in the future? What about his new sidekick, Lisa? And are you continuing the cycle of Salty Mice?

LRS: Lisa’s living in Berlin under an assumed name, and Tom is trying to give her some space.  He’s been in a terrible TERRIBLE headspace since Sel Souris went down. He’s also incredibly mad at me, which means dragging things out of him is very difficult. Happily, he talks a lot when he’s drunk.  And that’s not an uncommon thing for him.  

There is a book I’m compiling which I’m tentatively calling Wonderland which deals with what happened to the island.  Also, I discuss what really happened at Roswell.  It wasn’t aliens from outer space.  I was disappointed by that, but the truth was so much weirder.

TST: What’s next for you personally? Any forthcoming releases, hatchings, or germinations we should be on the lookout for?

LRS: I’m at work on compiling Wonderland to send to you folks, actually.  I’m also, god help me, about half a million words into a story set 175 years in the future, after the ecological collapse. It’s shockingly optimistic, and features a religious sect based on Klinger from M*A*S*H where the followers are trying to get out of the shit detail of life by getting a Section 8.

So, I’m keeping on keeping on.

I’m also working on a one man show in which I discuss the history and influence of Sel Souris….but as almost nobody knows what that is, who’d come?

TST: We’ll be there for it! We may not have visited the island in person, but it’s there in our dreams. Thanks Ryan! 

LRS: Thank you.

About the Author:

Laird Ryan States was born in 1971, in Calgary Alberta. He spent his childhood and early adult life in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, which is an excellent place to grow up for a writer, as it’s at least as weird as Austin, Texas. He currently lives in a lovely old house in Edmonton Alberta, with his best friend, novelist Gayleen Froese, three dogs, and so many reptiles and invertebrates that he has lost count.

Someone Else’s Story is his third book, and a sequel to his self-published Silver Bullets and Sleeping Underwater, which is kindly published by The Seventh Terrace. It is part of a cycle of stories and mixed media art about the island of Sel Souris. He has nearly completed the sequel to this book, tentatively titled Wonderland, and is many hundreds of thousands of words into a long novel about pro-wrestling and the end of the world that also has loose ties to this cycle.

Ryan has loved Frankenstein’s monster since he was a small child, and though he thoroughly takes the piss out of him in this work, honestly believes him to be one of the greatest creations in literature, and feels a kinship with him that is occasionally uncomfortable.

2022 – A Year in Flux

~ Noggy

N: LOLA!

L: Again with the yelling, don’t you ever shut up?

N: Not when I’m awake.

L: Unless I’ve run you ragged, or jammed a—

N: No need to be explicit. 

L: You started it.

N: I take no responsibility. For anything anymore. That’s what 2022 was about, right? Retiring a life of stoicism and embracing epicureanism. *** sobs *** 

L: Are you still upset about the cancellation of rum raisin ice cream?

N: Maybe…

L: Because LITERALLY everyone who likes it, except you, is dead. It’s just business, Nog.

N: Fascists.

L: Let’s get to the matter at hand, shall we? Each year asking the previous to hold its beer and 2022 was really no exception. 

Lola and Noggy’s 2022 Wheel of the Year. In Brief.

N: Well, brief’ish.

Yule

N: New Years! Naked snow angels! Leaning into photographic evidence by making the best custom calendar ever.

L: We wrote the 2022 year in review. And it was a DOOZY.

N: Your dad’s weed infused absinthe.

L: I lost about 16 hours, for real.

Imbolc

L: We tempted the Gods of Winter and went Ice Fishing at Gull Lake for Noggy’s b-day. This requires an entire review of its own: -30C, biscuits, dumb fish, a month’s worth of booze, and all-night ice cracking.

N: Don’t forget you got me a Texas Mickey of Smirnoff’s! Which was drank. Drunk. Drunken?

L: It got you running again after having your Achilles’ smashed through a meat grinder.

Ostara

N: Hey, remember when you gave me Covid? From Costco? Kirkland Covid, Jesus…

L: We caught up on a decade of TV, so stop bitching.

N: At least we recovered. Steve… he ate mouth full of mud. I don’t think he’s been the same since.

L: And then we made Borscht from a three-thousand-year-old Mennonite recipe.

N: Mmm, and Worm Moon night run magic.

L: Seeing Broken Toyz at the Back Alley where you wore a kimono and sunglasses and everyone thought you were some kind of celebrity.

N: I recall you nearly got kicked out of the bar for being naughty!

L: Happens. More often than you’d think.

N: Remember Velocipastor?

L: Trying not to. Do you remember David Sedaris complimenting my sweater?

N: Traffic cone strikes again!

L: I made a lot of rather drastic decisions post-covid. Bye, bye Medusa, was seriously time for a big chop.

N: And a large-ish tattoo in a post-covid fog. Totally good decision.

L: And Toxic Femininity. Where they ran out of fucking air in the coffee shop. Who runs out of air? Really?

N: And broken plate magic.

L: Which seemed cool until we found out it was a dumb Tik Tok thing. Kids these days…

Beltane

N: We have a guest reviewer for May.

L: Shit.

Steve: Fuck you both. I’m not sure why I invited you animals to come to Victoria for a week. Not saying that I regret it, but… let’s see. You hid in my house like vermin, poked a dead elephant seal, forced me to eat cinnamon buns and latte’s mid beach run, to drink at least forty expensive cocktails at the Bard and Banker, eat weird shit at the Fork n Pork in the middle of the night, listen to yacht rock, walk halfway across Vancouver island to find nostalgia at Spinnakers, run to the liquor store while you soaking wet losers had a nap in a dog blanket, made me run into highway traffic and almost get pancaked by a semi, and be friendly with bathroom stoners.

N: You missed Ferris’s not having Jambalaya, literally the only reason we even came to visit.

L: And the Empress bathrooms. 

S: …

N: …

Litha

L: We descended upon Julie’s book launch, totally unclear on which 80’s theme it was.

N: Pretty sure it was Def Lepard 80’s.

L: Debbie Gibson, all the way.

N: What else is there?

L: The writing retreat, in which I scared the absolute shit out of some unsuspecting memoirists.

N: And listened to drunk stories of cats licking balls.

L: And throwing watermelon rinds at cows.

N: Did we actually write?

L: Now that you mention it…

N: What about our awesome Horror Con cosplay?

L: Baby and Otis!

N: Of the notorious Firefly Family. We’ll never get the blood out. Never.

N: It was nice that summer kicked off with patios. So many patios. And magic. We purified a hell of a lot of patios.

L: Living the vagabond lifestyle my mother always warned me about.

N: We even made it to Stampede for the first time in years.

L: We went there for the weird food and couldn’t find any of it. But hey, my dad got totally fucked up and acquired covid. At least I hope that’s all he got…

N: And you took me kayaking. Twice! And we didn’t kill each other.

L: If at first (or second) you don’t succeed…

L: Stampede breakfast at the Baptist Church could have gone either way.

N: It definitely went some kind of way. With that Baptist Youth Band…

Lughnasadh

L: Ah, August. More house sitting. More patios. And hey, more nude beach.

N: Two words: pocket gopher.

L: At the nude beach!

N: Could have been a sundial.

L: Anyways… We crashed Squamish! Ran fifty fucking miles through forests and over mountains. Shout out to the August Jack Motor Lodge. Ate BBQ. Steve’s b-day in Vancouver, starting with posh cucumber margs in Yaletown, followed by Paper Planes in Gastown, and capping it off with the worst fucking old fashioneds imaginable at the Shark Club. Which in fairness, should not have been a surprise.

N: We also had that all day YYC craft brewery crawl.

L: Followed by Cornfest! Your 37th high school reunion, and a first date on the 2nd Berry Go Round.

N: We rocked the YYC Pride Market.

L: And we released Rhonda’s awesome book – Hell Hath No Sorrow like a Woman Haunted!

Mabon

N: Crustless pizza where have you been all my life?

L: We needed the calories. You know, for stuff…

N: Like WAM.

L: WAM, Wam, wam. A three-day stage mountain ultra-race in Whistler. Why do I let you idiots talk me into these things?

N: The deadliest part was your dad trying to eat a Blizzard while driving through a mountain pass construction zone one-handed, trying to beat the road closure.

L: Here’s to Mad Dads…

N: Cheers!

Samhain

L: Did anything happen besides Halloween?

N: Cocktails at the Wednesday Room with the Overlook Hotel carpet. And candy.

L: Soooo much candy. Twinkies, yes, Big Turks, less yes.

N: You had me at Big Turk.

L: Halloween though!

N: Lazlo and Nadja. Fangs. Blood. Possessed dolls.

L: We outdid ourselves this year, gotta say.

N: Wanted, Sasquatch skull.

L: That all you got?

N: Except for about two hundred birthday parties.

L: Moving right along…

Yule

L: A month late and two pennies short, but we managed to give birth to our latest Purgatorio book, Terrace V: Penitent’s Gold, and inflict more Trace and Solomon on the universe.

N: Running streak! Fucking cold running streak.

L: Don’t forget drinking a gallon of Colyte in preparation for your colonoscopy.

N: You’ll be old one day too!

L: I’ll never be as old as you. Plus, you recovered for Solstice at the Dorian.

N: True. Though you tried your best to kill me on that horrible frozen death run before Christmas.

L: Weird Christmas II: The Weirdening.

N: With bonus Boxing Day parking lot gin.

L: And another seriously required Dead Week. Betty Lou’s Library and Burlesque!

And that’s, as they say in shrew business, a wrap. And now on to 2023, which we’ll preemptively refer to as the haunted Wheel of Fortune…

Detonation #24: The Horror of AI Generated Horror

~ Noggy

The end times are near! Don’t believe me? You should. Not that I’m fucking Nostradamus or Baba Vanga, or, heaven help me, Nate Silver. But I am a divorced Gen-X technophile know it all who lives in a microchip factory, drinks Blanton’s Bourbon like its water, and spends WAY too much time dredging social media cesspools for nuggets of filthy amusement. That’s gotta count for something. Right? Hell yes it does.

And I know what you’re thinking. End times? Really? It’s always the end of the world or doomsday or (*** waves arms ***) post-modern Armageddon on social media. The truth, such as truth is, is that endings are always complicated and, unless it’s climate change or the sun going supernova or the moon falling from orbit, probably not the absolute finale, just a change – for better or worse. Usually better. Usually. Except for Coke Dreamworld. Brutalist architecture. And possibly Pontiac Aztek’s.

Of course, in case I wasn’t clear, the latest boogeyman to strike fear into the hearts of creatives across the multiverse is AI. Specifically, AI used to create art and write. Lot of gnashing of teeth on this one. Folks taking a stand against soulless algorithms trained on unlicensed material scraped from a billion network accessible sources. And it is currently problematic in a lot of ways. And pretty crappy. Not that I don’t think it’ll get better, this is pretty much the start of something new, but I like to think it’ll be a valuable tool to assist in a variety of ways as opposed to replacing most artists. It’ll never have true imagination. And plus, bespoke is always better than mass produced garbage.

That said, why not go to the source, asking the daemonic heart of darkness what IT thought of writing horror. Well, gotta say, I was rather surprised.

Using chatGPT to write horror literature is a dangerous and irresponsible endeavor that could have disastrous consequences for the world.

For those who may not be familiar with chatGPT, it is a language model that is trained on a vast amount of text data and is able to generate human-like responses to prompts. While this technology has a wide range of potential uses, it has also been used by some to try and generate horror stories and other forms of scary content.

However, using chatGPT to create horror literature is a terrible idea for several reasons. First and foremost, chatGPT is not capable of truly understanding the nature of fear or horror. It can only generate responses based on patterns and associations that it has learned from its training data, and these responses will likely be shallow and superficial at best.

Furthermore, chatGPT has no moral compass or sense of responsibility, and it is therefore entirely possible that it could generate content that is truly disturbing or even harmful to readers. This could lead to real-world consequences, such as psychological trauma or even physical harm, for those who consume this content.

In conclusion, using chatGPT to write horror literature is a reckless and irresponsible act that has the potential to cause serious harm. It is important that we do not use this technology in such a way, and instead focus on using it for more constructive and beneficial purposes.

There you go folks, from the daemon’s mouth itself.

Dreams of Avarice: “The Envoy’s Blessing” by Chris Patrick Carolan

~ Noggy
Penitents Gold

BETWEEN TWO FLAMES WITH THE SEVENTH TERRACE

Thank you for joining us for another installment of Between Two Flames — where we place authors in our hot seat for what surely must feel like an eternity of environmentally unfriendly gas grilling.

Today we welcome Chris Patrick Carolan, author of “The Envoy’s Blessing” — a pulpy cosmic horror tale of murder, slime, and gold from our latest Purgatorio Tower’s book Terrace V: Penitent’s Gold. Chris, please tell us a little about yourself in exactly thirty-five words.

Chris: Born in Glasgow, smuggled to Canada as a wee lad, then raised between Calgary and various spots on the west coast. Wrote a book one time, and I sure would like to do it again.

TST: The The Nightshade Cabal  is a fine piece of work, we’d love to see a sequel Chop, chop!! Okay, let’s get right to the greedy guts of it. What does Avarice mean to you? Is it inherently a bad thing? How does that play into your story of excessive desire found in this glitzy volume?

Chris: I don’t necessarily think a desire for wealth is a bad thing. It’s like any emotion or impulse; what you do with the impulse defines who you are as a person. When it transcends desire and becomes greed which compels one to set aside their morality to sop up more wealth than they could ever need without the least care for the damage they’ve done along the way, that’s avarice. The Envoy’s titular “blessing” is pure lucre in exchange for services rendered. But what exactly are the people of Port Urabus doing to receive this blessing?

TST: Nefarious deeds. It’s always nefarious deeds. Not that we have an issue with deeds of this sort. In fact, it’s kinda our thing.

Tell us about a time you desperately desired something and went to potentially unexpected lengths to acquire it.

Chris: I needed a new heel for my shoe. So, I decided to go to Morganville, which is what they called Shelbyville in those da… oh, wait, that was something else entirely. Uh… let’s see. Well, there was this one time — I must’ve been five or six years old — when I was playing Transformers with the kid next door. He had brought over some wonky off-brand toy that wasn’t even a Go-Bot. I think this thing was a slot machine, with arms and a head you would pop out to make the robot. Its face was a sticker, and I don’t even remember if it had legs. Anyway, for some reason I decided I had to have it, and convinced the kid I had the same one and that he must’ve left his at home before he came over to play. When my dad noticed it later he asked where it had come from, and I fessed up. I think I was actually proud of my deception, but my dad made me walk over to the neighbour’s house to return the toy and admit my guilt. I was grounded for a week, and even though I couldn’t tell you that kid’s name now if you put a gun to my head, I still feel bad about what I did to this day. What can I say? I grew up to be a total hall monitor.

TST: Just imagine who you would have become if you had gotten away with it. We’re thinking Charles Montgomery Plantagenet Schicklgruber “Monty” Burns. “Loose the hounds!”

Can you see any of your characters popping up again in other stories?

Chris: There will definitely be more Nathaniel Garaven stories. He’s a character who is always on the move, and there always seems to be another scrape to get into in the next town. ‘The Envoy’s Blessing’ isn’t actually the first Garaven story I’ve written, just the first one that was ready to send out into the world. I also suspect we haven’t seen the last of Lee Cane… and who can say where and when the Envoys themselves might pop up again?

TST: Excellent! We’d love to read more Nathaniel and/or Cane stories.

Give us a sentence (or short paragraph) from your story that you feel knocked it out of the park.

Chris: I’m really partial to this exchange between Garaven and Howard Sutter:

“Seems wherever I go these days, I find another dead friend.”

“You sound like a man with revenge on his mind,” Sutter said. If the barman had an opinion about that it didn’t show on his face. He had a stern, wind-worn look; Garaven had seen the same stolid expression on working men and women up and down both coasts. Not the kind of man to abide nonsense.

Garaven shook his head in answer. “I’ve got no stomach for vengeance, Mr. Sutter. I’ve tasted violence too damned many times, and it always comes back up sour.” He drained the last of his coffee. “All I’m after is the truth.”

TST: Such delightful phrasing! West coast gold rush and cosmic cults. Want to tell us a little about your research process? 

Chris: A lot of it was making sure I had things like timeline and modes of travel right. I’m a stickler for those sorts of details. I’ve set the Garaven stories into a rather tight window in history, roughly fifteen years after the end of the Civil War. I even spent a fair bit of time working out how the Envoy’s “blessing” might actually work as a physiological process, but those details didn’t make it into the finished story. I was reading a lot of cosmic horror stories around the time the ideas that became this story were rattling around in my head, so I think that definitely influenced the way this one went. Ultimately, though, the story started from the image of big gross larvae living under people’s skin, and I knew I wanted folk to accept them willingly. It wasn’t until I heard about the theme for this anthology that the reason why anyone would go along with it clicked into place.

TST: What’s next for you? Any forthcoming releases, hatchings, or germinations we should be on the lookout for? Or, any recent delights you’d love to flog?

Chris: I don’t have much on the way right now, unfortunately. I’ve got a few short stories out there in submission limbo, and I’m still working away on my second novel. Hopefully 2023 will offer a few chances to celebrate! But I’d be remiss if I didn’t take a moment to thank Sarah and Rob for having me in this book. It’s a true honour to be included alongside some great writers whose work I admire the heck out of, and you’ve been amazing folks to work with on this project. Cheers!

TST: Thanks Chris! And folks, don’t forget to check out Terrace V: Penitent’s Gold, available on Amazon.com and Amazon.ca and under whatever rocks and tiny libraries you might find stray books.

About the Author:

Chris Patrick Carolan is an author, editor, and hovercraft enthusiast, originally from Glasgow but currently based in Calgary, Alberta. He writes science fiction, fantasy , horror , and steampunk, though he has also been known to turn to crime to make ends meet. Crime fiction, that is. The Nightshade Cabal was published by Parliament House Press in 2020 and was a finalist for the Crime Writers of Canada Awards of Excellence ‘Best First Novel’ award. He can be found on Twitter as @cpcwrites but consider this fair warning… it’s mostly just wisecracks about McNuggets.

Dreams of Avarice: “Hares and Hounds” by Lindsay Thomas

~ Noggy
Penitents Gold

BETWEEN TWO FLAMES WITH THE SEVENTH TERRACE

Thank you for joining us for another installment of Between Two Flames — where we place authors in our hot seat for what surely must feel like an eternity of environmentally unfriendly gas grilling.

Today we welcome Lindsay Thomas, author of “Hares and Hounds”, a thought provoking tale of why it’s never a good idea to hang out with your co-workers, from our latest Purgatorio Tower’s book Terrace V: Penitent’s Gold. Lindsay, please tell us a little about yourself in exactly thirty-five words.

Lindsay: Master Gardener, introverted-event-planner, Buddhist practitioner residing on Treaty 7 territory; frequent memory lapses; occasional attempts at overcoming imposter syndrome may result in shitty first drafts or planting more tomatoes depending on the season. London Fog.      

TST: Gardener? Lola definitely requires tips on keeping arboreal entities alive. Alright, let’s get right to the greedy guts of it. What does Avarice mean to you? Is it inherently a bad thing? How does that play into your story of excessive desire found in this glitzy volume? 

Lindsay: Embracing our full range of human emotions can go a long way in self-awareness and healing. Avarice, however, is desire on steroids; the obsession with “more” is all-consuming: It’s a source of suffering that cannot be sated and devours those who choose to remain in ignorance. Kevin, seriously, get a hobby – model trains, ceramics, something.

TST: Ha! Damn you Kevin… And anyone named Kevin. Or with Kevin adjacent names.

Confession Booth: Tell us about a time (real, embellished, or completed fabricated) that you (or, y’know, a friend) desperately desired something and went to unexpected lengths to acquire it. 

Lindsay: Made by Marcus’ Sea Salt and Goat’s Milk Caramel Ice Cream. No other ice cream exists to me now that I have sampled this sorcery. It is the greatest ice cream, the only ice cream, the ice cream to end all ice creams. They have three locations in Calgary so I can’t exactly say I have to go to “great lengths” to get it unless we’re counting driving down 17th during rush hour. Not very exciting? I know. I revel in apathy most of the time.  

TST: Mmm, Made by Marcus is fabulous. We’re, of course, partial to Lemon Curd Blueberry. And 17th is a god awful place to traverse and parks at times. So it counts!

Can you see any of your characters popping up again in other stories? 

Lindsay: Hares and Hounds could easily send me down a rabbit hole of world-building. Kevin’s story is a brutal reality that’s waiting to be smoked out; one that’s only a minor hop from our daily 6:00 news. We know Kevin’s origin story, and I might be sniffing around a backstory for Mikey. I guess we’ll see what gets pulled from the top hat in the coming months. 

TST: Excellent! Now’s the time to show off. Give us a sentence (or short paragraph) from your story that you feel knocked it out of the park.

Lindsay: Rereading something I’ve written is close to a nightmare, but I’ll indulge you this once.

I can’t claim to be bored. Boredom would be something; a sentient recognition of time, a shiver, a stirring of breath against skin, anything, something.

But this. This is nothing.

A monotone haze of tedious mediocrity arranged in consecutive order.

TST: Love it. Rolls off the occipital lobe and straight right into the cerebellum.

Can you tell us a little about how you came up with this story or your creative process?

Lindsay: My initial idea was to do something about the seven deadly sins, but I realized that I didn’t care enough to write about that. So the idea evolved into something about a scavenger hunt, but I’m really not clever enough to come up with clues that the reader would find challenging but would still make sense. I suppose what I’m saying is that I got lazy so I stopped overthinking and started writing. A novel idea. 

TST: Always the best way. Overthinking leads to starting a small horror press — and boom, you’re getting backed over by a Pontiac Aztec for suggesting Christmas anthologies. What’s next for you? Any forthcoming releases, hatchings, or germinations we should be on the lookout for? Or, any recent grim delights you’d love to flog?

Lindsay: My great-grandmother going back several generations was one of the women murdered as a witch in the Salem Witch Trials. I’ve had an idea fermenting for a while – something that ties her experiences through the lens of generational trauma. But do I have the attention span to research historical fiction? Let me know if you know the answer because I don’t. 

TST: Witches! We look forward to reading that. Thank you, Lindsay! And folks, don’t forget to check out Terrace V: Penitent’s Gold, available on Amazon.com and Amazon.ca and under whatever rocks and tiny libraries you might find stray books.

About the Author:

Hailing from the deepest bowels of Alberta, Lindsay Thomas traversed the craggy depths of Europe and Asia before bumbling her way into Calgary after The Great Personal Upheaval of 2007. In 2022 she bumbled her way back out again with an unexpected relocation to Bragg Creek, where she resides with her spouse and many canine companions. A perpetual student, Lindsay has degrees in theatre and psychology , and is currently studying the terrestrial art of horticulture. She is a tender of gardens and composer of nonsense who spends her time finding more questions than answers.

Dreams of Avarice: “Pieces of Prue” by Chris Marrs

~ Noggy
Penitents Gold

BETWEEN TWO FLAMES WITH THE SEVENTH TERRACE

Thank you for joining us for another installment of Between Two Flames — where we place authors in our hot seat for what surely must feel like an eternity of environmentally unfriendly gas grilling.

TST: Today we welcome Chris Marrs, author of “Pieces of Prue”, a thought provoking tale of having too much skin in the game of rags to riches from our latest Purgatorio Tower’s book Terrace V: Penitent’s Gold. Chris, please tell us a little about yourself in exactly thirty-five words.

Chris: Before I get into the all about me part, I wanted to say thanks to extraordinary Sarah L. Pratt and Rob Bose for including “Pieces of Prue” in PENITENT’S GOLD. Chris lives in Calgary, Alberta.

TST: Thanks for writing us such a fabulous story. Alright, let’s get right to the greedy guts of it. What does Avarice mean to you? Is it inherently a bad thing? How does that play into your story of excessive desire found in this glitzy volume?

Chris: I feel anything in its excessive form isn’t likely to end up being a good thing for all involved. While noodling what to write about for this anthology, I read some interesting articles on greed and the brain. The basic idea presented was in the beginning the chase and subsequent gains can be exciting and the dopamine hit of the acquiring intoxicating. And like anything that gives you a rush, over time you need more and more of that thing to achieve the same result. I started thinking what would happen if there were a couple and one person needed to sacrifice something of themselves for the other to gain the wealth. Would they both strive for more and more once the initial rush dissipated? Would they both put a stop to it once the cost of the sacrifice became too high?

TST: It’s a fascinating question. And all too often what starts out as easy and simple and exciting takes a dark turn as human nature digs in and takes over.

Confession Booth: Tell us about a time (real, embellished, or completed fabricated) that you (or, y’know, a friend) desperately desired something and went to unexpected lengths to acquire it.

Chris: Once upon a few years shy of a couple of decades, I was to play the lead in my theatre group’s Spring performance. Rumor had it a couple of scouts from Vancouver were going to be in the audience. My understudy really, really, really wanted my role and even more so once she heard about the scouts. In the days leading up to the dress rehearsal, she did everything to try and get rid of me. Little “accidents’, malicious gossip, petty theft, you name it. The day of the dress rehearsal, though, she seemed to have a change of heart and offered me an olive branch in the form of a piece of pizza. She brought it to me while I was in the dressing room for a final costume fitting. Said it was one of the last slices so to apologize for being a bitch, she saved it for me. I accepted it. What can I say, I was trusting and famished. It was a long day. Now I’m not saying she did anything to it but she was heard snickering in a stall in the girls bathroom beforehand. And I was the only one who appeared to have gotten food poisoning. Unfortunately for her, I rallied  before curtain call.

TST: No good deed goes unpunished. No, that’s not right. What goes around comes around? One reaps what one sows? Gotta hope at least.

Can you see any of your characters popping up again in other stories?

Chris: I can see the door and what lays behind it coming up in another story. There’s a whisper coming from it that says there’s more to explore.

TST: Excellent. There’s definitely something both wonderful and terrible lurking there, we’d love to read more.

Now’s the time to show off. Give us a sentence (or short paragraph) from your story that you feel knocked it out of the park.

Chris: The opening sentence:

Unlike Bluebeard’s wife, Prue knew exactly what lay behind the locked door.

TST: Love it! So intriguing, it had us instantly.

Can you tell us a little about how you came up with this story or your creative process?

Chris: I’m one of those pantser types so usually it’s the characters that speak to me first. Then, as I’m imagining the characters, a what if, sometimes two, presents itself. Once I have the characters and the what if, I sit at my desk and see where they will take me. Sometimes nowhere and sometimes in directions I didn’t expect. PIECES OF PRUE was one of those that went in a direction I didn’t expect.

TST: What’s next for you? Any forthcoming releases, hatchings, or germinations we should be on the lookout for? Or, any recent grim delights you’d love to flog?

Chris: November gets to see two stories by me. In addition to PIECES OF PRUE, my story THE FROSTLINGS will be reprinted in Wily Writers Presents Tales of Foreboding edited by E.S. Magill and Bill Bodden. This is the fourth anthology in the Wily Writers Presents series and will be out November 15th. 

Thanks for having me! This was fun despite the hot seat.

TST: Thank you, Chris! And folks, don’t forget to check out Terrace V: Penitent’s Gold, available on Amazon.com and Amazon.ca and under whatever rocks and tiny libraries you might find stray books.

About the Author:

Chris Marrs lives in Calgary, Alberta where it’s a lot drier and colder than the West Coast she’s used to. She’s had short stories published in various anthologies, most notably the Bram Stoker award winning The Library of the Dead (edited by Michael Bailey 2015) and the Bram Stoker award nominated A Darke Fantastique (Edited by Jason Brock 2014). She’s an active member of the Horror Writers Association. You can find her lurking on Facebook at www.facebook.com/chris.marrs.14, on Twitter as @Chris_Marrs, or Instagram as hauntedmarrs.

Dreams of Avarice: “Gold Digger” by Taija Morgan

~ Noggy
Penitents Gold

BETWEEN TWO FLAMES WITH THE SEVENTH TERRACE

Thank you for joining us for another installment of Between Two Flames — where we place authors in our hot seat for what surely must feel like an eternity of environmentally unfriendly gas grilling.

TST: Today we welcome Taija Morgan, author of “Gold Digger”, a thought-provoking tale of why your Last Will and Testament should always contain a few surprises, from our latest Purgatorio Tower’s book Terrace V: Penitent’s Gold. Taija, please tell us a little about yourself in exactly thirty-five words.

Taija: Hi everyone, I’m Taija Morgan. I’m an editor and a horror/thriller/suspense author. Not much to say about myself besides that I love the horror genre. I like to travel and read constantly. High-key ultra introvert.

TST: We love high-key ultra introverts – we should start a club! Oh… right… Maybe it can online. With no video. Anyways… let’s get right to the greedy guts of it. What does Avarice mean to you? Is it inherently a bad thing? How does that play into your story of excessive desire found in this glitzy volume?

Taija: Avarice… Well, this was a fun, challenging topic to write on for this story. As an author, I love sinking my teeth into some hot rage and seething desperation, but I didn’t have a lot to draw from for greed initially. For me, avarice isn’t quite synonymous with greed but rather expands on the standard definition of greed as “I want it all” to become “Not only do I want it all, but I specifically don’t want you to have any of it, just because I say so.” It’s a malicious, calculating, vindictive energy. So, of course, perfect for horror. 

Inherently bad? I don’t think anything is inherently bad, just inherently human. It all depends on how far you take something and in which direction. Avarice can also be something like healthy ambition taken to an ugly extreme. But I love ugly extremes, so that’s what I tried to capture with my own short story in this collection. In Gold Digger, we see a woman struggling with unprocessed grief and a broken heart, and her response to those difficult emotions is to do some pretty stupid, dangerous, gross, and wildly inappropriate things—all in an attempt to hold on to something she’s lost while simultaneously holding on to her self-image as someone who doesn’t care about what she lost, even as it tears her apart.

TST: Good. Bad. Here in the Towers it’s all about the gold, right? So, confession booth: Tell us about a time (real, embellished, or completed fabricated) that you (or, y’know, a friend) desperately desired something and went to unexpected lengths to acquire it.

Taija: *waves vaguely to the current global political climate* I can’t beat that, sorry. The closest example of real, true avarice that I can think of off the top of my head might be that story about Tonya Harding, the figure skater, who disfigured her competitor in order to secure her position as figure-skating top dog. I remember that being on the news when I was a kid. If that’s not a messed-up, super-dark manifestation of avarice, I don’t know what is.

TST: Figure skating is a goddamn vicious sport, I think we can all agree on that. Though Christmas shopping is a close second.

Can you see any of your characters popping up again in other stories?

Taija: Hard to say, since they don’t all make it… But maybe some could!

TST: From beyond the grave! Literally!! Now’s the time to show off. Give us a sentence (or short paragraph) from your story that you feel knocked it out of the cemetery.

Taija: Okay, here’s a line that really cracked me up when I wrote it:

Sterling is wearing an Armani suit, simple lines, a casual “sure, I’m grieving, but I have to catch the next flight to Ibiza with the boys” vibe that Jennifer doesn’t hate.

TST: Horror is all about the fashion—we’ll keep saying that until everyone believes.

Can you tell us a little about how you came up with this story or your creative process?

Taija: Absolutely. I spent ages trying to think of something to fit this theme, and I knew I wanted to center it in some way around a funeral. Funerals provide a really fertile space for people to be on their absolute worst behaviour. People you’d think are the sweetest and calmest in the world can go absolutely rabid with greed at a funeral or just while grieving in general. So I thought, hey, let’s put the “fun” back in “funeral” for this story! From there I crafted some particularly detestable characters to play with and then let them take the reins on the plot. I did do a ton of research for this short story just to be able to convincingly talk about things like fashion and embalming. There are some crazy expensive dresses out there!

TST: You certainly put the fun back into funeral. Such a fabulous story. So, what’s next for you? Any forthcoming releases, hatchings, or germinations we should be on the lookout for? Or, any recent grim delights you’d love to flog?

Taija: Sure! I’ve got another story released Oct 27 in Prairie Witch by Prairie Soul Press that I’m excited about—there’s a haunted train track and a witch, so it’s a lot of fun. And between now and winter I’m expecting the release of two other anthologies, Bad Spirits and Rabbit Hole V, in which I have a short story as well. Hoping to get some novels out in the world next year too, so if you love disturbing horror/thrillers/suspense, you can follow my latest releases by joining my newsletter at www.TaijaMorgan.com or following me across any social media platform. Here’s a list of the most relevant: www.goodreads.com/taija_morgan | www.linkedin.com/in/taija-morgan | www.facebook.com/TaijaMorganAuthor | https://www.instagram.com/taijamorgan/

TST: Thanks Taija! And folks, don’t forget to check out Terrace V: Penitent’s Gold, available on Amazon.com and Amazon.ca and under whatever rocks and tiny libraries you might find stray books.

About the Author:

Taija Morgan is a professional fiction editor with short stories and non-fiction articles published in various anthologies and magazines, such as Opal Writers’ Magazine, the Aurora-nominated Prairie Gothic anthology (2020) and Prairie Witch anthology (2022) from Prairie Soul Press, Tales to Terrify’s horror podcast, and When Words Collide’s In Places Between anthology (2019). She has bachelor’s degrees in psychology and sociology that contribute realism and insight to her dark, twisted fiction.

Dreams of Avarice: “Attachment” by Shane Kroetsch

~ Noggy
Penitents Gold

BETWEEN TWO FLAMES WITH THE SEVENTH TERRACE

Thank you for joining us for another installment of Between Two Flames — where we place authors in our hot seat for what surely must feel like an eternity of environmentally unfriendly gas grilling.

Today we welcome Shane Kroetsch, author of “Attachment” — a thought provoking tale of loss and memory from our latest Purgatorio Tower’s book Terrace V: Penitent’s Gold. Shane, please tell us a little about yourself in exactly thirty-five words.

Shane: I’m a builder of things, real and imagined. My mind rarely stops. I’m always planning, scheming. I write fiction to process the confusing mess that is the human race. I also enjoy word count limitations.

TST: Excellent, nothing better than word count limitations, keeps the bones young. With that out of the way let’s get right to the greedy guts of it. What does Avarice mean to you? Is it inherently a bad thing? How does that play into your story of excessive desire found in this glitzy volume?

Shane: I suppose it boils down to possessions with no purpose to them—acquiring for the sake of acquiring, or having without being able to maintain. Is any of that an inherently bad thing? It can be, but life is built on shades of grey. We are animals with individual values and agency, what is a want to one is a need to another. My opinion is one of many. I took the exploration of avarice in two directions with my story. The idea that greed and love are one and the same, and how far the need for unique possessions can be taken.

TST: It’s an fabulous exploration. And bonus points for setting in the Towers, we loved that. Now tell us about a time you desperately desired something and went to potentially unexpected lengths to acquire it.

Shane: As I move through life, I am heading in the direction of having fewer moving parts, quality takes precedence over quantity, but that hasn’t always been the case. The instance that comes to mind is from the late 2000’s. My year-end bonus was supposed to pay off the loan on my daily driver, instead I used it to buy a fifty-year-old Volkswagen convertible listed on eBay.

TST: Hopefully the VW brought both joy and terror. Or is terror just from old Volvo’s? We can never remember exactly.. Speaking of retreads, can you see any of your characters popping up again in other stories?

Shane: As soon as I say that I’m done with a particular character or story, whether because I think I’ve said what I need to say or I’m simply sick of looking at them, that’s exactly when my mind will wander, and I’ll start building a new story in the same world.

TST: Give us a sentence (or short paragraph) from your story that you feel knocked it out of the park.

Shane: I’m fond of the opening, 

Fernen steps around me as he scans the message scratched into the concrete wall. Fixing his attention on the closing, he pauses.

I hope you are well.

I hope you are unafraid.

Good-fucking-luck with that.

TST: Beautiful! Can you tell us a little about how you came up with this story or your creative process?

Shane: I generally begin with an image or a line of dialogue, then I start digging the story out of the dirt. For this piece I knew a few of the elements that I could or wanted to incorporate as the framework for the world it takes place in is already established. I set the protagonist’s motive early on. I liked the idea of souls as possessions, as currency, but how I got from there to the finished product is a story longer than the piece itself.

TST: What’s next for you? Any forthcoming releases, hatchings, or germinations we should be on the lookout for? Or, any recent delights you’d love to flog?

Shane: It’s been a year of drastic change for me. What comes next is to get back into the business of writing. The plan for 2023 is to relaunch my zombie pandemic trilogy with a new edition, and to finish up a paranormal series that’s been sitting half-finished for too long. So many ideas, so little time.

TST: Thanks Shane! And folks, don’t forget to check out Terrace V: Penitent’s Gold, available on Amazon.com and Amazon.ca and under whatever rocks and tiny libraries you might find stray books.

About the Author:

Shane Kroetsch writes stories to explore the inherent darkness that makes us human and the monsters that haunt our dreams. In his spare time, he builds projects out of old junk, paints watercolour blanket ghosts, and shakes his butt while vinyl spins. In addition to publishing a collection of short fiction and a zombie outbreak trilogy, Shane’s work is featured in Lampblack Books’ The Planchette Volume One: Genesis and the Alexandra Writers’ Center Society’s 40th Anniversary Anthology WonderShift.

You can read more of his writing and keep up to date with his creative shenanigans at ShaneKroetsch.com and @shanekroetsch.

Detonation #23: On Professionalism

~ Lola

You are not special. If nothing else, this is the takeaway. You are not special. I’m not saying you don’t matter as a person or even that your book isn’t any good. Jesus Christ, stop crying… this is the tough love we all need. Lots of folks have written books. Lots of folks have talent. These things are neither rare nor unique. I’ve written books and I promise you I’m loads happier knowing how unspecial I am.

All that is to say that as writers, we need to get over ourselves. Because you know what will serve you better and longer in this biz than any amount of specialness? Professionalism, that’s what.

“But Lola?” you might ask. “Why should I listen to you?”

And the answer is that you probably shouldn’t, but here are a few reasons why you might want to.

  1. Writing professionally for 10yrs with 4 published books
  2. Teaching/Editing professionally for 7 years
  3. Bookseller for 7yrs
  4. Publisher for 4yrs
  5. Wrote a college admission essay for a kid. A freelance gig that, while ethically dubious, got him into Cornell and got me $1000USD

See? Aren’t I special? The answer is no. Always no. But am I qualified to speak to the fundamentals of professional competence as a writer? You bet your sweet ass.

“Cool story, Lola. But maybe you could arrive at your point sometime before 2023?”

Right, I’m getting to it.

While my tentacles bristle at anything deemed to be a rule, I really like the idea of blasting MY rules into stone, so here they are.

Lola Silkysocks’ 10 Commandments of the Professional Writer

  1. Though shalt read all information and guidelines provided by the folks you hope to work with, be they publishers/agents/editors/reviewers/booksellers. Trust me, we know if you haven’t read the material and it displeases us.
  2. Thou shalt acquire basic computer literacy. “I’m not good at computers” will not fly. Get good at them. And trust me, if you have the wherewithal to go on Facebook and spread vaccine misinformation, you can email a high-res image file of your front cover.
  3. Thou shalt not talk shit about rejections on social media, even if they’re anonymized. Rejection is not fun for anyone, but it is part of the job. So be cool.
  4. Thou shalt accept critique gracefully. Once your work is out there, people get to have thoughts about it. Any thoughts at all. My advice? Stay off Goodreads.
  5. Thou shalt not hassle people for reviews. I get it, algorithms and all that. You can ask politely, but if someone bought your book, they’re already supporting you, so don’t be a dick about it.
  6. Thou shalt read. I’ve said this before, at length, and with a lot of profanity. But read, or listen, to a fucking book once in a while. I’m quite serious. We all have ADHD and dyslexia, but find a way. Reading is essential professional development for a writer.
  7. Thou shalt support others. Locally and virtually. Go to literary events, tweet up your fellow inkslingers, spend some money at an indie bookstore because they are a vital part of your cultural community.
  8. Thou shalt learn to compose a clear, concise, and pleasant email. It AMAZES me, ASTONISHES me, and has me UTTERLY SHITTING MY BRAIN how many grown-ass adults don’t know how to communicate professionally by email. I could write a whole detonation about this. I still might.
  9. Thou shalt meet thy deadlines. Yes, life happens and we’re all doughy flawed humans blah blah blah. But deadlines aren’t put in place for funsies. As the name would suggest, projects live and die on the basis of deadlines, so the second you’re aware that a deadline is in peril, you communicate that shit.
  10. Thou shalt cultivate the ability to speak in public. Don’t give me that look. I get it. Extroverts suck so why would you want to be one? But this is something you must be able to do. A professional writer gives readings, answers questions, and has the capacity to exist in front of a crowd without fainting. I’m not asking you to change your fundamental nature, just like…suspend it for half an hour. Do what you have to do to make it happen. Don’t torture your audience by making them sweat through your anxiety attack.

Don’t be overwhelmed, this is good news! These commandments require no talent at all and will ensure you’re putting your best foot forward in a business that turns entirely on first impressions. Maybe some writers are special. For sure some are lucky. But whatever pacts they’ve made with their devils, the fact remains that nothing will shut a door in your face faster than behaving like a boob. You want to be a pro? Then goddamn well act like one.

Rob’s Spring Sparks

~ Noggy

So much to read and watch, so little time to review. While I wish I could blast out a full write up of everything, I’m going to go with the highlights of what I enjoyed over the last couple of months.

Books

Cult of the Spider Queen by S.A. Sidor (Arkham Horror)

Current read in progress and so far an enjoyable 1920’s jungle romp with all the cosmic horror trimmings. I’m a huge fan of Sidor’s first Arkham Horror novel, The Last Ritual, and his two supernatural-pulp adventures from Angry Robot, Fury From the Tomb and The Beast of Nightfall Lodge, a series I hope he continues.

When Things Get Dark: Stories inspired by Shirley Jackson edited by Ellen Datlow (Blackstone Audio)

Current listen in progress and after the first few stories, altogether excellent. Lots of family, and dining rooms, and creepiness.

X’s for Eyes by Laird Barron (Bizarro Pulp Press)

I’d read the first part of the book “We Smoke the Northern Lights” in The Gods of HP Lovecraft and was excited to finally read the second half of the novella and see what happens. Pure awesomeness of course. Love the Tooms brothers and their weird, wide, universe which feels a lot like the Venture Brothers with cosmic horror replacing superheroes.

King Solomon’s Mines by H. Rider Haggard (InAudio)

I hadn’t read this book since I was young and my main recollections of it were distorted by the 1985 Richard Chamberlain movie, which is more comedic parody than faithful adaption. The book is far superior, albeit steeped in damn horrible colonialism where every non white is a savage and gunning down herds of elephants is considered heroic – definitely overpowers the bones of the story which are about friendships and family.

Pickman’s Gallery edited by Matthew Carpenter (Ulthar Press)

I always loved the character of Richard Upton Pickman from a couple of Lovecraft’s stories and dug this collection continuing his legacy. I especially liked that the stories weren’t necessarily about him, but in many cases adjacent or referential. Great fun.

The Fisherman by John Langan (Word Horde)

I’m of two minds about this book. On one hand I loved it – loved the world, loved the mythology which really reminded me of my favourite Michael Shea stories. The structure, on the other hand, was unexpected. I think I was hoping for more back and forth between the times and less the three act narrative. But, as Sarah says, I’m horribly impatient, so take that complaint as a personal preference. Definitely an amazing story!

Rules for Monsters by Michael Minnis (Lovecraft eZine Press)

So many stories, and I hear there will be another volume – Michael is a prolific author indeed. While not every story is a winner, I enjoyed many of them and loved some, especially where he didn’t directly homage or extend classic Lovecraft stories.

Cthulhu Reloaded by David Conyers

Some entertaining military cosmic horror. Major Harrison Peel is a solid character and his adventures take him across many Lovecraftian locals and pit him against even more Lovecraftian monsters and gods. A fun page turner and I’m looking forward to picking up and reading the next couple of books in the series.

Mr. Cannyharme by Michael Shea (Hippocampus Press)

Michael Shea has always been one of my favourite authors and a serious inspiration for my own writing. I’ve read pretty much everything he wrote and was delighted to learn that this novel existed and would be published (and I hear there may be yet another lost Shea manuscript out there!!). Mr. Cannyharme was written in 81 and is a homage/adaption of Lovecraft’s “The Hound”. Loved it.

Movies

Possum (A Sarah pick)

Holy shit this was bleak. And British. If that’s not a genre, it should be. I’m not at all a fan of horrible creepy puppets so yeah… The plot? Sure. Well, there’s this dude named Phillip who used to be a puppeteer and ends up back at his old house with his weird old uncle. Phillip has old, deep issues. And a horrible creepy spider puppet. I can’t even… thanks for nightmares Sarah. Pro tip: Never go home with a puppet.

The Deeper You Dig (A Rob pick)

We’d watched Hellbender and enjoyed it, and I was listening to a podcast where they talked about this being the Adams Family’s (not THE Addams Family, though I kinda wonder, hmm) second movie. So we hunted down The Deeper You Dig and weren’t disappointed. Pretty much the same cast and with a similar witchy/psychic themes, which we loved. The plot? After her daughter dies and haunts the killer, her mom, a psychic, tries to figure out what’s happening. Pro tip? Don’t sled in the dark in a blizzard across a road.

Jug Face (A Rob pick)

Another movie I heard about from a podcast (The Lovecraft eZine Podcast?) that sounded intriguing. Like, what’s not interesting about devout backwoods hillbillies worshiping a malevolent/benevolent pit that’s probably some kind of forest demon god? Hits all the right notes in my book. The Plot? The Pit wants what the Pit wants. And it’s not the friendly sort of blood filled pit that everyone likes. Let’s just say it’s best to obey it’s demands or you lose your intestines.. Pro tip: Don’t sleep with your brother.

Covid-19: A Spiritual Journey

~ Lola

Noggy: We’re really calling it that?

Lola: Yes, shut up.

Noggy: Okay, but let the record show, you laid your spores in me. Unclean woman.

Lola: It’s my version of trapping you with a baby.

Noggy: Alien parasites. And not the good kind that everyone likes.

Lola: We have a review to write, quit stalling.

N: Fine! (cut to mumbling). It all started when I was minding my own business, living a life of selfless virtue, building orphanages and rescuing baby birds fallen from their nests—

L: And I went to Costco, maskless, like a dumbass.

N: A few days later we went for a four-hour run wherein you aerosolized me with Kirkland brand covid, and the next morning you tested positive, destroying my innocent little life.

L: You didn’t have to invite me to quarantine with you.

N: Did you miss the part where I’m selfless? And didn’t want your family turned into transhuman jelly?

L: Let’s just do the review, okay?

Day 1: You are a SUPERNOVA!

L: I slacked work with my rapid test selfie and soon enough several people were typing: condolences, concern, well-meaning banishments. And I’m all, “I got this, boo. I feel fine.”

N: Then you came over to WFH, which you did for about an hour before faceplanting on your laptop. I like to call this part ‘the sickening.’

L: Turns out, not so fine.

N: I tested negative but had a nap anyway. One can never have enough naps. Pretty sure that’s in the Purgatory manual.

L: Then we watched that show about WeWork…for some reason.

N: Remind me why we’re supposed to care about rich white people problems? Rich whites who got richer after their shenanigans? Where’s the comeuppance?

Day 2: Of Which Lola Has Little Memory

N: You poured a 5oz slug of brandy in your Neo Citron, remember?

L: I think we’ve already established that I don’t.

N: I was still testing negative but starting to show minimal signs of plague, though to be honest, I think they were sympathetic at this point.

L: You made me go for a walk in the middle of nowhere. I was literally dying and you made me exercise.

N: It’s easier to explain a body in the wild and not stuffed under one’s couch.

L: Especially that couch.

N: Hey, it may be the worst couch ever but at least we discovered the filthy delight that is Human Resources on Netflix while expiring on said couch. Literal bags of assholes.

L: The show, not the couch. I think.

Day 3: Noggy Tests Positive

L: Finally.

N: Late evening and bam, murdered.

L: We also did an episode of Between Two Flames for Rebekah Raymond’s virtual book launch. I’m told we did this. I’m told it was brilliant.

N: So that’s why I woke up wearing sunglasses and a vest…

Day 4: Cracow Monsters!

N: It was the worst of times, it was was the worstest of times.

L: Yeah, but soup. Don’t forget the soup.

N: True. Magic soup from the soup fairies. Bless their souls. I watched from the window as they placed the bowls in the symbolic configuration, mystically protected from the dark water feral bunny god, before making the proper ritualistic gestures and vanishing from whence they came.

L: I’m pretty sure that was the arcane cabal from the Netflix show.

N: Vietnamese, not Polish.

L: What the hell are we talking about again?

N: Dying.

L: Right. The Big Sleep.

Day 5: It’s always darkest before dawn

L: I think I feel…better? Or maybe I’ve turned…

N: Aren’t you glad I made you exercise?

L: I went a little easier on you, because you had man-covid.

Day 6: In Which Lola is Paroled from Covid Jail

N: And I was still holed up in my midden of diseased blankets and used Kleenex

L: Like a rat. While I N95’d and went to Dairy Queen for Blizzards. It was glorious…until I realized I couldn’t taste a damn thing. It wound up taking three days to eat.

N: That was also the day we aired out the place. Neither of us could smell either but I’m sure it was something akin to a festering hockey bag.

Days 7-10: Noggy turns the corner

N: And Lola decides she’s in the right headspace to get a large tattoo

L: Not as impulsive as it sounds

N: But the leaking black goo! Or was it black blood? You had turned.

L: Turned a corner.

N: Soon enough we had the energy to get drunk and yell at the television

L: Then I went home. I was actually…sad.

N: I thought we’d kill each other in quarantine, but I didn’t hate it, aside from the fatally diseased part.

Overall Impressions

So, what have we learned from Ten Days in Purgatory?

That you always come out of Costco with more than you planned. Always.

5/5

P.S. 8 weeks later. We’re not saying long covid, but we’re not-not saying it…Jesus Christ.

Detonation #22: Why So Serious?

~ Noggy

It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, right? Nope. Not since 1963. If they remade that classic Spencer Tracy flick now, it would totally be called It’s a Sad, Sad, Sad, Sad World. A world choked with endless wastelands of gut tearing grief. No joy to be found. Not in the important things like five-gallon pails of hagfish slime lube, not in the minor things like senior discount McDonald’s coffee nursed for sixteen hours. Instead of a madcap, zany, over the top flick where greedy idiots rush around in search of cash buried under a big W, it’d be about a bunch of bullied earless albino orphans desperate to find both their identities and lost parents who abandoned them due to crushing poverty and substance abuse and who died horribly in a Moldovan prison carving literal regrets into soviet era concrete with toothbrush shivs fashioned from their own femurs.

I’m going to write the novel version to that one, by the way. Probably snag myself a Pulitzer or Booker or, heaven forbid, an Aurora if I’m unlucky. People will snap it up, devour every wretched, miserable word, comforted by the knowledge that they aren’t the only ones suffering in this cold, terrible planet. Commiserating. People love to commiserate. It’s become a top tier hobby, right up with doomscrolling and trying to find something to watch on Amazon Prime video.

So… while I’m not saying that the world’s Boomer mangled and storm ravaged corpse isn’t becoming a forlorn, dreadful hellscape, cause it most certainly is, what I’m saying is I’m fucking tired of reading about it. The last two years have been rough for a lot of people, do we really need to dwell on the emotional wrecks we’ve all become? I say NO! Cast off those chains of loss and grief and read (and write) something less forlorn, whether it be cheesy pulp or twisted erotica or weird fiction involving combines and Mexican Mennonite tacos.

Now I can tell you’re totally thinking “but Noggy, that’s the shit you write. Are you sure this isn’t just a cheap plug disguised as a timely rant?” Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. But my friendly neighborhood psychoanalyst bar tender assures me that at my discount McDonald’s coffee age, self-promotion and yelling at clouds are valid coping strategies. And my writing can’t sell itself. Apparently…

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again, so many goddamn loss and grief riddled books feel like award bait these days. And yes, I’m sure I’m exaggerating, but those are the books that get all the press and attention and critical acclaim. Lola loves them, of course. She leaves them lying around to tempt me into reading them, talks about the exquisite writing and fabulous depth. How the authors turn a despondent phrase. How they rock gloomy readings. How they dress like 70’s era drapes. Flashes her… exquisite covers.  I never fall for her tricks. Grief and loss. Loss and grief. Real god damn life!

No thanks.

I’ve had my fill of real god damn life and I’m hungry for Mexican Mennonite tacos. And you should be as well.

Today’s non-grief filled Detonation happy hour(s) cocktail is the appropriately named A Short Trip To Hell.

  • 2 parts Peach Schnapps
  • 2 parts Strawberry Schnapps
  • 2 parts Wildberry Schnapps
  • 1 part Jagermeister
  • 8 parts Energy drink of Choice.

Shake the energy drink and Schnapps in a cocktail shaker filled with ice. Strain into a tumbler. Put the Jagermeister into a shot glass, drop in the shot, and take the express elevator to Hell.

2021 – The Great Diaspora

~ Noggy

N: LOLA!
L: I’m literally right here. Sitting next to you. You don’t need to yell.
N: But I like yelling. This is a very yelly year.
L: You’re not wrong. Remember our 2020 year in review?
N: Should I? I told you nobody reads these. Including us.
L: Something about 2021 asking 2020 to hold her beer?
N: Fuck, so it’s our fault? Why can’t we just keep our gob holes shut?
L: It is, we can’t, we didn’t, and it happened.
N: Not sure if 2021 was the best of times or the worst of times, but it was… times.
L: Let’s start with the best…
…
…
N: Lola?
L: Shh, I’m thinking… Never mind, better to just puke meatballs on the wall and see what sticks.
N: … we said we would never speak of that again.
L: shrug emoji.
N: Let’s try some new categories.

THE LITERARY

THE (MIS)ADVENTUROUS

  • Cocktails!!
  • First Vaccination. When everyone was getting the Pfizer Cadillac, we hopped a ride on the AZ hillbilly hay truck down a road full of potholes.
  • Witchcraft. Look, we trapped an Elemental in a candle. It’s still there. In the back of a drawer. We don’t know what to do. Help us… please.
  • Found a butt shaped rock on a full moon run. Serendipity.
  • The bug in Lola’s eye. ROFL!.
  • Tetanus shots.
  • Second vaccination. Yay, Pfizer!
  • Skinny dipping in the river. While high. Wearing dress shoes. Coming back to find our clothes covered in slugs.
  • Running the Blackspur Ultra in Kimberly. In the rain. In the cold. Uphill both ways. Epic chafing. Meatballs. Meatballs, in reverse. 
  • Running the Lost Soul Ultra in Lethbridge. In the rain. In the cold. On fucking pavement.
  • Noggy running the Whistler Alpine Meadows Ultra, with acute Achilles bursitis.
  • Third vaccination. Are we done yet?
  • Shockwave therapy! It’s like fun, but with extra medieval torture.
  • Dogma Logs (see image above). 

THE CELEBRATORY

  • Cocktails!!!
  • Noggy’s birthday. Cannoli in a parking lot.
  • Wedding Anniversaries. Latest and last.
  • Living our best lives in parental basements and decommissioned love hotels.
  • Shrek-themed birthday party for Lola. Random, yet utterly perfect.
  • Cursed pies.
  • Weird Thanksgiving.
  • Betty Lou’s Library speakeasy followed by dinner with the Russian mob.
  • Taylor’s Version everything! Lola is obsessed. Noggy will sing along three sidecars deep.
  • Solstice: sneaking in a yule log into Fairmont Hotel #1, praying to Hecate, cayenne pepper in the carpet, poking our noses where they don’t belong, five bourbons and an eggnog at the Tipsy Elf.
  • Omicron!
  • Weirder Christmas
  • Dead Week: the most wonderful time of the year

2022 SNEAK PEEK

  • Naked Snow Angels (there may be pictures).
  • Roofied by Lola’s dad and his weed infused absinthe punch.
  • Hell Hath no Sorrow Like a Woman Haunted by R.J. Joseph and Terrace V: Penitent’s Gold curated by us!
  • Lawyer fees.
  • Vaccinations 4, 5, and 6?
  • Squamish Ultra and the Triple WAMmy with like fifty thousand feet of vert.
  • Hopefully some writing.

N: Soooo. No way we should have survived.
L: Yet here we are.
N: Are we though?
L: Where ever here is. In spite of it all, I’m still happier now than I was a year ago.
N: That’s the literal four thousand cocktails speaking, and maybe that weed punch.
L: I predict the first half of 2022 will be like the signature Icelandic shark dish Hákarl, it’s gotta ferment five months before it’s non-toxic.
N: We’ll wash it down with Arby’s and extra-large DQ Blizzards come July.

Forbidden Fruits: “Vomitus Bacchanalius” by Mike Thorn

~ Noggy
T6 Forbidden Fruit

BETWEEN TWO FLAMES WITH THE SEVENTH TERRACE

With the release of Forbidden Fruit, the second (or sixth, depending your reckoning) instalment in our Purgatorio anthology series, we are inviting our fabulous contributors between the flames to get their hot, gluttonous take on their story and the book and life in general, such that it is in these end days.

Today we welcome Mike Thorn, author of “Vomitus Bacchanalius”, a tale of ultimate culinary and dinner party pleasure gone delightfully sideways. Mike, please tell us a little about yourself in exactly twenty-seven words. 

Mike: I am Mike Thorn, author of Shelter for the Damned, Darkest Hours, and “Vomitus Bacchanalius.” Here are some more words to meet the specified number of twenty-seven. 

TST: Specificity is important and those extra twelve words won’t hurt anyone, right? Maybe we shouldn’t ask. In fact, forget we said anything.

All right, let’s get right to the oozing meat of it. What does gluttony mean to you? Is it inherently a bad thing? How does that play into your story of excessive consumption found in this unwholesome volume? 

Mike: I was about to to say that gluttony is okay in moderation, but upon consideration, gluttony is, by definition, about the lack of moderation. With “Vomitus Bacchanalius,” I wanted to depict the celebration of over-consumption among privileged elites, and the incumbent exploitation therein.  

TST: Damn privileged elites! We’re never sad when they get what’s coming to them, even with the collateral damage inherent in these sorts of… situations. Now, tell us about a time you overindulged, like really stuffed yourself silly…with anything. 

Mike: One of my very earliest memories is of a giant bag of Jujubes that some unsuspecting adult left within my toddler-fingers’ reach. My baby id took hold, and I started cramming fistfuls of them into my mouth, barely taking the time to chew. 

The memory is hazy, but I know someone caught me in the act and stopped me from choking … maybe the Heimlich maneuver was involved? In any event, this was an early lesson about moderation (there’s that word again).  

TST: Mmm, Jububes. Now we’re hungry. We just did an trail ultramarathon and they had them at an aid station in the middle of nowhere. Saved our damned lives! Moderation? It has its place. Probably.

Which of your characters could you see popping up again in other stories? 

Mike: Many of my protagonists don’t make it past the final page… but I have a feeling that I haven’t seen the last of Cate, from “The Auteur” (published inDarkest Hours).  

TST: We’d love to see Cate again! She’s a survivor. So, since we conscripted a recipe from you, tell us about your usefulness in the kitchen. Does preparing food get your creative gravy gushing? 

Mike: I enjoy cooking! For me, it’s a good form of distraction, especially if the meal I’m preparing is comprised of several moving parts—I totally zone into the task at hand. I have a few go-to dishes I tend to make often—tofu scramble; Beyond Meat spaghetti sauce; seitan sausage with mashed potatoes, mushroom gravy, and greens; and a rice bowl with roasted sweet potatoes, sauteed spinach, pinto beans stewed in fresh tomatoes, and tahini-miso sauce.  

TST: Drool. God, we’re so hungry now, ravenous actually. We’re tempted to kidnap you and make you cook for us. We didn’t just put that in writing, did we? Damn. Oh well, it’ll be worth a couple of years of fugitive status.

While we ponder that: Roman orgy, aliens, and effluent. Would you tell us a little about your research process?  

Mike: This story took a while to gestate. When you folks graciously invited me to contribute, I took some time reflecting on the theme of gluttony, and it took me a while to “find” “Vomitus Bacchanalius.” 

I spent some time perusing the Internet for myths and stories involving gluttony, and I came across an article describing popular misconceptions about the ancient Roman vomitorium (commonly misperceived as a place where revelers barfed mid-celebration to clear stomach space). It dawned on me suddenly that I could explore gluttony through an elaborate Bacchanalian orgy held by members of high society. The genre elements fell into place soon after that.

At the time, I was doing some preliminary research for an essay, and I was fully immersed in Georges Bataille’s Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939. Bataille’s ideas definitely found their way into this story, as did the Schopenhauerian concepts that undergird so much Black Metal Theory.  

TST: We loved it and are so glad you took the time to craft such a wonderfully horrible story.

So, what’s next for you? Any forthcoming releases, hatchings, or germinations we should be on the lookout for? 

Mike: My second short story collection, Peel Back and See, comes out from JournalStone this October. I think it might be the darkest book I’ve written.  

TST: We are so looking forward to it. Thanks, Mike!

And folks, don’t forget to check out Terrace VI: Forbidden Fruit, available on Amazon.com and Amazon.ca and under whatever rocks you might find stray books.

About the Author:

Mike Thorn is the author of the novel Shelter for the Damned and the short story collection Darkest Hours. His fiction has appeared in numerous magazines, anthologies and podcasts, including Vastarien, Dark Moon Digest, The NoSleep Podcast, and Tales to Terrify. His film criticism has been published in MUBI Notebook, The Film Stage, and In Review Online. 

Visit his website mikethornwrites.com, or connect with him on Twitter @MikeThornWrites.

Forbidden Fruits: “Fat Apocalypse” by Robin van Eck

~ Noggy
T6 Forbidden Fruit

BETWEEN TWO FLAMES WITH THE SEVENTH TERRACE

With the release of Forbidden Fruit, the second (or sixth, depending your reckoning) instalment in our Purgatorio anthology series, we are inviting our fabulous contributors between the flames to get their hot, gluttonous take on their story and the book and life in general, such that it is in these end days.

Today we welcome Robin van Eck, author of “Fat Apocalypse”, a tale of a future that’s let itself go. A… lot. Robin, please tell us a little about yourself in exactly twenty-seven words.

Robin: Writer. Mom. Pet lover. Book reader – of all things horror, weird, contemporary. Face it, I’ll read most anything. And write just as eclectically. Don’t believe in limits. 

TST: Limits are definitely best ignored. Sooo…. what does gluttony mean to you? Is it inherently a bad thing? How does that play into your story of excessive consumption found in this unwholesome volume?

Robin: Gluttony. An over-indulgence of anything good or bad. Is excess a bad thing? Too much money?  I’d like to roll in money. Who wouldn’t? Too much food? Well, I do hate that bloated feeling after a really good meal. Too much love and forbidden fantasies? We all need fantasies. A glutton for punishment? I guess that depends on the punishment and what it’s for. See fantasies. Alcohol and drugs…ok, maybe some bad can come from excess.

In Fat Apocalypse, the world has gone to shit, people are over-indulging because there’s not much left. Isn’t that usually how it works? The less we have, the more we want and will go to almost any extreme to get it. On one hand, the protagonists in my story are searching for healthy food, the bottom has dropped out of the economy, fresh fruit and vegetables are nowhere to be found, we’ve wasted and the environment and society is paying for it. Maybe that’s a little too Alberta for this interview. 

TST: I’m sure better times are right around the corner here in good old Alberta. Sunny days! Hmm, smoky days at least. Now, tell us about a time you overindulged, like really stuffed yourself silly…with anything.

Robin: Not sure I want to admit this right now. Let’s just say chocolate is my comfort food and comfort is something that is needed right now. 

TST: Chocolate is the best. One day the Press will be rich enough to have its own combination chocolate fountain and hot tub and then, look out world! Speaking of legacies, which of your characters could you see popping up again in other stories?

Robin: I don’t tend to recycle characters. I guess we would just have to wait and see. These characters are all a little odd, I think I might have to simply leave them where they are. 

TST: Nobody ever escapes a Robin van Eck story, got it! Since we conscripted a recipe from you, tell us about your usefulness in the kitchen. Does preparing food get your creative gravy gushing?

Robin: This is a bit hit and miss for me. I’m a good cook. I can read a recipe. I can be creative. Whether it tastes good or not is another story.

TST: We can attest personally that it’s always a hit, though our memories are fragmented at best. Having lived through a pandemic, have your thoughts on what the end of the world might look like changed from the time you wrote about your apocalyptic carnival? And will you ever go to the Calgary Stampede ever again?

Robin: This is an interesting question and something I’ve thought about a lot actually. Remember that heat wave just a few weeks ago? All the fires currently blazing. I think we’re going to fry to death before we ever have a chance to eat ourselves silly. So many naysayers about the environmental impact we’ve had on the world, yet the evidence keeps coming. It’s a scary thought. I picture us living in some kind of Mad Max world. If we survive, it will be an us vs them situation. Us being the realistic reasonable people, wanting to help one another survive. Them being the ones who can’t get their heads out of their asses and realize there’s more to life than oil and money and of course, it’s all a conspiracy. 
And no. The Stampede should never have happened this year, yet they went ahead. I have lost complete interest, not that I had much in the first place.  

TST: The world is definitely burning. In all the ways. But at least we’ll have front row seats at the BBQ! Hmm, now we’re hungry. Again For chocolate and seared meat.. Before we head to the meat locker, what’s next for you? Any forthcoming releases, hatchings, or germinations we should be on the lookout for?

Robin: Nothing coming up, but a lot going on. Since my novel came out in November of last year I’ve been picking away at a new manuscript that is close to completion, but not complete enough to really talk about except to say if you’re interested in death and some of the weird sites around Alberta, you might like this new book. 

TST: Thanks Robin! And don’t forget to check out the book – Terrace VI: Forbidden Fruit is available on Amazon.com and Amazon.ca and under whatever rocks you might find stray books.

About the Author:

Robin van Eck’s stories and personal essays have appeared in various literary magazines and anthologies across Canada and internationally such as Lamplight, FreeFall, Prairie Journal, Woven Tales Press, Waiting: An Anthology of Essays, Very Much Alive and more. Her first novel, Rough, was published by Stonehouse Publishing in November 2020.

More information at www.robinzvaneck.com.

Forbidden Fruits: “Tuny” by Julie Hiner

~ Noggy
T6 Forbidden Fruit

BETWEEN TWO FLAMES WITH THE SEVENTH TERRACE

With the release of Forbidden Fruit, the second (or sixth, depending your reckoning) instalment in our Purgatorio anthology series, we are inviting our fabulous contributors between the flames to get their hot, gluttonous take on their story and the book and life in general, such that it is in these end days.

Today we welcome Julie Hiner, author of “Tuny”, a warning tale about what happens when you just need one more tiny little wafer-thin mint. Julie, please tell us a little about yourself in exactly twenty-seven words.

Julie: I am a toxic concoction of equal parts 80s rocker, true crime addict, wheel of cheese eating and beer guzzling glutton, outdoor adventurer and 80s horror lover.

TST: And queen of horror make-up! You really terrify us some days. With that out of the way let’s get right to the oozing meat of it. What does gluttony mean to you? Is it inherently a bad thing? How does that play into your story of excessive consumption found in this unwholesome volume?

Julie: When I hear the word gluttony, I automatically jump to thoughts of food. I think that gluttony CAN be a bad thing, if it becomes an addiction that we cannot control. However, if one is generally a well balanced human being of sorts, then the occasional excessive night of eating and/or drinking can be a delicious indulgence. In short, if I puke too often, I cut back on my eating.

The story about Tuny was inspired by an experience I had as a young girl. At one time, I had absolutely NO concept of calories in and calories out. I literally did eat myself sick one more than one occasion. Now, I am able to indulge without barfing my guts out.

TST: Noggy knows all about the vomit comet. He never learns though, it’s in his DNA. Now, tell us about a time you overindulged, like really stuffed yourself silly… with anything.

Julie: The time I spoke about, which inspired my story, I think it was Christmas Day. I recall eating an entire box of turtles. Yes. That was just the start of it. I still ate all the meals that we had that day including a large dinner spread as most families do. I ate SO much that I literally barfed my guts out. I was staying at my Grandma’s house. I believe she thought I was sick with something. I don’t think she knew the truth. I was embarrassed. I don’t think I really put it together.

As the years went on, I still had moments of over eating. I recall eating ENTIRE Bernard Callebaut Easter Eggs (the big ones) stuffed with several dozen chocolates. In one sitting. Not good. 

I have since learned how to enjoy the food I love without being a ridiculous, gluttonous beast.

TST: Now we want chocolate. Like ten pounds of it. At least it’s only 74 days until Halloween. So which of your characters could you see popping up again in other stories?

Julie: The only character in my story was Tuny. And I do think this was a one time show for her.

TST: Probably for the best really. Poor Tuny… Since we conscripted a recipe from you, tell us about your usefulness in the kitchen. Does preparing food get your creative gravy gushing?

Julie: YES. I love to cook. I love the fresh ingredients. I love a family meal where we sit down, enjoy slowly and connect with eating.

My favorite meals of all time were in Italy, on a cycling trip, where the dinners took hours, the group came together over slow eating and lots of chat.

TST: There’s a lot of internalized shame driving poor Tuny’s binge. Besides not stuffing an entire turkey down your gullet, any words of advice for anyone struggling with distorted body image? And… how much you really love Turtles?

Julie: Yes. I do have advice. My inability to understand how much I was eating and what I was doing to my body led to me gaining a bunch of weight, and hating my physical being. It caused me a lot of anxiety for many years. I just couldn’t go on feeling so awful all the time. I learned how to portion control and to eat a healthy balance of everything – treats included. That would be stop 1 of my advice – learn how much your body needs. There are many online tools out there now to help someone track calories and do a rough calculation of how much you need depending on your activity level.

Step 2 of my advice would be to find a physical activity that you love, and to make time for it. For me, cycling changed my life. I found my inner athlete and love for my physical being. It opened the door for many activities that I now love to do.

Step 3 – don’t try to be perfect. Allow yourself to enjoy and indulge in the foods you love. But balance it out with activity and healthy eating.

TST: Thanks Julie! Feel free to partake of the hot tub and vomitorium on the way out.

And folks, don’t forget to check out the book – Terrace VI: Forbidden Fruit is available on Amazon.com and Amazon.ca and under whatever rocks you might find stray books!!

About the Author:

Julie Hiner is an author, storyteller, and blogger. She has independently published an inspirational work of non-fiction and two dark crime novels – Final Track and Acid Track. Two of Julie’s short horror stories have been published in anthologies, and she is currently collaborating in the horror realm. Julie’s home-base is KillersAndDemons.com where she serves up toxic cocktails of 80s metal, ritualistic murder, and raw horror.

Julie lives in her hometown in Canada, nestled near the Rocky Mountains. A hardcore 80s rocker at heart, Julie’s writing is infused with music of all eras. Her dark crime novels are a fusion of 80s metal, 70s acid rock and dark story telling. Obsessed with the dark mind of the serial killer, Julie’s characters are based on bits and pieces of some of the most terrifying monsters to roam the earth.

Find Julie online at killersanddemons.com.

Forbidden Fruits: “Death Shot” by Konn Lavery

~ Noggy
T6 Forbidden Fruit

BETWEEN TWO FLAMES WITH THE SEVENTH TERRACE

With the release of Forbidden Fruit, the second (or sixth, depending your reckoning) instalment in our Purgatorio anthology series, we are inviting our fabulous contributors between the flames to get their hot, gluttonous take on their story and the book and life in general, such that it at the end of all things.

Today we welcome Konn Lavery, author of “Death Shot”, a wild tale of a man settling into his stay in Purgatory after certain, how do you say it… indiscretions. Konn, please tell us a little about yourself in exactly twenty-seven words.

Konn: Why yes, my parents are Star Trek fans. Yes, they adjusted the spelling to mask my true power. I write dark fiction and am a graphic designer.

TST: “Khhhaaaaaaaaan!!” Revenge is a dish best served cold, isn’t it? And… moving on to the main course of our revenge banquet, what does gluttony mean to you? Is it inherently a bad thing? How does that play into your story of excessive consumption found in this unwholesome volume?

Konn: Great question… I think the warnings of gluttony tie into each of the seven deadly sins, which are designed to warn people about excessiveness within themselves. Let’s get hippie-dippie zen by saying that life is a balance and too much of anything can lead to high contrasts in your life.

The concepts of good and evil create a gnarly rollercoaster within us. If you remove the higher peaks, such as overconsumption and substance abuse, you’ll find yourself on the kiddie rollercoaster ride. Life is easier but less exciting. Keep in mind, the ride may be awkward as there is a height restriction, and the nearby parents will give you dagger eyes. So, in short, enjoy the sins of the flesh but know when to cut out overconsumption.

Gluttony plays right into the short story “Death Shot”. The protagonist named Newbie had an addiction problem on Earth before dying (no spoilers), which leads him into the afterlife, and his greedy ways come back to haunt him, bringing in the classic cautions of the deadly sins.

TST: Indeed. And, let me tell you, you can’t trust anyone in Purgatory! Anyone!! Now tell us about a time you overindulged, like really stuffed yourself silly… with anything.

Konn: Oh boy! How embarrassing do we get? Well, I’ll share a milder warning. In Calgary, there is this breakfast joint named Galaxie Diner that holds dark temptations with each visit. Entering the narrow corridor, you’re met with mountains of frying potatoes and coffee all around. Their menus clearly state “bottomless toast and endless hashbrowns,” which brings fleeting pleasures of the tongue. Plate after plate, the mashed-up taters pile up in the belly, stretching innards, waiting to break free. Some souls never make it out of the diner as their stomachs rip open, dumping a mangled mess of potatoes and stomach fluid onto the checkered floor. The nearby customers scurry on all fours, licking up the spilled out potatoes, hoping to please their tastebuds. Thankfully I managed to escape this dark fate, collapsing into a bed and slipping into an afternoon coma of drool.

TST: Mmm, endless taters, now we’re hungry again. And speaking of endless regurgitation, which of your characters could you see popping up again in other stories?

Konn: Mo is someone I’d like to revisit. He’s got a lot of humorous mystery to his character with the shapeshifting and vampiric nature.

TST: Mo does seem like a solid wingman, I bet he brings all boys to the kitchen. Since we conscripted a recipe from you, tell us about your usefulness in said kitchen. Does preparing food get your creative gravy gushing?

Konn: Cooking does! Working from home for many years, I learned to get good at it. Most of the meals I make are vegan with raw ingredients making the sauces from various spices and acids. The bulk of the meals are vegetables, legumes, and beans. My favourite dishes to make are ginger Szechuan, pad thai, and curried chickpeas. Prepping the meals and cooking them helps break me from the usual workflow. It gets the brain to work in different thought patterns compared to design work or writing, giving it room to see situations from new angles.

TST: Mmm, ginger Szechuan. You’re killing us here! If you were to massively overdose on cocaine and wind up at the Purgatorio Bar & Grill, who would you hope to run into there? And would you sell a soul to save your own?

Konn: I’d hope to run into someone cool like Jimi Hendrix or Marshall McLuhan. Not that they were terrible people, but they thought outside of the box, which may be enough to send you down into Purgatory. Now for selling a soul . . . heh heh, depends on who.

TST: We can give you an extensive list and we’ll totally make it worth your while. So, what’s next for you? Any forthcoming releases, hatchings, or germinations we should be on the lookout for?

Konn: The next release is a complete overhaul of my horror novel Seed Me in the fall. It’ll be labelled as a Relapse Edition. Basically, a retelling of the whole story with new scenes expanding on the World Mother mythos. After that, I’m in a strange crossroads covered in fog. But I am working on a modern-day urban fantasy series mixing in drugs, crime, and Illuminati conspiracy theories.

TST: Excellent, those sound fantastic! Feel free to partake of the hot tub and vomitorium on the way out.

Konn: Nice! Already jumping in.

TST: Thanks Konn! That about wraps things up – don’t forget to check out Terrace VI: Forbidden Fruit now available on Amazon.com and Amazon.ca and under whatever rocks you might find stray books.

About the Author:

Konn Lavery is a Canadian author whose work has been recognized by Edmonton’s top five bestseller charts and by reviewers such as Readers’ Favorite, and The Wishing Shelf Awards.

He started writing stories at a young age while being homeschooled. After graduating from graphic design college, he began professionally pursuing his writing with his first release, Reality. He continues to write in the thriller, horror, and fantasy genres.

He balances his literary work along with his own graphic design and website development business. His visual communication skills have been transcribed into the formatting and artwork found within his publications supporting his fascination of transmedia storytelling.

You can find Konn online at www.konnlavery.com.

Detonation #21: When Life Gives You Lemons…

~ Lola

You learn a lot about yourself. The first thing I learned is that I am undoubtably in the shit. It’s up to my neck. And I put myself there.

I’m debating over how specific to be. This is personal. It’s the hugest thing. To me anyway. Others have been through worse. There are refugees who’ve walked away from a lot more than I have. I can live in Noggy’s Pontiac Aztek if I have to.

But my creative engine is completely busted. I miss writing. I miss coaxing something real out of a few nebulous thoughts. Everything is sour now. I’ve always been the kind of person who can’t write if I’m too down or too giddy. I gotta be on an even keel.

When life gives you lemons…. Jesus, can I be real for a second? You likely gave those lemons to yourself. Life doesn’t have that kind of agency or punitive zeal. You made choices. You know what you did. Idiot.

So that’s the first thing you do. Kick the shit out of yourself. When life gives you lemons, shut up and eat your fucking lemons. Such is your penance, you villain. Taste good? You want some more? Here’s a whole goddamn ass ton. Pucker up, dirtbag.

Eventually you get will tired of eating shit. Or sour citrus. I’m confusing the metaphor but stay with me, I promise this will make sense. If you’re not in therapy by now, you probably should be, because this is when your shrink, with an empathetic head tilt, will say, “be kind to yourself.” Takes a few days or weeks for this to sink in, but when it does it’s a relief. Pour a little sugar in your glass, babe. You don’t gotta take it straight anymore because punishing yourself doesn’t actually fix anything. Drink up and watch Netflix.

With a little sweetness reintroduced into your life, you can make some room, a little space in your noggin where the creative magic can happen. But it doesn’t. And you don’t understand. You’re calm, you slept a whole 6 hours, your eyes are no longer swollen shut from crying. You study yourself in the mirror and sure it’s not the best you’ve ever looked but three drinks and you’d probably fuck you. So it’s not a self-esteem thing. You don’t hate yourself, yet there’s that flatness. Lemon juice and sugar. It’s nice, but not magical. Honestly the idea of lemonade is always better than the reality. Try that Netflix again.

Here’s the worst part, if I may be so vague. I can’t say everything will work out okay, because I have no clue. This isn’t a tidy step-by-step for how to navigate the biggest trauma of your life and keep working on your dumbass novel that seemed so important three months ago and has now dropped to the sub-basement level of your priorities.

But I miss my work. I can’t even watch Netflix because I can’t pay attention, even to the shower scene in Sex/Life. I miss writing more than I miss dick.

I said this isn’t a guide. More of a journey thus far and now you’re caught up. This is the first creative work I’ve done since my life exploded. It’s not creative magic, but I’m getting my thoughts down at least. The lemons though. They’re still here. They keep coming. And this, my friends, is what the sidecar was invented for.

2oz Cognac

1oz Triple Sec

1oz Lemon Juice

1/4oz Simple Syrup

Shake it up and shake it off. I just wrote something, bitches. I’ve still got it and so do you. Let it never be said that we don’t know what to do with our lemons.

Forbidden Fruits: “Gluttony” by Cam Hayden

~ Noggy
T6 Forbidden Fruit

BETWEEN TWO FLAMES WITH THE SEVENTH TERRACE

With the release of Forbidden Fruit, the second (or sixth, depending your reckoning) instalment in our Purgatorio anthology series, we are inviting our fabulous contributors between the flames to get their hot, gluttonous take on their story and the book and life in general, such that it is in these end days.

Today we welcome Cam Hayden, artist and author of “Gluttony”, a graphic tale of a little old woman with some serious and pressing issues. Cam, please tell us a little about yourself in exactly twenty-seven words.

Cam: I’m pretty tall, probably like 7 feet or so, and super ripped, like totally shredded, most people when they see me are like, “woah! That dude can’t keep shirts on his body because they get all cut up on contact!”

TST: Alright, forty words but we’ll let that slip – this time! Let’s get right to the oozing meat of it. What does gluttony mean to you? Is it inherently a bad thing? How does that play into your story of excessive consumption found in this unwholesome volume?

Cam: Well, right now I’d say gluttony is kind of a survival mechanism. I’m living in this place with 29 other dudes, all competing for the affections of one lady. There’s only so much food to go around so at night I’ve been sneaking into the kitchen and just going to town on everything I can get my hands on. I need to keep my strength up because I never know what I’m going to be doing the next day. Could be wrestling orangutans, could be doing flips, could be seeing who can dig the biggest hole in 15 minutes. Any food I can get in me instead of those other guys, that could be the edge I need. Our task last week was to submit a comic to a prose anthology. Those other chumps were too weak to come up with anything.

TST: That’s one lucky lady, right Lola? And we agree about the other chumps. Tell us about a time you overindulged, like really stuffed yourself silly…with anything.

Cam: Back in the day, I was in a prog rock band and ate 7 peregrine falcons, including beaks and feet. Normally I’d only eat 2 but we kept getting encores. Man, they loved us in Red Deer! I even had to abstain from the groupies that night because I kept burping up those little hoods. It was embarrassing. I played it off like it was funny but it really upset me.

TST: Red Deer is the cat’s pyjamas – smells like a serious road trip – beaks and feet and donuts. Which of your characters could you see popping up again in other stories?

Cam: Maybe the maggots.

TST: Never enough maggots. That makes me want to tell our maggot story. No? Fine, you win this time… So Cam, tell us about your usefulness in the kitchen. Does preparing food get your creative gravy gushing?

Cam: Sometimes while my chef is mashing my taters I make my butler do improv with me. Does that count?

TST: Yes, definitely. Also, taters, mmm. What would you do if you swallowed a fly? And what’s the largest land mammal you think you could cram down your throat?

Cam: I swallow flies all the time, it sort of comes with the territory where I’m living. I was also having trouble sleeping so I went to one of those sleep clinics where they videotape you tossing and turning all night. As it happens, the reason I kept waking up was because my nose and mouth would fill up with the little buggers. It was like there was an after hours club for flies inside my yap. It turns out the reason was because of all the tubs of honey I’d been chugging while the other dudes were working out or whatever. Largest animal: peregrine falcon. No wait, that’s not a mammal. Let’s see… ok, one time I shotgunned an orange crush but I didn’t realize that due to some mishap at the plant, a skinny pig had gotten into the can.

TST: Sounds like you need to work your way up to a camel or possibly a hippo, but a skinny pig is a good intermediate step.

Thanks Cam! And don’t forget to check out the book – Terrace VI: Forbidden Fruit is available on Amazon.com and Amazon.ca and under whatever rocks you might find stray books.

About the Artist:

Cam Hayden draws strange comics, cartoons, makes odd prints and things like that. A lot of his inspiration comes from underground comic folks and an early exposure to Mad Magazine and National Lampoon. He also makes goofy trading cards.

Find Cam online on Twitter at @Lancegoiter or at www.patreon.com/lancegoiter.

Forbidden Fruits: “Naked Samantha” by Eddie Generous

~ Noggy
T6 Forbidden Fruit

BETWEEN TWO FLAMES WITH THE SEVENTH TERRACE

With the release of Forbidden Fruit, the second (or sixth, depending your reckoning) instalment in our Purgatorio anthology series, we are inviting our fabulous contributors between the flames to get their hot, gluttonous take on their story and the book and life in general, such that it is in these end days.

Today we welcome Eddie Generous, author of “Naked Samantha”, a story about uh, hmm, poker? and one I suspect you never thought you’d get published. Eddie, please tell us a little about yourself in exactly twenty-seven words.

Eddie: I’m currently a bit sweaty, and bloated from ice cream (non-dairy, I’m suddenly allergic to everything, happened the moment I outlived Jesus Christ). I’m fond of cats.

TST: Alright! With that out of the way let’s get right to the oozing meat of it. What does gluttony mean to you? Is it inherently a bad thing? How does that play into your story of excessive consumption found in this unwholesome volume?

Eddie: Gluttony, I guess, is crossing a line from consumption to criminal consumption. Probably it’s usually okay, I mean, the world’s on fire and conservative politicians want everyone miserable before they burn. So, indulge. How gluttony plays in this story…ignore what I just said; don’t indulge in that, you perverts. Some carnal urges need to be ignored…then again, sometimes it’s fun to watch things play out when there’s a secret on the horizon, an ace up the sleeve.

TST: Tell us about a time you overindulged, like really stuffed yourself silly…with anything.

Eddie: When I was fourteen, I drank thirty-three beers in one night and was sick for a whole week, but I had to go to school. Not like anybody was going to let me stay home for a hangover. Also, I split one of the beers with a donkey not long before I passed out in the field where we were drinking.

TST: Which of your characters could you see popping up again in other stories?

Eddie: From this story, I guess the Starbucks employee? Otherwise, I don’t know. Not too many options and Samantha kind of steals the show, so it might be like rewriting this same story all over again if she reappeared.

TST: Tell us about your usefulness in the kitchen. Does preparing food get your creative gravy gushing?

Eddie: I’m a good cook, if you’re into low-brow offerings. I’m not excited about cooking, but I know what something’s going to taste like if I make it, so I tend to do my share of the suppers around my house.

TST: In your view, how likely is it that the barista who smiles as she takes down the complicated instructions for my mochafrappishitino would murder me in a heartbeat if the opportunity presented itself? And in your view, would I deserve it? Also, five card stud or Texas hold’em?

Eddie: Baristas seemed unhinged at the best of times. I guess they weed out people who would thrive in other environments and take what’s left over. I guess the real question that would answer your question is: did you tip? Texas hold’em, I guess. I don’t know much about cards or gambling or convening with enough humans to facilitate a game; not these days.

TST: What’s next for you? Any forthcoming releases, hatchings, or germinations we should be on the lookout for? 

Eddie: I have a new novel on the way in September titled HETTY and, and in August or September I have a novella coming titled IT CAME FROM SPACE, and I have a handful of shorts on contract that’ll trickle into the world in the next however long, but mostly, if people want more of me, they should grab a copy of THE WALKING SON. It’s the story of a curse, a road trip, and some very old coins, plus ghosts and body horror. People, so far, really seem to like it.

TST: Thanks Eddie! And don’t forget to check out the book – Terrace VI: Forbidden Fruit is available on Amazon.com and Amazon.ca and under whatever rocks you might find stray books.

About the Author:

Eddie Generous has fallen off three different roofs and been lit on fire on multiple occasions. He grew up on a farm and later slept with his shoes under his pillows in homeless shelters. He dropped out of high school to afford rent on a room at a crummy boarding house, but eventually graduated from a mediocre college. He is the author of several small press books, has 2.8 rescue cats (one needed a leg amputation), is a podcast host, and lives on the Pacific Coast of Canada.

You can find Eddie online at www.jiffypopandhorror.com

Detonation #20: Sour Grapes

~ Lola

Everyone loves the idea of an egalitarian prize bestowed on a truly meritorious work of literature as determined by The People. Something like the Goodreads Choice Awards should be the ultimate in democracy, yet isn’t, for… reasons. So many reasons. Like Stephen King winning the horror award every year, even for his crime novels, ‘cause he’s the only fucking name anyone recognizes.

Next rung down this wretched ladder are the awards created by readers and writers, for readers and writers. Unfortunately, what follows in practice is an award by writers for writers. Which sounds close enough, but in fact couldn’t be further afield.

The bullshit mechanism of reader’s choice awards is not often discussed openly. It’s considered bad form to acknowledge honourees as anything other than purely deserving. Fortunately, Lola and Noggy don’t take anything that seriously and will always find a way cut off their nose to spite their face.

Noggy: So… writers submit to these snobby awards AND vote for them?

Lola: Yeah, by paying to become members of the association organizing the award. Publishers can and should submit, but in practice it’s writers, especially for anthologies and self-pub’d work.

N: The writers nominate and vote through long lists and short lists and then?

L: As voting members they typically get a package containing digital copies of all the shortlisted works.

N: Wait, isn’t that like…dozens of books? You have to read them all?

L: Jesus Christ, no. Who has time to read?

N: No one writing horror poetry and tweeting 89 times a day, that’s for sure. How does voting work then?

L: Easy. In categories where you’re a finalist you vote for yourself. In categories you aren’t, you vote for your friends. Chances are the only book in the pile you’ve actually read is your own. Isn’t that wild? The short story categories are the best though; for that one I’d recommend roulette, a lottery, or pin the tail on the jack ass.

N: So much for democratized literary utopia…

***

We’ve ranted about this before. The dirty secret of how little most writers actually read. And those of us who do read a lot are not going to waste our time consuming a reader’s choice award voting package because most of the material is honestly not that good. But we’re all too busy blowing each other to say it.

Yes, juried awards have their flaws but at least you can be reasonably certain the adjudicators have read the fucking book they’re voting for.

Reader’s Choice Awards are equivalent to The Emperor’s New Clothes. We ooh and ah at the grace and dignity with which he carries himself in his exquisite robes. When in fact he’s naked and eating a chili dog while fucking a pelican. But hey, we weren’t actually at the procession that day, and he’s our friend, so he’s got our vote.

***

N: You done ranting? It’s time for Arby’s.

L: Not even close. The other thing I’m going to get mad at. Awards for best anthology. An honor that belongs to all and to none. As an editor you can say you’re a winner for a book you didn’t write. As editors we consider this a dickwad move, considering the actual authors can only say they contributed to the project, which is hardly worth wedging into their bio. So, this award sits like a square egg in a kind of purgatory for unclaimed miscellany that no one quite knows how to handle. Is there even a word for adjacent congratulations?

N: I’m sure there’s a German word for it. A long, angry German word. Hmm, probably something like Beglückwünschung – that’s sort of terrifying.

L: Germans have more efficient things to do than acknowledge reader’s choice awards.

***

You could accuse us of being fucking jealous. Sour as hell. Green little goblins, ejaculating envy in thick bitter ropes. And you’d be right. But it doesn’t mean we’re wrong. And if you think we’re sore losers? God forbid we ever actually win anything.

Crosshairs by Catherine Hernandez

~ Lola

Queer fiction has long led the charge of stories with big ideas that challenge, terrify, and thrill, and this novel exemplifies those qualities. In near-future Toronto, devastating floods stoke the fear and hatred of the privileged, giving rise to a powerful civilian militia with a mission to eradicate immigrants, queer folks, poor folks, and anyone deemed to be other. This dark wave spreads unchecked across the country, until a black drag queen, transgender refugee, and a former social worker are recruited into a resistance movement that might be their last hope.

This is story driven by indelible characters, complex and non-conforming, without a single archetype to be found among them. With no molds from which to cast, Hernandez has accomplished something remarkable in creating wholly realized unique individuals. There is no saviour, no plucky sidekick, no sage. Evil is an utterly banal presence in the narrative, taking the form of politicians, angry suburbanites, and “concerned citizens”. It’s scary as hell because Crosshairs is our world exaggerated, but only a little, and some days not at all. Prepare to confront your biases in this unflinching novel where humanity shines in all its beautiful, messy, resilient diversity.

4/5

Detonation #19: This is Not Censorship

~ Lola

Navigating Life in a Literary Minefield

On March 2, 2021 six Dr. Seuss titles, published between 1937-1975, were pulled from publication by Dr. Seuss Enterprises due to portrayals of people deemed to be “hurtful and wrong” aka racist as hell. The most recent title being a Cat in the Hat companion piece called The Cat’s Quizzer. I’ll save you the math, that’s 46 years ago, and my point is:

A) These are old-ass books

B) You’ve probably never heard of them

But holy shit! Folks get wind that a few obscure books are going away and suddenly it’s Fahrenheit 45-fucking-1. Even more wild is that there’s virtually no disagreement over whether these depictions are racist or not. They totally are, and some of us just really want to show them to our babies. White nostalgia vs. institutionalized racism isn’t a problem I’m going to solve with a few paragraphs and a bunch of swear words, but fuuuuck me side-saddle…

Instead, let’s take a minute to talk about censorship.

Books go out of print. All. The. Time. That’s right ducklings, most books will eventually be lost to the shifting dunes of the cultural desert, with the lucky ones growing spores in a used bookstore somewhere. Why does this happen? The details may differ but it all funnels down to the same reason: no demand. Modern readers have little appetite for the vast majority of what was written decades ago, even if it’s not explicitly racist. With zillions of books flooding the market every goddamn day, their lifecycle is shorter than ever. A midlist book published just five years ago has even odds of being out of print today.

So, if you were hoping to pick up a copy of the 2015 zipper-ripper Donkey Dick Dan’s Billionaire Bride – brand new, without half the pages stuck together – you’re likely out of luck. It’s not banned. It’s just that no one wanted the thing.

Here’s the straight dope. Declining to publish is not censorship. Declining to be published is not censorship. Those with rights to the work get to decide where it does or does not appear. Libraries get to curate what they do and don’t want in their collections. Bookstores get to decide what they will and won’t sell. This is not political correctness on ‘roids. Equating loss of platform with muzzling, cancelling, and attempting to sanitize history is fallacious. We’re smarter than that. Pulling a few Dr. Seuss titles most people didn’t know existed until a few days ago is NOT censorship.

Censorship is government suppression of free expression, and this is not that.

And I get it, y’all love Dr. Seuss and want his wonderful books available to your children and their children and on and on. I do too. And great news! As long as there’s demand, they will be! What the frothing mob screaming about book burning and other nonsense doesn’t seem to get is that Dr. Seuss Enterprises made this decision to protect Seuss and his legacy of delighting children for generations. Instead of, y’know, risking the cancellation of his life’s work because they continued to publish racist imagery and just, like, hoped that people would tell their kids that shit’s not cool anymore.

Why not read your kids some books that portray different colors, and cultures, and identities, and abilities with nuance and compassion rather than lazy ignorant stereotypes? There’s great stuff out there and this is just a short list. Check it out, then if you’re still hungry, you can have your Green Eggs and Ham.

2020: The Year We All Walked Through Fire

~ Noggy

L: NOGGY!!!
N: Jesus, Lola…what?
L: It’s January 11, 2021.
N: Congratulations, you learned to read a calendar. Next, you’re going tell me it’s 6:43 p.m.
L: Shut up, I just meant eleven days is enough time to get some perspective on the most remarkable year in living memory.
N: Hate to break it to you, Silkysocks but I don’t even remember what happened last week.
L: Put the bottle down and let’s do this.
N: Fine, but let the record show I am aggrieved. Are we even allowed to talk about this stuff? People might get mad.
L: For that to happen they’d have to read our blog.
N: Which no one has. Ever.
L: So, let’s warm up with the good. We had two whole months that weren’t a pandemic.

The Good

  • Launched End of the Loop and Starseed by getting drunk on something blue called Sex in (on?) the Driveway and presenting the first and possibly last episode of Between Two Flames over Zoom. Poor Guy…
  • Attended Wordbridge in Little LA and got lost in a blizzard tryin’ to find Arby’s.
  • Celebrated Noggy’s b-day sucking the cream out of a bunch of cannoli.
  • Summer road trip to BC. Noggy, Lola, and Particle Man, running through the mountains, angering the gods, and capping it off riding Sturgeons in Revelstoke for Lola’s Birthday.
  • Bloody Offensive Literary Salon. A real boner of a good time.
  • Neither of us got fired/arrested/strip-searched or investigated for crimes against the living or dead. Or god(s).
  • Crashed a wedding. That sooo needed crashing.
  • Attended 80’s themed book launch in the most disgusting dive in the city on the coldest day in twenty years. Noggy really took a shine to his red metallic leggings. Cash bar. Bathrooms physically residing in Hell. But hey, great band!
  • Noggy & Lola’s alter egos saw their very first co-written story, about Grandpa’s freezer meat, purchased for actual money, and published in an actual book called Chew on This!
  • Road trip to Taber, complete with lunch at the Mexican-Ukrainian fusion restaurant and Lola desecrating Noggy’s grandfather’s grave (details redacted, but there were haunted soul holes and spiders. And owls.).
  • Wrote an epic poem for Particle Man’s birthday “The Many Deaths of Particle Man.”
  • Taylor Swift released two new amazing records!
  • Exotic cocktails with the Secret Saturday Night Quarantine Society.
  • Working from home.
  • First name basis at local liquor stores.
  • Picnics.
  • Full moon runs.
  • Jaja Ding Dong.

The Bad

  • Lola dropped her phone down a mountain trying to take a picture of a goat.
  • Virtual events. They suck. Good Merciful Gary, do they suck. Even ours. Especially ours.
  • Writer podcasts that are 1hr+ of aimless, unedited yammering – but we listened anyways, cause.
  • All races, literary events, festivals, and conventions cancelled. Although this is probably why we didn’t get fired or arrested.
  • Everyone deciding they need to get some fucking fresh air, dawdling about in enormous groups clogging entire paths.
  • Doing the summer scavenger hunt and Lola having to be nice to the path cloggers.
  • Doing the summer scavenger hunt and Noggy forbidding Lola from sticking her hiking pole in some idiot cyclist’s spokes.
  • Noggy forced to listen repeatedly to two new Taylor Swift records.
  • Perturbed skunks on a full moon run.
  • Sunday mornings.
  • Trying to work from home with your entire family up your ass.
  • Lola’s number one Spotify song: Jaja Ding Dong.

The Ugly

  • This is eerily mostly the same list as The Good.
  • Actually missing open mic poetry about rocks and streams and dead parents.
  • Noggy projectile vomiting 65km into our 80km self-directed urban ultra-marathon. That bush is dead now, the city bench melted. They should really replace the memorial plaque.
  • Lola setting her hair on fire doing witchcraft.
  • Running 420km in December + Eggnog + Herring Rollmops.
  • Homeschooling six (6) gremlins.
  • 11 p.m. Particle Man ukulele singalongs (the other hotel guests loved it).
  • The mall. Any malls. All malls.
  • IT WILL NEVER BE ENOUGH!

Bonus List: The Weird

  • Running at dusk and finding ourselves, no shit, surrounded by beavers.
  • Approached by an elfin teenaged boy after dark and offered a cookie.
  • Along the river finding many, many elaborate dwellings constructed from deadfall.
  • Elementals chasing us off Mount Okanagan.
  • Repeated sex dreams about all our friends.
  • The metallic pants, again. Noggy can’t get enough.
  • Onesies.
  • Lola’s cover girl debut…as a corpse.
  • And, as always, the weird wonderful constant in this topsy turvy world: Arby’s

In closing, there’s a lot more we could have added, but Legal has advised us to quit while we’re not in contravention of any number of municipal bylaws or provincial health orders. Suffice it to say, it’s been a trip. From the looks of it, 2021 is already asking 2020 to hold her beer, and you know what? We can’t wait.

Detonation #18: Living at Ludicrous Speed

~ Lola

Navigating Life in a Literary Minefield

Typically we use this space to yell at idiots, and rarely exclude ourselves from that classification. Today is no exception, except we’re excluding all of you. Feel free to self-include in this public castigation, but today we’ll largely direct our vitriol inward.

Forward thinking is good, mostly. You don’t want to see your best days trailing behind you, winking out like ancient stars. That’s never been my style. I’ve got my eye on the road ahead, on what dreams may come, and mostly it’s served me well. I guess because the alternative makes me sad to the point of illness. People who are like, “Ugh, 2020 is the shittiest year ever!” bother me, because you know they said the same thing about 2019, 2018, 2017, and so on. For that person, no matter what year it is, it’s shit. Every day is the worst day of their fucking life, and I don’t even wanna speculate what that must feel like.

I can be cynical when it comes to human nature, but when it comes to the arc of my own existence I am an incorrigible optimist. Believe me, no one is more surprised than I am. Single days may vary in degree of suckage, but over time I believe each year will be better than the last and you know what? I haven’t been wrong yet. I went through a dark period in my thirties when I had young children and no personal identity outside of Chief Juice Pouring Technician, but even at my lowest point, I never wished to go back to some better time in the past. The future is unwritten, you know? You can fill it with all the good exciting stuff you want and so long as it remains in the future you can’t rule it out. It’s how I’ve learned to thrive in high stress environments, to keep cool in the cut, to be happy when there is objectively little to be happy about — because there is always something to look forward to.

And in this way, by rolling at a breakneck pace towards that brilliant light on the horizon, I cheat myself out of taking pleasure in where I’ve been and where I am.

A case study: Lola and Noggy are not ambitious in the traditional sense. They aren’t type A. They aren’t climbers out to prove how much better they are than anyone else. They’re more like those annoying kids that won’t sit still at carpet time. Most of the time they’re barely aware there IS anyone else. They’re just…busy.

Lola: I see you’ve made a spreadsheet of all our projects and tasks for the next few months.

Noggy: Launch two books, finish our novel drafts, edit forthcoming publishing projects, and make more spreadsheets. Think we can handle it?

Lola: What’s the worst that could happen?

Noggy: We’ve spent the length of a pregnancy working on these two new releases for The Seventh Terrace, it’s so cool to see them birthed out into the world.

Lola: That was yesterday, Nog. We got drunk on zoom, ensured both authors will never work with us again, what’s next?

Noggy: NaNoWriMo!

Lola: Wow, did we really just launch two books and do NaNo?

Noggy: That was yesterday Silkysocks, shouldn’t you be editing our next book for TST?

Lola: And then we have to work on that new Purgatorio book

Noggy: And then we’re going to run every single day in December

Lola: And then I’m going to get back to my novel

Noggy: And we have the winter running scavenger hunt

Lola: And then we should co-write another story, and it’ll be race season again!

Noggy: And then I’ll make more spreadsheets!

And then

And then

And then…

If you ever wanted to see goblins on Adderall, this is it. These two are fucking exhausting, and the problem becomes evident.

There’s nothing wrong with having goals and a plan for the future, but at a certain point I find I’m moving too fast to take any real satisfaction in what I’ve accomplished. Maybe I’m even more afraid of getting stuck in the present than I am in the past.

I don’t do resolutions, but this is more about evolution. I still believe my best days are ahead of me, but I’d like to develop the skill of being still, to lose the fear of losing momentum, to hang out unhurried, look back and be like “Wow, we really did some cool shit, didn’t we?”

#17 – Don’t Bend Over and Take that Advice

~ Noggy

Navigating Life in a Literary Minefield

I’m not in the habit of taking advice. Of any sort. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure a lot of advice is wonderful, applicable in a variety of circumstances, and sincerely helpful. And it’s not even that I don’t think it applies to me, or I know better. Cause I damn well don’t. I just choose not to take it. Why? I’ve a stubborn streak a mile wide and I grew up telling myself I’d never let anyone tell me what to do, or how to do it. I’d find my own way – good or bad, hard or easy. My boss of the last twenty years used to growl that he may run the company, but he didn’t run me. I think he’s dead now, but it’s not my fault. I don’t listen to my wife’s advice either, though some consideration must be made to prevent marital Armageddon and all out thermonuclear war. Friends? Colleagues? Authority figures? Smile and wave boys, smile and wave. Of course, you can only pull it off with an excessive level of insanity, be willing to ignore any and all dire consequences, and have a cavalry worth of horseshoes up your ass. Your own results may vary.

But I’ll come right out and say that everything amazing comes from not listening to advice. Cases in point:

“Don’t eat a hotdog from the back alley food cart in Mazatlán at 2 a.m..”
“Don’t drink behind, under, on top of, or in that burning dumpster.”
“Don’t run a hundred miles in eyeball melting heat without pickle juice.”
“Don’t pet that beaver. Even if it’s a porcupine. Especially if it’s a porcupine.”
“Don’t stick your arm in that hole.”
“Don’t start that publishing company.”
“Um, you should see a doctor about that.”

Advice given. Advice not taken. Stories for the ages.

That’s life though, and we’re here to trash talk and throw shade on more literary pursuits. Now you’re probably thinking “But Noggy, we already know better than to become a poet-musician.” And you’d be right. But that’s just common sense.

I’m way more interested in thrashing the pile of advice you’ll find spouted from many a famous author and quoted from many a writing craft tome and lapped up by the desperate and sycophantic masses.

And I understand the irony of providing advice about ignoring advice. Please ignore everything I’m about to say. Trust me, it’s for the best.

The Road to Hell is Paved with Adverbs: Sure, sure, adverbs can be lazy crutches used to hobble through flowery prose where stronger words, built up through years of soul sucking thesaurus drudgery, might be considered better. But if adverbs weren’t useful, they wouldn’t exist. There’s what, literally a thousand adverbs in the English language? So, if you feel like using a fucking adverb, use a fucking adverb. If you use too many? Well, then you’re probably a poet, in which case all bets are off anyways. Besides, you need to give your editor something to bitch about.

Show Don’t Tell: Chekhov said, “Don’t tell me the moon is shining. Show me the glint of light on broken glass.” Sometimes it’s just the moon. And it’s shining. This is the reason people write two hundred and fifty-thousand-word fantasy novels where absolutely nothing happens. They’re too busy showing you every god damn thing. Yes, yes, a story that’s all telling reads like a Pontiac Aztek repair manual, but when your character walks out of the house into the rain, you can just say “Jesus, it’s fucking raining again, where’s the damn umbrella? I’m going to chug a gallon of whisky and call in sick.” instead of “The splash of God’s tears washed away my anxiety and fear, leaving me cleansed and refreshed as I made my way to the bus stop to be whisked away to my dream job as a Walmart greeter.”

Kill Your Darlings: Why? I swear this advice is half the reason most writing is so wretchedly dull. Yeah, kill all the cool little bits that you love and may or may not need to be in the story just because some rich, famous mansion dwelling uber-author tells you to. Then again, my definition of darling may vary from the norm. Cause honestly, if something great in your story really needs to go for the good of the entire story, then it’s probably not that that darling to begin with.

Write What You Know: If everyone wrote only what they knew, all writing would be memoirs and grocery lists. All literary – all the time. How many writers have been to a galaxy far, far away, or Faerie, or belong to some super-secret spy organization that regularly assassinates brutal dictators with weapons that can’t possibly exist? Sure though, if you have some cool personal experience or skill or knowledge you can transfer directly to your story to make your Arby’s meatcraft salesman more authentic, by all means give him that Hentai tentacle fetish. And be specific. Most writers like to think they’ve had an extraordinarily cool life they can draw upon. ROFL. Pulease. So, write whatever the hell you want as long as you’re mindful of your subject. Expropriate and die. Simple as that.

Write Every Day: Nice thought. And yes, actually decent advice. I’d love to be able to write every day. And I do when I can. But I’m not going to beat myself silly trying to make it the #1 priority that trumps all others. I got a bloody life that’s full of frankly other priorities, some of which I’ll write a book a book about when I’m dead.

Write Drunk, Edit Sober: While this quote is attributed to Hemmingway, I think it was Faulkner who actually subscribed to it. Good ole Faulkner. A legend really, I’d call him a demi-god if he hadn’t dabbled in poetry, but nobody’s perfect. Could have went further though. Write Drunk, Edit Drunker, Publish Drunkest. Best to dull the pain at every step. And writing is pain. A good bottle of Blanton’s or Hibiki 17 or Oban is medicinal, take that from Dr. Noggy. Look, I’m sure there’s nothing wrong with being sober. I’ve heard stories about sober people being healthier and happier and such. I’ve also heard similar stories about Cryptids. Can’t believe everything you read.

So, yeah, whatever. Just remember this isn’t advice. This is opinion, written for promises of ice cream and beaver petting. It’s all about the priorities, man.

Detonation #16: What to do when you feel like shit and nothing is fun anymore.

~ Lola

Navigating Life in a Literary Minefield

Like many a nitwit in quarantine, I was at first optimistic about my productivity. I suddenly had no plans. Obligations evaporated. My social calendar emptied out.  I’d get so much done. Life would finally slow down and I’d have time for everything I’d wanted to focus on but was too busy.

Then I had to homeschool three gremlins.

Then I was working in a bookstore pivoting to a phones-ringing-off-the-hook fulfilment center so fast it gave me whiplash.

Then, far from being isolated, I never had a single conscious moment to myself.

What a little idiot I was. What hubris. But it wasn’t as simple as being busy or mentally paralyzed because teaching me a hard life lesson is never that straightforward. I keep thinking I didn’t write at all over the last six months. I keep thinking I was totally unproductive and uncreative. I keep thinking I had a great summer, camping, swimming, and shaking the absolute shit out of fancy craft cocktails. I keep thinking that overall it hasn’t been so bad, that I’ve been okay.

Yet I did write two short stories, a novella, and query a publisher

Yet I did edit two books

Yet my buoyant moods are fragile, I’m latching hard onto anything I can hold up as proof of my uselessness, and I drink soooo much.

I’m a runner, right?  It’s my medicine, meditation, religion, and all my goddamned races got cancelled. Adventures in the mountains bursting with mud, suffering, exhaustion, and camaraderie by the light of my dim junky headlamp. I’ve been running, of course. What the fuck else is there to do besides attend some shitty virtual hangout where everyone is awkward and looks like garbage and I’m so self-conscious I spend most of the time staring at myself on camera wondering if I’ve always been this ugly. So I run. I signed up for virtual challenges and did a self-directed urban ultra-marathon. I’ve been running more than ever.

But I don’t feel fit.

But I feel worn out.

But I feel sick sometimes and hate my face.

Anger? Is anger the right response? It feels better than despair. How many nuanced emotions are realistically available under these circumstances? Anger is the spearhead. It drives forward with purpose and a message. Aren’t these detonations nothing more than angry little letters to a disappointing world full of assholes? I guess this one is for me. I did not lose my job. My family is safe and healthy. What do I have to complain about? Suck it up, there are people with REAL problems out there.

I guess what I am is sad and bored.

I guess it’s harder to find happiness in the dark.

I guess the heading to this post should’ve had a question mark because I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing or what the fuck to do.

I guess…I need a better damn headlamp.

Rad Recent Reads

~ Lola

Lola’s Picks

You know what’s great? Books not written by white people. So we’re sharing some recent reads so delicious you should definitely buy them and lick every page with your horny eyeballs. BIPOC voices are crushing it, and if it’s been a while since you waded off white author island, you really ought to dive in because the water is glorious.

Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Noemí Taboada is a Mexico City socialite sent to check on a sick cousin at High Place, a dilapidated Victorian mansion in the mountains, and the ancestral home of a once wealthy English family that owned the nearby silver mines. Soon Noemí finds her cousin has married into a family with secrets eating away at them much like the strange mould devouring the wallpaper, carpet, and draperies of High Place. At a loss for how to help her cousin or herself, Noemí’s dreams turn to dark horrors and every flicker of light leads her down yet another haunted corridor.

This book serves up mood and atmosphere big time, steadily dialling up the dread, violence, and desire. It’s Noemí, however, that keeps the story from tilling up the same gothic soil farmed over and over again by so many others. She’s spoiled and beautiful. Sharp and tenacious. Neither a damsel in distress nor a Strong Female Character perfectly executing roundhouse kicks. She’s a young woman still discovering who she is and what she stands for in a world controlled by men. She’s also frequently bored, and enjoys rubbing one out in the bathtub on occasion.

Between the ghosts, family tragedy, eugenics, mycology, feminism, and romance, Mexican Gothic lives up to the hype and leaves you with a lot to think about.

Catch the author on twitter @silviamg

5/5

My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh

This book isn’t horror, but it’s pretty fucking horrible, in the very best ways. I’ve got a stygian sense of humour, and damn if this novel doesn’t tickle my blackened funnybone.

It’s pre-911 NYC, and the unnamed narrator is tall, blonde, pretty, and above all, thin. An art history major, recently fired from her job at a shitty gallery. Her best friend Reva is sleeping with her boss and obsessed with her twin interests of “weekend plans” and pouring tequila into cans of diet Mountain Dew. She’s a wretched human, but she’s all the narrator has left. Both her parents are dead, and though they were objectively terrible people, she can’t bring herself to sell their house. She decides to sleep on it. For a full year. Sleep as much, and be awake as little, as possible. Her project requires that she seek out a goofy psychiatrist and manipulate her into prescribing ever increasing doses and varieties of tranquilizers, downers, sleeping pills. All taken with an OTC chaser of NyQuil, or Benadryl. In her passionate dedication to hibernation, she hopes to find a way to truly wake up.

This novel is so, so dark, and utterly hilarious. You’ll cringe, you’ll laugh, you’ll want to black out for three days and wake up on your couch wearing nothing but a Brazilian bikini wax and a mink coat with broccoli in the pockets.

5/5

Noggy’s Picks

I’ve had the good fortune to read not one, not two, but three fabulous cosmic horror novellas over the last number of weeks, and there are few things I love more than cosmic horror novellas. They hit the sweet spot. Long enough to tell a fleshed out story, short enough to devour in one or two jaw distending gulps without leaving you cramped and bloated. Which happens more frequently than you’d think – especially to hairless guinea pigs – but that’s a different horror entirely, one we totally don’t need to get into right now. Unless you want to? I’m here all night.

Anyways, on with the show.

All three of these are about the monsters within us, either figuratively or literally. In these cases, definitely leaning on the literal side.

Hammers on Bone and A Song for Quiet by Cassandra Khaw

I’ll start with a two-fer, a pair of delightfully dark stories starting off Cassandra’s “Persons Non Grata” series (which I’m now impatiently waiting for more – so chop chop!). This is cosmic horror of the Lovecraftian persuasion, with just enough to anchor you to the mythos.

Hammers on Bone tells the story of a John Persons, a unique private eye cut right out of the detective classics. While there are the elements of that homage you’d expect, it’s just enough to give you a warm fuzzy and not make you roll your eyes and mumble “oh god….” John’s a monster who hunts monsters and the story is solid and excellent with a great hook: A ten-year-old kid hiring him to kill his step-dad. Wow. Not something you see every day.

A Song for Quiet is not a direct sequel, but shares the setting including John Persons in a cool supporting role. This story is a deeper one, more musical than pulpy. Lyrical. Deacon James is a bluesman haunted by a lot of things, including the music in his head that wants, and needs, to get out. Though that’s not a great thing. For him. Or everyone on the planet.

I adore the covers. Black and white and red. Powerful stark imagery. One of the things that drew me to them me when I saw people gushing on Twitter. Where you should definitely follow Cassandra at @casskhaw.

The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor Lavalle

I’m a slacker. I’ll come right and say it. I’ve been meaning to read this since it came out, but somehow never did. Why? It kept popping up in my “this is your thing, why haven’t you read it yet,” list and yet… Yeah. Anyways, I did read it and I did love it. And now I have The Devil in Silver sitting on my table staring at me, taunting me. I’ll slack less with it. I promise.

The Ballad of Black Tom is a retelling of H. P. Lovecraft’s story “The Horror at Red Hook” through a substantially different lens. I read that original story way way back, and it comes up often as quintessential Lovecraft horribleness, so it was cool to see how Victor turned it on its head.

Tommy Tester aka Black Tom is an interesting fellow, a not so great musician, but with a knack for doing jobs and going into white neighborhoods where his fellows fear to tread. One of these jobs lands him in the sights of a the police and goes swiftly off trail from there. There are some great cosmic horror elements at play, with a spooky old lady that’s obviously way more than she seems, cryptic books, dark cults, a rich occultist, and powers beyond time and space.

I’d highly recommend it, especially for the rich setting and feel of 1920’s New York and the racial conflict which is as real today as it was then (which makes you realize how much HASN’T changed in a century).

Victor is also found on Twitter, at @victorlavalle, and is always worth listening to.

5/5 For the lot

Cover Reveal! End of the Loop by Brent Nichols

~ Lola
Cover design: A. Bilawchuck

David isn’t sure why he lives in the Institute. He’s not sure why the doors are locked and guarded. He doesn’t know why he has to take pills that turn his memory to mist.

But one day he doesn’t swallow his pills. On that day, he starts to remember. Once, things were quite different. Once, he went outside. He had friends, a lover, a life.

Once, something bad happened. 

Soon the staff will notice. They’ll make him take his pills, and these precious scraps of memory will fade away. There’s only one way to prevent it. Only one way to find out what’s truly going on.

He must escape.

“A tensely suspenseful reconstruction of a cold case reclaims a life lost to unimaginable tragedy.” ~ J.E. Barnard, author of When the Flood Falls

Tiny Sledgehammer: Fall 2020

Gary’s got great news!

~ Lola

Untuck your tentacles and unfurl your freak flags…

The Seventh Terrace is delighted to announce the Spring 2021 publication of Unfortunate Elements of My Anatomy by Hailey Piper. Eighteen stories of queer horror, isolation, and the monstrous feminine, including an original grim novelette, “Recitation of the First Feeding.”

This collection is darkly fantastic, queer as hell, and we can’t wait to share it with all of you.

Hailey Piper is the author of Benny Rose, the Cannibal King from Unnerving, and her short fiction appears in Daily Science Fiction, The Arcanist, Tales to Terrify, and elsewhere. She lives with her wife in Maryland, but can be found online at www.haileypiper.com or on Twitter via @HaileyPiperSays.

Detonation #15: Do Us A Favour And Don’t Share That Covid Poem

~ Lola

Navigating Life in a Literary Minefield

The news is dominated by ‘rona coverage. Most online content is at the very least pandemic adjacent in focus. You could escape into a book but that requires an attention span, and yours went out the window in March, approximately eleventy-hundred days ago.

We’ve got COVID on the brain and it’s hard to make good art when you’re distracted.

The solution: make COVID art!

Well, aren’t you fucking original. I’m sure no one has thought of that. You must be confident that everyone is starved for yet more angsty plague-centric literature and especially poetry. We can’t get enough. Riveting accounts of weight gain, images of a soggy magpie, or LOLOLOL your quarantine-drunk, spear-wielding spawn rampaging through your 9am Zoom meeting. Here’s the thing, these experiences are now universal to the point of cliché. In other words, anything but novel.

And what’s with the relentless insistence on the essential nature of poetry in this bonkers world where your closest relationships are with your co-workers’ nostril hairs and double-chins? I’m not a doctor or anything, but I dunno how essential it is to read something that feels like reading nothing. Scratch that, less than nothing. A nothing that leaves a little bit of itself behind, like a tiny malignant egg laid in your ear, whispering its nonsense in poet voice.

Maybe you’re compelled to indulge this shitty impulse to wax lyrical over a pile of rocks or giving birth in a rain barrel as a metaphor for social distancing. Maybe it quells your anxiety or lubes your ego to think someone might read your tortured placental images of loneliness and swoon. Maybe they will, but it’s the kind of swooning you do when you find the cat busily decapitating a rabbit on the front porch. The kind where it seems physically impossible to have eaten the amount you just vomited.

Real talk, okay? Poeming about COVID is not a noble pursuit. This drivel is for you, so stop inflicting it on others. We’re all struggling to find ways to cope and function in such times. Your poetry may be a balm to your soul, but it’s an acid bath to mine, so Jesus frick-fracking Christ, keep it in isolation.

P.S. Lola was in a mood when she wrote this. She’s also a wretched hypocrite who admits to writing a poem or two herself.

If It Bleeds by Stephen King

~ Lola

“AMAZING!” ~ slavish fan

“King at his best.” ~ slavish reviewer

“Loved! But the cover sucks.” ~ some dork from goodreads

Before you get mad, I’m not here to drag the King. I read almost everything he wrote up until 2010-ish. Needful Things, Pet Sematery, and Different Seasons are among some of my rare re-reads. I’m possibly the only person out there that really loved Duma Key. And King writes some of the greatest short stories and novellas out there. Apt Pupil is relentless horror on so many levels. The Road Virus Heads North is a master class in punishing suspense in the short form.

But he’s not incapable of mediocrity. Cell, anyone? He’s also a frequent idiot on Twitter, but whatever. Boomers gonna boom. Never meet your heroes. (Also, I haven’t read any of The Dark Tower books. Shut up, I don’t care.)

Now for the review! I picked up If It Bleeds because of the clever cover. I like animals all up in each other. It’s fun. Like the cat-rat version of turducken. Without the third thing. I don’t know what that would be. Maybe a fish or a lizard.

Now the review, for real this time. I was ready to settle into the comfy pair of slippers that is a Stephen King book and If It Bleeds did not disappoint. This book is very King-y. Four novellas containing all his greatest hits. Folksy olds. Poignant moments of loss. A child’s world existing just below the line of adult sight. And, of course, a struggling writer.

I’ll go through one at a time and give my thoughts.

Mr. Harrigan’s Phone

A ghost story for the digital age. Young boy earns a few bucks each week reading the newspaper to a retired finance industry titan. Eventually the old man dies, but not before the boy teaches him how to use an iPhone. Life goes on, but in some ways stays rooted in place where it begins to sicken and rot. It’s a story about grief. In a sense, all the novellas in this collection are about grief, but Mr. Harrigan’s Phone is the most explicit, and it sets the tone nicely. Also harkens back to the advent of the smart phone with a certain nostalgia and horror. This story felt the most fully realized of the four, but the novelty of tech doesn’t make it a novel King story. If an AI was programmed to generate Stephen King stories, this would be one of them.

The Life of Chuck

This one reads almost experimental, like a China Mieville novel. Told in three acts in reverse order, or from the inside out, or from the top down. I don’t know really. Chuck is born, he lives, he dies, and the world he carries within dies with him. I can’t say more than that without spoiling because this one isn’t a thriller chiller. It meanders, and does so delightfully. As a whole the story doesn’t quite take shape the way you sense King wants it to, but that’s why it’s my favourite of the four. It takes a risk and does something King doesn’t normally do. It surprised me.

If It Bleeds

You get the feeling the other stories are just blubber padding out the headliner. I didn’t read The Outsider. I hear it’s good. Maybe I should read it because this one was just okay for me. The premise is cool, a face shifting monster orchestrates a middle school bombing and Holly Gibney is on the case. This is what happens when an author loves his characters too much. This story is indulgent. King tries to get our hearts to bleed for Holly, but I didn’t feel it. She’s basically perfect with a few quirks. He loves her too much to give her actual flaws. It was a fun read, but nothing that resonated on the level I know King is capable of.

The Rat

I’m just going to say it. This story was some dumb shit. A recycled mish mash of Bag of Bones, 1408, and The Secret Window and probably any story where King is clearly writing some externalized version of himself. Writer is having trouble writing. Writer goes to cabin. Writer experiences a strange. Writer makes Bad Deal. Consequences. I kept waiting for King to subvert his own trope, but he doesn’t. If I had to guess, I’d say this was a trunk story he hauled out to meet a page count that would justify a $38 hardcover.

Overall, I enjoyed this collection, and with the exception of The Rat the stories were entertaining. The Life of Chuck was nearly brilliant, and I give King credit for taking that risk, considering the rest of the stories play it incredibly safe. Maybe the cover says it all? We’ve got the cat and mouse (or rat), which is clever if familiar. What’s missing is the third ingredient that surprises and makes the whole thing memorable. If It Bleeds is not bad, Constant Reader, but it’s no turducken.

3/5

Detonation #14 – Such Times

~ Noggy

Navigating Life in a Literary Minefield

“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo.

“So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

I’ve always loved those lines, and they’ve never been more apt. Such times indeed, and so true. We all have to decide what to do with the time that is given us.

So, of course, we’re totally wasting it. And I’m not talking about the last couple of months, trapped in our homes and clinging to sanity with alcohol and Netflix. Nobody is going to begrudge a little demotivation and aimlessness right now. It’s an unusual and uncertain glitch in the matrix.

But it will end and there will be a new normal. What will you do then? Try to wiggle back into your old life? Because, really, who’d want to live in those boring old times, doing the same thing day after day, year after year, living on the dying carcass of global free market capitalism? 

Well, regular people, I guess. And there’s no shortage of them. In fact, in an informal poll where I browsed both Facebook and Twitter for a six and half hours every day for ten years, it was obvious that a majority of social media users, which is to say everyone on the entire planet, is so bored and boring and unenlightened they’ve outsourced their life to a drinking bird. Like clockwork, the bird dips and another meme blasts forth, another tweet is retweeted, and the noise cloud that is our reality gets slightly noisier.

Of course, at the moment, most of this is complaining or fist shaking. Life is shit. You’re making my life shit. Don’t you know you shouldn’t do this? That you can’t do that? And now, because people are nasty, we have snitch lines. Is this the fucking Spanish Inquisition? If you see a few people walking down the street, less than two meters apart, don’t fucking call the cops. Don’t write letters to the editor. Don’t complain about it on Facebook. Look, I get it, I do. Every time I wander out to the park for some fresh air, there are milling groups of people with t-shirts that say “Oh no, the Economy” or “Cull the Weak.” Every time I go to the grocery store I see people going the wrong direction down clearly marked aisles. Makes me wish I’d brought the woodchipper. But I smile and wave and maneuver far around them. I don’t call the cops. Or complain. At least about that, complaining about complainers currently consumes most of my free time.

Damn the irony.

Right. Interesting times, which doesn’t have to be a curse. I’d posit that if you pull your head out of the social media Khazad Dum, you’ll notice there’s a damn remarkable world both inside and out worth writing about.

And I’m not talking about poetry.

Please do not write personal plague poetry, or as Lola so elegantly puts it, “Poetic observations of a nature so shallow they appear to be fathomless.” I’m not saying it’s impossible to write decent poetry about living in your kitchen, baking bread, and calling the cops on some poor neighbor who happens to break the two-meter rule, but… yeah, it is. Same goes for plague prose. Give it time. Give it a year or two. If we need to flatten the curve on ANYTHING, it’s to make sure everyone doesn’t write about the exact same thing happening to everyone, regardless of how much nightmare fuel is being poured on the fire. You think the emergency wards are taxed now? Wait until everyone is forced to read about the horrors, or possibly pleasures, of social distancing, or about what happened to all the toilet paper.

No.

There are far better uses for that pent-up wellspring of emotion, both now and into the new normal. Whether your life is currently a smoking crater, or not, you’re experiencing something novel that hasn’t happened in a hundred years and probably won’t happen like this again. There’s a lot of passion out there, generated by wanting to see other people punished for doing things you don’t understand aren’t technically against the law. Capture that passion. Capture the fear. Capture the determination to make them pay by killing or torturing them in your next story.

Let that passion infuse your work.

When this does end, don’t flush that passion away and go back to your old life. You only have so much time, you know, and you’ve probably wasted enough of it writing poetry.

Detonation #13: Schrodinger’s Trunk

~ Lola

Navigating Life in a Literary Minefield

Warning: Explicit language and mature themes. If you’re offended by such things, you might want to venture elsewhere.

***

There are writers that never waste a word they’ve written. Once they start a project, sooner or later, they will see it finished and published. These people exist, we all know who they are, and if you happen to be one of them…

I’m not sure where you got the outsized self-confidence it takes to believe everything you cook up is worth eating… but I’m not here to yuck your yum, I just don’t think I’m talking to you.

For the rest of us, once you’ve been at this a while, you will have generated a large body of discarded work colloquially referred to as trunk stories. You know the ones I’m talking about. Stuff we started and didn’t finish. Stuff we finished but couldn’t sell. Some of it is plain shit. Some had perhaps more-than-shit potential but blew up on the launch pad. Some of it was desperately trying not to be shit, but the harder it tried the shittier it got. Whatever the reason, the trunk is where they go to die. Except that’s not exactly what happens.

We think of a lot of the junk in our trunk as potential. We reserve the right to pull these stories out one day, blow the dust off, rework, and maybe get them published. You could say these stories are neither dead nor alive, or more accurately they are both dead and alive. They exist in a state of quantum superposition until you lift the lid and observe them.

So, the question becomes: is it worth a possible Raider’s style face meltening to break the seal on that ark and see what all is going on inside your personal writing hell?

Consider the following case study.

Lola Silkysocks has got it in her dotty little head that she wants to pull one of these dreadful novel remnants out of mothballs and have another go at it. As always, she turns to her accomplice Noggy Splitfoot for feedback.

Lola: Did you read the first chapter?

Noggy: Um, yeah…when did you say you wrote this?

Lola: That bad?

Noggy: You’ve definitely grown as a writer.

Lola: Is it salvageable?

Noggy: Wait, you’re serious about this? I thought we were just sharing shitty old drafts.

Lola: You’re such a bastard—are those sirens? Where are you?

Noggy: *engine roar* No time, Silkysocks. Meet me at the rendezvous point in half an hour. Bring a shovel.

Lola remains unsure. There’s a lot to like, even love, about that novel. The premise, the characters, even the writing in certain places is good. Like really good. But there’s a lot that’s fucked too. Jumped up dialogue, info dumps, thready world building, leaning too heavily on tropes. But that’s not the bit that’s really broken. In fact nothing is broken. It’s doing exactly what a first draft is supposed to do: sucking with the cyclonic force of a Dyson upright. Those flaws are all fixable. And if it were that simple, we’d all be the writer I mentioned at the beginning of this essay. Nothing would be unsalvageable

Where is that dividing line between set aside and trunked? Hard to say, and probably different for everyone. For me it’s when the writing feels like a shed skin. The writer I was back then is not just grown, but kind of gone. I can see where I’m trying so damn hard to be clever, I can read a passage and know what book I was reading at the time that inspired it. I can see these things and even see how to fix them, but it would always feel like trying to slide back into that old skin.

Sometimes it isn’t like that. Sometimes a story just wasn’t ready to be written at the time you started it. The idea too fragile and complex to be rushed. Your skills not developed enough to execute properly. Sometimes years go by before that story pokes its way out of the trunk and opens itself up. Sometimes that story is a skin you needed time to grow into.

There’s a lot of metaphors flying around this essay, it’s confusing, and I don’t care. There’s something about potential. The allure of imagining all possibilities, all at once. Until you open that lid, your stories are everything they never were. I’m not saying it’s a bad idea to re-evaluate old work. But what do you have to gain by collapsing that wave function?

If we’re being honest, probably not a lot. I mean, there’s a reason you trunked that story in the first place. Schrodinger’s cat was most likely dead before he dumped it in the box and lifting the lid is only going to let out the smell.

But the curiosity is killing me…

Detonation #12 – Subversion Recursion

~ Noggy

Navigating Life in a Literary Minefield

Readers expect if they pick up the twenty-second volume of their favourite thriller series it’ll be more of the same, a creaky wheezing corpse dragging itself forward with rotting fingerbones. These sorts of books are where the money is. The boilerplate of the industry. Month after month, year after year, these books are churned out assembly line style for the public to ingest, absorbing three sad calories of literary enjoyment, before shitting them into the trash or closest used bookstore. 

It’s an ugly cycle. At some point people started buying these books based on firehose marketing and celebrity endorsements and in response more books were written to cater to those buying tastes, ad infinitum. It’s not a secret, far from it, authors know there is a certain magic formula that if they are talented enough, or lucky enough, to master, they can join the ranks of the serializers.

Not just the serials either, the entire mass market oozes sameness. The books look the same, the titles sound the same, the plots are indistinguishable except for the anti-hero’s cup size and eye colour — blue steel or smoky aluminum. Writing by rote. Writing by formula. Everyone wants to be the next James Patterson or Steven King or J.K. Rowling or George R.R. Martin. Rich and famous, with terrible movie adaptions and mansions full of dirty money sex dungeons.

Hmm, that actually doesn’t sound so bad. Where the hell was I going with this again?

Oh right, total lack of imagination in the pursuit of sell out success.

The ability to conjure ideas from the billion facets of existence and assemble them into unique works of music, art, and writing is a superpower with unlimited potential, so it really grinds my gears when writers, who have the entire universe of possibilities to play with, take the same old tired elements and assemble them in bloody identical ways. Sure, they may brighten or darken the paint some, and give the work a clever name and twist the marketing, but it’s typically a clone of a seminal work, and a shittier one at that.

Stories in a particular genre and sub-genre are going to have similar and even required elements. A murder mystery, by definition is going to have some sort of murder and quite possibly a mystery. A thriller should thrill. Noggy loves heist stories. Lots of people love zombie or werewolf stories, half the world either loves or hates vampire stories, traditional or glittery. There are haunted house stories, cosmic horrors, cryptids, occult detectives, you name it. Some sub-genres are narrow, some are wide, but they instill a little order to chaos that is the literary landscape. As I mentioned, there is an expectation that if you pick up a book in that sub-genre it should actually, you know, not be false advertising.

That’s not what my little rant is about though. What I am talking about are overused tropes and by-the-number formulaic bullshit. 

Sure, it’s easy to write yet another school for bizarre weirdos novel, packed with bullies and not-so secret secrets and angry, clueless teachers — sorry teachers, you know how it is. Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.

Does every supernatural detective story, mine included, need to pay homage to a certain hard drinking, chain smoking, trench coat and fedora wearing reprobate from the 30’s? Does every epic fantasy novel have to involve an orphan from a purged royal family who grows up to be an assassin with legendary abilities because their father was king of the horny gods? Does every single heist series have to start with a book that’s entirely about putting a misfit, yet oddly exceptionally uniquely talented crew together?

FUCK NO.

Subvert those tropes. Do it!

We already discussed in a previous episode that if you want to write, you need to read. Period. And it often helps to read the sort of stories you want to write. Subverting tropes requires intimate knowledge of them. You need to know where the boundaries are and what you can twist, and hollow out and fill with explosives, and, in the end, completely break.

Does your haunted house story require a gothic New England farmhouse complete with a vengeful revenant left over from the original occupant’s penchant for baby ear soup? Nope. There are a thousand elements ripe for subversion. And I’m not talking easy ones like making the house a brownstone apartment in Manhattan and the ghosts aliens. Who says the house needs to be a regular house? And who says the ghosts have to be regular ghosts? I’m not saying write a story about a construction site porta-potty possessed by ghost pepper hot wings, but I’m also not, not saying that.

Find an angle, run naked with it. You know you can. Don’t be afraid that you’ll never get published by the big five, or one of their imprints, and get that sex dungeon. Write weird, terrible shit, that has its own unique soul and flavour, and take that unoriginal WIP, wrap it in a tarp and stash it under the Aztek’s trunk liner next to the trencher and gasoline in anticipation of the next wolf moon and a satisfying internment.

It’s for the best, it really is.

Coming Soon…

~ Lola
The Seventh Terrace

The Seventh Terrace is delighted to announce the upcoming release of the deranged, debauched, cosmic-horror-by-gaslight novella STARSEED by Steve Passey writing as Dio Cornito.

And for those with a taste for noir, our pulpy crime imprint Tiny Sledgehammer proudly presents END OF THE LOOP by Brent Nichols. What you don’t know, or can’t remember, will definitely hurt you.

If you like ’em short, sharp, and scintillating, look for these two novellas coming atcha in 2020.

Detonation #11: Keeping Your Muse Lubed in the Time of Contagion

~ Lola

Navigating Life in a Literary Minefield

Warning: Explicit language and mature themes. If you’re offended by such things, you might want to venture elsewhere.

***

Welp, the world’s on fire, folks. Like really this time. If you’re not there already, it’s likely a matter of when and not if you’ll end up locked in your hovel, let out once a week to drive the Aztek to the feed lot for your family’s alfalfa ration. God willing, the liquor stores will deliver.

And lest you think we don’t take this seriously, let Lola assure you. WE TAKE IT FUCKING SERIOUSLY.

Amazon is going to clean up, and the rich will emerge richer than ever. You think this plague is the great equalizer? Think again. Maybe you’ve got it worse than most. Chances are you still have it better than some. Those inequalities are immortal, but you aren’t. Statistically you’re likely to survive, but a shit ton of people are dead, and a lot more will follow. This is a crisis.

So, in a time of economic death rattles and social distance (which we know you’re doing as best you can because you also take it fucking seriously) the question becomes…

How do we get through this?

Art is needed now more than ever. It’s the balm we’re all desperately seeking to escape or at least soften this reality. But wow is it hard trying to stay inspired when your theoretically homeschooled kids have gone feral, you’re trying to work from home, or scrambling for any work at all, separated from your friends, and suddenly cellies with a partner whose middle name you actually forgot in the last twenty years.

Let’s talk about creative process. Right now, your muse is probably drier than a Death Valley creek bed. She needs a little lubrication and you may have heard that everything is material, but you can’t just grease her gears with any old gunk. A prime example would be The News. There’s staying informed, and there’s gorging on catastrophe causing an overgrowth of doom and wiping out all your healthy creative flora.

A case study:

Lola and Noggy attended a gift exchange last solstice where Lola ended up with a dubious (and expired, she would later find out) bottle of g-spot stimulating lube. How was she to know it was a joke?

Noggy: You’re not gonna actually use that are you?

Lola: Well, it doesn’t taste too bad. Kinda like toothpaste. What could go wrong?

I don’t want to frighten you. This story ends happily, thanks to Canesten, but Lola learned a lesson that day.

The wrong lube will only crank your creativity up long enough to burn it into a pile of yeasty ashes. So, for fuck’s sake, stay informed, but don’t cram a world’s worth of toxic news in your pussy. I forget where I was going with this. It’s been a weird couple of weeks.

Lola: Nog, I have to tell you a story.

Noggy: Not if it’s about your vagina.

Lola: All my stories are about my vagina.

Noggy: You know other people can hear you, right?

In fact, Lola respects her vagina a great deal. It works hard and she tries to give it everything it needs to be happy. Your muse deserves the same consideration. So, lube her up with something nice, something that will last, that’s compatible with your creative chemistry.

Read the books you’ve been meaning to get around to, listen to the amazing quarantine concerts being livestreamed, take one of those cool virtual tours every museum on earth is throwing online, go for a run at night. For the love of Gary, don’t poison yourself when there is so much delicious creative nourishment to be found so easily.

I think we’re going to look back on this pandemic as a time of great tragedy but also of great discovery. Moments like this are defining. So, stay healthy, stay slick, and who knows what you’ll slide into.

***

P.S. Hang tight, critters. We’ll get through this together, 2 metres apart.

xo

Sarah & Rob

Detonation #10: The Side Piece

~ Lola

Navigating Life in a Literary Minefield

Warning: Explicit language and mature themes. If you’re offended by such things, you might want to venture elsewhere.

***

Gather round spawlings, for a tale of two novelists. A pair of faithless whores who barely get past writing the prologue before their eyes are wandering. Before they’re burning through a string of short stories, some very short, some they don’t even bother to name before slipping away and crumbling back into bed with their novels. It’s disgusting, really.

Or is it?

What is it about these slutty distractions encountered in the periphery of our novel writing journeys? Why isn’t one project enough? Where is the harm in stepping out on your novel?  Glad you asked, as I hereby offer the following arguments in defense of the much maligned side piece.

Novels are long and monogamy is boring

Let’s just say it’s a good thing each of my tentacles doesn’t feel entitled to know what crevices the others are exploring at any given moment. But when it comes to writing, your novel is in fact well served by occasionally dripping your quill over a fresh sheet of vellum.

A case study. Noggy and Lola are best friends. Imagine them locked in a room together for a year. They’d run out of things to say and Lola would zip the nose hole on Noggy’s gimp mask shut in his sleep. Or what if this wasn’t a dystopian dungeon world and they were permitted to come and go, spend time with other people, and still hang out in the dungeon whenever they both want? Isn’t that a more gratifying relationship in the end? RACK rules apply.

Saying you can only work on one project at a time is as ridiculous as saying you can only have one playmate at a time. But srsly, Nog + Lola = BFF

Procrastination can generate a robust body of work

It’s truly astonishing how clean your house gets, how orderly your filing cabinet, and how much other writing you can produce when you’d rather do just about anything than work on your fucking novel.

Noggy: Did you work on your fucking novel?

Lola: Erm…no.

Noggy: You made me promise to bludgeon you with a garden weasel if you didn’t work on your fucking novel.

Lola: I did, but so ardent was I in my fucking novel avoidance that I wrote three bitchin’ short stories.

Noggy: A promise is a promise.

Lola: You’re at Home Depot right now, aren’t you?

Noggy: You’re lucky the weasels aren’t out until Spring.

Not all ideas are shelf stable

A brilliant story idea is not like a can of condensed milk pushed to the back of the pantry. You can’t come back in a year expecting it to be as vibrant and magical as it was freshly squirted outta the creative udder. Some ideas you need to use right away before they spoil.

Noggy: Wanna help me drink a bottle of insanely expensive Japanese whisky?

Lola: You said I wasn’t worthy

Noggy: Yeah, but I opened it a year ago, thinking I’d finish it when I finished my novel. Now it tastes like socks, and somebody needs to drink it, even if it is you.

Lola: I’ll be right over…

Art is a process as much as it is a product. That process is rarely linear. As an artist the last thing you want to liken yourself to is a factory cranking out ‘art’. So redraw your novel writing maps to allow the occasional detour of a short story, essay, or even a goddamn poem(if you must). The finished novel is a worthy final destination, but the side piece turns that journey into a winding, recursive, messy, metaphor-mixing ride you definitely don’t want to miss.

The Haemophiliac by Tania Donald

~ Lola

The shortest month of the year is Women in Horror Month, and I’d rather not waste time inking out a list of scary ladies that’s mostly all the scary ladies you already know and are maybe dead (to all the horror bros proud of having read Shirley Jackson and Charlotte Gilman, I see you, here’s your cookie). Instead I’ll turn my tentacles to the ones doing amazing work not many people are talking about. Octoclot asks so little of you, so consider this humble request. Read Tania Donald. Do it now.

The protagonist of this historical gothic novella is the young and vulnerable Fraulein Klein. A seamstress desperate to turn her life around and climb out of the pit of poverty. Desperate enough to take job as a governess at a remote estate in the Black Forest. One year. For a suspiciously outsized sum. One year and she can afford to start her life over and take back the baby daughter she was forced to give up. In Fraulein Klein, Donald shows us a heroine battered by life but with enough steel in her to keep trying, for good or ill.

On arrival Klein is greeted by a haggard housekeeper who remarks on Klein’s scrawny appearance and immediately insists on feeding her, though not in a particularly kindly way. As Klein eats her first hot meal in an age, the housekeeper sets out the rules. She must remain in the child’s room at all times. She must eschew color, especially red. She must never ever allow the child to handle anything sharp, like a pin or a needle as she’s a hemophiliac, and the slightest prick will have her bleeding to death, the fate that befell her twin sister.

This novella is the epitome of a slow burn, punctuated with increasingly hot flare ups. What I particularly appreciated was the skill with which Donald developed the deep inner life of her protagonist. Complex characterization is so often lacking in the horror genre, especially in short stories and novellas, but Donald nails it. She also takes the time to develop those elements that make a story resonate past the final page. Things like theme, subtext, and symbolism, all through carefully chosen language and structure. The writing is sophisticated which elevates The Haemophiliac, in my unapologetically snobby opinion, to the level of literary horror.

Nothing is what it seems in this web of white lace nestled in the Black Forest. This is not the story of a sick child, but a story of what we carry in our blood, a legacy of betrayal and deception, the twin curse of lust and hunger. Traps of our own weaving. You are what you are, and no matter where you go you cannot escape yourself.

4/5

Detonation #9 – First Impressions

~ Noggy

Navigating Life in a Literary Minefield

Warning: Explicit language and mature themes. If you’re offended by such things, you might want to venture elsewhere.

***

People are boring, living their monochrome little lives at their monochrome shitty jobs in their sad monochrome existences. Endless lists. Vague descriptions. Random numbers.

Devoid of personality.

How do I know? Because Noggy just spent the last two days reading hundreds of resumes, that’s why. And if I have to judge people, which I’m emphatically willing to do whether I get paid to do it or not, then I’m going to give it to you straight. What the absolute fuck? Does anyone ever take a step back, look at their resume, and think “Wow, amazing! I’m amazing. People are going to read this and shit themselves trying to hire me.”

Short answer: NO.

There’s blame to go around of course, all the job site optimizers and expert self-help influencers that tell you how to game the system. How to include every damn industry buzzword, stat, skill, tool, process, and methodology which, I discovered, almost always involve the word ‘cucumber’, so to better fool the modern yet stupid AI enhanced job placement fit scanners. These sorts of resumes don’t give you an actual picture of the person you’re looking to hire, they’re more like D&D character sheets without the bio and background part filled in.

But I guess there’s no room for colour when the ‘experts’ insist on mashing your life into a single page, reducing ALL resumes to the SAME resume. Which means that once it does get picked out of the labour carnival bin-o-fun by the claw and deposited on my donut crumb crusted desk, I get riled up enough to write another one of these fucking articles.

Look, I’m not saying you ARE necessarily boring, but your public business persona probably is. All I ask is that you find ways, even simple and subtle ways, to give me some idea about who you are and why I should spend any energy hiring you. Give me an interest, give me something you’re proud of that doesn’t involve this particular capitalist self-sacrifice. Present yourself differently. Show personality. If I see a flicker of light, where you casually mention in your soft skills section, that you’re drilling a hole to the hollow earth in order to find a dinosaur husband to add to your polyamorous collective, I can guarantee, given a minimal required skill set, that I’ll be booking an interview.

***

I’m sure you’re asking what the fuck this has to do with writing and why the hell you forced yourself to suffer through four hundred words of old man yelling at clouds?

Everything. It’s exactly the bloody same.

I have a question for you.

“How do you present yourself to first time readers?”

Unless you are already an established author with a solid fan base, or a true phenom, you’re constantly mining for one of the most valuable commodities on the planet. I’m talking, of course, about attention. Every author desires it. Every author strives for it. Few get more than a few grains, sluiced from the meandering, braided river of current public trends and interests. A river brimming with other prospectors, elbows up, trying to stake their claim and eek out a passable existence, hoping to hit the mother lode and strike it rich.

Let’s, for the sake of simplicity, focus on one particular type of author: the eager up and comer, one with a couple of stories ‘out there’ in the weird wide world, one who doesn’t have an agent or a contract or a big-name publisher. An indie author. Our aspiring literary star wants to gain attention, has to gain attention if they don’t want to get washed away.

As with resumes, authors fling themselves and their creations into the world. They toss the dynamite and thousands, if not millions, of eyes see the resulting explosion.

Boom!

Then what?

There are a couple of co-mingled elements at play here. The author and their writing. Not the same thing, though they eventually merge together as time goes on.

But the important part is the First Impression.

So, I ask again, “how do you present yourself to first time readers?” When they pick up your book and lick the cover, fondle the spine, devour the backmatter, gape at your bio, and leaf through a few pages, what impression are you leaving? Does your bio invoke awe? Does your writing speak for you, providing amazeball feelings? When they come across you on social media or your website or at book events or conventions, do they think “Holy fucking shit, this author is the cat’s ass, I want to be them, I want to be with them, I might even read their book if I can get it on sale.”?

You’d better hope so.

Every second another hardscrabble author picks up their pan and wades into the mayhem working on just that. Sure, you can slave away, slowly building up your claim, and maybe, just maybe you’ll eventually get lucky or at least modestly successful. But if you wait for a break or let poor work speak for itself, it may be a long dreadful bitter life.

So do yourself a favour, take a step back, look at your resume and make it as fucking interesting as possible, even if it’s only eighty percent honest. Oh, and don’t forget the cucumber.

The Broken Hours, by Jacqueline Baker

~ Lola

This historical novel is a ghost story set in a maze of nested aliases. At its core, it questions the concept of identity. Who are we? Does that change depending on who we’re with? Who are we when we’re alone?

Arthor Crandle is a man fallen on hard times, a grieving father with an estranged wife. He’s travelled to Providence, Rhode Island to take a position as a personal assistant to a reclusive writer, Howard Phillips Lovecraft. Once installed in the house, supposedly shared with a few other mystery tenants, he is consumed by the mystery of his employer’s past and drawn to the gregarious young actress living in the apartment downstairs.

In the well-established Lovecraftian tradition, Baker’s narrative is suffused with a gloomy nihilistic dread. Set in Spring – my least favourite season, muddy and cold – it rains constantly, the ocean is a repulsive set piece reeking of sewage, and the people are dour and suspicious. One gets the impression that nothing in this story will end far from where it started, and even if it did, nothing much will change as a result, because we are simply too insignificant to move that cosmic needle.

Arthor goes about his work, maintaining the household, transcribing handwritten manuscript pages, and communicating with H.P. primarily through letters. All the while Crandle is unravelling, seeing a ghostly little girl in the garden at night, hearing screams from the study, and encountering an oppressive malevolence stalking the halls. His one source of solace in a storm of confusion and despair is Flossie, the actress, though she too grows more and more insubstantial as the days press on.

It all comes back to the names, the aliases. Baker skillfully uses names as metaphor for the stories we tell ourselves about the world and our place in it. Who are you? Using beautiful language and clever subtext, she builds a new mythology around an already somewhat mythical figure, and slowly, mercilessly, strips it away.

4/5

Detonation #8: If You’re Gonna Write, You Gotta Read

~ Lola

Navigating Life in a Literary Minefield

Warning: Explicit language and mature themes. If you’re offended by such things, you might want to venture elsewhere.

***

If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you’re on the right side of the issue. For everyone else, shut up, I don’t care. I’m taking no prisoners because there is no grey area. Let me be perfectly clear:

It is immoral to write but not read.

That’s right, children. It doesn’t matter if you are dyslexic, or struggle with ADHD, or have a very busy life. Your excuses bore me. If you have the ability to write, you have the ability and the moral obligation to read.

But let’s back up and first establish what I would consider reading. Perhaps not an exhaustive list but you get the gist.

Books

Comics

Audiobooks

Articles

Essays

Short stories

Poems (I guess)

And perhaps more importantly, what does NOT qualify as reading:

Social media

Headlines

Memes

Podcasts

Buying books

Sniffing books

Posting pics of books to your insta

Talking about how many books are in your TBR pile

Rhapsodizing about how much you loooooove books

Watching the movie (Seriously, this didn’t work in middle school, why would it work now?)

Why is it so important to read if you aspire to write? Why is writing without giving equal time to reading a sign of corrupted character, anti-intellectualism, and a weak narrow mind?

Fairness. Obviously if you are writing with the expectation that others will read your work, it’s rather selfish not to devote attention to the work of others.

Empathy. If you are not regularly taking in narratives that do not originate with you, how are you to craft a story that will connect with others? How are you yourself to connect with others?

Better Building Blocks. Do yourself a favour and unsubscribe to that fucking word of the day email. There is no better vocabulary builder than a robust reading practice. There are so many words to play with and if you never read anyone else’s, you’ll be stuck with your boring starter set forever.

Craftsmanship. It’s been said the way to learn how to write is to write. And yes that’s part of it, but like any other craft, honing it means apprenticing yourself to those more knowledgeable. Study how an author you admire turns a phrase, describes setting, or adds flesh to a character’s bones. Self-taught won’t teach much.

All right, you’re thinking, you may talk the talk but are those tentacles walking the walk? So let me tell you, I was a delayed reader, unable to read fluently at grade level until I was almost nine years old, but once it clicked, it unleashed a monster. I demolished books like it was my job and I didn’t slow down until my thirties when I started to write. The more I wrote, the less I read, and my writing reflected that. It lost depth and breadth. It lost sparkle and imagination and universality. It became familiar and predictable. It didn’t take long to notice a direct relationship between the quality of my writing and the amount of time spent reading.

I’m also a bookseller, so reading a lot and reading broadly is critical to doing my job well. All told, I read about 30-50 books a year, and spend at least an hour a day reading online articles and essays. A good long form journalism piece is one of my fav ways to pass a lunch hour. By almost any metric, I read a lot. This isn’t bragging, but disclosure for the purposes of credibility. You don’t have to read as much as me, and possibly you read more, but trust me when I say the act of purposeful reading is essential to all writers.

You don’t have to read fast. You don’t have to read War & Peace (I haven’t). But a good rule of thumb is to spend at least as much time reading as you do writing. Ideally more. Read in long stretches, read in tiny bites, read literature, read trash, read poetry, read something translated. Do it every day. Cultivate in yourself a love of reading so passionate that if someone were to ask you to give up one or the other, you wouldn’t have to think twice. I promise it’ll make you a better writer and a probably a better person.

A writer writes. A maxim meant to shore up the confidence of those suffering from imposter syndrome, tentative to claim the title of ‘writer’. While the sentiment is well meaning, it’s not quite complete. Here’s the secret half of what a writer does: a writer reads.

Bunny, by Mona Awad

~ Lola

My name is Octoclot, and I read literary fiction. I read more literary fiction than genre fiction. I’m a snob and I’m not sorry. That said, there’s nothing better than sinking my tentacles into the juicy unicorn that is the literary genre novel, and Bunny fits that bill perfectly.

I’d read Awad’s previous novel, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl, and didn’t much like it. So I wouldn’t have read Bunny if I hadn’t attended a reading and fallen in love with Awad’s voice. Seriously smooth. I’d also recently read The Secret History (yes, I’m late to most parties), and the parallels intrigued me. I mean, Bunny.

Samantha is a scholarship student enrolled in a creative writing program at an elite liberal arts university (shades of Tartt and Ellis). Desperately poor and lonely, she’s recruited into a cult of beautiful women in her workshop that dress like little girls, eat miniature food, hug for hours, braid each other’s hair, and call each other Bunny.

Naturally, a cruel obsession lurks beneath the glossy cupcake frosting. In an MFA program fixated on the concept of ‘the body’, deconstructing it in their workshop to the point of meaninglessness, the Bunnies have summoned the power to create life, to create a boy, from a bunny. Though not exactly boys, they’re rough work, malformed drafts. Built to serve until required to ponder a sense of self and then they unravel (or explode, in the more gruesome scenes). They seem to think that Samantha, their unrefined, emotionally wooden newbie, has what it takes to do better, to create a real boy.

In this bizarre story described as The Secret History meets Mean Girls, the juxtaposition of the saccharine with the sinister evokes a dreamlike dread that’s hard to shake. Samantha is more disturbed that you think. The Bunnies, more hollow. The drafts, more calamitous. Make no mistake, this is a horror novel, an erotic horror novel, masquerading as literary fiction.

One of my favourite things about Bunny is the mythic references. We’ve got swans, lambs, wolves, and rabbits. The best part is the complete lack of subtlety. I mean, they go to Warren College for Christ’s sake, and there is almost literally a big bad wolf. Lit fic values nothing so much as metaphorical murk and obfuscation, and to see it explicitly splashed across the page in such an outsized way is terrifically fun. She also refers to poets as Lizard People. Seriously Mona, I feel seen.

And the end, oh the end! No spoilers, but the climax bricked me right in the heart. Let’s just say there are worse things than someone you love dying. And the more beautiful the lie, the more tragic the truth.

For this reader, Bunny was not about mean girls. Or classism. Or the ridiculousness of MFA culture. It’s about desire and loneliness, and the lengths we’ll go just to be loved. Without sentimentality, Awad suggests that perhaps that’s all we’re made for.

5/5

Detonation #7 – Smart Resolutions

~ Noggy

Navigating Life in a Literary Minefield

Warning: Explicit language and mature themes. If you’re offended by such things, you might want to venture elsewhere.

***

So, it’s that time again, the commencement of yet another cycle around the sun, marked by a semi-arbitrary date that doesn’t quite align with cosmological anchors. Like how hard would have been to just set New Years on the Winter Solstice? It’s the sort of thing that grinds Noggy’s OCD something fierce. And don’t get him started on why months have their fluctuating number of days.

Fucking Romans.

It’s a happy time none-the-less. A chance to wash away the sickly stains of a cursed life with overpriced and underwhelming champagne. Maybe reminisce about the highlights you captured with your goddamn selfie stick. Eat loads of crap. Socialize with friends, enemies, frenemies, or in all probability, yourself, pantsless and eating pie in the backseat of your Pontiac Aztek or garbage filled K-car.

Call it what you want. Tradition. Ritual. Self-loathing and/or self-reflection. It’s a transition, that’s the important part. From one oozing nugget of time to the next. When you crawl out of your cocoon sometime early January, you know it’s a clean slate, you know that everything that came before is last year’s news. You made it. And this year will be different.

Special.

Energized.

Productive.

You heard right. Productive. Whatever writing or editing or design or marketing or publicity or publishing you did last year, you’ll surpass it this year. More. Faster. Better.

Why?

Because you made a fucking New Year’s Resolution, that’s why.

You’ve resolved one or possibly many things. It may be a vague decree like “I’m going to write every day”, or more explicit, like “I’m going to a thousand words every day.” Or it might be ambitious like “I’m going to write and publish three novels this year.” Or ethereal like “I’m going to procrastinate less this year.”

Kinda bullshit.

I’m not saying those aren’t worthy goals, because they totally are. They’re just soft. And squishy. Moist even. Soft resolutions are like ideas. Everyone has a billion of them, but at the end of the day, rather small and limp.

The concept of “I’m going to write more” is pretty vague, and the more vague and fuzzy the resolution, the harder it’ll be to stick with. What is “more”? What is “less”? If you can’t quantify progress, if you just jam your thumb or tentacle or mating appendage in the air and guess that you may be doing more of what you said you’d do, you’ll rapidly fall into the same old lull you’ve always fallen into.

Imagine meeting up with your writing partner at the end of January.

“How’s the novel going,” asks Lola, stuffing a grinning orifice with crisp Kale salad. “You talked big at NYE before I left you rotting in the dumpster.”

“Meh,” says Noggy. “My resolution was to write more than last year. I’m spitting out words.”

“How many more?”

“Well, more… Way more… I think. It feels like way more at least.”

“So, you’ll be done by summer?”

“I have absolutely no idea. How about you? I sort of recall you mentioning you had serious resolutions of your own this year.”

Lola slides her tongue under her lip to clear out a yard of astroturf, swishes her mouth with rosé. “Yeah, got some killer ones. Turning the hot tub into an alcoholic sex cauldron three times a week for six months and drowning anyone who doesn’t like it. Then, I’m going to ruin two marriages by seducing spouses in Japanese love hotels. Targeting one every three months, but I’ve built in a month overlap contingency.”

“Uh, I meant writing resolutions.”

“Exactly. I’m taking copious notes for my book, which will be done by year’s end. Next tub is Monday by the way, you should come.”

***

Noggy can do better. If he can stimulate his Bourbon soaked brain cells for two minutes, he’ll realize he just needs to be smart like Lola is. That’s smart as in SMART – specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-based. While maybe the concept has been around forever, George Doran, Arthur Miller, and James Cunningham first formalized it in the November 1981 issue of Management Review. The exact definition of each element has shifted over time, but SMART goals tend to have these elements:

Specific – Pick an unambiguous writing/editing/publishing objective.

Measurable – Make it something you can quantify with a number and keep track of progress. Spreadsheets baby!

Achievable – Make sure you can actually do it. We can go into BHAG’s, Big Hairy Audacious Goal’s, in another time and space, but don’t set yourself up to fail. And don’t include qualifiers that are out of your control – specifying that you want to sell X number of stories or novels is grand, but perilous since that’s in the hands of someone else.

Relevant – It should be an actual writing/editing/publishing goal. Sometimes I wonder about Lola…

Time-based – Choose an end date, and/or dates to measure progress by.

***

Boom!

It’s not rocket science. It’s not even literary science (which, if that isn’t already thing, it is now). Now repeat after me:

“I’m going to write at least three hundred words a day for the next month.”

“I’m going to write six short stories this year and submit them to markets until they are sold.”

“I’m going to complete my novel by the end of May, have it edited by August, and query a dozen agents by year end.”

Rinse and repeat.

***

So, call them what you want. Resolutions. Goals. Objectives. Just remember to be SMART and don’t be caught with your pants down in the back seat with only pie for company. We won’t judge unless it’s Saskatoon Berry.

The Arby’s S’mores Milkshake Experience

~ Lola

Sometimes Lola Silkysocks wants to go where nobody knows her name and the feature milkshake is orange. Where Picasso prints line the walls, an annoyed shift worker slouches behind the counter, and the place is usually a graveyard. Until it’s not.

After the Garlic Butter Steak Sandwich catastrophe, I’d learned my lesson to not experiment at Arby’s, to just order my goddamn beef n’ cheddar and enjoy the fuck out of it under the sallow cubist gaze of the deserted dining room.

I do not peruse the menu. I know what I want. Noggy and I place our orders. The bored cashier asks if there’s anything else. I swear it’s another voice coming out of my mouth.

“I’ll have a S’mores Milkshake.”

As you may or may not know, Noggy has two glares. There’s affectionate exasperation or I suffer you to live, and they’re functionally identical. Though after the way I carried on about the buttered steak, you can guess which one this was.

How to describe the S’mores Milkshake? It makes you wonder things you never wondered before, like, “What are marshmallows supposed to taste like?” When a marshmallow forward milkshake prompts this question, you know you’re in shark infested waters and Terry is about to offer you a shrimp.

I slurp some more. There are chunks. I’m 60% sure they’re graham crackers. A vague thrill of chocolate runs through the whole business, though little more than it takes to lull you into a false sense of trust.

Meanwhile people are wandering into Arby’s by the dozen. Boomers ordering coffee, bougie boxing week shoppers, a mom berating her small child like she’s his parole officer. Arby’s employees leap into unprecedented levels of animation. The meat trays empty and full baskets of curly fries sizzle in their vats. Metaphysical laws are being broken. This is Arby’s. The very gates of Purgatory. No one comes here intentionally. But it is the season for Deadly Sins, and I’m heavily distracted by this confusing confection that is the S’mores Milkshake.

Eventually it had to happen. “Hey Nog, try this.”

In my defense, he didn’t have to drink the whole thing. But he did, and he can tell you the rest…

It should be obvious, if you’ve been paying attention, that Lola has this thing about trying ‘new’ and ‘possibly interesting’ items on the menu at our vintage Picasso adorned local Arby’s. Undeterred by the nightmare that was the Garlic Butter Steak Sandwich, and ravenous after running for thirty days straight, she swore they couldn’t possibly fuck up a milkshake.

Yeah.

I should have known something was up when Lola had a couple sips, pushed it across the table, and said “Try this.” She had that look in her eye. That glazed look. The kind you get when you’re teetering on the edge of a coma. And it wasn’t so much an offering, as a challenge. Sadly, I can’t resist a challenge, or any eatable substance jammed in my face.

Well, I’m going to come right out and say it. It’s not that it’s… bad. And not that it’s… good. It’s just… sickly sweet. Like you used a Christmas elf to clean your teeth with and then washed it down with liquid marshmallow juice. While it does taste vaguely S’more’ish (as any combination of graham cracker, chocolate, and marshmallow tends to) it’s a pale imitation of the actual heavenly camping staple.

Regrets? So many. Within minutes, my stomach began to gurgle. Within an hour, I was little more than a perturbed sea cucumber, nastily expelling both my stomach and twenty feet of large intestine, while hastily scrawling my last will and testament on three sheets of toilet paper I couldn’t actually spare.

Will I drink it again? Uncertain. I guess that depends on if she thrusts it in my face next year.

Noggy and Lola went back and forth on a flame rating and ultimately split the difference between the not totally terrible flavour profile and post-shake warp core ejection.

2/5

Season’s Meatings

~ Lola

On behalf of the Purgatory Towers tenant’s association, Gary would like to wish you an Incendiary Solstice and Saturnalia.

We love a delicious Yuletide tale, so consider this our gift to you. Snuggle up with us on The Seventh Terrace and let this letter to Santa toast your wee hearts this winter’s eve.

Merry Christmas, ya filthy animals!

xoxo

Rob & Sarah

The First Wife

Dear Nicholas,

I promised never to write this letter.

If you still read the letters at all, you might be clutching mine in your hand, tempted to throw it in the fire. Are the flames hot on your bare toes? Or perhaps, like me, you wear socks now, and shoes, proper clothing all around. Perhaps there aren’t any more fires.

After so long, I’m sure you’ve changed. They say you got fat. A neutered animal has a way of going soft, I suppose. Still, I remember the way you were, the way we were. Do you ever think of that time? Before?

~

Arctic air tore at our throats like fangs. The bone runners of our sled shrieked over snow and ice as our laughter filled a black sky. Sealskin robes, clean and pliant when we departed, crimson-splashed and frozen stiff on our return.

On those nights, we owned the world. The Germanic cowered at our names. Others knew us only as death. They terrorized their children with our stories and left lavish offerings at their hearths. In the hopes that we might pass over.

Much as I loved the frost on my face and the burn in my veins, my favorite part came at the end of the hunt. At the top of the world, we’d descend into the ice. In that tiny burrow, deeply suspended, the surface ceased to exist. Blood-drunk, we’d stumble about building up a fire that would burn all year round. Then we tore away the sealskins with greedy hands and teeth. Our bodies, robed in firelight, were sculpted renderings of immortality. Your beauty left me speechless. Not that it mattered. In those moments, words were a waste of our mouths.

In our dark cocoon, time blurred into a fevered dream, sifting and drifting while we’d whisper and sing and fuck and sleep endlessly; eternally. Until the hunger quickened – calling us to the surface with the promise of a child’s whimper at our shadow filling his bedroom door.

~

The happiest time of my life. Before her.

How she came to you, I still do not know. I do know she taught you a word. A word in her language that had no equivalent in ours.

Sin.

She insisted that a life of savagery had corrupted your soul. She spoke of Jesus, the fisher of men. Give back, she said. Make amends. Repent. How could she poison you so completely against yourself? How could you let her? My love, you and I took only what was in our nature to take. Deviants, she called us. Base and depraved. I argued that denying one’s true self was the purest form of depravity, the very definition of deviance. You wouldn’t listen. She urged you to rise above your nature.

From the beginning, I knew she wanted you, that apple-cheeked cunt. Fool that I am, it never occurred to me that you might want her.

God will forgive, she said.

God?

What could we possibly have to fear from this God? What Hell could He create that we had not already wrought upon His earth? I wonder, has rising above your nature changed what you are, my love? Has this farce of an existence sanitized your soul?

Now your satchel is full when you enter, and empty when you leave. You are a giver. Yet, they still leave offerings. Their ancestral memory quivers, and subconsciously, they are afraid. Does it tempt you? A tender throat relaxed in sleep. Does it make your jaw ache? Just a taste, after all – you’ve brought them so much joy. You said you’d lost your appetite for the kill. Who were you trying to convince with your lying?

I remember a time when there were no falsehoods between us. A time when I laid my head in your lap and you twisted my hair into a thousand slender braids, one for each blood-drenched December. You swore to love me always. Now, your eternity yawns, filled with the adoration of legions. But none of them know you. She doesn’t know you. I felt your every thought and deed as if they were my own. I loved you brutally and without end.

Sin.

Before her, it didn’t exist.

Are you happier, now that it does?

I sound bitter, don’t I? A woman scorned. The first wife. A joke. This is the letter I promised I wouldn’t write: a letter to Santa. You bring gifts for good boys and girls, don’t you? I’m not entirely good – we can’t all be saints – but I believe I’d still make your ‘nice’ list, if only for old time’s sake. Now I want to ask for something.

Your Mrs. Claus.

Bring her to me.

Lay her under my tree like a sweet, ripe plum, and I will show her what you are. We’ll show her together. Then, if she can kiss your mouth, wet with her blood – if she will yet offer up her flesh to her defiler – if she can forgive, as her God would; then I will release you. I will keep my peace, knowing you are loved for who you are.

Burn my words if you must. In writing them, I’ve done what I must. You have my heart, Nicholas – the only heart that has ever known you – the only heart like your own.

Love eternal,Krampus

Detonation #6: Hustlers

~ Lola

Navigating Life in a Literary Minefield

Warning: Explicit language and mature themes. If you’re offended by such things, you might want to venture elsewhere.

***

Recently I watched a YouTube video of Jennifer Lopez taking pole dancing lessons in preparation for her role in the movie Hustlers. I learned that the only thing I have in common with J.Lo is…well, nothing. She’s a goddess. I’m a goblin. Moving on.

Let’s talk about the money. Makin’ it rain as a writer. You’re good at this wordsmithing stuff, and you work really hard. Is poverty inevitable? Is there a way to use your skills and ambition to make a bit more cash than it takes to buy a second helping of gruel?

Some writers make bank off their writing, we’ll call them Darryl, and they can go directly to Hell. Others, like Noggy, are gainfully employed in a day job where they go to an office, do business, get regular paychecks that are more than three digits, and can afford to get their kids teeth unfucked. I both respect and resent that, but I’m not talking about them either. I’m talking about Lola, and those like her. The freelancers and part-timers, Frankensteining an income through several different writing adjacent streams. I’m talking about the writerly side-hustle.

Here’s the thing. Lola is nothing if not an opportunist. She’s been fortunate, strategic, and manipulative enough to do work that dovetails with her writing career. Like Lola, I coordinate literary events at an indie bookstore, teach creative writing, and freelance edit. I’ve also written articles, done one-on-one mentoring, and ‘assisted’ young people with their college admission essays (all ethics are situational). It’s a juggling act I perform on top of my own writing projects, publishing, running in the woods, attending to family and friends, and other…interests (see the Six Lives Theory).

I’m grateful to be a professional creative, but it didn’t just fall into my tentacles. When I was just a baby mollusk, slinging ink and dreaming of one day maybe, maybe, seeing my work in print, someone gave me some very good advice. GET INVOLVED. The writing community is not just a group of people doing what you do, they are a resource, a pool of limitless opportunity. So, I took classes, went to events, volunteered, collaborated, and worked hard at building real relationships. Finding kindred monsters is its own reward, but beyond that, when paying work comes up, so does your name, and when it does, you gotta be ready to say yes.

Jennifer Lopez is the original Lola. A creative role model. An artist with an appetite for experience and an eye for opportunity. Dancing, singing, acting, and learning to kill on a pole at fifty freaking years old. I bet both her kids have Invisalign. Making a living off your writing is great, for Darryl, but if I did that, I probably wouldn’t have the drive to do and learn all this other cool stuff, like planning burlesque literary salons, singing, acting in plays, and posing as a corpse for someone’s book cover. My writing is better for the experimentation, and while I may not be J.Lo, I’m definitely a hustler, and my back porch ain’t half bad. Just sayin’.

Detonation #5 – Ending It, One Way or Another

~ Noggy

Navigating Life in a Literary Minefield

Warning: Explicit language and mature themes. If you’re offended by such things, you might want to venture elsewhere.

If you’re a rational human bean you undoubtably spend more than a trivial amount of time contemplating the end. It’s inevitable, right? Everything has a beginning and an ending. Everything. It’s a fundamental law. The universe began with a singularity programmed by an alien basement dwelling nerd and will succumb to painful, spasmodic, heat death, billions of years in the future.

Entropy is a bitch, and there is no appeasing her.

So yeah, everything ends, and the literary landscape is no exception. Books have beginnings, middles (we’ll delve into those horrid soggy messes another day), and endings. When you spend your ill-gotten lucre on that piece of trash dead tree, recommended by someone you’ll never trust again, you’re invested. You dive in, praying you can figure out what the fuck those metaphors actually mean, and crawl along, double checking the back copy every fifteen minutes to make sure you’re actually reading the right book. Maybe you’ll put it down so you can re-enter your pointless existence for minutes, days, or in rare cases, years, but you will eventually finish it. You will! Unless it blows chunks, or the book is Alan Moore’s Jerusalem. At twelve hundred and sixty-six pages, you’re likely to kill yourself first.

And the end, after you’ve put in so much time and energy, has an excellent chance of not meeting your expectations, and in many cases, just plain disappointing. There’s a ton of reasons for that of course, the primary one being that writing awesome finales is hard. Like brutally hard. Authors are vicious, emotionally conflicted monsters when they write, and unless they’re pumping out four shitty, cookie cutter books a year, they want their books to be award winning masterpieces from start to finish. But, unfortunately, that doesn’t mean they’re capable of doing just that.

Here are a few bits we dislike about endings, in no particular order except metaphysically.

It’s better to Burn Out than Fade Away: Chuck Wendig swears even more than Noggy, and that’s saying something, so when he talks about the third and major climax of the book needing to hit Holy Goatfucker Shitbomb! magnitude we tend to agree. Too many endings fall short by not exceeding what came before, ramping down instead of up. The last thing a reader wants to find when they’ve clawed their way to the top of Mount Doom is that the eagles got there first and those idiot hobbits could have retired to the Prancing Pony for ale and weed.

John doesn’t Die in the End: You’ve set the stakes high. The moment arrives where everything is on the line and you pull the punch right before it lands, striking a glancing blow or missing all together. On purpose. WHY? A poet-musician has to die, or at least be brutally maimed, or your reader is going to break the spine and use the pages to line their neurotic parrot cage. If your book says Poet John has to die, you better bloody well kill the bastard.

Too much of a Known Thing: Noggy and Lola step out for ice cream. One thing leads to another and they’re racing down the blacktop, police cars and angry spouses and various aggrieved parties hot on their trail, a famous yet poor life choice thriller writer bouncing around in their trunk. And then? Off the preverbal cliff, nose diving two thousand feet into the bottom of the Grand Canyon. The end of the road, both figuratively and literally. Everyone suspected it would end that way, hopefully with some inspired screaming.

Entertaining? You bet. Unexpected? Not at all. You, the reader, knew they were going to going to be eating fireball sandwich the moment they snatched the drooling lush from his opulent digs and roared away in their Pontiac Aztek. At least set the damn story in Gloucestershire with a subplot involving a cheese wheel race for god’s sake.

Overstaying your Welcome: While the climax and end of your story aren’t technically the same thing, we’re in the camp that feels they should be close together. If your heroine slays the dragon and gets the girl and then goes home and bakes cookies for a hundred pages, there better be something sinister about those cookies. Just because Tolkien got away with it at the end of Lord of the Rings doesn’t mean you can. After a world spanning adventure of epic proportions, he earned it (though the movie version destroyed a generation’s worth of bladders).

Best to leave the bar before they toss you out.

Ends that Aren’t Ends: While standalone books need hard, satisfying endings, the current genre writing trend is trilogies (which, contrary to the laws of mathematics, can comprise anywhere between two and fourteen books) where endings are often just transitions to the next episode. This is often extremely unsatisfying. Every book should stand on its own, with an ending that wraps up the story the book is telling, even if there is MORE ending at the absolute end. And don’t get us started on cliff hangers if there’s a better than average chance of abandoning your baby, or dying of old age before you write the next one (I’m talking to you George. And you, Lola…).

***

Call us negative Nellies if you must, but yeah, so many bad endings. Can we explain what makes a good one? Sure. Avoid writing a bad one. As we said, not easy, but honestly, not THAT difficult. There are eight million stories in the naked city, and every one of them has potential for a horrible, gruesome, unhappy ending. So get writing.

Detonation #4 – Networking on Social Media: Do We Really Need to Go Over This Shit Again?

~ Lola

Navigating Life in a Literary Minefield

Warning: Explicit language and mature themes. If you’re offended by such things, you might want to venture elsewhere.

Facebook defines people with whom you agree to communicate as ‘friends’ and I wish they wouldn’t. Friend is a loaded word. If a person has agreed to speak with me, it doesn’t make us friends. We don’t have a relationship. We don’t even know each other. At best we might know a few people in common, which is usually my criteria for accepting a friend request.

So what the fuck is up with dudes on the internet? And Jesus Christ of course #notalldudesontheinternet Look, if you aren’t a creep, then you aren’t being kicked here, so quit yelping. And for the sake of argument, let’s not even single out dudes on the internet. Let’s invoke Kant’s Categorical Imperative and design rules of conduct that are most effective when applied to every digital meatloaf currently hammering away at a keyboard, or staring slack-jawed at their phone while masturbating in their Pontiac Aztek.

The following are Lola’s ten commandments for networking with new Facebook ‘friends’. Listen up motherfuckers…

  1. Thou shalt not follow up an accepted friend request with an immediate pro forma DM to like your page/buy your book/subscribe to your podcast.
  2. Thou shalt keep DM inquiries related to your common interest. Remember, you don’t actually know this person, so don’t ask personal questions.
  3. Thou shalt not stalk your new friend’s page and like old posts and especially not their old photos.
  4. Thou shalt be honest. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with saying “Hey, thanks for accepting my friend request. I’m trying to get to know more people in the writing community.”
  5. Thou shalt not ask for favours. Ooh, remember? You aren’t actually friends and they don’t owe you a beta read or a blurb or a review so don’t make it weird by asking.
  6. Thou shalt keep DM exchanges brief. Demanding a lengthy conversation with a near stranger is a good way to get ghosted.
  7. Thou shalt like or comment on current posts if you find them interesting. This is actually the best way to get to know your new friend. In the common area. Chat ‘em up in the living room, don’t corner them in the toilet.
  8. Thou shalt not slide into their DMs and steer the conversation into sexual territory. Fuck, that this has to be said is fucking exhausting as fuck and I’ll just leave it fucking here.
  9. Thou shalt keep your personal problems to yourself. That door isn’t open yet, in either direction.
  10. Thou shalt be cool. Can’t we all just be cool? Social media is about connecting with people that share our interests without the barrier of geography. That shit is brilliant! So enjoy it, and be cool, ffs.

Detonation #3 – You’re a Grown-up Monster, so Meet Your Goddamn Deadlines

~ Lola

Navigating Life in a Literary Minefield

Warning: Explicit language and mature themes. If you’re offended by such things, you might want to venture elsewhere.

Everything is connected. Each critter throbbing on this planet is at least indirectly dependant on every other critter. For food, shelter, companionship, employment, transportation, entertainment, and bulletproof alibis etc.  It’s the great social supply chain and we are all but tiny links in the mail. We give in order to get, and we don’t like to wait. We want the Amazon Prime of existential deliverables, human and environmental costs be damned.

This is a way of saying deadlines are a fact of life. The key word being “dead”. As in, something unpleasant may happen should you fail to accomplish your task in the allotted time. This is the colloquialism we use to explicitly define when things need to be done. Work projects, school assignments, household chores, car maintenance, taxes etc.

So why do we have such a hard time meeting our creative deadlines? Because we’re busy, we don’t have family support, society doesn’t value art, we’re uninspired/day drunk/on the run from law enforcement… Yeah, yeah, yeah…

Time for real talk. On the most primitive level, human beans, and almost every other sentient piece of ooze, are far more motivated by aversion than affinity. Want to avoid starving? Store up nuts for the winter. Want to avoid freezing or being eaten by a mastodon? Build that fire and keep it burning all night. Want to avoid being friendless and lonely? Don’t be a cunt and return a text once in a while.

The problem is that nothing objectively terrible happens if we don’t finish writing that novel, essay, or poem*. World keeps on turning, you know? Maybe we’re frustrated and sad, but there’s no shortage of well-meaning friends to tell you it’s okay, you’re a brilliant artist, and you’ll get around to it eventually.

Well guess what? It’s not fucking okay, you’re not that brilliant, and why on earth would you get around to it eventually when you haven’t managed to get around to it already?  I mean, is this important to you or not?

But Lola, you may ask, doesn’t this make you a big slimy hypocrite? Heck, yes**. But it doesn’t make it any less true. The first step is realizing that your excuses are worthless. With few exceptions, getting shit done is within your control.

Okay, hear me out… maybe we’re more motivated by punitive measures, but if no one is going to flog us if we don’t write (unless we pay for it) and rewards don’t work, what’s a writer to choose? Neither. This is about habits, children. Forming good habits, so you don’t have to rely on external validation or condemnation to be productive.

But where’s the roadmap? Don’t worry, I gotcha. I call it the 3Ps and I’ve applied them to a case study for your amusement and edification.

The subjects: Noggy Splitfoot and Lola Silkysocks are writers. They are both quite good writers. They are also unmotivated bags of hot diaper pail trash. How can the 3Ps help them meet their creative deadlines?

P1 – Prioritization

Schedule writing time. Plug it in the damn calendar if you have to, and find a buddy if you can. It’s a lot harder not to show the fuck up when someone else is waiting on you. Lola and Noggy agree to check in over FB messenger on Friday night. Like they had anything better to do?

Noggy: Hey Silkysocks, ready for our writing sprint?

Lola: Yes, indeed. Having a friend to write with creates a compelling illusion of accountability.

Noggy: Plus, depravity loves company, so there’s that (sends gif of hippos mating in a mud wallow).

P2 – Planning

Mission statements are horse shit, until they aren’t. You need a plan, man. What are you going to use your writing time to work on, specifically? Share this with your buddy.

Lola: Imma edit that Detonation about meeting your deadlines.

Noggy: I’m going to write the sex-cannibal scene in my middle grade novel.

Lola: Right on. Check in again in an hour?

Noggy: See you then!

Lola: (sends gif of lascivious typing tentacles)

P3 – Permission

You’ve got your tush in the chair, set your intention, and perhaps like our subjects you’ve poured yourself eight fingers of bourbon. Now it’s time to actually write. But here’s the thing, don’t hobble yourself by demanding greatness. You’ll never commit anything to paper with such high standards. Get over yourself. It’s okay to churn out rubbish. It’s more than okay. It’s encouraged, necessary even. So, stop whining, drink your bourbon, and embrace mediocrity.

Lola: How’d you make out, Nog?

Noggy: I wrote ten thousand words

Lola: You…in an hour?

Noggy: It’s mostly shit, but I got one salvageable paragraph, wanna read?

Lola: Hit me.

Break up the writing sprints in any way that works for you, refill your glass, tuck your crotch goblins into bed, swap more disturbing gifs (sometimes sending them to unsuspecting friends because you’ve got too many conversation windows open).

And so it goes. Lather, rinse, and repeat. Do it enough and it becomes routine. Kind of boring, right? Maybe, but this is how a body of work is generated. One sprint at a time, using the 3Ps or however you want to organize your process. Not through a system of punishment and reward, not through will power, or hauling up buckets of inspiration from a magic well, but though habitual practice.

Take it from me: you can finish what you start. All you have to do is show up, decide where you want to go, and get there. One shitty word at a time.

*If you must

**Take all advice with a pillar of salt, and hypocrisy is the least of our sins, trust me

Detonation #2 – The Six Lives Theory

~ Noggy

Navigating Life in a Literary Minefield

Warning: Explicit language and mature themes. If you’re offended by such things, you might want to venture elsewhere.

***

There’s a terrible word echoing across the thankfully not endless blacktop of life. If you slow down and poke your head out the window, you’ll hear it, day in and day out. You might even hear yourself scream it, whether consciously or unconsciously. It’s insidious. Always out there, easy to snatch from the wind and repeat without conscious thought.

Busy.

It’s the go to for thousands of authors and poets on this rotting planet, toiling away in their pit stop cafes and roadhouse lairs and squalid pits. And you know exactly what I mean. It doesn’t matter what situation you’re in, when someone, typically not desiring an actual answer roars by and asks you how you’re doing, you inevitably mumble “Good, just goddamned busy.”

Bullshit. (A word not used nearly enough in our humble opinion!)

Busy. Yeah, what else is new, everyone is fucking busy. At this stage in our evolution, it’s the norm. The word means nothing.

It’s not that we don’t get it. Everyone has a lot going on, we know that, and making the time to write can often be difficult, if not seemingly impossible, but it’s not because you’re busy.

It’s because you’re a shitty driver with no self-control, and you don’t make it a priority.

But, if you’re reading this, you’re either looking for cheap entertainment, or you desire our simple brand of… enlightenment, so hang on tight baby, we have both. 

***

Here’s the true’ism we’re going to force down your miserable throat, one we’re calling The Six Lives Theory, which is sort of self-descriptive, semi-deep, and bloody obvious.

In a nutshell?

Everyone has six lives. Well, maybe not everyone. It would, in hindsight, be better to call it the Many Lives Theory or the More Than Two Lives but Less Than Eight Lives Theory, but six lives has a certain je ne sais quoito it, so we’re going with it.

So, six lives, let’s examine this for a moment though a totally fictional author named Noggy Splitfoot. Noggy is a ‘busy’ fellow, though if you ask him how he’s doing he’ll probably just shrug and go back chugging from his brown paper bag and scrawling words on the side of the cardboard box he’s living in behind his small yet opulent mansion. You see, Noggy, for all his business, haspriorities, and writing is way up there, probably close to the top. If Noggy had to make a list, it would look something like this:

Life 1: Family and/or Friends and/or Pets

Life 2: Work

Life 3: Ultra-Running

Life 4: Publishing

Life 5: Dirty Deeds Done In the Dark.

Life 6: Writing

Six separate highways that may or may not intersect with each other, roads that need to be driven day in and day out. The first couple are, of course, mandatory unless you don’t actually happen to have family, friends, pets, or work—in which case, fuck, how could you possibly be complaining about being busy, you’ve won the bloody lottery mate—but in all likelihood you’re shackled to that 2001 Pontiac Aztek you know will eventually crash and burn, leaving you a smoldering blackened marshmellow praying for a death prolonged by unaffordable health care. 

Then there are your hobbies. The sports of all sorts. Reading trash because you don’t know quality literature if it bashed your face in. Overpriced video games. Netflix and Chill with discount hookers. Travel to exotic destinations like haunted gopher hole museums and Bigfoot hunting grounds. Posting fake news and feral cat pictures on FB and Twitter. We could go on and on (and we could, trust us, we soooo could).

Publishing we just tossed in there because… well, let’s just say if anything is a time and money sinkhole, that’d be it. But everyone has one of those, a life that consumes, like a black hole, everything that comes in contact with it. Sure, it brings joy—in theory at least—but it sucks, both literally and figuratively.

Noggy’s fifth life? Let’s just say if we told you the details we’d have to kill you, and nobody will know the absolute truth until he’s dead, missing-presumed dead, and/or the sun goes cold. Intrigued? You should be. A secret life. A… sinister sounding secret life. Everyone worth more than a wooden nickel has one of these puppies whether it involves collecting vintage porn from a creepy old bastard named Lazlo, going to late night strip karaoke, or cuddling chickens in an intimate, yet shocking manner. Stuff you’d never cop to, yet there you are.

And that brings us to writing. Noggy, bless his cursed and twisted soul, needs to find time to write. Needs to make it a priority. And, even with all those lives crowding him, sideswiping him, pushing his kitted out futuristic, yet oddly retro camper van, onto the shoulder so he plows through all manner of road kill and unfortunate cyclists, he needs to put his foot on the gas and stay on course. Not in the fast lane maybe (except to pass, he’s not a savage. Usually.), but in one of the lanes that doesn’t make it too easy to take an off ramp to the Olive Garden.

So how? How can you get any goddamn work done when you have to deal with the endless stop and go? Great question.

Two words.

Zipper Merge.

You’re welcome. Look it up, learn how it works. Don’t fuck it up and you’ll be ahead of the game in no time, nudging your way to the front of the line, weaselling your way in between every other car clogging your six lane life.

Get up an hour early and write before work. Run at lunch so you free up that hour to write in the evening. Take the bus so you can write on your commute. Wedge yourself into those cracks, take advantage of every opening. Sure, you gotta be aggressive. Fearless. Willing to endure the seething hate from all the clueless drivers who never read the classic Advances in Queueing: Theory, Methods, and Open Problems by Jewgeni H. Dshalalow and, you know, actually get it. But trust us, it works and your life will never be the same again.

Coming soon from Tiny Sledgehammer…

~ Lola
The Black City Beneath

The Black City Beneath

By R. Overwater

In the final days of steam and airships, a mysterious woman is eliminating the world’s great scientific minds using unrecognizable technology. A salvage diver from a notorious family is nearly killed when he discovers a scuttled Russian submarine fabricated from an unidentified black material. And a whiskey-soaked engineer narrowly survives an attack on Britain’s most luxurious civilian airship. Flying under the radar of military authority, the diver and engineer must follow the woman’s electric trail of espionage into the wasteland of a parallel world, to prevent the destruction of their own.

Wall of Fire ignites on Nov. 5, 2019

Featured ~ Lola

What would you walk through fire for…

T7 Wall of Fire
Cover design: Aaron Bilawchuk & Emily Pratt

November 5, 2019

Terrace VII: Wall of Fire

By Robert Bose & Sarah L. Johnson

Welcome to the Seventh Terrace of Dante’s tower of Purgatory. Here, in darkness lit only by a wall of flame, we find souls enslaved by the sin of lust. Desire, curdled by madness and desperation. From a pair of crazy-in-love criminals on a scavenger hunt at the outskirts of Hell, to a lonely custodian working in a love doll brothel, to a sinister lingerie boutique hidden behind a red door. Lust is a great and terrible thing, and this collection of dark tales follows a mere handful of the many paths leading to the wall of fire.

Ultra Trail Running Alphabet

~ Lola

Here in Purgatory our idea of fun is to head out to the wilderness and run ourselves just about to death. We did a lot this season with Frozen Ass 50, River Revenge, Canadian Death Race, and Lost Soul Ultra. Trail racing is a form of penance. A cleansing. Atonement for sins committed and those we hope to commit. So, in the tradition of Gorey’s Gashlycrumb Tinies, we offer you an alphabetical introduction to this grand and gruesome sport.

A is for Al, loudly listening to Tool

B is for Betty, chafed by wet wool

C is for Chidi, with tape on her shin

D is for Dave, who quits if he can’t win

E is for Emily, swallowed by mud

F is for Francisco, puking black crud

G is for Gord, with his broken headlight

H is for Helen, vanished in the night

I is for Ian, who gave a cactus a hug

J is for Julie, stung by a bug

K is for Karen, who crashed down a hill

L is for Larry, speared by porcupine quills

M is for Maria, lubing her crotch

N is for Nasir, and his damn beeping watch

O is for Odessa, with blackened toes

P is for Peng, who shot Gu up his nose

Q is for Quentin, who cheered “You’re almost there!” with 70km to go. He’s dead now. True story. And back to the rhymes…

R is for Rob, slashed by barbed wire

S is for Steve, peeing blood and fire

T is for Trace, who led you way off course

U is for Una, eaten by a horse

V is for Vikram, shot as a duck

W is for Wilma, in a port-a-potty stuck

X is for Xeno, blistered and red

Z is for Zelda, who can rest when she’s dead

Detonation #1 – Embracing Auto-correct for Fun & Profit

~ Noggy

Navigating Life in a Literary Minefield

Warning: Explicit language and mature themes. If you’re offended by such things, you might want to venture elsewhere.

***

We’ve all be there. One moment you’re slamming away on the keyboard, a trickle of bottom-self Bourbon leaking down your chin, when you stop to read your last chunk of dialog. “I’m sorry Mrs. Harris, Katie won’t be at school today. She got dick yesterday and spent the evening bent over the toilet.”

Hmm, you think, both synapses misfiring in sympathy with the piece of shit 2001 Pontiac Aztek parked outside the mouldering, rat infested writer’s pad you inhabit. Hmm. There’s something about those words that aren’t… quite right. You realize what’s happened, of course, by the fifth re-read. Katie wasn’t technically bent over the toilet; she was leaning her head against the seat so her crazy Rapunzel hair wouldn’t end up soaking in vomit or flushed. And technically, given your sketchy as fuck outline, it’s Saturday morning and thus no school.

But still. Hmm.

You hmm a lot these days, cylinders spitting and sputtering, so close to compression, yet producing little more than black, oily smoke. Your fingers deform the red Solo cup left over from your bestie’s Solstice smudge party and you take a sip of the rotgut and grimace, knowing your feeble mind is missing the obvious.

Only one thing to do: what every responsible Hemingway wannabe does in a situation like this. You wrap a ribbon around the troublesome prose and fire it to your closest writer compadre. And wait.

The response is immediate. “Lol.”

“What?”

“Brings me back to when you wrote all those Penthouse Letters in college. Awesome.”

“Uh, thanks,” you reply, hastily re-reading for the sixth time and finally catching the elusive switcheroo your firmware refuses to acknowledge.

You select the word and type in the intended adjective, watch it magically revert to it’s erotic alternative, and mash your face into the keyboard.

***

Auto-correct is both a blessing and a curse. Sure, if you’re using a heavy-duty word processor or some ancient nostalgia relic like WordStar, it’s probably not a huge issue, but if you write on your phone or tablet, using the same learning algorithms you sext with, it’s an inevitable fact of life.

Most of the time you’ll get some sort of bullshit gibberish, or wildly obvious replacement. You groan or shake a fist at the gods or even laugh, if it’s silly enough. And you fix it, hoping it’ll stick.

So what if I told you there’s a better way?

What if I told you to embrace your worst auto-correct transgressions and run with them? Because face it, most writing is dreary. Literary. Memoirs and poetry. It desires spice. Requires spice. Nobody wants to read boring crap, unless they are old or responsible for grants specific to non-commercializable artistic ventures. Your subconscious yearns for more. The algorithms designed by a thousand horny nerds yearn for more. You just need to give in, embrace it.

Look at this sad, bland throwaway:

Billy wiped his forehead with a soiled handkerchief, reached down between his scuffed knees, and jammed his hand into the roiling muck bucket.

Or this gem:

Willy wiped his forehead with a soiled handkerchief, reached down between his scuffed knees, and jammed his hand into the roiling fuck puppet.

Yeah. I thought so.

Billy, the poor orphan, abandoned on the doorstep of Conception Abbey and forced into menial drudgery suddenly becomes Willy, a rough and tumble sort of fellow, going all in with his insatiable Factory girlfriend. Maybe you won’t win any awards, but it’ll pop. 

Screw the red pill. Blue all the way baby. Dive head first into that rabbit hole and see where the twisted tunnel leads you. You wont’ be sorry.