Always make it a point to live up to your own standards, not everyone else’s.

By all means, let the success of others inspire to set your own goals, models and aesthetics, but never let that rule your own self worth.

Never let someone else’s success drag you down, point blank. Strive for better, strive to be your best, but take your own path toward your personal holy grail, no matter how long that takes.

Never beat yourself up, figuratively and literally in the pursuit. Always congratulate yourself for having the wherewithal.

After all, it’s always more about the journey than the destination.

–Ray Van Horn, Jr.

—Photos by Ray Van Horn, Jr. and TJ Perkins

So my stepfather, always the treasure hunter, knickknack rescuer and all-out purveyor of “stuff,” dropped me a huge surprise a couple weekends ago from one of his collectible raids.

In 1980, The Empire Strikes Back ruled everything in my 10-year-old world. Much as the original Star Wars did in 1977.

Suffice it to say, I’ve had my own spurts of collecting things throughout my entire life. Lately, it’s down to comic books and the occasional movie soundtrack or score. Thinking back upon on my childhood, I’ll never forget Burger King carrying four drinking glasses sets for all three original Star Wars films, including Return of the Jedi.

I used to have all four from Star Wars: A New Hope as a child, now down to a single with C3P0 and R2D2 on the desert planet, Tatooine. The other three, well, too many moves, too much carelessness in my younger life, always forgetting bubble wrap. So be it.

When The Empire Strikes Back was out, I would harass my father to take me to Burger King every Saturday when a new glass in that cycle arrived. It took us no time to collect the glasses for Lando Calrissian/Princess Leia, Luke Skywalker and Yoda (which I still have) and our droid pals, Artoo and Threepio in a bipolar icy climate on Hoth.

What was the biggest pain back then, was getting the legendary Darth Vader/Boba Fett glass. Given Empire was the debut of everyone’s favorite intergalactic bounty hunter, anything with Fett on it was an instant sell. In Burger King’s case, a instant sell out.

My dad was many things, good and bad, but never let it be said the man didn’t love me, nor would I ever accuse him not going out of his way for me. In this case, I dragged the poor guy to numerous Burger Kings in search of the Vader/Fett glass to no avail.

Every one of them had extras of Lando and Leia the entire run of those glasses. Kinda reminds me of Turbo Man and his pink fuzzball sidekick nobody wanted, Booster. Not that Calrissian, the king of cool in a galaxy far, far away would ever be considered an unwanted kickaround.

In the end, I never got that Vader/Fett glass and I let my dad off the hook after exhausting his patience. As I got older, I thought about that glass, but it became a whatever thing for me, as I pared down and purged most of my collections over time. Sidebar, if you can get your head around it, to snag a glass back then, you only needed to buy a medium Coke for .88 cents!!!

Can you just imagine the shock on my face to find that Vader/Fett glass sitting on my Pop’s bar? The man both did and didn’t have a clue what a magical moment that was for me at 53 years old. Like my cousin, Shawn, scoring those Eddie Murray bobbleheads for us outside the stadium when we got skunked out of them at the gate even showing up an hour early for the Orioles game. Very much like that, only over a more extensive bit of time.

I think my Dad is probably happy and feeling skunked himself from the great beyond that it was Pop who managed to pull it off. But I got my Vader/Fett glass, yo! It’ll be hanging around with me, screw the purges.

–Ray Van Horn, Jr.

From a fitness-themed post I did at Facebook last week:

I see you out there, my friends. Many of you making a transformation, seeking a better you, keepin’ on grindin’ I am proud of each of ya, so always believe in yourself.

Not every day do I feel like Godzilla. Sometimes I feel like garbage. Sometimes I gotta kick my own butt. Sometimes I let the daily do smother me.

I’m 53 and sometimes I have to curb and bow out to pain. Most of the time, I’m the old fart in the room doing my thing.

However, we can all be our best selves with commitment and drive to our best abilities. It’s never easy, but don’t let it deter you. Go be your best you.

–Ray Van Horn, Jr.

I have much to be thankful for, but receiving my second Pushcart Prize nomination, this time in advance of Revolution Calling’s release comes with a different level of gratitude.

What a wonderful thing to wake up to on a holiday weekend.

Revolution Calling, by Ray Van Horn, Jr., coming soon from Raw Earth Ink.

Happy post-Thanksgiving, everyone! Hope you all are having a wonderful time with your loved ones, or, if applicable, a warm, introspective time to yourself. To those who still get up butt early trying to catch big saving sales today, Godspeed to you!

I haven’t done the Video Jukebox in a while, and decided this time I would drop y’all a Black Friday edition. Given the amount of bands, song titles and albums featuring the word “black” in it, I had a tough time narrowing it down to five tunes. Fair warning, these five are on the heavier side, but the heavier side is well-known as being paved crepuscular. Bird-in-hand. Raven, as it were.

Not much else preamble other than to mention my choice of the Ronnie James Dio-led Black Sabbath over Ozzy Osbourne is due to watching the Heavy Metal animated film last night (I also prefer Dio to Ozzy in voice), and “My War” from Black Flag (in my opinion, the most dangerous song ever dropped) has a scene of prominence inside my novel Revolution Calling.

Be safe out there amongst the crazies on holiday launch weekend, and hope these tracks give you a little extra bounce. Or something.

The Rolling Stones – “Paint it Black”

White Zombie – “Black Sunshine”

Megadeth – “Good Mourning/Black Friday”

Black Sabbath – “The Mob Rules”

Black Flag – “My War”

–Ray Van Horn, Jr.

Here’s a little video stroll through my old school, North Carroll High in Hampstead, Maryland. No longer used as a school, but prominently used in my new novel, Revolution Calling, coming December 15th through Raw Earth Ink!

@rvanhornjr

♬ original sound – rvanhornjr

This week I wrote two entries for a sci-fi story contest, the prompt being what fetishes might an alien life experience.

Having myself a good chat with the editor, who encouraged me to write a second story after my first submission, I got to telling her how the contest theme reminded me of Heavy Metal, the “adult illustrated fantasy magazine,” for which I’ve had a long love affair. I’ve stupidly had one collection after another of Heavy Metal built, then sold off to either make space or make the bills, but historically, this is one the greatest realms of hard sci-fi, fantasy, pulp and cyberpunk that’s ever come about.

So popular, so revered in the underground is Heavy Metal magazine, I once had a silent, snarling skirmish with a younger woman over a box of back issues a vendor had on the cheap at a comic book convention. Me being a gentleman to a fault, I gave her a silent wave to have first dibs. With a brisk nod but a noticeable leeriness about her while pawed through the vendor’s stock of The Spectre comic series, she got all the ones I wanted, but I came out fine with a handful of my own. Geekdom supremo.

I mean, the covers alone have hosted the who’s who of sci-fi and fantasy art royalty, H.R. Giger, Boris Vallejo, Simon Bisley, Frank Frazetta, Berni Wrightson, Olivia De Berardinis, Barry Windsor-Smith, Walter Simonson, Jean “Moebius” Girard, Richard Corben, Neal Adams and Esteban Moroto, to name a few.

Now, the term “adult” with Heavy Metal magazine comes with a very real caveat. In the later 1970’s and Eighties, there was no term “mature audiences,” not until DC Comics spun off their Vertigo line of non-mainstream, cutting edge material unsuitable for younger eyes. Back then, things were more full-frontal, in warning and in content. Accordingly, any real Heavy Metal fan has a Pavlovian, one-word phrase to sum up the entire imprint’s experience: “Den.”

Richard Corben took Conan the Barbarian, shaved him bald and set him in an X-rated sword and sorcery realm. Softcore chop ‘n slop with a lot of payoff sex. Sometimes Den was the conqueror. Often, he was conquered himself. Sexually, of course. Raped, even, if you can imagine it. Den got laid ten times more than Conan, and like James Bond, it’s prerequisite that Robert Howard’s timeless Cimmerian gets a shag or two per adventure.

I always enjoy telling the story of being age 12 and going into a local convenience store chain called 7-11, and I would go get my comic books every week at another convenience store. I would save just enough of my allowance money hoarded over a few weeks to pick up the latest Heavy Metal issue and Savage Sword of Conan. Both forbidden fruit to younger eyes of any decade, but especially 1981-83.

I was always pushing the button at 7-11, since you know a curious lad at that age was all about the naughty contents inside material youngsters aren’t supposed to have access to.  The Hispanic clerk always on shift knew it, knew me, always gave me a devilish grin and sold them to me anyway. He only gave me a refuting “Eh eh” once when I pawed an issue of Penthouse on the shelf in his store. His chuckling at me gave us an unspoken bond, nonetheless.

It’s always fun, just little more delicious having an “in” at certain points in your life. It was better than pinching my dad’s Hustler and Playboy magazines when he shoved them into a box he thought was stowed away from me. Heck, I wasn’t above crawling into dumpsters back then when I saw someone throw their skin and porn mags away!

I grew to love the writing in Heavy Metal as I grew up and was a religious follower during my time working in a comic book shop in the early 1990s. I hopped back on a few years ago, because I just cannot resist this magazine for sci-fi literati and porn pundits alike.

Thus, it was not just the naughty stuff that attracted me, though I was thinking upon it when writing my second entry for this contest I titled “A.I. Love.”  I’ll be lifting an extra smirk on my face if it gets published.

–Ray Van Horn, Jr.

Before USB thumb drives, before the Cloud, if you didn’t want to blow the RAM of your word processor stuffing it with countless writing projects, you used a floppy disk.

No, not the true floppy disks from the 1980s, where they were what they sounded like: pliable, flat, square sized code containers less the size of a 45 r.p.m. record. I trust most of my readership to know what I mean, inclusive of a 45 m.p.h. record.

“Floppy” disks eventually became harder and smaller 3.5-inch plastic holders, able to store up to 1.44 megabytes of data on them. Back then, cutting edge tech, but laughable in comparison to the 1 to 4 gig thumb drives which preceded them and already hint at obsoletion. For a writer, being able to hold 19,000 to 77,000 pages of our craft on port key storage today has become a lifeline. A way to avoid system crashes from data overload. Even just to transfer pictures, videos and media off our motherboards and keep the gateway humming.

The annoyance to change, and I’ve always said it’s blatant strategy on the part of corporate manufacturers, is the profit through progress ethos forcing consumers into buying the “latest thing.” By default, sending the prior “thing” into archaism. VHS tapes to DVD to Blu Ray to 4K to streaming. Vinyl records to 8 tracks to cassette tapes to CDs to downloads and streaming. Atari 2600 to Intellivision to Colecovision to Sega to Nintendo to PlayStation and Xbox. You gotta pay to play, and you’re gonna. President Business says so, in Lego form and real-time. I’m still quietly Jonesing I have thousands of digital pictures, a decade’s worth, stashed on CD Rom and I keep a hard drive processor on-hand for access.

Rant over. I was going through a box marked “Office” from my past three moves, and I recall my now wife, TJ, mocking my novelty metal lock box featuring The Little Rascals on it. “What kind of silly lunch box is that?” she teased, suggesting I move on from it while were both downsizing for our first place together.

“Non-negotiable,” I simply told her, flipping open the lid overtop two stymied facades of Spanky and Buckwheat. When she saw the contents inside, she was both wowed and foiled to see a large collection of those 1.44 megabyte data holders, especially when I showed her what the contents were.

Another entire decade-plus of old short stories I’d written. As it turns out, countless of them. Poems, essays, even my debut, long out-of-print novel, Mentor, I’ve never really owned up to anymore due to the shady publisher. I had three separate disks holding the entire novel! I found band interviews, media reviews, the entire beginnings of my entry into the music business. “How are you even going to access all that?” TJ gamely tried me with. “No computer is designed for those anymore.”

There’s this thing I’m sure you’re all familiar with, an online market called Amazon. With the grin of an author reconnecting with a buried past, I ordered a portable USB-plug floppy disk reader from gadget peddlers, Chuanganzhuo. I’d had a similar device years ago, lost to the ether from another move, vanished with my handheld cassette recorder and an entire box of tapes holding hundreds of music and film industry personality interviews. I later used a digital recorder to conduct interviews. Would that I could retrieve those spindling nuggets of gold, sigh… I have some, but not all of the transcripts from those glorious chats with heavy music royalty and then-youngbloods, some of whom made it in the industry and others who faded into the same ether.

You can get this external USB reader for less than twenty bucks if you happen to have some of these disks with your long-hidden work on them. I had a total gas pulling up files of the damned while the reader ground and wheezed machina-speak at me, reminding me how primitive the early days of data storage were. Those nattering pops extracted stories I laughed at myself for writing. The naivete, the amateurishness, the desperation to be heard, no matter the cost. Some of it was so cringeworthy, some of it so explicit, those pieces had a right to be slapped into a digital cargo bay with a snug lock.

Yet, I found many pieces I’ve unearthed and tucked into the latest Word format for future rewrites and cleanups. I have so much more to rediscover, but I snickered in remembrance of back in the day when the disks would spout “exceeding maximum storage” messages at me and how little there is on those disks compared to my thumb drives holding my work. 3 floppies for a single novel, laughing out loud. Almost as ingratiating then as those blood-boiling bomb icons the old Apple MacIntosh processors used to pound in your face during system crashes–and those happened ad nauseum in Apple’s early days. I never bought another Mac again, despite my colleagues’ pressing me to get with the program, no pun intended.

All of that, of course, being obsolete.

–Ray Van Horn, Jr.

Yesterday I wrote a horror drabble and sent it along to a periodical for hopeful publication. In case you don’t know what a “drabble” is, it’s a 100-word exact start-to-finish story engineered to test a writer’s mettle in brevity.

I feel like my submission made the mark, but I’ll let the editors decide. I had such a blast knocking that one out in 20 minutes, I decided to do another one, writing it in my head at the gym this morning.

I always wanted to pen a dénouement for a superhero character I wrote at Cyber Age Adventures when I was with them many moons ago. I wrote five different serialized superhero stories then, and out of all of them, Revolutionary, whom I came up with out of a love of Black Panther since my childhood, resonates the most with me. Last year, I started writing him a finale story I never finished. I think giving him a drabble closure says what I’ve always wanted to say for him. I hope you enjoy.

End of Revolutionary’s Watch

by Ray Van Horn, Jr.

Some scars never fade.  Some battles are meant to be lost. 

            One thing remains constant; evil never dies.

            Jemahl knocks on a door for what he knows is the last time.

            The cadre returned after Revolutionary put them down.  So Jemahl thought, weeping with a vow graveside after they took Latisha from him nine years ago.

            The door opens.  Jemahl, bleeding out, pupils blurring, smiles through crimson teeth.

            “I made sure this time,” he moans, reaching to touch Qadry’s cheek.

            “God, you were him all along,” Qadry blurts through his own sudden tears.

            “I love you son,” becomes Revolutionary’s epitaph.