While I continue to promote Revolution Calling, I am finishing my 17th horror story since last September and we’ll see what fate has in store for all of them. I have also been working in and out on my next novel, which TJ and I brainstormed together on our honeymoon in the Deep Creek mountains.
The plot has had to change three times already, but the core is there to build from. Inspired by the spectacular autumn colors we were surrounded by on our honeymoon and also the Type O Negative album of the same name, my next book will be titled October Rust.
I’m seeing that “10 Things About Me” or another number prompt out there, so I revisited one with 25 things I did about a decade ago. I had to shake my head at some of my answers, since life has changed greatly, but here are 10 that should still make the cut today with some modifications, lol.
1. My favorite concert in memory has to be the Red Hot Chili Peppers, 1989, Mother’s Milk tour. They were still a funk-punk band, nothing like the laidback group they became after Blood Sugar Sex Magik. To this day, I’ve never seen more raw energy and outrageous execution. While I’m sure substances had something to do with it, this was the most amazing live performance I’ve ever been witness to. Plus it was great locking up with my buddies and pogoing all around Painters Mill Theatre to “Me and My Friends.” Dead close behind this one is Voivod-Soundgarden-Faith No More, the latter two legends as OPENERS and Voivod still won the day.
2. I have many great memories in my childhood but being there in 1977 at the movies when Star Wars came out for the first time is the holy grail moment of my young life. Nothing compares to that sense of wonderment I felt at age 7. I wish my son could know it like I know it, since, being a teenager, he mocks the original trilogy as “weak” compared to Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, the SW film which rocked his world.
3. I was on the old school kid shows, Romper Room and Professor Kool’s Fun School when I was a kid. These were locally broadcasted children’s shows during the seventies and early eighties. If you’re a Baltimore Gen X’er, you’ll well remember “Romper Bomper Stomper Boo…tell me, tell me, tell me true…”
4. I was pissed I didn’t win “Most Outrageous” in the high school yearbook. I even lobbied for it!
5. My worst fear in life is never achieving my dreams. If you know me, you what that entails. If I could be anywhere right now, I wish I was on a book signing tour. It’ll happen. Bank.
6. My favorite thing to do after a big workout is kiss my wife. Like Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ “Margo” said to “Todd” in Christmas Vacation, after I shower of course, lol…
7. People often add an “e” to my last name or mash the words together to make “Vanhorn.” Annoying. Some address me as “Ryan” or “Roy” instead of “Ray.” Double annoying. Happens more than you’d think.
8. I live vicariously through a John Carpenter/Alan Howarth synth score.
9. PG Tips rules all teas. I was the pinhead in the theater who hollered out “It’s a tea, man!” during Rob Zombie’s Halloween II when Malcolm McDowell asked his onscreen assistant for one and she was clueless about it.
10. If I had a choice of being a pirate or a ninja, I would have to go with being a pirate so I can shamelessly chase after booty and blame the rum every time. As long as both lead to the treasure trove that is TJ.
Even with the end of a literal switchblade propped beneath my chin, I couldn’t tell you the name of the live streamer pawning wholesale killing.
Problem is, the pitchman not only looks like me, he is me. Hacked into a garmented avatar of death.
I’ve become an e-merchant of slaughter. The robocall doesn’t match the moving lips, yet it’s my voice, synthetically created, out of progression.
Scatters of pinyin scatter camouflage an auction counter beneath me-not-me, selling murder rights to a sobbing girl offscreen. The bid pushes into seven figure territory.
Helpless, the laptop camera transmutes my dread into virtuality.
I’m being purposefully cheeky with my response to this prompt, but I’m going with the G.O.A.T. of Godzilla films, Minus One.
As a big ‘zilla fan, I waited all 53 years of my life to see a truly frightening and truly inspirational Godzilla movie. Three times, twice in color, the third last week in black and white for the Minus Color re-release. Yeah, I’m that obsessed with this film, which just finally finished its run in either format. The same way I went out of my skull in Blade Runner 2049 worship.
Maybe not the most important invention, but certainly a hallmark experience of my entire lifetime. No cheese, no filler, a powerful story of survivor’s guilt where you root for the humans for a change. Minus One is deserving of the hype, accolades and celebration as the highest-grossing live action movie from Japan. Even gnarlier than my long-gone 1977 Shogun Warriors line Godzilla, as far as toys go, one of the greatest invented with his lever-pushing plastic “fire” from his jowls and his shootable right claw.
Wish I still had my ’77 Godzilla, but I do have one surviving Godzilla figure out of the eight I used to own, and he’s holding sentry in the office I share with my wife. Thank you, TJ, for putting up with my Godzilla geekery, right down to my snagging two Minus One t-shirts and the breathtaking Minus One score from Naoki Satō I ordered straight from Japan.
Classy move of Toho Studios to send a global video thank you to the world which embraced this deserving spectacle of terror and honor.
Arigato for sharing this masterpiece with us all, Toho. Arigato.
Just last week, I was cutting up with a few people at the gym and feeling pretty darn good by the compliments I was getting, in particular my rope skipping. One of the regulars asked me if I was a boxer once, which was flattering, but I said no, though I wanted to be one as a kid.
I told the gang I loved the Rocky movies, cheered on Balboa, but I always wanted to be Apollo Creed instead. Seeing Carl Weathers pound that jump rope like he was on air inspired me back then and went after the rope for much of my life.
I do it backwards, instead of forward, which people tend to notice, but the other thing I said was how I’ve always felt Carl Weathers was the best-looking dude I’ve ever seen, a man of style, class, brawn and dignity we men should ascribe ourselves to. A week later, Carl left us. I mean, damn. Thanks for being a worthy idol your entire career. Apollo forever. RIP.
I want to thank each and every one of you who have thus far bought Revolution Calling and I am seeing an uptick in sales for Coming of Rage. I appreciate the plugs, the word-of-mouth, the amazing reviews, the interview I did last week with Holleye at Chasing Destino, the personal messages showing me your copies. I am thrilled by the stores who have already added my books to their ordering lists. I am thankful to those who came out to my signing last week. More of those to come!
This has been a long, hard journey starting to build into something I am proud of. My writing has only gotten better in the recent stories I have written and submitted and I can’t wait to share what’s next.
Revolution Calling and Coming of Rage are available at Amazon, Lulu, Nook, Kindle and Kobo. Barnes and Noble to follow with Revolution Calling. Coming of Rage is already there. I also take PayPal if you want an autographed copy. On behalf of myself, my loved ones and my publisher, Raw Earth Ink, you all have my deepest gratitude.
Years ago, my mother gave me a Christmas present that has paid dividends for more than a decade. A fajita grill, which has become more a therapy tool than a cooking gadget. I am so attached to my fajita maker it was one of the few things I was unbending with TJ when we first moved in together. We often joke how she’d initially sneered at my fajita maker until I made her a batch during our dating years. My son was already accustomed to my fajitas and told her she’d change her mind after tasting the output.
Granted, the grill looks a little silly, if festive, but in the past, I’d made my fajitas for many friends and family after they’d seen my numerous posts on social media cooking them. I may not compete with an authentic Mexican restaurant, but the love I put into my fajitas has translated into happy customers, including TJ, who relented and, moreover, made sure we had special storage spots for the grill in both places we’ve lived together. Even to the point she now wraps my grill up with TLC after it’s been cleaned up.
I’m most likely to make fajitas on a Friday or Saturday night, usually for my little family who look forward to them as much a I love making them. I take great joy in cutting peppers (sometimes onions and jalapenos), chicken and shrimp and with everyone leaving me to my work, it’s about a 2 hour process in which I enjoy a cocktail while prepping, blending my marinades and cooking. It’s an opportunity for me to decompress from a busy week and I get a kick when our cats lurk back and forth in the kitchen, rubbing my legs and sniffing the mixes wafting in the air.
I’m happy to say most time I fire up my fajitas, there are no leftovers, save for maybe a small pinch of grilled peppers, which get repurposed into salads or on top of burgers. Waste not, especially what comes off my grill! The most satisfying part to making fajitas, aside from the looks of content from my family, is that blazing hissssssssss by the time I get the marinated chicken on there.
It was a shared computer with my ex-wife, acquired from Best Buy back in 1997. We were only two years married, in our second place, a duplex with baseboard heating and window unit a/c. Barely a step up from the moldy, bug-infested 2nd floor apartment we’d begun our time together inside an old Civil War-era house on the west side of Westminster, Maryland. The duplex had well water which left blue rings around our tub and the winters were especially brutal from the down winds. A tornado had ripped through the valley in which we were positioned, skipping over us by a miracle and touching down in a rural subdivision less than a mile down the road. As with everyone and every path taken, humble beginnings.
With very few dimes to rub together and minimal credit allotted at our twenty-something ages, Best Buy offered us a hot deal (so we’d thought) an Apple Power Macintosh G3 233 Desktop unit. Brand spanking new, an operating system now primitive, but for the times, a sparkly third-gen 233 megahertz processor stuffed with 34 megabytes of RAM, a 4 gig hard drive and a 512K backside cache.
We opened an account with Best Buy and, having been pushed by friend testimonials to go Mac instead of Dell back then, especially with my writing aspirations, we took one home, $1,400.00 deeper in the hole than when we’d arrived. Funny enough, I’d added Rush’s Test for Echo, a double-pack of The Cramps’ Songs the Lord Taught Us and Psychedelic Jungle and some techno mix CD to the purchase. Somehow I remember that anecdote down the minute details.
I can’t honestly say either of us were terribly happy with the Macintosh G3 233 and we quickly learned why the unit was discontinued nine months after its release in November of 1997. My ex used to play a lot of games on the Mac and I did too, Solitaire being our go-to. The few CD Rom games we bought for the Mac were a horrid disaster for loading and screen transitions.
To the good, I wrote a ton of short stories, then 27 going on 28, usually in the evenings after work or right after Saturday morning cartoons loaded with Animaniacs, Pinky and the Brain and the Batman and Superman animated shows. The Mac processor had its own internal 3.5 inch disk drive for storing all those tales which went nowhere and you can read a prior post of mine about those disks and what I found on them last year after ordering a new portable disk reader. The majority were written in these Mac days. The crunches inside the Mac were even more comical to think upon versus the whirring chunks of the portable reader.
The biggest pisser to Macs back then, and you know where I’m going if you owned one back in the day, is those confounded system errors and crashes, and Susan Kare’s taunting bomb icon which accompanied them. Seemed like Kare’s bomb had more onscreen time than actual processor applications. I often lost data not being able to save in time before the damned bomb struck. We lost an entire budget in process with the bomb blowing a digital raspberry at us more than an actual detonation. In other words, the Mac we’d put ourselves in hock for was a total P.O.S. Paying that bill down for a fritzed processor which ultimate froze to death in less than a year positively chapped my ass.
I never went back to Macintosh, despite so many of my colleagues and writer friends back then leaning on me to have a second go, especially when I proposed putting together my own ‘zine. Layouts being one of the Mac’s bragging rights over standard word processors of the day. It became a hard “no.”
Considering what Apple has engineered in modern times, sure, their products have become more reliable–genius level–even if my current wife, TJ and I get ridiculed for being droid instead of iPhone owners everywhere we go. Perhaps it’s a latent thing, with me, anyway, since if I ever see that goddamn bomb icon again, I’m likely to haul whatever device triggered it against the nearest brick wall.
It was a shared computer with my ex-wife, acquired from Best Buy back in 1997. We were only two years married, in our second place, a duplex with baseboard heating and window unit a/c. Barely a step up from the moldy, bug-infested 2nd floor apartment we’d begun our time together inside an old Civil War-era house on the west side of Westminster, Maryland. The duplex had well water which left blue rings around our tub and the winters were especially brutal from the down winds. A tornado had ripped through the valley in which we were positioned, skipping over us by a miracle and touching down in a rural subdivision less than a mile down the road. As with everyone and every path taken, humble beginnings.
With very few dimes to rub together and minimal credit allotted at our twenty-something ages, Best Buy offered us a hot deal (so we’d thought) an Apple Power Macintosh G3 233 Desktop unit. Brand spanking new, an operating system now primitive, but for the times, a sparkly third-gen 233 megahertz processor stuffed with 34 megabytes of RAM, a 4 gig hard drive and a 512K backside cache.
We opened an account with Best Buy and, having been pushed by friend testimonials to go Mac instead of Dell back then, especially with my writing aspirations, we took one home, $1,400.00 deeper in the hole than when we’d arrived. Funny enough, I’d added Rush’s Test for Echo, a double-pack of The Cramps’ Songs the Lord Taught Us and Psychedelic Jungle and some techno mix CD to the purchase. Somehow I remember that anecdote down the minute details.
I can’t honestly say either of us were terribly happy with the Macintosh G3 233 and we quickly learned why the unit was discontinued nine months after its release in November of 1997. My ex used to play a lot of games on the Mac and I did too, Solitaire being our go-to. The few CD Rom games we bought for the Mac were a horrid disaster for loading and screen transitions.
To the good, I wrote a ton of short stories, then 27 going on 28, usually in the evenings after work or right after Saturday morning cartoons loaded with Animaniacs, Pinky and the Brain and the Batman and Superman animated shows. The Mac processor had its own internal 3.5 inch disk drive for storing all those tales which went nowhere and you can read a prior post of mine about those disks and what I found on them last year after ordering a new portable disk reader. The majority were written in these Mac days. The crunches inside the Mac were even more comical to think upon versus the whirring chunks of the portable reader.
The biggest pisser to Macs back then, and you know where I’m going if you owned one back in the day, is those confounded system errors and crashes, and Susan Kare’s taunting bomb icon which accompanied them. Seemed like Kare’s bomb had more onscreen time than actual processor applications. I often lost data not being able to save in time before the damned bomb struck. We lost an entire budget in process with the bomb blowing a digital raspberry at us more than an actual detonation. In other words, the Mac we’d put ourselves in hock for was a total P.O.S. Paying that bill down for a fritzed processor which ultimate froze to death in less than a year positively chapped my ass.
I never went back to Macintosh, despite so many of my colleagues and writer friends back then leaning on me to have a second go, especially when I proposed putting together my own ‘zine. Layouts being one of the Mac’s bragging rights over standard word processors of the day. It became a hard “no.”
Considering what Apple has engineered in modern times, sure, their products have become more reliable–genius level–even if TJ and I get ridiculed for being droid instead of iPhone owners everywhere we go. Perhaps it’s a latent thing, with me, anyway, since if I ever see that goddamn bomb icon again, I’m likely to haul whatever device triggered it against the nearest brick wall.
Roads Lesser Traveled 