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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
What an incredible thing to be given from one of the Master Jedi of rock and heavy metal journalism, the elite Martin Popoff, about Revolution Calling:
“It’s obvious Ray knows his metal, but it’s also obvious he knows his wider pop culture, history, politics and world events, as Van Horn, Jr. snaps us right back to life as a goofy metalhead in the pressure-cooker that was the late ‘80s—or as Morrissey called it, the haties. As well, he delivers action events, concepts and plot in a rock-solid writing style that shines with clarity. Dialogue is mapped-out with similar confidence, allowing Jason and his exquisitely-drawn buddy Rob, as well as the tale’s other characters, to take shape quickly. Completing the circuit and keeping the tale fizzy and effervescent are endless flashes of place names, band names and brand names.”
Just wow. Thank you, brother. Revolution Calling is almost here!
I want to thank all who came out to the Carroll County Ag Center in Westminster, Maryland last Saturday to see us and for buying Coming of Rage and TJ’s books and oracle cards.
Next, I have another advance review of Revolution Calling from the esteemed Joel McIver, metal music writer and author of To Live is to Die: The Life & Death of Metallica’s Cliff Burton :
“A story of everyday heavy metal folk and how their everyday pain is real.”
His thoughtful quote has landed on the back cover of Revolution Calling. Mega thank you to Joel!
Today was a bit of wish fulfillment as me and my new wife and longtime fellow author, TJ Perkins, did our first joint book signing in Westminster, Maryland.
It was my first public appearance doing a book signing in promotion of my short story collection, Coming of Rage, while TJ was knocking it out of the park cross selling her various books for differing age brackets including The Healthy Witch (book and oracle card set), Four Little Witches, Wound Too Tight, Mystery of the Attic and her ninja fantasy Shadow Legacy series. TJ will be joining me at my publisher, Raw Earth Ink, for an upcoming re-release of her Kim and Kelly mystery series sporting all-new covers.
Many years ago, when we were just friends, we supported each other’s writing endeavors and used to daydream back then about sharing a space together at a future book signing. When we re-met years later and became an actual couple, we raised the proposition of a joint signing once again. Today, we made it a reality. I can’t think of a finer way to start a marriage.
TJ is a natural salesperson and her gift of gab pushed more than half of her stock off the table. Coming of Rage did rather well in its own right. The most refreshing element to the signing other than doing it together and dropping a lot of bookmarkers into prospective readers’ hands was meeting so many sweet and cool people in attendance.
The Pushcart Prize-nominated Coming of Rage and TJ’s worksare available for purchase at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Likewise for Revolution Calling, scheduled for release this coming December.
If you’re interested in a review copy of Coming of Rage and/or my upcoming novel, Revolution Calling, both released through Raw Earth Ink, please drop me a message!
Roads Lesser Traveled 