Melcome to My World

Here I am an author of “morbid” tales as my dear Mom always said and believe it or not, this is my first Blog! I’m going to date myself here by saying that when the Internet boom hit I had owned computers going back to the old Texas Instruments 994a. It was basically a wannabe hybrid of an Atari Game system and the old Commodore. It played games that came on tape cassette or hard cartridge and could handle a staggering 8 kb of memory (16 if you had a cassette player attached). It was, however, my first exposure to programming. I lived happily in the Land of DOS and bemoaned its fate when Windows 95 became a hit regardless of its shortcomings.
I moved to Backwaterville, USA in late ‘96 from Southern California and found myself moving not into the 21st century but closing in on the mid-20th. Here still 11 years later, things are a bit better than I expected.
Once I worked in the cinema/theater industry designing SFX, costumes and make-up for screen, stage and entertainment. I worked on major Monster projects that required separate servos to animate the piece that one tech alone would not be able to handle! The hours spent on applying make-up fx for actors are but a dream passing by now. Hollywood has let the original Monster Makers be replaced by CGI. Set designers and Miniature specialists are lost to the green screen. So I suppose I haven’t really missed out being gone from the “bright lights” of Movie City, but a little part of me has died as those I knew who were to old to adapt to the new computer age of film making sadly faded away into the past.
As for myself, I turned my talents and creative urges to writing and art. “Dark and demented” was one critic’s view and another was “…horrified that someone who would illustrate such venial pieces would be allowed to live among us…” What can I say? With such wonderfully crafted words of encouragement like that I found a market for my art in the rapidly growing Horror Role-Playing Gaming industry. Changes in the RPG market have left that as a less than profitable business if you do it by hand.
I create. It’s what I do. So I returned to writing (having garnered some publishing kudos in my early 20’s.)
I’m working on my first novel length book and I have a small writing circle here in Our Town with high hopes, and if my Mother is reading this: YES! The book is morbid! <ahem> Sorry. I remember what Stephen King said in Danse Macabre: when asked by a person how he could write such horribly terrifying stories, he responded that he “… had the heart of a 4 year old child… sitting on his desk in a jar of formaldehyde.” King also says that the only movies he was allowed to watch were Disney. Yeah, that one got me too. If you don’t believe Disney makes the scariest movies in the world for children, then you never saw “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” as a kid!
So there you go! Let’s all blame good old Uncle Walt.