Author Archives: Gary W. Olson

Links or Consequences, New Mexico

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I’m up to 19.5k words on the first draft of The Morpheist, though my projected word count is also up–to 33k. I like how it’s shaping up so far, though it’s going to take a lot of working over after the first draft is done to get it ready to go. I’m realizing a lot about the motivations and desires of some of the characters as I go, even though they may not surface in this novella. I’d almost forgotten how much I like this process of discovery. I’ve had to pause it, though, to work on the revisions and polishing of “Goldilocks Zone,” the horror short I first-drafted a couple months ago. Once that’s out the door, it’s back to The Morpheist till it’s done.

As I briefly mentioned three weeks ago, I’m going to be at PenguiCon 2012, April 27th-29th in Dearborn, Michigan (USA), on panels and otherwise slithering about. Don’t know my schedule yet, but I’ll list it here when I get it–also, it will be available online here. I’m really looking forward to this one, as PenguiCon always has some seriously awesome and fun stuff going on.

I’m also slated to be doing a reading from Brutal Light at Nicola’s Books in Ann Arbor, Michigan (USA) on May 7th, 2012 (7pm EDT). I won’t be there by my lonesome–also reading and signing there will be Jim C. Hines, author of the Princess Novels fantasy series from DAW Books, Emmy Jackson, author of Empty Cradle: The Untimely Death of Corey Sanderson, and Bethany Grenier, author of Sings with Stars. Save the date!

You know what else is happening on April 28th, besides Penguicon? It’s Obscura Day! Which, according to the website, is “an international celebration of unusual places, full of expeditions, back room tours & explorations of the hidden wonders in your own hometown.” Sadly, even if I wasn’t busy that day, I’d still be far, far away from the events I’d like to go to the most, such as ones at the House of Automata in Scotland, the Athenaeum in Boston, Massachusetts, and Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois.

I fully support this use of unmanned drone helicopters, even though it doesn’t seem likely to happen anytime soon: TacoCopter startup delivers tacos by unmanned drone helicopter.

Here’s a cool DIY augmented reality monitor baseball cap… thing. I’m tempted to see if I can put one of these together myself.

The privacy invaders are back. Did they ever leave? CISPA looks even more awful than SOPA.

Waiting for those hand-manipulable 3d windows, as seen in films like Minority Report? They’re getting closer to being real.

Someday soon, you’ll be able to design and print your own robot. THE FUTURE, WE ARE IN YOU.

For writers: Eight reasons your story might not be selling that have little or nothing to do with whether the story is any damn good. Favorite line: “I mean, sure, it seems funny and original when you’re six tequilas to the wind, but then again, so does Zardoz.”

More for writers: 9 ways to piss off an editor. I don’t know how accurate this is. I’ve been a pretty princess for ages, and no editor has yet remarked on it.

And finally, here’s what your favorite tv shows would look like if they starred marshmallow peeps — at least, if your favorite shows are The Walking Dead, Dexter, Downton Abbey, Game of Thrones, The Simpsons, or Arrested Development. I see this and pose two questions: 1) Whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy? 2) No Doctor Who or True Blood?

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Gary W. Olson is the author of the dark fantasy novel Brutal Light and several previously published and forthcoming short stories. He can be found via his website, his blog A Taste of Strange, as @gwox on Twitter, and in many other far-flung places on the Internet.

Short Reviews: “Help! Wanted” edited by Peter Giglio / Lily’s “Eden Fell”

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Help! Wanted: Tales of On-the-Job Terror edited by Peter Giglio

Help! Wanted collects 25 short stories on the really dark side of the workplace, with tales ranging from a financially-desperate undertaker given a horrifying request (Stephen Volk’s “The Chapel of Unrest”) to a bookstore where the more annoying sorts of customers have a habit of dying (Lisa Morton’s “Face Out”) to an interview in which a psychiatrist with some highly unusual views on treatment tries to hide his true self (Adrian Chamberlain’s “The Interview). The workplaces and workers featured vary as greatly as the styles of the contributing authors, making for an entertaining mix.

As always, a collection of stories has its high points and low. Not all of the stories here worked for me, but my level of satisfaction overall was quite high. In addition to the three stories mentioned earlier, my favorites included Jeff Strand’s “Work/Life Balance” (on a Casual Fridays policy gone very wrong) and Mark Allan Gunnells’ “Must Be Something in the Water” (featuring a new water cooler that encourages some highly unprofessional conduct). Overall it’s a good and tasty collection of sharp short horror fiction, well worth checking out.

Eden Fell by Lily

Eden, an abstract painter, journeys through reality and unreality as her life falls apart. Accompanied by a snake and a rhinocerous, she encounters a strange and surreal set of characters and situations, all while struggling to hold her life together and find what she is desperately missing. Through a stream of consciousness narrative we’re drawn into Eden’s struggles and to her ultimate fate.

Eden Fell is one of those books that, while I liked it a lot, I find difficult to explain, or sometimes follow. A lot of the pleasure of this book comes from the exquisite prose, and how well it drew me behind the eyes of Eden’s character… and since she is often at the mercy of weird happenings, so was I. I love experiences like that, and too seldom find them. If you do too, I recommend this book.

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Gary W. Olson is the author of the dark fantasy novel Brutal Light and several previously published and forthcoming short stories. He can be found via his website, his blog A Taste of Strange, as @gwox on Twitter, and in many other far-flung places on the Internet.

Kathryn Meyer Griffith: The Story Behind Blood Forge

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Kathryn Meyer GriffithThe Story Behind Blood Forge (Author’s Revised Edition)
By Kathryn Meyer Griffith


1985. I’d just published my second paperback novel, The Heart of the Rose, an historical bodice ripper (remember those?) about a suspected witch in 15th century England amidst the War of the Roses political intrigues, with Leisure Books of Dorchester Publishing and my editor there asked me if I had another novel to show them yet.

It just so happened that, yes, I’d been working on a third novel; another romantic horror similar to my first book with them, Evil Stalks the Night (which will for the first time in 29 years also be out again, revised and updated, on July 1, 2012) I was tentatively calling With This Gun. The story centered around a scandalous love triangle/murder between police officers that had taken place in our small town years before and that I had firsthand knowledge of. Some of them had been my friends, as my first husband had been a police officer in town as well. The police force, their wives and families, had been a tight knit group, but the murder still came as a great shock to most of us. One of my husband’s coworkers had been seeing another coworker’s wife and the two were thinking of splitting up their respective marriages, both with children, to be with each other. The problem was, the cop being left didn’t like it and shot the other cop dead in his house one day after being told what had been going on. It was terrible situation.

Well, I’d let the whole matter age for over a decade and was finally writing about it, sort of, as a way to free me of all the bad memories.

Now to the horror aspect. I’d use a possessed gun as a device to explain the killings the gun would be responsible for. Now I wasn’t exactly a lover of guns, but I was married to a cop. Guns were part of our lives. Always in the back of my mind was what I’d say to people who didn’t like the idea of me writing about a gun or hated guns: It isn’t a gun that kills people… it’s the person using the gun.

In this book, I gave an even better motivation. The gun made people kill because it was evil. This theme was what made it a supernatural story. A Colt Python would be possessed by an ancient demon; that the weapon had been forged from tainted iron or metal from the bowels of the earth centuries ago connected to that ancient demon-god. So the title Leisure eventually came up with was: Blood Forge (though I begged the editor to call it With This Gun or at least, Blood Forged, which made more sense, but no the publisher was determined to call it Blood Forge and in those days the author didn’t any say so on that or the cover).

Anyway, in the book I’d follow that gun after its creation from unfortunate human to human as it made people crazy and murderous; created havoc in everyone’s lives it touched. Until two people deeply in love have faith that they can defeat it…with the help of a mysterious priest (who may or may not be a priest at all). There are ways to get rid of a demon, no matter how strong it is.

Blood ForgeThat plot about following a gun on its deadly rampage has been used many times since in television shows and stories, but I’d began thinking about the book as early as 1983, so, perhaps, I was the first. Who knows?

Which brings me now to what happened after I turned the book in to the publisher. My editor for my first two books, Jane Thornton, read it and refused to editor it. Turned it down flat, saying she despised guns. They killed people. Guns bad. They scared her. She wouldn’t edit such a story, sorry.

I don’t remember exactly what happened after that. It was a long time ago. I think either Jane Thornton left Leisure or she gave the book to another editor, a man called John Littel.

Anyway, he liked the book, gun or no gun, and they offered me a contract on it anyway. I was thrilled. Wasn’t thrilled with the title, as I said, though, and I wasn’t impressed with the cover, embossed or not. Too dark. A snake coiling around the barrel of a menacing gun on a black background. Along with the title, I felt it didn’t portray what the book was entirely about. The novel was a love story, a survival against great odds, a parable of faith, tale. A story of a man’s fight with alcoholism and how his wife’s love helps him beat the insidious influence of the alcohol as well as the gun. It was about cops, their lives and their families. But, as with the title, I had no choice on the cover and had to take what they gave me. That’s just the way it was back then. I still feel that’s part of the reason the book never did well in its first incarnation. I was still an unknown writer and when that’s the case I’ve found that the cover and title–how compelling they are–makes a difference in the sales.

At this point, I must admit, after having just finished rewriting it…it was a very dark book written at a very dark time of my life. The darkest, I think, of all my books. I had gone through a divorce, remarriage and was juggling a full time job and a family. Trying to write at night. It was actually difficult for me to relive most of it. I was still in that early part of my career, still young without enough life experience, where I’d embed what I’d lived through and saw around me into my stories. I didn’t have the maturity yet to write anything too layered.

Anyway, the book came out in 1989 and didn’t do as well as my first two books. I noticed that the publisher turned cool towards me after that and, seeing the way the wind was blowing, I went on to get an agent and she helped me jump up another rung of the ladder when she sold my next four books to a bigger publisher, Zebra Books (Kensington Publishing). And I left Leisure behind; and my three books there went out of print long ago.

But now, 23 years later Blood Forge-Revised Author’s Edition (wish I could change that title but it wouldn’t be fair to people that already read the original book) is coming out again in print, and in eBooks for the first time ever, in March 2012. I love the cover this time. My fantastic cover artist, Dawne Dominique, who did eleven of my other new covers, did this one, too. It’s stunning.

So that’s the story of Blood Forge. My second published novel. It, along with my older novels (12, plus a novella and a short story) will all soon be out again. And when the last old book from 1984, Evil Stalks the Night-Revised Author’s Edition, comes out in July 2012, my forty year writing career will have come full circle. It’s amazing. I guess a book never dies, huh? I guess not.

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A writer for 40 years I’ve had 14 novels and 8 short stories published with Zebra Books, Leisure Books, Avalon Books, and the Wild Rose Press, since 1984. And my romantic end-of-the-world horror novel THE LAST VAMPIRE-Revised Author’s Edition is a 2012 EPIC EBOOK AWARDS FINALIST NOMINEE.

My books (most out again): Evil Stalks the Night, The Heart of the Rose, Blood Forge, Vampire Blood, The Last Vampire, Witches, The Nameless One short story, The Calling, Scraps of Paper, All Things Slip Away, Egyptian Heart, Winter’s Journey, The Ice Bridge, Don’t Look Back, Agnes novella, In This House short story, BEFORE THE END: A Time of Demons, The Woman in Crimson, The Guide to Writing Paranormal Fiction: Volume 1 (I did the Introduction)

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Blurb:

Blood Forge–Author’s Revised Edition

An ancient snake-demon lays trapped behind the stone walls of an Incan prison, for centuries demanding blood sacrifices and scheming to escape. Then it discovers a pathway into the world of men, forging itself into a malevolent 357 Colt Python, and making itself capable of incomparable destruction and misery. Through decades it torments, decimates, the unfortunate people whose lives it comes into until a loving married couple, Emily and Sam Walters, have enough love and faith–and the help of a mysterious priest who’s much more than he appears to be–to fight against and destroy it forever…and to send it back to hell where it belongs.

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Gary W. Olson is the author of the dark fantasy novel Brutal Light and several previously published and forthcoming short stories. He can be found via his website, his blog A Taste of Strange, as @gwox on Twitter, and in many other far-flung places on the Internet.

Links… in… Spaaaaaaaaace!

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I’m still working away on my dark science fiction novella The Morpheist. It’s at about 12.5k in verbiage, around halfway in terms of story told. It’s the most sustained work on a single story I’ve done in quite a while; it gives me confidence that this will be the next big thing I finish. It used to be that I wrote with discipline and a sense of purpose. That was true in the 90s when I wrote for Superguy, and it was true for Brutal Light. I have to admit I lapsed once I finished Brutal Light, and stayed lapsed for several years–not going over all the reasons why, just acknowledging it happened. I’m mildly relieved to find I can still write this way.

It looks like I’m going to be a panelist at Penguicon 2012 (Friday April 27th through Sunday April 29th) in Dearborn, Michigan, USA! I’ll post again when I know the what and the when of the panels. PenguiCon attracts some big crowds, and is always insane amounts of fun, so I’m really looking forward to it.

The first review I’ve seen anywhere of my novel Brutal Light has come in. Admittedly, it’s mixed, but it’s overall positive. What do you think?

Meanwhile, on to the links!

Author and editor Lincoln Crisler has been hosting a series of ‘virtual panels’ on various subjects regarding Corrupts Absolutely?, the dark superheroic fiction anthology he edited. Two weeks ago, the topic was Meta-Morality. Last week it was Meta-Misses. Yesterday, it was Meta-Mates. Lots of perspectives and food for thought!

The first communication using neutrinos has been sent and received by a group at the University of Rochester. It’s the first step toward someday being able to communicate without worrying about pesky things like oceans or the moon getting in the way. (Not quite Star Trek-style, since it doesn’t beat the lightspeed barrier, but pretty cool, nonetheless.)

Speaking of cool, there’s a new system developed that lets a wearer make every surface a touch screen for smartphone-like usage. I won’t comment on what uses my inner 12-year-old has already imagined for this. Every surface means every surface, is all I’m sayin’. 😉

Here’s an interesting debunking of the ‘Creative Right Brain’ myth. The truth turns out to be a lot more complex, messy and interesting, which is just how I like it.

Interesting speculation going on in The Atlantic regarding how medtech could expand beyond the injured. The future is coming, ready or not! This is the sort of thing I find fascinating, particularly as, in The Morpheist, I try to worldbuild a cyber/biopunkish future in which some of our dreams and nightmares in this area and many others have come true.

Finally, as a folklore fan, I was amazed to read about five hundred new fairytales being discovered in Germany. Tales like these, particularly so close to their sources (they were collected around the same time as Grimm’s, and were far less rewritten), are a tremendous window to our collective past.

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Gary W. Olson is the author of the dark fantasy novel Brutal Light and several previously published and forthcoming short stories. He can be found via his website, his blog A Taste of Strange, as @gwox on Twitter, and in many other far-flung places on the Internet.

Short Reviews: JE Gurley’s Bloodlust / Fiona Dodwell’s Obsessed

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Bloodlust by J.E. Gurley

A monster is on the rampage in Detective Tack Hardin’s city, murdering young women and drinking their blood. It isn’t long before Hardin learns that the killer is a chupacabra, and that its young will soon awaken with their own thirst for blood. He finds an ally in the beautiful and mysterious Joria Alvarez, whose father was murdered by the creature and whose obsession with it may prove Hardin’s undoing. As the body count rises, Hardin risks his career and his life to fight a threat to humankind that may be more massive than even he realizes.

There’s a lot to like about Bloodlust, starting with Hardin, who reminds me in some ways of Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch in his grim determination to protect the innocent and ability to take large amounts of damage and keep going. The subplot with a secret government agency attempting to capture a chupacabra alive to further its own projects was intriguing. As far as Joria’s character went, I’m afraid I guessed the twist with her well before it was revealed, but that was about all I foresaw. If you like hardboiled police noir with a supernatural enemy, you’ll likely enjoy this tale.

Obsessed by Fiona Dodwell

James Barker is haunted by the death of a man who jumped in front of a train he was driving. Despite the urging of his wife Chloe, he finds himself increasingly drawn to investigate the man’s life, and what possessed him to commit suicide. It’s not long before he is seeing visions of the dead man, both in his nightmares and in the waking world, and is forced to choose between abandoning his search to save his sanity and his marriage, or to pursue the clues all the way down to the dark truth of that night.

Fiona Dodwell does compelling work in creating a feeling of compulsive need in Barker, and as he goes deeper into obsession, in keeping the supernatural suspense as to what is really happening and what is in Blake’s fevered imaginings. The book relies more on atmosphere and suspense to draw readers in, all the way to its unflinching denouement. If you like your horror stories mixed with subtlety and suspense, I recommend trying this one.

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Gary W. Olson is the author of the dark fantasy novel Brutal Light and several previously published and forthcoming short stories. He can be found via his website, his blog A Taste of Strange, as @gwox on Twitter, and in many other far-flung places on the Internet.

On The Speaking in The Public

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It will not come as a shock to anyone who has met me in person that I am not a natural talker. I am comfortable in silence, or at least in staying silent while the world surrounds me with its endless noise. In conversations, I typically end up following the lead of a more talkative person, quite happy to listen while occasionally commenting, asking questions, making puns, or interjecting random sympathetic noises. When it is down to me to take the lead in conversing, I’m hesitant, sometimes stuttery, and often my sentences wander off when I realize I have no idea how they’re supposed to end.

So you’d think that there are certain aspects of self-promotion that would be more difficult for me–doing interviews and participating on panels at conventions, for instance. These do, in fact, elevate my anxiety levels, and I’m usually looking forward most to the experience being over, so that I can scuttle back to my silent comfort zone. But then the weirdest thing happens — I’m doing the interview or participating on the panel, and I find I’m enjoying it. I’m chattering away–still hesitant, stuttery, and sometimes meandering–but I don’t care because I’m talking about things that I love–the strange places I find ideas, my influences, and things I’m writing.

Take the interview I did with Greg Walker on A Cup of Coffee and a Good Book a couple days ago. Between a desire to be ‘on’ and sound like I actually had something to say, my usual pre-speaking anxieties, and a couple large mugs of coffee, I was dialed up toward the high end of my talking abilities. (It also helped that Greg’s a good conversationalist, keeping me going while keeping me from meandering too far afield from talking about Brutal Light. People like me are helped a lot by people like him.) We probably could have gone on for a lot longer than the half-hour of the show.

As for panels, the four I was on for ConClave helped ease my mind on the prospect of my clamming up in the presence of other writers who were better talkers who could gab at length. I was less caffeinated at these events, but was determined to put in my commentary and not be That Guy. To my surprise, I enjoyed the give-and-take, and had fun. (Though, being that they were ninety minute panels, as opposed to the usual sixty, I can’t say they would have gone on for a lot longer than the assigned time.)

The key for me in both situations was preparation. A couple of the panels–the ones on social media marketing and the future of publishing–I did some advance reading on, to give myself a better idea of what the issues and sub-issues were, and to get me thinking on things I’d only nebulously thought about before, if at all. For the interview, I went over the guest interviews and guest blogs I’d done for my virtual book tour, just to refresh myself on how I’d answered some questions and to get me in an expositional frame of mind. (One thing I added that was not in the blog tour–my relating of dark fantasy to noir films and fiction.) It’s a lot easier for me to be ‘on’ when I’m prepared to be ‘on.’

So… it turns out that The Public Speaking is not quite so vexing for me as I’d expected it to be. Of course, it still stirs anxiety, in roughly inverse proportion to the amount of time until I have to do it. But now I also feel like I’m looking forward to it as well… and that’s a good feeling.

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Gary W. Olson is the author of the dark fantasy novel Brutal Light and several previously published and forthcoming short stories. He can be found via his website, his blog A Taste of Strange, as @gwox on Twitter, and in many other far-flung places on the Internet.