Storytellersunplugged

This has been one of those days you know you should curl up and hide from, but after wading through it, I have come to the conclusion that it can end on a positive twist. It can inspire me to write this essay, and that is how I intend to banish it from my mind, heart, and life. Actually – it started last night. Let’s be accurate. It started Saturday. I woke up in the morning, and my machine – before ... Read More

The atoms of my being are scattered across too many places. I'll watch a movie that is arguably set in a "foreign" culture or place to perhaps 99% of its audience - and things will swim into my conscience from absolutely nowhere and slot into their own proper places. Most recently - "Whale Rider", a New Zealand-made movie set deeply into a New Zealand Maori culture, and the science fiction series "Charlie Jade", set in South Africa and filmed in Cape Town. "Whale Rider". ... Read More

Last month, alert readers will have noticed that my post was conspicuous by its absence. My excuse is a good one: an utterly ghastly bout of stomach flu. Trust me, you don't want to know what I was thinking about on May 29. This month, I find that I'm envying my fish. I have an albino bristlenose plecostomus--which isn't nearly as alarming as you think, since the maximum size these critters reach is four inches and they are vegetarian, subsisting mainly on ... Read More

Wayne Allen Sallee That’s what I call my writing resume these days, the collections of newspaper interviews and my appearance in Chicago magazine, sadly when I still had hair and wore my Larry King glasses. More on that in a minute. Or maybe not, considering my lack of concentration lately, due to my brain popping rods of pain on a regular basis. Never could get the voice activation to work, I get too many spasms in my right cheek. At ... Read More

Los Angeles is not my usual stomping ground, so visiting twice in a month is quite the event. One trip was for Book Expo America, while the current trip is tied into a recording session for a Game Which Shall Not Be Named. Both trips seem straightforward – go in, take care of business, go home. But around the edges, you can always find stories. Here are six. ONE Never before have I been haunted by Dr. Ruth Westheimer. I first saw her in ... Read More

by Janet Berliner Last night I took a bath. No big deal, you say? Actually, it’s a huge deal for me. At the end of 2003, they wanted to pull the plug on me. Four years ago, I came home palsied, unable to eat or go to toilet on my own, and unable to walk or write my name. It’s been a long journey from there to getting into that tub unaided: The realisation of a dream. I tore a sheet of paper out of the ... Read More

I was doing a reading at a Barnes & Noble last night and one of the readers there was complaining that she had had a hard time finding my books. Oh, they were in the store, all right, but where? She tried Mystery and Sci-fi/Fantasy with no luck. Finally she asked for help and the clerk took her to Fiction and Literature. That’s because THERE IS NO HORROR SECTION at Barnes & Noble. And there’s barely ... Read More

A giant homicidal maniac with the head of a bear splits a man in half from head to chest with a rusty machete. A soldier performs battlefield surgery on himself, not because he is wounded, but to remove a bit of unwanted government hardware, something that was not a part of his original equipment. A teenage girl beats a man to death in a crowded diner with his own cane. A giant catfish swallows a scuba diver whole.  Not content to be the fish’s dinner, ... Read More

My latest work in comics just hit stores this week: Blood Bowl: Killer Contract #1 from Boom! Studios. It's the first in a five-issue miniseries of comic books based upon my Blood Bowl novels, which are in turn based upon Jervis Johnson's Blood Bowl board game. I've written a handful of comics before, but this was the first time I'd tackled such a long story arc. Before I jumped in, I decided to see if anyone had come up with any new tools ... Read More

Or: I Didn’t Know I Was a Dark Fantasy Series Paperback Writer Until They Told Me Or: In The End You Actually Do Have To Write the Damn Thing By Justine Musk 1 My agent called me up the other day. “I just got off the phone with Jessica,” she said. Jessica is my editor. “You know how Roc was waiting for the pre-sale numbers to see whether or not they’d want another book?” For the folk out there who ... Read More