OK, so contrary to what I’d said earlier, I guess there’ll be one final Stoker-related post …

Two things happened in the hours after the Stoker banquet to remind me of what truly matters.

First, immediately following my loss to Gary Braunbeck, I received the following e-mail on my BlackBerry from my parents in Florida. They’d somehow managed to figure out how to watch the live web cast, and so sent me these words of commiseration:

We managed to stay up and watch the awards. We love you and you’ll always be a winner to us.

Later, after I returned from post-banquet partying, I was chatting with Irene, who had gone back to the room once the ceremony was over, and I noticed a small box on my pillow.

“What’s this?” I asked. (more…)

The Dead Dog party is dead and gone, and all that remains of World Horror 2008 (besides a few hours to squeeze in enough sightseeing to claim that I’ve seen more of Salt Lake City than the inside of the Radisson and then the mad dash for the airport) are the memories. Here are the things I’ll remember most from this year’s WHC:

At the top of the list has to be any time spent with Gene O’Neill, my Clarion classmate from 1979. Looking back at my Stoker loss to that talented rat bastard Gary Braunbeck, it turns out that what I missed most wasn’t the loss of the trophy, but the fact that I could have been handed that trophy by Gene as the presenter in my category. It would have meant a lot to have shared the stage with him for a few moments, and besides, I’d planned to use my time to deliver payback for three decades of friendship. I enjoyed our chances to break bread together and catch up on our lives face to face this weekend, instead of via phone call or e-mail. When I look ahead to next year’s World Horror Convention in Winnipeg, one of the things I’m most looking forward to is more time with Gene. (more…)

Tucked into my bed here in Salt Lake City, I dreamed that I was wandering a convention, and heard the names of other writers being called, again and again, with no response, in a manner much like the way in which Ben Stein took attendance in Ferris Beuller’s Day Off. The voice echoing through the halls belonged to Barry Malzberg.

And then I heard him call my name. Unlike those other writers (and alas, no, now that I’m awake, I no longer remember who they were), I answered the call, and went into a conference room, and there was Barry, standing in the front of an audience, dressed like Ko-Ko from The Mikado. In the dream, I saw nothing strange about this at all. And I said to him, “Barry, you know that all you ever need to do is call my name three times and I’ll be there.” (Which was odd to be saying, since I’d showed up on his first call.)

He then proceeded to ask me a question as if I was a game show participant. I can no longer remember the exact question, only that it had to do with Groucho Marx (who in the dream I remembered having heard sing “Willow, tit-willow” sometime previously), and in answer to that question I was going to say, “Margaret Dumont,” but before I spoke I suddenly knew that would be the wrong answer, and as I struggled to think of the right one, I woke.

I had a long phone conversation with Barry last week and it was nothing like that, so though this dream was entertaining to me, it makes no more sense than any of the earlier dreams I’ve shared with you here.

Now a dream in which Lee and Nick and me had killed Gary Braunbeck and dumped his body out back in the hotel parking lot—well, after the events of last night, that I would have understood!

Before the Stoker Awards banquet began, the attending nominees in the Long Fiction category came together in an attempt to decide the winner like gentlemen. Here you can see Gary Braunbeck, Lee Thomas, Nicholas Kaufmann, and me attempting to calmly discuss who should walk away with the trophy.

Unfortunately, instead of letting us decide the result in the time-honored manner, through the use of fisticuffs, long knives, and tactical nuclear weapons, the administrators of the Stokers wussed out and let the voters have their say.

I say “Bah, Humbug” to the democratic process! When has listening to the will of the people ever worked out? Which meant that Gary Braunbeck took home the haunted house for “Afterward, There Will Be a Hallway.”

But seriously—it was an honor to have been on the ballot with such talented writers. It truly was an honor to have been nominated.

And you know something? Being a three-time loser doesn’t feel so bad after all.

Con is short for convention, but it can also be short for conversation, for that’s what conventions are—one long flowing conversation as I bounce from one attendee to another. (The bouncing is purely metaphorical, I assure you, though if things get too tense with the nominees competing for the Stoker in my category, you never know what might happen.) When I think of Friday at the 2008 World Horror Con, that’s what I remember, endless conversations with friends old and new.

Discussing professional wrestling with Dennis Etchison, the pros and cons (there’s yet a third con!) of writing collaborations with Wilum Pugmire (with whom I sat at the mass autographing session, as you can see at right), the many forgotten 1980s’ small-press horror magazines with Gary Braunbeck, what a nice guy Pete Crowther is with Roy Robbins, the slowness of some publishers to bring out their promised books with GAK, hot new writers such as Paolo Bacigalupi and Benjamin Rosenbaum with Jeremy Lassen, revenge as a means of literary inspiration with Gene O’Neill, the magic of Italo Calvino and Julio Cortázar with Maria Alexander, methods of dealing with rejection with Whitney Lakin, pissing off editors with Adam Niswander, the changing face of the San Diego ComicCon with Eunice Magill, his upcoming first novel The Jigsaw Man with Gord Rollo, suicidal authors with Norm Prentiss, and many dozens of other conversations that swirl in my memory.

And then there’s also the chance to pull out and dust off old stories to tell all over again, as when I shared with Ann Laymon and others over dinner how I’d once chased a pickpocket through the New York City subway system only to end up having to go to the hospital, and when I told Beth Gwinn and Ed Bryant about my private tours of the Manhattan morgue given by then Chief Medical Examiner Michael Baden. So far I’ve managed to avoid telling my flying cow story, but we’re only halfway through the convention, so who knows what’s still to come?

Convention throat—always a danger when I just won’t shut up for days at a time—is starting to set in, and I’m scheduled to do a reading in a just a few hours. I’d better keep my mouth shut for awhile so I don’t sound like a cross between Broderick Crawford and Harvey Fierstein!

Take a look at the three men below. Note the hope in their eyes and the smiles on their faces. Approximately 30 hours from now, the smiles and hope will be stricken from two of those goofy mugs.

These three competing nominees in the Stoker Awards category of Long Fiction are, from left to right, Lee Thomas, author of “An Apiary of White Bees,” you know who, the author of “Almost the Last Story from Almost the Last Man,” and Nicholas Kaufmann, author of “General Slocum’s Gold.”

(Check here for further Flickr photos.) (more…)

I faced some true horror yesterday evening when I arrived at the World Horror Convention—because though I had made it all the way to Salt Lake City, my suit had not. And unfortunately, I couldn’t blame the airline, only myself.

As I emptied my suitcase, I discovered that though I had packed my suit pants, the matching jacket that went with them was still at home. I have no idea how I managed to do that, but that initial discovery upon arrival didn’t seem like a good omen to me for Saturday night’s banquet, at which I’d hoped to look spiffy whether I won a Stoker Award or not.

So my question for the blogosphere this morning is—do I just try to pass in black slacks, my black leather jacket, and my skeletal Nightmare Before Christmas tie? Or do I run out this morning to the local Men’s Warehouse and buy myself a new suit? Suggestions, please! Oh, the horror!

Other than that, I had fun Thursday night. That’s Gene O’Neill, old pal and Clarion comrade from the class of 1979 in the photo above. (I’ve started loading other photos to my Flickr account here.) Since we live on opposite coasts, Gene and I don’t get to see each other as often as we’d like, so we’ll have a lot of catching up to do this weekend. (more…)

The only drawback to heading off for Salt Lake City tomorrow to attend the World Horror Convention is the timing of it—by leaving home during the last weekend in March, I’ll miss the biggest explosion of daffodils our garden gets. Oh, we’ll have blooms through mid-May, since over the years we’ve planted many different types of daffodils, so it isn’t as if I’m losing out on the season completely, but the difference between your average March 27 and April 1 is amazing.

As you can see, the Dutch Masters (what used to be called King Alfreds) just started to pop today, joining the Tete-a-Tetes that began to bloom a week and a half ago. I counted the blooms this afternoon, as I do from time to time, and we had 220 daffodils brightening up the acreage today. We’ll likely have an increase of at least another 500 over those few days.

I’ll miss seeing the daily, sometimes hourly, changes to the landscape that—forget the calendar—are the true sign that Spring is here. Gardeners will understand. But for the chance to attend another Stoker banquet as a nervous nominee … well … I guess the daffodils will just have to take care of themselves until I get back.

It’s too early to share any photos of the fun from this year’s World Horror Convention, because I won’t even be heading off to Salt Lake City until Thursday. But what I can share is a look back at a moment of fun from one of my favorite World Horror Cons past.

Here’s a kooky quartet of writers yucking it up sixteen years ago at the 1992 WHC in Nashville. (Click on the image at right to make this fantastic four even more fantastic.) The trio towering over me is, from left to right, Nancy Holder, Adam-Troy Castro (who I already told you about here), and Connie Hirsch. I have no idea how we ended up in such a compromising position, but since I have no shame, I guess it doesn’t really matter.

As you might suspect from everything that’s happened since, the only way that I got Adam off my back was by agreeing to buy all those Vossoff and Nimmitz stories when I was editing Science Fiction Age. Why else do you think I published them? If I hadn’t, he’d probably be around my neck still!

As you can see, World Horror Cons are always a blast, and I expect the coming one to be no different. Check back later this week to see just how wild and crazy it gets.

As you may have noticed, even though I blog here about writing and publishing matters, I don’t tend to write much about the actual writing process itself. I don’t share about how many words I get written each day, or my struggles with solving story problems, or my sorting through alternate story titles to find the one I really like.

To be honest, I only very rarely discuss those things with friends either. Until I’ve finished several drafts of a story, it’s almost as if my work doesn’t exist. Even when I’ve workshopped, the manuscripts I share tend to be in as nearly marketable a form as I can make them on my own. I guess I’ve always agreed with Vladimir Nabokov that sharing rough drafts was “like passing around samples of sputum.” Of course, that might be simply because my first drafts tend to be much more raw than those of other writers.

And then there’s also the fact that I’m slightly superstitious about it all, and I’m afraid of jinxing a story. Shedding too much light on on a story before it’s finished might kill it.

But in the interests of opening the window slightly into my writing process, I’m sharing a page from the first draft of a new short story, “Petrified,” which will appear this coming weekend in the program book of the 2008 World Horror Convention. I doubt that you’ll be able to read it anyway, as it’s written by hand, and I’ve always had the world’s worst handwriting. (more…)