Most times, I’m champing at the bit to write. If anything, time is the enemy between work, life obligations, fatherhood, book marketing, networking, social media upkeep, gym life, the daily-do. It’s often enough for me to carve out time to read, if you ever have a look at my bedside book basket. My weekly comic books alone, just saying. Add the for-fun novels, books I buy to support friends and reference books for both my writing and my spirituality, I’m always in a slog catching up. Happily so. As my mother has wisely said, a reader’s paradise is an unread library.
Yet often when I’m doing my heaviest reading on weekends, I’m twitching deep inside to grab the laptop and get busy, as an idea may strike or another author drops something of such magnitude I feel compelled to challenge myself to get something down within that writer’s level. Sometimes I only have enough time to hit a blog post and must content myself with that. I can honestly say, Todd, I’m always ready to go when I have those precious moments to write. Sometimes I skip a workout day to write instead, and sometimes I take a day or two off after a handful of intensive writing days and hit the gym an extra day, but I’m motivated as hell and constantly grinding out stuff. I’m very blessed. Hopefully this trend stays with me for a very long time.
How do you deal with writer’s block?
It’s been quite a while since I’ve dealt with real writer’s block, where you’re just stymied and feel like every word is remiss and you’re going nowhere. You type any old crap, thinking it’ll be the germination to something amazing, then you see your immediate folly and erase it all, cursing the blank white Word doc before tomahawking yourself as a nobody or a slacker. Back to the “Go” square on the writer’s Monopoly board, no collecting two hundred for your efforts.
I’ve had moments where I know precisely what I want to do, where I’m going, what the outcome is and then I’m hiccupping in the opening paragraph. Whenever that’s happened, I usually find a film score (the more valiant or frightening and quick-timed, the better) and get it spinning. I’ll either make myself a tea or a cocktail and let the juices lubricate my mind, letting the music drift into my ears and open my portals. I’ll surf the internet for about five minutes, usually relative to the topic or theme I’m writing to further prime me. Almost always, this method activates me.
What mystery in your own life could be a plot for a book?
That time, from 1987 to early ’88 when metalhead Ray Van Horn, Jr. landed one of the straights, not only a Popular in our school, but a senior while he was a junior. We made no sense being together and yet we were. It was love, for what it was in high school terms. 1987 was one of the greatest years of my life, but it was ultimately a doomed affair, regardless of our so-called foolproof plan to be together after separation by college. Ridiculous, when you say that out loud.
Despite jilting me as my prom date with a week to go, she was a wonderful girlfriend with a differing religion than my own, which, that alone, could fuel a ton of comedy relief in a proposed story as much as the sight of us hairballs making out in the hallways. The kids were dumbfounded by us at first, but I’d been the rare social headbanger who had made friends from across most of the subdivision lines I’m glad for that, because one, I’m still friends with many of these people nearly 40 years later and, two they were a pool of faces who gave the school body in my novel Revolution Calling texture from all walks of life in the 1980s.
What are you currently working on?
Writing a few short stories back-to-back and fleshing out an outline for a brutal retro horror novel. Also, I’ve written a comic book script featuring Godzilla that I’m trying like mad to pitch to IDW Comics. From a horror convention I recently attended, I gathered source material from one of the all-time great directors in horror cinema (getting to meet him in-person after interviewing him twice in the past was an emotional high for me) for the aforementioned retro piece. I promise it will be genuinely nasty business, some of the sickest material I’ve come up with yet.
I’m also pitching around a recently completed horror novel, “October Rust.” On the plate are ideas for four more short stories, all horror of course. When I have official announcements to make about any or all of it, I’ll make sure you have the skinny, brother.
Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?
My recent books Bringing in the Creeps and Behind the Shadows are both collections of horror short stories, “mixtapes,” as more than one reader has said about them. I take enormous pride in that, because I like to do various themes and set my pieces anywhere and everywhere from the 1950s (a vehicular game of death in Creeps called “Chickeerun,” for instance) to modern age. I do have a lot of stories thrust from the Eighties (“Galaga Dreams,” “Age of Quarrel” and “Meteor Shit” from Bringing in the Creeps come to mind), but I also wrote a Victorian period story in Behind the Shadows which follows one of the brides of Dracula who has broken off from her undead sisters after their master’s demise, combing London for a coven of her own in one my proudest short tales, “Vladana’s Daughters.”
A real-life covered bridge in Kingsville, Maryland served as the setting to “The Darkest Side of Jericho” from Behind the Shadows, and it was fun going to visit the real deal. It’s had decades of history as a haunted covered bridge, and I cover those legends in my story. I’d have to say a lot of my stories are set in Maryland and Pennsylvania, but I’m branching out. Having done several conventions in the past few years conjured “Wolf Con,” the first (to my knowledge) all-werewolf convention set in Colorado where one of the celebrities is a faded horror star who happens to be a real lycanthrope. “End of the Midway” seems to have hit the mark with readers of Bringing in the Creeps, and I dropped that gory beastie inside a patch of woods set off fairgrounds based off an actual fireman’s carnival in Westminster, Maryland. I have all sorts of tales behind the mixtapes, my man. I will say I put my bones into these projects.
For “October Rust,” I have a fun story which I hope to be answering on repeat if it’s a success. The paranormal concept behind it was hatched between my wife, TJ and I on our mountain cabin honeymoon in Deep Creek, Maryland two years ago. It being in October, we had the glamping resort all to ourselves, so we carried on a bit, crushed a bottle of Jameson between us porch side in the evenings, pounded tea in the mornings, acted like hooligans, just because we could.
One of those mornings, I told TJ the spectacular autumn foliage around us was an October rust if there ever was one.Her eyes popped open and after telling her I’d pulled the reference from the Type O Negative album of the same title, we paused, stared at each other and shouted, “Next book title!” From there, we had one brain stew session after another. On the porch, in our bed in the middle of rainy nights spattering on the tin roof, on the trails. We came up with character names and backgrounds, only two of whom made the cut. We wrangled scenarios that got downright outrageous the more we poundedJameson in the chilly night air under hoodies and blankets. We laughed at half of what we threw out there, but we both knew it should be a paranormal horror story with the intent of coming up with some yet-to-be-classified evil in the realm of the mystical. Being a writer herself, TJ was invaluable to me in getting this project formulated. I will tell you that whenever “October Rust” is a reality, the opening chapters are set in Deep Creek and exactly as we saw the area.
What kind of research did you do for this novel?
TJ got immediately hyped by the prospect of “October Rust” that was she was roping me in every nightfor paranormal investigation shows on Travel Channel, Discovery and YouTube. We were constantly delved into The Unexplained, Most Haunted, Evil Things, Ancient Aliens,The Paranormal Files, Shivers, Haunted History, Paranormal Witness and the like. Most of those shows are bunk or at least dubious, but there’s enough out there to suggest the reality of the supernatural. Certainly, enough freaky shit to spark writing triggering encounters I hope terrify people.
I got the idea for one of the novel’s integral characters, Justin Polzer, a “ghost hunter” (a term he despises) from the YouTubers out there who have a monster following. To mold Justin Polzer’s character, I put my trust in the world-renowned British supernatural magazine,Haunted, along with hours of online research, particularly on phenomena recording equipment. I also spent much time boning up on the infamous Enfield Poltergeist case in Brimsdown, England. Were those well-documented hauntings in 1978 real? Justin Polzer will tell you.
In general, what emotions do you usually wish to elicit with your writing?
First and foremost, anything to avoid someone calling me a hack or a pretender! That comes from my music and film journalism days, where the critics stand to get criticized themselves, from the bands to cellar dweller internet crusaders.
I try to keep things realin my writing, as best I can, and I know my style palette can be considered primary at times instead of tertiary. The biggest compliment I’ve received from readers and reviewers thus far is their saying my characters are believable, the situations I thrust them into are relatable, the settings descriptive and encompassing and the dialogue, while sometimes basic, sounds and feels natural, like you’re sitting there inside the world I’ve built. That means a lot to me, even as I ascribe to evolving with deeper and richer surfaces.
With horror, I want to unnerve you, destabilize you, make you wonder what sick and twisted life I lead, which is…not very much. I’m not even an author version of Dexter, fooling the world while leading a bloody double life. I’m an average guy. I’m a laidback guy. I get along with anyone and everyone, until I don’t.
I want to make you cringe and laugh on occasion where it’s strategically placed, and that tension breaker is always necessary in this genre to trick your audience into a false sense of security. Stephen King is the gold standard of dropping humorous interjections as set up to his diabolical designs. You always know that guy’s gonna force feed you your worst nightmares come to life, over and over again, and he succeeds every single time because his settings are true-to-life, and he knows how to make you snicker uncomfortably before he clubs you over the head with something terrible and nauseating. That’s my biggest lesson learned from the Master, though he does it far better than anyone and always will.
I also strive to find a gut-punching emotion to drop on my readers. Something that makes them cringe, like that blood rave in the opening of the original Blade, or feeling remorse, maybe, or a sigh of relief, or even an “Awwwwww” moment to conclude their journey with me when we part at “THE END.”My intent with “Lucky Burns” from Bringing in the Creeps(a story built off the title alone from a flopped novel project) was to make people wince and perhaps cry for the central character, a writer who has given her all for the craft and failed miserably and at life itself. Her final summation and judgment over herself and her lack of attention is designed (I hope) to make people think of her as pathetic but tragic. She’s carried a burden of rejection from her younger years. In the end, the ongoing dismissalshe gnaws through consumes her to such desperate lengths I can only say her resolution is a step premature (more like figurative) in the story’s ironic finale.
I’m a monster fan of the original Twilight Zone. Richard Matheson, Rod Serling and Charles Beaumont were the BEST at dropping the nut-kicking, bitchslapping “Gotcha!” finales to their incredible stories of the unfathomable. That show, the G.O.A.T. for me, along with the original run of EC horror comics, are the biggest influences over my horror writing outside of King.
Best advice on writing you've ever received?
My editor recently validated what some authors shared with me, and I failed to heed. There’s nothing wrong with using “said” in several doses as cues to character vocal actions. I used to think “said” was the mark of a novice and thus sought to be more colorful. Yet I was wrangled in by my editor and toldto restrain myself from overusing the flowery words like “exclaimed,” “interjected,” “stated” or “declared” as a norm. Spread those out and let “say” and “said” do the jobs they’re intended for. Attributing to the character, then keeping the momentum flowing beyond the dialogue.
What is the weirdest/wildest topic or fact that you’ve had to research or uncovered in your research?
For “Chickeerun” in Bringing in the Creeps, I set out to make Rebel Without a Cause meets American Graffiti meets Stephen King’s Sometimes They Come Back. I was raised by Fifties kids, as you probably were, so you can appreciate when I say I was submerged in 1950s and Sixties culture in steady diets. Especially when I was age 11 and 12 and my stepfather had what we called “Fifties Friday” after dinner before we settled in for The Dukes of Hazzard and Dallas.I was drilled Fifties rock ‘n roll classics that altered the course of music forever, and he would keep his 45 records tilted to hide them, then point at me and ask for the artist within the first ten to twenty seconds of play. When I got good at the game, he wanted song titles as well. The whole exercise groomed me for my future as a music journalist, and I can’t thank him enough for doing that.
Taking all of this into account, I created a playlist of music for “Chickeerun” to correlate with what music teens of the day would’ve bopped to in 1957. I knew the tunes, the artists, the titles, but I had to go back through my Fifties music section from my library and meticulously snag what would’ve been hot singles between 1955 and 1957. The playlist became the story’s soundtrack, and I dropped them accordingly within. I treated this story like a duty, to honor my parents and friends of their generation and Stephen King. When I call my story a “vehicular game of death from 1957,” I want readers fully submersed, kind of like John Carpenter’s shrewd usage of the period music in his film adaptation of King’s Christine. I didn’t want to make another Christine here, though. Instead, sometimes they come back, and they want to right certain wrongs, from their time on the planet and wrongs from morally bankrupt suicide artists in real-time, circa 1957.
I had the benefit of knowing the music, films, television and political hotbeds from the 1950s, so “Chickeerun” was partially easy to write, but between the research on music, cars and specific fashions that would’ve belonged to a certain personality type of my characters in 1957, that part was stressful. I wasn’t going to flop this thing if I could help it. I ran “Chickeerun” through beta readers to make sure I had things snap case. When it was finally in the can, I played the Beach Boys’ bittersweet “All Summer Long,” the fadeout number at the end of American Graffitias my victory lap song. “I did it,” I said to an empty house and a chirping CD player, wiping at my moist eyes.
Can you tell us a two-sentence horror story?
Love this, bro, though you’re putting me on-the-spot, sheesh. Cough, cough, here goes…
Skeptic billionaire Ted Swanson dropped scammer psychic Jared Aldrich a check for ten gees, to be cashed if Aldrich’s drawing of the Tower and Reversed Wheel of Fortune cards for him proved legit. The money never transferred hands.
What else would you want readers to know about you? Where can readers find you online?
I was recently brought on as a contributing writer to The Metal Hall of Fame. This after a few years being out of the game from music and film journalism, in which I spent sixteen years. As you know from our time together promoting your artists at Ripple, I interviewed more than three hundred bands, artists, actors and film directors. I wrote around a thousand album, video and book reviews. Those years were some of the wildest, most exciting times of my life and when I was deep in it, I felt unstoppable. At one point, I was writing for thirteen simultaneous magazines and websites, maintaining three monthly columns. I was almost as hungry as I am right now for belonging to communities I’ve loved for a very long time.
I covered ten to twelve concerts a month, mostly local in Baltimore, but frequently road dogging up and down the east coast to NYC and deep Virginia and points between. Those stories would require an entirely different interview. I worked a full-time job and slept very little. I took a lot of on-site assignments on weeknights, hitting a show, getting the interview backstage or on a tour bus, a bar, a sub shop, in an alley, even a pisser once,if you can believe it. Toilet flushes and all on my recorder.
I saw broke and sick bands spill their all into my recorder and play their guts out onstage just to make merch money with venue comped chicken fingers and Doritos to gimp into the next town on their touring itinerary. I admired the hell out of them and lamented the ones who split up later. They wanted it so bad, much as I want to be a financially independent successful horror author bestowed at least one Stoker Award to validate my entire life. I get it why those bands beat themselves senselessly for an uncertain outcome and I honor them even today.
On show nights, I got home deep into the night, transcribed my conversations and assembled them into articles, submitting them with my concert photos right under deadline and getting to bed most times at 4:30 and 5:00 a.m. Back up at 8:00 a.m. and get to my day job. Repeat cycle. It ate me alive, but God, was it some of the most exhilarating times of my life. I envied the fuck out of my colleagues who did this full-time.I had to interview bands inside the conference room of my job during my lunch breaks, and dude, that was wild stuff. I had my co-workers lining the glass of the room watching me go at it, and sometimes I had them come in and listen to the higher profile bands. I was such a showoff, ha!
When it was gone, though, it was gone. Like I hadn’t even been there, save for many of the publicists and record label friends I’d always had and still do today. You know how it is. Out of sight, out of mind. I did so stinking much for the metal and punk industries alone. I was called an A-lister of the metal and punk scene and just that fast after sixteen big ones, I was on the outs looking in.
So, I rebranded myself doing the one thing I loved more than music: horror. On the uphill climb again. Not so easy this time, as when I got into the music industry by cold contacting metal legends in the late 1990s who’d been doing nothing and took my calls and reach outs. Dee Snider, David Coverdale, Joe Lynn Turner, Kevin Dubrow, Michael Schenker, Anton Fig, Lita Ford, Lee Aaron, Jake E. Lee, John Gallagher, the Girlschool gang and all the heavy metal heritage heroes who donated their time to a failed project that nonetheless caught the attention of the entire metal world at the time to reel me in and groom me…simply thank you.
I am grateful to The Metal Hall of Fame for offering me a branch to my old life and I was thrilled recently writing my first piece for them, a forty-year retrospective titled “1985: Metal’s Formative Year.” I told no one, not even my wife, but it was an emotional experience writing that, for numerous reasons. I did so behind closed doors in my office, the significance hit me that hard.
Bringing in the Creeps can be grabbed at Anuci Press.com and that one, plus my other books, Behind the Shadows, Coming of Rage and Revolution Calling are all at Amazon, Barnes and Noble.com, Wal Mart.com and many online book retailers. All four are digitally available on Kindle, Nook and Kobo.
I am all over social media at Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Blue Sky, X, Goodreads and corners I’m probably not even aware of. I write a regular blog called “Roads Lesser Traveled,” where, like my horror anthologies, I mixtape different features such as “Cool Destinations” you might not know about, retro advertisements, my “Thursday Throwback Jam” music picks, “Meme Hell,” a self-explanatory segment called “Go Go Godzilla” and of course, my writing life.www.roadslessertraveled.com is the handle.
Thank you, Todd, for having me on with Ripple Music! Thank you, readers, for your amazing support. Let’s take it higher.
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