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Ghosthunting in Australia

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Over the last six months, I’ve taken part in a few stays in haunted locations.

First was the official Australian Horror Writers Association’s Aradale Asylum Creative Retreat, in February of this year. It was three days and two nights of writing, paranormal investigations, and fun. There is an official blog for the participants of that weekend.
Then, it was another weekend in May that was arranged by the people who run the ghost tours at Aradale. More fun, ghosts, and a lot of freezing cold.
I wrote two columns at the UK site This is Horror, based on the experiences we had on that weekend. The first has had a great response. The second is just up today.

Next month, we will be staying the night at Old Geelong Gaol.

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Then, in October, we have another AHWA Creative Retreat, this time held at Beechworth, at the old Mayday Hills Lunatic Asylum.

Mayday Hills Asylum

Ah, the fun of hunting ghosts here in Australia…
More to come once we make it back alive from Geelong.

Geoff

 

BRAM STOKER AWARDS 2012 CEREMONY (2013)

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Bram Stoker Awards Ceremony

bram-stoker-awardThe livestream began, showing the HWA logo, slightly askew

Jeff Strand, the MC, introduced Rocky Wood, HWA president, and Lisa Morton, HWA vice-president. Lisa announced eleven categories, Lifetime Achievement award, the Specialty Press and the Silver Hammer Award, thanked the chairs, panels and webteam, and acknowledged platinum sponsors (Samhain publishing).

Lisa then thanked the convention sponsors:  Let the Dead Sleep by Heather Graham, Journalstone Press and Dark Regions Press.

The announcement of the next Bram Stoker Award banquet at WHC next May in Portland Oregon.

Now, on to the winners

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Superior Achievement in Poetry:

Linda Addison and Stephen M. Wilson – Dark Duet (NECON eBooks)

Bruce Boston and Gary William Crawford – Notes from the Shadow City (Dark Regions Press)

Michael Collings – A Verse to Horrors (Amazon Digital Services)

WINNER: Marge Simon – Vampires, Zombies & Wanton Souls (Elektrik Milk Bath Press)

Mary A. Turzillo – Lovers & Killers (Dark Regions)

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Stoker Award for Non-Fiction:

Michael Collings – Writing Darkness (CreateSpace)

Leslie S. Klinger – The Annotated Sandman, Volume 1 (Vertigo)

WINNER: Lisa Morton – Trick or Treat: A History of Halloween (Reaktion Books)

Kim Paffenroth and John W. Morehead – The Undead and Theology (Pickwick Publications)

Kendall R. Phillips – Dark Directions: Romero, Craven, Carpenter, and the Modern Horror Film (Southern Illinois University Press)

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Silver Hammer Award

Award to HWA volunteer: instituted in 1996 and decided by Board of Trustees.

TO: Charles Day of Evil Jester Press

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Anthology

WINNER: Mort Castle and Sam Weller – Shadow Show (HarperCollins)

Eric J. Guignard – Dark Tales of Lost Civilizations (Dark Moon Books)

Eric Miller – Hell Comes to Hollywood (Big Time Books)

Mark C. Scioneaux, R.J. Cavender, and Robert S. Wilson – Horror for Good: A Charitable Anthology (Cutting Block Press)

Stan Swanson – Slices of Flesh (Dark Moon Books)

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Collection

Jonathan Carroll – Woman Who Married a Cloud: Collected Stories (Subterranean Press)

JOINT WINNER: Mort Castle – New Moon on the Water (Dark Regions)

Elizabeth Hand – Errantry: Strange Stories (Small Beer Press)

Glen Hirshberg – The Janus Tree (Subterranean Press)

JOINT WINNER: Joyce Carol Oates – Black Dahlia and White Rose: Stories (Ecco)

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Richard Laymon Presidents Award – for service to the HWA

Jim Chambers

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Screenplay

Jane Goldman – The Woman in Black (Cross Creek Pictures)

Sang Kyu Kim – The Walking Dead, “Killer Within” (AMC TV)

Tim Minear – American Horror Story: Asylum, “Dark Cousin”

Gary Ross, Suzanne Collins, and Billy Ray – The Hunger Games (Lionsgate, Color Force)

WINNER: Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard – The Cabin in the Woods (Mutant Enemy Productions, Lionsgate)

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Specialty Press Award

Centipede Press – Jerad Walters

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Short Fiction

Bruce Boston – ‘Surrounded by the Mutant Rain Forest’ (Daily Science Fiction)

Joe McKinney – ‘Bury My Heart at Marvin Gardens’ (Best of Dark Moon Digest, Dark Moon Books)

Weston Ochse – ‘Righteous’ (Psychos, Black Dog and Leventhall Publication)

John Palisano – ‘Available Light’ (Lovecraft eZine, March 2012)

WINNER: Lucy Snyder – ‘Magdala Amygdala’ (Dark Faith: Invocations, Apex Book Company)

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Long Fiction

Kealan Patrick Burke – Thirty Miles South of Dry County (Delirium Books)

Jack Ketchum and Lucky McKee – I’m Not Sam (Sinister Grin Press)

Joe McKinney and Michael McCarty – Lost Girl of the Lake (Bad Moon Books)

WINNER: Gene O’Neill – The Blue Heron (Dark Regions Press)

Norman Prentiss – The Fleshless Man (Delirium Books)

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Lifetime Achievement Award

Clive Barker and Robert R McCammon

Barker’s accepted by the vice president of his company

‘I’m not done yet. I have written, painted, and made movies for 30 years now, and I would like the same again. Thank you. I love you all’ – Clive Barker

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Graphic Novels

Cullen Bunn – The Sixth Gun Volume 3: Bound (Oni Press)

Terry Moore – Rachel Rising Vol. 1: The Shadow of Death (Abstract Studio)

Ravi Thornton – The Tale of Brin and Bent and Minno Marylebone (Jonathan Cape)

Peter J. Wacks and Guy Anthony De Marco – Behind These Eyes (Villainous Press)

WINNER: Rocky Wood, Lisa Morton and Greg Chapman – Witch Hunts: A Graphic History of the Burning Times (McFarland)

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Young Adult Novel

Libba Bray – The Diviners (Little Brown)

Barry Lyga – I Hunt Killers (Little Brown)

WINNER: Jonathan Maberry – Flesh & Bone (Simon & Schuster)

Michael McCarty – I Kissed A Ghoul (Noble Romance Publishing)

Maggie Stiefvater – The Raven Boys (Scholastic Press)

Jeff Strand – A Bad Day for Voodoo (Sourcebooks)

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First Novel

Michael Boccacino – Charlotte Markham and the House of Darkling (William Morrow)

Deborah Coates – Wide Open (Tor Books)

Charles Day – The Legend of the Pumpkin Thief (Noble YA Publishers LLC)

Peter Dudar – A Requiem for Dead Flies (Nightscape Press)

Richard Gropp – Bad Glass (Ballantine/Del Rey)

WINNER: L.L. Soares – Life Rage (Nightscape Press)

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Novel

Benjamin Kane Ethridge – Bottled Abyss (Redrum Horror)

John Everson – NightWhere (Samhain Publishing)

WINNER: Caitlín R. Kiernan- The Drowning Girl (Roc)

Bentley Little – The Haunted (Signet)

Joe McKinney – Inheritance (Evil Jester Press)

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All up, this was a wonderful ceremony, and I really wish I could have attended.

Congratulations to all the winners.

Facebook’s Witch Hunt: Horror, social media, and bullying. » This Is Horror

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Recent events played out on Facebook that have the potential to change the face of social media marketing for publishers and writers of horror. As they say on reality TV, this could change the game forever.

On Tuesday 28 May (US time), Facebook took an unprecedented action. They contacted AHWA member/HWA President Rocky Wood, HWA Vice-President Lisa Morton and HWA/AHWA member Greg Chapman about the Facebook promotional page for their book Witch Hunts: A Graphic History of the Burning Times.

“Yesterday I received a notice from Facebook about a page promoting our book Witch Hunts: A Graphic History of the Burning Times,” said Lisa Morton. “The notice stated that the page had been flagged for containing content that fell under ‘bullying’, and that it had been temporarily removed.”

Read more of my article via Facebook’s Witch Hunt: Horror, social media, and bullying. » This Is Horror.

How people read online: Why you won’t finish this article. – Slate Magazine

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“I’m going to keep this brief, because you’re not going to stick around for long. I’ve already lost a bunch of you. For every 161 people who landed on this page, about 61 of you—38 percent—are already gone. You “bounced” in Web traffic jargon, meaning you spent no time “engaging” with this page at all.So now there are 100 of you left. Nice round number. But not for long! We’re at the point in the page where you have to scroll to see more. Of the 100 of you who didn’t bounce, five are never going to scroll. Bye!OK, fine, good riddance. So we’re 95 now. A friendly, intimate crowd, just the people who want to be here. Thanks for reading, folks! I was beginning to worry about your attention span, even your intellig … wait a second, where are you guys going? You’re tweeting a link to this article already? You haven’t even read it yet! What if I go on to advocate something truly awful, like a constitutional amendment requiring that we all type two spaces after a period?AdvertisementWait, hold on, now you guys are leaving too? You’re going off to comment? Come on! There’s nothing to say yet. I haven’t even gotten to the nut graph.”

Read more via How people read online: Why you won’t finish this article. – Slate Magazine.

Don’t make fun of renowned Dan Brown – Telegraph

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This is just brilliant…

‘Renowned author Dan Brown smiled, the ends of his mouth curving upwards in a physical expression of pleasure. He felt much better.
If your books brought innocent delight to millions of readers, what did it matter whether you knew the difference between a transitive and an intransitive verb?
“Thanks, John,” he thanked.
Then he put down the telephone and perambulated on foot to the desk behind which he habitually sat on a chair to write his famous books on an Apple iMac MD093B/A computer.
New book Inferno, the latest in his celebrated series about fictional Harvard professor Robert Langdon, was inspired by top Italian poet Dante. It wouldn’t be the last in the lucrative sequence, either. He had all the sequels mapped out. The Mozart Acrostic. The Michelangelo Wordsearch. The Newton Sudoku.’

Read more via Don’t make fun of renowned Dan Brown – Telegraph.

Amazon Secretly Removes 1984 From the Kindle

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Amazon Secretly Removes 1984 From the Kindle (2009)


“Thousands of people last week [back in 2009] discovered that Amazon had quietly removed electronic copies of George Orwell’s 1984 from their Kindle e-book readers. In the process, Amazon revealed how easy censorship will be in the Kindle age. In this case, the mass e-book removals were motivated by copyright. A company called MobileReference, who did not own the copyrights to the books 1984 and Animal Farm, uploaded both books to the Kindle store and started selling them. When the rights owner heard about this, they contacted Amazon and asked that the e-books be removed. And Amazon decided to erase them not just from the store, but from all the Kindles where they’d been downloaded. Amazon operators used the Kindle wireless network, called WhisperNet, to quietly delete the books from peoples devices and refund them the money they’d paid.”

Read more via Amazon Secretly Removes “1984” From the Kindle.

My Latest Published Short!

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Hi everyone.

It’s my pleasure today to announce that the anthology For the Night is Dark, featuring my short story ‘His Own Personal Golgotha’, has been released in both print and Kindle format via Amazon.

Amazon Print
Amazon Kindle

Other ebook formats coming soon.
It’s one of my favourite stories so far, and the collection seems pretty good, from what I have so far.
Edited by Ross Warren.

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Competition time:…

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Courtesy of Crystal Lake Publishing, who release a new anthology on Monday which contains one of my short stories:

Competition time: to win print and eBook copies of future releases like Fear the Reaper, Children of the Grave or The Outsiders, follow the link to the website and subscribe to the newsletter.
http://www.crystallakepub.com/contact-us.php

via Competition time:….

Warning of piracy in France

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Warning to any and all writers who’ve had a story published in France.
The Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BNF) has launched a doubtful venture reminiscent of the one Google tried to launch a few years ago. They’ve decided that if a book published in the 20th century is out of print, they have a right to publish it as an ebook and reap the profits (a pittance is due to the original publisher, and, oh, yeah, to the author, too). Despite the protests of French writers, the thing has been launched this week, with the creation of a website featuring a database of approx. 60,000 books liable to get the pirate ebook treatment (State approved, that is) unless the author or legal representative files a formal complaint.
Yeah, you say, but this is only for French writers, right?
Wrong.
They’ve done such a botched job listing the books they feel they can steal that they’ve included anthologies edited by French editors but featuring British and American writers.
A case in point: “De sang et d’encre“, edited by Léa Silhol and published by Naturellement in 1999 (the publisher has gone bankrupt since). With stories by Neil Gaiman, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Lawrence Schimel, Brian Stableford, Brian Lumley, Charles de Lint, S. P. Somtow, Brian Hodge, Nancy Kilpatrick, Nancy Holder, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Freda Warrington, Bob Weinberg.
Writers, check out the site and contact your agent to put a stop to this act of piracy.
You have six months to act.

More info here (French): http://relire.bnf.fr/projet-relire-cadre-legal

~Courtesy of Scott M. Goriscak