Now that the contract is signed, I am pleased to announce that I will have a short story published in a forthcoming (yet to be determined which) issue of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, which has long been one of my dream markets. I already cracked their sibling publication, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, so I’ve had my eyes set on this one for some time now.
I was invited to be part of the Literary Track at Comicpalooza in Houston next month. I’ll be sitting on two panels, one on “Horror Explorations in Literature” on Friday afternoon (Lee Thomas and Nate Southard are two of my co-panelists) and one on “Writing in the Thriller Genre” on Sunday afternoon. I’ll also have a signing at the Barnes & Noble booth on Friday afternoon immediately after my panel. This is quite a growing concern, this convention. Among the actors who will be attending are Sigourney Weaver, Paul Reiser, Kate Beckinsale, Sean Patrick Flannery, Norman Reedus, Bill Paxton, Tara Reid, Lou Ferrigno, Lennie James, Walter Koenig (!!), Peter Mayhew, and David Prowse. Not to mention the extensive slate of authors, musicians, and people from the comics and gaming worlds. Should be a blast.
We saw Mother’s Day on the weekend, directed by Garry Marshall. OK, so it’s not Wuthering Heights, but we enjoyed it. There were several parallel storylines, some of which interlinked. It stars Julia Roberts, Jennifer Aniston, Jason Sudekis, Kate Hudson, Timothy Olyphant, Margo Martindale, Hector Elizondo, Britt Robertson (Under the Dome) and others. Lots of preposterous and unlikely situations, but it was fun. The “bloopers” with the closing credits were amusing, too. We got a kick out of the one where Olyphant’s character is trapped in a collapsing inflatable backyard slide and Aniston looks to the camera and says, “Justified!” The movie has the lowest Rotten Tomatoes score I’ve ever seen (7% from 98 critics) but it fares better among the general audience. We’d shared a bottle of wine before seeing it, so that may be the recommended approach to it.
