"The Art of Death": Sample Chapter

My "evil art museum" book is coming along nicely.  I don't think I'm too far away from being finished with it.

As I race toward the finish line, I thought I'd give you a taste of how it will be.  The basic story is this: the curator of a new art museum has brought many creatures and monsters to life in order to sow havoc during a "blood moon" as part of a ritual.  This is the story of just one such creature.  (It hasn't been fully edited, so there may be some typos, poor word choice, etc.)

Read after the JUMP.

"Blood Moon Rising" and the New Title

I know it's been a while, but I've been writing rather steadily since New Year's.  And that's good!  We're midway through March and I'm nearing the finish line.  The final chapters have been outlined so now it's just a matter of actually writing them.

In the meantime, let me go ahead and officially announce the title change for the book.  Yes, I announced and stuck by Blood Moon Rising for quite a while, even making multiple versions of the cover for it.  The more I typed, however, the more that other title kept coming to mind.  And it made that much more sense.

Still, I stuck by BMR.  Why?  Well, it's stupid, but in my mind, the movie ends with (SPOILER REDACTED) while a certain Creedence Clearwater Revival song plays.

Like I said, it's stupid.

Still, even with the new title, I guess the movie could end the same way.

So, yeah.  The new title is also the name of the exhibit in my "evil art museum" that leads to the shenanigans:

Stay tuned for more soon!

Challenger's 30th Anniversary

I was almost eleven in 1986 when Challenger was destroyed seventy-three seconds after liftoff.  It affected me deeply.  I sent a letter to NASA asking for a photo and they sent one of the crew, not unlike this:

It hung on my bedroom wall for years and I learned all their names.

Today's the thirtieth anniversary of the accident.  I remember standing in line in the auditorium of Coates Elementary School, waiting to file into the cafeteria, when our teacher, Mrs. Fawcett, came from the teacher's lounge and told us what happened.  (I know many students actually saw it live at school, but we didn't.  Science wasn't a big priority for our school.)

Fast forward to today.  I saw a post on Reddit that discussed how NASA originally intended on sending Big Bird into space in order to spur interest among children, but when they decided it wouldn't work, logistically, they decided to use a teacher, instead.  Then someone suggested that NASA should have sent Santa Claus if they wanted to capture children's imaginations.  After that, someone wondered what the aftermath would have been like and said it'd make a good writing prompt.

I took the bait and wrote the below ... click the JUMP:

"The Art of Death": Designing an Evil Art Museum

If you're a reader of mine, you know I love to map things.  Not only does it help me plot out the action for a given story, it also helps provide some visual punch to what would otherwise be a boring wall of text.

Since ninety-five-plus percent of the story for The Art of Death takes place in a museum, I had to design it.  I just plain had to.

I'll go into the designs and the basic story behind them after the JUMP.

Blast from the Past: My First Book

I found a literary coprolite of mine in the closet this week.

It's my first novel.  Click the JUMP for more.

My Next Book ... Plus, Choose a Cover!

I've mentioned it before, but I had a dream a few months ago that I was making a movie at our local art museum and it was about Dracula, the Wolf Man, Frankenstein, the Mummy, etc., being resurrected by relics at the museum and going on a rampage.

In my dream, the movie was called A Night at the Museum.

Obviously, my subconscious mind chose to do what my conscious mind refuses to do.  It forgot about the Ben Stiller films by that name.

Regardless, I will be writing a book about that basic premise (monsters being resurrected at a museum).  In fact, if you've been following me on Facebook and Twitter, you've seen some preliminary designs for that evil art museum.  I'll post the final designs this week

I do have a title for the new book, however.  And I've got a cover.  Well, four of them.

Learn the title and help me choose the cover after the JUMP.

My son and I reviewed dozens of monster movies

Not Godzilla/Gamera/kaiju-style monster movies, mind you.  We already did that.

No, this was a list of seventy-three classic-style monster movies.  Universal monsters, Hammer horror versions of them, and several others in between.  We finished just before Halloween and here's the list ...