October was a hell of a month. And not in the normal spooky, festive way. Sure, we crammed in a yard full of skeletons and Telluride Horror Show 2024 and horror movie bingo amidst the traumas, but it was truly a struggle.
All of that to excuse the fact that I am woefully behind in providing an update.
I have a new novella (working title: Red Walls) under contract with Graveyard Press for publication in early 2025!
When parents seek revenge against the monsters who hurt their daughter, they never expect real monsters.
I am thrilled and excited to be working with this new publisher and also to finally release a new book out into the world. It has been far too long since Followers.
During COVID, I wrote until I had a backlog of three manuscripts, so I have been in editing hell since then. This is a huge step toward unburying myself from that period.
Additionally, the crowd-funding anthology I was accepted into made their goal, so that book will also be coming out soon. I also have a short appearing in another killer KJK Publishing anthology coming in the new year.
I have more related news that I will release when it’s official. Stay tuned…
The week before the Telluride Horror Show, my dog bit my son in the face. My son was hospitalized and had surgery, and I had to surrender the dog. Then my son’s wounds got infected, and he spent the weekend in the hospital again.
I was supposed to leave for Telluride a couple days after his release, yet after coming so close to losing him, I could not travel without him so soon. So, I didn’t. I brought him with me.
The Horror Show is not family friendly, not a place for children, so my experience was a bit different. And that’s OK. It was still a great weekend. It was what it needed to be this year.
Surprise Aurora
Unbeknownst to me, the Aurora Borealis descended in the southern night skies after we arrived and got settled.
Once we knew about it, we scurried outside and then up the gondola. The lights were faint and barely visible with the naked eye, but they showed up great on smartphone camera.
Obligatory Hike
To earn our sloth-like three days bound in movie screenings, we began our weekend on a hike. This year, we went to the other side of the town and did the Jud Wiebe trail.
After all my health challenges, I was embarrassingly out of shape, and we missed fall foliage peak, but it was gorgeous and glorious. The mental health boost I needed.
Horror Education
This year, the Horror Show offered the delightful treat of the Horror Vault. Over the course of the weekend, Jon Davison screened six classic horror movies on 16mm. Additionally, there was a screening of Night of the Living Dead (1968) colorized. It was the perfect opportunity to provide some horror education. Plus, the sound of the running projector is so soothing and nostalgic.
I was lucky enough to see:
Blood and Black Lace (1964): Touted as the first Giallo and possibly the first slasher movie, this film is a fascinating look back at where the tropes began. Peek-a-boo killer and oops I fell and my top came off are highlights.
Night of the Living Dead (1968): This was the first time I have watched the classic colorized. It gains some things but loses others. I have recently been watching The Walking Dead for a writing project, and this is the granddaddy of the zombie genre.
The Mummy (1959): I have always loved ancient Egypt and mummy stories from Goosebumps to my bisexual awakening movie The Mummy (1999). It was fun to see how my beloved 1999 version had modernized this story. Plus the set work is exquisite.
The Movies
Eight or so fests ago, I spent every moment in the theaters and saw as many movies as possible. Age, experience, and circumstance has changed my priorities. Particularly this year, I caught less screenings. But the ones I did see were fantastic.
The new screenings I attended:
The Creep Tapes 💀💀💀💀 A mini series in the Creep franchise. I saw Creep 2 at Telluride and love the killer in the franchise. We watched three episodes. The first is brilliant, fifth is entertaining, and sixth is just weird. I can’t wait to watch the entire series on Shudder.
Trizombie 💀💀💀 A Belgian film about a zombie outbreak where people with Down’s Syndrome are immune to the virus. When I read the synopsis, I admit I cringed. However, the film is funny, gory, and ultimately quite wholesome.
Daddy’s Head 💀💀💀💀 A creepy meditation on grief. Packed with jump scares, this movie is exceptionally unnerving with an emotional heart. The ending, to me, is perfect.
Presence 💀💀💀 POV piece with a ghost. This clever take on a haunting story feels almost found footage. While a slow burn, the plot is compelling and the approach interesting.
Final Girl Support Group
Admittedly, this year, my favorite event was not a movie. Instead, it was horror author Grady Hendrix’s Final Girl Support Group presentation. Having read some of his books, I knew Hendrix is a talented author. Even better, he is also a gifted performer with humor, voices, and even singing.
For Final Girl Support Group, Hendrix toured us through the history of horror and slashers. He framed the presentation in “how to stay alive” bullet points, citing friends and school as things to avoid then listing all the horror books and movies where those things get you killed.
He then double-clicked into several topics, including the origin of transphobia in horror, the blaming of the mother in both horror and pop psychology, the urban legends that started the slasher. This goldmine of information was delivered cleverly and with razor-sharp humor.
Until the end, when he punched us in the face with feelings, drawing parallels to the faceless killers of all those books and movies to the global COVID pandemic and the inevitable death of everyone in the room.
I laughed. Then I cried. And I loved every minute of it.
Fright or Wrong Trivia
As per tradition, we participated in Fright or Wrong’s horror trivia. Despite a strong Scream round, our team was bested once again. However, my Sidney Prescott with travel-sized Ghostface did at least win the final girl/boy costume contest.
In the past eight years, the Horror Show has grown and changed and evolved. In 2020, we did a fest from home then returned post pandemic. However, this year, it seemed to be the consensus that things felt different. While none of us could really articulate the cause, the intimacy seemed lost. The pace felt rushed.
Maybe it was an off year for us all. The awkward year we expected after quarantine a few years late. Maybe these are growing pains as things continue to change around us. Maybe we’re all just a little older. Or maybe my kid almost died and everything just looked different afterward.
Nonetheless, it was a great weekend of horror in the autumn mountains. Until next year, Telluride! Find me with my kids healthy and happy at home next year 👻
Friday the 13th was made for horror festivals, and Colorado Festival of Horror (COFOH) took full advantage this year. I spent last weekend participating in all it had to offer.
COFOH is now in its fourth year. My first time was their second year, when they featured Art the Clown from Terrifier. Then I volunteered last year, sitting with the creator of Final Destination and members of the cast of Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The festival definitely has been growing and evolving each year into a destination event for horror lovers.
The weekend is put on by genre lovers, and their passion shows. It is also still small enough that there is a community feel. It is welcoming and approachable, with fun events like karaoke, a cosplay contest, and a Little Shop of Horrors sing along.
This year, I participated even more by sitting on three different panels.
Meet Me in the Dark: We discussed the relationship between trauma and horror movies and how horror can be therapeutic. This conversation resonated with me both because I consume horror as therapy and also create it as an outlet. So many of my stories are my own trauma stretched and processed. We covered our favorite “comfort” horror movies, mine being ones like Scream and You’re Next where everyone lies and hurts the final girl but she emerges stronger and a survivor.
Turning Trauma into Art: This session was the workshop extension to Meet Me in the Dark. Instead of covering horror that comforts and helps us, we expanded to discuss the art and horror we create to deal with our own trauma. I discussed works like my post-partum horror short. Then we went through an exercise of word association with different feelings and crafted art from those lists.
Where is the Monster Line: Joining authors from Horror Writers Association Colorado chapter and Denver Horror Collective, we discussed our favorite monsters and villains we love to hate. Then we dove into what makes a villain sympathetic, interesting, or relatable versus what crosses the line into abhorrent.
I also volunteered with the celebrities again. My husband and I sat with Thom Mathews (Tommy Jarvis of Friday the 13th Part VI).
Befitting the theme and the weekend, other Friday the 13th people were in attendance. Tom McLoughlin (director of Friday the 13th Part VI) and Vincente DiSanti (creator/director/actor of the Never Hike Alone movies and a frequent Telluride Horror Show attendee).
We got to meet Pam Grier as she introduced a screening of Ghosts of Mars and provided new insights into the film’s merits.
And, perhaps most importantly, we sat beside the delightful Tiffany Shepis and helped her create and recruit for a spatula cult (IYKYK). The Spatulatti spread like wildfire.
The weekend was a bloody whirlwind that left me exhausted, but my black, little heart was full. I needed this time with fellow horror lovers. I felt involved and included, like I was contributing. At this point in my horror life, I probably should be!
The publishing industry continues to evolve. When I first started with the first edition of Savages, self-publishing, indie publishers, and all the Amazon-ing was starting to explode. And in the past 10 years, for better and worse, things have continued to change and evolve.
This week, I am trying a new author adventure! Crowd funding.
One of my short stories has been accepted into an anthology. The publisher (Tundra Swan) is running a Kickstarter campaign for this anthology.
This is my first time participating in a publication that is being crowd funded. (The anthology is getting published either way but with cool perks with the Kickstarter.) I’m excited and nervous and curious above all things.
Cross your fingers! If you want to go on this ride with me (and maybe get matching shirt perks), go ahead and back the Kickstarter campaign. We’ll see how this next adventure goes.
It has been a long time, and this blog is not the only thing I have neglected. My health the past few years unmoored me, but life sprinted on ahead. It feels like we have returned to pre-pandemic pace, but I am not the same person as before. I am broken and hobbling. I have lost the stamina to keep up with my own life.
That’s not to say I’ve been doing nothing. I have been doing plenty. Just not like I could before.
For months, I have been working on my three WIP novels. I have drafted and revised and put them through critique group and revised again. Now, two of them are out on submission.
Let the torture begin.
Query composition. Inadequate summaries. Form rejections. Miniature panic at every email. I wait for the guillotine to fall while hoping my hardest.
I’ve written more shorts. Some rejected, some accepted.
Ironically, I have done more speaking and vending events than I have in a long time. Readings with author groups, booths at Prides or oddities festivals, even podcast appearances.
I have been trying. Maybe I even have been accomplishing it. Perhaps I am the duck, gliding smooth along the surface while I’m kicking like hell underwater. But man, I still feel like I’m drowning.
The health stuff has slowed me down physically, obviously, but it has changed me mentally too. Bipolar has always been a thing; depression has always been a thing. So long that they became consistent companions, expected experiences.
Now, they have changed. What used to squeeze and suffocate me now leaves me feeling vacant. What used to torment me now numbs me. It feels like it is all happening to someone else and I am simply observing.
And I know how worrisome a symptom that is.
(Even now, the words trickle from my fingers rather than pour from my mind.)
So I continue to trip and stumble. I continue to try. Career, family, writing, existing. I just keep paddling and swimming.
If I were to manufacture a hell for someone with body dysmorphia and/or an eating disorder, it would be this. It would be an ill-defined, easily denied health problem (likely caused by damage from decades of the eating disorder).
That removes the ability to affect that hated body.
That makes it so no matter how they starve or purge or work, the weight packs on with no explanation.
That turns those hallucinated pounds into reality then adds more.
That steals the lie from the dysmorphia then steals their hair.
That compromises every objection to the hate flowing through their mind.
That makes the mirror more unbearable than when the cutter waited there.
That they blame themselves for, just like everyone else.
That traps them in their own skin, steadily drowning in the increasing weight of their flesh.
That is only outweighed by the humiliation of losing to whatever this is.
That has no treatment or cure.
That has no stillpoint to accept.
That makes them dearly miss the time when it was just dysmorphia’s distortions and eating disorder’s demands.
That makes it seem like they were so much happier when they just hated themselves.
That makes them want to cut just to exert some control over their body again.
That makes them want to end things not to die but to be out of this broken vessel.
Sorry. We’re here again. Alopecia flared and took all my hair again. Side effects and backsliding. And dark feelings.
My mind has been completely hijacked. As usual, by itself.
I have had body dysmorphia and an eating disorder since probably the late 90s. Hell, they were standard issue being raised back then. But it all masked very nicely under being “healthy” or “losing weight”. I even went to get treatment for it years ago and managed to run the therapy sessions. I am so painfully high functioning with it that it took going completely bald for it to break me.
And it has broken me. It has taken over my mind in a way it never had opportunity before.
It feels like the past decade has been tagging one physical suffering for the next. I had a miserable pregnancy, rough birth, and terrible recovery that ate a couple years. Then I tore my hip, which took over two years to just get properly treated. I had a major surgery, and the fix only lasted a few months. Then I got sick. With whatever all this has been.
As that (allegedly) recedes, it leaves me feeling a bit like a broken husk.
My appearance has always been a source of fixation and distortion, creating a rift between my sense of self and physical vessel. It never looked how I wanted (not that it could with my cracked lens), so I hated it. Now, as my body has literally turned on me and itself, it feels like it is all backlash from the years of abuse I delivered to my flesh.
The health details and symptoms and side effects are incidental. Things have been managed enough to alleviate the daily misery and anxiety, leaving me in the aftermath. Better but not good. Between survive and thrive. Relieved enough to focus on the undesirable and annoying.
My eating disorder, my dysmorphia had been flowing like a current all along. I was aware of it, but no one else needed to be. It was pacified with enough restriction, dieting, starving, and compulsive exercise. I never realized how deep it ran until I was staring at a bald gremlin in the mirror, until my body dissolved into foreign landscape.
My body does not feel like mine. Ironic, since I always drew such an illusory line between myself and it. It does not look, feel, or function like mine. No longer in the killing me way but in a way that constantly grates on my nerves. I feel every thread in my clothes, every fold in my skin, every ache in my joints.
I feel consistently and constantly uncomfortable.
And with that static in my brain, I can’t think of much else. My body feels like a sinking ship. It feels like the water is rising, cresting my chin, flirting with my mouth, and I am about to be suffocated by my own flesh. And my mind is compelled to catalog and broadcast that in real time every moment of every day.
I want to work. I want to write. I want to experience. I want to escape. But my mind has been completely hijacked by these relentless sensations.
So I am working on it in specialized therapy. Therapy I could have used 10-20 years ago. I’m not new to therapy or treatment. I know how this works. As we trench up these pervasive, deep rooted, dusty issues, their true form and extent are revealed. The carefully constructed walls and masks are revoked, and it all get so much worse. The monster feels untamed and bigger than ever.
But that is the only way to actually deal with and change it.
I haven’t had to do a full, retrospective unpacking since my bipolar diagnosis over two decades ago. I have been spoiled into complacency, coasting by on functionality. Opening these wounds has me vulnerable, insecure, off balance. That fucked up, lost kid again.
I’m old enough to know THIS TOO SHALL PASS is the truest thing someone can say about life. But I’m also dumb enough to forget it every time the situation swallows me. Last year, I was barely struggling through. I would have given anything to get this far. Pragmatically, I can understand this is another step, another transitory thing. Yet my emotions mire me in the suffering.
I want my life back. I want my mind back. I want to reclaim all the space this is taking in me. Even if it’s just enough to get lost back in my stories again.
Horror makes the best friends. Christina Bergling, Eva Bordeaux, and the Mighty Quinn have been partners in horror for years. From horror movie festivals to fake blood photoshoots to epic Halloween costumes. They often work together to lose at horror trivia. Christina is a published horror author with 5 books and over 20 shorts. The Mighty Quinn is the creator of the Wyrd Wanderings show on YouTube. Eva is a movie addict and the best damn hype person on the internet.
Wyrd Wanderings is a ghost-hunting and paranormal adventure show that takes viewers from haunted woods in Tennessee, a prison museum on the East Coast, and lots of spooky places in New Orleans. Check it out to see where the Mighty Quinn ends up next.
I would open by commenting on what a rollercoaster of a year 2023 was. However, saying that four years in a row now takes the impact out of the sentiment. 2023 was a lot, but it appears this is just the tone since 2020.
Last calendar year concluded with me freshly hairless and mired in autoimmune and medical issues. That adventure devoured a lot of this year too. However, I saw progress in treatment and coping, shifting it from something smothering me to something standing menacingly beside me.
I have hair regrowth. I don’t feel like shit every moment I’m awake. Gladly, I take these victories.
In all honesty, health issues and other losses were consuming for a long time. Writing and even more the business of being an author took a backseat to survival.
And much of it was survival. More so than I was willing to acknowledge at the time. On the other side of the storm, I can truly see how dark the clouds were.
Yet I still accomplished things. Part of it was therapeutic. The rest might have been compulsion.
“Hairs” is a special piece. I poured in all my Alopecia pain and trauma and made it horror (as if it wasn’t already). It was cathartic, and I needed it.
What I want, however, is another published novel. Not this year. I have three novels written–in various stages of editing. This is largely because I escaped into writing. I lived in the story then plunged into the next without a breath or a glance so I didn’t have to feel my life.
Again, survival.
With this editing backlog, I did skip NaNoWriMo this year. Since I was more functional by November, I repurposed the time for editing–NaNoEdiMo. It was ridiculously more challenging to quantify content reviewed and reworked versus pages written. I set my goal to go through two of my WIP novels–and I made it!
That progress leaves Invisible Girls ready for final polish (though I still have doubts about querying it), Monster Lane (for which “Opportunity” is a prequel) ready for critique group, and Savages 2 next in line.
Nothing may be “done”, but the progress must be acknowledged.
Now, I find myself torn. I want to write new works (I have a short and a novel knocking at my brain), but I need to get these WIPs out. And I’m not very good at alternating between the tasks.
I just end up with three unedited novels.
Perhaps the largest accomplishment of 2023 is that now, finally I feel capable of working again. I wrote, and I edited. Next, I can find my way back querying and promoting.
I had to set much aside and give myself a lot of grace to make it through the last year (+). What I find now is the optimism to be able to do more than just survive.
Fiery Pen 