World Horror Convention Report

In the effort to save digital trees, I'm not going to post my WHC report over all three of my blogs--rather, I'll just point people to the main entry site for all the name-dropping and self-aggrandizing goodness, and then bring you back here for the less magazine-centric stuff:

Click here for my WHC report on the City Slab Blog!

Okay, you back? Great.

It really was a blast getting to hang out with all those great and soon-to-be-great horror writers in SLC, and it was a thrill to attend the Bram Stoker Awards, since in the coming months I'll be able to point to the books with that legend emblazoned on the covers and say, "Hey, I was there when they got this award!" I'll take all the cheap thrills I can get--I'm on a budget.

It was also nice to realize that City Slab is fairly well-known and respected in the horror community, at least among those people I talked to. (I guess the ones that hated us wouldn't bother to stop by for a chat.) A few even described CS as "a dream publication," and weren't at all upset that I'd rejected them in the past. For the most part the horror writers I met were cool, down-to-earth, totally awesome people who I had tons in common with and could talk to for hours at a time within minutes of meeting them. It was like Governor's School, but for horror nerds. In a word, awesome.

I spent the whole weekend next to the display table for McFarland & Co. press, a mid-size publisher who puts out over 300 titles a year, many of them film and horror-related. I bought a few half-price books and struck up a conversation with the managing editor, Lisa Camp, and the long and short of it is I might get to do some freelance editing for them. In two words: FREAKIN' AWESOME. Hey, editing's what I do, it's what I'm good at--the more of it I can do, the happier I am.

And in the "strange coincidence" section of the trip, I was minding my own business at the Slab table when who should I run into but ANOTHER horror writer from Little Rock, Arkansas? That writer was John Jacobs, whose blog Bastardized Version I've added to the link bar at the side, and we had to travel all the way across the country to meet each other. Weird. We were both a little worse for wear running on convention-time, but we plan to meet up and discuss starting the Arkansas Horror Writers Group, which will probably be him and me crowding the little old lady romance writers off the tables in Barnes & Noble and laughing loudly about supernatural evisceration and what not. Can't wait.

So now I'm back, I'm energized to send out more of my horror poetry and fiction, I'm editing like a madman, and I wish I could go again next week. But I'll be at the Fangoria convention in LA at the end of April, and while there won't be as many writers there, it should be a blast nonetheless.

Yoiks, and away!