Me, as a zebra, 2009. I’ve never been a big one for costumes. As a writer, I tend to keep my fantasy in my head and on the page. Okay. That’s a lie. I costume myself every day. There’s the Laura, Field Trip Mom Turtleneck. The I Feel Icky Because I Ate too Much Cake …Read More

Forgive my melodrama, but am I the only one who felt like the summer of 2012 would never end? I’ve done a lot of driving over the last week and, here in the Midwest, it has just started to look like fall has arrived. The first week of October is over, and the leaves are …Read More

You know how I hate to send you away from here, but I’ve been busy at a couple of other places around town. The good news is that you can win goodies. Books, specifically. My books, very specifically! The Horror Writers Association is doing an entire month of Halloween blogs. Halloween Haunts kicked off on …Read More

Is there anything more depressing than talking about The Apocalypse? Talk about the Apocalypse is inescapable online and on our car radios and televisions. But what do people mean when they say the word Apocalypse? Biblical Apocalypse. This one is easy. It’s about the Anti-Christ showing up to cause all sorts of grisly trouble before …Read More

Being a kid who was attracted to the unusual, the disturbing, the alien, and otherness, I always wanted to visit a sideshow, but I was discouraged from it by my folks and, later, friends. Mostly on the grounds that it was a rip-off. But, finally, at my advanced age of *ahem*, I decided that I …Read More

Life is awfully quiet around our house these days. With a daughter off at college, and her brother starting seventh grade, it’s often just the husband-on-sabbatical and me in the house. Sounds like a writer’s paradise, yes? It is, and yet it isn’t. Sometimes I have to get away from the domestic distractions–critters, laundry, the …Read More

For years I’ve been a fan of stop motion animation. Not just Wallace and Gromit, but The Brothers Quay, Jan Svankmajer, et al. My first efforts were years ago–lost now, of course. I think they’re still on a 3.5″ floppy disk somewhere. One was of a Barbie doll climbing up to take a ride on …Read More