What Motivated Close Liaisons?

Close Liaisons features Mylar balloons and evil aliens.In a word, balloons. I’m referring to “Familiar Stranger,” which takes up two-thirds of the novella. Like me, the protag Cassandra can’t pass a gift shop without stopping in to buy a Mylar balloon. Her apartment is a rainbow-colored forest. It contains balloon trees in each room and Cassandra admires the Mylar fruits that grow on them. At night, nightmares about her uncertain past trouble Cassandra unless she’s got six to eight balloons surrounding her head. Their soft feel and shushing sounds lull her to sleep. Believe me, I know. I used to have a lot of nightmares about Mike’s health until I started sleeping with balloons around my head.

People have said they’re looking for a good juvenile balloon tale from me. I’ve got balloons galore in “Familiar Stranger,” but it’s not a kiddie tale. The helium in them serves as a lethal weapon. Good thing, too, because the bite of the alien centipedes, or hydeons, carries a deadly poison. “Familiar Stranger” originally appeared as “Echoes from a Different World” in Alien Worlds. The anthology got a four-star review; but thought nagged at me that Cassandra developed this close friendship with Yarol, and he traveled all the way to Earth to warn her about the evil Kronos. Cassandra, a nurse, didn’t have political connections. Why didn’t he contact the President or other US official? There had to be some romance to motivate his approaching her. Cassandra and Yarol didn’t exactly play Tiddlywinks when they were alone.

“Familiar Stranger” explores the romantic angle, but the danger remains. Cassandra’s survival depends on whether she’s willing to face her past. To find that out, you’ll have to read the book.

Close Liaisons is available on Kindle. You may download it here.

Healthcare Workers and Zombies

Barbara Custer included lots of zombies in When Blood Reigns.Before I wrote Steel Rose and City of Brotherly Death, I wondered how healthcare workers would handle zombies. What would my role as a respiratory therapist entail in a zombie invasion?

Let’s consider a brain-dead patient, someone whose heart still beats, but the lack of brain wave activity defines him as legally dead. The patient breathes through a tracheotomy tube with mechanical ventilation until he goes to the operating room for organ donation. My duties would include keeping his airway clean and making sure his ventilator works. Supposing I did my job, never suspecting that the “dead” person could be a zombie waiting to feast on someone?

Let’s backtrack to possible events before the patient’s admission. Perhaps our patient gets assaulted by a zombie, and he blows its head apart. All well and good, but the zombie bites him. Our guy’s shaken up and has no business getting behind the wheel. But he does anyway and drives to the police station. Instead, he winds up in a horrible accident that leaves him with traumatic brain injuries and broken bones. The severity of his wounds necessitates a tracheotomy. The unsuspecting paramedics put him on a ventilator and rush him to a hospital. The doctors may not notice the bite until too late. They’re more worried about the patient’s possible brain death.

Hours later, the zombie’s bacteria infiltrate Trach Man’s system, most likely before the hapless therapist or nurse come in to suction him. Mr. Trach Man yanks out his breathing tube, lurches out of bed, and chases his caregivers, all the while spewing bloody secretions from his tracheotomy before feasting on someone’s brains and flesh. Other staff may hear the screams. Because guns are banned at most hospitals, most people will stand by wringing their hands while their coworker(s) dies. The braver ones might tack the zombie, mistaking him for a combative patient, and get bitten themselves.

Of course, the staff therapist can run. He could call Security or try to fight back. His tools (scissors and a screwdriver) won’t protect him from zombies. If he’s lucky, he’ll be employed undercover by the zombie squad, using the therapist’s uniform as a beard because that’s the only way he’ll survive.

Hospitals are supposed to have surveillance cameras, security officers, and training to handle such situations. They are supposed to be able to handle terrorists, right? Perhaps they could stop a would-be child kidnapping in progress? That may be; but given the potency of the zombie’s bacteria, most staff won’t figure out what’s going on until it’s too late in the ballgame for a lot of people.

For the respiratory therapist’s sake, I’m hoping that Mr. Trach Man started to turn on his way to the hospital, while the paramedic is administering CPR or inserting an IV. That would be disastrous, but most ambulance vehicles are equipped with a kind of circular saw, along with the standard life-saving equipment. The paramedic could ditch the ventilator and resort to sawing and tossing bits of the former patient out the backdoor. So much for the Hippocratic Oath department.

Suppose the zombie outbreak happened because of an alien conspiracy. Instead of bacteria, perhaps the aliens installed a computer chip or robotics to make the dead body come to life. In this case, whacking the zombie with a portable oxygen tank would disable the computer and immobilize him. If the therapist, nurse, or are other worker decides to fight the zombie this way, they had better strike true, or else end up as the zombie’s next meal. Of course, given most hospitals’ policies on violence, the caregiver might face termination of his job. But he could always even the score by pushing an administrator toward the zombies, right? The plot thickens.

 

 

Here There Be Monsters

Barbara Custer included lots of zombies in When Blood Reigns.The traditional zombie is a mindless creature that knows nothing except an insatiable craving for human flesh. Perhaps a virus or chemical destroyed key brain cells, the ones that control reason and decision-making abilities. Perhaps a robotic implant causes a dead body to get up and attack. Jonathan Maberry’s Rot & Ruin series features a killer virus that turns the victim’s skin gray. He wakes up from the dead and goes after humans. I read all the books in the series and loved them. Now I’m contemplating books from other authors.

Stephen King knows how to turn the most ordinary things into monsters. If not a monster, it becomes a tool. The beloved balloons I can’t resist turn into a monster’s tool under the influence of King in his story It. Pennywise the clown uses balloons to entice children to the graveyard.

When I was younger, I thrived on the Hammer films, but now, vampires are portrayed as another race of people with good and bad in them. This is good because the old-time vampire meets human-vampire drinks his blood tales have gotten ancient. Woe betide the person who crosses a villain vampire. He’s got fangs, strength, and brains to go with his blood lust. Books featuring great vampire tales include Passion in the Blood and Bloodstorm.

Some people return from the dead to terrorize the living, as in City of Brotherly Death and Blue Plate Special. They might look like shambling zombies, but they know full well what they’re doing and why. They’ve got scores to settle with people who didn’t treat them right. These zombies—a better term would be revenants—are particularly dangerous because they crave flesh and blood, and they’re able to plot and scheme to get it.

The human monsters (Reapers) in Maberry’s Rot & Ruin series frightened me a lot more than the zombies did. Like the traditional beasts, they delight in the thrill of the kill. What’s more, they can scheme, use sophisticated weapons, and employ muscle power to wax people they consider liabilities. A love triangle might incite a psychotic human killer, as in JoAnna Senger’s Betrothal, Betrayal, and Blood. The Mob breeds and trains assassins who thrive on the kill, especially in Tom Johnson’s The Spider’s Web and Tales of Masks & Mayhem V4.

The vampire, revenant, and zombie are monsters to be reckoned with, but humans can be the most dangerous killers of all.

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One randomly drawn commenter will receive a signed copy of Steel Rose and a $10 GC for Starbucks.

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www.coffinhop.com

Also click on the red links on the bottom – these are the links to fellow members of the Coffinhop.  This Coffinhop will run October 24 to 31, including the release of Coffinhop: Death by Drive-in to benefit Litworld.org.

  

 

Where Paul DeBlassie III, Author of The Unholy, Gets his Ideas

UnholyThe_Unholy_Banner_copyIdeas come from the deep repository of the collective unconscious mind that inspires images and symbols during the fantasies of waking life and during dreams and nightmares. Mainly, it’s the nightmare stuff that bodes best for writing psychological thrillers and dark fantasy such as is in The Unholy. When I wake up in a cold sweat with the characters of the novels threatening me (I remember when Archbishop William Anarch, sinister prelate in The Unholy tormented me for nights on end, demanding that I not write the story) that’s when I know that real inspiration is flowing and that to listen to it and follow the images and symbols that emerge from my deep, unconscious mind during sleep and during the reverie of writing the story will end up in the development of spine tingling realities that jettison both me as the writer and the reader into phantasmagoric realms that have a way of shaking up conscious mindsets and get our heads blown out in a very, very unsettling but ultimately useful way. My writing, in other words, comes from an inner place of torment that needs to be let out so it can be set right. When mind stuff is set right inside me I can feel it by sensing a quality of being at peace, that I’ve written to the best of my ability and been true to the deep, archetypal energies swirling through my mind during the narrative. It really is a trip to listen to ideas, let them become images, and suddenly have them take over a page. It’s like the pages catch fire and everyone has come to life and things become disorderly, fraught with conflict, and danger looms.

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The Unholy contains psychological suspense.

BLURB: 

A young curandera, a medicine woman, intent on uncovering the secrets of her past is forced into a life-and-death battle against an evil Archbishop. Set in the mystic land of Aztlan, The Unholy is a novel of destiny as healer and slayer. Native lore of dreams and visions, shape changing, and natural magic work to spin a neo-gothic web in which sadness and mystery lure the unsuspecting into a twilight realm of discovery and decision.

Excerpt:

Lightning streaked across a midnight dark sky, making the neck hairs of a five-year-old girl crouched beneath a cluster of twenty-foot pines in the Turquoise Mountains of Aztlan stand on end. The long wavy strands of her auburn mane floated outward with the static charge. It felt as though the world was about to end.

Seconds later, lightning struck a lone tree nearby and a crash of thunder shook the ground. Her body rocked back and forth, trembling with terror. She lost her footing, sandstone crumbling beneath her feet, and then regained it; still, she did not feel safe. There appeared to be reddish eyes watching from behind scrub oaks and mountain pines, scanning her every movement and watching her quick breaths. Then everything became silent.

The girl leaned against the trunk of the nearest tree. The night air wrapped its frigid arms tightly around her, and she wondered if she would freeze to death or, even worse, stay there through the night and by morning be nothing but the blood and bones left by hungry animals. Her breaths became quicker and were so shallow that no air seemed to reach her lungs. The dusty earth gave up quick bursts of sand from gusts of northerly winds that blew so fiercely into her nostrils that she coughed but tried to stifle the sounds because she didn’t want to be noticed.

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Paul De Blassie is the author of The Unholy

Author Information:

Paul DeBlassie III, Ph.D., is a psychologist and writer living in Albuquerque who has treated survivors of the dark side of religion for more than 30 years. His professional consultation practice — SoulCare — is devoted to the tending of the soul. Dr. DeBlassie writes fiction with a healing emphasis. He has been deeply influenced by the mestizo myth of Aztlan, its surreal beauty and natural magic.  He is a member of the Depth Psychology Alliance, the Transpersonal Psychology Association and the International Association for Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy.

One randomly drawn commenter will receive the choice of a $50 Amazon/BN gift card.

Buy Links:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Unholy-Novel-Paul-DeBlassie/dp/0865349592

The Unholy contains psychological suspense by Paul De Blassie

 

The Genesis of Tom Johnson’s Three Go Back

Most of my life I’ve had a deep interest in paleontology and entomology. In school, while we were reading Shakespeare, I was thinking about bugs. During History class, I wondered what new discovery was being uncovered in fossil beds around the world. The only reason I passed History in the ninth grade was due to my artistic talent at the time. The teacher asked me to draw Hannibal crossing the Alps with his elephants.

I wanted to write as far back as age ten, when I wrote a comic book story. Of course, it was terrible, but the fire was there. Then about age 25 I started creating plots and characters, and putting them on paper. The stories involved animals. One plot eventually became the Jur series several years later. I was living my dream and creating stories to be read.

One of my favorite comic strips is Luann. While reading the strip one day, I began wondering why that evil little Elvis guy doesn’t hire a scientist to build a time machine, and accidentally send Luann and her girlfriends, Delta and Bernice, back in time. Then someone could go after them. Well, I figured that would never happen, but I liked the idea. I started thinking about writing it myself, only not with Luann and her friends, but with girls in their mold.

Thus, Three Go Back was conceived. I set my tale in the future, where teleport machines became the common transportation system. My problem was coming up with the time machine angle for the story. Okay, so what if my characters were teleporting at the same time a magnetic solar flare struck the planet, burning out the teleport circuits, and turning it into a time machine? Bang. That became my gimmick.

With the use of those concepts, my story almost wrote itself. My big problem was finding a publisher. You see, I used scientific names for the animals they encounter in their journey back through time. Publishers told me they would never find an editor who knew if the names were real, misspelled, or in the correct time period. They kindly but firmly rejected the story. I sent a proposal to Barbara Custer at Night to Dawn, who knew my background in prehistoric animal life and my extensive study on the subject. She took a chance. Actually, anyone with a computer can type the names I use and do a Google search, and it will show the data on any creature. But I understood the publishers’ decision to reject the book because of the editing difficulties. It can add a lot of work to an editor’s already hectic job. You do come upon variation of names, which can confuse you.

I live in the Permian Basin of Texas, which is an area rich in Permian fossils. The Permian Period in our prehistory was over 250 million years ago, or roughly 60 million years before the dinosaurs, so this area is famous for reptiles and amphibians. The Craddock Redbeds is an important dig in our area, and Dr. Bakkar, a famous paleontologist, brings a team up from the Houston Museum of Natural Sciences every year. Our town Seymour has a reptile/amphibian named after it – the Seymouria. So my childhood was drawn towards the study, and that’s why I write so much about prehistoric life. They do say to write what you know and love.

Besides Three Go Back and other novels set in prehistoric times, I write action and adventure novels in the tradition of the pulp magazines of the 1930s and ‘40s, a period I also love. My interest varies from western to detective and spaceships. Whether in the far-flung galactic worlds of the future or the eons in our past, to the modern-day mystery, I love the written word and enjoy telling a story. I hope you will read my stories and I’m sure you will see that love I project into my characters.

Blurb:

When their teleport vehicle malfunctions, becoming a time machine, it sends three young girls back in time on a journey of discovery they never expected. From the Ice Age through the Cretaceous, Permian, Carboniferous, and finally to the beginning of the Earth’s evolution of life, they experience their world’s prehistoric past in all its splendor and terror, coming away with the joy of knowledge and adventure!

Biography and Links:

I was born in 1940, going through elementary schools in Seymour and Wichita Falls, Texas. My dad was a cowboy and cook, and often worked at each profession, which required a lot of moves. He wanted me to follow in his footsteps, but I had more of a studious nature and didn’t want to spend my life on farms and ranches. I was different from most kids my age; I didn’t want to be a cowboy and never liked riding horses. My family lived something of an itinerant’s lifestyle, and we never stayed in one place long enough for me to develop friendships. In high school I worked on the ranch my dad was foreman of while other students my age were dating.

When I turned 18, I joined the Army as an MP and was off to see the world, never regretting my decision to leave the life my family had. I had some pretty good assignments, such as a three-year tour in France. Then I spent one year patrolling the DMZ between North and South Korea under fire and 13 months in Vietnam. But I did enjoy my twenty years as a military cop and took some college courses in the process.

After retirement, my wife, Ginger and I started Fading Shadows, a small press imprint. We published a hobby magazine, Echoes, for the next twenty years, as well as half a dozen genre fiction titles, which refired my interest in writing.

Today I leave the publishing for others and continue my love of writing. It has been a good life, and I in no way degrade those men and women on ranches and farms. It just wasn’t a life for me.

Blog http://jurnovels.blogspot.com

Blog http://pulplair.blogspot.com

Tom’s Amazon Page http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B008MM81CM

 

Further on Rod Marsden’s Desk Job

Desk Job features dark fantasy by Rod Marsden.

A satire on office politics

I hate injustice especially when it is disguised as fair play. At the time I was looking for inspiration to start a new book a news report on television caught my attention. A new wave of political correctness was in the planning stage. Political correctness, especially in the office, bugs me. Hence the giant praying mantis menacing a computer jockey on the cover of Desk Job. Like Lewis Carroll and Terry Pratchett, I use symbolism and metaphor to reveal the darker, weirder and more fascinating elements of life as I know it. Fear created by censorship inspired by political correctness is at the heart of why the office where Desk Job mainly takes place is so dysfunction. I have worked in offices not far removed from the office in my novel.

I do most of my rough first draft writing on the train. I edit at home on my P.C. Since I do a lot of travelling for my current job as a researcher for public transportation, this works out fine.

I don’t expect to get everything right with the first draft. If I did then I suspect the work, whether short story or novel, would lack inspiration and the kind of flavor that makes for a good read. It is okay to let your id free to play with ideas in the early stages of any kind of writing. You can edit out the accrued garbage in subsequent drafts. Also the ending you originally have in mind is often not the ending you arrive at. You get to know and develop your characters as you write and this can result in your muse finding a more suitable if not a more fun conclusion.

I get my ideas from life. I always have pen and paper handy when I’m travelling. You never know who you are going to meet on the train or how they will inspire you. I also read a lot. I try to get in a couple of factual books a year along with the novels I absorb. Even a bad author can teach you something about writing. There’s the question of why you have decided that he or she isn’t very good.

I have a novel in mind that will deal with a common fear. A man has just won a fortune but his past is about to catch up to him. Will it be flight or fight? It’s presently titled Cold Water Conscience. No plans to imbue it with fantasy elements like my other novels. It will be stark and compelling.

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BIOGRAPHY:

Rod Marsden was born in Sydney, Australia. He has three degrees; all related to writing and to history. His stories have been published in Australia, England, Russia and the USA. He has worked in the American anthology Cats Do it Better. Many of his short stories have been published in Night to Dawn magazine. Undead Reb Down Under and Other Vampire Stories is a collection of his short fiction on vampirism. His novel Disco Evil: Dead Man’s Stand is his first venture into the vampire novel. Ghost Dance is his first undertaking into dark fantasy involving a quest. Desk Job is a first in that it is his salute to Lewis Carroll and it is also his initial surrealist novel. He is no stranger to controversy and much of his writing is purposely as well as purposefully politically incorrect. He prefers truth and integrity over the lies and half-truths we are so often inundated with. Thus his work has a certain honesty about the times we are living in that may not be found elsewhere.

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Buy Links:

Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Desk-Job-Office-land-Rod-Marsden/dp/1937769143/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1376845126&sr=1-5&keywords=Desk+Job

Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/178806

Nook Books: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/desk-job-rod-marsden/1111866050?ean=2940044699878

 

 

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