I think I had a lightning in a bottle moment tonight.
I planned on going to a writers’ workshop after work. In true horror movie fashion, there was a darkening sky followed by a storm a few hours earlier.
I’m sure that this happening before attending a writers workshop at a horror bookstore was only a coincidence.
I decompress after work before heading over. Thankfully, the weather held up. I arrive and everyone in attendance as well as the shop owners chat a bit before we introduce ourselves and our writing prompt.
I don’t bring a laptop, only a small notebook and pen. Paper was provided, and as I read our topic on a whiteboard, the room is silent for about an hour. I don’t stop writing.
After 4 and a half pages of feverishy scribbling out a rant regarding a loud and inconsiderate neighbor and turning it into a true crime creepy doll story, my cramped hand puts the pen down and it hits me how stiff my wrist and fingers are as I think about how in this day and age, we live on laptops and the autocorrect of our phones. There was no AI prompt to what I was doing and I kind of impressed myself.
We were then asked if we want to read.
Oh shit…..
I don’t know how I manage to get the ball rolling, but I do it. I read my very very poor handwriting. What’s more, the group seemed to like it. I was even told that there was a lot of polish to it, and that it didn’t come across as a prompted first draft.
I had a lot of rejection letters and busy schedules. My writing took a backseat. I tried to revitalize my motivation a little when I asked my ex to read a finished work, but he would not. Those red flags are a subject for another time, or another writers prompt. There was something about this event that felt very right, much like my knitting group, book club and later the podcast network I joined.
I don’t know if this story was a one time lightning in the bottle miracle, but it worked. I like making a good first impression as anyone would, but I also like that writing can be a voice for people like myself who aren’t always verbose, who can be talked over. Either way, I should at least type it out this weekend. Did I mention my shitty handwriting?

I’m watching Euphoria on HBO max. As I hit the end of season one, I keep coming back to a part of a Jello Biafra spoken word album from the late 1990s or early 2000s. He was talking about how parents overmedicate their children to avoid dealing with them.

To quote or paraphrase, “I fear that today’s ritalin kids are tomorrows speed freaks and junkies.”

Watching those first episodes, it feels spot on. Now, I wonder what will happen to children subjected not just to meds, but their parents putting them on tik tok and doing who knows what crap for likes and sponsorships.

I finally started to do it. On May 1st, I will launch what I hope to be a long standing podcast.

Much like this blog, there will be horror movie reviews. I had meant to focus on slashers and franchises, but I noticed that my choices led to the more obscure. I can work with this.

I have recorded four episodes so far, all under 20 minutes long. I am almost done with the fifth about an indie haunted house movie called The Evil Down the Street. Funny story, one of the screenwriters/actors posted about it in an online group I’m a part of and I figured, why not give it a watch?

I hope to have a stockpile in the next few weeks, and eventually have other people on. This can be found on Podbean under badmoviebunnies.

When I first saw this, I couldn’t help but think that Rob Zombie tried to make Rosemary’s Baby, albeit more graphic and in Salem, Massachusetts. You can even see the witch statue downtown if you look for it.

Watching it again, I caught notes of witchspoitation movies from the late 60s into the 1970s. I’ll spare you puns relating to devils and details, but I couldn’t help but study the setting.

The gloom of the setting and gray skies immediately caught me as a New England native.

The music contained in the Lords of Salem mystery record struck me as Zombie’s fantasy Kenneth Anger movie score. As touristy as Salem, MA got to be, the compositions work very well.

The movie itself, blocked into days of the week, was very fast paced up until the final act. It didn’t even feel like I made the progress into my knitting project that I did. Then, it started to slow down and really focus on the weirdness and surreal horror imagery, an extended psychedelic trip, one can guess as Heidi began using after a long period of recovery.

Overall, I liked the movie. It was experimental and atmospheric to be sure, but the performances were pretty good. Sherri Moon Zombie as Heidi played a recovering addict and radio DJ who innocently enough receives a mysterious record during her show, only to jokingly play it after a Rush song (a joke among her coworkers, but endearing as hell to me!) She and her coworkers play it to eerie effect that was subtle at first, but as Heidi progresses deeper into madness and eventual relapse, it gets scarier and the movie’s conclusion that much more odd and gruesome.

It’s been over three years since I left New Haven, Connecticut for San Antonio, Texas. It was a significant change to be sure, and there are some interesting differences.

One of the most notable is the weather. Forget Philadelphia, it is always sunny in San Antonio. Once, there was a little snow in my time here, shutting down a good part of the city. In contrast, New Haven will get a more than a few inches of snow, slowing a commute but so long as we stop for coffee, we’re okay.

Another thing I’ve found pleasant about San Antonio is that it can get very windy, even on hot days in August. One friend joked about living in Tornado Alley. Major costal storms might hit, but from my third floor dwelling, I hear the winds howl in the dark of night, screaming, threatening….

….to knock over the plants on the balcony.

I will sometimes joke that in moving to Texas, I now live in a Hammer Horror film. I started to wonder, how would that would look in Texas? You’d be in metropolitan San Antonio with any type of one story house, apartment complex and every type of store and neighborhood. Would you start the story at a bar or music venue? What genre?

What monster would it generate?

There’s plenty of howling wind, nevertheless.

While the writing fell behind to a point where I stopped generating webcomics as well as reviews (let me note that for about four years, I self published three different comics of my own creation weekly), I tried podcasting. I was a guest on Chad Denton’s Trash Canon, discussing two Halloween sequels.

My visceral reaction to those episodes was one of, “I sound like that?!!” My stutter and tendency toward saying, “you know,” as filler when said stutter appears, was readily apparent.

I could improve. I want to create one of my own. I wouldn’t stick to horror movies necessarily. Like Rabbit Reviews and the handmade frankenbunny commentary, I’d want a gimmick. Some categories of discussions I thought of so far include:

Fun with Franchises: Movies and sequels

Six Degrees of [TV Show]: Discussion of a movie featuring an actor from a favorite TV show (For example, Russ Tamblyn of Twin Peaks in The Phantom Empire)

Fuck Yeah Source Data: Movies featuring cast or crew I made into a name authority record (few and far between if I can remember!)

You can check out Trash Canon via Podbean by following the link.

In the two plus years that I have left my home state of Connecticut for a new job, life and mystery allergies in San Antonio, TX, I have seen many a bad movie, but not much in the way of written reviews.

Worse, no B-Fest!

This year B-Fest is in February, so you bet that the minute that tickets went on sale, I picked them up and booked the hotel and flight. My Southwestern app got a workout and I’m sure I racked up points. I hope to do so more often.

Everything is reserved…..so now what?! How to pack, and what will be the knitting project of the Fest?

In the past, it took the form of a blanket, but I have a ton of them and while Texas can get cold (surprise to me as well), I don’t need many more.

Not that this will stop me. The sweater I attempted one year fell flat, and I need something easy.

After a crazy con season, it is back to movie reviewing.  I got to see Stanley Kubrick’s classic, “The Shining” on the big screen. My local bow tie cinema is showing a series of Turner Classic Movies, and with Halloween looming, a few friends and I met up.

Why there were so few people in the theater, I will never know. Either way, I was armed with the blanket I started knitting at B-Fest and ready to see one of Kubrick’s shorter films, and one of my favorites.

I’ve always had mixed feelings about movie adaptations of books. Movie adaptations of Stephen King books in particular tend to disappoint. I liked the 1994 TV miniseries adaptation of “The Stand” a great deal. I think that the miniseries format allowed for more details from the books that would be left out of a film adaptation. I understand that not every little nuance can or should reach the silver screen, but holy shitsnacks, Pet Semetary, both a favorite novel and Ramones song, made for a horrific movie I have yet to brace myself enough to review.

While I found the novel version of “The Shining” compelling, it did get a little drawn out, both when I read it at 14 and for the second time years later. Stanley Kubrick films tended to run long as well, to a point where the succinct quality of the film became a post movie joke among us. Think about it-it really is one of the short ones.

This is interesting in light of how long the book was to me.

The story takes place at the Overlook Hotel, a high end and isolated manse of an inn built many years ago on a burial ground. A former schoolteacher and aspiring novelist, Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) takes a caretaker position for the time that the inn would be closed, the nastiest part of the winter when guests and other staff would be sent out. Torrance agrees to the position for the peace and quiet needed to work on a novel, but is warned of the isolation and how the last caretaker went mad and violently murdered his wife and children before committing suicide.

Torrance, with a smile I would see later in his Joker performance in Tim Burton’s “Batman,” states that his wife would get a kick out of the story as she is a “horror addict.”

One doesn’t get that impression as the demure Wendy Torrance (Shelley Duval) moves in with their son, Danny (Danny Lloyd), who experiences psychic episodes and speaks to imaginary friend, Tony. If anything, Wendy is defending Jack’s drunken episodes, abusiveness and up until the climax walking on eggshells with Jack, all the while taking care of Danny and his episodes alongside her own isolation and visions once the viewer realizes what’s really going on with the hotel….

One could contend that the film shows  the eventual breakdown of Jack’s mental state down to the iconic scene where he breaks down a door with the ax yelling, “Heeeere’s Johnny” stemmed from being alone in a giant hotel that screamed the decades called and they want their brightly patterned carpets and gold ballrooms back. The viewer could also contend that while Jack claimed he wasn’t drinking since an incident where he became irritated with his son and dislocated his shoulder, he probably snuck a drink here and there when the family wasn’t looking, only to break when faced with a hotel where the manager took away the booze for insurance reasons. The point of the story was that the hotel itself, built on a burial ground, possessing inhabitants in the worst way, but some critics felt that the viewer didn’t really see that, and it was just a case of abusive Jack becoming insane from isolation, writer’s block and delirium tremens. I wonder about that. There were shots where I could have sworn the expansive, and brightly gaudy hotel seemed to move. I thought the carpet patterns were going to jump out at me along with the kool aid blood that gushed from the elevators.

All in all, this is a fantastic film with chilling performances from the cast and a nasty reminder of how we shouldn’t be too isolated for too long, even in a storm. I remember when a nasty snowstorm hit a few years back. The city was shut down for days. The university where I work called me to tell me that it was closed, a rare occurrence. As the snow piled in front of my front door higher and higher and I ran out of coffee, I got a little stir crazy, happy when the roads cleared up just enough for me to take a walk downtown. If I were caught in a “Shining” storm, I’d have knitted who only knows what in my cabin fever.

As mentioned before, I took some knitting with me. I didn’t do a lot of work with the B-Fest blanket since B-Fest, but to recap:

 

By the time “The Shining” was over……

 

Now, with more stripes!

I wonder what the pastel monstrosity will be by B-Fest 2017.

This September, I completed both a personal and professional goal. I got to see Portland, Oregon for the first time, and I took Happy Kitty Studio to the West Coast, my first convention that required air travel.

For the most part, I traveled by car. One year at Otakon, I traveled by bus, taking a suitcase of display materials with a duffel bag of plushes shrunk down by a space bag. This allowed me to also pack clothes. Down to two bags and some knitting for the trip, I had yet to find out how useful this was when I got sick to my stomach on 7-11 donuts the last day of the show. At the time, I was gloating over the discount I received for booking early. I was hoping that the same didn’t happen when we boarded a plane bound for the west coast and back.

Also, how was I going to get as much merch into as few bags as possible? 

Putting the labor in Labor Day

I had from August 28-September 8 to get everything together. While I didn’t expect to do as well as I did at CT Horror fest, it happened and I had to restock on a sizeable scale on top of my day job. That week, I drew and cut patterns most evenings. I looked forward to an ace in the hole that was a long weekend.

Saturday and Sunday, I completed 24 cats. One day was dedicated to the sewing machine construction and the second to stuffing and putting them together. While I have my system to expedite the process, it is repetitive and time consuming. There is also so much a person can binge watch. Monday was the day to construct 12 Harley Quinn cats. Out of all the villain cats, I think she’s my favorite. Like her knitted doll counterpart, while a little more challenging, the end result is a joy.

Monday was the sewing day, meaning the fabric bodies and head were cut up and stitched back together in the harlequin four quarter pattern before I stitched a white mask, put together ears and tail and by 11:00 that night, I had twelve plushes to stuff and attach.

In hindsight, I should have taken Tuesday off, but, there were tasks I needed to take care of. By 2:43, I was on the phone brainstorming with a colleague as to how to run a script to add online handles in a batch because I was out in 45 minutes not to return until next Thursday. We do it, and I manage to ensure that two other batch loads went through correctly. Feeling rushed, I walked home hell bent to complete those cats.

I was seven cats in when I felt burnt out. By the ninth cat completed, I couldn’t do any more. Camped out with the Hulu criterion collection film, Fear, it hit me that it wasn’t yet 9:30. I was grateful that I took the next day off. I sleep until 10:00,  eat apples and cereal with my pumpkin spice coffee (I love you, fall foods and weather despite it being a few weeks from being official) and hammered out a few travel plans with Stefanie while finishing the last three cats.

It was time to head out….

I picked up Stefanie and headed to casa de Peli, which thankfully is near the airport. We have amazing takeout Indian food with her family. Her dad picks ghost peppers from his garden.

They were wonderful, but I got drooly at one point. Pro tip: never eat the seedy half in one bite!

After a few episodes of Archer, we got some needed sleep and headed to the airport. We got a little turned around, but we made the flight with time to spare.

Part of me was very tempted to head to baggage claim, and while searching for my suitcase, which contained cats on top of the carry on, yell out that I wanted those motherfucking cats of this motherfucking plane now. But, there were no luggage issues and I doubt you could do that even in Portland, Oregon.

Then again, we had fifteen minutes to get from the plane to our connecting flight when we touched down in Chicago. Thanks, elliptical machine.

We get to Portland in pretty good time. I was a little worried that I had to check my bags with the toys. I was a little worried they would get lost in baggage claim. It took forever for our bags to come out of the carousel, but everything was present and accounted for.

Thankfully, my friend, Desiree was waiting to grab us for food, coffee and  merch dropoff at the convention center. Portland, and the west coast as a whole, it seems, is very aware of dietary needs and restrictions from various food allergies and lifestyle choices. People want to work with you accordingly. Living in the northeastern section of the country, there are times when I feel the odd one out for being vegetarian. This can be a little disheartening for group events, and I feel like the sole complainer. Not in Portland. You can even find lavender ice cream in the local shop, which of course, we all had to stop at!

Rose City Comic Con was a bit of a bust for me, plus I was a little disheartened to be stuck behind a table when in Portland for the first time. Well, Desiree, her husband Jason and I more than made up for it when exploring the city proper as seen below:

One thing that I noticed was a lack of yarn shops. I’ve seen galleries, bakeries, eateries of all types, and Powell’s books, the largest independent bookstore I have ever had the good fortune to enter. There was punk rock pizza, but no yarn stores. Either I have to explore this further, something I need to do anyway as I want to take a proper non convention vacation, or I need to explore this and set up shop……

It’s not the craziest idea I ever had.