Give the Gift of Lycanthropy 2009

For centuries wolves have been hunted, persecuted, and reviled by many as monsters. They have been hunted to near extinction in several countries, including the mainland United States. On the other extreme, people have often taken wolves or wolf hybrids and tried to domesticate them, only to realize they can’t really care for a large pet. Somebody needed to step up and help educate the public about the true nature of the wolf, and provide a home for those cast-off hybrids that are neither wolf nor dog. That somebody was Mission: Wolf of Westcliffe, Colo.

Last summer I worked with Gabrielle Faust to raise money for Mission: Wolf and The Bat Sanctuary of Austin, Texas, at a joint book signing. It was a success, but I want to do more, and I’m hoping you’ll want to help … and possibly win a nice prize. So, my annual Give the Gift of Lycanthropy campaign this year is designed to help the good folks of Mission: Wolf provide care for the animals they’ve taken in.

Here’s how it works. On the left side of my Web site there is a donation button. By clicking it, you can donate money to Mission: Wolf through me. When the contest closes, I’ll send Mission: Wolf a check for everything donated. I’m not keeping any of the money for processing, to pay for the prizes, or anything like that. Every penny will be sent to Mission: Wolf.

Prizes? Yup. The person who donates the most money at www.stevenewedel.com between now and Christmas (Dec. 25, 2009) will receive one of my “PC” numbered copies of Little Graveyard on the Prairie. This is a small collector’s edition book that retails for $50 and was limited to a print run of 100 hardback copies. Here’s a link to Horror-Mall’s listing for the book. Now, because it is a rather expensive prize, the minimum donation to be qualified to win it is $10. You can donate as many times as you want. Your cumulative amount as of Dec. 25, 2009, will determine your eligibility for this grand prize. Remember, the money goes to Mission: Wolf.

If that’s too steep for you, don’t worry. You still have a couple of chances to win a free book. Everyone who donates any amount at all at www.stevenewedel.com will have his name put into a drawing to win his choice of one of my Scrybe Press titles.

But wait! There’s more. Everyone who reposts this message and sends comments/replies here with the working link (or includes me in the Facebook note) will also be entered into a drawing for a free Scrybe Press title from me.

That’s THREE chances to win. Plus, everyone wins that warm, furry feeling you get from helping some majestic animals and the wonderful people who take care of them. You can’t beat that with a dead vampire! Go to www.stevenewedel.com and click the Donate Now button in the upper left corner to help Mission: Wolf.

I hope you have a great holiday season, and thanks for your support!

New Moon

This post has nothing to do with the second in that horrible tween vampire series. I just thought it’d be fun to throw that in the subject line.

It was a pretty busy week. I’ve been editing on Ghost Sickness as much as I can, which is not enough. No work on Nadia’s Children, and that sucks, as I stopped in the middle of a big scene.

I finally made some changes to my Web site, going back to utilizing the Godaddy.com hosting I’ve been paying for all along, but including my WordPress blog. Anyway, the important thing here is that I can now go forward with the big contest I’ve been talking about. You’ll see the first announcement about that during the Thanksgiving break this week.

My English 3 class is reading The Haunting of Hill House and they seem to be liking it. We’ve only made it through Chapter 1, but some were upset we didn’t get to keep going the other day. The AP class is reading Othello, and liking it. I can’t say enough good stuff about the Shakespeare Appreciated audiobook series. They are just awesome. The narrator explains all those things you never understood.

The English 4 class … Yeah. I’ll be spending Thanksgiving break reading about 50 essays about the history of British literary periods and major authors and books from those periods. I’m sure most of those 50 essays are not yet written, despite being assigned over a month ago. Gee, I can’t wait.

Went to Half Price Books today and got a copy of James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers. I love the time period of The Leatherstocking Tales. I asked for the missing volumes to the series a few years ago and some dumbass at Enid’s only bookstore told my mom they were out of print. Yeah, right. I suppose Charles Dickens will be out of print next.

Went to GFF grocery store today and they’re already playing Christmas carols. When is it too early for Christmas songs?

Probably the best thing about this week was Beauty and the Beast. This was the WHHS production. The kids did an amazing job. It was so good I went to it twice. If you know me, you know that I am NOT a big fan of musicals, but I would gladly watch this one again. Not only is it good, but to see the kids I know performing in it was a lot of fun. I took my youngest daughter to the Friday evening show and she loved it. It was sure sweet to sit there with her beside me, her head against my arm, watching her clap and laugh. It was her second time to see it, too. She liked a lot of it better than the Disney movie, she said, especially the guy playing Lumiere. The girl who played Belle is amazing. I already knew she was a great student and cheerleader, but had no idea she could sing like she did. It was a great show.

I remember seeing Beauty and the Beast when it first came out. Kim was extremely pregnant with out first kid (who was born about three weeks later). I liked it so much I came home and wrote Songbird, a kids’ story that’s never been published, and only submitted a few times.

Good day

It was mostly a good day at school. Yeah, I have to write two referrals — one for the girl who couldn’t keep the bird to herself while my sub was there on Friday, and one for the guy who was throwing a tennis ball at my severed head while I was on hall duty this afternoon. And I had to chew some AP butt over missing work. But overall it was still a good day. Why? I’ll tell ya.

First, I finally, finally, finally found an activity that got my English IV class involved in the literary analysis essay they have to do. What I did was to write an essay myself yesterday, label each paragraph, chop it up, then make them put it back together. Sadly, only a few of the pairs were able to do it correctly, but pretty much everyone got involved in working on it, and that’s enough of a success for me. Each student has been assigned a period of British literary history. They have to write an essay that analizes one work written in that period, talk about how it is an example of the period, and provide some biographical info on the author. I wrote an essay about Jack London and American naturalism. Tomorrow they’ll see that essay all put back together and we’ll talk about why each paragraph is where it is and how they’re constructed. And about formatting, MLA citations, etc.

The other good thing was a student hug. These aren’t so rare, but when they come from a kid who recently lost her dad, has been raped in a state juvenile shelter, already kicked a meth habit and been beaten up by her boyfriend, it means more. I saw her at her locker and she didn’t look right. Last time she looked like that she broke down crying about her dad, so I asked what was wrong. This time it was just a headache, so I explained how she could “steal” some ibuprofen from my desk. Later, she was obviously feeling better, stopped me for a hug in the hall and thanked me for taking care of her. It’s just incredible what some kids have to go through and how they’re able to maintain a positive attitude most of the time. This girl struggles, but she works really hard and has already overcome so much that I know she’s going to be successful. Knowing kids like her is what makes being a teacher the best career I’ve had.

Work, work, work

So. No werewolves have prowled since the day after Red Dirt. Nope. I have a major scene going on, but haven’t had time to finish it. Two people are about to die. And it’ll be shown live on a Web cam. Eventually. Well, there ya go.

I spent most of the weekend grading a monstrous stack of papers. Hopefully that load will be cut down beginning this week. On Saturday morning I was “trained” on how to use these electronic clickers. Basically, I can create an assignment or quiz and students answer via remote control. The computer grades them, and I just have to transfer the grades to the other program where we actually record our grades. What I like is that I can time the questions. This should keep the little buggers focused and cut down on some of the cheating. If you only have 10 seconds to choose the right answer, you’re less likely to be able to look to see what other people are doing, right? We’ll see.

I did try to do some Web site remodeling earlier today. The result? A message saying my site is temporarily unavailable. I had my domain forwarded to a WordPress site, but WordPress won’t allow me to embed a PayPal button I need for a contest I’m planning. So I tried going with an older style site with frames that includes the WordPress blog in the design. It worked on my computer. Needed some tweaking, especially in color matching, but it worked. I put it online and changed my forwarding and I have nothing.

Back to writing. Since we’ve talked about it at Conestoga and she’s mentioned it a time or two, I guess it’s not a “super secret project” any more. So, what I did with the little bit of writing time I had yesterday and today was work on a book I co-wrote with Carrie Jones. Her agent wants a few more changes, the biggest of which is to get it under 400 pages. Yes, it’s that long. And it’s shorter now than it originally was! Anyway, I have to say that I really enjoyed writing this book with Carrie and it’s a lot of fun to be back in that world.

Red Dirt Book Festival Roundup

Want to meet some fantastic people? Visit any of the Pioneer Library System libraries. They hosted the fourth bi-annual Red Dirt Book Festival yesterday and today, and I’m here to tell ya, they are some of the most helpful, enthusiastic, book-lovin’ people you’ll ever meet. This was my third time to attend the festival — second as a guest — and I mean it, they go all out for the authors and the readers. They put us up in the Hilton Hotel in Shawnee, provided tickets to the meals, had a shuttle that ran from the hotel to the conference sites, had a hospitality room, provided the books themselves, and even paid us a stipend to talk about our books and writing. Hell, most of us would do that for free.

It was a good conference, too. I learned a few things, though a lot of the panels provided information I’d heard before. One of my favorites was where three of those librarians did mini-reviews and some reading from various books from the attending authors. It was just refreshing to see somebody other than the authors pushing their work. I don’t know if they mentioned mine or not, as I missed over half the two-hour panel, but it was good, anyway. I met several new people, including the editor for Silhoutte, but spent the most time talking to Michelle Bardsley, who was on the Vampires, Werewolves and Demons: The Sexy Side of the Paranormal with me and Chrystal Inman. Michelle gets a link because she’ll be giving away a couple of my books at some point.

Probably the best thing about the conference, though, was the quiet time in the hotel. I wrote 14 or 15 pages, which is nothing compared to what I used to do in the same amount of time, but it was enough to really put me back into Nadia’s Children. I can’t wait to get back to it. There’s a really, really big scene coming up. A couple of minor characters we haven’t seen for a while are going to be killed.

Here’s one of those word count things to show my progress. I guess I completed another 3 percent of the book over the weekend.

16211 / 100000 words. 16% done!

I also got my hands on about 83 pages of Gayleen’s YA (or is it middel grade?) novel that she’s working on. She’d left me hanging in a house that’d had all the air sucked out of it by a dust storm a long time ago. This is good stuff and I’m glad to finally get to see what happens next.

Last thing. Remember the post about my acting debut back in September? Well, the music video is online now. You can watch it here. It’s good cheesy fun.

Visit me in Harvest Hill

I got news today that Graveside Tales’ newest anthology Harvest Hill is now available for purchase. The book includes my new story “Hungry is the Night” written specifically for this book. Like my story “The God of Discord”, this one involves a monster I first wrote about in about 1990 or ‘91 for a novel called The Living Dark, something I’ve messed with rewriting off and on ever since. But I digress. Like all stories in this anthology, mine takes place in the little town of Harvest Hill, Tennessee, on Halloween night. Mine is a modern story featuring the newspaper editor of the little town. I have to admit I’m rather proud of the story, particularly considering how quickly I knocked it off.

Right now you can only get the book from Graveside Tales’ site. (I’m sure it’ll be at Amazon and all the usual places very soon.) Here’s the link to a pretty cool (but rather uninformative) book trailer.

Happy reading!

Looking back, looking ahead

First off, HAPPY HALLOWEEN! Oh, to be 10 years old again …

Well, it was an interesting week. I heard from an agent who wants to look at The Girls Nobody Wanted to Date. Not bad for the first query I ever sent out on it. I didn’t get any real writing done, but I did make a few pages of notes for things that are coming up in Nadia’s Children.

The biggest event, I guess, was having a student break down in the hallway, bury her face in my chest and cry for a while. It’s just incredible what some of these kids have to go through. When I was that age I never would have imagined a teenager actually having that kind of life. This poor girl lost her father recently. She feels the grief, of course, but she’s also feeling guilt because she left home because of another woman living in the house. She told me a lot more about herself that I won’t divulge here. She’s a strong young lady who has already overcome more than most people could, but losing her daddy really tore her up.

One thing she told me was that last time I went to the school counselors about her, they called her in, talked to her about what was going on at that time, and then called the parents of the guy she was living with and told them what she’d told them. The boyfriend beat the hell out of her for that. Most of our counselors should stick to making schedules. Sheesh. The school did just hire a full-time social worker, so hopefully we’ll get somebody who is trained, compassionate and understanding of what the kids are dealing with so they can get some real help.

Another one of my students was arrested for what started as a just a minor school-related infraction in the hallway, but because he was stoned he went nuts when he was called on it. Yesterday, another of my students was so wasted in class that he didn’t know what he was doing most of the time. I know I should have sent him to the office, but … Well, there are reasons I didn’t.

Looking ahead, I’ll be at the Red Dirt Book Festival next weekend. My panel is “Vampires, Werewolves, and Demons – The Sexy Side of the Paranormal” with Michele Bardsley and Crystal Inman. The panel is from 4:15 to 5 p.m. on Friday. I’ll also be at the book signings from 2-3 p.m. both Friday and Saturday. Red Dirt is a very good conference. It’s the most literary of the conferences and conventions I attend, bringing in a lot of librarians, teachers, etc. This year’s featured guest is Billie Letts.

I am not taking any school papers with me to Red Dirt. When not at the conference, I will be in the hotel room provided by the conference, writing about werewolves.

Look for an announcement very soon about a new contest. The prize this time will be one of my PC copies of Little Graveyard on the Prairie. It’ll cost you to enter the contest, but they money will go to a very worthy charity. (No, not me!) I’m still hammering out a few details and getting things set up.

Werewolves in the library

We have new projectors at school that allow us to show movies on a pull-down screen. Yeah, like what we had when I was in elementary school, but I’m not talking about film strips made in the 1950s shown through a big and heavy blue projector. These let us show DVDs. The downside is that our school didn’t have the foresight to hook up the DVD player to the projector, so we have to use the computer. You can’t do anything else with the computer while the movie’s playing. And you have to move the mouse every once in a while to keep the screen saver from coming on. But I digress. My three English IV classes finally finished Beowulf and took the test, so I’m showing them the movie and we’re griping about things that were changed and talking about why. But, with the room dark, the kids engaged, and the computer occupied, I have nothing to do. So I took my laptop on Thursday and Friday. The battery was dead on Thursday. On Friday, though, I finally had a breakthrough.

Yes, I finally began writing again. I didn’t get much done, but it was enough. It was kind of like hitting the Hoover Dam until finally a crack appears in the cement and a trickle of the Colorado River leaks through. I figured out a format for what I needed to do on the chapter of Nadia’s Children that’s been holding me up. It isn’t brilliant, and it may not be the final format, but it was enough to pull me back into the story.

So today, to get some quiet time without discussion of past-due bills or breaking up squabbles between children, me and the trusty laptop went to the library. It was damn near orgasmic. The words flowed and flowed. I got there at about 3:30 and wrote pretty much non-stop until the library closed at 5 p.m. There was a brief break for some added research on an 18th century war between Sweden and Russia, but I knocked off seven pages. Now, that’s not a lot compared to what I’m typically capable of, but considering how long it’s been since I did anything, it was pretty damn good. Is it quality work? I dunno, but right now that doesn’t really matter.

Here’s one of those word meter things to show where I stand:

12658 / 100000 words. 13% done!

There were a few things that went into breaking the dam. One is reading John Steinbeck’s Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters, and following his lead. Yes, I’m keeping a “werewolf journal.” I did it with Ulrik, too, but then it was mostly just chapter outlines to plan ahead. This time there are outlines (or will be), but also notes about things that are giving me problems, possible ways to fix or get around them, things I want to include, reminders of things that have gone before, etc. Writing in it before starting my actual writing kind of gets me ready to write and focused on what’s ahead.

The problem I was having was figuring out who Fenris really is, and why he’s against the Pack uniting. This ate at me for weeks! And, of course, the answer was there all along. It was assigning and reading the first draft of my AP essays on the barbarism vs civilization debate that made me understand what Fenris is all about. Okay, but why does he believe what he does?

That’s where the history comes in. What did we know about Fenris’s history from what was in Ulrik? Not very much. He almost killed Ulrik in the forest surrounding Hitler’s Wolf’s Lair retreat and he looks like Jim Steinman (okay, that’s not explicitly in the book, but that’s who I based his physical appearance on). Now his history is coming into focus. And, I think, readers may be able to have some sympathy for him. When I teach creative writing, I always emphasize the fact that nobody sets out to be the bad guy; everyone is the hero of his own story. I wasn’t doing that with Fenris in the last book. He was just a cardboard villain to oppose Ulrik. Now he’s somebody unique. He’s kind of reminding me of Captain Wolf Larsen from Jack London’s The Sea Wolf.

When the library closed, I considered going to the park to keep writing until my battery died, but came home instead to help fix dinner. (There’s a cop in the library who makes sure you’re preparing to leave once they start announcing that closing is pending and he was giving me the stink eye the last 10 minutes or so.)

*If you care, the AP essay assignment is to read Jack London’s The Call of the Wild (yes, I am a big fan of London), Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs, Stephen Crane’s story “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky”, and one other source of the student’s choosing, then write an essay agreeing or disagreeing with Robert E. Howard’s statement from “Beyond the Black River” that “Barbarism is the natural state of mankind. Civilization is unnatural. It is a whim of circumstance. And barbarism must always ultimately triumph.” First draft essays were mostly bad to mediocre, almost like they’d never seen a persuasive essay before.

Lick It Up!

First, thanks to Gayleen and Paul for meeting me for lunch today. I needed that. Thanks for all your kind words and encouragement. I’m working on a query letter for The Girls Nobody Wanted to Date Gayleen. I swear it.

I finally got out and bought the new KISS album, Sonic Boom, today. I like it a lot … and I didn’t expect to. Even “Modern Day Delilah” has kind of grown on me. I”d have to say “Never Enough” is my favorite song on it so far. It isn’t the Destroyer meets Love Gun that Paul Stanley said it was, but it has some real klassic moments. I have to say it does have several riffs and licks that sound like they were … uhhh … borrowed from older songs. Still, I’ll be playing the heck out of this one for a good long time. Right now I’m listening to the bonus CD. These recordings are a little different than the originals, I think. Or maybe it’s just that I haven’t listened to them through headphones in a long time. Every track on the bonus CD is a killer, except that horrible piece of shit “Forever.” Yeah, skipping right over that one for “Christine Sixteen.” By the way, “Lick It Up” has to be one of the best KISS songs ever, and really sums up what I think the band is all about.

It’s fall break. The wifey had a list of appointments for me, plus my youngest daughter came down with an ear infection and strep throat, so I haven’t gotten any real writing done, but I have been doing some research on something that’s stumped me for a while. Fenris, the lead villian of The Werewolf Saga, needs a deeper identity. Who is he, really? And, why is he so against the Pack uniting? These are things I’m working out. Right now he seems to much like an Arnold Schwarzenegger bad buy from one of his 1980s action flicks. And that’s not a good thing.

I have a stack of essays to grade. First drafts of persuasive essays exploring whether man is more prone to a state of barbarism or civilization. Should be “interesting” reading. Plus some shorter benchmark essays analyzing a quote from John Steinbeck’s Cup of Gold. There are also some makeup quizzes and such to grade.

Speaking of Steinbeck, I’ve been on a real binge with him. A while back I ordered an omnibus of his short novels, his journal from the writing of The Grapes of Wrath and an annotated version of that novel. I’ve been reading the essays in that one while listening to East of Eden in my car. East of Eden is a book I read a long time ago, while working in some machine shop. I remember loving it … and am surprised at how little of it I remember. It’s weird. It’s also pretty damn depressing, but the writing is beautiful and inspiring. He was a master at finding the perfect little detail to define a character or place. I just ordered the East of Eden letters, plus a Steinbeck biography and an examination of the banning of Grapes from Alibris. How much of it will I read before I burn out? I dunno. It seems I prefer reading nonfiction to fiction these days.

You say you want to go for a spin, the party’s just begun, but let you in. You drive us wild, we’ll drive you crazy …

Tulsa Sci-fi Horror Weekend Recap

I spent Friday and Saturday in Tulsa for the first Sci-Fi Horror Weekend. This was a convention in the vein of Horrorfind Weekend or the Texas Frightmare Weekend. It’s geared more toward the movies and features the stars of some genre gems. The main guests were the stars of the first (that I know of) and best zombie comedy, Return of the Living Dead. There were also several people there from some of the Nightmare on Elm Street sequels.

I imagine the weekend was not as well attended as the organizers hoped, but it wasn’t nearly as dead as the Horrorfind Weekend I went to in Phoenix. There was a pretty steady, if modest, stream of people meandering down the aisles. Some people stopped to look at books, but not much money ended up in the hands of the authors in attendance.

Not that it was a bad con. I met a lot of new and intersting people. Among those were Damon Blaylock, who I’d spoken to on the phone and via e-mail a few times. Damon has directed a movie called Howling Moon that is based on the same source material I used for writing Murdered by Human Wolves. I got to see his trailer, which looked really good, and met his werewolf star, Carl Buffington, who seemed very cool. I’m very excited to see the movie. Oh, and Damon wants to do an interview with me for the DVD release.

I met another dude whose name escapes me, but we spent a good bit of time talking about writing screenplays.

Then there were the old friends, like Duvy and Z, Joyce, Dennis MacDonald, another Enid boy writing horror, and Jackson Compton and his very, very pregnant wife (due any day now). John Ferguson, aka Count Gregore, was there and it’s always good to see him out and about.

It seemed kind of strange not having the event at a hotel, so there was no after-show hanging out, and it cost $16 to park for the two days. The biggest drawback of the event was my natural tendency to do everything wrong when it comes to driving. It took an hour and 45 minutes to drive from Moore to Tulsa, but then it took an hour and a half to make the 10-minute trip from the Convention Center to my motel. I got so freaking lost, then when I tried to get back there was road construction everywhere. That’s nothing new, though. If there’s a wrong turn to make, you can bet I’ll make it.