All That Is Dark and Beautiful

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imageimageimageimageAutumn goes fast!! Sometimes it’s too full to keep track in words and posts, so here’s a quick cram session of all the things wonderful and a bit unbelievable that happened along with crunching leaves, bonfires, trick-or-treat, PTO Vice Presidency (shut up), soccer season, Apple Festival, a NINE YEAR Wedding Anniversary, a new legit job at A.L. Terry Jewelers, Back to the Future Pt 2 celebrations, reading amazing stories at Menacing Hedge…. you get the idea, things are booming!! In the midst of all that, there’s also this:

MORE!! At Booked.

Halloween means the annual Spookedtacular, and this year was a two hour NyQuil and beer fest of The Final Girls, The Abominable Dr. Phibes, urban legends, serial killers, and sincere love and vitriol splattered in all directions between Robb Olson, Livius Nedin, Jesse Lawrence and myself. Is a Christmas special coming, with the four of us? You bet! AND! At the beginning of 2016 while Robb and Liv take a Disney Cruise (or whatever it is they do when they can’t record) Craig Clevenger and I will be holding down the Booked. fort and co-hosting an episode ourselves. It should be hot. But more on that later! Click HERE to be taken to the Spookedtacular 2015,

Pantheon Magazine Winter Edition

A little sad, sweet piece of mine has been accepted at the lovely Pantheon Magazine. “Orphans” will appear in the “Hestia” edition. It’s a beautiful publication and I’m honored I’ll be found in its pages!

UPDATES for ‘Gutted: Beautiful Horror’ Table of Contents

If you don’t know what the anthology is about, click HERE to find out a little more about the depths of darkness and beauty coming from Crystal Lake publishing in 2016. It was incredible enough when I learned Neil Gaiman was on the roster, along with authors John F.D. Taff, Brian Kirk, and (one of my own) Richard Thomas – who needs a shout-out and huge thanks for tossing my name their way – THEN editors extraordinaire Doug Murano and D. Alexander Ward announced on Halloween that along with all of us, Clive Barker will be including a story. It’s a bit surreal at this point, and I can’t wait to hear who’s announced next!  My story, “Cellar’s Dog,” is gangly and bizarre and pretty in its own way, and I’ll be forever grateful the editors could see what I saw when that black dog walked into those headlight beams.

So there you have it. The leaves are barely gone and already the Autumn is so full of goodness, I’m not sure where to go from here! Up? Or maybe I’ll just swim awhile. Float. Hug my lovelies and enjoy the laughter and the warmth. I think this is the top.

Thank you all so much for reading!

Amanda

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Confessions

This is inspired by an email I just received, and also that segment they used to do on the old Conan, called ‘Secrets,’ where Snoop Dogg would ‘confess’ he’d never actually smoked weed or David Bowie would talk about how he liked to stick his hand up in the straw dispenser at McDonald’s and touch all the straws.

Meaning there’s no way a court of law could ever prove any of these things true or untrue, I just feel like making a list of crap that might not ever get brought up in conversation:

* I don’t ever remember wanting to ‘be’ anything when I grew up, except maybe being in movies, though I knew I was supposed to want to be stuff and made up all kinds of things. Pretty sure I said veterinarian for awhile…

* Played with some dead animals as a child. Not in an effigy sort of way, in a baby doll sort of way. Still haven’t killed anyone, though.

* All of my dreams are very complicated and convoluted romance dramas with celebrities, or about errands and household tasks I need to do. No in-between.

* Rod Serling was my first major crush. And it turns out my husband is related to him – by marriage, I think.

* I don’t respect dogs. I like them, but I don’t respect them. I respect cats.

* I still want an initials tattoo of “HM” for Herman Melville and Henry Miller, my first and always true writing loves.

* Domesticated birds terrify me, and I’ve never met one that didn’t try to physically harm me.

* Almost all my ex-boyfriends are gay. There aren’t many of them, and I think some of them are still…not being gay, if that makes sense, at least part of the time.

* I’ve peed next to nearly every water tower in Jackson County, under the cover of darkness.

* Somewhat related to the previous post, I never, ever, litter – but I did go through a brief period in highschool when throwing beer bottles at road signs out moving vehicle windows didn’t count as littering.

* I talk about highschool like it was crap, but I had really beautiful and amazing friends and we made the best of it. Substance abuse helped.

* Cigarettes are awesome and I will always miss them.

* Courtney Love had two really good albums so shut up.

* I sweep the living room and kitchen floor with a broom a minimum of three times a day, but I don’t dust. Dusting is ridiculous.

* If I could go back in time, I would’ve done a lot of nude photo shoots because I’m 35 and damn I really didn’t appreciate everything where it was when I was 19.

* I have no ambition. But it’s in what I’ve come to realize is a good way – I have no long-term goals to reach. I don’t want anything material. I dunno. Maybe a pool?

* I lie about my brain chemistry and how all that business works on a pretty much daily basis.

* People terrify me, so I try to be stupid/crazy/funny right up front as an icebreaker.

* I got kicked in the forehead by a cow when I was seven or eight. We (I won’t name the ‘we’) were all trying to milk it at the same time. I still have the scar. Can’t remember what lie we made up to cover up what happened.

* Looking back, my childhood was charmed, and what wasn’t, I conveniently erase.

* I spend more time in a given day thinking about Tom Hardy and Andrew Scott (Jim Moriarty) and Adam Levine than is probably healthy.

* Two-thirds of what I write gets trashed.

* Jack-in-the-boxes are an abomination, and if I could go back in time and kill the person who decided it was a good idea to make weird-faced dolls and jester-looking monsters pop out of boxes on a spring, I would, without a second thought, even if the person was still a child.

* If my son ever wants to join the circus or a sideshow or wander aimlessly looking at the world in any sort of creative profession, I will support him with all of my being – unless the circus involves animals, or the profession involves weird dolls like marionettes or ventriloquism.

* I’ve been email pen pals with my friend Craig for almost four years.

* Sometimes I still want big boobs, but just for the day, so I could wear tube tops now and then.

* Nathaniel Hawthorne sucks.

* I loved that show The Simple Life.

* Simultaneously, I wish guns had never been invented and I LOVE LOVE LOVE shooting. I’m good at it, too.

* I like James Franco, I think he has a lust for life in the spirit of that Iggy Pop song.

* I think food and eating and all that is an inconvenient hassle, even though I’m not supposed to say that stuff because I’m skinny and our culture says I’m supposed to have suffered and worked for skinniness. In reality I just don’t eat every much, and have always wished, since I first saw the Jetsons, that they made food/vitamin meal replacement capsule things.

* My kid is the best kid, and I hope he always likes me.

* Once when I was like 9 or 10 I licked a cookie so no one else would eat it, and my mother still tells that anecdote to every human being every chance she gets, and it’s one of the only times I feel what True Rage is like, and think I could kill another human being.

* But okay yeah one time I did try to hit someone with a truck but they totally deserved it.

* My husband is the first and only person I ever dated that I already liked, going into the relationship, before that I just sort of fell into relationships where I thought I had the upper hand.

* I hit my head a lot. A LOT. Like bottoms of cabinet doors, corners of table or chairs, undersides of porch swings, window sills, door knobs, etc. I don’t tell people unless there’s blood involved or I get caught because I’ve greyed out; I just can’t see how adding x-Ray radiation will help.

* If I could write one story as eloquent as any John Prine song, I think my stomach and soul would ease off me a little, and I could die happy.

* If I could switch bodies/physical emodiments with any human it would be Rose Byrne, I think she’s perfect.

* I don’t find the idea of death to be particularly disturbing or scary.

* Raw meat is disgusting. I think I like crock pots just so I don’t have to cut chicken.

* I have an arsenal of embarrassing stories that I tell (hair on fire in church, stood in the corner when I was 16 in history class) so I don’t have to tell the real ones.

* Alone in the car I have all the arguments with people, loudly, that I don’t allow myself to have in real life, just to get it all out of my system.

* Most of the time I believe in ghosts. The times I don’t, I want to believe…. 🙂

* I considered going back throguh this post and editing it for length and to make it more funny and less offensive here and there, but didn’t. I don’t think there’s anything really offensive in it. And so what it’s long? It’s my damned brain dump.

 

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Happy 5 Year Anniversary, My Love!!

busy, busy… and inspirational!!

WOOOO!!! Interviewed by a zombie for Craig Wallwork’s blog, which should with any luck go up about the same time this weekend as the Booked podcast i guest-hosted (i have tourette’s, they’re saints to let me anywhere near that podcast) with Chris Deal for Craig’s story ‘Revenge of the Zombie Pussy Eaters’ and general horror topics. chris is so damned smart about that stuff – screw you, chris, you hear me?? i rambled about frickin’ ted nugent and false penises on female hyenas, and pretty much everything you said was insightful and funny. yeah, i’m calling you out right here on this blog no one reads, chris deal!!

so anyway. this weekend both of those things should be up. links forthcoing, also to be found in their respective homes in the blogroll list to the right ->

only two soccer games left. i love the kids. they’re so awesome. i’m actually considering doing this again in the spring. i’m vicariously living their happiness just running and jumping and kicking and getting SNACKS!

rehearsal every night the rest of this week and all next week (except soccer night). i’m trying. my big fear is to be the ‘okay’ one – like, not the one that ruins it, but the one that ‘didn’t ruin it’ – but just barely. like keanu in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. please god don’t let me be keanu….

Friday is our five year wedding anniversary. FIVE FRICKIN’ YEARS! i forgot that we made this joke agreement to go on five year contracts and re-evaluate if we’d go another five at each interval. i sure hope we sign on for another five, because i can’t hold a job. only thing i’m good at is teaching my kid stuff and rambling and… well, to be honest i could always be a hooker.

in conclusion, i would like to say, don’t let anyone tell you that rambling like an idiot about zombies won’t get you anywhere. because it can. believe in yourself, damnit.

this is my inspirational post. i feel pretty good about it.