I want to tell you about some friends of mine.

They’re all writerly types. That’s the first thing that brought us all together, you see. We share a passion for the printed page; for constructing fantastic worlds with mere sentences, and drawing pictures not with paints and brushes but with words.

This particular writerly friends adventure all started with Vlad V.

Vlad writes all sorts of tales—horror novels and novellas, science fiction, and children’s fantasy books. Vlad had this (not entirely unheard of) idea to start a writers group, in which he and his writing buddies would run stories by each other, providing critique and feedback to improve their fiction. In his author travels, he started collecting his group: Ursula Wong, a women’s fiction writer with a technical mind yet an ability to sketch a scene with beautiful prose, and she also had an eagerness to learn more about the craft; David Daniel, an established fiction author with MacMillan/St. Martin’s Press, who knew the writing world was transforming and wanted to keep up with the changes (plus, he so enjoyed a rousing discussion on things like writing on notepads versus using a word processor); Rob Smales, a horror writer and novice editor who could rattle off ideas faster than the rest of us could write them down; and me, a horror writer/humor blogger/copy editor who, much like Vlad, appreciates the little things in life, like five-cheese-and-bacon macaroni and cheese. (Listen, I know it's important to have friends that like to talk about the same things you do, but it also helps if they like to eat the same things, too.)

Here’s one of the nice things about Vlad: he dreams big. He took a look at all of us: a technically minded engineer-turned-writer; an established author looking to revamp his approach to publishing and marketing; an editor-in-training with ideas; a horror writer/humor blogger who earned her living as a copy editor. Vlad himself was learning more about content editing, website design and promotion, and, like all of us, constantly striving to improve his craft of writing. He looked at our group and thought: Wow. We are all remarkably talented and strikingly attractive. Then: we can be more.

Vlad’s train of thought went something like this: if we pool all of our talents, share ideas, promote each other, and work hard to create the best, most polished stories we can, success will follow. He asked us all to roll up our sleeves, work together, and apply our individual skills for the good of the group. We could write stories and polish and edit and rewrite and collaborate and revise and edit more and . . . well, produce some darn fine tales. Soon, we were creating marketing plans and designing logos and contributing blog content and above all, most importantly, writing stories. Because at our core, amid all of this, is the passion to write.

We’ve published two group anthologies so far (Insanity Tales and Insanity Tales II: The Sense of Fear) and just launched our website (www.thestoryside.com). You’ll notice that going forward, I’ll have links to The Storyside blog posts at the end of my blog each week. We have plans and ideas and dreams and goals for the upcoming year, and the year after that. And the best part is, we get to get together every six weeks or so to talk about our all of these things . . . and inevitably, about the joy of writing.

And yes, we look strikingly attractive doing it. Check us out, won’t you?   
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This week's golden nuggets from The Storyside (click on the descriptions below to be taken magically to the website blog entry!):
Fabulous Free Fiction: "The Visit" by Rob Smales
"How I Was Inspired by a Homicidal Cannibal" by Stacey Longo (hey, that's me!)
Writing Advice: "Adverbs Aren't Your Friends" by Vlad V.

I do a lot of Halloween attractions. I’m a horror writer, after all, so I feel like I’m obligated to check out these haunted houses and spooky spectacles for you.

Here are some of my favorites:

1.     Trail of Terror, Wallingford, CT—We did the trail a few years ago with my sister-in-law and brother-in-law. The line was long, but there were zombies doing the “Thriller” dance to entertain us as we waited. The power went out (really—it wasn’t meant to be part of the experience) when we were about a third of the way through. We were trapped in the dark for the better part of an hour. The truly terrifying part was how badly I needed to pee. However, the best moment of the Trail of Terror was at the bathroom facilities afterwards. Jason’s sister Joy waited until her brother was in the porta-potty, then started banging on the port-a-john walls and screaming. I nearly wet my pants from laughing so hard. Maybe you had to be there. But I’d highly recommend doing this attraction with my sister-in-law.

2.     Eastern State Penitentiary, Philadelphia, PA—This prison is absolutely worth touring during the day, and I do suggest you do the audio tour with Steve Buscemi narrating. At night in the fall, they turn it into a fabulous haunted attraction. The actors are spooky, completely into their roles, and there are seven different sections of the prison to walk through. So much fun!

3.     Six Flags Fright Fest, nationwide (I went to Agawam, MA)—I won’t lie: I’ve had better. But you have to hand it to Six Flags: they try. During the day, they have “Monstertainment” in the form of performing vampires, ghouls, and mummies; at night, they open up the Wicked Woods and Zombie’s Revenge. It’s fun, though repetitive—Area 51 hasn’t changed much from year to year, and throwing some cobwebs on the Buzzsaw doesn’t really make it more terrifying. But the Demon District and Midnight Mansion are fun. As with everything at Six Flags, their main goal is to part you from your money: many attractions require an additional fee.

4.     My cousin Lori’s house, Columbia, CT—Okay, so this isn’t open to the public, but she and her husband Frank delight in, and I quote, “scaring the living crap out of the neighborhood kids.” She had a ghastly pumpkin-head scarecrow on the lawn one year, and at least three kids pooped themselves when it moved. Hee hee! Too bad you can’t visit her.

5.     Universal Studios Halloween Horror Nights, Orlando, FL—If you want to do Halloween right, you have to visit Universal during Horror Nights. They change over nine different attractions to make them haunted, and I’m not talking about some cheap nylon cobwebs. These people have the budget to change the whole freaking ride to make it so terrifying, you will be filling your shorts like the kids who live on my cousin Lori’s street. They think of everything, even shutting off the bulbs on the drive-in theater so the sign reads DIE-IN. Absolutely the pinnacle of Halloween fun.

So there you have it: my top picks in Halloween horror attractions. Apparently, for me, Halloween means soiling yourself repeatedly. If you can’t afford the trip to Orlando this October, I highly recommend trekking over to Philly. The prison’s awesome, the food is good, and they also do a haunted downtown tour of the city at night.

You do what you must to get your scare on. I’m going to Lori’s house.

I’m pretty sure, given my lifelong love affair for all things Duran Duran, that it’s no secret I grew up in the 1980s. It was a simpler, more fluorescent time then. So many things happened that influenced who Gen Xers are today. I’m not talking about the fall of the Berlin Wall, or Reaganomics, or the development of the modern Internet. I’m talking about the fine selection of horror films being produced for consumption by young, impressionable minds during that time period. Here are some valuable life lessons we all learned from those instructive films:

1. To kill a leprechaun, you must slingshot a four-leaf clover down his gullet. However, don’t expect him to stay dead. He’ll be back, at least five more times, and he wants his gold.

2. Don’t build your home on a Native American burial ground. Also, stuffed clowns are a terrible birthday gift idea. You might as well put out a doormat that reads POLTERGEISTS WELCOME HERE.

3. Speaking of bad birthday gifts, put that Good Guy doll right back on the shelf. You can’t be sure the spirit of a serial killer doesn’t possess that thing. Need a good gift? That puppet master down the road had some cool toys in his window.

4. To kill a bloodthirsty, machete-wielding murderer in a hockey mask, you need to put an axe through his head, kill him with his own machete, chain him to the bottom of the lake where he initially drowned, drag him back to the bottom of the lake again after he escapes, blow him up with a grenade, stab him with a mystical dagger, freeze him in cryonic suspension, or eject him into space. Of course, he’ll still come back. You thought the leprechaun was bad? He was child’s play compared to this guy!

5. Things to avoid: April Fool’s Day, prom night, graduation day, sleepaway camp, trolls, chopping malls, Motel Hell, and critters.

6. Speaking of malls: if there’s a zombie apocalypse happening all around you, do not go to the mall. Also not recommended: living in an underground military bunker where a commander whose mental state is questionable at best is conducting experiments on zombies; living near a cemetery.

7.  If your dad is offered a job as caretaker for the winter at a Colorado hotel, try to talk him out of it. If he’s truly taken a shine to the place, maybe you can live with friends for the winter or something. I’m sure Isaac and Malachai have room.

8. To fight vampires, you need stakes, holy water, and two Coreys. Though really, why fight them? If Keifer Sutherland and Jason Patric taught us nothing else, they did prove that vampires are sexy.

9. When buying a home, maybe avoid Elm Street. You thought the hockey mask guy was hard to kill? Ha! The only way to avoid Freddy Krueger is to take hypnocil and move the hell away from Elm Street. What about that nice split-level ranch in Haddonfield?

 10. Anything can be used as a murder weapon. Paper clips, horsehead bookends, chalkboard erasers, an eggplant . . . the possibilities are endless.

Kids today have no idea how hard it was to survive an ’80s horror movie. These days, they think if something’s not working for them, they can just reboot it. 

Pinheads.

I’m a planner. I like to have everything mapped out ahead of time, whether it’s my five-year career plan or my approach to the weekend laundry. So while all of you have been daydreaming your time away, I’ve been diagramming my plan for the zombie apocalypse. Because I think we can all agree that the zombie apocalypse is not an if scenario, but a when.

The three most important things to consider during the zombie apocalypse are as follows:

1. Where will I live?

2. What will I eat?

3. What will be my weapon of choice?

For me, living and eating go hand-in-hand. The basics of what I’ll need for food consist of protein, fruits/veggies, and fresh water. (Bet you thought I was going to say Double Stuf Oreos there. The world has ended. We’re going to have to make sacrifices, friends.) This is why I’m going to move to North Port, Florida during the zombie apocalypse. There’s a warm mineral spring there for fresh water, it’s near the ocean so I can fish, and there should be plenty of orange groves for fruit. I figure I can find a nice, gated retirement community, kill all the old-people zombies living there, and take it over. How will I get there, you ask? I’ve already designed my transportation. I call it a Spike Bike (patent pending). I’ll just ride down, and any zombies that cross my path along the way will be impaled on my front bike fender.

Of course, for the first year of the apocalypse, I can supplement my fish/orange/mineral water diet with supplies plundered from the grocery store. This will give me time to plant my cacao and coffee bean trees. As I said, some sacrifices will have to be made, but I’m not giving up my coffee or chocolate. We don’t have to turn into heathens, after all.

All that I have to worry about from there is my zombie-killing weapon. I love Daryl Dixon on The Walking Dead as much as the next gal, but a crossbow just isn’t efficient. He’d have to constantly be on the lookout for more ammunition. This is why I recommend a handheld, pointy instrument. Michonne’s choice of a katana sword makes a lot more sense to me. It’s sharp, it provides a bit of distance between her and the zombie, and it lops off heads like a hot knife through butter. However, why not take it one step further? Maybe increase the distance between your brains and the attacking zombie? This is why I’ll be spearing the undead with a giant whaling harpoon. Sure, it’s heavy and maybe awkward to lug around, but if it can kill a whale, surely it can take out a zombie or two.

Uh-oh. I just heard on the radio that toxic waste was discovered leaking into the East River. I’m sure the rest of you will feel pretty foolish in a few weeks. I’m going to grab my fishing pole and pedal off to North Port—see ya!

It’s tick season again, and if you’re like me, you hate those bloodthirsty little parasites (who doesn't?). Luckily for you, gentle reader, I’ve had quite a bit of experience in removing ticks, having grown up on a farm with lots of long grass around (we called it “hay”) and from living in the very state that holds the town for which Lyme disease was named. I have more ticks than dandelions in my back yard. When those vampiric goons dig in, here’s what you need to do to get rid of them:

1.     Get out the peanut butter. There’s a popular old wives’ tale that says if you put peanut butter over a tick, the peanut butter will start to smother the little bugger, and he’ll release his lockjaw bite on your flesh. This is a total lie. The peanut butter is for the snack you’ll want before this is over.

2.     Find a pair of needle-tip tweezers. Nothing but needle-tip will do. I can’t stress this enough. Regular tweezers will cause you to rip off the tick’s abdomen, leaving its filthy, diseased head still firmly burrowed under your skin. Tick heads are infinitely more difficult to remove than whole ticks.

3.     Place the tips of the tweezers as close to your skin and the tick’s hellspawn pincers as possible, squeeze, and gently start pulling. Slowly, slooowly . . . pop! What the—didn’t I TELL you not to use regular tweezers? Now you’ve got a tick belly leaking your freshly sucked blood all over the place, and a half a tick still stuck in you. What happens next is of your own making, pal!

4.     Start sharpening the filleting knife. You’ve got a tick head that’s got to come out, my friend, and the only way to do that is to cut it out. Regretting not splurging on the needle-tip tweezers now, aren’t you?

5.     Using your crappy regular tweezers, pull on the tick head hard enough to pull your skin away from your body. I know it’s gross. Don’t say I didn’t warn you!

6.     Use the filleting knife to gently saw away at the two points where the tick pincers have a death-lock grip on your skin. Luckily, I’ve found that the person with the tick often passes out from the pain at some point during the process, which makes it easier to saw.

7.     The heck with it. When “gentle” fails to get you very far, just start hacking away. You’re going to wind up with a hole in your skin anyway, might as well gouge it out yourself. Continue to do this until the chunk of skin with the tick head still embedded separates from your body.

8.     Stuff the gaping, bleeding hole that remains with gauze. Don’t use cotton. Hey! You saw what happened when you ignored my tweezers advice, didn’t you? Put that cotton ball down!

9.     Collect the tick abdomen and tick head (with your flesh still attached) and bring it to the doctor. Put it in a safe container, like an old pill bottle. Don’t worry, you’ll get a new pill bottle when the doctor prescribes antibiotics for you.

10. Enjoy a spoonful of peanut butter. Go ahead. You’ve earned it, and you’ll have a battle scar for the rest of your life to show for it.

If you’d known me, say, back in fifth grade, you probably wouldn’t have thought I’d be writing horror these days. My main interests were Duran Duran and cats. So how did I wind up utterly fascinated with people who do really bad things?

My Geraldo moment came in 1988. Literally. This was the year Geraldo interviewed Charles Manson, and my passion for the macabre was born. I’ll admit that prior to this, I was primed for an interest in all things dark and dreary. I loved reading Edgar Allan Poe. And then there was my overactive imagination. It’s always been a bit warped. When the windows would rattle during a storm, for instance, my first thought wasn’t “wind.” It was “poltergeist.” So when I learned that the things that go bump in the night might not just be the creaks of an old house settling, but in fact Manson family members, my twisted imagination felt validated. I self-righteously picked up a copy of Helter Skelter, thinking See? Crazy things really do happen. I’m not so nuts for thinking the tree branch outside my window was a giant anaconda. The downside to this revelation, of course, was that after reading Helter Skelter, I slept in the closet for a week. I lived in real terror that Manson would get paroled.

I began consuming nothing but true crime books and Double Stuf™ Oreos. I read about Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, and Ed Gein with the same voracity that my friends were reading about the Sweet Valley High twins. I’m not knocking them, though. I’m pretty sure those books didn’t leave my friends with a lifelong fear of gold VW Beetles, clowns, and men who live with their mothers, respectively. I saw madmen wherever I looked. It was unfortunate for Mike K. that he owned a yellow Volkswagen bug, because when he asked me to the prom, I kneed him in the apple bag and ran away screaming. (You could argue that I was not the only one traumatized for life by my true crime reading habits.)

All of this murder-reading, naturally, kind of bummed me out after a while. There are some real sickos out there. Around this time, I discovered one of the most delightful things about growing up in the ’80s: cheesy horror movies. After reading horrific stories about the worst of humanity, I found that nothing cheered me up quite like watching Freddy Krueger crack jokes as he sliced at people in their dreams. Bad day? Throw on They Live, a fabulous B-horror romp starring Rowdy Roddy Piper cracking jokes, kicking butt, and chewing bubble gum. It felt good to laugh with these guys. Heck, it was a relief.

So when I finally turned my pen to horror back in 2010, the words came easily. I’d read a library’s worth of accounts of people doing bad things. I was primed to write scary stories. Except . . . sometimes, when we think that scratching at the window is a giant anaconda, or Squeaky Fromme, and we snap on the lights and it turns out to be a tree branch, what’s our first reaction? After the danger of a serious cardiac incident has passed? 

We laugh at ourselves, don’t we?

When people dare to complain to me about my stories, the thing I hear most often is that the tone was too light. In the midst of the terrifying chaos, I made them laugh.

It’s a criticism I’m happy to take. Life is short. Life can be scary. You’ve gotta laugh.

On Tuesday, my novel Ordinary Boy will hit bookstores (you can pick it up on Amazon as of today). It’s been a long time coming. About twenty-four years, give or take.

Let me explain. The story behind the book goes back to early 1991, when the news hit the hallways of my high school that two of our former classmates had been murdered by their stepfather. We had something like eight people die my senior year—car accidents, overdoses, the usual teenage fare—and I was getting a little tired of all the dying going on. But there was one detail about this spectacularly awful death that bothered me. According to the high school rumor mill, the boy my age (we’ll call him “K”) had been shot while hiding in his closet.

It was a detail that bothered me for years. So much so that twenty years later, when a paramedic at my old job mentioned his hobby was researching—ancestry, court cases, that kind of thing—the first thing I asked him was if he could find out what had happened to K’s killer. I knew the guy had been caught, but didn’t know much past that.

My paramedic came through. Besides reporting that the murderer had been sentenced to four consecutive life terms, he mentioned one small, monumentally important detail. K hadn’t been hiding in his closet at all. The rumor mill had gotten it wrong.

The weight of the world lifted off my shoulders that day. Wonderful news! I mean, sure, K was still dead, but no longer did he haunt my mind, crouching in the closet, holding his breath, hoping his stepfather’s wrath would pass him by. What a relief! All those years, I thought that poor kid was hiding . . . hmm. You know, that would make an interesting twist in a . . . oh, book, or something.

 So I started outlining a story about a kid growing up in the ’80s, trying to navigate his way through puberty, avoiding the school bully, making a friend and finding a girlfriend. I knew where it was heading. As much as I adored my main character, Curtis Price, his sense of humor and his vulnerability, things would not end well for our friend Curtis.

I didn’t know K well—I knew nothing about his hobbies, his friends, whom he dated, what kind of music he listened to, or what kind of car he drove. I’m certain Curtis resembles him not at all. The town, the details of his life, the neighborhood where he lived, the number of siblings he had, none of these remain the same in Ordinary Boy. But still, that sense of being an ordinary boy in an ordinary New England town who wasn’t really noticed until this one horrible thing happened—that came from K.

I can only hope I did all right by him.

“Reading Stacey Longo's Ordinary Boy is like opening presents on Christmas morning: the excitements of pathos, humor, terror, and surprise keep coming in this touching and relentlessly honest tale of growing up in small-town America. Longo is an original, and Curtis Price, the protagonist and narrator of her novel, is an inspired and wholly believable creation. Ordinary Boy sounds the depths of youth, adolescence, and young adulthood in a voice at once deft and ghostly and heartbreaking. Huck Finn, Nick Adams, Holden Caulfield—they all would've ‘got’ Curtis Price perfectly.” ~ David Daniel, author of Reunion and White Rabbit

Ordinary Boy is out now! You can buy it here: http://tinyurl.com/ordinaryboy

Here's hoping your turkey day was as steeped in tradition as mine. On Thanksgiving Eve, Jason and I like to watch Thankskilling, a fabulous little film about a killer turkey, to put us in the holiday mood. We prefer to spend our Thanksgiving morning bickering (in my defense, he tried to talk to me before my first cup of coffee, which is never, ever, advisable). Then we head over to my mother's house to share our testy attitudes with family.

Every year in Colchester, they have a scarecrow contest on the green in the center of town. Since our bookstore is in Colchester, Jason decided that 1. We would sign up for the contest and 2. I would create the whole thing by myself. Incidentally, we're still not speaking.