Paul’s latest Hellnotes editorial has been posted. You can find it right here:
Hellnotes Editorial
While you’re visiting over there, be sure to subscribe to the newsfeed, so you won’t miss any of the horror news, updates, reviews and other information being posted around the clock!
As we anticipate (finally) getting back on a regular schedule around here, Paul has unveiled a new project — a Web site that will focus on his independent projects and a variety of other topics, some of which may not quite fit under the umbrella here at olsonandsilva.com. Despite the occasional detour or outright divergence, that site should complement this one quite nicely as time goes by.
Now that the dust has begun to settle a bit, we probably owe you an explanation of what happened here.
Apparently, there was some sort of large-scale natural disaster that none of us heard about on CNN — a huge fire, a flood, an earthquake, at attack of locusts, frogs raining from the sky, or the arrival of pale horsemen on pale horses. Something like that must have happened, because the company that formerly hosted this site (as well as Hellnotes, Dave’s personal site and many other Web sites that he administers) simply vanished off the face of the earth a few weeks ago. This was a seemingly reputable firm that had never given us a moment’s trouble or cause for concern, so you see, it must have been something of strange and biblical proportions that caused them to disappear overnight, with no notice, no explanation, and no response to our queries.
At first, we didn’t think much of the “service outage.” About six weeks ago, the whole system had gone down for a couple of days, presumably for some technical problem or other. It seemed likely that the same thing was happening again, and we expected everything to be back to normal in a day or two. But then two days stretched to three, then to seven, then to ten, and with no response from the hosting company, it became clear that we’d have to make a move.
Which is precisely what we have done.
Set up with a new host, we then faced the daunting task of rebuilding the site. What should have been just a minor nuisance, a boring busywork sort of task, soon turned into a major headache, when it became clear that neither of us had a complete local backup of what was posted here before.
I know … I know. You can say it. You can call us every name in the book. It’s true. We were idiots. And we’ve learned our lessons, believe me. From this day hence, we will always — always — keep local copies of our Web sites. Did I say always? Because that’s exactly what I meant. Daily backups. Local copies. Always.
Fortunately, the story has a happy ending. I was eventually able to salvage all the old material in several different ways (one of them quite mysterious, even miraculous), which brings us to where we are today — in rebuilding mode.
As of now, just the biography and FAQ pages have been reposted, but as I said below, the rest will be gradually reappearing over the next week or so. That includes all of the exclusive material and all of the old posts. There’s a fair amount of formatting involved, so it’s relatively time-consuming, but when I start getting frustrated, I remind myself that the problems here are nothing like what Dave is facing at Hellnotes, where hundreds of posts need to be put back up. We’re all thinking of you, Dave, we really are. Now get back to work!
Anyway, that’s our story in a nutshell. There may be more to tell someday, including the fairly inexplicable way I was able to capture some of that old material. But for now, let me just say thanks for your patience and your support. It means a lot, and we appreciate it.
Yes, the site’s a little empty right now. Wait … did I say “a little empty?” It’s actually completely empty, as in desolate, barren, devoid of all life.
We’ve had a few technical problems, but they’re being ironed out even as I write this. Over the next week or two, you should start seeing all the old content reappear, including posts, links, exclusive material, etc.
As the title says, please stand by. All should be back to normal — or what passes for normal around these parts — soon.
I’m a bit late coming to this one. It’s been around a while, and most voracious readers probably encountered it long ago. But on the off chance that some of you have not yet discovered Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s The Shadow of the Wind, I urge you to track it down today.
I honestly can’t say enough good things about this novel, but let me try to at least say a few:
The Shadow of the Wind is a long, dark, densely-plotted, sometimes horrific, often thrilling, frequently humorous and overall enchanting treasure house of a novel. It’s a love letter to books and literature, writing, thinking, and ultimately, a love letter to love itself. It is overstuffed with both high ideas and gothic cliches, and seems written with the belief that a plot twist is no good unless it leads to at least a dozen more. It’s a reminder of why we read, why we write, why we crave stories in our lives … and a reminder that a good novel should be like life itself, not a rocket ride on a straight line, designed to get us from A to Z as quickly as possible, but a winding, mysterious journey.
It’s impossible to summarize this book without A) giving too much away, B) ruining the fun, or C) sounding utterly ridiculous. But I can tell you that The Shadow of the Wind is filled with dark mysteries, baffling quests, tense pursuits, great heroes, terrific villains, doomed romances, and even a genuinely creepy “haunted house.” Above all, it has plot to spare, and Zafon spins it all out like a master.
After a break of slightly more than four years, I’m once again going to be writing editorials for Hellnotes.
Although I once swore I’d never again take on that kind of obligation, things are a bit different this time, with a looser structure and a much more flexible deadline. In other words, I can write an editorial if and when I feel like it, as often or as little as I like; who can pass up an offer like that?
In all honesty, I’m looking forward to this project. My deep, dark secret is that I always enjoyed doing the Hellnotes editorials. The stress level and brain-drain were fairly severe, but the process was challenging, the work often pleasant and the feedback gratifying. When Dave and I first passed on the reins of the newsletter in 2002, it was an immense relief not to have that editorial shadow hanging over my head … but I kind of missed it, too.
It’s been exciting to see the success of Hellnotes in its latest version (using the popular if somewhat silly system of numbering everything in life as if it were software, I make this out to be Hellnotes 6.0 — maybe 7.0 if you count Dave’s original “Hellnotes” column in The Horror Show). It will be fun to be part of that madness once more.
My first column was posted yesterday. It doesn’t say much — it’s more of a mood-setter than anything — but if you’re interested, you can find it here.
It’s been a week since the death of Charles L. Grant, and I can’t shake the feeling — that hollow, floating feeling in the pit of my stomach. This is what it feels like when one of your heroes dies.
Over the years, I only had a few chances to work with Charlie. He was a supporter of my old magazine, Horrorstruck. He provided a pair of terrific tales for Post Mortem and Dead End. He offered gentle, thoughtful and constructive rejections every time I tried to sell him something. (He also was generous about suggesting alternative markets for a particular story, which shows just what kind of editor he was, although I probably didn’t appreciate it enough at the time. I didn’t want to see my work in this anthology or that magazine. I wanted to reach my own personal holy grail. I wanted to be good enough to have a story in Shadows, dammit.)
As you can see, Charlie and I weren’t exactly “colleagues.” More like ships that kept passing in the night, often within sighting distance, occasionally within hailing distance. But I still felt closer to him than almost anyone else in the field, simply because I idolized him so much.
When I attended my first World Fantasy Convention (WFC 5, Providence, 1979), I was only marginally familiar with Charlie’s work, but that all changed over the course of that magic weekend. After watching him on several panels, chatting briefly with him during the autograph party and again in the dealers’ room, buying everything of his I could lay my hands on and gobbling down part of a novel and several short stories … well, let’s just say that by the time I left the east coast and flew back to Michigan, I had a new role model. I spent the next several weeks immersed in the work of Charles L. Grant and never looked back.
It was a pivotal time in the life of a young writer who was just then taking the first tentative steps toward a career, and Charlie became a brilliant signpost on that winding, mysterious path.
He was the kind of writer I wanted to be — not insanely, stratospherically successful, but someone who earned a living with his craft, who seemed to find real joy in doing the work, who always took that work seriously, who understood the field and truly believed in it, who saw value in the genre and eloquently expressed his feelings about it, who charted his own course in defiance of trends, who switched back and forth from writer to editor with apparent ease, who was helpful and kind and generous, and who, along the way, earned the sincere respect of his peers. Wow, I thought. If I could do all of that, I would be a happy man indeed.
Did I achieve the goal? No. But as I’ve told a few other people this week, I only missed the mark because what I wanted to achieve was nearly impossible. Charlie had set a standard that was simply too high to reach.
I don’t know how much longer I’ll feel this sensation of loss, this little black hole in my spirit, this … this emptiness. A long time, I’m sure. Perhaps forever. That’s what happens when a piece of you suddenly goes away, when the signpost you relied on vanishes.
I’m grateful, of course, that I still have Charlie in my library, three or four long shelves worth of Charlie, dozens and dozens of books to touch, take down, reread, marvel over, and reread again. But right now, that seems like cold, thin comfort. It’s not enough, not nearly enough.
This is what it feels like when one of your heroes dies.
Things have been pretty quiet around here lately — so quiet, in fact, that some of you may have been wondering if we fell off the face of the earth. Not quite. But March did turn out to be a pretty treacherous month, with both of us experiencing bad crashes.
In Dave’s case, it was a computer crash. I don’t know all the details, but I know it was horrible. Shortly after it happened, I could see a plume of smoke snaking upward from the western horizon, and for a few weeks afterwards, during those quiet hours right before sunrise, if I cocked my head just right and held my breath, I could hear some very faint sobs coming from the direction of Las Vegas. I’m not sure if he’ll ever recover enough to tell the entire tale, but he does spill a few juicy tidbits here.
In my case, the crash was a physical one — one tiny misstep in my driveway, in the dark, followed by weeks of misery. It was such an odd experience, that fall. There was a split second where I thought I caught my balance, where I actually said to myself, “whew, that was close!” But of course it wasn’t close at all. Even as I was thinking how lucky I was to have saved myself, how fortunate I was to be blessed with an extraordinary sense of balance, I was already going down, in agonizingly slow slow-motion. Then I hit the concrete. I’ll spare you the rest of the gory details. Let’s just say it’s been two weeks and I’m still hurting. It’s going to be several more weeks, at least, before I can use my right hand (my writing hand, naturally) without wincing, or take a full deep breath that isn’t accompanied by a pathetic little whimper of pain.
On the bright side, spring has finally arrived here in the great white north and numerous writing projects are beckoning. I’m looking forward with childlike glee to the e-serial referred to below, while Dave and I are getting ready to take a good, hard look at a joint project that … well, I’m not at liberty to say anything about that yet.
Stay tuned …
This is not a formal announcement — more of an early warning, I guess.
Starting later this spring, perhaps around mid-May, I’m going to be distributing a previously-unpublished novel to members of our mailing list. The free e-serial will be sent out on a fairly regular schedule, probably a couple of times a week, to every subscriber. The novel is big and complex, so the journey promises to be a long and interesting one. At the same time, I’ll be using this space to blog a bit about the book and its creation, which I hope will add another level to the experience.
What can you do?
Well, for starters, keep watching this spot for the official announcement and updates.
Also, if you haven’t already signed up for our mailing list, why not do it right now? You’ll immediately get access to the “classic” stories Dave and I are giving away, get important news from time to time, and be assured of receiving every single installment of the novel.
Finally, if you know of anyone else who would be interested, send them a link and tell them to sign up, too. It’s always nice to have your friends along when embarking on a new adventure!
Couldn’t let this one pass …
LONDON (Reuters) - The living dead beat rhino horn to be named Oddest Book Title of the Year.
Bookseller magazine gave the award Friday to a self-help book on being haunted entitled People Who Don’t Know They’re Dead: How They Attach Themselves to Unsuspecting Bystanders and What to Do About It.
I recently did something I’d never done before. I read an entire novel in e-book format. I know I’m late to the party. Way late. Welcome to the 1990s, and all of that. But quite honestly, despite thousands of attempts over the years, I’ve never developed the mental muscles needed to become a good “screen reader.” I’m one of those guys who has to print out everything I write before I can proofread and edit it. I download stories from the Web and immediately print them out, too. Sometimes, I even print long Web pages, so I can hold the information in my hot little hands. It’s not that I don’t try reading on screen. It’s just that I’m no good at it. No matter what I do, no matter how intently I focus, I tend to get restless and impatient after just a few minutes. I start to squirm. And pretty soon I’m scrolling faster and faster, skimming more than reading.
Then, about six weeks ago, I decided to buy a copy of Stephen King’s The Cell for my Palm. The book was already on its way from my preferred online retailer (I live in the wilderness, remember). I could have simply waited for it to arrive, but I wanted to get a head start. I figured I’d purchase the e-book, play around with it a bit, and read at least some of it before the hardcopy showed up in my mailbox.
As luck would have it, I picked the perfect time to do it. I had a lot of meetings that week and found myself spending way too much time just sitting around, waiting for board members to assemble, gavels to fall and proceedings to begin. In the past, I would have filled that time by staring aimlessly at the ceiling, chatting idly with other audience members or gazing with dismay at my growing to-do list. Suddenly I could pass the time a whole new way, by firing up the Palm and skipping right past the jam-packed date book, reading 20 or 30 pages of The Cell instead. I not only found it convenient, comfortable and useful, it was actually kind of fun, and much to my surprise, I finished the entire e-book two days before the novel turned up in the mail.
Will I do it again someday? Maybe. I don’t think I’ll ever get addicted to screen reading, and I certainly won’t opt for e-books over ink-and-paper or even audio, but I won’t automatically dismiss them, either.
So, go ahead. Tell me how out of date I am. Call me a Luddite. I can take it. But give me some credit for persistence, too, for trying again and again until I finally got it. And don’t be surprised if the next time you see me, I’m squinting at my Palm with a big grin on my face. Playing Tetris? Maybe … or maybe just catching up with the rest of the world at last.
If you haven’t read part one yet, scroll down. Then come back up here for the rest.
P.W. Sinclair’s Horrorstruck columns never drew many comments, but there were a few kind words here and there, which was nice. I had never expected those backpage essays to generate lots of attention. They were there to do a job, to be a little palate cleanser after a heavy meal, and at that I guess they mostly succeeded.
In the beginning, there were only three people who knew that I was P.W. I knew, of course. So did my wife. So did Dave Silva. But what happened as time went by? Did anyone else ever catch on? To the best of my knowledge, just one person – a good friend and Horrorstruck columnist (Hi, Shelia!) who revealed her suspicions in a brief note. “It’s funny how P.W. Sinclair sounds a lot like you do in your letters,” she wrote. And then the coup de grace: “I wonder what P.W. stands for? Pseudonymous Writer, perhaps?”
I was impressed with her deduction skills and her sense of humor. Maybe she should have been writing the magazine’s back page. I was also amused that she’d given me credit for being more clever than I was. I liked the idea of P.W. standing for “Pseudonymous Writer,” but hadn’t been sharp enough to think of it myself. For all I knew, the initials could have stood for Pendergast Wainwright or Psychological Warrior or Piggly Wiggly.
P.W. might have vanished along with Horrorstruck if I hadn’t made the unusual decision to use the penname on “Getting Back,” my contribution to the Post Mortem anthology that Dave and I were putting together. To this day, I can’t say with any real certainty why I did that. I was really proud of the story, and still am satisfied with it today, so it’s not as if I was trying to hide the authorship of a substandard work. Still, there was almost certainly a degree of hiding involved, since I was feeling a bit shy about putting my name on the cover of the book and on one of the longest stories inside. I also enjoyed the thought of people wondering who P.W. Sinclair was – the only writer in the anthology who didn’t come with any sort of “name” or reputation. And finally, there was some ego involved. At the time, my career was starting to take off, and I think I decided, way back in some dark recess of my mind, that it might be helpful some day to have a pseudonym ready to go, with an established name and a list of credits, all set to use when I had two stories appearing in the same issue of a magazine or four new books coming out in the same month. I was, in effect, trying to give P.W. a leg up in the business while preparing for my own eventual superstardom. I know. Go ahead. Laugh now. It’s all right.
As it turned out, the name P.W. Sinclair never appeared on another piece of writing. After Post Mortem came out, he simply disappeared from the radar screen, vanishing just as quickly as he’d been born on that day I needed a Horrorstruck column and couldn’t find anyone to write it.
If I had it to do over again, I’m sure I’d put my real name on “Getting Back.” If the story is ever republished somewhere, I will use my real name. In the meantime, subscribers to our mailing list will find both names on the tale. It seems only fitting. It seems fair. I’m happy to share credit with P.W. one last time, thanking him for the thankless services he provided me, and I hope you’ll think of him kindly as you read his words.
First things first. If you haven’t signed up for our mailing list and gotten your free copies of our Post Mortem stories, “Getting Back” and “Brothers,” why not do it right now? Go ahead … I’ll wait.
Okay, you’re back. All signed up for the list? Got the stories? Good.
The release of “Getting Back” to list members marks a first for me: the first time I’m officially revealing that I was P.W. Sinclair, under whose name that story appeared in Post Mortem. Now, I understand this isn’t exactly earthshaking news. It’s not as if there were hundreds of people, or even dozens, or (let’s be honest) even one, spending sleepless nights wondering about P.W. Sinclair’s true identity. But I still want to explain who P.W. was and how he came to be.
I invented P.W. many years ago, when I was publishing my magazine, Horrorstruck. He was born of necessity. From the very first days of the magazine, I had wanted to conclude each issue with a lighthearted backpage column – not humor, necessarily, but something a little lighter and fluffier for loyal readers who had just worked their way through 50 or 60 pages of horror analysis, news, critiques, and articles about the hardships of being a freelance writer. The problem was, I couldn’t find anyone willing to take on the task. I had plenty of people who wanted to write for me, but they all wanted to be Tom Monteleone, whose MAFIA columns were making waves and drawing lots of attention. I tried to explain. I said, “I already have a Tom Monteleone in the magazine, and as luck would have it, he’s not just a Tom Monteleone, he’s the Tom Monteleone. I don’t need another one.” To no avail. Everyone wanted to be the next disseminator of controversial opinions. Nobody wanted to write a few hundred words of goofiness to wrap up each issue of the magazine.
So I did it myself.
As for the decision to use a pseudonym … I honestly didn’t think about it very much. I just did it. Part of it, I suppose, was wanting to avoid yet another page of Paul F. Olson in a magazine that already had a lot of Paul F. Olson. Part of it may have been embarrassment or self-protection: wanting to hide behind another identity in case my attempts at humor fell flat, as they sometimes (often?) did.
I chose the name quickly and easily. In an early unpublished novel, written just after high school, I had a character named Louis St. Onge, a DJ who went by the radio name Pat Sinclair. I thought about that novel one day, and decided it would be fun to fall back on that particular character – an inside joke that was so far inside I was the only person in the world to know about it. For some reason, “Pat” seemed a little too definitive for Horrorstruck, so I added a bit of mystery by using initials instead, and P.W. Sinclair was born.
To be continued …
