Listening to:
Rebranding. Am I really, though?
I've always been a creepy sombitch. As a big guy, not just as an old fat man, but as a young, broad-shouldered guy with dark eyes and a thick dark brow and constant male version of RBF, I've always had to go out of my way to not appear threatening or intimidating to strangers. If that wasn't a type for some women, I would have had no dating life! I post a dark picture of myself on social media and my wife gets all aflutter, and I'm here for it. As a writer, horror has always been a part of everything I've ever written. I've always called The Black Crusade dark fantasy, but with the caveat that, for me, dark fantasy means horror with a fantasy setting and tropes. Freaktown is urban fantasy, but there is horror all over it. All my short fiction is horror or it's dominated by horror elements. Saying that I'm rebranding as horror is really sort of silly. I think what it really means is that I'm no longer trying to avoid scaring the normies. This decision was floating round in my head for a year before DJ Cooper of The Wordpeddler Society asked me to take the lead in her horror writing group. A year after the tragic passing of the group's founder, the Written Horror group was floundering, just another group whose members remain but have little to nothing to do with. That sealed the deal for me to return to my horror roots. And, so, the Facebook group Dark Fiction Addiction was born. It's a name I've been considering for some time. I can't express how at home I feel in the horror writing community. Let's just say my creepiness was not well-received in the fantasy community. Here, I don't have to explain myself nor do I have to worry about putting the demons and gross bits into a storytelling context when discussing my work. These are my people, and they already understand that just because I write horror, it doesn't mean I'm a psycho. Here's the cool part of Dark Fiction Addiction. I've been mentoring, connecting, and boosting authors since ye ole Myspace days. The goal of The Wordpeddler Society is to boost indie authors in various genres and bring their stories to the readers that are dying for original stories unrestrained by the unartful corporate hands. With Dark Fiction Addiction, we live by the idea that a rising tide lifts all sails, even the tattered, decayed, black sails of the ghost ship Nevermore, and her captain, the spectral lady, Lenore.
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