Exhaustion, Thy Name is Me

It’s Wednesday evening and I am still recovering from AuthorCon and the associated drives. Don’t be surprised if this is a short one.

The drive from our house to St. Louis is not one that is new to me. We have relatives that live about an hour further down the road who we would visit every year. Of course, back then my job was navigator, not driver.

Ah, the fond memories of using AAA TripTiks (and if you are old enough to know what that is, you might want to take some Motrin for your sore knees).

One thing which has not changed in the decades since we took that family trip was that the drive is BORING! On the plus side, I was able to listed to an entire audiobook on the way down and about 80% of another one on the way back.

Speaking of…

Listening To: In the past week I finished So Thirsty by Rachel Harrison and Tales from the Gas Station: Volume 4 by Jack Townsend. In a nutshell, Harrison does another amazing job of taking a classic horror figure and giving it a modern reimagining while Townsend returns us to the insane world of a gas station that just happens to be the gateway to all manner of insane alternate worlds.

Currently Reading: The instructions of my animatronics.

Current Obsession: Sleep. I need sleep. I’m so tired.

We had a great time in St. Louis. Thank you to everyone who came out to visit, who stopped to talk to us, to our neighbors and other vendors, and especially the amazing people from Scares that Care who set up the convention. In case you have not checked out the links, Scares that Care is an all volunteer organization which raises funds for one person with breast cancer, one family with a sick child, one one person with burns each year.

We spent our downtime working on the newest Erie Tales anthology and on Arkham Institutions. Both should be ready to go very soon.

As of this writing, we are fully funded on Kickstarter and are working on closing the gap on our first stretch goal. If you read this right when it is posted, you will still have enough time to jump in.

(Also — there is still about a day to try and get me from 5th to 1st place in my Face of Horror group).

We had our second meeting with ProAudio today and are moving ahead with the production of the audiobook version of The Pleasure in Pain. We’ll keep you updated on the progress.

As mentioned above, the trip from Michigan to Missouri is one that we made every year when I was a kid. Unlike my relatively comfortable SUV (a/c, adaptive cruise control, bluetooth audiobooks, etc.), our thrip was usually done in a 1976 AMC Hornet with no air and a push button radio. Absolutely the worst place to leave Silly Putty outside of the egg or Brach’s caramels (both of which were done at one time or another). Fortunately, I never had braces for those melted caramels to get stuck in.

My cousins weren’t so lucky.

Again, as mentioned above, this was sooooooo pre-GPS/cell phone. Every year we would go to AAA and get a TripTik. For those who are not familiar with these wonderful little maplets (or who haven’t attended one of my Plotters vs. Pantsers panels), the TripTik was a page by page map (the pages flipped up) which showed the preferred route. It also broke the trip down to little increments. It was always so exciting to flip another page.

Another thing which kept us from going insane as we passed corn field after corn field, was the selection of that trip’s theme song. We would pick one song, usually one that was popular at the time, and that would be The Song of the trip. Whenever that song came on, we wake everyone up, roll down the windows, turn up the radio, and sing along. This mandatory sing along was especially amusing the year the chosen song was the theme from The Rockford Files.

Sorry, I told you this was going to be a short one.