Words of Wrath

Two New Book RELEASES!

2012-01-07T07:00:00.000-08:00

SKINZZ is now available from Thunderstorm Books! http://thunderstormbooks.com/skinzz.php

"At a hardcore concert in Philadelphia, a Punk Rock girl named Miranda is stomped, punched and kicked into a coma. On a subway platform at midnight, an old black woman is burned alive. On a busy street in Camden, New Jersey, in broad daylight, a suspected homosexual is stabbed to death. A sociopath named "Little Davey", a member of a racist skinhead group called "The Unrest", is on a killing spree, eager to send a message to the lesser races … and he is just getting started.

In 1988, Philadelphia's legendary South Street was a battleground. Fights between skinheads and punkrockers were growing more frequent and more violent. Concerts became bloodbaths as the two countercultures clashed. Mack and Jason were soldiers in the battle against "The Unrest". They lived to kick ass. But the fight has just gotten more serious than either of them was prepared for and if they want to survive, they'll have to become even more ruthless, more vicious. They will need to be willing to kill.

From hardcore horror master, Wrath James White, comes a story of hatred, violence and the everlasting bonds of friendship."

My long-awaited story of a UAV pilot with post-traumatic stress disorder, The Reaper, is now available from Bloodletting Books! https://www.darkfuse.com/the-reaper-by-wrath-james-white-signed-limited-hc.html

"Each morning, Marc wakes up, does a few pushups, takes a shower, has breakfast with his wife Isabel and his son and daughter, Luke and Carrie. Then he kisses his family goodbye, drives to Creech Airforce base, sits down at the UAV command center, and goes to war. For twelve hours a day, he flies the MQ-9 Reaper Hunter/Killer UAV and bombs targets in Afghanistan. He watches as the survivors crawl from the wreckage, often with missing limbs and severe burns. Sometimes there’s collateral damage. Sometimes kids get caught in the blast, kids as young as Luke and Carrie. He has seen American soldiers die. He’s watched helpless as entire squadrons were destroyed. Then, at the end of the day, he goes home to his family and tries his best to forget about the horrors of war. He tries to remember to pick up the dry cleaning. He tries to pay attention to the conversation around the dinner table. He tries to stay in the moment and keep the war and his family life separate, but it is getting harder. Everyday the line between The Reaper and the sensitive, god-fearing, family man grows thinner and the war comes ever closer to home."

Goodbye 2011!

2012-01-01T07:06:00.000-08:00

It is easy to say that 2011 sucked and boy did it ever. I hit rock bottom financially in 2011, got arrested for assault in a road rage incident (Don't ask. Still pending.) I was unemployed twice, tore the hell out of my meniscus and had to have knee surgery, and found and then failed to qualify for a house my wife had fallen in love with. Yeah, shit sucked. But there were quite a few bright spots as well.

I made the ballot for the HWA Bram Stoker Awards for the first time in 2012 for my poetry collection VICIOUS ROMANTIC. I can't tell you how proud I am of that little book. Poetry has always been my first love.

The company that bought the film option for The Resurrectionist, renewed the option with the promise to get started on the movie in early 2012. This is a big deal for me. I think every author's dream is to see his novel hit the silver screen and this book is perfect for it. The sale of the film rights will also help me finally purchase a new house after losing my house in 2009. Fingers crossed.

I helped my good friend Shane McKenzie start his small press publishing company and became one of their first authors when they published SACRIFICE. The genre desperately needs strong publishers and Sinister Grin Press now has a pretty solid business plan that should see them thrive in the next two years. They will be publishing my collaboration with J.F. Gonzalez, THE KILLINGS next year and another novella by me sometime near the end of 2012. Their emergence also helped stabilize my finances when they were at their worst.

I made a great new friend in Brian Wubbena who gave my wife and I the best anniversary we ever had. He also has many of the same interests as me and, like Shane Mckenzie and Nate Southard, bridges the gap between my horror friends and my fighter friends. Kicking it with him and his wife, Tabitha, actually makes me feel normal. In addition to being a horror fanatic and a fight fan, he also likes to cook (he's actually a chef) so that pretty much seals the deal. Odd to find someone with all the same interests as you. My wife doesn't even have all the same interests as me. If he had breasts and a vagina she'd be in trouble. Well, if he had a pretty face as well and was genetically female not transgender and if he was more curvaceous. Okay, I wouldn't get romantic with him, but you know what I mean.

After being unemployed twice in 2011, I ended the year by being rehired at the company I had worked for since 1999. How huge that is for my family and I cannot be measured. It makes the prospects for 2012 all that much brighter.

Deadite Press put out three of my novellas last year and the fans were nearly unanimous in their approval. It's great to have a strong new publisher in the horror genre. Even the rereleases were better received this time around then they were on their initial release. Might have something to do with the covers? If you pick up a book with a title as provocative as LIKE PORNO FOR PSYCHOS with a cover image featuring a woman posed on a bed minus much of her skin and you're surprised by the amount of sex and gore then you're an idiot. I think Deadite got that and the fans got it as well. More good stuff coming from them in 2012.

KillerCon was a huge success in 2011. We had many surprise celebrity attendees, last minute guests of honor, the panels were amazing, and the contests were just plain incredible. Everyone had a great time and we're doing it again in 2012!

Shane McKenzie came through for me like a champ this year, once again proving what a great friend he is and confirming that my choice to move to Austin was a great one. Don't know what I would have done without friends like him, Nate, and Brian.

So, despite the many ill fortunes I suffered this year, I had my share of good fortune as well. Still, as I said in a recent Facebook post: "‎2011 should have been murdered in the womb, but I survived it and came out stronger in the end than I was when it started. Now, I just need some peace."

Appreciation

2011-12-10T19:40:00.000-08:00

There's an old saying that goes: "No man loves his debtors." It is hard to feel gratitude. It is hard to live with the knowledge that you owe someone, that you are in their debt. It typically breeds resentment and eventually denial. But this isn't always the case.

There are a great many people to whom I am indebted. My writing career may have never gotten off the ground had it not been for a few writers and editors who helped me along the way. My fighting career would have never begun had it not been for my trainers, promoters, and matchmakers. Here's a partial, but by no means exhaustive, list of those to whom I owe a debt.

Floretta James White (Mom). Besides giving birth to me and raising me, my mother always encouraged me to do and be whatever I wanted to do. She believed that everyone should explore their talents and do what they love. She was also the one who exposed me to horror and nurtured my love of reading. Without a doubt, I would be nothing I am today without her. I love you, Mom. Thanks for making me the man I am today.

Bob Strauss. I had just started writing, posting stories at the Horror Author's Network's now defunct (and greatly missed) website, when Bob contacted me to tell me how much he enjoyed my writing. I had never heard of Extreme Horror before him. I naively assumed that all horror was extreme, but then I hadn't read much horror in over a decade. I was just writing the type of stories I wanted to read. He was the one who told me about Edward Lee, Richard Laymon, and Jack Ketchum. He was also the one who told me about Delirium Webzine and suggested that I submit stories there. I owe you one, my friend.

Shane Ryan Staley. I was an unknown writer still learning his craft back in 2001 when I submitted my first story to Delirium Webzine. It was a twisted little tale called "After The Cure" about an orgy breaking out following the cure for AIDS. Shane published it and then followed that up by putting me in his first and only online gross-out contest. I entered another story titled "Nothing Better to Do" about a man trying to kill a dog who was really a two thousand year-old demon that planted subliminal suggestions in his mind at night while he slept. That story was the first one to really get me noticed. At that time, Delirium Webzine was one of the most widely read horror webzines online. Their Sunday night chats (which I still miss) were attended by some of the brightest up and coming writers in the genre including Brian Keene, Paul Tremblay, and Monica O'Rourke. Putting my little story online helped introduce me to all of them. I was surprised when I went to my first convention, Horrorfind I, and people noticed me and remembered me because they'd read me in Delirium. Shane was also responsible for my first sale to a major anthology, Dark Testament and the publication of my first solo novella, His Pain. Even my short story collection, The Book Of A Thousand Sins, was originally written for Delirium Books at Shane's request though he later passed on it. Thanks for all you've done for me, Shane.

Brian Keene. I was attending my first horror convention, Horrorfind I, when I met Brian. I had spoken to him online before. He'd even published a couple of my stories in Horrorfind's fiction section. Still, I was surprised by how friendly and accommodating he was. He introduced me to several writers, editors and publishers. It was Brian who, at a later Horrorfind, introduced me to Edward Lee, inspiring the collaboration that would have the first major impact on my career, The Teratologist. It was Brian who put me in a reading slot with Edward Lee and Jack Ketchum, one of the highlights of my career, which led to the best blurb I've ever received. It was Brian who introduced me to Don D'Auria, which led to my first mass-market deal for Succulent Prey. No other person has done more for my career than you, Brian. My debt to you is immeasurable. Thanks, my friend.

Brian Hopkins. Brian was my mentor when I first joined the HWA. My style was raw and unpolished (some may say it still is) when he took me under his wing. I doubt that I would have gotten anything published back then if not for his guidance.

Edward Lee. I had just started reading Lee's work when I met him at Horrorfind. I was blown away when he told me that he had read and enjoyed my writing. A nearby editor overheard the exchange and offered to publish a collaboration between the two of us and thus Teratologist was born. Lee didn't have to agree to it. He had plenty of other authors clamoring to work with him. If he hadn't though, my career would never have received that much needed boost. Thanks, my friend.

Monica J. O'Rourke. I met Monica online at Delirium's Sunday night chats and in person at Horrorfind. We hit it off pretty quickly. Her twisted little novel, Suffer The Flesh, remains one of my favorite reads. After reading it, I contacted her about collaborating on a piece and Poisoning Eros, one of my most popular and sought after collaborations, was born. Since then MoJo has been my behind the scenes weapon proofreading nearly every novel and novella I've published. Thanks, my luv.

Larry Roberts and Jamie La Chance. I put them together because, my very first novel, Succulent Prey, would never have existed had Jamie not read it and recommended to Larry that he publish it and had Larry not agreed to take that world altering leap of faith on a new writer. This book was the one that introduced me to the world and later led to my first mass-market deal. My sincere gratitude to both of you.

Don D'Auria. Yes, I have had my issues with Leisure Books. Still, the fact remains that my star would not be shining nearly so bright had Don not agreed to publish my first mass-market novel. And, had he not published The Resurrectionist, the possibility of seeing the product of my imagination on the silver screen would not exist either. Thanks for everything, Don.

Maurice Broaddus. Yeah, I know. I'm stretching here, but the reality is that if Maurice had never invited me to join his messageboard and never invited me to speak at his church, I would never have realized how many people were actually interested in my views on atheism. Arguments with Maurice have led to many of my most popular essays and even led to the creation of my blog at GODLESSANDBLACK.blogspot.com. Our collaboration, Orgy of Souls, introduced my work to a whole new audience and (if he ever gets his ass in gear) our latest collaboration, God's Wrath, is destined to make serious ripples. Thanks, Maurice!

Kru Sam Phimsoutham. Kru Sam was my first Muay Thai instructor. I would never have stepped into the ring had it not been for the patience and skill Kru showed in training me throughout my amateur career and his commitment in sticking by me through my pro career as well, even when I was training with Master Toddy. He was there to train me for my retirement fight. Much of the man I am today, I owe to you, sir. Thank you.

Thohsaphon Sitiwatjana (Master Toddy). When I turned pro, I moved to Las Vegas to train with the world famous Master Toddy. I lived at his house, ate at his table, and fought whoever he put in front of me, even when I sometimes had no chance of winning. I trusted the man that much. If he said fight, I fought without question. I would never have fought in Japan had it not been for Master Toddy. I would never have had some of my most cherished memories. Many of the techniques I use and teach today, I learned from you. For that, I owe you much. Thank you.

There are many more people I could add to this list. My wife, my ex-wife, my ninth grade English teacher, my great-grandfather, my grandmother, my philosophy professor, my latest collaborators: J.F. Gonzalez and Andre Duza, my former fight promoters, the matchmakers who got me my first fights in Japan, everyone who's ever bought one of my books. There are too many to name. My point here is that I hate being indebted to someone else as much as anyone. I am militantly independent and I like to think I can do it all by myself, but the reality is that none of us can. We all need other people and it is good to know there are people who will step in to help even when you think you don't need it. I love my debtors. There is no way I could ever fool myself into thinking I could have gotten half as far in my life without you. Thank you all.

Writing My Ass Off!

2011-11-13T10:13:00.000-08:00

Writing to pay bills has always been a fear of mine. "What if I become a hack, churning out the next book just to pay the light bill? What would happen to my artistic integrity?" I didn't see how anyone could give an honest effort while cranking out three or four books a year. Now, even though I have a full-time job, this economy has so decimated my savings that I have had to up my writing output to keep food on the table. This terrified me at first. All my fears of becoming a hack resurfaced. "How could I feed my family with my writing and not compromise myself?"

I remembered Stephen King's output in the eighties. I read then that he wrote 2,000 words a day. I write around 850 words a day. That's not exactly balls to the wall. I have more ideas for stories in my head than I could ever possibly write this year or next. So, I am not at a lost for inspiration. I am not struggling to come up with the next book and churning out whatever I can just to make a quick buck. That would suck, for both you as a reader and me as a writer. I'd rather starve.

Every book I have written in the last year has been one that has been on my mind for at least two years prior to me putting pen to page and some had been sitting unfinished for ten years or more. The stories I'm coming up with now will probably not get written for a year or two at the least. I write as much as I possibly can without taking too much time from my family or risking divorce or insanity.

What I have found is that necessity not only breeds creativity, but it spawns the motivation to actually give life to the ideas languishing in one's mind. An overdue power bill is a great impetus to get off one's ass and write. I cannot imagine how much longer Sacrifice might have remained unfinished had I not needed to pay the rent or when or if I would have ever finished Amber Alert or written SKINZZ. Would I have even begun my collaborations with Andre Duza or J.F. Gonzalez had I not been unemployed from March to September? Probably not.

Writing three or four books a year while working full-time, training fighters, and raising three kids and a wife ain't easy. Don't get me wrong. My point is that it does not necessarily lead to a decrease in the quality of one's work as an artist. Some authors, like Brian Keene, have done some of their best work since they became full-time writers. If I had more time to write, and didn't need the money, I'd probably write a helluva lot less and many of the books my readers now enjoy would not even exist. Hell, I wrote The Resurrectionist under a time crunch and finished the last 17,000 words in one weekend and I would go so far as to say that it is one of my best books with one of the best endings I've ever written. So, more time is not necessary for better quality when it comes to art. And it appears that my fears of becoming a hack have (so far) been for nothing.

Despite my enormous output the last two years, I still have more ideas than time to write them. My novel about a former Ugandan child soldier being chased through Death Valley by subhuman cannibals remains uncompleted. My novel about an interracial couple involved in a cruel BDS&M game is only half complete. My zombie(ish) novel has yet to be written. There's a collaboration I've been meaning to start with one of your favorite extreme horror authors that I have not gotten around to yet. The sequel to Population Zero is still bouncing from brain cell to brain cell, but has yet to make it onto the page. I've got a novella to write for Sinister Grin Press next year that is still just a pile of notes. I am trying hard to finish Prey Drive by January and I just came up with an idea for a screenplay. That's seven or eight projects right there that will carry me through 2013. So no dearth of ideas here.

What's funny in all of this, is that even writing three or four books a year, I feel like I'm not writing enough. I keep remembering Stephen King's 2,000 words a day and thinking: "Damn. I'm a fucking slacker." I need to get my ass in gear! So, I'm setting a goal for myself of 8,000 words a week until Prey drive is complete. That's the goal. Now, if I can just get my slave-driver of a muse to back off and let me concentrate on one project before filling my head with new ideas, I should make it. Wish me luck!

IS THERE A DEMON IN YOU?

2011-11-02T19:13:00.000-07:00

A new anthology from Camelot Books containing the following novellas:

The Witching Tree by Brian Keene

Fan-favorite Levi Stoltzfus (the ex-Amish occult detective from Brian's Ghost Walk and A Gathering of Crows) returns home to fact a very different sort of possession--one that will rock his faith to its core and challenge everything he believes.

Possessing Amy by Mary SanGiovanni
When police officer Liam McInnes answers a domestic disturbance call, he discovers a battered woman whose inner demons have given her a new kind of strength. But in order to free her of those demons, Liam will have to navigate the gray areas of evil, and face the desperation that comes with true possession of another.

Mr. Gray by Nate Southard
After years of terror and heartbreak, Ben Gregory confronts the demon that possessed him as a child, but how many innocents will suffer in order for him to get revenge?

Amber Alert by Wrath James White
All over Las Vegas, women are giving birth to monsters. While on a search for a missing child, Spencer Logan stumbles into a world of occult science, demonic pregnancies, and an angry young scientist intent on changing humanity's genetic future.

Specifics on the book:

Cover art: Chad Savage
End papers and intertior art: Glenn Chadbourne
Page count: 303
Limited to 500 signed and numbered hardcover copies
Published price: $50.00

While the above stories may one day appear in digital or paperback form, this will not happen for at least two years from date of publication of the limited.

There will also be a lettered state, but we are still working out the details.

Those ordering copies direct from Camelot Books will also receive a free chapette as follows (1 chapette per 1 book ordered):

Fast Zombies Suck by Brian Keene
Baby Teeth by Mary SanGiovanni
The Devil Crashed In by Nate Southard
Tamara's Last Exorcism by Wrath James White
Chapettes are limited to 125 signed and numbered softcover copies

Here's how the chapettes work:

With each order of a book, we will include a chapette with the shipment or paid for copy, put in hold box. Please don't ask for a particular chapette as they will be shipped one after the other as books are shipped or put in a hold box, while supplies last. What that means is, when I ship out a book, or put a paid for copy in your hold box, I'll include "Fast Zombies Suck", with the next book, I'll include "Baby Teeth", then "The Devil Crashed In" with the next book and "Tamara's Last Exorcism" with the next, and then start the sequence over.

Order your copy now!

http://www.Camelotbooks.com

Out Now!

2011-10-13T20:32:00.000-07:00

I know it's hard to keep track of all the stuff I've got coming out in the next few months, so here's a quick list with links (You may need to cut and paste them into your browser window):

HIS PAIN from Deadite Press.
http://www.amazon.com/His-Pain-Wrath-James-White/dp/1936383675/ref=pd_sim_b2

LIKE PORNO FOR PSYCHOS from Deadite Books.
http://www.amazon.com/Porno-Psychos-Wrath-James-White/dp/1936383845/ref=pd_sim_b1

SACRIFICE from Sinister Grin Press
http://sinistergrinpress.com/books/

http://www.amazon.com/Sacrifice-Wrath-James-White/dp/0983911800/ref=pd_rhf_dp_p_t_3

PURE HATE from Dark Quest Books.
http://www.amazon.com/Pure-Hate-Wrath-James-White/dp/1937051218/ref=pd_rhf_dp_p_t_3

COMING SOON:

THE REAPER from Cargo Cult/Delirium Books (Fall/Winter 2011)

SKINZZ from Thunderstorm Books (Fall/Winter 2011)

SON OF A BITCH (co-authored with Andre Duza)from Sideshow press (Winter 2011)

THE KILLINGS (co-authored with J.F. Gonzalez) from Sinister Grin Press (Spring 2012)

If you like what you read feel free to post a review on Amazon, on your blog, on messageboards, Facebook, Google+, Goodreads, or Library Thing. Thanks for your support! Keep reading and I'll keep writing.

KillerCon?

2011-09-28T19:49:00.000-07:00

You may have heard all the buzz about this year's KillerCon and might be asking yourself, "What's the big deal? It's just another convention." But KillerCon is more than just another horror convention. KillerCon is a celebration. It's Christmas for writers of disturbing fiction. It's where writers and would-be-writers come to feel like the 80s never ended and horror is still the most popular genre of all. At KillerCon, horror, thriller, science fiction, and paranormal romance authors are literary rockstars! No pretentious B-movie cult stars or aging scream queens hogging the limelight and charging fans for autographs. No video game or role-playing game creators or voice-over actors. Here, writers take center stage.

In addition to the readings, author Q&As and the mass-signing, at KillerCon we present informative panels and workshops on the business and craft of writing. From Matt Schwartz's workshop on self-marketing at the first KillerCon to Mort Castle's writing workshop at KillerCon 3, we are committed to making this convention an opportunity to learn and grow as well as a chance to meet your favorite authors. Next year, we are planning a workshop on self-editing and a "Grammar Workshop for Writers" from "Grammar Girl" Mignon Fogharty.

Then there's the location. No dingy hotel in the middle of nowhere. KillerCon takes place in the world's playground, Sin City, the Las Vegas Fucking Strip! The hotel, the world famous Stratosphere hotel and casino, is one of the most recognizable landmarks in a city of landmarks. The staff is friendly, cooperative, and accommodating. They really do treat you like royalty. I'm sure we've all been to conventions where you've paid between a hundred and two hundred dollars a night for a room only to have the hotel staff treat us like annoyances rather than honored guests of their establishment. Not here. The staff at The Stratosphere could not be more gracious and hospitable and most people paid roughly a hundred and sixty dollars for the entire weekend!

Though most people stuck close to the hotel, within walking distance from the convention, there are more than a dozen casinos, bars, strip-clubs, four and five star restaurants, and outrageous danceclubs and Vegas-style stageshows. Once back at the hotel, there is a party every night during the convention with alcohol flowing non-stop unto the wee hours of the morning. But that's not what makes the event so special. It's the people.

From our volunteer staff to our guests of honor to our attendees, everyone at KillerCon is treated like family. I know you've heard that before, but here it is true. It is something you can feel the moment you enter the hospitality suite for our traditional Thursday night welcome party. It is a reunion of friends. KillerCon is your safe place. It's where you can get falling down drunk and can trust that someone will get you safely back to your hotel room (though I wouldn't recommend it.) As one of our guests of honor said this year: "I feel okay leaving my books unattended here because I know that no one's going to take them. Everyone here's a friend." And that is probably the best summation I can give of the atmosphere at KillerCon; "...everyone here's a friend." Ray Garton put it best in his convention recap when he said, "In some ways, it was like attending a reunion ... The great thing about KillerCon — the thing that struck me repeatedly throughout the weekend — was that even though Dawn and I had never attended before, we were made to feel a part of the reunion."

That's what KillerCon is and that's why you should be a part of it. www.killercon.com

Like Porno For Psychos

2011-09-17T04:45:00.001-07:00

When I first started writing short stories again, after more than a decade of only writing poetry, my first efforts were in the realm of pornography. It was pornography with a strong supernatural or thriller element, but pornography nonetheless. Its sole purpose was to arouse unto the point of orgasm. I even sold a couple to Hustler Magazine. Later, I rewrote many of these short stories, pumping up the speculative fiction elements, and removing much of the sex (or so I thought.) I then resold these stories to horror magazines. I was quickly labeled an "Erotic Horror Author". Years later, when I reread these tales, I realized that I had not removed nearly as much of the sex as I had thought. A couple of these stories, like Fly, about a guy who tosses women off balconies after having sex with them, ended up in The Book Of A Thousand Sins. The rest of them have been collected here, in my latest short story collection available now from Deadite Books.

Like Porno For Psychos includes some of my most lascivious writings. These stories drip with body fluids. There is a story about a cure for AIDS that spawns a world-wide orgy resulting in the erosion of society, a story about a woman with a fetish for lions, a story about a pimp who sees the power of creation in the vaginas of his whore's, a story about a prostitute from hell and the right-wing conservative politician who can't get enough of him. There are less salacious fare as well. A story about the neighbor who owns the dog that is really the thousand-year-old demon that once commanded David Berkowitz to kill, a story about a woman so obsessed with losing weight that she will go to any lengths. There are even a couple of erotic poems.

After reading this short collection of pornographic terrors, you might be left with the impression that Wrath really likes sex. This impression would be correct. There are few things I enjoy that I can't either fuck, fight, or eat. If you don't also like sex, violence, death, and horror then this is not the read for you. As the title implies, this is not a book for prudes. This is erotic horror with a strong emphasis on the erotic. Ever read a horror book with one hand? Well, this would be the one to start with. Enjoy.

You can order this little book of horror porn here:
http://deaditepress.com/2011/09/12/like-porno-for-psychos-by-wrath-james-white/

Avoid This Book

2011-08-21T12:34:00.000-07:00

Ill advised as it may be, I Google myself. Particularly after the release of a new book. I wait a month or two to give readers time to digest it, and then I Google the title to see what they thought. There are always mixed reviews. I expect that because I am not a perfect writer, though I am trying with all that I am to be that perfect writer. I have my good moments and my bad ones. I shoot for the moon with every novel and so sometimes it results in glorious errors, spectacular abominations.

I love my artistic failures as much as my triumphs and, for the most part, my readers do to. Because they get what I am trying to do. They respect that I am not just playing it safe and imitating my own work over and over again. They see the labor pains, the growing pains, and they appreciate that it was all done for them. They dig the fact that I am trying to push my own boundaries, trying to make each book something different than anything they can read from any other author. They appreciate that they have read something unique and unusual even if it was not entirely perfect and they see the progress and want to come along for the ride so they can say, "I knew him when..." They keep reading because they know that every so often I nail that shit. I knock it right tha fuck out of the ballpark!

So, I accept and respect critical reviews, even the most harsh and seemingly mean-spirited ones. What bothers me is when the reviews come down to, "There was just so much sex." Not, "He used the same word ten times to describe the villain". Not, "His female characters acted like idiots, the Asian characters were stereotypes, the women all had huge breast and the men all had enormous penises and he can't put a comma in the right place to save his life!" I can accept those criticisms. What I hate are criticisms like "There was too much sex and gore for my liking." Did you read the name on the cover? What did you think you were buying?

I like reviews, even bad ones. I learn from them. Critics are my literary professors and not just the professional critics. I read the reviews of my work on Amazon, Goodreads, and even Library Thing. I read the reviews on blogs and messageboards and take it all seriously. If I screw something up in one book and a fan calls me on it, even if he is the only one with that objection, if it is legitimate, I make sure to correct it in the next book. By rereleasing books through Deadite Books, I am even able to correct mistakes from the original printing when it is rereleased. I don't go on messageboards and argue with readers about how they are wrong to dislike my book and I am some unheralded, unrecognized literary genius. I write for them. So when they speak, I listen. I want to give my fans the best product, the best reading experience, something that speaks to them and elevates them ,something transcendental and I want them to love me. There. I said it. I want my readers to love me. But what do I do when readers hate everything about what I do? What can I say but, "Stop buying my fucking books if you don't like what I write!"

As a writer, I hate saying that. I want people to read what I write. But there comes a point where I have to ask why someone keeps reading my work if they don't like it. Is there some masochism involved? If you don't like sex and gore and perversity then don't pick up a Wrath James White book. If you don't want to hear criticisms about race and religion and society, don't read my shit. If you want an optimistic portrayal of the human condition, seriously, DO NOT PICK UP MY BOOK. So, here is a list of upcoming titles that those with more delicate sensibilities should selectively avoid.

LIKE PORNO FOR PSYCHOS. Coming in September from Deadite Books. (The title should tell you all you need to know.)

PURE HATE. Coming in September from Ambrotos Press. (Sadistic serial killer murders a man's entire family. You won't like this one either.)

SACRIFICE. Coming in September from Sinister Grin Press. (Sex, lesbianism, voodoo, animal attacks. Probably not your thing.)

SKINZZ. coming this winter from Thunderstorm Books. (Racist skinheads burn a woman alive, beat a girl into a coma, stab a man dressed like Michael Jackson, and commit all manner of other atrocities. Lots of street fights, loud music and profanity. Yeah, you should probably skip this one too.)

I may have one for you though...

THE REAPER. Coming this winter from Bloodletting Books. (A UAV pilot with post traumatic stress disorder struggles to adapt to daily life after watching US soldiers die, Afghan soldiers blown to smithereens, men, women and children caught in the crossfire. Actually, some of the war scenes are pretty brutal. Maybe avoid this one too. Just to be on the safe side.)

Appreciating Daddy

2011-08-11T09:03:00.000-07:00

The "workaholic father" who spends so much time and effort chasing the next paycheck that he ignores his family and misses important moments in their lives is an old cliche'. It is easy to say that a father should prioritize his family above his job. This is easy to say, but often harder to do.

If we're talking about a family that is financially comfortable with a father who is desperate to make them wealthy and sacrificing quality time with his children in the bargain, then I think we can arguably say that his priorities are askew. I say "arguably", because if his quest for wealth is successful, he might have more leisure time with his family as a result and they all might have better lives. But what about if the family is barely scraping by? What if the choice is between spending quality time with the family and paying the rent, keeping food on the table, keeping the lights on?

It is easy to call a man a workaholic because he's busting his hump 12 to 16 hours a day in one job or another. For me, this means going from day job to writing job to personal training job and back. But when all these jobs are keeping the family afloat, that's not a workaholic, that's a man doing what's necessary to protect and provide for his family. That is, first and foremost, the reason for the existence of the male species.

We get little credit for this. As Chris Rock said in one of his stand-up routines, no one ever thanks dad for the heat or the lights or the roof over their heads. Mom gets the thanks for taking the kids to McDonalds. Ignored is the fact that there would be no McDonalds if dad was not out there busting his ass. Mom gets the credit for buying the kids new toys. Ignored is the fact that dad's sweat paid for those toys. Of course, most fathers would rather they had the leisure time to spend with their families. The reality is (particularly in today's economic climate) that if mom is staying home with the kids (another luxury in today's climate) someone has to fill the bank account.

Now let's look at the alternative. There are some fathers who spend lots of time with their kids because they are unemployed or grossly under employed and have no ambition or motivation to do anything about it. Their kids sometimes go without quality food or clothes or shoes. The utilities occasionally get shut off. Their mother cries over stacks of bills and wonders why her husband does little or nothing to fix it. For many of us, those are the two choices. Deadbeat or workaholic. There is no middle ground. We are struggling to get to that middle ground, working our asses off to get to a place where we are comfortable. Not wealthy. We just want to get to a place where we know all the bills will get paid on time,the refrigerator is full, the car has gas, and the kids have clothes and shoes, there's some emergency money set aside in case the car needs repairs or the kids need braces, and maybe a little extra for vacations and nights out on the town with the wife. If that makes us workaholics then we are so by necessity and we should be damn proud of the fact that we are willing to sacrifice sleep, fun, and time with the families we love, to give them better lives.

It is, in my opinion, the mother's job to explain to the children why dad has to work so much, to make them appreciate the sacrifices he has to make to give them decent lives, especially if she is a stay-at-home mother. It is her job to ensure that they are grateful rather than resentful if dad has to work a holiday just as much as it is the father's job to make sure that the time he does have with his family is maximized with as much love as he can fill it with.

If you are out there working long hours, putting in overtime whenever you can get it, working two or three jobs, all to keep your family fed and clothed, then you are a real man, a real father, and you deserve all respect and praise. Of course, you should not lose sight of your family's need for love and affection. You should not lose sight of your role as your children's educator and role model. You should not lose sight of you wife's need for romance and emotional support and adult communication. But that can be hard when you're exhausted after a long hard day. That should be understood as well. It is hard being a father and balancing all of this. It's even harder with the country in economic freefall. All we ask is for a little appreciation... and the big piece of chicken.

Sacrifice

2011-08-06T06:50:00.000-07:00

My newest novel is coming in September from Sinister Grin Press and it's going to be a doozy!

“Las Vegas Homicide Detective, John Malloy, hates the weird cases, the difficult ones, the kind that make the cover of tabloids, the kind that make or break careers. He’s had enough weird cases to last him a lifetime. So, when a man is murdered in Green Valley, eaten alive by his own dog along with half the pets in the neighborhood, he knows this is going to be a bad one. The next day, an elementary school teacher is beaten to death by his students while being stung by thousands of bees. Then an ex-football player/heavyweight prizefighter is reduced to blood and bones by a swarm of insects, rats, dogs, cats and angry children. All over town, little girls are going missing and turning up starved, dehydrated and nearly catatonic. Somehow, it’s all connected and it’s up to Malloy and his partner, Detective Mohammed Rafik, to figure out how, and how all these deaths and disappearances are connected to a mysterious voodoo priestess named Delilah with the power to take away all of your hatred … all of your fear … all of your pain.”

I started Sacrifice six or seven years ago before attending the Borderlands bootcamp. It was based on a dream I had in which a little girl knocked on my door and when I opened it she touched me and said "Tag. You're it." Then followed that with "They're coming. You'd better run." She turned and began to walk away. I called to her and asked her who was coming. She stopped and turned back with a grave expression on her face, the look of someone abouttoattend a funeral, and answered "Everyone. Everything." Then she walked off into the night.

The dream freaked me out, so I knew I had to do something with it. The result was Sacrifice a novel about how far someone would go to experience a life without fear or anger or hatred. I really think you are going to like this one. It's scheduled to be released this September at KillerCon 2011 in Las Vegas.

The Life and Times

2011-08-02T19:35:00.000-07:00

I need to apologize to anyone who sent me a manuscript to read this year in hopes of getting a blurb and to let you know now that I just don't have time to get to it. I have been buried in my own writing all year and am just barely getting to the point where I can see some glimmer of daylight. Why? Because my writing has been paying the bills. Often, it has been the only thing paying the bills. Were it not for my novels and novellas and training clients at the gym, the lights would have gone out many times. So, that's why I haven't gotten to your manuscript. I'm sorry and I wish I could say it was going to get better, but I'm booked solid through the first quarter of next year when I will finally have time to finish Prey Drive, the sequel to Succulent Prey.

I have been writing my big, sexy, ebon ass off this year. So far this year, I have completed a collaborative novella, Son of A Bitch co-written with Andre Duza, a short novel titled SKINZZ, A full-length novel, Pure Hate and another short novel, Sacrifice, and am now going to work on a collaborative novel with J.F. Gonzalez titled The Killings. Two jobs have come and gone. My income was reduced to nothing and then, just today, good news, I just got back the job I had when I lived in Vegas working with the company I worked for, for ten years. It is very, very good news.

What that means for me is that I won't have to kill myself like I've been doing the past two years, trying to keep food on the table. I can start saving to buy a house again and my family might just have a decent Christmas. What that means to you is that I'll be less surly and disagreeable and maybe, just maybe, I'll actually have time to read a few manuscripts.

His Pain

2011-06-26T05:45:00.000-07:00

Next month Deadite Press will be re-releasing His Pain , originally published in 2006 by Delirium books as a limited edition. Here's the gist of the story:

19 year old Jason suffers from a rare central nervous system disorder that causes his brain to translate every physical sensation he experiences, every touch, every taste, every smell, sight, and sound into searing agony. From the day he emerged screaming in mortal anguish from his mother’s womb he has known nothing but pain. His days are spent in a padded rubber room and at night he seals himself in a sensory deprivation bag, insulated from all external stimuli. Even the sound of his own mother’s voice, the feel of her arms around him, are anathema. Until the day his mother summons a spiritual healer from the Temple of Physical Enlightenment who teaches him how to convert his agony into ecstasy. Now, Jason wants to share what he has learned with those he loves, to let them experience his pleasure and his pain.

You are going to love this one.

New Novella Up For Pre-Order!

2011-05-22T18:37:00.000-07:00

Each morning, Marc wakes up, does a few pushups, takes a shower, has breakfast with his wife Isabel and his son and daughter, Luke and Carrie. Then he kisses his family goodbye, drives to Creech Airforce base, sits down at the UAV command center, and goes to war. For twelve hours a day, he flies the MQ-9 Reaper Hunter/Killer UAV and bombs targets in Afghanistan. He watches as the survivors crawl from the wreckage, often with missing limbs and severe burns. Sometimes there's collateral damage. Sometimes kids get caught in the blast, kids as young as Luke and Carrie. He has seen American soldiers die. He's watched helpless as entire squadrons were destroyed. Then, at the end of the day, he goes home to his family and tries his best to forget about the horrors of war. He tries to remember to pick up the dry cleaning. He tries to pay attention to the conversation around the dinner table. He tries to stay in the moment and keep the war and his family life separate, but it is getting harder. Everyday the line between The Reaper and the sensitive, god-fearing, family man grows thinner and the war comes ever closer to home.

This is one of only 150 signed and numbered hardcover copies.

Pre-order now at http://www.horror-mall.com/THE-REAPER-by-Wrath-James-White-Signed-Limited-Edition-p-22415.html

New Projects

2011-04-26T08:58:00.000-07:00

So, I've gotten behind on a few novels, novellas, and such. Here's an update on the progress of all my uncompleted projects:

Wrath of God (working title, my post-apocalyptic collaboration with Maurice Broaddus about what happens when God returns to earth to take over the planet, is still in the works. I wouldn't expect this one to be finished until the end of the year or early 2012.

Miles of Hell, my novel about a Ugandan child soldier fighting sub-human cannibals during a 135 mile ultra-marathon across Death Valley I'm diving into this one immediately following and perhaps during WHC. I've already completed the first 30,000 words so I should be able to get the rest done in a couple months.

Dog Women, my novella about werewolves in the projects of Philadelphia. I'm planning on cranking this puppy out in between Mile of Hell and ...

My collaboration with J.F. Gonzalez. Too soon to go into a lot of detail but lets just say it will be bloody. We start writing this puppy in July and should finish it by the fall.

Then I begin work on Prey Drive, the sequel to my first published novel, Succulent Prey. This one will contain all the cannibalistic sex and violence you have come to know and love.

Yes, my plate is full. But while you are waiting for these babies, here's what I already have in the pipeline:

Remember The Reaper, my novella about a UAV pilot with PTSD who goes berserk? This one is scheduled to be released this summer from Bloodletting Books.

My latest novel, Pure Hate (see below) is due out this September.

And Deadite Press is re releasing His Pain, originally published in 2006 with delirium Books. This is a novella about a boy with a nervous system disorder that translates every physical sensation into blinding pain.

Also, Son Of A Bitch, my collaboration with bizarro author, Andre Duza, is in the hands of a couple publishers as we speak. I should be able to let you know who's publishing it and when in the next few weeks.

Well, as the pig says, "That's all folks!" I'm sure you're going to really enjoy these titles. I will be certain to keep you updated as they are released.

The Story Behind "Pure Hate"

2011-04-21T05:18:00.000-07:00

When I was 15 years old, I dated a young Italian girl named... let's call her "Amy". "Amy" was the first girl I ever loved and I loved her with the sort of smothering, obsessive adoration only a lonely teenage outsider could feel. Her parents were racists who forbid her to see me, so we had to sneak around behind their backs. After three months of dating me in secret, she couldn't take it anymore and broke up with me. That was the worst pain I had ever felt and it changed me. The damage that little break-up did to me still sticks with me.

Over the next few months we continued to talk and send each other love letters and eventually, a year later, we started dating again. This time, she told her parents about us and they threw her out of the house. For the next year, she was bounced from one shelter to the next and I was always there, trying to keep her spirits up, buying her clothes and shoes and anything else I could to make her happy, smothering her. I got her into the same high school as me, The Philadelphia High School of the Creative & Performing Arts, so that I could better take care of her. That's where she met my then best friend... let's call him "Reed". Amy and "Reed" became close, too close. I confronted Reed about it, never really believing that anything was going on, but believing it to be a matter of respect and appearances. She began to change and I resented even the slightest alteration from that perfect girl that I'd fallen in love with and placed on a pedestal so high it gave her nosebleeds. Finally, my relationship with Amy ended and I started dating a lovely young girl named... let's call her "Natasha" who was Amy's polar opposite. "Natasha" was the wild daughter of a hippy whose mother not only approved of me but frequently hit on me. The problem was, I still wasn't over Amy.

I was an asshole toward Natasha. I knew it then and freely admit it now. For that, I am deeply sorry. I resented her for not being Amy and pointed out every "un-Amy-like" thing she did. Soon, she began spending a lot of time with my good friend Reed as well. Then, one evening, I caught Reed at her house, in her bedroom. I was so angry that I couldn't even kick his ass. I wanted to murder him and if I touched him I would have and that would have been the end of both of us. I had a knife in my pocket and I wanted to stick it in his throat repeatedly. I didn't. I controlled my temper, but I had to walk away to keep from murdering them both. The next day, when Natasha came to my house to apologize and explain herself, she told me that not only had she slept with Reed, but Amy and Reed had, in fact, been sleeping together as well. I went ballistic. Fist through a window, eight bottles of Tylenol, type of ballistic.

Now, to put things into perspective, I didn't really think much of life before I met Amy. I was fourteen when I met her and at that time I expected my life to end by suicide. It seemed inevitable. The only question in my mind was how many people I was going to take with me when I went. Then I met her and everything changed. I could see beauty in the world and life was suddenly worthwhile. So, when I heard that she had cheated on me with my best friend, I went berzerk. I wound up in the hospital getting my stomach pumped and then, later, there was a little incident with a gas stove and a lit match that could have ended badly.

Reed was jealous of me. He coveted my popularity, my self-confidence, and most of all, my girlfriend(s). I loved the guy and would have done just about anything for him. I even tried to set him up with a girlfriend, several times, but he wanted mine. So, when he betrayed me, I wanted him dead. With that passionate angst and single-minded rage that only teenagers can muster, I wanted him to suffer. It was all I could think about for months, years.

Well, you know how the story ended. I got over it and went on to live a relatively normal, happy and well-adjusted life. But what if I hadn't? That's the premise of Pure Hate. It's basically about what would have happened if I had carried that hate around with me for the rest of my life, what kind of monster I might have become. Of course, this is fiction, so Malcolm is not exactly like me. His past is not my past and the characters he surrounds himself with are not quite the same as the ones from my life. They are a bit more interesting. This novel is only "inspired" by true events. It is not even close to what I or my friends were really like. There was no Detective Titus Baltimore or Detective James Bryant in my life. And Malcolm is a bit more warped and a lot more dangerous then I ever was and what he does to his victims is worse than anything I could ever do. Or is it?

My WHC Schedule (Catch Me If You Can!)

2011-04-14T13:56:00.000-07:00

For those of you who are attending the WHC in Austin, TX the 28th through the 1st, and are looking to connect with me, here's where I'll be and when:

Guest of Honor Q&A – Jack Ketchum (interviewed by Wrath James White)
7:00 PM Friday, April 29 – Phoenix Central

I’ll Kill You With My Bare Hands! (Well, Maybe a Gun…)
11:00 AM Saturday, April 30 - Dezavala Brian Keene, Joe Lansdale (M), Wrath James White, Hank Schwaeble, Lincoln Crisler, Sandra Wickham, Adam Coates

Violence is easy, but writing violence is difficult. Hear from martial artists, gun aficionados, and combat veterans on how to get the blood, guts, and fistfights correct.

1:00 PM Saturday April 30 - Reading – Wrath James White

The Rape of The Genre (And What You Can Do To Stop It!)

2011-03-24T08:20:00.000-07:00

We are in a time of great transition in our industry. The old publishing models are no longer working, largely because they were idiotic to begin with, but also because of the rise of the e-book and the decline in readers overall.

The old model of publishing a ton of books by old and new writers, promoting only the biggest names while leaving all the new authors to fend for themselves, warehousing all of these books until they are distributed, and then allowing bookstores to destroy and then return what they can't sell, has failed.

Really? That sounded like such a good plan? How did it ever fail?

Let's look at it one issue at a time. First, can you name another industry that spends the most advertising dollars on its most well-known products while spending hundreds of thousands of dollars creating new products that they don't market or promote? It is absurd. Why bring on any new authors if you don't intend to promote them? As a result, hundreds of authors a year publish their first novels with print runs of 5,000 to 10,000 that no one ever hears about and no one ever buys and the publishers scratch their heads, wondering what happened. It was always stupid and always doomed to fail.

The second idiotic practice was that of allowing bookstores to return books after ripping off the book covers. Name one other industry that allows retailers to return unsold product after destroying it so it can never be resold? Pure stupidity. This is even dumber in light of the fact that there is now such a technology as Print-On-Demand. Heard of it? POD publishing allows publishers to only print what they can sell. They no longer need to print 5,000 copies unless they actually have 5,000 bookstore orders. Would you be surprised to know that the major publishers have still not embraced this technology? Really? The same industry that wants you to destroy their product and return it to them for a refund?

In the midst of all this chaos, confusion, and stupidity, there's Leisure books. Leisure was, at one time, a powerhouse in the world of horror fiction. They published more horror than any other U.S. publisher. Their advances to their authors were woefully low, but they had pretty good distribution so there was the trade off. You took the small advance in the hopes that you'd see the money in royalties once the book hit the shelves. Well, that didn't happen to me. I kept getting emails telling me that they couldn't get the books into the stores, they were having problems with distribution and, as a result, the books weren't selling. I did my part. I did radio interviews to promote the book, I did the convention circuit, I did readings and signings at bookstores. I blogged about the book, sent emails, posted on message boards, told everyone within earshot to go to their local bookstores and demand that they stock my book. Leisure? Well, I was a new author and they followed that age-old business model in publishing, promote your top-sellers and fuck the rest. But why was Leisure, who had one of the better distribution networks, having such a hard time getting my books on the shelves?

Some of it was, undoubtedly due to the extreme content of the novel. Some of it was that I was a new and unknown author. And some of it was the "love-it-or-hate-it" reviews. But there was something else going on.

The Resurrectionist came out in 2009 and the problems got worse. No one would stock it. As a result, fans couldn't find it and new readers, new would-be-fans, never saw it and never knew it existed. Wrath was sad. I assumed the failing was mine. Then, through the grapevine, I discovered that Leisure was having a hard time getting distributors to take any books from any new authors and even some established authors. Why? Well, this is purely speculation, but the rumor was that Leisure hadn't been paying its bills. I ignored the rumors. I had seen other new Leisure books on the shelves so that couldn't have been the reason. Could it? But the rumors persisted. Then came the rumors that Leisure was in serious trouble and facing bankruptcy. Then they let go of Don D'Auria, one of the most trusted and respected editors in the genre, and all hell broke loose. Authors began coming forward, announcing that they hadn't received royalties in months. Some, were still waiting on advances for novels that were already in print. The rumors were true. Leisure was in trouble.

"Uh oh. What about my books?"

It seems a lot of authors were asking that same question and many began writing to Leisure to demand their rights back. The responses from Leisure were all over the place. Some, like Brian Keene, were given their rights back in exchange for absolving Leisure of past debt. Others, like me, were completely ignored. Now, apparently, many of the authors who supposedly received their rights back have seen their books pop up in e-book format from Leisure. Essentially, they are selling books they no longer have the rights to. What gives? Leisure's Facebook page has been flooded with messages from angry fans. Many (most) of these messages have been deleted. This goes beyond the unfortunate implosion of one of the most popular publishers in the genre. Leisure Books/ Dorchester Publishing is taking its authors down with it. Brian Keene is calling for a Leisure boycott:

"*If you follow them on Twitter, please unfollow them.
*If you like them on Facebook, please unlike them.
*If you receive their marketing emails, please remove yourself from their list.
*If you belong to one of their book clubs, please consider canceling your membership.
*If you are considering publishing with them, please reconsider.
*Most importantly, please don’t buy their books, regardless of whether it’s on their website, in the $1.99 dump bin at Wal-Mart, or available on the Kindle. If you aren’t sure how to identify a Dorchester book, check the spine. It should say Leisure Fiction or Dorchester Publishing."

I am in agreement. I am recently without a day job which means I now rely solely on my writing to pay the bills. Being able to republish The Resurrectionist and Succulent Prey as ebooks would go a long way toward putting food on the family table and keeping a roof over our heads. So, if you love me then leave 'em alone until they pay us starving authors what we are owed and return our rights. FIGHT THE POWER!

A New Author

2011-02-27T06:42:00.000-08:00

I've been writing seriously for 12 years now. I say "seriously" because I hate when people say that they have been writing since they were in elementary school as if that was the question. Were you submitting your writing to editors and publishers when you were nine and ten? No? Then it doesn't count! Yeah, I started writing horror stories when I was twelve but they were far from being ready for publication.

My serious run at a literary career began in 1999. I put together a ten year plan with the goal of being published by a mass-market publishing house before 2010. I had some moderate success in the small press with a few infamous short stories, novels and novellas and then I got my deal with Leisure in 2007. I was lucky in that I got that mass-market deal three years early. Now, people expect me to know what I'm doing because I've got a few fans and I've written a few books. But I'm still a new author. I'm still learning.

Whenever an aspiring writer asks me for advice I am simultaneously flattered and terrified. Who the fuck am I to be giving advice? Ask Wilson or Ketchum or Piccirilli or Clegg or Keene or Braunbeck or Monteleone. All I'm going to do is parrot something one of them told me anyway. How did I get published? I don't know. Intimidation? And please don't ask me for grammatical advice. My proofreaders hate me. I still have to repeat "I before E except after C" to remember how to spell "piece". And I always misspell "their" because the damn rule doesn't work for "their"!

What's worse for me is that my mentors are starting to treat me like a peer. Whoa! Slow down there. I still need your help! It may seem like I've been around forever but 12 years is not a long time in the literary world. A writer grows just like a child. We don't reach maturity until at least a good twenty years have passed. I am far from a seasoned vet. I am a mere adolescent in this game.

Getting a book published is not easy and I am not trying to trivialize it. It is an amazing accomplishment and anyone would and should be proud of themselves for reaching this major goal post in their career but it is just the first of many. Getting published does not automatically mean that you have "made it". Not artistically and certainly not financially. I have so so much yet to learn about the craft of writing. I am always looking for classes and workshops to attend. That's why I attended the Borderlands Bootcamp a few years back and why I encourage anyone and everyone to attend. I'd go again if I could afford it. That's why I am excited as hell to have Mort Castle's writing workshop as part of KillerCon this year. It's why I am reading Michael Knost's anthology of literary advice "Horror Writer's Workshop" and why I read every book about the business and craft of writing I can get my hands on from Stephen King's "On Writing" to Robert Mcgee's "Story". And that's why I will probably start taking a few English classes at the local college. Because I ain't there yet and if I don't continue to learn I'll never get there. "Man is like fruit. When he ceases to grow he begins to rot." Or something like that.

My next ten-year goal is to be in a position where I can write full-time by 2020. I have a two-pronged approach to this goal. #1 Write more, get a good publishing deal, and increase my readership/fan-base and #2 help my wife get through college, get a really good job, and then kiss her ass religiously so that she'll sup;port me and never leave me. Both plans are currently in the works. Maybe by then I'll be a seasoned vet and fully capable of talking anyone else out of making all the mistakes I've made.

Skinzz

2011-02-18T09:45:00.000-08:00

The first 30,000 words of my latest novella, SKINZZ, are complete. I've got about 10,000 words or so to go. SKINZZ is about a period in Philadelphia between 1988 and 1989 when fights between punks and Nazi skinheads in Philly's hardcore scene had reached a dangerous fever pitch. There are a lot of autobiographical elements to this story but it is not a true story. I say this because some of the events are so close to reality that some might get confused. Let me repeat, this is a work of fiction. Any similarity between actual places, persons, or events is strictly coincidental. This is not about what happened to you or me or us or them. It is a fictionalized story inspired by actual events. All authors pull from their lives and the lives of others to some degree to craft their stories and characters. That's how we do it. But we lie. That's the other part of the craft. We exaggerate. We omit. We add. We change. That's how fiction is written.

Some readers, who were actually there, might get upset at some of the liberties I've taken with the story, compressed timelines, bands and venues that have been changed, fights that have been changed from one venue to another or exaggerated to make them more or less violent then they actually were.

Some of this was done in order to make the story fit into a novella-length work. If the fights were weeks apart in several different venues, as they actually occurred, it would have quadrupled the size of the book. That's the same reason why the bands have changed because I took events that took place at several concerts and compressed them into one. That left the decision of which bands to include because they couldn't have all been there. It also allowed me to up the violence by taking three or four violent events that took place at three or four different venues and putting them all into one night. In reality, it's probably less of an exaggeration then it may seem because in a large brawl there are injuries and things that take place that you never hear about because you were too busy worrying about your own. So, you may remember one serious injury when there were actually five or six.

So, if you were there, I don't want to hear "That happened at the Fishbone concert not The Pagan Babies concert!" or "That happened in June not December!" or "He was just hurt. He didn't die!" I know. I was there. But this is fiction. So, it can happen anyway I want it to. I can up the violence a little here and there. I can change events and timelines. I can make myself sexier. I can make the villains more villainous and the heroes more heroic. Because that is how stories get written. And this one, is a doozie!

SKINZZ follows two friends, Mack and Jason (aka Demon), who are part of the hardcore scene centered around South Street in Philly, as they attempt to single-handedly win the war against Nazi skinheads before Mack leaves for college in the Spring. One night, they accidentally murder a skinhead. This sets in motion a chain of events that leads to a climactic battle between a group of skinheads called The Uprise (strictly coincidental remember?) and Mack and his friends, including a couple of skinheads who have been on a murderous spree of their own. I really think you will like it whether you were moshing in a pit somewhere in the 1980s or have never even heard the word "mosh" until you read this. It is as violent and provocative as anything I've written. Coming soon from Thunderstorm Books. Well, as soon as I finish it, get it proofread, make the changes, send it to the publisher, sign all the signature sheets, send them back to the printer, and the printer prints and binds the whole thing. Yeah, coming as soon as all that happens.

Human Rights

2011-02-05T09:17:00.000-08:00

A recent Facebook discussion got me thinking about human rights and exactly what they are and where they come from. When I was in college, I was labeled a fascist for saying that you cannot possess a right that you cannot defend. See, I was speaking from my experiences growing up on the streets of Philadelphia not from the ivory tower theoretical viewpoint of those who have never had their human rights threatened or trampled. My response at the time was to ask, "What does it mean to say that you have the right to speak your mind without getting physically abused for it if I kicked the shit out of you for saying something I didn't like? I don't because the police would throw me in jail if I did. The government defends your rights. But, absent the police, where would your rights be? Where I grew up, you would definitely get your ass kicked for saying the wrong thing to the wrong person. You may even get shot or killed and, in most cases, no one would do a thing about it. That's why I say that rights in this country are unequal between races and economic classes." That did not, obviously, convince anyone that I was not a fascist but my point was that rights are not inherent. They are not something that you can just sit back and claim that require no action on your part and take no effort to maintain. You are not born with them. They are given to you and at great cost.

Every human right you now possess came at the price of someone's blood and is maintained at the price of someone's blood. Be it that of our millitary, our police force, or protestors who marched and often martyred themselves for it. To smugly sit back and claim that you were born with these inherent human rights belittles the sacrifice of those who fought and died to give you those rights and those who are suffering and dying right now so that you may retain those rights. It does another thing too, it puts those rights in jeopardy and causes people to take foolish actions. When people do not realize the cost of their rights they are quicker to give them away or to do things to weaken them, vote for laws that conflict with them, or for political agendas that threaten them. They even put their own lives in danger.

Back in the early nineties, when I worked as a bouncer at several nightclubs in the Bay Area, it was a common sight to see women stagger out of the club drunk and walk to nearby parking lots or down side streets or even pass out drunk on the curb. Invariably, when I would comment about how those girls were just asking to get assaulted, someone would chime in that "A woman has the right to walk anywhere she wants, drunk or otherwise, without getting assaulted." Did you catch the flaw in that logic? It lies in the word "has" as oppossed to "should have".

There is no argument that a woman should have the right to walk down any street in America in whatever state of inebriation she desires without fearing for her safety. She should have that right. The question is does she? Is it a fact that she can walk down any street in America, drunk off her ass, and not get assaulted? Of course not. So, obviously, this right is theoretical rather than literal or actual. But what's bad about statements like the one above is that it puts people in danger. There are very different behaviors associated with the woman who says she SHOULD have the right to walk down any street in America and the one who says she DOES have this right.

The woman who says she does have this right acts very much like the women who staggered off drunk into the night. They take no precautions, confident in their god given right to be an idiot without suffering for it and they often pay for their foolishness. The women who say they should have this right take precautions. They carry pepper spray or a gun. They take self defense classes. They avoid certain streets. They walk with a buddy. They lobby local government for more street lights, more police patrols, tougher sentencing for criminals who assault women. They make sure that those rights are secured, defended, and enforced rather than assuming that they are some inherent property of humanity like opposable thumbs.

In the discussion on Facebook, the word "inherent" was debated. I, of course, said that there are no inherent rights. Rights must be fought for and defended. Period. Others, argued that you are born with rights. Here was my reply:

"Not to argue with you, but what do you mean by inherent? If you mean the true definition of the word, as I do, i.e. "Existing in something as a permanent, essential, or characteristic attribute" then human rights simply are not. Something inherent cannot be taken away. As I said, a casual glance at the world would quickly prove that human rights do not meet this description. My right to think is inherent because I can actually do it. I could do it since birth and I will do it until I die. The right to live free of oppression is not inherent because many have never and will never do it from birth to death. That's what I mean by getting past the poetry. Rights aren't inherent or else they could not be so easily given and taken away. That's why we need to fight to gain and keep them. Calling them inherent, to me, fails to spurn the same call to arms as a recognition that they can be taken from you and that governments should be fighting against those who would take them away rather than being the very ones usurping those rights."

My point was that, like the girl staggering drunk down a dark street, when we don't realize the cost of human rights, we do not fight hard enough for them. We loosen miranda laws and search and seizure laws in order to "Catch those damn criminals!" not realizing that we have given away our own rights against invasion of privacy and illegal searches in the bargain. We give the government the power to send American citizens to foreign countries to be interrogated and then are shocked and appalled when innocent people wind up at Guantanemo Bay on flimsy evidence. We take rights for granted in this country, insulated against the true cost of those rights until they are slowly taken away.

Society's and governments are formed to defend our rights as citizens. We give power to the government and in exchange they are supposed to defend our rights. Somewhere along the way this has been forgotten and governments now exist for their own sake. We are assaulted and abused by police officers, illegally detained, our homes searched and practically vandalized if we happen to be the wrong color and living in the wrong neighborhood. Worse if we are the wrong color and driving through the wrong neighborhood. So, we sue and we march and we protest but, in the mean time, we take precautions, recognizing that our rights are fragile in this country. Human rights are not inherent despite all the poetry and hyperbole. Where they are not defended they do not exist as even a casual glance at the human rights abuses around the world would quickly attest to. So, why do governments exist that do not defend our human rights when that should be their sole purpose for existing? Answer that question because there in lies the answer to world peace.

Child Abuse?

2011-01-10T11:06:00.000-08:00

So, I was watching The View (no gay jokes) and they were interviewing a young girl who had just lost 90lbs. Years earlier, her parents pulled her out of school because she was being teased for being overweight. They home-schooled her, bought her fast food three times a day, and let her lay around without getting any excercise. Predictably, her weight ballooned to over 250 pounds. To me, this sounds like child abuse. Allowing and enabling your child, who looks to you for guidance and direction, to eat fast food and gain enormous amounts of weight thereby putting their health and happiness in jeopardy is every bit as destructive and negligent as allowing your child to drink alcohol, have sex, and use drugs. In fact, since these parents were buying her fast food, it is, in my mind, the equivalent of giving your child alcohol, drugs, and providing them with sexual partners.

Am I being too judgmental? When I see overweight parents at the grocery store buying sugary cereals, pastries, and fatty fried foods for their overweight kids am I wrong for thinking that they ought to know better? Having presumably grown up overweight themselves, why would they condemn their children to the same fate? Aren't we, as parents, supposed to try to give our kids a better life than we had? If you were teased as a child for being obese and still have emotional scars as a result, why would you want your kids to experience the same pain? If you are now experiencing the health issues associated with a lifetime of obesity, why would you pass those same health issues on to your children?

I think this is abusive neglectful behavior. I see no difference between feeding greasy fast food to kids genetically predisposed to obesity and sharing a beer or a hit of cocaine with kids genetically predisposed to substance abuse. Do not pass your disease onto your children! It is your job as parents to protect them.

Soap box abandoned.

Things That Make Me Smile

2010-12-21T12:37:00.000-08:00

As we enter the season for giving, I have been thinking a lot about what makes me happy. There was a time when I would have had a hard time naming anything outside of making love and making money. What a sad individual I surely was. As I grow older, I should be growing ever more appreciative of the beauty all around me, but recently, it seems that I have been heading in reverse. The challenges and drudgery of everyday life have dampened my enjoyment and tarnished my rose-colored glasses. I regret the loss of that childlike wonder at the world we all had before we became adults.

Earlier today, I was watching squirrels play as I sat in my office. I remembered when I was an ashy, roughneck little kid back in Philadelphia and I would sit for hours watching the squirrels through my bedroom window as they chased each other through the trees. I even named them all and hoped to one day get a real pair of binoculars so I could study them closer. I bought books on squirrels and studied all about them. My love of animals was not limited to squirrels. I studied every book on animals, wild and domestic, that I could get my hands on. I was a walking wildlife encyclopedia at one time and my dream was to become a zoologist and study animals full time. I even dreamt of being wealthy enough, with enough land, to have my own collection of animals running wild on my property. They were all so beautiful to me. I had forgotten that until recently.

I used to be able to stare at a beautiful painting for hours. I cannot count how many hours I spent wandering through The Philadelphia Art Museum when I was a kid. I would take girlfriends there and try to impress upon them the sheer beauty and wonder of art. When I was older, I haunted art galleries and went to art openings religiously. The art, music, and literary scene was my church and all of my friends were artists or writers. I refused to date a woman who was not an artist for many years because I could not imagine that we would have anything in common. It has been over a year since I have set foot in an art gallery and it had probably been many years before then. I can't remember the last time I've been to a poetry reading. I need to unfuck that. Art is one of the great joys of life. It is the breath and soul of human existence.

I have been absorbed in my job the last year and had forgotten the peace and bliss of physical exercise, running in particular. I knew I missed it, but I could not have told you why. I started running again and it is amazing how wonderful it feels. A cool breezy day and a few long miles of running is the closest I get to pure Zen.

As much as I talk and write about it, I think I had even forgotten the joy of sex. Amazing, considering how obsessed I used to be with it. But recently, it had begun to feel like work. Orgasms had been reduced to a mere biological function like eating or drinking. It was something I did just to relieve the pressure rather than something I luxuriated in the way I used to. I remember what it was like to make love for hours, never wanting to stop, going beyond fatigue. I miss that. It is one of the joys and pleasures that I had forgotten with age and responsibilities.

This economy has brought me to a place where even writing had lost it's joy. In my desperate struggle to survive this economic tsunami and keep a roof over my family's heads and food in their bellies, writing had become an economic transaction and nothing more. I give you a few thousand words and you give me a few hundred dollars and that's all it was. I had forgotten the joy of discovering the thoughts and experiences of my characters, of looking at a strange world through strange eyes, of seeing a story slowly unfold and take shape.

A lot of this is just a normal part of getting old. A lot of this is a normal part of being locked each day in an economical struggle for survival. It is hard to stop and smell the roses when you are trying to put meat on the table, but that's just what I need to do. Keeping one's nose to the grindstone is good for a while but you cannot go on forever that way. That is the road to depression. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy and a suicide risk.

So I have compiled a list of the things that make me smile so that I won't forget to indulge them every once in a while. Here are a few of them, in no particular order:

My daughter's smiles.
My wife's laugh.
My dog's wet nose and rough tongue against my hand.
My mother's voice.
A letter from a fan praising my writing.
Making a stranger happy.
Making a new friend.
Helping a friend in need.
The smell of trees and flowers.
A cool breeze.
A thought-provoking book or movie.
A Prince song.
A powerful work of art.
A challenging philosophical debate that makes me question everything I thought I knew.
Running several long miles on a warm day with a cool breeze.
Running with my son.
Driving with the windows down, the wind in my face, and the radio blasting a song that reminds me of my youth.
Complimenting a beautiful woman and seeing her smile and blush.
Stand-up comedy.
Reconnecting with a friend I thought I'd never see again.
Lifting weights.
Sparring with another heavyweight.
Lifting weights with my son.
Hearing my son tell a funny story.
Watching my children grow older.
A nice ass.
Really large breasts.
Really, really, really, great sex!

Where I'll be in 2011

2010-12-11T08:52:00.000-08:00

2011 will be a slow year for me as conventions go. I had to shift priorities in light of the economy and that meant cutting out some of the conventions I normally attend and some, like WFC and DragonCon, that I have been meaning to attend. So far, I will definitely be at:

VisionCon in Springfield, MO, February 18th - 20th

World Horror Convention, Austin, TX, April 28th - May 1st

MoCon, Indianapolis, IN, May 20th - May 22nd

KillerCon, Las Vegas, NV September 22nd - 25th

Come join me!

Human Kindness

2010-11-19T10:38:00.000-08:00

Like many people I'm sure, I find it far easier to give money to charitable organizations than to give or perform acts of charity directly to individuals. I'm not talking about friends, family members, co-workers or other acquaintances. Of course it is easy to act altruistically toward them. I am talking about strangers, the guys holding signs at the freeway off-ramps or holding out a cup on a busy downtown street. The ones who approach you at gas stations and ask you for money for gas so they can get home. I am naturally distrustful of them. I was taught to be by my mother and by a childhood spent in the conman capital of America, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In Philly, the blind man asking you for change is probably picking your pockets at the same time. The deaf kid who tries to sell you pencils walks away with your shopping bags before you know what happened. It has made me distrustful.

When I look at the guy holding the "Will Work For Food" sign I am looking at him for signs of drug or alcohol abuse. I am looking to see if he has any injuries and handicaps that would explain why he doesn't already have a good job. Before I give him my money I want to know that he is really going to use it for food and isn't going to buy alcohol or drugs with it, that he isn't some horrible felon. I want to know everything about them as if I was going to give them a job instead of just a dollar or some spare change.

Well, I began thinking about this recently and the absurdity of it. Why would I so readily send money to Goodwill or Big Brothers Big Sisters or Adopt a family for Christmas but will not lend a hand to people standing directly in front of me? It is true that a great many homeless people have dependency issues. But it is also true that a great many of them are mentally disturbed or disabled. With the woefully inadequate number of beds available for mental patients in most cities they are being pushed out onto the streets in droves when most of them are not capable of finding jobs and supporting themselves and so they wind up on the streets. It is also true that a great many homeless people are now our neighbors who have lost their jobs to the recession and lost their homes to foreclosure.

It has occurred to me that, were I to lose my job in this economy where jobs are so scarce, and I was to wind up homeless on the street, struggling to support my family, I would not be the sort of person I would give money to. If I saw someone who looked like me asking for money to buy his daughter diapers, I would walk right by him, wondering what such a healthy, obviously intelligent person was doing begging for money instead of working a 9 to 5. That is one fucked up realization to come to. Sometimes, we all need a helping hand and I now feel that I have failed my fellow man with my distrust and skepticism.

I have done exactly what I have accused conservatives of doing. I have trivialized the suffering of others, assuming that everyone is as equipped to succeed as I am. This is simply not the case. We are not all equal. We are not all educated equally. We do not all begin life with the same opportunities economically or otherwise. We do not all have the same emotional strength. We do not all have the same intellectual abilities, the same mental faculties.

There are some who, through no fault of their own, have fallen behind and some that will never catch up, that will always need extra help. And I know that this will make the conservatives among you cringe, but there are many that we as a society have failed by trapping them in ghettoes and providing them insufficient education, healthcare, and economic opportunity. There are some who were doomed from birth, who have been so emotionally damaged by their parents and others that they will never succeed without help and that help may be as simple as a meal, a shirt, a jacket, some shoes, or the change from a stranger's pocket in a time of desperate need.

With this being the case, I am trying to amend my thinking about charity. I am trying to be more altruistic to those who are right in front of me rather than continuing to send checks to charity while overlooking the outstretched hand in front of me. It is a hard road. I am no less distrustful. I am not saying that I will now give without thought to every open hand. There are still many who need to just get a job. But there are many many more who will always require the kindness of strangers to survive and, for them, I will try to be there when I am able.

Poisoning Eros is available for Pre-order!

2010-11-02T17:28:00.000-07:00

One of the most infamous and sought-after books in small press history returns in this beautiful deluxe hardcover edition featuring a brand new second half expanding on the tragic story of Gloria.
https://sideshowpressonline.com/?page_id=4&category=1&product_id=22

Once, Gloria was a porno queen. Augmenting her God-given looks with the best surgical upgrades money could buy, she crafted herself into the ultimate sex machine. Man or woman, young or old…it didn’t matter as she sucked and fucked her way to the top of the industry.

When a positive HIV test destroys her career, Gloria soon finds herself shunned and penniless. With a nasty drug habit to feed, she finds work pleasuring animals for a seedy Internet webcast. Her body ruined, her spirit crushed, her life is a downward spiral of sexual degradation and addiction.

When Goria is approached by a mysterious businessman with a fat wallet and a need for her unique talents, she thinks her luck may have finally turned around. But she is soon to discover that there are still lower depths for her to sink to…depths that could take her straight to hell.

If you are one of those who missed the twisted, gory, perverted, gross, erotic and violent style that was my trademark for years but like your sex and gore with some philosophical and socio-political flavor then this is the book for you. Everything you've ever heard about this book is absolutely true.

Coping with Death as an Atheist

2010-10-30T06:41:00.000-07:00

I have found myself lately, surrounded by friends and family with near fatal illnesses. My aunt has recently survived a bout of pancreatic cancer which is usually fatal. My father-inlaw has apparently survived mesothelioma though he's not completely out of the woods yet. And my wife's sister's mother is still being treated for stage four breast cancer which has spread into her bones. I have therefore been inundated by statements like "They are in my payers" and "I will pray for her or him" along with requests for prayer by their friends and family. My wife has, understandably, stated in no uncertain terms that if her father dies no one had better come to her and tell her "It was God's will" or "He's in a better place now" or any of the usual vapid religious platitudes. She doesn't care if he's with Jesus and the angels and all of their ancestors. She wants him here with her. She doesn't want him to suffer through lung surgery and chemotherapy only to be "called home to Jesus" and she is a Christian. I hold no such illusions about death so I cannot imagine what I would feel were it my mother going through what Christie's father is going through and I was being bombarded with bullshit.

I know it is well-intentioned bullshit. I know they are stating their sincere and honest beliefs and trying to be consoling and supportive, but the death of a loved-one is really a pretty horrible and distasteful moment to try to foist your beliefs onto someone. I don't think I'd handle it well.

So how do atheists find comfort in moments of sorrow and death? How do we cope with the loss of a loved one or our own impending end? No different than any other tragedy I should think. No different than the loss of a job or a house. We wouldn't say it was God's plan or that it's "all in God's hands" or any such nonsense. We would recognize the unfortunate series of events that led up to this happening and try to figure our way out of it. We would try our best to find cures to employ specialists to find the best treatment and when none of that worked we would resolve ourselves to the reality. We did all we could and now it's over just as the end has come for hundreds of millions of other human beings throughout history. It is the deal we each make with life from the moment we take our first breath, that eventually we will also take our last.

I had a bout with pancreatitis a few years back and the doctors were not certain what was causing it and were not ruling out pancreatic cancer which is often a death sentence. As I was being wheeled into surgery there was a possibility that I might never wake up. The one thought that kept me from panicking was my near certainty that death was the end of all consciousness, all sensation, that I would never experience death since being dead I would not be able to experience anything. The anesthesia would put me under and I would either wake up or I would not. If I didn't I would never know that I didn't because knowing is a condition of the living. Those who do not live do not know. I tend to agree with Epicurus on death:

"Death is nothing to us. For all good and evil consists in sensation, but death is deprivation of sensation. And therefore a right understanding that death is nothing to us makes the mortality of life enjoyable, not because it adds to it an infinite span of time, but because it takes away the craving for immortality. For there is nothing terrible in life for the man who has truly comprehended that there is nothing terrible in not living. [Death] does not then concern either the living or the dead, since for the former it is not, and the latter are no more."

I look at the death of a loved one with the same degree of sorrow (and no more) than when a friend moves away to another state or country and I know that I will never see them again. I am sad that we will no longer share each other's company. I cherish the memories we had and I look back upon those memories with longing from time to time. It is painful but seldom devastating. There is no unique or special sadness reserved for death over other types of loss. If it is a friend who has suffered long than I am happy that he or she is no longer suffering.

My wife often asks me if I will feel the same way when my own mother finally passes and I could not imagine how I could possibly feel otherwise. What is the alternative? I have no God to find solace in or rage against and raging against the laws of nature would be absurd. That would be like being angry at gravity were she to perish in a plane crash. Perhaps there would be anger at the failings and limitations of modern medicine or of my doctor in particular but unless I planned to go to medical school and make it my mission to find a cure for whatever finally took her that anger would subside and I would be left with nothing but acceptance and eventual healing just like everyone else, regardless of belief. Because once all the usual religious blatherings have been uttered the truth is that we all feel the same pain and loss regardless of what we believe. It is disingenuous to say that those who believe in an after-life suffer less at the death of a loved one than those who do not. I was once a believer and I can tell you that this is bullshit. What we grieve is that our time with them on earth has ended. That we will never again have a meal together or reminisce about old times or share a joke. It is the loss of their company that we mourn not whether or not they are going to Nirvana or inferno or non-existence. We cry because we miss them and that loss is universal.

This Is Why You're Hot

2010-10-23T07:42:00.000-07:00

If you've read some of my more erotic horror stories, you may have come away with a very distorted image of my sexuality. In fact, you probably think I'm one twisted motherfucker. Perhaps you've read Succulent Prey or The Book of A Thousand Sins, then saw me with my wife and were tempted to slip her a note saying something like:

"Dear Mrs. White,

Run! Run far far away. Your husband is a psycho!

Sincerely,

A concerned reader"

You might think my wife must be either crazy, oblivious or as perverted as you imagine me to be for sharing a bed with me. You probably think I'm only turned on by women with whips and chains who dress like strippers, fuck like porn stars and have the sexual appetite and proclivities of a serial killer. The reality, however, is somewhat more mundane.

So, you want to know what really turns me on? I won't get into detailed descriptions of sexual positions but I will tell you what I find attractive:

1. Voluptuous women i.e. thick hips, thighs, breasts, and buttocks. That's one thing that was real in Succulent Prey. I like women with meat on them. I just don't chew it off their bones, because that would be wrong. Wouldn't it?

2. White girls with dreadlocks. Something about Angelina Jolie in The Fast and The Furious just did it for me.

3. Women who fight. Not street fight. I'm talking about boxing, kickboxing, or MMA. There is just something kick-ass about a woman who kicks ass.

4. Women in black latex or leather. Okay, I guess that's a little kinky but have you ever felt latex against bare skin? Oh. My. God.

5. That fresh from the bath smell. Aaaah, it just drives me crazy.

6. A big joyous smile especially before, during and after sex.

7. Women who read. It's a plus if you read my writing.

8. Women who are interested in philosophy.

9. Visual artists (but only if you're good. Bad art is a major turn off.)

10. Writers. But only if you write well and write the kind of books that I actually like to read. Writing cat detective novels will do nothing for me. If you write horror I might cum just by looking at you.

11. Creative individuals of all types.

12. Open-minded and sexually adventurous women. Having a sexy mind is better than having a sexy body. I would take a freaky Paula Poundstone over a prudish Halle Barry.

13. Enthusiasm! The more you like it, the more I like it.

14. Atheists. There is something sexy about intellectual clarity.

15. Generosity. The more you give the more I want to give to you. (And baby, I got lots to give.)

16. Liberals. I just find an open mind sexy in and out of the bedroom. Being conservative about anything turns me off. Besides the fact that most political conservatives that I know are religious nutcases, homophobes, sexists, or racists. And I know that not all of you are so don't write to tell me how you are the exception. I know, you're just a "Fiscal Conservative" which essentially means "I don't want those poor, elderly, handicapped, and minority Americans getting any of my money!" But, as Bill Maher said, "I'm not saying that all Republicans are racists but if you're a racist, you're probably a Republican."

17. Educated women. I don't care if you have a degree in underwater basketweaving. If you hold a college degree then you ma'am are hot.

And no, it is not necessary for a woman to be all of these things. I don't need to eat everything on the menu. Just a main course and perhaps a desert. My wife isn't all of these things and she's hot as hell. So, if you've got one thing from the above menu going for you then rest assured that Wrath James White thinks you are a hottie.

Apex Halloween One Day Sale-ORGY OF SOULS-40% off today only!

2010-10-19T21:41:00.000-07:00

Twenty for one. Twenty souls for his brother’s life is a price that seductively beautiful Samson is willing to pay. Twenty souls drenched in blood, powdered with cocaine and more than one kind of ecstasy. A fair trade for the life of a brother. A fair trade for the life of a priest. And everyone he meets seems so willing to give theirs away.

ORGY OF SOULS is a horror novella measuring the price of a man by Maurice Broaddus and Wrath James White you really should read. Especially at today's one day sale (Oct 20) of 40% off. Drop by the Apex Publications Store and get yours now.

“Broaddus and White are an unlikely pairing of talents that works astonishingly well. Orgy of Souls is a powerful, innovative work of fiction and one I recommend wholeheartedly. A damned fine read!”
—James A. Moore, author of Deeper and Cherry Hill

Don't forget, any customer who buys any book between Oct 15th and Oct 30th will have their name put in for a raffle of awesome prizes: A critique Apex Digest Fiction Editor, Cat Valente, or $25 gift card for Amazon.com, or an Apex Minion pack, or a $10 gift certificate to the Apex Store.

http://www.apexbookcompany.com/orgy-of-souls/

Currently Writing

2010-10-18T13:36:00.000-07:00

I have some exciting projects in the works including three collaborations, two novellas, and two novels.

I have almost completed my collaboration with Andre Duza, an urban bizarro novel titled Son of A Bitch about a hitman who winds up trapped in the body of a demon dog. Maurice Broaddus and I are still hard at work on our collaboration, an apocalyptic novel about the Old Testament God coming to earth and taking over all the governments of the world titled God's Wrath.

Next month I begin another collaboration, an extreme horror thriller about a guy who drives a billboard truck in Las Vegas advertising escorts. He falls in love with the girl on the billboard only to find out that she is missing. So, he plays amateur sleuth and tries to track her down which leads him into a dark world of sex slavery and devil worship. Sorry, but you'll have to wait to find out who my surprise collaborator is but I promise you it will blow your mind. Your mouth will water for this one.

As for my solo works, I just signed a contract for my novel Pure Hate about a sadistic serial killer obsessed with the former friend who betrayed him fifteen years ago. This one will be brutal. Blood and guts galore. I am editing it now. Look for it to hit the shelves in the fall of 2011.

I am writing another novella for Thunderstorm Books titled Skinzz about a group of punk rockers in Philadelphia who take on a skinhead group from New Jersey in a bloody war in the late eighties. This is another really brutal and extreme story that I think you guys are going to really enjoy.

For those of you who have asked, I am still working on Miles of Hell and hope to finish it next year.

Currently, The Book of A Thousand Sins and Vicious Romantic have been released and are available on Amazon. My short story collection, Scabs, is still available at Horror Mall. And next month will see the release of Poisoning Eros and its long awaited sequel from Sideshow Press.

The Re-Release of The Book Of A Thousand Sins!

2010-09-22T17:48:00.000-07:00

My first short story collection, The Book Of A Thousand Sins, is soon to be re-released by Deadite Press. If you missed your chance before to purchase this encyclopedia of depravity, don't worry. Here's your opportnity to unfuck that. It will be released as a beautiful and inexpensive Trade Paperback. Your bodily fluid stained hands will be holding it very soon. You absolutely have to love this cover.

Coming this October from Deadite Press.

What I'm Writing Now

2010-09-18T05:20:00.000-07:00

Anyone who has been following this blog for any length of time knows that I tend to burn the candle at both ends and then hold the entire thing over an open flame. I'm an "and" person not an "or" person. If I can do this and that I find it far more fulfilling than this or that. It's just who I am. So, it should come as no surprise that I have once again buried myself in projects. Think I released a lot of stuff in 2009? Well, wait until you see what 2011 and the rest of 2010 will bring.

I am currently writing Miles of Hell, my story about the Ugandan child soldier fighting subhuman creatures during an ultra-marathon in the desert. I am also finishing up a small novel/ large novella for Thunderstorm Books called Run about a woman possessed by a demon that has given her the power to take all of the fear, pain, and hatred out of people and transfer it into other people who then radiate these negative emotions, attracting every living thing in the immediate area to attack them. I am also writing a collaboration with Maurice Broaddus called God's Wrath about what the world would look like if the Christian God were to come to earth in the flesh and take over all the governments of the world. I have also just started a collaboration with bizarro author, Andre Duza, called Son Of A Bitch, about a dog breeder in North Philadelphia whose dog gets impregnanted by a demon and gives birth to a hellhound. The situation gets worse when one of the baddest hitmen in the hood gets his soul stuck in the canine's body and goes on the search for a new human body to possess. This one is about as weird as it gets. In the midst of all of that I have started an outline for a new novel, my first zombie novel, about down and out MMA fighters battling zombies in a cage. Oh, and there's more!

Poisoning Eros II is still due to be released by Sideshow Press this year and Deadite Press will be rereleasing The Book of A Thousand Sins. The Reaper is still due to be released either this year or next from Cargo Cult/ Bloodletting Books and, if you haven't picked it up yet, my poetry collection Vicious Romantic was recently released by Bellfire Books and is now available on Amazon.

A hell of a lot on my plate but I wouldn't have it any other way.

SCABS

2010-08-17T15:26:00.000-07:00

For those of you who failed to get the memo, my latest short story collection, SCABS, is now available in e-book format from Delirium Books.

A man haunted by the children that teased him when he was young destroys anyone who tries to love him. An OBGYN has a religious conversion that leads to an act of terrorism. A promiscuous man tries desperately to hold onto a woman. A former drug dealer runs from the demons of his past. The ghost of a former classmate visits the one boy who was kind to her when she was alive. The daughter of a mafia hit man uses her skills of persuasion to get a former lover to acknowledge his son.

These are tales of pain and regret, revenge and redemption. Blending the emotional with the extreme, the perverse with the profound, the violent and visceral with the philosophical and the socio-political, these stories epitomize the controversial style that you have come to know and love.

Go to http://www.horror-mall.com/SCABS-by-Wrath-James-White-Digital-Edition-p-21066.html to order your copy now!

Money Ain't A Thing?

2010-07-28T22:53:00.000-07:00

In 2002, when I was still married to my first wife, our combined salaries put us well into six-figures. We had two nice cars, a nice house. We took trips wherever and pretty much whenever we wanted to. My wife had regular manicures and pedicures and massages and indulged her hobby of collecting expensive antique furniture and restoring them. Our kid had everything a kid could want and I don't think any of us was happy.

Just a year ago my annual income, when combined with what I made at the gym and from the occasional book or story sale, was almost more than the combined incomes of me and my ex-wife. But that was a year ago. Now, I am struggling like most Americans. I had to sell my dream house and leave Las Vegas after its economy imploded. I live in Austin, Texas now. I don't make shit at my day job but it keeps me so busy that I don't have time to train fighters anymore and barely have time to write. For the last few years I have been trying to find a way to write that best-selling novel like half-a million other writers. I have been planning to open that successful business that would allow me to be comfortably self-employed. I have been trying to find that idea or invention that would make me a millionaire. I dream of leisure even as I cram every waking moment with ceaseless activity.

It's easy to make quaint little statements like "Money isn't everything," "Money can't buy you happiness, love, etc." but the reality is that money keeps your kids from sleeping under a freeway underpass and eating at soup kitchens. Money keeps the bill-collectors at bay. Money even keeps marriages from falling apart. In many studies financial problems beat infidelity as the number one cause of divorce. Most Americans would rather you fuck their best friends than fuck up their finances. Those without money are more likely to commit violent crimes than those with it. Even the bible says: "A feast is made for laughter, and wine maketh merry: but money answereth all things." So how important is money? Damn important. But will it ultimately make me happy?

I work too damn hard. I don't think there's anyone who knows me who wouldn't agree with that. As a result, a lot of what I do doesn't get done as well as it otherwise might have. I have tried to slow down but it just ain't in me. I'm like a shark and I need to keep moving. Would I slow down if I had money? Probably not much. I would just refocus that energy into other pursuits. Would that make me happy? It wouldn't make me a better writer but it would allow me to devote more time and money to marketing my work which might make me a more successful writer. It wouldn't make me a better trainer but it would allow me to spend more time training fighters which is something I love to do. It wouldn't make me a better father but it would allow me more time to spend with my daughters. It would allow me to provide them with music and dance lessons and actually make it to their recitals. It would allow me to fly up to Exeter New Hampshire to visit my son more often. It wouldn't make me a better husband but it would allow me to spend more time with my wife and to wine and dine her as she deserves to be wined and dined.

So, would more money translate into increased happiness? Damn straight! Do not expect me to relax any time soon. Not until I make my first or second million or maybe after my first billion.

This I Fear

2010-07-03T10:34:00.000-07:00

I am in the fear business. Knowing what scares people is integral to what I do. This has helped me to write some truly terrifying scenes. Often I am asked what exactly scares me. In truth, being human, a lot of the same things that scare you scare me as well. However, being a horror author, I have confronted those fears so often in my writing that most of them no longer have the same sting and many of them are merely an echo, a distant memory, of their former terror. Some of these fears are gone entirely with not so much as a whisper. So, what am I afraid of? Most of my fears are emotional rather than physical. Here are a few of those things that still keep me up at night.

1. Death. Hey, I'm human. The idea of dying with goals left unaccomplished, dreams left unfulfilled,and experiences left unhad, scares me as much as anybody. I don't have any fear of what lies on the other side. I'm pretty certain that when you are gone you are gone, but I am worried about being forgotten, my entire life amounting to nothing more than dust and stench. That's one of the main reasons why I write.

2. Failure. Even more than being forgotten after I'm dead, the idea that I might be forgotten while I'm still alive scares the hell out of me. I'm okay with the idea that one's reach should exceed their grasp but if your dreams are always out of reach eventually, even the strongest of us, would crumble under the weight of despair and disappointment.

3. Screwing Up My Kids. I think every parent's worst nightmare is that some unresolved issues of ours or some momentary lapse in judgment might ruin our children's lives forever. That our daughter's will wind up drug-addicted whores and our son's will end up in prison.

4. Being Hacked To Pieces By A Maniac. Why do you think I write about it?

5. Home Invasion. Having my family at the mercy of some gun-toting assholes and having to risk my life to save them but knowing that even after I'm shot down my family might still be in danger. That's a conundrum I can do without.

6. Torture. Again, why do you think I write about it? Being completely helpless while some lunatic does whatever he pleases with me would be about the scariest thing I could think of.

7. Large Moving Objects Underwater. Yeah, I know. I may not be afraid of snakes and spiders but I too have some irrational fears. Lets just say that if I was swimming and a whale swam up next to me, I'd probably faint and drown.

8. Large Bridges and Scaffolding. A reoccurring nightmare since I was a kid has been traveling across a crumbling bridge. As I have gotten older, the bridges in the dreams have gotten exponentially larger. In the last dream I was driving across it and it crumbled into the ocean and I had to swim. I can't swim. This one is so bad that I was driving past the new bridge that they are constructing over Hoover Dam and I couldn't even look at it. I have confronted this one many times, driving and walking over huge bridges, yet it persists. Another irrational fear.

9. Getting Old and Being Alone or Unhappy. This is one of those universal fears. We all know we are going to get old and we all hate it. The idea that we will outlive our family and friends or simply lose touch with them is scary to me. As is the fear that I will be single at 50 or 60, one of those old guys chasing young girls and going home to some lonely old apartment, kids who don't speak to him, a string of bitter ex-wives, dreaming of his youth when he was a handsome stud as his waistline expands and his muscle-tone diminishes.

10. Toxic Relationships. Friends, family, lovers, who take more than they give and seem to complicate your life and make it harder. Yeah, that's one of my biggest fears.

That's all of them. Yup, even horror authors get scared and that is how we are able to scare you. If you've read my work then you probably recognize some of these fears as they have appeared in past stories. Look forward to some of these fears, like crumbling bridges and large objects moving underwater, showing up in future stories. I'm surprised I've never written a sea monster tale. I will definitely have to correct that. So, what terrifies you?

Twelve Things I'd Hate About You

2010-06-15T17:07:00.000-07:00

Okay, so I bared my soul for you. I confessed all of my nastiest most intimate little flaws. Now, because none of you are perfect either, I have put together this little list of things that annoy the hell out of me, things that I'm sure a lot of you do.

1. Yelling. The louder you are, the lower I imagine your IQ to be. It doesn't matter if you are angry at me, the dog, some guy who cut you off in traffic, say it in your indoor voice. And don't yell at me. Ever. It won't end well.

2. Drunk stupid people. Trust me, drunk and stupid are not mutually exclusive. You may think you aren't a stupid drunk but, in the eyes of a sober person, there are no wise drunks. You look like an idiot when you are staggering around, giggling, with that lopsided smile, slurring your words. Drunk giggly girls are probably the only things guaranteed to kill my erection. Dead kittens are sexier.

3. People with no opinions on anything or people who have opinions that they cannot back up with reasons, evidence, and arguments. If you can't logically defend your opinions than you should probably keep them to yourself. Remember the old saying, "Stay quiet and people may mistake your silence for wisdom. Open your mouth and you remove all doubt." Take that to heart.

4. People who don't read. If you haven't read a book since high school then, despite my best efforts, I will probably judge you i.e. consider you an ignoramus. And, despite what you might believe about "street smarts" or "common sense", I'd probably be right.

5. Americans who cannot speak proper English. If English is not your second language than you should be able to pronounce it. Slang has its place. When I'm with my friends from the neighborhood I tend to slip back into the neighborhood dialect. When I'm around people I don't know, I'd prefer they thought I was somewhat intelligent.

6. Animal prints outside of the bedroom. If you have a pair of tiger print boxers or a leopard print nightie, that's your business. Tiger print bra and panties might even be sexy. But if you're wearing zebra striped tights or a blouse with a giraffe print, you are not going anywhere with me.

7. Prudes. If sex is disgusting to you then you're probably irritating to me.

8. Drug users. If you look at pot-heads, crack-heads, junkies, and meth addicts and see a lifestyle you want to emulate then please, do not reproduce. The gene pool is better off without you.

9. Undisciplined kids. If your kids are rude, ignorant, disrespectful little brats that you can't control then please, keep them the hell away from me.

10. Hoarders. One cat is cute. half a dozen or more is a psychological disorder.

11. Conservatives. No explanation necessary.

12. Religious Fundamentalists. I find you both ridiculous and annoying.

So, you can pick your nose, your scabs, the crack of your ass, leave your underwear all over the floor, and leave the cap off the toothpaste. Nothing I can't deal with. Just don't get drunk, snort coke, and vote against gay rights, while wearing zebra stripes, and yelling about Jesus at the top of your lungs in a room full of cats and bratty kids. You may very well get shot and wind up in a pit of lye in the backyard.

Twelve Things You'd Hate About Me

2010-06-12T05:24:00.000-07:00

At MoCon this year we did a panel on how much you should tell your readers about yourself on your blog. How much do readers really need to know about your personal life and when have you just said way too much? Well, one of the things that I believe my readers appreciate in my work is my emotional and intellectual honesty. I don't hold anything back. For those of you who have followed this blog for the last few years you know that I am the same way on here. I tell everything I am thinking or feeling, for better or for worse. If you read this blog then you probably know my opinions on love, religion, family, politics, art, sports, and just about everything else. Those who have read my blog for the past five years know some of the most intimate facts about me. Well, here are a few more.

I am not perfect. I am romantic. I write poetry. I work out. I cook. I buy roses and jewelry for no particular reason. I am that rare man who even loves shopping for clothes with my wife. I shower my loved ones with gifts and compliments. I am affectionate to a fault. You will never say, "How come we never go anywhere?" I love dinner and dancing as much as any woman and I don't skimp when I do it. A five star restaurant is fine with me. But I am still a man underneath all of that. So, for the ladies out there who have wondered what life with Wrath James White would be like, here's a look at me from my wife's perspective.

1.) I bite my fingernails and spit them just about everywhere.
2.) Occassionally, I even bite my toenails.
3.) I shave my face and head and sometimes forget to wash the hairs off the bathroom sink.
4.) I don't like turning on the bathroom light when I get up in the middle of the night to use the toilet so sometimes I miss.
5.) I sometimes pass gas in my sleep.
6.) I am not a handyman. I won't change the car's oil or build you a nice set of shelves but I'll happily pay someone else to do it.
7.) I am not the fishing, camping, hunting type. I'm a city boy through and through.
8.) I often think I'm right and usually am. Hey, I was a compulsive reader in my youth. I read a book a day until I was nearly thirty. I know some shit. If you aren't certain about your info than don't start the argument, especially when it comes to areas where you know I know my shit.
9.) When it comes to things I don't know shit about I sometimes find it hard to fake interest. We live in the information age, generally, unless its something new like a recent scientific or medical breakthrough or some kind of current event, if I was interested in it I'd already know a lot about it.
10.) I'm still a sex addict. So, "Let's just cuddle tonight." is still kind of hard for me.
11.) I don't do dishes. I cook. You clean. Deal? Deal.
12.) I don't do bathrooms. I know. I know. I'm the guy who sometimes misses the toilet but I won't clean the damn thing? Can't I just buy you jewelry instead?
13.) I don't like team sports and have no interest in hearing about the exploits of your favorite baseball, football, basketball, or hockey team or player unless he just killed somebody. (see #9.)

So there you have it. I know, That was thirteen. See, I'm not perfect. I can be as much of a neanderthal as any man. And, in case you were thinking it, men don't change. We try, but underneath it all we are still the same. So I may turn on the bathroom light every night for six nights straight but on the seventh night I'm back to shooting in the dark. Did I mention I leave the toilet seat up? Damn, I'm a mess.

When is Sex Appropriate?

2010-05-29T09:16:00.000-07:00

When is sex appropriate in a horror story? When is it not gratuitous? Must it advance the plot or is it enough that it aids in character development? If it doesn't do a damn thing for character development is it still appropriate to throw it in there?

I may seem like the last person to answer this question. I have occassionally been accused of gratuitousness in regards to the sexual content in my writing, though I would argue that I have never written a single sex scene that hasn't either advanced the plot or helped define the characters involved. If anything, I write a lot of plots that revolve around sex but plot-driven sex is not a crime. I think I'll Twitter that.

So when is sex appropriate in a horror story? When it would be appropriate in life, which is to say anytime and any place where children are not present and you are not in any imminent danger. That's my answer. Short and sweet. I'm sorry if you were expecting some long drawn out essay but I just don't feel it's necessary.

Art should imitate life as much as possible and in life you need no justification for having sex other than a mutual attraction. I'm not suggesting that everything that happens in life should go into your novel. The daily minutia of life needn't be included. You don't need to know every time someone passes gas or picks their nose. But sex? That's a bit too big to ignore and how a person makes love says as much about who they are as where they were born or how they were raised. Who they make love with tends to be important to the plot. If someone has sex with the main antagonist of the story how could that not be important?

So, in my mind, sex is always appropriate where it would not seem ridiculous. When it is natural, it is right and looking at the broad spectrum of human sexual behavior, both moral and amoral, I would challenge anyone to find a scenario that would be "unnatural". People fuck. Deal with it.

Everyone Dies Famous In A Small Town

2010-05-08T17:25:00.000-07:00

My newest novella, "Everyone Dies Famous In A Small Town" is now up for pre-order at Horrormall.com!

Mika Shaw is a promiscuous, drug-addicted, schizophrenic who lives in Bishop, California, a small town in the Eastern Sierras where there's nothing to do but drink, get high, and have sex. Plagued by bizarre hallucinations, reality and nightmares co-exist in her mind, indistinguishable from one another.When her closest friends begin dying all around her under increasingly violent and bizarre circumstances, Mika is terrified that this time the nightmares aren't just in her head.

The Paiute believe that malevolent spirits called Pahoha, water-babies, live in the Owens River. The Pahoha have pale skin and black eyes and their voices sound like the cries of young children summoning strangers to the lake to be drowned. Sometimes they look like lost loved ones, dead friends or relatives calling from the other side. To see them is to be fatally cursed... and Mika has seen them.

http://www.horror-mall.com/EVERYONE-DIES-FAMOUS-IN-A-SMALL-TOWN-by-Wrath-James-White-softcover-p-20771.html

You guys are really going to like this one.

Vicious Romantic Available Now!

2010-04-24T16:15:00.000-07:00

For pre-order that is. Go to http://bandersnatchbooks.com/banderblog/?cat=17 and grab a copy or two of my new collection of Asian-themed horror poetry, "Vicious Romantic"! This is my first poetry collection in almost twenty years. If you're a fan of horror and/or a fan of poetry, I really think you'll enjoy this one. If you're a fan of my writing I KNOW you'll enjoy it. my poetry pulls no punches just like my prose.

Yaccub's Curse

2010-04-10T05:19:00.000-07:00

My long awaited novel of crime, poverty, race, and of course, horror is now out in both trade paperback and now in hardback from Necro books. So far it has been getting great reviews. Here are a couple of them:

From The Horror Fiction Review:

YACCUB'S CURSE by Wrath James White (2009 Necro Publications / 291 pp / tp)
Malik ("Snap" to his friends) is a street hustler who, along with his 2 best friends, eventually becomes one of the most feared gangstas in the ghetto. He's eventually hired by the most notorious pimp in the hood, Scratch, and his rep grows even more. All hell begins to break loose when Malik, under orders from Scratch, refuses to kill one of two targets . . . one the baby of a crack whore that Malik comes to understand may actually be the second coming of Christ Himself.
YACCUB'S CURSE reminded me of the film MENACE 2 SOCIETY with a latent supernatural undertone that begins to blossom during the action-packed finale. As is Wrath's style, this one's filled to the brim with over-the-top violence, plenty of philosophy and intelligent dialogue, and this time I found more suspense than in most of his previous works. The realistic characters and descriptions of ghetto life are quite grim, but are part of what makes CURSE so hard to put down. Kudos also for some intriguing discussion about race and class.
This is gangsta horror at it's most extreme; who else but Wrath could even throw some cannibalism into a 'hood tale yet keep it as serious as a shotgun blast to the face?
Highly recommended.

And from Hellnotes:

Hatred is one of the most potent of emotions. In Yaccub’s Curse, Wrath James White looks unflinchingly at antagonistic race relations in a horror filled urban universe. Hatred flourishes in this setting: Certainly between African Americans and Caucasians; but also, between gangs and between the powerful and powerless. There is a suggestion of a supernatural purpose behind the hate – a metaphysical means of maintaining the delicate balance of a vicious, vindictive status quo. The otherworldly premise is far less interesting than the excellent edgy atmosphere that the author establishes with a vengeance.

The story unfolds from the point of view of a suicidal gangster, Malick Black. Malick tells of his transformation into a cold blooded killer known on the streets as “Snap.” In a very astute portion of the novel, Malick partially blames a well meaning school teacher for the course his life takes. The teacher sees his intelligence, and notes his philosophical bent. She gives him some books, with existential themes and characters, to motivate him to read and reflect. The works, however, only solidify his negative world view. In his mind, they validate violence; there’s no point to life, anyway.

Much of the narrative is, indeed, about the reality of violence and Malick’s maelstrom of malice. It is punctuated by too many fight scenes. The story’s other excess is its theological ruminations and morality musings. Malick’s opinion of religion is reiterated several times, and his thoughts on the suffering of innocents are also often repeated.

What the author excels at is the ferocious, yet lyrical, way he attacks ambiance: “As the train made its way through and the depressed weather-torn houses with sagging roofs, rotting paint, and shattered windows loomed into view looking worse than the death camps at Auschwitz, the entire train would go silent. This was the roughest, poorest section of Philadelphia marked by hills of garbage, thigh high weeds, packs of soot covered children chasing each other through barren fields of rusted cars and occasionally shooting at one another, miniscule yards filled with trash and savage, half-starved mongrels chained to rusted fences that snarled at us as we rumbled past, and tired old men rocking on front porches while nursing bottles of wine and watching the crackwhores strut by them offering their withering and diseased bodies for less than the price of a happy meal.”

Wrath James White also pointedly employs the wisdom and wit of a wide spectrum of cultural-political movers and shakers; their words are used as quotes to head each chapter. The range of diverse voices includes rappers, Charles Baudelaire, Jean Paul Sartre, Mark Twain, and Aristotle. The quotation from Malcolm X is particularly powerful: “Be careful, be courteous, obey the laws, respect everyone, but if someone puts his hands on you, send him to the cemetery.”

Yaccub’s Curse is a controversial and combustive tale. The supernatural element alluded to briefly at the novel’s opening, and then picked up again much later in the story, can easily be construed as simple allegory. It is of secondary relevance to the up front, no holds barred, futility of a harsh homegrown hell. The devastating erosion of a people; their economic entrapment and enslavement is the core and crux of the novel. Stark sorrowful suffering, without the promise of release, is the hardened heart of horror.

Here's what some of my fellow authors are saying:

"Deeply disturbing in a way that only the most honest stories are, YACCUB is a fiercely written, daring journey through America's urban wilderness and into the souls of our forgotten brothers. But Wrath James White hasn't forgotten about them--and after reading this book, neither will you."

-- Brandon Massey, author of THE OTHER BROTHER

"Wrath James White weaves an intricate, controversial tale of extreme horror set against a realistically bloody urban backdrop like Boyz in the Hood on steroids!" --LA Banks

“Yaccub's Curse deals with racism and race-relations with a raw, intense honesty that I haven't seen in horror fiction (be it subtle or extreme) in quite some time.”

-Brian Keene author of Castaways, Urban Gothic, and The Rising.

Yaccub's Curse is available at http://www.necropublications.com/titles/yaccub.htm or at HorrorMall.com

I Like Big Girls

2010-04-09T18:02:00.000-07:00

Most of my life I struggled to avoid becoming a stereotype. I didn't talk in slang. I didn't smoke weed or sell crack. I didn't have rims on my car and sub woofers that rattled every window on the block. I actually read books, not a magazine, not the sports page, but real books. I didn't eat pig's feet or chittlins. I was never in a gang. I never went to prison. I didn't blame the white man for all the ills of the world. I never took a Muslim name. I was an absolute individual. All that has changed now. I have found out something about myself that places me firmly within the black male stereotype.

I have always said that I don't subscribe to the popular standards Americans have of what a beautiful woman is. I have blogged about how disgusted I am with the modern female standard of beauty and how damaging I think it is to a woman's self-esteem. I have said that I have no preference when it comes to a woman's physical appearance. I like women of all shapes and sizes. I was wrong. I do have a preference.

I was standing outside of Lane Bryants the other day and I found myself staring long and hard at the models whose photographs adorned the walls. It surprised me because I don't usually think much of models. They're pretty but I seldom find them sexy. These women however, were sexy as hell. I couldn't stop staring at them. I actually walked into the store and found myself in the lingerie section ogling the posters of the models in nighties and bras. Yeah, I'm kind of a dirty old perv. But they were the sexiest, most attractive models I had ever seen... and they were all plus-sized models.

There was a Dove advertisement in a women's magazine the other day at the doctor's office. The women in the ad were amazingly attractive. I was literally drooling over the photo. They had large breasts and thick thighs and big round butts. Once again, they were all plus-sized models and they were fucking jaw-dropping gorgeous. Then it hit me. I do have a type. I don't like all body types equally.

I like big girls.

It's not that I appreciate a curvaceous woman as much as a slender model type. Slender model types don't really arouse me at all unless there's something about their personality or the way they carry themselves that attracts me. But when it comes to pure physical attraction I like my women plus-sized. What a revelation that was.

I never wanted to be one of those black guys that chase chubby women. I never wanted to be the guy that slender beautiful black women looked at in disgust because they had a large white woman on their arm. But I have to admit that those extra pounds my wife gained after giving birth to our daughters has only made her more attractive in my eyes. Not that my wife is a heavyweight. She is far from it in fact. But what I realize now is that if she was, I wouldn't mind. I'd fucking love it. I am now, despite all my efforts, a stereotypical black man. How did this happen? And where is all the good chubby porn?

MoCon V!

2010-03-19T17:21:00.000-07:00

I will be attending MoCon again this year, April 30th through May 2nd in Indianapolis. If anyone was on the fence about attending and were looking for just the right push to get them going and you're a fan of my work then hopefully this is just the push you needed. Get thee to MoCon!

The Winner of The Resurrectionist Book Trailer Contest Is...

2010-02-27T17:51:00.000-08:00

William Miller! Great job, my friend. Here's a look at his winning entry:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIqEHIxt8Ds

Awesome work!

William: Please send me a message on Facebook with your address and email address so I can ship you your autographed book as soon as it is released and confirm your registration to KillerCon!

The Resurrectionist Book Trailer Contest!

2010-01-16T08:33:00.000-08:00

Create a trailer for The Resurrectionist. Place it on YouTube and the one that gets the most hits will win a free signed limited hardcover edition of The Resurrectionist from Cargo Cult Press plus a free registration to the KillerCon convention in Las Vegas where you will get to rub elbows with some of the hottest writers in the genre including Brian Lumley, John Skipp and Cody Goodfellow, Tananarive Due, and Sci-Fi Writer Stephen Barnes. All combined it's a $235 prize!

The rules are simple. The trailer must be true to the subject matter.(Making a funny trailer may get you more hits but it will also disqualify you from the contest.) It must list the title and publisher of the book as well as the author's name. (I know that's obvious but common sense is not always common.) You must also send me the link to let me know where to find your trailer so I can monitor its traffic. You can contact me on my blog or on FB or even on Myspace (if you're still into that sort of thing.) The most creative and well-crafted trailer, regardless of hits, will also recieve a prize of one free registration to the KillerCon convention!

Contest ends March 1st!

KillerCon!

2010-01-16T08:32:00.001-08:00

Two weeks left to register for KillerCon at the discounted rate! Don't miss this exciting writer's convention in Las Vegas, NV with Brian Lumley, Tananarive Due, Sci-fi writer Stephen Barnes and the incomparable team of horror legend John Skipp and Cody Goodfellow. Go to www.killercon.org for more information and to register for the event.

Dark Faith

2010-01-10T15:05:00.000-08:00

My latest short story, He Who Would Not Bow will be published in the upcoming anthology Dark Faith due out this month. The anthology features stories with a religious or spiritual theme, stories of belief and non-belief. My story is about the biblical god coming to earth in the flesh, taking over as supreme ruler of the planet, and an underground resistance movement determined to reclaim their freedom. You can go to http://www.apexbookstore.com/products/dark-faith-edited-by-maurice-broaddus-and-jerry-gordon-white to pre-order a copy.

Distribution of Horror

2010-01-08T08:37:00.001-08:00

It seems that Leisure has been having a hard time getting the local bookstores to carry some of my titles. If you haven't already, please go down to your local Barnes and Nobles, Borders, or even your nearby independent bookstore and demand that they stock The Resurrectionist. If they say they have run out of copies then ask them to reorder. Keep horror alive!

2010

2010-01-05T07:11:00.000-08:00

Well, it is yet another new year and I have a shit ton of goals to meet, Big Hairy Audacious Goals. First thing is to finish my novella, Amber Alert, which I should have finished two or three weeks ago. Then I have my new novel Miles of Hell to start and complete. Then there's my next collaboration with Maurice Broaddus, a novel about what happens when God comes to earth as a living being in modern America and all the chaos it would cause, which I will likely begin this month and a collaboration with Brian Keene that I will hopefully begin next month or sometime in March and then there's a YA novel (The working title is Wolf Mountain) that I'd like to get written this year. In addition to that I have at least three short stories to write, a convention to run, and I am starting a new job. Yup, busy days ahead.

Diabolical Radio

2009-12-30T12:42:00.000-08:00

I will be on Diabolical Radio on Wednesday January 6th at 10pm Eastern time, 7pm Pacific. http://www.blogtalkradio.com/diabolicalradio. We will be discussing my latest releases as well as what I've got in store for 2010. I would love it if you all called in to ask me all of those burning questions you've been holding inside. The call in number is (646) 652-4625.

And the winner of the Resurrectionist review contest is...

2009-12-25T07:23:00.000-08:00

Paul Synuria! Congrats, buddy and thanks for the great review. Now I just need your address, my friend. I hope you enjoy your signed limited edition copy of Yaccub's Curse.

Upcoming Releases

2009-12-21T07:24:00.000-08:00

For those keeping track, these are all the books I have coming out in the near future so far:

Yaccub's Curse, Necro Books, December 2009

Vicious Romantic, Bandersnatch Books, February 2010

The Resurrectionist (limited Edition), Cargo Cult, February 2010

The Reaper, Cargo Cult, mid 2010

Everyone Dies Famous In A Small Town, Thunderstorm Books, mid 2010

Poisoning Eros books 1 and 2 ,(co-written with Monica O'Rourke,) Sideshow Press, late 2010

Unsold:

Amber Alert, a 20,000 word novella about women being kidnapped and impregnated by demons. (Think Rosemary's Baby on a grand scale.)

Miles of Hell, an 85,000 word novel about a former child soldier battling subhuman creatures while running a 135 mile ultramarathon through Death Valley in Mid-July.

Monster Librarian Interview and Review!

2009-12-19T09:48:00.000-08:00

Erik Smith over at MonsterLibrarian.com did a wonderful review of The Resurrectionist along with an interview. Check it out.

http://monsterlibrarian.com/WrathJamesWhiteInterview.htm

http://monsterlibrarian.com/ghosts.htm

Assholes of All Races

2009-12-16T07:48:00.000-08:00

For years I have been listening to people, both black and white, defend their use of the word nigger or spic or dago or chink or white trash with statements like "Well, you know there are niggers and then there are black people. I'm not talking about honest, respectful, hard-working black people. I'm talking about those ignorant, disrespectful, criminals and welfare recipients." I have often nodded along in agreement with this rationalization. Chris Rock even used it during one of his standup routines but I was wrong and so was he. Let me just say for any of you who have ever used this argument that this is bullshit and it makes you a racist 100% if you believe it.

There are ignorant, disrespectful, criminals and welfare recipients of all races. Singling out a specific race for this type of behavior and identifying them with a racial slur is fundamentally racist. What is the point of separating assholes by their race? Why have a different name for a black asshole, a white asshole, an Asian asshole, a Middle Eastern asshole etc.? There is already a name for the Asian guy who cuts in front of you in traffic. Asshole. There is already a name for the black guy wearing his pants down around his ankles who drives down the block blasting music loaded with profanities at earsplitting window rattling volume. Asshole. There is already a name for the white guy wearing the Nascar hat and wife beater t-shirt drinking beer at 12pm on a weekday and driving. Asshole. There's a name for the Mexican guy blatantly ogling every woman who walks past. Asshole. What is the point of identifying the race of the asshole accept to perpetuate a stereotype or reaffirm your own prejudgement of that race? An asshole is an asshole regardless of race.

Every asinine behavior I described above could have been done by a member of any race. It could be a white guy openly leering at women or wearing his pants down by his thighs and blasting his music. It could be a black guy cutting you off in traffic or drinking and driving during rush hour. It's just that we have ascribed certain negative behaviors to certain races and then given them derogatory names to identify people of that race who engage in those types of behaviors. That is called stereotyping and that, my friends, is deeply and fundamentally racist.

The same goes for criminals. A black criminal is a criminal. A Latino criminal is a criminal. A white criminal is a criminal. They are not niggers, spics, and white trash. They are just criminals. To call them by derogative racial epithets makes you a racist. Period.

Now, don't beat yourself up over this or get defensive. Stereotyping people is normal human behavior. It is a natural consequence of the way we reason. Inductive reasoning is just a more refined form of stereotyping. The difference is that in proper inductive reasoning one exception kills the rule. In racial stereotyping it doesn't matter how many exceptions you see to that stereotype you still maintain that belief. It doesn't matter how many non-criminal blacks or Mexicans you meet you still believe that most most blacks or Mexicans are criminals and so you feel justified in calling them by racial epithets that denote them as black or Mexican criminals. Don't get defensive about this. Don't beat yourself over it. Just stop. Stop it right now. It is really as simple as that. If you don't want to be a racist then just stop. The next time an Asian guy cuts you off in traffic just call him an asshole. Trust me. It feels just as good.

Contest!!!

2009-12-06T15:57:00.000-08:00

Because I like to read about myself, anyone who posts a customer review of The Resurrectionist will be placed into a drawing for a hardback of my next limited edition release! The reviews can be good, bad, or indifferent. Just post them on Amazon, Barnes & Nobles, Goodreads, LibraryThing, Horror Mall, Shocklines, Dorchester, anywhere and send me a message here on my blog or on Facebook telling me where to find it and you're entered. The winner will be announced Christmas Day!

Empathy

2009-12-01T08:45:00.000-08:00

In most of my stories in the past the "fear" or "disquiet" comes from me putting the reader into the villian or antagonist's head and blurring the lines between antagonist and protaganist. I try to get the reader to identify with the killer. In Succulent Prey I even upped the ante by making the cannibalism and the killings themselves erotic so that readers would feel themselves becoming sexually arroused as they read about these violent acts and would be afraid of their own physical and emotional responses to the work. The fear would come from what they were thinking and feeling. As one reader said about Succulent Prey "I felt like you made me into an accomplice..." I wanted the reader to find themselves in agreement with the villain and to even root for him and to freak themselves out when they realized that they were cheering for a murderer and that they could even understand his motivations.

In Population Zero I tried to start slowly by giving readers something they could all agree with, people scamming the welfare system, and see how long I could keep them nodding their head in agreement as the antagonist/protagonist became increasingly violent. I wanted readers to find themsleves at a point where the killer was doing something truly reprehensible before they finally realized that they had been agreeing with him for half the book. I did that because it was hard to do and I didn't think many other authors did it or did it well. Well, Succulent Prey was first written in 2004. Since then I've done it a lot and so have a lot of other writers. It's not as challenging for me anymore and not quite as unusual as it once was.

With The Resurrectionist I wanted to go back to the more traditional horror viewpoint, that of the victim. I wanted the terror to come from the actual acts taking place within the story, from the reader's empathy with and vicarious experience of the victim's fear rather than from their empathy or sympathy for the killer. It sounds simple. It's what horror writers do. But it was rather new for me. So far it seems to have met with favorable reviews. I'm not saying that I am entirely abandoning the way I used to write. In fact, my upcoming novella The Reaper, is sort of a return to that fear device though in that one the reader is placed into the role of voyeur, watching as the main character self-destructs. You will continue to see the very humanized sympathetic villains in my work though they will probably not be the central figures very often. Even Dale McCarthy in The Resurrectionist is a very human villain though I wouldn't neccessarily call him a sympathetic one. I think anyone who reads the book will want to see this guy fry.

Sneak Peek!

2009-11-20T15:13:00.000-08:00

Take a peek inside The Resurrectionist! Coming from Leisure Books December 1st!

In Verse

2009-11-17T18:44:00.000-08:00

In keeping with my pledge to challenge myself this year I have nearly completed a collection of poetry to be released from Bandersnatch books in February 2010. Not content to merely stretch myself by trading prose for verse I further challenged myself by experimenting with Japanese and Korean formal structures, namely the haiku, the choka, tanka, and a Korean form called a sijo. But of course I didn't stop there. Many of the haiku in this collection, though individual poems in their own right, form larger poems when read one after another.

All of these forms have a very strict meter and structure. I honestly found the discipline of these ancient poems to be a perfect compliment to the discipline of my life as a martial artist. I even created my own form, influenced by the haiku, with a meter of five syllables followed by two lines with seven syllables each.

All of the poems in this collection are horror poems with themes of terror and tragedy. There are poems about everything from serial killers to werewolves, wendigos, and vampires, and even a serial killer murdering a vampire. There's a poem about a woman who murdered her child, a poem about a woman who murdered her husband, a cannibal poem, and much more to suit every palate so to speak.

I am only six poems and a few rounds of editing from completion. Look for it next year from Bandersnatch Books.

Miles of Hell

2009-11-08T11:00:00.000-08:00

I am just sitting down to write my next novel. I'm working on the outline as we speak. It will be my first true "monster" novel. Here's the synopsis:

“When Dembe Lutalo was only seven years old he was kidnapped by the Lord’s Revolutionary Militia in Uganda and forced to become a child soldier. For five years he fought and killed, tortured and dismembered at the command of his general until he escaped to America where he was adopted by a former Red Cross volunteer he’d met in Africa named Jonathan Moore.
Four years later, Dembe has a new life, a new father, and the promise of a career as a marathon runner. But when he and his adopted father enter the Miles of Hell ultra-marathon, 135 miles through Death Valley in mid-July, he finds himself in a life and death struggle against vicious humanoid predators, the merciless heat and grueling terrain of the Mojave desert, and the memories of Dembe’s own brutal past which may be his only hope of survival.”

The research on child soldiers has been eye-opening to say the least. The brutality that exists in this world is far more vicious and extreme than anything fiction has yet to approximate. But I'm trying ;)

It will probably take me three or four months to finish this one. I'm guessing I should have it done by late February or early March and then another six to twelve months before it's published. I wouldn't look for it to see print until winter of 2010/2011.

Don't Let Your Neighbors Die

2009-09-28T19:12:00.000-07:00

I said once and have said often in regards to the benevolence of God, that the most fundamental and basic criterion, the minimum requirement for a father be he heavenly or earthly is that he not let his children suffer or die if it is within his power to prevent it. Allowing preventable suffering to occur is incompatible with moral virtue. This is self-evident and should require no further argument. The greatest good for the greatest number should be the goal of any ethical society that holds the sanctity of human life above all other virtues. What then must we think of our fellow Americans who oppose universal health care? How can we think them anything but evil and reprehensible?

If my only objection to allowing millions of low income mothers to receive prenatal care and reduce infant mortality is that I don't want my taxes to go up then what does that say about my love of humanity? If my only objection to allowing millions of my fellow Americans to receive preventive care that might forestall some debilitating illness is that it does not adhere to my dogmatic capitalist ideology then what does that say about my own benevolence? If I would allow my hatred of a single politician or political party to get in the way of one diabetic receiving insulin, one cancer or Leukemia patient receiving chemo, one AIDS patient receiving integrase inhibitors,then I would be a monster, a villain, a thoroughly reprehensible human being.

So then what are the motivations behind those who protest so vehemently against government sponsored health care or socialized medicine or public health care or whatever they want to call it? We must assume they are not all evil and greedy no matter how much we may wish to paint them as such? So how do they justify their seeming inhumanity.

"I don't want my tax dollars going to fund abortions!"
"I don't want my tax dollars paying for illegal immigrants!"
"I don't want the government deciding whether I or my loved ones are too old or sick to waste money on!"
"I don't want long lines for health care like they have at the DMV and the post office!"
"I don't want government run health care to have an unfair competitive advantage over private health care and put all those companies out of business increasing unemployment and causing another economic crisis!"

Did I get them all? Okay, so let's look at these objections one at a time.

I'm not a Christian so I have no objection to abortion for religious reasons. I do have an objection to hundreds of thousands of unwanted children being born into the already overcrowded ghettoes of America and what that would do to both the crime rate and the economy. Think of the neighborhood crackwhore or meth addict and her stream of endless "Baby Daddies" getting knocked up in between trips to rehab and/or the penitentiary and tell me how society would benefit from forcing them to give birth to children doomed to repeat the cycle? But that's just my opinion and it is not a popular one to be sure. The reality is that the proposed health care overhaul does not provide for abortions anymore than private health care does yet I don't see anyone picketing Blue Cross or Cigna.

The idea that universal health care would cover illegal immigrants is a stupid one. Your tax dollars are already paying for the health care of illegal immigrant but only at twice the rate because they are showing up in emergency rooms. Just like you'd would be covered by Canada's health care system if you got injured on a trip to Toronto. Urgent care costs thousands more than preventive medicine. But they are trying to find a way to exclude illegal immigrants just for you folks.

If you believe that there will be death panels than you and Sarah Palin deserve each other. The idea was to have end of life counseling but don't worry, the right-wing idiots have scared that out of the final bill so you can still waste thousands of dollars of medical care on vegetative corpses with heartbeats and no brain activity and no one will suggest that maybe it's time to pull the plug. Happy?

Those who suggest that government run health care would look like the DMV are forgetting that we aren't talking about government hospitals like in Russian. You would still go to the same hospitals and primary care physicians. It's just your insurance that would be owned by the government. You know, like the current government run health care known as Medicare? See any geriatric cheese lines forming at the doctor's office, pharmacies, or hospitals with seniors waiting months to be seen the way the Republicans are trying to scare you into thinking there will be? No? Now what does that tell you? Come on. Put your thinking caps on.

Now, the idea that a public health care option would have an unfair competitive advantage over private insurance is a good one. My answer is this. So? There needs to be more competition in the insurance market where some states are monopolized by only a handful of providers. Why should I care if these billion dollar companies have to lower their rates and make somewhat smaller profits. Do I think government health care would put them out of business? Of course not. They and the pharmaceutical companies would just have to cut back on a few jets and get smaller corporate bonuses come Christmas time.

Look, the bottom line is this. People are dying and going bankrupt because they don't have health insurance. If you're a decent and moral person you have an obligation to do something about it. There is no excuse. None of the worries I listed above are enough for one infant to die because they didn't get proper prenatal care. Not one of them is enough for one cancer patient to go without chemo. Are we a moral country or does capitalism supercede all morality? That is the only question here.

What Am I?

2009-09-12T00:13:00.001-07:00

It takes seven or eight years for every cell in your body to die and be replaced by another. So, every eight to ten years you have an entirely different body than the one you had previously except for some of those in the cerebral cortex. You share very few cells in common with the person you were eight years ago, hardly any. So who is this new person? Is it still you?

I turned 39 this year. One year away from the big 40. The year before I said goodbye to my fighting career. First triumphantly in front of family and friends, racking up my 18th victory and then unfortunately, in front of strangers, humbled by a right hand I didn't see, racking up my sixth lost. I am not a fighter anymore. Too old. Too slow. I am now permanently retired. I miss it. I miss having a fighter's physique. I miss the fame, the prestige, and the competition, the thrill of victory. That's all gone now. I am not that guy anymore.

The other day I found myself staring at a woman at the grocery store. She was pretty but not remarkably so. She was the type of woman who I could have charmed with a smile just six years ago. The type whom, in my arrogance, I would have considered not to be in my league. I realized, as I caught myself staring, that she was not staring back. She did not even notice me. Now, I was not in her league. I was beneath her notice. I was just some creepy old man ogling a younger woman. I realized how long it had been since a woman followed me around a store trying to get up the nerve to talk to me. It used to be a common occurrence. Now, I can't remember the last time it happened. I am married now. I shouldn't need the ego boost, but I do. We all do. It's good to get that validation from a stranger. It's good to know you've still got it. I have to learn to live without that now. I am not the guy that women chase anymore.

I look in the mirror now and I can't believe the image that stares back at me. The six pack is long gone, smothered beneath a layer of fat I can't seem to rid myself of. The muscles in my chest and arms don't look the same. Still large but not quite as shapely. No cuts or striations. The gray hairs in my beard are multiplying. I barely recognize myself.

My son left for boarding school this year. He's going to Phillips Exeter Academy, one of the oldest and most prestigious college preparatory schools in the country. Lincoln's son graduated from Exeter. Sultan was one of only 70 boys accepted into the school out of 800 applicants from around the world. I'm proud of him. But now what? Getting him to this point has been my mission for the last fourteen years, doing flash cards with him when he was only a year old, teaching him to read when he was three, teaching him to add, subtract, multiply, and divide at five and six. Teaching him how to write short stories. Giving him his first Stephen King book followed by his first Brian Keene book. Now, his education is in the hands of others. I still set the expectations. He knows that I expect him to go to an Ivy League College, but I am no longer the one responsible for getting him there. Now, it is largely up to him and his teachers. My role as father has diminished and will diminish more and more the older he gets.

After nearly thirteen years I will be leaving Las Vegas soon. I am moving my wife and daughters to Austin, Texas. I will be leaving behind countless friends and acquaintances and possibly even the job and the company I have been a part of for the past decade unless my transfer goes through. I am not sure if this is a negative or a positive. It remains to be seen.

One positive is that my writing career has finally begun it's slow upwards ascent. After ten years of trying, I have made the transition from fighter to writer with some small modicum of success. With that comes a fear of falling, a fear of stagnation. When people ask me what I do it still feels awkward to say I am a novelist instead of a kickboxer. Now, winning the hearts of fans is not as simple as landing a head kick or a left hook. Now, it takes months of writing and many more months waiting for the publisher to do his part and get the book onto the shelves. The immediate gratification of a knockout, a raised hand over a fallen foe, is gone. Now I wait for fans, editors, and critics to judge my work, hoping I was successful, hoping they will understand and approve of my art. It has occurred to me how much easier this process was when I was still a fighter and the writing was just a hobby. The criticisms stung less when I kicked ass for a living.

So much has changed now. There are so many more changes on the horizon. I have always embraced change rather well. The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune never held any fear for me. I am a survivor. Come what may. But upheavals of the sort I have undergone this year have not been common. My life alone has not just changed this year. I have changed, mentally, physically, and emotionally. My son is nearly a man. The body that has been my pride and joy for the last twenty five years has succumbed to age and a slowing metabolism. The career by which I defined myself has ended. The sex appeal by which I defined myself has waned. My economic future is uncertain. So what am I now?

I am a different man. A new man. I am a different man from the guy who once turned women's heads just walking through a grocery store. I am a different man from the one who made men's legs weaken and their hearts pound with fear when they stared across a ring at me. I am a different man then the one who ran marathons and could curl nearly 200lbs. I am a different man from the one raised his little boy into a young man. I share hardly any cells in common with that man. So who am I now?

I am still a father. I have two beautiful young daughters who need me every bit as much as Sultan did when he was growing up. I am a husband. I have a beautiful wife who drives me crazy. I am a writer, a novelist. I have a fan or two who actually enjoy the crazy shit I write. It seems I am now the co-chairman of a major Las Vegas convention. I still have a wealth of fighting knowledge that I pass on to up and coming fighters. I still have a a hell of a straight right even if it is considerably slower. I may never have a six pack again but my upper body ain't bad for a guy who's almost forty. For a writer, I'm in excellent shape. I have a great resume even if my future employment is uncertain. I may never be a Las Vegas resident again but I will be a citizen of Austin, Texas.

So what am I now? I have no fucking idea. I don't know if the future will be heaven or hell. I don't know whether to look forward to it with enthusiasm or trepidation. But one thing I have always been and will always be is a survivor. Come heaven or hell I will remain unbowed. Come what may I will remain Wrath James White in whatever form I may take.

KillerCon Programming Schedule!

2009-08-30T12:18:00.000-07:00

KillerCon Programming

Thursday:
12:00 to 5:00PM Registration
5:00PM: Strip Crawl! Shuttles will leave every thirty minutes to take you to and from the Las Vegas Strip to enjoy the glitz and glamour of some of the world’s largest casinos.
10:00PM to 4:00AM: Pajama Party and Horror Movie Marathon in the Hospitality Suite. Six hours of nonstop horror—what better way to get you in the mood for the weekend?

Friday:
10:00AM: Registration and dealer’s room open
10:00AM The Seven Deadly Sins of Writing the Short Story: The basics every writer needs to know to avoid rejection from paragraph one. Moderator Adam Pepper. Panelists Hal Bodner, Gardner Goldsmith, Paul Gifford, Gene O’Neill, Erik Williams.
10:00AM: Reading by Gord Rollo
10:30AM: Reading by Nathan Walpow
11:00AM Anatomy of A Serial Killer: How to write a realistic psychopath, dispose of a body, and other things the FBI would rather you didn’t know. Moderator Nathan Walpow. Panelists Gord Rollo, Mark Worthen, Dave Simms, Tim Marquitz, Noel Hynd
11:00AM: Reading by Gene O’Neill
11:30AM: Reading by Adam Pepper
12:00-1:00PM: Lunch
1:00PM: Six Million Ways To Die: How to Write A Realistic Murder Scene While Avoiding Clichés and Utter Absurdity. Moderator Brian Keene. Panelists Joe Lansdale, F. Paul Wilson, Edward Lee, Bill Gagliani, Nathan Walpow.
1:00PM: Reading by L.L. Soares
1:30PM: Reading by Meghan Knierim
2:00PM: Seven Deadly Sins of Marketing and Self-Promotion. Pimpin’ Ain’t Easy: How to promote yourself and your work. Moderator: Matt Schwartz. Panelists: Brian Keene, Gabrielle Faust, Gene O’Neill, Kasey Lansdale, Maurice Broaddus, Lori Perkins
2:00PM: Reading by Edward Lee
2:30PM: Reading by F. Paul Wilson
2:30-4:00PM Q&A with Joe Lansdale, Heather Graham & Edward Lee
3:00PM Bite Me, Chew off my Face, but Love Me: When did vampires, werewolves and other monsters become love interests? Moderator Gabrielle Faust. Panelists Bill Gagliani, L.A. Banks, Beth Blue, Cory Cramer, BL Morgan.
3:00PM Reading by John Skipp
3:30PM Reading by Cody Goodfellow
4:00PM Seven Deadly Sins of Working with an Editor: How to learn to listen and to let go of your prose, no matter how beautiful. Moderator: Meghan Knierim. Panelists: Bailey Hunter, Roy Robbins, Angela James, Bill Gilchrist, Kim Richards-Gilchrist, Kelli Dunlap.
4:00PM Reading by Brian Keene
4:30PM Reading by Sèphera Girón
5:00PM Seven Deadly Sins of Self-Publishing: Authors Talk About The Pros and Cons of Self-Publishing. Moderator: Jennifer Caress. Panelists: BL Morgan, Paul Gifford, Rick Holderman, Azrael Paul Damien
5:00PM Reading by Mark Worthen
5:30PM Reading by Kurt Newton
6:00-8:00PM Official Welcome/Opening Ceremonies; Cocktail Party with our Guests of Honor!
7:00PM Dealer’s Room Closes
8:00PM Sensual and Spooky: Is Paranormal Romance the new horror? Moderator Jeannie Eddy. Panelists L.A. Banks, Heather Graham, Sèphera Girón, Hal Bodner
8:00PM Reading by Wrath James White
8:30PM Reading by Rain Graves
9:00PM Creative Fiction Contest! (Judges TBA)
10:00-?PM Damnation Books Party in the Hospitality Suite!

Saturday:
Pitch sessions (details TBA)
10:00AM: Registration and dealer’s room open
10:00AM Seven Deadly Sins of Characterization: Writing Believable Characters While Avoiding the Tropes: Moderator: Bill Gagliani. Panelists L.A. Banks, Hal Bodner, Maurice Broaddus, Adam Coats.
10:00AM: Reading by Gardner Goldsmith
10:30AM: Reading by Noel Hynd
11:00AM Seven Deadly Sins of Living With a Writer. The Highs and Lows of Life With A Writer. Moderator: Jeannie Eddy. Panelists: Karen Lansdale, Christie White, Mark Worthen, Kelli Dunlap, Derek Sullivan.
11:00AM: Reading by Lisa Mannetti
11:30AM: Reading by Bill Gagliani
12:00-1:00PM: Lunch
1:00PM: What makes a good horror movie? Moderator L.L. Soares. Panelists Mike McCarty, Edward Lee, John Palisano, Kurt Newton, Zac Sanford
1:00PM Reading by Heather Graham
1:30PM Reading by William Ollie
1:00-3:00PM Marketing and Promoting Your Book on a Shoestring Budget with Matt Schwartz, Director of digital strategy for Random House Publishing Group and an adjunct professor teaching book marketing at New York University. Learn the tricks of the digital trade in this 2-hour seminar that will teach you more than a dozen ways to market your book and build your online fan base that are free or cost next-to-nothing. Limited to 20 seats per seminar, you will receive custom advice specific to your books and goals. These tips can assist established authors and newcomers alike. This is a FREE event but is limited to 20 attendees. First come, first served! Sign-up will be available at Registration, or by emailing committee@killercon.org (registered members only).
2:00PM: Eros and Thanatos: Erotic Horror vs. Paranormal Romance vs. Pornography. What’s the difference? Moderator Sèphera Girón. Panelists Angela James, Rain Graves, Meghan Knierim, Heather Graham, Lori Perkins
2:00PM Reading by L.A. Banks
2:30PM Adam Coats Lecture: Martial arts, techniques, and adding realistic fight scenes to your fiction
2:30-4PM: Q&A with Allen K, L.A. Banks & Brian Keene
3:00PM: Seven Deadly Sins of Writing Extreme Horror: The Fine Art of Sex and Violence. Moderator: Gord Rollo. Panelists: Edward Lee, Amy Grech, Cody Goodfellow, John Skipp, Gardner Goldsmith, Wrath James White, Monica J. O'Rourke
3:00-5:00PM Inside Digital Publishing with Angela James, industry expert and Editorial Director of Quartet Press. Get answers to your questions about digital publishing. Angela James offers a frank discussion on all aspects of digital publishing, answering questions from previous sessions, as well as questions you come prepared to ask, such as: Why don't e-publishers pay at least a minimum $1000 advance to all of their authors? What are the benefits of this shift from the long-time “business model” used by print houses? Is there a future for e-books other than erotica? Why should print authors also look to publish e-books? What should I know about my digital rights with traditional publishing houses? Limited to 12 seats, Angela’s workshop will assist established authors and newcomers alike. This is a FREE event but is limited to 12 attendees. First come, first served! Sign-up will be available at Registration, or by emailing committee@killercon.org (registered members only).
3:00PM Reading by John Palisano
3:30PM Reading by Jeannie Eddy
4:00PM Turning a Monster on its Ear: Can You Really Romance a Zombie? Moderator Gord Rollo. Panelists Brian Keene, Lori Perkins, John Skipp, Cody Goodfellow
4:00PM Reading by Joe Lansdale
4:30PM Reading by Maurice Broaddus
5:00-7:00PM Mass Signing
7:00PM Dealer Room Closes
7:00PM Strip Crawl! Shuttles will leave every thirty minutes to take you to and from the Las Vegas Strip to enjoy the glitz and glamour of some of the world’s largest casinos.
7:00PM Male or Female? The game show that challenges the audience to guess the gender of the author of a passage of classic or current horror. Can you tell the difference? Moderator Matt Schwartz. Panelists Allen K, Maurice Broaddus, Rain Graves, L.L. Soares
8:00PM Seven Deadly Sins of Writing Erotic Fiction: Moderator: Gabrielle Faust. Panelists: Sèphera Girón, Rain Graves, Hal Bodner, L.A. Banks, Jeannie Eddy
8:00PM Reading by Rhodi Hawk
8:30PM Reading by Amy Grech
9:00PM Book Reviewing vs. Criticism: What’s the difference? Moderator Jim Argendeli. Panelists Bill Gagliani, James La Chance, Barbara Vey, Chris Welch, Jerry Unangst, Kelli Dunlap.
10:00PM Open Mic Poetry Reading hosted by Rain Graves: You weren’t planning on going to bed tonight anyway, were you?
11:00PM Erotic Horror Fiction Contest! (Judges TBA)

Sunday:
10:00AM: Dealer’s room open
10:00AM Seven Deadly Sins of Horror Art: Becoming famous while you’re still alive. What the horror artist does in and for the genre. Moderator GAK. Panelists Allen K, John Palisano, Russell Dickerson
10:00AM Reading by Azrael Paul Damien
10:30AM Reading by Cory Cramer
11:00AM Seven Deadly Sins of Plot Development: Why storytelling is more than just having a good plot. Moderator Rain Graves. Panelists: Joe Lansdale, Lisa Mannetti, Brian Keene, Sèphera Girón
11:00AM Reading by Paul Gifford
12:00PM Seven Deadly Sins of Working with an Agent. Moderator: Adam Pepper. Panelists Robert Fleck, Lori Perkins, Laura Bradford, Jeannie Eddy, Angela James
12:00PM Reading by Tim Marquitz
1:00PM Closing Ceremonies
6:00PM Dead Dog Party in the Hospitality Suite

Go to www.killercon.org for more information and to register for the convention.

Evil Never Dies

2009-08-11T21:37:00.000-07:00

So, my wife and I have been going through a really scary time the last few weeks. I was driving home from the gym about three weeks ago, listening to NPR as usual, when I heard a story about skin cancer. The announcer was describing the differences between melanomas and carcinomas and how to tell them apart. The description he gave sounded very much like a spot I had seen on my wife's arm. I decided to call her right then and there. I told her to make an appointment with a dermatologist. She did and they were able to get her in the next day.

At the dermatologists office the doctor walked in and walked directly over to Christie and circled a spot on her shoulder.

"Is this what you're here about?"

Well, they did a biopsy and it came back positive for melanoma. I was at work when I found out. I cried a little. I never cry. Ever. In case you don't know, melanoma is the bad one, the fatal one. I pulled myself together before I went home. The last thing Christie needed was to see tears in my eyes. I had to be strong for her. I held her while she cried and I assured her that everything would be okay.

We went back to the doctor last week and they cut a hole in her shoulder one inch all around the area where the melanoma had been discovered, cutting all the way to the bone. Then they performed another biopsy on what they removed. We had to wait a week to find out the results.

Today we went to the Nevada Cancer Institute. We registered her with the Cancer Association of America. They gave her a little card with her picture on it. Everyone there was amazingly polite and professional and just plain nice. It scared the shit out of us. We signed papers with the Cancer Research Institute allowing them to use her blood samples for research. Needless to say, we were scared to death by the time we finally got to see the oncologist. Luckily, he had good news. The surgery had been a success and all the cancer was gone. We had caught it before it had grown more than a few millimeters. The difference between a few millimeters of melanoma and a few centimeters of melanoma is the difference between a 90% survival rate and a 60%. It hadn't spread. There's a 30% chance that it will reoccur but if she stays out of the sun and wears sunblock she should be fine. I looked over at her after we got the good news and smiled.

"I told you, you'd be okay. Evil never dies."

Everyone Dies Famous In A Small Town

2009-07-05T10:35:00.000-07:00

Everyone Dies Famous In A Small Town is the story of Mika Alonzo a promiscuous, drug-addicted, young girl suffering from schizophrenia who lives in Bishop, California, a small town in the Sierra Nevadas where people seem to be dying all around her under increasingly violent and bizarre circumstances. Is it all in her head or does it have something to do with the water babies, evil spirits that live in the lake whose voices sound like the cries of young children and summon strangers to the lake to be drowned?

This book is as close to bizarro fiction as I get. It's equal parts twisted, perverse, gruesome, and sad and it's all based on actual events. It will be published by Thunderstorm Books sometime in 2010. I'm sure you guys are going to love it.

Lottery!

2009-06-19T21:26:00.000-07:00

The Apex author lottery is going on now! Win some cool books (written by me) Hero, Succulent Prey, and Orgy of Souls!
http://www.apexauthorlottery.info/products/orgy-of-souls-hero-succulent-prey-wrath-james-white

Come Chat With Me!

2009-06-17T21:13:00.000-07:00

Sunday, June 28th at 8:30pm EST at The Horror Mall. I'll be there to answer all your questions about what I do, don't do, have done, might consider doing, could be bribed or seduced into doing, along with what I write and think. The only catch is that you have to be a member of The Horror Mall so go sign up at http://www.horror-mall.com/haunt/ and I'll see you on Sunday.

Here's the link to the chatroom:

http://www.horror-mall.com/haunt/forums/display_topic/id_1206/page_2/WRATH-JAMES-WHITE-au/#r27549

The Ressurectionist

2009-06-01T17:53:00.000-07:00

In six months Leisure will release my next novel, The Ressurectionist. Unlike Succulent Prey which was originally written for the small press, this one was written with the mass-market in mind. It is written almost entirely from the protagonists' point of view and is probably one of the creepier books I have written. It still has its share of sex and gore though nothing like the over-the-top orgiastic bloodbaths of Succulent Prey. What I think most readers will enjoy about this book is the eerieness of it, watching as the two main characters try to figure out what the hell is happening to them.

The Ressurectionist is the story of a man with the power to bring people back from the dead with no memory of their deaths. But not every miracle comes from God and not every healer is a saint. Dale is a rapist and murderer. When he moves in next to a beautiful woman and her husband he quickly becomes infatuated with his gorgeous neighbor. When she starts to have nightmares of being attacked and killed and begins discovering clues around her house, bloody sheets, clean spots on the floor, a broken lock on the backdoor, Dale finds himself at the center of a murder investigation and his accuser and the police's prime witness is the victim herself.

The Ressurectionist asks the question, "Why would God give such immense power to someone so evil? Why are some of the most powerful people in the world also the most wicked?"

Cargo Cult Press will also be releasing a limited edition hardcover edition of The Ressurectionist in November. I'm sure you will enjoy.

Where I'll be in June

2009-05-08T00:25:00.000-07:00

Hypericon5! 2009 in Nashville
June 5th - 7th

Hypericon 5 Guests
Author Guest of Honor
Brian Keene
Artist Guest of Honor
Steven Gilberts
Fan Guest of Honor
Bob (Outsidecon) Embler
Special Film Guest
Kathy Mar
Special Author Guests
Glen Cook, Jonathan Maberry
Author Guests
D.A. Adams, Michael A Banks, David Jack Bell, Alicia Benson, Maurice Broaddus, Elizabeth Donald, John Everson, P. S. Gifford, Sara Harvey, Julie Kagawa, Ronald Kelly, John Klement, Deborah LeBlanc, Julianne Lee, Scott Nicholson, Phil Nutman, Stephanie Osborn, Kimberley Raiser, Edmund Schubert, Steven Shrewsbury, Bryan Smith, Bill Snodgrass, Matthew Warner, Wrath James White, and Honorary Princess of Hypericon, NY Times Best-Selling Author Alethea Kontis!
Editor Guests
Jason Sizemore, Toni Weisskopf
Artist Guests
Paul Bielaczyc, Melissa Gay, Todd Lyles, Alex McVey, Deena Warner
Film Guests
Hunter Cressall, Stephen and Suzie Lackey, Mark Wright, Stephen Zimmer
Podcasters
Mark Kinney

Go to http://www.hypericon.info/ for more information and to register for the convention.

Latest Projects

2009-04-11T06:35:00.000-07:00

My newest novel,The Resurrectionist, is now in the hands of the publisher(s). I would expect to see the limited from CCP fairly soon. Probably this summer around the time that Yaccub hits the shelves via Necro Books. Then the mass-market release from Leisure should be out in November/December if not early 2010. Here's a glimpse at the back cover copy to give you an idea what the book is about.

Dale McCarthy has a unique and miraculous ability. He can bring the dead back to life, though the resurrected have no memory of their death. But not every miracle comes from God, and not every healer is a saint.

Ever since her new neighbor moved in, Sarah Lincoln has been having terrible nightmares. Last night she dreamed that she and her husband were brutally murdered in their beds. This morning she found bloody sheets in the laundry and blood stains on her mattress. And the nightmare is the same, night after night after night. With no one prepared to take her wild fears seriously, Sarah will have to save herself from being murdered. Again.

I'm sure you will enjoy this one. For those who don't know about my urban gangsta horror novel Yaccub set to be released in August from Necro Books. Here's a brief synopsis:

Yaccub follows the life of Malik Black, a highly intelligent though confused and often angry young black kid as he grows up in a crime infested neighborhood in Northwest Philadelphia known as "G-town". The novel follows Malik and his two best friends, Tank, a hulking teenager attracted to the “gangsta” lifestyle by the promise of wealth and women, and Tank’s brother Huey, light skinned and comely but ruthless and driven by an almost psychopathic racial hatred, as he digresses further and further into the criminal lifestyle. When Malik becomes a hitman for a white drug dealer named Scratch, who may or may not be Satan himself, it sparks a desperate battle within him between good and evil, sanity and madness, redemption and damnation. Things further complicate when Malik learns that his employer is on a mission to murder a newborn crack baby that he believes to be Jesus Christ. Malik later discovers that his own prejudice and violent egoistic hedonism has made him as much a menace to his people as the man he believes to be the devil and that both he and his employer may have been created millenniums ago by an evil geneticist/sorcerer named Dr. Yaccub for the same purpose, to ensure strife between the races.

Drawing on Christian and Nation of Islam mythology, Yaccub is a look at the destructiveness of drugs, poverty, crime, and prejudice from a unique perspective, that of the guilty. It examines the motivations and rationalizations of drug dealers and murderers and the hypocrisy of those who think there is such a thing as justifiable prejudice.

Yeah, I packed a lot into this novel. I do hope you enjoy it.

So what am I writing now? I'm currently working on a short novelette titled Reaper about a drone pilot experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder. I'm haunting the bars around Nellis Airforce base trying to find a drone pilot willing to talk about what he does. I'm also watching hours and hours of war footage of bombing missions in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, taken via satellite and some from actual control rooms at Nellis. Funny, how you never imagined that a pilot sitting in Las Vegas bombing targets in Iraq could experience PTSD. If anything the argument was that they would be so detached from the humanity and reality of war that it would be like playing a video game and they would dehumanize the enemy even further. But apparently they get it worse than regular pilots. This one is pretty deep. It's much different than my normal stuff. None of the psychosexual violence, but this is so real that I think it's just as disturbing as anything I've written.

Well, that's it so far. So be on the lookout for The Resurrectionist, Yaccub, and The Reaper, three very different tastes that taste great together. Al due out this year. Next year...Poisoning Eros II!

First Annual Las Vegas KillerCon

2009-03-14T20:34:00.000-07:00

The First Annual Las Vegas KillerCon will take place September 17 through September 20, 2009 at the Palace Station Hotel/Casino in Sin City. The Horror, Thriller, and Paranormal Romance genres collide in this inaugural multi-genre writer’s convention.

This event will feature panel discussions, readings, two writing contests, parties, book signings, and author Q&As with guests of honor Joe R. Lansdale, Brian Keene, L.A. Banks, Heather Graham, and Edward Lee as well as many other top talents in Fear Fiction who will be in attendance.
Joe Lansdale’s books include the newly released “Leather Maiden,” “Lost Echoes” and “The Bottoms.” Brian Keene’s works include “Dark Hollow” “Ghoul,”“The Rising,” “City of The Dead” and “The Conqueror Worms,” among others. Leslie Arsdaile Banks has written more than 30 novels including the first few novels of her 12 book “Vampire Huntress” series as well as a werewolf series “Crimson Moon” debuting this spring. Heather Graham is a New York Times Bestselling author who has dozens of novels under her belt, with recent titles including “A Kiss of Darkness,” “If Looks Could Kill” and “The Death Dealer.” Ed Lee’s brand of literary mayhem can be found in recent releases “Brides of The Impaler” and “House Infernal”. He is also the author of “Infernal Angel” and “City Infernal” as well as “Fresh Gothic”, “Slither” and more than a dozen others.
KillerCon is the brainchild of author Wrath James White, who is not only enmeshed in the horror/thriller community as a writer (author of Succulent Prey, Population Zero, and His Pain) but has extensive experience in coordinating and promoting sporting events and concerts.

Wrath is joined by writer Monica J. O’Rourke (author of Suffer the Flesh, Experiments in Human Nature, and co-author of Poisoning Eros along with Wrath James White.) Monica chaired the 2005 World Horror Convention in New York City, as well as several New York City-based Stoker Awards banquets, and has many years’ marketing experience.
Come join us for this exciting event or no one will ever love you.
Go to www.killercon.org for more information and to register for the convention.

MoCon IV: A New Hope

2009-03-08T21:29:00.000-07:00

“The Love and Business of Writing”

May 15th – 17th , 2009

What is Mo*Con?

Brought to you by the Indiana Horror Writers, Mo*Con is a friendly convention focused on conversations revolving around horror literature and spirituality. If you enjoy writing, horror, fantasy, poetry, and food, you’ll find plenty to enjoy at this convention

Who Will Be There?

Tom Piccirilli
Tom Piccirilli is the Edgar nominated author of twenty novels including THE COLDEST MILE, THE COLD SPOT, THE MIDNIGHT ROAD, HELLBOY: EMERALD HELL, THE DEAD LETTERS, HEADSTONE CITY, A CHOIR OF ILL CHILDREN, and NOVEMBER MOURNS.

Gary Braunbeck
Gary A. Braunbeck is a prolific author who writes mysteries, thrillers, science fiction, fantasy, horror, and mainstream literature. He is the author of 19 books; his fiction has been translated into Japanese, French, Italian, Russian and German. Nearly 200 of his short stories have appeared in various publications.

Lucy Synder
The author the author of a trilogy of novels that are set be published by Del Rey starting in 2009; the first book in the series is entitled Spellbent. Also the author of Sparks and Shadows, a cross-genre short story collection from HW Press, Lucy A. Snyder may be most known for her humor collection Installing Linux on a Dead Badger (And Other Oddities). With over 70 short fiction sales and over 20 poetry sales, her fiction goes all over the road, although she does tend to write genre stories (science fiction, fantasy, horror, romance, etc.) more often than straightforward mainstream fiction. She also writes a column for Horror World on science and technology for writers.

Linda Addison
Linda D. Addison grew up in Philadelphia and began weaving stories at an early age. She moved to New York after college and has published over 200 poems, stories and articles. Ms Addison is the author of “Being Full of Light, Insubstantial” (Space & Time Books) and the first African-American recipient of the world renowned Bram Stoker Award. She was honored with her second win in April 2008 for her latest collection.

Gerard Houarner
Gerard Houarner is a product of the NYC school system who lives in the Bronx, was married at a New Orleans Voodoo Temple, and works at a psychiatric institution. He's had over 250 short stories, a four novels and four story collections, as well as a few anthologies published, all dark. To find out about the latest, visit www.gerardhouarner.com, or drop by and say hi at www.myspace.com/gerardhouarner or his board at www.horrorworld.org

Wrath James White
Succulent Prey marks his first mass-market release from Leisure Books. If you have a taste for extreme fiction with socio-political and philosophical messages that push boundaries, break taboos, and leave you thinking long after the book has ended then check out Teratologist co-written with Edward Lee, Poisoning Eros co written with Monica O-Rourke, The Book of A thousand Sins collection, His Pain novella, Orgy of Souls with Maurice Broaddus, Hero novella with J.F. Gonzalez, and Population Zero. If you have a weak stomach, a closed mind, rigid morals, and Victorian sexual ethics, than avoid his writing like the plague.

When/Where is it?

May 15, 16, and 17th

Trinity Church
6151 N. Central Avenue
Indianapolis, IN 46220

There are plenty of nearby hotels (MicroTel has served well in the past). This page will be updated as more guests and details are confirmed. [We can also make special arrangements, just drop me a line at MauriceBroaddus@gmail.com]

Programming

Friday
7:00 p.m. Doors open
8:00 p.m. Guest Dinner/Reception
10:00 p.m. Poetry Slam

Saturday
10:00 a.m. Doors open
11:00 a.m. Panels on spirituality, writing, horror, and readings. Lunch.
5:00 p.m. The Dwelling Place Gathering, featuring sermon by Wrath James White. Dinner afterwards.
[After party to be announced]

Sunday
11:00 a.m. Farewell Brunch

Cost: $35 per Person
Money will be accepted at the door or it can be sent to my paypal account [Maurice Broaddus - MauriceBroaddus@gmail.com memo: Mo*Con IV]

There will be several debut projects, so this blog will be updated accordingly. More details to come (as will a re-vamping of my web site to feature a Mo*Con page to include footage of previous Mo*Cons).

Fear of the Dark

2009-03-07T12:53:00.000-08:00

A couple months ago I finished reading Ray Garton's book about werewolves terrorizing a small town titled Ravenous. For several nights afterwards, I walked downstairs naked in the dark and had a moment of fear where I thought how easy it would be for a werewolf to lunge out of the dark and disembowel me with a single swipe of its claws. My imagination being what it is, I could even pictures the beasts slavering mouth and two-inch fangs its silver eyes catching the starlight and casting it back from the shadows. I could see its sharp yellowed claws reaching out for me from the blackness. Quickly I would grab a glass of water and hurry back upstairs to the safety of my bedroom. I had similar thoughts after watching 28 Weeks Later and reading Brian Keene's zombie apocalypse novels The Rising, City of the Dead, and Dead Sea. I still have moments where I imagine zombies lurking in the dark as I go down to the kitchen to raid my refrigerator.

What's even weirder is that I have the same fears as I write my own novels. Right now, I am finishing a novel about a serial killer who lives across the street from a couple that he repeatedly rapes and kills and then brings back to life. The novel is called The Ressurectionist and in my mind, it takes place in my neighborhood, in my house. As a result of living with these characters for the past few months, every time I go down stairs it is the antagonist from my own novel that I see lunging out for me from the darkness. I imagine how easy it would be for a killer to slash my throat or even decapitate me with a single stroke of a well-honed blade. I imagine all the terrible things he might then do to my family... and then I go back upstairs and write about it.

That's what a lot of readers do not realize about horror writers. Most often we are writing about the things that terrify us in the hopes that you share our same phobias. When someone asks me how I can think of such terrible things my first thoughts are always, "How can you not?" See, horror writers cannot shy away from the unpleasantries of life. They are our stock and trade. Thinking about the very worst things that can possibly happen to human beings is how we make our living, Part of writing in this genre means constantly researching and brainstorming about the very worst elements of human nature, life, nature, death, the afterlife, and the supernatural. We scour the headlines for tragic events to turn into stories. Rather than turn the channel when we hear of some horrific crime, natural disaster, disease, accident, or genocidal war, we listen attentively, filing away every detail to be used later. We even reach back through time and across continents to research myths and legends and atrocities from the past. Our minds are filled with more terrible things both real and imagined than most people can scarcely conceive of. And here's the secret. They scare us too.

Readers love to imagine the ghoulish horror writer that delights in madness, death, and perversity. But this is largely a myth. Most horror authors are outraged at the atrocity and inhumanity of which the world is everywhere full. That's why we write about it. We want you to be outraged too. We want you to be aware of it. We hate the fact that others are able to turn the channel and ignore even the most horrific events and pretend that they do not exist. We hate it because we can't do it. We see the serial killers lurking in the dark. We see the monsters under the bed. We see the Bogey man in the closet and the werewolves and predators that gobble up lost children and make men and women disappear never to be seen again. We see them in every unsolved murder or disappearance. We see the possibility of genetic mutations in every government funded biological experiment, the apocalypse that awaits us in every new nuclear weapon that is created, every new disease that is discovered and every newer, faster, smarter, more powerful computer we invent. We are terrified by it all and we want you to share our terror.

So I don't turn on the lights when I get up in the middle of the night to get a glass of water. I allow myself to experience the terror so I can give it all back to you and make sure that when you get up in the middle of the night, you turn on every light in the house. Because something from the mind of your favorite horror author just might be coiled in the shadows, waiting to strike.

Expanding the Ten Bears

2009-03-02T20:13:00.000-08:00

In my recent interview on NPR I mentioned Stephen King's "Ten Bears" and how I thought those "bears" might have risen to fifteen during the past two decades. I think I may have been too conservative in that estimation. Here's a look at King's original list of common fears:

1. fear of the dark
2. fear of squishy things
3. fear of deformity
4.Fear of snakes
5. fear of rats
6. fear of closed in spaces
7. fear of insects
8. fear of death
9. fear of others
10. fear for someone else

To these I would add:

11. Fear of technology
12. Fear of authority
13. Fear of Poverty/ Fear of the poor
14. Fear of Insanity
15. Fear of Sex and Sexuality
16. Fear of Disease
17. Fear of Apocalypse
18. Fear of Isolation

Fear of technology is, of course, nothing new. Science fiction has been tackling this fear for years. Ray Bradbury and Phillip K. Dick were masters at exploiting this fear. Movies like The Terminator have made millions off our own paranoid distrust of our own creations. In today's world where people walk around with computers ten times as powerful as the one that launched the first space shuttle in their pockets, where the power of computers double each year, the idea of a massive computer revolt never seemed more possible.

Likewise, fear of authority is not really a new one either. George Orwell's 1984 was perhaps the quintessential treatise on this particular phobia. After eight year's with a President who did his own thing regardless of what the country wanted resulting in the deaths of thousands, it is easy to understand this fear.

Fear of poverty and fear of the poor have been around for quite some time as well and as poverty has driven more of the lower class to crime, you don't have to be the French aristocracy to get a bit nervous about walking through an impoverished neighborhood. The idea of living there, even for someone like me who was born and raised in the ghetto, can be truly terrifying. Gangs, drugs, guns, rage, frustration, and desperation combine for one hell of a deadly mix. And now, with the world in economic ruin, and people losing homes and jobs all around us, the idea that we may soon join the unwashed masses of the poor is a terrifying thought to those of us who have worked hard all of our lives. The idea that we may someday be unable to provide for our families, that we may someday sit helplessly while our children starve, or that we may turn to crime to feed them, is as scary as any dark squishy thing a horror writer could throw at us.

Fear of Insanity. Imagine if you suddenly began hearing the voice of God and he was telling you to murder your children. Imagine if you began to see monsters and demons everywhere but only you could see them. Imagine if there was a worldwide conspiracy against you and even the people on the TV were watching you. I can think of few things more terrifying than losing my mind.

Fear of Sex and Sexuality. As bizarre as it seems, I could write a story about completely legal consensual sex between adults that would terrify and apall as many people as it aroused. Societal taboos have rendered many sexual acts abhorrent and even terrifying to many people. Fear of deviancy including our own is quite real. If you were to read Succulent Prey and imagine that it was a man trying to find a cure for homosexuality rather than cannibalism or a homosexual man who was suddenly overwhelmed by unwanted heterosexual urges that he couldn't control, it would still be just as terrifying on many levels. Imagine being the only freak in a world full of painfully normal, uptight, judgemental, vanilla sex and having to hide it from everyone for fear of shame and ostracism, trying desperately to suppress your desires and be like everyone else, always afraid that someone would find you out.

Disease, like Stephen King's fear of deformity, is one of those body horrors that can make you want to crawl out of your own skin. The age of HIV and AIDS has spawned an increasing paranoia around deadly diseases. Even Robin Cook never conceived of anything like AIDS or Ebola or the flesh-eating Necrotizing Fascitis. The idea that the apocalypse might come in the form of a super-flu is a very real fear for many.

The Apocalypse. As a kid who grew up in the eighties expecting to wake up any day to the sound of Strategic Defense counting down the minutes until the bombs struck, the idea of Armageddon has always been very real and very terrifying. Now, with a world overrun by religious extremists, any one of which might acquire a nuclear, chemical, or biological weapon and decide that we would all be better off in heaven, that threat is no less real and no less terrifying.

Fear of Isolation is one of those fears that too few writers ever tackle but one that is at the core of what it means to be human, to be a social animal. I'm not just talking about your loved ones abandoning you but being abandoned by everyone, being totally alone. As much as computers and technology have brought us together with our distant neighbors from around the world they have isolated us from our neighbors next door. We live now in a world of hundreds of acquaintances and few friends. We are terrified of each other. We shutter ourselves in our homes and talk only from the safety of a computer screen. Since the days of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe to Richard Matheson's I Am Legend, the idea of total isolation has horrified us and continues to frighten us to this day.

And there you have it. Eighteen Bears to terrify and delight you. With all of these very real and natural terrors lurking everywhere around us it seems almost unnecessary to invent supernatural horrors. Perhaps that's why I have always found psychological horror so much more disturbing than tales of zombies, vampires, and demons. Then again, if you include the supernatural you might just add another five or six bears to our list. How about fear of the undead?

A Note About Characterization

2009-02-19T16:08:00.000-08:00

As a horror writer, you are often stereotyped as being sick or demented for being able to create such evil characters and terrifying monsters. It is assumed that their perversity, their evil and insanity, must somehow be a subconscious or conscious reflection of the author's personality. Readers are often surprised when they meet a horror author and he or she is not a slavering madman. I have always thought it interesting that readers do not assume that the hero of the novels must also reflect an aspect of the author's personality. They do not seem to remember that the horror author created all of the characters in the novel, the heroes and victims, as well as the villains. If the villain is assumed to embody some hidden desire or subconscious perversity why is it not also assumed that the heroes and victims in the stories likewise embody an aspect of the writer's persona?

While the author is writing, he is inside all of the character's heads. He is seeing the world he has created, not from one singular perspective but from the perspectives of every character in the novel as he writes them, even if that is only for the length of a single sentence, even if the novel is written in first person. Just because the novel may be written from one character's perspective does not mean that the author is not still a part of all of the other characters. These characters would not be able to make a single action or utter a single line of dialogue if the author did not first put himself into their perspective and ask himself "What would I do now if I were him or her?" It is an essential part of the creative writing process.

The author is the protagonist, the antagonist, the murder victim exsanguinating onto the sidewalk, the unsuspecting jogger who discovers the body, the police officers who arrive at the scene, the crime scene investigators, the reporters, the coroners, and the grieving loved ones. Every individual who inhabits the world he has created contains a bit of the author's perspective because in order to write these characters we must ask ourselves, "What would I do if I were him or her? What would I think? How would I feel?" Nothing could happen in the novel without this necessary first step.

This stereotype appears to be entirely unique to horror authors. Mystery writers, action adventure writers, spy novelists, are all identified with the heroes of the novel no matter how diabolical the villains. You identify Ian Flemming with James Bond not Goldfinger. You would never assume that Ian Flemming must secretly harbor a desire to conquer the world because the antagonists in his novels are megalomaniacs intent on world domination.

The omniscient perspective that a writer must adopt in order to create realistic characters that the readers can identify with and believe in is often an uncomfortable place to be. Thus the temptation to write one-dimensional characters. Giving depth to your characters requires the courage, the talent, and the work-ethic to get inside their heads. Getting inside the villain's head may be disturbing but it is much less disturbing than being inside the victim as she or he is shot, slashed, strangled, mauled, mutilated, stabbed, tortured, dismembered, or eaten. Likewise, getting inside the mind of the hero is a more comfortable place to be. We all want to think of ourselves as heroes rather than villains or victims. The writer has no choice in the matter. If he is to write believable characters, he must be all of these. The author must inhabit these characters often for many months. Think about it. Imagine living in the mind of a woman being stalked by a vampire or a serial killer for five or six months. That's what horror writers do.

In Brian Keene's The Rising he tackles a theme that is very personal to him, that of a father trying desperately to return to his son. Brian inhabited this father's head through months of writing. He also inhabited the world of The Rising. He lived there for months in a world populated by flesh-eating zombies. Just imagine months looking at the world through the perspective of a father desperately trying to return to his son, battling across hundreds of miles inhabited by fast-moving intelligent zombies. To only identify Brian with the zombies and not with that courageous father belittles the entire creative process.

Delving the motivations of the villain or the terror of the victim is far more difficult than that of the hero. It is far more difficult to try to understand the motivations of a killer who tortures, dismembers, and cannibalizes his victims than those of the hero trying to stop him. In Succulent Prey, Joseph Miles was the villain of the story as well as the hero and one of the victims as well. Writing that one character required me to look at the world through all three perspectives. Yet, due no doubt to the graphic descriptions, the villain is all anyone recalls.

When I wrote Population Zero, I had to try to understand what would motivate a person to forcibly sterilize people or else it would have been exactly what many extreme novels are accused of being, one-dimensional torture porn. I had to understand Stephanie and Cathy's motivations as well though. I had to also understand the motivations of each victim or else who would have given a fuck one way or the other when they were killed. If you cheered for Todd when he gave Nicolene a hysterectomy but hated him for hitting Stephanie in the belly with a hammer then you felt the way you did because you felt like you knew those characters enough to judge them and decide which one deserved it and which one didn't. In order for you to know them, I had to know them first.

The novel I am currently writing is written almost entirely from the perspective of the victim. Everyday I spend a few hours feeling her fear and pain and confusion. I also feel the emotions of the antagonist and of the detectives who are trying to solve the case and rescue her.

That is why it is so odd when writers are looked upon as being twisted and amoral for doing such terrible things to their characters when those characters are us as well. It is odd that we are looked upon as being evil and demented for creating such horrific monsters and villains but not as noble and heroic for the heroes we create or empathetic and compassionate for the victims we create. All of these characters came from the mind of the author. And all of them reflect an aspect of the author's personality.

Wrath James White on NPR

2009-02-13T14:47:00.000-08:00

I even found myself slipping into that whispery NPR voice.

Here's the direct Link for the NPR download and listen: http://www.knpr.org/audio2009/090213_wrath-jameswhite.m3u

If you've heard me in interviews before then you'll probably notice that my voice sounds a lot higher here. I have no idea why.

On the Promo Trail

2009-02-02T17:03:00.000-08:00

Well, I have taken my promotional efforts to the mass media. The local weekly paper here in the City of Sin, Las Vegas City Life, has done a feature article on yours truly http://www.lasvegascitylife.com/articles/2009/01/08/ae/books/iq_26127543.txt

I am also scheduled to do an interview on National Public Radio next friday the 13th to talk about Succulent Prey and all things Wrath. I'm not sure if this will be broadcast nationally or just locally but I'll post a link to the podcast following the broadcast either way.

I've done almost a dozen interviews yet for some reason this one has me as nervous as a virgin on prom night. Wish me luck.

A New American

2009-01-20T12:47:00.000-08:00

I said the Pledge of Allegiance this year for the first time since I was eight or nine. After Obama's election, I truly felt like an American for the first time. I know, that is an odd concept for some. I am willing to go out on a limb here and guess that everyone who has a hard time grasping that concept is probably not Black. You are probably not Native American, Latino, or Asian either. If you are Black, until today, pledging your loyalty to a country that still excluded you from many of the privileges that you helped to create and defend felt uncomfortable, ridiculous, weak. I would have felt embarrassed to say The Pledge before. Like a woman declaring her love to the husband who abuses her. Knowing that she loves him but knowing she should not. Knowing that others would look at her like a fool for doing so. I would have felt like an Uncle Tom. There has never been an American Flag in or on my house, car, clothes, or in my hand. Not since a July 4th parade I was in, in kindergarten.

I stopped saying The Pledge of Allegiance in elementary school. When all the other kids stood, I remained in my seat. I was pulled out of class and sent to the principle's office. My mother was called. She took off time from work to come down to the school to meet with the principle of Lingelbach Elementary School, Mr. Smallwood. The minute Mr. Smallwood saw my mother he knew he had made a mistake. I could see it in his eyes and I smiled and sat back in my chair to enjoy the show. My mother walked into his office, all 5'11" of her, six inches taller than Mr. Smallwood. She had a shoulder to shoulder afro and she was wearing a dashiki and platform shoes that made her well over 6'2" tall. She ranted and raved and cussed and hollered for a full five-minutes while Mr. Smallwood apologized again and again and promised her that I would not be made to say the Pledge ever again.

All through high school and college I sat while the other kids stood. I stayed mum while they repeated those words of fidelity to this country that I could not fully embrace as my own, feeling that it had not fully embraced me. As an adult, during the Clinton years, I was more subtle. I stood but would not recite and did not put my hand over my heart. It was bad enough that the government took my taxes without truly representing me, I was not going to compound the insult by bowing down before my oppressor. This feeling became more vehement during Reagan's term in office when the young Black male became Public Enemy number 1 and I just happened to be of that sex and hue and even more so during the reign of George W. Bush when we were simply ignored by a president who appeared content to pretend that Black people simply did not exist.

Then came Barrack Obama. Martin Luther King said that we would reach the mountain top and seeing Barrack's inauguration felt like that mountain top. For a man born of an African father and a white mother to have reached the highest office in the land was the very epitome of that dream. For the first time, it felt like my America. I felt represented in a way that no Black person in America has ever felt before.

I was reading a a poem today by Linda Addison titled My Country The Day Before, January 19, 2009, and I was almost moved to tears by these words:

Stars and stripes forever
red, white and blue
bringing us all home
finally, willing to be
responsible, each person finally
willing to be American

I had always been unwilling to be American because America had always felt unwilling to have me as one of its citizens. I had always felt as if America wished it could be rid of me, this dirty little secret. Black people, like Native Americans, are a reminder of America's less than virtuous past. But Black Americans have not been murdered to the point of near extinction. We were not interbred with Caucasians to the point that we can no longer be identified. And those of us who remained were not herded onto reservations and forgotten. Our continued presence in nearly every city in America was a constant reminder, an embarrassment, a blight, a stain, and we felt it. We felt it every day. I felt it every day. I felt your pity. I felt your anger. I felt your disgust and I felt your apathy and so I returned it. Even when I tried my best to let it go, it remained, boiling there below the surface. Now, I can let it go.

The idea that we are all expecting Obama to wave some magic wand and cure all the ills of the world is ridiculous. We expect him to make mistakes. We expect him to have the usual failures and controversies that every president before him has had along with quite a few victories. But the victory we were all most interested in was the one he made in November when he became the first Black man elected to the office of the president. If he does nothing more, that was enough.

I know, that seems odd for those of you who have grown up looking at faces that looked like you and your family whenever you watched a presidential election or inauguration or whenever the president of a major US company or corporation spoke on TV. It may even seem silly and naive. "Silly Negroes. He's only a man." We must seem deluded, hysterical, misguided. Someday, I hope to be so comfortable with the fact that a Black person can get elected to any office in this country, hold any position in business or politics, that I will look back on this day and wonder what all the fuss was about. I hope to be able to look at this type of event as no big deal. I hope to be able to wait and see what the Black guy does when he takes office before getting all excited. To see it all as inconsequential in the face of all the other challenges America has to face. I hope to feel that someday. But not today. Today, for the first time in memory, I am proud to be an American.

Sold it!

2009-01-08T21:16:00.000-08:00

That's right folks. Leisure Books has just contracted my novel-in-progress, The Ressurectionist. I could not be happier. I have got quite a bit of writing to do to make my March 31st deadline, but it will be worth it and since I am enjoying the hell out of writing this book it should be a breeze. I can't wait to see this one on the shelves. Look for it in 2010 at a bookstore near you!

Book signings in January

2009-01-01T10:02:00.000-08:00

On January 9th I will be joining Weston Ochse at Borders in Phoenix Arizona, 2402 E. Camelback Rd. Suite 200, where I'll be signing copies of Succulent Prey.

On January 17th I will be joining John Skipp and Cody Goodfellow for a book signing at Mysterious Galaxies in San Diego California.

I will be posting my Las Vegas readings as soon as they are confirmed.

Sex and Horror

2008-12-20T06:59:00.000-08:00

Recently, I have been hearing terms like "Torture Porn" thrown around to describe any horror that includes graphic descriptions of violence and dismemberment and particularly if there is a sexual element to it. This is of course a derogative term meant to imply that these works have no artistic merit and are meant merely to appeal to man's basest nature. Saw, Touristas, and Hostel have recently acquired this label. Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween, Friday The Thirteenth, they would have all been slapped with this label had they been made today. Now, Erotic horror novels that are designed to titillate as well as terrify are at risk of being dismissed as torture porn along with just about any novel with graphic descriptions of violence and sexual violence in particular.

Now, it doesn't take a prude to be offended or disturbed by my writing. I push the envelope with the reckless abandon of one who genuinely has no idea where the boundaries of that envelope ought to be found. But let's get it straight, I'm not doing it just to turn you on or freak you out. I've got a point I'm trying to get across in 99% of what I write. And I don't mean to imply that every work of extreme horror ought to have some social relevance in order to avoid the torture porn label. There is such a thing as artistic merit above and beyond any socio-political message a novel might contain. An expertly described evisceration is every bit the artistic achievement of a skillfully rendered landscape. The difference is one of aesthetics. It is one of preference not talent or artistic merit. As I have said many times in the past, you can take a bad story and remove all the sex and violence out of it and it won't get any better and conversely, adding sex and violence does not make it a bad story. It just may not make it your cup of tea.

I wouldn't call works by writers like Kathe Koja, Poppy Z. Brite, or Sephera Giron torture porn even on the occasions where there work has ventured toward the extreme end of the violence spectrum. Even when they write about the most violent acts there is still a poetry and beauty to their words. I wouldn't put even the most extreme works by writers like Jack Ketchum, Dick Laymon, or J.F. Gonzalez into this category. Why? Because they all have meaning beyond mere titillation and terror. You could compare both Off Season and Off Spring to Lord of The Flies as a study of how quickly man can revert to his animal nature when left to his own devices. The Girl Next Door was of course a riveting look at child abuse, the depths of inhumanity people will descend to out of peer pressure and when "just obeying orders", as well as a look at how truly cruel children can be. This was made even more disturbing by the fact that it was true. Gonzalez's book Survivor was originally titled Maternal Instinct when it was released as a novella by Delirium Books before being expanded into a mass-market novel and the original title tells you exactly what this book was about. It was a look at how far a mother was willing to go in order to protect her child, even to the point of sacrificing another mother's child. Poppy Z. Brite's book Exquisite Corpse about love between serial killers offered us an entirely new way to look at love and with her lavish and beautiful descriptions, even the most horrific scenes had a type of romantic beauty to them. As extreme as it was, Exquisite Corpse could almost be called a romance novel, a tale of impossible love between two lovers whose lifestyles and peculiar obsessions doomed their romance from the start. And finally there is my own novel Succulent Prey , a tale of addiction and obsession set against the backdrop of sex, serial murder, and cannibalism.

All of these books have at one time or another been dismissed as "Torture Porn" and not one of them deserves it. Each one of them has a real story to tell. The graphic sex or violence may not be your thing but that's quite a different statement then to say that the violence and the sex are the only point to these novels. Speaking for myself, I usually use copious amounts of sex and violence to keep the socio-political or philosophical themes in my stories from overpowering the narrative and making them too cerebral or from turning them into pure propaganda for whatever point I am trying to make or message I am trying to get across. Often, I am not successful and the messages are so heavy-handed that no amount of sex will hide the fact that I'm proselytizing. Most of those novels don't get published (though I'm still trying to get one or two of those onto the shelves because I think that what they have to say is that important.) Sometimes I go the other way and the violence and sex completely obscures whatever point I am trying to make. That's when I get slapped with the pornographer label. The difference though is that pornography is not trying to make a point. If I fail to make my point that is not quite the same thing as not having a point to begin with.

In truth, I have written pornography many times. I have written stories with no other purpose then to arouse a visceral reaction in the reader, whether sexual excitement, fear, or revulsion, and there's not a damn thing wrong with that. Everything has its place and horror, by its very definition, is all about evoking a visceral reaction. So is porn. Seems like a perfect marriage to me. If you called some of my shorter works "Horror Porn" I probably wouldn't object so long as you applied that term to the right stories and not to every damn thing that I write.

I like porn. I love it in fact. I am, after all, a sex addict. And when I am writing porn I am just as proud of that as when I am writing stories with genuine social relevance. In the end, we are all entertainers and a multi-billion dollar porn industry speaks strongly to the fact that porn is damn entertaining. I can write pornography in a short story but I cannot do that for over 30,000 or 80,000 words. Even a hedonist like me would get bored with that. So, if you have a book written by me in your hands and all you have gotten out of it is an erection or a chill up your spine or a roll of the stomach then I suggest you read deeper. You definitely missed something.

New Blog!

2008-12-18T03:32:00.000-08:00

Feeling the need to separate my writings about love, family, and the horror genre from my religious criticisms and political ramblings, I have decided to create a forum solely for my atheistic writings. I am planning on slowly importing past posts from Words of Wrath onto this one as well as posting newer blogs. So, if you would like to continue following my examinations of faith please go on over to www.GodlessandBlack.blogspot.com and subscribe to my new blog. Words of Wrath is now officially a blog about my writing and me. I hope you will contniue to follow my musings on one or both of these blogs.

I Broke Another Damned Computer!

2008-12-14T07:23:00.000-08:00

For those who have wondered why I have these long breaks where I publish nothing and then seem to publish half-a-dozen things all at once, here is the simple truth. I break shit, computers to be more specific. Whether it's from surfing porn sites and collecting more viruses than a five-dollar crackwhore or from doing something stupid like tossing a bag off the bed that just happens to contain a big ass candle that comes down on my laptop and smashes my computer screen all to hell, I just keep breaking shit.

So, now I have to buy yet another computer (thank goodness for Ebay)and transfer all the data from my old harddrive into this new one so that I can finish my non-fiction book and one or two of the three novels I am currently writing. Luckily, the novel I am most enthused about is on my wife's laptop. Lucky for me. It sucks for her because now I am on her laptop all the time and she complains that her virus protection isn't strong enough to cope with some of the websites I go on. Oh well, that's what you get being married to a hedonist who breaks computers.

I think I need to buy one of those ToughBook laptops that you can drop off a speeding Jeep. That and Pentagon grade virus protection so the people over at PhatBooties.com can't put spyware on my hardrive.

That Loving Feeling

2008-11-29T10:21:00.000-08:00

Faith is a very emotional thing. Despite the attempts by Christian apologists to do so, it really cannot be logically defended. The practice of believing without evidence and against all contradictory evidence, really is the antithesis of scientific investigation based on logic, reason, and empirical evidence. In that regard, it is very similar to other often irrational emotional responses like trust and love. As such, it is just as easily misled, just as easily twisted and deceived and abused, and just as often wrong. Still, for many, the answer to the question of "Why do you believe?" is a simple one.

Because I can feel God's love. I know God is there because I have felt his presence in my life.

In the end, after all the arguments have been made, all the evidence and clever analogies presented, and all the counter-arguments refuted, many believers will fall back on the one thing it is believed that logic cannot assail, their own subjective feelings and experiences,

I know there is a God because I have felt him there when I needed him. I have felt God's love when I was at my lowest and it gave me the strength to survive.

I'm sure we have all heard some version of this argument. Usually, the discussion ends right there. This is the part of the discussion over which logic and reason are assumed to hold no sway. How can you argue with some one's feelings? But don't we do just that all the time? Don't we argue with the woman who feels that her abusive husband really loves her? Wouldn't we argue with the child who felt in his heart that he was worthless and would never amount to anything? Wouldn't we argue with the aging fighter who had already begun to slur his words, suffering the first signs of pugilistic dementia, who still believed with all his heart and soul that he could be champion again? Would we accept as evidence of truth, the feelings of a teen aged couple who believed that they were destined to be in love for ever because they could feel the love burning in their chests more powerfully and passionately than even the most pious and devout believer? Or would we instead believe that they were mistaken, that their feelings were wrong, that they would fall in and out of love many times in their lives and that what they were feeling now was no evidence of anything real or eternal. Wouldn't we argue with and eventually seek therapy for a person if they believed that a celebrity they had never met was secretly in love with them and that they had a personal relationship with this celebrity, a bond that no one else would understand, because they could feel this celebrity's love so powerfully they knew it had to be real? Why are their feelings any less real or valid than the person who believes that they have a personal relationship with God because they can feel God's love?

In any church you will find cynical men and woman who have lost all faith in romantic love and have instead turned to the love of God to replace what they could not find in their fellow human beings. It is surprising that those very same individuals who have grown the most skeptical of human love still embrace this nebulous feeling of "Divine love" with absolute unquestioning certainty. It is so surprising because we find so many reasons, and often rightly so, to doubt the love of those physically present in our lives.

We question the love of the women who bare us children, cook our meals, go to work to help us pay the bills or stay at home to take care of the house, nurse us when we are sick, embrace us when we are sad, reassure us when we are uncertain, laughs with us and makes love to us. Yet the God who has never held us in his arms, who has never spoken kind words to us and reassured us when we were feeling weak and uncertain, whose voice we have never even heard, his love goes unquestioned. Does this make sense?

Often, we find that we were correct to question the love of the women in our lives. We find that the love we thought we had, had long died, or been taken by another, or had never been present at all. Despite the love we thought we felt coming from them, it had all been a lie.

Women question the love of the man who physically protects and provides for them and their children, who pledges that he would die for them, who listens to their woes and provides them a strong shoulder to cry on and a few words of assurance, who struggles beside them and for them, removing obstacles from their path, and often they are right for being cautious and suspicious. This same loving man often reveals himself to be unfaithful, abusive, lazy, selfish, and unloving.

How often has a woman believed that a man loved them who was only after casual sex? If you asked them they would swear that the man really loved them right up until the phone stopped ringing or they caught him with other women. When they cry to you about him, how often do they tell you how clearly they had felt his love, and how they had felt certain that the two of them would be together forever?

How often has a man believed that a woman loved him who was only after his money? Believed it with all his heart until they day he lost his job and his money and found himself abandoned? So, if the love of someone that you can see, touch, and hear, who clearly demonstrates their love to you again and again is not certain and can be merely an illusion, how much less certain should be the love of a being that you can not see, hear, touch, or smell, who has never caressed you, held you in his arms, nursed you when you were sick or wounded, fed you when you were hungry, protected you, kissed the tears from your eyes, whose voice you have never heard actually say the words "I love you", whose eyes you have never seen fill with love as those words passed from their lips?

How often has a woman been harassed by a man who swore that she loved him and just didn't know it because he could feel her love? how often has a man been plagued by some woman he considered little more than a booty-call who swore that he really loved her because she could feel it when they made love, she could feel it when he looked in her eyes, when they kissed? Isn't that the very definition of a stalker? Someone who feels with absolute certainty a love that does not exist?

I won't rehash my entire argument against miracles except to say that for every time you believe that you could not have survived but for the presence of Jesus in your life, you should look around you at all those non-believers like myself who have survived the same and worse. You should think about all those non-believers who have survived brushes with death or rescued themselves or been rescued from hardships without appeal to any higher power. Then think of all those who were not rescued, both faithful and faithless alike. Think of all those times you were not rescued, when you have fallen victim to tragedy, hardship, injury, and despair. Where was God's love then?

So what can we say about this loving feeling? What can we say about that feeling deep in your heart and soul that God loves and cares for you? I would say that, that feeling means absolutely nothing. Just as we demonstrated with the feeling of human love, our emotions are easily fooled. Fear and desire, religion's most powerful tools, are also the tools of pimps, players, gold-diggers, conmen, magicians, marketing advertisement execs, and all manner of tricksters. Our sense can be easily deceived by these emotions. We want something so badly that we believe it exists. We begin to feel that it exists. It is no different then the dehydrated traveler seeing an oasis in the desert or a lonely man fantasizing that he is a relationship with a pop-star or a child believing that the father who abandoned him will be coming home any day now because he can feel it in the core of his being. For that individual, these emotional experiences seem unquestioningly real but an objective evaluation of the situation would clearly reveal them to be delusional. That is why reason, evidence, and logical arguments, must guide our beliefs and ideas rather than irrational unverifiable feelings and emotions which are the most unreliable and easily confused and misled so-called sources of knowledge.

"Why do you write such terrible things?"

2008-11-18T20:46:00.000-08:00

Succulent Prey has just been released by Leisure books. It is a violent little book It is violent even when compared to novels like American Psycho and Silence of The Lambs. Some will say that it goes too far, crosses boundaries that should not be crossed. What can I say to that?

I write horror. I write some of the most extreme, terrifying. violent, horrific horror you will ever read. Horror writers cringe at the horror that screams from my pages. Yes, I am one scary dude. But why do I do it? Why can't I write a nice paranormal Romance? Why can't I just write about angst-ridden metrosexual vampires? If I must write horror, why can't I write about creepy ghosts that do spooky things? Why does there have to be so much blood?

Because safe is boring. The mundane is too mundane. The ordinary is too ordinary. Fiction must be about extraordinary things, extraodinary people, and extraordinary depths of emotion, more emotional highs and lows than our work-a-day lives can provide. Horror gives us a look at the extraordinary. We see the horrible and the heroic. We see life intensified, magnified, and set free to tear shit up!

My life is extreme. Not in the way that my novels are. I'm not going to turn into a werewolf and rip your face off. I am a sensualist. I drink deep of existence. I have fought in some of the world's largest arenas. I have made love to women on three continents of all races and nationalities. I have recited poetry on stage at rap concerts. I have co-starred in an action film in Hong Kong. I have run marathons. I like my food so spicy it makes my eyes tear and my forehead sweat. I like art so staggeringly beautiful that you never want to tear your eyes away from it. I have experienced terrific highs and lows, the most intense emotion. I do not follow the usual path. Horror gives me a high I just could not imagine recieving from writing a western or a biography or chik-lit.

The world is a dark place. To create something darker and more violent than reality is a challenge but meeting that challenge creates a contrast that reveals the light. Put simply, what I write makes the world look like a nicer place. If you read my novels you quickly discover that the world in my head is not one you would want to reside in. The world where a communicable disease turns people into serial killers is probably much worse than anything you are experience during the current economic recession. Joseph Miles is worse than your boss or your ungrateful kids or those nosy neighbors. Being eaten alive is worse than losing your job or your house or finding out that your wife is sleeping with your best friend.

This is what fiction is about. It is escapism. It is a vacation from the vexations and trials of your daily life. If you can spend a few hours in sheer terror imagining what the librarian in Succulent Prey must have felt like as Joseph Miles tore into her with his blunt little teeth, trying to chew through layers of muscle and fat, then maybe your terror at that adjustable rate mortgage coming due might not seem quite so debilitating. Succulent Prey is real horror. Life? It ain't so bad.

John McCain, Supply-Side Economics, and Complete Idiocy

2008-10-26T11:52:00.000-07:00

For years we have heard the Republican mantra of "Trickle-down" economics now commonly known as "Supply-side" economics and it continues to sound just as idiotic today as it did when Reagan first proposed it. The idea that giving tax breaks to suppliers instead of consumers will stimulate the economy and promote job growth flies in the face of common-sense economics. Demand always drives supply get that backwards and the economy collapses and jobs evaporate.

The housing industry collapsed because of interest-only adjustable rate loans but people defaulted on those loans because their homes did not appreciate like they thought they would. And why didn't those homes continue to appreciate? Because builders built more homes then there was a demand for. Investors and speculators began buying five, ten, fifteen, homes at a time, artificially inflating the price of homes by reselling them at a higher price and builders mistakenly believed that there were real families buying these homes so they built more But soon the investors were buying more homes than they could sell. The builders kept building and soon the market was flooded and there were more homes on the market then there was a demand for. Much more. In Las Vegas alone the number of resales on the market went from 1,400 homes to 26,000. Supply outstripped demand,home values plummeted, no one could refinance their loans before they were scheduled to adjust, so they began to default on their loans which drove home values down further as banks tried to discount these foreclosures in order to get them to sell. The rest is history. The entire economy collapsed. Still, there are idiots who don't get it. There are people who still don't see that without people buying things those who sell things will go broke no matter how many tax breaks they get.

John McCain believes that if we lower the business tax and the capital gains tax, it would make businesses more profitable and create more jobs. Now how would that work? I've been in the building industry for more than a decade and I can tell you that I have never heard of anyone hiring more workers because of lower taxes. You hire more people because of increased demand for your products and services. You wouldn't just hire guys to stand around doing nothing no matter how profitable you were. Even if you paid zero taxes that would just be an idiotic business practice. On the flip-side you would hire more people if demand increased no matter how high your taxes were. In fact, I have never, in my entire working career spanning more than 25 years, heard of anyone laying off workers because of high taxes. It just doesn't happen. People get laid off when products and services stop selling and products and services really stop selling when consumers have no money to purchase them. That's why supply-side economics is so mind-numbingly stupid. If you want to boost the economy you put more money into the hands of the consumer and that will inevitably end up in the hands of suppliers as the consumers go out and spend their money. You can cut all the taxes you want on corporations but if no one buys their products or services, because they just don't have the money to do so, that corporation will still be laying people off and eventually going under.

Now let's look at another claim John McCain has made about the reasoning behind his tax policies. He believes that cutting taxes on companies that ship jobs overseas will somehow woo them back to America. Because surely it's the lower taxes luring them to China and India and Mexico and not the cheap dollar-a-day labor. Come on Republicans, tell me you don't really believe this nonsense. Tell me that you just don't really care about the economy and its abortion and gay marriage that makes you want to vote for John McCain. Just don't tell me that you actually believe this idiotic notion that lower taxes will keep jobs in America. Do you realize that there are companies that raise chickens in America, freeze them, ship them to China to be cut up and then ship them back to America. Do you think they do that to avoid those high American taxes? The labor over there is so cheap that it is actually cost effective for them to ship meat over there to be cut up and then ship it back into this country and pay import taxes.

You know what would keep jobs in America? Taxing the living hell out of any company that moves their headquarters overseas. Since the Bush tax cuts went into effect have more companies relocated to America? No. Have companies that had moved overseas during the Clinton administration moved back to America? That answer would again be no. Have less companies moved overseas thanks to the Bush tax cuts then when their taxes were higher under Clinton? Once again, that answer is negative. So why do you think it would be different under McCain? Once again, republicans are doing the same things and expecting a different result. This is not the definition of insanity. It is the definition of stupidity.

Give tax breaks to Americans who make less than $250,000 so that they can afford to buy more stuff and you will see an immediate impact on the economy. If you are making more than $250,000 a year I seriously doubt that your lifestyle will be significantly impacted if your taxes go up a bit. You'll still buy just as much shit as you did before the election. And here's the other thing that should be fairly obvious, tax the living fuck out of any American company that ships jobs overseas, denounce them publicly and drive their asses into bankruptcy. Make examples of them. If the president of the United States were to declare that any company that shipped their jobs oversease was a traitor to the United States of America how eager do you think Ford would be to open a new factury in Korea? On the other hand, if we were to give them huge tax breaks after they closed a factory in Detroit and reopened it in Beijing, do you really think that would send the message that Americans were not going to tolerate companies that export jobs? I don't think so.

Tomorrow

2008-10-21T21:33:00.000-07:00

I have, at long last, discovered the meaning of life. It is not anything as lofty or poetic as living to do the will of some omnipotent deity or to go to paradise after you die. It is not as ideological as living for the betterment of humanity or to build an enduring legacy. It is very simple, very basic, and true of all of us but I will try my best to make it sound poetic and grandiose.

I have often said that we must strive to find the meaning of life because existence demands a toll from us in blood, sweat, and tears, stress and anxiety, sorrow and pain, and therefore we must ask the value of that which we suffer so dearly to maintain. It must be valuable enough to justify all the distress, fear, anxiety, and dissapointment we suffer in order to continue inhaling and exhaling day after day and year after year, struggling to acquire the commodities of existence. I have said this and because of these statements I have exhausted myself in search of some grand prize when all along the answer lay within me. All I had to do was imagine killing myself and think of the very reasons that I resist the notion, the same reasons that we all resist self destruction. Curiosity. Hope. We all want to see tomorrow out of sheer curiosity and hope for a better tomorrow. We are gamblers betting that the next hand will be the jackpot. It is the mystery of what tomorrow may bring that motivates us to keep moving forward. Why do we live? The answer is simple. To see another day. To see tomorrow.

When you imagine terminating your existence you think about how you will miss your friends or your family and how you won't see your kids grow up or your grandkids be born or the results of all your efforts or how the world will change and move on without you. You don't do it because tomorrow might be better than today. Religion fulfills this by giving you hope that there might be other tomorrows in the afterlife. But where there is no curiosity the will to live is defeated. Certainty is the cause of all suicide.

That seems like an extreme statement but look at it objectively. From religious martyrs to the clinically depressed to the hero who lays down his life for his country, without certainty they would find themselves unable to defeat the will to live which, as I have stated, is little more than curiosity about and hope for tomorrow. The suicide believes that tomorrow will be the same or worse than today. They are certain that their pain will never end. That they will never find happiness. There is no curiosity or hope. There is certainty that life is hopeless. The religious martyr is certain of heaven. He is certain that he will enter paradise, spend eternity with God, get his 72 virgins. The hero who faces death without fear is certain that his story will be told. He is certain that his legend will endure or that he too will go to heaven. He is certain that without his sacrifice the war would be lost and his loved ones would suffer. True, many heroes die in battle without martyring themselves and they are no less heroes but I am not talking about those who expect to survive and die fighting for their last breath. I am talking about those who willing throw themselves on the grenade certain that their sacrifice will not be in vain.

I, like all of you, wake up every day hoping for a better day and often fearful that the day will be worse, but as long as there is hope that the day will be better, that the future will be brighter, I have to keep going. I want to write the next book and see if this will be the one that wins awards and becomes a bestseller. I want to see if I ever attain that spark of entrepeneurial genius that will make me independently wealthy. I want to see if my son and my daughters will grow up to be happy, healthy, and successful. I want to see the culmination of all of my efforts. I want to live to see new scientific discoveries and the advancement of technology. I want to see how far society progresses, if we solve global warming, world hunger, world peace, renewable energy. I want to hear the new music trends, see the new fashion trends. Hell, I want to see who wins the next big prize-fight. I want to see tomorrow and that's the reason I suffer and struggle through vexations and dissapointments and boredom and pain to see the sun rise each morning. That's why we all live, for that one simple reason, to see tomorrow.

What Barack Obama Should Say To America

2008-10-08T19:10:00.001-07:00

When I was a kid in junior high school and first discovered that I had a talent for writing, one of my dreams was to be a political speech writer. I gave up on that dream and instead I write novels among other things. Still, I could not help wishing I was writing Obama's speeches. There is so much more he could be saying to put McCain into proper perspective for Americans and truly show how Obama could benefit this country.

I am not your typical political analyst. I am not even your typical American. I am just a guy with a blog who, as a taxpayer and an American who will be retiring from the workforce in twenty years, with a nephew serving in Iraq, a son who will be going off to college in four years, and two daughters who will be inheriting the outrageous federal deficit this administration has created, has a profound interest in how this election turns out. I listen to my fellow Americans everyday and so I feel I am qualified to say a few things about what Obama should be saying in these debates to reach more Americans and widen his increasing lead in the polls. Not to put words in the man's mouth but the first thing he needs to do is make the differences between his proposed policy changes and McCain's crystal clear. Obama has done more of this in the last debate but he needs to really hammer it home. What follows is an idealized debate between McCain and Obama.

McCain: "Under my Economic Resurgence plan, I would order the Secretary of the Treasury to set aside 350 million dollars to buy up all those adjustable rate mortgages and renegotiate them at the current market value of each home, forgiving the differences in value and absorbing the loss. That would stop the bleeding at its source which is the housing industry, stabilize the economy, and allow millions of Americans to stay in their homes."

Obama: "John, that is an extremely generous plan. But with a multi-trillion dollar deficit and a billion dollar a month war increasing that deficit every day, I'm just not as convinced as you that we can afford to be so generous. That's why I have a plan that would not make Americans, many of whom cannot and never will be able to afford homes or who did not get caught up in this economic mess, foot the bill for this housing crisis. My plan, would be to set up a National Mortgage Company, similar to the one Roosevelt set up during the Great Depression, and allow homeowners to refinance their homes and get out of these interest-only and adjustable rate loans into government backed low-interest 30-year fixed-rate mortgages. These mortgages would still be at their existing loan amount. There would be no lowering of the loan amount with the taxpayers absorbing the loss of equity. These new loans, however, would not adjust and increase their loan payments and with a lower interest rate, and I propose offering everyone 5% interest, their mortgage payments would decrease so that they can stay in their homes and pay off their mortgages and the government would make back its investment rather than assume another loss that would bail out Wall Street and these predatory lenders at the expense of the American taxpayer.

That would be a great start but even that alone would not solve the crisis that the Bush administration has dragged us into. We need to spend 100 billion on a "New Deal" program to put all of those out of work construction workers back to work building roads and bridges so that they have renewed buying power which will allow them to reinvest in our economy by purchasing goods and services. This increased purchasing power will increase retail spending and allow businesses to expand due to increased demand for these products and services putting even more people back to work. Not supply side economics but demand side economics. See, just like we all learned back in high school, demand must push supply, not the other way around. Giving more money to suppliers is not the way to build the economy. It is the consumers who need help and when they have the money to start buying again that's when the economy will prosper once more."

McCain: "My opponent still will not admit that the Surge in Iraq has worked when he predicted it would not. He predicted that it would increase sectarian violence when in fact violence has decreased. My fellow Americans, I do plan to bring our troops home. The difference is that I plan to bring them home with honor and victory and my opponent would bring them home in defeat."

Obama: "John, when you talk about victory, it makes me wonder if you have been paying attention the last six years. We are spending billions of dollars a month in a war that America should have never been involved in and losing thousands of American lives. This war has bankrupted America. Your war is exactly what men like Bin Laden wanted. It has crippled this country. You have accomplished the Taliban's goal by drawing us into a senseless war and dragging it out for six years. Look at America before the war and look at it now and you tell me who's winning, John. I think your passion for war and victory is clouding your judgement here. Whether the Surge is working is not the issue, the issue is should we be there at all. The issue is that your war has strengthened the Taliban and weakened America. The issue is that your war has cost more than 4,000 American lives. The issue is that while we have been fighting a senseless war in Iraq, who never attacked America, we have been losing the war in Afghanistan, we have let Bin Laden slip from our grasps. If that's what you call military success, then I don't think the American people can afford your brand of victory."

MCain: "I have served my country honorably as a soldier in the United States Armed Forces and veterans know that they can count on me to take care of them and look out for their interests."

Obama: "Do they know that you have one of the worst voting records in the US senate when it comes to veteran affairs? That you have not supported bills that would have increased spending for veteran health care and education? That you were given a "D" by the nonpartisan veterans’ group The Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA’s) Action Fund as part of its congressional report card? I myself received a “B” from the group which I am not proud of and vow to bring up to an "A" but McCain is among just three senators who scored a “D.” Only one senator, Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), received a lower score than McCain scoring an “F.” Is that what you call looking out for our veterans?"

McCain: " I have a plan to give a $5,000 tax credit to every American and allow them to go out and purchase their own health Insurance."

Obama: "What John McCain is not telling you about his health plan is that he would put a tax on people who currently have employer health care in order to subsidize it. With the average cost of healthcare at $12,000 a year, giving each American a $5,000 tax credit will still not bring health coverage within reach of many Americans. His plan to privatize health care would mean that each one of you would be out there on your own fighting against the health insurance companies rather than having your employers to back you. You would see your co-payments and premiums go up and the coverage you receive would decrease because there would be no one to regulate these companies. Letting insurance companies operate across state lines would mean that companies would move to states with the very least amount of regulations so that they could avoid accountability. As McCain himself has said, his health care plan would do for health care what he has done for the economy. Is that what you want? My plan would allow those who are happy with their existing health care programs to keep them and those without health care would be able to get the same type of health care as members of congress.

Look, one of the biggest drains on the health care system is people without health care who are not able to afford preventive care and so they don't go to the hospital until they are extremely ill and the price of treating them is much greater. And we are paying the bill for this emergency care right now. My system would allow them to receive medicine and treatment that would keep them out of the emergency rooms for things like colds and toothaches and keep medical costs down. The choice is clear. John McCain's system would increase the costs of health care for everyone and my plan would decrease costs for everyone."

McCain: "Obama wants to increase the size of government and raise your taxes. his record is clear. he has voted for tax increases 94 times."

Obama: "That's just nonsense. By that way of looking at things, you yourself John have voted for tax increases 477 times throughout your career."

McCain: "I believe that life begins at conception while my opponent is for abortion rights."

Obama: "Since neither of us have ever been pregnant, I think that we are the last people who should be making decisions on what women should do in that circumstance. Now, I am personally not in favor of abortion and would do everything in my power to make sure women had other options. First by increasing abstinence and birth control education for our teenagers because history has shown that abstinence education alone does not work. Secondly, I would make parental classes and health care programs and assistance for unwed and underprivileged mothers a priority under my administration. But I will not overturn Roe V. Wade. I think that would be a mistake."

McCain: "Obama opposed offshore drilling while I am in favor of it. I think that the only way to bring down the cost of oil and cut our reliance on foreign Middle-Eastern oil is to increase domestic oil supplies by lifting the moratorium on offshore drilling."

Obama: "America is one of the largest consumers of oil in the world. We consume 25% of the World's oil while we posses only 3%. Even if we drilled for every last drop of American oil we would not put a dent in the price of oil for at least ten years and we would still be dependent on foreign oil for 90% of our oil. The only way to decrease our dependence on foreign oil is to decrease consumption. We must have more efficient homes and cars.

I propose mandating that all cars must have 50 miles per gallon fuel efficiency by 2013 and 75 miles per gallon by 2020. New homes must exceed the model energy code by 50% by 2013 and I would give a tax credit to homeowners and businesses for switching to energy efficient appliances and renewable energies to heat and cool their homes and businesses including solar energy. I would also create a federal program on the scale of the Manhattan Project to come up with a renewable source of energy to end our reliance on fossil fuels once and for all. McCain's plan of trying to drill our way out of this is less than a Band Aid it is just letting the wound continue to bleed."

I know, I put some of my own ideas in their along with Obama's but only because I think they are ideas that Obama is going to need to adopt in order to hold off McCain. It will not be enough for him to point out the problems with McCain's Economic Resurgence Plan. He needs to propose his own, in clear simple terms that Americans can understand. He needs to hammer McCain on health care and off-shore drilling and he needs to attack John McCain at his heart by pointing out his poor voting record on veteran's rights. If Obama does all of that, I have no doubt that he will be our next president because it is definitely time for a change.

World of Hurt

2008-09-14T19:13:00.000-07:00

On Friday I ran 8 miles for the first time since June. On Saturday I ran another 8 miles at Red Rock Canyon, 4,000 feet in the mountains. Today I ran 4 miles at Red Rock as fast as I could. This coming Saturday I will be competing in an 8 mile race at Mt. Charleston at 8,400feet. It will hurt. I will want to quit. i will question my sanity. But I will make it. Then, two weeks later, I will be running a half-marathon, 13.1 miles at Red Rock Canyon at elevations up to 4,700 feet.

All of that sounds crazy, excessive, one more indication of my impending mid-life crisis. Well, that's not the worst of it. Today I stumbled across this little baby: http://www.sincityruns.com/woh%20b.htm

The World of Hurt 34 mile Ultra-marathon. I am seriously considering doing it. It is on a dirt path, running through rugged desert terrain for a distance 8miles longer than a marathon and it takes place in 6 weeks. I could probably run a marathon in six weeks if I trained my ass off but an ultra-marathon?

Eight miles is the longest distance I've run since I sprained my ankle before the San Diego Marathon. My ankle is still not 100%. I am talking about more than quadrupling that distance in six weeks. I'm not even sure it can be done but damn if I don't want to try.

Why would I do such a thing? Because I need the challenge. Because safe is boring. I need to stretch myself and push myself beyond all previous limits. That's the only way I know to break the monotony, the redundancy, to add mystery back into my existence. Life must be more than work, eat, shit, sleep, repeat. No, being a father and a husband is not enough. No, working my nine-to-five is not enough. Even writing a novel is not enough. I've done all of that before and so have hundreds of thousands, millions of others. Only 3% of the population can run 13 miles. Less than 1% can run a marathon. I cannot imagine what the statistics must be for an ultra-marathon. They must be extraordinary. One in a thousand? One in ten thousand? One in a hundred thousand? One in a million? I want to be one of those.

Life must be extraordinary or it is a waste. That's why I write. I think that's why all of us do. I think that's what motivates all artists in fact. To live a life less ordinary. It is why I fought. It is why I train fighters. It is why I started my own business. And it is why I run. Because life must be about doing the extraordinary. It must be the type of life that demands impossible questions. Trust me, 34 miles of rugged terrain is going to force me to ask a lot of questions I never thought I'd ask and hopefully teach me a lot about myself.

Earlier this week Evan Tanner, former UFC middleweight champion, rode his motorcycle 100 miles out into the middle of the desert, ran out of gas, and died of heat exposure. According to his blog, Evan rode out there "where any type of equipment failure might cost him his life" because living life on the edge kept him sharp and made him feel alive. I only knew Evan for a very short time, he lived and trained for a several months at Hard Knocks Muay Thai which is the same gym I train out of. He began training for his big comeback the same time I did. We trained together once or twice, did some light-sparring, we are two different weight-classes so nothing serious. We never really spoke more than a few words to each other. He was a very solitary sort of guy. His comeback was not quite as successful as he would have liked. Neither was mine for that matter. Still, he never gave up.

I don't know what went through Evan's mind before the end, but I don't think it was regret. He lived his life to the fullest. He always challenged himself and pushed himself right up until the end. He could have died on his couch forty years from now having never done anything more than what every person he knew had done. His life could have been long and unspectacular. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure he would have rathered his life was long and spectacular as I hope mine will be, but given the choice between long and mundane and short and spectacular, I'm sure he would have chosen the latter. I certainly would. Even if the choice is between a safe comfortable existence and a World of Hurt.

Book Signing in Burbank

2008-09-05T21:37:00.000-07:00

I interrupt my usual pontificating for this commercial announcement:

Sunday, December 7th at 2pm I will be at Dark Delicacies in Burbank California signing all of my recent releases including Hero, Orgy of Souls, Population Zero, and Succulent Prey. I will be joined by David Morrell author of First Blood and Rambo. If you're in the area I'd love to see you.

The Redundency of Wisdom

2008-09-02T20:27:00.000-07:00

I no longer get asked many questions that I don’t know the answers to. That’s how I can tell that I am getting old. I don’t have to run to other people very often to ask questions. People now run to me for answers. I suppose that this is what they call wisdom. If so, wisdom is boring. When your life has become so routine that there are no longer any perplexing mysteries, any confounding dilemmas, any unanswerable questions, that is my definition of a rut. I don’t want such simplicity in my life.

My life has relaxed into a predictable routine. It is filled with all the same challenges that I have faced so often that they are no longer challenging. They are minor inconveniences at best. When someone comes running to me with some problem that seems monumental to them but is commonplace to me, I can almost feel myself yawning inside as I repeat the same answers I have been repeating for years. But I have to pretend to be just as concerned as they are, to view their concerns as every bit the challenge that they do or else I am being insensitive. I can't wait until I am old enough where sensitivity to simple dilemmas is no longer required, when I can just dole out wisdom with all the boredom and disinterest that I feel. I can barely even sit through these breathless recitals of woes that have now become mundane to me before I am already interrupting them to provide the remedy. I feel like I can do both ends of most conversations. I already know what the other person is going to say, what they are going to ask, what I will say in response, and whether or not my advice will be heeded. I am bored.

I want to hear something new. I want to be challenged again. I want to be perplexed. I am sick of being asked the same questions so often that it no longer takes any effort to respond. I don’t have all the answers to life’s questions. But somehow, I have all the answers to my life’s questions. How did this happen? When did all the mystery and adventure drain out of my existence? Sure, I can sit and contemplate abstractions that will keep me perplexed and amazed for hours. What is the meaning of life? Is there a God? What is the nature of morality? But these are dilemmas that I seek out on my own. They are not questions that my life forces me to confront. My life no longer demands such questions of me and I suspect that most of our lives do not. Most of the questions in my life are of the “How am I going to pay my cable bill?” variety. They are questions like “Are you voting republican or democrat?” “How can I lose ten pounds in a month?” “How can I juggle my work life and my home life?” “What’s the best way to discipline a child?” “How can I make sure my kid gets good grades and gets into a good college?” “How do I let my wife know that she is loved and appreciated?” “How am I going to finish writing this novel?” “How am I going to sell this short story?” “How am I going to find time to go to the gym?” Questions that once seemed so baffling but are now painfully mundane. The answers roll effortlessly from my tongue. They may take aggravation and effort to do but I know they can be accomplished because I have done it all before. The biggest questions of my life have all been answered before.

This is why old people have so many answers. They have been doing the same shit for so long that there's just nothing new anymore. They've seen it all before. Their lives have become redundant. Well, I'm too fucking young for that! I'm too young for my life to be so fucking predictable. I'm too young for my biggest challenges to be the same damn challenges I have faced again and again for the past ten years. This year I ran four half-marathons, had two professional fights, wrote two novellas and one novel, started a business, and lost twenty pounds and still didn't do a single thing that I haven't done before. What tha fuck?

So, it is time to do something drastic. Even if I fall flat on my ass I am going to try something new. I am going to put myself into situations where I will be forced to ask questions of myself and my world that I have never had to ask before. I am going to do things I've never done before, even things that I am afraid to do. I am writing a non-fiction book for the first time this year, an opinion book, and I am shopping it to the major New York publishers. I am going to learn how to swim and sign up for a triathlon. I am considering running an ultra-marathon. I will be chairing a Horror Writers Convention for the first time next year, the first annual 2009 Las Vegas KillerCon. I am going to travel to cities and countries that I've never visited. I'm not going to do anything too outrageous like experiment with drugs or have sex with a man but, if I get the opportunity, I might just jump out of an airplane.

Why I'm Voting for Obama

2008-08-30T15:42:00.000-07:00

I have tried to maintain my objectivity when it comes to the upcoming election. I had at least succeeded in fooling myself into believing that I was being objective, that I wasn't letting myself get carried away by my emotions but was rather making logical calculated, well-researched, well-reasoned decisions based on all available data on all of the candidates. I watched CNBC, Fox News, CNN, Hannity & Colmes, Anderson Cooper. I listened to NPR every day, all day. I had emersed myself completely in this election. I wanted to make certain that I was not basing my opinions and my choices on things like race and gender alone. In my mind, voting for a candidate simply because he or she shares physical and cultural similarities with you was just plain stupid. That's what got us George Bush, because gun-totting rednecks could imagine sitting down for a beer with him. He looked, sounded, and acted just like them, a good-old boy from the Good Old Party. But he wasn't. He may have sounded working-class when he spoke but he was a child of privilege as disconnected from the average working-class American as Micheal Jackson and Paris Hilton.

So when Obama threw his hat into the race I resisted the urge to go with my emotions and vote for him because he would be the first African American president in US history. I even went back and read one of my earlier blogs, Only The Best for Our Country, in which I laid out what I thought the qualities of a leader ought to be based on Plato's revolutionary idea that "Only the best and the brightest should rule". I was surprised to find that Obama met almost all of my criterion, generally if not specifically. A high I.Q., highly educated, has performed works of humanitarianism in low-income areas, and has held a high political office. When I compared him to all the other candidates he stood out above all except Hillary Clinton. So why wasn't I voting for her?

When it came down to it, I had to admit that the only thing differentiating the two candidates was my emotional response to them. I found Hillary's voice annoying. It literally grated on my nerves, more and more as the campaign progressed. Obama's voice was energizing and inspiring. I know, that shouldn't have mattered, but it did. the idea of listening to her voice for four to eight years was just plain depressing. That and Obama was Black like me. His race was the trump card. The good that the symbolism of an African American president would do both here and abroad made all the difference and, despite the sense that it made for me as an African American, I felt guilty about it. I felt like race shouldn't have had anything to do with it. But it did.

When the campaign narrowed down to McCaine and Obama I felt relieved. McCain doesn't stand for any of the things I stand for. He is my ideological antithesis. He has no head for economics in a time when we are in dire need of economic relief. He is a return to the borrow and spend, cut taxes on the rich, cut social programs for the old and the under-privileged, deny rights to homosexuals, teach myths as facts in school, force women to give birth to babies they don't want, spend billions on faith-based programs while cutting school budgets for the arts and physical education, and continue a costly war that nobody wants or believes in, idiotic policies of George Bush. He doesn't have Obama's education or intelligence. He doesn't have Obama's hands-on humanitarian experience. It was an easy choice. I had the devil I was looking for to make Obama look like an angel. I was off the hook. I didn't have to claim that I wasn't voting for McCaine because Obama was Black. In McCaine, I had an entire litany of reasons not to vote for him, to fear and detest the very idea of him as a leader of our country.

Then, Obama began going back on some of his earlier statements and my resolve began to waver. He said that he would continue most of Bush's costly and assinine faith-based initiatives. He wavered on his opposition to off-shore drilling. He appeared to waver on his commitment to bringing home the troops and ending the Iraq war. I felt like once again we were going to be stuck with the lesser of two evils. I began to get deppressed and to lose interest in the entire procees. Then the Democratic National Convention began and the reality of the first Black presidential candidate for a major political party set in.

I made my son watch Obama's speech. We all sat in the livingroom, my son who is Black, Hawaiin, and Fillipino, my two lovely daughters who are Black and Irish, and I got it. It was okay if one of the reasons I was voting for Obama was because of the color of his skin. As long as that wasn't the only reason there was nothing to be ashamed of. This was a historic moment, one my son would always remember and one that I could tell my daughters that they were a part of. An African-American of mixed race was a hair's breath from the White House. The concept of a Black man leading the country no longer seemed as remote as that of a White man leading the Nation of Islam. This was something to celebrate!

The more I listened to Obama speak, the more I began to reclaim my lost enthusiasm for his candidacy. I let go of my dissapointment at his move to the center and his recent pandering to Evangelicals, Catholics, and other religious voters. I understand that he has to broaden his appeal and that means that he can only appear so liberal without scaring away half the country. And as little as I could give a fuck about those Americans, the president of this country would have to care about them, particularly while running for election. The important thing is that he win or nothing will change. I understand. I also understand what his inauguration would mean to all African Americans, all bi-racial children, my own included, all single mothers who are worried that they won't be able to give their sons what they need to be successful, all people who are currently on welfare struggling to make a better life for them and their children, everyone who has lost a job because the companies they worked for have moved overseas or gone bankrupt as the economy has faltered, every kid approaching graduation wondering how they will ever afford college, every senior approaching retirement wondering how they will ever afford to live, every woman carying a baby born of rape, incest, or simple ignorance, every gay couple wondering what will happen if their life-partner is hospitalized or dies and they have no marital rights. I am voting for Obama because he is Black and because he is the right candidate for this country,

Escaping The Overseer (How I learned to doubt)

2008-07-28T13:11:00.000-07:00

I am neither a scientist nor a theologian. I have no doctorate in anything. I am no different than millions of other Black men in America. I was once a Christian. I once bowed and scraped and prayed as I had been taught by my parents and grandparents as they had been taught by their parents and grandparents who had been taught by their ancestors who had been taught by their slavemasters.

I accepted Christian dogma and mythology without question as I had been conditioned to do. I accepted both the authority of the church and the efficacy of prayers with the blind trust and faith of all young children. I felt it no more possible to question the existence of God than that of the sun or the moon. I internalized guilt as I had been taught to do and worried incessantly about which of the many sins I had already committed and were still likely to commit in the future would be the one that would ultimately damn me to eternal torment. No matter how wretched my living conditions or those of the other Black people around me, no matter the sting of racism nor the burning shame of poverty, no matter how many times I was robbed or beaten or teased or bullied, no matter how many prayers went unanswered, I never questioned God’s goodness or his wisdom or his love. I never questioned that all was in accordance with his plan. I was seventeen before the illusion finally shattered.

There is an old cliche' that everyone wants to go to heaven but nobody wants to die. I was perhaps the exception to that rule. I was anxious to die and go to heaven and the wait was killing me. I didn't understand what the purpose of life was. Why did I have to suffer here on earth if God ultimately wanted everyone to join him in heaven? Why couldn't I just kill myself and go join him? I began studying the bible trying to find a loophole that would allow me to kill myself without going to hell. I read the bible over and over again with a critical eye, rejecting everything everyone had told me about it, determined to find the answers myself by going in with a completely open mind, free of all preconceived ideas. This was relatively easy because I had never found it easy to rectify the reality of the streets with what my parents and pastor had told me about the bible. It had never made sense to me, so I had always formed my own opinions about it but I had been doing it from a point of total ignorance, never having read the bible before. When I finally did sit down to read it, what I found horrified me. But more of that later.

I grew up struggling for the meager commodities of happiness available to me on the streets of Philadelphia at a time when designer jeans were a mandatory fashion accessory, when expensive sneakers and sunglasses first became symbols of social status and excessive amounts of gold jewelry the measure of a Black man’s worth, which is to say, at one of the most materialistic times in American History. Crack cocaine was the currency of the street and it was worth more than human life.

I could not afford designer clothes or sneakers or a neck full of gold necklaces. It was against my morals to use or sell drugs. Even amongst other poor people this made me an outcast and often an object of pity and disgust. My sense of humor was my saving grace and the one thing that allowed me to eventually overcome my social obstacles. Still, poverty was not my only handicap.

Prince, Michael Jackson, Ray Parker Junior, sallow-skinned androgynous mega-stars whose racial composition was as ambiguous as their sexual preferences were the standards of beauty for African American males at that time. I was neither light complexioned nor androgynous. By ‘80s pop-cultural standards, I was ugly. Too black. Too strong. This, along with my conspicuous poverty was enough fuel to feed years of ridicule, scorn, and abuse from other young kids. Every day I was teased and bullied and picked on. Every day I fought either in the streets or in the schoolyard and sometimes both and every night I wept, praying to God to make it all better and though Jesus had said “All that you ask for in my name shall be granted.” My prayers went unanswered and my suffering unabated.

Like most young kids I began to speculate on my condition and the condition of the other Black people around me, trying to rectify it with my faith in god. Having not read the bible yet, I began to form my own opinions about why there was so much suffering among my people. I speculated that perhaps I had been some horrible person in a past life for which I was now being punished in this one. Obviously, I was unaware that Christianity had no belief in any sort of reincarnation. I further speculated that perhaps all Black people were reincarnated sinners.

I wondered if perhaps earth was really hell and we were all suffering in eternal torment for sins we had committed while alive and just did not know it. I listened to preachers talk about freewill and accepted that God was perhaps powerless to predict what people would do even though at that young age I already found most human beings to be fairly predictable. I accepted that perhaps God was just not as smart as I was or perhaps, with so many different people to keep track of, it was too difficult for him to predict what all 6 billion of them would do. I accepted this despite what the preacher in the church had said about God being all-powerful and all-knowing.

As I grew older, I began to think that perhaps God was like a scientist and we were all just an experiment in a lab somewhere and that God was just out there watching it, amused by it but not particularly interested in the individual lives of his creations, merely fascinated by it all the way we would be fascinated by an ant farm or bacteria growing in a petrie dish. I even began to suspect that God had been there at the very beginning of the universe to set the ball in motion and then had left to pursue other, more interesting things and perhaps had not thought about us since. Perhaps the entire universe was sitting on a dusty old shelf in his closet like the toys I had long ago grown tired of playing with or perhaps tucked away in his closet. I wondered if perhaps God had simply forgotten about us or grown bored with us or perhaps this was a toy that he didn’t even like and wished he had never made, after all, he had tried to destroy it once with a great flood. Perhaps he had died after creating the universe. In a sense, I had never really been a Christian. I had always been more of a Deist, believing in God as more of a first cause and nothing more.

I learned fairly early on that a God who answered your prayers was pretty much a fairytale right up there with Santa Clause and the Easter Bunny. I think I had stopped believing in a God that intervened on man's behalf even before I had stopped believing in Santa Clause. I had more empirical evidence for the existence of Santa than for Christ. At least Santa did leave presents and drink the milk and cookies I left for him. Jesus had done nothing to make his presence known unless you count a nightmare I once had in which the rosary that hung on my mirror turned into a vampire bat.

Everyone I knew prayed to Jesus Christ and none of them were doing any better than I was. When I was twelve or thirteen and there was a rapist terrorizing our neighborhood, I was pretty sure that all the women he had raped prayed too. But God hadn’t intervened to strike down their rapist before he could attack any of them. My friend Ed had a mother who was a drug addict who had a string of abusive boyfriends who often abused him as well. I was fairly certain that he prayed to god every night to help his mother but still black-eyes and fat lips were fairly common sights on both of them.

So, the possibility of us living in hell or having been reincarnated into these horrific lives to pay for the sins of a previous life, or God having died or forgotten about us all, made infinitely more sense to me than the things the preacher was saying about God. I could not, even then, force myself to believe in a being who was all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving and all-good, who still allowed my people to go hungry and homeless, die of diseases and addictions, get murdered in the streets, enslaved and then oppressed, robbed and beaten, denied adequate education, adequate healthcare, adequate housing, equal job opportunities, and equal treatment before the law.

It made more sense than the idea that God has the power to change all of this but doesn’t because that’s just not part of his plan. His plan was for me to have to fight much older and bigger kids every other day and sometimes three or four at a time? His plan was for me to get robbed at knife point twice by age twelve? His plan was for me to watch my mother get beaten every night by her boyfriend when I was only five-years old and too young to defend her? His plan had been for my father to abandon the family when I was born because he was too lazy to get a job and for my mother to have to do it all on her own? His plan was for me to have to hear my mother cry every night because the bills were piling up and she wasn’t sure she could make it? It was much easier to think that God had just died or forgotten about us completely than that he was up there controlling all of this and the oppression, rape, murder, and enslavement of Black people for the last 400 years and my own suffering was somehow part of his plan.

I was enraged at the preacher's suggestion that God would put the Black man through such torture merely to test the depths of our love. If God is all knowing then why would he need to test anyone? He would already know who would pass and who would fail. It seemed cruel, capricious, self-centered, egotistical. This God that everyone loved so much seemed to possess some of the most reprehensible human qualities. I began to question every notion I’d ever had about God. I began to wonder if God really loved us after all.

I couldn’t understand why we gave thanks to the overseer that kept us enslaved. Why we thanked him for the strength to endure the whip. I thought about all the times I’d heard my Grandma say how blessed we were to have food on the table and wondered if we were then damned on the many nights when we went hungry. I wondered if we were blessed on the nights we laid awake listening to the big sewer rats rumbling through the cracked and water-stained walls and ceilings, afraid to let our hands or feet dangle off the side of the bed at night for fear that one of them might gnaw off a finger or toe while we slept. Afraid the entire ceiling might come crashing down on top of us from where the floor joists had warped and rotted from the leaky toilet above that was constantly overflowing. I wondered if we were blessed when we couldn’t find a single piece of food in the cupboard that wasn’t infested with roaches. I wondered if I was blessed all those times I was teased for wearing hand-me-down clothes that barely fit. It made no sense that we would praise God when things went well or when we merely survived when things went bad but not condemn him for the many evils of the world. Why would we thank God for giving us the strength to survive horrible atrocities we should have never been asked to endure? It seemed ridiculous, meek and cowardly and reminded me of the happy slave mentality of house niggers. I was shamed and embarrassed by it.

These were my thoughts as I grew up on the streets of Philadelphia trying to make sense of my life. This was the climate under which my own understanding of man’s place in the universe was being formed. I was eight years old when I realized one evening, as I lay crying myself to sleep, that I could not remember a single day that had not ended in tears. That evening I decided to keep track of how many good days I had each year and by good days I meant simply one in which no one purposely set out to hurt my feelings. It would take another six years before I would have my first good day.

By age ten (two years without a single good day) I resolved to murder myself if life ever grew too painful to bear. Knowing that I could end it at anytime and go to heaven was the one thing that made life tolerable. I sat up nights trying to decide how best to terminate my existence when the day inevitably came that it no longer made sense to live. Then one night, I was watching a late night movie on TV, an old black and white flick from the forties or fifties. The movie was about a man who had reached the end of his rope and was contemplating suicide. He was standing on the rooftop of some old tenement building when an angel came to him. The angel tried to convince him not to end it all, first by telling him that suicide was an unforgivable sin for which he would burn in hell. I still remember how I shot upright in my bed, astonished by what I’d heard. Burn in hell for committing suicide? That couldn’t be possible. I suddenly felt trapped. I felt as if I had no way out. I looked around the ghetto and saw it finally for what it was, a dungeon, a torture chamber from which there was no escape, not even death.

This was what first drove me to pick up the bible and read it. I was just searching for a loophole. I read about God creating the earth and the universe and all the animals and finally man in some six days after I’d already read about dinosaurs that had existed hundreds of thousands of years before the first man. I read about how God called his creation good and then later flooded the entire thing in a fit of rage after deciding that it wasn’t as good as he had first thought. God’s startling idiocy in putting Adam and Eve in proximity to the forbidden and then his childish tantrum when the curiosity he’d imbued them with quite predictably led them to eat of the forbidden fruit. I read about how he then capriciously condemned generations of man for what was quite clearly his own error. I read passages in which the bible condoned the enslavement of strangers and their children and even the brutal beating and murdering of those slaves so long as they did not die immediately of their injuries. I read about God’s hatred of homosexuals, the subjugation, dehumanization, and humiliation of women, the beating and murdering of children by their parents, all gleefully condoned in the bible. My mind reeled. This was not the God of love and mercy I had been told about in church. This was a childish, insecure, unstable, mentally defective monster! Is this the God my people had so foolishly worshipped since their enslavement? Still, I found nothing that would have allowed me to escape hell were I to flee this world which was so clearly flawed and imperfect yet had been supposedly created by a perfect deity.

In desperation, I turned to the New Testament. God may have been a lunatic but Jesus had at least come to save us from his insanity. Yet at every turn I read of Jesus condoning his father’s behavior and exalting and holding him up as an icon of peace and virtue. I could understand a son’s love for his father, but even at that young age I could distinguish the failings in my own mother and the man who I’d once thought to be my father and no matter how much I loved them I knew when they were full of shit. Yet apparently Jesus was little more than an apologist for a father who was clearly self-centered and abusive even to the point of demanding the life of his own child, watching as Jesus was tortured and murdered in order for him to change his mind about sending all of us to hell for our sins. This didn’t jive at all with what I’d been told up to that point. If Jesus was God, as my pastor had told us all then what was the crucifixion all about? God sacrificed himself to himself in order to convince himself to change his mind about sending all of us sinners to hell thereby saving us from him? It made no sense. Then, there were the many false promises and outright lies. To me, only an asshole would offer hope to a suffering people and then fail to deliver.

Mathew 7:7 “Ask, and it will be given you; seek and ye shall find; knock. and it shall be opened unto you.

Mathew 7:8 For everyone who asketh receiveth; he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh, it shall be opened.

Mathew 7:9 Or what man is there of you, whom if his son asks for bread, will give him a stone?

Mathew 7:10 Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent?

Mathew 7:11 If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him?”

It floored me, because I had been asking for bread for as long as I could recall and had usually received stones and serpents. As I looked around at my people I saw that most of them had likewise learned to subsist on stones from heaven.

As I grew older and read more and more of the bible, my perspective on God and race began to change, seriously eroding my belief. I saw Black preachers driving brand new Cadillacs while their congregations walked, car-pooled, or arrived on public transportation. I heard them echo Jesus’ words about praying for relief and receiving it when every day I saw even the most devout Christians crushed beneath the weight of racism and poverty. I began to wonder if we were all cursed by God. I wondered what type of God would allow the horrors I saw everyday perpetrated against my people. What had we done? And what type of God would hold an entire race accountable for the actions of a few? What type of God would damn an entire race for the sins of generations long past? None of it made sense.

I began to read the bible more and more critically, shocked and appalled by what I was uncovering about our supposed savior. I tried to forget about all the things people had always told me about God and read it with a completely open mind. I wanted to see what the Bible was really saying and not what others said it was saying. Every word I read shook my faith further. Worst of all was the bible’s condoning of the institution of slavery.

“…And the Lord said unto her, Two nations are in thy womb, and two manner of people shall be separated from thy bowels; and the one shall be stronger than the other people; and the elder shall serve the younger. Genesis 25:23”

I thought of all those white power groups that used the bible to justify their prejudice and was shocked to find that again and again the bible does just that. It blatantly stated that Christians should make slaves of the heathen races. It was absurd to me that black people, who had suffered these fates, should worship the God that engineered it all. I could not help but to lose some respect for my own race. It was like they were all blind.

Despite all the begging and praying black folks did and all the millions of dollars they dumped into collection plates, God seemed to avoid the ghetto like the plague. Children got killed every day, and every day the pious were drained of wealth yet none of that ever seemed to shake their faith one iota and not once did I see any of them rewarded with a single oxen let alone a thousand the way Job had been. No sheep. No camel. Nothing. Yet still they believed. It was like God had better things to do than to fuck around in the ghetto with a bunch of poor helpless niggers. He was too busy smiling and tap dancing for the white folks who lived in the nice clean neighborhoods with white picket fences and brand new BMWs. In my mind, God took on the persona of every other criminal and con-man in the ghetto getting fat off the desperate hope and naivety of the under-class.

The story of Job haunted me more than any other. I kept hearing Job’s impossible declaration: “…Though he slayed me yet will I trust him.” How? Why? Why would God persecute someone who loved him so dearly just to prove to Satan how much he loved him? How could he merely replace all the wealth and children he destroyed with twice what he had before and think it excused the senseless suffering he needlessly allowed Job to endure? It seemed so cruel and insensitive to me to kill someone’s children and then say, “Oh, don’t trip. I’ll make sure you have twice as many kids to replace those.” I wondered if that’s what God thought when he saw little black kids gunned down in the street? But when Black kids were murdered, when our wealth and our health was blown away by the wind, despite our refusal to curse his name, we didn’t get so much as forty acres and a mule.

I couldn’t tell you how many times I cried myself to sleep wondering what we had done to make God hate us so?

I envisioned God as one of those white business men looking down on the ghetto from one of those towering office buildings downtown, aloof and immune, wondering how he can suck more profit from our misery. In my young mind, God was white and powerful and he hated us just like I believed all white folks did. I later learned that not all White people were prejudice and out to keep the Black man down. I wasn't so sure about God.

My Mom started dating this Muslim brother that tried to tell me that God was Black. I laughed in his face at first but he persisted. He said that we were all God’s chosen people descended from the tribe of Shabazz. He was trying to make me feel better, I know. But all he did was piss me off even more. If God was black than why the hell wasn’t he doing anything to help Black people?

I thought about all the bourgie Blacks I knew: the doctors, lawyers,
businessmen, and politicians, who talked a good game to gain black support and achieve their positions and then promptly turned their backs on us once they achieved their desired status. They would put as much distance as they could between themselves and the people who helped to make them what they were. I thought of all the big-time players and pimps, the hustlers and gangstas who leeched off the black community and exploited their own brothers and sisters worst than any white man ever had. If God was Black then he was just another bourgie nigga who got large and forgot where he came from. Somehow the idea of a sell-out, house-nigga god, was worse than the idea of a racist white one.

I was eighteen years old before I finally accepted that the God I had heard about all of my life had in fact been as much of a myth as Santa Clause. What did it for me was the simple realization that I had no actual reasons, evidence or arguments to support my belief. I had believed simply because my mother had believed and her mother before her and her mother before her and everyone else that I knew believed. It seemed then the most ridiculous reason to believe in anything. I was ashamed of myself and embarrassed by my faith. I felt like a fool. So I decided to start over.
I decided to abandon every belief I had held up to that point that I had never questioned. Every belief that I had accepted solely on the authority of my parents, grandparents, and church leaders, every idea that I had accepted because of the overwhelming popularity of it and the pressure to believe placed on me by my peers. I examined every moral claim from murder to thievery to incest. I examined every scientific claim and every religious claim and while most of my moral views remained intact. I found that I could not find a single justification for any of the religious beliefs I had held all of my life. I realized that I had asked more questions and been more skeptical buying my last BMX bike then I had when I adopted Christianity, when I took on an entire way of life. True, like most religious adherents, I had only been a child when I had been indoctrinated into the Christian faith and had lacked the cognitive resources to question what I was being told and resist the efforts of my family and friends to convince me of their beliefs, but it still embarrassed me that I had held these beliefs so fervently and for so long. I had once told my best friend that his mother was going to hell because she did not believe in Christ. I had condemned and ridiculed homosexuals because the bible had called men who lay with men as with women abominations. I was ashamed of myself.
For all the freedom I felt being rid of such an oppressive ideology, I also felt a great sense of loss. I went through a period of great existential malaise. In my mind, if God did not exist then life was completely without meaning and thus all of my suffering and all the suffering of my people, unjustified. I sank into a deep depression. I began to read anything I could find about the meaning of life. I read everything from the Greek philosophers to the Existentialists. I picked up book after book trying to find something with which to replace my lost faith in the Christian god. I found a lot of very strong arguments against the existence of God in the writings of Bertrand Russell, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Arthur Schopenhauer, and even Voltaire and Thomas Paine. None of them went quite far enough for me though and I was always left with questions the author had either not anticipated, did not have answers for or often appeared to not have the courage to ask himself. So, I began answering these question on my own. Recently, my quest for answers has been aided by modern day atheist thinkers such as Daniel Dennet, Victor J. Stenger, Richard Dawkins, and Sam Harris who have had the courage to take on religious thinking head-on without apology and without shying away from unpleasant or unpopular conclusions. Their books have reinforced many of the conclusions I had already reached on my own and sparked even more questions, particularly in regards to the arguments against Intelligent Design. Now, my goal is to bring the things I have learned to others and help them to answer the questions I have found answers to and to enlist their aid in finding solutions to the mysteries that still remain unsolved. My goal is to be that Underground Railroad my people so desperately need. To help them to finally escape the great overseer in their minds as I have.

Population Zero

2008-07-14T16:41:00.000-07:00

I am a weird dude. I think about some weird shit and weird things worry and terrify me. I guess that's why I write horror. It lets me get out some of this weirdness and spread it around. Maybe get other people worrying about the same weird shit that worries me. Population Zero is one of those weird thoughts that goes through my head.

What if one individual decided to do his part to cure overpopulation, not through any grand gestures like chemical or biological warfare but just one life at a time? A human predator with a mission.

The idea for Population Zero probably began back when I was a kid watching Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom and listening to Marlon Perkins talk about the ecological benefits of predation in nature. I remember watching wolves hunt deer and lions hunt buffalo as Marlon Perkins droned on in that sonorous monotone about how this was all a normal and neccessary part of nature and asking my mother why there had to be so much violence in nature. She explained to me that without the lion and the wolves to thin their ranks by preying on the weak, the old, and the sick, they would breed out of control and become a danger to the entire ecosystem. I then asked her who our predators were.I imagined the human population breeding out of control until we covered the entire globe in a blanket of humanity. My mother told me all about famine and disease and natural disasters to which I replied that animals had all of those things as well. "We also have each other" she said. "We have wars to keep our populations down." This satisfied me.

After that little discussion, I began following the number of wars the world was engaged in, the amount of natural and technological disasters and it just didn't add up. There were not enough wars or natural disasters to account for the high birth-rates and decreasing death-rates around the globe. We were living longer and having a lot of kids. Whenever I heard about a natural disaster or a war or an epidemic that killed a couple hundred thousand people I always thought, "That's not enough." When I watched a plane crash on TV while my mother and sister looked sad and shocked by the horror I would think, "A hundred people? That's not enough." Hearing about serial killers who murdered ten or twenty people never fazed me. Even guys like Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, and The Green River Killer who racked up body counts of thirty or more did little to faze me. What was thirty people when the population was increasing by more than 76 million people per year? Yeah, I was an odd and twisted kid, but who wasn't?

At age 19, I took my first flight to California. I remember looking down at that big sprawling metropolis of concrete, glass, and steel, asphalt and glass, and seeing how humans had so completely transformed the land paving over it, diverting water, blasting through mountains and leveling hills, murdering predators and hounding them into seclusion and extinction, mass-producing livestock, clearing trees for houses and farmland, spraying pesticides, exuding carbon-monoxide and exhaust from cars and factories into the air, making hundreds of miles completely uninhabitable. Uninhabitable by any species or organism other than mankind and those insects, vermin, and parasites that thrive off of our waste and those animals we choose to keep as pets. It was a terrifying sight to me. I imagined how we would feel if some other species, like the cockroach, had so completely transformed so much of the landscape. The very thought made me shutter. It still does.

My first year in California, I got involved in the Earth Day celebration in LA. I did a lot of research on man's impact on the environment and put together a spoken word performance based on the data I'd uncovered. I called it "Mass-Murderers for the Preservation of Animal Life". The most terrifying statistics I uncovered came courtesy of the Sierra Club. Statistics like the fact that it took more than six hundred thousand years for the planet's human population to reach one billion and in the two hundred years since that milestone the population had quintupled and was expected to double to 10 billion in as little as sixty years. Stats like 50,000 species of plant and animal life reaching extinction every year because of deforestation for housing, agriculture, roads, and industry. That number has now shrunk to 27,000 species and I would suspect that this has less to do with conservation efforts than that there are just fewer and fewer species left to destroy. That vision I'd had of how human technology had completely transformed the nation was but a small taste. 50% of the earth's landscape has been transformed by humanity, 30% of the earth's forests destroyed.

I stopped thinking about over-population mostly because the problem just seemed so huge. What was I going to do about it? Nothing. Not one damn thing. I wasn't going to refuse to have kids like the character in my book. I have three of them and I love each and every one of them but I support and provide for my kids. Not everyone does. Not everyone should be a parent. I wouldn't support a law like the one in China limiting each family to one child. Maybe I would. I don't know. I would support voluntary sterilization made free and easily accessible by the government. I'd support a voluntary sterilization campaign on the scale of the failed abstinence campaign of the Bush administration. And i support land, ocean, and animal preservation. Other than that, I just write books. Hopefully, someone will read them and come up with an acceptable answer to the questions they raise.

That's why I wrote Population Zero, my newest novella now available for pre-order from Cargo Cult Press. It is about a guy who is so terrified of overpopulation that he attempts to convince people to voluntarily sterilize themselves and those he can't convince he decides to sterilize anyway. Population Zero is about more than overpopulation however. It is about abortion, birth control, the welfare system, and animal rights. It is one of those stories that will have some people cheering and others cringing and many doing both simultaneously. But, love it or hate it, it will make you think.

Population Zero is available for pre-order at:

http://www.horror-mall.com/POPULATION-ZERO-by-Wrath-James-White-Limited-Edition-p-18140.html

Is faith the same as a scientific theory?

2008-07-12T08:20:00.000-07:00

Nope. That is one of those silly and annoying things that believers say just to annoy non-believers. In fact, science is the exact opposite of belief without evidence. You cannot even call a scientific theory a theory without compelling evidence and reproducible experiments with predictable results, something that faith woefully lacks. In science, until you have a reproducible theory and a wealth of empirical data it is just a hypothesis. That's where faith stands. Faith is unquestioning belief in a mere hypothesis and worse yet, it is unquestioning belief in many hypothesis that have been refuted and disproven time and time again, not just belief without evidence but belief against all contradictory evidence. That doesn't sound like any scientific theory I have ever heard of.

To suggest that magic underwear, virgin births, reincarnation, ressurection, and wine and crackers turning into the blood and flesh of someone who died two thousand years ago are on equal footing with gravity and The first Law of Matter and Energy is too absurd to even bear repeating. The idea that the belief that the secrets of the universe are contained in a book written by people who believed that the earth was flat, less than four thousand years old, the center of the universe, and that the sky was made of water, is as sensible or anything remotely similar to the idea that we don't know anything with absolute certainty and all theories are subject to change as new theories are created and new evidence is introduced is unsuportable. They are completely dichotomous.

To make the claim that the belief that you can cure terminal illnesses with prayer is the same as the belief that you can cure cancer with surgery and chemotherapy or, here's a better example, the belief that you can cure AIDS with penicilin is idiotic. I use the example of the AIDS penicilin hypothesis to illustrate the difference. There was a belief among a fringe element of scientists that because the HIV virus behaved much like the Syphilis virus that it should be treated the same way, with penicilin. They tried it and it didn't work so the medical/scientific community discarded the theory. When has religion ever discraded theories because they didn't work? To even make the claim that belief in scientific theory is the same as faith demonstrates a fundamnetal lack of understanding of the scientific method.

If a scientist were to make a statement like "seek and you shall find. Knock and the door will be opened. Ask and it shall be given to you." he'd conduct an experiment and if it didn't pan out even once the theory would be immediately disgarded. In faith, when these claims invariably do not pan out they are rationalized with statements like "You didn't have enough faith" or "You should not test God" or the old fall back position "God works in mysterious ways". When the answer should be "Well, I guess that was just a bunch of bullshit." Fear and desire, emotions not facts, are the backbones of faith. Logic and empirical data, experiments with predictable results that can be reproduced, not unverified, unverifiable miracles that can never be reproduced, are the backbones of science.

I like how this guy explains the differences (another black atheist by the way). He's a lot nicer about it than I am:

http://theblackatheist.blogspot.com/2008/07/do-scientists-have-faith.html

Wrath to the Nth

2008-06-19T18:35:00.001-07:00

Through some bizarre convergence of fate, everything that I have written in the last two years appears to be getting published simultaneously.

On Friday, June 14th, Orgy of Souls co-written by Maurice Broaddus was released by Apex Books.

http://www.apexbookcompany.com/products/2008/03/orgy-of-souls-available-for-pre-order/

On Tuesday, June 17th, Hero co-written by J.F. Gonzalez was released by Bloodletting books.

http://bloodlettingbooks.com/hebywrjawhjg.html

Sloppy Seconds my chapbook collection of short stories from the WHC Gross-out Contest is due out in the next couple of weeks from Skullvines Press.

http://skullvines.com/main/page_collections.html

My new novella Population Zero has now been picked up by Cargo Cult Press and is scheduled for an October release.

Succulent Prey, my first mass-market novel, will be released in December by Leisure books.

If you love me, buy a book. It would be a shame to see all of those trees go to waste.

Black Racism

2008-06-08T10:01:00.000-07:00

In the early 90's there were many debates about whether or not a Black person could be a racist. This was always a ridiculous question. Of course we can be racist. Anyone can be. We can discriminate. We can prejudge. And, despite popular opinion, we can even oppress. We cannot oppress on the massive scale and with the overreaching impact that White America has oppressed us. That is currently not possible and hardly anything we should aspire to. But if you've been the only White kid in an all-Black school or in an all-Black neighborhood or job, you know a little bit about what it feels like to be oppressed. There can often be no one more cruel than an oppressed minority who suddenly finds the roles reversed even on such a small scale as a school playground.

This attitude that minorities are somehow above being called racists and that we don't need to show the same racial sensitivity we demand is self-destructive and will backfire. Minorities are every bit as capable of causing major emotional damage by prejudging people based solely on their color as we are of being the victims of such discrimination. We have become blind to what equality truly means. It does not mean equality for Black people but for all people, black, white, brown, yellow, red, male, female, gay, or straight. If you allow for any group of people to be discriminated against then you open the door for discrimination against any and all people.

Hearing Black Americans rail against interracial marriage, Mexican immigration, same-sex marriage, seeing them attack other minorities and even White people, it seems to me that we are stabbing our own cause right in the back. Isn't the point, ultimately, to get rid of the entire concept of race? I know that sounds naively optimistic. I was just recently in a conversation on a messageboard about this exact same subject and I pointed out that it will be difficult to get rid of the concept of race until we get rid of racism. That may seem backwards but as long as racism exists than there will be the need for racial groups to band together to oppose it. If we abandon the concept of race while we are still being victimized because of our race we will only divide ourselves and make ourselves more easily victimized. Still, the goal should be to one day get rid of the concept of race entirely and view each other as we truly are, one human race. Notice that I did not say anything about getting rid of culture. Cultural differences will always exist and they should be celebrated for the diversity they bring to the human family and not used as a means of division. At the very least, there should be some unity among the oppressed.

Mexicans are no better off in this country than African Americans are so why the hell wouldn't we stand with them to make this a better country for all Americans? Why the hell do so many of Black Americans side against them? Asians have enjoyed great success in this country recently but it wasn't always that easy for them. Many Chinese Americans came to this country as virtual slaves brought here to work on the railroads for pennies a week. And Japanese Americans were not exactly met with open arms after WWII. many of them were forced onto concentration camps. We should be happy that they have overcome so much and look to them as a model to follow towards our own success in this country. I know that there is racism directed at us by many of these group and perhaps our racism is just a reaction to theirs. But where does it stop? What does it matter who started it? What is this, a fucking schoolyard? How do we look calling a Korean or a Mexican racist while referring to them as Chinks and Spics? We look like hypocrites. The same is true of Whites.

We have suffered much at the hands of White America but there can be little doubt that things are getting better. Times are changing. Holding onto the past will only ensure that we never move past it. We need to forgive and move forward towards a better tomorrow for all of us. We have to move together as a country. If anything has been made clear by Barrack Obama's candidacy it is that racial divides have to end. If Black Americans hold onto our own prejudices, how can we expect White Americans to let go of theirs? Can we say that we would never date a White person, or hire or vote for one and then get pissed off when a White person says they would never date, or hire, or vote for a Black person? Can we make broad sweeping generalizations about White people and then get angry when they do the same in return?

Look, I am not the most racially sensitive guy in the world. I have laughed about racial jokes directed at every single race, most of all, my own. I think there is value in acknowledging and making light of our differences. It is often a good springboard to substantive conversations about race because, as has often been observed, a joke is a great icebreaker. It gets people to loosen up and not take themselves so seriously. I don't think there is value in ridiculing and attacking people because of these differences, however. I don't think that there is anything to be gained from perpetuating negative stereotypes and I think it would be self-destructive to base any major decisions on these stereotypes. Definitely not political or relationship decisions. In other words, don't vote or not vote for Obama because he's Black. Vote for him because you think he's the best man for the job or don't vote for him if you really and truly believe that he would make a worse president than McCain. And if you think McCain is really the better man for the job than vote for him. Don't avoid friendships or romantic relationships with people because of their race. Don't base your employment decisions on race. If all Black people decided to only work for companies that were predominantly Black what do you think that would do to our job opportunities? Yet, surprisingly, I know people who think this way. It is pure idiocy and self-destructive racism.

There are real and definite cultural differences between people of various nationalities but color does not always equate with culture. Black people from North Carolina, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia and New York, all look exactly the same but culturally there are great differences. In fact, I would bet that if you were to look at the cultural differences between a Black person and a white person who were raised in the same neighborhood in Philadelphia versus the cultural differences between two Black people, one who was raised in Los Angeles or North Carolina and the other who was raised in New York or Philadelphia, you would find an equal number of differences between the two Black people raised in different neighborhoods as the Black and the White person raised in the same neighborhood. The influence of church in the South is much larger than in the North. The diet is different. The emphasis on education is different. The speech patterns are different. The style of dress is different. The way we look at race is different. Sure, you can argue that the differences between the Black people would not be as significant but I would say that even that would be debatable. In Philly, I never think about what color shirt I wear in what neighborhood, where such a mistake might get you killed in certain parts of LA. I'd say that was a significant difference. And if you were to look at the differences between Black people in Great Britain, France, Africa, the Carri bean, versus American Blacks, the differences would increase exponentially. Do you really think that a Black person from Detroit has more in common with someone from Zimbabwe than a White person from his own neighborhood? I think not. Race is not so big a deal as we make it out to be.

I am often asked by Black women how I can be married to a White woman, if the differences bother me; "Don't you want someone who can relate to you?" The assumption being that a Black woman can relate better. Here's the funny thing. I have found just the opposite to be true in practice. There is no race of women that find me easy to relate to with any regularity. I have not found Black women to have any easier time relating to me than White, Latino, or Asian women and often less. I am a rather unique individual and I don't fit very easily into groups. Try to stick me in any group and I stick out regardless of race. I am an odd duck.

I am an atheist which automatically makes 94% of Black women unable to relate to me. According to the Barna Research group: Blacks (52%) are the ethnic group most likely to have attended a religious service in the past week, followed by whites (49%), Hispanics (41%), and Asians (29%). By those stats, I'd find it much easier to find an Asian woman who can relate to my atheism than a Black or a White woman. In fact, my first wife was half Asian. Women, by an almost 10% margin tend to be more faithful, attend, church more often, pray more frequently, and interpret the bible more literally than men so, if I was looking for a mate based solely on how well they could relate to me, it might be better for me to be gay. At least I'd have a spotter when I go heavy on the bench press and perhaps a sparring partner in the gym.

I am extremely open-minded and liberal whereas Black Christians tend to be very conservative about most issues. I am not homophobic. I am Pro-Choice. I write horror. Have you been to a Horror convention lately? Not a lot of Black folks there. I workout every day. Have you been to a martial arts gym lately? Not a lot of Black women there. Not a lot of women of any race. The differences go on and on. If I had limited my search for a wife only to Black women who can relate me then I'd be one lonely man. We could certainly relate in terms of issues of racial prejudice but that is such a minuscule part of my life. I have met few women of any race who fit all of these categories. If I find woman who can relate to me philosophically, politically, artistically, and emotionally, then I am dating her and that woman has just as much chance of being Black, White, Asian, Latino, Middle Eastern, etc. The assumption that only Black people can relate to Black people is flawed and yes, racist. Those women that look at me wrong and whisper under their breath when they see me with a White woman and bi-racial kids are racists. The brothers that make comments like "You fuck a White girl but you don't marry them." They are racist too. Anyone who thinks that interracial relationships are wrong is a racist regardless of their color, what generation they were born in, or what area of the country they live in.

Now, if I haven't pissed off everyone already here's something that will probably do it. After the, yes, racist verdict in the Rodney King police brutality trial there was a huge riot in which Blacks and Latinos burned, looted, and beat, just about any non-Black or non-Latino business or person they could find. Most of this violence was directed at Korean store owners and any White person who happened to wonder by. The result was that they destroyed much of their own damned neighborhood. I get the anger and I get the reaction. It is no different than getting so mad that you punch a hole in the door in your own home, knowing that you are going to have to now pay to replace it. You aren't thinking. You are just trying to let the anger out and whatever is nearest to you is probably going to pay. This is an emotional reaction akin to temporary insanity. The choice to target certain racial groups however, was racist. If they had gone after the police I would have perhaps understood a little better, but the choice to go after anyone who happened to be the same color as the police officers was racist, pure and simple. I understand the rage and frustration. Hell, I understand the rage and frustration when a White kid gets his ass-kicked by a bunch of Black kids and develops ill feelings towards Blacks. But if that White kid decided to retaliate against all Blacks, if his Friends and neighbors rounded up a posse and started beating the hell out of every Black person they saw then they would be indicted for hate crimes as they undoubtedly should be. If that White kid went the rest of his life never trusting another Black person because of that ass-kicking, we would not hesitate to call him a racist. If the Rodney King riots had happened in the reverse and it had been White people targeting Blacks because a White man got beaten half to death by a gang of Black cops there would be no question. True, as I have often pointed out, the history of racial discrimination in America has created a deep well of rage and frustration that few besides us could ever relate to. I understand the hate that hate made. This is one cultural difference that we as Black Americans all share. It is real and undeniable. No White person could feel what we felt while watching those cops beat Rodney King or, more recently, watching as those cops in Philadelphia beat and kicked Thomas Jones. It brings up every racist or discriminatory remark ever made to you, every racist act ever perpetrated against you, your parents, and even your grandparents. Still, adding our own hate won't help. Discriminating against those who have discriminated against us won't help. Only when all racial discrimination ends can our own freedom be ensured. We have to stop acting as if we get some sort of special exemption from racism.

"Reverse racism" has become a new catch phrase. It has become a rallying cry for straight White men who feel that they have been demonized by minorities. It is often just a sickening self-pitying way for racists to justify their own racism by saying "See! See! They're doing it too!" The power-structure in America makes it impossible for minorities to discriminate against Whites with anything near the impact of institutionalized racism. So, many minorities dismiss these claims without a moment's thought, even the ones that happen to be legitimate. Just because institutionalized racism against White people in America does not exist does not mean that racism against White people does not exist. When someone gets pissed off because there's a Black Entertainment Television and not a White Entertainment Television or a Black History Month and not a White History month then I think they are whiny idiots who need to take a real hard look at the world and ask themselves seriously if they think that White Entertainment Television or White History Year doesn't exist. When someone complains that the Black kids in their school beat them up everyday just because they are the only White kids there or that they want to sing soul music or rap but can't get a record deal because they are White or that they can't get elected to public office in their predominantly Black district, even though they are the more qualified candidate with the better platform just because they are White, then I listen because that is real racism and it is wrong.

There is no such thing as "reverse racism". Racism is racism and anyone can do it and anyone can be hurt by it and it all needs to stop. I have two beautiful bi-racial daughters and I no more want them to grow up in a world where Black people discriminate against White people than one where White people discriminate against Black people. I want a world free of all racial prejudice and discrimination. They deserve to live in a world that is better than the one I inherited. All of our children do.

The Evidential Argument From Slavery and Oppression

2008-06-01T20:50:00.000-07:00

The Evidential Argument from Evil is perhaps one of the most damning arguments against the Christian concept of an omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent creator/god. This concept of God is contradictory to the facts of this world, namely the fact that evil, in the form of senseless preventable suffering and death, exists. Why would an all-good, all-loving, all-knowing, all-powerful deity allow his beloved children to suffer and die? Why would he allow slavery? Why would he allow Jim Crow laws? Why would he allow hangings, house, church, and cross burnings? Why would he allow beatings, whippings, burnings, skinnings, police brutality, false imprisonment and all the other horrors of racial oppression in this country? Why would he allow Black kids to starve in ghettos, be shot down in the streets, become addicted to drugs, be neglected, abused, and flushed down the socio-economic toilet? There seems to be no answer to this question which should satisfy a reasonable human being yet over and over in churches all over America answers are given and accepted.

"It is because man has freewill and God can't control him without impacting his freewill."
"It is because this is the best world possible and God can only do that which is possible."
"It is because you cannot have light without darkness."
"It is because God is testing you to see if you are worthy for heaven or grooming you to become more worthy."
"It is because God works in mysterious ways and has calculus that our finite minds cannot fathom and therefore we have to have faith that it is all according to his plan and will work out for the good in the end."

We are given these weak answers and arguments and our longing to believe and fear of disbelieving forces us to accept them when nowhere else in life would we accept answers like these from anyone. If you bought a refrigerator that malfunctioned or a car that kept breaking we would never blame the car and hold it's manufacturer blameless. Yet when it comes to God we do just that. If we bought a car that was filled with factory defects we would never accept the answer that this was the best car possible and that we should just shut up and be grateful. We would never accept our loved ones telling us that they had to be mean to us sometimes or else how could we ever appreciate it when they were good to us? We would think they were crazy for even suggesting such idiocy. We would never accept our parents telling us that they made our childhoods hell, let us starve, let us get injured, abused, and neglected us, let our other loved ones die in front of us, all because they wanted us to be prepared for adulthood and were just testing us to be sure we were ready. Child Protective Services would have long ago taken us away from such a parent and filed charges against them.

If we saw our friend or neighbor killing a child or neglecting his own children and letting them starve to death and be attacked and abused by others when it was in his power to prevent it, no matter how wise and benevolent we knew our friend to be, we would never say simply that, though we don't know exactly why he's killing that kid or why he's not lifting a finger to defend the life and well-being of his own children, he's a good guy so he must have his reasons. We would never let an elected official, not even the President of the United States, abuse and neglect us without questioning him and if his answer was, "I have a plan and you could not possibly understand it so I won't tell you. I'm just going to continue letting your children and loved ones be raped, murdered and abused, and you have to just trust that I know what I'm doing." We would impeach him immediately if not revolt and murder him.

Why should we expect less from our leader in heaven? From our fathers who art on earth we expect love and protection as we should because that is how a parent shows their love for their children, by protecting, comforting, nurturing, and providing for them. We expect them to comfort us when we are sad or fearful. We expect them to keep us safe from harm. We expect them to keep us fed, and clothed, and sheltered, and to care for us when we are sick. At the very least, we expect our parents to not let us die if they can help it, to not let us be injured or abused. This is the very minimum expectation anyone should have of a parent. Don't let your children die. Should our expectations of Our Father Who Art In Heaven be less than this? Should they not in fact be greater?

The freewill argument as a defense against this argument is such a feeble attempt that it is laughable, totally destroying the idea of an omniscient God who is eternal because he exists outside of time and space and replacing him instead with a bumbling buffoon baffled by his own creation and therefore not omniscient or even particularly intelligent which leads to the question of how such a moron could have created the universe? But yet that tends to be the best that those who believe in a God with these characteristics can offer. Arguments like "This is the best of all possible worlds" are likewise inept because since we have obviously cured diseases that have destroyed hundreds of millions of people before such cures were invented, the best of all possible worlds would have been one in which these diseases never existed. It would, at the very least, be a world without viral infections, bacterial infections, viruses, congenital diseases and birth defects and if man could create a world without polio or measles or rubella or chicken pox and the many other diseases and infections we have cured, then if God could not, he is not omnipotent. So this argument fails as well.

The argument that, "You can't have light without darkness" fails because you do not need a preponderance of darkness (i.e. evil) in order to contrast it with light. In other words, you do not need to have 30,000 children a day perish from hunger and disease nor even one. We could watch the death of other animals and their children and feel grateful that ours have not suffered the same fate. We could stub our toe and imagine how much worse it must feel like to be eaten alive by a lion or bitten by a shark or crushed by an earthquake or stricken with cancer without ever having to feel such a thing.

By far the worst of these arguments is the idea that "We need pain and suffering to teach us and prepare us for heaven. It is a test." which then leads to the question of why we aren't already born ready to enter heaven if that's what God ultimately wants for all of us? Why do we need to be tested or prepared? Would you tell the kids born into poverty in a drug-infested war zone, watching as his friends and family are murdered, arrested, or become addicted to drugs that this was just some fucking test? That they were just being prepared for their reward in heaven? Would you tell the thousands of African Americans who suffer and die each year because of inadequate health care that this was all just a test? Would you tell the Africans who were brought here in chains, who died on slaves ships, in cotton and tobacco fields, and at the hands of overseers, shot, whipped or worked to death that this was just the work of an omnipotent and omniscient God preparing them for heaven? Is that what you would have told them when their wives and daughters were being raped and abused and sold away from them never to be seen again? Is that what you would tell the parents of the children who die every 3 seconds in this world of preventable illnesses? Is that what you would tell the thousands of Africans who die each year of Malaria and AIDS, who are raped, dismembered, and murdered in tribal wars. Would you tell the women and young children who are sold into prostitution all over the globe that God was just putting them through their paces in order to prepare them for heaven? Is heaven such a rough and rugged place that you need a lifetime of suffering to prepare you for it or is it like the elephant taking his foot off your toe and it only looks like paradise when compared to these atrocities? Does God need to punish us so brutally in order for us to appreciate heaven because otherwise we just wouldn't think much of it? If heaven is so lackluster that it requires such extreme suffering before it can be appreciated then it is certainly not so grand that it could adequately compensate for that suffering.

If God is omniscient there is no need for a test because he already knows if we will pass or fail before we are ever even created. And if he is all-powerful than he could have created us fully prepared for heaven without need of a lifetime of suffering to ready us. And what about those who never get to enter heaven? Whose failure is that? What about the sinners like me who never ask for forgiveness and never “come to Jesus“ and the atheists and infidels and blasphemers who an omniscient creator knew would reject him and be sent to hell or at the very least perish and not know eternal life in heaven but simply suffer on earth and then die? What about them? What about the countless generations around the world who lived and died without ever being exposed to Christianity? Are those untouched tribes in the Amazon rainforest doomed to burn in hell or perish because Jesus didn't think it was worth his time to appear to anyone outside of Israel?

All of those African tribes that existed between the so-called coming of Christ and the beginning of the slave trade when Christian missionaries and slave traders first brought the bible to the motherland are all now burning in hell if you believe that the only way to heaven is through Christ. by that scenario I guess we should all be grateful to the slavetrader for rescuing us from certain eternal damnation. Ultimately, life on earth makes no sense if God's ultimate plan was for everyone to sit behind him in heaven. Jesus' abbreviated life and death and his narrow and limited exposure to the world make no sense if God's plan was to have every man, woman, and child come to him through Jesus Christ. It only makes sense if God was prejudice and didn't care about anyone who wasn't Jewish or possibly Roman.

Now, probably the most convincing answer to this dilemma for believers is the claim that none of this is God's fault, that all the evils of the world are the result of man's freewill. I will ignore for the moment the fact that things like diseases, natural disasters, famines, and birth defects have nothing to do with freewill (but only for the moment.) Instead I will concentrate on the idea that man's relatively predictable nature should so baffle the being that authored our natures, a being who is supposed to be the supreme intellect in the universe, even omniscient as many Christians believe.

Here's the thing with the freewill defense for the Teological Argument from Evil, it just doesn't work. Were there truly a being who was all-knowing and all-powerful who also created each and every one of us, then there would be no such thing as freewill because he would have to have known everything we would ever do from birth to death before he ever created us. If God is our creator and he is at least as intelligent as a second year psychology or sociology student then he would know before he ever created someone what they were capable of. What they might do if born to those parents, in that neighborhood, at that time. He has the option of not letting them be born to those parents or not letting them be born in that neighborhood or not letting them be born at that time or with that personality or to not be born at all.

Most of the people who grow up to commit evil acts have flaws in their basic natures that coupled with the environments they grow up in lead inevitably and rather predictably to evil. When some kid in the ghetto whose mom is a crackhead and Dad robs liquor stores grows up and becomes a criminal there's no one standing around going, "Now how the hell did that happen?" That kid was doomed from the moment he took his first breath. When a kid grows up in a neighborhood infested with gangs and grows up thinking it's okay to murder someone for wearing the wrong color it is not some bizarre unpredictable anomaly. The fact that there are some who are able to avoid these pitfalls is no anomaly either. They have a strength of character that cannot be explained by the environments they grew up in or how they were nurtured. It can only be explained by something in that individual's nature. And if it can be in one individual's nature than it can be in them all and if not than why not?

Certain circumstances breed evil in people with certain personality types. Take, for example, this question: "Would Hitler have killed eight million jews had he been born in New York City in the 1980s?" Nature plus environment creates evil. Alter one or the other and you have no evil. If God is reasonably intelligent and has been paying attention the last few thousand years than he's well aware of what happens to certain personality types when placed in certain environments. It would not change anyone's freewill to not create people with those personality types or to place them in different environments that would not lead them to commit acts of evil. If he can create one person with the strength of character to endure hardship and crime without becoming a criminal or a drug addict without that impacting their freewill than he could have created a world of such people. And notice that I am only talking about an intelligent deity, not an omniscient one.

The concept of freewill when coupled with an omniscient creator is ridiculous. How can we have freewill if the being that created us knew everything we would do from birth to death before he ever created us? That's what all-knowing is, it is knowing everything. Most people believe that a palm reader can tell us our future but think freewill just baffles the hell out of God. That's absurd. All-knowing is not mostly-knowing or sometimes-knowing. It is knowing All. An all-knowing God might say you have the freedom to make whatever choices you want but since he knew what choices you would make when he created you that's really just a bunch of bullshit.

It's like me telling you that you have a choice between eating excrement or eating cake. You think I'd be surprised when you ate the cake and not the feces? It isn't in your nature to eat crap so that's not really a choice. If God knows your nature because he created it then him giving you choices is really just an illusion. For an omniscient creator, past, present, and future would look exactly the same. Likewise for an eternal being existing outside of space and time. God is presented as being all-knowing and eternal, which in itself means that everything that you will ever do or ever think about doing he knows before he ever creates you. As Einstein theorized and modern science has proven, time is not linear, it is not a straight line but a tapestry with past, present, and future all existing on the same plane. God, being outside of space and time, would stand above this tapestry looking down on it the way we would read a road map. The fact that he creates you knowing every choice you are ever going to make makes freewill an illusion. If I know whether you are going to pick Pepsi or Coke because I created you then I created you to make those choices because I could have created a different sort of person. No amount of squirming or intellectual sleight of hand can get you out of that dilemma.

You can't have an omniscient creator and one who is baffled by freewill. It is frankly difficult to have a highly intelligent creator and one who is baffled by freewill. We are largely determined by our nature (which God creates if you are a believer) and our environments which God also creates or at the least has intimate knowledge of. Guessing how someone will turn out and the choices they will make given intimate knowledge of both of those factors would be child's play for a supreme intellect and unneccessary for an omniscient being who would be like a psychic with a 100% accuracy rate. The two concepts are antithetical.

So, as I said previously, God must have created Hitler knowing he would kill eight million jews because for an all-knowing all-powerful being he would have known what he would do before he ever created him and therefore had the opportunity to create him with a different nature or in a different environment that would not have lent him to become such a monster. He created Jeffery Dahmer knowing he would eat people. He created Idi Amin, Stalin, Mussolini, the racists that enslaved and oppressed our ancestors and those who continue to do so today and every monster back as far as humans have walked the earth. He created them all knowing full well the outcome. He created George Bush knowing he would start a religious war. In fact, God would have to have known that humans would eventually evolve into these types of people and what they would ultimately do from the moment the first one-celled animal emerged from the protoplasmic stew. He would have to have known that Black people would ultimately be enslaved and oppressed by White people from the moment that hyper-dense singularity exploded to form the universe. That's what omniscience is. And if you want to believe in Genesis then he created Adam and Eve knowing they would eat of the apple. And that one is even more telling because if he didn't know Adam and Eve would eat the apple than he is neither all-knowing nor terribly intelligent at all. It is an inescapable dichotomy. And why the hell was the tree of knowledge in Eden in the first place? Was God just setting them up, entrapping them all along knowing that they were going to fuck up? Does he get off on punishing his helpless creations for some sadistic purpose? Does God have control issues? It would seem so.

This should also preclude that ridiculous argument of this all being the result of a fallen creation damned by original sin. The original sin was the Christian God being too stupid to see what was coming or else deliberately setting it up. Who the hell would create curious and adventurous beings and put them in proximity of the forbidden? What the hell was the Tree of Knowledge doing there to begin with? Okay, that story is just too silly for me to even pretend to believe it long enough to ridicule it. If you really believe all that bullshit about Adam and Even you then don't even bother reading the rest of this. But if you do, then there's your answer.

This then leads back to the question of how we can worship a God who knew before he ever created the slavemasters that they would kidnap us from our homeland, cram us onto slave ships so crowded that many of us died of suffocation and others died of dysentery, lying in one another’s blood, sweat, and excrement, drop us off in a strangeland where son was sold away from his parents and wives sold away from their husbands, force us to work long hours without pay at threat of severe beating and even death, force us to watch our women raped and our children sold off never to be seen again?

How can you forgive a god who knew before he ever let that young African boy be born on the Ivory Coast that he would be kidnapped and die plowing the fields with the overseer's whip at his back thousands of miles from where he was born? How can you forgive a god that knew before that gangbanger was ever born that one day he would pull the trigger on a gun whose stray bullet would murder an innocent child? How can you worship the god that knew that generation after generation of our people would be born into poverty and suffer all manner of hardship, and economic, political, and social oppression? How can you forgive the one being who truly did have the freewill to make a different choice? How can you praise him?

If you believe that God exists then you cannot disagree that man did not author his own basic nature or choose the circumstances into which he was born. No one chose to be born into slavery. No one chose to be born in the housing projects to drug-addicted parents. No one chose to grow up poor, hungry, and unenducated, dodging bullets and fighting everyday of their lives for the basic commodities of existence that so many take for granted. No one chose to be born into a world of prejudice and economic oppression.

You can also not argue that man's creator did author man's nature and did create the circumstances and the environment into which he is born. I think our father who art in heaven (if such a being exists) has to take a little more responsibility. We talk about God like some idiot savante who had the intelligence to create the universe but somehow couldn't have predicted that Adam would eat the forbidden fruit or that Bin Laden would fly airplanes into the twin towers. I ain't a genius but I could have predicted what would happen in the garden of Eden. It really doesn't take a rocket scientist. We act like freewill is so damned baffling that an omniscient being would go "whoops!" when a kid who was raised in drug ridden, gangland ghetto by a mother who is on crack and a father who is in prison goes out and shoots somebody. People are, in fact, fairly predictable as any study of history would show and should be even more so for the one who created us. We tend to repeat the same mistakes over and over again, make the same choices, and seek the same goals. The reason is because our basic nature, our instincts, our drives and desires, are the same. Slavery was far too common in North and South America, Europe, Africa, and in the history of the world, for it be some kind of deviation from nature. It is in our nature to enslave and we did not author our own nature. We are largely the animals nature intended us to be. If you believe in an omniscient or even a highly intelligent deity then you have to believe that we are completely or at least primarily, the animals God intended us to be. God therefore intended for the White man to enslave the Black man. For the believer, there is no escaping this conclusion.

And what does the bible say about all of this? What does Jesus and the apostles say about slavery and oppression?

Ephesians 6:5 5 "Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in singleness of your heart, as unto Christ;"

"Christians who are slaves should give their masters full respect so that the name of God and his teaching will not be shamed. If your master is a Christian, that is no excuse for being disrespectful. You should work all the harder because you are helping another believer by your efforts. Teach these truths, Timothy, and encourage everyone to obey them." (1 Timothy 6:1-2)

"A disciple is not above the teacher, nor a slave above the master." (Matthew 10:24)

"Blessed is that slave whom his master will find at work when he arrives." (Matthew 24:46)

"Let all who are under the yoke of slavery regard their masters as worthy of all honor." (I Timothy 6:1)

"Slaves, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling." (Ephesians 6:5a)

"Tell slaves to be submissive to their masters and to give satisfaction in every respect." (Titus 2:9)

"Slaves, accept the authority of your masters." (I Peter 2:18)

And of course the truly horrific Old Testament:

"When a man strikes his male or female slave with a rod so hard that the slave dies under his hand, he shall be punished. If, however, the slave survives for a day or two, he is not to be punished, since the slave is his own property." (Exodus 21:20-21 NAB)

If we are dumb enough and have such little respect for our ourselves that we would worship such a god then, I hate to say it, but we deserve all that we get. It is past time for us to shrug off this last vestige of our enslavement and truly stand as free men, bowing to no master and accepting no dogma, and adopting no ideology without proof. It is time for us to refuse to buy into any philosophy or movement without the same reasons, evidence, and convincing arguments we would demand from the local conman or street hustler. It is time for us to finally escape the overseer and this time the underground railroad is right in our own minds.

Words of Wrath

Two New Book RELEASES!

Goodbye 2011!

Appreciation

Writing My Ass Off!

IS THERE A DEMON IN YOU?

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Like Porno For Psychos

Avoid This Book

Appreciating Daddy

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The Life and Times

His Pain

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My WHC Schedule (Catch Me If You Can!)

The Rape of The Genre (And What You Can Do To Stop It!)

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Skinzz

Human Rights

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Things That Make Me Smile

Where I'll be in 2011

Human Kindness

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Coping with Death as an Atheist

This Is Why You're Hot

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Money Ain't A Thing?

This I Fear

Twelve Things I'd Hate About You

Twelve Things You'd Hate About Me

When is Sex Appropriate?

Everyone Dies Famous In A Small Town

Vicious Romantic Available Now!

Yaccub's Curse

I Like Big Girls

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Dark Faith

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