They Paved Blog-o-ween and Put Up a Parking Lot

Welp, kiddies, it is that time o’ year again. Time for the days to start getting shorter. Time for the leaves to turn the colors of a 1970s basement game room. Time for your cardigan sweaters to be taken out of the cedar chest at the foot of your bed.

It is — you guessed it — time for Spooky Season.

And that can only mean one thing: it’s time for me to spend the next thirty-one days spewing forth a whole bunch of gobbledygook about my favorite scary books, movies, old time radio programs, podcasts, music, and whatever other format you can think of. 

I’ve spent the month of October for the past four autumns blogging about all things Halloween. It’s a lot of work, but it’s also a lot of fun. By the time I fall across the finish line of my annual thirty-one day marathon of the macabre, I am pooped — but also pretty proud. I look back at past Blog-o-weens and think, “Well done, sir. Well done.”

For the past four years, I have been rarin’ to go a good week before 1 October. Sometimes — as was the case with last year’s Lots of Salem’s Lot (my thirty-one day trip through Stephen King’s 1975 novel of vampires in small town Maine) — I have a majority of my posts locked and loaded by the beginning of September.

Alas, this year, I’ve got nothing.

Not an overarching project, not a particular subject, not a single post. Not even a goofy gif. I got nada, niente, nichts, rien — in short (and in English), nothing.

I wracked my brain for much of this year looking for an “in” — some overall structure that would grab ahold of me the way last year’s day-by-day, chapter-by-chapter reading of Salem’s Lot did. No such luck. Sadly, nothing stood out to me, and (sadder still) nothing excited me. Finally, as the time to begin drew nigh, I had to ask if I wanted to subject myself to thirty-one days of dreariness, if I wanted to spend a month trying to hit a thousand words a day on topics that left me cold. That’s not how I want to enjoy my favorite time of year.

It’s not all doom and gloom, however, Blog-o-weeners. There is another, more important, factor in my decision to give Blog-o-ween a pass this year: I’m busy writing a novel. As I type these words, I am hard at work on the third draft of my giallo. This is a work that has been in progress for what seems like forever. Indeed, I’ve been working on it so long that each of the past four Blog-o-weens have felt like a sort of vacation from the characters and situations of my book. This year, I feel like I need to keep my momentum going and plow through to the end (of this draft, at least). I am hip-deep in all the chapters that I promised myself during the first and second drafts I was going to fix later. Well...it’s later!

But old habits die hard and all that, and I don’t want to let October go by without at least writing something scary, so I’ll tell you what...if you promise to stop back here a little later on in October, I’ll promise you a mini Blog-o-ween.

As many of you know, I am a great admirer of Tommy Lee Wallace’s Halloween III: Season of the Witch. (It should never have been saddled with the Halloween franchise moniker and the expectations that come with it. It’s its own thang.) A good friend of mine back in Pittsburgh (hello Gil!) is also a fan, and he loves to celebrate what he calls “Silver Shamrock Day.” This day falls on the date that H3:SOTW opens: 23 October. So here’s what we’ll do...beginning on 23 October, we will celebrate the 9 Days of Blog-o-ween. From the 23rd through to the 31st, we will try to cram thirty-one days worth of love for ghouls, ghosts, zombies, vampires, mummies, werewolves, and whatever the heck else we can grab hold of into those nine days. It’s better than nothing, no?

In the meantime, take care of yourselves and look out for each other. It’s getting crazy out there, but you’ll be okay if you keep one thing in mind...