Aphorisms Should Be Peaks

Hello friends! Did you know that the term "swords and sorcery" was coined by one of my favorite writers, Fritz Leiber? He used it in a letter responding to another author by the name of Michael Moorcock. Of course, Leiber is famous for his Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories and books, and Moorcock is famous for his Elric of Melnibone series. Around the age of thirteen, I was introduced to the genre by my best buddy, Matt Mohn. I had read and heard of Tolkien and Lewis, but I wasn't yet indoctrinated into the world of swords and sorcery. From that point on, I spent long nights under my blankets with a flashlight while reading Robert E. Howard , L. Sprague de Camp , Clark Ashton Smith , and other greats. So this month, I am proud to have a short story included in a fine online publication,  Swords and Sorcery Magazine . The story is titled " Bringing Down the Mountain ," and it is about a young Viking lad who saves his family and home from a rampaging ice ...

I haven’t revealed this to many friends, but the first horror short story of mine that was published was a dream. Almost scene-for-scene, the entire plot was somehow written and directed and screened by my sleeping brain. Like many, I’ve always avoided spiders. They may be friendly little critters that eat flies, but I avoid them. They creep me out. One night long ago, I dreamed of a colossal alien spider-thing that descended from space in a weird lightning storm. The bloated giant hovered over a Midwestern suburb, and from its hull, hundreds of its long-legged young dropped down on hawsers of webbing. But the beasts had no heads or faces—they were just bodies with legs. To communicate and try to convince humans to submit to the new ravenous overlord, they would decapitate people and stick the heads on their own bodies to speak.  Crazy, huh? I’ll sit and work on a plot for hours and then write a story that is rejected time after time. But that one story given to me by...