10th Day of Twisted: Guest Post by Collin Kelley

Happy 10th day of Twisted!  Today's guest post is Mystery and Magical Realism by Collin Kelley...Enjoy!!

Remain In Light is a mystery/suspense novel, but it also contains touches of magical realism and its premise relies heavily on Carl Jung's theory of synchronicity, which posits that there are no random occurrences. The main characters, Martin Paige and Irène Laureux, are separated by a 40 year age gap and, initially, a continent, yet the dreams and experiences they share cannot be dismissed as coincidence. They both seem to have an extra-sensory perception of each other and events before they happen.

In 1968, Irène's husband was murdered during the Paris student and worker riots. Thirty years later, she is still on the hunt for the man who knows how and why Jean-Louis died – his secret lover, Frederick Dubois. Martin, an American expat writer, is helping Irène, but he's also still reeling from a love affair gone wrong with a student, David McLaren. Martin meets a young poet, Christian, and the two fall in love, but their happiness is shaken when Martin's friend, Diane Jacobs, arrives in Paris with news that David has gone missing.

As Irène and Martin search for clues, they go deeper into an underworld that is not the Paris of postcards and travel programs. The city is filled with corrupt cops, drug dealers, prostitutes, stolen identities and immigrants fleeing genocide living in the shadowy, slightly out of focus urban landscape. I wanted the Paris of Remain In Light to exist in a kind of alternate universe, where I could create buildings, streets and Metro stations that suited the characters and worked to advance the plot.

I've always had a hard time sticking to one genre. We don't live in the black and white, cut and dry worlds that often exist in genre mystery novels. I wanted to give readers a little jolt, leave them guessing and let them come to their own conclusions about the more paranormal events that take place in the story. If you're reading this and looking for a mystery with an unexpected twist, Remain In Light might be the book for you.

Remain In Light is available in eBook format at Amazon and Smashwords. A trade paperback edition will be published in January. For more visit www.collinkelley.com.

9th Day of Twisted: Guest Post by Red Tash

It's the 9th Day of Twisted here today and we have Red Tash, author of This Brilliant Darkness... After you read this, make sure you run over and enter the contest going on at Red's blog!!

Thanks for having me on your blog, Rachel!  Especially today, when I'm rounding up the last-minute entries to my Trick or Treat Bash.  I released my first novel recently, and I've been hosting a Halloween-themed giveaway in celebration, ever since.  In fact, many of your guest bloggers have contributed to the Grand Prize: a loaded Kindle!  Yep, I'm giving away a new Kindle, and it's going to be loaded with novels and short stories perfect for the Halloween mood.  How's that for cool?  2nd and 3rd prizes are Amazon gift cards, and free copies of my book This Brilliant Darkness, as well.  Hope to see some of your readers around the Bash before it ends on the 16th!

So, I write scary stuff.  That's not all I write (in my other life I am a journalist), but since I released my book, that's where my focus has been.  Lately I have been asked several times how or why I started writing.  That's a long and boring story, probably, but here's a tiny part of it that I just remembered, while looking at a pretty fearsome photo.  One of the first serious fiction pieces I wrote was horror.  And I never thought of myself as a horror writer, back then.  Ironically, I dreamed of being as big as Stephen King, but I did *not* want to write horror!  LOL! 

So, back in high school (yes, we’re climbing into the Way Back Machine, hold onto your hats), there was a writing competition by the Literary Guild, or Literary Society, or Literary Club, or something like that.  I wasn’t a member, only because I was too damned busy running the yearbook and other diversions.

Anyway, they had a contest.  I submitted a story.  I have absolutely no recollection what that story was about, but it won.  They even gave me a decent cash prize.  I think it was $50 or something, which ain’t too shabby for a kid in rural Indiana in the early 90s.

The Literary Club was preparing some kind of publication, perhaps a journal…?  Anyway, they lost my story, so they asked me if I could rewrite it.  Yep, this was in the olden days, children, before we typed everything out and had saved copies.  They’d lost my only copy of this hand-written masterpiece, and they were deeply remorseful.

I replied honestly—I didn’t have the heart to rewrite it.  I just couldn’t.  I guess it was too demoralizing for the 17 y.o. emo-when-emo-wasn’t-cool version of Red.

So, I offered a compromise.  I would write them a *new* story for their journal.
And I did.  I wrote a horror story, instead.  Again, I don’t remember a thing about that first story, only that it wasn’t horror.  Don’t get me wrong, I can do light and fluffy!  It’s just not my favorite, and perhaps this story I’m telling you now reveals why I write the kind of fiction I do. 

There was a boy.  (Isn’t there always a boy?)  He was a complete jackass.  I understand he grew up to be a deadbeat “dad,” among other things, so I’m assuming he still is one.  Anyway, I digress.
I was waiting for that jackass to check in at the military recruiting office.  I don’t know if they were just going ahead and giving him a physical, or what, but he was in there a VERY long time.

I guess that long, frustrating wait really poisoned my mood (that, along with the jackass), so I wrote a story about a little boy who went completely crazy and slaughtered his family with a large kitchen knife.  I think I made that kid about 6 years old.

Never heard from the Literary Club again.

Kids, I think, are inherently dangerous.  They shout threats that they mean with all their hearts, and the silent thoughts they bear inside their minds are often deadly.  Especially the revenge plans.  I challenge you to meet any killer who ruthlessly slays others, who doesn’t have the heart of an abused child.  I mean that.

And, hey, even the nice ones are hiding all those TEETH.  Think about it.

HEY, speaking of winning contests, enter mine while you still have time.  It ends October 16th, winners announced on the 17th!

Links, for your convenience:

My blog: http://RedTash.com

Kindle Giveaway: http://RedTash.com/bash
 This Brilliant Darkness: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005LSNB2A/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=myxangaweblog-20&linkCode=as2&camp=217145&creative=399373&creativeASIN=B005LSNB2A

 Follow me on twitter: http://twitter.com/RedTashBooks

 Follow me: http://facebook.com/RedTashBooks

8th Day of Twisted: Guest Post by V.A. Jeffrey

Welcome to the 8th day of Twisted!  Today we have V.A. Jeffrey, author of Dust and Bones.  Awesome title!  Enjoy!

October is the perfect month to talk about stories with dark themes - be they light gray themes with a little silver lining or stories as black as sin (evil laughter!)
Dust and Bones is interesting in that I started with a cool sounding title first.. Back when Guns and Roses were at the height of their popularity they had a great song off their Use Your Illusion I album called Dust N' Bones. Both of the Use Your Illusion albums came out the year I graduated. Actually, nearly everything they made was great, but that's off the subject!
I have always loved the song and the title and eventually I became so enamored with the title that I wanted to build a short story around it, but a story never came. I've always had this idea about a guy in the desert, but that was it. So the title and this inchoate idea rattled around in my brain for years while I got on to other things. Oddly enough, last year I was watching some YouTube channels I'm subscribed to and a few of them centered on corrupt ministers. Specifically, two of them. A poster had uploaded videos of some sermons by these two preachers that showed in no uncertain terms what they were really about; raw, naked greed and absolute contempt for those who didn't tithe, those who were not wealthy like them. One of them even had the nerve to brag about buying his wife a $15,000 dog!
It was ugly and blazingly offensive and these YT videos exposed these charlatans for all the world to see! I was so mad after seeing that I didn't know what to do for a long time. Unfortunately, you can no longer watch these videos because, unsurprisingly, YT forced the poster to take them down. I'm certain it was at the behest of these ministers or their "people". Whatever. I will never forget those videos nor will I forget the names of those bad ministers. A lot of other people saw these videos too, so no matter what legal means they use to threaten those who expose them, people know what they are: hucksters!
Then it came to me: That's the story! Greedy, wealthy men playing a game hosted by a mysterious man for even MORE money! That's the story! I believe in the Almighty and I believe that men (and women) who cloak themselves in the Holy Bible for profit will have a reckoning before God one day. That became the story for Dust and Bones. After I had figured out what I wanted the story to be, it came rather easily. I loved writing Dust and Bones and I hope readers enjoy it. Dust and Bones is free.

 
Smashwords Link: http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/86909
Scribd link: http://www.scribd.com/doc/63958169/Dust-and-Bones
Dust and Bones is free at Smashwords and Scribd.

7th Day of Twisted: Guest Post by Steve Vernon

For the 7th day of Twisted, we have Steve Vernon with us, author of The Lunenburg Werewolf and Devil Tree...Enjoy!

Cabbage Night, Colcannon and Creativity

"Did you ever eat Colcannon, made from lovely pickled cream?
With the greens and scallions mingled like a picture in a dream.
Did you ever make a hole on top to hold the melting flake
Of the creamy, flavored butter that your mother used to make?”

(traditional Irish folksong)

There is going to be an awful lot written about Halloween in the next couple of weeks – but I want to tell you folks about a night that rural Nova Scotia folk sometimes refer to as - Cabbage Night.
In years ago Cabbage Night was a time for running with the shadows and whooping and yelling and building great bonfires and whispering in the darkness.
And giggling.
Cabbage Night was a night for giggling.
Every year, on the night before Halloween, children on the French Shore of Nova Scotia would stage great raids upon local cabbage fields. Here they would uproot the nastiest and foulest cabbage they could find. They would search through the bracken and ruttle of turned over dirt – hunting for the most frost-bitten and rotten cabbage they could uncover.
I’m not saying it smelled sweet, you understand.
These cabbages would be flung at the doors and walls of local cottages and houses. They would land with heavy satisfying slaps and splatters against the brick and siding of local residents.
And woe to those who were careless enough to open their door to a knick-knacking pack of children – for they would find themselves the unhappy recipient of a deftly rolled rotting cabbage head that would bowl forward just long enough to reach the clean spot in the center of the kitchen floor where it would break down into a nasty fragrant decaying mulch.
Also useful were the long, gnarled stumps left over from where the farmers had cut away the good cabbages. These too could be used as wonderfully groaty projectiles but it was far better to use them as cudgels. Great cabbage stump battles would be waged on the shoreline as two or three or thirty hardy – or perhaps foolhardy – young warriors would wage battle with the cruciferae cudgels.
This is what I love to do with my writing.
I root through old fields and midden heaps and graveyards and landfills of history. I rummage about and find something good and groaty and then I pull it out. An old ghost story, a legend, or just the bare hint of a tale.
Sometimes I unearth entire carcasses, other times it is nothing more than the shadow of a bone.
Whatever it is, I work with it and try to give it life. I add meat and build it up – one piece at a time. We writers must often play Frankenstein and stitch up our cadavers from the bits and pieces we discover along the way. We stitch each chunk of rotting cabbage together with love and care and precision – until we have modeled ourselves a fine fat Cabbage King.
And then we give it life. We let fly our thunderbolts of creativity and give those old bones and rotten meat life – of a sort.
Each of my numerous ghost story collections (Haunted Harbours, Wicked Woods, Halifax Haunts, Maritime Monsters and The Lunenburg Werewolf) are nothing more than a mass of stories based upon the bits of fact, fiction and folklore that I have stitched together. I am a great recycler, taking old yarns and giving them brand new life. I soup them up and update them. I pimp them out.
In the end that is what we writers do. We take our dreams and our memories and we stitch them together with our imagination and a well-placed lightning bolt of creativity and we give our stories life!
(insert sound-bite of Colin Clive’s craziest cackle – He’s alive, I tell you, alive)
Let me leave you with a wee bit of a recipe.
It is considered customary to make yourself a pot of Colcannon on cabbage night. It is a simple and hearty dish made by mashing boiled cabbage with turnips and potatoes. Butter and salt as liberally as you like.
On Halloween a ring and a thimble were often added to the mixture. If your bowlful contained the ring it would signify and upcoming marriage in your future – if you were unlucky enough to find the thimble in your bowl of Colcannon it meant you’d be doomed to a single life.
Here’s the recipe.
I used 4-6 potatoes and one good-sized turnip. About 2-3 pounds. Peel them and chunk them and put them in a pot with enough cold water to cover them by at least an inch or so. Scatter a bit of salt over the spuds and neep. Boil until you can smoosh the potatoes with a blunt fork – maybe 15 or 20 minutes. Drain in a colander.
Chop a fair-sized cabbage while you’re waiting for the spuds to boil. Whistle if you must, but do not attempt to dance. It is bad luck to try and jig while you’re chopping cabbage – especially if you’re using a knife.
Put the pot back on the stove and set over medium-high heat. Melt a good wad of butter, about 5-6 tablespoons, into the pot and add the chopped cabbage. Stir it up some until it begins to wilt. While you’re waiting chop some onions. Try and look like you know what you’re doing – even if someone isn’t watching. Practice pays off. Stir in the chopped onions. This whole part of the process shouldn’t take too long. About two minutes for the cabbage and one minute for the onions. Keep stirring and whistling. It is a fine aerobic workout.
Pour in a cup of milk. Traditionalists will use cream, but cream gives me heartburn. Reduce the heat to medium. Don’t burn the milk. Dump the spuds and turnip into the mot and mash them up, getting the cabbage and onion all smooshed together. It ought to look like somebody had dropped a Martian into a bowl of curdled puss and hit frappe.
Salt and butter and pepper to your liking. Serve it with meat – bacon or sausages or pork goes great. Fish is fine too, but it’s awfully healthy for wasting on such a wonderful cholesterol-riddle mess as good Colcannon.
Some people will tell you that you can use kale or chard or even mustard or dandelion greens in place of the cabbage. Others will talk of using parsnips instead of turnip.
People say a lot of things, don’t they.
Whatever you make it out off, have something cold to drink it with. I favor a thick knife-and-fork ale – say a Guinness or something local from a micro-brewery. Stock up on your incense while you’re at it. Colcannon can be mighty fumish, afterwards.
Just remember that there is no real recipe for anything – beyond boil it, fry it, bake it or barbecue. Cooking, like any form of creativity has no real rules to it. The main thing is to have fun.
I like to make my own version of Colcannon with purple potatoes and red cabbage and fat turnips and a gi-normous red onion. The resulting purple mulch is both tasty and filling – and I call it Nightcrawler Stew – after the teleporting blue-furred X-Man. A bowl or two of this will keep you warm and giggling the whole winter long.

"Yes you did, so you did, so did he and so did I.
And the more I think about it sure the nearer I'm to cry.
Oh, wasn't it the happy days when troubles we had not,
And our mothers made Colcannon in the little skillet pot."

Yours in storytelling,

Steve Vernon

Steve Vernon is a writer/teller/collector of ghost stories and all things that go booga-booga. If you want to try one of his ghost story collections check out The Lunenburg Werewolf – available at Amazon.ca or Chapters/Indigo outlets across Canada – as well as in many wonderful independent bookstores. For Kindle users you might want to take a peek at Steve Vernon’s novel DEVIL TREE or his story collection ROADSIDE GHOSTS.



Buy The Lunenburg Werewolf here:  http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/Lunenburg-Werewolf-Other-Stories-Supernatural-Steve-Vernon/9781551098579-item.html



Buy Devil Tree here: http://www.amazon.com/Devil-Tree-ebook/dp/B004OA6M3G

or here: http://store.crossroadpress.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=22_28&products_id=229

6th Day of Twisted: Guest Post by Stuart Jaffe

Today's guest author is Stuart Jaffe, author of The Way of the Black Beast.  Take it away, Stuart!

Let's start with a big round of applause for our host! Thanks for letting me and all my writing brethren into your blog home. Now to the post:

I have a confession to make. For a long time, I couldn't stand the fantasy genre. Don't get me wrong. I love fantasy. SF, too. Horror, dark fantasy, gothic, you name it. I love it all. The problem was that since the 1980s, the fantasy genre had become bland and predictable. The Big 6 played everything safe and so produced nothing but medieval epics with a slight twist -- the hero is a heroine, it's a comedy, dragons are the heroes, etc.

Today, thankfully, things have become far more interesting. The Urban Fantasy movement brought classic monsters into a modern light. Authors like China Mieville introduced a successful blend of horrific and grotesque elements with classic fantasy and science-fiction tropes. Then he lit a fuse to it all and watched what happened.

But the really exciting work is being done by the indie-movement where challenging, fun, and experimental fantasy is growing. David Dalglish, to name one, has produced three excellent fantasy series that blend old fantasy tropes with fresh characters, clean writing, and a big, heaping pile of horrific gore. John Hartness, to name another, takes the typical UF vampire story and spins it around with the easiest twist of a writer's hand. Instead of vampires all being incredibly seductive creatures, John figures once a geek, always a geek. His nerdy vamps are now nerdy for eternity. And then, of course, I have to mention myself. My novel, The Way of the Black Beast, blends many of my favorite elements into one. Post-apocalyptic world, bushido, sword fighting, blues music, parallel universes, bizarre creatures, tattoos, magic, and a lot more can be found in these pages.

These books, and many like them, revel in the great freedom of the indie-movement -- that the only people who can tell the writer something won't work are the readers. And, because of this, the readers are being exposed to all kinds of fantasy they never had the chance to read before.

It's been said in the last several months that it is a great time to be a writer. This is certainly true. But it's an even better time to be a reader. So, go out there and be an adventurous reader. Try an indie book.



available at:

Kindle-- http://amzn.to/r9h7II
Nook-- http://bit.ly/pJdKV4
Smashwords-- http://bit.ly/ppqn2l
Print-- http://amzn.to/nmfAwj

5th Day of Twisted: Guest Post by Eileen Cruz Coleman

Today's guest author is Eileen Cruz Coleman, author of Rumpel.  Enjoy!

I first heard the story of Rumpelstiltskin when I was seven years old. I remember sitting in "circle time" while my teacher read the story. When she got to the end, I felt that there had to be more to the story. I honestly thought she had read us a shortened version and that the longer version was out there somewhere! From that day on, the story of Rumpelstiltskin fascinated me. I wanted to know why he wanted a baby. What was he going to do with it once he got it? Who were the people in his life? What was his world like? What was his childhood like? All of these questions led me to write Rumpel which is a retelling of Rumpelstiltskin. In keeping with the original Brothers Grimm Rumpelstiltskin, Rumpel is dark and at times disturbing, yet it also has a light and quirky element to it in that it is told from the point of view of many different characters all of which play an integral part of the story and how it unfolds. We also get to know Rumpelstiltskin as a child, then as a young man, and finally as a brokenhearted adult. When my previous literary agent was not able to sell Rumpel to traditional publishers, I thought long and hard about what to do with Rumpel. With the advent of e-publishing, I decided to publish Rumpel on Amazon Kindle and let readers decide its fate. I couldn’t be more thrilled with my decision to publish Rumpel on Amazon Kindle and later on Smashwords and Barnes and Noble. Rumpel is being read and gaining momentum. As a writer that’s all I can really ask for. I’m planning a sequel to Rumpel which I hope to release within a year. In the meantime, just in time for Halloween, I’m publishing, Taker of Light, a post-apocalyptic speculative fiction story inspired by the Brothers Grimm's lesser-known fairytale, Godfather Death, in which Death raises a child who then betrays him. When a deep darkness descends on earth, sixteen-year-old Raylie must protect herself from the source of the darkness and from the aliens who are seeking to colonize earth when their planet is destroyed. Happy Halloween! Here is a link to Rumpel on Amazon Kindle: http://www.amazon.com/Rumpel-Cursed-Tales-Novel-ebook/dp/B00408ASDW/

4th Day of Twisted: Guest Post by Deanna Chase

Today we have Deanna Chase, author of Haunted on Bourbon Street.  Happy reading!

When you're home alone, do you ever feel like...well, you're not alone? I'm rarely alone since my hubby and I are both self-employed and each have our home offices. During the day I never get that weird vibe. You know the one. When all the sudden you feel another presence in your space.
It's pretty hard for the hubby to sneak up on me. First of all we have a hundred-year-old house and no matter how quiet you are, the wood floors are going to give you away. Even if one did develop super-human, stealthy spy moves that rendered them a silent walker, the dogs would give them away in a heartbeat. They're the type that have to follow you everywhere you go even when you tell them to stay.
Things change after ten p.m. The hubby goes to bed, and I settle in at the computer. I've found nighttime is when I get most of my writing done. Hubby is sleeping, his TV is turned off, regular business is done for the day, and the dogs are crashed out at my feet.
Silence is golden.
Except when it's not. With all that silence I hear every creak of my old house, the wind rambling the windows, rain on my metal roof. Actually all of these things are comfort sounds, and I welcome them. Everything except the footsteps.
I know what it sounds like when someone is walking through my house. It isn't just the house settling, or pipes making noise. It's weighted footsteps. The kind that make me get out of my chair to go make sure no one has broken into my house. And I've done this more than a few times. I know it isn't the hubby getting up for a drink or to use the restroom. It'd be hard to do that while snoring. (Sorry hubs). I can hear him in the next room. It's like white noise.
I never find anything that leads to the mysterious night-walker. I'm left with the only conclusion I can dream up. The house is haunted.
The mysterious night-walkings aren't the only clue though. It appears our ghost may occasionally enjoy a cigar and quite possibly a bit of the Mary Jane. The two distinct aromas are hard to dismiss, especially since this is a strict non-smoking household. I know I'm not smoking. And the hubby is asthmatic. His indulgence of choice is a high quality margarita.
It must be the ghost.
We used to believe we had a ghost dog. Right after we moved in our golden retriever used to stand in the hallway and bark at nothing. She wasn't much of a barker, so her behavior was pretty odd. She'd do it randomly at weird times for no obvious reason. Immediately we assumed we had a ghost dog. You see, she loved people and almost never barked at them. A ghost dog was the logical choice.
Now I'm not so sure. The footsteps at night don't sounds like a dog. My gut says it's a person. Probably a man. Luckily our ghost has done nothing to scare me or freak me out other than make me wonder who was sharing my space. I could also live without the funny smoke smells, but hey, live and let live...or die.
Do you think ghostly second-hand smoke is harmful to ones health? If so I'm gonna have to order him outside for that kind of behavior. What about you? Are you haunted or sharing your space with an uninvited being?
The funny thing is I noticed all of this stuff while working on my book, Haunted on Bourbon Street. Weird right?

Blurb:
Jade loves her new apartment--until a ghost joins her in the shower.
When empath Jade Calhoun moves into an apartment above a strip bar on Bourbon Street, she expects life to get interesting. What she doesn't count on is making friends with an exotic dancer, attracting a powerful spirit, and developing feelings for Kane, her sexy landlord.
Being an empath has never been easy on Jade's relationships. It's no wonder she keeps her gift a secret. But when the ghost moves from spooking Jade to terrorizing Pyper, the dancer, it's up to Jade to use her unique ability to save her. Except she'll need Kane's help--and he's betrayed her with a secret of his own--to do it. Can she find a way to trust him and herself before Pyper is lost?

To learn more about Deanna visit her website at www.DeannaChase.com.




http://www.amazon.com/Haunted-Bourbon-Paranormal-Romance-ebook/dp/B005EHRSUY/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1318246050&sr=1-1