Happy Halloween!!

The Coffin Hop is coming to an end…I wanted to pass along a HUGE THANK YOU to all 237 people that visited my blog in the last week!!!! I am amazed and very thankful for all the attention. I hope you keep coming back. The prizes will all be given away tomorrow! I hope you win and I hope you enjoy the ebook!

My porch is all decorated…floating hand and lightening machine still work! I have three pumpkins out there that my daughter carved up…here is my favorite one: creepy man with an umbrella. I used to have nightmares about this guy and he may end up in one of my stories some day!

Time to give the Velveeta a stir and check the pizza. Kids will be wandering the streets soon!!

Happy Halloween!

Coffin Hop is here!

The lightening machine is going. The fog machine is in full gear. The porch is alive with trick or treaters!! I’m so glad you stopped by for a treat…my pulse is quickening…I almost forgot, I have a huge pumpkin sitting on my porch that I have yet to carve up. Every time I pick up the carving knife I start daydreaming about…stuff. So I force myself to put the knife down.

I hope the floating hand by the candy bowl doesn’t freak you out too much.

First, let me tell you a couple cool facts about me. I spent 20 years in the Air Force and lived in many cool places around the world like Iceland, Germany and Saudi Arabia! Now I am settled down with my wife, daughter, cats and dog in small-town Iowa. To earn money, I teach psychology classes at a community college and help people with intellectual disabilities.

My debut horror novel is “Fall Leaves and the Black Dragon” I also have several short stories that cover a wide range of horrors: demonic gardens, a murder of crows, a spooky TV, a shark lover, and a pond you wouldn’t want to swim in! Click on the My Writing tab above to read more about them. Try a sample…I hope you enjoy them!

Not ready to buy one of my stories yet? That’s fine by me. How about a coupon code from Smashwords for a free copy of one. Any of my titles! You pick! How’s that for a treat? At the end of the Coffin Hop, I will randomly choose FIVE lucky people to win!! Good luck.

What do I want from you for this giveaway? No blood. No brains. Just leave a comment and tell me about your most favorite Halloween costume you ever wore. Your favorite could have been from when you were a little kid or as an adult or anytime in between. There must be at least one that stands out!

I remember when I was a kid the coolest costumes were the cheap plastic masks with a stretchy string stapled to them so they would stay on. My favorite costume as a child would have to be Spider Man. As an adult, I have to admit I loved dressing up for the evening as a woman. I used to have a collection of dresses and wigs! A little make-up here and there to get the look just right…and I always had my hairy legs prominently displayed! After the night was over, I just threw the wigs in a tote so every year the wigs became more tangled and wilder looking. I looked crazier and crazier as the years went by. I could have passed for a zombie toward the end of my dressing up as woman phase. I’m not sure what that says about me but it was fun!

One last thing, who is participating in NaNoWriMo this year? If you are, add me as a buddy and we can motivate each other to finish line! My name there is BaliTiger.

After you say hi and tell me about your Halloween memory (oh yeah please leave your email so I can notify you when you win!), there is one more thing you should do. There are tons of other blogs participating in this monstrous event so please creep back to the Coffin Hop main page and visit more great writers!

Happy nightmares!

the gory details:

1) HAVE A SPOOKY FUN TIME!

2) INVITE YOUR FRIENDS AND SPREAD THE WORD!

3) THIS TOUR STARTS: Monday, October 24, 2011 at Midnight (PST)
THIS TOUR ENDS: Monday, October 31, 2011 at Midnight (PST)
Winners will be drawn and posted November 1, 2011

4) MEET AND MINGLE WITH THE AUTHORS! EXPERIENCE A NEW DESTINATION AT EVERY STOP! PARTICIPATE IN EVERY SITE’S CONTEST AND BE ENTERED FOR CHANCES TO WIN MULTIPLE PRIZES! EVERY BLOG VISITED IS ANOTHER OPPORTUNITY TO WIN!

5) PARTICIPATION AT ALL SITES IS RECOMMENDED, BUT NOT REQUIRED. THE MORE SITES YOU HOP, THE BETTER YOUR CHANCES OF WINNING PRIZES.

6) DID I MENTION TO HAVE A SPOOKY FUN TIME?

***Authors have full discretion to choose an alternate winner in the event any winner fails to claim their prize(s) within 72 hours of their name being posted or after notification of win, whichever comes first. Anyone who participates in this tour is subject to these rules***

Flash Friday: Ginger’s Marble

Ginger’s Marble by Erik Gustafson

Ginger is a tomboy and her favorite thing to do is climb trees. Her golden blond hair is always in pigtails and she dresses in jeans and t-shirt most days. The eight year old wouldn’t stand for the cute dresses all her other friends wore. In fact, she preferred to play with boys but her parents steered her toward girls her age whenever they could.
There are two large apple trees in her backyard and she has climbed them both a thousand times.
All she has wanted for Christmas and her birthday for the past three years is a tree house nestled in one of the apple trees. Her dad, Bobby, probably would have built her a tree house by now but mom is set against it. Still, Bobby tells his daughter he will build one for her someday.
Until that day, she climbs and perches in the limbs and straddles branches. The first branch is too high to reach so she wraps her arms and legs around the trunk and shimmies up until she can reach the first branch then swings up. After that, climbing is cake. She has made it about half way up each of the trees and her goal is to climb all the way to the top.
Today she is leaning between the main trunk and a limb that almost stretches to the other tree when she notices something odd by the next branch up.
She pulls herself up and sits on that branch. Ginger looks down at the yard and the top of the back porch roof and realizes she has set a new record. She can even see the fake pond with real turtles her neighbor has behind his privacy fence.
“Ginger!” The girl spins around and scans the yard below. She doesn’t see her mom anywhere.
“I’m ok mom!” she hollers down.
“Ginger,” the voice came again but it was softer. Almost as if the voice was right there in the branches with her. Somebody hiding among the thick rows of leaves and twigs. There is no way someone could be up here, she muses.
She spots what she climbed up this extra branch for in the first place: it was a small cavity in the bark. A tiny hole in the tree, about the size of an eye patch.
Ginger leaned her face up to the hole. “You in there, Mr. Squirrel?” She saw a shadow coated pine cone just inside the opening. She reached in and pulled it out to examine it. She wondered what a pine cone was doing this high in an apple tree.
She leaned out from the limb she was sitting on and held the cone between her fingers. She watched the spiral cone drop to the grass below.
She looked back in the small crevasse and something twinkled off the sunlight. She inserted her small hand into the hole and felt around. She felt sticks poking her and heard the rustle of leaves. Her palm grazed over something smooth and she closed her hand around it.
Ginger opened her hand and was looking at a red marble about the size of those pop-in-mouth tomatoes that her grandpa grows and she loves so much. The red glass seemed to have clouds inside of it.
“Cool!” she held the marble close to her face as she explored the puffs of red inside the glass. The clouds shifted and swirled around in the marble. She blinked hard in disbelief. Had it moved? She wondered.
The marble rolled along the groove between two of her fingers and fell over her fingertips.
“No!” she tried to catch the marble but it fell fast.
From her height, the marble looked like a red eye staring up at her from the ground.
Ginger climbed down the tree as fast as she could to retrieve her treasure. She sat at the base of the tree rolling around the marble in her palm, watching the red storm inside surge and rage. There was a bright flash from deep within. She thought it was a miniature lightening bolt. For an instant, the flash even made the rosy clouds light up.
“Ginger,” she heard her name a third time and now she was sure it was coming from inside the marble.
“Is somebody in there?” she asked, holding the marble not two inches from her nose.
The red cloud drifted and shifted in the marble and spread. A red haze oozed from the marble and floated around. Ginger breathed in and the red smoke went up her nose and she coughed.
The girl sat there perfectly still for an hour. When she blinked her eyes were crimson colored. She dropped the solid black marble in the grass and arose. She was starving like never before. She had to eat something immediately.
The little girl marched across her back yard, pig tails bouncing, then down concrete steps past a flower garden and onto the back porch.
Once inside the porch, she heard herself growl. She thought it was just her stomach growling but she realized that she had made the growling sound. So hungry.
She pushed the back door open and waked into the house and through the kitchen. She opened the fridge door but nothing looked good. Then on the bottom shelf she spotted a plate with raw hamburger defrosting. Her hunger overwhelming her, she squatted down and grabbed a fistful of the ground beef and shoved it in her mouth.
She chewed and moaned, swallowing huge chunks of the soft meat. Pieces of hamburger were falling down her front and sticking to her face. Before she knew it, the entire plate of meat was consumed but she was still hungry. In fact, she more hungry than before.
“Ginger what on earth are you doing?” her mom shouted standing in the doorway.
Ginger looked up at her mother through grisly red eyes, salivating.

Copyright 2011 Erik Gustafson

Indie Horror Halloween Treats #5

Still going…I had planned on pumping out a review of a different Indie Horror flick in my collection every day in October. Yeah good luck with that, right? I am up to 5 now. I consider that a pretty good percentage since its the 12th. 5 out of 12. If I won 5 out of 12 times I pulled the handle on a slot machine (well pushed the button, I’m lazy) I won something that I would be beside my self with glee.

If I was beside myself I would have bigger problems then where to stash all the cash I won from the one-armed bandits…like how to use my new found superpower.

Oh I upgraded my iPhone today to the shiny and new operation system. I guess its OS5. Yeah lost all my apps. Had to re-download everything. Stanza isn’t compatible with OS5 either. No Stanza means I stop reading. Screw it. I’ll read old issues of Highlights in doctor’s offices from now on. Or start using the Kindle app more, whichever causes me to drool less.

The Indie horror movie I want to share with you this evening is Book of Lore.

The cover to my copy doesn’t look like this at all. My copy looks like the composition book you see there on the cover and the DVD is hand written in a black sharpie. No its not a bootleg, it was a director’s copy given to me from Chris LaMartina. He is both writer and director. Book of Lore was made in 2007 but is still available out there. I think when you buy it today, it comes bundled with a second movie. I could be wrong. I might be thinking about parasites bundling in the teeth of a shark.

Book of Lore is about a killer loose in a small town….or at least he was. The killer was called Devil’s Left Hand and he made a bunch of babies go away a long time ago. It’s a small town and secrets have a way getting tucked away. Not to worry, the Book of Lore is a real book filled with all manner of secrets and clues…its been a while since I watched this one but its pretty good.

Anybody have any suggestions for other cool, neglected Indie horror flicks just shivering for attention?