Destiny or Chance?

Do you believe in Destiny? Can a single decision set you on the path you were always intended to be on? Or do you set foot on that path by pure chance or luck? Can a single kiss lead to love or a glance across a room become a lifetime of devotion? Can a seemingly random meeting open a cornucopia of opportunity, all because it was destined to be? Does something set that in motion, some living, compassionate force, or do we make our own destinies based on a spectrum of possibilities?

And what about the bad side of things? Is bad luck just bad luck, landing on our heads like a gesture from the Great Cosmic Seagull? Is it designed to teach us something, lead us to something better, in this life or another?

Destiny is defined as: The inevitable or necessary fate to which a particular person or thing is destined; one's lot. Is that lot set in stone, never to be veered from or do we have some control over it? Are there opportunities given we merely need to be receptive to in order to realize them?

Are we destined ever to know the answer?

Perhaps destiny is a path meant for us to discover. Sometimes we miss it, overlook it, choose another destiny option, like hitting a button on the remote. Sometimes we settle on one because we can’t wait for the true opportunity to open up or need to learn from a number of wrong destinies to be ready for the right one.

Sometimes perhaps people fail to see it entirely and end up missing out. Sometimes something or someone gets in the way and prevents you from embracing it, temporarily or permanently.

So is Destiny a Rubik’s Cube or a will-‘o-the-wisp? Who can know for sure? If you believe you have found the right destiny, grab it, don’t let it slip away. Give that destiny everything you have.

If it’s all just chance anyway, what have you got to lose?

My name is Chloe Everson…and I kick demon ass…
THE CHLOE FILES by Howard Hopkins
In the tradition of Sookie Stackhouse and Buffy, The Vampire Slayer…
In paperback from www.bn.com and www.amazon.com

The Real Monsters

It’s a few days before monster month begins on Dark Bits. Monsters, in movies, literature and TV, can be great fun and we’ll celebrate them all month for Halloween.

But there is another type of monster that has been cropping up far too often on the news lately, one that has no association with the fun of fall spookiness and is all too real and disgusting.

The child molester. If you have any sympathy for this particular slime, read no farther. For I have none. As far as I am concerned these sick perverted freaks should be wiped off the face of the earth. They cannot be “cured”. Once a molester always a molester. They ruin lives and familial legacies. They are out there, lurking, stalking, preying on the innocent. Sometimes, even worse, they are in the home, a sick parent or relative or even a religious or authority figure. Mostly, they are men. Always, they are heinous.

Childhood should be a safe time. A time of tea parties and comic books, laughter and skinned knees, baseball and Barbies. All too often in today’s world it is not. Children should be protected, nurtured and allowed to be carefree and fascinated by the wonders this world has to offer—not exposed to and distorted by its dark underbelly. Of course, it’s not a perfect world and not all darkness can be hidden from our kids, but as parents we are obligated—mandated—to try. When those molesting parents, relatives or random perverts take advantage of a child unable to protect him or herself from their advances, it shatters fragile psyches and leaves a lifetime of pain. Some never recover. Some live with its scars. Some rebel and rally against it, while a handful carry on a depraved inheritance.

This has to stop. Today is Prevent Molestation Day. Every day is Prevent Molestation Day. If you are a parent, do your best to protect your children. If you see it happening, report it. Stop it. If you know a parent allowing themself to be around a molesting parent or relative, or allowing their molesting parent or relative to have access to their child, then they are emotionally ill, seriously deluded or stupid. Try to open thier eyes. Get them to seek help. These poison people should be stricken from our lives and never allowed near another child, and locked away permanently. There are national registries; make yourself aware of those molesters in your neighborhoods or towns. Watch your kids; know where they are and what they are doing online.

Childhood is a wondrous time. Full of learning, experiencing, growing and dreaming. It is time to stop dreams from being turned into nightmares. Now.

Terror Tuesday: The Lure of the Witch

It’s getting very close to the Witching season

Fall has officially begun and leaves are streaking with red and gold. Nights are colder and the moon is brighter. If you look close enough, you just might see a shadow whisking across its yellow face, a shadow on broomstick. The Witching season is nigh.

The witch is one of the classic Halloween monster archetypes and one of my favorites. Not the haggy crone with the wart on her hooked nose who gobbles little children. The sexy witch. Blonde hair flowing, wispy gown revealing. Maybe this fascination comes from watching Jeannie and Bewitched as a kid…but I have always had a thing for the witch. She is magical and alluring, casting her spells and weaving her magic all through my childhood and into my adult years.

She appears in the mist of a foggy night or under the bright moonlight, her laugh gentle and her blue eyes mesmerizing…Once you are under her spell…well, you write blogs about her.

But I digress. The beautiful witch has appeared likely as long as the haggard one, the object of artists’ paintings from classical to pulp covers. I have used witches in my own fiction, such as Grimm, The Chloe Files and the third Nightmare Club book, The Willow Witch, both naughty and nice. She’s a staple of Halloween, costumes and cards, and for us horror writing males, as fascinating as the vampire hero is to women. Except we usually live through it when we fall for a sexy witch…no blood loss…

So I guess if you are out on a starry night, and see a shadow flutter across the harvest moon…don’t run in fear. Enjoy the magic and up your broom insurance…

My name is Chloe Everson…and I kick demon ass…
THE CHLOE FILES by Howard Hopkins
In the tradition of Sookie Stackhouse and Buffy, The Vampire Slayer…
In paperback from http://www.bn.com/ and http://www.amazon.com/

Western Wednesday: Ghost Towns…of the East?

Mention ghost towns and most folks will immediately think of the West, tumbleweeds tumbling across dry dusty streets embedded with the iron tire tracks of a hundred years’ past, dilapidated saloons and maybe the haunting moan of a gunned-down Pistolero at High Noon.

But the West doesn’t have the patent on ghost towns. No sirree. Some exist in the great North East, in my home state of Maine.

As a matter of fact, we even have a town named Flagstaff, in Somerset County, on the ghost town list. Perhaps this is why a number of Western writers, including myself, hail from Maine.

Benedict Arnold’s forces erected Flagstaff in 1775, while attempting to invade Quebec. The town remained until the 1940s, when the local power company decided to flood the Dead River for construction of a dam, forcing all residents to leave, with the exception, legend has it, of an elderly dweller who refused to move. His ghost was said to haunt the town thereafter.

There are other ghost towns here in Maine, such as Oriental Powder Mills, Riceville and Dead River, each with their own tale of spookiness and history. There are no tumbleweeds or gunfighter spooks, but there are dilapidated buildings and the sense of emptiness that accompanies the ghost towns of the West. If you listen close you might even hear the echoing hoofbeats of a spectral horse…

Terror Tuesday: From the Shadows

Welcome to another Terror Tuesday. Leaves are starting to color, nights are touched with a chill and things are crawling out of their graves…

Have been watching a lot of old Dark Shadows episodes lately; specifically, the Leviathan sequence. This is where the show’s main character, vampire Barnabas Collins, comes back from the past with a strange box containing the essence of a creature, who, once let loose in a ritual room, grows in spurts and bounds from a child to a man (and reverts to his monster form), and does lots of nasty things between. The Leviathans are an ancient underworld bunch who want to regain control of the surface world. Mixed in with that story line are Chris Jennings’ werewolf troubles and Quentin Collins’ search for his lost love, Amanda Harris, and subsequent struggle to bring her back from the Land of the Dead.

I watched all this as an eight-year-old kid…with my mother. On a particular episode the other day, Leviathan-child-grown-up, Jeb Hawkes, resurrected some zombies. This was daytime TV in the ‘60s, don’t forget, right after kids got home from school. And these walking dead had eyeballs dangling mid-face. Quentin Collins was buried alive. A werewolf was tearing up folks in the woods. So I am wondering how it never bothered me as a kid and just how I got away with watching it at all. My father cut me off of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and The Wild Wild West for excessive fight scenes. Yet, somehow, I managed to watch this ghoulish and pretty frightening for its time soap opera. I tried showing an episode to my 11-year-old niece, who watches and reads Twilight. She practically ran screaming from the room the moment a dangling eyeball showed up and I felt bad. Kinda. Well, maybe a little snickery, too. Odd that today’s CGI-infested scary stuff was nowhere near as disturbing to her as the use of make-up and a half a ping pong ball for a dangling eyeball.

Which makes me wonder even more why I got to watch it and, though it scared me, why it didn’t send me into therapy. I actually find some things in it bother me more now than they did then! At least, now that I “get” some of the moral implications.

But, mom, what were you thinking? Don’t you know letting children watch something like that might warp them irrevocably? Turn them into, oh, I don’t know—gasp—horror writers?

Jeez.

My name is Chloe Everson…and I kick demon ass…
THE CHLOE FILES by Howard Hopkins
In the tradition of Sookie Stackhouse and Buffy, The Vampire Slayer…
In paperback from http://www.bn.com/ and http://www.amazon.com/

Modern Pulp…

To modernize or not to modernize, that is the question.

A lot of talk has been going around Internet pulp circles recently with the introduction of DC’s First Wave pulp world in comics—which includes Doc Savage, The Avenger (sort of), The Spirit, Blackhawk and others—and, soon, Moonstone’s Return of the Originals line. Some long time fans—sometimes rightfully so—are riled over changes made to some of their beloved characters, while others, more modern comic readers, are either all for it or blissfully unaware of the original incarnations. Often both sides have good arguments.

Do the pulp heroes need to be changed/modified/modernized or left as is? Can they flourish in this day and age left unchanged?

It’s a complicated answer, often subjective, and often applicable only to certain characters. Some things DO need changing. For one thing, pulp writers wrote fast, had little time to revise anything beyond a first draft, and were poorly paid. Modern writers, I think, have to put more craft into it for a more sophisticated audience. Pulp editors sold cheap entertainment, labored long hours. There was simply no time or inclination to completely rewrite to literary standards or even bother filling big plots holes when a deadline loomed. The audience ate it up and needed heroes at a dreadful time in our history, the Great Depression. Nowadays, readers need more than cardboard characters with deus ex machina endings.

Yet still today we need those heroes, though the writing has to be better, as does the editing and presentation. It’s a different world. Even in comic books.

So, will these heroes work "as is"? Beyond the writing, do they need to be changed, updated?

Yes and no, in my opinion. Some, like Doc Savage and The Avenger, don’t need screwing with. They are archetypical heroes, timeless, at home in their period—the 1930s/40s. They were and are popular and identified with for a reason. Small things can be changed, of course, but not merely for the sake of change. Their “soul” should be preserved. It is unfortunate with DC’s Justice, Inc., this did not happen and it has been rewritten as to be virtually unrecognizable. The soul of the character was completely discarded. If one is blatantly going to disregard all that has been, why not simply develop a new character?

And that also is true of the less well-known characters—The Black Bat, The Golden Amazon, The Phantom Detective, Captain Future and others. Some of these certainly can stand some tinkering, especially ones with short runs, or uneven presentations. As long as the core of the character as originally defined is respected. With Moonstone, readers can be assured of that, and modern readers will find them just as endearing and exciting as did readers in the ‘30s. The authors and artists and editors involved have taken great pains to make certain of it.

For me, it all comes down to respect and preservation of what made the character unique. I have altered quite a bit where my own charge, The Golden Amazon, is concerned, but have striven to keep her soul intact and expand upon her world and personality. I fell in love with the character and that is what I want to show through. I hope her old fans—both of you!—will see that, and that she will attract legions of new ones. She will be appearing in Moonstone’s Originals line soon enough, but check out all their releases, starting very soon, and the fine writers bringing these characters back.

So, readers, writers, give me your opinions on this issue. Modernize or don’t modernize? How much, how little?


My name is Chloe Everson…and I kick demon ass…
THE CHLOE FILES by Howard Hopkins
In the tradition of Sookie Stackhouse and Buffy, The Vampire Slayer…
In paperback from http://www.bn.com/ and http://www.amazon.com/

Western Wednesday: The Ghost Town Trail

Welcome to Western Wednesday—put on your chaps and stick a quarter in the mechanical pony’s coin box—it’s time to ride!

News comes that my next Lance Howard novel release, The Killing Kind, date has been moved up to December. Galleys arrived today. I always hate rereading my own work, but it must be done! From the back cover blurb:

Jim Bartlett thought he could put his former life behind him and forge a new one as small Texas ranch owner but he was wrong—dead wrong. Because someone from his past has followed him and is systematically and permanently trying to destroy that new life piece by piece. And now with his friends and the woman he loves threatened by a man who knows no remorse and no boundaries, he finds himself in a desperate struggle not only to escape his past but hold onto his very life.

The Ghost Town Trail—it begins in Tombstone, Arizona, a dust-coated trail that sixteen miles on delivers you to the ghost town of Gleeson. The town was first populated by Indians, who were attracted by turquoise deposits, then whites who discovered copper, lead and silver. It lasted about four years, until the time gold was discovered in nearby Pearce. Prospectors returned to the area, however, lured by new strikes of copper and silver. In 1928 a fire wiped out most of Gleeson, which should have been enough to send it into the annals of ghost town lore right there. But, being rich in mining metals, it was rebuilt. However after the first World War, prices of metals plunged and ore production fell off. By the 1930s, the mines shut down and before the decade was over Gleeson was officially a ghost town.

In modern times, little remains beyond a few ruins of buildings, such as a hospital, a jail, some houses, a salon and the remnants of a school foundation. The cemetery on its western edge, by the trail to tombstone, bears mute witness to its short booming life, and perhaps the souls of those who perished in its heyday still haunt the town. Who knows? Perhaps on some nights, when the moon is high and the coyotes sing, you can hear the sounds of pick axes hitting rock, the cheers of miners discovering precious metal and the moans of those who mourn what once was…

Terror Tuesday: Ghosts of Fall

Welcome to Terror Tuesday...get out the sharp objects and strap on your hockey masks...

Screened: The Haunting of the Winchester House. I had high hopes for this one because I am a huge fan of the Winchester House and its lore, but…poor acting, derivative script, and jerky direction make this a snooze fest. The twist ending is no longer a twist, having been done to death over the past few years. The disc includes Ghost stories episodes from the Fox Family Channel series, which aren't too bad.

It’s approaching fall rapidly here in Southern Maine. Suddenly the air carries a chill and leaves are tinting with color. The heat of summer, bikinis and scents of pier fries hanging in the air are now gone with the Labor Day Weekend and exodus of tourists—making room for the ghosts.

Fall always seems a time of increased spookiness in Maine. Does paranormal activity really go up or is it an ingrained mood from childhood that comes with the expectation of shortening days and Halloween? Do ghosts like cooler weather or does the veil between worlds get thinner? Does imagination simply take over, wishful thinking?

I love a lot of things about fall—the smell of fall leaves and their colors, Halloween, apple picking and cider, big orange pumpkins and amber sunlight sparkling off the incoming surf. But fall also carries a certain loneliness that embeds itself into the soul. It mocks summer and those burning hot moments that now seem as fleeting as the dying embers of a midnight campfire. Fall is, indeed, the time for ghosts, of memory and of the supernatural.

But with those ghosts—hope. Hope that something special lingers on, in the twilight and the dawn. Memories of special moments and persons, lost only temporarily, and the haunting promise of their return when the spring chases away the winter chill.

Embrace your ghosts, real or memory. Because they’re the spirits of what made you live and what will make you live again…

My name is Chloe Everson…and I kick demon ass…
THE CHLOE FILES by Howard Hopkins
In the tradition of Sookie Stackhouse and Buffy, The Vampire Slayer…
In paperback from http://www.bn.com/ and http://www.amazon.com/

All Pulp Interview/The Pulp Originals Return!

If you haven't heard of Moonstone Books Return of the Originals line yet, get ready because the wave begins this fall. Moonstone is bringing a number of the original pulp heroes of the 1930s/40s back in comic book and prose form--The Black Bat, Captain Future, The Green Ghost and The Moon Man to name just a few.

Those who read this blog and follow me on Facebook and Twitter know I will be handling the writing duties on The Golden Amazon, a cold and relentless justice machine predecessor to Wonder Woman and myriad female superheroes to proceed her in comic book form. As well as introducing my new pulp heroine, The Veil, Trina Fade, a woman with a tragic past and a fluid future.

A brand new pulp blog is spotlighting Moonstone's efforts, with Moonstone Mondays, weekly interviews from the various creators on the project. This week check out All Pulp Interviews as I am in the hot seat discussing not only my pulp projects but other writing as well. Click on over to http://allpulp.blogspot.com/p/all-pulp-interviews.html And give All Pulp and Moonstone's Original Line your support. Time to put a little kick ass back in comics and adventure fiction!

Finally Having a Threesome…

No, no, get your mind out of the gutter—not THAT kind of threesome!

Threesome is the title of a brand spanking new comic book I am co-authoring with the lovely and talented Nancy Holder (four-time Stoker Award winner, author of the Wicked series and Buffy, the Vampire Slayer books). The book was originally scheduled to be a twosome, starring Nancy’s charge, sexy 1930s super-sleuth The Domino Lady, and my Moonstone Originals character The Golden Amazon, and scheduled for a regular 22-page single issue. It soon grew into a 30-page special edition and added my original pulp heroine creation The Veil to the mix, who makes her four-color panel debut.

Working with Nancy has been a joy and batting ideas and situations back and forth led to what we hope will be great fun for readers of comics, pulp fiction and sexy romps. The story takes place in a “haunted” burlesque theater, where two young women have gone missing. When the Domino Lady investigates at the behest of a friend, she soon discovers she is not the only one on the case. She runs into Violet Ray Brant—The Golden Amazon—and Trina Fade—The Veil, but who is friend, who is foe and just what are they really facing? And just how many sexy gals dancing half naked can we get into one comic book?

Hope you will read it when it hits the stands and find out. Coming soon from Moonstone Books.

My name is Chloe Everson…and I kick demon ass…
THE CHLOE FILES by Howard Hopkins
In the tradition of Sookie Stackhouse and Buffy, The Vampire Slayer…
In paperback from www.bn.com and www.amazon.com

Unveiling…The Veil!

Well, it’s been a fun, frustrating, enlightening, exhilarating creative process—but at last I can unveil my original 1930s/40s pulp comic book heroine to appear from Moonstone Comics—Trina Fade, The Veil.

Trina’s is a life touched by tragedy, and is now one dedicated to the eradication of those who would harm others through their machinations. Her mother and sister were horribly murdered by unknown forces when she was a small girl. She was raised by a cold bitterness- and grief-driven father, trained by specialists and given “something” to even the odds in her fight against evil. Working for a covert organization, she tackles unusual and super-crime and has certain “abilities” that are sometimes as much a curse as a benefit.

Look for Trina’s debut in “Threesome”, a special 30-page comic book written by myself and award-winning Wicked and Buffy author Nancy Holder soon. The book will star Nancy’s charge, The Domino Lady, along with my other Moonstone character, The Golden Amazon, as they investigate bizarre happenings and kidnappings at a burlesque club.

My name is Chloe Everson…and I kick demon ass…
THE CHLOE FILES by Howard Hopkins
In the tradition of Sookie Stackhouse and Buffy, The Vampire Slayer…
In paperback from http://www.bn.com/ and http://www.amazon.com/