Our grandson adores “Dad jokes”. Here’s one of his favs: How do you weigh a dragon? Depends on its scales.
Recently I was having a one-on-one dinner with my daughter. Fixing me with a gaze steeped in the superiority of youth, she asked: “What do you think of the chicken joke?”
Me: (thinking of grandson) You mean the old chestnut, Why did the chicken cross the road? To get to the other side.
Daughter: “Do you get it? I mean, really get it?”
Me: What’s to get? It’s Captain Obvious. Chickens are stupid. They follow their beaks across the road to the other side. If you don’t see the joke, you’re as dumb as the chicken.
Daughter: (deep sigh) No, think about it: the other side. What’s the other meaning of “The Other Side”?
Me: The hereafter?
Daughter: (convinced her mother is beyond help) Right!
Oh, so the real joke is about a suicidal chicken or a bird so brainless it’s about to become roadkill.
I’d honestly never thought about the irony inherent in “the other side”. Neither had my husband when I retold our conversation. Was there some deep philosophical meaning behind our misunderstanding the true joke? A denial of life’s mortality? Or a deep-seated faith in the superiority of humans to the idiot chickens we regularly eat?
Probably not. The sound you now hear is the whistle of the penny dropping through the decades stretching from the Jurassic Period of my childhood till now.
On the other hand, our daughter didn’t get the joke that made our grandson laugh his butt off:
Why couldn’t the bike stand up by itself? Because it was two tired.
The first inkling that I’d strayed from dark mystery into horror happened when the multi-genre conference, When Words Collide, put me on a horror fiction panel.
Horror – moi? I never watch horror movies, they’re far too intense. I hardly ever read horror fiction. Well, I have read Clive Barker’s masterpieces, but that’s about it! Somehow, somewhere my writing crossed over to the dark side.
What I learned from my fellow panelists at WWC is that the core of horror literature is fear.
So that was it! It had to be my novella, Snake Oil, the one about snakes and real estate agents, nominated for a CWC Award in 2018. Many people have a deep-seated fear of snakes.
I remember reading from Snake Oil at a Noir at the Bar event south of the border. My reading went pretty well, I thought, but the following day, a macho noir writer stopped me. You know the type: shaved head, muscular, loads of tattoos. He fixed me with a wary eye and said: “You – you’re the lady who wrote about snakes.”
Even the scariest dude can be undone by slithering reptiles apparently.
Looking through my stories and novellas, many do pivot on fear. In my most recently published story, “The Lost Diner” (Pulp Literature, Issue 47), an older woman driver strays off the main highway and pulls in to a deserted diner. Soon she ends up fighting for her life. The owners of the diner like to disappear customers who won’t be missed.
Isn’t this a primordial fear we all share? The fear of an unknown place where we are on our own and defenseless.
Even my comical stories, like “Must Love Dogs – or You’re Gone”, edge into darkness. (Published in GONE, Red Dog Press.) My heroine is forced into working off her murdered ex-husband’s debt at a doggy daycare. It’s either groom dogs or die! There she discovers that her ex used their dog, Flea, to smuggle diamonds into the USA, since Flea will eat anything. The resolution is a pretty dark fight at the edge of Niagara Falls…
Perhaps the difference is this: in noir fiction, the often violent characters remain in control though a bad outcome is often assured. In horror, the characters are not in control: they are frequently isolated and must battle through to an ending that promises to be bleak.
So what to do? Why not embark on a new adventure? And so, like Bilbo, I’m quite ready for a scary dive into the realm of horror writers!
When friend, Donna Carrick and I co-founded the Mesdames of Mayhem in 2013, little did we realize that our 13 member group would double in size and become a national organization. Nor did we foresee that we’d have a CBC documentary made about us and publish six anthologies, all with the brand of “13”. After all, thirteen has been our lucky number!
Every year stories in our antho’s have been nominated for the CWC Award of Excellence or the Derringer. Two of our stories have won :”The Outlier”, by Catherine Astolfo in 13 Claws (never trust a man what keeps pigs) and “Hatcheck Bingo” by Therese Greenwood in The 13th Letter (never underestimate hardworking women).
And so, we’re super-delighted to announce our seventh anthology, The Power of 13, with the theme of luck, fate, karma, chance, games of chance, deadly gambles…
Publication date September, 2026. Stand by for our spectacular cover reveal!!
Better to be busy than being a hermit and doom-scrolling!
October has been a crazy busy month with the book launches of three friends: Jon Redfern and his dark thriller, The Ogre Club; Lisa De Nikolits and her noir novel, Mad Dog and the Sea Dragon; and Lorna Poplak and her latest true crime book, On the Lam, which I also blurbed.
And lots of personal readings!
I started off with a reading at a Zoom meet-up held by the Short Mystery Fiction Society on October 8th. Then a wonderful evening as at Queer Noir at the Bar organized by friend, Hope Thompson, at the Black Eagle Pub, Toronto. I read the raunchy “karaoke strip night” passage from my thriller, Windigo Fire, one of my personal favs.
Tonight I’ll be reading from my horror short story, “Snake Oil” at Drunk Fiction, organized by Emily A. Weedon, a Halloween special held at the Caledonian pub, Tuesday, October 28th at 6 pm.
When my husband, Ed and I learned that a total eclipse would pass near Toronto on April 8th, we got excited. After all, we’re Trekkies and space nerds. The next total eclipse near Toronto won’t take place until 2106, so if we didn’t see this one, it was now or never.
Toronto would only view a partial eclipse. I’d witnessed one once before in the 1990s. A business friend and I broke away from our lunch near Yonge and Bloor and rushed out for a look, allowing ourselves only 1 or 2 second glimpses so we wouldn’t burn out our retinas. At the max of the shadow, all went still. Traffic stopped. The only sound was birdsong: very cool.
Back then Ed made a pinhole camera for our daughter for them to watch the moon cross the sun. Now, 30 years later, he made another and ordered safe viewing glasses from Amazon that resembled retro cardboard 3-D movie glasses. Fingers crossed they worked!
Dorky but it works!
To see the full eclipse meant a drive to Hamilton or Niagara Falls. News reports said The Falls were expecting 100,000+ people so we opted for Hamilton. Somewhere on Hamilton Mountain surely we’d find a spot.
Getting there proved to be a challenge. Sadly the news reports weren’t wrong. Highway 407, the toll road, looked as clogged as Highway 401 at rush hour. Time was running out and we were beginning to lose hope when Ed remembered that the path of the total eclipse passed through Burlington.
We turned off the 407 and raced down to Burlington and Lake Ontario. Not too much traffic, thank God. We parked on a residential street and made the long walk down to the lakeshore, armed with our safety glasses and trusty pinhole camera. Bolstered with refreshments from Tim Hortons, we found a spot in Spencer Smith Park right next to the lake near a large hotel called appropriately enough, The Waterfront Hotel.
How Canadian!
Spectators were in a festive mood. Hotel staff were giving their outdoor cafe patrons eclipse glasses. They continued to hand out glasses to the nearby crowd – even to drivers who’d slowed down and parked to view the spectacle.
The beginning
Then we waited – and waited. It started slowly with a tiny edge of dark crescent. Overall daylight stayed bright. Yet incrementally over the next 20 minutes, the light dimmed to the level of a cloudy day.
“Maybe this is as good as it gets,” my husband mused. Indeed during the partial eclipse many years ago the noon day light dimmed to early twilight.
Then it happened: the moon moved over the sun and we saw the corona. A few seconds later, the light went out. Exactly that: midnight! All the night lights of the city came on: the streetlights, the restaurant and store signs. The sun was gone – snuffed out.
The coronaThe Brant St. Pier in Burlington, Canada at night (Stock photo, my camera didn’t work.)
And it got cold. All I could think of were those retro science documentaries we’d seen as children: all life comes from the sun….No kidding. How long would it take for the earth to cool down to the Absolute Zero of outer space?
The light comes back.
Then the moon moved away and the light came back. Spectators cheered and applauded. For a short time, a warm camaraderie shared by tiny denizens on Earth.
I’ve been a bit absent during 2024, but starting now, look for my blog once a week. My first topic, the mind-blowing solar eclipse in Burlington, Ontario in 2024 (my first ever!).
I’m delighted to announce the Mesdames and Messieurs 6th anthology, The 13th Letter, edited by Donna Carrick and published by Carrick Publishing. The title and theme of our book is one of Donna’s many brilliant ideas.
You see, “M” is the 13th letter of the alphabet. What could line up better with our brand of “13”? The leading crime writers in this collection have used “M” to stand for mayhem, mischief, mystery and of course, murder. Very happy that my story, “The Boy in the Picture”, is one of the 22 tales in this book.
“The Boy in the Picture” was inspired by my visit to Calgary to attend the multi-genre conference, When Words Collide. I took the opportunity to visit one of the three houses I lived in during my unsettled childhood. My house was long torn down, but the street, including the one heritage home on it, was exactly as I remembered it.
Once again, amazing artist, Sara Carrick has created the cover that’s not only visually arresting but reveals how “M” is the 13th letter.
The 13th Letter will be available for pre-order later this month or in early October. Look for it on Amazon in hard cover, soft cover and ebook!
And if you are in the Toronto area at 2 pm on Saturday, November 2nd, drop in to our real world launch at the fabulous bookstore, Sleuth of Baker Street, 920 Millwood Road.
I was delighted and surprised that my short story, “Wisteria Cottage” , published in Malice Domestic’s anthology, Mystery Most Traditional, was nominated for CWC’s Best Short Story Award. It’s up against some stiff competition from award-winning author, Marcelle Dube, but I’ll take it!
Another wonderful thing: I was just interviewed by CWC’s Erik de Souza. It’s always a pleasure to chat with Erik and here are my 15 minutes of fame:
So excited to be attending another Left Coast Crime from April 10 to 14th. I’m on a super panel, Mix it Up: Authors who Bend Genres moderated by one of my fav authors, Rob Osler. (Friday April 12th at 4 pm) Rob is the author of two wonderful comedy mysteries: The Devil’s Chew Toy and Cirque du Slay.
I’m excited to meet the other members of the panel, Stephanie Clemens who writes steam punk adventure; Kat Richardson whose work encompasses fantasy and romance; and Rob Hart, who writes both crime and speculative fiction. I think I may be the horror rep with my dark snake-based novella, Snake Oil, though I do stray into SF and sometimes even try my hand at comedy.
I can’t wait to connect with my American and Canadian crime writers friends! On Thursday, April 11th, friends A.J. Devlin and Winona Kent are hosting a Canuck get-together, featuring that most Canadian invention: the Caesar. And on Saturday at 7:15 am, if I can haul my butt out of bed that early, there’s the Short Mystery Fiction Society breakfast.
Last year, my friend, author and magician, Stephen Buehler and I attended the Author Speed Dating event as readers rather than writers: a terrific learning experience and a most enjoyable way to discover new favorite authors. I aim for a repeat this year.
Will tell all my adventures in Seattle in my next post!
Great news: the Mesdames and Messieurs of Mayhem are bringing out The 13th Letter, their 6th anthology. The 13th letter for the alphabet is the letter “M” where M stands for Mesdames, Messieurs, mischief, malfeasance, mystery and of course, murder!
Edited by Donna Carrick, The 13th Letter, is slated to be released by Carrick Publishing in September / October, 2024 with a launch in late October / early November at our favorite bookstore, Sleuth of Baker Street.
Cover will be by our amazing artist, Sara Carrick. Reveal to come, stay posted!
Our grandson adores “Dad jokes”. Here’s one of his favs: How do you weigh a dragon? Depends on its scales.
