Roger Zelazny – My Family & other Vorvolakas

January 12, 2016 greydogtales 1 Comment

No lurcher posts for nearly two weeks. Boo hiss. Next week we’ll have a new chapter of Lurchers for Beginners. But for now, grit your teeth. We have a really weird special for you – books, paintings, film and music. What connects writers Roger Zelazny and Edgar Wallace, the actor Boris Karloff, Greek vampires, the artist Roger Dean, the composer Rachmaninoff and the most influential Art Nouveau typeface/font? M’shimba M’shamba knows…

This is a trail which began many years ago. For decades we have recommended Roger Zelazny, and in the process cited his novel Lord of Light as one of the most inventive and wonderful SF/F novels ever written. It isn’t exactly written sequentially, it doesn’t base itself on European myths, and how much of it is SF, how much is fantasy, is up to the reader. It’s full of religious and social truths, but riddled with human failings and hopes. We used to buy multiple copies so we could give them to people, on the grounds that they’d never follow up a drunken recommendation at 2 in the morning.

But this article isn’t about Lord of Light. We just had to get it in, as usual. The book we’re on is Zelazny’s Isle of the Dead (1969). Months ago we mentioned those interesting but dubious works of Edgar Wallace, the Sanders of the River stories. And particularly his African God of Storms, M’shimba M’shamba, who strides in thunder:

“M’shimba M’shamba was abroad, walking with his devastating feet through the forest, plucking up great trees by their roots and tossing them aside…”

Isle of the Dead is science fiction, except that it may also be a religious morality tale. Put briefly, it concerns Francis Sandow (who appears in two other Zelazny stories), a man who has bonded with – or become possessed by – a deity from the pantheon of the dying but long-lived alien race, the Pei’ans. Don’t worry, there won’t be questions at the end.

Sandow is a human who has survived through centuries as a result of suspended animation. He is immensely rich, and as a result of his bonding with the Pei’an god, a telepath and worldscaper who can terraform and transform planets. He is the only non-Pei’an ever to have taken on the aspects of a deity. On one of his planets, he re-creates what he calls “that mad painting by Boecklin, The Isle of the Dead.” This island is the scene for the final confrontation between Sandow and his enemies.

Apart from wanting to know more about the painting he mentions, we were struck by the fact that the alien deity involved was Shimbo of Darktree, Shrugger of Thunders, whose powers in the novel seem to be identical to those ascribed to M’shimba M’shamba in the Sanders cycle. Had Roger Zelazny read the Sanders and Bones stories? Shimba → Shimbo? We don’t suppose we’ll ever know, unless someone comes up with a letter in which Zelazny says “Got drunk and bored, nicked Edgar’s god. I have this idea about an island…”

Whatever the answer, Zelazny’s Isle of the Dead is a cracking bit of SF/fantasy if you like a change. It does need more than one read if you want to really take in the Pei’an and religious/moral bits properly. You can either get the paperback second-hand, or get the e-book version below:

isle of the dead/eye of cat (kindle)

Now, back to the Isle of the Dead (the painting), and the key link to everything.

Arnold_Boecklin-fiedelnder_Tod1872 — böcklin self-portrait

Arnold Böcklin (1827 – 1901) was a Swiss symbolist painter who produced at least five versions of this painting between 1880 and 1886. A number of his works have a weird vibe, but this one is particularly on our wavelength. Böcklin himself described it as “a dream picture: it must produce such a stillness that one would be awed by a knock on the door.” Rather than describe it, here are a couple of the versions to consider for yourself:

The isle is said to reflect two distinct real-life sources. Three versions were painted at and influenced by the English Cemetery in Florence, close to Böcklin’s studio:

The source of the overall image is supposedly the island of Pontikonisi, just off Corfu. Pontikonisi not only fits the outline, but it has an 11th century Byzantine chapel on it, surrounded by cypresses:

Pondikonissi_Island_05-06-06 — pontikonisi

As an aside, in Greek storytelling, Odysseus’s boat is said to have been transformed into the island of Pontikonisi by the sea god Poseidon. Bet you didn’t know that. Or really need to.

Ace Books later commissioned Dean Ellis to do a new cover for Zelazny’s book, drawing on the Böcklin painting for inspiration:

Dean Ellis Isle of the Dead — dean ellis

Böcklin’s other paintings vary in their subject matter, but the two below seem perfect as inspirations for ghost stories in the style of M R James or his peers:

Arnold_Böcklin_-_Campagna_romana — campagna romana

1280px-Arnold_Böcklin_-_Mondscheinlandschaft_mit_Ruine1849 — mondscheinlandschaft mit ruine

Unfortunately his later Isle of Life, painted in 1888, is quite frankly disappointing, proving that the Devil has all the best tunes, or something like that.

Nabokov also references the Isle of the Dead in his novel Despair, but sadly we haven’t read it. And we don’t why anyone would want to know this, but the painting features a number of times in the US TV series Pretty Little Liars, and may be a clue. A clue to what we have no idea, as we’ve never watched it.

Which brings us to the horror film The Isle of the Dead, starring Boris Karloff. It is 1912, during the First Balkan War, and General Pherides (Karloff) visits his wife’s grave on a small Greek island. As so often happens when you do this sort of thing, someone dies, there is fear of disease, his wife’s tomb is empty and a young girl on the island is suspected of being a vampiric creature called a vorvolakas. We had a Tuesday like that last week. You can see from the screenshot below how this film was influenced by Böcklin.

If you add fear of premature burial, a brooding atmosphere on the island and septicaemic plague to the vorvolakas myth, you get a pretty good horror film, more a moody classic than an out-and-out shocker.

Vorvolakas, or vrykolakas, are interesting in their own right. The Isle of the Dead film is unusual for using this Greek folk myth rather than going for the standard vampire. Because they crop up all over the Balkans under similar names, there are contradictory tales about them being werewolves, vampires or even werewolves who have become vampires.

Note that vorvolakas do not have to be blood-drinkers, and they are not Bram Stoker-type vampires. No capes or pointy fangs. Mentions of vorvolakas in literature go back at least as far as De quorundam Graecorum Opinationibus by Allatios (1645). They are, in essence, part of the widespread fear of dead people rising from the grave to cause mischief or bodily harm to the living.

The animated corpses can rise on every day but Saturday, and on that day they can be killed. Burning was a good way to do that; piercing the heart with iron nails was another one. Prevention was by burying the corpse upside down, or by leaving a coin in its mouth, a metal cross in the coffin or a sickle at its throat, approaches which are echoed across other parts of Europe. A particularly neat legend is that a vorvolakas will knock once on your door, and if you do not answer, will pass by. So always wait for the second knock, listeners.

We promised Rachmaninoff, though, and we shall deliver. Isle of the Dead (Opus 29) is his romantic symphonic poem inspired by seeing a version of Böcklin’s painting in Paris. He saw the black and white version, and wrote his tone-poem in 1908. After he saw a colour version later, he was rather disappointed, and said that he might not have written Opus 29 if he’d seen that one first. Have a listen – it starts slow, but it’s pretty powerful after a while.

If you’re classically inclined, five years later the composer Max Reger (1873 – 1916) also wrote Die Toteninsel as one of four tone-poems inspired by Böcklin.

If you’re not classically inclined, you might be more excited by the fact that exactly 100 years after Arnold Böcklin finished his last version of The Isle of the Dead, the heavy metal band Manilla Road recorded their own. We have, however, no idea if Manilla Road were Böcklin fans at the time. Perhaps they wandered into an art gallery whilst stoned and had one of those “Oooh!” moments.

Our final major rabbit from the hat (approved by Animal Welfare) connection is that in 1904, Otto Weisert produced the typeface called Arnold Böcklin, which went on to become the best known Art Nouveau typeface and font, one you will have seen all over the place on posters and book covers. It was also used by the SF, fantasy and album cover artists Roger Dean.

By the way, there is even a Giger metallo-organic version of Isle of the Dead, which really has to be included here.

In light of all of this, we can only end by saying “Thanks, Arnold.”

####

End-Note Thingy: As often happens in these excursions, long after putting this article together bit by bit, we discovered a site devoted to looking at some of the influence of The Isle of the Dead painting – Toteninsel.net. This would have been a Good Thing to find before we started, and would have made life a lot easier.

toteninsel.net

That’s it. We are so weighed down by writing commitments, interviews we’ve haven’t planned out properly and being dragged through six-inch deep mud by longdogs that we have no idea what is to come next time…

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Scary Women: Clarissa Johal and Anita Stewart

January 8, 2016 greydogtales 6 Comments

Welcome, dear listeners. We’re back to horror, and going for something different today. Inevitably, we find ourselves covering quite a lot of fiction by dead white males, including the weird works of Hope Hodgson and Lovecraft. We can’t kick the period/pulp habit. But today we have two living, contemporary female authors with us – Anita Stewart and Clarissa Johal for our first Scary Women feature. Not only are they cool people to know, but they’ve notched up a lot of books between them, and they write horror that’s a bit different from our usual fare. Have a look…

greydogtales is about the weird, and about the creative urge. We celebrate what others create, be they women, longdogs or even men, and encourage our listeners to get involved. Last autumn, during the October Frights blog-hop, we met a number of neat female authors who do not obsess about Cthulhu stealing their minds (generally) but who produce the sort of fiction they want to produce. From paranormal worries to full-blown horror, their stories are what they do.

Women are not defined by men (it’s true, you know), and writers in this field are certainly not defined by the opinions of a decrepit Yorkshireman who happens to produce weird fiction. We wanted to have some women speak about the genre in which they chose to write, and why. And, in the process, see if they thought that gender affected their writing. Simple as that.

So we’re very pleased to have Anita and Clarissa with us, so we can get the low-down. Both of our guests have novels and anthologised stories available.

Writing as A F Stewart, Anita writes horror, SF and fantasy, and is from Nova Scotia, Canada. She also versifies.

Clarissa is from the United States, and writes tales of the paranormal (when she’s not on her trapeze).

greydog: Welcome, both of you. Let’s start with the overall view. The markets, and to some extent the fans, often like to label their favourite authors. Gothic, urban fantasy, dark fantasy, paranormal romance and so on. What do you call the genre(s) in which you write, regardless of other people’s labels?

clarissa: Paranormal without the romance, gothic horror without the gore. Simple as that. There may be some romantic tension, but if you’re looking for full-blown romance, look elsewhere. My characters keep their clothes on, and the bedroom door shut.

anita: As I write in a few genres, the labels tend to change depending on the story or book, but overall I generally use the labels dark fantasy or horror. I’ve also been known to sneak into the genres of paranormal, gothic, sci-fi, steampunk, poetry, and even non-fiction. I’m a bit fickle that way. And similar to Clarissa, I rarely write romance, or romantic scenes. My characters kill each other more often than kiss one another (although sometimes they do both).

greydog: So why these areas? By that we mean if fantasy and adventure, why weird fantasy and adventure? And if exploration of character, why use dark or scary fiction to go there?

anita: I never set out to write dark and scary fiction. I wanted to write epic fantasy, but I kept killing off my characters (often quite gruesomely), and exploring darker subjects in my writing. To me, the darker aspects of human nature were more compelling, delving into a character’s choices and questionable actions, and their consequences. Eventually I accepted it as inevitable, and declared myself a writer of all things dark and macabre.

clarissa: The genre chose me—flat out. I started out writing fantasy. Mid-way through a book I was working on, I was hit by two characters (Cronan and Lucas; my death spirit and guardian from Between) who didn’t fit. I kept setting them aside, but they’d come back, stronger than ever. I gave in, and began writing my first paranormal novel. It took me a year to complete, and it was accepted by a publisher three months later. I joke that I was pulled into the Otherworld with Between. I’m on my sixth book, and the ideas come to me faster than I can write them down.

greydog: We started out with the same intentions, but also went dark and weird somewhere along the path. When you entered the field, were you affected by the market presence of other women already writing in the genre?

anita: Not really. As I said, I never made a conscious decision to write the scary stuff, I stumbled into it. Any market influence would have been by example of good writing, no matter what gender. For example, one of my one of my biggest writing influences is Ray Bradbury. Another is Agatha Christie. The only consideration I gave to gender was with my pen name, and using my initials instead of my full moniker. That decision was in part to be gender neutral, and not to be pre-judged—I’m a woman writing fantasy, so I must write romantic stuff (which is about as far from the truth as you can get).

clarissa: I have to say, I rage against being pigeon-holed as a paranormal romance author. Again, it’s very difficult to write paranormal without people assuming you write romance. I love men in all their forms, but shirtless men will never grace my book covers.

greydog: We’ve heard it said that there is an area of paranormal and horror fiction which is dominated by male writers and readers, perhaps a bleaker, nastier section of the field. Do you think that’s the case?

anita: Possibly. I have found many female writers in the horror genre tend to lean more on the side of psychological horror as opposed to the gorier realm. (Though not all. I myself like to dabble with the blood and guts from time to time. In fact, I sometimes run a character body count on Twitter when I write a book.) That leaves the sub-genres of gore, slasher horror, and the so-called ‘torture porn’ open for the men to dominate. Though any discrepancy may simply be a matter of numbers, with horror in general still being dominated by the male writers.

As for the paranormal genre, that might be a matter of skewed perception. If you’re a woman and you say you write paranormal, I believe there’s still a tendency for people to automatically think ‘paranormal romance’, whether or not it’s true.

clarissa: There’s a definite sector of horror that’s hard core, and I do see the glut of that being written by men. However, there are women in that market too—and they can be just as twisted and evil, if not more so.

greydog: Let’s sneak down to character level. Do you feel more involved writing a female character, or does it make no difference what gender the character is?

clarissa: My characters tell me what to write, not vice versa. They come to me perfectly formed, and I usually dream their back stories. Because of that, I feel a connection to each and every one of them—male and female.

anita: I’m involved with every character, regardless of whether they are male or female. They all invade my head and talk to me, and tell me their stories. Although I do tend to find writing female characters easier (no doubt due to first-hand experience and all). I did deliberately put female characters front and centre with the Killers and Demons sequel, though. I figured why should the male villains have all the fun.

greydog: They shouldn’t! But on that point, there’s been a lot of talk about how well males can write female characters. The cheap way of writing so-called ‘strong’ female characters is to make them as axe-happy as the men and swear more. That may be fun, but it’s not exactly the answer. What makes a female character ‘strong’ for you?

anita: Generally I write my characters from a human perspective, as opposed to specific gender roles. I don’t approach characters as strong or weak, but well-rounded, with virtues and flaws both, be they male or female. I did, however, have to tackle this gender issue with Althea, the main character from my book Gothic Cavalcade. Her character has a background that could be viewed as stereotypical (a woman with a troubled and traumatic past) and it’s one of the few stories I wrote with a romance. So I needed to tread carefully, as not to turn her into a wishy-washy girl looking for a man to save her, or a hardened cliché. I needed a strong character, someone who survived evil, but still maintained a fragility of spirit. So I opted to make her cautious, even shy, in nature, but hopeful and sensible. A character whose choices lead her back to confront her past and eventually realise she can destroy it. And as the story plays out, her new love interest becomes her emotional guidepost, but not her saviour.

Also, I don’t think “axe-happy” women should necessarily be dismissed as a short-cut to a strong character. There’s no reason why female characters can’t be as action oriented as male ones. A character I’m currently writing, Doyle, is seriously lethal. But she has much more to her personality including slightly misguided loyalty, a sense of obligation, doubts, misgivings, and a maternal side that precipitates a change of heart and a change of allegiance. I think if you want strong female characters, then write them as fully realized human beings. And if they want to swing axes, let them.

clarissa: I find those particular characters annoying. If brandishing a weapon and dropping the f-bomb makes you strong, anybody can do that, it’s not a skill—sorry. Strength comes from within. A strong character (in my opinion) approaches a tough situation with their smarts. That said, I’m a pretty damn good fencer.

greydog: We’ll be careful what we say, then. Our fencing épées are rusting in mother’s loft (yes, we really did have some, but we were rubbish!).

And we suspect that we know the answer to the next question, from what you’ve both already said, but we’ll go there anyway. Do you feel that you write primarily for a female audience?

clarissa: I write stories for readers—I really don’t focus whether they’re male or female.

anita: In a word, no. I write for whoever likes dark fantasy and horror, with guaranteed dead bodies and little to no romance. I’m not picky, I’ll take any readers, female, male, alien, zombie…

greydog: Are there other female writer(s) in the field, early or contemporary, whom you admire?

anita: I admire fantasy writer, Jennifer Roberson very much (and if you’re looking for strong female characters, Del from her Tiger and Del series is a perfect example), and Morgan Llywelyn, who writes terrific historical fantasy and fiction. A recent favourite of mine is writer J. A. Clement, author of the On Dark Shores series; she’s a brilliant writer. And I have to give a shout-out to some fellow horror authors, Clarissa Johal, Ash Krafton, Angela Yuriko Smith, and Nina D’Arcangela, to name just a few.

clarissa: My favourite authors are male—Brom, Neil Gaiman and Robert Holdstock. There are a handful of classical authors I enjoy too, but again, all male.

greydog: Rob Holdstock was a great loss – Mythago Wood, just to name one book, was a seminal work in the eighties. Despite that, I remember talking to him about writing TV scripts to pay the mortgage, which always seemed unfair. Nice guy and a fellow zoologist, curiously enough.

Finally, as we’ve got you here, where next for both of you? Tell us what we might be seeing in 2016.

clarissa: I’m working on a paranormal novel, Poppy. My readers really liked a side-character from Struck, and kept asking for her story. Usually, I don’t do sequels or spin-offs, but decided to give it a go. Unbeknownst to me, Poppy had a story to be told! Here’s a peek at the blurb:

A red-headed, pink-loving mortician who speaks to the dead.
A socially awkward funeral director.
Poppy and Dante from Struck are back.

Something is lingering around Skyview Funeral Home–and it’s stealing souls of the departed. With Dante in tow, Poppy is determined to put a stop to it. Will she be able to protect those who are trying to cross over? Or will her soul be next?

anita: I’m working on three novels, in various stages of completion, at the moment. I have two steampunk books, one horror tinged book titled The Duke’s Assassin, one more of an adventure novel, called Racing the Hellfire Club. I’m also working on the first book in a dark fantasy series, called The Prophecy of Seven. Hopefully at least one will be finished sometime next year.

greydog: Many thanks for your time, Anita and Clarissa, and lots of luck with these projects.

We’ve put a couple of additional links to books up on the right-hand sidebar, but if you want to explore, Clarissa and Anita have author’s websites and Amazon pages as well, which can be found here:

clarissa johal

clarissa on amazon

anita stewart

a f stewart on amazon

Next week on greydogtales – probably more lurchers, and weird stuff by someone who isn’t around to complain… uh, what we mean is ‘a classic author’. That sounds better, doesn’t it?

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Hurrah, our most boring post yet. No, really.

January 7, 2016 greydogtales Leave a comment

The eccentricity that is greydogtales has a minor headache, which we shall seek to alleviate by a quick piece in between lurchers and the weird. What do we actually think of the links, writers, artists and works which we mention on the site? It’s probably time to clarify some stuff, which sounds so hideously self-important that it’s why we haven’t done it until now. We usually try not to take ourselves too seriously.

We are a signpost, as Queen Victoria never said. By that, we mean that we often have no real idea if you, as an individual listener, will enjoy the things we mention. We hope that you’ll get something out of it, and we might express an opinion if we really like something we come across, but what do we know?

Tastes vary. Just because you love dogs, you might not like having a lurcher (you should, but that’s not under our control). Similarly, if you like M R James, you may hate a contemporary horror story we mention. And vice versa. Artwork is even worse – we love Art Deco; our editor-in-chief is left icy cold by it. You get the idea.

There are exceptions, of course, where there is no doubt about what your taste should be:

Our longdogs – who are utterly brilliant and The Best Dogs in the Universe and can do no wrong, except when they do and drive us mad;
Our writing – the fiction of John Linwood Grant has been described in such glowing terms as ‘tolerable’ and ‘better than reading sandpaper’ (Stephen King’s plumber’s sister), so that settles that;
Our website – which is, as you know, “the highest-rated site on the Internet that covers both lurchers and weird fiction,” (Arbroath and Smokie Herald).

As greydogtales staggers around the world, we get to know people. That’s nice. People can be fun. Or food. But we also get asked for reviews more often. It seems that we have to do slightly better than just muttering in a corner about this one. Then the headache will go away. So…

Almost a Policy

A signpost says where you can find things, unless you’re in a war movie, in which case it’s been taken down or turned round so that you’re heading straight for the enemy tank column. Feel free to use greydogtales for that (not the enemy tanks ruse, the first bit).

If you’re doing something exciting in the world of lurchers, weird art or fiction, do tell us. Get in touch, send us the gory details. If we also think it’s exciting, we’d like to give you a nod on here. Collaborative would be our middle name, but Linwood is easier to spell. Remember that we’re not cutting-edge, though. Half of our brain cells are still puzzling over the events of 1908. Those Austro-Hungarians are tricky fellows…
If you want to send us a review copy (and people do), that’s cool. We’ll happily read it (or watch it) eventually. We’re old and slow. If we think it’s great, or if it fits a theme we’re into, we’ll cajole you to into coming on one of the broadcasts and maybe doing a full feature or interview. We love introducing our listeners to new weird things. You won’t get a ‘proper’ review out of it though, even if you are utterly brilliant. Not our kettle of ribcages.
If you want us to mention your site, that’s also good. Our Links section really should be larger, and our Weird Media page is desperately in need of completion. The more relevant your site is to our obsessions, the more quickly we’ll get you up there.

The above has been hovering over us for some time. We were impressed by Dawn Cano‘s recent article on Ginger Nuts of Horror (we must stop mentioning them), concerning reviews. It reminded us that we’d better say something ourselves before anyone got the wrong idea about the books we discuss on greydogtales. We don’t critique what we cover, we just signpost it.

If we don’t like what we get, we’ll e-mail you privately and say that it doesn’t quite sit right with us. We’ll even be helpful if we can, but not in public. If we say ‘excellent’ or ‘talented’ in an article, that’s a personal comment. You should judge for yourselves by having a quick look and going “Hmmm.”

Dawn’s piece can be found here:

reviews – a reviewers guide

And that’s it – a lame-ass policy statement from an insignificant corner of a little rock-ball. You can forget all about it now. We should probably put this up somewhere permanent on-site, but we have to take the longdogs out, it’s pouring down again, and our wellies leak.

Normal service resumes tomorrow…

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The greydogtales Guide to Social Networks

January 5, 2016 greydogtales 2 Comments

In which we self-destruct and lose all our friends by exposing the truth about social networking.

People often ask about the nature of the greydogtales collective. What’s with this authorial “we”? It would be foolish to expose our entire, multinational staff to public scrutiny. Let’s just say that most of my body cells, some of Django‘s, and our mate Trevor, are crucial elements. The rest of my body cells are in the process of starting a rival blog, tentatively entitled “Why We Hate John Linwood Grant And What We’re Going To Do About It”. My partner hovers in the background, pointing out plot-holes and ludicrous character mistakes, which is what I pay her for.

This would be a good point to have a photograph of a lurcher, a nice dog anecdote and then shut up. Or to muse on what a funny old world it is writing horror, and share an amusing incident. Unfortunately, we like to call a spade a potentially seditious element for use in peasant uprisings, and thus feel bound to tell our listeners what all this Internet stuff is really for.

greydogtales came online last year as a terrifying experiment in how to beat agoraphobia by “getting out there”, but without having to open the front door*. It was an all-or-nothing approach. Full fb exposure, commit to three lively (ha!) blog posts a week, register for Pinterest and then forget why, etc. And we also read somewhere that if you’re going to publish your writing, you need to do this sort of thing. Maybe.

*People also ask how I can be agoraphobic and be out dog-walking. The short answer is that if you have two large, hungry longdogs next to you, you feel somewhat less vulnerable. If the whole world came at me all at once, Chilli would have it on its knees in a millisecond. And then Django would pee on it.

blogging-336376_960_720 — a blogger forgets to turn his screen on

But we had a plan for this article, didn’t we? Let’s have a scientific look at social networking in reality. Here are some of the exciting opportunities which are open to you:

Blogging – what you were thinking about last night after a few beers, which you then decided, for some strange reason, to share with your seven and half followers;
Twitter – what you are thinking about right now, which might have been more interesting if you’d had a few beers before posting it (non-drinkers might substitute extra caffeine);
Facebook – a system created by memes so that they could replicate without human assistance;
Google Plus – a system created by Google so that they could track you down later when they have to ‘adjust’ certain elements of the population;
Reddit – a bulletin-board system for promoting hearsay to the level of Government policy. Or a way to learn about new stuff. We’re not sure;
Insertnamehere – the secret network your children are on because everything above is so last-week and only for old people and nerds;
Pinterest – pictures of cakes.

We’ll now look at two of the most familiar of those in detail, ie sketchily, with no real evidence and in a way which makes people wonder if we’re talking about THEM. Of course we aren’t. We love YOU. It’s the others who puzzle us.

Blogging

Blogging is actually a complex process which allows interesting people to come over as rather dull and rather dull people to sound interesting. For those in between, such as ourselves, it is a stroke of genius. Decades of half-remembered facts, books we once skip-read and whatever magazine is next to the toilet allow us to sound authoritative and well-informed. Suddenly those moth-eaten copies of Smersh the Thunderer in the attic are collector’s gold, to be shown off, and Napoleon’s shoe-size is a gem of arcane knowledge. Blogging justifies an entire life of remembering useless things and forgetting your mother’s birthday and your credit card PIN.

Blogging is also Hard Work. When we started, we looked into the intricate dynamics of which blog posts were read in which hemisphere, when the most shares occurred, what days of the week gave best coverage, how often to post, the prime word-count for a successful post, how to retain readers, how to tag properly and how to optimize for all search engines.

We then entered a lengthy consultation period, and decided, considering all these factors, to shove something out about three times a week, making each post as long as it happened to be. If it’s vaguely relevant, we occasionally ram it onto a Facebook group as well.

It’s important to have a clear focus for your blog, so that readers understand your field of expertise or knowledge. Which is why we cover classic horror authors, weird illustrations, lurchers and other things on a random basis. We want readers who are confused and willing to read anything just to get out of here alive.

It is also essential when you blog to respond to every comment. That’s why people don’t comment – they don’t need more of your dribble. You do, however, hear regularly from Nike Trainers, SEO marketing people and Chinese knock-off sites, so you’re never alone. That’s something.

Facebook

Facebook is still popular, despite absolutely everyone having migrated to Twitter and Insertnamehere. There are many good reasons to be on Facebook. One is that it makes a nice pinging noise when someone likes or comments on your posts. That’s quite fun. Another is that you can trawl frantically through your feed and timeline for what just happened, and manage to lose the one post you were looking for. It’s like a wordsearch, but you don’t have to buy the little books.

friends-1027840_960_720 — pledging allegiance to facebook

However, after considerable effort, you can achieve a list of crucial contacts, which breaks down as follows:

People who might be useful to your Grand Plan and help transform you from shoe-shine boy to best-selling author;
People who you befriended in case you’re missing out on something, which you always are;
Old friends who you hang onto for nostalgic reasons or because you really fancied them twenty years ago (and still do but daren’t tell them);
Family members who have hunted you down on-line despite your security measures;
People who only befriended you to further their own Grand Plan (losers);
People whose work you idolise but who wouldn’t know you from a can of beans and are too busy working to respond;
People whose posts worry you so much you keep track of their activity in case you need to ring the CIA very quickly.

If you’re really fortunate, you may also end up with:

People you actually like because of who they are and what they post.

We’re not sure about this last category. They sound suspicious as well. What are they trying to sell really? But you’d better not unfriend me. I might still be useful, one day, honest.

Another use for Facebook is to join groups. These offer a lively and interactive way to get yourself blocked for promoting your own work all the time, or to discuss Napoleon’s shoe-size at length and learnt the name of his cobblers, but only the ones in Toulouse who no-one else knew about. Somewhere in between, we are forced to admit, there are groups which are quite interesting. Most of these don’t want you. Persevere long enough, however, and Facebook will ask if you if you want to create your own group “Things beginning with V which can be found on Latvian bus seats”. And you’ve made it!

(Actually we quite like some of the groups we’re in, but if we printed that, we might have to be more active and read things properly.)

greydogtales is also supposed to be on Twitter, but we can’t face that level of commitment yet without knowing where the relationship might lead. We’ve been hurt in the past.

And there you have it. The wonderful world of social networks. We remember carbon paper and typewriters, you know. And we probably had relatives who fought in the war for the likes of you…

Next time on greydogtales – Scary Women: Actual, real-life horror authors, Clarissa Johal and Anita Stewart, talk about their fiction, the writing process and why they’d don’t write paranormal romance, thank you for asking.

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