Month: November 2018

Listen Up: “Don’t Let The Bedbugs Bite” Receives Otic Makeover

/ Clint Smith / Leave a comment

post for blog, header

So here’s a first for me:  one of my (early-published) short stories, “Don’t Let the Bedbugs Bite” (originally appearing in the summer, 2011 installment of the British Fantasy Society Journal), has been refashioned in the form of an audible episode at Max Ablitzer‘s engrossing endeavor, Horror Tales.

Horror Tales has produced a series of top-notch episodes from writers Caleb Stephens (“The Wallpaperman”), G.D. Watry (“The Mosaic”), Timothy G. Huguenin (“The Unknown Thing”), and T.E. Grau (“Transmission”).

Each episode is expressly created by Ablitzer, who invests calculating care into the crafting of each story’s transition.  All tales are accompanied by the ambient underscore of music, and textured with the swaying draperies of eerie sound effects.

House for quote.jpg

According to Ablitzer, seven episodes have been planned, with an eighth under consideration.  As of early November, 2018, Horror Tales continued to chart around the world, entering Great Britain’s “top fifty” in iTunes; and the podcast also recently attained the following impressive international iTunes standings:

  • Paraguay:  #1 (Arts)
  • Singapore:  #2 (Literature)
  • Costa Rica:  #4 (Literature)
  • United States:  #30 (Literature)

The Horror Tales Podcast submission guidelines are found here.

“He who has begun is half done…”

/ Clint Smith / Leave a comment

And while Mike and Lawrence and Kevin and Harlen and Cordie watched the satellite pass over, their faces raised in wonder at the bright new age now beginning, Dale watched them, thinking of his friend Duane and seeing things through the words that Duane might have used to describe them…

—Dan Simmons, Summer of Night (1991)

As I’m wont to do on Thanksgiving evening, as dusk draws up on a day dedicated to frantic culinary endeavors, a spectrum of logistics, and general familial demands (I’m grateful for the chaos and chores in all their variegated forms), I also nurture a memory, a narrow moment which had a profound consequences.

DS

That day and date back in November, 2000, represent coordinates of a tectonic shift along what was, at the time, a rather ambitiously listless landscape.  As I, along with many of you, express sentiments of, I also grow preoccupied by a sense of melancholy at closing that crease-covered paperback—a daunting melancholy (The amount of time and attention it must take to be a writer…) which was not wholly unpleasant, as it compelled the dissective questions:  How is it done?…How does this work?…How do you get them to see?

I began studying.  I began dissecting.  I began.  Sapere Aude—Incipe!

####

(November, 2017)

20171123_2147513492415209868696562.jpg

Seventeen years ago this evening, I stole away from an acidic / insipid Thanksgiving-dinner-table conversation, retreating to an isolated, second-story bedroom to read the last eight pages of the Warner Books paperback-version of SUMMER OF NIGHT. I scrutinized / savored the novel’s last lines with the understanding that I’d inadvertently navigated myself toward a craft-creative crossroads…

I’m still trying to figure out what kind of writer I’m supposed to be…