Further to announcing I will be attending World Horror Convention this year, I thought I would add a short blog entry. The last WHC I attended was in 2008, in Salt Lake City, Utah. At that time I was totally new to the genre and just beginning to meet people. I attended the Bram Stoker Awards and various panels and parties and started to get a sense of the who’s-who among authors and publishers.

Between the last conference and this one I’ve published several short stories, a novella, and made connections with many new authors, editors and publishers. I’m looking forward now to reacquainting folks with whom it’s been too long, as well as finally meeting in person, folks with whom I’ve only interacted online—people like Ross Lockhart, Armand Rosamilia, Sydney Leigh to name a few, as well as perhaps getting to attend panels, hear readings with some of the more established writers in the genre (authors like Wrath James White and Brian Keene). Some of the attendees are also represented by the same agent, so it will be nice to meet them for the first time.

Why has it been so long since I attended a convention? I certainly didn’t stop writing in the meantime. There are two good reasons for this—the first is named Maddy Dee, the second Izzy Marie. They are my and Sarah’s two daughters and since Izzy’s birth in 2008 (the same year I attended my first WHC), we guided them through the first amazing and exhausting five years of their lives. Any parent out there knows the first five years combine moments of wonder with the sleepless carnivalesque. I couldn’t be a happier with these two budding personalities—Maddy who, at age seven, bored with the standard slopes, attempts to sneak onto the ski lift so she try the black diamond, and Izzy, who at age five informed the doctor that the shape on the vision chart was not in fact a “moon” but more specifically a “crescent.”

Well, forgive a dad if he’s highlighting the upside—any little luck is needed in the world’s constant barrage of its opposite. It’s a theme not lost in The Crimes of Heaven and Hell, and I hope to have more to say on the publication of book one in the not too distant future. In the meantime, I will be posting at least one more entry before heading off to WHC 2014, a review of a contemporary classic in honor of one of the best authors in the genre. Until then, it’s great to be a little less cloistered again, and working with my agent on the submission of a new manuscript.

–C.R.M.