Category Archives: Author’s Spotlight

Author's Spotlight

Listen to Your Toaster!

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A free sample short story from The Devil and Leo Persky

I used to be a writer and editor for Weekly World News, the fake news supermarket tabloid that chronicled such phenomena as Bat Boy, Big Foot, alien babies, and Elvis sightings. The job of a WWN writer was to think up crazy shit and write a couple of hundred humorous words on it because, of course, everything we published was fake…except for the disclaimer in six-point type at the bottom of page three that confessed we were just funnin’ you for entertainment purposes.

I missed WWN when it folded in 2007. Not only was it a great day job where I got to work with a small staff of friends (including fellow Crazy 8’er Bob Greenberger), but writing those wacky articles was fun. It was all about starting with a premise loosely based on reality; an idle thought about what happened to the rest of the rabbits whose feet were used to make good luck charms, I wrote an article about the disabled surviving hares bringing class action lawsuits against rabbit’s foot manufacturers. I turned historical speculation about Abraham Lincoln’s mental health into a story in which he was a straitjacketed lunatic. Anything and everything was fodder for a WWN story. Continue reading

Author's Spotlight, New Releases

“What Took You So Long…?”

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There’s an old Yiddish saying that translates to: “Man plans, and God laughs.” Boyohboy, did the Writing Gods yuck it up at my expense.

FLASHBACK: Things were going swimmingly for me in September 2017. My new book Galloway’s Gamble had just been published by Western-historical fiction specialist Five Star Publishing, and (after four decades writing lots of Star Trek and other science fiction) my very first historical novel also won a Western Fictioneers Peacemaker Award—a little icing on the cake.  

When my Five Star editors asked for more stories about endearingly argumentative brothers Jamey and Jake Galloway, I thought I’d won the writer’s lottery! I’d stumbled into a new storytelling niche I loved. I was embarking on my very own novel series. And I believed I’d found a happy publishing home for the rest of my writing days.  

But . . . “Man plans, and God laughs.”

Right around the time Galloway’s Gamble came out, I started having back problems that would keep me from sleeping for the next four years (which ain’t good for the brain). After twenty different medical practitioners, umpteen different drugs, and back surgery all failed to help; I’d lost four productive years and counting (although many people suffer far worse misfortune than I did).  Continue reading

Author's Spotlight, New Releases

Jim Beard Talks Oooff! Boff! Splatt!

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I was eight months old on January 12th, 1966. I didn’t watch the premiere of Batman that chilly evening—we lived in Toledo, Ohio—but somehow, I “saw” it, and it set the course for my life from that moment on.

There’s no doubt in my mind my father had the show on that Wednesday night. He was a Batman fan as a kid, growing up in the 1940s and 1950s, and I can’t imagine him not tuning it in in 1966. There were two other kids in the house then, my older brother and sister, four and five years old respectively, and while they weren’t necessarily devotees of comic books and the like, it’s also hard to imagine kids that age not watching Batman.

Me? I was probably sleeping at 7:30 pm, or at least burping and rolling over. Who knows? Maybe I was in the living room when “Batman IN COLOR” flashed on the screen. I’d like to think I was. How else would I have become such a fan myself of the Caped Crusader?

Well, for one thing, there was a lot of Bat-stuff around the house back when I was growing up. There were a few comics leftover from my father’s childhood, as well as a few then-current “New Look” Bat-books; there were a puzzle, a card game, coloring books, a Switch-N-Go set, and a Magic Magnetic Gotham City, just to name a few things. Add to all that the DNA I inherited and, well, any wonder I am how I am? Continue reading

Author's Spotlight, New Releases
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Mel Brooks summed up my feelings about life in the title song of his film, The Twelve Chairs: “Hope for the best, expect the worst.”

In The Devil and Leo Persky, you’ll meet Leo Persky, the living embodiment of that philosophy. Under the penname “Terrance Strange” (the earlier pseudonym of his grandfather Jacob, himself a monster-hunter and journalist of the weird), Leo is a columnist for World Weekly News, a supermarket tabloid of the supernatural and strange in a world where every Bat Boy, Bigfoot, alien baby, Satan visiting, Elvis sighting story is the truth. A world where vampires exist, magic is real, and extraterrestrial visitations routine.

What you may not know about me is, I was once a reporter for Weekly World News (1979 – 2007), the black and white tabloid that billed itself as “the world’s only reliable newspaper.” There was truth in that statement; you could rely on virtually every word in it to be made up, excluding the trivia column and the 6-point type warning at the bottom of page two that virtually every word in it was made up and suggesting readers suspend their belief for the sake of enjoyment. From 2005 to 2007, I wrote close to 100 bylined stories for the paper, as well as ghost writing at least that many more under the names of our numerous fictitious columnists ranging from “Miss Adventure, the Gayest American Hero” to “Ed Anger” to “Lester the Typing Horse” and “Sammy the Chatting Chimp” once I was on staff as Executive Editor from February 2006 to the end in August 2007. Continue reading

Author's Spotlight, New Releases

Aaron Rosenberg Talks Time . . . of the Phoenix

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Stories change and grow and evolve over time. It’s one of the things that makes oral storytelling in particular so vibrant, that the core of the story may remain the same but the details and even the style and flow can change to reflect current attitudes and issues.

Prose fiction doesn’t adjust in the same way, of course. After all, once you write it down and especially once you publish it, it’s a fixed form. Unless you plan to emulate Walt Whitman, who continually updated and revised Leaves of Grass, that book is now set, as is the story within it.

But when you’re working on a series, there’s still room to play, to revise, to change course. Sometimes it’s because you realized something partway through, and other times because the world around you has changed—or you have—and you discover that the story you started out to tell isn’t the one you want to tell now.

When Steven Savile and I started Time of the Phoenix, back in 2009, we already knew that it would be a series following the immortal Phoenix, avatar of humanity’s creativity, throughout history. We bounced around ideas about various historical figures, came up with a rough timeline showing who the Phoenix had become and when, and then sketched out a set of five stories from that. We released the first one, “For This Is Hell,” in 2011. We were both happy with that first story, and it did well. Continue reading

Author's Spotlight, New Releases

Russ Colchamiro Talks Angela Hardwicke

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With a new year comes a new sci-fi mystery from Crazy 8 Press inmate Russ Colchamiro, featuring his intergalactic hardboiled private eye Angela Hardwicke. Part Doctor Who, part Blade Runner, part Philip Marlowe, Hardwicke is back again in Fractured Lives.

As Hardwicke gears up for another mystery, we sat down with Russ to discuss this noirish sci-fi tale and his long-range plans for the character:

Crazy 8 Press: You say Angela Hardwicke is an intergalactic private eye. What’s her turf?

Russ: Hardwicke’s turf is Eternity, a galactic realm in service of the design, maintenance, and construction of the Universe. Eternity—or E-Town, as it’s known—is to the Cosmos what Hollywood is to the movie business. At street level, Eternity looks and feels much like our Earth, but a bit more futuristic. Not quite Blade Runner, but not entirely modern Earth either. Somewhere in between.

C8: What was the inspiration for Hardwicke?

Russ: I’ve always loved private detective stories and noir. And I love science fiction and fantasy. Hardwicke first appeared in two of my previous novels Genius de Milo and Astropalooza. I immediately fell in love with her and knew we’d be together for a long, long time. Continue reading