Tag Archives: Bad Ass Moms

Listen to Your Toaster!

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.

A couple of years later, I was invited to contribute a short story to a horror anthology with a vampire theme. In search of a protagonist, I eventually hit on the thought of making him a reporter for WWN, but not exactly my WWN. Instead, this version of the paper existed in a world where every single word it published was true, from aliens to zombies. I’ll admit, there was a tinge of Carl Kolchak of The Night Stalker fame in my thinking, but considering the extreme wackiness of the average Weekly World News stories, I wanted to inject a lot more humor into the character and the stories. At first, I was leaning towards someone modeled after a fictitious WWN “contributor,” Matthew Daemon, the creation of the real WWN contributor, the late Dick Siegel, and star of the comic strip I had commissioned in my editorial capacity from Mike Collins.

Matthew Daemon was your typical big, strong, trench coat- and slouch-hat-wearing supernatural adventurer. But, as dad-bodied Kolchak proved, big and strong isn’t as funny as an ordinary guy, and if an ordinary guy was funny, a little nebbish guy was even funnier. Yeah, I’m looking at you, pre-Interiors Woody Allen!

So with Woody and Arnold Stang (a comic actor best known as the voice of Top Cat and for his role in 1970’s Hercules in New York), I went total nebbish and found Leo Persky there waiting for me. Recognizing that at 47 years old and “five foot seven, 142 pounds, glasses, and a spreading bald spot that’s got me to wearing a hat,” he wasn’t the most imposing authority figure, Leo, a third generation monster hunter, has adopted the name and photograph of his strapping, imposing grandfather Terrence Strange for professional use.

“Man Bites Dog” was the result, and even before I was finished with the first story, I knew this wouldn’t be the last time I visited with Leo Persky. In fact, I went back to Leo and his world of genies, aliens, and snake-gods, five more times, including a story starring Leo’s Mom, the little old tough-as-nails septuagenarian Barbara in another vampiric encounter, “Come In, Sit Down, Have a Bite” for the Crazy 8 anthology Bad Ass Moms. And then, because I still wanted to play some more with Leo, the novella, “The Devil and Leo Persky.” And I have a feeling I’m still not done with him!

But look, you don’t have to take my word about how much fun Leo is. I’ve posted “Man Bites Dog” in its entirety over on my website as a free sample that will hopefully whet your appetite for more. As Leo says, “The government learned a long time ago that the best way to keep a secret was to tell it to everyone…because only the nutjobs are ever going to ask in the first place.”

Or as former Weekly World News managing editor Sal Ivon once famously said, “If someone calls me up and says their toaster is talking to them, I don’t refer them to professional help, I say, ‘Put the toaster on the phone’.”

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.

In 2010, I was asked to contribute to an anthology about vampires. At first, my thinking went down the more traditional road of dark, angsty tales of cursed people, but I was having a hard time tapping into the necessary melodrama of the situation. Horror had never really my cup of tea; the tame, old timey black and white horror movies I grew up on from the 1930s to the 1950s weren’t really all that horrifying, and, in fact, looking back at them with modern eyes, are pretty campy and funny. And the modern blood-spurty “don’t go in the basement” kind are all formula and no surprise. Comic book horror stories of the time were equally lame, published under a code that prohibited every single horror trope imaginable. The only time I’ve ever really been frightened by horror was the moment in the 1963 Twilight Zone episode, “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” when William Shatner lifts the window shade to find the face of the gremlin staring in at him. My brothers and I jumped, screaming as one, and slept with the lights on that night. I was 8 years old.

I did a lot of stories about the supernatural for the News… I even wrote a multi-part tie-in/crossover story with the CW-TV show Supernatural! There wasn’t a serious bone in the body of any one of any of those articles. So when I needed a horror story, I decided to go at it from the angle of a reporter for a tabloid in the aforementioned world where all this stuff was true. And because I’m a wiseass, I made my reporter one too because, you know, it makes writing dialogue that much easier. Write what you know, they say, so I also made him kind of a nebbish. And 5’ 7”.

I had so much fun with Leo in that first story that I returned to him five times for further adventures over the next decade (well, technically four, since one of the stories, another vampire tale, “Come in, Sit Down, Have a Bite,” stars Leo’s mom, Barbara, herself a retired monster-hunter), including in stories for the Crazy 8 anthologies Bad Ass Moms, Love, Murder, Mayhem, and Thrilling Adventure Yarns 2021. Those 6 stories and an all-new 27,000-word novella are now available as The Devil and Leo Persky, all under a sterling cover by my buddy, artist/poet/performer/mensch/designer Rick Stasi. And speaking of old friends, at the made-up World Weekly News, Leo Persky’s editor is Rob Greenberg, a highly fictionalized take on fellow Crazy 8’er Bob Greenberger (not a vampire!), who had been the Weekly World News’ managing editor with me.

I start off writing every story hoping for the best but expecting the worst. Some I have to chase all over the damned place before I finally find the story I had been trying to write from the start, believing without doubt that I’d spend countless days and thousands of wasted words before having to abandon the effort as hopeless. But Leo has never given me a moment’s doubt. I didn’t usually have any more of an idea where a Leo story was headed than I did with those that gave me trouble, but I always knew he would get me there, sooner or later, snarky wisecracks and all.

The Devil and Leo Persky is now available on Amazon in paperback and eBook.

Announcing BAD ASS MOMS

Too often in fiction, I’ve found myself asking: Where are the moms?

Dead moms are a long-established trope in stories, especially in sci-fi/fantasy. Mothers are, culturally speaking, meant to be nurturing figures who protect and coddle, and one of the easiest ways to force a protagonist to strike out on their own adventure is to get rid of the safety net that is Mom. I’ll confess that, as a writer, I’ve fallen into the same trap more than once (in my defense, I’ve killed off an equal number of dads).

When you look at stories—and the way we talk about stories—there’s this sense that when a woman becomes a mother, she ceases to be the heroine of her own story. Instead, she’s relegated to a supporting role for her children, who are now meant to be the center of her life and the only reason for her existence. There are exceptions, as there are in everything, but overall, we’re left with the impression that once a woman becomes Mom, her tale ends. She fades away and, often, disappears altogether. Or, if she does remain, her destiny is disproportionately influenced by her children when compared to their impact on Dad.

Mother figures also rarely figure into fiction the way father figures do. It’s not often that the wise or experienced elder sought out by a young protagonist is a woman who has established a reputation for herself.

Here’s the thing, though: Moms aren’t defined solely by their offspring, any more than dads or other parental figures are. A heroine doesn’t stop being a heroine because a kid came into her life—she’s still a heroine, but now with a kid.

A little while back, sci-fi author Paige Daniels and I were talking about the whole dead-moms trope, which we come across a lot when reading submissions for our young adult anthology series, Brave New Girls. One of us, and I can’t remember which of us said it first, proposed pushing back against the trope with a new anthology that would simply be titled, Bad Ass Moms.

And so when my turn came to edit the annual Crazy 8 Press summer anthology, I knew exactly what I wanted the theme to be.

Paige was on board. So was the Crazy 8 Press crew. So here we are. In addition to the usual inmates of the Crazy 8 asylum, we’ve got a great slate of guest authors (including Paige, of course!). There was only one criterion for stories: that they be about a bad ass mother or mother figure.

What is a mom, anyway? To me, that’s no different from asking, “What is a person?” The possibilities are infinite, and our stories should reflect that.

We’ve got moms across the age and experience spectrum, from grandmas to new moms. We’ve got biological moms, adoptive moms, and mom figures. A mom who runs a space colony, a hard-boiled detective mom, a witch mom, a coach who’s a mom figure to her students… and much, much more.

Oh, and we’ve got a cover:

Art by Sean “MunkyWrench” Eddingfield, design by Streetlight Graphics.

And no, it’s not poorly cropped. Those words are intentionally too big for the frame. Just as the idea of a mom is too big for any box.

I’ll be kicking off a crowdfunding campaign in February to bring this vision to life, and I hope you’ll come out to support us! More to come on that as we draw closer to the campaign launch.

In the meanwhile, here’s our story lineup:

“Mama Bear” by Danielle Ackley-McPhail

“What We Bring with Us” by Derek Tyler Attico

“Pride Fight” by T. Eric Bakutis

“The Hardwicke Files: The Case of the Full Moon” by Russ Colchamiro

“Mr. EB’s Organic Sideshow” by Paige Daniels

[Title TBD] by Kathleen David

“Krysta, Warrior President” by Peter David

[Title TBD] by Mary Fan

[Title TBD] by Michael Jan Friedman

“Shoot Center” by Robert Greenberger

“The Devil You Know” by Glenn Hauman

“Shape Up, or Ship Out” by Heather Hutsell

“Jupiter Justice” by Kris Katzen

“Come In, Sit Down, Have a Bite!” by Paul Kupperberg

“The Art of Crafting Resistance” by Karissa Laurel

[Title TBD] by Khaalidah Muhammad-Ali

“Perfect Insanity” by TJ Perkins

“DuckBob in: Running Hot and Cold” by Aaron Rosenberg

“Hellbeans” by Jenifer Purcell Rosenberg

“The Songbird and Her Cage” by Joanna Schnurman

“Raising the Dead” by Hildy Silverman

[Title TBD] by Denise Sutton

Add Bad Ass Moms on Goodreads.