Hey Guys and Gals:
I know that is a whole lot of stuff to put in a subject line but this blog has been banging around in my head for months and I figure I better get it out or (you never know) the head just may explode.
Gotta relieve that pressure.
Last year I was one of the guests at KillerCon 2009. It was a fun time even though the career development that was the purpose for going never came to be. (I’ll keep my own assumptions on the reasons for that to myself.)
Me and my wife Judi met some great people: Our favorite couple had to be Pat and Jenny Smock. Jenny is published as Jennifer Carress. She’s the wonderful author of the Perverted Realities series. They are extremely friendly people and we had a great time with them. A down to Earth couple who are just as silly as me and Judi is. That’s great!
Also great to meet was one of my favorite guys to read Joe R. Lansdale. He was friendly and put up with me hanging around like the starry eyed fan that I was. He gave me a great deal on a book I had never been able to get my hands on either through a library or through Amazon: The Drive-In The Bus Tour. So, now I’m going to break out in Book Reviewer Mode:
First of all, all three books get a very big 5 stars out of 5 rating. If you want me to tell you about flaws in these three wild ass, off the wall, totally strange sci-fi adventures I’m not going to do it. Plainly put, all three books were fun as hell to read and that’s my main criteria for reading a book. Besides, I didn’t really see any flaws.
The Drive-In (A B-Movie with Blood and Popcorn, Made in Texas.)
This is the beginning of it all, where going to an all-night horror show at the drive-in does not end up being the fun time that everybody thought it was going to be. I am going to attempt to not give any plot details at all but to wet your appetites so that you do grab this book. All I’m going to tell you is that The Orbit Drive-In is ripped away from the Earth and all kinds of weird mayhem takes place. You’ll have to read the book to find out what the mayhem is and even then it’s going to be hard to believe what you are reading!
The Drive-In 2 (Not Just One of Them Sequels)
Where everybody gets to leave the Drive-In, but they can’t go home. The weirdness gets weirder. There’s dinosaurs, aliens and always popcorn. Guess Lansdale really does like his popcorn. The world just ain’t what it used to be for the movie-goers. This was a wild sequel.
The Drive-In: The Bus Tour
Where our heroes get a bus that they make float on an ocean, get (I shit you not)swallowed by a whale and maybe meet God and maybe discover the meaning of life. Is it fun as hell? Oh yeah. Is it inventive? Oh Hell yeah! Is it profound? Maybe.
I definitely recommend these books if you can get hold of them. I checked and there’s a few left at Amazon.
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Now, On with the second act of the show:
Going public on: Blood On Celluloid-this is a book that I have gotten a bit of grief for writing and that’s the reason why I feel as though I should explain why I did it and why I will never remove the book. I have a niece that is an adopted child from China. When I heard what happens to a lot of kids from Asia and believe it or not poor children in America it really pissed me off. To put it bluntly, it’s wrong for wealthy men to sexually abuse women and children and get away with it because they have the money to hide what they do. That’s about as plain as I can state it.
I did a bit of research and found out that there are organizations that dedicate themselves against the exploitation of women and children. (Here is where I am going to get very vague because I do not want to cast any organization that takes on a task as hard as that one in a bad light. I will not name names here.)
Before I wrote Blood On Celluloid I wrote one of those organizations and informed them of my intention of writing a novel that has human trafficking as the main focus of the story and donating all the royalties from that book to their organization. Their answer was a simple, we appreciate any and all support.
I guess a lot of people say they are going to do something but never follow through. Anyway, to make a long story short I wrote Blood On Celluloid and it took me around 9 months to finish it. It was the only book that I had to force myself to get through. The way I write a book means that emotionally I experience what the lead characters go through. That time it was like experiencing a nightmare while being wide awake and going through it on a daily basis for nine months. By the time I was done with BOC I was mentally exhausted as far as wanting to write another book. I knew I definitely never wanted to go through that again.
I informed the above mentioned organization that the book was done and got no response. At that point it didn’t really make any difference anyway. I didn’t have a publisher for that book or any of the John Dark Books so them not getting the royalties from nothing didn’t really matter.
Fast forward a few years and I landed a publishing contract with StoneGarden.net Publishing, a small press publisher who accepted all three J.D.Books. I still wanted to do some good in the world. (No matter how small that might be.) I attempted to contact the unnamed organization again. This time I got a response that said that because I have been published in the Horror field they didn’t want their name associated with me.
Interesting.
I wonder if they would have pulled this on a Dean Koontz or well any well known author. The bottom line is, every author takes pride in his work. Well known or unknown, we have to feel what we do is worthwhile or we would never get through the drudgery of what creating a novel is.
I will state here that I am not ashamed of my work in the horror field. I consider horror stories to be hero stories where the bad guys are just so bad that they are scary as hell. At least that’s the way I do them. All of my proceeds from Blood On Celluloid is going to charity. I donate it to whatever charity seems to be doing some good in the world.
Because of my background of pulling myself up from a very dark place in life I have had people turn their noses up at me in the past. That’s fine, but it doesn’t mean I have to like it or will cooperate with it. In the past I have been very uncomfortable with talking about my motivations for doing BOC. Human trafficking is a hard subject to talk about or look at. Our politicians, the same ones who get elected by telling everyone how they only want to do good for people, pretty much ignore this. If BOC gets just a few people to take notice of this horrible problem then it will have been worth it.
I always sign the book: Fight the good fight, always!
That’s the way I feel about that.
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On to the third and final act of the day:
John Carter of Mars & Public Domain Properties-
Like a lot of kids I got hooked on reading when I ran into a book by Edgar Rice Burroughs. For me it was The Gods of Mars. I spent a lot of my time on Barsoom because it was more fun to go hang out with the Green Martians and fight Blue Plant Men than it was to hang out with anybody around my own neighborhood. John Carter, Deja Thoris, Tars Tarkus and all the gang brought a lot of color to the drab existence that I figured my young pre-teen life was.
I read every book by ERB that I could get my hands on.
Not only did I spend time on Mars but I visited Venus, Pellucidar, the Moon, and even traveled to Beyond The Farthest Star. I loved those places. I lived there and they became a part of me. I learned a whole lot from those books. Things like a sense of honor and justice that was black and white. In those books if somebody did wrong they paid for it. The good guys just about always won and the bad guys just about always lost.
It was predictable but so what. In a Burroughs book, the Universe operated according to rules that we all understood. Those books also imparted a kind of rough moral code that was simple and realistic. Do good as much as you can and always fight against evil. Although I have strayed on occasion I have (especially in recent years) tried to live by those simple rules.
Now on to rules that I learned as an adult and some information new to me: Every since I was a kid I wanted to add something to a series of books by ERB because of what he gave to me. After I started getting some short stories published I sent a letter to Burroughs inc. and asked for permission to do so.
I got no answer.
I sent an email asking the same thing.
I got no answer.
Interesting. If I have learned nothing else from all my years in the work force it is that to be a professional you must do the tasks that are not pleasant. If they didn’t want me to add something to an ERB series they should have answered and said why.
Now about the new information: Recently I met an author who was using well known characters in books that he writes and making a pretty good profit by doing it. He didn’t create the characters. They came out of very old books that were familiar to everybody. Using those characters created instant name recognition. When I asked him how he got away with it he informed me that the books they came from were in PUBLIC DOMAIN. (Those words are not all in caps because I hit the caps lock and forgot to take it off. I want to emphasize PUBLIC DOMAIN.)
Most of Edgar Rice Burroughs books are now in PUBLIC DOMAIN.
The Edgar Rice Burroughs books being in public domain means that I can do anything with them that I want to.
If you don’t believe me just check out a recent movie by the name of A Princess of Mars that stars Tracie Lords. I’d bet anything that ERB’s relatives never OK’d anything about that movie.
If I should so choose to add (unauthorized) to any series by ERB I will do so. If I learned anything from my late father Bob L. Morgan Sr. it’s that if you really want to do something you had better do it while you can. As far as we know we only have one life to live.
Get done what you need to.
And by the way, I do have some projects that I am currently working on so it will definitely not be this year before I get around to adding anything to an ERB series. If anybody wants to beat me to it and add something to an ERB series then let me know and I’d like to read it. I did enjoy the John Eric Holmes novel Mahars of Pellucidar and would probably enjoy other authors adding to any series that ERB started.
My own motivation is that I would like to give somebody an experience like what I had when I first read ERB. If I can do that, then all will be right in my writing world.
And that’s all folks!
Take Care
Have Fun
B.L.Morgan
The Creator of The John Dark Books
YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!!!
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