Happy Halloween 2017




November 1, 2017 — Another Halloween Season for the books—the Necronomicon, the Handbook for the Recently Deceased, the Sanderson Sisters’ Spell Book, Tobin’s Spirit Guide, all o' dem books.

Thanks to the daily 2017 OTIS Halloween Die-ary, I don’t feel like there are a lot of loose ends for me to tie up this year. If that’s something you want to catch up on, I’ll have it up for a few days, and then I’ll be archiving it with this season’s posts in the Blog section of the site.

The Die-ary was a fun Transylvania twist on the season for me…although I don’t know if I’ll ever do it again. Definitely 51 entries on top of 36 OTIS posts and seven OTIS Club Newsletters was a lot to keep up with. I think next year, it might be either the Die-ary or the articles. Like, if I only did the Die-ary, I could do a more detailed version of it in that same stream of consciousness. Or, I guess, I could find an easier way to do the Die-ary and keep both. Like as a daily list of Halloween moments or something quick like that. Of course, I’ll probably forget all of this by the time the season resurrects next year and just Linus into the leaf pile again.

There are a few lawn bags to tie up, though. One is that I never did publish that interview with Lindsey about her experience watching Evil Dead 2 for the first time. And that’s because…she really didn’t like it. Plus our timing was bad for watching it because she was having a bad night in general. Which is sort of fine. I mean, it still would have been a valid, interesting article for me, but by the time we got around to doing it, it would have been one of the last posts of the season, and I didn’t want to end it all on a bummer note. We were once bitten by Halloween III: The Season of the Witch, you know.

It’s too bad because I think that I developed a renewed appreciation for Evil Dead 2 in re-watching it, and we’ve never had that happen (in these experiments, at least) where one of us was into it and the other wasn’t. We’ve either both loved it or both hated it (damn that Halloween III), so I think just for that reason it might have been an interesting interview.

Next, although October 31 is the end of the season, it’s the beginning of the public life of my latest (and first fiction) book. Death and Douglas is now out everywhere macabre kids novels are sold. I’d love it if you’d pick it up. If only to convince publishers to let me keep writing books. If you do like it, I’d way appreciate it if you could throw some stars at me in the reviews or tell your friends and social media peeps. I know some of you have already done so, and I’m massively grateful to you guys.

Anyway, I’ll stop being a one-man telethon and finish by saying that I hope you guys dug your own personal season or at least the OTIS season or at least at least had more good times than bad this season. For those of you who had too much bad, my sincere condolences and here’s to next year trying again! That’s how we do it.

And now I need to go de-Halloween the house. Both inside and out.

Happy Halloween!