Welcome to the Horror Roundtable
Get yourself a drink and pull up a seat. Put your feet up. Welcome to the Roundtable, a public discussion about all things writing. A monthly virtual horror panel, if you will.
Roundtable 4
Date: September 10 – 16, 2012
Start Time: 3pm Pacific Daylight Time (check the Time Zone Converter)
The Darkness of Being Human
Special Guests: Rick Hautala, Joseph Nassise, Lisa Morton, and Christopher Conlon.
How do you create characters that end up walking down dark and dangerous paths? Also, taking it a little further, what makes a good villain or ‘bad guy’ in fiction? We’ll cover some memorable antagonists and discuss what makes them so good—or bad. Like that saying, a madman who knows he is mad, isn’t, some of the best ‘baddies’ are those who don’t know they’re bad, or who aren’t bad but aren’t exactly doing good things.
Let’s explore the dark side of a character’s humanity, in all its shadowy guises…
Guests for Roundtable 4
Rick Hautala: under his own name, Rick Hautala has written around thirty novels, including the million-copy best seller Nightstone, as well as Winter Wake, The Mountain King, and Little Brothers. He has previously published two short story collections: Bedbugs and Occasional Demons. He has had over sixty short stories published in a variety of national and international anthologies and magazines.
Writing as A. J. Matthews, his novels include the bestsellers The White Room, Looking Glass, Follow, and Unbroken.
With Mark Steensland, he has written several screenplays, included the multiple award-winning short film Peekers, based on the short story by Kealan Patrick Burke; The Ugly File, based on the short story by Ed Gorman; and Lovecraft’s Pillow, inspired by a suggestion from Stephen King.
In 2012, he was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Horror Writers’ Association.
Most of his books and stories—and all of them, soon—will be available in all major e-book formats from a variety of e-publishers. For more information, check out his website www.rickhautala.com.
Joseph Nassise is the author of more than a dozen novels, including the internationally bestselling TEMPLAR CHRONICLES series, the JEREMIAH HUNT trilogy, and the GREAT UNDEAD WAR series. He has also written several books in the popular Rogue Angel action-adventure series.
He’s a former president of the Horror Writers Association as well as a multiple Bram Stoker Award and International Horror Guild Award nominee.
For more information about Joe’s work, visit him on the web at www.josephnassise.com.
Lisa Morton is a screenwriter, author of more than 50 works of short fiction, and a Halloween expert. Her novel THE CASTLE OF LOS ANGELES received the 2010 Bram Stoker Award for First Novel, and her novella THE LUCID DREAMING won the award for Long Fiction. She has also received the Black Quill Award (for editing the anthology MIDNIGHT WALK), and was listed in the American Library Association’s READERS ADVISORY GUIDE TO HORROR as one of the genre’s leading “Ladies of the Night”. She lives in North Hollywood, California and online at www.lisamorton.com.
Christopher Conlon is best known as the editor of the Bram Stoker Award-winning Richard Matheson tribute anthology He Is Legend (Gauntlet/Tor), which was a selection of the Science Fiction Book Club and has appeared in several foreign translations. Conlon’s first two novels, Midnight on Mourn Street and A Matrix of Angels, were both finalists for the Bram Stoker Award; his third, Lullaby for the Rain Girl, was recently published. He has written three books of short stories, the newest of which is the flash fiction collection Herding Ravens; a stage adaptation of Midnight on Mourn Street; and four books of poems, including Starkweather Dreams, winner of The Black Glove’s Horrorhead Award. His anthology Poe’s Lighthouse, originally published by Cemetery Dance, was reprinted in paperback this year by Wicker Park Press. A former Peace Corps Volunteer, Conlon holds an M.A. in American Literature and lives in Silver Spring, Maryland. Find him at www.christopherconlon.com and http://chrisconlon.livejournal.com.
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The discussion will be open to comments from the general public after the first hour, and will remain open until 3pm Pacific Daylight Time, Sunday the 16th of September, so please feel free to add to the discussion.
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