H.A. Wickenden

Just a few days until Halloween. I'm looking for horror short stories in the vein of Shirley Jackson- unsettling, a little gothic. Recommendations of authors or anthologies from the ether?
#booksky 🩸📚

The Manchurian Candidate, except instead of a presidential candidate it's three of the five people in the focus group the DNC is apparently relying on to decide what to do.

When did Halloween become about buying the biggest plastic junk from Lowe's for your yard, and not what it was about when I was a child, which was stress-testing your pancreas annually?

I'm giving out 13 free digital (Amazon) copies of my new horror short story collection, Lonely Souls at Lakeside Cemetery- if you or someone you know would be interested in food truck witches, porch ghosts, or teenage angst in a small town, drop me a message. First come, first serve.
#horrorsky 🩸📚

Sometimes I think there's a Spiders Georg issue in publishing where it looks like it's a lucrative industry but actually it's just James Patterson's mills and then everyone else is sort of a rounding error.

Shares in 'Room full of fireworks Inc." ended higher today after crazy old man wandering around the room promises to only light five or six fuses instead of ten as originally ranted. Investors are upbeat about this trend.

Mixed feelings when the little town down the road gets a mention in a podcast, but it's a podcast with Paul Holes.

Kids were watching a cartoon and there was a constellation of cheese and I said it was Caseinoppeia and my genius is wasted here.

I think this is one of the things you're not supposed to admit to people, but the only time I like cinnamon raisin bagels is when they're next to the everything bagels for a while.

Blue, Song 2, Starship Troopers. Did not appear in the film. Comes on the radio and I'm back in high school watching Casper Van Dien splattering CGI bugs all over the place.

Add "Insta Baddie" to "List of phrases I heard before I knew what it meant and what I pictured it meant was way cooler than it actually is."

One of those rainy New England spring days where everything is starting to get lush and overgrown.
In the winter I look out in the woods and think, "Everything's dead there; the forest will eat me because it's hungry."
Now I look out there and think, "There's so many places for things to hide."

I just received a screenshot of a .pdf as a submission for an assignment from a student.
Something something back in MY DAY floppy disks something something.

Canvas has the ability to plug in "tentative grades" to see how it impacts their total and let me tell you that sounds great on paper but the number of times I'm sitting there hearing "I just need a 93 on this test to stay on the team" and I'm thinking, "Oh, please don't do that to yourself."...

Absolutely worth the trip and let them know you're coming. They're a real treasure for authors and book lovers. Plus, great cafe on-site...

Never actually heard "Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" until today and man does it go hard.
Songs that tell true stories? Suggestions?
#music

Made my day to see @katebeaton.bsky.social here on Bluesky.
Hark! A Vagrant was wonderfully goofy and erudite, and Ducks, her graphic memoir, is one of those works that has stuck with me: clear-eyed and human and funny and heartbreaking.

I'm not even that much of a Star Wars fan but even I know it should be "Forest moon of Andor".

Drinking my Irish Breakfast; realizing it sounds a little like a racist admission of an alcohol problem.

For all you short story writers out there.
With an anthology- how do you decide what makes the cut? Rely on beta readers? How often do you leave a story on the cutting-room floor?
There's some stories here I like better than others, but I don't know if it's darling-murdering time or what.
#booksky

Headline that says mushrooms may talk to one another with up to 50 words

so they're mycoblogging

If you have a window with direct sunlight may I recommend a prism? 'cause that's straight up magic.
Also, it reminds us that sunlight is woke.

Don't forget "masculinity". Not sure how, but Fox News will tell you later.

The NPR, PBS Grift Has Ripped Us Off for Too Long For years, American taxpayers have been on the hook for subsidizing National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), which spread

As a biologist, I'm appalled at pride the White House takes in willful ignorance.

In yesterday's executive order about NPR and PBS, their first example of "the trash that passes for `news' at NPR and PBS" is the statement that "banana slugs are hermaphrodites."

But this is unequivocal fact.

It seems like having a bunch of bumperstickers/flags/tweets that generally celebrate violence against the state, and then a bunch of bumperstickers/flags/tweets that generally celebrate violence done on behalf of the state, you don't have a political philosophy so much as an underlying pathology.

Local fraternal organizations have fundraisers called "meat raffles" and I always think it sounds like Clive Barker's homage to Shirley Jackson.

Fresh Hell? In this economy?!
*Goes to Job Lot to buy a years' worth of canned Hell*

People need to get over the "he's a businessman, he'll be transactional" mindset.
He cosplayed a businessman. He's a bully + predator: if there's something he wants and he thinks he has power over it, the "offer" is not a transaction. It's him assuming he can get whatever he wants by asking.

It's weird to have mixed feelings about this, right?

Misread "Cleveland Cavaliers" as "Cleveland Clavicles" and I think more sports teams should be named after underappreciated bones. Looking at you, Roller Derby. Phoenix Phalanges. Halifax Hyoids. Baltimore Baculums.