The Whole Haunted World #19

Bits and pieces

Hey All!

I hope you’ve been surrounded by spring renewal! Here in Southern California, our weather has been unseasonably chilly and dry…until, of course, this weekend when several major outdoor events (the L.A. Times Festival of Books, the Spooky Swap Meet) were held, and so we had torrential downpours yesterday, groan. But the events survived, and hey - we DID need that rain.

My April has shown some signs of life in other areas, too, like…well, my writing career. I got an offer on a dream non-fiction book project which my agent is currently negotiating for me, so I’ll probably be working on that for the next year. The good news is that it’s a subject I think you’re all going to love, and as my paid subscribers, you’ll get the first glimpses and juiciest tidbits as I unearth them!

For now, I’ve been trying to catch up on some reading I owed folks for critique and blurbs, and clearing out a few shorter pieces of my own. One of those shorter pieces is for a book on the films of Jack Hill, who happens to be one of my favorite exploitation directors (if you haven’t seen Spider Baby, Coffy, Foxy Brown, or Switchblade Sisters, remedy that ASAP), and it’s been a pleasure revisiting Hill’s work. The film I’ll be analyzing is one of his lesser known gems, a women-in-prison movie from 1972 called The Big Bird Cage, starring Pam Grier and Sid Haig as jungle revolutionaries who break into a women’s prison to free the inmates. This movie was the first time Grier really got to show her action side (Hill would direct her in Coffy a year later and she’d become a bona fide, box office-killing action superstar), and she is just fabulous in it (as is Haig).

I’m also working on some short stories for anthologies, and I’m still digging into the history of everyone’s favorite Biblical necromancer Simon Magus. I’d hoped to share Part 2 of my essay on Simon this week, but the more I unearth on this guy, the stranger and more incredible his story is!

So this time around it’s just a few bits that I hope you’ll enjoy.