Dat writin

Getting in to the mood to write fiction is very difficult, but when I'm there, I stay that way for a long time. My job is settled in, music is steady and recording is NOT fun, but I am finally in a place where I can sit down by myself late at night and be a solitary fiction junkie.

I can't even think about novel length stuff right now, so expect a short tonight. It might be REALLY short. I don't know yet, but yeah, at around 3am. Peace out for now. Hope your funday Monday is going as well as it can...

A Little Gratitude is in Order

My mother is the person who told me to pick up a book and read it for fun instead of a video game controller. She got me excited about things I couldn't see, except in my head. In many ways, she is the person responsible for my love of all things storytelling, and because that is one of the greatest passions in my life, I will forever be grateful for it.

Consider this a thank you for today, and for the past, when I dropped 5 bucks on a card and gave it to you, as if it had come "from my heart." I've always wanted to write you something, but I'm horrible and poetry, so I thought I'd write a top five list of my most fond mother memories.

5) Orange juice spilling at a red light before Kindergarten class. You changed my clothes, dried my tears up, and taught me an early life lesson. Accidents happen. Sometimes they are out of your control.

4) You coming to pick me up from YMCA day camp when the mean kid broke in to my locker and busted my glasses on purpose.

3) You taking me out to eat at Po Folks when I wrote the "I Like Hendersonville" essay, and telling me how proud you were of me on that day.

2) You taking me to Waldenbooks on Saturdays to pick out a new Goosebumps, or whatever series/story I was in to at any given moment.

1) You being there for me the night I saw "The Ring," had a nightmare, screamed, and had to literally crawl in to your bed when I was sixteen years old because I was so terrified.

You are an amazing mother, and I feel blessed every day to have strong, loving women in my life.

So thank you, and happy mother's day.

Goodbye Dark Recesses...

I made the final issue of Dark Recesses before their online publication stops circulating. Wrote "Club" two years ago when I first got on creepypasta, and glad to see it's found a permanent home. Also check out the stories "Three Grams" and "On the Lovecraftian Ghetto," by two other very talented authors. You can download the final edition for FREE here:

http://cuttingblock.net/darkrecesses.html

I am hard at work, like always when Spring time hits. Thanks for stopping in. Dark Recesses and Cutting Block Press, we'll miss you!

Meta

Playing music four nights a week, working forty hours, and even the weekends feel like a job at the moment. I am still writing, but alas, it will be a minute before I have ten chapters of LB rewrite up. Thanks for your patience!

-VH

Necromaster (incomplete)

I.

I started all of this at the end of round one, before I learned that there is far more power in the company of death rather than a futile struggle, day to day, clinging to the fragile coils of life. It's a lie that rules over all of humanity as we cherish and bow down to it, obsessed with prolonging our end. I was like everyone else once, during my first chance that I pissed down the toilet over the course of seventy years. Anyone who says they're not afraid of death --- that they're "at peace," or that it's "their time to go" --- they're lying.

But this is your moment, when you have the opportunity to change and open your mind to something different. There is real power to be gained, and I've made it very difficult for those I've chosen to seek out this grimoire. This will be my final message before the cogath.

There is nothing to be afraid of if you are willing to learn.

I'm only different than you because I've learned the truth. I've defected from the gruel and grievous circle of lies, and entered the deceptively sweet embrace of death. My second chance didn't come with exercise or good diets or vitamins. Life was a monotonous letdown. The gift came to me, a very unworthy and clueless old wretch, and it's a wonder at all that I discovered the blessings of death before I tried to off myself. But that's not what happened.

This is about a lot of things. It's about making all of you realize that you need to wake up. You've forgotten what it means to survive. You devour gluttonous value meals from drive throughs and fry your minds in front of digital displays for hours and hours at a time, and every single facet of living has been spoonfed to you from a silver bowl of shit. That's what I call this pathetic sideshow of paychecks and miles per gallon and reform bills that inspire panic because you're all going to lose pieces of paper from your wallets or digital ones and zeroes inside bank computers that tell you how successful you are and whether you can have a new Mercedes since your Lexus is over five years old.

Life is billioning everywhere, but the real potential of the human race has wasted away slowly. So this about a worldwide reminder. When the graveyards start erupting and soccer moms are robbing their neighbor's house for a revolver, they will be reminded. They will know what it means to deserve life, and they will pay an instant fine for years of cheating death. They will go from being afraid of the internal revenue service to being afraid of the mean alcoholic uncle they buried four years ago when he shows up hungry at their front door. They'll be freezing and diseased in forests and caves and fields, hunkered down and fearing sleep without another breathing partner to keep watch.

The government will call it bio-terrorism, the churches will call it the end of days, and the Twitter addicts will try to popularize YODO instead of YOLO.

And still, they will cling to the lie of life. Consider yourself fortunate.

You and I will call it the cogath dar marbh. In English, it means war of the dead. It's from the old tongue, when the Gaelic chomhairle tried in vain to do what I am about to attempt. Their druid enemies stopped them.

It's been exactly one thousand years since my ancestor failed the ritual. I stay in contact with him on a regular basis. His favorite sacrifice is a twenty something redhead.

So this is about making him proud, and giving back to my otherwordly community that has granted me authority over life itself. It's about returning power with power in return, quid pro quo.

Will you be one of them, or will you accept my gift?

Before you go any further, I would advise you to visit the cemetery of your family's legacy, gather up the remains of your loved ones, and grant them peace from the impending chaos.

Cremate them. Your mother will thank you on the other side later.

II.

The first steps have been taken. Let us take a moment to mourn your old existence, because it's only natural to have those feelings. Kiss it goodbye.

It's been bred in to you to chase these intangible and incessantly insane things called dreams. You can do achieve anything if you work hard enough. This what you're told when you're young, because we only have so much time on this earth, and the people who think they have the power and the control know they have a lot of money to make off you believing this. I worked hard for over thirty years at a company I started myself, only to get backstabbed by my partner. I'm a quadruple divorcee. I was depressed and eating valium because I made seven figures instead of eight. This is what life and dreamchasing does to you.

The cost of what will be required of you is astronomical. You think I don't know you, but I do. You care about three things. Money, sex, and power. These three motivations rule the world of the living. Some would attempt to question the big three, perhaps bringing up futile concepts like love and goodness, but those people are worthless to me. They won't be approached or instructed like you. You are depraved like me. That's why you've been given the opportuntiy to learn.

Lesson number one. Nothing comes without sacrifice. Absolutely nothing. This also proves true in life, but death is a much more forgiving teacher. You've put in hard work to get something you want out of life. Nice things, a pretty girlfriend, whatever. What's valuable in life is not valuable in death.

There is no big three. You will prosper through asking of what is required of you in the nether. I am your instructor, but I don't hold you accountable. More about that later.

For now, I need you to forget about morals and right and wrong. You are going to kill people, but in the process, you will make them something bigger than they could have ever hoped to become in life. You will spill blood. You will cause suffering, and you will love it.

Order number one. You need a partner in crime, and I don't expect you to do this alone. As I said before, death leaves you a lot of room for poetic license and creativity. You need to find yourself a living, breathing thing that's not human. I used my house pet and turned her in to vicious hell hound, but I leave the choice to you. The first step to gaining potency in your rituals requires something to keep watch over you as you commune with the dead. As you drift about the nether, you will be protected from the raging spirits of old, but you will be vulnerable in the real world.

What is left of the Gaelic rituals can be found in the Munich manual of demonic magic. Nearly all of the terms and superstitions outlined within it are inaccurate, but there are detailed instructions for creating a familiar. Read it, create your circle, and bleed out the old husk of your chosen animal.

When the last drop of blood falls, you will witness the opening of the nether for the first time.

I will not be there waiting for you, but rather, you will attune yourself and converse with the first spirit drawn to the body of the animal. Do what it asks of you, no matter what the request.

Should you succeed, then I assure you that I will be aware of it.

III.

You've made quite an interesting choice, my little necrolyte. I saw you, screaming and covered in blood, with your circle crudely etched in the wood by a shaky hand. Fortunately, a perfect circle wasn't required by the particular spirit who came to you. I appointed it specifically to your induction due to its chaotic tendencies. It felt the grave sense of terror in your gut with the bleeding fox on your lap, and it was grateful to consume such a strongly human emotion.

And you were grateful to have it taken away from you. How does it feel, knowing that you will never fall prey to fear again? It's been ages for me, but I've never forgotten myself.

I watched the entire ordeal. I saw your face contort with tears and regret, only to shift in one glorious moment as you wrapped your clutches around the first hint of necropotence. Your open, screaming mouth became a beautifully sadistic grin when the fox rose again. From a pitiful, dying and broken thing to a stalwart guardian of your legacy. How long that legacy persists is an entirely new question altogether.

Lesson number two. The pleasures of the world are meaningless to you now. and so are the consequences. Maybe you had thoughts of changing your appearance, of sucking the life from someone you hate, only to change the circumstances of your mortal life and get a second whirl at things. I don't blame you for these feelings at all, for I must admit I fell victim to them at first. I murdered my boss and my wife, I looked to be in my twenties, and my first inclination was to hit the town and find a nice, lovely piece of college ass. But there are things you don't realize.

Forget about your "nether regions" and burying them in pussy, or painting the town red and impressing people who don't matter by creating little green lights that dance on the ends of your fingertips. You have a new center of pleasure now. Remember that money and sex mean nothing, and when you bleed out your first victim and make your first offer of blood, you will be filled with such elation, with such physical pleasure, that you will forever regard humans as a snack for your brethren across the veil. They have much greater things to offer you in return for your service than a three second orgasm.

Forget about the police or any fears of worldly justice. There is nothing capable of punishing you except for what lies in the nether itself. Well .... and me, should you fail miserably and waste my time so close to the hour of our war.

Order number two. Your familiar is ready, but ninety percent of you is still pathetically human and therefore very weak. You will have to create your own pumice stone for mixing the blood of your offerings. To command the dead, they must respect you as they respect me, which means you need to become as close to your master as physically possible. Draining the blood of one will bring you a longer lifespan and restore wrinkles, but draining the blood of ten at a time, mixing them in to a grisly soup, and then offering it will allow you to learn new techniques and rituals. There's more to being a necromancer than living forever and drawing circles. You will learn to transform blood and bone in to shockwaves that will bring buildings to rubble. You will learn how to enslave any living, breathing thing indefinitely, so that it might do your bidding for eternity. You will learn a great many things, but none of them will come to fruition without a pumice stone.

Any solid object will do. Mine was given to me by one of the last remaining chomhairle when I was a child, crafted from a piece of stonehenge itself. It's important you understand that the object itself is simply a medium. You don't need some special keepsake like the pocket knife your grandfather gave you before he passed away. You can use a roll of toilet paper if you'd like (although you may become the brunt of many a sideways snicker at the hands of your necromantic brothers for doing so).

When you've chosen your object, create a new circle (which should look much better, considering the excitement I feel in you, rather than fear and trepidation), and find your first blood offering. It would accelerate your progress if you could select someone particularly special to you, be that in a positive or negative way. Very soon, your old girlfriend or your Monday night football buddy will become fodder for the corpses, so in a way, should you slice up and bleed out someone in your social circle, you are saving them from a much more grisly fate later. You will carry them with you, and at times, you may hear their whispers and screams from the object itself.

The choice is up to you. Take them alive, and ensure that every last drop touches your pumice. It will devour the blood like a rabid beast, and you will once again open the nether.

Enjoy the flood of youth and real power. This is your first kill, and it is your first step to belonging with your prestigiously gruesome family of the macabre.

I will be watching.

IV.

<c>

 ( This is what I have that isn't being edited/changed at the moment, hope you enjoyed the opening hook, stay tuned. Thanks - VH)

Liquid Blue (40,000 words, last edited 8/22/12)

Google Docs Link:

Liquid Blue

This is exactly half of the book. I can guarantee that it will change somewhat, getting chopped and edited as I tack on the last fifteen chapters. I'm trying to make sure everything lines up, that my characters make sense in what they say and do, and I also want more of a horror element and less of a dark fantasy tone.

In the chapters following this shared half, David will become a vampire, Mercer's war will hit the streets and bring the Shroud to its knees, the war of the dead will be looming just behind the current list of problems the vampires face as an entire species, and the six bloodlines will be fleshed out with characters introduced from each of them.

I'm very much looking forward to sharing the rest of the book, but for now, this is what I have that feels somewhat presentable. You would think after three years of doing this and one novel already under my belt that I would get rid of the "stage fright" that comes with self-consciously sharing your mind with the world, but I doubt it will ever disappear completely.

I'm still working on it, but vampires are very dear to me (as well as zombies), and I hope I can bring them back to their true element and give them the justice that Twilight slowly cheated them out of, one retarded sappy chapter after another.

Au revoir, and thanks for reading. I'll have more soon, as well as Necromaster and some more side-plots that run canon with the Liquid Blue universe.

Cogath dar marbh!

-Drew W / VH

Install, PULP!, and other great horror shorts.

Twit Publishing has released their new anthology (which includes "Install") through print, Kindle, and Smashwords.

I stayed up until 4am last night reading the stories from the other authors in this collection, and I can assure you that if you're a creepypasta lover, these are definitely right up your alley. If you want the hardcover edition with my first published short story ever, you can order it from them, or you can grab it on Kindle for $2.99.

Here's the link, and I hope you enjoy these stories as much as I did:

http://www.twitpublishing.com/CatalogWS2011.html