I might be a liar, but I'm not dead yet, or, My blog posts are still just as pointless and rambling as ever...

Hey there, ‘you still here? I promise, I won’t keep you long. Sorry. No, really, I’m sorry. Quite a few months ago now, I promised that I’d make a better go of this whole blogging thing. Hell, I even went to the extent of reintroducing myself. In my defence, I have said before that I’ve never been the most prolific of bloggers – I have to find the time to scour the corners of my mind just to figure out whether I’ve actually done anything worth blogging about. More often than not, I end up coming to the same conclusion; No, I haven’t.

 
I have been busy though. Honest.
 
Remember a while back, I made mention of a work in progress that I’d picked up several times, only for it to fall by the wayside? Well, guess what? In the meantime it crossed the finish line!
 
Penance has been quite some time coming, a novel several years in the making, thanks in no small part to the several forced hiatuses – the cause of which I’ve mentioned before and won’t again. It’s played the dual role of labour of love and neck-embracing albatross, a source of frustration during those times when I neglected it. It’s everything that you might expect from me by now: dark, bleak, violent. It also ended up possibly becoming a little more autobiographical than I anticipated, but I’ll leave that aspect of it for you to figure out. Penance is a love letter, a throwback to ‘80s horror, and probably the closest I’ve come to writing something that I would consider pure, traditional horror, whatever the fuck that might be. Whatever, I'm proud of it.

I’ve also recently recorded an interview with Chris Corvan of the Dripping Creativity/Creative Café podcast. Chris is a great host, and he even managed to coax a few things out of me of the sort that I’m sometimes a bit reluctant to talk about. On YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts, I’ll give more details on that when it’s available.
 
About Penance though: I set the novel in a specific time period for a main reason; life was simpler back then. No internet, no mobile phones, none of those pesky little things that we now take for granted and can be such a thorn in the arse when it comes to writing genre fiction. Someone following you? Call for help. Need advice on how to dispatch a demonic entity? Google it. You know what I mean, right? Yeah, life was simpler but here’s a thing; it sure as hell wasn’t any safer, and it mystifies me when some people claim otherwise. There’s always been evil in the world, it’s just that it’s so much easier to find now. The news constantly drip feeds us ghoulish details of each new disaster, every new thing to be terrified of. That doesn’t mean that we suddenly live in some horrific dystopia, just that the bad stuff has become that little bit harder to turn a blind eye to. Modernity has ensured that we can’t pretend the boogeyman doesn’t exist. The horrors are real, they’ve always been real, and they always will be real. Anyone who says otherwise is either full of shit, or blinkered to reality. Life is a dystopia, and happy endings are for fairy tales.

And as long as those horrors are real, I’ll keep dreaming up ways of writing about them, because, it’s how I cope, it's how I like to keep those nagging voices that I'm so fond of name-dropping at bay. I labour under my own delusion that, if I try to write about the worst that can happen, then perhaps it won’t happen. It probably doesn’t help, but at least I try. Anyway, on that note, thanks for sticking around, to anyone reading this: I fuckin' love ya!

That’s my lot for now, novel #5 ain’t gonna write itself. Laters,
Love,
- L