My Horrorfind Weekend reading time has been changed. (Thank you, Nikki!!) I’m now reading at 6 p.m. on Saturday, and am paired with the mega-talented and feisty Beth Massey. I was at her reading last year. You don’t want to miss her. Well, you know … you want to come for me, too.
Anyhoo, I’m having some trouble deciding what to read. I just don’t produce much short fiction anymore. Supposedly, Seven Days in Benevolence will be ready for Horrorfind, but it’s less than two weeks away and I haven’t received the new proofs yet. If I knew it would be out and I’d have copies on-hand, I might read an excerpt. That’s what I did at Conestoga, and frankly I feel like it didn’t go over so well. A haunted house story really depends on that building atmosphere, and picking a scene out of the middle just doesn’t work.
I could read from Ulrik, but God knows when that book might really appear. Crap! I just remembered I promised an excerpt of that story to Werewolf Magazine. Gotta get on that immediately. The upside to reading from Ulrik is that almost anybody coming to hear me will be familiar with Shara and maybe interested in the sequel.
Or I could read from the unsold Amara’s Prayer or Little Graveyard on the Prairie or even this new novella I’m still calling Pain. Lots of people do that. I think reading from Little Graveyard would have the same problem as reading from Seven Days, since they’re both ghost stories that depend on build-up. The prologue to Amara’s Prayer might work.
There’s the bar-clearing gross-out story “Dead Betty.” This audience probably wouldn’t walk out during the zombie oral sex like the folks at Galileo’s did last October. There’s “New Moon,” but early readers don’t like the main character, so maybe not that one. There’s the redneck werewolf video dating piece that I finally took another look at the other day. It’s not as bad as I feared, but nothing really happens in it, either. However, it does have some humor to it, and that seems to go over well. I can’t read “Noodlers Nab Nekkid Nymphs” again, though it’s probably my best piece for public reading where there’s no content restrictions.
The dating video piece is short. I can read it in under 10 minutes (it’s only four pages long). My Okie twang works in it. The prologue for Amara’s Prayer is short, too. It’s serious, and has some nice gore in it. Maybe I can do both of them. Hmm.
What are your thoughts. Those of you who, for whatever reason, read this journal have heard about most of these pieces. Based on what you know, what would you want to hear?
Steven E. Wedel 
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