Read something new this weekend. Every Friday, I’ll recommend a short story, novel, comic, or graphic novel that’s sure to tickle your fancy and help you forget the trials and tribulations of the previous week.

Created by Manly Wade Wellman, Silver John is a wanderer who roams the Appalachian mountains of North Carolina, encountering all sorts of dangerous creatures and evil mystics. Carrying only a silver-stringed guitar, John triumphs over evil time and again with only his wit and good luck, and he almost always has a song in his heart.  The first of the Silver John novels is titled The Old Gods Waken, followed by After Dark, The Lost and Lurking, The Hanging Stones, and Voice of the Mountain.  A number of short stories featuring the character have also been published over the years, and I believe they’ve been collected a few times.  Each book stands alone and is fairly short, but every page is rich with atmosphere, immersing the reader in regional flavor and southern dialect.  You could do much worse than treat yourself to these tales of mysterious mountain folk, druids, backwoods legends, and Satanism.

My own story, Countless Haints, is inspired to some degree by Wellman’s folksy fantasy tales.

Writers — or so my wife says — like to complain.  We complain about slow magazine response times.  We complain about editors.  We complain about writer’s block.  Maybe more than anything else, we complain about time … or lack thereof.  One of the questions I hear over and over again is, “How do you make time to write?”  Today I thought I’d take a few minutes to address one of the most vicious time-killers around — the new fall television season. We all have our favorite shows, and some of those new programs look like they might be fun.  But if you aren’t careful, you’ll be spending even more time in front of ye old idiot box.  That mean’s you’ll have even less time to exercise your typing fingers.  And that means you’ll complain to your spouse about it even more frequently.  Growing weary of your sniveling, he or she will leave you, taking half or more of your precious fortune, leaving you in the gutter to lead a sad, meaningless existence until you die of some insidious infection. So really I’m saving your life.Here are a few tips to help you avoid an untimely demise at the hands of your big screen.  Take what you will and leave the rest.1 – Ration your TV time.  Pick a certain number of shows to watch.  Say, five or six.  Don’t watch anything else.  You get to enjoy the best of the best and forget everything else.2 – Set up a specific time (and place) to write and stick to it.  Even an hour a day will work (although two would be even better).  Find a nice, quiet place away from the TV.  Put on headphones so you can’t hear your family members watching Manimal in the other room.  If you really have no willpower and you’re able to do so, consider staying late at work (off the clock, of course) to write after your co-workers have left for the day.  Like pudding after veggies, don’t reward yourself with the TV unless you’ve done your writing. 3 - Trim the fat.  Get yourself a DVR, Tivo, or good old-fashioned VCR and start taping your favorite shows.  After you’re done writing, watch them and skip the commercials.  Let’s say an hour show has fifteen minutes of commercials (sometimes more than that).  If you skip the ads on just two shows a night, you earn yourself an extra thirty minutes.4 – Wait a week.  Don’t watch all those recorded shows right away.  Let them ferment for a few days.  You’ll be surprised how many of them you decide to delete without watching.5 - Don’t be afraid of spoilers.  I hate spoilers as much as the next person, but if someone tells me the big surprise ending of last night’s episode of Small Wonder, I’m probably not going to bother watching it.  They deserve a medal for contributing to my success as a writer.6 – For pity’s sake, stop watching bad TV.  I’m not commenting on the quality of the shows you watch.  I like a lot of shows other people consider really, really bad.  If you love it, that’s good enough for me.  But I know a lot of folks who say things like, “I used to love Charles in Charge, but it hasn’t been nearly as good since they changed the character’s motivation.  I still watch it, though, out of habit.”  It’s almost like some strange collector mentality.  You’ve watched one episode and now you must watch them all.  If you don’t love it, skip it.  The world will keep turning.7 – Cut the cord.  Or the cable as the case may be.  I know many very productive people who have managed (without loss of sanity) to get by just fine without cable or satellite.  In some cases, they don’t even have TVs. Give any (or all) of these ideas a try.  Maybe they’ll help you navigate the minefield of new fall programming.  Let me know if you have any additional suggestions! 

Read something new this weekend. Every Friday, I’ll recommend a short story, novel, comic, or graphic novel that’s sure to tickle your fancy and help you forget the trials and tribulations of the previous week.

More pulpy goodness this week. 

Robert R. McCammon is one of my favorite writers, having written a bunch of great horror novels like They Thirst, Swan Song, The Wolf’s Hour, and The Mystery Walk, as well as Boy’s Life, which is hands-down my favorite novel of any make or model. 

But today I’m talking about a pulpy short story titled “Night Calls the Green Falcon.”  Our hero, Cray Flint is a retired cliffhanger star who witnesses a serial killer called the Fliptop Killer at work.  He’s the only person who has ever seen the face of the murderer and lived to tell the tale.  In an act of heroism (or, more accurately, failing sanity) he dons the costume of his on-screen crimefighting days and pursues the killer through LA.  Along the way, we runs afoul of drug dealers and biker gangs, and he befriends a group of unlikely sidekicks.  Each chapter of the story reads like a chapter of a movie serial, complete with how-will-he-possibly-survive shockers.

And his encounter with the mysterious fellow called the Watchmen chokes me up.

You can find the story in McCammon’s collection, Blue World, which is full of great reading material.   “Yellowjacket Summer,” “Nightcrawlers,” and “He’ll Come Knocking at Your Door” are also terrific reads.

Read something new this weekend. Every Friday, I’ll recommend a short story, novel, comic, or graphic novel that’s sure to tickle your fancy and help you forget the trials and tribulations of the previous week.

Short and to the point this week, because I’m even more short on time. The story, “Hell Creek” by Karl Edward Wagner, appeared (as far as I know) only in the anthology, Confederacy of the Dead. This was the stand-out tale from the collection of Civil War horror stories (although I also liked “The Sunday Go-To-Meeting Jaw” and “The Crater” quite a bit, too). It featured a weary, mysterious hero; murder; the undead; and a whole mess of pigs in an action/horror romp the likes of which Robert E. Howard might have written. Great stuff if you can find it.

Cover prices have climbed quite a bit since my earliest days as a comic collector. But I find it comforting that quarter comics can still be purchased at almost every comic book convention in the country. If you’re willing to dig a little bit, you can find complete runs of some terrific books. Each week, I’ll highlight a worthwhile title you can scoop up by the pound for just a few of your shiny coins.

There are many comics that have been given an undeserved bad rap over the years — really fun books that for whatever reason are ridiculed by the average comic reader. These comics flourish in the quarter boxes. One of my favorites is Rom: Spaceknight, a Marvel book inspired by the Parker Brothers action figure.

Rom, as the title so subtly hints, is a spaceknight — a cyborg tasked with battling the evil Dire Wraiths, a group of shape shifting aliens (a deviant branch of the Skrulls, in fact) who use high technology and sorcery to further their vile plans. Rom arrives on Earth and sets out to rid the planet of a Wraith infestation, but because the aliens appear human, he is quickly branded a monster himself.

In the hands of a lesser writer, this comic might have failed miserably, but Bill Mantlo breathed a great deal of vitality into the series. Since the book was set in regular Marvel continuity (like many of their licensed publications), Rom was able to meet up with the mainstays of Marvel, like Dr. Strange, Galactus, and Alpha Flight. Rom faced numerous bad guys, aliens, and super villains over the course of his Wraith-busting. My favorite antagonist was Hybrid, a monster who was (again, as cleverly hinted by his name) a hybrid of human and Wraith who tussled with Rom, the X-Men, and the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants from time to time. As the war with the Wraiths drew to a close, almost every Marvel superhero showed up to help Rom out. (I had this idea that the only way to finally defeat the Wraiths would be to reprogram the mutant-hunting Sentinels to track down and destroy the alien menace.) All the while, Rom expressed a heavy dose of angst over being trapped within his cyborg body.

Monsters … superheroes … magic … and self-loathing? How can you go wrong?

With 75 issues and 4 annuals in the series, you can scrape together a complete set for less than 20 bucks. It might take a little searching, but that’s half the fun of quarter bin diving.