Sue Marie St. Lee

Random Thoughts/Irritations:

• On following your blog…
  • If you do not allow me to click the “follow” button without requiring my email address, I will not follow your blog. Many bloggers give an option for the reader to surrender their email address. I prefer having the option.

Unfinished books – reading, not writing

• “False Memory” by Dean Koontz
  • Out of curiosity and having never read one of Koontz’s books, I borrowed this from my library in Kindle format. Perhaps my expectations were too high based on Koontz’s popularity, but, I could not finish this book. I could not develop an interest in his characters even after reading to its halfway point. It boils down to a matter of taste and Koontz’s writing does not appeal to me.

• “Blackwater: The Complete Saga” by Michael McDowell
  • I do not recall how I ran across this book, but am happy that I did. Perhaps its blurb hooked my interest:
    • Blackwater is the saga of a small town, Perdido, Alabama, and Elinor Dammert, the stranger who arrives there under mysterious circumstances on Easter Sunday, 1919. On the surface, Elinor is gracious, charming, anxious to belong in Perdido, and eager to marry Oscar Caskey, the eldest son of Perdido’s first family. But her beautiful exterior hides a shocking secret. Beneath the waters of the Perdido River, she turns into something terrifying, a creature whispered about in stories that have chilled the residents of Perdido for generations. Some of those who observe her rituals in the river will never be seen again…
    • Originally published as a series of six volumes in 1983, Blackwater is the crowning achievement of Michael McDowell, author of the Southern Gothic classics Cold Moon Over Babylon and The Elementals, and screenwriter of Beetlejuice and The Nightmare Before Christmas. This first-ever one-volume edition will allow a new generation of listeners to discover this modern horror classic.
  • The print version weighs in at 734 pages, too long for me to finish in the library’s allotted two-week loan period due to my personal life’s demands. I want to finish this book and thought about borrowing it again from the library but, in all reality, I still won’t be able to finish it in the next two-week segment. So, I am going to take the plunge and purchase the Kindle version (not the KU version since I am not a Prime member and I want to own it outright).

• • I like McDowell’s writing style. Right from the start of this saga, my interest engaged in the cast of characters who are well developed but not to the extreme… I don’t want to know how many, or the color of so-and-so’s nose hairs.

• • I also like the genre — “Horror” which is my personal preference for reading material.

Unfinished books – writing, not reading

• Despite announcing, in a recent interview, that I would be moving away from writing more Horror stories, I heard the voices of dormant characters calling out for me to tell their tales. I must answer those calls. This time, I am aiming for a full-length novel 40 – 50K words and have invited another author to partake in this venture. We have worked together before and I love the way Eddie D. Moore writes and how the horror stories drip (sometimes gush) from his creative mind. As of this post, we have not yet set a date for publication, everything is still in the works as the voices in our heads are still telling the story.

Author of the Month

• I thought it would be a good feature for my blog to highlight an independent author once a month… to have one more source for Google to index the author’s name, adding to his/her internet exposure, especially when they are preparing to release a new book. Sometimes, my “Author of the Month” will stay in that position longer than one month due to not having found my next victim, er, uh, volunteer.

• If you are a published author and would like to be featured in an upcoming “Author of the Month” post, please use the contact form here. It’s painless. Simply let me know of your interest and I will send you a document with interview questions. You choose which ones you would like to answer, you can even add a few of your own. I will ask for a current photo and links to your latest book, social networking, website, blog… all that jazz. Painless!

“Age is something that doesn’t matter,
unless you are a cheese.”

– Luis Bunuel