The Ben­son is an Exper­i­ment in Ter­ror novella/short story that takes place between #2 Red Fox and #3 Dead Sky Morn­ing. Call it #2.5 if you will.

It should be pub­lished in the next few weeks as an E-book ONLY ver­sion through Smash­words (for Kin­dle, Nook, etc). It will also be.…FREE.

Yup. My gift to you, my loyal readers/new fans/curious looky­loos, etc, is that you won’t have to pay any­thing to own it.

What’s The Ben­son about? The Ben­son was actu­ally an episode of Exper­i­ment in Ter­ror that Perry Palomino and Dex Foray filmed (it was hinted at in Dead Sky Morn­ing), set in the sup­pos­edly haunted Ben­son hotel in down­town Port­land, Ore­gon. Now, I per­son­ally have stayed at this gor­geous, old hotel and I can per­son­ally tell you…there’s is some­thing a lit­tle off there.

What, though? You’ll have to read to find out

 

 

 

 

 

To the man today who paid for my groceries,

I don’t nor­mally post these types of things here, but I gave you my busi­ness card with this web­site on it and per­haps you’ll see this. I hope you do.

Tonight I was remark­ing on how won­der­ful love is. How being in love and see­ing peo­ple in love, and lov­ing others…well, how is that ever a bad thing? It’s not. Love is good. It is kind. It is lovely. I thought the world needed more of it. I’m still right about that.

But you, good sir, you gave me hope that the world is at least not lack­ing it. Being a strug­gling artist and a moron at times, my bank card was declined while in line at the gro­cery store. The bill was over $60. The clerk already packed my bags. The line behind us was build­ing, peo­ple were impatient.

You were only buy­ing eggnog, yet you vol­un­teered to cover it. The whole bill. It made your eggnog cost $72.

I cer­tainly didn’t deserve it. You didn’t know me and you didn’t ask for any­thing in return, even when I insisted.

Love is all around. Indeed.

I hope only good things come to you. I have no doubt it will.

And I encour­age every­one else to pay it for­ward to some­one. I know I will be doing exactly that (donate that amount and more to the food bank). Do some good. Help some­one in need, big or small. Let’s show some love to each other, to our fel­low man. And keep that love going around and around.

Bless  you <3

How is everyone’s NaNoW­riMo com­ing along? Mines…eh, it’s get­ting there. My life got crazy turned around and busy as of late but I think things will be com­ing together. In fact, I will be fin­ish­ing up an Exper­i­ment in Ter­ror Novella (#2.5) called The Ben­son and will be hav­ing that as a free e-book…so that counts for some­thing. Right? RIGHT?

Any­way, thought I’d throw up these two inter­views I did recently, a more lengthy one for The Van­tage mag­a­zine, and the other for Freado.

Read: Inter­view with Karina Halle @ The Vantage

Read: Inter­view with Karina Halle @ Freado (where you can win free books!)

It’s that time of year again with aspir­ing and work­ing authors alike decide to buckle down and write 50,000 words in one month. Sounds daunt­ing, right? Well it is…but even if you don’t com­plete a novel, it’s usu­ally enough that the goal puts some fire under your ass. Who knows where that leads?

I did my own ver­sion on NaNoW­riMo (National Novel Writ­ing Month) in Novem­ber 2009. Actu­ally I cheated a bit. I started in Octo­ber. And my goal wasn’t to have so many words by one month, rather to get in the habit of writ­ing every day. And guess what hap­pened? By mid-November, I had DARKHOUSE and 82K words. A ter­ri­ble first draft, but it was done and I wouldn’t be where I am now had I not bit the bul­let and jumped right in. Prob­a­bly still think­ing about it…

This year I’ll be tak­ing part in the event. I’ll be doing it prop­erly this time, which doesn’t nec­es­sar­ily mean writ­ing every day (I’ve got a busy month) but it does mean I will have 50,000 words of Exper­i­ment in Ter­ror #5 ON DEMON WINGS (work­ing title) down. Isn’t that awesome?

In the mean­time, here’s your first blurb about book #4 LYING SEASON (pub­lished Dec 13th 2011):

Ama­teur ghost-hunter Perry Palomino has already bat­tled ghosts, fought off skin­walk­ers and walked the fine line between life and death. But can she sur­vive bunk­ing down in Seat­tle for a week with Dex, the man she secretly loves, and his uber babe of a girl­friend, Jenn? And can she do so while being tor­mented by a mali­cious spirit from Dex’s increas­ingly shady past? With love and life in the bal­ance, Perry must dis­cover the truth among the lies or risk los­ing every­thing she’s ever cared about.

BTW thank you to all who down­loaded Dark­house, Red Fox and Dead Sky Morn­ing for free over the last 24 hours as part of the Hal­loween Sale. Hope you enjoy the books. For every­one else, the books are still avail­able on Smash­words and Kin­dle for less than $3.

OH and if you’re a dude, get on MOVEMBER this year. Grow a mus­tache (Dex proves ‘staches can be sexy) and raise some money and aware­ness for men’s health and cancers.

From now until Novem­ber 1st, all Exper­i­ment in Ter­ror books on Smash­words are free. Yes, that’s right…FREE. As in $0. Now is your chance to own the first three books in the series, Dark­house, Red Fox and Dead Sky Morn­ing and dis­cover how read­ers and review­ers are falling in love with our ghost-hunting duo Perry Palomino and Dex Foray.

Dark­house (“this was the per­fect book to read right before Hal­loween; an excel­lent thriller chock full of white-knuckle moments and edge of your seat heart thump­ing ter­ror” — First Reads win­ner) can be down­loaded HERE for free.

Red Fox (“I could not put this book down, and when I absolutely had to stop read­ing, I thought about the book every sec­ond that passed” — Beck­oned by Books ) can be down­loaded HERE for free.

And Dead Sky Morn­ing (“This is a deep, dark hor­ror that deserves high marks from the begin­ning” — Bitsy Bling Books) can be down­loaded HERE for free.

Note you can get all e-versions through Smashwords…Kindle, Nook, PDF, etc.

Just remem­ber to act fast — you have a lit­tle more than 24 hours to get this deal. Tell your friends!

And…

HAPPY HALLOWEEN EVERYONE

Get­ting into the Hal­loween spirit, I was try­ing to think of movie I could watch that would scare the shit out of me.

There were some usual sus­pects like The Shin­ing and The Exor­cist. But most of the titles that flashed through my mind were kid’s movies. Either movies I found scary as a child, or movies that weren’t meant to scare chil­dren. In my clouded mem­ory, it’s hard to tell the dif­fer­ence. Was I really sup­posed to be scared of the lit­tle midget peo­ple in Wil­low? So I decided to com­pile a list of movies that freaked me out as a child, unin­ten­tion­ally or not. Some of these films I would like to watch, just to see if the scare tac­tics still work…I did that with Pol­ter­geist last year and found while the guy rip­ping apart his face in the bath­room was scary, the tree reach­ing into the win­dow and grab­bing the boy was not.

Any­ways, here it goes…

Unin­ten­tion­ally Scary Films:

The Never End­ing Story — That dog was freaky! I know, I know he’s cute…but still. And then the horse, in the swamp and, and…

Labyrinth — Hands grab­bing her: Scary! Mup­pets jug­gling their heads: Dis­turb­ing! Eyes in wall: Creepy! David Bowie in Span­dex: oddly mezmerizing.

Return to Oz — And this is sup­posed to be a children’s film? It’s NOT. PS don’t watch it on mushrooms.

Care­Bears the Movie and the Sequel — Shut up. It had scary bits.

Jacobs Lad­der — Don’t think that was a kid’s film.

The Witches — Anjel­ica Hous­ton at her scariest.

Twi­light Zone the Movie — Theeeeeeeeeere’s. Some. Thing. OnTheW­ing. (ditto for The Simpson’s version)

Arachno­pho­bia — Need I say more?

The Secret of Nimh — There is some­thing mildly dis­turb­ing about that film. Just so.…uneasy.

Lost High­way — Again, not a child’s film. But Robert Blake with no eye­brows is scary as hell.

Juras­sic Park — Rap­tors will haunt your dreams!

Ghost­busters — There was some­thing in her fridge…

Dumbo — Shut up. Don’t tell me you weren’t scared by the psy­chotic Pink Ele­phants on Parade.

The Birds — His eyes were pecked out!

Flight of the Nav­i­ga­tor — The 1st half of the movie was creeeeepy. Then Sarah Jes­sica Parker showed up.

The Last Uni­corn — Weird, trippy stuff. Leaves a bad taste in your mouth.

All right. That’s my some­what lame list (yes, I am a dork). Feel free to share me yours by reach­ing out to me on Twit­ter (@metalblonde)

Aside from Dead Sky Morn­ing, Book Three in the ghost-hunting Exper­i­ment in Ter­ror Series, being avail­able at the Cre­ate­Space e-store (ship­ping world­wide) in paper­back for­mat HERE and in any e-format at Smash­words HERE, it’s now avail­able through Amazon.

You can pick up a paper­back copy at Ama­zon HERE and the Kin­dle ver­sion HERE.

Obvi­ously if you buy the e-versions it’s instan­ta­neous but if you order the paper­back now, you should get it in time for Hal­loween. This is my favorite time of the year (which is appar­ent if you’ve had a glimpse into my twisted mind) and I love hav­ing some­thing scary to either watch or read dur­ing the month of Octo­ber. And really, what’s scarier than camp­ing on an iso­lated island that’s haunted by duplic­i­tous ghosts who are out for revenge? Dex’s mus­tache, maybe.

I’ll be back later this week to share with you some of my own per­sonal favorite ter­ri­fy­ing books and movies.

Happy Haunt­ings!

The day is here. Huz­zah! Dead Sky Morn­ing, Book Three in the ghost-hunting Exper­i­ment in Ter­ror Series, is now offi­cially available.

So far you can pur­chase the book via Cre­ate­Space e-store (ship­ping world­wide) in paper­back for­mat HERE.

You can also pur­chase the book in any e-format at Smash­words HERE.

The book will be avail­able on Ama­zon and Kin­dle over the next 24 hours as well, so I’ll keep you posted on that.

In cel­e­bra­tion of the book launch I’ve gath­ered some stills of the trailer shoot for the book (by the way the trailer will be released soon and I’ll be keep­ing you updated when that comes out).

And if you need some incen­tive to buy Dead Sky Morn­ing, or get hooked into the whole series, I sug­gest you read this review at Bitsy Bling Books. Author Char­lie Court­land describes DSM as “By far, the most ter­ri­fy­ing of the three books because of the emo­tional inten­sity” and says “Halle’s descrip­tions reveal the vul­ner­a­bil­ity of rela­tion­ships along with the flawed imper­fec­tions and mag­netic com­pli­ca­tions that come from attrac­tion, expe­ri­ence, emo­tion and rationality.”

And for some fun videos, give­aways and more stuff, keep scrolling to the pre­vi­ous posts below

Behold…outtakes from the Dead Sky Morn­ing trailer.

Of course these prob­a­bly won’t make any sense until AFTER you read the book, but you know… I still get a chuckle out of it

Watch out for tomor­row for lots of behind the scenes footage, plus links to where you can buy the book. Yay, so exciting!

There’s a whole slew of give­aways going around the blo­gos­phere this week in cel­e­bra­tion of the release of Dead Sky Morning.

Super awe­some swag (and I mean some pretty cool, sub­stan­tial prizes like tote bags, under­wear) can be found at Naughty Between the Stacks and YA-Aholic right now.

There’s also a give­away for all three books (Dark­house, Red Fox and Dead Sky Morn­ing) at I’m Lov­ing Books, which also has an exclu­sive sneak peek at the trailer (in stills format).

Some of these give­aways end this week, so get cracking!