EVERYTHING THAT RISES MUST CONVERGE By John Rose

Mad Doctor

So this year was sort of a hard-candy Halloween.  I didn't get to do a lot of the stuff I wanted, and I didn't get to do treat bags and Halloween CDs like I did before.  And there was something in the air around a lot of us Halloween nutcases this year.  There's a guy in my hometown who has done a walkthrough haunt in his front yard at Halloween for quite awhile now; this year... he didn't.  And a lot of the online community was feeling it too.  It was just a weird Halloween.

But I persevered, and I cut back.  Just said I'd save it all for next year.  And oddly enough, it turned out being a really good Halloween.  Some new people came to the MonsterGrrls Halloween-A-Go-Go this year, and enjoyed themselves.  My next-door neighbors turned part of the triplex they live in into a haunted house, and invited trick-or-treating folks to walk through.

And for me, it was a year for something new, too.  I cut back from MonsterGrrls' 31 Days Of Halloween to MonsterGrrls' Thir13en For Halloween, and while it was less, it was also more.  Because I started to do interviews.

I am a shy person by nature, and I find it occasionally very hard to blog, because I began blogging in the age where people were still doing a lot of navel-gazing and there were still people on the Net who were putting out independently-published comic books that mostly revolved around their outstandingly boring lives working at copy shops, clubbing, drinking too much, spending too much money at Starbucks, and wishing that the Cool Person(s) in their lives would Notice Them And Fall In Love Or At Least Sleep With Them.  I had begun to mature at the time that whole herds of the Immature were making their private lives almost achingly public, and I had no desire to bore anyone with the minutae of my day-to-day life.

But as I worked on MonsterGrrls stuff and looked around the Net, I started finding other monster heads who loved the same things I did, who had the same kind of geek passion I did.  And I also discovered that absolutely everyone, no matter who they are or what they like, is a total geek about something.

So this year for the Halloween blog I interviewed several people on the Net--artists, writers, producers, horror hosts, monster heads, and Halloween nuts--who all turned out to be great people, who answered my questions with thoughtfulness and seriousness (despite the fact that they work in the most unserious professions possible), and who found time to talk to me and the Grrls even in the busiest time of year for them.  And I ended up having a really great Halloween.  And I would like to demand that Universal Studios return an affordable version of a Shock Theater-style syndication package of its classic horror films to availability so that these people can show classic horror films besides the ones in the public domain.  (Plus, I think Amazing Braino ought to have his own TV show, personally.)

So here's what else is happening:

I used to run three blogs, which wasn't working.  One was The Morlock Heights Harbinger, which was the official Grrls blog and meant to be for news, reviews and whatever had to do with the Grrls.  The other two were Notes From The Monster Shop, which was supposed to be a production/personal blog where I'd just put stuff--sketches, essays, and so on.  The third, which was created because I was reviewing a lot of cartoon collection sets on Amazon, was The Powerhouse Files, which was all about my obsession with animation and Saturday morning cartoons, now in its forty-second year and showing no signs of stopping.

And all of it was pointless.  So now they've all been combined into this one, inspired by the title I gave the interview pieces--Tales From The Monster Shop.  The Grrls and I will continue to relate experiences and do news, reviews, essays, interviews (and even the Easy-Bake Coven recipes) about all the horror stuff and other stuff we love, and the Thir13en For Halloween will definitely be back next year.  (Thanks for being patient with us while we figured out how to do this.)  We're also working up some new features to put on here, since Blogger is introducing a lot of cool new stuff to use.  (Plus, we didn't want to move to Wordpress or Whatchamacallit Blog or anywhere else; we love Blogger.) And we linked to everybody we interviewed, plus a lot of the blogs we really like, just to show where a lot of these ideas we have came from.  (Besides, as far as a lot of the blogs are concerned, I've stolen stuff from these people for my own personal virtual-ephemera files on a regular basis, so I'm kind of obligated to give them some love.)

Not Marshal, Will and Holly, but more routine exposition

And as for the cartoons, that will show up in the form of our new occasional feature called Toons Of The Lost, where I'll continue to write and share about cartoons and animation.  Plus, I had worked up this cool graphic that I wanted to use somewhere, and that was also part of the impetus to combine everything.

And as for Book II... it's coming sooner than you think.  All I'll say is, just watch out for blood on the moon.

There you go...