Guest Post: CHILDREN OF THE WITCHING SEASON - By Michelle Garza and Melissa Lason

Today I'd like to welcome the Sisters of Slaughter to the blog.  Real-life sisters who certainly have the horror genre sitting up and taking notice.  Come  back tomorrow as I review their newest release.

CHILDREN OF THE WITCHING SEASON

By Michelle Garza and Melissa Lason

We have always been horror children, we don’t know how to explain it other than it was what drew us in, the same as some kids love astronauts and others dinosaurs or princesses, we, on the other hand, have always loved creepy scary things.  We were interested in stories of witches and ghouls, we dressed our cats in doll clothes and pretended they were werewolves attacking our Barbies, and we begged our mom to buy us Goosebumps books for our brother to read out loud to us.  We loved to watch things like Hocus Pocus and Ernest Scared Stupid, every Scooby-Doo episode we could find and even Alvin and the Chipmunks meet the Wolfman and Frankenstein.  As teens, we loved going to the school library and when that was closed we walked to the city library to get lost in the shelves of horror fiction and books of mythology and stories of true crime.  We were drawn to the macabre, the darkness of the human mind as well as the make-believe monsters creeping in the shadows.

Those days spent reading and absorbing the oddities and tragedies of the world helped shape our retreating into our minds was a much better place.  We dreamed of becoming storytellers and sharing our tales with other people but as we got older we buried that dream and thought it would remain just that. It was something we’d think about especially around Halloween, our love of horror and the dusty notebooks filled with pages of handwritten terrors…

imaginations and the stories we would tell.  We started writing together just for fun around the age of eight or nine, it was just an extension of playing pretend.  We wrote stories and drew little pictures to go along with the tales and then read them to our mother out in our little playhouse our dad made for us.  Those were magical times, some of our greatest childhood memories were of the occasional rainy Arizona day and reading to our mom while sipping cups of tea she would make and carry out to us. When we became teenagers, a time when most kids give up their make-believe worlds for entering the “real world”, we continued writing because we got a taste of what was beyond our imaginations and decided

The years slipped by and we got old enough to stop feeling the fear of rejection.  We were thirty when we finally decided to start submitting our work for publication.  The road was rough and the rejections came creeping in, but we didn’t give up.  Time makes you bolder, as the song goes, and we refused to give up until we achieved our goals.  We worked on our craft and kept on submitting until we started getting accepted. We were in a number of anthologies and then released, Mayan Blue, our first novel and it was nominated for a Bram Stoker Award.  Now, five years after making the plunge into the publishing world, we’re still at it, still fighting every day to keep our dreams alive, but they are, like a monster resurrected from sewn together corpses of daydreams we imagined decades ago, it breathes and it lives.

October is here and in the desert it signifies the death of summer’s brutal grip on the land and its people.  We are free to roam without the burning gaze of the sun, like creatures emerging from hibernation or spirits rising from the grave, we seek our old haunts in search of merriment and revelry.  We just released our latest book through Sinister Grin Press, Twin Lakes: Autumn Fires and following on its heels we launched a serialized fiction project, Silverwood The Door through Serial Box, alongside our idols and friends Brian Keene, Richard Chizmar, and Stephen Kozeniewski.  We can’t stop the stories from flowing from our fingertips like automatic writing.  They form in our minds like the whispers of ghosts and they take us back to listening to the rain outside and softly reading to our mother, they reconfirm that we are children of the witching season, now and forever.

-Michelle Garza and Melissa Lason