Fox News and the titillation industry

As I’ve written before, there is no real “sex industry” in the United States. Outside of a few counties in Nevada, the world’s oldest profession is strictly verboten here.

We do, however, have a thriving “titillation industry”—driven by corporate media, and millions of men who can’t resist clicking on thirst traps.

Consider the following headline from Fox News:

“Sydney Sweeney shares swimsuit-clad boat photos with boyfriend Scooter Braun”

I should mention at this point that I’m not one of the Sydney Sweeney haters. I think she’s a talented and attractive actress. Moreover, she has a genuine sense of humor, and she often makes me laugh.

And sometimes Sydney Sweeney is genuinely newsworthy. She is, after all, part of our pop culture… such as it is. I’m not one of those culture snobs who has a problem with any headline about an entertainment celebrity or a sports figure. (In fact, I have often found the biographies of successful pro athletes and entertainers to be worthwhile reading. These are people who have overcome tremendous odds to succeed in some very competitive fields.)

But the above headline is simply an attempt to convince Fox News’s readership, which is disproportionately older and male, to click on the link so that they can see some cheesecake photos of Sydney Sweeney bursting out of her swimsuit on the beach. There’s a financial incentive at play here, of course. Those clicks and page views generate ad revenue.

Nor is it my desire to be a finger-wagging killjoy. If you genuinely want to see the Sydney Sweeney photos, then go ahead and click on them.

All I ask is that you realize that you’ve just become a rat in a maze, scurrying in a specific direction for your reward… a morsel of cheese that you can only gaze upon from afar. Sydney Sweeney still doesn’t know you’re alive, and you’ll never go where Scooter Braun has gone.

-ET

Indie publishing has an originality problem

(And that’s why indie authors have to spend so much money on Facebook ads—and worry endlessly about AI)

The other day I was scrolling through my Facebook feed when I came upon an ad for an indie-published military science fiction series.

The ad was slickly produced with AI video that was only available to movie studios a few short years ago. The ad promised tales of drone swarms, planets in peril, and gritty space marines!

Hoo-rah!

I was curious. And so I exited Facebook and did a little research on the author using Google. I also searched for his books on Amazon.

He was the author of a five-book space marine saga.

Hoo-rah!

As soon as I returned to Facebook, Meta’s algorithm continued to show me ads from this same author.

But that wasn’t all. Meta also had now identified me as someone interested in space marine stories (hoo-rah!)—probably because of my Googling and my searches on Amazon.

For the rest of the day I was served more ads for indie-authored space marine sagas. They all had the same exact tropes.

A planet in peril!

Terrifying aliens!

Drone swarms!

Space marines!

Hoo-rah!

But no discussion of mind-numbing sameness in indie publishing would be complete without mentioning the romance field. Indie romance authors now write almost exclusively in hyper-focused niches: hockey romance, billionaire romance, enemies to lovers, cowboy billionaire romance, etc. (And that’s without delving into the really weird, hyper-focused romance niches, which I don’t care to mention here.)

There is an indie author who openly copies the Jack Reacher novels. I mean—openly copies them to the point of borderline plagiarism. The hero of these novels behaves exactly like Jack Reacher, all the way down to Reacher’s famous black coffee habit.

Indie publishing was supposed to provide room for creative freedom and literary diversity. (I mean that word in its best, truest sense.) But then the indie author “gurus” convinced indie authors to pick a narrow lane, and mass-produce the same kinds of books written by other authors working in that same lane.

This has made most of indie publishing both tiresome and mediocre. The market is filled with “me-too” offerings that capitalize on prefabbed packages of tropes.

This must bore the bejesus out of readers. I mean—seriously—how many books of the exact same kind does the market really need?

It has also made indie authors highly dependent on an increasingly complex, ridiculously expensive PPC ad ecosystem. Most authors working inside constricted trope lanes have little space to differentiate themselves. They must therefore rely on the brute force of high-bid, pay-per-click advertising. Many indie authors are spending more than half their revenues on Meta and Amazon ads. Some indie authors are outright underwater because of high ad spends.

That path is not for me. Whether you like my stories or not, each one of them is mine. I would never write by committee with “beta readers” (one of indie publishing’s most ridiculous concepts). Nor would I ever want to churn out repetitive stories to a trope standard. If I’d wanted to march in lockstep with a specific, clannish little group, I would have stayed in the corporate world.

But there’s another problem with the lemming-like approach so common in indie author circles. Many indie authors are fretting about the threat from AI: software penning novels—whiz bang!—with a handful of prompts.

The best way to yield literature to soulless AI is to make each story a soulless, standardized product. Yet that’s exactly what so many indie authors are doing nowadays.

-ET

Older men and lawnmowing

This past weekend I mowed my lawn and my dad’s lawn. This is something that I do practically every week during the spring, summer, and early fall.

Far from being onerous, lawn mowing is an activity that I moderately enjoy.

Lawn mowing provides an aerobic workout, and I utilize the time productively by listening to audiobooks or foreign languages. (Sometimes I listen to podcasts, too.)

But there is another benefit to lawn mowing. Lawn mowing is a finite, clearly definable task, and its completion provides a minor sense of accomplishment. When one mows a suburban lawn, one has brought a condition of order out of chaos.

Is that reflection a little too “zen” for a weekly household task? Perhaps. But lawn mowing is something that I enjoy more as I get older. When I was a young fellow, I never understood older men who enjoyed cutting the grass. (My maternal grandfather was one of them. That man loved to cut grass.)

But now that I’m 58, I get it, somehow.

-ET

Dean Wesley Smith’s ‘Advanced Writing into the Dark’

There are very few indie author gurus whom I would consider worth quoting. The indie author commentariat has declined even further in recent years, since the indie publishing field has been swamped with pornographic romance novels.

Dean Wesley Smith is one of the exceptions. He got his start in trad publishing in the last century; and he tends to view the indie author guru orthodoxy with even more disdain than I do.

For example, Smith has coined the term “review begging”. This refers to the practice of indie authors doing backflips, somersaults, and mass giveaways in order to solicit as many random reader reviews and ratings as they can.

Smith is also an ardent proponent of discovery writing, which he has codified into a process he calls “Writing into the Dark.” (Smith considers the more common term “pantsing” to be a little too cutesy; so do I.) He’s put decades of thought into the art and process of discovery writing. Even if you are a dedicated outliner (as a fiction writer), you owe it to yourself to at least give Smith a hearing.

**View ADVANCED WRITING INTO THE DARK on Amazon**

I recently purchased and read Dean Wesley Smith’s Advanced Writing into the Dark. This book was a follow-up to his 2015 title, Writing into the Dark.

Overall, Advanced Writing into the Dark is a worthwhile read, but the title is a bit of a misnomer. While there is some new content, much of the book simply restates what was contained in Writing into the Dark. Advanced Writing into the Dark would have been more properly labeled a second/revised edition.

I admire Dean Wesley Smith for his vast experience in the publishing industry and his original ideas. He is not always adept at organizing those ideas, or—in this case—labeling them.

That said, I’m mostly content with this minor purchase. (I used some of my accumulated Amazon points.) Advanced Writing into the Dark could have been a bit more advanced, but it’s still a good edition to every fiction writer’s library—even if you already own the 2015 edition.

-ET

Why dinosaur encounters scare us so much 

I recently produced a story for my YouTube channel called “Ohiosaurus Rex.” This very short piece depicts a married couple’s encounter with a dinosaur during a drive through the Ohio countryside. I explain this unusual event with a time slip.

Then, lo and behold, I find that Warner Brothers Entertainment had a similar idea. A new movie called The End of Oak Street, starring Anne Hathaway, is about dinosaurs invading the suburbs.

No hard feelings. I didn’t plagiarize Warner Brothers and they didn’t plagiarize me. The idea of modern-day humans coming face-to-face with giant carnivorous reptiles has been a universal story concept since dinosaurs were first discovered more than one hundred years ago. This is the basis for the entire Jurassic Park franchise. But maybe Michael Crichton got the idea from Land of the Lost, a TV series I remember from my childhood.

No one owns the idea of “dinosaurs versus humans.” Every creator leaves their unique stamp on the idea. The End of Oak Street promises to be a very good movie, based on the online clip. And it will be a very different movie from any of the Jurassic Park films.

Why do dinosaurs fascinate and scare us so much? They tap into a primeval fear, that of being prey. Modern humans are at the top of the food chain. Yes, we may become prey in very specific and rare instances when we encounter polar bears, great white sharks, or Nile crocodiles. Those are predicaments that most of us can easily avoid.

But what about a giant reptile that crashes through a fence? There is nothing quite like that anywhere on Earth—nor has there been, since the dawn of humankind.

I’m looking forward to seeing The End of Oak Street. I would also speculate that I’ll be returning to dinosaur stories myself. There are just too many possibilities to pass up, where dinosaurs and humans are concerned.

-ET

We all get negged from time to time

Esme Gordon-Craig is a twenty-something contributor for the Times (in the UK). She recently wrote a piece about falling for “negging”.

Negging is a manipulation tactic. Negging is frequently employed by pickup artists, pushy salespersons, and even itinerant preachers. Your nosy neighbor may employ it too.

Negging consists of using subtle insults and backhanded compliments to shame a person into a desired outcome.

Non-drinkers like myself are frequently on the receiving end of negging. When I decline an alcoholic beverage, I am occasionally asked if I am a Baptist. I reply deadpan that, no, I am an idolatrous Roman Catholic. That usually puts an end to the interaction.

Ms. Gordon-Craig relates how a group of older men approached her and her Gen Z girlfriends at a bar in the UK. (Since she was in the UK, it was probably a “pub”.) The older men (I’m guessing they were in their late 30s or early 40s) offered a round of drinks.

One of them became specifically interested in her:

“One bought my friend a drink and another offered to buy one for me. I politely refused but he persisted. In all honesty, even if I wasn’t done for the night, I doubt I’d have accepted the drink — he wasn’t really my type or anywhere near my age.”

Then the man uttered the words that flustered her and broke down her defenses:

“You need to stop being so uptight… You need to let loose… Learn to express yourself, be more open.”

“Soon I was flirting,” she writes. “Half an hour later we were exchanging Instagrams and then making light of the fact that he’d insulted me earlier.” Continue reading “We all get negged from time to time”

‘Victim Number Eight: Book Four of Deadly Byways’ now available for preorder on Amazon

The fourth novel in my Deadly Byways series, Victim Number Eight, is now available for preorder. The book will be released on October 7.

The Deadly Byways series is set in southwest Ohio in the late 1970s and early 1980s, an era before cell phones, GPS tracking, surveillance cameras on every corner, and many of the other technologies that have changed both crime and police work.

At the center of the series is Milton Jones, a seemingly ordinary tradesman who has managed to conceal a very different existence from almost everyone around him.

By the beginning of Victim Number Eight, however, the police know that something is happening.

Several people have disappeared along the back roads of southwest Ohio. The newspapers have given the suspected predator a name: the Bywayman. Detective Will Hayworth believes the disappearances are connected.

The police even have a description of the man they’re looking for.

Unfortunately, they’re looking for the wrong man.

A first date goes terribly wrong

Victim Number Eight begins on a cold night in January 1982.

Teenager Sharon Asher is on her first date with a boy named Trent Delaney. They have dinner at an Italian restaurant and set out for the movies in Trent’s 1978 Trans Am.

Then they stop for gas at an isolated Sohio station.

Before the night is over, Trent is dead and Sharon has disappeared.

Sharon becomes Victim Number Eight—the eighth person whom police believe may have fallen prey to the mysterious Bywayman.

Two investigations

On the outside, Will Hayworth and his partner, Jerry Anderson, are trying to make sense of the evidence they have. Unfortunately, some of that evidence is misleading. A possible suspect emerges, and the investigation begins moving in a direction that may take the police even farther from the truth.

Meanwhile, Sharon has an entirely different problem.

She is being held in an underground prison beneath a remote barn.

Another captive is already there when Sharon arrives. From her, Sharon begins learning about the man who has taken her—and what may have happened to the women who came before them.

Sharon quickly realizes that waiting passively for the police to find her may amount to a death sentence.

She will have to find a way out herself.

And then there is Judy

Readers of the earlier Deadly Byways books will already know Judy Jones, Milton’s teenage daughter.

Judy becomes increasingly important in Victim Number Eight.

I’m not going to say much more about that, because Judy’s role is one of the elements of the book that I would rather let readers discover for themselves.

I’ll only say this: Milton has spent years creating a system that allows him to hide what he does from the outside world.

But no system is perfect.

And sometimes the greatest threat comes from inside.

Deadly Byways continues

Although each installment has its own major story arc, Deadly Byways is a continuing six-book story. Victim Number Eight is Book Four, following The Dungeon, The Bridge, and The Bywayman.

With this book, the series moves into its second half. The police investigation is intensifying. Milton’s carefully maintained secrets are becoming more difficult to contain. And Sharon Asher is determined not to become simply another name on the Bywayman’s growing list of victims.

Victim Number Eight is available now for preorder. The book will be released on Amazon Kindle and in Kindle Unlimited on October 7, 2026

**View it on Amazon**

She wants the moon—and she has a list

Brooke LeBlanc, a woman with a name that sounds like a brand of luxury purse, recently attracted criticism on the internet after she posted a list of “non-negotiable” requirements for her future husband. The New York Post called her list “cringeworthy”. But is it, really?

At the top of the list was her mandatory age requirement of 35 to 42 years old. This is not unreasonable on the surface. LeBlanc is twenty-nine years old herself. (If she thinks that I’m a little too seasoned for her at 58… well, no hard feelings, and bless her heart.) But this range seems a little arbitrary—especially on the lower end. Why is she not willing to consider men between the ages of 28 and 34? That may not be cringeworthy; but it is curious.

She also wants someone who is “funny,” “smart,” “lighthearted,” “masculine,” yada, yada, yada. Continue reading “She wants the moon—and she has a list”

9/11 and the time we are given

With the 25th anniversary of 9/11 this past week, I found myself confronted again with the personal stories of some of the ordinary people who died that day. Many were pressed by circumstances into acts of heroism. Their names include: Todd Beamer, Brian Sweeney, Mark Bingham, Betty Ong, and Lauren Grandcolas, among many others.

While the 9/11 attacks did have elderly victims, it seems that many of them were young people in their prime years: their twenties through their forties. That is the nature of air travel, perhaps—especially on a workday. (September 11, 2001, fell on a Tuesday.) Most of the WTC victims were at work.

All of those people’s stories, compelling as they are, were cut short twenty-five years ago.

I was not anywhere near the events of 9/11 on the morning of September 11th, 2001. I was working at an office building in Erlanger, Kentucky, hundreds of miles from all of the horror that was taking place.

By that time, the internet was commonplace and ubiquitous (though social media did not yet exist). My colleagues and I became aware of what was going on in more or less real time, as it was being reported on the various news sites.

But I went home that day. Many people did not.

All those lives were cut short on September 11, 2001. I, meanwhile, have had 25 years since then—25 years of joy, sadness, disappointment, and triumph. There have been good days and bad days since then, and—I dare say—some good years along with some not-so-good ones.

But those 25 years were mine. That’s a lot of memories. On 9/11/01, I was 33 years old. I’m now 58.

Twenty-five years is an entire generation of time, a generation of time that was given to me, but not to everyone. Even as I mourn the deaths of inspiring, ordinary people whom I never knew, and (in all likelihood) never would have known, I’m compelled to reflect on my own mundane life.

I should be more grateful. I should be kinder and more considerate toward the people around me. I should make better use of the time I have been given, time that was taken from so many others.

-ET

The Vampires of Wallachia: A Halloween story from ‘Hay Moon and Other Stories’

There are certain decisions that seem completely insignificant when you make them.

Where should we stop for dinner?

Which exit should we take?

Should we try that restaurant up ahead?

Most of the time, nothing comes of such decisions. You eat your dinner, get back on the highway, and forget about the place before you reach home.

But sometimes you stop at the wrong restaurant.

That’s the premise behind “The Vampires of Wallachia,” one of the stories in my collection Hay Moon and Other Stories.

Three corporate employees are returning from a business trip through Ohio. They’re tired, hungry, and looking for somewhere to eat before continuing toward Cincinnati.

They eventually find an isolated Chinese restaurant near the small community of Wallachia.

It seems like an unlikely place for a restaurant.

But the lights are on.

The restaurant is open.

And they’re hungry.

So they go inside.

That turns out to be a mistake.

Vampires in the Ohio countryside

One of the things I enjoy doing in horror fiction is putting the fantastic alongside the extremely ordinary.

You don’t need a crumbling castle in Transylvania to encounter something ancient and dangerous.

Sometimes all you need is a lonely highway, a rainy night, and a restaurant that probably shouldn’t be there.

“The Vampires of Wallachia” begins as a fairly mundane story about three coworkers traveling together. There are workplace tensions among them, including an unpleasant boss who is accustomed to getting his way.

Those tensions don’t disappear when the supernatural element enters the story.

They become part of it.

Because the people inside the restaurant aren’t quite what they appear to be.

And the three travelers gradually discover that they haven’t merely stopped at an unusual roadside restaurant.

They’ve walked into someone else’s hunting ground.

A story for the Halloween season

I’ve always liked horror stories in which the everyday world remains recognizable even after something impossible intrudes upon it.

You can still see the highway outside.

Your car is still sitting in the parking lot.

Home may be only an hour or two away.

But suddenly that distance seems much greater.

That was the atmosphere I wanted to create with “The Vampires of Wallachia”: the feeling that somewhere along an ordinary journey, you’ve taken one wrong turn and crossed an invisible boundary.

And getting back across that boundary may not be easy.

If you’re looking for something appropriately creepy to read as Halloween approaches, you’ll find “The Vampires of Wallachia” in Hay Moon and Other Stories.

The collection is available on Amazon Kindle, in paperback, and through Kindle Unlimited.

Just remember:

If you’re driving through rural Ohio late at night and somebody suggests stopping at a strange restaurant for dinner…

Maybe keep driving.

**View HAY MOON AND OTHER STORIES on Amazon**

Why Novig ran that Sydney Sweeney sports ad 

The latest Sydney Sweeney ad is causing outrage of epic proportions. Heads are exploding and fingers are wagging everywhere.

But what are the supply-and-demand roots of all this? Or: who paid Sydney Sweeney to get tastefully naked again?

Novig is a sports betting platform. The company’s recent ad features Sydney Sweeney holding various sports equipment, clad in little but a come-hither smile.

Critics have blasted both Sydney Sweeney and Novig for “sexualizing” women’s sports.

A part of me gets it. The generation of women who were my classmates during my school years were the first generation of women to benefit from Title IX legislation. I’m a big fan of women’s sports—as a principle and a concept. (This is one reason why I feel strongly about the need to preserve women’s sports only for women—but that’s another conversation.) 

I don’t watch spectator sports very much, regardless of who is playing. But I know plenty of men who do.

And here’s the sad truth of it: most of them are aficionados of a handful of men’s sports: football, basketball, baseball, or hockey. (There are, however, some bright spots. One of these is the WNBA, which has recently experienced a surge in viewership, now nearing that of the NBA. Good for them!)

Why aren’t more men watching women’s lacrosse and women’s track and field? I can sympathize with those who are frustrated here. When I was in high school, I ran cross-country. There was a men’s team and a women’s team. Neither of our teams received much spectatorship in comparison to the school’s football team. I was never particularly bitter about this. That was just the way it was.

There is a stark gender disparity where the sports betting market is concerned. Seventy-seven percent of the people stupid enough to regularly bet on sports are men. Women comprise only about twenty-three percent of the idiots betting on the big game this weekend.

This means that online betting platforms like Novig have to appeal to the male audience. And what’s one way to appeal to the male audience?

A scantily clad Sydney Sweeney!

Keep in mind that men have actually purchased soap infused with Sydney Sweeney’s bathwater. This woman could sell ice to Eskimos—so long as the Eskimos are heterosexual males.

What about charges that Sydney Sweeney’s appearance in the Novig ad sexualizes female athletes? The ad really has very little to do with female athletes—even though Sydney Sweeney gets naked with all that sports gear.

Notice that the sports gear consists mostly of accoutrements for men’s sports. The bitter truth is that the men flocking to Novig to bet on sports probably aren’t betting on women’s lacrosse. They’re betting on men’s football, basketball, hockey, and baseball.

Sydney Sweeney has become a predictable trope in our culture wars. Conservatives are supposed to love her. The very sight of her makes progressives boil with anger.

We live in an age where everything, seemingly, is political. We have become accustomed to combing everything in our culture for some underlying political motive… some coded message to support one larger agenda and undermine another.

But sometimes an ad really is about the cold, hard capitalistic pursuit of lucre—and not much else. The Novig Sydney Sweeney ad, I submit, is one such instance.

-ET

New story: THE WITCHES OF HARMONY

I am drawn to foreign locations. Some of you know that I’m an avid, lifelong student of foreign languages.

At the same time, travel involves many unknowns. There is a lot that can go wrong… especially if you encounter supernatural entities at your destination.

That’s the idea behind my Terrifying Travels series.

The most recent addition to the series is THE WITCHES OF HARMONY, which involves restless 17th-century spirits in the fictional Greater Boston town of Harmony, Massachusetts. Check it out on Amazon.

Amazon book description:

Some business trips are better left unbooked.

Bill Preston has spent years traveling the country for his job, working trade shows in convention centers from one coast to the other. So when he’s assigned to an industrial expo in Harmony, Massachusetts, he expects another routine week on the road.

Then a coworker warns him about Harmony.

He won’t say exactly what happened there. Only that he never wants to go back.

Bill soon discovers that Harmony is a picture-perfect New England town with a history no one wants to discuss. There are whispered stories about witches who escaped the Salem trials—only to meet a more terrible fate in Harmony.

There are warnings not to go outside after dark.

And there are things in Harmony that only certain people can see.

Bill considers himself a rational man. He doesn’t believe in witches, ghosts, or ancient curses.

But something in Harmony has noticed him.

And before this business trip is over, Bill may discover that some places never escape their past.

The Witches of Harmony is a supernatural horror tale of haunted history, business travel, and a New England town with a secret it has been keeping for more than three hundred years.

Lindsay Clancy, the 19th Amendment, and our culture wars

The trial of child murderer Lindsay Clancy has produced yet more political fallout. Over this past weekend, some Republican women in media circles expressed concern over online calls to “repeal the 19th Amendment.”

Let me save you some googling here. The 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was passed by Congress in 1919 and ratified in 1920. It was the amendment that gave American women the right to vote.

So why would anyone want to repeal it? There is scarcely anyone left alive who was even born before the 19th Amendment’s passage. No living American woman has ever been lawfully denied the vote because of her sex.

The answer is… because of vocal (though fringe) feminist calls to pardon, exonerate, or otherwise excuse child murderer Lindsay Clancy. Throughout Lindsay Clancy’s recent trial in Plymouth, Massachusetts, pink-clad, overwhelmingly female protesters showed up to demonstrate on Lindsay Clancy’s behalf.

The pro-Clancy demonstrations provoked widespread backlash. At the most extreme end of this backlash are some calls to repeal the 19th Amendment. Such declarations are mostly limited to social media.

According to the logic here, if women will support child murderer Lindsay Clancy, they should not have a voice in our democracy.

Before we go any further, allow me to make a necessary disclaimer. Taking away women’s right to vote is neither justified nor a plausible political outcome.  “That dog,” as the old-timers say, “ain’t gonna hunt.” Women’s suffrage is not some newfangled idea of the social media age. My grandmothers both voted, as did all four of my great-grandmothers. This is not 1919. Women are now CEOs, governors, senators, military personnel and police officers.

And then there are the retail political realities—even if the 19th Amendment is never repealed (which it won’t ever be).  Want to elect liberal Democrats for the next four or five election cycles? Keep talking about the repeal of the 19th Amendment.

Calls for the repeal of the 19th Amendment are so politically toxic that one almost suspects a false flag operation. But that probably isn’t what’s happening here. This is yet another instance of social media rewarding the most extreme and combustible positions available.

***

But two things can be true—or false—at the same time. The wrongheaded, politically suicidal proposal to repeal the 19th amendment must be evaluated on its own terms. So must the affection for the filicidal Lindsay Clancy in certain feminist circles. Continue reading “Lindsay Clancy, the 19th Amendment, and our culture wars”

Hating Boomers without knowing what they are

The other day I came across a news story on Facebook about a contentious local issue. Against my better judgment, I ventured into the comments section. (Nothing good ever comes from reading the comments on Facebook.)

A woman in her early 50s (born in 1973) expressed an opinion that conflicted with the views of many of the younger commenters, who were mostly in their thirties.

Rather than answering her argument, the younger commenters replied with a string of denunciations of “Boomers.”

One even typed, “I can’t wait till all the stupid Boomers die.”

Source: Facebook

There are a number of problems here—the gross generalizations and hopes of mass death aside.

First of all, a person born in 1973 is no Boomer. A person born in 1973 is solidly in Gen X (born 1965 to 1980) territory. So insulting a Gen Xer by wishing death on all Boomers is kind of like insulting a person from Germany by saying that you want to exterminate all the citizens of Denmark.

I have noticed this tendency among some Millennials and older Gen Zs on the internet: They define “Boomer” as anyone ten years their senior who happens to disagree with them. At best, this is a scattershot approach to being an insufferable boor on the internet. At worst, it is a display of rank idiocy.

For the record: a “Boomer” is someone born between 1946 and 1964—i.e., someone between the ages of 80 and 62 at the end of 2026.

If they don’t fall within that age range, they aren’t a Boomer—just like a hummingbird isn’t an armadillo. You can’t use these words interchangeably just because TikTok has told you that Boomer = “bad.”

If you’re going to be a jerk, at least get the terminology right.

-ET

Halloween is coming: 12 Hours of Halloween

Halloween is next month.

For some of us, Halloween is inseparable from memories of childhood: plastic masks, drugstore costumes, jack-o’-lanterns glowing on front porches, piles of candy, and suburban streets that seemed much darker and more mysterious after sunset.

That is the world of my supernatural novel:

12 Hours of Halloween

12 Hours of Halloween takes place on Halloween night in 1980. Three friends—Jeff Schaeffer, Leah Carter, and Bobby Nagel—decide to go trick-or-treating one final time before adolescence brings their childhood Halloween traditions to an end.

They expect an evening of candy, pranks, and perhaps a few manufactured scares.

Instead, they find themselves trapped in a very different kind of Halloween.

A sinister teenager known as the “ghost boy” warns them that they will endure twelve hours of trial. Soon their familiar suburban neighborhood begins to change around them.

Haunted houses. Possessed trees. Restless spirits. And a terrifying figure called the Head Collector, who roams the nighttime streets looking for his next trophy.

But 12 Hours of Halloween isn’t only about monsters.

It is also about that strange boundary between childhood and adolescence—when old friendships begin to change, childhood certainties disappear, and feelings that were once simple suddenly become complicated.

Jeff believes he is falling in love with Leah. His longtime friend Bobby, meanwhile, is becoming someone Jeff no longer completely understands.

And all of this happens during a single long Halloween night.

A Halloween story for the Gen X generation

I wrote 12 Hours of Halloween very much in the tradition of the supernatural stories I grew up with.

If you enjoy the autumnal nostalgia and childhood wonder of Ray Bradbury—particularly stories in which the ordinary world seems only a few steps away from something strange and supernatural—you may find something familiar here.

The setting is deliberately Gen X: Halloween 1980, before smartphones, before social media, and before parents could track their children electronically.

Three kids go out into the October darkness, largely on their own.

And the darkness turns out to contain far more than they bargained for.

12 Hours of Halloween is a coming-of-age story, a supernatural thriller, and a nostalgic trip back to the Halloweens of another era.

With October almost here, this is a good time to take that trip.

12 Hours of Halloween is available on Amazon in Kindle and paperback editions. It is also available to read through Kindle Unlimited.

Happy Halloween—and watch what follows you home.