So I've picked up "Attack of the Two-Headed Poetry Monster" by Bram Stoker Award Finalist Michael McCarty and Bram Stoker Award-winning author Mark McLaughlin. This is a collection of over 80 dark and twisted poems that I would call a perfect combination of Tim Burton and Shel Silverstein, with dashes of Steven King and Lovecraft thrown in. 

Already a prolific writer — with six books being released this year for a total of 20 by the end of 2010 — Michael McCarty had never penned a children’s book. “That was always on the back burner,” the Rock Island writer, 47, said. But that’s changed with the publication of “Rusty the Robot’s Holiday Adventures,” an 84-page book targeted at 6- to 12-year-old readers.

Read the entire article here.

Welcome to the weird and wild world of ESOTERIA-LAND! You won't find it on any map, but you will find it between the covers of this book. ESOTERIA-LAND is the realm of Michael McCarty's nonfiction. Over the years he has written hundreds of interviews, articles, essays and reviews, and he has selected an authentic, eclectic, and eccentric array of these works for your entertainment - and education, too. You'll learn surprising things about your favorite actors, comedians, musicians, artists, movies, CDs and books that you never knew before.



Inside you will find interviews with Tommy Chong, Justin Hayward of The Moody Blues, Boris Vallejo and Julie Bell, Bobcat Goldthwait, Mojo Nixon, Terry Pratchett, Alan Dean Foster, Forry Ackerman, and many more. You'll learn tantalizing tidbits about Roger Corman's movies, Red Dwarf, Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, and the writing careers of Dean Koontz, Neil Gaiman, and Richard Laymon. You'll find out why world-famous Masters of the Macabre like Halloween, receive helpful hints on how to write Science-Fiction, Horror and Fantasy, and discover new facts and insights as Michael reviews a variety of CDs, movies, and books.

An introduction by scream-queen Linnea Quigley and afterword by The Amazing Kreskin round out this amazing collection. Welcome to ESOTERIA-LAND, but be warned . . . you'll enjoy it so much, you may never want to leave!

A few of you have mentioned to me that you want to publish and sell some of your writings, so I want to share some information with you. I've recently chatted with Mark Coker over at Smashwords.com. Mark offers a very good service for independent authors. With Smashwords, anybody can sell an ebook, and it gives authors full control over how their works are published, sampled, priced and sold.