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The recording and mastering has been completed on the audiobook adaptation of the latest in S.D. Smith’s Tales of Old Natalia series, The Wreck and Rise of Whitson Mariner, read by yours truly.   It was a pleasure to revisit characters from The Blackstar of Kingston (which you definitely should hear first), as well as give voice to new characters in the series and wonderful characters who only existed off-stage in the first book.  (Mother Saramack, anyone?)

It is a worthy sequel and definitely advances the community of rabbits toward the kingdom we know it will become in The Green Ember (as read by the fantastic Joel Clarkson).  They just have to survive, first.  And no one’s safety is guaranteed.

Expect publication in early December.

Recording has officially begun on the next audiobook for which I am serving as narrator: The Wreck and Rise of Whitson Mariner by S.D. Smith. It is the second book in Smith’s Tales of Old Natalia series, which are set a century before his regular Green Ember series and detail how that kingdom began.

I can report that it is a worthy sequel to The Black Star of Kingston and it’s good to be voicing old friends (and enemies) once again.  If you’ve not read (or better yet, heard) The Black Star of Kingston, you should do so before journeying up river for the next one.  Otherwise all the twists and turns won’t be nearly as satisfying.

Look for it (listen) in early December.

Eric is making signing and speaking appearances to promote A Consternation of Monsters. (He also occasionally does some acting.) You’ll find those appearances and roles here.

November 10, 2018 — Eric will be leading a writing workshop called the Joe McCabe Memorial Short Play Writing Workshop as part of the Fall Writing Conference for West Virginia Writers, Inc.  The first workshop Eric ever attended at a WV Writers Conference was one on the craft of writing short plays taught by the late and prolific playwright Joe McCabe. In this workshop, Eric will honor Joe’s legacy by using examples of Joe’s work (as well as Eric’s own short plays) as a backdrop to discuss the form. The goal is for participants to leave with ideas for short plays of their own to develop as well as resources for submitting those plays to theatres around the country who are actively seeking them.

The wife and I dined at Shoney’s for Sunday brunch, both because we were very hungry, but also because I’d been suffering from a bit of constipation.  Shoney’s buffet, we knew, would cure both.

Shortly after we were seated, a family consisting of a grandmother and four children–two boys and two girls of the age range of 7ish to 15ish–were seated at the table next to us.  Eavesdropping on their conversations quickly became our mealtime entertainment.  For instance, when the waitress explained that Shoney’s Sunday buffet contained both lunch and breakfast items, the youngest girl beamed with amazement and proclaimed “I like lunch and breakfast!”

“Yeah, I think she’s my favorite human, now,” I told my wife.  For I also like lunch and breakfast.

We got some lunch and breakfast for ourselves from the buffet and a few minutes later the family members filtered up for their own grub.  When the kids returned to the table, they were all atwitter about something.  It was hard to determine what exactly they were excited about, but eventually we got enough clues to start piecing things together.

“Who is Tiger Woods?” the younger brother said.

“You don’t know who Tiger Woods is?” the older brother replied.

“No,” younger brother said.  “Who is Tiger Woods?”

“He plays golf,” the older sister said.  “Professionally,” she added.  “At the Greenbrier,” she finished.

Oh, I thought. maybe they had watched some of the PGA Open a few weeks back.  I assume he played in it, but I didn’t go and didn’t even watch any of it on TV, since my sports intake is pretty much limited to the Olympics and American Ninja Warrior.  Then the older sister threw a wrench into my theory.

“He looks really young.  I can’t believe I was standing right next to him,” she said.  At first I thought she meant that she’d attended the PGA and must have somehow stood beside him there.  Why this would come up again so long later, I wasn’t sure, but that was my working theory.  My alternate theory was that he was in town again and was playing golf at the Greenbrier and the family had somehow seen him there.  However, the way the two sisters on the opposite side of the table kept craning their necks to look toward the buffet in the room behind me gave me pause.  I knew it was possible that Tiger was in the area, but was it somehow also possible that he was dining at Shoney’s?  The girls kept craning to see.

“Do they mean Tiger Woods is here?” I whispered to the wife.

“No,” she said.  “Tiger Woods would never eat at Shoney’s.”

“I dunno,” I said.  “I think he’s demonstrated something of a taste for diner waitresses.”

The wife was not amused by this.  She added that if Tiger Woods was really in the restaurant there would be far more excitement and whispering and craning among all the other tables.

A few minutes later, the waitress returned to the other table and the Tiger topic was still going strong.

“Did you know Tiger Woods is here?” the youngest girl asked the waitress.

“Oh, is he playing at the Greenbrier?” the waitress asked.

“No.  I mean he’s here!  He’s in Shoney’s!” the younger sister replied excitedly.

“We stood beside him in line,” the older sister confirmed.

“You did?” the waitress said in a confused tone.  She looked around, but didn’t seem to see him.

My wife shook her head. “See, if Tiger was here the staff would have been told in advance about it.”

I wasn’t convinced they would, but I was also far from convinced Tiger Woods was breathing the same air as me.  I finished my last bite of cheese grits and decided to go back to the bar, both for round two and for a scouting expedition to see if I could figure out who it was in the restaurant that those girls thought was Tiger Woods.  I looked all around, scanning the horseshoe of booths near the bar, the double rows of booths stretching toward the cash register and front door, and the back room where gatherings are sometimes held.  They were all full but I didn’t see any customers who could remotely be mistaken for Tiger Woods.  In fact, the only African American male I could see in the place was a waiter, who in no way resembled Tiger Woods.  Maybe these kids were racist and couldn’t distinguish between different black people.

Throughout the rest of our meal, the kids continued to talk about Tiger Woods, and crane their necks, and go back to the bar.  Each time they returned they seemed to have a new story about seeing him again.  I was on the verge of asking where he was, but decided that it would just lead to the kids’ illusions being shattered when I pointed out that whoever it was they thought was Tiger Woods was not really him, which was the most likely scenario to me.  Let the kids keep their story.  It was time for us to leave. Shoney’s had done it’s job.

The coda to this tale is that days later, while attending a public event in town, I was SHOCKED to my core to see a dude at the same event who was the spitting image of Tiger Woods.  The guy was clearly 20 years younger than Tiger Woods himself, so I knew he wasn’t the genuine article.  But he was dressed in a collared golf shirt and was wearing a ball cap much like ones Tiger might wear, and looked to all appearances like a long-lost Woods son.  Just to make sure I wasn’t crazy, I asked a friend to take a peek for confirmation that the guy really did look like Tiger Woods.  He confirmed it.  Now, I don’t know for certain that this was the guy the kids saw during lunch and breakfast that Sunday, as I didn’t see him myself, but now I have to think it was highly probable.  Of course the only way to know for sure would be to ask him, or to subtly inquire as to the regularity of his bathroom habits over the previous week.  But I didn’t want to have that conversation.  And so it will remain something of a mystery.

Happy birthday.

I’ve been leeching off my barely-used themed account @thingsyouforgot long enough. It’s time to be my own Twit… or, have my own Twitter account at least.  So you can find me on the Tweets @EFritzius.

Let the twitting commence.

Things in my life that are currently broken:

1. My Subaru’s driver’s side window, which, two months ago, stopped rolling down and presumably also no longer rolls up. Makes drive-through windows kind of a pain to deal with.  In more positive news, I’ve begun eating less fast food, cause lord knows I cannot be bothered to get out of my car and go inside.

2. My lawnmower, which, three weeks ago, began  making horrible noises (the kind of sharp-blades-of-metal-about-to-fly-in-all-directions kind of noises that most people don’t care to hear coming from some place beneath their butts.  It has been sent to the shop where it has been for two weeks.

3. My desktop computer, which, two weeks ago, made a funny ozone smell upon startup, worked for another five minutes then shut itself off.  I ordered a new power supply on the theory that my old one was bad, but this doesn’t seem to be the issue.

4. My bluetooth headphones, which have been ailing a bit since one of the arms of their neck-wrapable housing snapped, exposing fragile wires within.  I “fixed” it by the use of some gorilla glue and some moldable glue putty on top of that.  Then, the headphone earbud developed a gap where the wire-cover meets the earbud.  I “fixed” this with some liquid electrical tape.  Unfortunately, it didn’t last and the earbud went ahead and developed a break in the wire, killing that earbud.

5. My sense that anyone in government is decent or can be trusted, which has actually had several hairline cracks in it since the `90s, but which has finally gone ahead and shattered into multiple pieces.  The best I think we can hope for is that a given politician’s self-serving interests might coincidentally line up with good policy.

Eric is making signing and speaking appearances to promote A Consternation of Monsters.  (He also occasionally does some acting.) You’ll find those appearances and roles here.

May 18-19, 2018 — Eric is the director for the 2018 Opera House PlayFest at the Pocahontas County Opera House in Marlinton, W.Va.  Featured plays will include “Petting Zoo Story” by Jason Half, “Daughters These Days” by T.K. Lee, “Beans and Franks Never Tasted So Good” by Jon Joy, “A Game of Twenty…” by Eric himself, “Riding Lessons” by Brett Hursey, and “Bankin’ on the Grand” by Chris Shaw Swanson.  Featured actors will include Chris Curry, John C. Davis, Eric Fritzius, Janet Ghigo, Charlie Maghee Hughes, Kim King, Jay Miller, Bill Mitchell, Joanna Murdock, Rhonda Pritt, and Shenda Smith.  Tickets will be available at the door.

I would be remiss if I didn’t take a moment to write about the passing of Art Bell, purveyor of strange ideas and the poser of questions concerning all manner of mysteries of the universe.  He was for many years the host of Coast to Coast A.M., one of the most successful radio programs of the last half century.  Art’s was a fantastic and fascinating format, as he basically just opened the phone lines to anyone who wanted to call about whatever topic he was covering in a given night.  Ghost stories?  He took `em.  UFO sightings? He wanted to hear about `em.  Were you a time traveler?  Give Art a call if you were in the same year.  He might not believe you, but he’d let you tell your story.

I wish I could say I grew up listening to Art Bell, but if a radio station in my area of Mississippi broadcast his show I was unaware of it.  I learned of him in the late `90s while working as a radio DJ myself in Tupelo, Mississippi.  I can’t recall for sure how I came to know of him, but likely from one of the various conspiracy, UFO, or cryptozooloigic websites I was a fan of in the day.  I know for a fact that I had read a creepy story or to featuring his show in an encyclopedia of Fortean topics I owned at the time (but which has mysteriously disappeared from my shelf now).  He was a fascinating figure, even if I couldn’t hear him on a regular basis.  I was able to download clips of his shows from his website, but streaming was an odd creature in the late 90s.  And then, in 1998, just as I was learning of Art to begin with, he retired under mysterious circumstances.  It was to be the first of many such retirements, almost all of which didn’t take for very long.  Art was soon back on the air.

When I moved to North Carolina in 1999, Coast to Coast was broadcast by one of the sister stations to the one I worked for in Charlotte.  And during the two months or so I did an overnight shift there, I often found myself switching over to the AM feed and listening to Art in real time, rather than downloads days later.  It was always entertaining.  However, my thankful departure from that shift and Art’s various other premature retirements kept me from regularly hearing him much after that.

Bell is, of course, the inspiration for my fictional character of radio host Rik Winston and his UFO All Night program, who is referenced in my short story “…to a Flame.”  (You can read more about that story in the Moths & Men blog series elsewhere on this site.)  In the story, one of the characters, Virgil–loyal Rik Winston listener–tells the tale about a “doctor guy” who calls in to Rik’s show following an alien encounter.  This was inspired by a real series of calls to Art Bell’s Coast to Coast AM from the 1990s. The real story turned out to be a complete hoax, of course, which the “doctor” guy eventually admitted on Art’s show.  However, this hasn’t stopped that guy from trying to make money off of it to this day.  (UFOWatchdog has more about the real story and the “doctor’s” actual identity HERE.)

While Rik is also the “author” of the foreword to A Consternation of Monsters.  But he’s only turned up in one short story, so far.  However, he’s been referenced and even makes an audio appearance in three of my short plays.  I call them  the Ellipses Cycle, as they all have titles featuring ellipses and are thematically tied together by their strange and unusual (and often West Virginia-related) subject matter.  They also all mention Rik Winston.  They include the stage adaptation of “…to a Flame,” the inspired-by-a-true-story African lion adventure “…and Tigers and Bears,” and a third play set in the waiting room of eternity called “A Game of Twenty…”  It’s a story about a guy who finally gets to ask for answers to all the questions about strange and unusual things he has wondered about.  Naturally, he loves every single answer he gets.  That play has been produced for Greenbrier Valley Theatre as well as a staged reading at the 2016 West Virginia Playwright’s Festival.  And, in May, it will again be performed as part of the Opera House PlayFest 2018.

I’ll have to dedicate it to Art Bell.  Hopefully now, the man has all the answers.  But here’s hoping it’s another early retirement.