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My New Book "They Came From Fort Blue Hill" Is Now Available!

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  Back in late-2019, I had a germ of an idea and decided to just sit down and start writing it. I developed a character I really enjoyed; a down-on-his-luck, small-town reporter named Wes McGavin. I wanted to write a book that people who hate reading books would enjoy. A book that just wanted to be funny and entertaining, but still contained a structurally-sound story. The idea was that Wes thinks of himself as an intrepid reporter, but in reality is a slacker, who was looking for a way to quickly rise through the ranks of journalism and get out of his hometown. The story he lands on is that aliens are being kept at a military base north of town, and he teams up with a disgraced conspiracy theorist to uncover the truth and save both of their careers. I wrote about thirty pages before finding myself in a corner and putting the manuscript aside. If I remember correctly, I picked it up sporadically through the spring of 2020 because, I mean, if you remember that particular stretch of time
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The Most Threatening Car In The World May Shock You... Or Not, I Don't Know

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The great thing about going on walks is that it gives you time to think. Sometimes I contemplate the meaning of life, other times I think about how fortunate I am to be alive and taking in the beauty of nature, but more often than not I think about how I should get Chick-Fil-A tomorrow. But one thing that is always on my mind while on a walk is not getting hit by a car. Sometimes my mind wanders to how Stephen King got hit by a car one time and that maybe if it happened to me it'd help me sell a bunch of books, but he didn't sell a bunch of books because he got hit by a car, he sold a bunch of books because he's Stephen King, and just so happened to get hit by a car. Recently I was thinking about cars that look threatening, essentially thinking about whether or not I could profile cars that would be most likely to hit me. I found I really couldn't, so I started thinking about cars that are most threatening in general. Think of the oil tanker from the Stephen Spielberg T
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A Very Christmas Christmas: My Annual Hallmark Movie Treatment

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It's no secret that Hallmark movies are objectively trash. There's nothing particularly interesting about them and any form of "stakes" are as hard to find in them as a lead actress who didn't star in a late-80s/early-90s sitcom. That's why for the past few years I've written treatments for movies I thought would be perfect when it comes to placating the rubes who eat up Hallmark's holiday offerings. Who could forget the heartwarming tale of a woman overcoming her husband's death by autoerotic asphyxiation,  A Conundrum For Christmas ? Or the Christmas/Hannukah mashup we all needed, The Christmas Dreidle ? How could I top those? Well, it won't be easy, but perhaps with this... *** A Very Christmas Christmas By Matt Reigle Warren Christmas (played by me) and Jeanine Christmas (Kate Beckinsale) live on a quiet cul-de-sac in the town of Humbugsville, Maryland. Everyone in Humbugsville hates Christmas, and the townspeople  even banned celebrating b
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I Spent My Weekend Figuring Out Why Jack The Ripper Stopped Killing; How'd you Spend Yours?

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The identity of Jack The Ripper is one of history's great mysteries. A monster who stalked and viciously killed women in London's Whitechapel district taking six victims in the late 1880s then managed to elude capture. It's a case that will likely remain unsolved entirely, but I think I may have cracked another important aspect of the case: why did he*  stop killing. *(I say he, but there are some pretty compelling arguments into the crimes having been committed by a woman posing as a nurse, The key to that argument is she could have posed as a mid-wife which would have allowed her to walk around Victorian England in bloody clothes without raising suspicion.) Jack The Ripper wrote a series of letters to Scotland Yard in which he taunted authorities. I was reading a book that featured one of the letters — the famous "From Hell" letter, the killer's final letter — when something hit me. Here, read it for yourself: From hell. Mr Lusk, Sor I send you half the Kidn
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Snowflakes: The Biggest Lie Ever Told To The Public... Except For All Those Other Ones

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I hate lying... except when I do it, in which case it's fine and I understand its value. The difference is when I lie it's usually about small, inconsequential things like telling someone their hat makes them look cool when it doesn't or telling my neighbor that the kid who lives down the street smashed their mailbox with a bat when in reality it was me. Those are little lies designed to make my life easier, not massive widespread deceptions intended to mislead the public. That brings us to snowflakes. If you think back to your earliest school days, one of the first useless facts you ever learned — long before calculus or the preamble to The Constitution — you were told that no two snowflakes are the same. You sat on the floor in wide-eyed wonder at such an incredible piece of information and would go on to regurgitate for years to come. I remember this piece of information was backed up by the story of Wilson Bentley , who in 1885 at the age of 19 began photographing snow
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A Rankin/Bass "Classic": The Wonderfully Weird "Mad Monster Party

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Nothing feels like a warm, creepy, claymation-y hug quite like a Rankin/Bass holiday special. Even if you're not familiar with the name Rankin/Bass, you'll no doubt be familiar with their filmography which boasts classics like Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer, Santa Claus Is Coming To Town, The Year Without A Santa Claus, and  The Little Drummer Boy. The company is synonymous with Christmas, but they have a little-known gem to their catalog for the Halloween season:  Mad Monster Party. Released in 1967,  Mad Monster Party ( sometimes inexplicably written as Mad Monster Party? with a seemingly superfluous question mark)   tells the story of Baron Boris Von Frankenstein summoning all the monsters to his Isle of Evil (which oddly enough is in the Caribbean) to tell them about a major discovery he has made and inform them that he will be retiring from his position as the head of the Worldwide Organization of Monster. In attendance are Frankenstein's Monster (who is sometimes refe
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G-g-ghost B-b-blog: Why Aren't There Any New Ghosts?

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Ever since I was a young kid I've loved watching ghost documentaries. I find them fascinating and always held out hope that someday we'd be able to scrounge up some proof as to whether or not there is life after death. However, thanks to a recent revelation, I've finally accepted the fact that the whole ghost thing isn't real. It all comes down to one simple question: Why aren't there any new ghosts? Every ghost documentary I've ever seen follows the same formula. There's an old building (almost always a hotel or bed & breakfast for some reason) in which some Civil War soldier clomps through the hallways with his ghost boots. But therein lies the problem; It's almost always a Civil War soldier or anyone else who happened to live in the 1860s or within 80 years or so in either direction.  In addition to Civil War specters, you also hear about Revolutionary War soldier ghosts, Turn-Of-The-Century Prospector ghosts, woman who is sad because her fiance d
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