4/13/26
Had a great time at the Ashland Library this past weekend. Thanks to all of your for coming out! My recap and pictures in yesterday’s newsletter.
The drive home yesterday, however… oh madonn’! (Spellcheck insists that isn’t right, but I’ve been married into an Italian family long enough to know that it is). I loathe taking interstate 95, the GWB, the Tappan Zee — all of that shit. A few years ago, on a drive up to Boston, I found that if I went north from here and up through State College and Scranton, I could take back roads and avoid all of those heavy corridors and population centers, and in doing so, it only added about an hour to the drive. But given that i’ve never sat for less than an hour on 95 in that Mad Max zone between New York and Connecticut on 95, even with that extra hour on back roads, it became a shorter drive.
I took that way up this time, but on the way home, I wasn’t paying attention because I was laughing sooooo hard at some classic Riley Martin and Eric the Actor snippets on Howard 101 (the two greatest Wack packers of All-Time) and my brain’s autopilot took over and next thing I knew, I was heading the cursed way, and eventually ended up sitting in bumper to bumper traffic on the GWB’s lower level in NYC. Which ultimately added a bunch of hours to the drive.
Next appearance is on Saturday April 25 at the Ephrata Public Library 550 South Reading Road, Ephrata, PA 17522 which is only 45 minutes from our house and nowhere near any of that.
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Women In Horror Year: Day 11
Dirty Bombs by Dacia M. Arnold
Surviving war isn't always the hardest part—sometimes it's coming home.
Staff Sergeant Miranda St Claire thought she’d seen the worst war had to offer, until the dead started rising. Trapped in a combat support hospital after a biological attack turns soldiers into ravenous monsters, Miranda must navigate a battlefield unlike any she's faced before. With her comrades dying—or worse, returning—around her, and the government abandoning those left behind, she makes an impossible choice: get out or die trying.
But survival comes with a price. When she finally returns home, she’s labeled a deserter, not a hero. And the virus may not be finished with her yet…
Dirty Bombs is a gritty, pulse-pounding military horror that asks what happens after the end of the world begins.
Many of you probably know Dacia as my co-host (along with Jim Cobb) on the limited series podcast HOW TO SURVIVE 2025. I first met her at the ill-fated Ghost Town Writer’s Retreat in Colorado — the absolute hands-down worst convention I have ever attended, popularized in my story “The Goat” (which can be found in THINGS LEFT BEHIND). That weekend and in the years since, I have seen first hand how strong, capable, and resilient Dacia is, and I have long said that she’d be one of my first picks for a zombie apocalypse survival clan. Which makes it all the more funny that her first book-length published work would be a zombie apocalypse story. Dacia wrote what she knew, and there are some autobiographical elements that efinitely infused this book and the character of Miranda. I feel like it is an excellent glimpse of what Dacia would do in such a setting, and I am resolute in my pick of her for my team. First serialized on Amazon’s Vella platform, Dirty Bombs in currently available in eBook and audiobook.
