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Anxiety at the highest level!

Most of our blogs stay with the publishing and book industry, but when a story like this hits the scene, sometimes you have to step out of the box.  Ozzy Osbourne just announced that the original lineup of Black Sabbath is getting back together.  They will have a new album and tour to showcase this monumental event.  Music is one of my first loves, first listening to Kiss back in 1977 and then seeing them in concert two years later when I was nine years old.  From that point I’ve been a music fan, especially hard rock / heavy metal.  However I love all music, except country, hip-hop top 40 and rap.  A lot of the bands that I loved back in the 80’s are back and sounding just as great as ever.  It always makes me think what concert never happened that I think would be great to see.  I thought that I would spend any amount of money if Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd did a concert together.  I would also have loved to see Iron Maiden and Metallica share the stage, even though I’ve seen both of them separately many times.  I was too young to see Zeppelin, and now that John Bonham is dead, that will never happen.  However the one band that I didn’t see and would love to catch is AC/DC.  For some reason I’ve not been able to work that one out. I’ve seen over 250 concerts in my time and seen so many great bands, but I would have to say that when I shared a special moment with my wife Shannon in Las Vegas to see the G3 tour (Joe Satriani, Steve Vai and Yngwie Malmsteen) was the highlight of my concert life.  I still love catching the old acts and live in Southern California where a lot of those bands still come.  I took my 12 year old to see her first Kiss concert two years ago before Thanksgiving and she fell in love with them and that music.  My wife and I felt it was important to take our kids to concerts and let them experience the joy of live music.  Some of the bands we went to as a family are: Boston, Queensryche, Dream Theater, Fates Warning, Great White, Maroon 5, Train, Kiss, John Mayer and others.  We are planning to see Cinderella in September.  I think that all families should include their children to some of the concerts that come around, so they can explore the music we grew up with.  The crap that is hitting the airwaves now is all they have to listen to.

What concert experiences do you have?   What band or bands would you like to see that you haven’t?   Looking forward in hearing your responses!  All forms of music are welcome!

John Raab

CEO / Publisher

Suspense Magazine

What would you do faced in this situation?

Growing up I loved reading the “choose your own adventure” books.  I found myself making the dumb move almost every time and having to go back and pick the other way to get through the book.  Well let’s bring back this situational book and see where it leads.  I decided to write something and hopefully you will find it funny and entertaining.  Let’s set the scene.

“Crash”, the sound of glass breaking wakes you from a dead sleep.  You sit up in bed wondering if you are going to hear another noise or maybe your cat jumped on the table and knocked the glass vase over.  You spend about 15 seconds and realize that everything is silent.  You decide to walk downstairs, slowly, to see what happened.  When you flip on the light over the staircase, you can’t see anything broken.  You slowly continue down the stairs trying to look over the banister to see if you can see around the corner into the living room.  As you continue further, you see your cat, Dixie, walking in front of the bottom of the stairs.  You continue down to check Dixie out, thinking that maybe she knocked something over and cut herself.  Instead, you find that she is in perfect health.  As you take another step to go to the kitchen, you hear a creaking sound coming from upstairs?  You freeze in place wondering what the hell is going on.  You race to the kitchen and grab the house phone to call 911, however you get no dial tone.  You bought a gun over a year ago, because of the rash of break ins people where having in the neighborhood, however that gun is in your bedroom, along with your cell phone.  You find your flashlight in the kitchen junk drawer and shine it around.  You continue to listen to see if you hear anything else coming from upstairs, but there is no doubting that you are in danger, you just don’t know where it will come from.  You look out of the kitchen and into the dining room and notice the scene of the breaking glass.  However, you see something strange, because the glass was broken from the inside, as there is very little glass lying on your floor inside the house.  The sound you heard from upstairs you’ve not heard again and you can’t be sure if the sound came from the inside of the house or the outside.  Now comes the time for your decision:

1. You can leave the house, not knowing what or who is out there and try to reach a neighbor’s house to call the police?

2. You can grab a weapon and go upstairs to get your gun and cell phone?

Which path do you choose??  Read the correct numbered paragraph with the path you picked.

1. You decide, because you have watched many horror movies and leave the house.  You exit out the backdoor from the kitchen, cat in hand, and go in the back yard.  The moonlight is bright and you don’t see anybody lurking around.  You make your way to the side of the house, to exit from your fence to the front yard.  As you grab the handle Dixie hisses and jumps from your hand, scratching your arm.  As you grab your wound, you feel a hand grab you and the cold steel of a knife on your throat.  The end is quick as the knife cuts open a deep wound and the warmth of the blood leaving your body make you slump down on the grass.  You never see your attacker, as you land face first in a pool of blood.  Before you breathe your last breath, you feel Dixie licking your at stretched hand.  Your attacker watched the movies also. THE END!

2. Not knowing what is going on outside, you feel it better to arm yourself with a butcher knife and head back upstairs to grab your gun and cell phone.  You make it half way up the stairs when you hear a sound from the side of the house, coming from outside.  You rush upstairs, grab your cell phone and get your gun from the lockbox under your bed.  Since you live alone, you leave the box open and the gun loaded.  You dial 911 and tell the police what happened.  You look out your bedroom window and see a figure running to your backdoor.  You hear the sliding glass door open and you decide to get a better look at the stair case and get on one knee in your bedroom doorway, gun stretched out ready to fire.  In a split second you see the figure on the bottom stair and you aim.  You have to remember exactly what to do, as you went to the range about 10 months ago learning how to fire.  You aim for the stomach, knowing that the gun will probably shoot a little higher than normal.  As the attacker reaches the third step you see his eyes and he see yours.  You don’t hesitate, you fire one shot and knock the attacker backwards from the stairs, one shot in the lower chest.  You stand up and go to the top of the stairs looking down.  You see no movement.  You cautiously walk down a couple of stairs, gun at the ready.   It was about 1 minute of watching later, that the police arrive at your house.  You didn’t sustain any physical damage, but the mental wounds cut you deep.  You pick up Dixie and give her a big kiss.  THE END!

How far will you go?

In the wake of the family tragedy that we are going through, it made me think how far an author should go to include real life into fiction.  Most authors will use stories that they read or things happening in the news to get their ideas.  Andrew Gross just put out “Eyes Wide Open” and he used a personal real life tragedy to conduct his story.  It was very emotional and charged throughout with the feeling that he had left part of him in the pages.  I believe that every author needs to explore the depths of their emotions and write about something that happened to them or a family member, to give that type of emotion.  I was watching the BIO channel and a behind the scenes look at “Saturday Night Fever”.  Not only was it fascinating to see what happens and the struggles that cast and crew had to go through, but I didn’t know that during the middle of filming John Travolta lost his first love to breast cancer.  He flew back for a couple of weeks, leaving everyone wondering if he would be able to come back.  As you know the answer was yes and he used that emotion in his acting.  There was one scene where John was sitting on the bench looking at the Verrazano Bridge with his co-star.  She could see that John was hurting inside and lend over and kissed him on the cheek, and this made John break down on film.  This was not acting but real emotion in the wake of his loss.  Fiction is just that, but should still have a sense of real to make the reader or audience feel the emotion that the writer was feeling, or touching the reader’s soul in their life.  If an author can do this, they can do anything.  However this is not easy and you could end up making your family unhappy by bringing something so horrible to a fiction story.  Andrew was lucky in the fact that his family was behind him (you can listen to his interview about this on Suspense Radio www.blogtalkradio.com/suspensemagazine) and he was able to give the reader a look into his eyes and feel his pain.  This does lend to the question, how far should you go as an author or how far will you go in your writing.  I would love to see more of this in books and from authors.  Not only will you have to search the depths of your emotions, but it will help make you a better writer by getting in touch with yourself.  Only you can decide how much is enough, but never think that being too emotional is a bad thing.  The more you give, the more you will get back.

Suspense Magazine