Coincidence, or Just the Makings of a Great Story?
On this day in 1937, Amelia Erhardt was officially pronounced missing.
On this day in 1947, an unidentified flying object crashed in the desert near Roswell, New Mexico.
Are there grays among us, or — is Amelia back? If so, where did she, go, and by the way, did she Elvis? The Weekly World News could have made magic out of this, but, alas, they are gone. I miss that weird little paper with Bat Boy on the cover and the world’s largest whatever-of-the-week pictured. Miss it bad.
Meanwhile, the writing world continues to fluctuate in odd directions. I’ve been asked to do the introduction for an upcoming Dark Regions collection of short stories by my buddy and collaborator Steve Saville, which means I’ll be hard pressed to live up to my own recent column over at Storytellers Unplugged, where I spoke about these introductions, praised some by Peter Straub, and those I got from Elizabeth Massie and Brian Hodge, and panned the average introduction for the meaningless tripe and excuse to add an extra signature to a signed limited edition that they tend to be.
That was a long sentence.
Anyway, have that, a blurb request, finishing up reading MAD DOGS by Brian Hodge, which I’m enjoying a lot, and listening to the audio book of THE MONSTER OF FLORENCE by Douglas Preston, who you may remember from a couple of years back when he and his Italian reporter collaborator ran afoul of some big wigs with power as they fought to uncover the horribly botched investigation the Italians strung out over decades while failing to catch this killer. Oddly, the two also seem to have pretty much solved it - using the FBI profile conveniently ignored by the Italians for not matching the suspect du jour - and he’s still running around over there.
That means that when I visited there in the 1990s, the killer was running around - had killed not that far back - and i never even knew it. Florence, of course, is where Hannibal’s old stomping grounds were located. Anyway, more on that later. For now, go think about what actually crashed at Roswell ten years to the day after Amelia disappeared.
DNW
