Thought I'd contribute to this thread in hopes of kickstarting some other contributions, since I'm interested to know about the people who have joined The Nightmare Network.
At present I'm 34, married for 12 years, with a stepson who will graduate from high school this year. I have a B.A. in communication (emphasis in radio and television production) with a minor in philosophy, as well as an M.A. in religious studies. My professional path has taken me all over the place. I worked for a few years in the music theatre industry in Branson, Missouri. I co-founded a video production business around the same time, although now it's been many years since I sold my portion of it. I produced telecourses for a large state university. I worked as a mortgage broker for three years. I taught high school for three years. Last year, briefly, I worked as an independent videographer and taught a creative writing class for a university extension campus. Presently I'm employed as a salesperson at a large piano and digital keyboard dealership.
My favorite authors include Ligotti, Lovecraft, Alan Watts, Eckhart Tolle, Jan Van de Wetering, Henri Amiel, Robert Anton Wilson, Nietzsche, Huston Smith, C.S. Lewis, and Theodore Roszak, with generous helpings of Algernon Blackwood, Mary Shelley, and a few other leading lights in the field of horror fiction thrown in for good measure.
Music-wise, some of my most dearly treasured artists and bands are David Darling, Dead Can Dance, Vangelis, and Blue Oyster Cult. At various periods in my past I've been fanatically in love with the music of Queensryche, King Diamond, Beethoven, J.S. Bach, and various metal bands and producers of space music or ambient music. If you're familiar with the venerable National Public Radio program Hearts of Space (
www.hos.com), then you have a window into one of my most pervasive musical mindsets. David Darling's composition "Children" (from his album
Cello Blue) and Vangelis' composition "Abraham's Theme" (from his soundtrack for the film
Chariots of Fire) embody my dominant mood, which alternates between peaceful Buddhistic resignation and melancholic despair, as well as any two pieces of music I'm aware of.
I'm the author of the short story collection
Divinations of the Deep (Ash-Tree Press, 2002) and the novella
The God of Foulness (Delirium Books, 2004) as well as various stories, essays, and reviews. My writing has appeared in
The Children of Cthulhu,
The Thomas Ligotti Reader,
The Best of Horrorfind II,
Dark Lurkers,
Penny Dreadful, and Mark McLaughlin's omnibus collection
Hell is Where the Heart Is (Delirium Books, 2003), and on the Web at Thomas Ligotti Online, The Art of Grimscribe, Terror Tales (now renamed Horror Quarterly), Strange Horizons, Horrorfind, and Sinisteria. I've written a number of academic papers exploring my dual interests in matters of horror and religion, but these remain unpublished at present. Also unpublished is a 50,000 word manuscript I culled and edited last year from a private journal that I've kept for over 15 years. I titled the manuscript
There Is No Grand Scheme (which is a phrase that will be familiar to readers of Ligotti's
My Work Is Not Yet Done) and presently have no plans for it, although several excerpts from it will be published in June of this year in a book to be titled
In Pieces: An Anthology of Fragmentary Writing from the American publisher Impassio Press.
My writing, incidentally, is powered and motivated to some degree by a recurrent experience of sleep paralysis that plagued me during the 1990s, and that still returns occasionally to this day, although not with the same intensity that it used to have. These episodes were -- and I promise this is not too strong a way to state the matter -- transcendently terrifying, in large part because they involved an excruciating and realer-than-real sense that some horrific metaphysical presence was hovering over me and exerting an unspecified but nightmarishly awful influence upon me. These experiences altered me in significant respects, not least by suggesting to me for a time that I might be going insane. At the time they began occurring, I had already been an avid reader of horror fiction, especially Lovecraft's, for many years, and had also been a longtime student of religion and philosophy, but it wasn't until these episodes occasioned a piercing of my skin, so to speak, with an experience of terror and horror that was not enjoyable, but was instead dizzying and sickening in its existential immediacy and inescapability, that I discovered Thomas Ligotti and fastened upon his writings as the exquisite embodiment of the thoughts, insights, and emotions that had come to dominate my worldview and inner life.
