Welcome (Back) to HELL!

Here I am in 2010. A fresh-faced horror writer hard at work. So young, beautiful and full of hope and dreams…
WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED?
Read on, my friends.

Welcome (back) to HELL!

A.K.A. I am writing again.

Here’s the story… I have been a professional writer since 2006. I know, long time, and I get it, and as of late, I have been feeling urges. Some dark, most fun, all painfully work related and they have to do with getting the stories out. What’s that even mean? What is this all about? This website, this blog (if you can call it that.)? If you haven’t figured it out by now, I am back to the grind of the written word. It’s not a want unfortunately, it’s a need. Writers write because they have to and it can be a very hard way to go. The pay is shit, the work is long and the 24hr stress of always having an active mind can take its toll, but hey, I can’t help it. For instance, take my website, I struggle with setting it all up again because I don’t know if it will be worth it in the end. Then I thought that it did not matter, the end, I mean. I needed to do something, anything to alleviate this burning passion to tell stories. Hell, just to write a ramble. So that is what you are reading right now… ramblings. Hey, got to re-start somewhere, right?

 Will anyone read this?

Probably not.

Do I care?

Also, no.

A quick note on the title of this post. A while back, I bought a book from my good friend Tom Piccirilli. It is called WELCOME TO HELL. It was a beginning writers guide to the business and oh boy was it accurate! I was toying with the idea of a real good first blog title and that’s when his work came to mind, that’s where the title came from. Unfortunately, Tom passed back in 2015. I miss him. Please read his work, my favorite recommendations are A CHOIR OF ILL CHILDREN and COLD SPOT. Great reads!
Ok, where was I?

Oh yhea!

Ok, Ideas for this website; In the future, as I get rejections or acceptances of submissions, see a cool thing or want to talk about some bull, or any band news (Ya, I have a rock band called Big Luv, check us out in the links at the top of the page, were pretty darn good!) or any scrape or tatter of anything interesting, I will (might) plop onto this page. Sometimes I may feel like writing a full length article. Maybe a short story. Maybe (and most likely) it will just be word vomit, which is fun, I guess. But I digress… hard.
So, yup, here I am.

My name is Chuck Rios and I am a wordaholic.

…

Oh boy, does that sound stupid, and make no mistake that in due time, as people eventually get to reading this post, it most defiantly will be called stupid and much more (Comment section is open, folks! Do your worst!).

The Rundown: As of this writing, I am 44 years old. I have been a lot of things in my life; a butcher, a father, a husband (Divorced now), professional musician for most of my life and even a tattoo artist for a brief time, but I have never had more of a love hate relationship with a career than with writing. It feels like a thankless job and for all I know, it is.  With guitar playing, I write songs, sell songs, teach and play and have, up to this point, made a pretty good living off of music for over 25 years. I have also hated music, kissed my guitar crying at 3 a.m., thrown guitars across the room in frustration, talked to them, bleed on them. But music has served me well and the guitar is just a tool, after all (Well, maybe MORE than a tool at times, IYKYK.) But with writing, you just write. You create and pour your heart and soul into the craft, then send it off to be published and (GASP, OH NO!) it gets rejected. So, you shelve it and keep on pushing forward. Clocks don’t matter anymore, the outside world stays outside and you become your stories, which is terrifying if you write horror like I do. But the worst part is when you leave the desk and keyboard behind.

On your “free time”, it’s never really your free time, because you have a writer’s mind; You’re at the bank and robbers stick up the place and one removed his mask and it was an alien? Or you’re at an antique shop and see a painting and wonder if you brought it home, would it be cursed? What kind of curse? Maybe your reality starts to become the painting and the artwork changes everyday as it reflects the horror that is you or what you are becoming? And the only way to get rid of it is to give it away… (Classic trope, btw.)
There I go again… do you see now? I get typing and get it out of my head and then what?

 It sits there?

 No one wants to read it.

 But I do.

Richard Laymon said in his famous autobiography ‘A Writer’s Tale’, “Write the novels you want to read”, and I believe him. I’m sure I’ve heard that echoed in other books, but Laymon is what comes to mind right now (I can talk ad nauseum about Laymon!). I know that King (ya, that King.) said, “To be a writer you must do two things above all else; read a lot and write a lot. You can’t have one without the other.” And he has never been more right, because it is dead true.
So that is what I am doing now adays. Playing in my band Big luv (Currently recording our first EP!) and reading a shit ton every day and writing a shit less (Working on it!).

Now that was not everything, but I think I caught up my few fans that will probably read this.

Oh, and seriously, thank you for your years of support! I truly appreciate you all!

TLDR: I am writing again part-time, playing with and recording with my rock band BIG LUV all while working a full-time “real job” and taking care of a family.

Will I lose my mind?

Will I succeed beyond my wildest dreams?

Tune in next time, here, um, on my website or socials, but probably here... Oh, and I have a new Instagram for the writing career… well it is actually an old handle, but since, when you look my name up on the ‘ole Google, the internet says I am known by chuckofhorror (which was my very first Instagram handle about 3 careers back) that is what I went with. So yhea, check all those out in the links and I have a few other accounts on there, if you can sleuth them out (Not that hard to find)!

 And one more thing, I am kicking around the idea of a news letter in the future, probably on substack, and a Patreon, so that’s in development and if I get enough interest in it, it will fly.

 That’s all for today, my friends, and if you are still with me, thank you for reading the ramblings of this lonely little kid from Baldwin Park, while I figure out how to give the most value to you all for the least amount of work. Ha!
Stay Scared

-          Chuck