Hello, friends.
Another stellar week in the Bizarro Universe. Not sure how things got here and don’t really care at this point. This week was amazingly mundane if you ignored the chilling spectre of what’s to come. We’re winding down on the first trimester of school in our district and I have a bunch of students who are entering their Find Out stage. It is what it is. A lot of my week was family related with going out with my wife and two daughters last week and then taking my younger one to basketball practice twice, things were mundane.
Anyway, let’s get into this week’s updates.
Welcome to the 96th installment of Gauthic Times, the newsletter about my writing, my life, and nightmares I love.
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Anyway, let’s do this!
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This morning I got to page 316 in Project: Amusement Park. I’ve left 2024 for a little while and am in 1973 right now. I’d forgotten how that section opens and I loved it. There’s a certain friend I have who I can’t wait to read it and see their take. A piece of advice for beginning writers that I’ve seen many times is to write the kind of book you want to read. I’ve always thought it okay advice but kind of silly, too, because why wouldn’t you spend all that time writing something you didn’t want to read. Well, I can safely say that this novel definitely is one I’d want to read. Which is good, because I’ll have at least one more, but more likely two or three more, drafts to do.
During the basketball practice on Tuesday night, I began writing something I think may be posted to Patreon at some point. I think it may be a book that will start here in installments. I haven’t done anything with it since Tuesday, so I’m not making any official announcement unless/until I get further along. Let’s just say that it’s appropriate I began writing it on a week where there was a full moon.
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With last week’s nightmare of an election unfolding, I forgot to mention the 40th anniversary of my favorite horror movie–and one of my top five–favorite movies of all time, A Nightmare on Elm Street.
The movie was released on November 9th, 1984, and slowly built up its legend. I was nine years old when I saw the movie in the fall of 1986 on HBO in a double-feature with A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge, hosted by Freddy Krueger himself. I was hooked immediately.
The movie was the perfect blend of fear, surrealism, and imagination. Fred Krueger didn’t have a large body count like some of those horror icons in the 1980s, but he had style and could actually be scary. His taunting his victims made it worse.
I’ve been somewhat obsessed by the movie–and some of its sequels–for almost 40 years. So many of the ideas within the first five movies are so good even if the execution in three of them is lacking. I’ve also spent time writing about the movies.
Back in 2010, with the upcoming release of the remake–er, reboot (it wasn’t a reboot even if that’s what they wanted you to believe)–I spend a significant amount of time writing essays on each of the movies for my blog on LiveJournal. After I closed that blog down and was on WordPress, I rereleased those essays with some revisions in March through May 2013. For a long time, they were the number one thing people came to my website for. This past year, I removed them, along with other essays about franchises I wrote.
Last week, realizing I’d forgotten to write about A Nightmare on Elm Street in the update, I got an idea. I took to social media and asked:
I’m not going to the response was overwhelming, at least not in terms most people consider the word, but it kinda was to me. I asked the question on Bluesky, Threads, Facebook, and Instagram. I got responses on all except Facebook, I think, but I could be wrong there. Maybe Threads? Maybe I got responses on all. Anyway, what surprised me was that not only a few friends I suspected would respond responded, but others did, too. Writers and the like and that surprised me.
Right now I’m in the thinking phase of how to approach this. My initial thought was that I’d revise the essays, which I’d called A Nightmare in Gautham, and post them on Patreon for paid-subscribers and with the ability to purchase for those who aren’t on the paid-tier and don’t want to be, like I did with “The Death Museum.”
The thing is, I know a lot of people don’t necessarily want to read on a computer or an app. This would mean trying to publish it. As of right now, the essays together don’t really make a book. So I thought about writing reviews of the scripts, both used and unused, that have appeared online. There’d be other things related, like the essay I wrote about Freddy’s makeup and how even the publicity for new editions of home video don’t have the correct Freddy Krueger selling the movies.
I thought that maybe starting them on my Patreon and them collecting them in print form might be the way to go. I may be able to find a publisher for them or I could just bite the bullet and do it myself.
Right now, I’m not entirely sure if I should do any of this. So I thought I’d ask you.
Would you be interested in a collected (and revised) version of my essays about the Nightmare on Elm Street films? If so, would you read it through Patreon and/or in print?
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Pamela and I finished watching The Penguin. Goddamn, it was good. I’m an easy mark for these things but I did not expect what Matt Reeves and friends did. Perfectly structured and so much to chew on.
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Well, I think I’ve reached the end of this update. Thank you for reading and for your support!
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Gautham: Bill Gauthier.com 
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