JournalStone Announced as Supporting Sponsor

• Posted by Savage in WHC News and Updates, WHC2015 on September 27th, 2014

The Horror Writers Association (HWA) is pleased to announce JournalStone Publishing as Supporting Sponsor for the 2013 Bram Stoker Awards® Banquet. The Banquet is part World Horror Convention 2014 in Portland, Oregon and will be held on 10 May 2014, honoring works published during the calendar year 2013. Full details are at the dedicated website: http://www.stokers2014.org/ .

Christopher C. Payne, President of JournalStone (http://journalstone.com/) said, “It is both an honor and a pleasure to support the HWA. The members and Board have been instrumental in supporting JournalStone‘s fledging endeavor as a new publishing company. I can only hope that we as a publisher continue to live up to the expectations of the HWA and all of its members.”

HWA President Rocky Wood welcomed JournalStone’s support: “This renewed sponsorship from genre publisher Journal Stone is greatly appreciated by HWA and I am sure by all our members. Journal Stone has proven to be a highly professional and innovative genre publisher, with a strong horror line. We look forward to welcoming them in Portland.”

There are limited sponsorship opportunities available – for more details contact president@horror.org .

The Horror Writers Association (www.horror.org), the peak group for horror writers, is a worldwide organization promoting dark literature and its creators. Started in 1985, it has over 1100 members writing professionally in fiction, nonfiction, videogames, film, poetry, comics, and other media.

Just announced: Special Presentation by Dacre Stoker

• Posted by Savage in WHC News and Updates, WHC2015 on September 19th, 2014

We are very pleased to announce a special presentation from Dacre Stoker!

For the past three years Dacre has been working with Hans de Roos creating a specialized travel guide, focusing on Bram Stoker’s life and the locations mentioned in his most famous novel, Dracula. Dacre and Hans have focused on Bram’s life in Dublin and London, as well as his holidays in Whitby and Cruden Bay, Scotland, and also on the actual locations of the novel in Romania and England and backgrounds of the characters. What is new and different from Dacre’s past presentations is that he offers up compelling new theories pieced together from Bram’s notes, Austrian war maps and Romanian history. These theories involve the actual site of Castle Dracula, and the identity of another historical character that Bram modeled his Count after.

In the process, and much to the delight of the Romanian Tourist Authorities, Dacre and Hans demystified the connections between Bram’s Count Dracula and the real historical Vlad Dracula lll. This Travel Guide will direct tourists to visit the sites associated with both the novel and to sites associated with the life and times of Vlad the Impaler.

Dacre’s one-hour PowerPoint presentation includes stunning photos of sites associated with Bram’s life in Dublin, his holidays in Whitby, Cruden Bay Scotland, Count Dracula and Vlad Dracula sites in Romania.

Dacre Stoker is the great-grand nephew of Bram Stoker; together with his wife Jenne he represents the interests of the Bram Stoker Estate and is actively engaged in research, writing and publishing on topics related to his great-granduncle. Dacre has appeared in numerous TV shows and documentaries in Ireland, England, Canada, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, and Germany; he has lectured at numerous locations worldwide: in 2008, Vampire-Con (Hollywood, CA), The Dracula Festival, Rosenbach Museum (Philadelphia, PA), Ottawa International Writers Festival, (Ottawa, ON, Canada), Scrittorincitta, the Literary Festival (Cuneo, Italy), Comic-Con International, (San Diego, CA), National Library of Ireland (Dublin, Ireland); in 2009, Anne Rice Vampire Lestat Fan Club (New Orleans, LA), San Paulo International Book Fair, (Sao Paulo, Brazil), Rotary District Conference, (Greenville, SC), Spoleto Festival USA, (Charleston, SC); in 2011, Comic-Con New York, MENSA Regional Gathering (Greenville, SC), Horror Writers Association, Stoker Weekends in Long Island, NY and Salt Lake City in 2012.

Together with Prof. Elizabeth Miller, he has edited The Lost Journal of Bram Stoker – The Dublin Years, (The Robson Press 2012) and has contributed to John Edgar Browning’s Bram Stoker’s Forgotten Writings (Palgrave MacMillan 2012). He co-authored a sequel to the novel Dracula, named Dracula The Un-dead (Dutton 2010), which was translated into 22 languages and sold approximately a million copies worldwide. Next to his activities as an author, he works as a teacher of CPR and First Aid and a Court Tennis teaching professional; he was coach of the Canadian Olympic Team in Modern Pentathlon for the 1988 Seoul Olympics.