Mark Orr, AKA SirOtter

I've been receiving, and loving, our fearless leader's Frightening Flix posts from HorrorAddicts.net for a while. Especially enjoying the ones about the movies I grew up watching on The Big Show, the after school movie that followed Dark Shadows when I was a kid in the 60s on one of the local stations in Nashville. I watched all the Universal and Hammer and RKO horror classics there, along with some pretty cheesy stuff from AIP and Bert I. Gordon and Ed Wood and other schlockmeisters. So, after perusing the latest Frightening Flix post, I went exploring and found this place.

Ahem. About my nom d'horreur. I have way too many interests. Old time radio is one. Some fifteen or eighteen years ago, I was using otrfan (old time radio fan) as an online alias. A friend, who was briefly my literary agent until she felt obliged to give up that occupation before she was able to actually represent the book I was working on at the time, thought OTR looked like Otter, and that's what she began to call me. As there were a large number of Otters online at the time, some one of my internet acquaintances (maybe Brian Keene? I don't recall, exactly. I doubt he does, either) suggested a knighthood would differentiate me from the crowd of aquatic mammals. And so, Sir Otter I became and have been ever since.

The previously mentioned book, Dead Women in Love, was finally published by Dark Recesses Press last November. They have also published its predecessor and prequel, Smarter Than the Average Werewolf. These are, like most of my stuff, hard-boiled supernatural mysteries. I've also sold or placed, oh, three or four dozen or so short stories, poems, critiques and essays here and there, online or in small press periodicals, over the last twenty years, and have edited one online and one print magazine. My most recent sale, 'Mourning Medusa', was picked up by the Gallery of Curiosities for the current sixth issue of their magazine, oddly enough called Curiosities. It's a themed issue, all about World War II. Kindly to purchase mass quantities of it, as well as the novels. Retirement has not proven to be as lucrative as I hoped.

Ah, yes, retirement. I love it. Fortunately, I married a woman with marketable skills almost forty years ago, and she supports me in the manner to which I have become accustomed, although not in the manner to which I would like to become accustomed. She tolerates me because I enjoy cooking more than she does, and feed her well; enjoy ballroom dancing and world-wide travel as much as she does; and our three daughters sort of like me most of the time. Our grandchildren, number four due this spring, think even more highly of me, because I know where we keep the candy.

I have a BA in history, which I have never used professionally. I spent most of my adulthood working on behalf of or directly with persons with disabilities, because the work was personally satisfying, the health insurance was necessary, and my employers didn't care what my degree was in as long as I had one. I am now using it in an amateur capacity, by assembling a massive and ever-growing pile of material towards a comprehensive history of horror and the supernatural in the culture of as much of the world as I can manage, prior to the digital age. Gotta have some sort of cut-off date, so I have arbitrarily picked 1980, because the way we access culture of almost every kind changed radically during the following decade, as did the way the genre was perceived by the masses. I'll leave the subsequent period to another historian.

I do, of necessity, lean towards English-language material, but there's so much more than that to consider. Alas, I am finding my recollection of my high school German woefully inadequate, and my menu-reading-level French, Spanish and Italian even moreso. I can manage simple passages in those languages, along with Dutch to a lesser degree, but the material I am finding tends towards more complicated usages. I am loath to seek more schooling to overcome these deficits, but might have no choice. Thankfully, as a former employee of the State of Tennessee, I can audit courses at public universities, which might be sufficient to enable me to proceed. I hope.

All of which is way more than anyone is likely interested in knowing about me. If not, feel free to ask. I am my own favorite topic of conversation.