{"id":7568,"date":"2025-03-07T17:13:32","date_gmt":"2025-03-07T17:13:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.gwendolynkiste.com\/Blog\/?p=7568"},"modified":"2025-03-07T17:13:32","modified_gmt":"2025-03-07T17:13:32","slug":"the-bram-stoker-awards-women-in-horror-month-living-the-horror-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.gwendolynkiste.com\/Blog\/the-bram-stoker-awards-women-in-horror-month-living-the-horror-life\/","title":{"rendered":"The Bram Stoker Awards, Women in Horror Month, &#038; Living the Horror Life"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>So it&#8217;s already March, and I really can&#8217;t believe we&#8217;re almost a quarter of the way through 2025. Needless to say, it&#8217;s been a challenging year so far for anyone living in America. Sometimes, it&#8217;s hard to even fathom how we&#8217;re going to get through the next four years and beyond. But every day, I see so many people around me who are fighting the good fight, and that&#8217;s the one thing that keeps me going and keeps me fighting too.<\/p>\n<p>It does feel weird to do any kind of promotion right now, but there have been some updates in my horror world, and honestly, there&#8217;s no reason to let the bad guys win and steal all our joy. So what the heck, let&#8217;s get to those updates, shall we?<\/p>\n<p>So first off, I&#8217;m completely over the moon that <em>The Haunting of Velkwood<\/em> has been nominated for a <a href=\"https:\/\/bramstokerawards.horror.org\/front-page\/the-2024-bram-stoker-awards-final-ballot\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Bram Stoker Award<\/a>! My neighborhood of ghosts is officially a Stoker nominee. Seriously. This is real. I know it&#8217;s been almost two weeks since the announcement, but I have to keep reminding myself that it&#8217;s true, because I&#8217;m still so shocked and elated that it happened.<\/p>\n<p>*screams with horror glee*<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter wp-image-7602\" src=\"https:\/\/www.gwendolynkiste.com\/Blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/Velkwood-Nominee-Web-987x1024.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"437\" height=\"453\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.gwendolynkiste.com\/Blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/Velkwood-Nominee-Web-987x1024.jpg 987w, https:\/\/www.gwendolynkiste.com\/Blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/Velkwood-Nominee-Web-289x300.jpg 289w, https:\/\/www.gwendolynkiste.com\/Blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/Velkwood-Nominee-Web-768x797.jpg 768w, https:\/\/www.gwendolynkiste.com\/Blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/Velkwood-Nominee-Web-1480x1536.jpg 1480w, https:\/\/www.gwendolynkiste.com\/Blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/Velkwood-Nominee-Web-624x648.jpg 624w, https:\/\/www.gwendolynkiste.com\/Blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/Velkwood-Nominee-Web.jpg 1927w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 437px) 100vw, 437px\" \/><\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve said it before, and I&#8217;ll say it again: this book was so personal and so painful to write, and it means so much to me that it&#8217;s resonated with readers. For this novel to be a Stoker nominee is honestly a dream come true. So thank you thank you thank you to everyone who&#8217;s supported <em>The Haunting of Velkwood<\/em>. It absolutely means the world to me.<\/p>\n<p>We are just over a week away from the paperback release of <em>The Haunting of Velkwood<\/em>, so expect to hear me talking about my neighborhood of ghosts over the next month! It&#8217;s thrilling to think the book might reach some new readers very soon!<\/p>\n<p>So now let&#8217;s talk about the other big news: Women in Horror Month! It&#8217;s now officially March, and for the last few years, this has been the month when we celebrate Women in Horror. Unfortunately, it&#8217;s been too quiet the last few years, so I really want to see that change. In the next week, I&#8217;m going to be putting together a post featuring places where you can find Women in Horror Month content. I&#8217;m also in the process of doing a roundtable of female horror creators that will go live later this month as well as a spotlight on female villains.<\/p>\n<p>If you&#8217;re a woman in horror and you&#8217;re interested in being involved, please DM me on social media or contact me through my website! Lots of fun things are being planned, and I want to see as many women getting to be a part of it as possible!<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter wp-image-7605\" src=\"https:\/\/www.gwendolynkiste.com\/Blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/WiHM-1-987x1024.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"499\" height=\"517\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.gwendolynkiste.com\/Blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/WiHM-1-987x1024.jpg 987w, https:\/\/www.gwendolynkiste.com\/Blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/WiHM-1-289x300.jpg 289w, https:\/\/www.gwendolynkiste.com\/Blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/WiHM-1-768x797.jpg 768w, https:\/\/www.gwendolynkiste.com\/Blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/WiHM-1-1480x1536.jpg 1480w, https:\/\/www.gwendolynkiste.com\/Blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/WiHM-1-624x648.jpg 624w, https:\/\/www.gwendolynkiste.com\/Blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/WiHM-1.jpg 1927w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 499px) 100vw, 499px\" \/><\/p>\n<p>More than anything else, however, I want all of us to start working on pooling our resources and creating a network of outlets, blogs, podcasts, and more, so that next year, Women in Horror Month can come back even bigger and better than this year. It used to be such a fun and widespread celebration every year; let&#8217;s try to recapture some of that magic! We need that kind of joy now more than ever. So stay tuned for more updates from my writing world!<\/p>\n<p>And with that, happy reading, and happy Women in Horror Month!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>So it&#8217;s already March, and I really can&#8217;t believe we&#8217;re almost a quarter of the way through 2025. Needless to say, it&#8217;s been a challenging year so far for anyone living in America. Sometimes, it&#8217;s hard to even fathom how we&#8217;re going to get through the next four years and beyond. But every day, I [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7568","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gwendolynkiste.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7568","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gwendolynkiste.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gwendolynkiste.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gwendolynkiste.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gwendolynkiste.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7568"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.gwendolynkiste.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7568\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7606,"href":"https:\/\/www.gwendolynkiste.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7568\/revisions\/7606"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gwendolynkiste.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7568"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gwendolynkiste.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7568"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gwendolynkiste.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7568"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}