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From the Writing Desk to the Highway

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 Bookstore Signings, dReadCon, and the Joy of Talking Stories Face to Face As much as I love the solitude of the writing desk, there’s something electric about packing up the books, loading the car, and heading out across Southern Ontario. This year’s calendar is filling up nicely, with stops at various Indigo, Chapters, and Coles locations from March straight through October. Each store has its own personality. Some are tucked into busy malls humming with weekend shoppers. Others feel like small community hubs where staff know regulars by name and can recommend a novel based on a two-sentence description and a raised eyebrow. If you’d like to see the full list of dates and locations — and figure out when I’ll be closest to you — you can always check the updated schedule at tobinelliotthorror.com . I keep it current, because half the fun is knowing who I might run into next. So, there's all those bookstores...and then, of course, there’s dReadCon in October — two full days of horro...
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An Apology, A Reset, and A Promise (Now With Fewer Cobwebs!)

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 The site was dead. I wasn’t. If you’ve ever discovered a new author, gotten excited, and immediately gone hunting for more information… you know the feeling. You click through to their website expecting updates, news, maybe a glimpse into what they’re working on next. And instead, you find a digital time capsule. Old announcements. Blog posts from two or three years ago. A homepage that looks like it last saw human contact sometime before a major global event everyone is tired of talking about. It’s deflating. It makes the author feel distant, inactive — possibly fossilized. Right now, that author is me. My website has been stale. Outdated. Quiet long enough that if it were a fridge, I’d be afraid to open it. So if you’ve read my work — or even just discovered it and came looking for more — I owe you an apology. You deserved better than a digital ghost town and a “last updated” date that could legally apply for a driver’s permit. The truth is, life has a way of hijacking momentum....
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Shitty author behaviour

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 Something happened to me the other day that's never happened before. And it both blew my mind, and pissed me right off. And I have to call it out. If you're going to skim this blog quickly to find out who the author is, I'll save you some time and tell you right up front that, despite them being an asshole, I'm not going to out them. So, if that's what you're looking for move on. So, a few days ago, I got a book off Amazon. The premise had been promising, right up my alley, and it sounded like it was going to be a fun, short read, so I read it—as one does. And, while the actual writing was pretty good, the rest was...not. There's a litany of things that weren't good about this and, knowing that if I put something out like this, and seeing a one-star review come back, I'd appreciate knowing why it was a one-star. Seriously, as an author, I can tell you, it's frustrating to see a low rating with no review. At least, it is for me, because I'm s...
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The Book That Would Not Be Recorded

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 This one's just a weird tale of strangeness and fuckery, folks. So, late last year, my incredible audiobook narrator, Jenn Johnson (you can find her link on my Collaborators page), finished recording the audio for all six of my Aphotic novels. By then, I'd released my two short story collections, UGLY STORIES ABOUT TERRIBLE PEOPLE DOING HORRIBLE THINGS , Volumes One and Two , and I was so happy with Jenn and her talented voice, I floated the idea of her maybe...? possibly...? doing the audiobooks for those as well. She was completely open to it, but asked for a break until early in 2025, which was fair. She'd basically been going for quite a few months on six books, back to back to back to back to back to back... So, in February, I reached out, and she said she was ready. I proposed one weird wrinkle this time around. In these two collections, after each short story, I appended a quick little author's note, offering up a bit of insight, a bit of history, or a bit of co...
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Why I left social media... other than because it's a steaming cesspool of hate and stupidity

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  Somewhere just before the end of 2024, I was doing my daily scroll through my various social media accounts. And I was on a lot of them: Facebook. Instagram. Threads. Bluesky. TikTok. Slasher. I don't know if LinkedIn counts, but I'd dumped that one a month before. Anyway, I was going through the accounts, and I honestly can't even tell you which platform it was, which post did it, or the ridiculously stupid response that I read, but I remember stopping and thinking, What am I doing? This is such a waste of time. Because, also as usual, I should have been writing, but instead, here I was, unable to ignore the notifications, the checking of likes, of responses, the constant influx of information. I should have been writing. But instead, I was sacrificing my own projects for other people's thoughts. And I realized, right at that moment, that I'd had enough. I was done. I literally spent the next hour jumping through all the hoops of all the social media platforms, s...
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Oh yes, I'm the great pretender (...or, that time I went to a great event, and came home broken)

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  This is something I've been trying to write about for five months. I have, in fact, started, then erased, three other attempts at this point, so let's see how far I get with this one. Back toward the beginning of November, 2024, I attended the Horror Readers' Weekend in New York, in the hills of Bear Mountain State Park. It was a three day event, and I have to say, in the months leading up to it, I was extremely excited. It was my first appearance as a horror author both outside of Ontario and outside of Canada. I decided to drive. It was only about eleven hours, and I don't mind driving. I got to listen to a few audiobooks on the way there and back, including the Alex Van Halen BROTHERS memoir, then DEENA UNDONE by Debra Every, then the first half of THE FISHERMAN by John Langan. On the way home, I finished off Langan's novel, then a couple of Stephen King shorter works (MORALITY and UR). So, I was in the company of some really fun and interesting authors while i...
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The Surprise of Inspiration

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To paraphrase the song "Love Is In The Air" popularized by John Paul Young (and apologies to the original writers, Harry Vanda and George Young)... Inspiration's in the air, everywhere I look around Inspiration's in the air, every sight and every sound And I don't know if I'm being foolish Don't know if I'm being wise But it's something that I must believe in There's a story that I relate in Volume One of my UGLY STORIES ABOUT TERRIBLE PEOPLE DOING HORRIBLE THINGS collection, regarding a story called "Three Lock Box" where I had a vague notion of a story about some weird, approaching cosmic horror, and the vague idea of a blind guy somehow involved. It was nebulous, and there was no real story there. When I have a loose sketch like that, I've learned to just hold on to it, revisiting it every so often, and keeping myself open to any other elements that might work. The next thing that happened was that I saw a post from someone abo...
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