Letters From Nowhere 03/29/26
Vicious Luck: Recapitulate and Reanimate
Welcome to Letters From Nowhere! My name is Laszlo Tamasfi, I’m a horror writer, translator, game designer, and I run the small press Strangers From Nowhere. Thank you for reading!
TODAY’S MOOD:
Fine-tuning my online presence for a better signal-to-noise ratio.
I found myself in an over-thinking and over-tinkering spiral, and oof, it’s been a struggle to break it…
…and to be honest with you, I’m still not completely out of it. But I’m getting there.
Vicious luck!
Personal trivia: “vicious luck” is a dumb phrase (that I guess would qualify as a familect) I say, usually to my wife, when I set out to do something challenging. It’s supposed to be “wish us luck”, but I have an accent and I pronounce the English “w” sound as a “v”, so at one point I just leaned into it as a joke and it stuck.
COOL THINGS!
A few weeks ago The Horror Writers Association released the final ballot for the 2025 Bram Stoker Awards, and it features four members of the Chicagoland chapter: Grace Daly (Superior Achievement in a First Novel for The Scald-Crow), Daniel Kraus (Superior Achievement in a Graphic Novel for Athanasia), Becky Spratford (Superior Achievement in Long Non-Fiction for Why I Love Horror: Essays on Horror Fiction) and Cynthia Pelayo (Superior Achievement in Short Non-Fiction for “My Mother Was Margaret White”).
While I haven’t been as active in the chapter as I want to be lately (moving 300+ miles away from Chicago didn’t help), I genuinely love Chicagoland HWA so huge congratulations to everyone!!!
My friend Charlie Queen is making music with his wife Lauren under the Wasp Honey moniker, and they’re really good:
The Public Access Analog Horror Mystery TTRPG (currently on Kickstarter) is one of those projects that I instantly fell in love with. This game managed to combine several things I love: found footage horror, lost media, glitch art, and old tv programs nobody but you seem to remember*.
*On this last bit: I realized that despite the huge overlap between the pop culture I grew up with in Hungary and pop culture in the United States, I will always have gaps in my cultural knowledge. Yes, I watched TMNT, played with He-Man action figures and I mostly listened to American bands in high school, but I still miss references to old commercials, I don’t recognize catch-phrases from sitcoms, and until recently I had no idea that “Here’s Johnny!” from The Shining was a callback to The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. On the other hand, I was scandalized when I discovered that my wife didn’t know who DJ Kat was!!!
CREATIVE WORK
I’ll have a table at SalukiCon next month! This will be my first convention as a vendor/publisher, and I’m excited for the chance to present my books to a new audience. If you live near Southern Illinois I hope to see you there!
Last month I got to play Pod People with a small group of players at Castle Perilous, my local comic/TTRPG store, and I’m happy to report that it went really well! The system - especially the Deviation mechanic - ran very smoothly and provided for an inspired game experience. It gave me some much needed boost in confidence as a designer!
Speaking of confidence: let me dig into the over-thinking/over-tinkering part I mentioned earlier… I got sick at the very end of February, which wasn’t too bad in and of itself, but it gave me a brain-fog. I could think clearly enough to function in my day-to-day life, but not clearly enough to do any creative work. Unfortunately I had a deadline, which means that I pushed myself to work when I shouldn’t have, which means that I cut back on my sleeping hours in order to stay afloat, which means that I wasn’t getting better as quickly as I could have.
Nothing terrible happened, other than I second-guessed some good ideas and perhaps pushed through some questionable ones… So I spent most of March sorting through things, fiddling with my projects and being unsure of work in general.
Shit happens.
LIFE
We saw Nine Inch Nails at the end of February in St Louis! This freakin’ band never disappoints; they sounded incredible, and they even opened the show with two true rarities: a beautiful acoustic performance of (You Made It Feel Like) Home from the Bones And All soundtrack, and Non-Entity, a With Teeth era outtake.
Another exciting bit of news is that our foster pup Olive was adopted last week!
She’s been with us for six months now and of course it would’ve been impossible not to fall in love with her. I mean, look at those eyes! While I miss her terribly and the house feels empty without her, it warms my heart to know that she found an incredible Mom who adores the crap out of her!
COLLECTING
I picked up two items for my Nine Inch Nails collection at the show: the 2026 tote bag and these weird knitted fingerless gloves.
I just adore weird merch so I’m super stoked about these gloves (I think officially they’re “arm warmers”, whatever that means)! I know they sold out of them before the tour ended so I’m glad they still had some in St. Louis.
OTHER
LISTENING TO
It’s a mood. I know.
I also made a playlist of cover songs, if you’re interested in checking it out:
WATCHING
READING
Two dollar thrift store find! Theodore Sturgeon is one of my favorite sci-fi authors and coming across this issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction made me very happy…
INTERESTING THINGS I RAN ACROSS
It’s been a weird month, in many ways. While I ran across plenty of cool things online I wanted to really highlight Rick Steves’ travel episode on Iran from 2009:
If you’re not familiar with his name, Rick is an American travel guide author who specializes in Europe, and he is an absolute national treasure. I think his tour video is the only serious piece of journalism (at least that I came across) that attempts to reflect life in Iran instead of focusing on politics or being fixated with terrorism.
Heartbreaking but important stuff.
Thanks for reading Letters From Nowhere. You can find me here, feel free to follow me on social media and I’m always happy to hear feedback!