Non-Fiction

WINNIPEG HORROR CON, September 12, 2026

Ladies and Gentlemen, Genders of all tastes, I present… Winnipeg Horror Con, September 12, 2026.  I’m D.G. Valdron, and I’ll be one of the dealers – offering my personal bookstore of weird tales of every kind. Starting with…

A dark excursion into cosmic horror, existential dread, over the top gore, featuring 90s slasher movie killers assembled, vampire infestations, river gods, wendigo, human farms, giant centipedes, alien dimensions, and stuff too weird and scary to describe.  The trigger warnings alone for this went on for three pages.

And more…

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A FIELD GUIDE TO SELF PUBLISHING – September 5, 2026

Exactly what it says on the box.  Got the craving to write? Eager to see you work in the world? Want to do it your way?

Welcome to the Crash Course in Self Publishing, by yours truly, hosted by the Manitoba Writers Guild.  We’ll guide you through ISBN registrations, the National Library of Canada, Copyright, book formatting, cover design, all the ins and outs of signing up to IngramSpark, Amazon and other spaces and getting your books out. Ebooks, Hardcovers, Print-Books and Audio, the opportunities and challenges of each.  Print on Demand, Small Presses, Small Printers, Friesen Press, Vanity and Hybrid publishers, cover designers and artists, editors. You name it.  Spaces are limited, they’re going fast. So sign up today!

All proceeds are donated back to the Manitoba Writers Guild.

Sign Up Here…

Field Guide to Self-Publishing

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WHEN WORDS COLLIDE – MY SCHEDULE

Ladies and Gentlemen, Genders of your Choice, Children of all Ages, Assorted Sentients and Sophonts,

Here’s my schedule for When Words Collide 2026. This is the stuff I’ll be actually doing. Basically, three low impact items, meet and greet, autographs and stuff. And three big items – Panels on AI, Presentations on Copyright and Contracts. You’ll find my notes on the big items on this website. Feel free to stop by and sit in.  I’m very entertaining. If you’re very entertaining too, so much the better!

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A CRASH COURSE IN CONTRACTS FOR WRITERS

WHEN YOU’RE A WRITER, YOU’RE NOT JUST AN ARTIST. YOU’RE ALSO A VICTIM.

A SAP, A SUCKER, A DOOFUS, A STUMBLEBUM, A BLINDFOLDED TRAVELER TRYING TO CROSS THE ROAD AT RUSH HOUR, YOU’RE THE ROADKILL ON THE PUBLISHING HIGHWAY.

But do you have to be?

WRITING IS NOT JUST ART, IT’S A BUSINESS, PUBLISHING IS A BUSINESS. YOUR PUBLISHER IS NOT YOUR FRIEND, YOUR EDITOR IS NOT YOUR FRIEND, YOUR AGENT IS NOT YOUR FRIEND.

Or rather, everyone is friends right up until they’re not friends 

IT’S ALL BUSINESS, AND YOU NEED TO KNOW THE CONCEPTS YOURSELF, TO UNDERSTAND THE ISSUES, AND HAVE SOME CONTROL OVER YOUR CAREER.

THERE ARE WAY TOO MANY STORIES ABOUT HOW THE WRITER GOT SCREWED. OFTEN, IT COMES DOWN TO ‘SHIT HAPPENED’  BUT ACTING LIKE A PROFESSIONAL MAY SAVE YOU SOME HEADACHES. HERE ARE THE FUNDAMENTALS OF PUBLISHING CONTRACTS, AND SOME OF THE TOOLS TO AT LEAST KNOW WHAT’S GOING ON.

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BANNER

BANNER –  Commissioned from VistaPrint.  Designed myself modifying the templates – so no snark please.

The image is from a photograph of mine from my home town. Fossil Cove is just on the edge of town, Dalhousie, a cove just off the Inch Arran beach (it’s a terrible beach, a field of rocks, but go figure, it’s the tourist site).  This is one of the ‘flowerpot’ rocks, exotic shapes carved by ferocious tides.  This rock is so big you can literally walk right underneath it.

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CREATING A COVER

OKAY – Here goes.  You need a cover. You have no money.  You can’t pay an artist. You have no talent, you can’t draw or do artwork.  What do you do?

Well, you get sneaky.  I was doing a book, B-Movie Monsters in Love!  It’s just a personal project, it’s a fun book and I want it to be out there in the world. But I’m a quirky eccentric guy, and this is a really quirky eccentric book. So while I want it to be available, I don’t know that it will sell. At all. But I need a cover.

The Book’s theme is mainly deconstructing movie monsters. So that’s where I’m heading. I need a picture of a monster. Preferably a public domain picture, one without copyright issues.  You can find public domain images if you keep your head around you and look around.  Anything from the 19th or early 20th century can be fair game.  We’re up to 1931 in the United States. Any image you can find that’s earlier than that is reliably public domain. Some of the stuff after that – from say Night of the Living Dead, or the Hideous Sun Demon is in Public Domain because the registrations got screwed up – you can get a screen capture from those. Or outside the US, the limitation period is 70 years after the death of the creator.

You can also buy ‘stock photo’ images with a legal license to use, from places like Alamy and Adobe. Some cover artists use them. I haven’t.

I poked around and poked around, and I found a really nice poster for the original Lost World, the 1926, Willis O’Brien stop motion animated film.  Due to copyright registration issues, the film and its materials had gone into public domain long ago. This was safe.

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COMING SOON!!!

Just a little relaxation project, while I’ve been working on other stuff. This is another collection in the same vein of Dawn of Cthulhu, Fall of Atlantis and Murder Chickens on Mars.

The cover art, by the way, is taken from the original poster for the 1925 film, The Lost World, now in public domain. I’ve cropped out the poster for everything but the dinosaur, switched to B&W and played with tints, textures and contrasts till I had something representing the old gray-skinned, leathery/rubbery stop motion dino look, slapped a border around and set it in red to make it pop.

 

KEYCON 2026

I’ll be doing the Dealer’s Room at Keycon 2026,

Hilton Winnipeg Airport Suites, 1800 Wellington Avenue

May 15th – 17th, 2026

I’ll be going in with other Authors of Manitoba, notably Nancy Walker, Rachael Clark, Sandra Terra and V.H. Balaban.

Since the last Keycon, I’ve got several new books – Squad Thirteen, Murder Chickens on Mars, The Time Traveller Chronicles, 1 and 2.  And I’ll be bringing back several classics – Starlost Unauthorized, Drunk Slutty Elf and Zombies, Axis of Andes, the Mermaid’s Tale, Lexx Unauthorized, Bear Cavalry and More.  It’ll be great. Don’t give money to Amazon, come to Keycon and give money to me directly!  Meet the authors!  I’ll autograph. We all do autographs.  I’ll give bulk discounts! Cash, Interac or Credit card!

Also, I’ll be doing panels and presentations:

Saturday 9:00 AM – Executive 4 – Worldbuilding Panel – Den Valdron & Casia Schreyer

Saturday 12:00 Noon – Executive 4 – A Starter Guide for Self Publishing  – Den Valdron

Saturday 4:00 PM – Executive 4 – Comedy and Sci Fi – Den Valdron & Casia Schreyer

Sunday, 12:00 Noon – Main Room – Authors Roundtable, Den Valdron & Others

Drop by!

 

MURDER CHICKENS ON MARS is out!

It’s official!  And available in Ebook and Print at Amazon, Apple, Smashwords, Google, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Vivlio, Biblioteca, Baker & Talyor, Draft2Digital, etc. I think some 18 platforms in all.  Or it will be.  It’s out there, it’s just taking time.
SO WHAT THE HELL IS THIS?

Let me try to explain the existence of Murder-Chickens on Mars, and help people understand, if not appreciate, what this book is.
I am the son of a Mechanic. I grew up around cars, fixing flat tires, pumping gas, taking things apart and trying to put them back together. I was an okay mechanic, but not gifted. My father and brother were both very gifted. But I could do breaks and exhaust pipes, replace whatever needed replacing, taking breaks and engines apart and put them together. I’m also the grandson of a Carpenter, and along the way I learned to hammer a nail, lay a beam, bevel, mortice, measure and cut. And along the way, I had other experiences.
I have always been driven to examine, to understand, to try to figure out how things work. There’s an elegance to the way a machine or a body works, to the precision gears of a clock or a social system, the intricacies and harmonies. My world is one of blood and chaos. And perhaps because of that, I’m desperate to understand to make sense of things.
I’m fascinated by the overlooked, by the hidden corners, all the stuff we take for granted. I think I was a journalist once, because of that. And a teacher. And a historian. This world of randomness and horror, I want to unravel it, perhaps to find a way to to make it less random and less horrific.

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