About R. Richardsson

Author and father of four, I dream of a day when my livelihood is my writing. My breakout work is with the 'Ballad of John Rizzerio' trilogy; the story of a vampire hunter who, through a tragic turn of events, loses everything he holds dear. It will take more than a few prayers to bring him back from the the brink of despair in time to defend humanity. I enjoy working with the Horror Genre, but will soon be spending a lot of time with Medieval Fantasy. I enjoy both genres and will always have one foot in the door of the other, depending on my project. All of my work is fiction, and will remain this way, with the exception of an up and coming memoir. If you want to follow my progress, feel free to like my FB page, follow me @Cryptic_Dude or add me to your circle on G+ as well!

From Hiatus to the Trenches

Posted on July 8, 2014 by R. Richardsson

Having been away from writing for far too long, I am finally finding myself returning to a place where I am most comfortable; buried up to my neck in a quagmire full of words and bad intentions.

The last three weeks have been a whirlwind of emotions in our home which began with my wife undergoing a rather painful surgical procedure that she is still soldiering through. My free time, what little of it I have, was redirected towards organizing the troops and getting things done around the house while she recovered.

Barely a week out from under the knife, we lost a beloved member of the family, on her side. Sadly, we knew that that it was only a matter of time, but in reality there is no preparing for the inevitability of death. It’s never how you think it will be. When it happens, you don’t just skip to the burial. There are an endless parade of arrangements that have to be made before you get to this point, not just for the recently deceased, but in getting the extended family together for the final farewell.

Every breath you take is a struggle against the sadness and despair of realizing that you will have to learn to cope, to live, without the one you lost and it feels as if every second will last an eternity.

Finally, the last calls have been made. Events have been set into motion and just when you think that you are going to be able to live your trembling chin up once more, you realize that it’s upon you to begin removing the final details of your loved one’s life. Clothes, pictures, knick-knacks and every little thing that helped define this person must now be sorted, divided, donated and/or thrown away.

Fortunately, this is the point of transition. This is when you pass the point of “he/she was just talking to me “x” amount of time ago” to “he/she is really gone…” The pain returns, spreading over your entire being like frozen napalm and once again you lose yourself in the sea of melancholy that has settled around you.

As a horror writer, I was able to look at the whole process a little more objectively than everyone else. Yes, I was affected by the loss of this person whom I had come to know over the last thirteen years. I will greatly miss the ribbing and brutal honesty she imparted upon everyone around her. It was part of her charm, and she will be missed.

But as often as I find myself writing about death, I don’t often think of what happens between the point of being alive and being buried.

With my trilogy, there were a couple of difficult losses to deal with. But, for the sake of time (not my own, but because the characters were working against it), it has yet to be dealt with.

I have been home for a few days now and my thoughts are abuzz with ideas. Unfortunately, these ideas involve my recent experiences and incorporating them into my characters during a few moments of their downtime. I say unfortunate because this means I will have to rewrite some passages in order to give them these traits.

It feels necessary, considering the hell they’ve been through together.

So here I float, in a stinking quagmire of dark emotions and words that need to be sorted, shuffled like a deck of cards and inserted into the final installment of J.R.’s Ballad. I know not how long this will take. Compounded with the editing and rewrites I have yet to finish, it certainly looks like a daunting task!

But I am hard at work my friends. I am home, in spirit and in body and have returned to John’s tale for this final battle of words.

Posts toward my webseries may come a little less frequently, I admit it HAS been awhile since concluding the intro to my latest, but they shall not be forgotten. I have two posts uploaded that will need some final edits, and I expect to publish them with-in the next few days.

R. Richardsson

The Morelli Bros. (Prologue, iii.)

Posted on June 22, 2014 by R. Richardsson

They eventually lost their father to alcoholism. That had been the toughest summer of their young lives, for it was then that they learned just how far he had sunk in his depression. Piles of bills were stashed away beneath his mattress or unpaid and forgotten in the dust filled shadows. Collections Services came calling at all hours of the day, all in search of the same thing; coin that neither of the brothers possessed.

Every day became a struggle to not only maintain their meager lifestyle, but in keeping food in their bellies as well. For every dollar they made, they paid two more toward the debts they had inherited and it wasn’t long before their father’s folly caught up to them.

One by one, their customers began moving away from the Morelli Plumbing business and towards more commercially known ones. Despite their knowledge and experience, there wasn’t very much they could do to convince anyone to hire the sons of Rocco Morelli, a man who rarely finished a repair in a timely manner and who was suspected of stealing from his clients.

The Morelli name had become a curse in most homes and only a small handful of people still stood behind them. These were the people whom they had helped the most over the years. The families they had moved from one home to another and those who knew the struggles they’d had in their lives. And in some cases, they were the friends they grew up with, or the families of these friends after the former had moved on.

Eventually, their past caught up with them and they lost their apartment. There were too many tools for them to store in their van, and with heavy hearts they sold whatever they could do without and still continue peddle their trade. The rest was donated to the plumbing supplier whom they had given all of their business.

They washed their clothes a a local laundromat, where they could also freshen up in the restroom as the clothes were being cleaned and they ate as often as their funds allowed, which was at least once a day. It was a poor way to live and they both knew that time was against them. If they didn’t find something better, and soon, they were going to have to begin selling the rest of their tools and take minimum wage jobs in order to survive.

Without a physical address, they had forwarded their mail to a P.O. box, where the bills continued to pour in. Neither could believe the amount of trouble their father could create for them, even beyond the grave! There were bills for unpaid tabs at various bars and gentlemen’s clubs. On top of the bills they owed for their apartment, there were also bills for jobs that had been improperly finished, including one for a septic tank repair that was almost five figures!

They were steadily losing ground, but what they didn’t know was that sometimes you have to reach rock bottom before things begin to turn around. Of all the things that their father had taught them over the years, optimism wasn’t one of them. His secret resentment of the boys didn’t have room for the brighter things in life, things which he knew very little about from the beginning.

Ever the optimists, they had a long way to go before they lost the one thing they had left. Hope.

The Morelli Bros. (Prologue, ii.)

Posted on June 16, 2014 by R. Richardsson

When his sons were ten, just a few years before he became entirely dependent upon the bottle, the Morelli family set sail for America. Rocco had turned into a miserable excuse for a man, unwashed and unkempt, but he still worked just as hard as he had before his sons were born.

They made a small home for themselves on the outskirts of Brooklyn in an apartment that was only big enough to be comfortable for one person, while two would have been a crowd. To top it off, Rocco had no where else to store his tools.

The boys never complained. They never cried, and despite the fact that there was hardly ever any room left for them to play or sleep, they always found a way to make the best out of their situation.

Mario, the oldest of the two, had the strongest interest in his father’s trade. Whenever Rocco was still sober, he constantly grilled him for information about the various tools and equipment that was lying about. When Rocco was too drunk to talk, he studied from the various texts and manuals he found lying around. His younger brother Luigi was just as bright as he, but his talents lie more with how he interacted with people. Though he was a gangling youth, taller and often clumsier than his brother, he had a knack for reading people. This talent had gotten them out of all kinds of trouble growing up.

The boys were very athletic. They enjoyed playing outside from morning until evening. Running, jumping, climbing, nothing was off limits to them. They soon became legends among their friends. Where Mario was the stronger of the two, his brother was the quicker. Where one was known for his iron fist, the other was recognized for his ability to outrun and jump everyone else.

As they grew older, the boys began to pick up the slack that their father left behind. They did it without complaint. They did it unconditionally, because despite his faults he was directly responsible for their very existence. Even though he only ever grunted in response to their stories, they still loved the man whose passion was quickly becoming their own.

Much like the man before them, they began taking odd jobs here and there. If they weren’t fixing pipes that Rocco hadn’t properly set, they worked as a two man moving crew. They prided themselves in the jobs they did, though ‘moving’ was only a vague reference for what they actually did. While they sometimes helped the many other immigrants that have come and gone over the years, they were often called upon to help move things around by elderly neighbors who couldn’t do so for themselves.

Everyone thought kindly of two young brothers and often paid them more than for what they were asking and being the thrifty boys that they were, they used that extra money to buy clothes, food for the apartment and the various tools and parts that were needed for their father’s business. They knew where their father kept his earnings and when the landlord came each month, they took out just enough to cover the rent and the utilities.

It wasn’t an easy childhood for the Morelli brothers. Their days were more filled with work as they grew older. While their friends enjoyed going to school and playing out in the streets until the darkest hours of night, they quickly became masters of their trade. By the time their peers were graduating, they had taken all of their father’s clients. With their meager savings, they had purchased a used utility van to store their tools and spare parts for easy access. It wasn’t much, but it made things so much easier than hauling their equipment in the basket on their shared bike.