Gristle and Smoke: Jeremy D Brooks

BLOG HATH MOVED TO jeremydbrooks.com

2010-02-25T11:59:00.000-08:00

I've been planning on moving away from Blogger for a while now...the time has come.

The theme support and customization blows, the UI is clunky and doesn't much like Firefox, and, on top of it, Google (Blogspot owner) has started shutting down user blogs with no recourse and no deliberation for "content violations" (even though some of the so-called violators had explicit permission from the rights owners).

That all said, I am very happy to announce that I am moving to:

http://jeremydbrooks.com

My new permanent home on the intermawebs.

(Remember: the "d" in the middle stands for "Don't forget the "d" in the middle, because jeremybrooks.com is owned by a gay porn distributor")

I hope you all will stop by and update your bookmarks and RSS feeds...feedback on the new site is always welcome!

And...stay tuned, I will likely be holding a contest soon to get some new folks to visit.

WOO HOO!

I am a Part of the Writing Continuum

2010-02-18T20:52:00.000-08:00

I wish I was a better artist.

I wish I woke up in the morning to find that my pillow was coated in colorful, fantastic dream-spill that had leaked out of my ear in the night, and that I could strip off the pillowcase and ring the nectar out onto my desk and transcribe what I saw into what would eventually become a brilliant book.

I really do. Writing is hard.

Writing borders on art, but in many ways literature--at least scribblings that can be sold at a reasonable return--is as much technical and business venture as it is the creation of something new and interesting. If you want to sell a book in the standard model (and, in many ways, in any model), it has to fit readers' expectations for what a book should be; or, at least, be palatable to enough people to make it worth your time to do it. And, as with most media, the business part tends to squeeze the artsiness out of the work to appeal to a wider audience.

Robert Swartwood linked to a great article a while back where the NYT followed James Patterson around for a day to see what the life of a hated-and-vaunted bestseller-machine looks like from the inside. It's pretty much what you would expect: he writes a lot (longhand, and has someone transcribe), he plans new books, he farms out work to co-authors, and he works on his breast stroke in a swimming pool full of fifty dollar bills and Scores Girls (note: that last part is probably a lie on my part).

He says one of the things he learned--and one of the reasons he is successful--is that people don't want colorful writing or deep meaning in airport books; they want formulaic plots and familiar characters and books of a uniform size and density. It made him rich, and single-handedly saved his publishing house from the brink.

Another example: I just read an article in Esquire talking about a company working on the technology to do near-real-time focus groups on dailies (the raw edits of a day's worth of shooting in a movie that the director reviews at day's end) wherein the dailies would be shown to a group of people whose neural reactions would be monitored and correlated to the on-screen action, and a report would be given to the director telling him what turns us on and what doesn't. The net result: if you think Hollywood puts out formulaic assbombs now, wait until they can keep your brain's "on" button pressed for 2 hours straight with explosions and boobies and car chases, with nary a plot in sight.

Which loops back around to the question: is it more important for literature to be commercially viable or personally fulfilling for the writer? (Assuming that it can't always be both). Who is "right": the kid writing emo poetry on the sleeve of his jacket and the guy posting Avatar fanfic to his blog, or is it James Patterson and his ilk? Should it be business or art? If it's all business, will the art die? If it's all art, will it kill the industry?

I go back and forth on this almost daily--especially on my current novel attempt, which is probably a mixed bag of fancy wordplay and purple-ness mixed in with some chase scenes and some hand-holding under the sunset. I worry constantly that I'm writing it for me, and not to be sold.

But, ultimately, I don't think I care. I think that I can create what I want--and what I want is to make a living as a writer, telling stories that I enjoy--and I can call it art if I want to. If it sells, great. If it doesn't, hey, I tried. And I'll keep trying, probably until I am physically or mentally unable to. As I get older, I feel more strongly about art being there for it's own sake--and I don't feel the need to qualify art based on success, or even necessarily the intentions of the artist.

Sure would be nice to only have one job, though.

Anyway, here are some thoughts on art from Amanda Palmer. Even if you have issues with ukulele music, the lyrics are pretty much how I feel about art at this point in my life. In her song, GaGa is James Patterson, but it's the same result: art is still art. As I type this, it seems like I may have posted this before, but the message remains: call it a masterpiece, call it a urinal...

An Essay on Shifting Power Centers (pack a lunch!)

2010-02-11T16:48:00.000-08:00

(In which our blogger pretends to be an economist and writes a long-ass essay providing big-picture, historic context on what the changing economy means to writers, musicians, and other artists.)

Part I: The Decentralization of Power

The Power of Coordination

Centralized power is corollary to the human condition. You don't need to spend more than a few seconds thinking about the large- and small-scale evidence in the world: there are no nations without governments, no lasting groups without leadership, little action without common direction.

We are tribal; during one of the most recent ice ages, the human race was decimated, and, arguably, rugged individualism and self-efficacy only got one so far when food was scarce and survival--breeding, hunting, gathering--took more energy than a body could produce on their own. It took a village, literally, to raise a child. Scattered, uncoordinated peoples died, and those with common goals and direction passed on their genes to us.

Hence our natural propensity to join, to socialize, to form cities where we can be close to each other and erect buildings in those cities to bring us closer still, and leaders within those structures to keep us moving in a common direction. Nobody questions why the workplace needs a boss, or why the church needs a patriarch. It just feels right.

Fast forward a few dozen thousand years, and we have moved several notches higher on Maslow's Hierarchy; and, no longer primarily concerned with the daily drudge of staying alive, we are now free to focus on more complex social dances like art and scientific inquiry and self-actualization.

And power.

The natural progression always moves toward power. When we have abundance, we share with those who would share with us; when there are subsidies, we barter; when there is scarcity, we horde. Again, it's what comes naturally to us.

The Tipping Point

The propensity in the post-survival model seems to be to start as individual contributors bartering what they have--farmers/food, craftsmen/goods, laborers/labor, soldiers/fighting/defending--but always seems to move toward top-heavy supplier models.

For example: a ten hectare plot, split evenly between ten farmers. Each grows a unique food, and they trade amongst each other. They have more balanced diets, healthier children, longer lives than if they would if did not trade. One farmer is bought out by (or taken over by) a neighbor, who then has two hectare and, presumably, more bartering power to buy out the other eight or possibly hire people to move them out and take the land for him. After many years of dealmaking, he owns the entire plot, and he keeps on the original nine farmers as serfs who work the land for the landlord, who now sits on his ass in a large house situated on an eleventh plot down the way; the serfs are given a pittance of food for their labor--just enough to survive, not enough to barter. They are doing the same work, but for less benefit, while the excess benefit now rolls uphill to pay for the landlord's new, opulent lifestyle.

(This is not a tear on capitalism, mind you; on the contrary, the only way to keep the farmers from consolidating and creating power hierarchies would be to have someone with a bigger stick--the state, the church--to intervene. The problem there is that there is always ulterior motive by any party involved--power, by and large--and anyone with the power to control the landlord will want their toke at the end of the day as well. We're better off with the landlord.)

The landlord's tower of control gets higher and higher as he amasses more land and more serfs; he becomes a Lord or a King, and levies taxes on the already-poor serfs working his land. Eventually, the serfs are fed up, and they rise together to reset the board in their collective favor--storming the Bastille, declaring sovereignty from a monarch, staging a paramilitary coup, etc.

History is riddled with examples. The towers fall, but only temporarily. The pieces are collected by those below who will, inevitably, begin making towers of their own. It's a repeating cycle, and it's been in motion probably since the first agrarians made plow blades from ox ribs and increased their productivity, thus moving from sustenance to a business model. Technology, as a rule, seems to drive the downward-and-outward power shift.

Which brings us to the age of computers and worldwide connectivity. If you make your living (or want to make your living) creating goods in the age of new media--music, art, technology, literature--it's important that you understand that we are in that last stage: the towers are crumbling, and it's up to us to pick up the pieces and build our own fortifications. This is part of the ongoing cycle of production, the part we can call the renaissance of decentralization; and our window of opportunity is finite.

Part II: The Power of Decentralization

Beating Our Ploughshares into Cisco Routers

The cycle continues because new technology is, by-and-large, uncontrolled. The King's smithy may have figured out how to forge swords from steel, but that doesn't stop the peasants from figuring it out and arming themselves to the teeth. The internet may have been developed by DARPA, but once students and hobbyists got their hands on it, the playing field got horizontal faster than Tiger Woods at the Playboy Mansion West.

But, for the most part, innovation does not come from the top down. It comes from us, and it belongs to us.

That's the power; that's the magic. From a technology standpoint, we are a million monkeys whacking away at typewriters, and every now and again, one of us will inevitably come up with something brilliant, simply because we've been given the opportunity to do so. The tools to do great things are out there for us to use, as long as we continue to have the ability to use them freely.

Again, narrowing our focus to creators of art--literature, music, graphics, etc--we know our markets. We can look around and see who lives in the tallest towers, who controls the environment and dams the flow of information and resources in their own favor. We talk smack about them every time they do something that bolsters the power structure, even if they are the ones we rely on for our bread and wine rations.

The Queen is Dead, Long Live the Queen

Amazon and Walmart sell Stephen King's new book for one third of the market value, and authors rage. Amazon presses for price fixes for e-books, and publishers revolt. Publishers insist on higher prices for print and electronic books, and consumers slam their wallets shut.

Online news outlets begin to charge for content, and the world collectively balks.

Apple sells music with digital locks, and music buyers move their business to alternative suppliers. Independent musicians find that they can't sell their music on iTunes without an aggregator (like a large label), and that their sales figures aren't actually counted by Nielsen/Soundscan and they, therefore, aren't legitimate artists in the eyes of the industry. After the LiveNation/Ticketmaster merger, the number of venues to see reasonably priced music drops significantly.

Artists like Amanda Palmer and Trent Reznor opt out of the music label system completely, because they have come to realize that although they are giving up the rights to their own work to provide revenue the labels that "support them", they aren't really making much money for their life's work after the piper has been paid.

Once-friendly outlets for user-controlled media like YouTube begin to lock down/out content that does not meet their standards for profitability.

Music and book publishers put more of their resources toward a much smaller stable of dependable, albeit generic and crowd-pleasing, talent.

And in all of this turmoil and finger-pointing, there isn't a single bad guy to be found. These are free market dynamics, nothing more, nothing less. And, just as importantly, these are early indications of top-heavy towers swaying in the wind.

Will they fall? Will there be people below to pick up the pieces, and put the recovered resources to use for their own good?

I don't know for sure. Nobody does. It probably will happen, in one fashion or another. If you consider that many of the public moves we see from these tower masters are defensive, finding ways to divert more resources away from customers (fair use rights for "purchased" media, higher prices) and suppliers (smaller payouts for work, fewer opportunities), it really does seem inevitable, and it seems near. It does not seem sustainable that you can treat everyone in your supply chain poorly and continue to survive.

Sooner or later, the peasants will rise up and topple the throne, loot the treasury, and find their own way to make a living. The result will be an inversion of the power structure, a disaggregation of resources away from middle-men and back to content producers. The crown deposed, the farmers reclaim their plot of land and sow their seeds. And the cycle begins anew.

The Survivors

This essay wasn't intended as a history lesson, nor a primer on market economics. Zeus knows, I 'm not an expert in either. I'm just a schlemiel trying to break into the glamorous and exciting world of literature.

And, to the best of my limited ability to read market trends, I'm trying to provide context for what is likely to happen next (and, arguably, what is already happening).

Resources are finite, as we saw in the farmer example above. It takes resources to create products, and it takes resources to sell products, and it takes resources to acquire products. If some--or a lot--of the resources are being used to sustain the machine that gets your product from the workshop to the street, the opportunity is upon you to reclaim some of those resources and put them to work for you in a way that they are not being used now. The game-changer, the lever that will allow you to move the Earth, is cheap computers and fast, affordable internet access.

You can make it work for you as long as you are willing to reframe your idea of what it means to produce successfully.

Are you willing to sell a thousand song downloads at $.80 profit apiece instead of ten thousand at $.08, knowing that you won't have someone helping you beat the street, placing ads, coordinating, selling, managing your website, and bookkeeping for you, and that it is highly unlikely that you'll ever be as big as GaGa or Muse?

Can you deal with making the same net income from a print-on-demand book that you had to pay someone to edit, has no ISBN and features cover art from DeviantArt.com as you would from a book that your publisher edited, your agent managed the contract for, and some PR team in Manhattan is actively shilling for you? Maybe a book that doesn't come in physical form at all?

If you can handle that reality, then this may work for you. But if you really like having people in ivory towers doing the work for you while you sit around hoping that your big break is just around the corner, knowing that you can't settle for moderate income with fewer sales and more work--well, you probably have good reason to be stressed about the new economy. Sorry.

Everyone else, keep looking up. These are exciting times the likes of which we may never see again. If you can't stomach the way it's being done now, this is your chance to find another way.

Burn the land and boil the sea...

2010-02-05T13:48:00.000-08:00

I'm mad at Fox.

Not Fox Movies (nèe 20th Century Fox) for releasing Marley and Me and making me pretend that I wasn't crying on an airplane full of people flying over the Pacific Ocean last year. Not even for letting George Lucas make Phantom Menace. Rupert Murdoch backing Avatar made those offenses forgivable.

Not FoxNews for flapping their arms around like rabid ospreys, shouting above the surrounding din of mass media sound bites and reality TV and talking heads "Hey, look over here! We have Crispy Cremes at our booth! Hey!!" Everyone on TV does it, it's hard to fault them exclusively for playing along. Mostly. Heaven forfend that they should be the classy ones at the dinner table.

Not even their cable network FX, who had the gall to produce what I understand is some pretty quality stuff like Rescue Me and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, but not appearing anywhere on the stupid satellite service that I inexplicably pay $60 a month for.

No, I'm mad at the broadcast network arm, simply known as Fox, as in "sly as a". Well, those sly bastards did me a disservice, and it wouldn't come to my attention for another five years (give or take).

I'm not a big TV watcher. We will typically pick up Mythbusters, Man vs Wild, and 30 Rock, but that's about it. My wife likes Craig Furgeson and I'll watch it if I happen to be on the couch, too lazy to move. But, for the most part, we are Netflix junkies.

So, it came to pass a month or so ago that I was browsing Netflix, and came across a 2004 TV series called Firefly. The blurb sounded interesting: 500 years in the future, transport ship, dangerous fringes of space...sounds good. I threw it in the queue, and put the 2006 movie Serenity in my Watch It Now queue, assuming that, based the release dates, I should wait on the movie until I'd seen the series. My expectations were middling, at best (the last sci fi TV show I was really into was the original Battlestar Galactica, although I tried my best to love Star Trek TNG and Enterprise, but the relationship never got past hand-holding and a few flirtatious pecks on the cheek).

I was very impressed with both Firefly and Serenity. Although the whole space cowboy-thing seemed a bit over the top at first, it is completely forgivable as an artistic hook. Joss Whedon, the creator, did a fantastic job of creating a world that is instantly immersive--even believably so--and rich, and deep, and addictive.

The characters are likable and memorable, even so much as some of them are unlikable and maybe even detestable. The captain is about as charismatic a leader as you could write (and I think that has as much to do with the actor Nathan Fillion as it does Whedon's spellcasting), his pilot Wash is a scene-stealer, and the rest of the cast tie the crew together nicely. It's exciting and dark and very entertaining.

Also: catchiest theme song ever.

If you are a Firefly fan but have only seen it broadcast, it may be well worth it to pick up the DVD/BluRay. It has two episodes that, I understand, did not air on Fox: the pilot, "Serenity", split into two segments. Having not watched the show on-air, I think it would be confusing to watch the series not having seen the pilot first.

Anyway, back to my hate-filled thesis: Firefly apparently wasn't making money, and Fox killed it after one season--fifteen episodes, if you count the pilot. I know, Fox isn't a charity, they need to play to the revenue base, blah blah blah. I know that. It just really blows to learn that something that awesome existed for a short time, but was killed off in its prime. Whedon was fortunate enough to get funding for the movie Serenity, which brought the final plot lines that were intended for later seasons of the TV show together (primarily the Reavar storyline which never got a fair shake in season 1), gave viewers closure, and closed in an open-ended but heartbreaking conclusion that put a nice period on the tale.

I'm glad I found it, but it's almost kind of sad. Firefly is one of those discoveries that you make that you wish you could re-discover over and over, like when I first picked up Nirvana's Nevermind on a whim, or realized that a Jägermeister and Redbull was a great way to start the day (kidding, kidding...Redbull makes me crash in the afternoon).

So if you haven't seen it, go see it. If you have seen it, well, see it again. One of these days I'll pine so hard for it that I'm sure I'll buy the Bluray set. I may even check out some of Whedon's other work; but, in keeping with my slow-ass TV timeline, I'll probably need to wait another four or five years until they've been canceled and forgotten by all but his biggest fans.

Some Credit Card Miscellany

2010-02-02T17:04:00.000-08:00

Earlier today, I got a phone call from the local po-po; a Detective told me that a few months ago, my credit card was skimmed by a waiter at a well-known steakhouse chain. Yeah, bummer. Luckily, he didn't use it yet (that we know of), but apparently he was working with another guy to clone the cards and run them for cash advances, prepaid cards, etc.

I know a little bit about credit cards. I've been in the payments processing industry for close to twelve years, and have had at least some exposure to pretty much every facet of the industry--card issuing, downstream processing, fraud and security, chargebacks, etc. It's a constantly-shifting, complex, layered world, and understanding the rules is extremely difficult. I don't talk about that much here because, well, it has nothing to do with my writing hobby and, frankly, my company can be a bit uptight about employees discussing shop publicly. That said, a lot of what I know--and can share--is publicly available, and can be helpful to people like you (yes, you), who have not spent a decade learning the inner workings of credit card processing but do like to whip out the plastic now and again.

(Note: I work on the processing side; I'm not an expert in issuing, which means that I can't tell you how to best reduce your rate, how to defer your payments, explain why your issuer just raised your rate, which cards are best, or anything to do with credit scores...I work exclusively with companies for processing.)

Without further ado, a top-of-mind, non-exhaustive laundry list of things that may be helpful for a card user or someone who accepts cards.

If you are nervous about using your card online, get over it--it's just as safe as in person transactions. But, just like any business transaction, know who you're dealing with. If you are typing your credit card number into a website with a dubious domain name or odd website, be wary. If you don't know who you're dealing with, go somewhere that you do know--amazon.com, bestbuy.com, etc. Your card is far more likely to get stolen by an employee than from a hacker.
For in-person transactions, try to keep your eye on your card as long as you can; and, although it's not always feasible, consider only going places where the card is swiped at the counter or at the table--somewhere where you can always see the plastic. Cards have two important sets of data: the account info (number, expiration, CVV code) and the data on the magnetic stripe. The latter is far more dangerous--with a card number, someone can run a few transactions online or over the phone, but it's going to take time for the merchandise to arrive, and the thief has to provide a physical address for goods. Magstripe data, however, enables the thief to create new cards that can be used in-person for purchases, cash advances, pre-paid cards, etc. To get that data, however, the card has to be swiped, typically in a small, handheld device called a skimmer. Know where your plastic is, and your risk is much lower.
Another aspect of skimming is ATM fraud. If the slot on the ATM machine that you're about to slip your card into looks exceptionally bulky or unusual, beware. There are a host of fake card acceptors and ATM faceplates that will not only skim your magstripe, but have a small camera to record you pressing the PIN number. Another clue: these transactions will often fail (card not read, try again later, etc).
In most cases, merchants are not allowed to add surcharges to credit card transactions (PIN-based debit is a different story). This is less a fraud issue as it is merchants taking advantage of consumers not having read the 1,000+ pages of Visa/Mastercard operating regulations. If they want to add $.50 to your card bill for buying a beanie baby at that mall kiosk, dispute it. If they insist, you can walk away, or you can accept the charge and fight it later with Visa/Mastercard or your local attorney general. Also, although I'm having trouble finding the regulation number, it has historically been prohibited to set minimum purchase amounts for cards.
Fighting a disputed charge can be a chore. Although it doesn't always work out that way, chargeback rules are stacked more on the consumer side than the merchant side. But, just like with insurance adjusters, if they have to back out charges and refund your money, the issuer and acquirer stand to lose money--so do your homework. Call your issuer right away, get names, document everything. Follow up. Send letters. Get manager names. Read the above-linked dispute regulations. Build a strong case.

I could go on for days...there is a lot of info out there. Again, this is all publicly available information, and only a few of the aspects of cards and fraud. Fraud is rare, but it does happen, and some of these points may help.

And, I would be more than happy to take questions in the comments. Hit me.

If You Use This Idea, I Want Points

2010-01-16T15:27:00.000-08:00

At the tail end of an endless flight home last week, it occurred to me how we can re-invigorate the publishing industry:

Reality TV. Just...stay with me for a minute.

I hate reality TV as much as anyone--more so than most people, maybe--but it draws eyeballs. My wife sent me a video of a celebrity chef the other day who is (hold on to your goddamn hat) on tour, selling out auditoriums, hawking his bestselling books and t-shirts, and, well, cooking food. In the video, he stormed and stomped across the stage like a rock star, flames shooting up from the risers, his "backup band" (prep cooks) chopping scallions and mushrooms behind him while the crowd roared insanely.

And I thought: c'mon! This guy is a chef! He cooks food! If he can do it, why not celebrity writers? Why can't Grisham or Rowling take the stage to Metallica's "Wherever I May Roam", throw up the devil horns, growl a few choice lines from their latest tome, wink at groupies in the crowd. Awesome. People would flock. People would go home and read.

I now present a few minutes of the pilot episode of my new show called, simply, The Writer. Here's the setup: ten aspiring writers are locked in a Manhattan flat, all competing for a three-book deal with Simon & Schuster. There are literary "coaches" hanging about who offer encouragement, advice, and tough love.

♣♣♣

INT. MANHATTAN LOFT - DAYTIME

JULIE SMITH (competitor)  frets over a laptop.

JULIE

My God, I just can't get myself out of this plot hole! Why did I decide in the fifteenth chapter to make my Franciscan Monk a pimp-turned-spy? Why? Why do I hate myself?

HARLAN ELLISON (coach) slinks up behind and rubs her shoulders. He is standing on a step stool and working her over with the intensity of a teenager on prom night.

HARLAN

There, there. You just put that mean old story away for now and let Uncle Harlan make it better. Say, did I ever show you my Hugo? I have it in the back room. Why don't we just-

TONI MORRISON (coach) enters, flicks HARLAN on the ear.

TONI

You old pervert, leave that girl alone.

HARLAN

What? What? I was just trying to help her out.

TONI

Mm hm. Help her out of her dress.

STEVE BAKER (competitor) enters, looking confused.

STEVE

Hey, what's going on in here? Harlan, are you messing with my girlfriend again? I already told you, man...stay away, you little creep!

HARLAN scampers to the top step of the step stool, takes swings at STEVE. STEVE and HARLAN engage in a slapfight.

HARLAN

Bring it on, motherfucker! I'll take you apart and use the pieces to make an asshole carousel! Did you mother have any kids that survived childbirth? Come back here! Pussy!

JULIE

Jesus. I can't take this anymore. I need fifteen hundred more words today, and that bitch Shawonda keeps sneaking adjectives into my manuscript while I'm sleeping. Where in the hell did I put my percocets?

TONI

Um...did you check Hunter Thompson's corpse? Dead for a decade, and he still managed to sneak into my room twice this week and get into my stash of Valerian root and Chablis.

HUNTER THOMPSON'S CORPSE (coach) sits motionless in the corner. A cigarette burns from the end of the cigarette holder clenched between his blue lips.

HARLAN

You're not worth my time, you two-bit steampunk punk. Where the hell is that guy from PublishAmerica? I feel the need to disembowel someone before dinner. Ooo, and we're having mostaccioli alfredo tonight!

HARLAN rubs hands together, leaves the room.

COMMERCIAL BREAK

Tim Burton at MOMA

2010-01-14T12:13:00.000-08:00

...a-a-a-and....we're back.

Holidays are done, work is back in full swing, and the world is back on tilt. Mostly.

♠♠♠

I spent most of this week in Manhattan at a conference that ran Monday-Tuesday, and my week was marathon stretches of standing and sitting 8-12 hours at a time. In all of the hundreds of thousands of air miles I've logged in business travel in the past 12 years with this company, this, for whatever reason, was my first trip to NYC. It was almost all work and no play (and even most of the play was work), but, outside of work, it was worthwhile personally just to wander around Manhattan for a few days.

As soon as we crossed the bridge to the island, my internal radar completely shut down in the cement and glass labyrinth (as did the GPS on my phone). I got plenty of exercise walking in friggin' circles trying to find things that were only a few blocks away. Bizarre.

The old architecture in Manhattan is wonderful, but the closeness and intensity and controlled chaos of everything there--not to mention the absolutely random way people walk around yelling threats and insults at each other for fun--made me aware of just how far culturally the west coast is from the east coast. I'm a pacific guy, and I suspect that no matter where I go, I always will be. NYC is too stressful for me long-term.

Also, I hate traveling that far, as it kills so much time. I did, however, finish reading Nicholson Baker's The Fermata (which is a bizarre, EXTREMELY sexually-charged, but clever book), and wrote down about six pages of notes on a new book I want to start later this year.

♠♠♠

On the last day, I booked a later flight out, hoping I would have time to go see the Tim Burton exhibit at MOMA. I was able to spend about 50 minutes there (after wandering around for fifteen minutes to get five blocks from my hotel....my internal nav is comically bad--like, Three Stooges movie bad. If I ever give you directions, do the opposite), which was just enough time to see pretty much everything but the movies and video shorts.I wish I had my own pictures to show you (MOMA didn't allow cameras, and my phone doesn't have one for sneaky-pix), but I've included some from the web.

It started out with some of his early sketches in school, some for contests and homework (complete with teachers notes). It was, as you can imagine, typical work from a schoolkid. Interesting, but not oh-my-god-this-kid-is-a-genius work. It did begin to show his early interest in creepy images, malformed creatures and, interestingly, a strong emulation of Mad Magazine's Don Martin.

As it progressed, his work became more refined--monsters became more layered and fully-formed, and some of his signature design features started to appear (stitches, stripes, sharp angles, sullen eyes), and his angst started to flow more into the pictures. Honestly, that was about as far as I expected to see his drawings and paintings go--I had seen some of his work on his website many years ago and it was more interesting from a story and character standpoint than as what I would have considered "good artwork". See Stain Boy, Oyster Boy.

I was very surprised and very happy to see some of his more refined work--some, I think, made before and during his early movies, some after, some very recent. There is some really amazing stuff there. His teenage feelings of seclusion in suburbia take full, grotesque shape in images of spider-legged monsters wearing human torsos with party hats; big, fat Momma-Monsters sporting dozens of limbs with mutated children dangling off of the ends like little traps; houses and rooms bent and twisted and cracked like scenes from a nightmare. Scattered throughout the exhibit were large statues--some by Burton himself, some designed by others based on his sketches--which were the physical realization of some of his drawings. Those were really wicked--an six-foot tall robot stretched out floor-to-ceiling, a gigantic, twisted, Beeltejuice-style carousel playing bizarre, slowed down Danny Elfman-inspired music. Really cool stuff. The entrance itself was the maw of a snaggle-toothed, branch-hair monster.

Scattered between the artwork were LCD screens looping many of his short movies, like Frankenweenie, Vincent, Stainboy, and a bunch of others that I'd never heard of--some looked like footage from college or playing around with prop and stop/go effects in the backyard with a Super 8. They screened pretty much his entire full-length motion picture catalog throughout the week in the museum theater.

At the end of the ride was the coup de grace for fans of Burton's movies: his conceptual sketches of characters like Edward Scissorhands and Sweeney Todd and Jack Skellington and Large Marge, notes made while writing the screenplays, and a lot of props. Some that stood out were the inflatable arms from Beetlejuice (that rolled out from Keaton's body and had giant hammers on the end), actual motion capture models used in filming of Nightmare Before Christmas (including Jack, Oogie, and Sally), pretty much the entire cast of Corpse Bride, a full suit from Edward Scissorhands, the argyle sweater from Ed Wood, Catwoman's suit, the Headless Horseman's cape, and a lot more.

What I found most amazing about the exhibit was how clearly it showed that the weird stuff you see in his movies like Beetlejuice and Nightmare Before Christmas are really accurate, minimally translated iterations of what comes out of his head. The crooked doorways and gloomy ambiance of the offices in the Neitherworld from Beetlejuice are almost exactly taken from his early sketches, as are the hanging trees in Planet of the Apes and the rolling ducks from Batman.

Really amazing stuff. I was just randomly lucky to be able to see it--but, if you have the chance, don't miss it. I think it runs through April. Go early, though. I got right in at 10:30 when they opened, but when I left an hour later there was a long line to get in.

That sounds like a lot of words.

2009-12-23T15:31:00.000-08:00

There's still a week left in the year, but I want to knock this out while it's in my head.

This is how I spent my writing year (words-on-page, not including revisions):

150k words on what would (or may, someday) be novels (including my WIP, which should be finished by the end of the month)
5k words on short stories & poems
3k non-fiction (journalism-ism)
20k blogging (assuming 250 words per post, includes family blog)
18k tweeting (assuming 5 characters per word, 130 characters per tweet...man, that adds up fast. That's like six chapters.)

Just focusing on novels, shorts, poetry, and non-fiction articles, that puts me at about 432 words logged per calendar day on average--that's much higher than I would have estimated. Still, I need to do more.

My work towards a novel accounts for 95% of my creative writing. That was damn close to where I had estimated it to be.

I submitted work eleven times--six pieces of work in all--and had two accepted. That's 18% submit-to-sale, or 33% work-to-sale. My average wait time on those stories was 78 days.

My writing income for the year was $40. $15 of that went back to Duotrope.

My reading wasn't so hot--I think I read maybe fifteen novels, which sucks. That's all about time management. I'll do better.

Coming soon: 2010 writing goals.

WIPPER Day

2009-12-17T11:09:00.000-08:00

Happy belated WIP Wednesday (we'll call it Thought I posted this Yesterday Thursday).

Great night of writing...I locked myself in the bedroom and pounded out 2,000 words (plus about 100 words on a short story over lunch), which, after not writing a damn thing worth their collective electrons for over a week, felt nice. If I can do that a few more times before I go on vacation, plus spend some vacation days away from home at the library with headphones and blinders on, I may just finish this book by month end.

In the course of the day, I made bad things happen to good people, turned the tides of fortune toward the morally ambivalent, and sent something horrible toward the citizens of a small town in the Rocky Mountains. It's good to rule your own imaginary worlds, but not always good to be a member of one of them.

♠♠♠

This puts me on schedule to do some short stories in January, and start edits thereafter.

Which raises a question I have of all of you:

Crit groups. I've never done one. I've done some one-off crits for friends, but I've never had my work gone over. Everything I've heard says it adds value, especially at my level.

So:

Do you do them? If so, do you do them in person, or distant?

Stephen King (pause for angelic harmonies) says not to let anyone into your first draft, but let your trusted critics tear your second draft to shreds. Thoughts? Does anyone find value in crits on D1?

Small Market Roundup 2009

2009-12-15T11:00:00.000-08:00

Early in the year, a lot of us committed to doing more to support small market press--you know, the guys who pay to publish the stories we write, and who publish the stories we love.

I could have done better. In my defense, I spent most of 2009 waiting to get handed a pink slip from DayJob™ and was counting every dime (that has been delayed a little bit longer, if you're curious). But I did take advantage of a lot of the specials out there, and did my utmost to pimp small market magazines, anthos, and novels.

But, without further ado, the list of small market materials for the year (to the best of my cluttered memory):

Subterranean: Tales of Dark Fantasy: this started good, but my dog tore it to shreds before I finished.
Cemetery Dance #59: Great Keene story at the beginning of this one.
Douglas Clegg "Afterlife": I think this was a Cemetery Dance pub, too. I paid an obscene amount for this book to support CD sometime early in the year (might have been late 2008, come to think about it), and felt dumb afterward because the dialogue irritated me and I had to stop reading. I'll try again in 2010.
GUD Magazine #2, #3, #4: at least one of these I got for free, I think
Robert Swartwood "The Silver Ring": I don't think Robert got an ISBN for this, but I did pay a buck directly to the author, so I get karma for that one.
Catherine Gardner "The Sour Aftertaste of Olive Lemon"
Barry Napier "Debris": this is next on my reading list
Aaron Polson (ed) "Tainted": on order from Amazon, should be in my hands before the holidays

There were a lot more that I wanted, but once we really tightened our belts, it just wasn't happening...so, my apologies if you read my blog and wrote something that I didn't buy this year. I'll try to do better next year.

I have a ton of PDF magazines that I got free...I don't get points for not paying for them, but maybe if I give them some love here, it'll give them a half of a half of a fraction of a Google ranking:

Niteblade Dec 2008
James Moore: Home for the Holidays
Macabre Cadaver #3
Arkham Tales #2, #5
Crazy Horse #74
Ruthless Peoples Magazine March 2009

Definitely a scary year for small and large market press, and it goes without saying that the more we (read: I) can do in 2010, the better the odds that these guys will survive to end up on our 2010 year end roundup lists, too.

John Cleese is Pinin' for the Fjords

2009-12-12T11:29:00.000-08:00

I wasn't planning on posting this morning (only got 700 words in last night and need to make up for it), but I wanted to hit this while it's rattling around in the dusty, moldy-cheese-laden hamster maze that I carry around on my neck. So, I'll make it quick (yeah, right).

My thesis:

Surviving as a Producer of Popular Consumer Products in the New Economy; or: How Not to Use the Internet to Make Fans and Friends.

Some folks have it figured out; some are clueless; most of us are trying to get there, I think.

Amanda Palmer has it figured out. She tweets regularly. Not just tweets in a PR-heavy buy-my-shit kind of way, but really makes an effort to connect to fans. She has over 272k followers on Twitter, but actually talks to people who tweet her questions, comments, fan art, etc. She has responded to my lowly questions at least twice. She holds impromptu get-togethers before many of her shows and appearances, planned and announced sometimes an hour prior, always via Twitter--it's a little reward system for her followers. She tweets and blogs about her life, her problems, her victories. Zits on her ass (unfortunately, that's a true story). She helps her fans feel engaged, and part of her team, not just consumers of her products. She uses what often borders on over-communication to help her fans feel like they are truly integral in her successes and failures--the same behaviors you would find in highly successful managers at companies like Google.

Neil Gaiman has it figured out. Neil, who just happens to be making the two-back beast with Ms. Palmer, is a good Twit and blogger as well, but tends to be a little more private than Amanda--but that probably has as much to do with his British sensibilities as it does the sheer size of his following and respect for his own family. But, nonetheless, he keeps fans engaged at a good level, and it helps him stay at the head of his pack. Of note with Gaiman is that he was a relatively early adopter of this model--he started blogging his adventures while writing American Gods, sometime in 2000 I think.

Some other front-runners: Brian Keene, Adam Savage, Weird Al Yankovich, Cory Doctorow, Marian Call. They all seem to have their sea legs on the internet, for many of the same reasons as Palmer and Gaiman. You have to engage your fans, bring them into your circle (just decide which band of your circle to let them into), make it known that you recognize that your success requires a new kind of--to use the legal term--consideration. Quid quo pro. Tit-for-tat. This isn't the sheltered world of only seeing your heroes in magazines and TV. The wall is now paper-thin. Connect regularly and effectively, or get left behind.

John Cleese doesn't have it figured out. He tweets very rarely. In fact, there is strong evidence that John Cleese doesn't tweet, or at least pretends that it's not him behind the keyboard. He gets one point for trying, but the only time you hear from John's Tweetbox is either a random blip that makes no sense, or, more often, it's a direct and intrusive shill for a t-shirt. It doesn't work because he isn't taking the time to re-connect with his legions of fans, nor to open himself up to kids too young to remember Python, Fawlty, Wanda, or any of the other brilliant things he's done over the years. Cleese is the reason for this post, in fact--I just got a tweet from him asking me to click over and see what he's been up to. Well, he has been up to hiring a webguy to build a form on his website to capture my personal info so he can send me spam from third-party advertisers, as well as more t-shirt shills from his camp. Again, that's OK, but make it worth my while to continue to be a fan and give up my info--my time and patience aren't endless, and they certainly aren't free. Don't rely on your decades-old work to coerce me to open my wallet to buy a t-shirt.

Poppy Z Brite gets it, but she doesn't care. She has a good-sized following, she tweets regularly, connects with her followers, answers questions--but she isn't writing anymore and doesn't talk about writing much, and most of her tweets are either grouchy, angry, angry-grouchy, moody, or about football. But, such is genius, sometimes. I guess.

Danny Devito...Jesus, I don't even know what to say about this guy. I can't decide if he's a brilliant Twit, or just freaky-wrong. His tweets are random and often nonsensical (every time I read one of his wackier posts, I think about his drunken morning TV interview earlier this year, and the fact that almost every twipic he posts has a bottle or glass full or booze in it). Almost every post has a reference to his feet. It borders very closely on creepy. 90% of Devitos's tweets are like being drunk-dialed over the internet. But, goddamit, I can't bring myself to unfollow him, because he regularly tweets, he reveals details about his personal life (more in picture form than sentences that make sense--him and his wife in Paris, him behind the scenes at some play he's producing, him at the Venetian gondolas this morning). It works, I think, because it's intimate, it's voyeuristic, and it's like watching a slow-motion train wreck. I guess that counts as a win.

So, here's the challenge to all of you writers and new-media folks: after the books are written and the songs are recorded, what lessons will you take from these folks to help take your hobby and make it a career that actually pays the light bill?

Because your odds of getting that big book/record deal are getting slimmer every year.

Nook Review Time

2009-12-10T11:28:00.000-08:00

I got my greasy little typing sticks on a Nook last night at the Barnes & Noble by UNLV.

Summary review: daddy want.

Detailed review: when I picked it up from the display stand (to which it was bound with a white cable that, presumably, would reveal itself to be an iPod cable-white Coral snake if I made a run for it), I thought it was a mockup unit, like the cell phones with pictures of functional interfaces adhered to the screen that are actually hollow and once used to smuggle cocaine from, oh, let's say Tijuana.

The reason I thought it was fake was that the image on the screen--a hedcut image of Mark Twain--was obviously not a sticker, but obviously not a digital image. I asked the guy at the information desk if he had a real one, and he reached over coyly and hit the power button. Mark Twain dissolved in a black mist of e-ink, and was replaced by text.

I was impressed already.

Seriously, it looks that real: e-ink is absolutely indistinguishable from paper, albeit paper under a thin layer of glass-like screen material.

If you haven't seen the pictures, here's the layout: a smallish e-ink screen above--about the size of a hardcover book page--and a color LCD below. The LCD is used to navigate: scroll through your books, change settings, buy books, etc. Both screens look brilliant.

Positive:

E-ink is awesome, and, IMHO, the only acceptable way to read anything longer than a blog post on an electronic device. Remember that little voice in your head that eighteen years ago suggested that going to see Ratt and Winger concerts with no ear protection was probably a bad idea? That's the same voice in your head telling you not to read The Lost Symbol on your iPhone. (What's that? Couldn't hear you.) I said, don't read novels on your iPhone, you old goofball! Geez...
It's very small. Look around the room for a 5x7 picture in a small frame. It's about that big, maybe a little longer. It does not, however, have an image of you and your fabulous 80s haircut--but it does display pictures in black and white e-ink, so you could do that, if you wanted to...I guess.
It plays MP3s, which seems like a totally worthless feature to me, but somebody probably wants that. Ever read Skymall catalogs? There are toilet paper dispensers that play MP3s now. No kidding. Christ.
It supports ePub and PDF, so you can read those magazines you've been collecting in the internet for the past three years, as well as the large collection of third party books published in ePub, which seems to be the standard ebook format. Many, I believe, are free.
It runs the Android operating system, which means it is probably going to be more hacker-friendly than the Kindle. I'm sure someone has already modified a nook to do something related to porn, funny cats, Warcraft, or porn. My hope for this feature is that third parties will release modules and hacks to open it up to other formats, like Kindle books and Word docs.
If you're at a B&N store, you can read one book per day free via the wireless connection.

Negative:

The wireless function can use any WiFi connection, but can only be used to buy more book from B&N, or, if you're in a B&N store, read a book from their library. To read your own non-B&N books, you have to transfer them over manually via USB or a memory card. Which seems like a waste, but you don't really want to be surfing the internet on this thing, because...
E-ink is great for text or lineart/hedcut images, but anything more than that and it blows. Pictures look grainy, and the refresh rate is extremely slow. The time to flip pages in a book is about 2-3 seconds. I wonder if that would be distracting, or if you'd get used to it after a few pages.
For how small it is, it's heavier than it seems like it would be. I guess it has all of that electronic junk inside, but it's Bible-heavy--not a little tiny Gideon Bible, but not quite the leather-bound kind hand-written by Franciscan monks that came with a free deerhide bookmark and a hunchback named Eoderic to carry it around for you, either. But a big, solid hardcover Bible.
The interface in the LCD seems slow and bit clunky, but I can deal with that. After all, you're buying it to read books, not flip through settings screens. If taking ten more seconds to find your bookmark is the worst thing that happens to you all day, things are going much better for you than you probably know.

In all, I think the Nook is a winner. The only thing stopping me from buying it is that my physical, non-electronic TBR pile is immense thanks to Paperbackswap, and it would probably be a good six months before I read anything but PDF magazines on it. Not that that's a bad thing, but I just have to decide if that's worth $260.

The other thing worth mentioning is that there will be a lot of competition coming out in e-readers this year, and that always spurs innovation (no fewer than 4 major newspaper/magazine publishers are proposing their own proprietary readers, including Rupert Murdoch's News Corp and ESPN). Can someone else do it better? Maybe. Probably. Will they do it in a reasonable timeframe, and at a decent price, and not have it locked down to their sandbox with proprietary formats and binding subscription agreements? Probably not.

I'll decide in the next week or so--no rush, since I won't be able to get one shipped until likely late January. I am strongly leaning toward getting one, though, primarily so I can get through the 50MB of PDF magazines I have sitting unread on my computer.

That, and I want to see what it's like listening to Winger's "She's Only Seventeen" while reading New Moon. Creepy, I suspect.

Film Noir

2009-12-04T13:32:00.000-08:00

I sat down to write some insightful and/or funny post on some topic that I had not yet decided on when my wife pinged me on Messenger. It was horrible news:

"The Road" was not released to any theaters in Las Vegas.

A small tragedy, indeed--I slipped through all five phases of grief within about ninety seconds, all expressed in tweet form. Heartbreaking. Well, OK, not heartbreaking. But a bummer. I was looking forward to seeing it more than any movie this year since probably Order of the Phoenix.It was supposed to be the movie that balanced against Wolverine on my internal movie karma scale.

And if the hype holds up, this would have probably been the first time I had actually seen a movie nominated for an Oscar before the actual award ceremony.

I checked a few movie sites. I searched a few random zip codes on Fandango--nothing. I checked movietickets.com--they had the word "Limited" right by the release date. Jeremy Kelly tweeted that it wasn't in Atlanta, either.

Bummer.

I blame myself. And you. I blame you, too. I blame us.

Last summer, I took the kids to see Pixar's "Up". In line to buy tickets, they saw the poster for the Will Ferrell live action poo sculpture "Land of the Lost". They wanted to switch movies. We debated. They won. It cost me $25 plus a few ounces of my ever-dwindling soul.

In the Spring, we saw Wolverine. I literally can't remember a single plot point or interesting bit of dialogue. I think there was a talking beaver and an evil ice queen in the beginning; the ending is just as hazy, but I'm pretty sure the little boy--young Logan, I presume--found his golden train ticket in enough time to save Christmas for Cory Feldman and the kid from Malcolm in the Middle.

It seems like I wait to see the good movies until they come out on DVD. Mostly because of the kids, I guess.

And I now you're there with me--well, some of you. It's our fault. We are the market. We pay to watch schlock with Nicholas Cage and John Travolta and anybody from Saturday Night Live and the bald guy from Moonlighting.

The good news, I guess, is that it makes books even more attractive.

A few years back, my wife and I discovered the splendor of Netflix. One of the biggest criticisms of Netflix has always been that they don't carry many popular movies, and are overstacked with TV shows, classics, and independent movies that nobody has heard of. We aren't big TV watchers, but we have gotten brave enough to check out some of the independent flicks on there (via mailed DVDs and, our absolute favorite distribution system in the universe, Watch It Now). Now, the heavy catalog of unpopular fare has become, for us, the greatest part of Netflix.

Here are a few good ones we've found...feel free to add your own:

Adam's Æbler (Adam's Apple). My wife spent several months going through the Danish-language catalog, mostly because of Danish superstar Mads Mikkelsen (of Casino Royale fame). The Danes have a national film board that produces many (all?) of their movies, so you find a lot of the same actors working together. They really put out some good ones, and Mads seems to have been in every one. Anyway, Adam's Apple was my favorite--the story of a pre-release convict trying hard not to be reformed while he watches the people around him contort under their own emotional loads. Very well done, and the subtitles are not as distracting as you may think.

Primer. I found this movie in a reference in an xkcd comic. It was good--not fantastic, but I defy you to find a solid, well-written sci-fi movie with fewer (or no) special effects that is half as believable. It's a time-travel movie that is more thought-provocation than action, but that's good. It's a movie for people who like to think. It's also cool to see all of the credits fit on one or two pages, and only like five names, including the catering, which was probably someone's mom. Be prepared to watch it several times, or take notes. See the xkcd comic for details on that.

Run, Lola, Run. This was an artsy movie. My wife loved it, I thought it was pretty good--a very refreshing alternative to what we usually see. I think we liked it for different reasons--she liked the story, I liked the arsty-fartsy quality, how the characters and scenarios were kind of caricatures of reality. German with subtitles.

Idiocracy. From the creative team behind Office Space, a horrifyingly prophetic look at the future of mankind. A little bit ha-ha funny, but mostly oh-my-god funny.

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. A Jimmy Stewart classic featuring an amazing performance by Jean Arthur. Frank Capra obviously doesn't qualify as indie, but if you're looking for a good rental, don't neglect the oldies (my wife now almost exclusively watches B&W movies).

I am far from a film snob, I guess I just don't like being played to like I was a high-fiving, spiky-haired, bluetooth-headset rube. I don't mind being made to think a little bit for my entertainment, as, I suspect, doesn't most of the world. But, as always, the only way to change it is to vote with your pocketbook. Or make your own movies.

In any case, I will be protesting this year by not wearing my best clothes to watch the Oscars on TV. In fact, I may not even wear pants. That'll show 'em.

Turkey Shoot

2009-12-01T09:38:00.000-08:00

Back to reality from a lo-o-o-ong Thanksgiving break. The time off was nice...I didn't get a single line of writing done, but the break was much-needed.

Living in Vegas, Thanksgiving with out of town guests is different that what I've experienced in most cities I've lived in. We spent most days all together in our tiny house, but the last two days we split up--girls did shopping and girl-oriented shows, and the guys shot automatic weapons and did boy stuff. Most of the time was spent with the kids--we did a Renaissance-style show at the Excalibur, a movie, and some time in a massive underground video arcade.

And, of course, way too much food and drink and not enough going to the gym.

♣♣♣

I mostly focus on long-form stories, which is why I have so few credits to-date...but, every once in a while, I sneak in a short story between failed attempts at finishing a 70k manuscript that is worth revising.

And...as I mentioned a couple of months ago, I recently wrote a poem (yak, that even looks weird written down). Like I've said, I'm not a poet; most poetry to me is as abstract and hard to understand as Pollock paintings. Sometimes I "get" the cadence or emotional outflow, but a lot of the time it's just stuff.

But, apparently that isn't enough to keep me from writing one.

The Woodsman's Son, published up at New Myths today, started out as a short story that was heavily inspired by the Dresden Dolls song The Gardener. Whereas, I think, the Dolls saw their tale as more of a co-dependent, love/hate story, mine went more in a hero-worship, misplaced trust direction. As I wrote it, it took on a natural staggered cadence that kind of reminded me of Poe's The Raven (not in quality, per se, but in rhythm), so I decided to re-do it as a poem over a couple of months last winter.

Anyway, it's different. It was fun. I'm very curious to see if people who read it interpret it the same way I do. I suspect the reactions will be mixed.

Enjoy. And, congrats to everyone who finished NaNoWriMo! Now go take naps.

The Happy Couple

2009-11-20T10:58:00.000-08:00

Packing up the scary goods from Halloween, I decided that the full-size coffin I built was a perfect place to store everything. The first two things I put in were JerkyBoy and his girlfriend, the Bone Collector. I thought they made a cute couple all snuggled up in the casket, and had to share the love.

"It's Your One-Way Ticket to Midnight..."

2009-11-17T17:21:00.000-08:00

I loved Heavy Metal Magazine when I was little. Really, really loved it.

It was the early 80s. The radio was filled with the likes of Sammy Hagar, Blue Oyster Cult, and Pat Benetar. I was in an awkward post-Star Wars, post-Dr. Who stage at about age 10 or 11, and I started picking up the copies of magazines that my stepfather--an avid reader whose match in sheer volume of yearly book consumptions I am yet to see--left laying around. National Lampoon, Discover, and Heavy Metal were my favorites. Between those three magazines, my mind was expanded, my horizons set farther, my childhood stuffed into a pipe and smoked like so much hash.

If, in your mind, you just calculated the equation of "10 year old" + "National Lampoon Drug Jokes" + "Heavy Metal Cartoon Boobies" = "Parenting Fail", you need to chill. This was the early 80s. Life was different, people seemed to have a firmer grasp on reality vs fantasy. My parents were progressive and pragmatic enough to realize that me reading jokes about smoking pot and seeing cartoons of alien women with 48FF knockers wasn't going to turn me into a pervert or a junkie. I'm only 36, but I seem to be OK so far.

When I first discovered HM, I was hooked. I think it was Rock Opera that first pulled me in, but over time, they introduced some really great stories and fantastic artwork. Boris Vallejo, whose airbrushed fantasy works are recognized worldwide, appeared in just about every issue, and he illustrated some really fun stories in addition to his artwork layouts (although for the life of me I can't remember any names). HR Giger did some work for them, too, off and on, as did R Crumb.

One of my favorites (at least that I remember, there were so many stories that only lasted a month or two) was RanXerox, the story of a buff, taxi-driving, ghetto-bound cyborg-punk and his 14 year old girlfriend. The artwork was incredible, and the storylines were hard-edged, gritty, and brutal. Like Sin City meets Blade Runner, but throw in a lot more blood, drugs, and sex. A lot more.

Another was Texarcana. From what I remember, it was the unfurling story of a witch, a cattle rustler, and two beings from another dimension--one who looks like a chicken-lizard man, and one that is a cross between Grimace from McDonalds and a mushroom. I was really hooked on Texarcana, and waiting for my stepfather to finish reading the latest copy of HM so I could get my mits on it would drive me crazy.

Once I got hooked into the storylines, I started doing jobs around the house to earn enough money to buy the backissues. At one point I think I had every single issue from 1977 to 1988; I tore off all of the covers and cut out the best artwork, and covered every single wall (and ceiling) in my bedroom. That was about the time my hormones shifted, and my attentions turned from comics to...well, the things that teenagers occupy themselves with. The HM art came down, and I haven't read it since.

HM was on my mind today because I saw some random R Crumb picture, and a quick Google chase led me to find that the entire run of Texarcana is online. Check it out...it's a cool and weird story, and I look forward to reading it again, now, what, twenty-three years later?

I guess part of it is just being a kid with little else to worry about, but I do miss the anticipation of waiting for the next issue, the excitement of opening each magazine for the first time, the countless hours spent reading and re-reading each story, studying the fine lines of the artwork. It's honestly one of the few things about childhood that I miss.

This is my lawn. You know what to do.

2009-11-14T18:34:00.000-08:00

Is it a sure sign that I'm getting old when I blog more about crotchety-old-man topics than anything else? I need to get out more. Maybe I need to join a band (again) and, you know, leave the house, interact with adults. Stuff like that. Or I can put on my headphones and write more.

♣♣♣

First off in Old Man JD's craw today: changes in the TSA's rules of security theater.

A few months back, a guy who works for the Campaign for Liberty (formerly the Ron Paul presidential campaign) was trying to get through airport security when he was stopped, sequestered, harassed, threatened and, eventually, let go. The reason? He was carrying a lot of cash (which just happened to be campaign contributions, but that was none of the TSA's business). This type of thing, I'm sure, happens a lot since 9/11--the TSA was made into a pseudo Federal police force with no oversight. The reason it made news this time was that:

Being part of the Campaign for Liberty, this guy takes his constitutional rights seriously, and asserted them repeatedly, much to the TSA agents' confusion; and
He turned on his iPhone audio recording app once he was taken aside, and posted the entire 30 minute ordeal on the internet. Priceless.

Anyway, the ACLU filed suit on his behalf, and the TSA admitted that they did not have the right to engage in search and seizure outside of their duties to keep dangerous materials off of planes. A small win for liberty, but these days you have to take what you can get.

♣♣♣

The longer I live in Las Vegas, the more it seem like a big wasteland. I think I have a full article to write on that topic, but here is my Vegas Rant of the Day™:

I'm walking my dog, and notice that the street near my house--a typical Las Vegas road with 8 foot high block walls on either side--had a lot of new graffiti. Across the street was a man of about 50 going to town with a spray can, painting squiggles, squares, and random marks. It was white paint--same color as the graffiti, and definitely not the original color of the wall. I crossed the street to confront him.

I came up behind him and asked "What the fuck are you doing?" It's important to note here that I've spent my entire life being a socially awkward numb nut, and I see no signs of that trend abating. For some reason, he didn't take to that very kindly to my greeting. I can't imagine why.

In a thick accent that seemed to be Eastern European, he replied: "What the hell does it look like?" He puffed up, walked over, and looked, for a moment, like he wanted to square off with me. Not that I look intimidating, but he apparently decided that fisticuffs in the middle of the street with a 215 lb jackass and a 70 lb Malamute didn't sound productive, and he went back to work. "I'm covering up graffiti," he continued. "Are you trying to be a smartass?"

I took a step back to re-assess his work. It just looked like a bunch of squiggles. But, I decided, it was possible--probable even--that there was more graffiti underneath and that he was doing exactly what he said he was. It looked like shit, and was obviously intended to spite the taggers more than to mask the graffiti itself, but, I figured, at least he's trying (I've done the same on my street, but I, at least, tried to match the goddamn color of the painted surface). I bit my tongue as hard as I could and continued my walk. I even wrote his license number down, but decided later that reporting him to the graffiti hotline would be nothing more than Old Man JD being vindictive and petty, just because we had a misunderstanding.

I guess what I did there was I delineated graffiti-as-vandalism from graffiti-as-reclamation. And, apparently, I've decided that the latter is OK. I'm still not totally sure about all of that, but I guess that can be filed under "picking your battles".

In my mind, it all just adds to the large-scale ghetto vibe of Las Vegas. The kids tag the neighborhood, the "good guys" (there aren't quotation marks big enough to contain my sarcasm) almost come to blows over it, and I'm unsure if I'm part of the problem, the solution, or just standing around watching it all go to hell.

Like I said, I have a whole bag of rant about Las Vegas...more on that another day.

Wise Man Says: A Finger In the Nose is Not the Nose

2009-11-11T18:11:00.000-08:00

I'm just shy of 40k on my WIP, working title of "Amity". I'm procrastinating starting writing for the night, because I have to get up from my chair in about 10 minutes and make dinner. Just enough time to blog.

This story is different than anything I've written, and different than anything I've read. It looks at a subversive community--a real community, mind you--and, as such, uses a lot of the extremely non-PC, offensive language of this group. My fear--other than it will never see the light of day because it sucks--is that it doesn't suck entirely but nobody will publish it because of said offensive language. I've also considered that it will get published, and that the people that this group mocks make a big deal out of it. It's not the worst thing published, by any means--think of, maybe, American History X or Brokeback Mountain, and the language that an antagonist would need to use to develop the persona of a, well, a hateful prick. It's that kind of colloquial banter. I'm wondering about potentially alienating an audience right out of the starting gate. But, that's definitely cart-before-horse. I need to finish the damn thing first.

Does it seem obvious that the writing is not the writer, or do you just draw that connection automatically that, for example, based only on the works and not interviews, etc, that Annie Proulx is sympathetic to gays, or Chuck Palahniuk is an anarchist, or Ayn Rand is hyper-conservative, or Dan Brown is an iconoclast, or Hunter Thompston was, well, whatever the fuck Hunter Thompson was?

♣♣♣

My copy of Barry Napier's Debris just arrived. I have been very neglectful of my reading and still need to knock out my current book, but I'll probably put that one next on the pile.

♣♣♣

"...cast vicariously as both victim and villain... "

2009-11-05T10:20:00.000-08:00

    Remember, remember the fifth of November,
    The gunpowder treason and plot,
    I know of no reason
    Why the gunpowder treason
    Should ever be forgot.

Today, of course, is the Night of Bonfires in Britain.

Maybe those in the UK understand it more, but I think that most Americans have culled their knowledge of Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plot from the comic and later movie "V for Vendetta". It strikes me that for most people, at least outside of the UK and Ireland, the ongoing battle between Protestants and Catholics doesn't get much spin time in the front part of the mind.

The reason Guy Fawkes day is so romanticized, I suspect, is the same as for Bastille Day in France and the commemoration of the Boston Tea Party (and, of course, Independence Day) in the states: the religious connotation is secondary--if even that--to the idea of throwing off ones oppressors, aggregating as a people and sticking it to the overlords. It's the reason people show up to Presidential town hall meetings with Colt .45s strapped to their legs, why hordes of anonymous protesters can coordinate via the internet with no clear leadership structure and show up en masse to call attention to some perceived (or real) injustice, and, in a more groupthink but subtle manner, the reason why every other (or third) election cycle brings in the opposition party--we're sick of "their" shit and want to give the underdogs a chance (we tend to forget that once someone is elected, they automatically and without exception become "them").

So, even though it has nothing to do with my country, per se, and that I couldn't possibly be any more against justifying violence in the name of religion, tonight I will raise a glass of some kind of viscous alcoholic beverage in salute to our friends across the Atlantic, and to those across the globe and within our borders who continually remind us that an unchecked government is a corrupt government.

Here's to the Night of Bonfires.

Halloween 2009 Pic Dump

2009-11-01T12:31:00.001-08:00

Not much to say on this that readers of this blog don't already know...yesterday was a crazy Halloween adventure. It took me 2 full days to set up the garage haunt, and I'm sure it will take me most of today to clean it up (if I can stop procrastinating and get out there). We didn't count but I'm sure we had at least 300 visitors, maybe 350. It was fun...everything worked, no props failed. The only real disappointments were the Pepper's Ghost (it is sooo hard to get that illusion right...maybe next year), I ran out of red dye for the fountain (which also leaked, but not until we were ready to close shop) and my costume. As usual, I threw it together at the last minute after working in the garage all day, and it kind of sucked. Also, not to self: when you have a complex, somewhat fragile haunt to manage in the dark, don't wear a prosthetic that covers one of your eyes. That was just dumb. I kept knocking stuff over lurking around behind the scenes to adjust the fogger, manage cords, etc.

So, without further ado, a photo and video dump:

"Lobby" of the garage (daytime)

Hanging Pepper's Ghost (notice the ghost image and my reflection in the glass)

Notice the Bone Collector over my shoulder in mid-lightning flash

This one reminds of of Silence of the Lambs

Kind of a cool minimilast shot of the skull from Pepper's Ghost floating through the air

And two vids: the first one is standard def with normal lighting, so it's kind of hard to see everything

Second is a full walkthrough with my HD camerca, once in daytime, once in infrared (I think you can click on the video to see it in HD).

Garage Haunt Walkthrough from Jeremy D Brooks on Vimeo.

Fright Dome

2009-10-25T14:10:00.000-07:00

Less than one week until Halloween--Hallowe'-en, short for All Hallows Evening, the celebration of the night before the old Pagan celebration of All Saints' Day (later co-opted by Pope Gregory III, who, in Papal tradition, sought to divert attention to his deity by moving the Catholic All Saints' Day from May to November 1); also known as Samhain, from the Gaelic word for summer's end--a celebration of the end of the light, fruitful days of summer, and the beginning of the lonely, scarce days of winter's darkness.

Last night there was a zombie walk down on Fremont Street; I unfortunately had to take a pass on that, but I'm very anxious to hear how it went (I suspect Mercedes will blog it). The reason I missed was entrapment--my daughters got caught in the kind of dramatic turmoil of which only school age kids are capable; and, long story short, I should know better than to let schoolkids coordinate events without close oversight, and the only way for me to keep my weeks-old promise to my daughters to make sure they get to Fright Dome this year was to take them myself.

So...anyway, the thing I really wanted to talk about was Fright Dome. If you've ever been to Las Vegas, Fright Dome is built inside of the Adventure Dome at Circus Circus. (note: I couldn't find any good pictures of FrightDome in action...I suspect the fog makes photography almost impossible).

If you've never been to Las Vegas, let me 'splain what this is, so you can get an idea of the coolness of this thing: imagine a glass-shrouded dome about the size of a small football stadium. Inside of the dome is an amusement park, including a roller coaster, water ride (a la Disney's Splash Mountain), 6 or 7 big carny-style rides, a midway, video games, kiddie rides, concessions, and sideshows, all anchored in the center by a massive faux-stone mountain.

Every October, that park takes on a new life as Fright Dome, a massive haunted village that is only open at night. The Circus Circus takes that amusement park and turns off all of the lights, fills it with thick fog, adds lightning/thunder generators, laser light shows, stobes, and high-end Halloween decorations: pneumatic monsters, flying demons, echoing screams filling the dome. That alone is pretty cool, but that's just the beginning.

They close down a few areas, like the laser tag maze and some of the winding caverns underneath the mountain, and construct five large, elaborate haunted houses. This year they did a licensing deal with the producers of Saw, and had a haunt called Jigsaw's Revenge, complete with live actors and electronic/pneumatic props acting out torture scenes from the movies. Very cool. There was also a hillbilly maze, a haunted hospital, and a couple others.

Roaming the haunts and the hallways in between are dozens of actors in makeup, whose sole purpose is to scare the hell out of guests. The overall theme is evil clowns, but they also had hooded hillbillys with chainsaws (real, but no chain attached), mad scientists, popular baddies like Jason, Mike Meyers, etc, flying monkeys from Wizard of Oz, and dozens of generally weird characters.

In all it was fun--I loved the creepy ambiance of seeing big rides like Chaos and The Inverter running in the dark, their signage lights barely visible through the fog, and the packs of kids running and screaming while being chased by a green-haired clown with a chainsaw. The waits were killer, though...about 40-50 minutes on some haunts, which wasn't fun. Also, I was probably amongst the seven oldest people in the building, security guards included.

As much as it sucked missing the Zombie Walk, the kids had a good time, and I can say that I've done the Fright Dome. Finally.

Poltergeist IV: Cable Guy

2009-10-22T09:34:00.000-07:00

In keeping with our (well, OK...my) October tradition, my Netflix queue is stacked with horror movies. Last night was the BluRay release of Poltergeist. I gotta say, that movie really stands up well. I'm sure they did some remastering for BluRay, but it looked great, the story was good, and it was just a well-built movie.

I haven't seen it since the theatrical release (I was in 3rd grade, I think), and I remember not sleeping well for the next 3 days. Poltergeist, I think, is responsible for my propensity to put scary-ass clowns in my stories. It's interesting how different parts of a movie resonate with you as an adult, as opposed to the same movie watched as a child, how the family and children become more your concern than the safety of the adults--especially since Carol Anne was a dead-ringer for my oldest daughter when she was five.

Also, watching Craig T Nelson smoke pot while reading a book about Reagan's greatness was funny.

I'm a data fiend, and after I watch a movie I will almost always hit the IMDB to see what the actors have done recently, where they got started, and useless trivia about the movie. I knew that the little girl who played Carol Anne died during the third Poltergeist (mis-diagnosed medical condition), but I didn't realize that the actress who played the older sister was murdered by her boyfriend right after the movie was finished. Tragic. The guy served I think 6.5 years. Also tragic. Both of them are interred near each other in the same cemetery.

Anyway, I think my wife gets the next movie in the queue, and then I get one more scary flick before Halloween: Creepshow.

♣♣♣

No idea why, but this My Chemical Romance song (Helena) has been stuck in my head for days. I had to track down the video. If you've never seen it, take a look. The song is very hooky and over-produced, but it tells kind of a catchy story. Also, the video is stunning.

My Chemical Romance "Helena" from Cinelicious on Vimeo.

Free Speech, Protected Actions

2009-10-21T10:45:00.000-07:00

I don't want to use this blog as a political platform, per se. My primary purpose here is to connect with writers and readers and those who appreciate literature in all genres, be it Faulkner's immersive southern plantations or Tolkein's hobbit-holes and dead marshes or Herbert's spice-scented political landscapes, or even Sam Harris' biting secular lectures or the DT Suzuki's wonderful insights into Zen Buddhism.

The topic of anti-blasphemy legislation and special protections for religious groups has been coming up quite a bit recently, and, regardless of where I stand on that topic philosophically, it can--and will--impact literature sooner or later. Hence this essay.

Caitlin Kiernan tweeted this article earlier today, and I RT'd it in kind. It is an Op/Ed from USA Today columnist Jonathan Turley (also, a more measured analysis from The Desmoines Register) that gives an overview of a UN resolution co-authored by the US and Egypt regarding religious protection: "...the Obama administration supported the effort of largely Muslim nations in the U.N. Human Rights Council to recognize exceptions to free speech for any "negative racial and religious stereotyping.") Read that last part again and see if your head has exploded: Egypt, not exactly known for human rights or religious tolerence, has co-authored a resolution with the U.S. (home of Larry Flynt, Scientology, and adopted homeland of Ayn Rand) to define the international stance on free speech and religious protections. And it doesn't seem to be a let's-synthesize-our-ideas thing, it looks to be more of a concession on behalf of the US for whatever political reason.

The resolution, as I understand it, doesn't really have teeth, in that it carries no punitive measures and no body of enforcement (if I'm incorrect, please tell me). But, this has to be taken into context; in the last few years, we've seen violence, murder, and attempts of both done in the name of religion (the fatwah against author Salman Rushdie, the UK riots against Denmark for cartoon depictions of Muhammad, parents who refuse their sick children healthcare because their religion prohibits it, child marriage and abuse in the name of a person claiming they have been appointed as a diety's representative on earth). And that doesn't even take into consideration the "sanctioned" violence in the name of religion: Pakistan v India, Israel v Palestine, Ireland v N Ireland). If you take away people's ability to discuss the hows and whys of bad things like violence and war and crime within context, you kill the discussion before it has even started and you, to some extent, legitimize the activities.

I am not positing that violence is the domain of religion, nor that there is necessarily causation therein. I will say, though, that history has shown that a person or group with the inclination to violence or general nefas often have no problem doing it under the flag of piety. And the reason they do that, I submit, is that religion is given special protections against things that would often be seen as illegal, immoral, or objectionable if done outside of the realm of those protections.

There are oh-so-many reasons that giving religions--any religion--international standing as protected from derision or criticism is a horrible, horrible idea. Not the least of which is the potential for abuse of the "privilege", iterations of which I'm sure any of you could conjure up in horrifying detail.

But, let's take the very American (I can't profess to speak for my friends in the UK, Australia, Candada, etc) staple: Freedom of Speech--the very cornerstone of the Constitution, the first amendment added to the Bill of Rights in 1791. How can the concepts of "not criticizing religion" be synthesized with the Bill of Rights? I submit that it can't, not without outright destroying that document and all it stands for.

Criticize a Christ Scientist for letting their child die because insulin is not allowed? Out.
Protest a Scientology office? Out.
Make a joke about the Pope's funny hat collection? Out.
Debate creationism vs evolution? Out.

All horrible things to lose the ability to do. Not reduced privileges--eliminated rights.

Now, take that into consideration how this affects you, the author/reader. For this, I employ gross O'Reilly/Olbermann-style hyperbole. Why? Because it drives home the point of where this, unchecked, leads.

First of all, put Dan Brown's ass in jail, tout de suite. Salman Rushdie must be extradited to the U.S. and turned over to his accusers. Neil Gaiman, who is in China this month, may just want to stay there (between American Gods, Anansi Boys, and Good Omens, he may only be facing 10-15 if he behaves). Rand is lucky that she's already passed, she'd be first against the wall.

/End hyperbole.

If you care, what can you do? I don't know. I'm not an activist. But, a few places to start may be the Comic Book Defense Fund, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and American Civil Liberties Union...I'm sure there are plenty more places out there you can talk to. I'm not sure what they can/would do, but harrassing your Congresscritters is ALWAYS a good idea. Do NOT let these folks off easy (not just on this topic--ANY topic).

Most importantly, I think, is for all of us to be aware of the discussions that are taking place, and how they affect all of us, and make sure that the people around you are aware as well. It isn't enough to just say "hate speech should be prohibited". If the PATRIOT act and DMCA taught us anything, it is that overly general laws can, and will, be abused by somebody to violate existing law and rule. And such laws tear through skin and attach their sucking tendrils at the bone, and will not be removed.

So, that's my rant. Apologies to anyone offended or bored, but that's what is on my mind today.

The Governor Called, Something About a Stay of Elocution?

2009-10-19T15:40:00.000-07:00

I think I'd mentioned a while ago that my employer (-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named) was planning on sacking me (and a good sized group of my friends) sometime in Q1 pursuant to a business venture with another company. I've been sitting on nickels and dimes, putting of critical house upgrades (missing sections of roofing, carpet the dog tore out...pretty important stuff) until I could find something steady, which, in a city approaching 14% unemployment, wasn't looking good. Anyway, they just announced today that we have an 18 month reprieve, which at the same time takes a huge weight off of my shoulders, while making me want to slam my head in a car door and curse in Yiddish. If I was still writing for The Examiner, I would be typing up an article called Demoralizing the Masses: How Not to Fire People.

So, anyway, there it is. Not quite a microfiber swaddling cloth and a solid oak crib, but it gives me some breathing room to patch the damned roof and not put every spare dime in savings. Well, not as many dimes, anyway.

°°°

I'm sitting at about 26k on another story. One of these days I'll finish one of the damn things. I think the problem is that I learn so much about writing each time I work on a project that by the time I get to 50k or so, I start to doubt myself and want to apply those lessons to something new. I need to get over that and stay on task.

So, needless to say, I won't be doing NaNoWriMo this year. I ought to be close to 35k on this story by then, I don't want to lose momentum (with Halloween coming up, AND a conference I have to attend for work, I won't get much done between next Tuesday and Nov 1). I'm fighting the short story bug tooth and nail. I also have a story that I did about 20k on and put aside that I thought would make a great comic, I may draft a script and see if any drawers are interested this winter.

°°°

In keeping with holiday tradition, we're renting a few scary/monster flicks this month (rare for us) to set the mood. My oldest daughter and I plowed through the 3+ hour DVD of It last week, which I'd never seen. The ending was weak, but Tim Curry was awesome as Pennywise. He is really an underrated actor, that guy...I loved him in Clue, too. He ends up in hammy roles and doing audio for cartoons too often. I'd like to see him in some killer dramatic role someday.

I think Poltergeist is next in the queue. Every kid should watch Poltergeist before bed at least once, right?

Halloween Props Part IV

2009-10-16T13:26:00.000-07:00

(continued from yesterday)

In which I put nasty things in a box, and the true extent of my sickness is revealed.

One of the projects I had planned was a half of a zombie sticking up out of the ground, preferably with a motorized 3-axis skull on top and a grunty voice track. Due to budget constraints, the motorized skull was out. The natural solution to what to put in the toe pincher was to combine these two projects, and have a zombie peeking out of the coffin.

A big part of what I really wanted to do with the zombie was "corpsing"...taking a dry skeleton and making it look all meaty and greasy and rotten.

First step: a skull and a couple of skeleton hands.You can find these at a lot of Halloween supply shops, or buy direct from the Anatomical Chart Company, who I think makes them. They are designed primarily for lab/MD office/school use, but ones that are of lower quality (missing parts, discolored, etc) they sell cheap. They are perfect for this project.

Next: I pulled out a few of his teeth, removed outward-facing hardware (clasps that hold on the skullcap, etc, but not the springs that hold the jaw on...different tactic there). There are a lot of parts that come off for inspection (the entire faceplate from mid-eye to lower nose comes off so you can see the sinusus). Those got glued in place as well as a couple of bits that had broken off in shipping, and rough, machined edges got sanded.

While skull-shopping, I also picked up a liter bottle of liquid latex. This stuff is awesome. You can do fun stuff with it. I had heard that you can paint it directly on your skin to make kind of faux-clothing (go ahead and google that, but you may want to wait until you get home from work...), and my daughters and I played around with making gloves out of it. Really fun stuff.

Anyway, here comes the fun part, in handy instruction list form:

1. Lay down paper. This stuff is messy. Do not wear latex gloves--latex sticks to latex, and you'll have five pound hands before too long.

2. Unroll a cotton ball. Betcha didn't know cotton balls are actually rolls, did you? Me neither. Look closely, you'll see the spiral pattern. Find a gap and unroll...very easy.

3. Soak the cotton with latex and slather it on the skull. It really is that simple. It's messy and kind of unwieldy, but once you get it stuck to the skull, you can smear it down and smooth it, shape it, do all kinds of cool things. Some people put plastic eyeballs in the skull, I chose to go more corpse-realistic and took some of the dried latex that stuck to my fingers and jammed it in the eye sockets and nose hole to look like dried skin and cartilage. I really wish I would have filmed this part. Next year, I'll do a full video tutorial if I do another one. Try to stick with how muscle and sinew naturally lay on the body--how an eyelid pulls across the socket, how the jaw muscle goes behind the outer edge of the eye socket. Be sure to cover up the springs with latex (conveniently, I think that's where a muscle or tendon or something is, it looks very natural covered up)

Same procedure with the hands, with one exception: they have to be posed first, as this stuff dries hard. I had to climb into the casket holding the skeleton hands and pose in the way that I thought my actor would be--climbing out, reaching for the next victim (or, if you have a more optimistic viewpoint, a senior citizen asking for help from the nice young folks visiting). So: pose them where you want them, and apply the latex cotton. You can apply as much or as little as you want...my goal was to show meat and facial structure as well as exposed bone.

4. Let it dry overnight. Even at this stage, it looks pretty damned impressive, I think. A few years back, Amy and I drove to L.A. to see the BodyWorlds exhibit (they have a similar show here in Vegas now, I think at the Luxor), where plastinated corpses are displayed in various poses. This stuff looks just like that--very much like un-dyed turkey jerky.

5. Paint. There are a lot of ways to go with this. Some folks use dark wood stain, some use diluted black or brown or green paint, some hand paint the whole thing in detail. I wanted to use materials I had around the house to get the right texture and color, and ended up mixing black paint and cherrywood stain, about 1:3 I guess. The two didn't mix well, but it gave it a nice splotchy, uneven look. The only thing I didn't like was that 1. toward the bottom of the paint cup it got dark and gloopy without warning, and 2. the end result was shiny (which looks wet, so it isn't too bad, I guess, just not how a 20 year dead corpse would look)

6. Body. This part was pretty easy: pick up 12 feet of 1" PVC and some 45°, 90°, and H connectors and put them together in the rough shape you want. Add thrift store clothes. Once you get the forearms the correct length, cut notches in the pipe and slip the hand in, attach with a bolt. Apply more latex cotton and stain just like with the skull and hands to cover the pipe (same with the neck). I used a little bit of stain on the cuffs and collar to make it look like decaying corpse juice soaked into the fabric.

7. Sound. An old set of computer speakers, an iPod, and some zombie sounds from the internet, cleaned up and gapped for consistency. I also added some lights in the casket for highlights and ambience (red, but I may switch to green).

And there we are: Jerkyboy. The video clip is my first live test with him done with lighting (hard to see on the vid) and the lightning box running in the background.

There are a couple more projects that I may or may not have time for...if so, of course I'll post. Otherwise, I'll get some good HD video and more pix of the big day up after Halloween. Hope you've enjoyed so far, with you could be here to help scare the pants off of the neighbors.

Halloween Props Part III

2009-10-15T08:05:00.000-07:00

This is the post where I was supposed to lay out my killer project...well, this is half of it. The post got pretty long so I decided to split it into the two distinct phases of the project.

This is the project I had been looking forward to building for months.

I knew I wanted to do something with a coffin. I didn't know what, but I had always wanted to build an old-style toe pincher coffin. Some quick size estimates in hand, I ran down to the hardware store and picked up a stack of 6" fencing slats (cheapest I could find was $2 a board...wood fencing is pretty rare in the desert). I'm not a carpenter by any stretch of the imagination, so I was kind of making this part up as I went--as you all with any kind of wood skills will quickly see.

My strategy was as simple as it gets: lay the boards out, draw the lid to fit around an adult, snap a chalk line, cut, and screw together. Lay the lid across antother section of boards, outline, cut, screw. Figure out how deep to make it, cut some boards, screw them together. Dead simple and inelegant (and it shows in the quality, but I wasn't concerned...the rougher it looked the better the illusion, I figured. I wouldn't repeat that strategy for something I was going to sell or display in the house). The end result looked passable and seemed fairly sturdy.

Next question was: what to put in it? I had wanted to do some kind of automation, possibly either a skull kit with movement on 3 axes (as pretty much mastered by the guys over at graveyardskulls.com), or possibly a Monster In a Box (where a closed box shakes or the lid moves or some other movement that alludes to something nasty inside that wants out). The big problem ended up being that due to the tenuous state of my employment, I had to cut my budget wa-a-ay back for this Halloween. So, the three axis skull was out. Maybe next year.

Short version of the MIAB: I went too cheap, experimented, and failed miserably. My plan was to rig a motor and gear--a hand held drill, fairly commonly used for these I was told--and a motion detector so that once a guest approached, the motor would spin and the lid would open and close. And oh, did it ever. Holy crap.

Lesson 1: if you use a drill from a pawn shop, spend the extra $5 for variable speed. My mechanism worked great in testing, but the problem was that the motor spun so fast that it literally started to tear the coffin apart within seconds. Even after more reinforcing with cross braces, gorilla glue, and more screws and brackets, the result was the same. It wasn't going to last more than a few minutes before falling apart.

Lesson 2: a drill isn't the best solution for this, variable speed or not (I hooked an off the shelf rheostat--the kind you would use to dim your house lights with a rotary switch--onto the power cable, and it wouldn't even turn on). I asked some of the very cool folks at halloweenforum.com for help, and many of the responses said that a wiper motor was the way to go; a drill is going to have trouble with that kind of weight load, and at slower speeds loses a lot of it's power, meaning less strength to open the lid and more potential problems. You can buy a speed regulator (kind of like a rheostat but designed for power tools like drills and routers), but they start at about $20.

So, then, the question became: spend more money on a power regulator and hope that it would still be able to lift the heavy lid, buy and mount a wiper motor and 12V converter along with the proper gears and levers, or go cheap and pull together a sufficiently disturbing static prop. Finances being tight, I opted for the latter.

All was not lost. I combined two projects into one and made something that I think it pretty cool for a static prop.

To be continued...

Wink Wink Nudge Nudge Saynomore

2009-10-14T15:57:00.000-07:00

We inturrupt the Halloween prop gore-fest for a couple of literary announcements:

I learned last night that I've been accepted into the Hint Fiction anthology! Woo Hoo! Very excited about that. I've seen some other folks announce, and being in the company of people like Barry Napier and Mercedes Yardley, not to mention Pulitzer nominee Joyce Carol Oates, makes me smell way smarter than I really am. sniiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiffffffff....ahhh...that's good fiction.
Secondly, it occurred to me that during my last blog hiatus, I sold a poem and failed to post about it (although I think I did tweet it). So, in December my poem The Woodsman's Son will be up with New Myths. Very excited for that as well, particularly because 1. it was my first poem and 2. I don't know beans about poetry. It's not the smart-sounding kind of poetry with blocks of words that seem arbitrarily sewn together to invoke an emotion--it's the other kind, the kind that rhymes and tells a story and that nobody seems to write anymore. So, that is very exciting and although I admit I still don't really "get" poetry, I am content to call myself a poet--because that, too, makes me smell smart.

So that's the day's news. I'll be throwing up a post (HORK!) detailing part III of my 2009 props soon.

Halloween Props Part II

2009-10-12T08:21:00.000-07:00

This was a smaller project, but it solved a problem I've been thinking about for a while: how do you make ribs?

In a few years of playing with store-bought and homemade Halloween props, I've decided that the reason it's so hard to find a somewhat realistic skeleton at most Halloween stores is that ribs, spines, shoulders, and hips are probably hard to cast and even harder to ship and display without breaking. You can get a 4th quality bucky skeleton on Amazon for just over $100, but my budget wouldn't allow for that this year, and I really wanted a full size skeleton.

Last year I picked up a ground-breaker: a semi-realistic set of complete skeleton arms, hands, legs, feet, and a head that you're supposed to position so it looks like it's popping up out of a grave, still half-buried--but, no midsection. I bound them together last year with aluminum scraps and wire coat hangers and set up a Pepper's Ghost illusion (where the object is lighted and displayed reflected in a pane of glass, creating the illusion of a floating ghost). The lack of shape and the metal guts weren't a problem then, as the image was so faint in the glass that nobody would know the difference. This year, however, I decided to recycle the parts into a prop that would be displayed fully, and I needed more support in the body.

There are a few tutorials on the internet for making skeleton ribs, but nothing really great: expanding foam, plastic buckets, paper mache. All different ways to tackle the problem, but I wanted something less messy and dead simple. So, using thick guage wire, plastic tubing for a sternum, duct tape, and anatomical pictures from google, I threw together a passable frame, knowing that it would be covered in some kind of cloth. But, of course, I built it while it was still hot out, and once it reached about 100 in the garage, the duct tape failed and I was left with a pile of goopy tape and loose wires. One more try with industrial glue, and viola...insta-ribs.

This creepy little creature is going to be hanging from the ceiling under a blacklight with a fan blowing up onto her shroud, so it kind of looks like a flying ghost. It will be dark enough that you won't be able to see her metal parts, but the added bulk in the chest should help sell the illusion a bit more. The 200W lightning flashes will be right behind her, and there will be branches from my poor dead elm tree framing her, aiding in the flying-above-the-graveyard thing.

Next project: a nasty creature who goes by the nickname Jerkyboy.

Halloween Props Part I

2009-10-10T21:29:00.000-07:00

I've been holding off on this for a while (and this may partially account for my absence from the web for a while, this has been in play for a couple of months), but I'm at a point where I have some pictures to share. As you may remember from last year, I'm kind of a wacko for Halloween. This year the wacko-ness took a precipitous plunge into insanity.

I have three or four major projects that will make up the garage haunt this year, and I'm going o journal the making-of here (I started journaling at a depreciated blog, but I thought one blog is easier to neglect than two). May be more info than some of you want, but it has been damn fun and a lot of work and, in keeping in the wonderful, cooperative spirit of all of my internet literary friends, I thought there may be some gems in here you can use to scare the piss out of your neighbor kids, too.

I'm here to help.

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Project one was a lightning machine. If you follow the link to my old blog, you'll find some info there. This post is about project two: Skull Fountain.

This is an outset of an idea from last year. I had two styrofoam skulls from walmart and an old desktop fountain pump--so, needless to say, I built a fountain to spew blood that dripped down the skull-faces. It was nice, but a couple of problems: 1. the red-dyed water stained the skulls pink and 2. I needed a Monster Mud project, and this one screamed upgrade.

Step one: I took a cheap plastic bowl and draped some mesh screen around the base, and a rough wire frame around the top. I had no idea what the end result was going to look like, but as Monster Mud gives a faux-stone result, I thought just a rough carved fountain was a good place to start. I'm not an artist, so I wasn't too stressed about making it extremely balanced (which was good, because it wasn't). If you look at the crest of the arch over the top skull, you'll see a yellow-ish tube--that is a T I made in the hose leading from the pump in the basin. I cut holes in the top of the T, so that when the water turns on, it will (theoretically) drip menacingly across the faces of the skulls.

Step two: drape screen across the rest of the wire frame.

Step three: make Monster Mud. If you've never worked with MM, you're in for a treat. This stuff is messy and difficult to work with and generally just a lot of fun. It's the kind of material that, once you see what it can do, will make you want to just keep making new things with it. MM is simple to make: take drywall joint compound and dark paint (I used black), and mix to the consistency you need. Slather on with abandon. Tip 1: it's messy. Tip 2: it gets heavy fast--over-build your underlying structures.

The next steps basically involved slathering on layers (five total), dusting lightly with white spray paint to lighten it up a bit (I thought the original color would be too dark to see the dripping blood), and about six coats of grout sealer.

Below is the final result. I've tested it with water and the drip mechanism did actually work (glory be to Zeus), but I'm waiting until Halloween to use dyed water, just in case it gets past the grout sealer and stains. As with all of these projects, I'll have final action shots and videos posted early in November.

Next project: Flying Witch Ghost.

The Ballad of IP Freely

2009-09-30T16:48:00.001-07:00

Having just watched Steal This Movie II on Youtube yesterday and also having recently read an essay by Cory Doctorow on open and free information sharing, intellectual property has been on my mind, for sure.

This is a tough topic, and the discussion ain't going away soon, Molly. The problem is, I think, is less that people are afraid of losing control of their creations, as it is that they are afraid of someone else making money off of their labor. For example: what painter wouldn't love to see their work glide by on the side of a bus for the entire city to see--as long as they got paid for it.

And that's not a small thing, that is a very big thing. In this age, the end of 2009, when the economy is teetering on collapse and the bulk of artistic content (music, pictures, movies, writing) is controlled by a handful of gatekeeper organizations, it is getting much harder for emerging artists (writers included) to make any kind of living at their craft. Here are a few insightful posts on the subject of money and IP from AFP, Zoe Keating, and pretty much anything from Cory Doctorow.

So, that being said, I've been watching (and participating a little bit) in the revealing, chasing, and, hopefully soon, unmasking of a plagiarizing fiend who goes by the possibly-pseudonymous handle Richard Ridyard. Ridyard was caught absolutely red-fucking-handed ripping off the works of many authors and passing them off as his own. Much of the credit in this seems to belong to Angel Zapata, who, on seeing work from Ridyard that looked awfully familiar, did a hell of a lot of research to put together the pieces showing without a doubt that Ridyard had not only ripped him off, but many other authors as well. At about the same time, not knowing about the research that Angel had undertaken, Ken, Mercedes, and the gang at Shock Totem discovered that Ridyard had submitted a story to them that copied--almost verbatim--large sections of a short story written years ago by a guy named Stephen Motherfucking King. Obviously, Ridyard is a criminal mastermind.

As you can see from the post on Angel's blog (and Mercedes', and Aaron Polson's, and probably just about any of us small market writers today), news spread quickly, and it seems like dozens of these counterfeits have been revealed in the last 24 hours.

As much as I hate giving this tool any more press than he deserves (which is none), he duped some of my friends and he is damaging the industry in which I hope to make a living one day, and I want to make sure the name Richard Ridyard, as well as the probable alias RM Valentine, and his "publishing company" Valentine Publishing (now mysteriously vanished from the internet, I won't grace them with a link), get burned into Google's memory as shams and frauds. Ridyard's partners in the publishing business have also been disappearing from the web rather quickly as well. I suspect they just needed to take some time off of Facebook to help Ridyard clear his good name. Luckily, their names are forever captured in Google's caching system, which effectively means that unless they were to publicly disavow Ridyard and spill the beans, so to speak, they would be forever associated with him and Valentine Publishing. And that would suck, I'm sure.

Anyway, to link the tale of Ridyard together with Cory Doctorow's concept of Creative Commons: information may want to be free, but artists want to get paid.

New Releases

2009-08-18T13:35:00.001-07:00

Just a few quick notes while I take a breath from being buried in work (post-vacation overload...gah)

Mike "Gabriel" Krahulik from Penny Arcade was asked to do a cover for the comic version of The Talisman (King/Straub). This is win on so many levels...it was a great book, it will make a great comic, and Gabe is a great artist. Great, great, and great. Not much else to say. I don't read many comics (Roman Dirge and Jhonen Vasquez are about it), but I think I need to pick this one up, it's been years since I read The Talisman (don't recall that I ever got around to the sequel...Black House? Dark House? Something like that...it was a kind of allusion to the Dark Tower world, I remember)

Also, KC Shaw just released her book Jack of All Trades today. Check out details on her blog...congrats to KC!

"Happy Sunday!" said the Tickock Man

2009-08-09T11:42:00.000-07:00

With the family out of town, it's quiet and kind of boring around here, but I am getting some good writing done. I'm in the honeymoon phase with a new story...if it goes anywhere, I'll share details later.

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Watched Dreams with Sharp Teeth last night, a documentary on Unca Harlan Ellison. Crazy old bastard...sadly, my first introduction to Harlan was not his writing, but his very public, very nasty dustup with Gabe and Tycho from Penny Arcade a few years back. If you weren't in that gossip loop, the upshot is that onstage at the Foolscap awards ceremony, Harlan was being Harlan and accused Gabe of being a high school dropout, at which point Gabe, being Gabe, asked Harlan if he was the guy who wrote the Star Wars books. At that point, friendly banter turned to threats, and each camp's ferocious, drooling internet packs joined the fight. It was kind of fun to watch, but a sad misunderstanding--mostly, I think, because Ellison and the singular being that is Gabe/Tycho are really different generations of the same inspired, rebellious spirit (I won't say Maverick, John McCain ruined that word for me).

Anyway, the movie showed that Ellison is, indeed, a crazy man. But, it also showed very clearly that he is probably a really great guy, and a self-tortured psyche to boot. Interesting movie, lots of footage of Neil Gaiman who, apparently, has been friends with Ellison before Gaiman was even a working fiction writer. The movie does have a few good tidbits for writers, but mostly it's an homage.

I am about halfway through reading his Strange Wine collection. Great writing, very poetic, a very careful and conscientious selection of words and sentence structure. On a personal note, I find I relate to Harlan on a few levels, which is endearing and disturbing.

He also has a really, really cool house.

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I was cruising and found a reference to this story called "Candle Cove". It's a short story told in the form of a chatroom discussion. I found it on a different site with no reference to the fact that it was fiction and not just a blog discussion, so the intended creepy effect in the story definitely worked on me. The author is, apparently, Kris Straub (relation? not sure).

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It always makes me happy when one of my online friends gets something big released. Today the big news is the release of Catherine J Gardner's chapbook The Sour Aftertaste of Olive Lemon. Order one today, it's only $6 including shipping...it's been said many times, but that is the best damn title I've heard in a long time.

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And now, Unca Harlan plays us out.

Twitterly We Roll Along

2009-08-06T13:55:00.000-07:00

Twitter certainly is an odd little bug, isn't it?

You can follow some arbitrary threads of people's lives, people that you've never met, probably will never meet, and may be in drastically different stations of life than yourself. One of my new hobbies is following people's tweet-threads (tweads? sigh...) and watching their collective discussions unravel and re-connect with other people in their lives, online and off. Do you all remember party lines? How some communities had shared phone lines, and you could pick up the phone and listen to your neighbors chatting, if you picked up the receiver quietly and didn't giggle?

It's like that.

For example, an average celebrity twead chase (following one tweet to a thread to a follower's tweets etc etc):

Amanda Palmer makes kissy-face tweets with her boyfriend Neil Gaiman >> Adam Savage from Mythbusters tweets about hanging out with Penn Jillette at TAM7 >> Trent Reznor complains about scary women who now chase him in his middle age >> Weird Al twitpics Seth Green riding a segway in Al's front room, and then asks his wife where left his shoes, who reminds Al that he left them by the hammock where he napped that morning >> Clive Barker and Peter Straub try to out-story each other with (supposedly...probably) true tales of back-room shows in Amsterdam and Mexican girlie bars...

And so on. Bizarre. Not sure how much longer it can hold my interest, but it certainly is a new thing. Takes the fucking varnish right off of celebrities, which lies in stark contrast to how famous people were "supposed" to behave when I was young. I prefer this way--more natural. They seem human. Celebrity is a weird, artificial shell anyway.

Also, I've seen Clive Barker tweet-up Felicity Dowker a few times, which is very cool.

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Here in about ten minutes, the wife and kids are off to visit family on Montana for a week or so, and I (and my Malamute) have the house all to ourselves. I'm taking a few days off next week, and my plan, among other things, is to pretend to be a Professional Writer. Which means, I suppose, writing for the majority of the work day, instead of doing the DayJob™ all day and writing at night. It will be a fun little fiction...see what It would be like, if It paid enough to do It full time.

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And now, the new Zombieland Trailer (NSFW, zombie bewbs and all that).

Toe Pinchers and Story Clippers

2009-08-04T22:04:00.001-07:00

Besides writing, I'm still working on Halloween projects (started in January, sadly). I spent a weekend with my oldest daughter building a full-size toe-pincher coffin, which was a stretch for my sub par woodworking skills. But, it held together. My employer recently announced that they are selling my division off, and I will very likely be out of work soon, so I'm doing this thing as cheaply as I can...which means substituting manual labor and bailing wire solutions instead of buying the thing I actually need, which always takes more time. I love Halloween, though, and it's still worth it.

The wife and kids are off to Montana later this week, and, in addition to writing my big pink fanny off, I'm going to try and rig up my automation system: a motion detector in the coffin that lights up red and bangs and squeals when someone gets too close, like there is something not very darn nice in the coffin trying to get out. Should be fun, hopefully I have ten fingers when I'm done.

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As a few folks have mentioned, Robert Swartwood is now taking subs for his hint fiction antho, to be published next year. Hint fiction has been around as a discussion topic for much of the year, but I suspect the majority of the folks who have read about it haven't tried it. If you haven't, take a swipe at it...it's different than micro-fiction, in that you really aren't trying to tell a story--you're hinting at a story. The goal, I guess, could be stated as: enough ambiguity so that people can read it and get different meanings (i.e., fill in the blanks and get different stories in their heads), but provides enough info to capture the reader. It's harder than it looks.

Whereas a micro story may say "As they lowered the coffin, I wondered how I would get along without her.", a hint story may say "I wondered if the inside of the coffin smelled like her pillow." or something like that. It's unclear, but makes you wonder what the larger story is, and makes your mind race to fill in the gray areas. If your hint fiction clip is a story by itself, you have failed. I tried once, when Robert had the kickoff contest on his blog--and I failed. I didn't try. Tonight, I started working on some serious entries; and as I do so, it strikes me that hint clips are almost closer to poetry than stories.

Anyway, visit http://www.robertswartwood.com/?page_id=8, and give it a shot. You'll be glad you did.

Hiss Pop

2009-07-31T12:51:00.001-07:00

I have a recurring dream (partially based on real-life events) where I abandon my apartment, and then feel too detached from it to return; when I eventually do, the refrigerator is full of moldy food and the plants are spindly, dead things. Unpaid bills are stacked on the table. Insects and rodents have moved into the cupboards. Etc etc.

In reality, I have just felt too overwhelmed by information and work and life to log in and post anything to this blog. I will try to do better, honest. I like doing it, but sometimes it seems more like work than fun, and I needed a break. Also, and I think this is a big part of it, I don't think I have as much to say as most of you do; my goal is to finish a novel-length MS this year, and to discuss that on a blog is boring as all shitfire...so I don't, but I quickly run out of things to say. Unfortunately, that kind of led to not reading other people's blogs either, and that's really what I missed the most. So, I'm going to renew my efforts to keep in touch.

And that's all I'm gonna say about that.

I hit the 50k mark on Aquarium, but it got too dark, so I put it aside. No, not dark: just depressing. Kind of mopey. The characters were all in a bad way, and everything was going to shit, and I didn't have a good direction to take it except more suffering and whining. With everything going on in my life this year, I don't need depressing.

I have spent the last couple of weeks outlining a new story that I hope will be more light and fun to write, and I knocked out the first 1k last night. I hope it goes better. I will probably revisit Aquarium, but I needed to get my head out of that space for a while.

I did take a break and knock out a 4k short for an Esquire magazine contest. That was fun. My odds are probably better winning a progressive jackpot with one pull than winning this one, but, what the hey...if writers paid any kind of attention to those kinds of things, there wouldn't be any of us.

As a few of you know, I have been outed as a Facebooker and Twitterling. Despite my protests and bashing, I kind of get Twitter now. Kind of. I'm still pretty averse to talking about my goings-on randomly (because, in my mind, that assumes that someone gives a rat's ass what I'm doing, which may not be the case). Twitter is a great stalking machine, though. I know more about Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer's lovefest than I care to, I know where Adam Savage is at all times, In know when Zoe Keating is mixing tracks for her new album, and I know Peter Straub is kind of an old goofball, but in a good, funny way.

But on the other hand, it also helps me keep up with some good folks I know from the blogosphere, like Cate, Robert, Nat, and Mercedes. So, there you go. If you are in those clubs, friend/follow me, and I'll stalk you, too.

Since my last post, I finished King's Cell on audiobook, which was OK, started Elmore Leonard's Mr Paradise on audiobook, which is kind of funny because the narrator sounds like Dennis Farina and uses the same NYC gangster voice for all of the characters, even the cheerleader/prostitutes.

Also, I read and did kind of a critique for Barry Napier's Darklights, a published ebook that he is looking to re-write and re-release. If you haven't done a critical read of a book like that, I would recommend that you do, at least once. It was very insightful to read my own notes about the things I kind of stumbled on in the story, or points that seemed to be missing or scenes that weren't believable (not to publicly trash Barry's work...but that's what you have to do in a critical review...nitpick), and then apply that same criticism against my own work. Very insightful and useful. I had the opportunity to do the same on Cate Gardner's Poison Apple last winter, but I blew it...I think I was too afraid of being critical of someone else's work when I had no confidence in my own. But, I sucked it up for Darklights, and it was worth it.

He Said What?

2009-05-31T21:41:00.000-07:00

OK, he's free to say whatever he wants, and I understand that he's known for being kind of a run-at-the-mouth dick...but apparently ignorance plus hypocrisy equals success in the wacky world of Kanye West.

He was quoted last week as saying how he has no respect for books, doesn't read them, doesn't think anyone else should read them, and doesn't think they are worth the paper they're printed on--or something to that affect. At the same time, this pinhead has just--wait for it--written a book, and he would very much like you to buy a copy. I suggest you don't.

Pinhead. Effing twit.

In happier news, though, and I think in response to West's heroic stand against literacy, Cakewrecks has devoted an entry to books. Pretty cool stuff. Cakewrecks is geeky and goofy and for some unexplainable reason, really fun to read.

§§§

O, mighty Ra's beak, I haven't posted in like three weeks I think...nothing tragic, nothing new, just really, really busy. DayJob™ and family stuff have been keeping me on the run, but I have been writing; in fact, I re-wrote a piece (the only poem I've ever done...I re-did the whole thing with a stronger theme, and I actually really like it), have been making good progress on my full-length, and started another story-of-indeterminate-length called Cotton.

In the grand scheme of my life, if I run out of time, it's television and internets that lose my attention, but I have been trying to read everyone's blogs at least once a week. I've noticed that blogging is like diet and exercise: if it's a part of your routine, it's easy to keep up on it; but if you let it slip, damn is it hard to find that groove again. So, here I am, groovin'.

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Mercedes already did a writeup, but I wanted to touch on a few of the things local Vegas author Vicki Pettersson discussed in her spiel to the Las Vegas Writer's Group a couple of weeks ago.

First of all, she was awesome. She is fresh from the kiln, from a pro-writer standpoint (her forth book is being released soon, but didn't go full-time until 2006, I think she said...previously she was a showgirl with Jubilee, which I think plays at Bally's on the strip), and from that standpoint had some great advice on writing. Not so much language or themes or trends or any of that stuff. As she pointed out, there are hundreds of books on those topics; pick one. Her advice was more practical, and can be summed up as such: if you want to be a writer, then quit whining and write.

Some of the details of her talk that were particularly useful:

Time is the writer's currency; don't waste it (obvious, but worth stating over and over again)
Story is king, but word count is pretty frickin' high up in the court
Write every day; she actually surpasses Stephen King on this topic, and he took a pretty aggressive stance on word counts and work habits in his On Writing tome. To this day, she writes every single day, even if it's just notes (although she has a standing goal of 2k a day).
Get through your first draft as fast as possible; everyone does this differently (there was a guy in the audience who said he can do 10k a day but will spend the next two weeks editing that 10k before he moves on to the next section...I, personally, would go mad). Vicki said that once she has a firm grip on the broad strokes of the story, she'll tear through a 120k draft, including blocks of notes ("they talk about something here") scattered throughout. If it makes you feel any better, when she subbed her latest book to her editor, she had her re-write the whole thing twice, to the tune of 600 pages.
She logs her writing. I've been doing this for a couple of weeks, and it has been a very good thing. I now keep a spreadsheet with dates (every day between now and the end of the year), word count, which projects I worked on, and journal-type comments on the story, etc. It really has helped keep my word count up--the spreadsheet doesn't lie.
Lastly, a point that she made that I like so much, I paraphrased it in my own sardonic way and have it at the top of my writing log: "The person who will get the book deal instead of you got up an hour before you did this morning, fucker."

§§§

Lastly, a Kanye West meme, because I read that he really hates these pictures scattered around on the internet.

Sometime words get in the way of writing

2009-05-11T14:03:00.000-07:00

Read an interesting quote from Toni Morrison today: something to the effect that she solves all of her literary problems on the subway, because there's nothing to do there, anyway.

I think someone who has never tried to write anything of length or substance or quality may have trouble really catching the gravity of that problem, but, as we can all testify I'm sure, solving those problems is really a substantial thing, and it takes effort. Speaking for myself, I am constantly inundated with stuff: phone calls, emails, bloggies, twitters, facebookles, kids, wives (well, wife), etc, etc...sometimes I have to just leave everything and everybody, just walk away and think: where is this story going? what is the next scene? am I on track? why did this character do this? how will the other characters react? what's my next story?

I don't know about you, but if I have a literary problem and I sit down to type, I'm screwed...I have to solve it before I type, or at least think through it to define the problem better. Kind of like a musician doing their homework before they step into the studio. I like to strap on my iPod and sit outside and think; I don't like to walk, or shop, or drive...anything where I have to think about what I'm doing. I just like to sit and think. Or take a shower, but there's only so long you can do that in a day.

So, then--question of the day: where do you solve your literary problems?

Sage advice on getting through writer's block from...well, someone who goes by the handle Virtual Stranger. I haven't put any backwork into figuring it out, but I have no idea who this person is...but they are my new favorite blogger for writing advice.

Mathiplication

2009-05-04T23:18:00.000-07:00

I was just cleaning up my aging rejections spreadsheet to log response times, and when I went to log American Short Fiction, lo and behold, Duotrope has them listed as, well, Delisted.

I checked their website, whaddayaknow, they now charge a $2 fee to submit. My first thought was Holy Shit, if American Short Fiction, a seemingly reputable literary mag, can charge what amounts to a reading fee, who's next? Granted, $2 isn't much, but take that thought out a little bit: if everyone starts charging $2, or $5, or $7, multiply that by the many, many submissions a lot of writers keep out (off-hand, I know Mercedes keeps around 30 alive at any given time, for example). That's $60 in reading fees, in a world where most of us don't make that much in revenue from short stories in a month. I would happy-dance if I sold a single $20 story in a month.

My next thought was: I wish them luck getting writers to submit after getting kicked off of Duotrope.

My third thought was: no, I really don't wish them luck with that. At all. As much as I don't like seeing magazines fold under financial stress, I like even less for it to get harder for writers to get paid. So, I wish them bad luck with that, and hope they find a way to make more money with subscriptions and advertising.

Be interesting to see how this little experiment works out...

Random Yappings

2009-05-03T17:39:00.001-07:00

I can't believe I'm down to one post a week now...I think the problem is I've been so busy with the day job, coupled with my not working on any short stories--and there really isn't any news to report on the novel, other than word counts, and that's boring as all fugg. And, I've started suckling at the teet of Facebook, which is a time-thief. If I announce I've signed up for Twitter, someone please send me cynide-laced pastries.

So, them's my excuses. Apply liberally, use only as directed.

I did get one more rejection for a poem I've had out since January; it was a very nice but non-specific rejection from 42 Magazine which said it was "interesting premise", which to me says "I'm too nice to tell you to keep your day job"...but hey, it's the first and only poem I've written. I may re-tool it and try to find a home in May.

I often work from home for my day job, which keeps me bolted to my chair for 9-10 hours a day, at least. When I'm done there, I make dinner for the family (yes, I'm the cook), and, many days, come right back to that same chair and fire up some writin' work. 13 hours of sitting in the same chair day after day is starting to drive me just a little bit bananas, so I've decided that the best way to keep my sanity is to buy a little mini-laptop. I can't afford a full-size unit, and I'm hoping getting a little Acer netbook for $300 will at least give me a little flexibility in where I'm sitting and, hopefully, keep the few marbles that I have left.

Nice article from Apex with submission pet-peeves from all of their editors. Now that Apex Magazine is on hiatus and they are only dealing in books, good things to keep in mind if you have novels/novellas you're sending their way (or, for that matter, anyone's way).

Lastly, a review of X-Men Origins: Wolverine.

"Meh."

Really-lastly, for absolutely no reason whatsoever, Aneka from Krod Mandoon.

Chillin' and Shillin'

2009-04-27T17:53:00.000-07:00

OK, day-job stuff is put aside, dinner has been eaten, blogs have been read, and the kiddies are off doing kiddie things...time to write. After a blog post. Ahem.

One more reason I want to be Neil Gaiman when I grow up: instead of posting things like "whine whine worked all day and now I get to write until midnight bitch moan", I would get to post things like "When my friend Lisa Snellings came out to install the statue in the nook, ... " and "So from Tuesday for ten days I'll be New York, Paris, London."

So, yeah. Time to write.

Of course, after I shill my latest article on Examiner.com: How to (try and) protect your company from interweb flashmobs, like the one that almost killed Spore, is boxing Amazon around like a pillow, and has successfully turned the MPAA and RIAA into divisions of LexCorp.

Rawk and Roll

2009-04-26T21:04:00.000-07:00

Another crazy week...

If you haven't already, you still have a chance to enter Robert Swartwood's Hint Fiction contest. Kinda like flash, but 25 words or less. Ha! General Electric couldn't have made fiction more efficient! Robert is getting some great press on this deal as well, stop by and check it out. Cool literary prizes, and special guest judge Stewart O'Nan.

After all of the drama 2009 has brought so far (including Amazon wins with Kindle2, Amazon loses with selective search results, #queryfail, #agentfail, and, believe it or not, #failfail), it's been a pretty quiet week (at least in my neck of the desert).

I did just learn that local author Vicki Pettersson will be the speaker at the May Las Vegas writer's meetup, which should be cool. I scanned her bio, it sounds like she is a wild-idea-turns-into-writing-career example, and I would imagine has some good stories and/or insight on the industry.

I am still behind on reading blogs this week...work has been a big steaming pile of no fun, and lots of little roadblocks keep popping up. One of them is Outlook, or, as I've gotten to know it: Look out! Its RSS reader sucks, and I'm done with it. I spent an hour yesterday porting all of my feeds over to Google Reader; hopefully it will actually provide updates that are correct (there are a couple that it would just totally ignore, and I thought there just weren't updates...hopefully that's done, and I can get caught up with ya'll again!).

I'm curious what everyone else uses for RSS readers?

The girls went shopping today, and I rawked out on my novel...rawk==about 2,000 words for me these days. Which puts me at about 3,000 for the week, which does not rawk at all.

What's cooler than getting a box from Amazon? Getting a box from Amazon full of skeleton parts. In my house, Halloween planning starts, oh...about January. Is that bad? That seems bad.

Time, stress, and natural disasters

2009-04-19T22:37:00.000-07:00

I'm really struggling with finding time to do all of the things writing-related: working on my novel, knocking out articles for Examiner, reading everyone's blogs, keeping up on lit news, updating this blog, and squeezing in some reading when I can. And to top it off, I'm trying to juggle a Facebook account in the mix as well. Good thing I don't have a social life, or this would have been the end of it. This is really getting to be as much of a job as, well...my job. If I had a Twitter account, I'd probably go mad.

But, enough sour grapes...I made my bed, and shall lie/lay (I always get that wrong--just pick whichever is correct and pretend that's what I wrote) in it.

It has, however, pretty much spelled the end of my short story writing for the forseeable future. I really like short stories, but I need to knuckle down and focus on bigger game for the time being. Having two stories out from last year rejected kind of cemented that decision. If things don't work out with Examiner, I may go back to some shorts...but right now, I can't afford it.

I got an email from Ralan saying that an unnamed market had been declared dead by Duotrope, but was, in fact, still alive, albeit behind on slush and perhaps taking a small break. Does anyone know who they were talking about? Was it, perchance, From the Asylum? Their website seems to be active, but I didn't root around.

Writing: it's ten to eleven pacific time, and I just broke 1k on my novel, after spending a big chunk of the day with writer's block on Examiner articles. My problem with Examiner is that I understand their goal of being a regional news outlet, but my articles seem, to me at least, to be coming out like editorials. Need more news, less Jeremy.

Reading: I hate to say this about any book, but I got halfway through the audiobook for Ted Dekker's Boneman's Daughter, and I had to quit. I just really wasn't into it. I don't know if it was that I didn't like his writing style, or that I just don't really get into those kinds of books (kind of a suspense/mystery thing, I guess...I never read that genre), or if the narrator was distracting, or a combination thereof. It was like work trying to pay attention to it. If Ted Dekker reads this, sorry, man...I tried. Not my cuppa tea, I guess.

Since my dog ate the antho I was reading, I might grab Steinbeck next.

OK, this is absolutely the last you will hear about my vacation...I threw some clips together of our trip to the volcano and put it up on Youtube. From a storytelling perspective, there was so much there that was inspiring. From the point where highway 11 was eaten by the lava flow up to where the lava dumps into the ocean, it was like effing Mordor, if Mordor had ocean frontage. Amazing to think that this particular eruption has been going for like 22 years.

GA-A-ASP!

2009-04-15T20:27:00.000-07:00

I've been gone for so long, it feels like I'm coming up for air...

It's going to take me a good week to get caught up on my personal email, work email, and blogs, so don't flick my ears if I don't read your page for a few more days.

So, yeah...back from Hawaii, semi-rested, semi-sunburned, freshly tattooed, and feeling the pull of inertia which keeps wanting to draw me back to bed. (tons of pix up on our family website, if you're interested)

But, reality calls...

I did manage to squeeze out 800 words on Aquarium during some downtime. That was as much time as I had, and about as much effort as I was willing to put into it. Last night was my first opportunity to write since we've been back, and I rattled out another 1k on the book.

I did manage to finish reading Rabbit, Run on the endless flight. Updike had a gift with words.

Before I left, I put my name in for consideration to do some freelance journalism for Examiner.com. Examiner, it seems, is the re-imagining of the San Francisco Examiner. They ceased print operations earlier this year, and are now focusing on "citizen journalism", albeit with some minor editorial oversight and basic reporter vetting (had to submit a sample article, etc). They pay on a Google-style black-box sliding scale, which means you have no idea how much you'll make until you get paid. Hmph.

It's easy to be skeptical, but we'll see how it goes. I'm having fun with it. So far it seems to be shaking out to a penny a view or so, maybe a little more. I know some of you are interested in freelance, I'll let you all know how it goes as we progress (and I get paid). And, needless to say, I'll have a fresh crop of linkies up here as I put new articles up.

In the meantime, feel free to read my first two articles on workplace issues (here, and here). May not be the most exciting reads for this group, but hey...it's good practice, and it moves me further into the realm of full-time, professional writing. I just keep reminding myself that Gaiman started out as a journalist, too.

We never made it to the sacrificial grounds on the north end of the island, but we did spend two days in the Volcanoes National Park, which was nothing short of amazing. Here is a lava flow from Kiluaea dumping into the ocean. I'll have a video up on Youtube later this week.

Coconut Bra Optional

2009-03-29T22:19:00.001-07:00

Wow, I just realized that I haven't posted in over a week, and I almost didn't post tonight, either. I should be getting ready for bed, but I know how quickly the internets forget about us if we don't participate; so here I am, participating...;-)

It's been a crazy week...we're leaving town this weekend for our tenth anniversary (flying to Hawaii, and my mom is coming down to watch the kids...god, I love sky miles), and we've been scrambling to get caught up on work and prepare for the trip...which means that this week is going to be crazy too, and I may not post again until we return in a couple of weeks.

I got halfway through an antho from Subterranean Press that I can't remember the name of...I was really enjoying it, and then my Alaskan Malamute, Yuma the Destroyer, tore it to shreds while I was at work. Sigh. So, I'm taking Updike's Run, Rabbit to Hawaii with me instead.

I'm hoping to break 30k on Aquarium before we leave town. I have a ton of stuff to do before we go, but I'm at like 26,700, so another 3300 is totally doable by Thursday, I think. One of my main characters, whom I knew was going to be eccentric from the get-go, just turned into Hunter S Thompson, so that'll be fun to write. My character just happens to be a doctor, so I was thinking of making his last name Gonzales (aka, Dr. Gonzo).

Watched Pineapple Express last night...funny movie. I loved Cheech and Chong capers when I was a teenager. They were such alt-reality, grownup fairy tales that it was really fun to get sucked away into those worlds. Pineapple Express has that same vibe. Seth Rogan was good, but James Franco nailed his character. Best quote (from IMDB): Rogan was asked what he did to prepare, and he said he watched Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and studied Spicolli. Franco was asked the same question, and he said he prepared by making out with Spicolli (hint: Spicolli was played by Sean Penn, whose lover in Milk was played by James Franco).

Here is a place we plan on visiting next week: a 1500 year old holy ground in North Hawaii where many people were sacrificed to the war gods. I'll bring back pictures.

Meeting with grownups

2009-03-21T22:51:00.000-07:00

News for the last part of the week...

Mercedes Yardley talked me into going to the Las Vegas Writers Meetup, and I'm glad she did. 15 time bestselling author, very nice guy, (and, apparently, also a Las Vegan) Stephen Coontz was cool enough to come out and pitch his new project, Arctic Gold, give out free books, and provide his insight from a few decades of professional writing. Synopsis of his speech:

Paperbacks are dead; they have always been loss-leaders for bookstores and newspaper shops, but with newspapers going online, there is nothing left to lead. Smoke 'em if ya got 'em.
Ebooks are the new black. No surprise there. But...
Hardcovers, he thinks, will make a resurgence. They've always been more profitable than paperbacks; not sure what that means for the longevity of a given novel...maybe more printings in hardcover, instead of selling the paperback rights? Or ebooks become the new paperbacks?
Audiobooks are a profit engine right now, and are going nowhere but up. That explains the brouhaha between the Writer's Guild and Amazon over text-so-speech rights. Doesn't justify it, but it does add color.
His crystal ball tells him that people are still reading, contrary to what the Endowment for the Arts says.
Co-authored books are becoming more popular; I asked him why, and he said that the money generated by his name, coupled with the heavy lifting done by a no-name writer, is more than the amount of money they would have made writing two separate books. Who knew.

Also, I was able to meet the very friendly and very tall Mercedes in person, along with her friend Coffee, and a few other folks with whom I shared a table. We discussed the ramifications of a house being haunted by lolcats and people who can only write bloody warnings on the wall in texting shorthand (i.e., U R DED LOL!!!). And, as a bonus, I answered a quiz question correctly, and won an audiobook: Ted Dekker's Boneman's Daughter which, apparently, hasn't even been released to Amazon yet.

Writing: I'm approaching that 25k point on Aquarium where I tend to get stuck on novels (this will be my third to pass 20k to-date)...so far it's going well. I'm making an effort to think forward in the story and do mental outlines every day before I type to make sure I don't back myself into a corner. Ended tonight at 1400 words, and just wrapped up chapter 7.

Reading: I took Natalie's advice, and jumped from Gilead to a small market antho: Subterranean's Tales of Dark Fantasy. Got through one story so far, a good short by Poppy Z. Brite. Also, almost done with disk 1 of Boneman's Daughter. Iffy so far...not something I would go out of my way to read, but there are some good parts...and, to Jamie Eyberg's point, it helps me expand my literary (read: popular fiction) horizons.

Watching: just finished In the Heat of the Night. Good flick, actually holds well the 30-some year chasm since it was released (except the funky-ass music).

Quarter to midnight. Time for beddie bye.

Link Stew: More Harlanator, and POD

2009-03-18T10:27:00.001-07:00

Slashdot has picked up the recent rantings of one Harlan Ellison (specifically, his recent tirade against the Star Trek franchise); and, as usual, the Slashdot comments relating to author's intellectual IP range from inane to insightful, and every whistle stop in between.

As could be expected, it's a heated debate between those who think all information wants to be free (both kinds of free), and those who don't think writers should have to stand on street corners dancing for their dinner. Also, a lot people alternately mocking and adulating Ellison.

Oh, Slashdot...

Lit agent Janet Reid on listing a prior POD on your novel query:

"my first book was published by AuthorHouse/iUniverse"

My reaction to that sentence in a query letter is not what you hope it will be when you write it. You hope it implies "experienced author with pub credit who has a sales record."

What I infer from it is "book that sold fewer than 200 copies and means author can't be listed as a debut novelist."

Compelling argument against listing POD on your resume, unless you can add some sizable numbers to the tagline. I didn't realize referring to an author as debut was a good thing.

Reading update: can't decide between starting an urban horror antho from Shocklines, Grapes of Wrath, or No Country for Old Men to read next. Probably Steinbeck.

Writing update: haven't gotten a whole lot done since Saturday...I did get ejected from Pindeldeyboz, because apparently I can't friggin' count, and I was almost double their max word count. Duh. Actually not a big deal, I must have been really tired when I subbed that night, because I didn't notice that it was FTL. In my defense, I think it was the night my hillbilly neighbor was being cuffed and stuffed by the police in the middle of the street, and I was a bit distracted.

Review: Gilead

2009-03-17T20:58:00.000-07:00

I just finished Marilynne Robinson's Gilead. I was going to write a nice, lengthy review of it, but the only thing I can think to write is:

Holy shit.

Then, as a follow-up (for clarity's sake):

There is no doubt in my mind why this won a Pulitzer. Robinson uses the English language with a mastery that suggests that she owns the damn thing. Almost as a dare against her own formidable talent, she wrote a book that breaks just about every friggin' rule that they tell writers not to break: it's in the form of a journal, written in first-person as an aging third-generation preacher living in a desolate town in the midwest telling a rather narrowly focused narrative to one person--and the reader falls right into it. It's like 250 pages of tightly-woven poetry. It makes me embarrased of everything I've ever written; but not in a bad way...in a way that reminds me why I read fiction, and want to do better at writing it.

It's that good.

Contests? Why, yes...fresh off the truck!

2009-03-16T16:36:00.000-07:00

Two contests you very much need to know about...

1. Catherine Gardner is hosting a contest to help plan a werewolf's fate...and expose the deepest, darkest secrets of circus-folk. You could be a hero, and win a copy of the Malpractice anthology.

2. Nathan Bransford wants you to set up an account at ESPN and pick the winners for some sport that is, apparently, moving into finals. I think it may be basketball. What I did catch, though, is whomever does the best in guessing the brackets (not sure how that works...sports betting is well beyond my grasp) gets a query evaluation from one of Nathan's clients...he doesn't say who (whom? too lazy to check HOW9), but Nathan has some clout, and getting your query eval'd by someone who broke through his gateway may be worth more than a handful of magic beans to all of you novel and novella-makers out there.

**UPDATE**

Almost forgot about Natalie Sin's ongoing Pick the Winner contest...follow the linkie, pick a story, and the next one to get published wins you--yes, YOU SIR!--a prize! Step right up!

I don't fret over my hitcounts for this site, but I do check my Google stats every once in a while, and I would estimate that 75% of the hits I get go to a post from last year where I had a delirious dream under the influence of cold medicine. So every post shall forthwith contain the words Nyquil and Alcohol and Dangers. Mercedes thinks I should post a picture of myself in bright red lipstick, but I'm saving that as a last resort.

And, for really no reason whatsoever-- Lenore, the cute little dead girl:

Why a zombie nurse? Why not?

2009-03-14T17:53:00.000-07:00

This morning, we went to a flash mob down at the Planet Hollywood to support United Way. Interesting...I've never been to one. Basically, 200 people showed up at the casino, picked up their matching shirts, and stood still for two minutes. Fun, and good PR for United Way and Planet Hollywood.

All things about good intentions and supporting your local community aside (it wasn't a fundraiser, per se, but we thought it would be a good opportunity to indoctrinate the kids into thinking about supporting charities...I usually prefer to donate money to local organizations and not supersized fund aggregators); I think as soon as a superbig organization like United Way sponsors--nay, instigates--a flash mob, it is no longer cool. Cool, as in holy zhit, I just saw five hundred people dressed as zombies having lunch at the park this morning; how COOL! A multi-billion dollar group co-opting a grassroots thing like flash mobs is the corporate equivalent of playing The Game. (you just lost, by the way.)

My night is all laid out for me: dinner, 1k words on Aquarium, short story outlines, beer (channeling Hunter Thompson for inspiration) and Stepbrothers (Will Farrel movies help the brain turn off in a way not even beer can). Speaking of movies, we watched Silence of the Lambs last night on Netflix...I forgot what a great flick that was. I'll be doing Buffalo Bill impressions for the next week or so.

Now, put the lotion back in the basket and get to work!

Funk all around

2009-03-12T18:22:00.000-07:00

I always thought the Kindle was pretty portable and forgiving when it came to Mobibook and other non-Amazon formats...apparently, such is not the case, and Amazon is issuing DMCA takedown notices for people who try to facilitate putting non-Amazon-purchased books on the Kindle. Another reason to buy the Sony, I suppose.

Another link from Slashdot...a mind-blowing mashup of totally disparate and unrelated clips woven into a single funky-ass song. Just awesome.

Who-o-o Watches the Watchmen?

2009-03-08T13:20:00.000-07:00

I watches the Watchmen!

As I've mentioned, I never read The Watchmen--my first thought was that it had something to do with The Avengers (shows how little I know about either). Neither of my kids were interested (in retrospect, a lucky thing for me), so Amy and I did something we never, ever do: we went to a movie alone. It was like an alternate reality.

Anyway, the movie...I thought it was great. Not awesome, not the pinnacle of the genre, but for either a comic-based movie OR a dramatic/action flick, it was pretty damn good in both categories. The characters, for the most part, were well-layered--as much as they can be in such a compressed environment.

There is very little wrong with this story; I think it has some very interesting things to say about society, and a great depth of emotional storytelling and character development. It's also a very refreshing Socratic thought experiment on the genre: aren't superheroes really just vigilantes in cheesy costumes? Wouldn't people who do that be total outcasts? Wouldn't they have mental problems, emotional issues, and weird incestuous relationships within their little group of superfriends?

I do think that they could have fleshed out Silk Spectre II a bit more; there were a few points where it seemed like she was just there as a storyline pivot point, yet she was so central to the overall story. Ozymandias was a bit thin, too...he was just kind of out there as the guy who is super-smart, super-rich, and super-strong, but never really explained or justified any of that.

But, those are really my only complaints, and they are minor points at that. The other characters were great--especially Rorschach. Rorschach is the kind of character that I think many writers wish they could have brought to life: singular, intelligent, powerful, vulnerable, and, ultimately, broken beyond repair. The Comedian was also great--he was a grade-A motherfucker, somebody that you have no choice but to absolutely loathe, despite his 40-year spot on the "hero" team, and long relationship with the U.S. government. He is, in a not-so-subtle meditation on the nature of good guy/bad-guy, the worst parts of humanity all in one basket, but that's what made him interesting. He is a reflection of the darker parts of society; in his words: the American Dream come true.

It also featured two things that no other comic movie has had (that I'm aware of): softcore full-nude, pelvic-thrusting sex scenes, and extended full frontal male nudity, albeit the (presumably) CGI-rendered horse-member of Dr. "Papa Smurf" Manhattan, which, in one scene, swings to and fro as he walks across the room. Very brave for American cinema (which is a sad commentary on American cinema, I'm afraid).

I put the Watchmen compilation in my Paperbackswap queue, but I think I'm like 238th in line...which is fine, I wouldn't read it for a while anyway. Also, some things I've learned in researching the Watchmen saga: Alan Moore, the writer, is a pretty eccentric guy. He's so pissed at the studios, apparently he is giving all of his proceeds from Watchmen and V for Vendetta to the guy who penned the comics.

</end spoilers>

Still reading Gilead...there is no way in hell I'm going to hit 50 books this year, but I'm not worried about it...as long as I keep working through my TBR list, I'm happy.

Still pounding away on my full length Aquarium, although I did take a day off and knock out a 2700 word short story...it's kind of a funny story about a sadistic, murdering marriage counselor, and it's in queue with...someone. I can't remember.

Ooga ooga

2009-03-02T11:47:00.000-08:00

Two posts in one day? What the hell is that about?

Because Aaron and Jamie started talking about man-caves and flashing the workspace/writing space pictures...I wanted to join in the fun before I get busy this week and don't ever get around to it.

So, we have a little tiny house, and there is no man-cave to be found here...my wife and I have our computers on a single L desk (we work so much that if we didn't share a desk, we'd never see each other). Note that all three of the computers in the picture are mine; hers is hidden on the next desk section behind my big monitor.

Yes, I'm out of control.

One is my primary personal use computer; the laptop is for my day-job (I work from home a couple of days a week); the third is my old, crusty Linux computer for testing, coding, and pretty much being a geek who needs a third computer to break--it probably has the same processing power as your cell phone.

This is in what the previous owners used as the dining room (but, in our defense, what we now use as a dining room, they had a slot machine in. Seriously. Welcome to Las Vegas).

**UPDATE (because I don't want to do another post): according to Nathan Bransford, this is Positivity/Rainbows/Kittens/Puppies Week. So there. No take-backs.

Now, With More Superiosity!

2009-03-02T09:12:00.000-08:00

The wonderfully generous KC Shaw has nom-nom-nominated me for a Superior Scribbler Award! Thanks KC! (I don't do every meme that comes around, but most of them...it gives me something to write about that isn't about me)

The rules of the game:

Each Superior Scribbler must in turn pass The Award on to 5 most-deserving Bloggy Friends.
Each Superior Scribbler must link to the author & the name of the blog from whom he/she has received The Award.
Each Superior Scribbler must display The Award on his/her blog, and link to This Post, which explains The Award.
Each Blogger who wins The Superior Scribbler Award must visit this post and add his/her name to the Mr. Linky List. That way, we'll be able to keep up-to-date on everyone who receives This Prestigious Honor!
Each Superior Scribbler must post these rules on his/her blog.

I think I'm late on this one, so pretty much all of the writers whose blogs I read have been tagged, I think, and it's hard to pick the top five...but, without further ado, here is a list of the blogs I most enjoy reading who may or may not have been recognized so far...

Catherine J Gardner: Very prolific author from the UK...Cate is on the bleeding edge of the haps in fiction and horror, and loves to share this great and valuable info on her site.

Robert Swartwood: Robert has a bio as long as my arm, and always has sober insights into the publishing world, in addition to some noteworthy guest bloggers.

Felicity Dowker: Felicity is on the fast-track to ruling scary Aussie literature for the foreseeable future; reading her blog is like a voyeueristic window into how it's done...

Natalie Sin: Natalie explores the darker side of Korean Boy Bands, sodomy, and Chinese

Pugs...well worth a read.

Mercedes Yardley: a fellow Las Vegan and parent, Mercedes has been kind enough to volunteer to drag me kicking and screaming into the real world outside of the internets to meet other writers. In person. Like, the same room. Where you have to talk to them. (bites nails)

I could go on, there are so many more good blogs I read...but these are the ones that stuck out.

Happy memeday!

Lazy summer day in March...

2009-03-01T15:08:00.000-08:00

What a lazy damn day...my outside thermometer reads 92° F (but it's in direct sunlight...the actual temperature is probably closer to 75° F...but I'll still take it). I sat outside and read about 75 pages of Gilead, and my Malamute took a nap on the cool cement patio next to me. If you live somewhere where it's cold today, just remember this before you throw a shoe at your monitor: in only a few short months it will break 100° here in the Mojave desert, and then it will break 110°, then 115°, and it will stay there until September, and then ramp back down about 10° a month. This is one of two seasons when people actually leave the house in Las Vegas. Weird, huh?

I won't write until later tonight, but I've had a couple of >2,000 word days in a row on Aquarium, so I'm feeling pretty good about where I'm at. Should break 15k before bed.

It's been beat to death this past week; so the only thing I'm going to say about the Kindle 2 text-to-speech controversy is this: yes, authors are struggling for cash right now--just like everyone else in the world. No, the Kindle can't replace a professional audiobook. Yes, it's worthy of discussion. All true. But the important thing that Roy Blount doesn't seem to have acknowledged (or realized) is that by taking a hard line stance on this issue and leading the charge to protect the author-members of the Author's Guild from this minor so-tagged threat, he is risking turning the guild (and, by proxy, all professional writers regardless of if they belong to the AG or not) into the puppy-killing protectionists that the internet has twisted the MPAA and RIAA into. Reading as a pastime is tenuous as it is, and current and prospective authors don't really need someone pissing in the pool right now over a minor issue that is looking to get overblown in another case of the Streisand Effect.

If you're one of the 1.2 million people who haven't seen this short video about superheroes Piderman and Baman, enjoy in preparation of going to see Watchmen next weekend...

Yes, I Can (Dammit)

2009-02-27T12:35:00.000-08:00

Are you a confident or delusional writer?

I was thinking about a friend-of-a-friend the other day; he is a successful entrepreneur and author. Very spiritual and centered (he's a Sikh, which helps) but in a stange balance, is full of himself. But it works for him, and he is a very likable, approachable person...albeit very driven, and very likely to bring himself and/or his business up in conversation. But, to the point of the above link: that's kind of what it takes to be a working writer, isn't it? The ability to be confident when the odds are pretty much stacked against you? I know personally that everything I write feels risky (i.e., how weird is it to sit around and make up other peoples lives, and to write in a flourished way that I don't speak aloud?), but if I lose confidence in what I'm doing, even for a minute, I'll give up and not try.

Good week of writing...I've been averaging close to 1k every day this week, and over 2k last night; I think I passed 10.5k on Aquarium last night, which made me happy-dance on the way to bed. I'd love to crack 15k this weekend...there are some parts coming up that I really want to see.

I was never a fan of the comic, but I am kind of excited to see Watchmen when it comes out next week. I think the flaws and humanity of superheroes (a la Spiderman, Wolverine) are really some of the best parts of the story.

slurpslurpsnapcrunchslurp

2009-02-22T09:48:00.000-08:00

Not much to discuss for writing news today...I had a couple of 1500 word days this week, and a couple of 300 word days, and a couple of 0 word days.

Cemetary Dance is making some changes, but it sounds like a lot of it is TBA...and a mea culpa of sorts from the chief. I don't know the full history, but it sounds like he may be a bit hard on himself for not bringing his A game the last couple of years.

Dog Oil Press is accepting dark humor up to 981 words. This is one of the few market-focused stories I might go for, just because it sounds like so much fun (although I was jettisoned by Dark Jesters last year...). At this point I feel strongly compelled to focus much more on finishing one of these damn novels than doing any more short stories, but writing short stories are like having a bag of lime n chile tortilla chips in the cupboard. One can only walk by that door so many times before it finds its way open somehow...

To further perpetuate the stereotype that writers are generally social misfits, I am publicly declaring (admitting?) that I haven't watched a football, baseball, or anything-ball game in probably fifteen years, but I religiously watch the Academy Awards ceremony every year. I don't know why I like it; I think the pomp and glamour is hokey, most of the participants are more hung up on themselves than any human should be, and the thought that there should be a first-past-the-post contest for art is crap.

But I still watch; and every year I've watched, it made me want to sit down and write. Jealousy? Desire to stand on stage someday and win a little gold statue? To be accepted? I don't think so...a psychatrist may say differently, but I think I mostly enjoy it because it's a recognition and celebration of a bunch of people using their unconventional talents to make a living, and in the process making the world a more interesting place to live. It's not really that much different than what we do, I guess.

Lastly, a disturbing video my wife took last weekend: she took her parents to Lake Mead to feed the fish by the dock, and this is the footage she captured. I get a weird, primative chill when I watch this clip; anyone stuck for ideas for the Dead Bait antho may be inspired. She thinks they're catfish. I think they need a more sinister name, like Bonecleaners.

Hellooo.....?

2009-02-16T20:12:00.000-08:00

Echo...echo...echo...

I just realized it's been over a week since my last post. I have been busy. No excuses. But that's why I've neither posted to G&S, nor have I read anyone else's blogs...I feel out of touch already. I need to stand in the corner of the internet until I promise to be more attentive.
**
As of sometime last week--Tuesday, I think--I have begun dieting again. I hate dieting. For most of the week, I didn't take in any more than 1100-1200 calories a day, and I was so grouchy that for a few days I didn't want to talk to anyone, much less type. Being that hungry is too distracting; I lost three pounds in as many days, but at the cost of reduced productivity. I have since raised my intake a bit.
**
Also, some time last week, I set up another blogspot to journal my Halloween garage haunt. Sick as I am, I've already started working on Halloween 2009. That probably deserves double-sentencing to the corner. My wife certainly thinks so.
**

In reading news, I finished Straub's Ghost Story; really fun read. Actually kind of got me spooked in the second half, although there was a point in there when they could name the evil they were facing and kind of figure it out, and at that point it ceased being scary. I think the unknown is way worse. Anyway, I remembered at some point that a movie was made out of it in the 80s, and pulled it up on Netflix Watch It Now. It sucked, and I'm sorry I remembered (except that it had Alice "Borg Queen" Krige in the lead role, which was cool...also liked her in Sleepwalkers). On Saturday we went to see Coraline, and it successfully washed Ghost Story out of my prefrontal cortex.

I just started Robinson's Gilead; the reviewer's consensus on this one seems to be "just friggin' read it", so I am. Also, I also just traded Getting to Yes, a business-drone user's guide, for No Country for Old Men on Paperbackswap. Fair trade, I think.

A couple of re-subs and re-writes on short stories, and started another longer piece: kind of a modern-day, condensed Grapes of Wrath. Seemed apropos for 2009.

Happy President's Day, and have a good week...I'm off to read some of my much-neglected internet-friends blogs, then an hour of reading before beddy-bye.

Fear, Vorpal Blades, and Scary Youtubes

2009-02-08T10:15:00.000-08:00

The Sunday Rant, by Jeremy D Brooks

appx. xx words

This week has been plagued by self-doubt. I opened up the Mojave MS no fewer than a dozen times, and probably typed 500 words. My heroes are traipsing across the desert from scene 1 to scene 2, and they have some character development to do along the way, but it's re-a-a-ally dragging and I'm not enjoying writing this part. I keep getting the sick feeling that it's not a good story. But, as we've discussed ad infinitum: a successful author gives himself the freedom to suck at the first draft. I may pick up Seattle Pizza, my other full length attempt, and plug away at that. Contrary to what I've said, I'm beginning to think that bouncing between two big projects like this may work for me, maybe...putting each down for a month or so keeps me interested in them both, albeit one at a time.

I did, however, break new ground: I started an outline for a new horror story, and it had a kind of rythm...so I built it out into a poem, did a couple of revisions, and sent it off to 42 Magazine. As I've mentioned, I don't know squat about poetry. Mostly, for me poetry sits in that weird space in the world along with Jackson Pollock and string theory: I kind of, sort of understand...but not really. Apparently, popular poetry doesn't rhyme and does weird stuff with the page layout. Mine didn't follow either of those non-rules, and probably reads like Jabberwocky and may be, therefore, unpublishable. But at least I can say I tried to publish a poem.

I'm usually a few years behind on music trends. I found the Dresden Dolls just this year, and their two members have long since split off into solo acts; same with Elysian Fields. I downloaded some Jonathan Coulton last year after seeing some clips of him performing "re: your brains" at PAX 2007. Here's another one of his called Creepy Doll...if you're into horror and haven't listened to re: your brains and Creepy Doll, then, well...then you haven't listened to them, I guess. But you're missing the fun.

Also, a new clip from Amanda Palmer called Oasis. I like Amanda Palmer for the same reasons l like Dresden Dolls: creepy, brooding, fun, off-center, really kind of emotionally stripped-down music. Amanda is one of the victims of the latest tiff between Youtube and Warner Brothers, whereas the two companies couldn't reach a revenue sharing agreement, and Warner pulled any official video clips with their music from Youtube, and Youtube is muting the audio tracks on any videos that WB didn't pull, but might give WB some publicity that Youtube doesn't approve of--say, a baby dancing while a Madonna song plays on the television in the background. Petty. Anyway, there are still a few of Amanda's clips that survived, and here is one she just released, and may be pulled soon.

WARNING: This clip is guaranteed to be offensive to many people; it was banned by almost every media outlet in the UK. If you are likely to read a T-Shirt printed by T-Shirt Hell and get so mad that you fire off an indignant email to their CEO, you won't enjoy this clip. The point of the song is to sacrasticly look at sensitive topics, so if that ain't your bag, don't click. Otherwise...I think it's brilliant vanguard sarcasm at it's finest.

Miss Alaini

2009-02-04T21:57:00.000-08:00

Random stuff...

Amazon is doing their annual writer's contest. Not sure what to think about it; the first comment on that blog is telling, though:

"Quick question:What happened to LAST YEAR's winner of this stupid contest? Exactly..."

Article over at Nathan Bransford's pad with some links and blurbs on the industry. Random House's CEO is promoting a demand-based pricing model for ebooks; on the whole, the industry seems to continue to favor the Hollywood-style big-tent model.

I'm halfway through Ghost Story, and loving it. Just got Updike's Rabbit, Run in the mail today.

I'm dipping my toes back into Mojave, but it's slow going. I keep veering off into other story ideas, and have done nothing but notes and (wait for it:) a wad of story notes that turned into a half a poem. My notes just started rhyming, so I wrote it all out in a 1,1,2,3 pattern. Kind of fun, I never do poetry. I may try to incorporate it into the story that spawned it, if it ever gets written.

All of a sudden my fonts are wonky, and I'm too lazy to fix them. Must be time for bed.

February Already?

2009-02-01T15:21:00.000-08:00

Crap, I was just getting used to January. Now it's gone.

Last month held more writing than submitting for me, and definitely more rejecting than accepting.

Wrote a big chunk of D1 of Mojave, which currently sits in the experienced critical hands of Mari Adkins.

I took a week off of Mojave to knock out a couple of short stories and polish one that was rejected; by ten minutes before midnight last night (in between voyeur sessions of peering out the window watching my neighbor get dragged away for drunk driving by six patrol cars chock full-o Vegas' finest), I submitted a new story, Oilrag, and a redux of Filtered White Light, both to different semi-pro literary mags. My second new story may never see the light of day, unless I work it over for a flash market...just no ending for it yet. Tonight, back on Mojave after dinner.

50 Books in 2009: I finished the audiobook for American Gods, started Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, decided I was too impatient for Faulkner this month (I am commited to trying again, but I feel like my reading time is so limited right now that if I have to put that much work into understanding a book, I need to devote one big block of time to it), and put it aside to read Straub's Ghost Story, which I am enjoying very much.

And I'm 0 and 1 for the year, with five in the field.

Slashdot, the geek temple of the world, has an article today on the death of Realms of Fantasy, and Fantasy and Science Fiction moving from monthly to quarterly. I don't recall if either announcement is new information, but, keeping mind that Slashdot has millions of readers, many (or most) of whom are intellegent and literate and enjoy various forms of genre fiction: if you sub to scifi or fantasy markets, it may be of use to browse through the 183 comments to see if there is anything in that little impromptu focus group for you. Keep in mind, it is Slashdot, and, as such, the comments are a handful of insightful comments surrounded by offtopic musings and troll shit.

Telepaper (Dear Diary)

2009-01-29T11:05:00.000-08:00

Awesome San Francisco newscast from 1981 that I lifted from readerville on the two local newspapers who were offering downloads of the text of the daily copy of the paper (a "telepaper"). Best quote: "At $5 per hour usage fees, the $.20 per copy print editions have nothing to worry about." The irony: now 28 years later, and the pricing tables have inverted between the two media.

Very timely, I think, given all of the discussions going on this past couple of weeks around alternative delivery for books, stories, poems, etc.

To that end, here is my soapbox/Dear Diary train-of-thought treatise on the subject:

We all have a common problem: we want to make enough money at writing that we can pursue it full-time (or part-time); i.e., to move it from the domain of hobby to profession. The traditional route of writer>agent>publisher>reader is littered with Punji traps and ferocious beasties and misleading signs, and it is well known that very few will survive that way; and those who do survive may not make it in the same shape they may had once hoped for. For every J.K. Rowling, there are ten thousand Brian Keenes; for every Brian Keene, there are a hundred thousand Jeremy D Brookses.

But, let's consider that path. Why does everything need to flow in that direction? Because, I guess, despite all of the obstacles and heartbreak, it is still the path of least resistence (and on that path will be found electricity, water, and we humans). So what options do we have? There's the real question. Not question: discussion. Because that's what markets are: discussions between parties, each with a consideration and a need.

At its most fundamental level, what is the discussion between writer and reader? You want to be entertained; I want to entertain you. You will pay some amount of something (time, money, used furniture, green stamps, back rubs) to be entertained; I want to be compensated for my work.

Strip it back to the essentials, and the path of least resistence does not flow through Manhattan; not really. In fact, historically, and even moreso moving forward, the path to Manhattan seems like pushing water uphill. New York is full of brokers--and I don't want to in the least discount the value agents and editors and print publishers add to this chain. Their expertise and resources and specialised skills are part of the value-add chain. Without publishers, there is no marketing, no distribution, and no upfront royalties; without editors, our output isn't as good as it can be; without agents, the door to publishers is closed. But, times are tough; many publishers, large and small, are shuttering their operations; the ones that are still open are buying fewer (if any) books.

And it will get better, over time. Eventually. My day job is with a large bank; I've had all the gloom-n-doom I can take for one year, and it's not even February. It will get darker before it gets lighter; but it will, absolutely, get lighter. But none of it will look the same once the sun comes back out.

And I've only just begun to fight my first skirmishes of the publishing wars. And I'm still enjoying it. And I won't succumb to negativity or obstacles.

To that end: my personal goal, in addition to continuing to write my little ass off every night (or, if your eyesight is any good, my big ass), research agents and publishers, send out queries and submit to traditional markets, is to consider, strongly and aggresively, other ways to go about it. E-books, POD, vanity, PDF chapbooks, micro-payments, pay-as-you-read, pay-what-you-want, blog-stories (a la Blood Routes)...I think at this point in the game, everything is on the table, and the time is right to find other paths--provided that the output is as good as it would be coming out of the other end of the Manhattan meat grinder. Because bad output makes us all look bad.

So, that's my soap box report for the day. Back to work.

Ladies of light, and ladies of darkness

2009-01-23T08:55:00.000-08:00

Neil Gaiman posted links to some early reviews of his new children's book Blueberry Girl this AM...well, I suppose it sits on the children's book shelf, but it seems like more of a book for a parent to read to a daughter and explain the words like "paradox" and "never-you-mind"; my girls are a bit old for this level of book, but it reminded me that he read it aloud at the book fair here in Vegas last year (I think he read it in most cities on his tour, and told the story about how it was a gift to Tori Amos for her yet-to-be-born daughter). It also reminded me how wonderful poetry can be when it's accessible to philistines like myself, and gives me renewed respect for those who can pull it off:

Help her to help herself, help her to stand

Help her to lose and to find

Teach her we're only as big as our dreams

Show her that fortune is blind

I sent the first 26k of so of Mojave off to Mari Adkins this week for a critique. Not sure how long it will take, but I've decided to take a few days off before I dig back into that story and knock out a short. In a similar manner to what Aaron posted today, I was inspired by a building this week. I've had this vague notion of a story in the back of my head, but couldn't figure out exactly what the story was about. At lunch Wednesday I took a walk downtown and found an abandoned building (there are no shortage of those downtown in Las Vegas), looked in the window, and thought about the things that may happen there during the day, and the things that may happen there when the good people of the world are asleep. So, I started on that creepy little tale last night, written from the perspective of one of the residents of the building. It promises, so far at least, to be one of the more disturbing things I've written.

In other news, I got my first rejection for the new year from AGNI at Boston University. Next week I'll re-work that story a bit and keep bouncing it out to literary markets (I'm trying to stick to my "start pro and work downward" strategy...we'll see how that works out, and if my fragile ego and resolve can take the endless string of rejections that path holds).

On Reading

2009-01-16T12:06:00.000-08:00

I have recently become addicted to PaperbackSwap. There is a referral linkie on the left nav of this page if you want to check it out (disclaimer, if you sign up with that link, I get a credit towards a book...feel free to use this link (paperbackswap.com) instead if you don't want to click through the referral link). It is a smorgasbord of books available for trade...It's been kind of a struggle for me deciding on what to get.

(There was a long story here in the middle that I wrote and deleted, because it was, well, long. Synopsis: I used to read a lot, but stopped for close to a decade.)

On starting to read again after college, my inclination--having been bitten by the writing bug--was to start with what I thought of as standards and classics, hoping the magic would rub off on my fingers. I read Virginia Woolf, and although I loved her unusual style, I found it almost unreadable. I read Hunter S Thompson, and became a lifelong fan. I choked on Rand's Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged and, although I really liked them both, found them too inky and preachy to finish. I read The Great Gatsby and thought it was OK (maybe I read it too fast and didn't get it); I really liked Twain's classics, as well as Morrison's Beloved. I threw in some King, Rowling, Gaiman, Barker, and Adams for balance.

So, now with Paperbackswap, I'm faced with that question again: what to read for a balance of good, solid writing and entertaining fiction (spinach and ice cream); what will inspire me to be the best writer that I can be in the way that Cormac McCarthy and Ernst Hemingway do, but be entertaining enough to keep momentum towards fifty books read this year?

So far, I've ordered (and received almost all of): King's Needful Things, McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses, Goddard's In Pale Battalions, Russo's Empire Falls, Robinson's Gilead, and Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury. Of the books posted, I guess these made up the first round of what I considered to be modern literature's A-list. I have a few more on my wish list that aren't yet available. I probably need more "popcorn" authors, like Grisham and Koontz.

PBS has reminded me, in the way that visiting Barnes and Noble still does, how much I love books.

Pardon the delerium

2009-01-11T00:29:00.000-08:00

I should really, really be in bed. But, I was so happy that I did 2300 words tonight on Mojave (although it took me to 12:30 to do it) that I had to post (and then spend twice as much time correcting typos in said post).

That is all. Except for this cool, creepy song I found on Youtube from the Dresden Dolls. Tells an interesting story...I might have to write a tale called The Gardner someday. I also need to learn how to play guitar, drums, and sing at the same time. Shirtless.

Nice Problem to Have (I guess)

2009-01-09T13:32:00.000-08:00

Still grinding away on Mojave...I'm really getting the urge to stop and work on a short story or two, but I'm moving toward a deadline and don't want to stop.

No acceptances of rejections yet this year, but I still have 3-4 weeks on the four pending before their self-stated SLAs are up (I'm not counting Hotel Guignol's screenplay sub...at the time they were getting 300 per day--yes, day).

I just got the latest issue of Cemetary Dance, and there was an interview in there with Brian Keene. The interviewer asked him if he considered himself a sell-out because WalMart asked Random House to ask Keene (insofar as WalMart "asks" a potential supplier to do anything...they say sign here or find another channel to sell your crap in) to make a major change to his story because it might be offensive--I haven't read the book (Terminal), but apparently there is a child character who is the second coming of Christ, and the MC caused his death. Walmart didn't like it--so Keene changed it.

My wife said that's ludicrous, you wouldn't do that...would you? And I hesitated. I had to think about that, and I still haven't decided. Given my station and goals, I would have to consider it long and hard, but my gut tells me that I would probably toe the line on that. Keene's defense was that mainstream fiction is not art--it's entertainment, and must meet the demands of the supply chain. But, as the title of this post suggests: how great would it be to even to have the chance to answer that question?

Highly speculative (but hey, that's what we do!), but, what would you do in Keene's situation? If you had a rock that said "my writing is..." and two buckets, one said "demand-driven entertainment", the other "my artistic expression", which bucket would you toss into?

Se7en things...

2009-01-05T07:14:00.000-08:00

Share seven facts about yourself, and tag seven people at the end of the post.

I've had to do this before in meet-n-greets and offsite meetings, and like to choose the things that I may not be the most proud of, but the ones that are the most...um...unique, I guess (but wouldn't put me in hot water if a prospective employer were to find this post). Might be hard to hit seven, though, I'm just not that interesting...also, I find it weird talking about myself (blogging is a big step outside of my comfort zone).

1. Although far from virtuoso, I am a self-taught guitar player who started playing at age 13...despite that, I didn't join my first band until I was 34, and quit following our first gig six months later after an onstage row with the drummer (in the middle of Pink Floyd's Comfortably Numb). It was a fun six months, though.

2. I have been stung by a Bark Scorpion, the most toxic scorpion in North America (and I'm sure I will be again...my neighborhood has no shortage of the little darlings). It's like being injected with liquid fire that doesn't go away for 24 hours or so (in case you were wondering).

3. I dropped out of high school at the mid-point of my sophomore year. High school was too dramatic for me...I hate drama. I worked for many years, and in my early 20s aced my GED, got an A.A. in business, B.A. in Marketing, and an M.B.A.

4. My first 'real' job was at Old Tucson, a movie studio-cum-amusement park in Arizona. I drove a tour train around the town giving a speech about all of the movies that were filmed there. Fun job for a teenager.

5. I have worked for a bank for over ten years, and am the only person I've met there (at least in management) with full-sleeve tattoos. I also have Mr. Gosh on my right leg (done by the Hart and Huntington studio in the Palms Casino).

6. Being towed by a friend driving a hatchback, I have done 55MPH in a shopping cart. And I have the scars to prove it.

7. Before pulling my head out of my ass and figuring out what I was going to do with my life, I spent about five months in my seventeenth year homeless in Portland, OR, sleeping on the banks of the Clackamas river, or on random couches, or backyards of vacant houses, or the backseats of cars, or a wildlife preserve that inexplicably sits in the middle of the city. I'm sure there's a story in there, somewhere...

OK, not sure who hasn't been tagged, or who regurly reads this; but, stabbing in the dark:

Barry Napier, Josh Reynolds, Jeremy Kelly, Robert Swartwood, Cate Gardner, Rob Brooks, and Mari Adkins.

Side rant:

I'm livid with Blogger...I spent four hours messing with Blogger themes this weekend, four hours that could have been spent writing. I can't seem to get any themes I like to work properly, so I'll probably keep this one for a while and change some of the side nav stuff...blogger seems to have problems with the blogger roll widget, and there are several blogs I want to add that won't show up (mostly some Wordpress and Livejournal blogs), so I'm having to track everyone's blogs (I follow about 25 or so) in Outlook. End rant. Sorry, had to vent.

**Updated...forgot the linkies to the bloggies...***

Back ta woik, ya bum.

2009-01-01T22:18:00.000-08:00

It's been a nice, relaxing winter break, visiting relatives in Arizona, watching lots of movies (we are extremely grateful that the kids are getting older and we can watch grown-up movies like Benjamin Button and Valkyrie while they're still in the theaters, and the kids can go watch their movies in the next room).

But, it's time to go back to work.

I gave myself a deadline of 1/15 to get my ~30k MS off for Mari at Apex to critique, and I still have some work to do to prepare.

To that end: I took Robert Swartwood's advice when we got back to Vegas and ran down to the library and picked up a David Morrell book on fiction writing best-practices. It's been very valuable so far (thanks a bunch, Robert). One of the excercises I found particularly telling to guage the strength of a story early on in the process is a kind of self-dialogue to 'discuss' the story...with the assistance of that as a vetting mechanism for my next steps, I've decided that I want to continue on with Mojave with some additional development work, and will build that out to use as my MS for Mari (as opposed to Seattle Pizza, which I still like but will focus on later). Here is an excerpt from my discussion with myself on Mojave (this was not only a valuable excercise, but actually kind of fun to do):

Why is the Vegas compound an interesting topic for a story?

It would be interesting to watch it grow as a commercial, well-funded petri dish experiment.

Why is that interesting?

Because it explores commercialism and greed as a lord of the flies-type microcosm outside of government oversight.

Why should anyone besides sociologists care?

Because it helps people explore their own personal feelings about greed, society, rules, roles, and beliefs.

Word.

Indeed. Word.

...and so on for several pages, until the story and characters (and holes therein) really start to take shape in a much stronger way than just writing front-to-back or working off of an outline. You basically have to convince yourself that it's a story worth reading.

As for 2008...I decided I wanted to (attempt to) become a writer, against all odds and rational judgement. Since July, I have written eight short stories and a short screenplay, submitted them collectively to seventeen markets, had two published, one take the silver medal in a contest, and still have five of the seventeen submissions pending. I started two novels, and have aged close to seven years in the last six months. And I have learned that the stinging backhand of a rejection letter is all part of the process and, I've heard, it does, eventually, get easier. Or numbs faster. Either works.

And I have met some great and helpful folks in the literary blogosphere. Here's to all of us getting fat book deals in 2009, keeping our sanity through the economic turmoil, and generally having a great year.

The Bad Guy

2008-12-20T08:47:00.000-08:00

Still cranking away on Seattle Pizza, and still enjoying it...I find myself getting stuck often and often stare at the wall on the other side of my monitor for long periods of time, but it's coming eaiser, and I'm starting to understand my two MCs enough to speak for them consistently. I realized this week that I was missing something: a protaganist. My concept was that it would be these two guys who, in a roundabout way due to their work in paranormal investigations (I know, I'm a fount of originality!), find themselves in legal trouble...so, my concept was that the bad guy was, in general, the law (and by proxy, the prosecutor).

After watching Dark Knight again this week (awesome movie...media hype aside, I thought the Dark Knight/White Knight and Batman/Joker story arcs were brilliant, although they blew the movie when the Two Face story began), I realized how much more a complex, bona fide bad guy could add to the story. So, I'm going to do some rough outlining before I dig in again to see how it would work...it's still early enough in the story that re-writing (a first draft no-no, I know) would be minimal. I'd love to do a super-sinister character, a la Mssrs. Vandermar and Croup...maybe a female baddie.

So, on the list before we're off to visit relatives for the holidays: at least 5k more written, read and respond to Cate's MS, and maybe a year-end post.

Lastly: I played this game earlier this year...The semi-cheesy MIDI music is addictive, and the graphics (once you get past the first level) are pretty cool. I woke up this morning with the piano riff in my head, and thought I'd share. Some of the levels are difficult, but the music is so hyper-mellow that it's like audio ganja...

*Update*

Almost forgot to plug Barry Napier's web serial Blood Routes. I've read the first couple of posts, and it looks like an interesting story. I really like the concept of a web serial...I think it's a natural progression for literature. With the popularity of the Kindle picking up and it's blog-reading functionality (despite having to pay to register each blog...), it's really something for all short-story authors to consider.

No news is no news

2008-12-13T12:05:00.000-08:00

No writing today, nor yesterday...over the last few weeks we've had a fresh influx of scorpions (Katy got a nasy sting Wednesday night), and I've spent the last couple of days sealing up the house like a ziploc baggie (the lastest in a four year effort). And, tonight is our tenth anniversary, and tomorrow is my 26th birthday...so, no writing tonight. Once Amy gets home from work, we're off to have dinner at a place in the Palms Casino called Little Buddha.

Since learning about winning the critque from Apex, I've been pushing to get as much done on Seattle Pizza as possible so I can at least present a second draft of the first half of the book, and not writing for more than a day makes me feel tremendously stressed out.

But, duty calls...I had to at the very least blog today so I didn't feel entirely worthless for writing work.

What a strange thing to pay for...

2008-12-11T17:12:00.000-08:00

So, Jamie was the first to tell me this afternoon that Apex drew names for their charity auction, and Jeremy winned something! Woots all around! (Jamie won too, which also rocks).

Something pretty gee-darned cool, too. If memory serves, they had like 4 or 5 critiques of varying lengths offered, and I bought 2-3 tickets for each one. The one I scored is with Apex Editor Mari Adkins, and it's for up to 30k words. And I need it...at this point in my would-be career, that is probably what I need the most (besides not dancing about writing). So now, I just need to grind through a long enough manuscript to give her something to read. I am having a lot of fun with The Seattle Pizza Company; that's the one I want her to critique.

Isn't there something kind of BDSM-ish about paying someone to tell me how bad my writing is?

In other news, I started Douglas Clegg's Afterlife, and am having trouble getting into it. I did OK until two characters engaged in a dialogue, and they used langage that bugged me for some reason. It just didn't seem like a real discussion, like Clegg had never actually heard two people in that circumstance have that kind of intimate discussion. Or maybe my life experiences would have forced me to write it differently. But, Clegg is a well-liked author and obviously leaps and bounds more successful than I at the craft...it just struck me at how easy it is for language to derail what could be a very good story.

Clearing, and Thoughts on the Industry

2008-12-07T08:38:00.001-08:00

As of last night, my second accepted story, Clearing, is online! You can click here to get to it directly (with no way to back out to their main site...I think Abandoned Towers is one of the last of the heavily-frame-laden websites in the web-o-tron), or you can go to the Abandoned Towers site, and click on the Science Fiction section on the left.

I tend to be pretty laid back with a lot of things in life: for example, I program in PHP as a hobby; I know a little bit and can build most any functional thing, but I have no desire to become the best programmer that I can be; it just doesn't mean enough to me to take classes, read books, and stay up late for months-on-end and become a world-class über-programmer...I don't need to see the matrix, I just want to make a button that will generate a report.

Writing, however, isn't that way for me. It's become one of those things that, at least once a decade or so, I will become obsessed with (business was that way for me once, and that took me from being jobless and homeless during a chilly Oregon winter to seven years in business school and, eventually, a VP-level job in banking). I really, really want to do it as well as I possibly can and hope to do it for a living someday, and I love studying other writers' work and sponging up industry knowledge to learn what works and what doesn't.

To that end, as I mentioned to CJ earlier, I have been stalking agent and publisher blogs for a couple of weeks now. This has been a very valuable exercise. In that short time, I've gained some insights into what is selling, what seems to be declining, and general gut-check info from folks who are elbow-deep in manuscripts and New York publishing house drama (First Five Pages-type info). One thing I've learned, which I'm sure is no surprise, is that the publishing world is getting slayed by the economy, and some publishers have stopped, more or less, accepting manuscripts. And that sucks. So, I guess I could have picked a better time to try and get published for the first time; but, I guess it's tough all over (banking is no picnic right now, for sure). But, as one agent wrote, it's a good opportunity to wait out the recession and knock out a couple of manuscripts, submit to agents for, if nothing else, feedback, and keep grinding the axe.

But, I suppose I'm not all that worried about the selling part now, as I am yet to complete a full manuscript. That is definitely putting the cart first, but I guess it all becomes part of the long-term strategy. The important part of writing is...well, writing.

And, like Steve Martin said: talking about music is like dancing about architecture...same goes with writing. So, I'm off to the Land of Words...

Tag from CJ

2008-12-05T11:26:00.000-08:00

Tagged from Cate's blog: the who the hell are you and what are you doing here post...

I feel kind of silly doing this since I've only been at this a short time (especially compared with the rest of the folks on the left nav of this page), but I feel guilty reading everyone else's stat sheets without sharing...so, without further ado:

Age when I decided I wanted to be a writer: 24...I had a blast writing papers in college on my rusty little typewriter and got great feedback (the one kind of cinched it for me was a history prof who was impressed with my essay on pre-war German culture; he asked me where I went to H.S., and when I told him I dropped out in my sophomore year and got my G.E.D. years later, I guess he was so taken with my untrained writing style over the semester that he let me skip the final exam with a 4.0 and the reward-for-writing synapse formed instantly...I continued on to an MBA and became a banker, which is about as far from a creative writer as you can get)
Age when I wrote my first story: I started about a dozen, but didn't actually knuckle down to finish one for another 11 years: 35...I had zero confidence in my ability to write and got caught up in my day job and raising kids for the next decade.
Age when I first submitted a short story to a magazine: 35 became my do-it-now-or-forget-it-forever age for writing.
Age when I sold my first short story: 35 (Billy Don't Like Clowns to Niteblade)
Total number of submissions: 14
Total acceptances: 2
Thickness of file of rejection slips prior to first story sale: zero...the first story I wrote was the first story I submitted, and also my first acceptance. Sounds way cooler than it is...I was extremely lucky.
Number of short stories/novelettes/novellas sold for cash money: One...Billy sold for $1, which I donated to Ralan anyway (that was one of Niteblade's payment options).
Poems sold: zip...I enjoy story-style poetry like Sherman Alexie's early work, but poetry, for the most part, is beyond my understanding
Age when I started writing my first novel: 30
Age when I started writing my first completed novel: Haven't finished one yet
Age I finished that novel: Well, since I'll be 36 in less than a week, I'm going to be optimistic and say 36.
Age I started my second novel: NA
Age I finished my second novel: NA
Age when I sold a first novel: NA
Total number of novels written: Finished? Nada.
Books sold: 0
Books in the process of querying: 0
Short stories in the slush: 2 shorts and 1 screenplay
Short stories written this year: 8 stories and 1 screenplay
Age when I became a full-time novelist: (shakes magic 8-ball): "Reply Hazy, Try Again Later"
Age now: 35

Remember, Remember, the month of November

2008-12-01T08:26:00.000-08:00

OK, time for the November roundup...

Mrs. Marsupial's Tea Party, written and submitted to the Cafe Doom contest in October, took the silver medal for good behavior at Cafe Doom...subbed it to Clarkesworld (rejected), and is now in-slush with Sybil's Garage.
Started and completed Contract of Men, which now sits with GUD.
Started and completed Filtered White Light, out with AGNI.
Started and completed The Tucker Farm Incident for Dark Jesters (also pending).
Knocked out about 20k of Mojave, doubted my storyline, and put it aside to simmer.
Clearing (version 2.2) (does everyone version their stories, or just me?) accepted for the online edition of Abandoned Towers
Inspired by the story started in Tucker Farm, started a new story-of-indeterminate-length called Seattle Pizza Company v. The State of Washington. I knocked out about 3100 words last night, which I think is my one-day record.

Given that I got one acceptance and some positive feedback for Mrs. M, I'm calling November a success.

In addition to working an insanely busy job in banking, raising a family, trying to keep my old house from falling over, having a year-round infatuation with Halloween special effects, and trying to break into writing, I also do some programming on the side, and just knocked out a massive project that has been dogging me for over a month--which frees up a little more time for the other things on the list, and takes the stress quotient down a bit.

It's 8:30am on the west coast, and is now time to concentrate on the job that pays the bills. Tonight, back to the Seattle Pizza Company.

Number Two (no, the good kind of number two)

2008-11-29T10:16:00.000-08:00

After about seven weeks in round two, I got a minor revision request from Cyberwizard for Clearing and, within a few hours of resubmitting, an acceptance for Abandoned Towers! Woohoo!

Yes, it's for the website (she gave me the choice of web or print, and I chose the former...at this point I think I need broader readership more than another hard copy ToC); and yes, it's FTL (and we all are aware of the debate stirring around that topic... apparently that thread is still active, and, if you scroll down the bottom, plumbing new depths of pettiness and backbiting). But, like I mentioned over on Aaron's blog, this is the point in my career where I need some of that free love...of the few FTLs I've subbed to since kicking this whole writing thing off in July, I have gotten some great feedback from many of them, including early feedback from the former submissions editor for Abandoned Towers...and I am incredibly grateful. So, until I'm cool enough to sell exclusively to pro and semi (that's all I've subbed to since October or so), I'll enjoy a symbiosis with folks who are in a position to cultivate talent, and take whatever attention I can get, given that this is my second published work to-date.

To summarize: WooHoo! She said she'll put it up once she gets a hard copy contract, so hopefully in a week or so.

Also, I finished the Cemetery Book...it was a very cute book packed with Neil Gaiman creepyisms, and seems to definitely be set up for a sequel. My kids are really looking forward to the Coraline movie in February as well.

Ha-ha funny or Sweet-Fluffy-Jesus-No funny?

2008-11-26T14:57:00.000-08:00

I can't seem to get back into the groove of Mojave, and I've been in kind of a funk for a couple of weeks and everything I write has ended up kind of brooding, which sucks. So, over the last few days I knocked out, re-wrote, spellchecked, and submitted a piece for Dark Jesters...I needed a laugh, and that did the trick. Hopefully they think it's funny, too...I really liked the story--so much, in fact, that even if it doesn't end up in DJ I'd like to do a series of short stories (or even novellas) featuring the MCs, kind of Arthur Conan Doyle-style.

Congrats, by the way, to everyone finishing up NaNo projects! Extra helpings of stuffing for you tomorrow (if non-U.S., you must buy a box of bread stuffing and eat as much as you can in one sitting).

Life is what happens when you're busy with other stuff

2008-11-23T20:13:00.000-08:00

I sat down last weekend to work on my full-length Mojave, on which I have not yet broken 20k (that's pretty much why I didn't do NaNo this year...between work and life, I knew it wasn't going to happen)...it was the end of a crap day capping off a crap week and, being a moody sort of person, I threw my big project aside to do something a little more edgy to vent some steam. The end result was a story I just finished tonight called Filtered White Light; I am obviously trying to shake off having read McCarthy's The Road this month, and this story reflects that: stark, dimly lit, short sentences, and, although there is some dialogue, not a goddamn quotation mark in the whole story. Risky to try and sell something formatted like that, but it seemed to work for the flow...but, I guess I'll find out if I'm overstepping my current state of development based on if anyone wants to read it. My bigger fear is if the story itself was too subtle, but I guess I'll find that out, too.

It was, at least, an interesting exercise to see how the story flow changed with minimal punctuation (I added and removed and re-added and re-removed the quotations about six times)...you really have to try harder to make it friendly on the eyes, but if you strip it down enough to make the dialogue stand out , the starkness of the format kind of weaves itself into the story, and that kind of takes it all in a certain direction.

I have one story (Mojave) in the hopper and five in the field. At least one I should be hearing back on soon, I hope. I passed the first round and was told I should hear "in a month or so", and today is like 6 1/2 weeks, which I guess is still within that range.

Am I justified in being hesitant/nervous about pinging an editor for a status? Is that considered...rude? or pushy?

...and the winner is...

2008-11-14T13:49:00.000-08:00

Not me, but that's OK.

The winner of the Cafe Doom competition this year was an author named Jaelithe Ingold (not sure if she still uses that blog, only linkie I could find) for a great story called The Rules. It will be published by-and-by in Necrotic Tissue, be sure to check it out when it is released...

I was, however, fortunate enough to take second place in the competition--which, to me, is mind-blowing. There were some really great writers and fantastic stories this year (of the authors whose blogs I read regularly, I know Felicity, Cate, Rob, and Aaron had stories in) , and it is an honor to have not only had a few of them pick my story, Mrs. Marsupial's Tea Party, within their top three, but also to have Scott McCoy from Necrotic Tissue pick me in the top two. Just awesome. The third place winner was Monica O'Rourke's The Cellar, a good, creepy story as well (assuming I found the correct Monica O'Rourke's MySpace, she has a biblio as long as my leg).

The only bad news out of all this is that only the fastest horse gets published in Necrotic Tissue (although I now have $100 to spend at Shocklines, not to mention some mad props to cut-and-past into a Word doc and re-read when I need a little ego stroking!). So, to that end, I submitted Mrs. M. to Clarkesworld along with a cover letter telling Mr. Clarke that Mrs. M. is the best thing since sliced breadpeople, everybody already loves it, and the only thing left to complete the holy cycle is for him to buy it.

So, once again, to those who liked and voted for my story, Thank You; for those who read but didn't like it, thank you for reading it and for participating in the contest; congratulations to Jaelithe and Monica; and, lastly, thanks again to Ed and Scott and Matt for sponsoring it!

That's brilliant, Q--but can it fill plot holes for me?

2008-11-13T11:01:00.001-08:00

Had a rough time working last night with the kids home and bored stiff, since it now gets dark at 5pm here in the Southwest. Didn't start writing until about 9:30, and even then I spent more time going back over the last couple of chapters of Mojave to try and figure out where I was heading. That took two hours, and it was midnight by the time I hit 1,000 words for the day. Sigh...

My wife and I (and our 12YO daughter, but not so much the 9YO) like Daniel Craig's iteration of Bond...Amy is going to see Quantum of Solace Friday night with a girlfriend, and I'll probably take Katy on Saturday. I've been seriously considering picking up a Sony Reader this year as I'm collecting a lot of books and magazines in PDF form (I'm waiting to see if the new touchscreen edition drives down the price for the other models...I think $299 is too much). They have an Ian Fleming edition that comes with a few Bond titles; that may be my excuse to finally get around to reading some of his work.

On that note, you needed a new song stuck in your head today, right?

Grant me the serenity...

2008-11-10T22:33:00.000-08:00

It's been a long week already...I had to sit on a conference call for a data center move Saturday night-Sunday morning for 8 hours and didn't get to bed until 6am, and I'm still paying for it. So, I'm calling it a night after a measly 500 words on Mojave (taking me to 14.5k). Tomorrow is a bank holiday, which means I can sleep in; we're going for a short hike on Frenchman Mountain (which is about two blocks away) in the AM, and then I can spend a few hours writing in the afternoon. My minimum goal per day is 1k words, but I really want to hit 16.5 by tomorrow night, and 20k by the time I go to bed Friday.

You all probably already knew this, but short stories are addictive, like tattoos. Once I settle in on my novel, I keep thinking about how fun it would be to nip off and knock out a couple of pages on a new short...come on, I think, It'll just take a few minutes. It'll be fun. Just click "New...". It's easy. Do it now.

Speaking of short stories, I really want the Cafe Doom contest to be over so I can stop obsessively checking the site for new votes. I think voting ends tomorrow, and by my count there are still about 10 or so authors who haven't voted, assuming each story is from a unique author. There are some really fun stories up there, I'm sure a lot of them will get sold after the contest ends.

Free as in Beer, and Doldroms

2008-11-08T13:29:00.001-08:00

Some of you may have gotten this email as well, but GUD Magazine is having a lottery-style magazine sale...I picked up the summer issue for like $.56, or something crazy like that. In addition, they sent me a voucher for some lucky individual to get a copy of same (on PDF form) for free. If you're interested in using my voucher, first one to post their email addy here can have it (I'm sure they will want to put you on a mailing list afterward, but their mail volume seems reasonable...only a couple this month).

Obviously this is a way for GUD to increase readership and populate their marketing lists, but this made me think, though...how long will it be before the U.S. economic downturn really starts affecting the markets we all depend on for selling stories, poems, essays, and pictures? Markets come and go, but we can only hope that not too many of these good magazines and websites fold in the next year, or become FTL-only. My personal opinion, for what its worth (taking into consideration that I have spent the last decade with one of the largest banks around, and may have some perspective), is that we have another 9-12 months of doldrums ahead, and things will get better, gradually. It's just getting through 2009 that will be tricky.

This really feels a lot like the post-9/11 economic world...it was tough and scary and full of uncertainties, but I try to remember to take the long view on what's in the bank, and the short view on what's in my pocket. I guess the point this thinking is leading me to is that one of the best things that we writers can do to help the markets survive long enough for us to be able to feed our hobbies, help us express ourselves, pay the bills, or keep working toward that career-launching story, as the case may be, is to subscribe and support. I personally need to make a list of at least 2-3 magazines that I can subscribe to and stay within my comfort zone financially (not including the occasional donation to Ralan and/or Duotrope).

I'm certain that I (and my waistline) can survive one week without eating out so that Glimmer Train can survive long enough to reject more of my stories...

(steps off of soapbox)

Gaiman-isms and Updates

2008-11-07T08:04:00.000-08:00

I didn't write a word yesterday, due to going to see Neil Gaiman do the keynote address for the Las Vegas Lit Festival. It's funny, I spent like 20 hours with Neil's voice listening to Neverwhere last month, so hearing him in person is like being in a meeting with someone I actually knew. Weird. Neil is full of insight and advice for writers, and the target audience last night seemed to be not only fans but writers as well, and Neil tailored his talk appropriately. He talked about how he got his start in literature (lying about his resume), what inspires him (noticing things, talking to his kids), how he decides what project to work on next (whatever makes sense), and funny anecdotes from his career (apparently he spent a couple of weeks at a bankrupt hotel in Vegas while writing American Gods, and had spent time sitting on the ratty couch in the lobby watching TV with multiple Elvises in different colored jumpsuits, and had a running issue with a "defective bible" in his room). He also read two yet-to-be-published children's books of his coming out next year. Well worth staying up late to attend...he didn't do a signing, but had pre-signed most of his published works and had them for sale in the lobby (I picked up The Graveyard Book, and I thought my kids would like Coraline).

In writing news...after finishing up Contract of Men and tossing it over to GUD (they rejected Clearing pretty quick, but I think CoM might be a better fit for their mag), I was finally able to spend some time on Mojave. I was a little worried about getting back into the flow of the story after not touching it for about a week, but I broke 11k Wednesday night, and am at a point where I'm really anxious to figure out where it goes, and am enjoying the story a lot...a couple of interesting characters (I hope).

After just over 3 months, Faith, which is the second story of my would-be career and, in retrospect, not a very well put-together story, was rejected by Glimmer Train for the August Very Short Fiction contest. Ce'st la vie...it is, after all, Glimmer Train. I don't think I'll re-write that one...at least not for a while. It's more interesting visuals and feelings but not a strong story.

October Roundup

2008-11-03T21:41:00.000-08:00

Not a very eventful month for me, sadly...lots of words, not much submitted.

I managed to get a screenplay off to Hotel Guignol, but I think that was actually in September, now that I think about it.
Clearing was rejected by GUD, bounced by Clarksworld, but passed through the first gatekeeper at Abandoned Towers, where it currently sits.
I submitted a piece to Cafe Doom for their annual Writer's Choice contest...I can't tell you the name of it, as voting continues for another week or so, but I will say that of the twelve current votes, it's "on the board", so to speak. That is very exciting...really, unbelievably cool. There are some great stories up there by some excellent writers, and the fact that I've gotten any votes from that crowd is beyond flattering, even if I don't end up in the final three. I have about ten more stories to read before I can vote.
I knocked out 10k of Mojave, which will, hopefully, become a growed-up novel one day...but, I lost traction with the Halloween haunted house project (here are some pix, if you're interested...it also kept me off of Blogger for a week or so, hence my radio silence), Cafe Doom, and...
A new quickie project that popped out of my keyboard half-formed. It is called The Contract of Men, is non-speculative, and very much inspired by the humbling style of McCarthy's The Road (which I'm about halfway through).

So, there's October...next on the docket: finish Contract of Men, keep grinding away on Mojave, and go hear Neil Gaiman speak at the library on Thursday. I did consider it, but I'm not WriMo'ing my NaNo this year...I'm scared of getting sidetracked off of Mojave again.

Everybody sing...

2008-10-26T18:19:00.000-07:00

Five more days 'til Halloween...Sil-ver Shamrock

We spent the day at the Springs Preserve, a desert-eco museum located on the site of the original springs that brought settlers to the Las Vegas valley for the first time thousands of years ago. Neat place, and to make it even cooler, they had it decorated for Halloween. They did some kind of Halloween show after sundown, but... reality calls--laundry to do, grocery shopping beckons, Amy has homework, and we were tired of walking.

I'm about halfway through Cormac McCarthy's The Road. What an amazing book. I've never read his work before, but he is obviously one of these authors that makes other authors question their choice of vocation. He breaks the rules in a way that makes me want to re-write everything I've ever written (until the realization sets in that I could never do it as well as him and I'm best off plodding along on my current route).

I was up until midnight last night finishing my third draft of a story for the Cafe Doom contest (thanks for the heads-up, Cate). I'm kind of nervous putting my work out for peer-review (peer here meaning people much more experienced than I). It was a fun break, but now its time to bury my head into Mojave once again. Kind of funny, but I read or saw several things today at the museum that may make their way into Mojave; I'm actually writing the book using Google Earth to lay out the geography of the story and the journey of the MC, and seeing the geographic history of this valley helped me think in those terms. I thought it would be fun if, knock on wood, Mojave was published, I could put out a kmz file (Google Map overlay) with info on the story, kind of a Tolkein-esque map of the story.

Mojave Update and Advice from the Past

2008-10-19T22:16:00.001-07:00

No new news, really, but in keeping in the habit of updating my bloggy-dee-dum...

1. Just cracked 9100 words on Mojave. Been a fun story so far and have kept momentum, although finding time to write between family and work continues to be a struggle...sound familiar? I just wrote a class of monster (what is this, D&D?) that actually gives me the willies to think about. That's pretty cool.

2. Saw Shaun of the Dead Saturday night-- Best. Movie. Ever.

3. I'm going to try and resist cheating and submitting Mojave to NaNoWriMo (hopefully well past 25k words by 11/1), but I definitely won't be starting a new project. In thinking about NaNoWriMo, I remembered some of the well-timed emails they sent out last year with advice from people who make a living at this game. As this seems to be the Year of Neil Gaiman, I thought I'd reminisce on Neil's helpful advice for the midpoint of a novel, posted at NaNoWriMo.

Career Perspective

2008-10-13T19:30:00.000-07:00

In the latter half of 2008, the only really good thing left about working for a Large Global Bank©, other than just having a paycheck, is all of the paid holidays. Today being Columbus Day in the U.S., I was able to (mostly) resist the urge to fire up my company laptop and work, and wrote for a good chunk of the day (in between naps, playing guitar, and helping the kids with homework). It was rare and nice.

After a couple of weeks of dryness, I just broke 5300 words on my Vegas story on the third day of writing (Mojave is the working title), and it seems to be going well. I've spent a few sleepless nights the past week thinking about the storyline and characters, and I think I have a grip on what it is I'm trying to tell. Mostly. I'm trying to be mindful of telling a strong story, and not just describing stuff and having people talk and all of the "wouldn't-it-be-cool" moments of this world I'm knitting. I was tempted, but I didn't want to wait for NaNoWriMo...I needed to get moving on this. Hopefully I can keep momentum and finish a draft before I loses me mojo...

The Dangers of Nyquil

2008-10-07T11:19:00.000-07:00

After 4 days, Clearing was jettisoned by Clarkesworld with a form letter...yesterday, I submitted a query letter for Clearing to Abandoned Towers, got a positive response, submitted the story, and just now received another positive response from the sub editor, saying it "seemed well written and put together with nice clean dialogue" and has passed it on to the editorial group...not an acceptance, but I'll take it, even with the word seemed attached. That makes me happy.

I'm sick yet again, and had to choke back some Nyquil, mostly so that my poor wife can sleep through my gasping and choking and coughing. Since Sunday, I have been thinking through a story that really sounds fun (I'll share more as I progress, but kind of a what-if story around the proposed nuclear waste dump in Yucca Mountain just north of Vegas)...but, as I dig more into this story, it has to be a full length thing--at least 50-70k words. Which is daunting, as I'm yet to complete anything that long. Last night, in a diphenhydramine daze, I dreamt chunks of the storyline, which makes me even more excited to work on it. I don't want to blow this, so I'm going to take a few more days of outlining and character development before I start work.

Wandering through the desert

2008-10-05T14:49:00.000-07:00

Three updates...

Update the First: One of the neat things about living in Vegas is the close proximity to Utah (as much as it sounds like the setup to a joke, I'm being sincere). Shortly after moving here four years ago, we discovered the Shakespeare Festival about 2.5 hours from here in Cedar City, and after our first season of watching plays there, we were hooked. I spent all day there Saturday, and saw a fine but slightly off-center version of Julius Caesar (set in modern day, but still spoken from the original text and language of Shakespeare), and a mind-blowing Victorian-era murder mystery called Gaslight which, for someone who spends a lot of time thinking about storytelling and dark fiction, was almost a religious experience. I knew I would have hours spent alone during the trip, so I picked up the audiobook for Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, and am about six hours in. What a great story.

Update the Second: the first re-write of Clearing was ousted by GUD, who said it "wasn't what they were presently looking for"...not very specific, so it's off to Clarkesworld without any edits.

Update the Third: I'm kind of struggling with my next project. I have two of three stories in mind that don't completely excite me, and have started picking through the bones of projects never finished. I've commited to picking a project and pushing through by tomorrow night. Between Gaslight and Neverwhere, the juices are flowing today, and I don't think I'll have a problem settling on a project soon.

Fiction Rule of Thumb

2008-09-30T21:12:00.001-07:00

From xkcd.com

Side note: am I really that lonely that I need to post something every day? Jeez...I need friends in Las Vegas.

Sa-mokin'!

2008-09-29T18:48:00.001-07:00

Wow...exceptionally productive Monday. I finished my re-write of Clearing from the weekend, re-read it about 73 thousand times, and sent it off to Greatest Uncommon Denominator. Although it's focused on the relationship between a scientist and his computer, it's not as geeky as it sounds. it's really kind of sad. In my mind, it feels much more literary, so I thought I'd try a slipstream magazine first. I really want this one to sell, and I suspect I'm willing to re-write it several more times to do so.

Also, I made some edits to the Hotel Guignol screenplay and sent it off: a seven-ish minute piece called Welcome Back, Mr. Callaghan. According to their website, they are getting about 300 screenplays a day, so my odds are pretty friggin' slim. But, hey...it was fun, and I learned a little about formatting a screenplay. I have to say, I enjoy writing literature more. Screenplay writing is cool because you really have to visualize it, but it's too...I dunno. Cut and dry. "Bob stands up and walks to the table. There is a crystal ashtray on it. Inside of the ashtray is a leprechaun. Bob: Hello, leprechaun." it puts kind of a weird filter on the creative process, I guess.

Clearing

2008-09-28T15:48:00.000-07:00

I got a rejection this AM from Wanderings for Clearing...it was another very verbose, very useful note from the editor. He said he thought it had some very good writing, but dragged at points and didn't come to the point fast enough. Singsong, which was rejected by Potter's Field 3, had similar points of criticism, so at least I'm consistent. However, I think Singsong was forced...I didn't really enjoy writing it. Another bad analogy: I felt like a comedian who comes up with a funny punchline and then throws some cheap window-dressing around it just to set it up. Clearing, I think, is a good story...I like it, and I think it's worth polishing. So, that's how I've spent my afternoon: stripping away unneeded details, and really trying hard to tell the story, not just leading the reader around aimlessly. I like my re-write, I'll take another look at it tomorrow, maybe look at markets tonight before bed.

This morning was spent in Halloweentown...here is a nifty sign I just finished to hang outside of my garage (hard to see, but that's a bite taken out of the corner):

Now I want to write a story called Free Kandy.

34 Days 'til My Head Bursts

2008-09-27T17:44:00.000-07:00

I haven't written dick since I finished the first draft of the screenplay for Hotel Guignol...I have been doing a lot of thinking about my next project, which I count as writing. Sort of. "Literary Pre-Execution Brainstorming". See, that's the kind of sick shit that comes to front of mind when you work for a bank for ten years (something I've warned both of my kids against). I am of the opinion that managerial double-speak and mandatory corporate cheerleading sessions are far, far scarier than the most depraved, most secret horrors that King, Lovecraft, or Barker could come up with on their best day.

Also, I've been diverting my attention. My wife had trouble with her right arm a while back, so she switched to her left (non-dominant) for many tasks, including using her mouse. Within three or four months, she noticed she was able to sketch everyday objects freehand much, much better than she ever had, and she attributed that to using the other side of her brain more. In a different but somewhat related turn, I have noticed that, since immersing myself in creative writing earlier this year, I am more, well...creative. As a result of that, coupled with my sick love of all things creepy, I have officially gone batshit crazy on Halloween preparations. In the past two weeks, I have acquired a fog machine and built a custom fog chilller (to keep the fog low and heavy), built a blood fountain out of styrofoam skulls, and bought or made headstones, spiderwebs, skeletons, lighting, wall hangings, dried flowers, and signs. I'll put up pix after Halloween...should be...interesting. Yes, interesting. Not the word my wife uses, but...you know.

I read a short but interesting article in the New York Times Friday...a writer (formerly for Redbook) talks about some of the basic tenets her friend and editor taught her over the years, and how it shaped her writing:

"She valued clarity and transparency. She had nothing against style, if it didn’t distract from the material. Her blue pencil struck at redundancy, at confusion, at authorial vanity, at the wrong and the false word, at the unearned conclusion. She loved good writing, therefore she loved the reader: good writing did not cause the reader to stumble over meaning. By the time Helene was finished with me seven years later, I knew how to read a sentence and how to fix one. I knew what a sentence was supposed to do. I began to write my own sentences; needless to say, the responsibility for them is my own."

Seems like good, basic advice.

The Plan...

2008-09-24T17:52:00.000-07:00

OK, so based on my feedback from Champagne Shivers (which was pretty basic stuff: grab attention earlier in the story, cut the non-important junk, etc), I'm making a change to my writing strategy: I need to read more. And not just read, but study. As I look back over the past year, it seems like I've done a lot of reading, but I realize that it's been mostly business-oriented publications and an Ayn Rand novel I've been stuck on for six or seven months (damn you interesting but extremely long lectures on objectivism!!! (shakes fist)). I'm putting Atlas Shrugged down as a challenge for another time, and have started reading/studying a collection of Asimov stories I've had for a while but haven't cracked. I'm devoting half of the time I've been using to write to learning how to write. Also, I need to sit on my stories longer; I think I've been submitting first-draft, B material as finished because I'm impatient.

Also, got a newsletter from the Clark County Library District last night: Neil Gaiman will be here in Vegas in November doing a lecture, reading, and book signing! Woo Hoo!

One Down

2008-09-23T21:45:00.000-07:00

So, in an incredibly short turnaround (less than 48 hours), I heard back on Potter's Field...as could be expected with that short of a turnaround, they don't want it (crowd: aw-w-w-w....). So, there's my first turndown, which, of course, sucks-- but...I'm really, really happy with the response. I got some very specific and direct feedback from the editor on what I need to work on, and I am extremely grateful to Cathy Buburuz for taking the time, particularly at a point in my growth as a writer when I need it most.

I knocked out a quick-n-dirty screenplay for Hotel Guignol over the past two days. I've never done a screenplay before and had to keep bouncing between CeltX and some screenwriting websites to see how to do it...so, yeah...that there tell's ya what kinda quality we put into our screenplays over here in Nevada. Nuthin' but the best. I just picked a couple of real-life actors in my mind and had them play out what would be a somewhat entertaining (at least to a simpleton like me) 10 minute Twilight Zone, and typed it up. I don't have real high hopes for this one, obviously, but I'll probably go ahead and submit it nonetheless (after some cleaning up, making it a bit more grabby, etc). It was a fun exercise.

I think some of the feedback I got from Cathy will apply to the screenplay, so I'll edit with that in mind...unfortunately, it also applies wholesale to the stories I already have out, which lowers my already-low odds with them. But, that's how it goes...I have no illusions about being Clive Barker, and certainly not on my, what, fourth story ever; but it doesn't damper my motivation to learn.

Next in the chute

2008-09-21T20:48:00.000-07:00

First order of business: Catherine J Gardner was kind enough to give me a "I Love Your Blog" award! Which, per process, entails me now nominating seven blogs in turn (except Cate...against the rules)...so...I don't spend a lot of time reading blogs so this might be tough; but there are a few that I do like and read regularly, including a few that I've picked up since I started blogging on this site (including CJG's):

Felicity Dowker, Jamie Eyberg, and Aaron Polson all have great blogs that I enjoy reading; it's very motivating to read other struggling authors' notes on writing and life. I'm sure I'll find more once I dig deeper into blogger.com, it's a struggle to find the time right now, though.
My wife Amy Brooks, a Government Relations professional and Econ grad student has a nifty blog called What I Read Today, featuring interesting things she reads throughout the week and some things of note from her schoolwork.
Neil Gaiman has a swell blog...man, I want his life.
As much as I fucking hate MySpace, I check up on Roman Dirge periodically.
Everything else I just kind of read ad hoc looking for info or chasing something interesting down a rabbit hole...I'm not a regular anywhere, except Slashdot, but that strains the concept of "blog" a bit.

So, thanks again, Cate!

Secondly, I took another look at Singsong Friday night, and then again Saturday, and again today. Made some very minor tweaks, and it's off to the mercies of Potter's Field 3. I need to start working on something new in the next couple of days...hate losing momentum.

I've been sick all week, and the Nyquil just kicked in...time for bed.

After the break...

2008-09-15T12:58:00.000-07:00

A little singsong with the dead. And-a one, and-a two...

Just finished the first draft of a piece called Singsong for Potter's Field 3. Ever chip away at a story you really liked, but feel like you just can't wait and have to rush in and get to that really cool ending part? Yeah...I need to let this one sit for a while (what was the phrase Stephen King used in "On Writing"; simmer? ferment? fester?) before I look at it again. Has potential, but, again, it feels like I spent a lot of time kissing and groping at the beginning, but was too anxious to drop trou and get to the end, and it seems a bit rushed. I'll take a look at it later this week.

Maybe I'll work on a short screenplay next...I love old, creepy hotel stories; something about taking people out of their element and putting them together (or alone) in a place where anything can happen that just begs for stories to be written. I think I even have a copy of CeltX installed on this PC.

In other news, we did some Halloween shopping Sunday...I got a bag full of latex scars and makeup and liquid latex and blood all manner of nasty shit. I didn't do anything last year, so this year I'm gonna make up for it and be a failed suicide.