My haibun (a Japanese style poem linking haiku with prose poetry, for those who aren’t poetry nerds) “Banshee” is now up at Chizine.  I’ve also set up a link to it on the Free page of my site.  Go forth and enjoy, plus there’s a lot of other great offerings this month as well.  Take your time, sit and visit with the ChiZiners for a spell.  Guaranteed to unsettle you, if you like that sort of thing.  (And admit it, you do.)

Generation Loss by Elizabeth Hand.  A damn fine read.  Features a disturbing (and disturbed) protagonist with “as many words for hangover as the Inuit have for snow”.  There is simply so much going on in this sharply focused (and yet subtly developed) novel, it feels like I’ll still be digesting little bits and pieces of it for weeks to come.  Lyrical and deft in its artfulness, this book simply rocked my world.

I haven’t read as much nonfiction over the past couple years as I used to.  Another area I’m interested in intentionally  reading more of.  So I figured I’d see what’s new in brain science/psychology, a field in which I’ve always had more than a passing interest

How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer is like a toybox full of many interesting things.  Seems like every time I turned the page, new exciting concepts jumped out to amaze me from the emerging neuroscience/psychology intersection.  Highly recommended, and on so many different levels.  It validates scientifically many things I have always thought to be true about the way our whole Western reason/emotion dichotomy works, while at the same time shattering that whole paradigm.  Reading this while listening to Daniel Goleman’s Social Intelligence on audiobook (still in progress) provided something of a lagniappe, as many of the concepts are reinforced between the books, though coming from very different angles of attack.  Not only that, but Lehrer’s no dry science writer.  The lede stories are interesting and his style makes the best use of creative nonfiction techniques where appropriate.

I’ve always been interested in epistemology (the philosophy of how we “know” and “think” things, how can we be certain that what we know is true?).  This book fed my brain and gave me much to think about regarding my own decision making processes.  One of the most fascinating things for me was the analysis of certainty-bias, with absolutely fascinating studies that shed light upon the nature and tenacity of  political partisanship/religious affiliation, as well as the rigorous hoops our brain jumps through to protect what we already believe from any contrary evidence.

Too much here to really even summarize, but I loved every page of this nonfiction book.

Ah, modern love….

That makes three that I know of–two women and one guy.  Shelley will be converted, once she gives in and reads the first, I’m sure.  ;)

Being a person with the dubious morals of your neighborhood pusher, I lent my neighbor F. Paul Wilson’s THE TOMB.

She finished it in a day and immediately put books 2-5 on order.  I’ll say it again:  If you aren’t reading Repairman Jack, you are missing out on some of the best paranormal thriller action going!

What about you?  Are you an F. Paul Wilson/Repairman Jack fan?

Is there a particular series or author you “push” on anyone who will listen?

* I’ve seen the cover of Triangulation: Dark Glass and it is made of awesome.  A crisper revision of my WotF story “Deadglass” will appear within.  Look for it in to be released one month from now, in conjunction with CONFLUENCE ‘09.  Sadly for me, that’s a con too far.  No hope of being there for the release.  And it’s going to be such a gorgeous book!

* All of a sudden I’m busy with writer work!  Received galleys to proof on the aforementioned “Deadglass”, plus “Symphony for the Aligning Stars” (Tales Out of Miskatonic University).  And both are now done and turned in!

* Got to hang with Charlie Finlay, Rae Carson and Jaime Voss the other night at a signing/reading for the last of the TRAITOR TO THE CROWN trilogy.  A great time, apart from some weirdly bad service from the Turkish restaurant.  The books are about the American Revolution, with espionage by witches, plus demons and zombies!   What’s not to like?  I’ve been waiting for this set to complete, and now it is in queue.

* Had my girls this weekend and the theme park junkies were out in full force.  Hours in the sun at water park and connected amusement park left me a tired, sore-footed, sunburned Dad.  But damn is it a good sort of tired.

* One of my favorite albums from the early ’90s is Songs from the Rain by Hothouse Flowers.  Just an awesome bit of musical amazingness from Ireland.  It came up on the ipod today and I got swept up into it again.  Imagine my surprise to look them up and see that they are doing a US tour this year.  No  place close to me, alas.  I hadn’t heard a peep from or about them in over a decade.  Looks like they put out a few more albums since.  Anyone know whether their other stuff holds up as well as this?

Ugh.

Had some writerly/computerly turmoil over this weekend.  Started doing the old “submit stories to people who might buy them” thing, and encountered a problem.  Back when Vista was all I could get on a new computer, I opted to run Ubuntu instead.  Felt adventurous and I’d always wanted to learn a little about Linux.  Ubuntu had Open Office on it, and I’d been using that primarily anyway on my last laptop before it died.  Open Office worked fine for RTF docs at the time, which all my stories were in.

Flash forward a couple years.  As I start submitting these stories, I notice the format is going crazy.  Randomly switching from single to double space. Headers that were obviously on LSD…

So I did some research.  Turns out Open Office no longer really supported RTF.  I know, right? So I converted all my stories (grudgingly) to DOC. I checked they were all formatted correctly, and then saved.  I reopened the files: Still good.  Then I submitted them to markets electronically.

And that, kiddies, is where the magic gremlins live and thrive.  Because apparently, based on the emails I sent out, the formats have all regained some measure of their former dicked-uppedness.  Even though they were now in DOC.  A weekend of submissions going out and they all look like a typesetter sneezed for as much as I can tell on my end.

Kept me up all night, I’m not kidding.

Decided to give Vista a[nother] shot.   Desperate times and all…. It’s sat on a partition of the laptop unused for most of the past two years, except occasional excursions into molasses-time to do iTunes.  (The biggest criticism of Ubuntu I had before all this was the lack of itunes and webcam/Skype support.  Now, I’ll be fair and say Ubuntu itself is fast and easy to figure out for basic purposes–hence its popularity in netbooks, but if they can’t find a single word processor that can be taught Standard Manuscript Format, I’m Audi.)  After some consulting with a buddy, turns out what I needed to make Vista work–now that it’s had time to get out of “customer sponsored beta-testing”–was simply a RAM upgrade.

Got R Done and whammy-zammy, Batman, the Vista side is running fast!  It’s like having a whole new computer!

And then of course, in my abrupt abandonment of Ubuntu and Open Office’s unwriter-friendly issue, I discovered Windows 7 was out for testing.  OF COURSE I WAS SKEPTICAL.  But three IT guys I trust, plus the little dude at Best Buy all said they’d been running it just fine.  And I do have a problem with not being able to resist cutting edge techie stuff that’s free.  (I’ll never learn….)

Giving Win7 the old college try on the partition formerly occupied by Linux Ubuntu.  It is incredibly fast.  Thus far, not even one crash.  It has a bit more of the sense of fun that only rarely peeked its head out in earlier editions.  The themes and backgrounds have personality.  One of the pictures that came up on the desktop slideshow looked like the Space Needle and its reflection in the Science Fiction Museum in Seattle.  I’m fairly sure that’s what it is, anyway.

Win7 is very fast, and the most intuitive Windows yet.  It seems like they’ve learned something from Ubuntu and Mac (as usual) and  netbooks AND THE FLUSTERCLUCK THAT WAS VISTA’S EARLY RELEASE. There’s a neat feature where if you drag the window all the way to the left or right, it automatically takes up that half of the screen.  Makes it great for comparing documents, websites, etc. when you have the two windows on opposite sides.  Also good for file transfer.  If you drag the window to the top of the screen, it maximizes.  And the fun part is if you grab the top of a window and shake it, all the other windows fall away.  Shake again, and they’re back.

There’s a bit of coolth in the Show Desktop function too.  Roll over the button and you can peek behind all the open windows.  One huge improvement is the reduction of all those constant PITA reminders and “just making sure you wanted to do that” messages.  They wore me out.  There’s still some in Win7, but they’re like shy wallflowers now.  You hardly notice them.

And fast!  It is much faster than Vista, and at least as fast as Ubuntu was on my machine for booting, shut down and file transfers.  Yes, I did compare times with the extra RAM in.  I’m no more Anti-Ubuntu than I am Anti-Windows.  I only care what works and doesn’t cost me an arm and a leg for the privelege.  Oh, and using Wordpress website admin over the web was very draggy on Ubuntu.  Especially in regard to keyboard responsiveness.  Not so with Win7.  As I wrote this blog entry, I was transferring 16G of iPod music and movies over to this part of the partition.  Not a bit of lag!

So anyway, probably more Win7 geekery coming as I play with it.  It’s on a 50GB partition, with Vista still safely ensconced in the remaining 100GB.

I’ll keep the weeping and gnashing of teeth over my poor crap-formatted story submissions to a minimum.

My 20-year high school reunion happened this weekend and I wasn’t able to attend, though all the fun-havers and reminiscences were certainly on my mind.  To wit, a couple pics I dug up from this time of year in that storied era:

Prom 1989!

That would be me, youthful heartbreaker Catharine Cochran (who was a much better writer at 17 than I would be until well into my thirties), Sean Morrison in the shades with his date, and Mal Simmons with his.

And now, for my next trick, Rocky, watch me pull a really old picture out of my hat!

(Again?)

Nothing up my sleeve…

Of course, in that pic I was blind as a frickin’ bat. The coke-bottle lenses on my Navy issue BCGs or “birth control glasses” were tucked safely into my socks. 

Finding Your Voice Writing in Fragments and Pieces Workshop

And only 30 bucks!!! What a bargain.

::begins preparing next great American “Tw-ovel”::

A heads up for anyone interested–

Chaosium is offering retailer returned copies of Frontier Cthulhu at about half-price!

This anthology was a finalist for the Origins Award, and comes slam-packed full of pulpy goodness ranging from the Creepy Colonial period on out to the Weird West.  Here’s the TOC.

• The Long Road Home by Paul Melniczek
• In Waters Black the Lost Ones Sleep by Angeline Hawkes
• Where Men Had Seldom Trod by Lee Clark Zumpe
• Something to Hold the Door Closed by Lon Prater
• Terror from Middle Island by Stephen Mark Rainey & Durant Haire
• Children of the Mountain by Stewart Sternberg
• They Who Dwell Below by William Jones
• Wagon Train for the Star by Scott Lette
• Incident at Dagon Wells by Ron Shiflet
• Ahiga and the Machine by Robert J. Santa
• The Dead Man’s Hand by Jason Andrew
• Jedediah Smith and the Undying Chinaman by Charles P. Zaglanis
• Snake Oil by Matthew Baugh
• Cemetery, Nevada by Tim Curran
• The Rider of the Dark by Darrell Schweitzer

I’m not much of a daily writer.  Sometimes, I go a month or more without actually making new words on the page.  I have more of a binge and purge muse.  She is always on the job, stirring the pot, but when it comes to making new copy, she only works in fits and starts.  I think and plan and mulch my subconscious, even outline on occasion, and edit a lot. Then when the urge to write is there AND I have a large block of time to do it in, I sit down and write.  Usually, if I have a couple hours, I can drop anywhere from 8-16 pages.  This is why writers’ retreats (formal and self-created) can be so productive for me.

For a long time I kicked myself for not being one of the BIC2000 (Butt-in-Chair, 2000 words a day).  But over time I realized I’m not doing too bad, all things considered.  I have periods each year where I do write every day.  The single biggest thing I’ve noticed that keeps me from writing is the guilt feeling that I should be writing (new fiction, specifically) every day or else I’m just not doing it right. Over time, I’ve come to the realization that for me, writing whatever the hell I want (rather than something contracted) getting an average of a page a day over the year is pretty good.  Probably the best I can aim for, so long as I keep a dayjob and some kind of family and social life.  In previous years, I’ve only managed about 50-60,000 words a year, with an occasional blip around that lofty goal of 90K.

But I just looked at my stats, given it’s midyear and all.  So far, all is well.  193 pages (in SMF) of new copy logged, plus 1 salable poem.  Seeing’s how June isn’t over and the year not quite at half-done, I’m actually a bit ahead of my 1 page per day average.  Not bad, considering I’ve only had 16 actual writing days this year.  Average day is 12 pages.

Most of it on the unholy mashup novel, but some on a new short story from start to finish and yet more to finish an older short story.  Also, an older, unfinished novel (or novella, I think)  got some of my attention at the beginning of the year.  I think it’s this transition over the past couple years from short stories to novels and longer works that makes me kind of crazy.  The feeling that I rarely finish anything equates in my brain to the feeling that I’m not actually accomplishing anything.

I know this isn’t true, but typing END on those two short stories sure did feel good.

The place I’m sucking more and more these days is marketing stuff.  I have a back log of inventory which is tended by an equally binge-and-purge clerk.  Every couple of months I try to get religion and put those stories out there into the wild and make them fend for themselves.  

 My daytime work involves significant editing (a big honking textbook) so I ought to be counting at least some fraction of that  as “writing” work I get paid for.  I guess all in all, I’m not doing too bad. Plenty of room for improvement, but not enough room to wind up and kick myself.

Much.

At the end of last year, I noted that I had only read 3 novels (of 19) by women authors, and so set out to broaden my horizons a bit more in 2009.  (Pun only realized after the fact, heh).  Loosely, the goal is to double the number in 2009, but not to read any book just because the author was a woman.  There needed to be some other aspect in play as well that made me want to read it.

So I listened to THE HOST while working out earlier this year; Shelley and I were supposed to read this together but she got stuck in her own TBR pile and so I had to go it alone.    I picked up Octavia Butler’s KINDRED, which is still on my TBR shelf, a lonely woman in a sea of F. Paul Wilson, Arturo Perez-Reverte, Howard Waldrop, Michael Burstein, Tim Powers and Jay Lake, plus a bunch of zines and a bit of nonfic.  Then promptly set about reading whatever struck my fancy next through the year. Figuring the right mood would strike and sooner or later, I would know it was time to launch into KINDRED.  Meanwhile, I kept my eyes open whenever I went bookgazing to note any titles by women authors that caught my eye.

When the Small Beer sale happened, I saw Elizabeth Hand’s GENERATION LOSS on the list, and remembered being interested enough to read a review or two last year, but never had actually seen it in front of me when I was looking to buy a book.  See, what I think is more a factor when I go to buy a book or decide what to read next, more than the gender of the author, or whether they are a tranny Venezuelan midget of unusual shoesize or whatever, is the attractiveness of the story–or rather of the story as it is being sold to me.  (Plus all the memes and meta-stories that may surround the book and its concept.)

Which got me to wondering: How much of the overwhelmingly male gender bias of my own reading selections is based  on how differently a man’s book is often marketed, and how much ( or little?) is based on differences in the kinds of stories women tell.  Maybe some of my more feminist-aware friends could illuminate me on this, or how to forensically investigate?

Short story long, I picked GL out of the Small Beer sale lineup and it arrove over the weekend.  A gorgeous volume. When it got here, I thought I was going to set it on the TBR shelf, but it called to me immediately with the glamer of a new and shiny thing.  Given the timing ( I had just finished reading a nonfic book not yet reported here), I launched right in to it.  Chapter 1 kicked some serious ass; this is writing of personal intensity and a confidence of skill that borders on brashness.  I’m stoked to read more, but running a bit late this morning for work because I was up too late reading.

Anywho, just wanted to capture this while I ate my breakfast.  Off I go.

But I’ve had a good life all the way.

Yesterday was a wonderful, momentous, phenomenal day.  Twenty years before, at the ever-so-worldly age of 17, I woke up for my first morning at the Navy boot camp in  Orlando, Florida, where a growling chief with a baseball bat and a metal garbage can (remember those?) served as the only alarm clock I’d ever need.

To celebrate the occasion,  Shelley did the incredible.  She surprised me with a planned out, awesome day.  My brother Chad and his Shellie were up visiting from Tennessee, and the four of us spent the day tooling around in a rented convertible, listening to Jimmy Buffett, The Offspring, Blue October and the sound of wind, glorious wind in our faces.  At the end of the day, there was an amazing dinner with my friends from Indiana Horror Writers at Rock Bottom Restaurant and Brewery in Indianapolis.  Sara Larson gave a very nice toast (which thankfully drowned out my bro’s version!), the lovely Danielle Friedman graced us with her company (and tabletalk quickly turned to intestines, natch!), Michael West had some good news I’m not sure I can repeat as of yet, Jerry Gordon and Jill (who I don’t get to see enough of, but the promise of poker may change that!), Maurice Broaddus with Sally and the entire posse, Natalie of the last name that escapes me, Brian Shoopman, and a passel of others I am leaving out only for the sake of brevity and poor memory.  What a great capper to a great day!

There is yet more fun to be had today, before the fam drives back to moonshine country, but if you were there and you’re reading this, thank you so much.  You have no idea how touched I was that you all showed up to surprise me and share in the celebration.

I feel truly blessed and lucky in the afterglow of that fantastic day. Thank you Shelley for putting it all together behind my back.  I love you so much!

If the next twenty years slip away even a fraction as happily, they will be twenty damn good years….

From NYT:

In a sign that the government has stepped up its antitrust investigation of a class-action settlement between Google and groups representing authors and publishers, the Justice Department has issued formal requests for information to several of the parties involved.

The Justice Department has sent the requests, called civil investigative demands, to various parties, including Google, the Association of American Publishers, the Authors Guild and individual publishers, said Michael J. Boni, a partner at Boni & Zack, who represented the Authors Guild in negotiations with Google.

“They are asking for a lot of information,” Mr. Boni said. “It signals that they are serious about the antitrust implications of the settlement.”

The Justice Department began its inquiry into the sweeping $125 million settlement this year after various parties complained that it would give Google exclusive rights to profit from millions of orphan books. Orphans are books still protected by copyrights, but that are out of print and whose authors or rights holders are unknown or cannot be found.

More at the source.

Land of the Lost — All crassness, no comedy. I think Beavis and Butthead were hired to do the script punch-up.  The previews made it look like this would be a somewhat family friendly film, but with all the smarmy innuendo and drug references, it turned out to be the year’s worst movie with the kids.

But on the plus side, it was a drive-in double feature with Star Trek again.  Youngest fell asleep (predictably) and oldest got confused when “the old guy” showed up.  (Take note, producers, when trying to shoehorn Shatner into the next one!)  I’m happy they wanted to see it at all though.

My youngest told me in the car a few weeks back that she “doesn’t like Fantasy”.  Dragons, wizards, all that jazz that she says “could never happen”.  (This was a sad moment for me as a sci-fi geek dad.)    When I asked her whether she thought a talking sponge and his starfish friend could really have all those adventures under the sea, she said “That’s not fantasy, that’s comedy!”  Guess I still have a lot to learn about genres….

=D

Just after Sunset by Stephen King. (audio) Listened to this on audiobook recently. Brilliantly produced and cast.  I think “N.” was my favorite story of the book.  Naturally, it was the  modernized take on traditional horror that drew me in:  Lovecraftian/Machenian themes and plot delivered obliquely through a series of letters, news articles, and stories nestled within conversations nestled within stories.  The gist of the horror:  Spontaneous OCD as a response to (and defense against) otherworldly terrors attempting to break through into our plane of existence.  But it’s far better than that weak synopsis, Trust me.

Also, this collection highlighted for me a lesson I’m occasionally  delighted to relearn.  A hallmark of satisfying fiction, a trait ceded wrongly and often to the exclusive care of  the “literary/mainstream” style, is that it makes the characters’ inner landscape and the events that transpire there seem as real as the outer one.  It emphasizes what is happening inside the POV’s head, and in such a way as to endow the reader with a sense of verisimilitude of the subjective alongside that of the fictionalized “objective” world of the story.   Things happen inside the character, not just out there in the world.

Makes sense to me, at least.  Especially as regards to Horror and Weird fiction.  Because Inside is where the  horror and weird are really happening, anyway!

I wonder if I’d have arrived at this renewed realization from reading the book alone, or if to some degree the challenge of writing so much omniscient viewpoint for UHM, with a focus on tone and theme, has brought this into sharper relief.

Working in Huntsville, AL for a few days.  Had an awesome Cajun dinner with a writing friend (Crawfish etoufee, fried okra, green bean casserole, and lots of Shiner Hef to wash it down.)

On the plane down here—-I hate Delta.  Their chairs are not made for people with shoulders and every time I fly them I end up with pinched muscles in my back from trying to collapse my shoulder blades into Delta’s We Hate People(TM) brand chairs—-Ahem.  Let’s try that again without the rant. Heh.

On the plane down here I finished reading The Devil’s Marionette by Maurice Broaddus.  A Shroud publication with an attractive layout and showcasing an absolutely gorgeous piece of cover art from Steven C. Gilberts (who also did the cover for Frontier Cthulhu and upcoming(?) Tales Out of Miskatonic University) .  The story itself started slowly for me; it took until the second chapter before I felt I had become 100% engaged.  I think this is because in Ch 1, we are meeting so many people, and so much is happening in the story’s infrastructure:  thematic planks are being nailed in place, rifles being hung over the mantles, that sort of thing.  But long about Chapter 2, this thing really took off for me.  The vasty middle of this story rings with so much authenticity to vaudeville, to Hollywood and the comedy “industry”, and probably most important–with emotional authenticity.  There are sections in here where I felt the sense of rage and injustice heaped upon these disparate black actors in an inimical white world as if they were my own.  While the end veers a bit into familiar horror territory, it dovetails nicely with what has gone before it.  Overall, this was a surprisingly engaging, heartfelt story that truly transported me as a reader–not just to another place and time, but into another view of the world.

Also on the plane, I managed to hammer out a little bit more on unholy mashup novel, to the tune of some peculiarly affecting music.  Not long ago, I mentioned renting the original B/W Dracula and it having as a bonus feature the Philip Glass/Kronos Quartet original movie score.  Loved it, wanted to find it.  Forgot about it.  So imagine my surprise when I found a copy of the CD in my library’s collection!  This is a wonderful, wonderful piece of music for writing to, or just thinking to.  Evocative strings and drama in every phrase–without ever tipping over into melodrama.  Highly recommended.  (Are you paying attention, realthog?  Here’s a link just for you, with clips)

Tom Hanks looked around at all the exposition.  “Gee, there sure is a lot of exposition here,” he said, to no one in particular.

Then, because no one was listening the first time, he found some people and repeated it while standing near them.

Later, he picked up some of the exposition and used it to wipe the drool from his intended audience’s collective chin.  “I’m wiping the drool from their collective chin because I think they are so stupid they need every thing repeated dozens of times before they get it,” he said, dabbing at the audience’s chin drool with some exposition he found laying around.

When the required two hours of cinematic exposition had elapsed,  an important old fart in red teleported (apparently) to the Swiss Guard’s computer room long enough to watch some good old fashioned expositiony video.  “That there is some good old fashioned expositiony video,” the old man said, as he watched the expositiony video, which was both good and old fashioned.  “I must now teleport back to the Sistine Chapel, so I can glare sternly at the guy who was doing bad things on the expositiony video.  Thank goodness he walks so slowly.”

Then the important old fart in red teleported back to the Sistine Chapel, so he could be there in time to glare sternly when the guy who had been doing bad things on the expositiony video showed up. “When the guy who walks so slowly gets here, glare sternly guys,” he said to the other old farts in red, perhaps envisioning a Catholic version of the Care Bear Stare (but sternlier and glarier).  “I just saw him doing bad things on the expositiony video.”

A few minutes later, the movie ended.  But Tom Hanks did not notice because he was too busy loving on the exposition.  So he stuck around for another twenty minutes or so to  explain what happened.  “I sure do love me some exposition,” he said, lovingly loving on the expositiony exposition.

Remember the good ol’ days, when the writernets were abuzz with tales of Barbara Bauer and Publish America atrocities?

I hear they’re coming back.

Here’s the latest, brought to my attention when a friend sent me this PW puff-piece on IndieReader.com:

Edelman, who is both a self-published and conventionally published author, emphasized that the site will also be selective about the books it accepts. An editorial board made up of an editor, agent, book marketer and a consumer reader, will vet each title before it goes on the site. IndieReader is nonexclusive and will charge self-publishers $149 a year to sell through the site and another $25 fee to cover submission costs. If the book is rejected, IndieReader will refund the yearly charge, but not the submission fee. Once a book is listed on-site, IndieReader will notify self-publishers of purchase requests by e-mail and the author is charged with fulfillment. Authors set the retail price and are free to add all kinds of content to their author pages.

[*In the comments, Edelman clarifies that the $25 fee is included in the $149.]

MAX by “James Patterson”.  Dear Whoever Ghosted This One: They say sequels eventually must devolve into self-parody.  Sadly, I must say that this series has sunk even lower than that; it’s become an unintentional parody of boy’s adventure cartoons like GI JOE and Captain Planet.  MAX lacks even a dropperful of the energy, coherence and craft shown in the first 3 books.  It is only slightly better than book 4.  Think I’m done with these and eldest daughter is on her own with them.

P.S. Giving the villain’s sub-oceanic dome-lair an “electric net” for protection was made of first class sciencefail.  Also, one does not research the Navy and submarines by watching MASH reruns.  And one more thing–Naming the helpful sea-beasty in a kid’s book Gor?   Seriously? Seriously???

Skinny Bastard by PETA.  Liked the drill-instructor tone of the jacket copy and wanted to pick up something to get back on track and motivated.  Little did I know that the cruel  way chickens are treated in industrial farms somehow affects my health.  All joking aside, this book is a well planned out bait-and-switch.  Let’s sell a PETA pamphlet disguised as a diet book.  Worked for the crazy old lady who always gave out Watchtower “comic books” at Hallowe’en, didn’t it?

Yes, it has at least as much validity as it does profanity; more than 500 footnote citations and expletives can be found within these pages.  But in the end, it boils down to  simply this: BE VEGAN, YOU SMELLY FAT VAGINA-MAN.  So the essence of veganism, according to the book, is the avoidance of any animal exploitation in the human diet.  I suppose farm animal labor is excluded, so long as you treat the animal with dignity; they weren’t really clear on that.  So maybe it’s more accurate to say no animal parts or excretions. (They also shun honey.)   Is eating primarily fresh, whole, raw, plant-based food healthier for you?  I believe so, and if you can tune out  the  authoress’ PETA spokesmodels’ innate self-loathing long enough to finish the first few chapters of the book, a rational person will probably agree.  Is our meat industry cruel and bad for the planet?  Undoubtedly; though I would argue with PETA that the word human has no place in the word humane, and that their methods of outreach/education are often nearly as unpleasant and counterproductive as these people’s .   Now, I have cut WAY back on meat/egg/dairy and tried to focus on the veggies, fruit and nuts more, plus drinking more water and much less caffeine.  So the book accomplished something, despite itself.  I admit to feeling better, though the scale isn’t budging.  And I admit I’m still looking forward to this weekend’s festival of grilled meat.

Welcome to Hell: A Working Guide for the Beginning Writer by Tom Picirilli.  More powerful Fairwood Press goodness. Meeting Tom and Michele Scalise at MoCon was a blast.  Wish we’d had more time to talk.   Reading this breezy, heartfelt volume almost makes up for it, though.  There’s tons of good information packed in here tighter than my grandma’s shoe closet.  A recurring motif at the “business of writing” panel was how every time Tom would say something, one of the other panelists would remark how they wish he had told them that before they went and made whatever the new writer career mistake was that he had just warned about.  On reading the book, I feel smarter about the craft, business and lifestyle of writing–of being a writer.  While reading it, I too found myself griping at Tom as if he could hear me, “Wish you had told me that BEFORE I made the mistake, dammit!”  But at least he’s warned me away from a half dozen others–or more.  Another jewel from Fairwood Press, now signed (!) and at home on my keeper shelf.

What I’m Reading Now:

Elfquest, vol 1. for the nostalgia of it all

Untitled Novel by one of my favorite writers

Just After Sunset (Audio) by Stephen King