| The Night Shade Interview |
[14 Jun 2009|06:33am] |
In preparation for Tuesday's reading at Borderlands Books, Night Shade was kind enough to do an interview for their website, wherein I ramble on about all things LIGHTBREAKER, including giving a brief overview of what is to come in later books.
Additionally, Rick Kleffel at the Agony Column has posted some commentary on LIGHTBREAKER, where he says, among other things: "It's steeped in a dense mythology the author uses to transform and subvert the mystery genre into something both tougher and more fun. Markham's a great guide to Teppo's universe, which feels appropriately Hermetic, self-sealed and internally consistent. Teppo has clearly done his research, but more importantly, he enjoyed it, and readers will get that sense of joy and exploration."
Amen to that. More often than not, we forgot how much fun we're having when we're doing the long march to the end of a book, and assuredly, the CODEX books are a hoot to write.
For those of you in San Francisco area, hopefully I'll see you Tuesday night--7pm--at Borderlands Books. A reading and other hilarity with ensue.
UPDATE: And, for those who are elsewhere, I happily direct you to an Amazon link for Lightbreaker where you may read those magical words: "IN STOCK."
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| Reading in SF (June 16th) |
[31 May 2009|08:07pm] |
Celebrating the release of Lightbreaker, there will be a reading on June 16th at Borderlands Books, in San Francisco.
Borderlands Books
866 Valencia
San Francisco, CA
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
Time: 7:00pm
Tell your peeps. Spread the word. It's a weeknight reading (I know), but it's what worked with my schedule. We take what options we have, don't we? Anyway, tell your friends. Come on down. I'd love to see you and finally have a book to sign for you.
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| Blue Tyson reviews Lightbreaker |
[08 May 2009|07:49am] |
Blue Tyson does his mini review of Lightbreaker at his Not Free SF Reader site. "An urban fantasy novel that is a lot more Hellblazer, Mage and Highlander than it is high heels, hot pants and horizontal vampire mambo." This makes me laugh, and I'm glad he's offered such a concise distinction.
You really need to read the rest of his reviewthough, as it gets funnier (and true). I seem to have hit all the right buttons with him. Excellent.
How has he read it, you ask? Probably via the e-book edition out via Night Shade's relationship with Baen. The latest word from Night Shade HQ is that physical books will be on hand and shipping May 19th.
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| So Freakin' Close |
[27 Apr 2009|10:35pm] |
Twenty-four pages left. 2 - 4. Mostly minor line edits with one or two holes to fill, and HEARTLAND will be wrapped. Man, talk about close.
I do love Maureen McHugh's chart on Writing The Novel. So true. So very true. I'm discovering there's a corollary that comes with the second draft.
1. The first third will lull you. Line edits will go pretty quickly, the story will hold together fairly well, and you'll think, Yeah, okay, I can do this; this won't be so bad. You'll blow through a hundred pages in a day or so, and suddenly, this book will almost be DONE.
2. The middle third will remind you that of that aphorism that Gene Wolfe offered to Neil Gaiman: "Every book is your first book." Your pace will be halved (if not cut to a quarter), and you'll wonder what you were trying to do with introducing an entirely new character and plot arc at the 50,000 word mark. Is this really the time to work out that impulse to do an experimental tone poem or a Shakespearean pastiche? Really? Couldn't you just have stuck to the formula and cranked this fucker out?
3. The last third will try to kill you. It tried once already on the first draft, and you cleverly got away from its tentacled grip by the cunning use of magic tricks. Little things like: "INSERT PARAGRAPH HERE THAT SUMS UP THE THEMATIC THRUST OF THE BOOK," and "TIE UP LOOSE ENDS HERE," and even "FUCK, I DON'T KNOW. AND THEN MAGIC HAPPENS, AND EVERYONE GOES OFF TO HAVE SEX." But now? You have to fill those holes.
I swear it feels like I am writing at a serious, serious clip here, but at the end of the evening, I've only vetted four pages of the manuscript. But I think the whole thing will stand on its own now. Almost.
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| The Weekend; How Was Yours? |
[19 Apr 2009|06:50pm] |
This weekend, summed up in two tweets.
SAT: File Under 'Marvelous Things': Zee dancing madly on the couch while the Beatles are singing "All Together Now" at the end of Yellow Sub.
SUN: Dear small birds who opted to put their delicate blue-green eggs in my dryer exhaust vent: Sorry. I am an ogre. #coexistingwithnaturefail
Oh, and yeah, first 30K of HEARTLAND line-edited.
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| Norwescon Roundup |
[14 Apr 2009|08:18am] |
I survived Norwescon and had quite a bit of fun, actually. Panels went well, and I met some delightful people on them and at them. VP-alum pal Jeff Soesbe and I had one on how to properly celebrate your first major sale; there were a pair related to mythic structures and fantasy; and one on brain extensions, which happened to be the best attended of my bunch.
Night Shade sold out of Lightbreaker around noon on Sunday so there was a couple of hours of people not being able to get a copy, which makes the Evil Overlord in me cackle with delight. Soon, though, it'll be everywhere, and I will stop trying to track every copy, but for right now, the fifty or so of you? You are my favorites.
Members of Team Seattle were in attendance and I had a chance to bask in their glory. Mark Henry read from Road Trip of the Living Dead, his latest Amanda Feral zombie socialite adventure, and trying to describe how sick and wrong it all was will not do justice to the proceedings. And then he read from something even freakier. Richelle Mead read from the soon to be released Succubus Heat, the horrifying adventures of Georgia Kincaid in Canada (I know, the Horror! the Horror!). Both are filled with Teh Funny. Lots of it. Lisa Mantchev was flaunting ARCs of Eyes Like Stars, her YA theater fairy book--one, I have to admit, I'm looking forward to, thereby killing my cred with the occult crowd. I picked up a copy of Underground, the Kat Richardson book I didn't have and had her sign it (fanboy moment of the day).
And then there were Steve and Vladimir from Third Place Books, both of whom are filled with all manner of bookseller enthusiasm and I do need to get up north and see their store. Vladimir and I had two panels together and discovered that we could both name drop Eliade like we knew what we were talking about. (Oh, and Steve: It's Atomik Circus that I was talking about.) There were many other fabulous people whom I ended up on a first name basis with: Jenna Waterford, Tiffany Trent, Warren Hammond (who I met briefly in the autograph session and he and I and Kat shared our love for Chris McGrath; I still think Kat got the better atmosphere and Warren the better burned-out noir hero, but I'm not complaining too much), Gigi, Lance, J- (whose name has multiple syllables and an apostrophe, and as I will get it wrong, I'm just going to abbreviate it to "J-" for the time being), Gary, Garth, that guy with the--okay, yes, I suck at names. Forgive me.
Anyway, lots of fabulous people. It's nice to discover I don't have to go far to find a hotel full of entertaining souls. All of whom played along nicely with my publisher/carnie barker when he turned the Presidential Suite bathroom at the WOTC party into a glorified game of quarters with the bathtub. It was NOT my idea. Stop looking at me like that. Go look at the pictures instead.
The kids were waiting for me when I got home, and so we had Easter later in the day, much to their delight. After that, I shucked off the monkey suit and finally relaxed. It was good to be home.
(Picture taken by my five-year old son. Yes, he is better with the camera than I am, and half of the decent pictures taken Easter afternoon were taken by him. God help us all when he actually figures out how to read a manual. Which should be some time next week.)
I've got a head full of ideas too. Finished off the epilogue to HEARTLAND yesterday, so that's officially a draft. 121K. Most of which were written since January. Where do I find the time? I have a couple of weeks before the editorial calendar opens up, so I'm going to polish and fill in some holes, but baring huge problems with the ms., we're on track for a fall release. Which, in turn, means I should start thinking about ANGEL TONGUE and GHOST SPEAK now rather than later, but I think I need a bit of a break. (And hmm, I need to decide if GHOST SPEAK is going to be the title of the fourth book; it's one of my least favorites of the series.)
That, and there's this new book trying to bust out of my head. Man, it wants out. I have no idea if there is even a viable market for this sort of thing (and yes, it does keep insisting that it has the legs to be a series), but I'm going to see if I can lock the story down a bit and get enough on paper for it to be my agent's problem for a few months.
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| Half Page and Half Chapter |
[07 Apr 2009|09:41am] |
I picked up April's Locus and discovered that Night Shade Books has given Lightbreaker the half page spread of their ad. Half. Page. Ad. In Locus. For my little book.
That makes my day.
Norwescon this weekend for local peeps. My schedule is a few entries back, for those who'd like to stop by and say hello. Other than those times and locations, it'll probably be BarCon.
Half a chapter to go in HEARTLAND. I can almost taste the blood.
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| I Am In Trouble, Reason #345 |
[30 Mar 2009|07:33am] |
This morning, Zipporah's bedroom light is on when I go in to get her up. "Why is your light on?" I ask. She looks up at it and says, "Because it is."
She's not yet three.
I am doomed.
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| The Rapture of Repetition |
[25 Mar 2009|12:23pm] |
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) barthanderson pointed me toward one of the more fascinating uses for Twitter the other day. Weiser Books is pulling a tarot card twice a day (#1card and #nightcard). Tarot devotees are responding with interpretations (tagged with the corresponding tag, of course). I wasn't going to get sucked in, until this morning's card. The Moon. To which I had to write:
THE MOON: Blood in the water. Yours, or mine? I'm not sure. Our hands betray what we have done. Father, I'm sorry. #1card
I was sitting in Starbucks at the time I saw the card come up, thinking about the next bit in HEARTLAND, and ruminating in the back brain about reoccurring phrases. How there are certain sentences and phrases that become loaded with enough meaning that their placement in the novel isn't accidental. This is an out-growth of The Potemkin Mosaic actually, where the use of a certain word was rife with the linking structure that came with that word.
The Moon is central to Lightbreaker, and it is a card I spent a lot of time with when I was sorting out a sequence of events near the end of the book. And, in the section I'm currently working in HEARTLAND, Markham has just passed between two pillars, across a threshold, and into another world.
All of which is a rambling way to say that the above interpretation applies to both LIGHTBREAKER and HEARTLAND, via links created by some of those phrases. And I'm realizing that one of the central phrases that drove Markham through the first part of LIGHTBREAKER is going to be the thing that will cause him much pain in Book 4 (and following).
But what are these phrases? They're little aphorisms that we mutter to ourselves, that we swear by. They are the tiny rules that allow us to function throughout the day. They are our excuses and our justifications. And I think it's one of the fascinating things about exploring characters, when you find these little truisms that define them and see how far they'll go. How long will they hold them dear? How long will they rely upon them? At what point does the ritual of this phrase, repeated over and over, become meaningless?
And what do they do then?
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| Norwescon 32 Itinerary |
[23 Mar 2009|09:12am] |
I received my itinerary for Norwescon over the weekend. So that you may plan when and where you might ambush the Bunny Magus, here's the run-down.
Thursday
I Just Sold My First Story/Novel! Whoopee! [6:00 PM @ Cascade 8]
I sat in on this panel last year (along with Lisa Mantchev and Michael Ehart), and we managed to pack the room and keep everyone entertained. Hopefully, me and Mike and Jeff and John will do the same this year. Jeff (Soesbe) and John (P. Alexander) can probably still remember that first blushing excitement. Mike (Moscoe) will probably play the old curmudgeon ("I remember the days when we cut down the very trees that made the paper that went into our books!"), and I will try to pretend that I'm not as long in the tooth as he is (while I was off being fussy about 'art', he was actually selling books; crazy old man).
Friday
Extending the Brain [11:00 AM @ Cascade 5]
I signed up for a few science-type panels because I was trying not to be that guy who "just wants to talk about writing." As a result, I will be making shit up as fast as I can in front of a room full of people about cognitive corelation theories, quantum personality loops, and Very Small Things That Can Get Lost In Your Ears(tm).
The other three panelists may be bullshitting you as much as I am, which will . . . (wait for it) . . . extend your brain.
Magic Realism VS Fantasy - Fight! [Noon @ Cascade 7]
This one I'm actually keen to participate in. The panelists--Mimi Noyes, Mark Ferrari, Mark Teppo, Vladimir Verano, and Bruce Taylor--look to be a lively bunch who will happily take sides on this one. Bruce Taylor is going to surprise all of us by showing up in black chainmail and then debunking Magic Realism as a load of crap that only narrow-minded elitists waste their time with when there are so many faerie kingdoms to crush beneath our iron heels!
Myth, Legends and Fairy Tales [4:00 PM @ Cascade 10]
I'm going to invoke the spectre of Claude Levi-Strauss and get thrown off this panel for bringing an academic to the discussion. Though, to be honest, the rest of the panelists will probably bring their favorite dead professor too. After all, we're supposed to be talking about how myths, legends, and fairy tales find their way outside the traditional prisons of fantasy.
After that, it's BarCon and the Writer's Workshop for me (a couple of short stories to critique on Saturday and a novel excerpt on Sunday morning). So, if you're going to Norwescon this year, say hello. I'll probably be in a real daze as copies of Lightbreaker will be available in the dealer's room, which means I'll see them some place other than my house. Which'll be a trip.
I am NOT, at this time, scheduled for a reading. Though, as we didn't read at the University Bookstore event last week, I may try to find an open slot on the schedule and see if I can't do one. I'll post something here if that works out.
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| Lightbreaker Sells Out |
[18 Mar 2009|09:07am] |
As you may have heard, Night Shade was kind enough to drop ship a box of Lightbreaker over to the University Bookstore in Seattle in time for the reading/discussion last night (more discussion than reading, as it turned out). So I got to sit up in front of roomful of folk with a copy of my book on the table in front of me.
(pic by my pal, Rich)
It's been a long time since I've been on a panel (slumming at last year's Norwescon, notwithstanding), and even longer than I've actually talked about Lightbreaker to a room full of people who haven't some passing familiarity with it already. So, yeah, very brilliant things like, "It's full of words and shit" came out of my mouth.
(My wife pointed out later that someone--not her--piped up from the audience and said, "More words than shit!" but I had already wandered off into that tiny little room in our heads where we keep all the instruments of self-torture.)
tbclone47 was kind enough to forward another picture where you can see me trying my best to imitate a man being strangled by an octopus.
Another important safety tip for writers newly annointed with the 'Published Book!' stamp. Find something to do with your hands when you're on a panel. Really. Anything other than what you see me doing in the picture above.
Anyway, afterward, much to Duane's pleasure (and, gee, let's be honest, mine too), we sold out every copy.
Luckily, I got there early and snagged one for myself.
So, wee book, off you go. Have fun. The distribution channels should be getting theirs, and so the rest of the world will soon get a chance to fondle a copy.
I must go wrestle with Chapter 26 of wee book's sibling, which is proving more complicated than it should be. I just have to decapitate a stone elemental and hack off someone's arm (again). You think it'd be easy.
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| Lightbreaker, in the wild |
[17 Mar 2009|05:49pm] |
My phone is full of fail right now, so this is the best I have to offer. One picture of a stack of books.
More later. I'm still busy making the happy bat noise and jumping up and down.
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| XKCD love |
[17 Mar 2009|10:15am] |
My on-going love affair with XKCD is starting to know no bounds. Density was a recent favorite (and, really, 'favorite' is just a matter of deciding which one THIS WEEK I will lavish my love upon). And, if you haven't seen the Cartoon off between XKCD and the New Yorker, you should check it out. Talk about the new guard beating the crap out of the old guard.
And the persistent genius of XKCD isn't always the cartoons; sometimes the true magic lives in the title tag, that little extra kick hidden in the mouse-over. Like the one titled: Alternate Energy Revolution.
Thank God for dreamers.
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| Progress |
[10 Mar 2009|04:13pm] |
Well, look at that. 77,000 words. 10 chapters to go. I do believe I have come out of the Trough of Great Despair and am making the climb toward the final rollercoaster ride to the end. This book might not be the death of me after all. In fact, I'm getting quite a kick of some of it. Especially the parts where everyone is very mean to each other. The surest sign they care.
I've also hit on the little detail that is going to haunt Markham the whole series. It's one line from early on LIGHTBREAKER that speaks a great deal of his obsession with Kat, and it has come to symbolize the physical nature of his . . . investment in the matter at hand. Whatever that may be. Yeah, the payback for what he does in LIGHTBREAKER is going to be hanging over him a long time.
Too bad we have to wait until the end of Book 3 to deliver that bit of revenge unto him.
Caught Watchmen recently too. I agree with John Scalzi in that "it was fine." And, in some ways, I think maybe it didn't need to be made. Well, not entirely. The parts I really liked weren't the spectacle, they were the little bits of humanity. Mostly involving Rorschach, especially his final scene. But what I'm really thinking about is how I've seen this film before. Not this film (and not because it's so much a moving picture version of the graphic novel with better color-correction), but that the images weren't anything new or wondrous.
Unlike, say, the forest elemental in Hellboy 2.
One of the things I really love about the advancements in special effects is that the bar is raised for the writers. It isn't enough that we can dream it anymore, as anything we've imagined in the last ten years can easily be made by three guys and two laptops at the back table of a Starbucks. The movies have caught up with us. It's time to go off and invent new things for them to figure out how to render. I like that having that challenge.
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| Mark Your Calendars: March 17th |
[09 Mar 2009|03:16pm] |
On March 17, the Paranormal Bender Tour will be winding up in Seattle at the University Bookstore. Four of the hot, young urban fantasy kids will be reading from their latest books (Mario Acevedo, Mark Henry, Caitlin Kittridge, and Cherie Priest). The evening will doubtlessly be a hoot as Mario and Mark do funny very very well, and Caitlin and Cherie both write sharp, highly capable protagonists who take no prisoners.
Such a gathering needs an opening act, of course. You don't race right to the main event. You let everyone rattle around a bit, get comfortable, make that last stop off at the bathroom. While some trained monkey does his routine for a few minutes before the headliners come on. I get to be that monkey.
That's right. March 17th. University Bookstore. 7pm. I'll be reading for a real copy of LIGHTBREAKER. Not the dog-eared photocopy that I've been carrying around for the last six months. Not a crappily converted PDF on some wanktastic e-reader. A real book. Just like all the big kids have.
Listen up, my local peeps. This is your chance to get a head start on everyone else. There will be more than one copy. Night Shade has graciously made arrangements for a couple of boxes of Lightbreaker to wind up at the Bookstore in time for the reading. Everyone else will have to wait until April. So, if you can't wait, and you're within a hundred miles of Seattle, next Tuesday is your chance.
I doubt there will be extras. Plan accordingly. (Do you need to see the new cover again?).
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| Someone gets a makeover. |
[03 Mar 2009|09:13pm] |
Just in time for their fabulous debut next month. Or, for those in the Seattle area, a few weeks earlier.
Not to be coy, but I want to get my ducks all in a line before I start making with the jumping up and down. But, yes indeed, my long a-waiting friends, things are moving forward.
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| Today's quote brought to you by Manly Palmer Hall |
[03 Mar 2009|02:03pm] |
"Although the great cities of today rise as monuments to human ingenuity, they still are a serious menace to the health of the race. The large community brings with it unhealthful congestion, emphasizes poverty, and is a natural breeding place for crime. The vocations and avocations, amusements and recreations of the city dweller are artificial. Locked in a man-made world, he has lost contact with the God-made universe.
No simple Adamite ever groveled before the grotesque jujus of his devil cult with a blinder devotion than that with which the modern man venerates the superstition of wealth. The theory of accumulation has blighted teh whole course of our civilization. It has turned every man against his brother, and filled the world with a terrible fear. No longer is it the old blind fear of the unknown, but a new and tangible terror, the sickening realization that survival itself is threatened by human selfishness . . .
. . . Need it be said that the Divine Power that administers universal nature is influenced in no way by man's financial aspirations. The whole mechanics of accumulation is a human invention, and has no significance outside of the human sphere. If men wish to create little symbols on metal or paper, worship them, and fight, cheat, and kill for them, that is a matter of no interest in the wider vistas of Space. An all-wise providence has placed at the disposal of the human race all that is necessary to ensure peace, happiness, health, and security. If mortals prefer to wrangle over debits and credits in a universe filled with life and beauty, their rewards will be according to the demerits of their works.
The principle phobias of the modern man are closely related to the false belief to which he is addicted."
(Manly Palmer Hall, Healing: The Divine Art [1944], pp 22-24)
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| Unkindled |
[27 Feb 2009|09:53am] |
To save some trouble, let me just point you to my twitter stream today. I got a Kindle last night, played with it for a few hours, and have decided to send it back. The tech just isn't there yet. As the twitter-world is asking all sorts of questions, you should go there if you'd like to see the running commentary.
It comes down, in many ways, to the argument that Amazon wants the Kindle to be invisible, as much of a book as a book. And it isn't. Not even close. The case that would have prevailed for me was if it was able to replace the several thousand books at home. It doesn't.
The easiest comparison I have is the iPhone/iTouch and my physical CD collection. The CDs take up about fifteen feet of wall space and I stopped counting when it passed 3000 discs. They are useless to me if I'm not at home, and more often than not, I am not there. And, even if I am there, there's too much to listen. Digitizing the whole collection (which is about a year's worth of work, probably) means that I can carry a lot of it with me, and we can randomize it by genre and pipe it through the house. And I can put all the discs into storage and get that wall space back for . . . ah, bookshelves. What makes it easy to do this is digital distribution channels of music are much, much better now (Ad Noiseam, one of my favorite labels in Germany, is now selling all their releases as MP3s, which means that I don't have to spend $20 in shipping to get them from Germany, and emusic.com is still the best deal out there; and Positron Records' decision to all-digital was probably a risk for them, but they pull it off by having a fantastic interface), the mechanism for ripping and organizing is nearly painless (other than iTunes' insistence on squatting on my processor while it rips), and the portability of the iTouch.
Not to mention the iTunes App Store and all the goodies it contains (anything by Chillingo right now, Loot Wars, the Buddha Machine, Brian Eno's Bloom, Stanza e-reader; that's all on the first screen of my iTouch, there are three more filled with fun distractions).
The Kindle? Nothing about it is as simple, and therefore it is unpolished technology. After eight years of having Windows machines in the house, we recently switched back to all Macs, because doing so makes our lives less complicated. And I've decided that tech must make my life simpler and easier or it's not for me. The Kindle, while it does some things nicely, is still too filled with things that make me annoyed that it isn't better technology. Technology that is readily available. So, yeah, this version? Not for me.
And really, all I wanted was to put Manly Hall's Secret Teachings of All Ages in a portable format that I could read anywhere. What happened when I tried to convert the PDF version that I have? Crappy formatting and no pictures. FAIL.
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| Dreaming Again |
[24 Feb 2009|09:02am] |
Recently, I realized I was googling phrases like "vascular constriction" and "tingling in the extremities" more often than normal, and took a long look at the medication I was tossing down my gullet every morning. Because I was too much of a chicken, I opted to go off one of the pills instead of giving up caffeine, and over the next few days, I went into a lethargic haze that, well, sucked. More googling dredged up the note that that "side effects can be magnified by caffeine" and so I opted to deal with the week of caffeine withdrawal headaches instead.
The upside, in addition to being able to hold a coherent thought for more than five minutes, is the dreams have come back.
Monday morning's was a new yoga morning workout DVD. Now, while Rodney Yee may be the most spiritual centered man in the universe, at 5:00 in the fucking morning, that "I've transcended a need for sleep" tone of his voice isn't relaxing. It's fucking annoying. What we need is something that more appropriately corresponds to what we're feeling at the ass crack of dawn. Like the Mickey Rourke's Post-Oscar Yoga Workout.
It's the morning after the Oscar ceremony, and the setting is some suite at the Hotel Bel-Air in Los Angeles. Rourke hasn't gone to bed yet, and he's, you know, looking like Mickey Rourke after a night of partying. He's half undressed, a beer in his hand, a few more scattered around the room, and he's about to do some yoga to unwind after the disappointing evening. The mike on him is a little hot, and so you hear ever wheeze and crack as he goes through a routine. And it's not some voice-over afterthought, he's providing a running commentary about the routine as he does it, including a near Tourettian stream of invective about the Oscar voters in between each move. You start worrying that he's going to realize that his clothes are falling off and actually remove them.
Rourke, for all the fun everyone has at his expense, has been an underrated actor for a long time. Everyone remembers Robert De Niro from Angel Heart, but Rourke's Johnny Angel was a great sympathetic sinner. He was perfect as Marv in Sin City, of course, and his fatherly Ed Moseby in Domino grounded an otherwise chaotic and frenetic exercise in cinematic masturbation. The thing about Rourke is that he doesn't have to try to exude noir.
Take Bruce Willis, for example. His Hartigan in Sin City was a man who had been pushed to violence. Like most of Willis' hard-boiled guys, they have been driven into a corner, where contrary to their nature, they become bloody-handed men, and this fracture of their moral rectitude weighs on them. They would break shit, but only because we made them that way. Rourke, on the other hand, feels no sorrow at violence because it is as much a part of him as breathing or shitting or cradling a puppy in his arms.
And so, on the yoga tape, when Rourke pops out of an awkward half moon pose, picks up an end table and throws it through the French doors of the hotel suite, and then calmly notices a beer on the cocktail table and finishes it, you don't mind. He turns, looks right at the camera (which zooms in for a close-up, naturally), and says, "Sometimes the toxins don't come out when you coax them, you know? Sometimes you have to tell the little motherfuckers that it is time to go." He smiles that creepy smile that doesn't go all the way to his eyes. The one where you know he's trying for a facial expression that will make you feel less frightened, but he's not quite sure if he's got it right.
And then he goes into downward facing dog, farts a little, and sighs. "Yeah, that's it. That's much better."
# # #
That was Monday. This morning, I was dreaming that Richard Kadrey and I were going to a horror convention in his black Deathproof-esque limo. It was bigger on the inside than outside (of course), and he had a full bar, two leather sofas, and a heart-shaped bed covered in a spread of black shag and dyed peacock feathers. He's lying spread-eagle on the thing as the car screams down the highway, wearing a face mask that provides a constant flow of some sort of psychotropic inhalant, and he's laughing his ass off.
I have no idea what's behind the bed, but based on some of the pictures on his flickr stream, there's probably a cage with someone in it. I don't dare look; I'm too busy trying to stay on the slick leather sofa as the car careens through traffic.
Kadrey's Butcher Bird is available as free download, and if you haven't read it, well, there is no good excuse, really. I found a copy of his Kamikaze L'Amour on the shelf at Night Shade HQ last year when I was visiting, and I read the first few pages and raged for a half hour or so at the injustice that this book wasn't still widely available (though, I have since found a copy of my own). He's got new books coming out from EOS this year and next, and I'm looking forward to them.
His twitter is a subversive stream of surrealistic anarchy. In among all the mundane tweets about what people had for lunch and "I saw a squirrel this morning!" and "Should I get the red or yellow shirt? Reply to vote!" that I seem to have signed up for, Kadrey's posts are little IEDs for the brain. Yesterday, there was one about thawing octopi and the fact that the neighborhood cats would be thrilled later. When he was done with them.
Srsly. And what wakes me up from this dream isn't worrying that the car is going to crash (it isn't; not only is it Deathproofed, but there's a demonic lieutenant from the sixty-third circle of Hell under the hood, chained in place by six hundred and sixty-six lines of EEML*), it's the fact that I don't know what the hell is so goddamned funny.
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*Enochian Evocation Markup Language
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