Surreal Seconds

I dropped from nothingness into a crowd. On my left someone looking like Johnny Depp in Edward Scissorhands. On my right, a biped with fur, pointy ears and a flowing tail.

Hesitantly I took a few steps and information screens began to appear, and upon experimentation I discovered I had control over them just not control in the way I was familiar.

I moved a little further, past more strange people into a spot where several pavilions were set up with artwork and games and other displays.

I began to stroll through the pavilions and suddenly my pace accelerated and I was not in the pavilions any longer but somehow over a vast blue sea. I was walking on water.

I'd been meaning to get around to Second Life for a while, but since I knew there'd be some assembly required in the form of an account and computer tweaks I kept putting it off.

Then I got an e-mail that Dean Koontz would be putting in an appearance and thought what the heck.

I couldn't create an account that night, some system malfunction but I decided to try a second time.

I had to get new drivers for my graphics card and upgrade to a .net platform with new numbers in it, but wow once I finally got it working ...

This avatar living is kind of wild. I've been meaning to read Snowcrash for ages and even had an idea for a thriller using avatars that my agent didn't sell, but the cyberpunk world is here.

It's kind of fabulous just walking around the Second Life environments where blue men hover in meditation and kids with flaming hair swish past with winged shoes. It's like being inside a science fiction novel.

I dropped by the book shop where Koontz did his reading and the currently empty space where Book Mooch has gatherings, visited some clubs and Festival Island. So far loads of fun.

Word has it there's going to be a lot of marketing done in Second Life, so I figured I better get a handle on that for my first life job.

Ironically, I have had trouble getting my hair to look decent in Second Life also. Some things you can't change even in Quicktime.

Wicked cool - DC Comics' John Waters Tie-In

Online and in Virgin Superstores, Court TV is offering a House of Mystery/House of Secrets- style comic to promote its new John Waters-hosted true crime series 'Til Death Do Us Part.

John W is The Groom Reaper, who is probably a little more like House of Mystery's host Cain than Secrets' Able but bears a bit of resemblance to the Cryptkeeper, I suppose.

He introductes dramatized--or in the online case--illustrated tales of marriages gone wrong.

The comic is a lot of fun, building up to a cliffhanger to be resolved on the March 19 series debut, though readers are challenged to vote for which spouse they think is the killer in the meantime. ("She killed him" was pulling ahead of "he killed her") when I voted.

The comic features several great panels of artwork including a stunner of a page in which the husband of the tale, an undertaker, does his wife's makeup, in the morgue.

Clips of the show suggest a bit of "Tales from the Crypt" flavor.

It's a brilliant bit of online promotion for a series with a twist.

The show's website had a bit more about the show including some script samples and video clips. All of it is a nice flourish on a proliferating genre. I'm DVRing it.

Check out the comic at www.courttv.com/comic/

The Zodiac Character Actor's Game

Zodiac is not just a compelling procedural about the hunt for one of America's most frightening serial killers.

It's also an interesting opportunity to play "name that character actor." Clearly David Fincher's casting budget allowed him to draw on the cream of the supporting player crop, so if you go to the movie, see if you can spot:

• The guy who played the library cop in Seinfeld.
• The guy who played the priest in The Sopranos.
• The guy who played the original Hannibal Lecter. (The original original, not Anthony Hopkins who was replaced by Gaspard Ulliel)
• That guy from ER.
• That guy who shot House.
• That guy who played Drew Carey's brother.
• That girl who was the cop on Heroes.
• Chandler's crazy replacement roommate from Friends.
• Ernie from My Three Sons.
• The guy from Young Guns who wasn't Kiefer Sutherland or Lou Diamond Phillips.
• The guy who had small pox in Deadwood.
• That guy who was Carvelli in Welcome Back, Kotter.

And for bonus points can you spot Candy Clark?

Population 436

You know how you run across those rental movies you've never heard of and sometimes get a pleasant surprise?

I enjoyed Population 436, which I'd place in the small-town-where-something-is-a-little-off genre. I supposed it's also a bit of a metaphor for conformity and imposition of values.

I think I enjoyed it most because it reminded me of the now-ancient ABC movies of the week such as the delightfully frightening Crowhaven Farm and the more modestly chilling Dr. Cook's Garden, from an Ira Levin stage play.

I don't know if we really have census takers anymore but P436 stars Jeremy Sisto as civil servant for the bureau assigned to check out the small town of Rockwell Falls, population you guessed it.

The population has remained constant for just about forever in fact.

Sisto as Steve Kady enjoys some of the local pie and color and over about 45 minutes begins to peel away secret layers. Along the way he also befriends a surprisingly atypical small town deputy, a milquetoast against type Fred Durst (!?).

The plot advances to satisfying intensity with expected but appropriate twists and an alternate ending in the special features that basically lets you choose happy vs. sad outcome.

Maybe it's a wait for cable depending on your free time, but overall not a terrible 90 minutes.

Seldom an ill wind

The ad agency behind Careerbuilder's Super Bowl commercials wasn't exactly fired. They quit after the Careerbuilder powers that be called for an "agency review." That because the "office jungle" spots didn't score in the Top 10 of a U.S. Today poll of favorite Super Bowl ads.

I can't help but think the "firing of the client" was a good idea. It's certainly generated a lot of buzz and discussion in advertising trade publications such as Advertising Age and Ad Week.

Everybody knows now--if they didn't already--that Cramer-Krasselt helped Careerbuilder surpass Monster in popularity using their chimp ads, viral e-mails and other clever techniques, not to mention coming up with those Abe Lincoln and the beaver ads for another client. Somehow I suspect they'll take up the slack.

And those "jungle" ads such as "Darts" are great.

Journalistic clutter

I went to see Zodiac over the weekend. Good movie. I can't really speak to the authenticity of its theories on the actual killer, though I've read Robert Graysmith's (played on celluloid by Jake Gyllenhaal) conclusions are flawed and in question.

I can speak to the notion that generally newsrooms are a lot more cluttered than those depicted in the film. (That occurred to me upon reading an article by a current S.F. Chronicle reporter here.)

Ours was always a mess, though it wasn't for lack of trying on the part of the editors and administration.

Our employee handbook read that nothing was supposed to be on your desk but what you were working on at the moment.

Bawahhaaaaaaahaaaaaaahaaaaaaahaaaaaaaaa! Coffee through the nose, ROTFL and all that.

A.) You were always working on 20 things at once.

B.)Journalists don't generally play by the rule books.

There were, of course, people with sick, twisted minds, who had neater desks than others, but there were plenty of desks with piles instead of files. There were also plenty who defied the "no personal pictures" on your desk order.

My desk was among the messiest but I had rivals.

One Sunday when I pretty much maintained the newsroom on my own, the city editor came in and spied the desk of a fellow reporter.

Apparently he'd ordered him to clean his desk the previous Friday.

The reporter had defiantly concentrated on writing news stories instead of developing a new filing system.

Infuriated the editor first nabbed one of the staff cameras and snapped pictures of the desk.

Then he took all of the files including governmental workbooks, manuals, budget printouts and various and sundry other pieces of material. These he stacked behind his own desk so that the reporter would have to come through him to get it all back.

When the reporter arrived the following day to discover the situation, he said: "Fine, if he wants the stuff, he can keep it."

Yeah, it was a day everyone went home happy - we had fewer mistakes and gramatical errors that day, we unearthed more graft and corruption that day, we wrote more stories that changed lives that day.

No wait, I think that's a logical fallacy isn't it? I think we just did all that anyway and they guy's desk being neater didn't have any impact, except it was the biggest morale booste short of the time they decided to post all style errors on the bulletin board.

The greatest of these is love

Love never fails....And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love. -- 1 Corinthians 13:13

I was watching the new Andy Richter sitcom Andy Barker P.I. online. Because I can - there's a real sense of power watching a network show before it airs, and I'm a sucker for private eye stories.

It was a touch of social commentary that really made me chuckle, though.

"Don't park in front of the Christian bookstore unless you want to get towed," warned Andy's strip-mall neighbor. Ah, the observation in that simple joke. Sometimes there's just a disconnect between tenet and practice, between grace and legalism.

Several memories of encounters with irate faithful flooded back to me.

I will post some other time about adventures with a newspaper's wire desk, those often sullen, passive agressive folk who put pages together and write headlines that contradict your copy.

Once upon a time, some wire desk type on the paper at which I worked swaped the quotes associated with the Dr. Billy Graham and Dr. Lawrence Lamb head shots on their columns. It was probably a wrong keystroke.

Instead of clarifying some New Testament nuance, Dr. Graham had a quote about uterine bleeding.

To Dr. Lamb was attributed perhaps a point about Simon of Cyrene.

In addition to their other talents, wire deskites usually wern't around when the complaints came in. They did their best damage at night.

I got the old lady politely pointing out the technical faux paux on the phone.

"You idiots put this quote about you-tree-un bleedin' next to Dr. Graham's quote!" she shouted. "I cain't believe this!"

"I'm sure we'll run a correction," I said.

"This is terrible. I hope Dr. Graham sues you all!"

There was not much more to say to that than: "Thank you for pointing out the mistake. Have a blessed day."

Olfactory Illusions

I've been worried a few days that my modem might be burning out.

I had connectivity problems several days back, and those seemed to coincide with a smell in my home office vaguely like frying components.

I checked all of my connections first, not wanting to lose my Geek Card. Then I got worried some dust might have gathered inside my PC.

So I got out my vacuum cleaner and opened my box up and made sure there were no motes of the dust variety.

Connectivity improved but the smell persisted.

I checked the power supply on my printer and my printer and my spike bar, looking for any spots dust might get to electricity.

Still--the smell. Would that I come up with an olfactory rival for tintinnabulation to describe the smell.

Finally I decided I'd just wait out the modem, which had no dust in it. Let it run its course, connect me to the world then upon its death be replaced.

Yesterday at work, an IT guy came over because my DVD drive would not open and he put in a new one.

To celebrate this morning, when my buddy Robert, the photographer extraordinaire, brought a binder of photos over I plopped one into the new DVD drive.

And I started smelling the smell.

Once I'd convinced myself it wasn't a brain tumor, I stuck my nose in the DVD drive. (I don’t really recommend it.) Dust sneaked in on the new drive, I decided.

And I proceeded to look at Robert's photos. And I smelled the smell some more.

Eventually I started to notice I smelled the smell when I opened the binder Robert had brought. It contained proof sheets and plastic CD sleeves.

Plastic CD sleeves share an uncanny resemblance to the smell of frying electronic components.

And so, I’ve discovered, does the plastic mat in my home office that I bought a few weeks ago.

What's On the iPod?

My iPod's shuffle feature has served up 'Round Midnight by Thelonious Monk even though it's not quite 8 a.m.

I'm not sure if that's a dark omen or simply a mellow one.

Giving and Receiving

Book Mooch is so far proving to be a bit of all right.

I ran across the notion of tresspassing as a hobby, aka urban exploring, while researching my on-the-shelf-at-the-moment novel Zoe's Missing--which includes scenes set in an abandoned building. I was excited to see David Morrell of Rambo and The Totem fame had written a novel on that passtime. It's called Creepers and appears to be a chilling thriller. Got it in a Book Mooch swap for the exorcism thriller Come Closer.

Then I didn't get any requests for a while, though I earned the right to mooch L.A. Banks' Minion by having enough books in my inventory.

I added a few more books over the weekend and already have two more requests:

• Green Girls by Michael Kimball. It's an offbeat thriller, quite a good novel
• The Stone King by Alan Grant, a Justice League novel with a Batman emphasis

That gives me enough points for two requests. Kind of a happy spot to be in - what do I want next. I think I'm going to go for some urban paranormal fantasy novels because I've been enjoying those of late - just have to decide which ones I want to try.

If I should die

Don't know why I didn't think of it when I was talking about Stories of Suspense a while back. It includes Jack Finney's "Contents of a Dead Man's Pockets."

Wayne's got a pic on his blog of what the Reaper might find.

Along with keys, change and a few other odds and ends this is what he'd get with me.

I tend to like casual slacks with extra pockets on the legs these days. Allows for easier toting of the iPod, cell and digital camera.

I refuse to wear my cell phone on my belt as a matter of personal preferance.

Radar Range

I'm convinced my microwave oven includes alien technology. It came with the house, so I'm not sure of its origins.

Either it was accidently shipped to the contractor from Roswell, or it's one of those "Tommyknockers" things and I rewired it in my sleep, enhancing its factory presets.

I came to this conclusion not when it threw sparks off frozen diced bellpepper I thaw periodically for omlets, but while I was attempting to get a taco shell crisp without searing a hole through it tonight. Anything above twenty seconds and a taco shell is ashes.

It's the most powerful microwave I've ever owned, and it's particularly annoying with these new 100 calorie bags of microwave popcorn I bought by mistake. Christine said I have to use them all before I can buy more.

I can't seem to get all of the kernels popped before my microwave burns a hole in the side of the bag, though. I probably could use a half-power setting or something, but I don't like figuring out how to make it cook at half power. I hate when frozen dinners demand that you do that, while reminding me my food will be hot once its microwaved. "Don't come running us if you get a steam burn," they admonish me.

If I have to go to all the trouble to figure out how to set it to half power, I think I need to see if I can harness its capabilities.

Maybe I can use it to leverage world peace. I'll get back to you as soon as I figure this all out.

Books I'm Embarassed To Say I Haven't Read Yet II: All Heads Turn When the Hunt Goes By

I discovered John Farris as a reader with the paperback publication of "Son of the Endless Night." I knew of "The Fury" but I hadn't felt compelled to read another psychic story when it was released.

SOTEN, on the other hand, promised an excitingly different twist on the demonic possession story. It focuses a young man commits a murder while possessed by a demon.

He's tried and a "demonic possession" defense is mounted. Of course-- need I say it--all hell breaks loose at the trial.

After reading that I rushed right out and found a used--hey, all I could get at the time, we didn't have no Amazon in the '80s--copy of "All Heads Turn When the Hunt Goes By."

As Charles noted recently that phrase is a magnificent combination of words, and the book was touted as remarkable in many Farris articles. It's on many Top 100 Horror lists.

I proceeded to not read it.

That's a super power of mine, even though I knew it was supposed to be fantastic. (David J. Schow discusses just how fantastic it is in this review.)

I read "Shatter" and "Minotaur" and "Scar Tactics" by no "AHTWTHGB."

I don't have an excuse other than the "I was busy defense."

So I've been deprived of the intricate tale of families and history and voodoo it promises. It's one more selection on my shelf of must-read-horror, and I hope to rectify the situation soon.

American Gothic

When I mentioned to the lady who cuts my hair that Christine was contemplating a garden this spring, she suggested that we pose beside it for a photograph mimicing American Gothic.

She was surpised at my lack of enthusiasm for that notion.

It's not a bad idea, I guess, but it doesn't quite appeal to my twisted humor, though you'd think it would. If I warm to it, I'll just make one in Photoshop.

Photos aside, I am enthused about doing a little Square Foot Gardening, the approach Christine has determined we should pursue.

I never knew dirt could be so complicated, but we'll arrive at the right soil mixture eventually.

I fix a lot of salads, so the thought of some fresh produce as an enhancement is a plus, and we haven't had a garden in years. (P.J. O'Rourke once noted some jalapenos can turn a salad into a practical joke.)

Christine sees virtue in doing our own garden vs. buying things shipped thousands of miles, and she's found some heirloom plants we'll be using from Seed Savers Exchange.

Heirloom plants, it seems, are those that, for whatever reason, are not commercial in contemporary times. From what I can tell part of the problem is you have a lot of plants that don't spring up in the color we've come to expect tomatos to be.

Growing some purple tomatos and blue potatos does appeal to my sense of the slightly askew, so we'll see how this goes and maybe I'll have some photos around mid-July.

Arrogance and the Writer

Writers are creative, yet I remain amazed at the things writers can find to be arrogant about.

Some of the nicest people I've ever met are scribes, but writers certainly have the ability to be (fill in the blank)-er than thou.

I was at a conference once where a writer was introduced with the proud preface that he had a novel that had sold 1,200 copies. The underlying message was, of course, that it was such a brilliant work that it was not for the unwashed masses but for those brilliant few with pipes and patches on their tweed elbows.

So low sales=cause for arrogance.

Of course high sales likewise is a cause for arrogance.

I suppose arrogance is the shield against the world's slings and arrows and the world's indifference so well identified by Stephen Crane:

A man said to the universe:
"Sir I exist!"
"However," replied the universe,
"The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation."


It's not just writers. Pick a profession. All posture and preen.

If you catch me being arrogant just slap me. I don't want to be. I don't deserve to be.

I'm bored with arrogance.

I just want to ramble about my enthusiasms and struggles and breath my share of the air and eat my share of the guacamole dip.

Really that should be enough.

Tales of the City

Headlines about a mummified body found in front of a blaring TV set seemed to be everywhere I looked earlier this week. Just a few days ago Pravda--now as tabloidesque as any Western paper-- reported a similar case.

The New York man was elderly with health problems while the Russian was an alcoholic despondent over his mother's death.

Both of those lonely men, far from unusual really, seem to be instances of sad isolation and alienation.

Harlan Ellison once wrote a tale—collected in Alone Against Tomorrow-- called "Are You Listening?" in which a man becomes so insignificant he cannot be seen or heard and pleads to be noticed so that he will not cease to exist.

It seems to be made real in the two news accounts, cases of sociological science fiction being proven real in the way we usually think about technology catching up with the pages of Amazing Stories.

I've been saddened by those people passing in obscurity because I think I empathize. A few different twists in my journey and I could have been they.

Or I could be the neighbor failing to notice the absence, thinking sometime while I was not looking the person moved to hospital or home.

Wayne wrote of stopping to give a homeless man a fiver and Charles tells a story of wondering today.

It makes me contemplate how isolated we really are or can become and reminds me of a quote I encountered in school that I'll have to set down to "Anonymous" because I can't resolve the origin on Google or MSN. I suspect it was one German rationalist philosopher or another because those were the ones the fundamentalists were always concerned about us studying.

"We live in a lonely place on the far side of the love we have known."

May those lonely men rest in peace.

Favorite Short Stories: Talent by Robert Bloch

Try thinking of Robert Bloch but not getting "author of Psycho" on the same brainwave.

If you're schooled at all in the classics of the horror genre that's a double bind roughly like "don't think of a pink elephant."

Certainly Psycho is a major jewel in his crown, but its sparkle blinds the eye to many other fabulous works including the humorous Bloch, which I discovered on those Sunday afternoons of my early teens that I devoted to reading scary tales between Sunday dinner and the end of my parents' naps when it was OK to go outside again.

After Horror Times Ten and Gooseflesh, another collection came along, purchased from the paperback rack at the local drug store because the fiery red face of Dracula himself graced the cover. I'd read an interview with Christopher Lee in Monster Times around the same time, so I knew he was a reader of scary tales as well as a star of Hammer Films.

From the Archives of Evil features 10 tales, all introduced with a few paragraphs from Lee, though it is co-edited by Michael Parry. Alas, it is the first of two collections, but I never ran across the second.

In the cauldron
Stirred into that cauldron is Bloch's Talent, a 1960 story about Andrew Benson, a war orphan left on the steps of a Pasadena children’s home. The tale unfolds very matter-of–factly.

What is Andrew’s Talent? He’s a mimic. He can do Groucho Marx, other kids and the villains--always the villains--from Western movies.

Fortunately, the nuns at the orphanage are selective in what they let Andrew watch, so he's not exposed to excessive violence.

Until he's adopted, perhaps because he makes himself resemble the first child of the grieving couple who've come in search of a replacement.

Shapeshifting?
Is Andrew a shapeshifter? Word has it from one childhood friend he had a Jekyll and Hyde quality.

The narrator cannot offer proof of dark deeds on Andrew's part. He can only offer parallels.

Not long after the release of Man in the Attic--featuring Jack Palance as a Jack the Ripper-type--several similar murders occur in Andrew's area.

Then there are werewolf killings in the mid-'50s, roughly the time the Universal horror movies are being revived on television. That's just the start.

"Talent" is a brief masterpiece from Robert Bloch, dark of humor and sly of style with a final line that, like so many of Bloch's, wraps everything up fabulously.

Thomas Montleone once wrote a column listing Bloch among the overrated in the horror genre, postulating that because he was a very nice man he was granted a degree of grace.

I beg to differ. "Talent" is a fine exhibit to refute that contention. A fine example of Bloch's talent.

And in News of the Weird

Today is the anniversary of the rescue of the Donnor Party, according to The History Channel's This Day in History. (Put 2/19 in the upper left corner of their site if you're viewing this after Feb. 19.)

The Donnor ordeal is a tale of true-life horror that's inspired many re-tellings and spin-offs including the chilling "A Child of the Golden West" from Dennis Etchison. Read that story and you'll never look at a bottle of Mountain Dew in the same way again.

Addendum

A great tool for terror writers can be found at How Stuff Works - How Voodoo Works

Maybe, I'm Intrigued

Kate and Charles' buddy Steve have both mentioned a British article on the rebirth of horror which lists some upcoming releases.

I was particularly intrigued by The Raw Shark Texts by Stephen Hall, which has its own quirky website complete with an ink blot test. (Find another for fun here. Have those been dismissed as useful?)

Poking around the Raw Shark website there's also an excerpt to be found in .pdf format and a few other interesting features.

The novel itself sounds a little like Sandman so I'm looking forward to it.

Now Where Was I?

Other than a few exteriors, the film crew is finished. I'm not expecting any calls this morning. By tomorrow I shall have recovered. (That's a tense you don't get to use very often.)

It's actually fun work, kind of interesting, and it makes me channel my inner used-car salesman. I test so far to the introvert side of the spectrum I'm one notch to the right of comatose, I think.

When there are trucks to park, dolly's to move, talent to arrange, stuff to borrow and a line producer who's excellent at her job but also relentless, my shy-and-retiring self gets replaced by a hawker.

For two days I've had my cell glued to my ear, making deals all the time. My buddy who's head of one of the departments we stormed yesterday morning joked: "Your fingers are going to fall off before this is over." I was furiously thumbing a phone number in as he spoke.

It's sort of the flip side of writing, that loneliest of endeavors and in many ways it leaves me more tired than other work. It's summoning from a different inner place than creative effort.

Some people summon that strength more easily yet creativity with greater difficulty than I. Some worry less about feelings being hurt than I do.

I guess it's been like being a different person for a few days. That's probably valuable insight.

Filming Day One

Well, I survived the first day of filming, and we got all of the shots on a fairly ambitious schedule in spite of a host of mishaps.

Would that I could tell you of the things I saw and did, but alas this is no anonymous blog in which I can speak freely of my day job.

Let me focus instead on the fact that inspiration for my real calling can sometimes flow through the conduit of my work.

In my current project, I've had a scene that's plagued me for a few days. It's one of those Da da da then x happens scenes. What the F is X going to be?

Well, I was talking to the makeup artist--

We were just chatting while the small army of crew members set up all of the things they set up, things like "apples" other huge devices that look like they were borrowed from the Death Star.

--And she started telling me about being on an airplane that was struck by lightning. It sent a blue-blazin' burst of St. Elmo's Fire down the center aisle.

It was terrifying at the time for her and her family, but of course in my mind I started thinking: "Cool, St. Elmo's Fire. That's what I needed."

Hopefully it will illuminate my scene in more ways than one.

And the moral of the story is always listen to the makeup artist.

Commercial Ventures

We're shooting commercials this week at my day job.

I don't know how they finnish major motion pictures. We're shooting two 30-second spots.

I say "we." Actually a small army will arrive tomorrow night to do the actual shooting. Maybe not an army. It's more like a regiment. If we did any dialog that would take a brigade because then we'd need sound guys, too.

I'm just doing the coordinating, and boy are my arms tired.

I've been scouting locations with the director, the line producer and the producer. There's a lot of walking involved in location scouting.

It's the pointing that starts getting the arms tired. How about this hallway? No, OK let's go a couple of hallways over. Hmm, OK, let's look at the sixth floor the light is better up there.

My arms continue to get tired because I move them a lot when I rant.

That occurrs when I'm on the phone with people asking if I can use a corner of their area for a shot. It's really hard to stage Apocalypse Now in the midst of a functioning business. It's roughly like it would have been if the producers of Apocalypse Now had stuck with their original plan to film in Viet Nam during the war.

Then there are the explanations. I have to go through those with supervisors when they ask: "How long are you going to be in my area?"

"About two hours."

"Two hours! How much film are you shooting?"

"Well it won't be but a few seconds. But we have to have time set up lights. And there's going to be some track."

"Track."

"For the dolly shot."

"Why do you need a dolly shot?"

"Because it will be really cool."

"OK, you want a corner of the room for two hours and you're going to lay track."

"Uh, yeah, and uh, you might want to let the patrons know that there's going to be a lot of white light in the area during that time."

"Why?"

"We're going to park a truck with a spotlight on it outside the window and shine it in."

"Why."

"The lighting guy thought it would look really cool."

"Anything else."

"I'm going to need to borrow your staff for a while. We've found actors can't really fake the expertise. Except we are going to use an actor for what we call the `hero' shot. Can we get one of your jersey's for him in a medium?"

You may or may not hear from me the next few days, depending on how bad my headaches get.

War of the Worlds Positive Feedback

Troy Thayne, producer of the full-cast audio drama I scripted, received an e-mail from a listener.

"...as for your production of (H.G. Wells)"War of the Worlds" bravo. bravo. bravo. excellent, top notch job. everything from the script selected to the actors and sound effects (which were extraordinary and appropriate) we enjoyed the play immensely. please do more productions. we'd listen to each one, without a doubt. thanks again."

Always nice to get messages like that forwarded.

Naming the beast

I was tapping into my buddy Wayne's urban survival skills the other day when an epiphany struck.

He has traversed Second City streets for ages with only the occasional mishap, which he may mention over on his blog.

Digression
He once got me so familiar with the Windy City people were stopping me for directions. I looked like I knew where I was going.

Their desire to tap into my knowledge of the vicinity evaporated when they heard my accent. I didn't have to say "I'm not from around here." Most people could figure out that I couldn't get them much further than Borders.

Back to the point sorta
Anyway, because he knows pedestrian cities, I asked him how a clever person might deal with a dangerous situation on a crowded street, albeit in a different city.

Living in a place without much public transportation, I stay mostly ensconced in my car when I go place to place. That has its own set of dangers. There's a personal injury lawyer on local TV who scares the hell out of me. I'd rather have the Wolf Man after me than that guy.

What's in a name?
So anyway, I described my set-up so that Wayne could put his brain to work on it.

And as I did, a working title presented itself.

I'd had a working title up to that point, but it was a functional one-word title so that I had something to name Word documents. It wasn't a word I liked for the project.

Suddenly to the front of my mind jumped a longer, poetic and perfect title. One I think I'll keep.

And the gaps in the outline started to suddenly fill themselves in. I knew things about the villain. I had answers that had puzzled me.

Perhaps it's true that you gain power over a demon once you learn its name. A working title certainly seems to be a major hurdle in sparking the magic of creativity.

In truth, I'd been researching and mulling over plot points for a while and things probably just began to converge. My title grew from some reading and a factoid I picked up, and that gelled when I needed a name to relay to Wayne.

But a name for the beast also made it seem more managable. It's funny the difference a few words can make when they're the words that go at the top of the first page.

Handy Tool - Demon Name Generator
Not exactly the kind of demon my project is, but check this out - Angel/demon Name Generator from Seventh Sanctum™ .

Ashley's Eyes II

Ashley, our cat who is blind in one eye, went for his annual checkup with his veterinary ophthalmologist last week, and we learned he now has glaucoma in that eye, apparently a common problem when a retina is damaged.

The prescription: the same eye drops a human would receive.

They made the diagnosis with a pressure check, much like my dad received. My dad suffered from a number of eye complications in his final years and I took him to quite a few specialists visits as did my cousin.

Now I'm doing it for my cat.

Ash's pressure in the blind eye was 27. When it gets into the 40s it apparently causes a good deal of discomfort and pain.

You determine the pain because the cat sleeps all the time. "I know," said the vet. "It's hard to tell with a cat since they sleep all the time anyway."

Ironically for my cats, "all the time" is when I'm awake. They get wide awake when I'm asleep, and they cease to get along with each other then also.

The drops will serve for a while. When discomfort gets severe removal of the eye will be required.

Ash's partial blindness does not seem to slow him down. He even watches some television. He's particularly fond of commodities tickers, but he finds general news crawls fascinating as well. Weather panic updates, not so much.

I've toyed with the notion of a short story, something supernatural that explores what his eyes might have seen, but the notion is still processing through clockwork cogs of my brain.

In the meantime, he likes to sit on my lap when I'm at the computer, perhaps watching the cursor to see what I'm saying about him.

Father Allison

I met a lot of interesting people when I was a reporter. It was one of the best parts of the job. I wrote a column not long before I left my newspaper job, noting that in many ways there is no finer job in the world when you're young and filled with piss and vinniger, as the old salts in our newsroom used to put it.

One of the coolest people I met was Father Allison. I actually learned about him from another reporter, guy who worked at one of the TV stations in town. We were competitve but it was a friendly competition.

Father Allison was easing into retirement, working as an assistant pastor, but he'd spent a number of his years in church service in California.

And there he served as a consultant on church matters for film and television. He had some great stories, and I used to go to lunch with him after our interview.

He'd advised Helen Hayes on a Western television show in which she played a nun. He was at first hesitant to give her instructions, but she insisted he help her get things right.

He worked a lot on the television version of "Going My Way" with Gene Kelly, and he donned a cowboy hat as an extra on "Wagon Train" or one Western or another. Union rules precluded him from doing much acting, though.

I loved to hear his stories and his jokes, and when he figured out I wanted to write he encouraged me with the advice to do something every day even if it was a small bit of progress.

He said once Oscar Wilde left a gathering to write. He returned a short time later and when asked what he'd done he responded: "I put in a comma. I took out a comma."

Some days that's all I do but I try to force something from my brain through my fingers and across the keyboard.

I lost touch with him after a while. I kept meaning to get back to talk to him, but eventually I heard he'd gone to a nursing home. I should have gone by to see him and heard a few more tales of Hollywood.

(Thanks to Charles for reminding me to plumb my memory once in a while.)

Testing Book Mooch

I'm an advocate of buying books new whenever possible. Writers don't make royalties off second-hand book sales after all.

That's not to say I don't frequent used book shops because I love them and I love finding forgotten treasures in hidden corners. And writers know they increase their readership in used bookstores, which ain't a bad thing.

The web of course opens up whole new avenues for finding lost treasures. Ebay has made just about any book printed since the beginning of time available to bidders. I've added to my Doc Savage books via ebay and online used bookstores.

Online book trading came to my attention via Library Thing. They link to a number of book swap sites and people talk about them on the Library Thing message boards.

I'm test driving Book Mooch because it seems user friendly, becuase I'm a biblioholic and I have some books I've read that I don't need to keep inventoried, and I also have duplicate copies of some titles.

The most important of those reasons is: I'm a biblioholic.

Apparently you list books you're willing to trade. Other users request books from the list and you mail them out book rate.

When you send a book you earn the right to request a book, and someone mails one to you.

My first request is in - so I'll be dropping by a mailbox today.

We'll see how it goes.

Naming Names

Wayne asked me once if I sought to apply character names with meanings, adding myth or mystery to enhance with a single word.

The answer was sometimes, but I've paid more attention to it ever since. Wayne is a genius after all.

I wish I could come up with a host of relevant Cassandras this morning, but Mr. Dark in Something Wicked This Way Comes leaps to mind and suffices. You know he's going to be a baaaaaad guy as soon as he presents his buisiness card.

I sometimes use baby name sites to research name meanings and to choose names for my fictional peeps.

And I ran across a rather handy one this a.m., alternativebabynames.com. It doesn't provide name definitions, but it's a clearing house for the offbeat and the exotic including Science fiction names and Goth and Vampire names. It strikes me that both of those are probably better put to use by fiction writers than parents.

If the kid happens to choose different interests and paths in life, a name like Mink or Nightshade might be a bit of a liability in, say, a Congressional campaign ad.

The Face of Inspiration

This is an illo from Jimmy Hildebrandt, nephew of Troy Thayne, producer of the "War of the Worlds" audio.

You really need to click for a larger view to fully appreciate the picture. This is one of two pieces he sent me so I'll post another soon.

Perhaps it will inspire some story ideas for someone.

Writing for No Reason

Most of Emily Dickinson's poems went unpublished in her lifetime. She wrote for a box, not publication.

I was thinking of that as I read an interesting post from C.S. Harris , based on a question posed on Kate's blog.

Would you write if you never made a(nother) dime writing?

Yeah. That's the short answer.

I'm doing it right now in fact. The blog pays in sometimes intangible ways, but I don't make much direct coin for it.

I've been meditating a while about where I am as a writer, as periodically do most of the people in my circle of blog awareness, including not just Kate and C.S. but also Charles and Cliff and Stewart and Wayne (here too for Wayne). We're all on different shoals in the same stream.

The shoal on which I'm standing at the moment is, I think, a luxurious place.

My day job keeps my head under a roof and covers my cat's ophthalmologist. Said job could evaporate, I'm sure, but for now I can trial and error my writing and send it out when and if I think it's worthwhile.

I worked a while on a novel called Zoe's Missing that I decided to put in the trunk because it wasn't in toto what I wanted it to be.

I paused to write the War of the Worlds script for which I did get paid, and it was a wonderful new writing experience, challenging and exciting. And of course commissions or contracts can be a fabulous drug or a horrible curse.

Now I'm outlining and sketching portions of a different novel, sending out short stories which I had not done in a while. Getting occasional rejections. Ouch, I'd kind of forgotten that sting.

Do I get to keep the writer shingle out while the nother dimes aren't rolling? Doesn't matter. I'm proud of what I've done, and I've enjoyed the journey so far.

I'll be writing something whether it sees the light of day or stays in a box. I'll be writing just because that's what I do and I'm not sure why and I don't care why any more.

I might not leave behind the a box as brilliant as Emily's when my website shifts from Sid is Alive to Sid is Dead but I shall have kept myself busy and entertained. That's enough.

Comics Resources

For those lured here by the siren song of the search engine and such keywords as comics, there's a great post today by Jason Thibault of Optimum Wound Comics on the company's My Space Blog.

He offers tons of links to information on comics writing, comics art and some sample comics scripts from great writers.

Which Science Fiction Writer Are You?

I haven't snagged one of these in a while. They're kind of fun.

I am: Olaf Stapledon Standing outside the science fiction "field", he wrote fictional explorations of the futures of whole species and galaxies.

Which science fiction writer are you?

Listen to War of the Worlds for Free!

The Old Time Radio-style version of H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds that I scripted is now being streamed via Shoutcast.

It's actually an online radio station, so if you listen you'll be hearing the most complete version, with comments from the announcer leading into and coming back from commercial breaks.

To access it go to www.shoutcast.com, search for "War of the Worlds" using the search field on the left side of the site under the graphic text: Shoutcast Shocase.

Click the Tune In button when the results come up, and your default media player should open.

It's a continuous stream so if you get there in the middle it will start over.

Or you can order an MP3 version via the link at right. :-)

Addendum
Apparently the feed's down at the moment - if you search and fail to find it wait awhile and try again.

Birth of the Marauder

I read comics and loved them as a kid and I was fortunate enough to make a pass through the comics universe as a writer, never DC or Marvel but I did have titles published by Malibu and Caliber, a couple of the major minors.

Looking back on Marauder, the third comic book miniseries I wrote, there are some things I'd do differently today, but as Cliff notes, hmmmm I'm sure he's never heard that before, as Cliff writes in his blog a story is written by who you are now not who you're going to be as a writer.

Anyway, today I'd try to delve deeper into characters, I believe.

The no spandex rule
Marauder is the closest I came to writing a super hero comic. It was originally slated for Caliber but an overabundance of properties there shifted it to Silverline, the lable created by Roland Mann, my comics editor and packager and also creator/author of the wowfully--I made that word up-- successful Cat and Mouse series for Malibu.

Roland didn't want to do another spandex-clad protagonist, so Kirk Connell aka the title character did not have a uniform. He had an equipment-laden suit because he was first a thief.

He was not just an everyday robber, though. He was part of an ancient thieves guild devoted to recovering things for their rightful owners, though their ranks were becoming progressively corrupt. I'd read books and stories with orders of assassins but never of theives with their own codes, systems and councils that stretched from the Middle Ages.

The dramatic jewel heist that kicked things off is an action scene of which I've always been proud.

The idea started when I was a kid. A local jewelry store brought in a huge uncut diamond, eighth argest in the world I think. They displayed it in a glass case with a rattlesnake. The snake was more hype than protection, I'm sure, because it just lay there in the case as snakes in captivity and cold air are wont to do.


That snake became a host of king cobras in Marauder, an obstacle Kirk and Lumley had to overcome to grab the objective jewel in the opening panel.

As they worked to procure it with finesse, the supervillain's minions crashed the power with excessive firepower, dispersing cobras and blasting Kirk's mentor as he dangled helplessly from a rapelling rope.

Kirk managed to snatch a snake and finish one of the attackers, but the worst of the bad guy's escaped, prompting him to break with the guild in order to pursue them.

Having been a member of a street gang called the Marauders before Lumley rescued him, Kirk took that name for his new base of operation, a small ship which allowed him to skirt around to different locales.

I wound up writing a spec screenplay based on the comic. It had a different, more science fiction oriented plot but I kept the snake scene as the opener. I think it would have been a blast on celluloid

Books I'm Embarassed To Say I Haven't Read Yet: The Ceremonies by T.E.D. Klein

T.E.D. Klein's The Ceremonies appears on many lists of top horror novels. (Cliff cited it as a candidate in discussion on Charles' post about great works.)

I've owned it for about 25 years, and it's remained in what I consider my active stacks--books waiting to be read on the shelves vs. the books in boxes. They just don't all fit. I'm Sid and I'm a biblioholic. (I confessed in a post once upon a time.)

Mostly books I've read but want to keep are stored, though some books I don't expect to read quickly get tucked away. My interests ebb and wane. Sometimes I vacation from one genre for awhile, then some interest-flint strikes steel and produces a spark that sends me to dig out titles or series.

Somewhere in all of those mixed metaphors, some titles languish even though they remain in my line-of-sight.

I read Klein's collection of novella's Dark Gods when it came out and was enraptured by his fresh-take on things Cthulhu and more.

I heard from many people how great The Ceremonies was and I've always kept it handy. Just haven't read it.

I know it's a wonderful exploration of character and horror, that it follows a scholar to rural terrain where strange things transpire as he delves into gothic literature. I know it's an expansion of the short masterpiece "The Events at Poroth Farm" and I know it's something I should have read long ago.

I just haven't. I've passed it up from time to time for lesser works, quicker reads, lighter page-turners. For some such behavior is not a problem, but I know better.

Fortunately, in straightening books and re-organizing as I've been doing lately--trying to alphabetize and make my office livable--books' spells work on me. The back-cover notes call, their spines whisper when I pass the shelves. They even taunt me with what a Rod McKuen poem once dubbed "un-read smugness."

So I'm working to rectify my sins. I'm almost 100 pages into The Ceremonies, a point of no-return.

After that, well there are others for another day.

Masters of Terror - Black and White Terror

As I've mentioned, paperback anthologies darkened my back-to-school autumns when I was in junior high. I was introduced to Ray Bradbury, Robert Bloch, August Derleth and of course H.P. Lovecraft in selections from the Teen-Age Book Club.

Marvel and Warren's black-and-white horror comics brought fear to my summers and furthered my education of the horror greats. The other night--serendipitously, I think, the same night Cliff was writing Horror Can Be Comic--I was digging through several boxes of comics to locate issue #1 of Masters of Terror from Marvel.

The mag introduced me to Theodore Sturgeon's "It" which came along before Stephen King's pronoun-titled tome. It also includes Robert Bloch's "Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper"-- in which a police detective partners with a psychologist to track down a modern-day ripper. It was new to me then, long before I discovered it had been adapted as an episode of "Thriller."

Robert E. Howard's work in the horror field was also featured. Masters presented Howard's "The Horror from the Mound," an adaptation that looks like it probably started out in one of their four-color comics. It features art by Frank Brunner
and pits a cowboy against a vampire.

"The Drifting Snow" by Derleth and "The Terrible Old Man" by Lovecraft.

It was an impulse buy, probably because there were no new issues of Vampire Tales or Vampirella, but it was a good choice, 76 pages of chills.

Cliff rememers more issues, but unfortunately #1 was all I ran across. Maybe I'll scope out the next on ebay.

Character: Delmited

When I'm writing fiction, I'm not a profiler as C.S. Harris has discussed on her blog. I don't sit down and do a 100-question Q&A with my characters, though I'm not totally a seat-of-the-pantser either.

The Q&A is recommended in a lot of writing texts and may be useful for some, but when I tried it the answers came out goofy and didn't really help me define a character's voice.

I was working on a private eye character at the time and he wound up babbling about his need to help people. Having him articulate it didn't really define his drive nor did it keep him from getting locked away in three trunk novels.

Today in a limited way I do use a technique I picked up in a conference conducted by agent Donald Maas. I think the method is also discussed in his book Writing The Breakout Novel.

In the conference, he suggested jotting down major point-of- view characters and making note of the words they'd use for certain items. Simple things like pencil. If a character is a tech-saavy but harried executive might he say stylus in all instances instead of pencil or pen?

I don't remember if the Donald suggested an Excel spreadsheet but since I don't use pen and ink much that's how I do it.

Column A gets a list of main characters. Columns B,C, D and so on get some words as column headings.

I then try and determine what different characters would call different items. Everybody doesn't say "sofa" as Maas noted in that conference.

When you're writing a multi-viewpoint third person novel it helps make each character's narrative viewpoint more representative of that character's personality. I find it handy, and it helps with dialog too. Especially the column on the character's profanity of choice. (See Stewart and Cliff for more on that topic.)

It's fun finding different oaths and minced oaths. I once had a character who'd picked up some British slang which he'd use when he was angry: "God rot them," he'd spew.

Good luck with your characters.

Writing for Rescue

If you have a story you can spare for a couple of months it can be used to benefit animals in need of rescue.

Read for Rescue is seeking stories that can be sold online for a brief time with proceeds to benefit several animal rescue projects.

Stories 2,500 - 15,000 words are being sought in these genres according to the guidelines:

• Romantic/erotic stories (happy ending, please) For right now we're only looking for m/f relationships
• Science fiction/fantasy/adventure/futuristic
• Paranormal
• Ethnic
• Literary
• Any cross of the above. First or third person POV.
  

For more visit the Welcome to Suburbia site.

Resistance is Futile

Wayne has uncovered what has been suspected for a while in the Blogosphere. There is a Cult of Sternberg, and Wayne reveals all in his Frankenstein 1959 blog, while holding a Steve McQueen action figure I wish I had.

Wayne has announced that he will remain alert and on guard, but it is clear that resistance is futile. I have reached the point of Kevin McCarthy as Dr. Miles Bennell at the end of the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers -- you know, when he ran into traffic shouting: "You're next!" (Rent it! It's great!)

There are Sternberg minions around every corner. There are perhaps even Sternberg pods waiting to convert you while you sleep. You can't stay awake forever.

It's time to give up, accept it, and use the logo that true believers will be displaying until the great galactic mother ship returns from the Greater Magellanic Cloud.

Visit the House of Sternberg blog.

Zombie Orville

Am the only one a little creeped out by the zombie Orville Redenbacher in the new commercials?

I don't know that a reanimated Orville--even with an iPod--really makes me want popcorn. It's kind of like a TV ad written by a horror writer.

The man passed away in 1995. My vote is let him rest and find a living spokesperson to hawk the corn.

Addendum
I forgot to check You Tube for a version of the ad, but the Rain of Thought blog has a Google video version if you haven't seen just how strange the spot is, you can watch there. Jason, author of that blog seems to agree with my POV on the matter.

Fear and Colors

I had to get my oil changed yesterday morning since we were having a brief reprieve from rain and sleet, so I grabbed Ray Bradbury's Long After Midnight collection for the waiting room. Recently, Charles touched off some interesting discussion on the use of color to set tone and mood in fiction, noting Robert E. Howard made good use of the color black, while Stewart had some interesting comments on color in Something Wicked This Way Comes. I allowed how weather can serve in a similar fashion to set mood and tone.

While they replaced oil and wiper blades at the oil exchange, lo and behold I found myself reading a story that juggled all those elements.

The color white is used to make things eerie and ultimately redemptive in The Wish, a bit more upbeat variation of the Monkey's Paw set on a snowy Christmas Eve.

It begins with two writers in a huge, old, creaking house talking over life, death and miracles as they share wine and popcorn while the window is swept by "a whisper of snow."

The imagery continues with many wonderful poetic Bradbury touches:

• "It was a proper night for ghosts of whiteness to visit windows and wander off."
• "Is there a language of night and time and snow?"
• "A gust of snow rattled the window, clung like a shroud, unraveled away."
• "The graveyard resembled the scattered ruins of an ancient fort, blown up lifetimes ago, its monuments buried deep in some new Ice Age."

Tom, the narrator's Christmas Eve wish is to see his long-dead father again and the story unfolds from there, a story of the undead that's ghostly and touching, creating that magical Bradbury blend.

Variations of snow and white are mentioned repeatedly, like Howard's black--as Charles noted-- there without being noticed unless you're a bit primed for it.

I wish I'd discovered the tale for my pre-Christmas reading, but given the week we've had in Texas, it's nice for general winter reading as well.

A Writer's Faux Pas

I bet this doesn't happen as much any more. I haven't relied on Writer's Market in many a day. Partly because I haven't written short stories a great deal in many a day--though I'm starting to again a bit--but also because there are many other market listings with a thumb on the pulse of the fiction world.

Once upon a time, however, I'd pour over WM's listings searching out short story markets, and I know a few other people who did the same thing I did in the '80s.

It was well known in those days at least and probably still that many of the cool stories in Stephen King's Night Shift appeared first in men's magazines of the '70s, mostly in a title called Cavalier.

In the '80s when I was first cobbling together stories that at least seemed worthy of submitting, Writer's Market still listed Cavalier and other men's magazines as a market for horror fiction.

If you're a King reader you know his tales were all straightforward horror with occasional references to the Necronomicon, giant rats and man-eating laundry machines.

Eventually I finished a sorta kinda Lovecraftian piece that I thought wasn't too bad, and I typed up a cover letter and sent it off to Cavalier.

Before long I got a personal rejection note back from the fiction editor. "It's good, but I need strongly sex-oriented stories."

The world changed between the early '70s and the mid-'80s. One more nail went into the coffin of the short story market. (See Charles' excellent post which leads to his article on the topic.)

Sometime after "Sometimes They Come Back," men's magazines like Cavalier stopped publishing straightforward horror in favor of...well, ya' know.

I know many other writers with scary stories who did the same thing I did, though.

Eventually one buddy of mine modified a horror tale and placed it with one of those mags. He used to say: "You've heard of Playboy? Well it wasn't them."

The moral of the story, I suppose, is know the market before you submit to it even if you need a floppy hat, sunglasses and a raincoat to get a sample copy.

That reminds me of my adventures ordering books from Rhinoceros Books in preparation for writing a tale of erotic horror for one of their series, but that's another post.

Knife Wounds

I know three people with knife wounds at the moment. A girl I work with was making French fries and her right hand attacked her left. It was kind of like that Clive Barker story "The Body Politic," I think.

Wayne also got an unkind cut from an exacto knife, and Kate was prompted to ponder the color of blood with an artist's eye after a smilar slice.

Scars from the past
All that reminded me of the time I stabbed myself in the thumb. Christine and I recounted the story to my freedom-fry-deprived co-worker in empathy.

It was a Saturday night when we still had our apartment, sometime before the chain smoker moved in downstairs and prompted us to become home owners.

I was making an Italian chicken dish. I don't remember why I tried to open the drawer that was jammed but when I yanked it I got a knife - this little pairing knife with a thin blade went right into my thumb.

My actual recollection of the event gets a little fuzzy after that, I suppose due to the lack of blood supply to my brain. All of my blood was rushing out my thumb at that point.

It ain't easy bein' green
I wrapped a paper towel around it and staggered into the den, looking a little green, as Christine describes it. Green, I was, and glassy-eyed.

Then I used one of the words Cliff and Stewart have been talking about.

"I think I cut the (expletive deleted but it's bodily waste so I think you know which one it was) out of my finger," I said.

"Why don't you sit down?" she suggested.

Legend has it I sat down.

Then she walked into the kitchen, which she says looked like a homicide scene.

The next recollection I have of anything at all, we were at the local emergency room where we were processed by a clerk with indifference that achived remarkable degrees of coldness even for a jaded ER worker. After she took my information she sent us to the waiting room to watch TV while they dealt with people with larger wounds. It was a Saturday night after all.

There, somewhere just short of desanguination, the bleeding eventually stopped on its own.

The Fog
We went back home and in a bit of a fog I finished the Italian chicken and we went in the next day to a convenient care center for a tetanus shot. Since it was a stab it didn't require stitches, but it remained painful to turn faucets for a while after that.

It was really the worst injury-accident I've ever had short of the time I ate peppered shrimp at a social function and then rubbed my eyes.

To all those who've injured yourselves, I feel your pain.

The view from my office.

I stayed under the back door awning to avoid getting sleet and snow on my camera, so it's not the most artsy shot. But this was the view behind my office yesterday.

All the branches had that coated-with-ice look. It's continuing today and will take a while to melt, I believe.

Strange Deaths

I used to play around with a blog I called Hoofbeats of the Reaper that dealt with strange ways to die. Generally I pondered ways I might go, but I also included links when I ran across them to strange deaths around the world.

There have been a host of strange deaths the past few days:

Death while mole-killing - moles survive

Death by drinking water

Death by Australian eastern brown snake

Not a death but a rare case of a knife and saucepan fight

Rain Nor Sleet

Well the drive to work was interesting this morning as the day should be.

I had occasional bits of sleet bouncing off my windshield but it was mostly rain pounding my car.

I've been working on a scene set on a blustery day in Dublin, so if nothing else the weather should help me come up with a few realistic adjectives.

Happy Monday!

Something Wicked

A major chunk of the novel The Club Dumas didn't make it into the still excellent film The Ninth Gate with Johnny Depp.

It deals with a group of obsessed fans of The Three Musketeers and its sequels, a strange, European literary underground of readers driven to celebrate the characters and intrigues of the classic Dumas works.

I thought of that enthusiasm for a classic when Stewart mentioned the culling of great works from library shelves in the interest of titles with higher circulation. It's a bookseller's approach with an effect not unlike the fire in the library at Alexandria.

Since I used to be a librarian of sorts, I was dismayed by that report. I always had the sense we were preserving knowledge in our battles against mold, dust and non-returns.

I've been re-reading Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes this week, perhaps one of the tales pulled from some shelves. Portions of it are set in a library, I suppose because Bradbury haunted libraries in his younger days, enjoying the titles A to Z.

Knowledge preserved proves beneficial in the fight against Mr. Dark and his evil carnival.

More and more, with everything from the culling of classics to the fragmentation of television and movie audiences, we are not sharing the same dreams en masse like the Dumas fans. We are not experiencing as much serendipitously as a culture any more if it's not Paris Hilton mania.

I don't know that I'm exactly alarmed by that, but I mull it over from time to time.

What will be the cost of that? The loss of the campfire and the shared myth? The collective dream.

What will come of us if we lose the richer language of shared metaphors? If we don't get the references to the dash of D'artagnan when it's referenced or the treachery of Milady de Winter?

What language will we speak then?

WOW on Christmas

I'm told the audio adaptation of H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds that I scripted was aired online on Christmas Day by the American Council of the Blind.

Their online radio feed offers a regular stream of old time radio drama and other programming.

I was kind of excited to learn we got the holiday slot. The producer, Troy Thayne, had hoped to have the production finished for Halloween, sort of in remembrance of the Orson Wells broadcast, but sound editing took a little longer than expected. (I should note ours is quite different from the 1930s version. It sets the tale in England in the 1890s, closer to the period of the novel.)

Working on an old time radio style drama--of which I am a fan--has been exciting all around, and it proved to be a truly international production.

The actors, led by the fabulously talented Martyn Tott, were all British, and the soundtrack was composed by Greek musical artist Yiannis Kranidiotis.

You can listen to a streaming sound clip via the banner at the right.

A little noir on my wall

Christine and I spent a good bit of time browsing Cody's Books in San Francisco when we were there in the fall.

She secretly purchased a calendar for me, a compilation of mostly French film noir posters.

I suppose it's appropriate that many are French since they gave us the term film noir. I suppose it's also a great San Francisco gift. If San Francisco isn't the city film noir calls home, it's at least a renter there.

The Maltese Falcon, Dark Passage and a host of others are set in the city by the bay.

I put it up in my office at my day job. Adds an extra splash of color across the room from the Doctor Who poster.

Looks like for the month of January, a green Orson Wells as Harry Lime will be peering over my shoulder as I work, and The Big Sleep, Psycho (not sure I agree with that one as film noir), Little Caesar and I Love Trouble are coming in the months ahead.

Too bad my office isn't across the street from a building with a neon sign.

(My calendar, in case you want one, is officially the Black Cinema Noire calendar from Tushita.com.)

Birds and Mice and Frozen Goldfish Bowls

I acquired some of my favorite short story collections via TAB, The Teen-Age Book Club, when I was in junior high.

From TAB, a few quarters would purchase various young adult novels, comic strip compilations and other material deemed suitable to sell to kids in school. Every couple of months the teacher would send off an order and in due time a box would arrive with everyone's choices.

Though it wasn't branded horror, Stories of Suspense, (1963) edited by Mary E. MacEwen, had much to chill, tingle and tantilize the imagination. I didn't know it then but it packaged stories by some of the finest purveyors of literary thrills.

The lead story "The Birds" by Daphne duMaurier had already scared me as a Hitchcock movie by the time I read it, but the slim volume also included a host of other fabulous tales.

"Flowers for Algernon" by Daniel Keys - the short story that lead to the film Charly and a novel-length version. Though I later read the novel-length iteration, the shorter tale of Charlie Gordon is still the most poignant. The impact of Charlie's transition from mentally challenged to genius and back again is more concise and affecting in a few pages.

"Charles" by Shirley Jackson - a wry, clever entry by the brilliant mistress of the macabre, a juncture of her tales of the strange and her musings as a mother.

"Contents of a Dead Man's Pockets" by Jack Finney - one of two Finney tales in the collection. I didn't know who he was then. I was to discover The Body Snatchers later in a movie-tie-in edition with the Donald Sutherland version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. I was also to discover "Contents" was included in my mom's literature book as "An Untitled Story." It's indeed a story of suspense, unbearable suspense as a man whose wife has gone to the movies attempts to retrieve important business notes from his apartment's ledge. Only to have the finicky window trap him outside. We join him in his thoughts, wondering if he can hold on through the cartoon, short subject and the feature and ultimately through a re-evaluation of priorities.

"The Perfectionist" by Margaret St. Clair (aka Idris Seabright) - a wonderfully chilling, in more ways than one, journey into the strange world of a young man and his off-beat aunt who dabbles in painting. When she switches from still-life to living subjects she discovers it's challenging to get the detail right on things that move. Dammit!

The volume also includes works by John Collier, Roald Dahl and Lord Dunsany and while other books have come and gone from my collection I've always held onto this one.

If you see it at a used book store grab it. If not, look for the individual stories if you haven't read them. They're fab tales all.

It Looks Like Up From Here

Well, having returned from my descent into the underworld, I suppose I've brought back two pieces of information for the new year.

1. Stomach flu kicks you in the ass worse than you remember, and this wasn't even the worse case I've ever had.

2. Living through a dark night reminds you how good good can feel.

(All right three pieces of information)

3. Caffeine withdrawal is a bitch.

I hovered one day on that threshold where you start thinking, you know if that good night was willing, going gentle into it wouldn't be so bad.

Thursday I was feeling a little better and bland food started to pick me up again, then the queen mother of headaches pierced my brain like a spear. (When you self-diagnose on the web, the stomach flu literature says whateever the f you do stay the hell away from caffeine! it is ithe devil's brew.)

"I haven't had coffee in three days, the withdrawl should be finished," I muttered to Christine.

"Yeah, right," she laughed. She doesn't have the best bedside manner.

I went through a period roughly like Clint Eastwood's fever dream experiences in Unforgiven or Conan's near death experience in the first movie (you know wrapped in a blanket with ghostly spirits looming all around, am I remembering that scene right or is that just what happened to me?).

Then I woke up feeling marginally stable Friday morning.

And wow, risking a half-cup of coffee was like a dose of elixir. I felt like a chorus of "Let the Sunshine In."

I think Charles in his earlier comment below was right, maybe it's good to start the year with a downer. It certainly makes clear what "up" looks like and that you often take feeling OK for granted.

For a while, I may remember that.

Surviving the Norwalk Virus With Steve McQueen

I seem to have contracted the Norwalk virus or some variation, not a fun way to begin the new year.

I think this is the first time I've had a serious stomach virus since about 1989, so I'd really forgotten the power drain.

Strangely though I can remember starting to emerge from the last one - I'd received a complimentary copy of Mystery Scene magazine, and when I was able I went out and sat in the sun and read an article about the Hardman mystery series.

This time around I've been keeping my sanity with movies. The Sand Pebbles with Steve McQueen's a really good film, I guess a roadshow picture in its day and an Oscar winner. At around three hours long it's perfect for viewing when you can't move much more than your thumb on the remote control.

Also watched Under Siege 2 for the first time although I'd always heard it was good. It is.

I'm not reading right now or writing much because I don't want to inadverdently give myself aversion therapy to my current projects.

Hopefully in another day or so I'll be better.