[NOTE: This post is stuck to the top of the blog; for the time being, new entries will post below it.]
I’m not writing much here right now.
The reason is, I’m on a tight deadline for the second Doc Wilde adventure, Doc Wilde and The Mad Skull. Most of my typing has to be on that, so blogging (and Tweeting, and Facebooking…) has to take a back seat.
Still, I hope to get in the occasional piece while working on the book. Please bear with me.
I just came across the latest review of my book, Doc Wilde and The Frogs of Doom, and it’s from someone who knows ‘em some pulp.
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Back in March, I blogged about some oddly inspiring material I found in a new roleplaying game I’d bought (Optimism, Action, and How To Be The Neighborhood Pulp Hero). The text in question “caused a synaptic hiccup and made me think about my life.” Pretty darn cool for a game manual.
The game, Spirit of the Century, is not only the best-by-far pulp game I’ve ever found (and I know most of them, all the way back to the first, 1982’s Daredevils from Fantasy Games Unlimited), it’s quite possibly the greatest face-to-face rpg. I’m reserving final judgment till after I actually have time to play the game, at which time it’ll get a full review here.
My copy of SotC had some issues, alas, but Fred Hicks, one of the game’s co-authors, exhibited some first class customer service and sent me a new copy. I was greatly appreciative at this, so I sent him a signed copy of my book.
(Just to share a bit more good will, I also had similar fantastic service from Shane Hensley {of Savage Worlds fame} years back when a Deadlands book I’d ordered had a split spine. These are truly good guys in an industry with an often razor-thin profit margin.)
Well, apparently Fred read the book, because on October 20th, he gave it a quick review on his blog.
While set in the modern day, this book LOVES pulp (and Lovecraft, for that matter) and makes a bunch of oblique and not so oblique references to it throughout. It’s a breezy, very fast read for an adult, but an adult will be entertained precisely because of those references. It’s like a fast mad dash through a landscape littered with mines that explode with geek-love every now and again.
To summarize the plot would be to tell the story of the whole book, so I’m going to leave that out of this. It’s a fun family romp, has good life lessons for kids, and features a boy child and a girl child who both compete with each other and value each other…And if you’re looking to get your kids primed with some excitement about high-pulp adventure…I think Doc Wilde would be a handy tool for giving that to ‘em…
There’s a bit more, which can be found here.
This is an incredibly entertaining CGI short film from animator Lucas Martell.
It amazes me that anyone can still proudly claim to be a Republican these days. And, indeed, a record low number of Americans make that claim, which is a good thing, because those who still do have lost all semblance of a grip on patriotism, sound policy, rational thought, or statesmanship.
We have gun-toting buffoons showing up at presidential appearances, a congressman heckling the elected president in a joint session of Congress, legions of ignorant sheep letting Beck and Hannity and Limbaugh lead them toward the Apocalypse that many of them actually desire, a set of political values that can be summed up as (a) keep anything good from happening under Democratic rule so they can’t get credit, (b) cripple Obama’s power, and (c) do anything we can to regain our dominance so we can better serve our corporate masters.
Want to see a great example of the sort of healthy debate Republicans are bringing to policy issues now? Just watch this video, in all its glory, and see how it looks when unchivalrous, dishonorable rabble with nothing to offer get into government.
Me, I get a kick out of the “What is your objection?” “I object” exchange. With debate like that, who needs morons?
A fascinating interview with Frank Schaeffer, one of the founding members of the modern religious right in America, who has since recognized the dangers inherent in the worldview he once espoused.
One of these days, I intend to write some about my childhood and relationship with my father, how I believe my struggles with depression are rooted there, and how I think I have become a very good father at least partly because I have such a flawed model behind me to veer as far away from as I possibly can.
For now, I just read a column that hit very close to home. It’s by Andrew Vachss, a mystery novelist and lawyer who is also a relentless advocate for abused children.
I’m a lawyer with an unusual specialty. My clients are all children—damaged, hurting children who have been sexually assaulted, physically abused, starved, ignored, abandoned and every other lousy thing one human can do to another. People who know what I do always ask: “What is the worst case you ever handled?” When you’re in a business where a baby who dies early may be the luckiest child in the family, there’s no easy answer. But I have thought about it—I think about it every day. My answer is that, of all the many forms of child abuse, emotional abuse may be the cruelest and longest-lasting of all…
The whole thing is here.
Many moons ago, I was friends with Shane Black (who makes an appearance on the acknowledgments page of my book). He’s the guy who wrote Lethal Weapon and spent a few years wrestling Joe Eszterhas for highest amount ever paid for a screenplay (Shane’s personal best was $4,000,000 for The Long Kiss Goodnight, which was then run through the mediocritizer by director Renny Harlin).
Shane also wrote and directed the INCREDIBLE Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, which is oceans full of fun, and has great performances by Robert Downey Jr., Val Kilmer, and Michelle Monaghan.
But I digress.
Seriously, we'll all be better off if you let Tim write the movie.
Shortly after Lethal Weapon 2 was released, I had what I figured was a great idea for a third movie in the series. I wrote a treatment, and Shane took a look. (more…)
From NBC Philadelphia:
Four-year-old Paige Bennethum really, really didn’t want her daddy to go to Iraq.
So much so, that when Army Reservist Staff Sgt. Brett Bennethum lined up in formation at his deployment this July, she couldn’t let go.
No one had the heart to pull her away.
I don’t believe in hell. But I sometimes find myself hoping it exists so that George W. Bush can fucking roast for all the children in the world who are growing up without their parents because of him.
In my advice to writers, there are two books I always recommend. One is On Writing by Stephen King, the other is The War of Art by Steven Pressfield. Immediately after I first read the latter, I plopped down and wrote my first novel, Doc Wilde and The Frogs of Doom, and I re-read it regularly (easy to do, as it’s a short book).
Pressfield’s deal is getting us to overcome the resistances within ourselves and just getting down to the friggin’ work. His book is a self-help book that’s really helpful and not full of homilies and crap like “You are the captain of your own ship.”
(Which a therapist once told me in what was, inevitably, our one and only session because I damn near laughed in her face).
I recently became aware of Pressfield’s blog for writers, Writing Wednesdays, and it should be required reading for anyone wanting to make it in the arts.
Here’s one gem I found there:
The Muse, if she’ll forgive me, is kind of like a mailman. She makes her rounds every day, cruising past our offices and studios and peeking in the window. Are we there at our easels? The Muse likes that. She likes to see us taking care of business. And if we’re there with our hearts breaking or tears streaming down our cheeks, all the better. The Muse says to herself, “This poor bastard is true to me; I’m gonna give him something in return for his loyalty.”
And into our heads pops the solution to Act Two, the bridge to that song we couldn’t lick, the breakthrough concept for our new philanthropic venture.
The lesson is, if you’re not at the place you do the work, at least trying to do the work, the work won’t happen. And if you are there, and getting down to business, you will discover wondrous things, gifts from the Muse, that will surprise you and enrich both you and the work itself.
But you’ve gotta be working for it to work.
I conceived of the adventures of Doc, Wren, and Brian Wilde as a series, starting with Doc Wilde and The Frogs of Doom. That was the plan. As a writer, I decided, I am in the Doc Wilde business.
Putnam also saw the Wildes as a potential series, but largely avoided talking about that. They are, after all, a business. Profits must be made, books must be balanced. So they understandably played it close to the vest, waiting to see how Frogs of Doom did, both critically and commercially.
I kept with my plan, continuing to work on Wilde stuff, figuring that even if Putnam ultimately didn’t opt to publish more, I’d find some way to get these adventures out there.
As anyone who’s been following the reviews of the book knows, the Wildes have been extremely well received by the critics. I literally had one sort of negative review, and even it largely praised the book, though it wasn’t the writer’s cup of tea. Even Kirkus Reviews, which is notoriously tough, had only good things to say (Novelist Kimberly Derting commented “I’m awed, you’ve cracked the Kirkus code!”)
(Feel free to visit the Reviews page at the Doc Wilde website.)
As for sales… (more…)
“Do these jeans make me look fat?”
That’s the classic relationship question that has only one answer, unless you want to hurt the asker’s feelings. And largely, the asker wants that one answer. The reassurance. They’re not really looking for the asked to use their critical eye, not wanting raw, unflinching honesty.
This, precisely, is how the overwhelming majority of wannabe writers/artists/musicians ask for critique of their work. (more…)
Desperate to paint their cause in epic colors, the tea baggers released this image of their protest over the weekend. Pretty impressive. Look how they swamp the national mall, like neurons in the pathways of a brain. Well, a brain possessed by someone other than a tea bagger, anyway.
Well.
PolitiFact.com (“a project of the St. Petersburg Times to help you find the truth in American politics. Reporters and editors from the Times fact-check statements by members of Congress, the White House, lobbyists and interest groups and rate them on our Truth-O-Meter…”) ran down the facts about this photo, and about the baggers’ claims of multitude:
We spoke with Pete Piringer, public affairs officer for the D.C. Fire and Emergency Department, who said that the local government no longer provides official crowd estimates because they can become politicized. That said, on the morning of Sept. 12, Piringer unofficially told one reporter that he thought between 60,000 and 75,000 people had shown up.
So, not quite a couple of million. And the photo?
“It was an impressive crowd,” he said. But after marching down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol the crowd “only filled the Capitol grounds, maybe up to Third Street,” he said.
Yet the photo showed the crowd sprawling far beyond that to the Washington Monument, which is bordered by 15th and and 17th Streets.
There’s another big problem with the photograph: it doesn’t include the National Museum of the American Indian, a building located at the corner of Fourth St. and Independence Ave. that opened on Sept. 14, 2004. (Looking at the photograph, the building should be in the upper right hand corner of the National Mall, next to the Air and Space Museum.) That means the picture was taken before the museum opened exactly five years ago. So clearly the photo doesn’t show the “tea party” crowd from the Sept. 12 protest.
Also worth noting are the cranes in front of the Natural History Museum (the second building from the lower left of the National Mall). According to Randall Kremer, the museum’s director of public affairs, “The last time cranes were in front was in the 1990s when the IMAX theater was being built.”
That makes the picture at least a decade old.
That means the trumpeted count, and the picture, are about as accurate as most information offered up by these people. And lying is apparently very much a right-wing value. Like greed and intolerance.
In an editorial for the Washington Post, Sen. George S. McGovern (1972 presidential candidate who lost to Nixon, and boy that worked out, didn’t it?) offers up a simple, smart, elegant solution to our national health-care nightmare:
If we want comprehensive health care for all our citizens, we can achieve it with a single sentence: Congress hereby extends Medicare to all Americans. Those of us over 65 have been enjoying this program for years. I go to the doctor or hospital of my choice, and my taxes pay all the bills. It’s wonderful. But I would have appreciated it even more if my wife and children and I had had such health-care coverage when we were younger. I want every American, from birth to death, to get the kind of health care I now receive. Removing the payments now going to the insurance corporations would considerably offset the tax increase necessary to cover all Americans.
Medicare exists. It works. It’s beloved by its beneficiaries, who are such a large voting block that it’s beloved even by most conservative politicians, who ought to despise it as the dread “socialism” they fear so much. Why not just expand it?
We know that Medicare has worked well for half a century for those of us over 65. Why does it become “socialized medicine” when we extend it to younger Americans?
…We recently bailed out the finance houses and banks to the tune of $700 billion. A country that can afford such an outlay while paying for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan can afford to do what every other advanced democracy has done: underwrite quality health care for all its citizens.
If Medicare needs a few modifications in order to serve all Americans, we can make such adjustments now or later. But let’s make sure Congress has an up or down vote on Medicare for all before it adjourns this year. Let’s not waste time trying to reinvent the wheel. We all know what Medicare is. Do we want health care for all, or only for those over 65?
Those of us who care about our fellow citizens, rather than mostly ill-educated ideals of selfishness and short-sightedness, certainly do.
The whole piece is here. Thanks go to Betsy Burnam for making me aware of it.
Streaming movies on Netflix continues to be a source of discovery. It allows me (and you, if you sign up) to try any number of films I probably would never get around to, if I knew of them at all. Sometimes they’re duds (I tried 1994’s The Favor, for instance, and couldn’t bear more than ten or fifteen minutes), but sometimes they’re treasures.
The Life Before Her Eyes is a treasure. (more…)
Tom Tomorrow is by far one of the funniest and wisest editorialists drawing funny pictures…
The name of the next Pirates of the Caribbean flick (with Johnny Depp returning as Sparrow) has been released:
Wait, what…?
On Stranger Tides? Isn’t there already a pirate fantasy of that name, as in the one called On Stranger Tides that I blogged about in my 1/8/09 entry “A Few Great Books“:
On Stranger Tides
by Tim Powers
Years before Jack Sparrow staggered into port on a sinking skiff, Tim Powers gave us the gift of a rousing swashbuckler of a pirate novel spiced with voodoo, zombies, and a Blackbeard infested with ghosts. This book has the distinction of being the one book on my shelf for years that I consciously planned to read to my kid when I eventually had one. And I did.
Anyone out there know if they’re adapting Powers’s book to the PotC milieu, or if they’re only just stealing his title…?
Click to Order
Among the great pulp heroes created by Robert E. Howard, author of the only true Conan tales, was puritan swordsman against darkness Solomon Kane.
The complete tales are currently available in this beautiful Del Rey book:
Click to Order
For the roleplaying games fans among you, one of the absolute greatest RPGs in years is this Savage Worlds gamebook by Shane Hensley:
Click to Order
And this trailer for the upcoming cinematic adaptation looks very promising.
As promised earlier in the week, here is the second Amazon reader’s review of my novel Doc Wilde and The Frogs of Doom I really wanted to share with you.
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 It was everything I thought it would be, and more…………, June 7, 2009
I bought the book for two reasons: to support a local author, and to give my child something fun to read. I had no preconceived idea of the book, or its plot or style. Imagine my surprise when I read it AND LOVED IT !! I grew up reading fantasy books like THE DARK IS RISING series by Susan Cooper. I wanted my 10 year old daughter to have the same sort of experience. To be completely immersed in the story, and carried along by it. She read it all in one day, and only put it down to participate in required activities. I, on the other hand, read it very slowly, to enjoy it, and to understand the nuances. It stood up very well to both tests!! I am an avid reader but often find myself reading books and criticizing either a plot turn as predictable, or character development as being lacking, or worse yet sometimes the language usage or vocabulary is repetitive. My only complaint is that I wanted to find out what happens next in the series… and that’s what Doc prescribed, right? keep ‘em wanting MORE!! |
