Seeing Spots

Pants.

Since I’m once again dying of jealousy that I won’t be at WHC this coming weekend, I’m entertaining myself by proving why I shouldn’t attend such events anyway. This is what I’d be doing + what I’d say if I were on certain panels.

Continue reading WHC 08

First up: Vince Liaguno from Dark Scribe is a class act.

Second: David Niall Wilson has been posting interviews with each of the Sirens contributors at Macabre Ink.  My interview (my first!) went live today, and Loren Rhoads and Maria Alexander both gave great interviews, as well.  Christa’s is coming soon!

David Niall Wilson gives Sins of the Sirens an in-depth review at Macabre Ink. 

Wil at HY is disappointed because he didn’t find a “new female writer” worth his time.  (He also calls stories that appeared in such places as The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror and Hot Blood, and many stories that received honorable mentions in YBF&H, “stuff better reserved for their lockboxes.”  Trunk stories.  Heh.)  He even finds time to insult Nancy Kilpatrick for no reason at all – she’s not even in the book.

Vampire poet Derek Clendering appears only to have read half of the book before his deadline at Dark Scribe (he doesn’t address anything by half of our authors.)

Ayup.

Right, so this morning I finally finished Shadow of the Colossus.  I’d bought it when it came out, played through eight colossi, and finally was just so depressed that I quit playing.  I hated killing them.  They’d done nothing to me, and they only seemed interested in protecting themselves.  As soon as Wander left them alone, they went back to doing their colossal thing.  I just felt rotten and cruel, and that resurrecting some dead girl wasn’t worth what I was doing.

But I really *did* want to see the ending.  I was bothered for the year-plus away from the game – I wanted to see some kind of retribution.  I wanted the ending to be that the colossi were, perhaps, the souls of other resurrected loved ones, and that the finale would be that our sleeping princess would rise as a colossus herself, or something.

I was late meeting friends the other night and when I explained that I had to beat a colossus, was asked how the game was.  I told them it was depressing: you, Agro, and the colossi are the only things in the world, and you develop a real emotional attachment to them.  Hell, I even loved that you could pat Agro kindly, and made sure to do it often.

At about 6:30 this morning I’m playing and an event took place in the game that made me absolutely wail, no no no, no!  I threw a total tantrum – I pitched the controller at the (empty) dog bed, declared that I hated this game and would not play any more, and then went out on the porch and *wept.*  Over pixels.  And I do not give a fuck that weeping over pixels is stupid – it’s no different than weeping every time Gage gets hit by the damn semi truck.

Anyway, I eventually gathered myself and finished the game.  I won’t spoil it for anyone who cares.

I love fighting games – Tekken and Soul Calibur.  I like wild hack-n-slash mayhem like Otogi 2 and fast, fun things like Shinobi.  But this is the first game that’s ever engaged me emotionally to the point that first I had to quit, and then I had to cry.  Thanks, game designers, for fucking me right up.

My contributor’s copies of Sins of the Sirens came today, and my oh my, they’re pretty books.  I love the cover art!

In case anyone was wondering, my contributions are:

• “The Wild,” the second story I ever had published.  It appeared only in Carpe Noctem Magazine in 1998.
• “Close,” my Edegawa Rampo homage, which appeared only in Damned: An Anthology of the Lost.  From Tracy Vonder Brink’s review of Damned for Joe Bob Briggs’ site: ”

• “Close” by Mehitobel Wilson would make a great “Tales from the Crypt” episode. A hotel employee devises an ingenious way to spy on amorous guests with some unforeseen consequences. It’s deliciously nasty.

My east-coast ass missed the signing at Dark Delicacies last week.  If you missed it, too, dig this:
FEB. 23, 2008, 3 PM
Maria Alexander and Loren Rhoads will perform live readings from Sins of the Sirens (and, of course, sign books) at Borderlands Books in San Francisco.

Apologies for all the pimping, but I figured that after nearly ten years of publishing, it was about time I learn HOW to pimp.  I’ve never bothered to do it before.

(I also never bothered to vanity-search, which is why I never saw that awesome mention of “Close” until tonight.  Hee!)

I’m thrilled to be a part of SINS OF THE SIRENS, a four-author collection from Dark Arts Books.  My fellow authors are Loren Rhoads, Maria Alexander, and Christa Faust.  Hella good company, I must say!  My contributions include a couple of rare reprints and a – holy shit – a brand-new story.  I’d taken a couple years off from writing, but John Everson and some other friends kicked my ass and made me write something for you guys.

Learn all about it RIGHT HERE, and preorders are awesome because you get free shipping if you do it through Dark Arts by Dec. 31st.  There are story excerpts as well!

It’s also up for preorder at Amazon, here:

Woohoo!

Also, Maria, Christa, and Loren will be reading and signing at Dark Delicacies on Jan 19th:
2:00pm
Dark Delicacies
4213 W. Burbank Blvd.
Burbank, CA 91505
1-888-DARKDEL

I won’t be there because I live waaaaaay on the other side of the world, goddammit.

And in totally un-writing-related news, I finally got my Etsy jewelry store store up and running.  There’s a lot more stuff to come, but I have about eight minutes’ worth of good jewelry-shooting light a week, so photographing the pieces has been troublesome.

But if you like sparkly stuff, go look!

Wow, and also, fuck.

For once, I’m really glad I’ve talked about a story concept to a friend.  Usually I keep my mouth solidly shut until the story’s been written.

For a couple of years now, I’ve had in my mental idea-file the plan to write about four people laying face-down in the park.  Why are they laying face-down?  I don’t know.  Nobody does.  So a crowd gathers, and asks, and speculate to one another, and bother the facedown people (that’s how I thought of them, the “facedown people,” and it was the “facedown people story” whenever I’d mention it.)  Eventually the reason why the foursome were laying there would become clear to the spectators (but not to the reader), and others would be compelled to lay down too. Blah blah surreal thing, blah blah statement on gawking & getting into people’s business and how if you get burned by what you discover, that’s your own damn fault.

So.  I’m supposed to be doing a story.  I was writing one, and then the VA Tech shootings happened, and that made the plot of my story not only completely inappropriate, but too sad for me to finish.  So I switch to the facedown-people story.  Slow start.  Which is a good thing, good thing I didn’t pour too much energy into it, because this morning Robert, with whom I’ve discussed the story before, emails me a video.

HOLY SHIT.

?!!

Holy SHIT.

Also… shit.

I don’t think I’ve ever heard that song before, and I not only don’t recognize the video but don’t know where I could have even seen it (unless it was on a tv in the pool hall and I just idly watched it and absorbed it without realizing?)

I’m glad as hell that I’ve discussed the story with Robert and that he happened to find this vid today, though. This would have been a thousand times worse if I’d written & published the story, and THEN found out about it. Holyshit.

But now I’m scared to write anything at all, in case it’s a direct 100% ripoff of something I genuinely don’t remember having ever seen. FUCK, PEOPLE. Argh. That’s so scary!!

The Sony Reader is delicious. Amazing. It makes me happy on many levels: it’s a dream to read, nice to hold, has buttons, is electronic and gadgety, and has a pleasing peppery aroma and silken mouthfeel. It currently contains a handful of books I’ve been meaning to read but have been too lazy to order (stuff like Green River Running Red and Under And Alone) – exactly the sorts of books I’d grab in paperback, read once, and never throw away. Exactly the sorts of books I bought the reader to handle.

And I dug out the booklight that came bundled yeaaaaars ago with Desperation/The Regulators, remember that? And read my little electronic motherfucker in bed in the dark with the booklight, woohoo! Good times.

(Note the “in bed in the dark” bit – yes, people, I got to sleep before dawn last night for the first time in a couple of years. Granted, I hadn’t gone to bed at all the night before, but still: sleeping in the dark! Neat!)

I can’t wait to post the thing I want to post… just waiting for permission.

More info on the Amazon Kindle came out in mid-April, and pricing is going to start above $400.  Thought-balloons reading “so what if it has EV-DO?  Who cares that it’ll handle Mobipocket content?” rose from my head as I ordered a Sony Reader.

The Reader will arrive tomorrow.  I spent the weekend (painting, making jewelry, being appalled at poop on the Sopranos) converting files into BBeB, downloading manga and running it through JE-Comics and PDFrasterfari, and picking the eyeballs of dried baby anchovies out of my teeth.  Oh, and This Is England is very good.  Would be a good double-feature with Suburbia (not SubUrbia.)

My whole e-book revolution is simply because my house is full.  Full.  Books in the kitchen, books in every room, books floor-to-ceiling on shelves we built in the hallway.  Our 1100sf house is lined and insulated with books.  I’ll still buy hard copies of books I want to own and handle, but I also read a lot of more mainstream paperbacks.  Since I can’t bring myself to part with even the crappiest of physical books, and since I’m a gadgetwhore, I’ll satisfy the paperback-thriller whim with a gadget and not need to worry about storing this Greg Iles book or that random cat-person fantasy collection.

Tonight I went grocery shopping for the first time in, no lie, two months.  The last time I went, my total was $200, and I was so scarred by the receipt that I couldn’t bear to go again.  Tonight I eased back into the world of buying food with a $26 visit.  Man, I need to get my garden going.  I hate paying for food.

Yet I like paying for gadgets, and gadget accoutrements, and books with which to gag the gadget.

Seriously, the Sopranos poop made me gasp and recoil.  Jeez.  I mean, the squat and everything!  But the whole episode involved dumping, so I see the point, but still.  Ugh.