Rants & Ramblings	Links Writer's Resume Rants & Ramblings Pop Culture Email Me
4/09/09 The argument rages. And, like with two horses fucking, I cannot look away. ... What? What'd I say? Never mind that. Video games as art. Yay, or nay? First, a clarification: Will Hindmarch @wordwill wasn't saying that video games are categorically art; he's on the same page in that video games can be art, just as a chair can be art. Now, further thoughts on the subject: the scab I cannot stop picking. Devin wrote a thoughtful exploration of Why Video Games Aren't Art (found here, under his Devin's Advocate column at CHUD-dot-com). Also, Roger Ebert is a pretty notorious film critic that has long taken the position of grumpy traditionalist, and you'll find his arguments here in a refutation of Clive Barker's refutation of Ebert's refutation that video games can be art. Or something. Shut up. I feel like calling out a few points from these articles and from the responses to these articles, for no other reason than for me to help work through my thoughts on the subject. Art isn't subjective; it's objective and categorical. I talked about this in my last post, and I don't buy it. Sorry, I don't. If "The Novel" is automatically an artform, than All Novels Are Art. If that's true for you, fine; embrace it. It isn't for me. But if somehow you've convinced yourself that Novel = Artform, and yet All Novels Aren't Necessarily Art, then I'm confused. To me, that's like, Poodle = Dog, but All Poodles Aren't Necessarily Dogs. "Let's say it's something purposefully created or presented with the intention of communicating an idea or feeling. That's really broad, probably broader than I actually feel comfortable with, but it'll do for the purposes of this piece. It's also value neutral, which is very important. The thing doesn't have to be created or presented well in order to be art, just purposefully." That's Devin's definition of art. It's an interesting one, and not at all unreasonable. It is broad, of course, and like any definition of art, I can be a dick and pick it apart: romance novels are eerily formulaic, but say one author writes her formulaic Fabio-chested romance novel with the intention of communicating the feeling of "hopelessness in oblivion." Of course, it's still a romance novel by the numbers regardless of intention. And yet, it remains art by this definition, because of the neutrality of value. The other question is, determining intent. Can you determine the intent of a creator? Shakespeare's primary intent was to make money. Seriously. He wanted to entertain and make a little spare change above all else: do Shakespeare's plays -- written or performed -- cease to become art? Problem is, Faraci than goes on to say: "With that definition I believe we can say games are not art. They may be artistic - having beauty, or carrying subtextual meaning (you can see sports as metaphors for many things) - and they may be used as art objects - an exquisitely hand painted Monopoly board, for instance - but games are not art. The carved chess pieces are art, the actual playing of the game of chess is not (although, and this is really only going to serve to confuse the matter, but I have to be fair, a film of that chess game would be). The moves of a baseball pitcher as recreated by a dancer are art; on the mound they're simply artful. But in the end a game is simply a series of rules that the players follow. Those rules are not intended to communicate ideas or feelings, but simply to facilitate play. If rules themselves were art, the US Congress would be the most prolific artists of our time." He's done a switch-up. He's changed the question from "Are video games art?" to "Is playing a video game art?" Yeaaaah but, that's not the question on the table. Playing video games as art is a strange notion, because nobody's asking, "Is watching a movie art?" as a question meant to diminish film's artistic meaning. Narrative Games are almost art in that they're more film than game I'm paraphrasing his point, but it's interesting that he makes room for video games to become art when in their nature they're like something else (in this case, film). That's a little weird, right? A video game that strives to be a unique entity is not art, but a video game that apes film is art? A bit myopic, but okay. Devin says that all the game elements in a narrative game are really just window dressing slapped onto the framework of film. Yeah, but isn't film just a bunch of window dressing slapped onto the narrative of a novel, or the acts of theater? Further problem is that you can actually tweak the definition pretty easily to include most or all video games. Even a single level of Donkey Kong can be ascribed a narrative experience. It has a beginning, middle, and an end. It tells a brief (and not that interesting) story about a plumber, a monkey, and a princess. Devin acknowledges this gray area, to be fair. But it bears mentioning. "It is important for me to finally interject my value judgment here on narrative games as cinema. I think they're all various levels of bad art. I've never played a video game that was as good as even a mediocre movie, or a fairly readable book. The next level of argument, should one take my suggestion that narrative cinematic games are just a bastard form of cinema, is that one of them is high art. Art with a big A. The examples I've seen given - BioShock, Braid, etc - seem to me like holding up a Danielle Steele book as the paragon of literature. These may be pretty, possibly even involving, but they're all essentially stupid (and using Braid because of its art design and classical sounding music is like holding up a romance novel because of its gothic title lettering). I don't think there's been a narrative game that's exceeded the level of depth and emotion that you get in an average Nic Cage science fiction thriller, for instance. Even the deepest are shallow, feature paper thin characters, uninvolving storylines and often rotten dialogue. I'll be honest: in my opinion the last few Grand Theft Auto games are the ones that come closest to be decent cinema. "There are people who get really upset about the idea that video games are not art. Furious, in fact. And I suspect that the reason is because there's a need to validate one's hobbies. It's why comic book readers always try to convince you this one comic book is so much better than what you think a comic book is, for instance. I don't fully understand this. I like lots of things that I don't need validated. I watch tons of truly awful, creepy and gross exploitation films and while I may want to celebrate them, I've never really tried to argue for them as anything but awful, creepy and gross. For the people so hung up on getting video games recognized as art, I have to ask: why? Why does it matter to you that your hobby is validated in that way? If you're having fun, isn't that enough." And here, I think, is where it all falls apart for Devin. He gets close, and then spins wildly away from the purpose of the essay -- he wants to tell you that art has nothing to do with subjectivity, that it's a "value neutral" proposition, but the reality comes out: He thinks video games are inferior as a medium--I mean, even taking the word "art" off the table, he thinks them inferior to film. Further, he wants to take his opposition down a peg: we just want it labeled as art because we want to justify our hobby. That's a dismissive argument. It actually diminishes his own argument and is a meaningless metric: I can always claim that by arguing anything, we're just trying to justify our own selfishness. If I think film is art, it's because I like movies. If I think placemats are art, it's because I'm fat and love cholesterol-clogging diner food. Yeah, but no. I masturbate, I don't need to justify it by calling it a "symphony." (Though, I might start. "Honey, I'm upstairs composing a symphony. Don't open the door. No matter how much sobbing you hear.") I actually don't think video games are art. Just as I don't think film is art by default. I don't think all created media are automatically art, but I think all created media have the potential to be art. He claims Braid is on par with Danielle Steel? Holy fuck, no. Listen, I don't know if Braid is High Art, or what High Art even is. But it's close. It's a little pretentious, but so are a lot of films and novels and poems. It engages the mind in a way well-beyond the puzzle, and it presents the narrative as a puzzle. It messes with temporal conventions and does things only video games can do. It has a message. It conveys a feeling. And the game elements, the platforming, the puzzles, it's all necessary to deliver on that intent. Yes, most games aren't art. They're entertainment only. They seek only to be a game, or to be a story, and not both, and often not really well. But a few break from the herd, and I think Braid is one of those. Beyond this, I think Devin stabs his own argument square in the back: he watches explotation films, but he's never tried to argue for them being any more than what they are. But... isn't All Film Art? Does exploitation cinema somehow fall outside that? What? Wait? Huh? Anyway. This is all becoming a major wall of text, and for that, I apologize. For the most part, Devin's argument is interesting, even if I don't agree with it -- he does get dismissive at points, which I think always runs the risk of devaluing your own position (and his Twitter feed is full of this kind of hand-waving Internet surliness, like "The people with the touchy feely 'anything can be art' definitions are probably the people least likely to see 'art' movies." Yeah, really? That's an asshole move to suggest that. Does nothing for his argument, and essentially boils down to, "People don't agree with me are probably wankjobs.") But I always enjoy reading his criticisms and essays on CHUD, so, good for him. I would take time to pick at Roger Ebert's arguments, but first, I need to get real work done, and two, most of his ideas can be refuted as, "Dude, please stop being a dick." His ideas are truly myopic and overly traditionalist, and are similar to those old arguments that tried to argue that the novel isn't an artform, or that film isn't an artform, or that comic books aren't an artform, or whatever. I'll just conclude this rambling screed with: I actually don't give that much of a shit about art. Good is good. Whether it's art or not, I don't know. The intent to convey feeling and meaning does not make something art, because it may not successfully convey them. The lack of intent doesn't stop something from being art, either, because some things that never meant to convey such elements will convey them, and that's great, too. Doesn't matter genre, doesn't matter format: yes, I do believe a great many things have the potential to be art. I do not subscribe to reductionist categorizations. I reject them. I also reject pants. And boiled brussel sprouts. So there. 4/08/09 It came up on Twitter, this matter of art. Particularly in a discussion put forth by Devin Feraci @devincf and Will Hindmarch @wordwill about whether or not video games are art. Devin says no, Will says yes. Devin says the sum of a video game's parts prevent it from being art, because not one of those parts is itself a unique artform. Film, I argued, is similarly a sum of many artform parts, which then seems to put it in the same category of video games (by Devin's definition). He says film editing is a unique art form that isn't shared across any medium (except, it is), and so film is an artform, and video games are not. Here's my feelings on the subject. Take note, because it might change in about 15 minutes. Art is forever subjective. No act is automatically "art." The term "artform" is essentially bullshit. If an act, or a career, is art by default, then all things done under that aegis must similarly be called art, good or bad. Except, it's not. Devin argues that value isn't a part of his argument, that his position relies on art being categorical, except that's bullshit, too. Art is way, way too loaded a term to be categorical. There's no taxonomy of art. C'mon. Film editing is art by default? That's a little concerning. The film editing on, say, Requiem for a Dream, or The Conversation (recently watched due to my steady diet of conspiracy thrillers), or shit, let's hop in the Wayback Machine and hit Battleship Potemkin -- all of these, I'm happy to call art. But. Any David Spade movie? What about Sister Act? Maybe Transformers, which looks like it was at times strung together by an epileptic under strobe lights? Sister Act 2, perhaps? Art? Ehhh. I dunno about that. And there lies the problem of categorizing -- or uncategorizing -- any one job as art. They're all a craft. Same way that carpentry is a craft. Same way that writing is a craft. Painting is an art? A fine art? Not when I do it. You want me to paint you a picture of a parrot? Here. Hold on. I'll do it in my own feces. Give me a minute. ... Okay, I tried to scan it in, but I don't have a scanner. Maybe I'll take a photo of Still Life With Poo Parrot later. (But then, is a photo of a painting art? Shit.) Point is, it isn't art. Just as film editing isn't automatically art, and the film editor isn't automatically an artist. Just as a video game isn't automatically art. Nothing, by my defintion, should be held as categorically art simply by definition of its shape and form. But, taking that position can also free us: by not saying video games are automatically art, we also won't say that video games can't be art, either. And they can be. Oh, really, they can be. Anyway. This leads me to a brief discussion of Twitter, because that's where this all began. I love Twitter. Twitter is effective. Twitter is CB radio for Internet truckers. If I'm in a bigrig hauling ass down the Interstate, I might radio ahead if I see Smokey and the Bandit. I might ask to find a good place to eat. I might take a request from a cop to form a Florida Roadblock with a buddy against a speeding car. Twitter works that way. It's like being in an office with a number of useful people. Actually, that doesn't even cover it. Really, it's like Human Google. Google is a search engine, and it's great, but it has no context. It doesn't know my intent. It has no human response. Twitter does. Twitter's a hive-mind. I can give it context. I can give my searches meaning and responders are useful. I've learned about a good agent contest. I've learned how to cook the fish known as "corvina." I've shared recipes. I've experienced hilarity (and peed my britches more than a little). I've learned news before it's on CNN. Twitter's fucking crazy. Ant colonies are interesting because the colony is as strong as its strongest ant. That's not normal in human communities; we as humans are generally only as strong as our weakest member. Twitter changes that. The human hive-mind is here, folks. Join up. Oh, one last thing: I'm soon switching to a new webhost. Get excited. Or, y'know, don't. I won't take away your freedoms. 3/29/09 Yeah, yeah, yeah. You've heard the refrain. We can all sing along: "I haven't updated the blog because I've been busy." And it's true, goddamnit. I've been working hard for, as Eddy Webb roughly put it, "the color-challenged lupine," doing some crazy can't-talk-about-it-hush-hush-they'll-cut-off-my-nuts work. So that's been a good portion of my time. But I've also been hammering through a second and third draft of the script. I can't talk too much about the Really Awesome Stuff that's been happening with the script, or the Really Awesome People that are being brought on board, but I can tell you that I really believe we're making this movie. We have momentum. It's unstoppable (a lie; momentum in the creative sphere is always stoppable, but shhhh). The third draft netted out a billion times stronger (warning: possible hyperbole) than previous drafts. The win at Cinemart and the Really Awesome People getting on board is helping push us into the zone. Today, Hunter, with the standard crew plus two (David Hill and bad-ass mother goddess wife, Filamena) -- we're doing an awesome Storyteller rotation using a kind of episodic "monster of the week" (or "relic of the week," since it's a bunch of AKD-wannabe Lucifuges in a Friday the 13th TV show knock off). I'm first at bat, and I'ma run them through upcoming SAS, "Blood Drive." I'm on Twitter, by the way: http://twitter.com/ChuckWendig. So, for now, them's the updates. When next I arrive, I might, miiiight say something about self-publishing on the Internet! Wait and see! Or, alternately, I'll wait two months and show up with another lame update as to my work! The suspense is penetrating. (P.S. -- if anybody, ohhh, wants to take a stab at updating the website so that it Doesn't Suck Anymore, as in, it will work on Firefox and other non-IE browsers, give a shout. I can't pay. Well, I can maybe pay a little? I dunno. Will Hindmarch keeps saying "Wordpress, Wordpress!" from the shadows, but then he darts off into the darkness, leaving me with tear-smeared mascara on my cheeks and a full diaper with nobody to change me. It's sad, really.) 2/09/09 Traveling was weird in that it managed to both refill my sails and also kind of take the wind out of me. On one hand, I'm happier. I feel renewed. On the other hand, I'm left searching, wanting, looking beyond. Also having a bit of trouble getting moving on some projects (but not others). Speaking of projects -- one in particular is Full of Good. I've been working on a film project recently with director and writing partner Lance Weiler, and that project won at a co-production showcase and film festival called Cinemart. That gives us money to put toward the production of the film, and it also gives it some good exposure to get further financing. So, that's a big step, and here's hoping it continues grabbing the needed momentum. We also have another slightly-older project which is maybe seeing some new life with a Very Big Producer; then again, Hollywood runs hot and cold, so who knows? I'm hopeful, though. I've got two developer projects on my plate for White Wolf, so two more books will hit shelves with my name attached as High Muckity Muck developer (one of those books is announced already, tentatively titled Book of the Dead). Plus, I've got a handful of writing projects with them, too. So, I'm a busy monkey. Fortunate, given the economic climate right now. The weather's getting a tad warmer, which helps my mood immensely. I think the wife and I need to travel more. Not big trips like Hawaii; little day trips or overnight trips. Stuff we can drive to, by and large. Nothing costly (er, like Hawaii); just places to go, look at your surroundings, enjoy the change of one's frame of reference. Get out of the house now and again, y'know? Trust me, I love working from home. But it... er, lacks variety. I live here and work here, and so it's a bit like being in a box all the time. Good to get out of the box. See what awaits. We need a new mattress, but shopping for mattresses is crazy-town. I have 100% Kona coffee, and am loving it. I have even convinced my wife not to drink it with a ton of flavored creamer or sugar. New Lily Allen album tomorrow. I hear you can buy it for like, four bucks from some online outlets? I'll have to peruse. Oh, and this is funny. 2/03/09 I am infected by island madness. Maybe it's the beard. I dunno. But wherever I go, I think, "Hey, that's not a mango. That's not a whale jumping out of the water. That's not a warm breeze, not the sound of waves, not flip-flops or mongooses or a lanai." And it unsettles me. I see snow, I want water. I look at the fruit at the grocery store, and I wonder, "Why isn't it tropical, and why doesn't it look fresh?" I can't imagine why the air doesn't smell like salt water, or plumerias. Point is, the trip to Hawaii was great. We watched and did many things: took a boat trip ("a three-hour tour"), hiked a five-mile lava crater, witnessed distant lava pouring into the ocean, ate too many good meals, stalked a kalij pheasant, watched whales in the water just off our boat, watched whales breaching off the coast of our third hotel, took 2,000 photos, drove nearly 500 miles, wandered the rainforest, annoyed honu (sea turtles), wondered at giant manta rays swimming under our boat, gawked at spinner dolphins, ate sushi, ate Vietnamese food, ate two loco mocos, ate malasadas, spent a total of 24 hours on planes, had concierges kiss our ass because they had so few guests, did not buy pot from some crazy hippie dude, saw lots of crazy hippie dudes, met a 86-year-old man who loves his Canon camera and uses Photoshop regularly, met a pair of newlyweds in the beginning of our trip who we'd randomly run into again at the end of our trip 100 miles away, consumed and brought home a bag of kona coffee, wandered amidst miles of flowers at the botanical garden, ate a halo halo, got swarmed by the Japanese in a lava tube, saw about 200 Dodge Calibers, and watched countless sunsets. I'm also no longer afraid of flying, which is weird, but good. I didn't used to be, and then I was, and now I'm not again. I was alarmingly untense during those flights, at least as far as plane anxiety goes. Plus, I went out on the ocean and did not fear that it would swallow me whole, so I'd say that's a good step, too. Not to say that traveling was all good. Oh, no. Traveling through LAX was a punch to the scrotum, and those people at LAX (and who are members of United Air or U.S. Airways) can all go fuck themselves in the face with their own fists. Still, the wife was present, and she's a perfect travel companion. You'll find a travel report from me... here. And you'll find my growing photoblog (small now, but remember, I have 2000 pictures to mine for the gems)... here Otherwise, it's all a little strange having basically reentered the atmosphere. I was amongst the cosmos, and now I've been cast back down to the fundament. More specifically, it's kind of cold here, and bleak. The bleak is more the problem. The cold I can deal with. But bleak pervades. The good thing is, I have a ton of work. The bad thing is, I have a ton of work. But, this week some work is rounding the bend that might start to bring the whole career around the corner. We'll see. More later. It's snowing right now. Kind of a piddling snow, though. I'd love one good apocalyptic snow before the winter is over. Not ice. Snow. Twenty inches of the stuff. Can't leave. Can't do anything. Can only sit and wait and be toasty indoors, or frolic with the dogs outdoors. If I can't have a snowpocalypse, then I'll take this, instead: 12/31/08 Dear 2008, Seriously, dude, you were a long year. You're like that guy who just won't shut up. He stands there by the dip, and he's telling you about his trip to Patagonia, or the mole on his back shaped like Delaware, or how he really wants to learn how to windsurf, and I'm just like, "Man, you were interesting for about 15 minutes, but then you just kept talking." Plus, 2008, I think you're bipolar. See somebody about that. Get on some meds. One minute, you're great. I'm developing Hunter: The Vigil. I'm loving the wife. I'm quitting part-time work to go back to full-time freelancing. Gen-Con. Colorado. Good friends. Steady work. Happy dogs. That was great stuff. Seriously, good eye, 2008. Oh, and that Obama as President thing? Genius. High-five. For that, take a minute. Pat your own back. Masturbate gleefully upon the corpses of your enemies. But then, it's like you took a Shit Pill and turned into a real jerkoff the other half of the time. You should really listen to yourself. "Oh, funerals and anger and anxiety and lawyers, nyaa nyaaa nyaaaaa, blah blah blah, I'm cancelling Pushing Daisies." It's annoying. For that, punch yourself in the asshole. Right on the asshole. One fist. One hard punch. The result -- if you didn't fuck it up -- should be a prolapsed anus. Take it, 2008. Take it hard. Just be glad you're not in Singapore. In Singapore, they'll stick a biting fish in the tip of your dick. Right in the tip. And I'm not talking minnows or anchovies. I'm talking barricuda. Think about that, 2008, and be thankful. Like the goddamn pilgrims. Listen. You were a pal a lot of the time. I dig that. When I was low, you distracted me. Flight of the Conchords, Whitest Kids You Know, Iron Man, Dark Knight, Wall-E, Lost, Avatar the Last Airbender, Queen of Bedlam, and all that fun crap. You gave me lots of great ideas. You gave me a metric spleenload of things to think about. But I don't know that it was enough, 2008. You get an A for effort. But you get the aforementioned fist to the butthole, too. So, 2008. You started out a squalling baby covered in blood (and needing a diaper), and you'll go out a tottering old man, also covered in blood (and needing a diaper). You had a good run. You had a long run. Take your last few hours, enjoy it. Take off your crap-filled diaper and fling it wantonly at passersby. Do a little dance before your hip gives out. I'll even not punch you right on your asshole if you're kind enough to leave my new camera on the front porch before the day is over. I'll just let that offer hang out there. Take it or leave it. Maybe you care. Maybe you don't. I do know that 2009, I'm expecting to be leaner, meaner. Plus, 2009's sending me to Hawaii, 2008. Did you know that? The wife and I? Lush tropics? Whales? Mai tais? Lava? Yeah. That's right. That's what 2009's doing for us. I'm not trying to make you feel bad, but just in case, I've left a box of tissues in case you want to cry. I'll be over here in the bushes, watching. I will eat your tears, 2008. What else will 2009 bring when its born? Hard to say. I've got a novel in mind maybe he'll let me write. I'd love to get this website updated to something that only runs properly on a Texas Instruments graphing calculator from 1997. I've got more script-work. Maybe we'll start a family this year, but I hear tell that 2010 called dibs on that one. Anyway. Gotta run, Old Man Oh-Eight. I hear the squishy tectonic movements of the cosmic vagina slowly opening, ready to give birth to New Baby Oh-Nine. Tick-tock, tick-tock. Enjoy your waning mortality. (And give me my goddamn camera.) Love, C. Diddy P.S. Yes, yes, I get it. You just knocked the power out so I can't actually upload this to the Intertubes as yet, because the cable's out. But I'm a patient spider, 2008. I'll have my posting yet! 12/22/08 It's been a strange holiday season so far. Tepid, really -- it has no bite, no brightness. No fault of anybody's, of course, but it's all kind of been leading up to today, which is so far both easier and harder than you'd think. Sadness, I suspect, has a kind of gravity to it. Initially, it's all top-of-mind. It's surface. I don't mean "surface" as in false, I just mean it hovers there, creating a certain sensitivity. But over time, it sinks. Burrows, maybe. It never goes away, but it hides. It crawls into the comfortable spaces and waits. On one hand, this is better -- because it isn't always right there. Early on, anything can trigger the grief. Anything can drag it into the light, to the top of the skin. It's like a burn slowly healing; brush up against rough fabric and the skin is off and the blood flows fresh. On the other hand, it becomes almost septic as it goes deep. The burn becomes scar. Plus, it becomes a part of you, which is maybe what growing up is really about. When you come to have those certain sorrows as a part of you, you've passed the threshold. A grim, equalizing rite of passage. The playing field is leveled, because death is for everybody. (That's another byproduct. One maybe I'll talk about some other time. My mortality is something I'm distinctly aware of, these days. Now, part of it is that I'm a bit of a hypochondriac, but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking not about the means to the end, but the end itself. What will we leave behind? We get one turn on the carousel and don't know when the music stops -- with that time, what do you do?) It's strange. My grandfather passed before I was born, and he died around the holidays. It's why my father occasionally lapsed into a barely-visible grief during the Christmas season--barely visible, yet keenly felt. Now, my own father? The holidays are marked, I guess. That's a shame. I don't want to suggest that the holidays around our house were difficult or unpleasant, hardly -- but they had something that was equal parts hard edge and soft, blurry center. I don't know that you can ever stop that entirely, but I don't plan to let the holidays descend into negativity. This is the one holiday where I think it's by necessity going to be a noticeably empty stretch of time, like a gap on the bookshelf where a favored book went missing. But that can't happen every year. The holidays have their share of pains and troubles, but going back to that mortality issue, you only get one ride on the ferris wheel (or did I say carousel? shut up), so enjoy the sights while you can. So. Today's the day. Hard not to think about it. Hard to stop the mind from drifting back to a year ago. The way it played out is like a bad dream, now. Again, the sorrow's gone deep. The stinger isn't in the skin anymore; it's in the bloodstream. I think of that day, of him dying there in our arms and it's like I'm viewing it from an out-of-body experience. It's all flashes. An uncertain narrative. I guess I'll go down to the grave today. Though, truly, he's not there. Yes, half his ashes are. But the other half are in Colorado. In a rushing stream out back of his property. He's part of the stones and mountains, now. Stalking elk in the Happy Hunting Grounds. I remember going to my grandfather's grave with Dad, and I never really got it when I was a kid. Part of it was that I didn't know my grandfather. Never met him, and by all reports my father and him did not have the friendliest of relationships -- my grandfather was, if you believe the stories, a very hard man. And yet, you look at my father at the grave, and the grief that was there. I know they had some measure of reconciliation, but not a lot. I know that my father and I had a better relationship, though long a rocky one. We're all caught in cycles, it seems, but I think--to quote the poem--you can ensure that it's a widening gyre. I don't know that you ever break a cycle, I think you just spin it wider and wider until it's so broad that it's barely a cycle anymore. It's a strange thing, but you have to take lessons away from this kind of stuff. We as humans ascribe meaning to things that may otherwise be meaningless, but that's not a bad thing. It's what we are, what we do. So, you have something like this, you have the death of a parent and you have the grief that comes with it and it's like a ledger. And you open that ledger and you start to look over the debits and the credits and you try to take away a picture, try to envision how all the little pieces add into a bigger puzzle. What can you change? What can you take away? What image do you see? (Is it a rabbit, or a duck?) I don't mean to be solipsistic. I don't mean to suggest that only my experiences are significant, here. Turning the death of someone into a lesson seems somehow selfish, callow, callous. But, what else can it be? They've gone. They've slipped off the coil, and you're left. You have to examine it. Have to take something away from it. My grandfather died and it became about my father. My father died, and it becomes about me. Not because you want it to be, but because that's what happens. Then again, maybe I just need to get out of my own head. ... Well, shit, that was rambly and incoherent. I don't know how you people can stand to read this crap. "Christ," you'll say, "this guy's a goddamn ding-dong. He's a rabid moonbat!" Maybe true, maybe true. Whatever the case, I've got my lessons in mind. I've got things to consider. Maybe you do, too. Bare minimum, look around you. You've got family. Be nice to them. No telling how long they -- or you -- will be around. Happy holidays! 12/11/08 See? I told you. Third Nerdtivity. And you thought I'd forgotten. 12/09/08 I'm not updating this blog because I like any of you. I'm updating this blog so my wife will stop yelling at me to update this blog. And I dunno if this even counts as a "blog." Does it? Who are you people? Where are my teeth? Things are happening. An election was won by the right dude, but at this point, who wants to hear about that? Nobody. (I do like, however, that our President-Elect has basically become the President in all but name. He's doing shit. He's held, I think, more press conferences before his inauguration than Bush has held during some of his years in office? Good stuff.) I am, obviously, quite busy. This is not a bad thing, not really. I went back to freelancing full-time in the hopes that I would have enough and be able to farm enough work to support myself. So far, thumbs up. I'm chockablock with projects. So that's good. I do need to carve out some time next year to finish some projects. I have two novels roughly outlined in my brain, and they demand space in which to exist. Oh. So, we're thinking of going to Hawaii, the missus and I. Christmas present to one another. It's an odd choice. Neither of us really like the ocean. Or the beach. Or the tropics. So, what the fuck? Why Hawaii? I don't really know. I'm just captivated by the place. Once, I figured it was just a handful of Caribbean-style islands, except with a shit-ton of Asians running around. Nothing wrong with that (especially the Asian part), but nowhere I'd be rushing to for a vacation. But then, you start to read things and see things. Suddenly, you realize that Hawaii has a bucketload of stuff going on. Canyons. Rainforests. Bad-ass sushi joints. Weather that hovers right around the 75-80 degree mark year-around. Oh, and two more things: turtles and volcanoes, both of which are my wife's chief reasons for supporting the Hawaii venture, should it be made manifest. She says that Hawaii gets double-points if it can support a volcano that shoots turtles from its craggy maw instead of lava. We'll see. Don't get me wrong. Some of it might just be that winter can eat a dick and die. It's already too damn cold, and I want warmth. I want to see sun. And something green. Gray, gray, and dark gray doesn't thrill me as a choice of color palette, dig? Hawaii's got color. And Hawaii's got the warm. Christopher Moore lives in Hawaii these days. Barack Obama, he's a Hawaii guy. They eat lots of Spam in Hawaii, and who doesn't love Spam? Don't need a passport to go there (just the fortitude to deal with 12 hours on a plane). All positives. Plus, it's a lot cheaper right now because the economy took a crap on itself and fell down some stairs. Hawaii used to be expensive, but they have a lot of deals going on. It's also a good time to travel. We're going to have kids here in the next couple of years, and while I recognize it's perfectly possible to travel with the little son-monkeys and daughterkins, I have to wager that a day spent on a cramped plane might be less than pleasant. So, we travel now. Maybe a part of it, too, is that it'll just be nice to get away. We're kind of in a holding pattern here, a weird between. We're packed like sardines in our house at this point, so we can't really do much for Christmas that involves New Things For Our Home. The holidays this year are a bit meh pfhh pshhh thhbt. Time to make a run for it, I think, even if the egress is purely temporary. Speakatheholidays, Thanksgiving was lovely, but Christmas so far has failed to manifest its Holly Jolly Spirit in any meaningful way. It may not this year, and I'm comfortable with that, hoping that if it fails to show, then it'll just bring double the Jolly next year. (Or triple!) I do have to jump on creating the Third Annual Nerdtivity. Hrm. Maybe we'll do that tonight. Watch this space. 11/07/08 Happy birthday, Dad. 11/03/08 Thisclose, folks, to being out of the massive election haze that has surely suffused the air wherever you happen to be. On one hand, it's been a fascinating, historic campaigfn, one for the ages. On the other hand, I'm weary. I just want to vote already (and can't vote early here in our loverly state). So, tomorrow, we get to emerge from the fog. You can vote for Senor Cranky Pants, whose campaign has been no less erratic than a Superball tossed around an empty room. Or you can vote for the presidential guy, the guy who has good ideas that have been part of his campaign from the very beginning. You can vote for divisive politics. Or you can vote for something that might actually bring this country together. You can vote for a failed economic crapstink of a policy. Or you can vote for an economic policy that actually sounds sane in insane times, favoring the majority of people instead of the minority of people. Whatever you do, vote. (Except, y'know, vote Obama, too.) 09/19/08 Time for another Cooking With Wendig class. Ready? Go. You want to take a spaghetti squash, right? This is what you're going to do with that squash. You're going to pierce its armored hide. Seriously. Venting the skull of the squash is harder than you think, so be ready. You say, "I'll use a fork," and I say, fuck your fork. That's a pussy move. You say, "I'll use a knife," and I say, okay, better, at least now you're thinking like Rambo. But here's what I do, I take a sharpening steel, right? One of those big metal rods used to sharpen your kitchen blades? That's my spear. I cradle the spaghetti squash like a baby, and then I stab it with the sharpening steel. And no, I don't stab babies. At least, not this way. See, the steel's a bit blunt on the end, but it punches through the squash's surly shell like a goddamn missile, and it's a straight shot so there's no resistance. With a knife, you get too much resistance. Your blade'll get stuck. I stab it about 10 times. Get a good spread of perforation. Oh, somewhere in here, crank up your oven to 375. Once it's hot, stick the murdered squash in there. Leave it alone for one hour. Now, you get get out your little wussy fork and test the flesh. Does it yield? Is it soft? You're done. If not, keep cooking in 10 minute intervals until the sucker gets tender. Now, you pull that hot lunk of vegetable flesh out of the oven and you think everything's hunky-dory, but it's like you have a severed head that's been burned by barbarian torches. It's going to burn you. It's going to bite you. So you need to be careful. Put on gloves. Get a towel. Layer on a suit of asbestos shingles. Whatever works. Read what other people say, they tell you it's time to let the squash cool for 10, 20 minutes. Yeah. You do that--if you're a total vagina. Time to let go of Mommy's labia, little boy. Time to become a man. Forget waiting. That's bush league shit. You take a serrated knife, like a bread knife, and you hold that squash down like you're punshing a high school tormentor, and you cut it in half from stem to ass, a horizontal slicey-slice. It's open, now. It's yielding its flesh to you. It's spreading its loin, waiting for your culinary penetration. What's in there is the vegetable equivalent of goddamn napalm. Seeds and goo and muck, and it's sitting there at about two thousand degrees. It'll melt your fucking panties, this steaming viscera. Again, others will tell you to wait. But you're going to stop being a puckered butthole about everything and you're going to get in the game, Jennifer. You have metal tongs right? You'd better have metal tongs. Take those tongs, and just start ripping the seed mess from the upper bowels of the squash. You know what you need to rip, because it's slimy. It's peppered with seeds. Those seeds need to go, because if you eat one, it'll go in your stomach and grow a squash and then you won't be able to poop anymore. That means you die. So, don't eat the seeds. Clear out the goo and the ooze. And now you're left with the two halves of your prize. Inside is its flesh. Take your tongs, or go back to your froofy little fork and scrape a bit of it. Scrape from rim down into the flesh. We'll call this the "rimjob." That's a culinary term, by the way, like mirepoix or saucier or Cleveland Steamer. You'll note that the flesh comes away in spaghetti-esque noodley bits. You can eat one now, but remember, this shit is hotter than a chrome tailpipe on a motorcycle that just drove through the center of the sun, so just be ready to get a new tongue somewhere. Those noodley bits, that's your squash. You'll get about 4-6 cups of the stuff. You can do whatever you want with it. You can make a beard out of it. You can throw it at people. You can put it down your pants for whatever Godforsaken reason. Me, I like to eat it, but I'm fucking crazy like that. What I did last night was use this one recipe, but I changed shit a little bit. I stir-fried the squash-strings with some coconut milk, some cumin seeds, some coriander seeds, salt, a little chicken broth (though don't add salt if this has salt in it, otherwise you'll die from salt poisoning). At the end, you throw in a handful of chopped cilantro and some nuts. No, put your pants back on. Not those. I'm talking cashews. Put in some cashews. Filthy deviant with your greasy, eager testicles. With all of that, I did some scallops in a Thai-style recipe I found online, and that necessitated buying fish sauce, and fish sauce is totally fucked up. Because it smells like feet. Bad feet. Corpse-feet. With fish-guts squished between the mortified toes. And yet, you eat it, and it basically tastes like sweet, fragrant salty goodness. Scallops, too, are really easy, but that's another episode of Cooking with Wendig. Also, I mixed up some jasmine rice, and the easiest thing you can do there is right at the end, toss in some chopped basil and mix it around, then cover it up for the last 5-10 minutes to let the rice firm and the basil soften. It'll blow your mouth out your ass it tastes so good. 9/17/08 Faithful Readers, you totally failed. Seriously. You fucked up. I was testing you. Seeing how long I could go without putting a post up here about Gen Con without earning a flood of surly emails from you people. You know what I got? Two people. Only two asking where the updates were. One of them is my wife, and she doesn't count, because she's just being nice. The other is Matt Heslin, and he deserves high praise and some kind of medal, all that despite the fact he's a raving meth-hound and owes lots of money to a deposed Rwandan general. So, only two of you care. But, despite that, I'm going to muscle on and give you a Gen Con recap. Despite the fact that I have an emergency Vampire: The Requiem assignment to get done, I'm going to take time out of my precious day to entertain you all. All two of you. My Gen Con recap was going to be more robust, but shit happens. So, you get the down and dirty, the kind where I just unhinge my jaw and regurgitate information in no notable order. • As the aforementioned Matt Heslin puts it, I won a Nerd Award. They call it an ENnie, which is not the same as an Emmy, or an EMmy, or whatever. I won this for a little PDF product called Fear-Maker's Promise, which you should totally find and buy. Clicking here will take you to some random person's picture, which somehow includes me. Up there with me is Eddy Webb, who is a fine man with a contagious personality. By which, I do not mean syphilis. • As a sidenote, getting up to speak, I was dumbfounded by having to use words. I didn't expect to talk--I just kind of figured Eddy would handle it. It's not true. He shoved me in front of the podium, which was more or less the same as shoving a wobbly-kneed deer in front of an oncoming truck. I stammered a lot. Said some words. I think I maybe admitted to being a Communist or a cross-dresser. Not sure. • Indianapolis smells of hot garbage. They pipe this odor into the city from blowing steam vents. It's true. • Some nerds smell of sweat and garlic. This is especially true when trapped in an elevator with them. • Giraffeplay. Also, don't paint so broadly with the rape brush. • Rob Donoghue appeared a lot in front of me, which is like being visited by a powerful shaman that you happen to really like a lot. Rob is a comforting presence. He shows up to your panel, and you know everything's going to be okay. • I met, or re-met, my second cousin or cousin-once-removed or whatever he is. Steven Belledin, ladies and gentlemen. His site is here. I think he's going to do some work for White Wolf. • I think I mentioned panels? There were panels. The Hunter panel was good clean American fun, what with Justin Achilli comparing hunters to Animal Cops, and Marty publically using the word "teabag." The So You Want To Write For White Wolf panel was also good, and not filled with the standard herd of miscreants, from what I understand. • Russell Bailey and Marty Henley make for excellent roomslices. Neither offends. Both amuse. High-fives to both. • Travis Stout and his Wonder Dog will defeat you in wit. • Did a couple-few book signings. Had lots of people the first day, and on the second, as it turns out you need to actually hold the product up, or people think you're just a handful of douchenozzles sitting behind an unlabeled booth. Hold up the book, though, and people flock. We devalued books left and right. Nice. • Rich Thomas has two livers. Maybe three. He probably had five once upon a time. • John Newman lives in an area of the world where being a freelance writer earns you a devoted stripper all your own. Excuse me, "dancer." • There was a party. There was drinking and heat and ladies in cages. There was free liquor. • Ran two games. Both went well, though even in the same scenario it's funny how two game groups will take wildly divergent paths to do what you lay out. Hunter worked very well for me; it's really easy to run. • Joe Carriker will help you find where you need to go. • Some nerds are scary normal. Ethan Skemp? Matt Milberger? Wholesome and normal. Clearly, both are skin-flaying sadists. Or Republicans. • Frostbacks. Sleetmonkeys. Our weaker brothers up North. • Mike Cheney is inappropriate. In a good way. He also looks like he'll bite off your head and throw it back up down your neck. • Justin Achilli randomly doodles on shit. I think somewhere there's a napkin with, I dunno, a Trilobyte or something on it. • Jess Hartley has the best husband ever. I'd marry him. He also looks like he could carry me over the threshhold of our matrimonial home, which would be sweet. Jess also makes lots of "squee" noises. • Matt McFarland is exactly as I imagined him. He talks like he emails. He smells of familiar friends. • Pins will upstage you. Free pins, at least. • I took no pictures. Didn't want to be one of those creepy geeks with a camera, trying to snap off shots of that girl who stuffed herself into a Princess Leia slave costume. • I almost bodily ran into that guy, Feedback, from that Stan Lee Sci-Fi show, So You Want To Be A Superhero. He looked irritated. Like someone pissed in his bodysuit. • Before I went, I was afraid of flying. I didn't used to be afraid of flying. But now that I'm back, I'm not so freaked out anymore. Weird, that. • Mena and David Hill: met these two freelancers at the Succubus Club party, and then had them over for a Hunter game this past Sunday. Glad to have met them. • Bethany Culp is dangerous. And I am in her head. She'll eat that goddamn sorbet. • Jason Bolte is not at all what you expect. • Craig Grant is everything that you expect, and more. In fact, Craig Grant is my new hero, having seen Gangrel: Savage and Macabre. He makes us writers look fucking ace. Shit. I'm sure there's more. I just don't have the brain power to push on. I'll let Matt Heslin pick up the slack, who has decided to do some of my work for me. Let's all thank him. All two of us. "13 Aug 2008, Wednesday. 0430 hours Zulu Minus Six. Indianapolis is beautiful… from 15,000 feet of altitude. The sergeant gives me last minute jump instructions and I give him the finger. You don't get to be freelance writer and developer for one of the hottest gaming companies in Georgia or Iceland by meekly taking direction from someone who couldn't even get commissioned as an officer. Completely disregarding his increasingly urgent commands, I leap from the open cargo door of the C-130 into the cool air above Indiana. I have about a minute of weightless time hurtling toward the hard unyielding earth below to meditate on my being. I am Chuck Wendig, weaver of stories, creator of ideas, master of my destiny and the destiny of everything that I have ever dreamed of. I can end sentences with prepositions. I can fight wild animals with my bare hands, and do. I can dress better than any four male supermodels with sixteen personal assistants and three fashion consultants from any European country. This is what it's like to be God, except God isn't as good at hitting deadlines. I open my eyes and realize I'm approaching the safe point for chute release in about six seconds. I wait twelve more and then drift lazily down to the urban nightmare of Indianapolis. I only have to spend four days here, but it'll be enough to make sure this place never forgets the name of the man that changed things forever. Chuck. Wendig." 8/28/08 Gen Con recap... in just a moment. First, I'd like to say something. I know the world is listening, butt poised on the edge of its seat to see what kind of Mad Zcience I'm going to drop (it's so mad, I spell science with a 'z,' bitches), so here it is. The Republicans are mostly assholes. There, I said it. I know. That's some wisdom. Now, I'll also add that the Democrats are also mostly pussies, which pretty much completes the "political parties comprising the lower torso" theory that I've been working on since I was a wee tot. But, back to the GOP. Why are they assholes? Okay, flash back with me. Look back in your own life. Flip to page, say, 22, maybe 25, when you're in elementary school. You ever have someone make fun of you in elementary school for some unbelievably mundane thing? Me, it was a guy who made fun of me because I was chewing a cookie. Second grade, I'm sitting there, and I'm eating a cookie. I don't know where the fucking cookie came from--my Mom, your Mom, somebody's Mom. It's snack time, and I'm just quietly sitting there chewing the cookie, probably thinking about Star Wars or Zartan from G.I. Joe or some shit. (Remember: Zartan could change colors. He was a chameleon. He was like, a Hypercolor swamp pirate. That's some damn yeah, right there.) Anyway, this guy turns around and laughs at me, and mocks me because I am chewing a cookie. I'm not like, chewing it with my butthole or something. I don't have a great big cookie wad sticking out of my ear and snot bubbling. I'm eating a cookie. Mockery ensues. I've seen it elsewhere. "Hahaha, that kid's got shoes!" or "Stupid Roger, nice belly button, Roger! Roger's got a belly button!" Got me? Okay, back to GOP = Assnecks. So, instead of attacking Obama on, say, policy, they make fun of him because he's... a celebrity. Because he's popular. Are you goddamn kidding me? That's your brilliant attack? Because the candidate possesses the precise quality one needs to be elected in this country? We'd rather him be, what, unpopular? Some swollen-headed lackwit who can't put together three words without saying something retarded? (Oh, wait. We elected that guy. Never mind.) The sick part is, some people seem to buy it. If you buy that, you're an idiot. If you think his popularity somehow exists as a detriment, then somebody should kick your ass. You're just part of the moron's chorus, the parade of jackasses who join in with a bully's cries: "Ha-ha, Nancy has a dress on! Nancy has a dress on!" You know what, while I'm on the subject, can we lose the "common man, salt of the earth" approach, please? On both sides of the equation? Neither Obama or McCain are common. Neither are blue-collar (though, Obama's roots are far more mundane, far more "common"). That's why you're candidates for the presidency. Can we stop pretending like it's a fucking bag on your hip that somehow you excelled to this point and have qualities that push you to the top of the ladder? What kind of backwards country are we that we want to elect some dock-worker to the highest office in the nation (and potentially, the world)? Hey, no harm no foul if you're a dockworker. But you're probably not presidental material. I'm not presidential. I wouldn't elect me. I don't want them to be like me. I want my candidate to be bigger, smarter, faster than I am. If he's as dumb as me, we're all fucked, people. Double-super-fucked. I should also point out here that, duh, I'm a strident Obama supporter. Once upon a time, though, I was a crazy-big McCain fan. He really was this nutty maverick who did what was right, not what was popular. I figured that, with him and Clinton or him and Obama in this election, it'd be great to not have to pick the lesser of two evils and instead get to pick the awesomer of two awesomes. That didn't happen. McCain went south, tying himself to the most unpopular president in history (how that's a winning strategy, I'll never know). He sold out every last principle he had in this election--the same people who made the adds that slagged him in 2000 are the same people he hired to help him slag others. He's pro-war, pro-torture (!?!), and jokes publicly about bombing Iran (which despite its despotic regime, is filled with alarmingly liberal people who maybe don't want to hear about getting blown to gory gobbets). McCain's fallen way, way out of favor with me. ... Hm. *looks up at rest of post* Boy, that's a doozy. I'd better talk about Gen Con later. I already see your eyes glazing over. I'll be back, Faithful Readers, never fear. 8/25/08 Things! Stuff! Crap! Today? First day back at writing full-time. Giddy terror. Pants-pissing exhilaration? You decide, America. Also: Hunter: The Vigil seems to be doing well. Not sure how well it's doing in sales, but I know it's getting a lot more love than I expected. It's not that I think it's a bad game, not at all, I think it's the bee's motherfizzuckin' knees. But you just never know. We took some design risks with the game, and instead of going for the uber-tight focus of a game like Promethean, we went for the shotgun pattern approach, blasting the wall with a spray of birdshot, hoping to hit everybody's idea of "monster-hunter." It's the apotheosis of All Things Hunter-Flavored, I think, so hopefully it's working to make people happy. It makes me happy. Hold on. I'm going to go stroke the book lovingly. ... Okay, back. Also, just to see if anybody actually reads this blog (short answer: eehhh, probably not), I'll fully announce what we announced at Gen Con, which is the last Hunter book is called the Horror Recognition Guide. The guide is very much in the same vein as the clanbooks for Vampire: The Requiem in that it's a cool pastiche of about 20 or so encounters described through a lone first tier hunter cell's "files." It's an artifact book that can be dropped into your game, but it's not just about the artifacts--the stories that are told and the details parlayed can be nicely used by Storytellers and players alike. So, here's hoping people like it. I've read it, and it fackin' rocks. We also announced Block by Bloody Block, a PDF product (written by yours truly) that kind of takes the Damnation City (or Batman: No Man's Land) approach to a city's many territories, and how a hunter cell could approach said territories with an eye toward "claiming" them away from their monstrous masters. At the panel, we also talked about several SAS products coming up. Bad Night at Blackmoon Farm hits soon (also yours truly), then there'll be one SAS for (I think) each of the supplements. I'm writing one for Night Stalkers, and Ideal Reader Marty is writing the one for Spirit Slayers (which I might endeavor to test out). Beyond that, I don't think we announced much else? I should really probably definitely talk about Gen Con, though. Except--I have work to do. Expect Gen Con chatter tomorrowish. 8/11/08 Who the hell are you people? Get off my lawn. ... Oh, wait. I know you. Your faces. They're familiar to me. Been awhile, got news. That news is, drum roll please, I'm returning to the fun and wacky full time world of freelance writing! That's right, I am once more a desperate penmonkey seeking fulfillment at pennies per word! I'm doing financially well-enough that it seems high time to make some moves, and the first move is of course to shed myself of the day job. Nothing personal about the day job, no problems there, but it's hard to take it to the next level when I'm mired in the day-to-day. Yes, it's a bit terrifying, but I'll make do. I also might do some freelance graphic design work in the interim. Sometimes, you have to know when to take a fall. It's important to have the faith in believing you'll find a comfortable place to land. This is hopefully not a, "I'm going to die in a plane crash" metaphor, because I'm leaving on an airplane Wednesday. The last thing I need is for my four faithful readers to pore over this journal after the fact saying, "It's like he presaged his own doom! He talked about taking a fall, how sad and ironic." Where am I going on Wednesday? That's right, I'm off to Geekapalooza, to Nerd Prom, to the game convention to end all game conventions: Gen Con. Why? Well, because Hunter: The Vigil--you know, that gameline I developed--kicks off on Thursday, and I'm heading out there to support the launch. I'll be accompanied by Ideal Reader, Martin Henley, where we may be convinced to form our erstwhile hip-hop duo, The World's Biggest Black Man. No guarantees, though. Marty is, of course, also one of the Hunter writers, having turned in such magnificent work as "Haute Couture: Fashion as Equipment" and [REDACTED] from Night Stalkers. Quite a lot going on at Gen Con: signings, games, violent expressions of nerd rage, cake, liquor, panels, meetings, meals, sniper missions, quiet weeping, parties, loud weeping, and so forth. My schedule, for those who care about such things, is as follows: Wednesday 4:30: Arrive on some commuter puddle-jumper. Thursday 10:00AM-12:00noon: Book Signing! 12:00noon-2:00PM: Hunter panel 4:00PM-6:00PM: "So, You Want to Write for White Wolf" panel Friday 10:00AM-2:00PM: "Play with a Developer" session. Probably Hunter. 4:00PM-6:00PM: Book Signing! 7:00PM-10:00PM: Ennie Awards Saturday 12:00noon-4:00PM: "Play with a Developer" session. Probably Hunter, maybe Changeling? 8:00PM-Coma-o'clock: White Wolf party? Sunday Morning: Vague possible Hunter-flavored meal? 11:30AM: Leave for airport? 1:30PM: Fly away on puddle jumper. 5:30PM: Arrive home safely and without dying. So, if you want to catch up with me, well, that's my schedule. We'll figure something out. Anywho. More later, to be sure. 7/19/08 News of the Word! Let's see. Fear-Maker's Promise has been nominated for an ENnie Award. So, that's sweet. Lords Over the Damned is getting some noms, too, though it's surprising that it didn't earn the Prettiest Motherfucking Book Award (er, "Best Production Values"), but so it goes. Voting starts Monday. Hunter: The Vigil approacheth. My copies are, I believe, en route, which is exciting. Did a podcast interview this past Wednesday. When that's up, I'll ping you crazy kittens. Cobbled together a new treatment for Secret Film Project. Also, will soon start to work on Secret Short Web Film Project. Now-- News of the Nerd! Hellboy II was lots of fun--definitely a version of Changeling: The Movie. Though, really, that's the film's core problem. It deviates too much from what I come to expect from Mignola's world. His world isn't fantasy, really--it's more a paranormal, occult world. This world is blatantly fantastic. Which is fine. And it's cool. But it's not really... "Hellboy." (I've actually come to find a particular look found in modern genre film bothers me, and that look is one of cleanliness. Seriously. Nothing is every really dusty, nothing ever really looks used. This was part of the issue with the look of the new Star Wars movies; stuff needs to look like it isn't a movie prop, or a crisp CGI product.) Wall-E is phenomenal. The most subversive children's movie in a long-time. Loved, loved, loved it. Go read Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. Will maybe be seeing Dark Knight at a stupidly late-ass showing tonight to avoid crowds. Also, to give enough time to watch the Avatar: The Last Airbender 2-hour finale-fest. Also, in non-nerdly news, we have a pet praying mantis, whose name alternates between "Mister Mantis" and simply, "Stinky." I confronted him a couple weeks ago on our fence, and he leapt up onto my hand and used my body as a bridge so he could get to one of our flower pots. He now lives in those flowers, and has for many weeks. I feed him from time to time--I go and hose off an ant hill, which drives the ants crazy, and I drop ants near Stinky, and he eats them like popcorn. Seriously. He's all like, *grab*, NOM NOM NOM, and then he licks his kung-fu bug claws off and then grabs another one, repeat. That is all. Oh, our washing machine broke. Not surprising, given its age. I don't know how old it really is, but its aesthetic is that of a wood-paneled station wagon, so you can bet at least three decades. The resultant flood wasn't a delight, but thankfully our basement floor simply eats water, which is a nice effect. So, now, new washer. Hurray. 6/16/08 I think my fingers are bleeding. *checks fingers* Yes. Yes, my fingers are bleeding. Hey! Guess what, I've been working. A lot. Hence the digit-blood. But before I get into all of that: Drum roll please. That's right, another mention on Robert McCammon's author site. That's twice I've been mentioned on there, which I recognize does nothing for me professionally, but it does wonders for me, personally. Obviously, McCammon is my hero. He's why I write. So a mention on his site, I'll take it. And I'll giggle about it. And then I'll do a little dance on the skulls of my enemies. Back to the topic at hand: I've been writing a lot. And developing a lot. And also, writing a lot. Seriously, it's been crazy. I think I've worked on about 900 books in the last 6 months, with about, hrrm, twelvety-billion words provided. It has not been that egregious, no. But my work has been profound in its quantity (though I dare not speak for its quality). Hell, the measure of word count I did for three of the five clanbooks alone is above 150,000 words. Plus, other books, plus an SAS, plus an ARG, plus redlines and ancillary developer word-stuffs, plus, plus, plus. Basically? I vomit words. I do. I can't help it. I regurgitate pages upon pages. It's a sickness. It really is. The Hunter: The Vigil spoilers have begun, so you could go over to White Wolf's website here to check out what's going on. You could also go to this link, right here if you wanted to see me get my Interview Groove on. I've got a lot of work coming up. More word count for the Wolf. More developer work for the Wolf. Met with Lance the other day, so we'll move back toward some script development. I think we'll be doing a cool web-based film project for the fall. I've got a novel in my head that really wants to write itself. I just need more time. Anybody have more time for me? More time so I can heave all of this verbage up out of my guts and lungs and brainholes? Pretty please? Oh, I updated the resume. So, click above if you care to behold the approximately 70 books I've worked on for White Wolf. I need help, I really do. At an average of about 25-30k per book, that means I've written around 2,000,000 gorram words. That, my friends, is crazy talk. 6/15/08 I'm mentally constipated. Or, at least, this blog is. Quite a lot to talk about. So much, in fact, that it's all backing up in the system. The pipes are bulging. I'd better vent it soon, or it's going to go kersplat. And nobody wants to be covered with my mindfeces. The biggest thing, really, is Colorado. We're back. And have been for like, ohhhh, over two weeks, now. I could offer you a blow-by-blow of the trip, but I cannot promise that it would be in any way interesting. I do have a Flickr Photostream Set that gives a bit of context and a taste of narrative. The overall deal is, we went. We felt very tiny, caught in the shadow of the profound. (Go ahead. Try to grasp your ego in when mountains tower above you--or when a several thousand foot drop threatens you from underneath.) Went to Dad's house. Tried to measure the work that needs to be done there, and could not easily measure it. While there, we took a long walk down a serpent's path, occasionally leaving the path to try to find what we were looking for. Luckily, we did not find bears, or more specifically, These Bears in particular did not find us (oops). At the bottom, we found a bridge over the creek, and into the turbid waters, I upended Dad's ashes -- a gray swirl into the dark water, and then just dark water. The man is at his Happy Hunting Ground, and we were not attacked by bears. And, also good: the TSA did not flinch when I explained that I had "human remains" in my one checked bag. They did not believe my father was actually powdered anthrax or anything of that sort. We did a lot. We saw a lot. We ate a lot. Oh, and we drove a lot (seriously--drove over a thousand miles whilst out there; everything is exactly 45 minutes from everything else). We tried to enjoy the trip as much as we could, because, I think, that's what we were supposed to do. It was hard at times, but happy, too. And sad. And sometimes a little overwhelming. And sometimes tiring. But it was good. And now we're home. Happy father's day, all. 6/07/08 *wipes cobwebs away* Whoa. You people are still here? *winces* Oof. Sorry about that. Is this thing on? *mic feedback* I have quite a lot to say as soon as I find the time to say it. But, for the moment, this will suffice. Yesterday began with a death. Went to a funeral for my sister's father-in-law, who passed away earlier in the week during his sleep (sad that he's gone, but at least it is the coveted way to exit this earth). And then, yesterday ended with a birth. So, to the Mad Karabin Monks, I'd like to welcome their first little babs into the world, Illyana Katherine Karabin into the world. Welcome, nearly-nine pound wonder. And congrats, Karabins! 4/21/08 Dear Pennsylvania, My birthday is on Tuesday. If you don't know what to get me, get me Obama as the Democratic candidate. Please? Pretty please with American Politics on top? Thanks so much! Hugs and kidney punches, Little Chucky Wendig, Age 8 and a Halfsies 3/12/08 The weather today was perfect. By which I mean, it conspired to be both seasonally and thematically appropriate. I drove north today, about two hours, into the deep heart of Middle of Approximate Nowhere, Pennsylvania, and along the way I witnessed a staggering variety of weather. Sun. Clouds. Bright blue. Gunmetal gray. Rain. Snow. Heavy winds. A bit of ice. Rain with sun. Snow with clouds. Rain with clouds. Sun with snow. Flurries. Squalls. Buffeting blasts. The weather wobbled and wavered like a stop sign in hurricane gales, vacillating between Winter's Last Gasping Grasp and Spring's Desperate Struggle to be Born. Thematically, it bound itself to my erratic moods with mechanical precision. I drove up to the Ass-End of East Egypt, PA, to officially probate my father's will. I am now the executor of said will. Mostly, it's like ripping off scabs. You know how burn victims suffer great swaths of skin turning to scab? It feels at times like pulling it off, a great fibrous carpet of fleshy topography, ripped from its mooring upon muscle and bone. And the blood flows fresh. By which I mean, it just stirs up shit. It draws all that bad stuff to the surface once more. It's not that it's any mystery or surprise that my father's dead. I haven't suppressed it. I think about it every day. I sometimes get kind of weirdly weepy at almost-inexplicable moments (most recent: watching Ultimate Recipe Showdown on Food Network, no, seriously). Days come and go where I expect him to call, or I think of calling him. I'm surrounded by artifacts of his life. The occasional dream. The persistent thought. No mystery, no surprise. But going up there and making it legal, I don't know. Not to get heavy-handed with the metaphor (this is where you say, "Too Late"), but it's like hammering another nail in the coffin. The whole will and estate thing really distills a person down to pure data, like some kind of financial menu or capitalist binary code. And it's sad. Then again, I'm happy the process is at least moving forward. We had been waiting on some... problems (remind me to tell you about it someday, Dearest Internet), and with some roadblocks cleared out of the way (or at least identified on a map so you can drive around them), it does feel good to get moving on the whole shebang. And during the drive, good memories surface. Not-so-good memories surface. Images of death. Vignettes of life. Sun, rain, cloud, blue, gray, wind, still, calm, just keep driving. Happy, sad, happy, sad. Turn on the radio. Turn it off. Listen to one song. Spend ten minutes talking to myself. Keep on driving, keep on driving. So, that was my day. A bit hollowing. Time to move up and move forward, though. Coming soon, something less morose. Something about politics. Something probably about video games or changelings or Indiana Jones or barnyard pornography. Promise. 2/28/08 You're welcome, Internet. 2/24/08 Link of the Day: Garfield Minus Garfield Barnyard Porno Spam Tongue Twister of the Day: "Authentic Fuck Flicks with Farm Sluts Fucked" You may now return to your regularly scheduled Intertoobs. 2/18/08 Subject: Wild, unstable sluts get off in stables. It's almost poetic, really. Like something e.e. cummings might write (and, given his last name, are we not to believe he might've had an excellent career penning Porn Spam?). wild unstable sluts get off in stables. Really. Unstable? Stables? That's art in language, my friends. Unfortunately, it's also a sign that I've been receiving an egregious dumpload of barnyard porno-spam lately. Seriously. Every other email in my one inbox has to do with banging a horse or buggering chickens. I have no idea what I did to get on the radar of that particular Spambot, but somehow, they think me a farm-fresh pervert. (And I'll note: it's specifically farm animals. No emails about doffing a dog or licking a lion's loins. Oh, no. These emails want me to fornicate with domesticated livestock.) Eh well. I've no great uniting theme to this post, so I'll just barf up some basic updatery-doo: One: My culinary adventure continues: I have eaten escargot. The wife and I went out for Valentine's Day to celebrate our love, and we did so by wolfing down snailmeat. Snailmeat is actually pretty good. It tastes like really good mushrooms. Texture of mushrooms, too. Which begs the question: why not just eat mushrooms? Because you don't get to spear mushrooms and pluck them from their shell-encased homes, that's why. Easy to imagine oneself as a Giant Man Beast, plucking peasants from their huts and snarfing them into our crushing maws. Fun times. Anyway. Our snails were drizzled copiously with a basil-garlic butter sauce. Tastegasm. Two: Just finished the final text of Hunter: That Book About Witches about, ohhh, fifteen minutes ago. I'd say the whole Hunter: The Vigil thing is coming along quite nicely. It's a game with many faces, and I love them all. And going back and re-reading a lot of it, boy, it's a fucked-up game. The writers have really outdone themselves in making my jaw drop. Fucked. Up. Stuff. That "Wood Ingham" fellow has a way in particular of making me gape. Three: Wills and estate planning is for the birds. You know what you do with your money before you die? Spend it. Or throw it out of a helicopter or blimp. That'd be about as accurate as letting the law handle it. Maybe moreso. Four: Rock Band is muy fun. I am a drum god. And by "drum god," I mean, I beat the game on Medium and am working on Hard, but Expert makes my brain (not to mention my right foot and both wrists) hurt. Five: You are hereby requires to say the words: Obamaicans and Obamamentum. Say them. Right now. Out loud. Realize that we can make up whatever nonsense words we want. We have that power. Language is our magic. OBAMAMENTUM! OBAMAPOLIS! OBAMALICIOUS! By the by, I like Obama, even though he's a radical Muslim (er, he's not, people, so stop forwarding me that email like it's somehow magically true). The guy gives good speech. He gets my Hope Gland all-a-growing (and no, my Hope Gland is not something dirty). I like McCain, as well. Only concern there is, the guy's like, 90. Clinton, though, I don't think she's really ready for primetime, despite her claims to the contrary. Something about her sits false with me. All that being said, we can only improve from our current administration. Though, really, you could put a diseased brainstem in a chair, cover it with cookie crumbs and then put a pair of Groucho Marx glasses over it... and it'll probably handle world affairs with greater aplomb than our current Chimp-in-Chief. Six: Headline: Next plague likeliest to emerge from poor tropical countries. No shit? That's revolutionary news. Because, didn't Ebola totally come out of like, a Vancouver coffeehouse? Malaria comes from some guy who fucked a monkey in Lichtenstein. It's true. Listen, news media, seriously, stop reporting on things I already know. Headlines get lazier every year. Next one I expect to see: FOOD CAN BE EATEN, or maybe, SKY EXISTS ABOVE HEADS. Thanks for the tip. Seven: I am weary. I need a vacation. A real vacation. That is all. 2/10/08 It has been an awesome week. Just a hoot, I'll tell you. That whole "executor of the will" thing just got leagues more complicated and annoying, I have some kind of Mongolian Death Plague choking out my bronchial tubes, and I have to reassign various small and not-small chunks of books to various writers who hopefully will be able to do the work given to them on relatively short notice. Whee. Head, meet desk. What I'm trying to say is: Anyway. So, the week prior to last, we at Der Wendighaus, Inc. did up a little experiment. I decided to see what it would be like to cook and eat vegetarian all week. I mean, is it viable? Is every meal going to end up a glorified side dish? Are meat replacement protein products worth a damn? Four full nights of dinner, five days of lunches. Lunches were easy. PB&J sammiches, or hummus on pita. Boom. Done. Dinners, here's what I did: Vegetarian Chili with veggie burger crumbles. Penne with homemade pesto sauce, portobello mushrooms and strips of "tempeh." Moroccan red lentil soup. Tofu stir fry with a garlic chili sauce, served over Bhutanese red small-grain rice. Conclusions? The vegetarian chili was anus-burningly hot. On its next go-round I diluted the leftovers with another can of crushed tomatoes and a can of black bean soup. Totally did the trick. Whipped up some cornbread, covered it in a dollop of sour cream, and boo-yah. Dinner is served, and the anus is saved. The penne with the pesto goodness, well, that part went just fine. I love pesto, and I got a new food processor (a bigger one), so it came out quite nice. Very walnutty. So, tempeh? Tempeh. Tempeh. If you don't know what this is, it's basically a smooshed brick of partially-fermented soy product. It has the look of roofing shingles. Now, I'm to understand you can soak it in salt water or something before cooking, but the instructions on this package of tempeh just said to slice it and fry that bastard up. So I did. And it tastes... eehhh? Not awful. But nowhere near pleasant. It's very grassy, like I'm eating a brick of alfalfa that's maybe passed through two of a cow's myriad stomachs. It was made worse by the fact the portobello strips were delicious. They're excellent meat substitute: heavy, beefy, heady. So why buy tempeh? Maybe you want that "I just ate a part of my lawn" mouthfeel. Otherwise, leave it alone. The red lentil soup was good. No real surprises there. The stir-fry? Tofu's gross to handle, though this is no surprise to me, having cooked it many times before. The fact you kind of have to towel it off like some sweaty, pale-bellied boxer isn't altogether pleasant. ("I coulda... pant... been a con... pant, pant... contender.")But, outside of that, you cube it, and it magically absorbs the taste of everything else. It has almost supernatural powers of flavor-consuming spongery. But the biggest conclusion of them all? Veggie burgers are unmercifully delicious. I crave one right now. I always kind of thought veggie burgers had to be useless, like non-alcoholic beer or a short-sleeved straightjacket. Oh, mmm, sure, meatless meat. Can I buy a car with no wheels? A hand with no fingers? How about just half-a-testicle? I was so wrong. What an asshole I've been! Veggie burgers will forever be vacuumed into my eager maw. And shit, they're healthy, too. Now, I should clarify: I don't plan on becoming vegetarian. I just know that we as people eat too much crap. We shovel too much meat into our mouths, too many processed awfulness brined in cancer-causing hell-chemicals. I figure, hey, at least once a week I'll make something either vegetarian or seafoody. That'll amp up our healthfulness here in the house a wee smidge. I also don't have any moral compunctions regarding the consumption of meat. Cows, pigs, chickens, they're all cute. But they're delicious. Ducks are double-cute, and double-delicious. Those who think that the murder of animals is somehow anathema to man's moral nature or somehow flies in the face of the ecological weave and weft, well, you best smack yourself in the face and recognize some things. Our progress as a species is carried on wheels greased on the blood of animals. We wouldn't be were we're at right now if it wasn't for the killing and harvesting of the world's creatures. There's simply nothing moral about it. It's an amoral issue. Now, I'll agree that you can frame a vegetarian lifestyle on the moral quandary of not meat, but the meat industry. Sure. The meat industry is pretty brutal. It's about speed, not safety. It's about doing what's best for the profits, not what's best for man's health. The meat industry loves to feed its animals the same dead animals. It loves to pump them full of freaky hormones. Deformed chickens? Let's eat them! Half-tortured pigs? Shove 'em in my belly! Cows with brain diseases? They can't get to our grocery stores fast enough! See, but the moral issue falls apart a bit, here, too, because you can actively choose to vet your meat providers. Go to a local butcher or a local farm. You can buy free range chickens or grass-fed beef with some extra work and some extra money. What I'm saying is, if you're vegetarian, more power to you. And if it's because you can't stomach the thought of eating animals, hey, no problem. Just don't confuse your personal preference on that with my personal preference on that, which is that I like to and will continue to eat animals--hell, I've eaten animals I personally have killed. Man, I think I got way off track there. Veggie meals are mm-mmm good. There. Done. Hah. Oh, and now it's a blizzard outside and I can barely see our yard. That's interesting. All right, this blog entry has gone on long enough. Der Wendighaus, out. 1/28/08 Pant, pant, pant. Okay. Nosferatu is done. It's send out of my grubby hands. Next? Equinox Road, plus, scads more development on all the delicious Hunter books. Plus, we'll get a new treatment out this week to Lance's manager since it looks like the impacted colon that is the Writer's Strike will maybe start to loosen and evacuate. Any time I get to use an "impacted colon" metaphor is a good goddamn day, I must say. Okay. Got that out of the way. It seems a good time to discuss my new KitchenAid Artisan Standup Mixertron 9009, which comes in a loverly shade of pistachio. The wife got it for me for that holiday where everybody gets everybody stuff and sometimes thinks a little about Jesus before wolfing down gobbets of honey-glazed ham, and let me tell you: This Thing Has The Power To Whip Your Soul Into Shape. It's just that good. You throw stuff in there and the whirling ceramic paddle just obviates it, just makes its existence null and bloody void. It'll mix anything. Flour? Concrete? Monkey skulls? Glass marbles? Dark matter? Throw it all in the bowl. Stick it on 6, let it whip. Next thing you know, mmm, you've got some batter, just put it in the oven and bake the cake that destroys the Earth. I made some coffee cake in it. See, I don't really like baking. Cooking, I like. I love. Because it's like a Jackson Pollock painting: a dash here, a splatter here, flavor off, add some of this juice, toss in some of these pine nuts. I know that being a professional chef is very much about consistency, but being a home cook is at least a little bit about chaos. And that's okay by me. But baking? That shit's like math. You plug in the wrong number and your quadratic equation is going to bite you on the ass -- oh, and your cake's gonna suck. Texture of a mousepad, flavor of floor cookies. No good. Still, though, the coffee cake turned out all right. And I thank the mixer. The mixer, it just handles stuff. It reaches out, and it tell you in a comforting tone, "Don't worry, Chuck. Let me do that. Just dump that right here into my stainless maw. Let me do the work. I'll chew. You relax. Yum." So, y'know, thanks to the superrad wife, I'm gonna be hip-deep in baking goods. I got a killer recipe for marshmallows, of all things, and I'm-a-try that. Plus, mashed potatoes. Plus, simplicity: just take some ice cream, and mix it up in the bowl with some kind of internal filling: Butterfinger bits or gumballs or radishes or fingernail clippings, whatever piques your geek. But you know what piques my geek? Tell 'em, Marty From The YouTubes (Which Is Nothing Like Jenny From The Block): 1/16/08 Well. Trying to find some normalcy, so I'll post about vampires and other bugaboos. Rich Thomas, on the White Wolf Livejournal, went moonbatty and started throwing around the names of upcoming books like Chinese stars. As it is with me and my pleasantly insane workload, I'm on a lot of these books. The books I'm on as writer that he mentioned? Midnight Roads, Dogs of War, the Vampire: The Requiem Clan Books (I worked specifically on Ventrue, Gangrel, and Nosferatu), and some nameless Changeling books (but I'll tell you here, I continue my Changeling spree with Rites of Spring, Lords of Summer, and Equinox Road). The books I'm on as developer? Hunter: The Vigil, baby. Finally leaked, announced, and my name attached to it. So too is my name attached to its supplements, only one of which is named (and whose first drafts are due today, you pesky writers): Slasher. Oh, and Tribes of the Moon, too, for Werewolf, but you knew that. Books I might be on as writer or developer? EVE RPG, thanks to Russell Bailey. Night Horrors. Two Hunter: The Vigil SAS's (Storytelling Adventure System PDFs). And, as developer, the coveted fifth Hunter book. (Oh, and Hunter's getting a board game? I'm not really involved in that, but... a board game?! Brilliant. Love it. Do it. Want it.) Plus, we still have an optioned script out there who ekes with painful slowness toward a greenlight (please, please, please, Movie Jesus, bless our film with your Movie Jesus Magic), and I just tossed some notes to Lance today on a project that's been bouncing around in our hands and heads. Needless to say, I'm busy. But a good busy. A sane busy. The kind of busy where I can remove myself from the world a bit and concentrate on work, on fanciful notions of vampires and vampire hunters, of demons and diseases and lost highways and maybe even a space battle or three. Ahhh, escapism. I'm sure it's totally healthy. 1/13/08 Time, she'll kick you right in the twat. Really, she will. She'll steal everything you have if you're not looking. Point is, embrace what you have now, not later. You'll come to realize that opportunities to live and love are with you in the present and while they'll likely be there in the future, they may not be. Got something you want to do now? Do it. Got something you want to say now? Do it. No time like the present. Carpe fish, seize the fish. Or something. Anyway. You may care to read this, you may not. Here's the entire text of the euology I spoke for my father during last week's memorial service. Still can't believe he's gone. I keep expecting to get a phone call from him, or to make plans to go visit him. As I said, time has little mercy, so... Right. Eulogy. I write every day. I sit down at the computer and I commit my butt to the chair and I write bare minimum two thousand words. It takes discipline to attack the blank page, the blank screen, to accept a deadline and to never once fail to meet that deadline. It’s something my father taught me, this discipline. He was always clear about the value of work, the value of effort, the sacredness of a commitment. But even still, sitting down and writing this… speech, this eulogy, is the hardest commitment I’ve ever taken. But, I committed, and I finished it, because if I didn’t, I suspect he’d come back to life just long enough to kick my ass into shape. My father always hated mourning. Hated funerals. Hated how you sit here and stir up all the sadness and grief again. To him, I think it was like kicking over a beehive. He did not want to be mourned, and so today we shall not mourn him. Today, we shall celebrate him in story and prayer and poem. We shall applaud his life, and all the bad things he made good, and all the good things he made great. See, Dad was to me and many others both legend and hero. As a writer, I’m a storyteller, and I tell stories because of my father, because his life was all about both the telling of stories and the living of stories. Any time I get together with friends or family, the stories come out, some old favorites, some new to the telling. Funny stories. Stories of triumph and accomplishment. Stories like how my father, my uncles and I wrangled a pissed-off bull elk back into his pen with a nothing but a shotgun, a pair of ski poles and a home-made Nylon lasso. Stories of all my father’s hunting trophies and miraculous shots, of his many stunts and fistfights (all recalled with a wild and vibrant gleam in his eye), or of his engineering feats performed in service to his work. Stories like how despite his detestation of all things cat-related he saved a starving kitten from the barn, a kitten whose mother and siblings had been killed by a raccoon or possum. Stories of how he stood up for the little guy. How he made sure people were paid what they were owed. About how he did what was right regardless of cost. My father is those stories, you see, and that’s how he lives on: in the stories we shall forever tell of him. The Vikings—a tough race of old-school bad-asses, just like Dad—believed that there was one path to immortality, and that was by being remembered in all the legends and stories. A Viking warrior was set on a boat which was then cast aflame—a cremation, of sorts—thus earning his place in the stories, ushering him forth into immortality. We can all help to keep my father immortal by remembering the limitless stories in which he was an undeniable presence. I’ll tell you what my father believed, though. He had a lot of ideas about a lot of things, and they were all worth listening to. In regards to religion and spirituality, he had kind of a pantheistic outlook that coupled God and Nature together: one could not be taken away from the other. He always told me that he believed in the God of the Land, and what a blessing that was, to die and return to the earth and to become a part of the plants, and the animals that ate the plants, and the hunters who took those animals to feed their families. And so I’ll read this short poem, a poem that has taken many forms over the years but is said to have come from an early Native American blessing: Do not stand at my grave and weep; I am not there. I do not sleep. I am a thousand winds that blow. On the mountain’s rim, I am the snow. I am the sunlight on ripened grain. I am the gentle autumn rain. When you awaken in the morning's hush I am the swift uplifting rush Of quiet birds in circled flight. I am the stars that shine at night. Do not stand at my grave and cry; I am not there. I did not die. I’ll say this last thing: my father was both legend and hero to me, but he was also something else, something a thousand times more valuable. He was my friend. This was a relatively recent occurrence, having happened only over the last five years or so. It used to be that he’d call and check up on me with the standard battery of parental questions: how’s the car, how’s the job, how’s the weather. But it was only in these last several years that the parental checklist kind of… dropped off and was replaced by genuine conversation. He’d call me maybe twice a week and we’d just shoot the shit for a while. I’ll miss that most of all about him, but it gives me great strength and solace to know that he had found genuine happiness and serenity in his last years, that he was able to fulfill his dreams and reach a very real place of peace. In honor of him, we should not only remember him, but we should all endeavor to find that place of peace, to reach out and hold happiness to our chests as he once held us to his. 12/27/07 I am a disciplined writer in that I wake up every day and I write around 2,000 words. The other morning, I woke up and had to write my father's obituary. To be fair, a large part of it (the administrative details) were written, and I had to adjust some of the language and add some details. And yet... nothing I've written has been so difficult. Not just because a life like my father's is easy to encapsulate, but because it's my father. Writing something like that is irretrievable and indelible. It makes a mark. It's so wretched, so final. It's as if before the writing and printing of an obituary, there's still a chance, a mysterious and magical and miraculous chance that it's all wrong, it's all a fluke, it's all some mad Houdini stunt and my father won't really have passed away at all but is instead out there, laughing and shooting the shit with friends and family. Anyway. I wrote and modified the obituary. And today is the day it goes into the paper and online. Below is that obituary. Charles R. Wendig of Danville and Collbran, Colo. passed away Saturday, Dec. 22, 2007, at his home near Washingtonville. He was 64. Born Nov. 7, 1943 in Doylestown, he was the son of the late Alfred and Florence (Fortmann) Wendig. On Sept. 29, 2004, he married the former Barbara E. (Bray) Belledin and they have celebrated three years of marriage. A native of Bucks County, Charlie graduated from Central Bucks High School in Doylestown. He retired in 2002 as plant manager of Penn Color in Hatfield, and was a gifted mechanical engineer. He had an innate ability to make or fix just about anything. He was an avid hunter, and especially loved his hunting trips out west. Those trips led him to his second home in Colorado, where he and Barbara enjoyed times together. He was a member of the National Rifle Association and the Loyal Order of the Moose Lodge in Doylestown. He will be remembered as a great mentor to the children in his family, and an inspiration to all those who loved him. He was lovingly referred to as "Uncle Chick" by his many nieces and nephews and was a great uncle many times over. Surviving in addition to his wife are a son and daughter-in-law, Charles D. and Michelle Wendig of Richlandtown; two daughters and a son-in-law: Tracy L. and Robert Collie of Buckingham and Kimberley Beaton of Easton, Maine; two stepsons, Kris Pankotai and his, wife, Jamie of Washingtonville and Kenneth Pankotai of Danville; two stepdaughters, Catherine Martz and her husband, John, of Washingtonville and Constance Raborn and her husband, Scott, of Pittsburgh, Calif.; eight grandchildren, and one great-grandchild; two brothers and their wives, A. Daniel and Marilyn Wendig and J. Stephen and Christine Wendig, all of Buckingham; a sister and her husband, Dorothy Wendig McNamara and Terence Skelton of Doylestown; and his former wife, Christine (Shustack) Wendig of Buckingham. A service of memory and to celebrate his life will be held at 1 p.m. Saturday, Jan. 4, 2008, at Leaver-Cable Funeral Home in Buckingham. The family suggest contributions in his memory be made to the American Cancer Society, 1948 E. Third Street, Williamsport, PA 17701 or to the Last Chance Ranch Equine Rescue, 9 Beck Road, Quakertown, PA 18951. I miss my Dad and hope that this is not the final step of his journey but just another signpost along the way. Thank you to those who have written or called with such nice things to say. The Obit Online 12/22/07 My father passed away today at 3:00pm. I was with him when he died, as were many of his friends and much of his family. It was unexpected, but fairly swift. I loved him very much, and I am very sad. 12/12/07 EDIT (3:22PM): My Dad's in the hospital. More on this tomorrow: I think he'll be all right. Not sure if it's related to his prostate cancer or is some other bag of nastiness. Might be gallstones, might be a tumor. Hopefully, it'll all figure itself out and he'll be all right. (Back to your regularly scheduled Terribleminds entry.) Yeah, bitches! That's how you punt a deadline in the kidneys. Pant, pant, pant. Holy crapshit. I just sprinted through 70,000 words. Seriously. I had about 10k written when I started the rest on November 21st, which means between then and today (whatzat, 23 days?) I wrote 60,000 words. Not legendary, but no small feat. Given the fact of a day job. Given the fact of editing and developing some big ticket books. Given doing research for some film treatments. Given, given, given. And how, how did I do it all you writers out there who don't grok this voodoo? Discipline! And Meth! No, really, just discipline. It goes like this: Ass in chair. Write. Set a goal. Write to goal regardless of how shitty it is, because you can always revise. Handle 2,000 words a day, which is about an hour's worth of work, and boom. Sometimes you'll do more because you'll be en fuego. Other times you'll drag your sorry ass across the finish line, masturbate gloomily, and hate yourself for the next four hours. These things happen. Motor forth. This time, I actually did something a bit different, and I'll definitely do it again for bigger assignments: Excel. Yeah, the spreadsheet. Yeah, I'm a loser. But I tracked my progress and subtracted it down day by day, and divided by the number of days left on my deadline (which, by the way, is December 21st, which means I blasted into completion a good nine days early) and saw what I had to accomplish daily to hit the goal. And soon, 2k a day winnows down to 1.5k a day, and then you feel all the awesomer for writing 2.2k or something when you only had to hit a smaller target. Bam. Boom! Slaow! Flaow! Karate chop! And now I'm both buzzing and sleepy. Odd, that. Part of me wants to get up and dance and fight and laugh, another part of me demands that I lay down and sleep until Christmas. Mind you, all of this sounds good on paper. But there remains the possibility that I just wrote 70,000 words of Fetid Sewage. I'm competent and quick with the word count, but I don't know if I'm actually good. Hopefully, it won't suck. That's the goal. Not sucking. A low bar, I know. Anywho. Not much else to say. Christmas approaches, and it's a season that more and more would be made better if we just made it Thanksgiving II and focused on the friends, family and mealtimes: I like gifts, both giving and receiving, but it's a fucking tornado out there, man. I literally reached out the door the other day to grab an Amazon package, and ten angry shoppers--zombified and off their leashes--bit my hand off, and then fought over the bones for an hour on the porch. I had to shotgun them down. Then hose off the porch. Then construct a new hand from squirrel tendons, burlap and pipe fittings. Literally. One of our big gifts is already out of the way here in Der Wendighaus: the lady needed a PC for her new job, so I got her a PC that pwns all other PCs (not true, but it sure seems like it). Fat-ass monitor (22 inch), Half a TB of hard drive space, big graphics card, lots of memory, a Smoothie machine, a time capsule, a monkey cage, and seven maids a-milking. The goal was, even though it's predominantly a business machine, to get a computer that won't enter decrepitude any time soon. Plus, we may eventually cram a TV tuner card in it and make it another DVR since the old one went all 'splodey on itself. Huh. Pwns. How do you pronounce that? I've heard it said where it rhymes with "owned," but has a 'p' on it, so, "powned" or "poned." I've heard it "pawned." I've even heard that real l337 motherfuckers pronounce it "owned," and if you're too dumb to know that they have a 'p' and no 'o' there, well, that's your own problem, n00b. (Is it true that it comes from a videogame mis-spelling, some kind of Engrish like All Your Base Belong To Us?) Oh well. I'm out. I'ma go get a snack. I promise to write sooner next time, especially if you send me money. Oh! The Second Nerdtivity, right here. (Click it, go to Flickr, read the notes. I command thee!) 11/14/07 I'm sorry, I'm seeing another blog. Yes, it's you. Yes, you've gotten fat. And you smell a little like Cheeto dust. ... Well, okay, no. I'm just farkin' busy, okay? I'm developing my little ass of. I'm writing my little ass off. I'm revising the little ass of my scripts. Busy, busy, buzz, buzz, buzz. Or some shit. I've updated my Resume to include... well, more crap from from my wordhole. Biggest update is that the script ekes forward toward what we hope will be a greenlight for a Spring 2008 shoot, but we'll see. I think it goes out for casting soon, and if we hook someone, we're in like Flint. Weird that the writer's strike affects me more than it just disrupting my favorite TV shows, though. I'm not a Guild member but I can't work as a scab, so, no submitting scripts, no treatments, no pitches, nada, zip, zoinks. That's all for now, skirts and suits. Find me in my spare time on XBOX Live, Gamertag: Weaver42. 10/12/07 Right, okay, sure. It's been a month. I haven't called. I haven't written. We didn't go out for pie like we said we would. I get it. It's you, crying in your pillow. Trying to call me, but I've crushed my insolent phone beneath the heel of an angry boot. You know what? Toughen up, cookie. Shit's hard in this life. Daddy's been busy. Daddy's been earning so you have diapers to wear and tacos to eat. Daddy's been in the shit. Then again, Daddy's now gonna go live himself the sweet life. That's right, I now have myself a bonafide Sugar Momma. The wife has decided to kick to the curb about five to seven years of mundane advancement within the job she's currently in and is today giving notice. She is, of course, giving notice so that she can take a much bigger, much better job with a much cooler title and rad-ass benefits. They gave her the job yesterday. We consumed Victory Custard. We bought a Ben-Ten toy. We squealed in glee. Now, Momma's the one doing the big earning. Momma's the one keeping you shitheads in diapers and tacos. So, you best thank her, or I'll kick you in the butthole, wear your sphincter like an anklet. Beyond that, lots of stuff. On the writing front, I've been... oh, psychobusy. An emergency 34,000 words for Clan Book: Ventrue? Yup. Applied word count toward Lords of Summer? Ayuh-huh. Continued freelance development of not one but many books? Nod, nod. Script synopses, one big one with footnotes, and several little ones, to enter into the various hands of Hollywood? Sho' nuff. Plus, another 70k of another Clan Book coming right up, if you please. Plus, I'm hip-deep in pop culture pudding. Let's see. On TV, I'm loving the cloying sweet guts out of Pushing Daisies, a thoroughly unconventional TV show that is equal parts Amelie, Lemony Snicket, Big Fish, Toys, and anything Seussian. I was loving but grow concerned for Reaper, a show so funny I burp up exultations of gassy glee at its humor-factor, but a show whose canned, recipe-driven premise is going to get tired in T-Minus two more episodes (hence, they need to bust up out of that). Oh, and with TV-on-DVD, we finally picked through the carcass of Freaks and Geeks and found it so delicious it's amazing that it couldn't survive (but therein lies my answer: sometimes, stellar TV shows are gnawed apart by their numerous lessers, like a pack of hungry Marmots besieging a proud lion until there's naught left but cat bones). Oh, and I shan't fail to mention Book Three of Avatar: The Last Airbender, which is the best cartoon ever. Video games is good times right now, too. Halo 3, well, what can I say? It lives up to the hype. Excepting the first level of the single player campaign, which was dull and not at all immersive (and apparently doesn't care to explain how you got there, only vaguely referring to some novel or comic book series that might not even exist yet -- hey, here's an idea, Pop Culture People: I like when you take your story and you spread it out into other media, but don't make it necessary for me to get the "real" story, you gigantic assbastards). Half-Life 2 I've already played, but I had to run out and giggle and perform the Sin of Onan over The Orange Box. So far, the standout part of the five-games package is definitely the short-but-super-rad Portal, which is easily one of the funniest games I've had the good fortune of playing. The real winner is Best Game Of The Year, Possibly Best Game Of The Last Ten Years, Bioshock. Well-written, immersive, beautiful, art-decoful, scary, gross, weird, and with an ending that actually brought a tear to my dry and jaded eye. In comics, Walking Dead and Y The Last Man are a-thrillin' me. In books, well, I'll only mention: Robert McCammon's newest hits shelves in a week and a half! Squee! Giggle! Snort! Sweet unmerciful fuck, a new McCammon book? Life is goddamn good, people. The Man did not retire, ohhh no. He's a writer, after all. Prone to depression and overexaggeration, perhaps, but not prone to quitting the pen-on-paper, fingers-on-keys thing. You know why? Because writers have an organ that other people find to be vestigal, and it lives nestled somewhere under your appendix and to the side of your duodenum, and you can't pull that shit out of your body with anything short of an acetelyne torch and a melonballer. It's in him, whether he likes it or not. So, Queen of Bedlam. Soon. Watch this space for my review. Oh, hey, lookit that. Al Gore just won the Nobel Peace Prize. Go, Al. Don't jump into the presidential race, seriously. At this point, you're well above that, sir. Do not leave your Cloud Palace to become King of the Shitnecks. Welp. Time to go. Poof. 09/14/07 On one hand, you have the thing that seems right. On the other hand? The thing that feels right. What do you do? This is not an easy question to answer. What seems right appears that way because it has perhaps a pragmatic veneer, a coloration of the correct. But on the other hand, maybe your gut tells you different. Instinct leaps within you like an ass-shocked horse. Bzzt! The horse kicks. Bucks at its ropes. Despite popular theory, the gut is not a universal indicator of truth. It isn't always right, the gut. The gut houses an innate sense of unkenned wisdom, but it can also be home to cowardice, vice, and indolence. Sometimes, the gut knows the right way. Other times, it just knows the easy way. Don't fall into the trap of expecting your instinct to reward you with the proper path when all its really doing is high-fiving your ignorance or setting foot on the Path of Least Resistance (also known as The Path of You Doing Whatever You Want Anyway). Alternately, pragmatism is not the universal indicator, either. Pragmatism is good -- to a point. Pragmatism does not leave room for risk, and risk is what gets you eaten by the shark. But risk is also what gets you the golden idol. What is life without a little risk? Of course, life with constant risk, or uncalculated risk... Rewind. A little history. Months back, my "day job" asked me to go full-time. Dichotomy: what seemed right was different than what felt right. What seemed right was pragmatism. Go full-time. Get security. Benefits, woo-hah. Stable income. Mind you, my hours are close to full-time there, so it's not really about the money. (And, by and large, I get paid more writing, hour-to-hour, than I do at a desk job, but writing money comes in on its own schedule, carried with the whims of hummingbirds and honeybees, wildly unpredictable.) I chose full-time, but not immediately. I'd maybe wind down some of my work, see what happened. So, those many months ago, I told the day job peeps that I'd go full-time on September 10th. September 10th has come and gone, and... ... I ain't full time. The gut won out, here, though not without some infusions of pragmatism into its gurgling chambers (the gut does not like pragmatism, and it churns and squirms like a vampire made to sit on a hemorrhoid ring made of garlic bulbs). See, I'm following my dream, but at this point it's not like I'm following it blindly into a dark grotto. I've got a torch. I can see the way, if only I have the courage. If only the horse does not buck his ropes. Months ago, when I said yes to full-time, some things were different, too. Did I have an optioned screenplay? Was I developing like, a half-dozen books? Did I have unexpected writing contracts, one of which for a high-profile and high-word-count book? Some dreams are ephemeral, as insubstantial as a tuft of angel pubes on a light wind. (And yeah, I just went there. Angel pubes. That's what you get when you come here to Terribleminds, people, and if you don't like it, then go back to Youtube and watch that video where some dude gets hit in the nuts with a cat.) Other dreams, though, they have weight. Proof of their existence. It's like you have a dream about a unicorn and that shit can't be real, right? But then you wake up, and what's that under your pillow? Holy sweet fuck, a unicorn horn! It was real all along! Now you have justification to hunt that unicorn down, and steal his blood for your secret power! Consume the unicorn's heartsblood! Gain his vigor! Become the stallion! Wow, no. Hold on. Let me refocus. What I'm saying is, my dream has some weight these days, not unlike my own gut (which houses both instinct and, apparently, about 20 extra pounds of cheeseburger meat or something). So, the gut wins. The dream wins. The writing continues, full-bore, full-steam ahead. I'm gonna kick this motherfucker in the teeth. I'm gonna kill me a unicorn. Hope you're all here to watch. I'm-a eat its heart. 09/13/07 A more substantial post tomorrow. In the meantime, watch It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia tonight, FX, 10pm. Funny times. 08/25/07 Yesterday's afternoon encompassed rabbit rescue and rehabilitation, and with evening came the cruel recognition that we are not Certified Rabbit Doctors, and it was perhaps going to die no matter what we did. Upon coming home from work, I found that the neighbor's devil-cat had trapped a youngish rabbit against the side of our house and was gleefully fucking with said rabbit. I chased the cat away (normally easy to do, but the cat was not so keen to leave its prize to me), and nabbed the rabbit. Bunny was bleeding from the back of the head and on the side of the neck, and his one back leg seemed less than functional. Wife came home, we took the rabbit inside, cleaned him up a little. He ate some lettuce from sandwiches we had purchased. He drank some water. He occasionally had a little spunk, other times he just sat there, extending his jaw and coughing. A bunny cough? One of the saddest sounds in the world. If it does not provoke a small reaction in you, a kind of sympathetic, pathetic awwww, then you have been outed as a robot. We shall behead you and send the bleeding CPU back to your Robot Masters. After working on the deck walkway for a couple-a hours, the wifey contacted a local group of animal rehabilitators, and they told us that the rabbit would likely die in the next 24 hours. The jaw-opening-and-closing was indications that he'd suffer cardiac failure, and that... wait for it, waiiiiit for it... And that a cat scratch or bite generally causes sepsis in cute, fuzzy woodland creatures. Oh, shit, awesome. Cats have some kind of magical death juice on their claws and teeth? You know what? Fuck cats. More on "fuck cats" in a minute. So, the rabbit. At this point, we had a handful of choices. First, keep the rabbit, let him die with us, and maybe feed him along the way. Second, let the rabbit go somewhere, let nature take its course which is rarely kind but somehow ecologically fair. Third, put bunny out of his bunny misery. We chose option two. We didn't want to let the rabbit go near our place given that it's swarming with cats (see earlier note, "fuck cats"), so we took the bunny to a nearby soybean field. We let him go. And, in what inspired some level of false confidence, the rabbit rather spryly disappeared into the field under the cover of darkness. The assumption is, either the rabbit will live, or the rabbit will be eaten by something that deserves to eat the rabbit. I am not thrilled at the thought, but at least it's comforting to know that if the rabbit dies out there, a fox or hawk or something might feast. If the rabbit dies in a box or in our bathtub, the circle of nature is incomplete. Unless there's a particularly crafty fox who figures out how to get into our bathroom via ductwork, but that seems unlikely. So. Right. Fuck cats. Really, I don't mean that. Cats in and of themselves are fine. They're sick little hunters, and it at times is disturbing how cruelly and gleefully they play with their still-living food, but hey, that's the cat life for you. Maybe there's some biological imperative in there. What I do mean is "fuck cat owners." And that doesn't mean all cat owners, I maybe don't mean you. But, maybe I do. Here's the type of cat owner I mean: Do you let your cat outside to wander? And I don't mean in an enclosed, controlled space, I mean that the cat is considered in some ways to be an "outdoor" cat? Then fuck you. You know why "fuck you?" Because you're a lazy, irresponsible pet owner. You're irresponsible regarding your neighbors. And you're irresponsible regarding your pet. Can I let my dog out to just wander? No. Why? On a basic level, my dog might shit on your porch. He might dig up your flower beds. He might bite your children or try to hump your patio furniture. So why do you get to let your cat do that same nonsense? Worse, if my dog gets let out, he might get hit by a car, might get into a fight with another dog, might get shot, might get lost. Same goes with your cat. Your cat -- theoretically an animal you love, or at least like -- is out in the world and might get killed or contract diseases. Ever had a cat get hit by a car? And I don't mean the kind where, 'Oh, my cat slipped out the door, dammnit.' I mean, 'Oh, we let the cat out on purpose and he got hit.' Yeah, that's your fault, not the driver's. You weren't a responsible cat owner. Cats dart in front of cars, largely because cats are retarded. (No, I'm not hating overtly on cats, dogs are equally but differently retarded.) Some cat owners seem to want a pet that they don't have to think that much about. Then get a goddamn ficus tree. You have an animal. It has a dynamic life and requires certain needs, and it is your job to protect that animal. Keep it indoors. Get the fucking thing spayed (have you noticed that the world has a billion cats in it, and a large portion of them get euthanized?). Hell, get it declawed. ("Oh, but how will my cat defend himself? It's not natural!") Yeah. No. Your cat doesn't need to defend himself if, a) you don't let him out and b) you aren't trying to cornhole the cat when he's sleeping. Moreover, who cares about natural? It's a pet. It's not the goddamn Lion King. Do you think a cat in nature gets a litter box, a scratching post, antibiotics for wounds, and cans of cat food that smell like a tuna took a shit on a dead hailbut? Nature isn't what we're striving for when we have pets. So, to sum up: Keep your cat off my property and away from my goddamn rabbits. 08/22/07 First: Second: The table read? Went really well. Went to a casting agency down in Philly with Lance and his wife. They cast the script (age-appropriate, which surprised me, but it worked out well with the teens) and then... well, they read it. And let me tell you, that's strange. Watching a table read of something you wrote gives it both a kind of legitimacy and a kind of inadequacy. The good news is, heard lots of parts that flowed really well. It's a visual script and that seems to carry well. The bad news, and this is good news wearing bad news clothing, like a wolf in Grammaw's wig, is that there's some room for character improvement, some places to kick the dialogue up a notch, and so on. Nothing was bad, nothing stuck out like a hammerstruck toe, but some things beg for improvement. But that's the point -- to hear the vulnerabilities in the script now, not to let it pass as the bare minimum. So, we delve into some more tweaking. And with that tweaking, we -- and all of you pray to your respective gods, demons, gold idols and pop stars -- maybe get a greenlight on this motherfucker. Plus, we have a treatment for another project going out this or next week. And, maybe a little something else cooking on the cookfire, too. Many irons in the fire. Strike while the iron is hot. Iron fist. Iron my shirt with my iron will. Or something. I probably need a nap. 08/17/07 I love when you bite into a ripe, or overripe, pear, and as the teeth slowly perforate the pearflesh, you get that crazy oozing dribble of nectar. And then you get high on the rush of it, and you feel like you can do anything. And you kung-fu kick the girl at the copier, and you emit some kind of monkey-cry and leap headlong for the window, expecting to crash through, head-first, hurtling to the parking lot below where you land in a crouch. Of course, in reality, the glass is just too strong and your head bonks against it. And that girl you kicked in the jaw? Now she needs dental surgery, which costs like, as much as a Maserati or a black market infant, and she's damn sure not going to pay for it herself. No, she's going to sue you. And you'll have to live on floor sweepings and out-of-date ketchup to survive because your bank account statement lists your assets as "14 pencil shavings and 1 dirty sock filled with thistleseed." Stupid delicious pears. What I'm trying to say is, I've got some updatery-doo for you. I mean, a lot of it. On the writing end, much a-happening: Changeling: The Lost is out now, as are several copies of the first supplement, Autumn Nightmares. In addition, I've got the PDF SAS (Storytelling Adventure System) module I wrote for the game, and that's available at DriveThruRPG or through White Wolf's website. That adventure is called "The Fearmaker's Promise", and if you love me, you'll buy it. (Buy Me Now!!) Damnation City has also hit shelves, and that book is big enough that it has its own gravity. But the only thing that is drawn toward its pull is raw awesomeness. And strippers. Most exciting of all? The screenplay is optioned. Doesn't mean it's greenlit, but I think we have a good shot at it. Lance, with all his mondo connections, seems to have woven a powerful 'glammer' over the minds and souls of Hollywood, and is using it to our advantage. (So much so that we have two other possibilities for projects.) This whole thing just jumped the tracks from "A charming hobby!" to "Holy crap, I might actually make some money!" We've got some sketches coming in. Lance has organized a table-read for the script. It's becoming, well, real. Whodathunk? The house comes along. We've gone crazy with landscaping. I don't know if it's good landscaping, but when you're starting from a yard that was about as attractive as a fat man's zit-laden back, I think we've made stunning improvements. Fence is done, we're working on the decktop walkway, we've got lots of flowers and shrubberies planted. I never in a million years thought I'd know the difference between "coreopsis" and "gaillardia," or "Crimson Pygmy Barberry" and "Rose Glow Barberry," but there it is. I know. And I cannot extricate the info. I'll be old and senile and jabbering on and on about butterfly bushes and foxglove. Thus is my curse. Shit, though. What else? On media fronts, I'm mightily enjoying Flight of the Conchords on HBO. It's a more cogent, humble version of Tenacious D on HBO, and for as much as I love The D, it's a far, far better show. Going to see Superbad tonight. I have high expectations. I had solid expectations for Bourne Supremacy, and that was rock-awesome. A great threequel. Actually, all told, it's been a strong summer for movies, and I haven't even seen all the good stuff. Live Free or Die Hard was waaaaaay too good for its own sense, I really expected it to suck and be an action movie with the 'Die Hard' label stapled to its bulging forehead. But it wasn't, it was actually a gin-you-wine Die Hard vehicle. Go figger. I'm reading a lot, which means I'm not reading a lot (dribs and drabs of like, twenty different things). The only one even threatening to finish itself in front of my eyes is Jeff Long's Deeper, the sequel to The Descent which was the scariest fucking book in the last ten years. Seriously. I made tee-tee in my bloomers. EDIT: I just got my copies of Changeling: The Lost, and it's even prettier than I had hoped. I will woo this book and I will take it to the Homecoming dance. And then afterward, in the limousine (read: a beat-up Toyota Celica dubbed "the limousine"), we will make sweet love together. I will break its tender binding and be the first. Having a kind of Labor Day picnicky-slash-housewarming thing at our house on, appropriately, Labor Day. If I know you, you can come. If I don't know you, don't come, or we'll call security. (By "security," I mean "me with a mean chihuahua and a shotgun, maybe drunk.") I'm sure I've got more updates. Lessee. I love the new They Might Be Giants album. It's in nigh-constant rotation. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs' have an EP out that I have, love, but for some reason keep forgetting to burn to CD. Our Changeling game continues, and more importantly, continues to rock. Best game ever. If not ever, then close to ever. I enjoy watersports. Both the kind where I waterski and the kind where I pee on people for erotic gratification. I killed a white pheasant with emerald eyes, and before he died he offered me the keys to his kingdom. The keys unlock a door to an Airstream trailer in Dustgrove, Arizona, about 500 yards south of the Triple XXX Root Beer Burger Joint. I haven't yet summoned the courage to open that door, but from time to time a whispering voice beckons me forth. It tells me the secrets to my future, and intersperses those fortuitous fortunes with a sprinkling of recipes and charming anecdotes about growing up Inuit in Texas. Yeah, I think that pretty much covers all the pertinent updates. 08/08/07 So, remember how I was writing a script? A collaboration with director Lance Weiler? Well, looks like it just got optioned, bitches. 08/08/07 Some exciting news, possibly soon, possibly as soon as today. Watch this space. 07/23/07 I was going to be a good little Internet addict and liveblog my experiences at DexCon As They Happen!... ehhh, but the Hilton in which I made my temporary home had craptastic WiFi. Spotty like Paris Hilton's herpes. Getting a signal felt like floating around the Mid-Atlantic in a submarine, occasionally rising to the surface so I could communicate with the rest of the world. So, live-blogging failed. Instead, I return to you now, my head full of mush! I will now attempt to extract that mush from my brain with a, a, I dunno, a brainspoon, so that I may hurl it against your monitor. With the appropriate onomonopoetic sound of, splat. The Journey Not much to say here, except: New Jersey is for assholes. Especially the road system. Here's how they designed New Jersey's road system, and this is real, this is factual. I read this in Popular Mechanics like, three or four years ago. They took a chimpanzee, right? And they painted his toes in different colors. And then they gave him a few shots of Jaegermeister. And then they let him run around on a giant white mat. He stumbled and staggered this way and that, his paint-slop toes making all kinds of drunken whorls and clover-leafs. And that, ladies and gentlemen, became the New Jersey road system. Troof. The Arrival Not a great deal of fanfare, but here's how you know you're approaching a game convention: Outside, a girl in glasses and leather pants smoking a clove cigarette. Just inside the door, a lanky and underfed lad in a t-shirt that reads: I AM NOT A ROBOT. That's how you know. The First Game For those not in the know, I demoed Changeling: The Lost three times. It was a purposefully unorganized look at the system. The players had statted-up character sheets without personalities, without looks, without any kind of backstory. Together they created the rough backstory, their Keeper, their roles beneath their Keeper, and then I threw them into the escape scenario and the subsequent "stumbling out" -- i.e. the great egress from the Hedge. Right quick, here's the Seeming/Kith pairings that I used for every session: Elemental (Manikin), Fairest (Draconic), Ogre (Gristlegrinder), Darkling (Leechfinger), Beast (Windwing). First session out, I had a bad-ass bunch of players. Guys who got it, no doubt, which helped ease my transition from "Jerk Who Never Before Ran A Con Game" to "Jerk Who Feels Comfortable With Running Con Games." They leapt into their fae personas. They created a Snow Queen analog as their Keeper, but given that this was California, they made her a cruel Surf Queen -- you know, a vindictive undine living in a reef barrier and an underwater sand castle. That kind of awesomeness. (And one of the players, the Ogre, determined it was his job to turn a single crank for his entire durance. His turning the crank made the tides go. It was when he let go of the crank -- with his hands of three-inch-calluses -- that they were able to cause tidal chaos and escape into the Thorns. Later, he would endeavor to beat a hobgoblin with that very crank.) Highlights? The Windwing deciding he could leap off of Coit Tower and glide down (he could, but the other characters had to cover for the resulting panic from the nearby tourists). The characters discovering the existence of their fetches. The awkward-but-awesome beat-down on a hobgoblin wolf in the Hedge to help another changeling (a Satrap) protect his Hedge vines. Great in-character conversations. Hella fun. One of the players -- the Beast Windwing, named himself "Gull" -- asked me if I had anything going on for dinner. His invitation to hang out and experience "random nerdery" was simply too compelling to ignore. So I joined him for dinner. Interlude: Dinner I sat with this fellow -- Rob, we'll call him, because that's his name and I'm a stickler for accuracy (see earlier story: paintfoot chimp). Three others eventually joined us: another Rob, a Fred, and a Morgan. It became clear over the course of dinner that I was sitting with several of the people responsible for Spirit of the Century. If you roleplay, you know that name. And if you don't roleplay... well, what are you doing here? Go buy and sell some stocks. Nerd. Yes, Rob is Rob Donoghue, Fred is Fred Hicks. (Morgan is Morgan Collins, their Maryland buddy -- and he was a bundle of bad-ass like the rest of them. Rob Bohl is he of the impending “Misspent Youth” game.) Good times were had. Rob bought me dinner, an act which earned him a marriage proposal from me, and since we were in New Jersey it was a feasible thing to do. It didn't pan out, the wedding. My wife is probably sad at this, having now lost the opportunity to have pawned me off, her hands clean of me. Point being, Rob's a fine man. A good egg. A snappy dresser, even. Glad I met him. Theme and Mood The theme of the convention was GameLove. The mood of the convention was GameLove. More on that later. The Second Game Second demo session of Changeling: The Lost was as successful as the first, with the exception possibly of one player who kind of... didn't click with the other players. A nice guy, to be sure, and a guy who new the Storytelling System very well. Hopefully he had fun regardless. Interesting point of fact, actually -- I'd say 90% of all the players in all the game sessions I ran had not yet dabbled in the "new" World of Darkness. This was their first exposure to it, as apparently Changeling: The Lost gives off some kind of delicious pheromone, an odor which they could not resist. They seemed sold on it. I hope that remains true and that they can now go back through the goodness that we've been kicking around since the entire mad world rebooted. Interestingly, the general plot and plans of the characters in this game came close to mirroring those in the other game. Even some of the character concepts built from the barebones sheets came in somewhat similar. Their Keeper was a nameless fiend known as The Tyrant, or simply, “Him.” Highlights? One player determined that his character was the one The Tyrant used to deliver punishment unto the other changelings, thus earning him enmity from the get-go. One of the players, playing the Leechfinger, went with this great “aloof succubus” angle (and whose mortal Mask was black, even though the changeling Mien was not). More tension between members of the group, but that served for a great dramatic urge, too. Interlude: GameLove DexCon is a very indie-friendly convention. Lots of IPR/IGE (Indie Press Revolution, Indie Game Explosion) presence. Various gameheads were orbiting: Fred and Rob of Evil Hat, Rob Bohl, Ben Lehman, Justin Bow, Matt Wilson – list goes on and on. I am woefully underexposed when it comes to this world. Frankly, I’m just not that good of a geek. They should demote me. (It also came to light that, at the con, I was The Man. And not, “You’re the man now, dawg,” no. Not, “Dude, you rock, you’re the man!” Not that. Rather, I was The White Man analog, the well-fed bloat-belly of a Successful Legacy Game Company. Mind you, nobody treated me like that. I was no second-class citizen [nor did they treat me like a first-class citizen as in, “Hey, nice pedestal”]. They embraced me as one of their own. Sure, first they had to put a bag over my head and hit me with lead pipes and kick me with steel-toe boots, but shit, that’s like any Tuesday night at der Wendighaus.) These people are filled with GameLove. The love of gaming explodes out of their every orifice. Eyesquirts of game joy. Paroxysms of playgasms. Gibbering, jabbering exultations to the industry, the rules, the narrative, the dice, the lack of dice. They do this because they love this. They do this because they are this. It was, and is, deeply refreshing. The Third Game The third session was missing some folks. A couple of those who had signed up didn’t show. Thankfully, I had one dude (a teen librarian from New Brunswick who wanted to run Changeling for a teen game group there) show up without registering, and so he was with us for the game. Good times to be had here, too. Very enthusiastic roleplayers. They really jumped into the characters, and seemed to enjoy themselves. They took the session farther than any other, actually entering the second “game day” of play. Their Keeper was a mad Marquis in a massive redwood tree, in which the changelings were held captive. Highlights: The Windwing had his fetch stomped to “death” by the Fairest girl – and they marveled as the doppelganger turned to pumpkin shell, guts, and bloody scraps of burlap before their eyes. The Darkling’s “task” during his durance was to sort through and proofread thousands upon thousands of reports and lists – all of it information about the Marquis’ enemies. When he was done sorting them, the job began all over again. (This was actually seamless from the other characters, too – the Fairest girl was a callous spy for the Marquis, going among the other Fae to learn secret information, and the Windwing’s kept birds were responsible for relaying that secret information from the girl back to those in the tree.) Also cool, the Darkling forged a kind of rough “truce” with his fetch. Interlude: Momentary Violence I was introduced to someone whose name is now gone from me. I was introduced as, appropriately, a White Wolf freelancer. His response? A snarky, “I’m sorry.” I kind of wanted to punch him in the neck. The First Panel First panel: Interactive versus Non-interactive fiction. The difference between, say, writing a novel and writing a game. Since I’ve done both, I was excited. I was also the only one. Nobody showed up. Not even other panelists. I sat in the room for ten minutes, loosely contemplated masturbating in public, then left to find some people to talk to. Fred Hicks Does Not Blink I hung out with Morgan Collins and Becca Badurina (i.e. Dexcon’s den mother who always made sure I was not starving myself) that night after the third game, enjoying their company immensely. Fine folks, there. Then I got roped into a midnight game. Me, I thought, bed. Bed sounds nice. Mmm, bed, mmm, pillows. Sweet delectable sleep. Well, fuck that noise. The game session was technically scheduled for midnight till four in the morning, but apparently, that didn’t matter. Fred was running the game, an incredibly rules-simple piece of brilliance called Beat the Clock. He said, “If you’re tired and you want to go to bed, just choose to die!” See, the game’s basic premise is modeling itself after any Aliens-style “Escape or Die!” movie scenario. You are characters trapped in a claustrophobic environment and one or various forces are conspiring to introduce you to your doom. There remains, by thematic necessity, a time limit. It’s part roleplaying game, part resource management, part competition. (The competition part is hot, hot, hot. You screw the person to your left by literally introducing the conflict they now face – i.e., “A gaggle of alien prostitutes with switchblades swarms the hall in front of you -- what do you do?” It’s GM-less. It’s a hoot. And you set a time limit of, say, 5-10 minutes. Every time 5 or 10 minutes is up, BAM, you increase your doom counter. Any time your doom counters (or other negative counters) hit 12, well, shit. Good night, gracie. You are eaten by aliens or raped by robot monkeys or whatever the central conceit is of that particular session (a conceit that the entire group designs before play). Our conceit was a self-aware submarine whose mad AI had summoned a giant squid to destroy us all. I played an alcoholic chef. Fun was had. Though I still think the game should be called Doom Clock, because, that’s what it is. Interlude: I Come Bearing Gamejoy Fred took me through the entire IPR booth, naming off the many awesome games and their many awesome premises. Many – most, really – sounded great. (I expect they really are great, but it’s worth noting that Fred Hicks could sell water to a dolphin.) If there hadn’t been so many damn gamers scampering around, I might have bludgeoned somebody with the cash register and taken one of everything. As it stands, I purchased: Spirit of the Century, Primetime Adventures, Best Friends, Mortal Coil, and Don’t Rest Your Head. Bastards. Oh, and I met Jennifer Rodgers. My jaw unhinged upon seeing her art work. It fell to the ground. Then it turned to bone dust. I am now jawless thanks to her sketchery. The Second Panel Much more successful, this panel. At first, it was several game industry peeps (including Rob Donoghue and Matt Wilson) just geeking out about the industry, but then a couple other people filtered in. One in particular wanted to actually know how to break into the industry, so he got a brainful of information. My trajectory within the industry is very, very different from those who attended. Interlude: My Wife Is Made Of Win That’s some new Internet slang for you there, kids. I’m dropping it like it’s hot. “Made of win.” It’s got that same piquant freshness of all the lolcats talk: I can has idiotslang! Ahem. Anyway, Michelle joined me for the final night, which was good. She is a trooper, wading hip-deep into the churning froth-capped waters of raw geekery. The Third Panel This one was “my” panel. An hour with me. It was not widely attended, but it was attended. Yes, two of the attendees comprised my wife and Rob, but, hey, I’ll take what I can get. I was able to ramble on about That Thing I Do. I answered some questions. We geeked about all kinds of stuff. I had some dude tell me about his Moros Mage LARP character, blah blah blah. Good times. I also formally announced that I’m developing Tribes of the Moon for Werewolf: The Forsaken, a comprehensive five-tribe book. New, awesome information written by awesome writers. And I’m also developing some other good stuff, too, coming down the pipeline. I told people at the con that if I told them what it was, they’d see a poison dart suddenly sticking out of my neck and I’d faceplant into my dice. Interlude: Health Care It’s hard not to eat like a shithead at a convention. Everywhere you turn, badness. They had a chocolate fountain. They had something called “Sugarfest,” which was a room filled with pixie-stick level confections. But I did pretty all right. I ate reasonably. I kept mostly to normal meals. I never overdid it. My body did not get fatter as a result of this convention, and for that I am pleased. The Great Egress Sunday morning, poof, done, gone. I missed the indie workshop, but by that point of the con my brain was the consistency of whatever black and surly fungus now lurks under our one dog’s armpits (no, seriously, she has some kind of armpit smegma). The drive back was done on a road clogged with cocksuckers. Many felt the need to drive at 90 MPH, cutting me off so as to almost surgically shear off my bumper. They zoomed ahead. Then somehow, we all rolled up to the toll booth at the same time. Nice job, jackasses. Summation Good times had, though I’m weary. Good people met. Mind freshened from the entire experience. While not a huge White Wolf fanbase at the convention, there still remained a pretty good contingent. Not to mention the many folks who used to play the old game and were looking for an excuse to dive into the reboot (and that excuse is now called Changeling: The Lost). I come away, weary but pleased. 07/20/07 You disappoint me again, Starscream. Wait. What? Oh. Right. Transformers. Let me say up front, lest you get other ideas (and you will, oh, you will), I think it was a super-fun movie. The nummy equivalent of eating bad food and loving it, with sloppy meat grease and donut-filling coagulating on your chin whiskers. Good times had by all. But Michael Bay... you know, I keep trying to think of something witty, something pointed to say about him, but the only word that continues to rise up in my morning-addled brain is... are you ready for it? "Dogshit." That's it. That's the only word I can summon. Michael Bay is, by and large, dogshit. His eye is dogshit. His talent is dogshit. His directorial finesse is... I mean, it's a big burlap sack of fresh dogshit. (And that word, "fresh," applies. His dogshit isn't stale, I'll give him that. It's very fresh. Fertile. It'll give life to whatever awful swamp plants thrive in canine feculence.) Michael Bay cares little for subtlety. To him, more is more. If you can have one explosion, why not have three? If you can eschew human character in favor of giant stomping robots, then do it! The guy opens the movie with a Decepticon attack. It contains no suspense. You know next to nothing about the military characters who are about to battle said Decepticon. You only know that the giant robot is going to blow stuff up, and you kind of don't care. You know what I would've done? And every other director worth his salt? You wouldn't show a Transformer in the first act. It'd be all glimpses and weird transmissions. I mean, goddamn, even Independence Day -- a movie that just vomits ridiculous action -- doesn't show you the aliens for a while. You take some time to learn about the characters before watching the Earth blow up. Most of the characters are hollow automatons, given less soul than the ostensibly soulless robots. Bay's military fetishism ("Hey, look, another achingly slow-motion shot of dudes walking into a helicopter!") goes into overdrive, too. You can just picture him at the editing console, busting a nut any time he gets to cut to an F-22 fighter jet. He shudders and squees and then his assistant or second director or whoever has to Kleenex the monitor to get Bay's meth-flavored spooge off the glass so they can keep editing. Worse, the guy can't direct a robot fight scene. Eight out of ten robot scenes are so big and bombastic that you don't know what's happening. You just see colored hunks of metal blurring across the screen, then you'll see some big Decepticon dead. Not every action sequence is like this: Bay handles some of the action with crackhead aplomb. But a lot of it just ends up a mire of visual noise. All the characters lost within it. Ah, but then you have Sam Witwicky, played to the nines by Shia Lebouf (pronounced "Tom Spiznowski"). Shia is a fucking star, man. You can see it. You can see why Spielberg loves him and has him cast in Indiana Jones IV. In fact, all the good stuff about Transformers can be laid squarely at Spielberg's feet. He was involved from the beginning, and was the one to reportedly get that script into the solid condition that remained mostly on-screen (though the ending became a muddy mess, devoid of logic). I only wish that Spielberg had himself helmed the movie. Spielberg knows restraint. Even War of the Worlds makes clear that he has retained the lesson he learned way back on Jaws: less is more, and more just ends up as less. If he'd have handled this film like War of the Worlds, it would be so much more potent, a real jaw-dropper. And yet, I relent. I enjoyed the film immensely. I felt chills skitter up my spinal cord whenever Optimus Prime said any damn thing (even, yes, for real, "My bad"). I loved all the throwaway geek gems. Megatron is disappointed in Starscream! Jazz is a jive-talking blackbot! Megan Fox is hot and tan and ... wait, that's not a Transformer-related thing, is it? But she is hot. Crazy unreal hot. Her character is passable, given just enough to do, but she's unnaturally pleasant to look at. (And she looks as much like a high school student as I do, unless she's like, a twelfth-year senior.) But hot! Did I mention hot? The shame of Transformers is that it is good, which means that it could've been great if it wasn't in the epileptic hands of Doctor Dogshit over there. Didn't anyone see Armageddon or Pearl Harbor, two of the dogshittiest movies ever to be paraded in front of our eyes? (If you were to sit down and watch a double-header of those two films, one right after the other, you know what would happen? You would die. You would die because your brain would kill you. It would grow hands, punch a hole in your skull, and leave your head. Then it would stab out your eyes with a steak knife and ask you, "Why did you do that to me?" Then it would choke you and find a skull that doesn't so clearly hate it.) 07/07/07 Happy 07/07/07, people. Apparently a number of you are getting married or playing the lottery or something on this most fortunate of days. We'll see how lucky you all feel when an asteroid comes crashing into Earth, killing half of us. The other half will be eradicated by the hungry space rash that we all get from the space rock. I'm a "glass is half full" kind of guy, as you can well see. Anyhow. Shortly, I'll copy over some links that'll take you to the various Chuck-centric events at Dexcon 10 at the East Brunswick Hilton in New Jersey. I'm running three four-hour sessions of Changeling: The Lost there, which is a game that has ended up damn near perfect in its execution. Seriously, one of my Major White Wolf Goals was to someday be a part of a Changeling re-imagining, one that harnessed the good stuff about the earlier iteration (The Dreaming) and jettisoned all the stuff that sucked open ass in favor of stuff that did not suck open ass. Perhaps even stuff that rocks one's proverbial socks off. And yes, that's a proverb. Shut your mouth. So, C:tL is good, and I will run C:tL in July before the game's actual release in July. However, the fine people at DexCon were addlepated enough to think that I somehow merited a full hour of what I hope will be termed The Big Wendig Power Hour, Starring Big Goddamn Wendig. I do not know what I am supposed to do during this hour in which an audience gazes at me while I probably gaze back at them. Empty stares meeting one another like two laser beams meeting in space, or two guys whizzing on each other in the public pool. Whatever it is they expect of me, I have a forum. I assume that I'll get up there and address questions about... shit, I don't know. Game-related questions? Writing questions? Questions about my hot bod? My nerves of iron, my fists of steel? My sexual prowess, which was gained by eating the hearts of many Yetis? My acid blood, which was gained by watching the movie Alien like, 200 times in a row? I have answers if they have questions. I just hope they can handle the power of the, uh, Power Hour. Of Big Wendig. Of something. What else? I dunno. Does whitening toothpaste do a fucking thing? I don't think my teeth are any whiter. They're still that... jaundiced tooth-shade that everybody else has. Though, jeez, maybe if I stopped using whitening toothpaste, my teeth would look like grommets of crusty cat poop shoved unmercifully up into my gums. Who knows? It's probably some silly advertising thing, some weasel word that doesn't mean dick. You know: "This candy bar is 25% bigger!" Oh yeah? Twenty-five percent bigger than what? "Than a candy bar that is 25% smaller!" Dirty shitheads. In this case, the toothpaste probably like, whitens your teeth by 0.044% or some itty bitty fraction of a fraction. So legally the damn stuff still whitens your teeth enough that you can't sue them for a billionty dollars because of false advertising. Maybe I should rant about this at DexCon. I'll loudly eschew talking about anything game- or writing-related, I'll just mouth off about toothpaste conspiracies. It'll leave an impression, at least. Oh, in other news, Microsoft is a company I now officially trust with my life. Seriously. I left everything in my will to Bill Gates, that poor hungry pauper who is now not the richest dude in the world. I think the new richest dude is like, Dracula or something. What I'm getting at is, I mentioned how the Xbox 360 took a giant crap on itself a few weeks ago, right? Well, you may have read, but Microsoft stepped up to the plate in response to my complaints. I called them, told them last week that they were forcing me to buy another console (a lie, I already bought a Wii and I don't feel like buying a Blu-Ray boat anchor), and they could suck it. And this week, Microsoft stepped up. They extended their warranty on their console to an unprecedented three years. Huge. Big deal. They didn't have to go that far. The console hasn't even been out two years; they could've just settled on that and it still would've been awesome. But Peter Moore came out all hat-in-hand and apologized and chastised himself and then flagellated his back with a willow branch until it bled. So, Microsoft just saved me money and hassle. Instead of meeting complaints with a kind of corporate wiggle-dance to free themselves from the grapple of responsibility, they stood up like men and shrugged and said, "Oops, we done fucked up." Amen. Microsoft has earned my trust. 06/25/07 TECHNOLOGY MUST BE DESTROYED! So someone must've said when they cursed my household thrice. In a fairly short amount of time, I've had: My XBOX 360 take a shit on itself. My desktop mumble something about "the peaceful grove" before falling into an inert torpor. My cell phone gain a mind of its own and decide that only sometimes will it allow the battery within its body to be charged. So, whatever mad gypsy I pissed off, please stop cursing my tech. It's starting to really dampen my productivity. I do back up, so I'm not entirely smackered. But, I back up once per week, which is traditionally on Saturdays. And the system died on Friday morning. Which means, ayuh, I lost some stuff. Not a huge loss, all recoverable with an extra push for time. But annoying. Very annoying. Apparently, I had detected the subtle shifts in the technoforce, and whatever invisible antennae I possess apparently foresaw the coming Techpocalypse. Because I bought a new laptop a week or so ago. That's the good news, at least. Ooh, shit, maybe the new laptop is causing these problems. It is a Dell, an unusual purchase for me, being the unabashed Gateway fan that I am. Perhaps the Dell is just asserting its dominance, the way a new dog will rough up all the other dogs to declare his primacy. In the pecking order, perhaps the Dell wishes to be king chicken. It's a sweet laptop. Nothing personal to the laptop, but I've had spotty experience with Dell in the past. But this new sucker, it's stocked, locked and ready to punch some cocks. Big screen, lots of memory, good-sized keyboard, an actual graphics card, fat battery. Only thing I skimped on was the hard drive space, but I have a biggun' external hard drive which should cover all concerns. System's got Windows Vista, which is... strange. It's like XP, only prettier and more sensitive. Way more sensitive. Any time I go to do anything, it wants to make sure it's allowed to really do that. I have to sign forms in triplicate. It's like a nervous son, unsure if he's allowed to ask his father for a cookie. "May I truly have this cookie, father? Don't hit me!" It's constantly flinching from my firm hand, this Vista. Then again, that's better than XP, which held my own interests in wanton disregard. Whatever it wanted to do, it does it. "Ehh, I had to download some driver updates and reboot. Were you working on something? I don't give a shit, newbie. Hey, I didn't like that gay screensaver you were using. So I put up a slideshow of JPEGs. You'll like it, it's a bunch of dudes fishing, over and over again. And even if you don't like it, what do I care? I own you, fleshface." Fleshface, that's what he called me. A little rude, you have to admit. Anyway, the old desktop, I'm assuming it's the power supply. And it's an All-In-One PC, which makes it a tiddle-bit tough to crack open and replace the PSU, but who knows? I may try it. Or I may see if someone can do it for me. (Anybody volunteering?) Gateway will repair it, but to do so, I think they want to take a lien against my house, so... there's that. Hrm. I also need a new copy of Word, if anybody has one. I'll give you... well, not much. Candy? Adulation? Secret prayers to give your infernal soul hidden power? Other things are happening, some good, some bad. I'll get into them when I know more. If you have kind wishes, please partner those magical thoughts with The Screenplay, which is now out in Los Angeles trying to kiss up to executives and financiers. Our little baby, out in the world, naive and stumbling about. Our little word-born scriptmonkey. Do well, tiny monkey, do well. And if you're the gypsy who is cursing my tech, quit it. 06/03/07 Mowing the lawn is a kind of peaceful thing. Lots of time to think. Absorb. Zone out. Let the unconscious roll and tumble in its own joyous filth. Lucky me, too, as I juuuuuust beat the rain, man. (Bonus activity: re-read that sentence as, "I just beat the Rain Man." He was all like, "Wapner's on, yeah, Wapner's on," and I was all like, "Fuck your Wapner, little man.") Some brief administrative duties: I updated the Resume tab as well as revamping the Flickr badge at the main page. Don't all go rushing in there at once. You'll stampede. You'll shut down the servers. The Intertoobs will crash and we'll all be left wondering how to get our porn. We'll have to go back to masturbating to the Food Network or trying to see a glimpse of nipple behind the gauze of white static on those blocked softcore channels. Last weekend was, as noted, our first anniversary celebratory celebration. We looked at flowers at Longwood Gardens. We ate crazy good food at Roux 3, some of which was comped to us simply by dint of it being our anniversary (a brief tasty teaser of foods consumed: duck confit and gnocchi, scallops, crispy chicken, sashimi ahi tuna, molten chocolate cakeyness, pomegranite and pear cocktails, and so on, and so forth). We stayed at a delightful little bed and breakfast known as Sweetwater Farm, which blessedly was not a B&B in the vein of B&Bs, because as Ben Stiller says in Flirting With Disaster, "We are not B&B people!" I don't like old ladies forcing me to sit in the parlor with other old people while a cat walks across a not-too-distant plate of scones and everybody's perfectly fine with the feline's fecal toxoplasmosis getting all over the baked goods. This was the kind of B&B where they leave you the fuck alone until you want some attention, like breakfast. Then they attend to you, and then they leave you the fuck alone again. That said, there were a handful of dogs (one of whom was an unofficial tour guide -- seriously, he'd take you to all corners of the many-acred farm, and then he'd needle some chipmunks or aggravate the sheep). As noted, yes, sheep. Horses. Goats. Good times, good times. Flickr and the Livejournal both reveal pics from the expedition. What else? Fence is done on both sides, now. Putting in a fence is like fighting a bear. It's tough. You get banged up. But, if you win, you feel very satisfied. Vindicated, even, as you plant your bloodied boot on the sweat-frothed chest of the fallen ursine. Saw Knocked Up, which is funny enough that you'll void your bowels at least twice, and sweet enough where you'll unconsciously feel your once-thought-dead heart flutter and bumble in your chest. And crass enough, too, where you will have to readjust your unhinged jaw, the jaw having unhinged itself at some unbelievably awful thing or another. Been reading a lot, and I continue to move away from even the ability to enjoy fiction like I once did. It's almost all non-fiction anymore. I've heard other writers say the same, and I have always had a hard time believing it true, but it seems to be true. I'm pushing through Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, which is good at times and at other times is like smacking yourself in the head with a Dickens novel, and since the book is approximately seventy-eleven-hundred-and-thousand pages, it's tough going. Part of it, too, is that fiction absorbs into my consciousness too quickly. While I no longer ape it when I myself am writing, I still find that in reading, say, science-fiction, I suddenly get this awesome hankering to write The Best Science-Fiction Novel Of All Goddamn Time even though I've proven time and time again that I couldn't write science-fiction if I ate the minds and hearts of Robert Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke in some kind of soul-consuming ritual. Non-fiction, though, is neutral. Stylized or no, I don't have the urge to write in that style or to push forth writing some kind of creative non-fiction bullshit. It's funny. At 31, I know I'm not old, and I know in many ways both good and regrettable I haven't changed much. But other times, I recognize subtle shifts in my behavior or habits. Don't know if they're good or bad. Don't know so much if its an earmark of maturity, immaturity or simply a sign-o-the-times, but those shifts are present regardless of their value. Perhaps I should go mow the lawn again to ponder this. But first? The Rhymenoceros versus the Hiphopapotamus! 05/30/07 Top Ten Inside Jokes From This Past Weekend With My Wife 10) "ATMWT: African Tin-Man With Titties!" 9) "It's like the zoo, but with plants!" 8) "That sounds like a Fergie song: 'My punk, my punk, my lovely pussy junk!'" 7) "I think that old man just crapped his pants." 6) "Is it me, or is the Long Trail and the Short Trail the exact same thing?" 5) "Man, it's like the United Nations around here." 4) "Mmm. Bugspray and chocolate." 3) "I think his name is Berkley. Or Buckley. Or Barkley. I just call him 'Buddy.'" 2) "It's like a picnic, but with no food and a bunch of people I don't know." 1) "Happy Annibersary, Happy Annibersary, Happy Annibersary, HAAAAAAAAAPPY ANNIBERSARY!" Moral of the story: I love my wife precisely because I can have lists like this with her. Happy Anniversary, lady! More to come soon on our crazy misadventures this weekend in the Brandywine Valley. 05/13/07 So, the word on the street informs me that a number of the people I know happen to be awesome. Keith, becoming... I don't know what he's becoming, I think he just earned his Masters in Hypnosis or something? Or maybe he counsels dogs? I dunno. Then there's Matt, and I'm told that Matt became a Doctor of Jurisprudence, which I think is nonsense language for "lawyer" or maybe "bee wrangler." Finally, you've got Marty and Sarah, who have again made us all jealous of his potent seed and her comfortable uterus, for they have formed a perfect marriage of biology to create Progeny Number Two. (The girl, Lilith, is a tiny little creature, beautiful with big eyes. Too big, too beautiful, really. It tells me that they've gotten themselves a changeling all swaddled up in the crib. Good luck, is what I'm saying.) Congrats to all ye who have spawned or have gained degrees of some prominence. Let's see. What else to talk about? I may be a guest-of-honor at a semi-local convention (I say semi-local because it's only an hour-and-a-half away). I shall apparently participate on panels. I shall reportedly maybe kind of sort of run a game or three. I may wreck my hotel room and draw 20-sided dice on the walls in my feces. Hard to prophesy the precise details. I'm continuing to write. Scripts, yes. White Wolf books, sure. A little bit of personal stuff, okay, yeah. I'm continuing to develop my first book for The Wolf That Is White, and it is for an existing line and is a book that I believe people have been clamoring for (but what do I know?). We've got one half of our fence up, and it's already working. Because now when I walk by my neighbor's yard and they're all out there doing their thing, I don't have to slap on the politeness mask and acknowledge anybody's presence. With the fence, I am like ninja. I am like ghost. I am like ninja ghost. Gilmore Girls is ending its run, and that's sad. I know, I'm a big homosexual, I hear you. But it's also one of the sharpest shows out there, far smarter than it needs to be. But, if Gilmore Girls must perish so that Veronica Mars must live, then so be it. Spider-Man 3 was good. Probably better than the second, despite what you read. And yet, it also failed to really rock my boat or leave any lasting impressions. One negative of the movie is that, while I like Raimi's nerdy Three-Stooges-schtick, I think in this film he fails to balance that stuff properly against all the emo angst. Year Zero, the new NIN album, continues to impress. Yes, it's the same stuff from Reznor, lyrics-wise (broken, decay, hands-and-knees, violence, etc;etc;), except I like that he kind of takes the personal angle of The Downward Spiral but here he makes it about the group, the masses, the American people. The sci-fi story angle isn't anything jaw-dropping, but it fits the scheme. It plays well with the music. It hates George Bush. That's it, for now. If you're a mother, then happy Your Day. If you're a husband or a son, be nicer to your wives and mothers. 04/20/07 Dear Terribleminds: Artichokes are delicious. The new Nine Inch Nails album demands multiple listens to gauge its measure. My writing resume is updated. I love Avatar: The Last Airbender. Happy Almost Earth Day. Your Mom. That is all. You may now return to American Idol. -- The Wendig 04/19/07 So. 31, or nearly to it. Time to reflect, perhaps. And no, I’m not going to reflect on the Virginia Tech killings. There’s nothing I can say that hasn’t been said, really. In fact, there’s probably not much that I can say about me that’s particularly world-shattering. It’s just been a chockablock year. Since turning 30, I’ve gotten married, bought a house, had rabies shots, eaten sushi, written hundreds of thousands of words, finished two screenplays, taken on more hours at the library, taken on some book development work, traveled to California, paid someone to shave my dog’s asshole, and killed a man in Reno not so much to watch him die, but because he had a shifty look about him like maybe he was trying to steal my Reeboks. (Strange, as I don’t own Reeboks. But I dare not consider this in retrospect lest I be consumed by a tidal bitch-slap of guilt. I am content with this man’s demise, so let’s keep it that way.) Worth mentioning, I suppose, is that I’ve somehow… managed to navigate troubled waters and sail into a pleasant relationship with my father. I can’t say we’re really on the same page about stuff most of the time, but our pages in the book are damn sure a lot closer together than they’ve ever been in the past. Where before I was the beginning of th book and he was the end, now we’re both… I dunno, smashed somewhere in the middle. Maybe toward the third act. It’s odd, because these days he’ll call me just to call me, which is… I said odd already, didn’t I? It’s not bad. Not at all. But before when he’d call, I’d receive the standard litany of questions, asked in such a way that he barely paused to let me answer before getting to the next one. Basic rat-tat-tat of queries included: How’s the car, how’s the girlfriend, how’s the dog, how’s the job, okay, see you, yeah, uh-huh, bye. I could’ve responded with, in order, “It exploded, she’s dead, the dog ate her, and I was fired because I took a messy crap in all four of the copier’s paper trays, okay, yup, uh-huh, bye.” And he might not have noticed. Now, though, he calls to talk. Just ramble on. It’s a natural conversation, not a menu of mandatory topics. Odd, odd, odd. Good. But yeah. Odd. Is he mellowing in his older age? Sure, definitely. He’s got less of an edge. And I don’t mean that as in, “Old Hanrahan, he’s lost his edge, you can see it in the way he pushes his shopping cart full of empty boxes down the long and lonely road.” I mean it as in, “He doesn’t seem so much like he’s going to explode in rage and kill us all.” Which, if you know how many guns the man owns, you’d recognize the potential reality of that statement. (Though, it does continue to be true that during some kind of apocalypse scenario, be it nuclear or zombie-related, I’m traveling to wherever my Dad is at the time. If we’re friends, you and I, well, then dear reader, you can come with me. We’ll get there and he’ll have the sandbags stacked and the guns loaded. The man is prepared for the end of days, be sure of that.) For a little perspective, consider that I think my father disliked me for a goodly portion of the last 30 years. Probably from age, say, 12 to 29. He loved me, sure, but I can’t really say he liked me. He never really understood the whole “writing” thing, either, not until recently. Now he asks about it, seems intrigued by it, even vaguely…proud? What? Really? Shit. That’s crazy. Nevertheless, it appears true-ish. Seems to be a marker of my thirtieth year, so there you have it. That said, maybe I should reconsider this whole, "Gee, I get along with my parents," schitck. Why? Well, as it turns out, my parents tried to kill me when I was a child. Seriously. I just found out like, a week or so ago. When I was a wee tot, they had a water outage or some nonsense, so they tapped my grandmother’s well. (My grandmother, Gram, bless her heart, basically kept food products around for about a glacial epoch. She might have been a botulism farmer for all I know. I remember seeing a plastic container of caramel popcorn on her one table when I was very young, at about age six or seven. That same container of candy popcorn was on that same table in that same spot when I was a late teenager. No, I’m not kidding. Her cabinets were weighed down by bulging cans. Point of this parenthetical note is, it was not the wisest idea to eat whatever my grandmother had to offer. Or to drink her water, as would become abundantly clear.) Well, I guess nobody wanted to take a close look at my grandmother’s well, so they failed to notice the animal that had gone in there to die. Dunno what kind of animal. I like to think it was a possum. Anyway, long story short, I drank this dead animal water (heretofore known as “Possum Liquor”) and it made me deathly ill. I guess I almost died in the hospital. I was like, seven months old or something. Maybe there’s a little part of the possum soul that still lives within me. I’ll call him Little Stinky. Oh well. So, almost dead at seven months, but still living at almost thirty-one years. Here’s to you, life. The clink of glasses, a mumbled toast, and a wink from Little Stinky. 04/15/07 Right now, life is just too nutty to formulate a thesis on any one topic and ramble about it. Just impossible. It's like I have a brain, but it's made up of uncoordinated bees. These bees, they don't get along. They aren't doing some orchestrated honey-loving line dance. It's every bee for himself in this goddamn head of mine. So, I give you: Thoughtvomit. My brain. Vomiting thoughts. And bees. Sweet, sweet bees. I turn 31 in a week. The age doesn't bother me, but the swiftness of time is starting to. We're putting up six-foot stockade privacy fence. Fence is heavier than you think. And you need more of it than you think. But anything to keep out interlopers. We're going to put a bat house on it. I owe batkind (batmankind?) a karmic debt, really, for killing one of them a couple months ago. You can overdo sushi. I still like sushi. But, as it turns out, I don't like it in massive quantities. When you eat sushi, it's a lot to shove in your mouth. You don't take casual bites. You take the whole sushi turd and shove that puppy into your mouth. Plus, I got one with too much wasabi, which as it turns out, isn't even wasabi, which as it turns out disappoints me on some level I can't grasp. Anyway. It felt like a wave of fiery air blasting down my throat and up my nose and into my eyeholes all at once. Yes, I am developing some books for White Wolf. No, I won't tell you what they are, but they'll all be awesome because I know all the awesome writers. Thus is a privelege for having written 45+ of these damn things. Winter is an asshole. It's trying to snow even as I type this. It's rain for the moment. But snow threatens. Like a hyena in the shadows. Waiting to pick off the sick and sleepy. I have a picture on Flickr that is somewhat inexplicably up to 93,000 views. Some mad Blog robot out there must be in love with it. My next highest is at 12,000 or so, and that's apparently impressive given that I think the most viewed photo on Flickr is at 140,000 or thereabouts. I really enjoy digital photography. It helps me in my writing, believe it or not. Allows me to think even more visually. I couldn't give a fucking rat's nest full of rats about Don Imus or Rutgers or Sharpton. I'm tired of people with lax morality attempting to be moral shepherds. If you pee your bed, don't give me advice on how to not pee my bed. Braising chicken thighs in a sweet chili sauce is a recipe for bonerocity. It is not the exact Center of Bonerocity, but it orbits it. I think Promethean is one of the best games White Wolf has ever put out. Matt McFarland and his team of writers deserves a fat sack of kudos on that game for all the supplements. Very happy with it. One day maybe, we'll play it. You know, after we finish Changeling: The Lost, which is rocking my pants and will rock your pants one day soon. Neighbors are overrated. Bricks are cheap, until you need like, hundreds of them. State Senator Greenleaf's apparently favorite book is about canoeing. In Pennsylvania. As if canoeing in Pennsylvania is an experience unique to the whole canoeing ouevre. I have not seen Grindhouse, but I want to. I suspect it'll be a DVD thing, unfortunately. Netflix has not given me my new Avatar: The Last Airbender disc yet, which is like dangling a packet of China White above a heroin addict's head. I know they have it. They know I want it. C'mon, Netflix, let's come together on this. It's raining. I have to take the dog out in the rain. Which is not awesome, not awesome at all. Maybe I'll just kill the dog and save myself the time. Oh, I'm just joking. I can't kill him. He's apparently invulnerable. Poof. 03/25/07 It's been an interesting weekend, is what I'm saying. Sushi. If you know me, you know that the visual of me putting sushi in my mouth is on par with the visual of me sticking the entire Empire State Building up my ass without the courtesy of lubrication. In simpler terms: impossible. And yet, that's what I did this weekend. I ate me some sushi. This is not a metaphor. I do not secretly mean, "I got it on with my lady," or "I went down on a fishmonger's wife." It means what it says. I'm being as honest as I can be, here, people. I ate sushi. And I liked it. Double-take! Spit-take! Fwing! Ptoo! Wha? Huh? Ruhhhh? It's true. I fiddled together some soy, some wasabi, and popped a hunk of raw tuna followed by a hunk of raw salmon into my maw. It was great. The salmon moreso than the tuna, but both were pleasing to my Draconian palate. The two things I figured had to be completely unpleasant about sushi were proven non-existent. First, the smell. I figured, hey, it has to smell. It's fish. It's raw. It'll smell like, I dunno, cat breath, old shoes, unkempt vaginas. But, no real odor coming off of it at all. The second concern was texture. Texture is a meal-killer for me. It's why I don't eat tomatoes. The texture ruins it. Watery. Gooey. Meh. Mushrooms are hit or miss for me, too. Sometimes it's like eating a slug wrapped in boot leather. (But mushrooms have a great earthy taste which counterbalances it -- it just has to be a good mushroom for me to eat it, like Portobello or Shiitake.) So, I figured raw fish had to have a pretty distinct and unpleasant texture. Like eating a rubber worm or something. But, no. Actually, the texture is alarmingly pleasant. Silky. So, that was one part of the weekend. Eating raw fish. It's like someone replaced me with a robot. A robot who eats sushi. Second part is, looks like I'll be picking up some new work for Big Daddy White Wolf. I'll tell you naught about what I might be doing for them, but it's good stuff, and it's big. Some day, I'll share the 411. What else? Lots of home improvement. We did quite a bit this weekend, actually. New garbage disposal. New toilet seat. Hung some paintings. Installed a new light fixture in the foyer. Stained the grout in the bathroom prior to sealing it (color: "Antique White," which is a synonym for "Old Person" or "Dirty Curtains"). Learned some shit about electrical systems which I'll probably forget later (just in time for me to electrocute myself, which is why I've instructed Michelle to linger near me with a 2x4 so she can thwack me away from the embracing current). Oh! Hell, we finally found a breakfast place around here that doesn't suck. We have like, eleventy-billion diners in a half-mile radius, and they're all for shit. Odd, given that diners tend to be almost universally okay -- they walk a fine line, but always produce good, greasy victuals. The ones around here are just trash, though, with the exception of maybe one or two. Finally we found something tucked away, maybe 10 minutes down the road. I had some apple sausage. Michelle had strawberry-stuffed french toast. Life has returned to its balance. And finally, speaking of balance, Mama Spring, she's here. Like a baby bird, my mouth is open, ready for her to regurgitate her delights into my outstretched beak. I love Spring. I love Summer. I even love Autumn. I hate Winter. I'd like to kick Old Man Winter in his hoarfrost teeth and lichen-covered testicles. Winter just steals all the fire from my hearth, man. It really does. It saps me. Spring, though, soon as the first sunny, warm day hits, I'm like goddamn Tigger over here. Seasonal Affective Disorder or whatever they call it? That's me in a nutshell, kittens. Last bit: back on track with a second draft of one of the screenplays. Good times. Ah well. That's it for now. You'll hear more from me eventually. Peace in the Middle East, homies. I gots to bounce. 03/07/07 And here you thought I wasn't busy. Let's see. A writing update, long overdue. Got lots of books hitting shelves between now and May. I won't list them all here, suffice to say you want them, so you'll go buy them, and that will allow people to keep paying me to write this stuff. Also got a lot lined up, writing-wise. Got something under the vigilant eye of Matt McFarland. Got Autumn Nightmares, the first Changeling supplement, and also the second supplement in that line. Got something semi-big a-brewing for Vampire. Maybe some other irons in that fire. Just finished text for The Blood, Damnation City, and World of Darkness: Reliquary. Had ourselves some Changeling playtesting, too, and I'd tell you all about it, but the NDA Collar on my neck would suddenly start to beep (like it is now) moments before it goes off like a circle of firecrackers, popping my head off like a cork. A blood-spattered cork. With ears. Working on the second draft of the first new script. Will have that turned in and again out of my hands soonish. Did I mention that I got rabies shots? Needed because I was "exposed" to a bat in a mousetrap? (A very stupid bat, apparently.) I may have previously linked to my Flickr page. Lots of photos there to peruse, should you care. Yesterday, a milestone was hit -- made it to #1 on Explore, albeit briefly, with a pic I posted. It's not like it's any big deal karmically or anything. Nor will anyone give me any money. But there is a kind of satisfaction implicit. I'm not a good photographer, I'm just fortunate enough to have a nice digital camera, a wide-open SD card, and Photoshop. I've also been keeping up with My Livejournal, which functions as little more than a blog for my photo highlights. If they can be called that. My neck hurts. My head hurts. Lost is on soon. Humperdido. Humperdoo. 02/21/07 I don't like fish. It's not that they're repulsive-looking. I mean, they are. But that's not the problem. Chickens are fugly, too, but I'll eat the hell out of a chicken. Shrimp (or "skrimps") are basically ghastly little sea bugs, and I'll eat them in the right circumstances, too. But fish? It's the fishy smell. The fishy taste. The fishiness of fish disturbs me. If someone in a restaurant orders a particularly pungent fish, as it passes by my table (bathing me in a persistent whiff of the briny malodor), I'll lose a little of my appetite. Bleah. Blargh. So, I don't like fish. Except. I've been thinking. Fish is supposedly good for you. It's got Omega-3s or Alpha-4s or Magic Bean Oil or some nonsense crammed up in there between the tiny bones and beneath the slimy scales. Plus, it's relatively low-calorie and high protein. Good for the heart. Salve for the soul. Whatever. On a lark, I was flipping through an issue of Cooking Light at the same time I was paging through the local grocery circular. And what did I see? A tilapia recipe in the magazine. And tilapia on sale at the store. It seemed that tilapia and I were star-crossed lovers, like Romeo and Juliet (except in this story, Romeo buys Juliet at a slave market and cooks her up in some olive oil and cannibalizes her tender girlflesh). I went to the store. I bought tilapia. I cooked said tilapia, and spooned upon its flaky white flesh a fair helping of five-spice Ponzu sauce. I don't like fish. Yeah, but maybe I do. This is the second instance now where I've eaten fish (first instance: cod on the Napa Valley Wine Train) and liked it. Hell, not just liked it, but genuinely enjoyed it, as in, "Yum, I totally want to eat that again and I will murder an innocent to be allowed the pleasure of doing so." Wait, what? I like fish? That goes against my thinking. That's anathema to one of the things I irrevocably accept about myself. You know, we all have things -- core statements -- that sort of form the weave and weft of our very beings, right? "I'm a staunch Republican," or "I will always support the arts in my lifetime," or "I enjoy sticking cell phones in my ass so when somebody calls me, it vibrates my prostate and fills me with paroxysms of delight." Key, essential elements to our personas. One of mine was, "I do not like fish." But twice now, I've enjoyed fish. One time, I could dismiss it. Maybe it wasn't really fish. Maybe I was basking in the glow of a totally successful honeymoon. Perhaps I was high on ayauhuasca tea, and all things tasted good because I was one with the jungle, and the jungle was one with me. Twice, though, there's no accounting for that. I think I might like fish. Or, I think there are at least types of fish I will like. White fishes, mild fishes, sure. Tuna fish in a can still smells like a corpse vagina, so I don't foresee myself going there too often. But the reality is, apparently when fish smells fishy, it's not really good fish. It's either not fresh, or it's a cheap cut, or it was brought to this country under a fat man's teat. Bad fish. Bad fish-y, no eat-y. No tickey, no laundry. You get what I'm saying. It seems that what I must do is continue this food adventure I'm on and keep trying some new fishies. I'll see what I like, and I'll see what tastes like the anal glands of a mangy chihuahua. It's worth noting that my palate is changing (oh, Christ, that sounds pretentious. My "palate?" Fuck you, me! Fuck you). I'm certainly broadening my horizons. I'm considering eating things I'd never have thought to eat before. I think about something like sweetbreads and other offal-parts, and I instantly gag up. I go, "Oh, shit, no way I'm eating the sloppy innards of some incontinent hog." And yet, just what the fuck do we think sausage is? Or hot dogs? Any kind of processed meat is likely to comprise any number of awful "waste" parts. Obviously, the world eats this stuff. Here in this country, we're afforded the luxury of eating chicken breast or fine filets (though, truly, are those any different than the offal parts? It's all the constituent pieces of blood and muscle and tissue transformed over fire). Other countries, though, they're still smart enough to know that they need to eat every damn part of the beast. . My grandmother knew this. She would eat some of the vilest things I'd never considered eating. Liver, okay, gross to me, but not so bad. But blood soup? Pickled pig's feet? Are you fucking nuts? Well, no, she wasn't nuts. She was actually an excellent cook. She enjoyed food. So, could she have been onto something? (Hell, she lived to a ripe age and went nearly seven years with a cancer that was supposed to kill her in six months.) Might we, if able to push past the seeming grotesquerie our brains imagine in regards to some of these nasty bits, suddenly find a gastronomical Shangrila awaiting? The answer is probably "uh, duh, yes." It just takes the epicurean bravery to push past those truths we hold gross and self-evident. Out in California, I ate foie gras. I'd never have eaten foie gras. But it was really super-delicious, made all the more delicious because it involved cruelty to waterfowl, and that really gets me off. Settle down. I'm joking. I feel bad for the little ducks and geeses. But I also loves to eats me some little ducks and geeses, so, oh well. It's all a matter of perspective, methinks. I've been absorbing a great deal of Anthony Bourdain, who is obviously a powerful proponent of eating all the constituent bits of an animal. (Though, don't assume that he's why I'm considering eating more awful stuff. Before I read and watched Bourdain, I ate a bunch of stuff out in California I'd never normally eat, and I loved every last greasy bit of it. That food exploration lead me to Bourdain, not vice versa.) He puts a good spin on it. In this country, we look at some of the more disgusting culinary habits of other cultures and shudder. But they look at us eating cheese, and wonder just how we can stomach "rotten cow milk." Put it that way, cheese doesn't sound as delicious as the word "cheese," does it? Say it with me. Cheese. Cheeeeeeese. Mmm. Don't get me wrong, my food journey hasn't been filled with total hits. I'm still not a big fan of goat's milk cheese. It tastes too much like, well, goat. Though I do appreciate a good sheep's milk cheese. Point is, I guess I'm going to keep moving forward on this culinary adventure. In it, I'm learning more and more how to cook, how to concoct my own recipes (or spins on existing recipes). It's fun. Though, don't you bastards think you're ever going to get me to like raisins. Don't bother. Won't happen. Fuck raisins. Fuck raisins in their little puckered wrinkles. I'd rather eat rabbit turds basted in pig urine and garnished with the pubic hairs of a sweaty Yeti. Mmm. "Sweaty Yeti." Maybe I'll eat him, next. 02/10/07 So, as noted, we have Wii. Kind of a dual birthday-slash-Valentine's-day gift for my honey, with an added pepper of my own birthday thrown in for good measure. How is it? Technically, it ain't that great. It's graphics are dated. The games are, so far, okay (we have Zelda, but have yet to play it as we've been into both Wii Sports and Rayman Raving Rabbids). Not a lot of horsepower under that hood, making the system ultimately a Gamecube 2.0. Lord knows the whole thing is just a little dumb, like an eager idiot child next to the bullies that are Microsoft and Sony. And yet. And yet. For the love of a motherless goat, it's just so damn fun. It changes video games. While I love the bizarre name of "Wii," the earlier name iteration of "Revolution" was really more appropriate. It genuinely revolutionizes video games. While ultimately it's really just building off of what games like Dance Dance Revolution and Guitar Hero started, it takes it to the next (the "Nth") level. Shit, suddenly video games are getting me up off my ass? What the hell is that? We spent a few hours with Wii Sports the first night of the console's ownership, and the next day? I was sore. As if I had exercised. Wait, what? You mean to tell me that video game playing is no longer a sedentary hobby? A languid lull on the couch that worked out my thumbs, index fingers, eyes and brain but not much else? Someone at Nintendo is on crack. And it's good crack. Delicious crack, like rock candy, but made of crack instead of candy. Or something equally delicious but still cracktastic. To be clear, Wii Sports is dumb. Dumb, dumb, dumb. The sport games that are present are so rudimentary and hobbled (baseball consists of batting and pitching, and nothing else), you'd be amazed that you can lose yourself in them for so long. But lose yourself, you will. Rayman Raving Rabbids is similarly retarded. Throw cows? Shoot plungers at screaming monster-rabbits? Sketch the outline of certain foods before the aforementioned monster-rabbits wolf them into their toothy maws? C'mon. You're kidding me, right? Nope. No joke. It's stupid. And last night, we lost about three or four hours to it in a heartbeat. Gone. Poof. Cannot be reclaimed. I'm almost afraid to put Twilight Princess in the machine, for fear it will so easily suborn my soul to do terrible things. It'll eat my heart. I just know it. The whole system is just stupid. I create a virtual bobble-head of me, called a "Mii?" I have a "Wiimote," and a "Nunchuk," both of which conpire together to create whole new recipes of gameplay (f'rex, in the boxing mode of Wii Sports, simply holding each in the hand lets them function as your fists, so when you hold them up to your face, you're guarding. When you jab with one, you jab on the screen. Hold them vertical and lean left, right, or back, and your boxing Mii does the same goddamn thing. Holy shit!). The thing tells me the weather? It lets my Mii's parade around together? It's just so tiny and so crisply white. It can't be serious, can it? One thing is it serious about, at least most of the way, is its connectivity. Wi-fi right out of the box, just click and it connects free to the Main Nintento Brain. Now, if only they had games that used this, I'd be worshipping this thing like it was an idol dropped from a spaceship piloted by star-monkeys. And no, I don't know what star-monkeys are, but sweet fuck -- if you saw one, you'd worship it. I'm sure of this. So, the Wii gets a thumbs up. Or a Wii-mote up. Or something. It doesn't deserve to be this much fun, but it is. Don't get me wrong. Daddy loves his Xbox 360. Daddy can get Halo 3 on that. Daddy gets graphics that look real. Daddy has Oblivion, a name representing both an awesome game and the state of my very soul when I play said game. The 360 is serious. It wants me to play Big Boy Games, with Big Boy Pants. It can pull them up and down, it's a big kid, now. But the Wii? Shit, man, you gotta love it. You have to love that anything that comes on it isn't something you can play on a PS3 or a 360. And poor, poor Sony. They might pull themselves out of this tailspin yet, but Jesus, they've made some mistakes. A console that does, at its core, exactly what the 360 does, and with relatively few exclusives to sell it, and yet it costs so much more. Then you have the Wii, scrappy and cheap, a lovable loser who ends up the likely winner. It was funny -- getting a Wii was kind of tough. I mean, it wasn't in the end, but calling around made it clear just how rare they are. Nobody has them. When they do come in, they're gone lickety-split, as if fanboys and eBay resellers are hovering just above the stores in the stratosphere and are equipped with the ability to smell crisp white plastic. I got lucky wandering into an EB Games, where they told me their UPS shipment was late and who knows if they're getting Wii's in, so I went grocery shopping, came back 30 minutes later, and the counterjockey thumped the box up on the counter for me. He knew I wanted it. I didn't have to say a word. But the PS3s? Everywhere. All the retailers are starting to build little cairns of the black boxes, as if one day they'll each mark the gravesite of an idea, of a company, of a sellable video game icon. Maybe they're easier to burn when piled thusly. Who knows. Point is, while I'm sure you've got the diehard Sony peeps, the Wii's the console to beat right now. Will it edge ahead of the 360? It might. And what will that mean? Will it suggest that we're less concerned about crisp graphics, but more interested in innovation? Could be, rabbit, could be. The iPod already tells us that story. It's less capable and more expensive than a number of MP3 players, and yet it's the dominant force, as singular to the notion as Band-Aids or Q-Tips. Maybe one day we'll call all our video game consoles "Wii's," even when made my Microsoft or Sony or fucking Nabisco or whoever makes consoles in the year 2050. Anywho. I'll be back later in the week to talk writing. When I'm not Wii-ing. Heh. Wii. I Wii'ed in my pants. Wii-Wii. Hah. Snort. Shut up. 02/07/07 We have Wii. 01/25/07 I know, I know, I owe you people I real update. I probably owe people emails. I maybe probably possibly owe some money for that Alpaca I bought, killed, and had stuffed with gears and steamvents and other semi-robotic parts. Go home and cry to Mama. That's what I say to you. No, seriously, I'll get to a real update. Topics covered may include: the films of Children of Men, Hard Candy, and hopefully Pan's Labyrinth; porn; my newfound Flickr obsession; the Rave Motion Pictures theater in Center Valley; screenwriting; UFOs; the death of Robert Anton Wilson; the Oscar nominations; and porn. Meanwhile, I'm goddamn buried over here. Not in snow, but in work. Five books to write, and one script. Except, oh: I finished the script. Slaow! Bam! Bing! One more draft of a script in the can, a first draft of my (now) fourth script. So, you know, go me. 01/14/07 Hey, you. Whaddya doing? Yeah, like, right now. No, you know what? It doesn't matter what you're doing, because you're doing the wrong thing. What you should be doing is going to see Children of Men. Yes, right now. No, it can't wait. Seriously, I'm not fucking around here. Just put on some pants, for Chrissakes, and go see it. Go! Now. Children of Men. ASAP. 01/06/07 Because I just don't have the time for much else, I bring you... Crazy Burning Awesome Link Dump!!1! Buffy, Season 8 Preview! Fungus! Ants! Ant-fungus! The Best Vows Evar! And that's all. I'm done with you. 01/04/07 And like that, we're into another year. A toe over the line, and it's another 365 days of promise both filled and failed. I always look back over the year with a kind of, "Man, I could've done better" outlook, but then I remind myself that it's just the pills talking (well, the pills mixed with a generous warm glass of Southern Comfort), and then I look around and wonder where my pants are. And why I have two tattoos on my inner thighs, one that says "ROSALITA WAS HERE," and another that claims, "THE BADGER OWNS YOU." Looking back, it's foolish to have regret, since it's actually been a pretty banner year. Lots of great writing done, a few screenplays now under my belt, and I remember something about marrying the love of my life and buying a house, too. Oh, and a brief intercession, here: my wife has powerful balls. I won't get into the story, but let me just say that when she gets riled up, she fills with fire and vinegar, and breathes this acrid sear upon those who stand in her way. Thankfully, she has not turned this vengeful majesty upon me, but I did see her turn it upon another this week, and it was glorious to behold, like watching a mongoose rise up and tear out the throat of a lion. I don't do resolutions, as many know, as that's just a way to open the door to regret. You're not going to complete your resolutions, and in conceding defeat it drags down the spirit. So, underpromise, overdeliver. If anything, I simply say, "I plan to do better." You can fill in the rest. So, Gutes Neue Jahr, bitte. Welcome to 2007. I'm going to go get started by writing the first page of a new screenplay. (Oh, there was a wedding, and it was delightful. This week should see me resuming some kind of stabilization process, which means I can start hitting routine again, and I like routine, so maybe I'll speak more of it in the coming days. Suffice to say the wedding was a beautiful affair, a great parade of pomp and circumstance taken with playfulness and geeky revelry by its key players, which is the best way to deflate pomp and circumstance -- with the powerful needle of raw hilarity and nerdliness. I was honored to be a part of the whole shebang.) Later, babies. 12/29/06 I'll keep it short, because I'm tired, and this weekend is filled with madness. This Right Here is where you'll now find a new short story by Yours Truly. It's called "Hell's Bells." And you'll go there, because you're a good little sycophant who only wants to please Master. If You Go Here you'll find my continuing (and only growing) obsession with Flickr. And, finally, in news you can file under "Whew, excellent," I finished the first draft of the new script, and its -- for the moment, at least -- out of my hands. Good times. All right. Wedding tomorrow, with Best Man duties primed and pumped. Wendig, out. 12/23/06 'Tis Eve to the Eve of the Nativity of the Superbaby who dominates the moral will of Western culture, and we are all bathed in, and basking in, the cheer of good will toward men and nights that are silent and -- ZZzZzZZzzz... ... huh? Wha? Goddamn, sorry, did I fall asleep there? This whole "holiday" nonsense has left me numb, weary, bleary, and dizzy. (Those are, for those keeping record, four Dwarves that Snow White failed to mention. Can you blame her?) So far this year, the holidays are stacked like a giant Jenga tower, and the fucker keeps wobbling over my tender, soft head. The onslaught begins today -- in an hour, actually, when we drive up to East North Middle of Assneck, Pennsylvania, to see my father and his wife -- and that kicks off the events. This morning, then tonight, then tomorrow night, then the night after, then a few days later a rehearsal dinner, then a couple-few days after that another wedding, then New Years Eve, and then -- hopefully -- a coma. A big coma. A fluffy coma. To soothe all the aches and pains of Ex-Mas, I made Nog-of-the-Egg last night. Not the shit out of the carton, ohhh no, not for this gentleman and his goodly wife. I made the real shit. With raw eggs, and the faint whispered threat of salmonella. Nice! I always wondered, why go through the effort to make the stuff when Rosenberger's pretty much puts that crap in a carton, pre-made and pasteurized. Well, the reason is, because the real thing is better. It's a tasty treat, genuine Egg Nog, yessah, we gots to beat the com-puh-tih-shun. So, before I duck on out of here, I want to talk about James Bond. I hate James Bond. The movies, even when they're good, are terrible. He's a meaningless character. Bulletproof and square-jawed. All the silly gadgets. The twee jokes. The senseless explosions. They've become a parody of themselves, which is why few parodies of the Bond films have played well -- because the Bond films already brought the mockery and slathered it on, like jam upon toast. So. Casino Royale. I loved it. Explain that! Okay, I will. Though, some minor spoilers, for those who care. Proceed with caution. Here there be dragons. Daniel Craig, for one. He's not suave. He's a cocky bulldog. Imperfect. Blonde. He doesn't look like he drinks tea. He looks like he drinks tea, then snaps the handle off the cup and sticks it in your cartod artery before kicking you down some steps. Brutality, for two. This film is like Die Hard in the way they make Bond suffer. Blood-soaked tuxedo shirt? Sure. Cuts and scars that remain on his face for much of the movie? Yup. Genital torture? You got it, baby. He suffers physically and they manage to make him suffer emotionally. Hot. Hot! And the brutality doesn't just extend to Bond, ohhhh no. Everybody gets a taste. When Bond fights, it's ugly. It's a rough and grisly affair, like two sacks of meat slamming into one another. This is no careful karate chop to the neck. This is knuckles popping noses, this is someone getting drowned in a bathroom sink. Bond is a killer. A moderately sociopathic killer. Yes. Yes! Someone's been listening to me. Action, for three, is great. Just trust me on that. The contravention of expectation, for four. Bond has a certain number of things you associate with it, and the film either disposes of them, or turns them on their ear. The women with whom Bond has dalliances suffer mightily for even getting near him. They give him a nice car with few gadgets, them promptly wreck the fuck out of it. Bond loses. Gets played by women. Fucks up missions. Good times, good times. So, in short? Craig is Bond. Casino Royale is the best Bond movie, and is a solid movie in general. If they keep this mood up and adhere to the same principles of this one, I'm going to be a happy duck. Anyway. I'm off. There's blood in the water -- or it might just be the red from a melted candy cane -- and the holiday frenzy's poised to begin. Plus, got a dollop of writing to do before shipping out (78 pages in the script, nearly finished the first draft, woo-to-the-hoo). Enjoy. Happy Holidays, punk-ass bitches. 12/16/06 Things Little Chucky did this week: Posted pictures of the Holy Nerdtivity. Hit page 60 of the script, thus gently gliding into the horrors of Act Three. Ran from the cops. Listened to a guy describe how his Chinese wife won't let them have a dog as a pet because, "They eat them over there." Made some peppermint bark. Cursed at Amazon-dot-com while shaking my fist at it like it was a fickle and contemptuous god. Switched to Internet Explorer 7 which is an ugly and improper thing, like a mutant baby with ill manners. Killed a priest with naught but the heel of my hand. Only one of these things is a lie. I challenge you -- I double-dog defy you -- to discover which. 12/03/06 I used to play with toys. This isn't particularly unusual, really. I was a boy. I had toys. I played with them. I'm sure this chagrined my father to some degree, who would've preferred that my education and entertainment be spent in the woods hunting boar with a weapon of my own devising or learning how to fix a damaged sewer main, but what can I say? It was what it was, and I was what I was. And what I was was an imaginative little shit. The toys mattered little. Give me the G.I. Joe hovercraft, some M.A.S.K. figures, a few Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors knock-offs, a handful of Barbies, and a pile of fetish dolls made with sticks, mud and cat poop, and I was good to go. I'd craft epics. Some real Homeric shit. Lives hung in the balance. Fate was kicked on its ear. Violence. Incest. Love beaten down by treachery but made to resurge again by the end. (You know, before I circumnavigate this topic and reach my point, I'd like to take umbrage with the goddamn toy companies and their goddamn commercials. In the commercials, three well-adjusted boys would be playing with the Transformers, and they'd have built some kind of massive Ewok Village out of sticks and scraps of steel. It'd be a veritable fortress, a potent playset built by the finest DIY craftsmen. It required power tools, but it never said that, did it? Ever try to replicate the playsets cobbled together for those commercials? An exercise in frustration and futility. Moreover, when one of the kids would hit the button on Starscream's head or whatever and the plastic rockets would fire from his chest, that goddamn plastic rocket would blast forth as if it were a real rocket. It'd clip Jazz in the head and he'd go toppling down into some homemade river rapids which would dead-end in a realistic quicksand pit or some kind of disingenuous nonsense. Of course, when I did it, the rocket would topple from the slot with all the force of spit from a dying man's mouth. Ptoo. So, to Hasbro and its ilk, I say: eat my ass, toy company. You liars. You filthy asshole liars.) (Okay, back to my point. Or nearer to it.) What I'm saying is, I crafted some crazy shit. Toy-based recapitulations of invented history told in fake blood and iambic pentameter. And I'm serious about the fake blood. Marty and I, we'd use lighters to heat up the pointy end of compasses and press it into the plasticene flesh of our G.I. Joe's, simulating bullet wounds. Made all the more real with dabs and dollops of red paint. (Paint later used to mark missing limbs, too.) Special effects, baby. Of course, Marty and I also used to build massive ant mazes out of stone, littering the myrmidonian labyrinth with spiders and beetles. Y'know, traps. For the ants. Shut up. What I'm saying is, my toy stories were like movies. And, today, writing a screenplay is like recapturing my toy stories. Seriously. Writing is always about invention and imagination, but writing a screenplay is an exhilerating thing. Oddly exciting, and until now, I really couldn't peg precisely why. And then, today, it hit me. The blank page, with its minimalist direction and snippets of dialogue, is almost exactly like recreating my epic toy adventures of my probably-misguided youth. It's almost the same thing as making Storm Shadow kill Scarlett which makes Duke go ballistic and take out his anger on Optimus Prime who dies and falls on one of those ground-troopers from Hoth who was the brother of C-3P0 or some shit and so C-3P0 howls a dirge to his lost sibling and takes a goddamn Uzi and riddles some anonymous Go-Bot asshole with mad crazy droid bullets, and then Unicron and one of those fucking weird Cabbage Patch Kids who look like mutant animals come down and form one horrible beast that eats everybody because its wrath and gluttony is truly super cosmic. The only thing left is this shitty little action figure that looked like Lon Cheney's Wolfman. I don't know where he came from. But he had awesome claws made for raking faces. And suddenly? Lasers! Pyoo pyoo! Richochet! Pwing! (I didn't say my toy epics were good, did I? Shut your wordhole. Keep it together.) What I'm saying is, writing a screenplay is super-fun. And I'm ten pages deep into the newest. It features no Go-Bots or G.I. Joes. Sadly. 11/30/06 HERE you'll find the tales of depravity and Laotian border guards at this weekend's bachelor party. Odd, my second bachelor party in such a (relatively) short time, but at mine we didn't need any bhat, and at this one? Well, how else were we going to pay the Burmese ladyboys? (Excuse me, the Myanmarian ladyboys.) Good times were had. I don't got much time, kittens, so I'll keep it brief. The weather is retarded. It's going to be like, 70 degrees today, and then Sunday? They're calling for snow. Weather Jesus is up there doing I don't know what. Busy playing Yahtzee? Whacked-out on amyl nitrate poppers? Addicted to fantasy football? Hard to tell. Got another White Wolf book on the roster. A Changeling book, second in the supplements. The first, by the way, previously known as Springtime for Hitler here, has been sort-of-kind-of announced, and you can call it Autumn Nightmares. (Also got my redlines back already for Magical Traditions, and they're pleasantly light.) The movie thing progresses at a steady clip. Not just one, but two scripts demand attention, and should have them both done by, say, mid-January? First drafts, of course. After that, it's all red carpets and diamond-encrusted Segways and Lindsay Lohan showing her vagina to Britney Spears' vagina while Paris Hilton throws up on her own vagina. Hollywood, here I come. 11/10/06 Boom. Sold a short story to The Town Drunk, a cool little e-zine devoted to publishing humorous tales. I'll letcha know when it's posted. Good times. With that and the upcoming Carnifex Press release (which will show up sometime during the course of 2007, I guess), I've sold two short stories this year. That's like, a record or something. I also just wrote a new short story last week. I'll excerpt a tiny bit, right here, right now: Bob Horkin, with his smashed-flat nose and puckered butthole eyes, came over and dropped a stack of pink forms in front of Donnie. “Late again,” Horkin said, sniffing, snorting, gloating. Also, got a couple more White Wolf books lined up. One we'll call Springtime for Hitler and another we'll call, uhh, Magical Traditions because that's what it's actually called and the book is semi-officially kind of maybe announced. Oh, and Wild River Review has my new essay in their tender hands, and will hopefully be publishing that sometime after the first of the year. Continuing to work with Lance, who recently has had the good fortunes brought by uncontrollable talent to be signed by a major agency out in LA, so rock on. Speakathat, if you haven't picked up Head Trauma yet, you damn well should. I'd say you should do it to support true indie film and the DIY sensibility that keeps the art going, but that's not why you should buy it. You should buy it because it's a creepy fucking slice of awesomeness that, after all is said and done, surprises you and creeps into your marrow. The movie's all over the place, now: Amazon, Best Buy, Netflix. Go, buy. Love. You can find out more info on the movie, along with reviews and other snidbits, at the film's blog HERE. 11/08/06 Before I get all political, a tiddle bit about Heroes. Brian K. Vaughan, a genius amidst the wealth of comic book writers out there churning out product, has this to say about the show: "A show like Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a closer approximation of a comic book than Heroes. Buffy is like a guy who loves comic books doing a TV show, and Heroes feels like a guy who loves television doing a comic book." Spot on, Vaughan, spot on. So, politics. I'll mouth off a bit, and you'll indulge me. Because this is my soapbox. Go ahead. Try to toe your way up here. I'll kick you in the face, toss you down off my mountain, and make wee-wee on your grass-stained forehead. As you'll note, the Democrats are resurgent. I hate to use one of the President's own little cliches against him, but here I think we're really "turning a corner." See, people are starting to figure out that putting all the power in the hands of a single party is, in a word, hazardous. The Republicans are not universally bad people, but as a party, they have revealed a level of corruption -- like termite-chewed wood-rot now serving as home to poo-covered roaches -- that has been second to none in history. Money scandals. Hints of pedophilia. Affairs. The moral party, the upright party, the conservative party... well, isn't. As it turns out, they're more debased than any of us. Years of conservative proselytizing and self-inflicted oppression have turned them into smut junkies, kid-touchers, and people who like to drink piss and flog badgers for sexual thrill. Look at it this way. If parents left their kids alone for the weekend, the kids would throw a party. Except here, imagine that the parents left the kids alone for about, ohhh, six years. Absolute authority, corrupting absolutely. The Republicans have first shown that they are not the party of small government, but the party of Government-Writ-Large. They're in our businesses, they're in our homes. Yesterday, I saw ex-Representative Curt Weldon behind my TV, snapping pictures of me, muttering something about Mothman and UFOs. He was also masturbating, though, so I don't know what that means, exactly. The Republicans have also told us they're going to protect us, but evidence shows that they're not really protecting us. Moreover, it's not like terrorism is the only thing ever that presents a danger. In fact, a number of other dangers exist and are ultimately more prevalent than terrorism. And, as noted, the Republicans have claimed the moral high-ground, using such hot-button touchstones as gay marriage, abortion, and stem cell research as the maypoles around which they dance and frolic. And, as seen by a number of ballot measures rejected, people have other worries, suddenly. We're moving toward a less conservative mindset, I hope. The biggest error the Republicans made was turning away from their own base. Though, in some ways, their own base turned away from their own base (ahem, cough-cough, evangelical leaders enjoying the colon-cleansing benefits of anal sex from gay prostitutes, cough ahem), but the point is, you have a number of Republicans who turned to Democratic candidates this time around. I know registered Republicans who voted straight-ticket Democrat this time around. I'm talking dyed-in-the-wool Red State people who said, "Nah, fuck this!" and chose the other guy in every category. Shit, I didn't even vote straight-ticket Democrat. When you have your own party cutting off the hand to spite the finger, well, that's serious, people. See, two years ago, you had lots of talk about the Republicans being strong, the Democrats weak. It was an issue of momentum, and the GOP had it. But, the GOP also built up their entire party on a foundation of bluster and threat, of perceived strength over real strength, over the idea of moral fortitude over the practice of moral fortitude (there's a lesson in there for you Christians who think that "Faith Over Works" is the way to go -- it isn't, and if you think so you've rejected Jesus and gone straight to your own selfish whims, so go build a house for some homeless people, will you?). And, yesterday, a lot of that house of cards -- once glued-and-stapled together because the Republicans were so afraid of showing the airy gaps between wispy cards -- blew away in a stiff wind of resentment and fatigue. Now, the Democrats. I'm going to be clear, here. They've shown a proclivity over the last few years to have spines made of wet paper, muscles made of flavorless gelatin. Has that changed? I don't know. I'll admit that they came out swinging for the fences on this one, and I hope they keep that up instead of continuing to be the party that apologizes all the time. (The Kerry flap last week shows that they're still willing to bend over and take it up the dungtunnel -- Kerry and the rest of the Dems shouldn't have apologized, but firmly pointed out that George Dubya speaks like a brain-concussed retard, and is the last person who should be making judgments on other people's speaking abilities. Though, as a note, Kerry should probably also just stop trying to make jokes, because it's like watching an old man try to be hip, or a robot trying to dance.) Will the Dems fill their spines with concrete and fire and start trying to overturn a lot of the bad legislation that has crept into our lives like a septic infection? Don't know. I hope so. At the very least, I hope it sends a clear signal to all parties, all politicians: it may take us a couple years too many to realize just how clearly we're being mouth-raped, but realize it we shall. If need be, we'll kick you squaw in the throat and send you out on your ass with the rest of your kid-toucher buddies and torture-junkie allies. So, it ain't over yet. Dems may take the House, by the looks, and they're close to a Senate majority (but I don't think they'll get it, honestly). In 2008, what will happen? Can't say. Let's give these new kids two years to see what they can do. And if they can't turn some shit around, then we'll start painting them for eviction, too. 10/29/06 From the Intarwebbrainpan of -- -- oh, wait, never mind. It's me. I'm back. Guest blogs are done, but wholly successful. Many comments, all positive, except for that one guy who's claiming he's going to murder Matt Heslin using a 'board with a big nail in it,' but I dare not give out that guy's name, because I'm beholden to the Internet Law of Anonymity. I think that's a real law. One quick addition: since guestblogging here, Marty has continued his ramblings upon a MySpace page of his own craftation: You can find his thoughts on TV, gay marriage, and himself HERE. Enjoy. So, I moved into a house. I'll sum it mostly up as such: At first, I hated the shower. Too small. Hot water didn't last long enough. Kept banging my elbow on one of the myriad shampoo bottle holder shelf doo-dads. But then, it gets better. And I mean that. That's not a sarcastic comment, as in, "Then it gets better, I'm attacked by shower gypsies!" I just mean, yeah, it really gets better. Each shower since has been better than the last. Took a shower tonight that was downright pleasant. Sure, the shower still has the basic water pressure of a hobo with bladder problems peeing on your head, but it's a relaxing stream of urine. That's what I'm saying. The whole house has been like that. At first, I just wasn't used to it. But now, I'm getting used to it. Liking it, even. It helps that we're finally finding places to put our prodigious amount of crap. We have scads of crap. We could probably throw a match and a can of lighter fluid into a room and slam the door, and whatever burned up, we'd probably be happier we didn't have it than sad we didn't. Anyway. Right quick, there's these thing going around the Net, with all the geeks in a geeky tizzy. Seen the Wired piece on various authors' six-word-stories? You can find this HERE. I like them. They're interesting. Some of them, like Joss Whedon's, are particularly good. Geeks around the web are trying to emulate this style, entering the arena with their own six-word-stories. Most of them are not good. They shouldn't feel bad, because a lot of the ones from professional authors ain't that good, either. Here's why: in six words, you're meant to tell a story. An actual story. Stories require some manner of setup, conflict, and resolution. Six words isn't a lot of space in which to do that, which is why it's an awesome challenge. Many of the six-worders, though, are just... mood-setters or story seeds. They are not themselves stories. Example: "It cost too much, staying human." That's Bruce Sterling's entry. It's not good. I mean, it's good in that it takes six words to say something that's kind of interesting, but is it a story? No. There's no story, nor an intimation of one. It's the setup of a story, or a great opening line, or a super closing line, but that's it. Another example: "Longed for him. Got him. Shit." That one, from Margaret Atwood, is perfect. Sets up the story (longed for him), and finished with a resolution and conflict wrapped on one (got him, shit). Bang! Six words, razor-sharp, tells a story. In those six words you can cram in another six thousand, and the story is still the same. Longed for him. Got him. Shit. Rock on, sister. Sadly, most of the attempts of various webheads to conjure up their own entries are of the "not really a story" variety. Many use common gimmicks ("News at Eleven" shows up a lot). Some are quite good. Most are not. I won't bother with my own six-worders, because right now, my brain is essentially muddy treacle. If the fog clears later this week, maybe you'll see some from me. I wouldn't bet on it, though. Because I'll probably be attacked by shower gypsies. 10/26/06 From the Intersoul of Martin Henley: Dear Terrible Minds dot Com reader, the management regrets to inform you that they are still in absentia due to situations both within and without their control (buying a house counts as within his control, but having that house be atop a Native American burial ground and being assaulted by a young drug-addled Craig T. Nelson with a creepy clown doll is without). So, if you’re here for your fix of Wendigian wit and wisdom, well, tough titty. You get me. I’ve known little Chucksy Wendig since Grade Two abouts. I was his best man, he’s going to be mine. We are as two testes in a sack, he and I. I have lunatic scrawls of his dating back to 1984 which I keep in a safety deposit box for when he inevitably crashes the gates of Hollywood or otherwise blows up. So I can rake him over the coals for enough blackmail to retire to the foothills of the Yukon where I will live as a lonely goatherd amid a field of dirty money (and goats). Until then, I continue to bide my time and make with the pleasantries, which include (but are not exclusive to) writing guest blogs when prompted. So here it is, Terrible Minders. Guest Blog Part the Third: I Was a Teenaged Guest Blog Blogging is an interesting concept, which I admit I’ve never gotten the hang of. You see, I can idle words with the best of them, but as soon as I consider posting those words to the general public I assume I should have something of substance to say. This goes against all evidence considering 18 out of 10 blogs are noiseless nonsense or self important goings-on at the hands of 15-year-olds who feel they know the ways of the world by vantage of their parents’ basements. I tend to say “fie” to this kind of attitude, but can’t deny I’m totally being pantsed by 15-year-olds living in their parents' basements when it comes to my contributions to the web. So, by gentle nudging from Chax (the aforementioned Wendig goes by many names) I’ve decided to go ahead and open my word-hole without consideration of consequence or needless pressure to actually say anything vital, or indeed meritous at all. I think I’m off to a good start. This could get addictive. Let’s bother to opine on something I feel strongly about, because the internet isn’t the internet unless you’re cheerleading or flaming some inconsequential sector of civilian life. I choose Avatar: The Last Airbender, available on Nickolodeon. Yes, a 31-year-old is about to tell you to watch more cartoons. More adults need to watch this show, and if you’re a geek (I already know you are, don’t bother denying it, you smell like wee-wee when you lie) with any love of fantasy or fun then this show is pretty much everything you’ll need to survive this torrid landscape of touch-and-go television*. First, I hold up as evidence that I have reasonable taste in teevee: Lost and Battlestar Galactica are amongst my must-see shows. Yes, I am one of you, you may now take everything I say as Gospel according to TV Jesus. Avatar is a little more delightful than either of the above. It is, as you may assume, largely a kids' show (I prefer ‘All-Ages Show’) and thus isn’t going to alight on abortion, kid-touching, cuckoldry, murder, cheating and the abysmal-ity of the human spirit quite as often as your grown-up TV. Even still, this show is smartly written, and plays its cards better than any show on television. It has a long scope, and bothers to call its seasons “Books” and its episodes “Chapters;" now that’s class. It has some amazing Kung-Fu, and places elements in the first episode which will be revisited a season later. It takes nothing for granted, and delivers on every promise both made and unmade. Really. You will find yourself willing to forgive this silly little show for it’s one episode walk-on role by George Takei, until you find out George Takei will be back in the third season and they knew that from the beginning (“Oh my”). Great characters, great development, and as we approach the end of the Book 2, I assure you it is the Empire Strikes Back of the series. I find I can never say enough about this show, and could certainly waste a larger word count on the subject. Most importantly, Daddy needs more adults to talk to this show about, b/c the fan sites are filled with Furries and Cos-Player levels of intelligence that are dedicated to pondering which character will end up dating which character and making fan-vids to bad alterna-pussy-metal songs to accentuate their point (of which, I’ve watched all of them. You shut up). I also love comic books. In fact, I am much better read in comic books than I am in really-real American classics or anything so vaunted. (I would speak of my talents and far-reaching trivia in this field of geekery, but can only be slapped down by the previous guest blogger, Matthew Heslin, as his encyclopedic mind far surpasses any born of a mortal woman and finds room for card games, comic books, philosophy and American Law). Comics are a flawed art, but they have a method of expression which you don’t find anywhere else outside of, maybe, professional wrestling. Still, a strong case can be made that comic books are the part of our brain that created Gods and Goddesses for every tree, rock and wind finding a new outlet that expresses itself through a muse of tight-fitting spandex and anatomically-improbable ladies. To be fair to myself, I’m not in it for the spandex, or the aforementioned top-heavy brunhildes. However, I do believe I’m in it for the mythology. There’s just something culturally enriching about arguing for two hours over whether or not Batman could take Captain America in a bare-knuckle brawl, or how solar radiation can give Superman cold-breath and laser-eyes. Even better is the vim it brings when that argument escalates. Nothing is more life-affirming than watching some already ruddy-faced mouthbreather grow redder as he finds the courage he could never muster to talk to the fairer sex to let you know that She-Hulk could totally take Wonder Woman out. That kid is a prophet, y’all. A prophet of the new mythology, which unfolds in a corporate meat-grinder of an industry. You can smell it and taste it** in every comic shop the world over. I aspire to be amongst that number some day. Amongst those that manage to concoct the stories and not just read them (and then get in fights over which Blue Beetle was better). Sure, it’s a corporate meat-grinder of an industry, but it’s my favorite. Wow, this vapid self-absorbed masturbation IS easy! I should totally get my own blog. You’d read it, wouldn’t you World Wide Web-heads? You could listen to me talk about my favorite things all day. I’m sure my bosses wouldn’t mind, since I’m doing this on their dime. Alas, I leave myself to consider that for another day. For now, I’m sure I’ve filled Chax’s coffers with my interminable ability to go on at length and informed you all of very little indeed. Which were my instructions. * Oh, also, if you’re a White Wolf fan, which I have reason to assume you are, then did you ever play/show interest in Exalted? Then this show pretty much pwnxx0rz the concept in an accessible way. ** Actual tasting is not suggested in your average comic shop. Terribleminds.com does not take any responsibility for injuries sustained while randomly licking passerby in any public or private forum. From the Management: Stephen King, in his book On Writing, discusses how he -- along with most writers -- envisions an 'Ideal Reader' in their heads when they write. Their wives, their grade-school comp teachers, some hobo at the bus station, whatever. Martin Henley is my Ideal Reader. My writing exists largely to amuse him. (Don't tell him that, though, or he'll get a big head about it, and then he'll get fighty, and you don't want him fighty, because he has this kid named Josh, and he sics Josh on his enemies like a dog, but a mean dog made of lion parts and sparking circuitry. Be afraid of Marty, and be afraider of Josh.) Let's be clear, here. I've known Martin -- or Marty, or Wyrm, or Murphy, since he too goes by many a-moniker -- for a number of years equivalent to the shelf-life of Uranium. We were in preschool together, and became close friends -- as I think he mentions -- roundabout the Second Grade. I think I've known him longer than my parents, though there's a part of my brain that tells me such a thing is impossible, but I'm not keen on shit my brain says. Anyway. The point is, having spent my life in service to Marty's amusement, and he to mine, neither of us would probably be the same person without the other. If you like me, and you like him, than that's worked out to everybody's benefit. If you don't like either of us, well, I guess that's jolly well too bad unless you've got a time machine shoved up your ass or something. I think I'm off-track here in this bio. Point is, Marty's a fine man, and will someday be writing comic books, because it is his destiny. Remind him of that when you see him next. 10/23/06 From the Webmind of Aaron Dembski-Bowden: I first met Chuck Wendig back in two-zero-zero-four or so, nearly half a century ago, back in the days before dirt-cheap genetic engineering within the womb made a man too humiliated to take a piss next to his son once the kid hit his teens. Don't think I'm a Luddite, though - I love the technology, at least the stuff that you can get done as an adult. I sure don't miss the part of my brain that made me feel guilty for never giving to charity. But back to Chuck Wendig. We knew each other in the heady, rough and tumble last years of the pen n' paper RPG industry. We competed for the position of Best Werewolf Game Writer, which I ended up winning sometime in mid-2006. White Wolf's three fans emailed me to tell me it was so. Chuck, by this point, had a movie deal in the works, which turned out to be 2008's smash hit 'Angelina Jolie and Mira Sorvino Have Sex for Three Hours'. But the werewolf writer victory was big news for me at the time. When I emailed him to tell him he'd lost - and was therefore a loser - he emailed me back barely three minutes later and called me 'a small man, indeed'. But this was mere japery! This was naught but good-natured fooling of the kind we'd spent many hours sporting with before. The thrust and parry of emailed wit! Good times, good times. These were, as you can tell, also the days before Psy-mail was invented. We had to type back then. Psy-mail has made it much easier to contact people across the world, but I still have the occasional problem of thinking my boss is a dick, then hearing the muffled 'You've Got Mail' ding in his head from the other room right after. Also, I wake up each morning with a brain full of spam. Psy-mail's just not for me, I think. The cracks in our relationship first started to show at the publication of our first novel together. Our agent emailed me to say we'd sold the paperback rights for eight million dollars, and I was confused and happy over the whole situation. The problem was that I was English. I didn't know what dollars were, nor was I sure I could use them to buy cool things to put in my house, into my Xbox, or into my mouth. I called Chuck to ask. "Our novel went adamantium!" I told him. This was the genre novel equivalent of a platinum record. "I heard, I heard." He'd heard, then. "We did it, Chuck." "We sure did, Aaron." We basked in a moment of pride. Then I spoke again, speaking of critical things that needed to be spoken of. "Our agent says he's putting all the money right into your account today. Is there any chance you can PayPal me my half? Will half of eight million dollars buy me Guitar Hero IV, do you think?" "This is the wrong number. This is Chuck...Bendig's...house." "Oh, sorry. I'm trying to reach Chuck Wendig. With a 'W'." "No. No, I'm Chuck Bendig. With a 'B' and shit." I apologised for the mistake. It had happened before, when I was trying to talk to Chuck about our novel's movie rights the previous month. I'd eventually got hold of him after a few days, but he'd already accidentally sold the movie rights to Universal Studios for thirteen million dollars. It was by then apparently too late to put my name on the contract. I hung up and tried the number again. This time, he answered instead of Mr. Bendig. "Hi Chuck." "I don't know anyone called Aaron." He hung up immediately after saying this. Strange, I thought, considering my name was Aaron and he knew me. We'd written a novel together. Maybe he was hungover? It was about this time that it started happening a lot more than usual. Our relationship proceeded in this vein for many years. I met my ninth wife at Chuck's eleventh wedding. Porsche was an Italian girl hired for the event purely so Chuck could lick cocaine off her ass. I married her six days later, which turned out to be an error. Like all women named after products, she was twisted and hateful. And like her namesake, she was bad for the environment. When we divorced after three months, she took my house, my car, my favourite shirt and five of my ribs, which made me two inches shorter. The last time I saw her, she was over at Chuck's house for another coke party, and she was using my shirt to wipe up a vomit stain. "We've got newspaper," Chuck said to her. "I'll use this," she'd replied. That was a month ago. Why bring all this up now? Well, those of you with an eye for the Psy-news will have seen my latest court battle against the newly-elected aristocracy character, playboy, and man about town: Count Charles Davidian Wendigo of New-New Jersey. This summer's box office and Psy-office smash motion picture 'Castle Wolfenstein' is actually my movie, not Chuck's. You know that part at the end, when the cyborg Hitler has machine guns for arms? You know that catchphrase he says that everyone online is already repeating day in and day out? I wrote that line. I wrote the whole thing. And I'm suing Chuck to get my name put in the credits before the Psy-DVD gets into Psy-stores. There's an online petition you can sign to show your support. As of this date, the site's been open for only three weeks and we're up to seventeen signatures already. Thanks for your help in this difficult time. Sincerely, Aaron Dembski-Bowden, 2048 CE From the Management: Aaron Dembski-Bowden is the real deal, the cat's meow and the cat's pajamas. He's also addicted to Internet porn. I mean, really addicted. Anything from Men in Frilly Dresses to Wombat Girls to Pee-Drinking Accountants. If it's porn and it's on the Internet, Aaron is there. He's also a stellar writer despite his fixation on websmut, and truly deserves the "Best Werewolf Writer" moniker. You should read this part of a fantasy novel he wrote, really, it's the real deal. You'll wonder why he's not yet published, why he doesn't have a novel on shelves, and then you realize that the answer is, regrettably, Internet porn. Aaron lives in some European country. England or Wales or Canada or something. He has some cats, I think. And he pays this hot girl to live with him. He also thinks he's a Jedi. Aaron's got a lot of problems, now that I think about it. You can find his Livejournal HERE. 10/20/06 From the Blogbrain of Matthew Heslin: How many words does this have to be? I really should have considered that before taking this assignment. I probably also should have asked what my per-word pay rate is. Dammit. Too late now. So, Chuck’s too busy for you. As a result, you get me. I’m very sorry. Many of you have come to expect a vivacious, animated writing style from a professional author here; many of you are about to be bitterly, bitterly disappointed with the substitute. * Well, tough noogies. Take it up with the management. Oh, wait, that’s right – the management went to Acapulco for six weeks or something, and doesn’t care what you have to say. Does anyone read the funnies anymore? The comics? Comic strips in the newspaper? I think that for me, and people of an age with myself, the comics were kinda important. This might just be an oversimplification or overextension of my own experience onto my generation’s gestalt. But I think the presence of the funnies was important to the development of “our people.” I say this for three reasons: Bloom County, The Far Side, and Calvin and Hobbes. Bloom County gave us a mixture of weird, bitter humor and nonpartisan political and social commentary. It wasn’t limited to a specific aspect or genre, though – it could just as easily be a political barb aimed at Dukakis, satire of Donald Trump, or a poetic statement about hope. It was agile and variable. It was, possibly, a Doonesbury for our generation, but I won’t make the comparison (because, apparently, Gary Trudeau has made it enough times). The Far Side was much more specific. It was weirdness in a single panel. It invited you to think about things from an odd, sometimes bizarre perspective. I think the single panel was a reason for how weird it was. There was no punchline, no development – it was just there. Weird, and waiting for you to appreciate it or become bewildered. Calvin and Hobbes should not require any exposition. Easily the best comic strip in the last twenty years – not meaning to cast aspersions upon Peanuts, but absolutely meaning to heap spite and disdain on Dilbert ** - and for more reasons than we have space to discuss here. Art that could range from pulp fiction magazine covers to six-year-old crayon drawings, always well selected and applied to the subject matter. And the subject matter – real, unpretentious, accessible to children and grown-ups, important to so many in so many ways. All of these strips delivered something straight to its audience – whether it was a cynical take on politics, a skewed sense of humor, or an optimistic look for joy amid the darkness of humanity. Without an agenda, without self-aggrandizing. They were just comic strips. I’m not sure you get that anymore, in our postmodern world, where the Internets are making newspapers obsolete, irony is hiding out, and civil liberties are excess commodities. I wonder if Berkeley Breathed would have received a letter from the FCC by now, if he was still writing Bloom County (no offense is intended for Breathed’s current strip, Opus, it’s merely that I haven’t read it). Watterson would probably have made critical strips that no one in authority would notice, because grown-ups don’t notice Hobbes’ social commentary (obviously because he’s a stuffed tiger). Larson would just be weird. Accept it. It could be that I'm taking too much equity in the strips - they may have been just as important and accessible to other generations. Elderly librarians liked the Bloom County bit about the 106 weeks of late fees and the enormous executioner's axe, and perhaps subsequent generations have been able to enjoy the Calvin and Hobbes collections as our generation read them in the paper. Certainly the Far Side continues to be marketed to this day in various forms. But no other generation can point to these things are concurrent events or aspects of their formative years. Watterson never allowed his stuff to be licensed or merchandised - he felt the art shouldn't be compromised in that way. Maybe the pure presentation that we had, in the newspaper, carried that artistic message well. I'm going to get philosophical and trite here in a second. You've been warned. I don't think I'm overstating the case when I suggest that we've learned at the knees of a penguin, a cow and a tiger. (wince) Lastly, from the Onion A/V Club interview with Berkeley Breathed: O: To some degree, a lot of the readers have a mental image of you, Gary Larson, and Bill Watterson sitting around a pool somewhere together, drinking cocktails and being hilariously funny. BB: I'm not going to say a goddamned thing to divest anybody of that particular picture. Except to add that we are all incredibly handsome. Handsomer than, for instance, Tom Cruise. ------ *: I use swear words less. This is part of the reason my books don’t sell as well. Another part is my failure to have written any books. ** : Scott Adams, never all that funny in the first place, forever screwed himself when he listed great comic strips of recent memory as “Peanuts, Calvin and Hobbes, and Dilbert.” Wow, you just lined yourself up with Bill Watterson. Perhaps it’s the finely rendered art style, or the magical characterizations that confused you, Scott. I’m not even getting into why Scott Adams and Charles Schulz shall not be mentioned in the same breath, except to describe the blood sacrifice of Adams on an altar to the memory of Sparky. From the Management: Matthew Heslin is the blogmaster of the eerily minimalist Heslin-dot-Org. My earliest memory of Matt goes back to when I was in third grade, and he was in fourth. I did not know him, except even then I suspected he was a vaguely anarchist Republican. I first glimpsed him running out of the elementary school library brandishing a yardstick as a sword, chasing down this righteous douchecock named Kenny Barney. Matt was squealing with terrible joy. I'd give you more memories of Matt, but this one is about as relevant as it comes, as metaphorically, he's still chasing us all down, giggling madly, yard-stick gripped in white knuckles. Oh, Matt also has monkey toes. You need to know that in case he comes for you. You'll find this Ramblings entry cross-posted at Heslin's own blog, because that's just how he rolls. 10/19/06 Moving -- physically moving your stuff from one domicile into another -- is disconcerting, to me. You take one place, ostensibly your home, and you shift it to a place that is not yet your home and instead remains just a house, just a shell. You abandon the place in which you're comfortable, dismantling all parts of it (down to the magnets on the refrigerator, which was perhaps the most jarring distinction so far for some unusual reason) and then you throw it all into the new place. And the new place remains improperly arranged for six months, maybe a year. Oh, sure, you open all the boxes and put all the crap away. But somewhere at the four-month-mark, you're like, "I hate the table there. It needs to move across the room, which means everything else needs to move, too." At the six-month-mark, you're like, "My collection of petrified dolphin penises and that box of seventy-three old remote controls really doesn't look good in the middle of the bedroom like that on this gilded pedestal. I'll staple it all to the front door, instead." Things move, change, shift, and it takes a while for the house to be comfortable in its own skin -- for it to become a home beneath your working fingers. This old place has no reason to remain particularly endearing. It's too small. It's more than a little boring. We have a gaggle of neighbors who, let's be honest, are the social equivalents of Sloth from The Goonies. Though, there are neighbors we'll miss. And this place is comfortable, no real complaints, and we've been here for well over two years, now. Abstractly, I'm glad to move, glad we're getting the fuck out of Dodge. Yet there's a part of me that knows that, for a time, we don't really have a home so much as a new house, a place to store our shit and keep a bed and not much else. Slowly but surely it will become ours. It'll just take a little time, and in that time... limbo. All of this is a long and rather rambly (see the name of the page? Ramblings? C'mon, people, keep up) way of saying: Hey, we're moving. Soonish. Soon-esque. Quasi-soontastic. Saturday, to be specific. My time will be taken away from me over the next several days, and I won't be able to provide you with the proper updatery. (And I might experience some Internet downtime as we kick the new place's Net access into existence.) That said, while my time will be taken away from you, the time of others is yours to consume. I have three guest bloggers who will come here and take my place. They will, for a time, behead me and stand on my fountaining neckstump as if it were a soapbox, and they will yell at you about whatever they care to yell about. Ironically, I only have four actual readers of this website, so three of you are going to be totally bored by this process. The fourth guy, Jerry, he's going to be excited, though. Real excited. Jerry's an excitable dude. He might pee himself a little. So, three guest bloggers, meet Jerry, your temporary new readership. Jerry, meet these three jerks. Guest blogs start in the morrow and continue into next week. See you on the otherside of house ownership, plebes. 10/16/06 Before I say anything, THIS is super news in any world. I'ma take a second here, and talk about something other than The New House. I will, instead, give an spate of early -- and brief -- reviews of some of the TV I'm watching now that the season is in full gear. Heroes, Monday, 9pm. Good. Not great. It's a structured mess. Some parts of it are wholly more fascinating than others. The overall concept is appealing, and the hints toward a far larger plot grab me. The acting is mostly solid. The writing is mostly lazy. But wow, no other show knows how to end on a bang every episode. Nuclear explosions, waking up in the middle of an autopsy, death, teleportation, madness. Worth watching for now, but if the laziness in writing continues, I'll start to see past my fascination and find only annoyance. Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, Monday, 10pm. Somehow, the ratings on this puppy keep sliding downward. As usual, I think the Nielson ratings process is some carefully-concocted deception (or just plain useless), but hey, what do I know? This show pops. I've never watched something Sorkin-flavored before, but here, I'm enjoying it. Sorkin has his own flow, clearly, much like Mamet has his own, too. I like that. The world needs more of that. So, get on it, world. Now. Gilmore Girls, Tuesday, 8pm. The show is back. Last two seasons, it lost a bit of its lustre, as the creator seemed confused by her own creation. She's gone, now, and some other dude took over, and lo and behold, it feels like it should once more. Lustre, returned. And yes, I know watching this show requires me to either be deeply comfortable with my own masculinity, or have like, strawberry-scented and well-coifed testicles. I won't tell you which. Veronica Mars, Tuesday, 9pm. C'mon. Even though nothing can quite top the majesty of the first season, it's a witty scalpel of a show. Lost, Wednesday, 9pm. Apparently, some people didn't like the season opener. I found it a refreshing kick in the teeth. I'll take a moment here to talk about fanboys, and how a lot of them become haters. The Internet and their own badges of geekiness seem to have given them the impression that they have the right to be offended when a show does something they didn't like, expect, desire, whatever. To a point, this is true in that anytime you're dissatisfied with a piece of media, it's your right to disapprove and stop watching. But the ceaseless bitching about it gets out of control. People start looking for problems. They keep an eye peeled for that shark-jumping moment, as if they're just race fans waiting for a car crash. Gamers are the same way, really. Oh well. Rant, over. Anyway, Lost seems to have gained some footing from a weaker second season, too, and hopefully it can keep up its momentum and deliver a strong third season. Survivor, Thursday, 8pm. Different every time, this sucker's got legs. That being said, the "racial" experiment this time around was cut too early from the show, and has since lost a bit of its edge because of it. Potential, squandered. As it stands, it's a good season, but not great. The Office, Thursday, 8:30pm. Funniest show on TV, right now, bar none. Somehow, it has crawled its way out of a mostly-mediocre short first season, and has continued that climb upwards to the Apex of Hilarity Mountain ever since. Battlestar Galactica, Friday 9 and 11pm. The show's jarring lurch forward in time shouldn't have worked, but somehow, it worked. I won't spoil it all for people who haven't yet caught up, but wow. The show has turned a little subversive on us, and has strong flavors of The Great Escape running through the broth. This show is powerful good. It continues being a modern classic. The Amazing Race, Sunday, 8pm. Right now, leagues ahead of Survivor, though, like that show, Amazing Race is different every time. It's the people you watch. The challenges are secondary to the relationships. This one tends to be nicer, less backstabby, and more dynamic. It's more about the individual pairs than how the challengers fuck each other over. Here, you see every kind of relationship pair played out -- loving couples, Henpecked husbands, gay couples, passive-aggressives, close friends, mean folks, crazy folks, Hippie folks. You also get to see vastly different levels of ol' American tolerance at work. In last night's episode, you have some people embracing the fact they're in India, and others disgusted by it. And it's not always who you'd expect. Right now, there's a real cornpone couple on there -- real deep South Kentucky (I think) coalminers who have never personally met a gay person (!) or an Asian (!!). These two love gay people, now. They love Asians. They love being in India. And yet there's this hipster couple, this cooler-than-thou young white pair, and they can't muster one iota of tolerance. They hate the way India smells and how it's filled with poor people. In Vietnam, they couldn't muster the tolerance to try to communicate with the Vietnamese. Plus, they hate each other, too. Downright fascinating shit, this show. Other shows we've flirted with: Jericho, still meh. Something about it strikes me as both too dreary and too hopeful. Other people seem to dig it, though. Bully for them. 30 Rock, very funny. Tracy Morgan running down the street in his man-panties, waving about a plastic lightsaber while screaming about being a Jedi? A Michael Jackson vagina joke? Alec Baldwin? All good. Dunno if this will get thrown into the mix, or if we'll wait for DVD. We might DVR it, like we do The Office. Six Degrees, well, I was into it until I found out that Heroes is the same show, except that one has superpowers. I'll always take the show that has superpowers over the one that doesn't, because that's just how I roll. Haven't watched it past the first episode, so, screw it. My Name Is Earl, loved it last season, haven't seen it this season. Dunno why. We DVR it, though, so eventually we'll just siddown in front of the PC and watch like, five episodes in a row or something. Anyway. I think maybe we watch too much TV. But there's just too much good TV to ignore, y'know? If we had to cut shows from our viewing schedules, no idea what we'd cut. Survivor, maybe but then we'd probably just watch The Office at its normal time instead of in DVR-time. Battlestar is a classic and I don't want to miss it, but it is on Friday night, which sadly seems to be when I'm at my sleepiest. Heroes could go the way of the Dodo if they don't tweak that lazy writing. Who knows? 10/15/06 Several updates for your perusal. First, Gentleman Aaron and his Lady of the People, Jessica, sent me an excellent gift and useful tool, the hard-to-find and out-of-print Dark Ages: Fae. This is no small thing, since it tends to be very, very expensive to purchase. Right now, on eBay, the bid price is already up to one Dodo, three firstborn children, and a monkey with a glass eye. And it hasn't even met the reserve price, yet. So, to Aaron and Jessica, I give you both the Terrible Minds Upstanding Citizens Award. I've no idea what this award means, other than it's prestigious and made out of solid gold. And by "solid gold," I mean, "aluminum foil." Shh. Second, the big dog, Yaga, is now potentially cancer-free. He had some cancerous or precancerous tumor on his paw, some node of evil lingering there, and it's now off of him and out for biopsy. It's just another thing he's survived. Add it to: box of chocolates, Lyme disease, elk attack, cassette tape in his intestinal tract, rat poison, and the potential house fire that he saved me from. (I joke a lot on this website, but really, none of those things are jokes, they all -- sadly -- actually happened. Yes, even "elk attack.") Third, I don't think I've updated you good, fine, excellent people, but some books of mine have hit the shelves. Circle of the Crone, Lodges: the Splintered, and very shortly, Shadows Of Mexico. Fourth and finally, the house project found many projects concluded yesterday. New floor in kitchen? Check. New fridge? Check. Ceiling fan in living room? Checkity-check-chickity-chack. Plus, the walls are all painted, needing only some ittle-bittle touch-ups here and there. We're not done, but we're close to it. If, say, someone held a gun to my head and told me we had to move in today, we could do so comfortably without great agita. You can find a record of the ongoing picture project (titled Haus III: The Ownenation) HERE. 10/13/06 Dear Triskaidekaphobics: You're all going to die today. Sincerely, The Management. ... Now that we have that out of the way, let's move on. Things are so filled with nuts right now, you might think of them as "nutty." The house is reaching an apex point of effort and madness, that I think it has begun to grow on its own. I don't recall telling it that it was going to get a new roof here in the next week, but suddenly, poof, it's getting a new roof. (A weird coincidence: my wallet just became so light, it floats -- eep, supernature!) We did not expect for there to be a new kitchen floor until, saaaay, springtime, but lo and behold, a third of a shiny laminate floor now lurks in the darkness of the kitchen, waiting for feet to walk upon it so it can deliver unto them waves of pleasure. (Another weird coincidence? My hands are marked with blisters and scabs! And the floor is edged with a rusty red. I suspect that, while I slept, the floor tried to eat my hands as a blood sacrifice to the gods of its nadir.) New fridge is on its way, too; I think the house ordered it. The monster house swells and shifts, like a beast whose bones do not fit properly beneath its turgid flesh. Truly, the house really is crooked. If you look through two doorways, you'll note that nothing is level. It's a little like being in a funhouse. New paint colors in the house, officially: Autumn Fog: office. Gilded Linen: trim. Light Raffia: kitchen. Sandy Cove has been voted off the island. 10/05/06 Fascinating headline of the day: "Muppets Teach Afghan Children About Land Mines." "Hi-ho, this is Kermit, the --" Kermit's voice is cut short as an explosion rocks the old theater. The two old fuckers in the balcony just snigger as frogbits rain down upon the audience. Or something. The house we own continues to swell and change. Living room is now no longer a noxiously bright blue, and is now the color of warm clay (the paint company calls it Coastal Villa). The bedroom ceases to be weird pinkish-lavenderish, and is now a smeary sage green (paint company name: Secret Moss). (Actually, what the hell's so secret about moss? What does a carpet of moss have to keep secret? Did moss kill Kennedy?) (Anyway, nevermind.) Soon the trim will find paint slatherered upon it (paint company moniker: Sandy Cove). (Also the name of a 1970's porn actress with big waterballoon tits and a windswept vagina). (Nevermind.) Still have to purchase paint for the kitchen. Considering the following elusive hues: Coconut Milk, Lovely Bluff, Gilded Linen, Gilded Endive, and Woodrow Wilson Linen. We're not considering: Cooper Molera Fandango Red, Pink Odyssey, Delicate Bliss, Purpling Dawn, or Cincinnatian Hotel Nichols Taupe. Spackled some more shit shut. Picked out some potential tile for the forthcoming kitchen backsplash. Met the neighbors. A lovely group of people, we hit the neighbor jackpot. Our immediate neighbor is like, maybe 60-something, and is a grandmother. That didn't stop my wife from referring to her as a GMILF. The haunted house next door is also undergoing serious renovations, hopefully ending with the extraction of whatever housebound spirits and demons have been locked into the wretched gray stone. We also met the black cat known as Midnight. No word on the cat's gender. The place is also a haven for dogs. By their barking habits, angry dogs. We've got, within eyeshot, a big white version of Cujo, a schizoid Dalmation (which is like saying "a retarded Paris Hilton"), and a Husky. And I hear other dogs, yowling, barking. Our dogs will love the competition. I have pics, which I'll post here now. It's been a good week for TV. Veronica Mars. Lost. Battlestar Galactica is coming up. I'm a big geek. I grok that. Studio 60 is continuing to be solid, but less people watch it every week. Wonder how long it'll last? Watch it, people. Especially if you're one of those mythical Nielson families. (Who are those assholes, anyway? I've seen more unicorns than Nielson families.) It's been a good writing week, too. Got a lot done. Scored a smidgen more Changeling work, and what I turned in got solid notes from the Big Chief Muckity-Muck (He Who Is Known As Skemp). News on the movie front, but I'll save that for later, when the stars are properly aligned. The Republicans are acting as whoremongers and assholes, again. They might as well be Decepticons. I think that covers it, for now. So, I leave you with this. 10/01/06 Yesterday, much was done. Two ceilings, painted. One door, primed. Room trim, sanded. Holes, spackled with plaster. Paint, purchased, along with a new ceiling fan. But the real kicker, the corker, the piece de resistance, is the new back door. See, it was kind of a weird door. It had "character," which means you look at it and you're like, "Gee, that's neat," but really you're thinking, "I like it, I just like it on someone else's house." It was a big white door with a tiny little cock-eyed diamond window. It was like a... pub door or something. I expected drunks to wander in and try to buy beer from our dogs. Well, the wife's parents were deeply offended by this door. This door clearly slighted them within the last ten years. It perhaps insulted them at Prom or stole a family heirloom from them. So angered by this door, they decided to replace it. But replacing it, as it turned out, was no simple task, for the door was of an odd size (this is theme for our house: everything is an "odd" size), and could not so straightforwardly be switched out. Her father then took to our door frame like a Viking warrior, like a Russian bogatyr seeking glory for his name by defeating the evil door. (Not "evil-doer," only asshats and dumbfucks use language like that and mean it.) So, several hours later, frame was eradicated, and a proper door now sits as our gateway to the lawn and our driveway. In other news, my muscles (or, in case you're Popeye, "me muskles") hurt. Film at 11. 09/30/06 We are now homeowners. Though, really, that's sort of a subjective term. Technically, we're houseowners. Homeowner implies an abstract concept. Because I'm married, would you call me a loveowner? You can call me that, if you want. I'm just saying. It's all done. I'll share stories when time allows. For the moment, I'll note these two things: One. Real estate is equally as amusing as proctology performed by nervous chimps with rusty knives. Two. We considered a paint color for the bedroom known by its maker as Quaking Bog. More when time presents its humid moistness to me for my narrative penetration. Now, back to pizza and coffee, Breakfast of the Gods. 09/26/06 Heroes. Better than expected. Significantly so. Not as good as Lost was when it hit, no. Characters aren't quite as strong -- at this space in the narrative, they're a little one-dimensional. But compelling enough. Effects are good, overall mystery strong, and the writing is equally potent. Enough to warrant viewing the show several episodes deep, see what happens. Funny thing, though, this show is an ensemble cast partly about coincidences between people (several of them New Yorkers). It's like that other show, Six Degrees, but uhhh, with superpowers. And that other show doesn't mention Kitty Pryde. So, Heroes wins, and that other show will casually drop from my viewing schedule. (Oh, Heroes replays tonight, if you care.) Studio 60? Strong as ever. Really, great show. Very impressed. Totally compelling. 09/25/06 Random thoughts on culture and commercial products: Toothpaste that tastes delicious is jarring. Too jarring. Right now, we have a toothpaste called Vanilla Mint, and it's delicious. This is not, contrary to how it sounds, a good thing. It's like brushing your teeth with a milkshake. Or a frapped funnel cake. It does not call to mind the healthfulness of teeth. It does not tell me that my molars are a brusha-brusha-brushed. In fact, it makes me believe that my li'l chompers are probably pitted with holes, like a bad road after winter. I do not watch either CSI program on CBS. Wait. Are there three? There might be three. Whatever, it blurs. Let me get to my point. The original CSI, the proto-program, as it were, at least pretends to cling to some faint and fraying thread of realism. I've seen bits of the show, and at the bare minimum you see dudes looking in microscopes and shooting bullets into sexy scientific chambers to determine velocity or composition or flavor or whatever it is you look for in your bullets. But CSI: Miami doesn't look anything like Crime Scene Investigating. It's always David Caruso sneering and saying something only partly-cool ("I'm closing you down," or "I'm bringing the freeze to this custard stand," or something), and there's always prostitutes with guns and cigarette boats jumping over crates and exploding, and you have Dobermans running and jet-skis pirouetting and street gangs surfing on the backs of bullet-pocked dolphins. All kinds of shit. All kinds of shit that doesn't make me believe that David Curuso works for any police department in America, much less the forensics lab. Everybody's in sunglasses, not lab coats. They have Tec-9 machine guns, not microscopes. And David Caruso's kind of a douche. Toilet paper is a dumb product. Paper towels, I get. I grab one paper towel, I use one paper towel. TP, though, you need to grab like, a fist full of that business. One square won't do anything. One square will tear and leave your hand covered in poo. You'd clean your asshole better with the palm of your hand and a kind word. No, with toilet paper, you have to bolster your wiping hand with like, a softball configuration of the stuff. You've got to layer it, like baklava or something (but far less delicious). Swaddle your hand like a mummy's arm. As a sidenote, the toilet paper at work is bad news. They have two types of TP there. One is about as thin and wispy as a quilt sewn from fairy wings and spider web. You can wad up as much of that stuff as you want -- it disintegrates in your hand, as ephemeral as cotton candy on a wet tongue. The other brutal type is slick and waxy, like vellum. I feel like I'm wiping myself with pages from an expensive Bible. While significantly more substantial than the "ghost-paper" that comprises the other type, it remains as useless. Really, I think we need some kind of new ass-cleaning technology, and not one of those pathetic bidets, either. No, I need like, a water gun or a washable flannel pad or something. Or maybe just diapers. That might be the way to go, thanks for helping me work through this, America. People hate Dane Cook and I don't know why. I understand why you might not think Dane Cook is funny. Humor is subjective. You might think I'm not funny, and that's your right to be wrong-headed and filled with stupid juice. But people hate him like he's covered in herpes sores and helped blow up the World Trade Centers. It's odd. Though, it points to the fact that comedians are haters. They're funny because they're covering something up. They have big gaping holes where their esteem is supposed to live, and so they spackle that fucker shut with ha-ha's. I know what you're saying, you're saying, "Jeez, Chuck, but you're funny, so are you secretly ten kinds of screwed up?" My answer to that? No. I'm profoundly well-adjusted. Now shut up, and pass me the morphine and pie. Daddy needs something to help him forget that he just carved his sorrows into his abdomen with an expired credit card. Rachel Ray has a really big mouth, and (as the kids in the neighborhood are wont to say), a "badonkadonk." This doesn't bother me. I like Rachel Ray. I hope she does well, what with her accent and her acronyms and all. Men's fragrances (once known as "cologne") sometimes smell good, but now mostly smell like distilled bastard. It's a piquant, ermine-y smell. You'd know it if you smelled it. Like "frat boy" blended with "investment banker" and allowed to ferment in the ass-crack of a male stripper. Though, then you have Stetson, which smells like someone pissed on a cowboy and set him on fire. If you haven't noticed, iPods are getting smaller. The next one will slide comfortably inside your rectum. The one after that might be drinkable. I love that there's a woman with a bionic arm. She can feel sensation in it. It's no flying car, but it still tastes of the future. Cottage cheese is delicious, even though it looks kind of like smegma. Tomorrow, thoughts on NBC's Heroes. 09/22/06 Ever since turning on new shows like, say, Lost or My Name Is Earl, I've been hellbound to give interesting-sounding shows a break. Check 'em out, see what's what. New shows so far this season, I've only watched a handful. Quick thoughts follow. Jericho. Cool premise. Engaging idea. Kansas town survives what may be a nuclear attack on American cities, and show reveals the drama. My problem? Not dark enough. I don't need it like, unrelentingly dark ("Oh my god, my baby's covered in keloids! Everyone's throwing up blood! The Man with the Scarlet Eye is coming for Swan!"), but I need something that goes a little deeper than the mawkish sensibilities of a town banding immediately together in what would likely be the most horrid crisis the people there have ever faced. Yeah, there's some bumpy "Holy shit, we almost rioted over gas cans!" but then the mayor gives a mayor speech and the town is all suddenly a team. Mm. Okay. Plus, there's a scene where a dude has to give a little girl a tracheotomy and he puts a straw in her throat. I've kind of seen that done to death by now, and done better. So, the show is interesting, maybe worth a DVD view, but I'm not sticking with it. Six Degrees. New show from Lost wunderkind J.J. Abrams. Pretentious show, but that didn't stop it from being good. Basic rundown, you have six people in New York, and this shows how all their lives kind of intersect at random angles and born of basic coincidences. All people are therefore connected. The characters are engaging, if, again, a little pretentious. Worth a continuing look. Not mind-blowing, but solid, real solid. Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. Razor-sharp. From its Network style opening to a simple but classic conclusion, the first episode was strong. For those who don't know, it's about the backstage drama at an SNL-style late-night sketch comedy show. Bradley Whitford and Matthew Perry bring it home and sell the show with Sorkin's dialogue. (Lauren Graham, i.e. Lorelei from Gilmore Girls will be making a guest appearance on a few upcoming episodes, playing herself as the host of the show for that week.) A definite keeper. Other returning shows, so far, have been great. The Office last night made me laugh so hard I prolapsed my anus. Oh, and TV-on-DVD: Again, if you're not watching Veronica Mars, then shame on you. Someone staple a scarlet letter 'L' to your forehead. Second season was great. We're actually going to not be losers this time, and we'll watch the show as it happens instead of waiting for DVD. We're also now going through the 2nd half of the last Battlestar Galactica season. Wow. So good. Is it me, or has television turned the Awesome knob up to 11 before breaking it off? 09/13/06 This should concern you, and if it doesn't, well, then shove off. Let's see if if makes any news headlines. It won't, probably. Cynical? Maybe. Realistic? Probably the same thing, these days. Not much to say here, so I'll just give a brief state of the union: Still writing, writing, writing. Coming up on, I think, my 40th book. Oh, I'm working on Changeling, if you care. Book of Spirits, too. And finishing up redlines on War With the Pure and Saturnine Night. And I'm meeting with Lance next week to go over the pitch for the new movie when he heads out to LA. So, yeah, life is busy. Nevermind the fact I have a job at the library. And we're settling on the house in just over two weeks. And I'm in charge of reintroducing the extinct Auroch to the meadows of Europe. Mmm. Okay, that last one's a little white lie wrapped in a bow sewn of fibs. Not much else going on. Playing a little rented Lego: Star Wars II for the 360. Packing boxes. Noodling around with MySpace. So yeah, MySpace, right? This supposed networking site -- which, as I've noted there, is like what happens if a unicorn eats Metallica and then takes a shit on a clown -- is a really bizarre thing. You barely need to perform any effort to find people, and as it turns out, everybody has a MySpace page. Your own mother, she has one. I found that one of our dogs has his own page there, and it's filled with blog entries like, "My owner is a total jerk. I like to eat my own butt. Food is good. Somebody stole my balls and now I'm not a man." That's not exactly what it said, sure, but it's a good enough translation from Bark Language. So, yeah. MySpace is hideous. It's poorly organized, and some people have pages that look like... well, see earlier note re: unicorn, Metallica, clown, vomit. Gaudy stuff. Like Las Vegas and My Little Ponies thrown in a blender and put to the tune of some God-fucked Black Eyes Peas song. It turns the brain. And yet, it's kind of compelling, I won't lie. MySpace has a kind of retarded allure. Y'know, like cheese in a can. Or reality TV. Or any news item about Paris Hilton. You don't want to partake. But you'll partake. Oh, yes. I guess not much else happening. I'll leave you alone, now. Don't forget to wash behind your ears. 09/09/06 Allow me to flog my vanity for a moment. This is the new White Wolf Quarterly, and features a number of snippets from a number of books, many of which I wrote. I've got five books, I think, hitting shelves this Fall/Winter, so, y'know, go me. Also, allow me to take a moment to say, again, that I think James Bond is a weak character. Like Superman, he's too perfect. I've said it before, and I'll say it again -- -- or, at least, I thought I would. Truth is, there's a new trailer out for the new James Bond movie, the remake of Casino Royale. Is it me, or does it look really good? Will Daniel Craig bring the proper gravitas to the role? Looks like he might. I won't say he's the best Bond yet, but even from this trailer I know he's making his way to the top. Plus, there's just something about the trailer that hints at Bond's leaning toward sociopathy. I'm totally for this. I don't have a link handy, because I'm lazy, but I'm sure you can find the trailer at Quicktime or Filmwad or something. 09/01/06 The great irony of the MTV Video Music Awards is that MTV no longer shows music videos. It plays music, but only as the soundtrack to its million empty-hearted shows about vapid teens. MTV used to be a thing of substance, of some edge and meaning. It has lost all of that, but seems to feel it still possesses it. The irony is lost on itself, and it cannot recognize its own rampant soulessness. One commercial last night for the station boasted "24 Hours of Music." This is like me advertising, "Famous Astronaut!" or "Winner of the Hog Toss, Seven Years Running." It is, at this point, an unwholesome fabrication, a grotesque contravention of truth that can still amazingly be put on television without someone blowing his own head-ceiling apart with a 12-gauge autoloader. They haven't shown music videos in what, forty years or something? I remember the day when I'd see a dozen or more music videos in a single day. I'd just leave MTV on in the background. Now, I think I've seen that many this year. We watched the first half-hour or so of the VMAs, and occasionally popped back in to see what was going on. Nothing more than a sour-gutted pastiche of one piece of shit singing or dancing after the last piece of shit. It opened strong. The Timberlake-Timbaland bit was some good stuff, and Jack Black was funny -- which, sadly, was the last time he'd be funny all evening. Lou Reed with the Raconteurs, yeah, fine, but Lou Reed? What? I mean, fine, whatever, but Lou, dude. You're a luminary, here. It's like watching Leonardo Da Vinci hang his artwork at the local Taco Bell. Li'l Kim was dressed so conservatively-yet-gaudily, I thought she was a real estate agent from Vegas. Lady, stick out a boob or something. Clamp a starfish to it. Grip a pistol with your vagina and start shooting up the place. Seriously. The OK-Go dance routine on the treadmills is awesome, but nothing more than I've seen on the exact same music video (a video I saw on the Internet, not MTV, mind). Ultimately, who cares? It's four hours of desolation. It used to be a hot show. Now it's just hot shit. 08/31/06 I have decided to apply to the Chuck Club of Fiction Writers. The first rule of Chuck Club isn't, as fate would have it, to not talk about Chuck Club, but to instead have a vaguely-German and largely unpronounceable last name. I mean, it's gotta sound like a fist of mushy shit is coming out of your mouth. And so, I appeal to you, tender mercies of the fiction gods, let me join my two other Chuck brothers. Chuck Palahniuk. Chuck Klosterman. I shall be third among them, leastmost of the three, but still higher than mundane beings. I shall be Chuck Wendig. 08/27/06 In film, less is more. More, on the other hand, ends up being less. Case in point of the less is more theory: Jaws. Broken shark prop leads to lessons in subtlety. Let the audience use its imagination, and the terror will grow in their own minds. It unfolds, a narrative fractal in their own skulls. They picture the blood. They wonder what it would look like if it was them getting hit with the axe, or their sister, or their mother. It's a lesson not unlike when you hum the first few bars of a well-known song. Doing so lodges that song in a listener's brain; they are doomed to whistle it for the rest of the day. You don't need to hum the whole song; just a piece of it. It's the incompleteness that forces them to complete the song. So too with terror, horror, suspense. Intimate the darkness, madness, and grotesquerie, and the brain will grow disturbed with its own imagining of the details it lacks. Lead the horse to water. It will drink all on its own. Case in point of the more is less theory: The Hills Have Eyes, specifically the 2006 Alexandre Aja redux. It's a gross movie. Unpleasantly splattery. And it's not just the gore, but the somewhat ceaseless inculcation of rape and violence. It does little to engage the mind's terror centers, and instead just turns the stomach. And soon after, it fails to even manage that. It just becomes numbing, damning itself with its own redundant blood-soaked porn. I want to be clear, here. I'm not against violence, or gore, or other forms of horror in cinema. Shit, totally the opposite. But you can make these things effective by giving us the feeling. Don't show us a guy chewing on a human leg -- let us hear it from somewhere in the dark. Don't give us stupid-looking mutants with teeth growing out of their cheeks. Hint at it. Present the monsters in shadow, in poor lighting, in bad reflections. It's too much, here. Much too much, way too much. Aja's a good director, but he needs to pull himself back. You know what? It's kind of like actual porn. Give me too many shots of a grimly-veined member throbbing in and out of a woman's slobbery love-shack, and it simply becomes a weird and kind of unpleasant study in abstractions. Porn is better when parts of it are imagined; the moan, the lighting, the gentle rise and fall of the small of the back. Not the spray of man-goo, nor the flabby labia flopping about like a fish on the dock. Really, the less is more, more is less theory here holds up in all forms of storytelling, whether it comes down to horror film, porn movies, or whatever. Hell, apply it to Christian tract propaganda, or children's books, or anything. Anything except instruction manuals. There, more is more, you know what I mean? You do. I know you do. Conclusion: When writing anything, be it games, stories, novels, or films, I must endeavor to learn my own lessons. So say we all. 08/26/06 Pre-Order Lance Weiler's Head Trauma at Amazon. I think you'll be impressed. This is indie cinema, people. Creepy. Weird. Digital video. Check it out. Got that house inspection thing done. No goblins (wipes brow), but we do have some roof concerns. The roof is currently exhibiting no problems, but it's at the end of its life. Slate on the front, asphalt on the back, and all of it is at or beyond its temporal expectancy. It's not falling down, but it needs help. Maybe replacing. Not exactly cheap, so we're going to see what happens next. On the subject of writing: Ever feel like it takes something out of you? I don't mean that in a bad way, mind. I mean it in the way that, say, a good spate of exercise might drain you of your energy. Writing just takes a piece out of me. Strange, seeing as how the activity is so sadly sedentary. My fingers move on the keyboard. My eyes flit. My heart beats, angrily chewing coffee and blood in its crushing ventricles. Other than that? Not a lick of physical movement. I don't feel tired coming off a long period of writing, not exactly. I just feel drained. Again, it's important to note that this isn't a bad thing, really: it feels like hitting a marker in a marathon, it feels like pushing yourself that extra mile. But sometimes, too, it feels like three hours at the keyboard is equivalent to a normal eight hour day. Writing is a little transcendent, that way. It's tough. It needs you to push past the wall. Every word that comes out of you is like a pint of blood, a jar of spit, a briefcase of brain matter. Writing isn't difficult. But it's effort. Even when it's easy, it's effort. If it's effortless, you're doing something wrong. Go back and read your swill. Then rewrite it -- and put your back into it this time. Have I mentioned that I love writing? I send prayers now to Job Jesus ("Job" as in "career," not as in "that poor chump that God crapped on a lot"), entreating him to let me keep doing this as my life's work. Seriously, Job Jesus, pay attention. I'm begging you, here. Right. Now that we've gotten that out of the way. Brief updates: Readying the new game. Hoping soon to dig into Tim Powers' newest, Three Days to Never, and am also reading Fast Food Nation. Yaga, the big dumb dog, did a big dumb dog thing and locked himself in the bathroom twice last night. This is the second night where he locked himself in the bathroom twice in a single eight-hour period. Am churning away at a steady pace on many projects. Have destroyed all the infidels who oppose me. News at 11. 08/21/06 We have the haus inspection on Wednesday, so wish us luck. I always have a sinking feeling about things like this (granted, I have sinking feelings about everything, as I feel it keeps reality in check; y'know, underpromise, overdeliver). I feel it could go like this: We walk in. The inspector leads us around. He points at something here: "Mold. Not terrible, but take care of it." We go upstairs. He points at something there. "Paint's peeling. The caulk around the tub needs replacing." Through the attic, he's like, "No termites, but you might want to reinforce this wall eventually." Then we go back downstairs, and on a lark he lifts up a corner of the living room carpet. It's marked with black spots. Like hairy moles on the wood floor beneath. He hisses through his teeth, disappointed. He notes: "I wish we wouldn't have found this." We ask him what it is, and he says, "Mr. and Mrs. Wendig? I'm afraid you have a goblin problem." And goblin problems cost like, fat bank to get rid of. It's a long process of setting traps and spraying goblincide juice in every corner of reality to keep them from coming through and eating your food and replacing your babies with changelings. Though, I like to think of all problems as lemons waiting to be mulched into lemonade. Like, maybe we could take those goblins and milk them for their fey glutens, and we could sell that at local farmers' markets. Maybe the lactose intolerant would want goblin milk. Maybe it could be used to setting an upset stomach or make your dog grow antlers and speak English. Who knows? I'm just saying, hey, bright side. Silver lining. Anyway, wish us luck. Cross your fingers and wish for no goblin problems. I'm going to bring along an iron horseshoe just in case. In the standard portion of this website known as "other news:" I took 50k worth of word count on a book called Book of Spirits, which is a title that might be familiar to those who read this website. You'll possibly recall that yes, I wrote 30k for this book about 2-3 years ago. It never got published. It's back on the slate, same but different, different enough where it largely requires all new verbage. So, yay. Tautology for me. New words. Same thing. What else? Got a Mage: the Awakening game starting soon, which will cross the boundaries of reality and take place across weird modern digitalscapes like "chat rooms" and "e-mail" (since the holidays always head-butt us in the nads and steal our time like, y'know, like goblins). I'll post the track listing of the first soundtrack CD here sometime this week. Everything else goes according to my diabolical plans. Oh! Right. MySpace. I have a MySpace page now. Heslin the Elder and I were rapping about how MySpace represents, to us at least, a rather alien place on the web, despite the fact that I think it takes up roughly 51% of all the Internet Space Available. So, for no other reason than to say I did it, I got a MySpace page. I have already been inundated with Friend requests from random lurking Web Whores who want me to check out their Double-Hot picture pages or some such fucking nonsense. Some of them don't have those pages, and just seem desperate to have names on the Friend list, which I think somehow goes against the spirit of an actual Friend List, but that's just my Luddite ways talking, I guess. Terribleminds-at-Myspace. 08/15/06 08/13/06 And Lo, upon this Gloriousest of Sundays, the Lordy shall look down upon This Knucklehead and say, "Lo, Ye have done great things. Now go get yourself some ice cream." And Ye got hisself some ice cream, and it was good. In short: We bought a house. Or, as the kids say, a "hizzouse." It is in Richlandtown, which is a place you've never heard of. It's more or less Quakertown, which is a place you're more likely to have heard of, but even that, I can't promise. It's a 3-bedroom end home in a series of old brick row homes. Nice yard, good-sized kitchen, plus in addition to the bedrooms it has a small office, a dining room, a living room, an unfinished basement, and a big-ass walk-up attic that is serving the current homeowners as a 4th bedroom. So, it's big. We're excited. See, house hunting is fun at first, until you realize that real estate is a fools' game, and you're the fools. And you realize that you're too poor for the area in which you live because you live in an area firmly sandwiched betwixt several major metropolitan areas, and you have a lot of rich fuck commuter fucks who fuck up the whole fucking kit and kaboodle in regards to prices. And the only places you can afford are townhomes that smell of cat pee and black mold. And yet, somehow, we got lucky. This place thankfully has character, but in a good way. Some places have "character" and you realize that's not such a good thing. Y'know, character might look quirky and fun, until you realize that wood floors are such a pretty red color because the house was previously occupied by some Devil Cult that spilled the blood of the innocent all over the damn place. And then you find out the place is sinking. And it doesn't just have termites, but is also home to some massive locust nest, and every night at midnight the locusts and the termites gather in the basement and go to war -- and not just any war, but the kind of war where the screams of the soon-dead are only muted by the screams of the now-mad, and locusts are eating termite heads and termites are scorching and salting the earth. And then the house finally drops into its sinkhole, and the Devil Cult comes along to laugh and say, "Told you so, that's we moved the fuck out of there. Douchebags." Then the locusts sing in triumph. So, it's got character, it just doesn't have that level of character. Also: Finished the first pass at the film treatment for Lance, so that's on the table. Notes soon, and will hammer out a second amendment, and then bam, screenplay by mid-September, which is just before we settle on the house. So, rock on. Oh, right, in the midst I'm doing some emergency Promethean work for the Great and Powerful Matt McFarland, whose grace is undeniable and whose hat is black. I'm actually almost done my work on that book, which I feel is turning out very well, which probably means it stinks of moist, open ass. But that's the nature of the beast. At least it's something, and soon it shall be done. (Related note, the next game from White Wolf will officially be Changeling: the Flibbertigibbet, which in my mind can only be good, because the first one took all its awesome potential and crammed it up its own ass. But only before going on about bears with balloons and monocle-wearing lie-mouthed rabbits. If there is a Jesus up in yonder Heaven, he'll give me some Changeling work in the near future, as it's long been my crusade to make that a playable horror game.) There's probably more to talk about, but screw that. Daddy's tired. Daddy needs to rest his eyes. 07/23/06 I hear you, America. I haven't updated in a while. Well, it's not like it's my fault. Except that, sure, yeah, it's my fault. Shut up. Don't make me bring back the Monkey Overlord to kick all y'all's asses. I will. Anyway, jeez, I probably have a lot to talk about. First item is that I may very well be writing a movie with Lance Weiler. Some of you may know who he is, some of you may not, but suffice to say that Lance is a cool dude who makes movies. His first movie, The Last Broadcast, was a precursor to the Blair Witch Project in many ways, and his new movie, Head Trauma is all done and ready to hit theaters in limited release September 26th. Stephen gave Lance my name, and apparently spoke well of me, which is a gracious move that proves what a stand-up dude that dude happens to be. Met with Lance on Friday, and we committed to work together on his next movie, collaborating on the script. He had a few stories in mind; one seemed to ping both our radars strongly, and so we're going to take it from there and see where it goes. You can check out the Head Trauma website here. Check out the Flash animation. Some good comics-art went into that, and apparently serves a role in the film itself, and much of it is drawn by Stephen Bissette (of old Swamp Thing fame -- here's some info on him). I'm excited as shiznit about the collaboration. We seemed to be firing on the same cylinders, and I respect the hell out of the guy, so I'm happy as a pig in pig juice. The chance to work on a movie -- any movie, whether it's a four-minute PSA about masturbation addiction or some infomercial about some herbal oil that cures nipple acne -- is a thing of mirth. Second, apparently the writing for VII, the Requiem sourcebook, is nominated for an ENNie, a roleplaying award that I think will get announced at Gen-Con or some such voodoo. I guess if the writing is nominated, and I helped write it, then I'm kind of up for an award, sort of. Or something. They don't mention my or any of the other writers' names, but I'll take what kudos I can get in this life. What else? We're house hunting. It's a process on par with punching yourself in the gonads every day, and after each punch asking, "Did that one feel good?" Your response is inevitably, "No, that hurt," and so the punching continues, unsatisfied until you obviously learn the correct answer of, "That one felt good, yes, thanks, you can stop now." House prices here are just a smeeeedgen too high right now to even consider without vomiting up the contents of our bank account every month, but it seems like prices are eking downward. We'll see. We've got a few options, one of which is to move a little further north to, say, Bethlehem. Though, I hear real estate on the moon is pretty hot right now. For a two-acre crater, it runs you about $365,000, which is on par with the price you'd pay for, say, an outhouse around here. An outhouse infested with spiders. And goblins. I entered into writing this entry with a head full of goo that I was planning on spewing, but most of it is lost. I still have fragments of my thoughts, so I'll spit them onto the screen in little dribs and drabs. Do with them as you will. a) Temple of Doom is a weird movie. The darkest and yet most cartoony of the three Indiana Jones films. Dumb, but not as dumb as you probably remember. And it has a Dan Akroyd cameo and a club called Club Obi-Wan, all in that beginning fifteen minutes of movie that you always forget is there until you watch it. b) I don't really like The Avengers, but The Ultimates is a good time, so thanks to Heslin for providing the reading material. c) The world is exploding. Israel is freaking out. Lebanon is freaking out. People are dying. Everybody is calling for a cease-fire except for America, the UK, and Israel. Everybody else is like, "Whoa, everybody settle down." Even Saddam is like, "Jeez, those people are a little out of control, don't you think?" The world is exploding, and nobody cares. Just like nobody cares that nearly a thousand people just died in another tsunami. Pbbt. d) Penn & Teller's Bullshit! is a fine show. Not one I agree with all the time, but amusing and provocative nevertheless. e) Your Mom. f) Clerks II is a fine movie, in some ways better than its predecessor. The movie had no right being good. But lo, it was good, and Jesus was pleased, and Kevin Smith was silent. Pirates of the Caribbean, the new one, was just sort of meh. Too long, for one, and kind of empty of the puckish joy that fueled the first one. g) Your Mom's Vagina. More later. I swear. 06/29/06 Welcome to today's temporal loop, brought to you by The Internets. If you go here, Stephen Susco will counsel you to come here. And yet, if you come here, I will counsel you to go there. You will bounce back and forth 'twixt the two, seized in the throes of a mad web-browsing circle. You will have entered the digital lemniscate, that kooky sideways '8' that represents the unceasing racetrack of gods-damned infinity. Anyhow. He says nice things. So, go, read, and agree with him. Or I'll command bees to eat your corpus callosum. Uhh, let's see. We're roleplaying again, this time back to Vampire: the Requiem, except Sweet Jesus Lawd A Massy, I don't have to actually run the game this time. Nay, Heslin the Elder has returned from his torpid lawyerly exile in the two-dimensional plane that is Ohio, and he's running the sucker. It's a hoot so far. I'm just happy to play, honestly. I get to fill the shoes of the illustrious Gordo, Invictus legbreaker and occasional hallucinator. (He sees a dark hag-like figure more often than he'd prefer.) Game's great. Heslin tells a good story. He runs a very natural game. Fits like an old condom, it does. Warm and comfy with holes in all the right places. No, I don't know what that means, either. He ran one of my first gaming experiences ever, way back when in the year of Nineteen-Brickity-Dick, and it was awesome then, and it's awesome now. What else? Oh, Superman Returns. Not sure about this one. I hear good things. I like Bryan Singer's work. Brandon Routh looks unexceptional, but see, there's the thing. Superman, to me, is unexceptional. He's so beefy and bulletproof that he's, in a word, boring. It's like, who cares? You want the world's dullest tale? Tell a story about God, James Bond, and Superman. They bang a lot of chicks and save the world a couple of times, and James Bond maybe gets nicked on the nose and Superman cries a lot about Kryptonite, and Yahweh, I don't know, He forgets to close the gates of Heaven when He leaves and Lindsey Lohan comes in and vomits all over the linoleum. I don't know. Point is, how hard can you care about a relatively immortal figure? If Superman were given over to some good soap-opera-ey conventions like the Gods on Olympus, you might find a way to be invested. Those are good stories. But Supes? He's big. He flies. He's chin-tacular. He's a cub scout with a knifeproof codpiece. Snore. Drool. Wake me when it matters. But, but, but, the movie looks good. It does. So, see it, or don't see it? This fence-sitting makes my nuts hurt. Eh well. Oh. I ran out of my blessed olive oil tonight, some of the delicious stuff I picked up from the Olive Press out in Glen Ellen, CA. I swear, that stuff was milked from an angel's mommybags. Truly awesome. Now it's gone. Need more. Want to earn my love? Buy me olive oil from this place. Also got a new phone, which looks exciting because it lights up and plays MP3s and I think maybe does Sudoku and finishes my taxes and doubles as a polycarbonate telescoping baton. The real blueballs about it, though, is that you get this cool new phone (Sony-Ericsson z520a) you have to charge the battery for about fifteen years before you can use it. Assholes. Final thought before I fade: I'm enjoying the Red Hot Chili Peppers again. Now go away. 06/22/06 Just a quickie to whet your tastebumps. This will take you to Wild Review Review, a literary e-mag. Go Columns and Essays, then under Essays, you'll see "It Is What It Is." That's mine. Read it. Or, y'know, don't. (Weird thing about those essays. The one about the "Planet of Women?" That was written by Mary Lou Strewnewski, AKA my creative writing teacher from high school. It either validates my work that I share space with her, or invalidates hers. Either way, hey, cool.) What else? Working on a Hush-Hush Werewolf project, coming hot on the heels of another Hush-Hush Werewolf project. Having quite a bit of fun, which is a good sign that I'm not quite done this gig yet, gull-dernit. One more draft for a short story called "Hell's Bells," and it may get posted on the Town Drunk e-zine. At work, I got my boss hooked on Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and borrowed Civilization 4 from her. I also got to play with Nintendo DS's at work, for work (i.e. they paid me to play). Dark side of that is that I have to work the night events at the library, whereupon children come to play video games and do other silly things, which means I have to deal with other people's jam-handed mongrel broods. I think that's all for the moment. Away with you. Away! 06/13/06 Topic the Third: Places. A brief synopsis of the places we visited in California must first come with a note regarding its feel. I know, it sounds strange, that one place feels different than another, and yet its true. The West Coast -- at least, where we were -- retains a whole different mood than what you'll find out here. It isn't the slack-jawed sloth of the South (sorry, Southernfolk, it's not an insult, I mean, uhhh, not really), but it's certainly not the go-go-go, foot-in-ass anxiety of the East Coast, either. It's something altogether more Zen, more kooky, more cosmic. (Mind you, that might've been all the wine talking. Drink enough wine, and everything seems cosmic. Next thing you know, you're hiking down your shorts and whizzing into a whirling supernova, which is to say, your neighbor's hot tub. While he's in it.) Sonoma, California, is now one of my favoritest places on Earth. Classy without being uppity, it's just a nice town. Green, flowery, everything in walking distance. The restaurants are cozy, the people nice, lots of ease and comfort. Napa's nice, too, but it's less classy, and more uppity. More sprawled out, too. It has nice things, but it's harder to walk to them, and the whole place just feels like it's clinging to a greater disarray. Out of the two, you choose Sonoma. You choose Sonoma, or I'll headbutt you in the junk. San Francisco, man, what a city. We'd heard rumors that driving in that city was tantamount to stabbing yourself in the head with an ice pick six or seven times, and at first, I thought this might actually be true. California has this thing where it hides some of its street signs from you, as if it's a game. It's a game I lost, and a game that isn't much fun. It's probably on par with, like, Operation in its raw sense of futility. Still, though, once you get the hang of it, driving in SF wasn't too bad. The roads are plenty wide, and aside from a few odd-angled streets and turns, it all makes a kind of instinctive sense. Anybody who's driven in a city like, say, Philadelphia knows true horror. Roads barely big enough for a donkey and a kid on a Huffy bike somehow cram two or three cars wide driving rather zippily toward stop signs which all aforementioned cars will summarily ignore. I got so lost in Philadelphia one time with my sister, we were aiming for the big buildings, and we still couldn't get to them. SF has an edge to its Zen, like a knife worth contemplating. We wandered up to Coit Tower (inspiring view) and got lost in Golden Gate Park (a madman's oasis with little rhyme or reason to how to get in or out). We walked up to Fisherman's Wharf (a whore's parade of tourism) and through North Beach (old Italian community with a little Asian spice rubbed into its meat from nearby Chinatown). Chinatown was cool, it was neat to see the Chinatown (well, Chicago also lays claim to having that, but fuck 'em). Lots of chintzy shit for sale, restaurant barkers yelling for you to come inside, foo dogs and Buddhas at every turn. I kind of hoped to see more of those outdoor markets where they have like, skinned cats and wriggling piglets in fish tanks and weird puffer fish for sale, but it was for naught. We did walk by this one "poultry" place that smelled like diapers and salmonella, so, there's that. After Chinatown, we walked to the South of Market (SoMA) which was nice and ritzy and peppered with the occasional cityfied wingnut (more on that when I discuss the people of Cali). The city also has many things all its own. The Golden Gate Bridge, yoinks, what a feeling driving over that sucker. I kind of expected some warning, but suddenly, boom!, big red bridge. Also without warning are the hills of San Francisco, which rise up at roller-coastery 45-degree angles. You know it's steep when your hat falls off into the back-seat, and shit topples from the dashboard. I so wanted to take the rental car and drive like Dirty Harry or something, bottoming-out that sonofabitch so that the car rocks and sparks fly, and then we'd drive into a trolley, and I'd shoot it with my Smith & Wesson .44 Magnum Model 29A revolver with blued-steel 8-inch barrel, and then I'd say something all grizzled and bad-ass like, "Just another day in the Shit Parade" before blowing a hole through my partner's chest because he was really a sociopath killing little blonde girls in Washington Square Park with a meat cleaver. Or something like that. Other stuff in Cali includes: Driving up the PCH, Highway One. The coast is awesome. Ludicrously fun and kind of scary. At parts, the beach sits hundreds of feet below you, and the surf is crashing against these big rocks, and the whole road winds around like a carsmashed snake. Parts of the road slide off into oblivion. You dip between five mile-an-hour and forty, changing every twenty seconds or so. We found a seal colony, that was kind of fun. Can't get that in Pennsylvania, no sir. Also, Armstrong Redwoods Park. I've not much to say about redwoods, except they're big and silent, like weird guardians from some time past. Standing near one, you do expect a giant to come stomping out of the grove, muttering something about "puny mortals" and picking his teeth with like, an RV. That park is in the Russian River Valley, which is pretty and piney and misty, lots of dark green, lots of fir-thicket hills. Oh, and Sacramento. Can't say much about Sacramento, only saw the airport. It seems kind of... generic? Bleak isn't the word, but "basic," maybe? I dunno. We did see several signs for something called SMUD (Sacramento Municipal Uhhh Dunno), which is a horrid name for any kind of anything, unless that anything includes a bucket of petrochemical sludge that you can shape into fun animal shapes for your half-retarded children. "Here, kids! A whole bucket of SMUD! Oooo!" Anyway. There's probably crap I'm forgetting, like how you wake from a crazy-good dream but as the day goes on, more and more pieces of it disintegrate and merge back with your seamless subconscious. Oh well. More later on Cali, probably just one last discourse on the people, who were fun, but deeeeefinitely nutty. Other quick hits: Got a new Vampire assignment in the pipeline, I think. And I updated both the main index page for this site (replete with Flickr flash doohickey on the page) as well as my Resume page. Go. Download it all into your puny mortal brain, rawwr, Chuck smash. 06/08/06 Topic the Second: Food We were equally drunk on food as we were wine. I have no quantifiable evidence of this, but I do believe that California Wine Country probably has some of the best eating in the entire country. The meals eaten easily comprised the best food I've ever had, so much so that it actually depresses me to be back here. I look at the local array of restaurants, or even eye up the meals I make, and I shed a single tear. That tear falls on a 9mm bullet, in which I've carved a sadly-face (opposite of the smiley-face), and then I shoot the bullet near my head, but not into it, because I'm so pathetic that I don't even deserve death, only a proximity to it. That's how good the food was, out there. In more specifics, here's a restaraunt and meal breakdown in order of visitation and consumption. Taste of the Himalayas. You'd think tasting the Himalayas would be akin to licking goat fur or chewing frost-encrusted rocks, but it's really much better. The wife and I had our first dinner at this little place, which had no more than eight tables at which to sit. Chicken Chili appetizer, shared cubed lamb (Lukshya Tarkari), garlic naan, and some kind of tandoori. Thrown together with a bottle of Kenwood Chardonnay. Nepalese food is kind of like Indian food, but with a slight bent toward Asian food (Thai, f'rex). Better still, the restaurant was owned by actual, honest-to-Buddha Sherpas. Very friendly. Very delicious. Romantic to the Max. They guided us to the pinnacle of the mountain of deliciousness. After-dinner dessert, we each had chocolate gelato. I don't know what separates ice cream from gelato, only that gelato is somehow better, firmer, like a more confident ice cream. It kicks ice cream right in the almonds. the girl and the fig. As mentioned, the lack of capitalization is on purpose. Little restaurant, big reputation. World-known, renowned, written up in nearly every major newspaper. Cute, comfy, chic with a dab of pretentiousness that sits on top like a cherry. We had their fig salad, which was good, but strong. Goat cheese, to me, always seems to taste more of 'goat' than of 'cheese,' but whaddya gonna do? The entrees made us forget about the taste of gamboling goat. Michelle had the duck confit, I had the pork chop with jus (that's French for juice!) and Mission fig syrup, with mashed potatoes and these weirdly thin carrots. So good, I'm drooling right now. Dessert, though, oh sweet unmerciful fuck. You like Fig Newtons? They have this warm fig & thyme crisp with fig & port ice cream, and you'll be willing to punch your mother for a second taste. It's really like a big, gourmet Fig Newton, but about a billionty times better. Citizen Thai and the Monkey. Restaurant names get no cooler. This San Francisco Thai eatery, sitting on the cusp of North Beach and Chinatown, summons you inside with a green neon monkey, and it only gets awesomer from there. Hip, clever decor fuses a kind of wacky jazz sensibility with goldfish swimming in birdcages, bright colored lights, and lots of Buddha. Neat electronic music pulsing, thumping to the gurgling beat of your digestive tract. Had Mieng Kum as an appetizer, which is basically a little spoonfull of delectable madness hugged in the chilled embrace of a little piece o' lettuce. For dinner, we shared wok-friend chili chicken with cashew and Sonoma duck in a red curry sauce, topped off with jasmine rice and zingy green beans. Curiously, this was our second night of duck in a row. I never knew I liked duck that much, but turns out, duck is awesome. They're cute and funny, but fuck 'em, Daddy's hungry. No dessert there, had something back in Sonoma, but I forget what, so it must not've been divine. LaSalette. Portugese restaurant in Sonoma. (Can you tell we like ethnic dining? That's actually one of Cali's strong suits. Lots of ethnic food prepared with a kind of Californian fusion. So good you'll punch your mother and a baby.) For a starter, we shared a Portuguese cheese plate -- sheep's cheese (doesn't taste like sheep) topped with almond honey, home-made queso fresco dolloped with tomato jelly, and a kind of firm strong cheese with marmalade on top. Easily one of the top three things we ate in California. For dinner, I had the Petaluma duck with almond sauce and poached pears, and Michelle had some kind of crazy Portuguese dish with beef, pork, sausage, beans, and collard greens. If dinners are like that in Portugal, then I'm so there. Dessert was a fig cake and chocolate mousse, both delicious, but not good enough to kick a loved one. What was awesome, however, was the glass of Port and glass of Madeira we had to accompany that final course. For those, I'd definitely harm a friend or elbow an old person in the sternum or something. Celadon. Napa restaurant, all clean lines and icy mint green colors. Owned and operated by head chef Greg Cole, who showed up on this season of Bravo's Top Chef as a judge. Overall, this was probably my favorite place. Cocktails to start, Michelle had a red pear something-or-other, and I had the Green Lantern, a green-tea-vodka, lemonade, and mint sprig mix. Mmmm. And, named after a superhero. The waiter was hip to this, and noted the irony that the drink is actually more yellow, and therefore would hurt Green Lantern, as that was his weakness. (For all you waiters out there, this is the kind of thing that will make me tip you bigtime. I'll go gladly over 20% for pop culture savvy.) Appetizer was a beef satay that melted off the skewers like napalm-seared man-meat. (Uh, ew.) My lurvely wife had herself a Mongolian-barbecued chicken breast with charred pineapple salsa, and I had a pork chop glazed in a tamarind and red chile sauce, accompanied by sweet potato puree and a ginger-jicama mix. Dessert was a kick-ass gingerbread and a chocolate-hazelnut mousse bar with some kind of crunchy bottom. Which was my nickname in high school, "Crunchy Bottom." All the kids would be like, "Yo, Crunchy Bottom, let's play a game of horseshoes!" because that's what we did in high school, played horseshoes. Varsity horseshoes. Shut up. Wine Train. A Napa tourist institution, here we ate a four-course highly gourmet (read: pretentious) meal. It was good, don't get me wrong, but it just had an uppity thing looking down at you over its metaphorical nose, y'know? Plus, the dinner made me eat things I'd never have eaten otherwise, so that's a big bonus. I figured, fuck it, we're paying a lot of money for this dinner, I'm shoving whatever they put in front of me in my mouth and I'm going to pretend to enjoy it. It could've been a polyester necktie slathered in a gazelle urine demiglace, I would've eaten it. And smiled through yellow teeth. Anyway. First course was a goat cheese salad, and it had raisins in it, which despite my comments from a sentence or two ago, I did not eat. Goat cheese still tasted like goat, but less like goat than I imagined, so hey, fine. Second course was "cedar-something" pike, which is a fish, and was flown from France that day or some nonsense. I don't like fish, and I'm not precisely fond of the French -- and yet? Yeah, it was really, really good. I hate the fishiness of fish, and this wasn't fishy at all. Oh, and it was also sprinkled with caviar. Which, yeah, that's fish eggs, but I ate 'em. Though, here's the thing about caviar: save your money. Buy jimmies instead. Caviar is a tasteless garnish of little tiny crunchy round black and red spheres. Like sprinkles on your ice cream, they serve little purpose. Oh well. Third course, pork chop, cheesy potatoes (probably had a French name like Le Potatois Frites un Fromage le Pantaloons or whatever), and -- drum roll please -- foie gras. Foie gras, by the way, is fatty duck or goose liver. Goddamn it was good. I would've never wanted to eat that, ever-ever-ever. But it was really just awesome, so good you'll flick your mother in the eye, punch a hamster, throw a baby down a well and set fire to the Easter Bunny just so you can eat his delicious liver. I know there's a thing now where foie gras is illegal, because they forcefeed ducks unnaturally to get the liver so tasty. I hear that, and that's cool, but newsflash: no animal is treated well in the slaughterhouse. Ever see chickens? They're half-headless, covered in bloody peckmarks, swollen to balloon-size by chemicals. Why are people all fucking sensitive about the ducks? It's because they're cuter. That's all. Oh! Dessert at this place was Adam & Eve on a Raft, which is -- uh, what again? It was nice and all, but amounted to not much more than two scoops of ice cream or gelato (chocolate and vanilla, apparently somehow symbolizing Adam and Eve?) on what seemed to be a slightly more gourmet Eggo waffle. I mean, it wasn't, but that's what I tasted. So, fuck them. Mustard's Grill. Meh? Meh. The one honest disappointment of the trip. Mustard's Grill is a Napa staple, a kind of roadhouse-meets-bistro (without Patrick Swayze). I don't know what to say -- the food was actually very good, I had ribs, Michelle had a garlicky lamb shank (which is what I'd like to name our son, should we have one: "Lambshank Wendig" -- sounds good, no?), and the mascarpone cheesecake and lemon-lime pie with brown-sugar merangue was positively jowl-drooly. But, here's the thing. We were burned out on wine, and had wine back at the room, so we didn't get wine. Soon as we said that, boom, our waitress turned cunt on us. I mean, I figure she was actually probably a biznitch anyway, but she turned the Cunt Volume up to 11 and broke off the knob. Service counts for a lot. Plus, the place was noisy, the bathroom was little more than a closet, and there wasn't an ounce of romance to the whole place. Finally: Annalien. We had to make up for Mustard's Grill, so after we checked out and before we went to the airport, we hit a small Vietnamese place, very classy (kind of a French colonial Vietnam), in Napa. Really delicious. I don't remember what we had exactly, but there were dumplings and noodles and lemongrass-with-spice. A nice end to the whole foodie experience. That was our delicious adventure. I'll tell you, it really has turned me on to new foods and preparations and I truly appreciate fine dining. Not sure I did before. I also want to learn how to cook like that. I love cooking already, and cook practically every night (I wear the apron in this family, dammnit), but to cook like that? It's like Prometheus stealing fire from the fucking gods. 06/06/06 I will, over the course of several days, try to describe some of the crazy-fun-awesome that was our honeymoon. It seems wisest to broach it topic by topic, hitting the major points and then moving on before you fools have time to ask questions. Deal? Deal. Topic the First: Wine Seems fitting, since, y'know, it was California Wine Country and all that. This region is home to approximately 7 billion wineries. Some are truly palatial, sitting atop massive hills like grape-soaked castles where migrant workers labor like serfs in fields that go on for a thousand miles. Others are like, some dude in his basement, and he's all like, "Woo! I grow grapes out of my butthole!" and you're like, "Whatever, crazyhead." But every road you drive down, every turn you make, bam, new winery. We visited two wineries out of the 7 billion, which was, quite honestly, plenty. You don't need too much exposure to wineries in specific, because you don't need to go to a winery to get wine. Wine is everywhere. It flows in the streets like, well, like fucking wine. Everybody drinks wine, all the time, and they offer it to you, all the time. You could be trash-picking on the side of the road and sanitation workers will come up and brandish a snifter full of Pinot at your mouth. You go into a pet store boutique to buy gourmet doggy bones, and someone is thrusting a Merlot under your nose, claiming it's "pet-friendly." It rains wine. People bleed wine. You will ejaculate goddamned wine. So, don't get too crazy trying to make it to a million of the billions of wineries. Some tourists out there seemed obsessed with the notion: "Did you get to Benziger? Korbel? The Champagne Caves? We made it to fourteen wineries today! We're drunk, and we haven't eaten, but mmm-mmm, wine!" Our first winery was Ravenswood. Hip, slightly ballsier winery, where they tend to espouse the attitude that all the frou-frou shit about wine only half-matters. We didn't tour the facility, instead engaging on a nice tasting flight of their wines (various Zinfandels, a Cab, a Syrah, a Chardonnay, and the candy-like Muscatel). They instructed us how to spit out wines, which is the responsible way to drink it. At first, you don't want to spit, because, ew, spit. And yet, when someone gives you official permission to wantonly expectorate wine from your maw, oh, you'll do it. Because it becomes kind of fun. More fun is watching wine snobs attempt to retain their dignity when spitting purple fluid from forth their well-groomed lips. Jerkholes. Ravenswood gave us a good attitude about the entire experience. While our tasting dude had a bunch to say about smells and composition and what-not, the ultimate lesson he imparted was simple: "Taste is all that really matters." It's how it tastes. Do you like it? Do you like to eat it with cheese? Do you like to eat it with a goat, on a boat, while afloat? Moreover, the whole perception about wine, whereupon you swirl it and sniff it and rub a little behind your ears and flick some in your friend's eye, it's all relative. He was clear about this, as well, that there really are no "right answers," when someone asks you something like, "What do you smell?" (I wanted to be snarky and respond with, "I smell a hint of grass clippings -- and is that a pair of donkey balls I gently detect? It is! No wrong answers!") The curious thing is, though, the entire wine perception process isn't entirely useless. It's about half-dumb, don't get me wrong, but there is a lot to experience in a glass of wine. We had, what, three or four Zins, and each tasted similar, but not the same. Some smelled more strongly of oak or chocolate, others more like cherries. There is a verifiable variance between wines, largely determined by the soil in which a grape grows (appellation) and the type of grape (varietal). Still, though, here's my favorite irony. Someone hands you a glass of wine. You sniff it. They sniff it. We all sniff it. They smell peaches, figs, nectarine, cherries, whatever. They're all agog about the smell of oak or cedar, or a whiff of chocolate or goddamn asparagus. You know what they never say? What nobody ever smells? They never smell grape. Out of all the scents and fruits, nobody ever mentions fucking grape. I was tempted to try, but I was afraid they'd run me out on a rail. "I smell a fragrance of plums mixed with iron filings. What do you detect in the aroma, Chuck?" "I smell grape. Purple grape, not green grape. Like that one Gatorade flavor." Anyway. Our next winery was O'Brien Vineyards, which is wholly different from Ravenswood. Ravenswood ships everywhere. I can go to my local state store and buy it. O'Brien is a boutique, estate vineyard -- all grapes grown on their property, and they only ship to a few stores in select states. There, we did a private two-person tour, whereupon we learned about all the crazy vineyard stuff. Vats, barrels, roses, soil, the appellations of Napa, whatever. We also tasted a shitload of wine -- Merlot, a Chard, and their Seduction (a Bordeaux-style mix of two Cabs and a Merlot). We got to drink Merlot right from the barrels, which is probably equivalent to putting your mouth under a cow's udder as it sprays out, but it was delicious. We drank Merlot by candlelit barrels. We had a picnic out on the vineyard and were assailed by weirdo chickens. Oh! Speaking of weirdos, the lady who took us on the tour was a major fruitbat. Like, to the moon, Alice. I'll comment more on this later (see thesis further in the week: "Californians Are All A Little Crazy"), but suffice to say she was a real wingnut, a total space cadet. Laughing and saying, "Good, good, good!" to anything that came out of our mouth, this vacuous mad look in her feral eyes. She was lovely, very nice, but uhh, you know, crazier than a shithouse owl. We also had a wine flight at a restaurant called the girl and the fig (lower case necessitated), which is just a fun way to drink wine. We had a Red flight, five reds (about two mouthfuls apiece between us). Then we settled on a 2002 Cinsaut (a rarity in the region, as it's a predominantly French-grown red grape) from Frick, and it was some of the best wine we've ever had. So good. And, here's the awesomeness of California Wine Country -- you can just take the bottle with you. We drank half of it, then took it home. In Pennsylvania (a state to which you cannot ship wine from CA, which sucks fetid ass), you can't do that, no way. You can't carry an open bottle outside. There? They don't care. They encourage it. They clap you on your back and send you merrily on your way. So, the Cinsaut went home with us and lasted another night, which was wunderbar. There were many tipsy nights. We were never drunk, never hungover. But I believe we were perpetually tipsy. More later on food, people, sights, cities, and so on and so forth. 06/05/06 The honeymoon is over. I don't mean that as some kind of metaphor, like, now it's time to punch one another as husband and wife. I just mean, well, shit, the honeymoon is literally over. It was awesome, with any suffix you care to add to it: Awesomeriffic, Awesometastic, Awesometacular, Awesomespectaculariffitasticsome. We lived like kings. Or like pigs. Or maybe "Pig-Kings." Yes, we lived like Pig-Kings, shoveling the finest of crap into our hungry maws. The plane rides kind of sucked. More on that later. More on all of it later, really. Right now, two words: Jet and Lag. Go HERE for pics of the whole event. Complete with foolish captions and titles. 05/27/06 In just a li'l while now, boom, plane ride. Bam, wine country. Click-pow, honeymoon. Booze. Food. Amore. Redwood trees. Grape vines. Luxury. Madness. Blasphemy. It's all there, baby. I'm laying it down. We're smackum-yakum. As usual, I've little idea just what the crap I'm talking about, but really, I'm still coming down off the high that was our wedding. A year's worth of planning culminating in a single day. Before that day, I was ready to suggest that it kind of wasn't worth it. I mean, all that money? All that time? For one party? Yeah, but, it worked. Thank you, Wedding Jesus, it worked. It was storybook. It was Goldilocks and the Three Bears, except at the end, instead of them trying to eat her, they all have a house party, and Kid n' Play show up, and everybody gets drunk but nobody gets hangovers, and one of the bears cures cancer, and Goldilocks finds true love by the porridge pot. So, what I'm saying is, totally worth it. The honeymoon should be a blasty-blast, too. Some of the restaurants we're going to are going to be crazy-delicious. Heck, we were watching some of Bravo's Top Chef the other night, and two of the judges were from two restaurants for which we have reservations (Mustard's Grill and Celadon, if you're interesed). Plus, when in San Francisco, we're going to a place called Citizen Thai and the Monkey. How righteously bad-ass is that? We love Thai food. We love monkeys. They have a room called the Monkey Room, for Chrissakes! Other events include a private wine tour and picnic, a nice spa day, a whole day in San Fran, and other delicious accoutrements. So, that's that. We're gone. I'll be vaguely in email contact (wireless net at both inns), but don't expect me to care about you while I'm gone. You're all dead to me while I'm laying in a pool of my own Zinfandel vomit, just like Bacchus. Oh, we have more pics posted to that address posted in the last entry. So, go, ogle, bask in the wedded bliss. Laugh at us. What else? Go HERE if you want to see the Carnifex Press announcement for the anthology. Errr. I think that's it. Bye-bye. See you on the other side of the honeyed-moon. 05/22/06 Rain Jesus was kind to us this weekend, as were all the other Jesuses instrumental in watching over the facets of our wedding. The wedding, in short, was awesome. The people assembled were awesome. Nothing exploded. Nobody broke a bone. We were not besieged by hornets or tsetse flies. My bride is, was, and always shall be beautiful. And now she's totally on the hook, because this shit is legal and binding, baby! Bam! From our camera alone, handled by my sister, 515 pictures found their way back to my computer. This does not include the 50+ pictures I've already received from cameras that do not belong to us. Or the video taken by the one we call Heslin the Elder. Out of that fat wad of digipics, I've culled a quick survey of wedding shots taken from the Mad Photogs and Blistering Paparazzi that hounded us at every turn. More to come, since, you know, this is only like, 4% of our total photo load. Here There Be Pictures. Anyway. To sum up: Holy shit, Wedding! That is all. Go about your day. 05/19/06 All right, Eggheads. I'll keep it brief. Got the good-news-gospel, oh lawdy, yes. Various snidbits of goodery, in fact. [EDIT: Before I get started, you totally have to see this. Do it. Go there. It'll not only show you just how important the art of editing is in film-making, but it'll also make you laugh so hard that pee will squirt from the corners of your gods-damn eyes. Okay, now onto the goodnewsery.] First: I don't have the flu. Thought I might've. Went to bed last night, feverish, ill. Fever broke sometime around 12:30 AM, been all right since. I have to guess that being waylaid with the flu on, say, your wedding day has to be a real bite in the nuts. Second: A short story I wrote, "Squirrely Skin," is going to be published in the Vermin anthology from Carnifex Press in 2007. Pays a little. First book anthology I'll be in. Fourth: June 1st, Wild River Review will begin publishing a column of mine about the act of writing (screenplays in particular). Fifth: I'm marrying the world's most beautifullest and funniest chica tomorrow. T-minus like, 16 hours or something. Freakin' awesome. As the Germans say, "Ich bin ein lucky fuck." 05/17/06 This is what I propose for those of you with my conundrum: You need multiple Jesuses. Now, listen. Jesus was a cool cat, a real humdinger of a dude. His only real problem is that a lot of the people that zealously adore him are, in a hyphenated word, smacked-asses. But all told, Jesus was a mad awesome guy. Depending on the Gospel, he was either a teacher, a revolutionary, a sage, a wizard, the Son of God, the Son of Man. For damn sure he was a pimp, a total God-chosen playa, yo. But see, monotheism just isn't that interesting. It's cardboard. It's the same meal every night, and it's chicken breast, and it has no sauce, maybe a little salt, a dash of pepper. That's all you get. Polytheism, on the other hand, is the shit. It's viva variety, baby. You can have as many different gods as you want, with as many different flavors. It's like a big crazy soap opera on the divine scale. This jerk over here is like, the God of Office Supplies, and was made from semen and sea foam, and he rides a goddamn blue horse into the moon's eye. There he meets his sister, who's totally the goddess of Wood Grain Paneling, and she's a world-class balloonist, and can shoot hydrochloric acid from her eyeballs, and she's really hot except when a solar eclipse hits (at which point she looks like Ernest Borgnine smeared with bacon drippings). Why a solar eclipse? Maybe the Sun God is tired of having balloons come floating by his big orange face because it makes his dogs bark. I don't know. And I don't care. What I'm saying is, polytheism is cool, but there's really just too much to keep track of. Plus, no Jesus. So. Combine the two. The result is multiple Jesuses. Or Jesu, or Jesi, or Jesui, or the Many Awesome Faces of the Jesus. Call it what you want. That's up to you, Princess. I think it'd be great to worship multiple Jesuses. For one, when you have one of those little selfish prayers, you know who it goes to. Before, you had to worry about this one little prayer finding the Big Christ in the Clouds. That's some hard news, there. Slim chance, buddy. It's like, sending a postcard to Microsoft and hoping it gets to Bill Gates. Shit won't happen. But! If you were to pray for candy to, say, Candy Jesus, well damn! How many prayers does that guy get a week? Not nearly as many as the One Jesus would, were there only a single Jesus. Plus, Candy Jesus specializes. He knows what's up. You ask Regular Jesus for, say, those delicious chewy Lifesavers, and suddenly you get freaking Necco Wafers, and those things taste like powdered horseshit. But Candy Jesus, he knows of what you speak. On the mountain he has a limitless supply of those awesome gummy-Savers. Plus, if you come up with many-a-Jesus, you can imagine new costumes. Candy Jesus has to look pretty cool. The blood from his wristholes spirals down his arm in a merry way, like the red stripe that swirls down a candy cane. He's probably got a jaunty top hat, classy like Willy Wonka (but less purple and gay). Anyway, I bring all this up because, as you may know, me and the lady are getting hitched on Saturday, and we don't really want rain. I expect it's going to rain, because, y'know, that's just how the Universe works. "I don't want rain," you say, and boom, 40 fucking nights of rain. Still, I decided I'd waggle my toes in the Christian waters, and say a little public prayer, except I knew that Regular Jesus probably wasn't going to hear me, and so I aimed my prayer (like a magical arrow!) at Rain Jesus instead. I figure, he's the guy to talk to, Rain Jesus. Regular Jesus doesn't give a rat's foot about the weather patterns over Pennsylvania. Regular Jesus probably has to worry about cosmic shit. Scales balancing and dragon-fighting and whatever else Regular Jesus got goin' on. Hence, Rain Jesus. He's our only shot. Oh well. T-minus three or so days. Giggle. Snort. (Oh, PS: You'll note I changed the graphic at the top of the page. I call it the "Photoshop Butchershop Special," whereupon I make crap up as I go. I'm talented. And by "talented," I mean, "Whee, Photoshop filters!") (Crap, PS Number Two: I totally have another new Werewolf book I'm working on, right after the one I'm working on now. We'll call it, I dunno, Snackpunching For Dummies. It's really got me jazzed, it's some special bidness.) 05/06/06 Newsflash, hombres. I'm a busy chimp. Seriously. New job. Deadlines on projects with high word count. Wedding coming up. Honeymoon right after. Plus, I've got to go back in time to Ancient Sumer to fight Nazis who traveled back in time to Ancient Sumer to awaken Nergal from his slumber in the reliquary of Mur-Naki-Amman, because the Nazis want to give Nergal to Hitler as some kind of birthday or "Have Fun Storming Poland" kind of present, and if Hitler is given the reins of Nergal (who has a direct line to Ereshkigal, and we all know how that can go), then the entire timeline of history will change. Oh, America will still win the war, because we're all bad-ass (or, were bad-ass, now we're just a herd of dipshits lorded over by a semi-articulate orangutan), but Hitler won't die. He'll instead be infused with the power of the storm gods, and then they'll put his head in a jar, and the jar will go into space to build an army of, fuck, I don't know, it's all guess-work from here but I figure it'll probably be super-intelligent space-dust (or maybe robotic asteroids with the power to transform into people or trucks or something), and then future America will be subject to attack by Herr Fuhrer Hitlerkopf and his Battallion of Space Butchers. Nobody wants that. So, if you write to me, and I don't respond immediately, you can assume I'm battling Nazis somewhere in time. Or I'm getting married. One or the other. This post is for you, Heslin. 04/25/06 My Dad always said you're only as good as the company you keep. If that's the case, and that's one nugget of wisdom from his mouth that I'm inclined to believe, then I'm goddamn awesome. Why? Because the company I keep is the dog's bollocks, as the Brits reportedly say. (Though, how "dog testicles" translates into "Nice job, mate!" baffles me, but we're not here to discuss the idosyncrasies of other countries.) Suffice to say, I had a fantastic birthday weekend, and my friends ushered me into the Age of Thirty, shepherded forth by my lovely bride-to-be. I will not detail out the sheer depth of awesome swag I got, but I'll just let you know that I'm going to be playing with my new Battlestar Galactica toys, listening to free iTunes tracks, while stomping around in my new Doc Martens. From the shelves, a Jonah Hex Heroclix will watch me with that one freaky eye of his, sneering through his ragged lip. Way I see it, turning 30 just means I get to regress legally. Like, now I have the money to buy the toys I want. Fine by me. Also, I now work for the library. More on this later, and how it relates to my exile from the working world. In the meantime, I must go and get ready for my gub'mint job. Peace out, my homeys from the Internet. 04/21/06 Well, here goes. Episode II of Robot Monkey Spam Theater. Followed by: Episode III. Aaaaand Episode IV. (No, we can't call this one "A New Hope.") I'm beginning to suspect I'm not scared enough. People seem to think I should be scared. Am I nervous about getting married? About turning thirty? About having roguishly good looks coupled with a galaxy-strangling intellect? I'm scared about none of this. I'm actually more excited than anything. Marriage, well, shit, I'm marrying someone I want to marry, as it turns out, so why would I be freaked out about it? What, I'm supposed to be freaked out that I won't have sex or a relationship with anyone else, ever again? Uhh, hello? Bonus! That's totally why I'm goddamn getting married. I found the one, so why would I want to leave it? Dating is a ballbuster. Here's a scenario: let's say I spent about half my life looking through piles of dung for a diamond. Now, upon finding a diamond, why would I continue to search for another, better diamond in subsequent piles of offal? I wouldn't. Because I'm not a total fucking idiot. And people who bring up some wee-tard metaphor, "Uhh, you wouldn't want to eat the same sandwich every day, would you?" Well, yes, I would. Especially if it's a delicious-ass sandwich. If the sandwich is good enough that I'm willing to commit to a life of its consumption, then obviously I love that goddamn sandwich. Plus, I'm a dude who appreciates routine. If you can tell me, "Hey, Chuck, this ripping awesome fucking sandwich right here? It's yours. All you gotta do is buy it a ring." You know where I'm going? To get that sandwich a goddamn ring. As for turning 30, is that supposed to be scary? I mean, maybe fifty or a hundred years ago, sure. When one's lifespan was somewhere around 40-50 years old, then I can see why three decades deep I should be quaking in my twitchy britches. But what's the average lifespan these days? I think it's like, 160 or something. Point is, I have a lot of life left in me. Plus, your 30s and 40s is when shit happens. You never hear about shit happening in your 20s, unless you're like, a jackass pop star (they always seem to peak at about, uhh, 19). Nah, the 30s, that's when the gears turn. So, no fear there. Oh well. Sidenote: I love that I can make a computerized monkey say the words, "Accessible Asshole." I won't go so far as to say it's been a dream of mine, but it's certainly a signpost on the road to cosmic elation. 04/20/06 Before I get into anything else -- today, the first installment of Robot Monkey Spam Theater. Seriously, Check It Out. Various major landmarks approacheth. In one month, I'm married. In just a few days, I'm 30. In a couple minutes, I am going to eat a hot dog, and then take a major wicked pee. Well. Two out of three ain't bad. 04/19/06 My days as a bachelor are numbered. Not only are we t-minus (almost)a month, but this past weekend marked that traditional Rite of Passage, the expected Trial by Boobies, the necessary Gauntlet of Alcohol Poisoning. Yes. It was my bachelor party. I can say little of the events that night, for they are shrouded in mystery and a pervasive tequila-flavored vapor (which stings the eye, and makes it difficult to see). I do know that there was beef, frontally-massaged by a Japanese man with many knives. I remember boobs and cooters, with dollar bills wadded up like little dirty cannonballs, aimed like fiscal ballast at some naked girl's winking anus. There may have been hooting. Possibly a barn fire or three. I -- hazily, mind you -- recall events of ferrets and football helmets, of Indian leg wrestling and gambling with one-tenth of one's soul as the bookie's vig. Were there Russians with guns? Haitians with big hats and rust-chewed machetes? Were we chased down the streets of Philadelphia by the Tonton Macoute, herded into a trap laid out for us by a passel of Bosnian Transsexuals? It's all possible. Nothing remains unlikely. The following day, though, there's your corker, right there. Saturday -- or, Bachelor Party II: Revenge of the Wife-Kept -- we went to a book signing for the new Christopher Moore book, A Dirty Job. We got there, a hair late but happy nevertheless, and Mister Moore was in the middle of a hilarious talk on the nature of death and dying. Somewhere in the middle of this, he looks over to us (obscured in part by a shelf, mind you), and asks: "Are you guys the bachelor party?" And it turns out that yes, yes we are. He banters back and forth with us for a few moments. There is applause. He mocks us for coming to a book signing on a bachelor party. And then we get books signed, a picture taken with him, and we chat for a bit. It was awesome. At first, you know, I had to figure he was either psychic, or we really, like, unmistakably looked like we'd just been to a goddamn bachelor party. Did we stink of liquor and strippers? I know our hair was a bit on the mussy, and our clothes were certainly bedraggled. We hadn't showered. I can't promise we smelled good. We probably looked like the results of what happens when a Labrador Retriever vomits up a dirty ashtray. So, okay, maybe we looked so much like a bachelor party that he couldn't help but comment? Oh, no. My friends -- nay, check that, my awetacular friends -- basically set this shit up before hand. Emailing him, sending him money and coconuts (or whatever it is a dude like him wants), testing him with sleeper agents operating at other, earlier book signings. He was primed and ready to accept a herd of losers stumbling into a book signing, weary and queasy but full of some kind of half-life. Good times, good times. He even vaguely recalled the events from an earlier signing, some nine years previous, in which the ineffable Matthew Heslin and myself found ourselves going out to get drinks with the man. The subsequent dog races, dog fights, and prostitute-wrangling are forever emblazoned upon our memories. He remembered it, too, even referencing the dog races. Though, he seems to have changed his earlier and perhaps most critical advice when attending a dog fight, a gem about betting upon the dog with the lowest center of gravity (the underbelly, you see, that's the tenderest part of the dog, the tenderest). We'll see. Maybe someday we'll get to test the theory again. Pomeranian versus Wolfhound. Bam. That's a bachelor party. 03/31/06 I mean, you almost feel sad for the guy. I mean, not quite, but almost. I'm just glad it's over. We're going back to our anarchic, non-corporate roots, people. Expect the unexpected. And by the "unexpected," I mean the same old shit where I spout nonsense into your eyeholes. As Apernathy said: "Good night, America." 03/30/06 Wow. Uhh. This doesn't bode well for the future of the site. 03/29/06 I had a talk with Mister Apernathy, and he seemed to understand that his own peculiar ways of "connecting" with the public weren't exactly appropriate, given the relationship I obviously have with you, my readers. So, I asked him politely to put together a somewhat softer, more gentle message to my readers, so, check it out HERE. Hopefully he strikes the right tone for public relations. My life is soon going away from me, in other news. I'm playing Elder Scrolls: Oblivion on the 360, and it's boggling in its awesomeness. All the spectacular reviews don't really even cover the sheer spectacularity of the game. Imagine, if you will, that you were dragged headlong from this world and plunged into a real, living, breathing fantasy realm. Where you fight demons and occasionally purchase pie cakes from lizard people. Where you can pluck one of hundreds of books of shelves and read them as if they're real books. Where you might accidentally pick up a cursed wizard's staff that both plagues you with four totally useless Demon Scamps and halves your movement rate so that you move far more slowly than you'd like. It's a good bet that this whole "wedding" thing coming up isn't really going to happen, because, y'know, Oblivion. It's name is appropos to something. Oh -- I was also just wandering around the park today, getting in a walk, and -- did I ever mention before the old dude who came up to me and started talking about ducks and, by proxy, Ogden Nash? Well, I see him from time to time, and today he asked me about turtles. He came up to me and said: "Are the turtles out?" I blink, of course, and ask him to explain. He tells me that up ahead, in the one bend of the stream (which is not a magical stream invented by his senile brain, but a real stream), turtles sometimes bask in the sun. We talk turtle for a moment, and then he turns to leave, and I tell him that he's the Ogden Nash guy, yeah? So we chat for a little while. I learned before, and he reiterated again, how much he loves poetry. He then recited a great deal of both Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky and about half of the Walrus and the Carpenter. To top it off, he then recites the first stanza of Rudyard Kipling's Gunga Din. He then told me his name. Bill Banks. He said he just has a memory for poetry. I don't think he's crazy or senile -- which, by the by, is not an impossibility in that park. I walk there often, and a halfway house is nearby, so the park is often filled with lunatics, the age-addled, and the socially withdrawn. This guy, I think, is just eccentric, and possibly a hair lonely. He seems nice. And oddly wise. 03/28/06 I think there's been some confusion as to just what it means to have been purchased by a corporate sponsor and venture capitalist. Our nameless benefactor (though public records indicate his name may be "Apernathy") has sent a response to some of your queries: His Response. Anywho. I'm working hard on churning out some word count, like turning rancid milk into sweet butter. Milady's bridal shower was this weekend and went off with a bang. It was a hit amongst all, despite the slightly creepy intimations of my bride receiving semi-sexy lingerie from, uh, my mother of all people. Kind of gross. I want no minders of my mother during times of gilded booty. Let's just say that wilts the fruit on the vine, yeah? Yeah. That's all for now. Later: thoughts on those smacked-asses who think Intelligent Design is science (it's not) and who believe evolution isn't a proven fact (it is). 03/27/06 So, here's kind of a weird development. This website has just been purchased. As it turns out, a rather wealthy benefactor has decided to pay for all costs associated with the website, as well as providing "managerial support" to help steer the content of the site as well as my career. You can hear more from the site's new owner HERE. P.S. The Internet is totally awesome. 03/17/06 Sweet, unmerciful fuck! I'm a foolish dude. I might as well punch myself in the head with a brick. That's how dumb I am. Why dumb? Well, because I am saddled with work. Work of my own doing. I asked for it. I wanted it. I still want it. I love the workload. I love to have my plate overflowing with crap, because it keeps me sharp. Dumb. But sharp! Like a retarded knife! Or like a retarded metaphor about a retarded knife! Which makes no sense! I'm already addled! Call the doctor! Let's see. Betwixt now and, ohh, May, I've got three books I'm working on, one of which has a biggum-word-count. I also am going to be writing a series of columns for Wild River Review e-magazine (here) about my experiences writing a screenplay. Moreover, I just finished my second screenplay, and hope to get a third draft of the first screenplay, and a second draft of the second screenplay, and who's on first, and oh, also, four, eight, fifteen, sixteen, twenty-three, forty-two, hike. Plus -- I might get some part time work soon. I actually have an interview with the library. Oh! And I'm also joining the Quakertown film society. Oh! Right. And I'm totally getting married in May. I am stupid. I love it. I am a retarded knife. 03/13/06 Link Vomit. Ready? Begin. Here you'll find a video of Will Wright demonstrating his new upcoming game, Spore. Easily one of the most revolutionary games I've ever seen. Baby want. Warning: This puppy is like, 35 minutes long. This is what happens when someone hooks various PC soundboards up to Xbox Live, and "talks" to the various mouthbreathing ass-wits on Halo 2. The Mister Rogers conversations are probably the funniest. Website that, if it doesn't make you go, "Awwww," at least once, you probably have a clockwork heart and a brain of gleaming Tungsten. Slick Deals is all about the, uh, well, slick deals. Every day, the site rounds up a couple really awesome deals found somewhere on the web. Lots of tools, techstuff, cooking crap, whatever. This, I mean, I dunno. I'll let its title speak for itself: "I want to poop back and forth." That is all. Go home. Ingrates. 03/08/06 I went from a relative paucity of work to a sudden, tumor-like swell of it. That's a good thing, despite my reference to a tumor. I've got a Mage book, which we'll call Jellied Brains, an-as-yet-unknown Werewolf book, and a Supa-Sekrit project which we will call, Mr. President, It's Time To Summon the Pterodactyls. I also finished up the second draft of the screenplay, and am 50-some pages into a second piece. In addition to Pure redlines, Daddy's a busy bitch. There you have it. I was going to wax at length about why TV shows like The Shield and Battlestar Galactica are awesomeness-on-toast. I'm still going to talk about it, except I plan to keep it curt. Because I'm lazy. Here's why these two shows (and, to a lesser extent, Arrested Development and The Sopranos) are both powerful and revolutionary: a) They are not afraid to pull their punches. Pain happens. Conflict occurs. An episode is not a way to tie up conflict and usher in the next one -- it is, in these shows, a way to escalate conflict and push the madness further and further and further. b) The shows, really, aren't even all that episodic. They are, obviously, technically encased in that model we refer to as "episodes," but they are more like chapters in a novel, with the season representing that novel. Other shows handle each episode as an encapsulated device. These shows in particular contain a major story, carried throughout an entire season. Future seasons are continuations of a larger arc. c) As such, episodes are rarely wasted on filler. In every episode, something big happens to move the plot forward. They are not tire-spinners or place-holders. Big shit happens, always. It may be subtle (if you can have big subtlety, which I think you can), but it's there nevertheless. d) Characters are multi-faceted. They are neither good, nor bad -- they are merely people with traits of both. e) That single-shaky-cam shit really works. That is all for now. LATE DAY EDIT: Got the one dog, Yaga, back from the vet. His Lyme disease is mostly gone; not that it matters, mind you, because it never affected him adversely in the first place. Only time he got sick was when I started giving him antibiotics. Took him off the meds, and he was back to fine. Here, for you, is a brief history of the stuff this dog has survived, and why I suspect he's probably bulletproof: He ate a box of rat poison. He ate an entire box of chocolate truffles (which he them vomited up on my heating vents, so every time the heat came on that winter, my home smelled nicely of chocolate, and not-so-nicely of chocovomit). He was attacked by an elk (a bull-elk caught Yaga in his antlers and smashed the dog up against the fence a few times). He ate a cassette tape, which resulted in me having to tug about four feet of tape out of his asshole in a parking lot. He hits his head a whole bunch on things. He escaped, played with neighbors, and got taken by police to the SPCA for a couple nights. He's been kicked in the face numerous times by a rabbit. He's been bitten in the face numerous times by our other dog, who hangs on his lip like it's a goddamn pull-up bar. Finally, he has Lyme disease. There's probably more. Point is, he comes out entirely unscathed. You'd never know any of it. He's at least part Shepherd, Belgian by the looks of it, so maybe it's a shepherd thing. We had a dog growing up (I was very young) named Tasha. She survived getting hit by a car, getting shot by a shotgun full of rock salt, getting mauled by a Pit Bull, hit in the head with a shovel, mauled by a Doberman, and several other lesser scuffles. How'd she die? Of old freaking age. My father swears she was part wolf. My mother thinks that's crap. They're divorced now. The End. 03/06/06 Let me reiterate: Writing is easy, being a writer is hard. It's weird for me, right now. I'm in an odd place. Not a bad place, no no no, just a... weird one. Trying to describe it (or shit, even understand it) is like trying to wrestle with a greased-up swordfish. Even once I think I've pinned it, the damn thing either slips away from me or sticks me in the eye with its swordface. Right now, here's how I'll put it: I feel like I'm on the cusp. Not of something big, not some yawning chasm of delight or pain, but -- hell, I don't know. Something big enough. I know I've climbed the first rungs of success. And the ladder is complete. I'm at the top -- the zenith rung, a term I just made up but sounds like some crazy new Tom Clancy novel-made-into-a-movie ("The Zenith Rung," starring Steve Carell as Jack Ryan, dum-dum-dum!). I can't hang out on this ladder for long. I'm going to either need to climb down and get on a new goddamn ladder, or I'm going to have to jump for a bigger, better one. I've got a lot of irons in the fire, to be sure. First screenplay is nearing final draft zone (though one wonders if anything ever reaches a truly final draft). I've got a second screenplay in the works, and just hit the end of the first act. I've got a ping from an agent on the novel. I've got a potential column coming up in the Wild River Review online lit-mag. I might have a short story in another mag. I've got White Wolf stuff coming up (a new Mage book on the horizon, and maybe a Vampire one, too). And yet, I'm afraid. Like I'll botch it all. Since I'm so fond of dippy metaphors, let's say this: every small success buys you a small line of credit. You can use that credit, spending it wisely, investing it toward bigger things, or you can gamble it. There's a third, worse option, too: squandering it. If it sits, unused, the credit dwindles. Gotta strike while the iron is hot (double-metaphor-switchback, beware!), or you lose your heat and you can't mold the metal. I know I'm not squandering it. I'm doing stuff. I'm working. I'm making every effort, sticking the bucket on my head and trying to pound down the wall, but I am afraid that I'm gambling it, or making the wrong choices. We're coming down to zero hour. I'm getting older. Nearly 30. In the next ten years, I've gotta make something of myself, gotta figure out how to navigate the labyrinth. Labyrinth? Jesus. How many metaphors am I going to use? It's like, like I'm some kind of seven-headed hydra -- wait. That's a metaphor, too. Shit. Maybe I should rename my web address: www.metaphorsforassholes.com. Anyway. Them's my two pence, my pair o' rubles, my zwei pfennig, right thar. Random totally unrelated thought: In the most recent list for Famitsu Magazine's 100 Best Video Games Of All Time, only one -- one -- game is from an American developer. It's not exactly surprising, but it does speak to what I perceive as an odd irony of the Japanese pop culture. Take a lot of anime: yeah, it's clearly Japanese, but so much of it feels like they're emulating American figures, hairstyles, figures-of-speech. They certainly don't hate us, and yet, when it comes to technology (the category under which games fall more, rather than pop culture, I guess), they seem utterly anti-American. I may be wrong about this. If anybody has theories to the contrary, sound off on the forums. Wait, what's that? We don't have forums here? Oh, right. Ha ha ha ha ha ha. MY VOICE IS KING. Go mouth off somewhere else, peons! (Man, that was totally uncalled for. You people are nice to me, and see how I repay you?) 03/02/06 This is why you people need me. Go there. Number four is probably the best. 02/27/06 Hm. I think last week I forgot to mention that I had a movie review in the newspaper (The Reporter) last week. It's not like I got paid for it or anything, and the review was for Pink Panther, which was about as funny as wheat paste, but still. It's news from the World of Me, so there you go. Other quick tidbits: Fight Night 3 is a game so visceral, you come away from playing it with a bloody nose and a need for violence. It's a boxing game. I don't really give two squats about boxing, but I might start. The game -- for the 360 -- is very next-gen, and by that I don't mean the graphics (though they are realistic enough to disturb you). I mean to suggest that it needs no meters or gauges like other fighting games. Yes, it keeps track of your health, your stamina, your ability. But when you're boxing, none of those things are portrayed via the standard bars or meters. No, you just know how your boxer is doing, because it shows. It handles every iota of slowdown, every brow-cut, every winded wheeze toward the end of a round. It's sick. Scary. Awesome. Plus, the create-a-boxer thing is fun. It's like a roleplaying game, where you improve stats and send them on a career of boxing madness. My dude now, a giddy-looking dipshit named Curtis "Big Train" Frizzell. So good. Watched the end of Battlestar Galactica, the first season. Either my standards for television have dropped or TV has upped its game, because this is just one of a battery of shows that kicks my ass. Second draft of my screenplay nears some level of completion. I hestitate to suggest that it's a great piece of writing, but I know I enjoyed the process, so there's no better mark for me. Even if it's a genuine P-O-S, I like the process, and I like what came out of the process. So, good. Everything is peachy. Wedding, just shy of three months from now. Life progresses. I've a friend -- the amazing Jessica Vale (though I know her by a more mysterious moniker) -- who is partially responsible for The Sex Album, whose track Disco Libido is now on the Billboard charts. I was listening to Sirius satellite radio the other day, and they mentioned her song a couple of times. Crazy. Good for her, kicking life in the snacks and all that. This will take you to her website, should you feel so inclined. Oh. Go here -- two great tastes that, uhh, never mind. Just go. View. Be disturbed at the implications. Watch as your innocence is defiled, bent over the kitchen sink like a common scullery maid. 02/20/06 I got 99 problems. But a bitch ain't one. Week went well. It was the Lady of the House's birthday this week, alongside Valentine's Day. For the latter, I recieved some muy good goods, including the elusive "Spudtrooper," which is to say a Mr. Potato Head in Star Wars Stormtrooper gear. Geeks, rep-ruh-zent. His pistol is some kind of photon potato masher. It is delightful, and sometimes I stare into his bulbous detachable eyes, and I say things that no potato should hear. Which is pretty much fine, because he doesn't have ears. Real quick pop culture dump: The Constant Gardner is so worth your time. It's a subtle, powerful thriller. Waiting is not a good movie, not at all, but it is a funny movie, which counts for a lot when you're watching comedy. (And, hey, Dane Cook.) Pink Panther is not a good movie, not at all, and it's not a funny movie either, which counts for shit when you're watching comedy. Poor Steve Martin. Battlestar Galactica is a stellar television show (or, in other words, it is "bomb-ass"), and the new season of The Shield is so tight and hot it's like a sphincter with a Thai pepper shoved unmercifully inside. Oh, last pop culture note: Right-click here -- save this madness to your computer, and watch it. It's relatively work-safe. You'll thank me. Hopefully with money, in a bag. Real quick writerly dump: I think all my new releases are now on shelves. I have copies of all except Legendary, and I'll be winging some of my extras up onto eBay for all who care to hopefully give me money (in a bag, or, you know, through Paypal). I'm nearly finished Shadows of Mexico, which has been more fun than I really figured it would be (compared to Shadows of the UK, which was less fun than I expected). I got notes back from Stephen on the screenplay, which remains without a title. His notes were spot-on, complimentary, but not cloying and sticky (as if molested by a child's jam-hands). I will endeavor to punch a second draft into shape in the coming weeks, see if it can't be made to get up and dance. What else? Wedding is good. Dogs are fine. America sits poised on the brink of utter destruction, teetering on the lip of madness because the rest of the world is going goddamn beserk and we don't have the faculties to stave off the crazies anymore. So, situation normal. Yep. If you're having girl problems, I feel bad for you, son. I got 99 problems -- -- but a bitch ain't one. 02/06/06 Had a ping from an agent requesting to see the latest novel, so that's real good. I'm excited about it. A little too excited, actually, kind of queasy. You do your best to turn in a solid draft, the best of which you can conceive, but you can't help but feel that it's all crap, that everything you've done is crap, and that the best thing you can do for the world is to stab out your eyes and bite off your fingers to make sure that you never soil the world with your diaperwriting ever again. Y'know. Or something like that. Either way, it's good that my query letter maybe worked. Since I'm so drooly over metaphors, it's like fishing: I got a bite. Now, maybe I can reel it in. If I lose this fish, at least I know my bait (re: the query letter) is potentially a good one. I am hungry for success. Pray to your heathen gods for me. Screenplay, pleenscray, page 101. INT. EDGEWATER MOTEL ROOM - MOMENTS LATER The gun goes off behind the bathroom door: BANG. Moments pass. Nothing happens. Finally, the door opens. Harriet comes out, cell phone in hand. She opens it. Looks around, satisfied. DIALS a number. Presses it to her ear. HARRIET (into the phone) Frankie. It’s Harriet. More later. 02/01/06 More. From page 18. INT. ASHLEY’S APARTMENT - NIGHT Miriam has Ashley pinned on the couch. She’s clearly the aggressor. She’s down to her bra; he’s now shirtless. She bites his lip and tugs it with her teeth. He pulls away for a split second. ASHLEY (breathing heavily) Is this okay? MIRIAM Normally, I don’t let anybody touch me. Not anybody I like. You, I’ll make an exception. She attacks him again. Her lips cover his like she’s hungry and hasn’t eaten for weeks. The Vampire project is official, rec'd outline, contract on its way. I'd call it Yo Quiero Taco Blood, but fuck it, the book is already half-announced, so we'll just call it what it is: Shadows of Mexico. Random note about me: I have become a coupon whore. It's a science, this grocery shopping thing. On a regular visit, I save 30-50%. I am fierce. I attack sales and coupons like a Spetsnaz knife fighter. 01/31/06 Screenplay shit. Page 53. EXT. BUSY ROAD - DAY Austin runs across the busy road chasing his balloon. Miriam stands in the parking lot, calling to Austin. She stands with a TALL COP and a BITCHY MOTHER, but only Miriam sees the boy running after his balloon. A car strikes Austin. I'll tell you right now that writing for the screen feels weirdly intuitive. Maybe I've seen too many movies. Who knows? It's both easier and harder than writing a novel. Easier because it's a very streamlined process. Action, dialogue, action, dialogue. Set the stage, and people talk. Conflict happens. Action occurs. A novel is the same, but has the added dimension of thought and explanation. We delve into a character's head. As author, we explain things to the reader that she could not normally have known. In a novel, for good or ill, there's a lot more telling beyond the showing. In a screenplay, you don't have that. You show. Telling is only possible through dialogue, and even then, it's a form of showing, because it is through a character's own words and mannerisms that an explanation exists. It is in this brevity that writing a screenplay can also be more difficult. I liken it to this: Writing a novel is like a spray of machine gun bullets. Rat-a-tat-a-fucking-tat. I'm going to hit you as often as I don't, but you're still dead even if I've chipped away half the wall in my attack. A novel is sloppy, almost by necessity. The path from beginning to end meanders; wild switchbacks are not uncommon in a novel's narrative. Certainly you don't want this to be too extreme, or you'll lose the reader, tossing them off the curve as if the asphalt was this mortal coil. But a degree of sloppiness -- it's also useful in a novel. It's like spice or garnish. It's not necessary, but it completes the meal, makes it more appealing, less bland. Yeah. I know. I'm mixing all kinds of metaphors. Food. Guns. It's my website! Shut up. Back to guns. Writing a screenplay is like a sniper bullet. You get one shot. You have to hit the head, or you don't hit at all. You simply don't have time to spray the field of battle with bullets. You have X number of pages (i.e. minutes) to convey a series of things: plot, story, character, nuance, mood, theme. If you miss your shot, that's it, too bad. You don't have time to be sloppy. To jump the tracks and go with a food metaphor, a screenplay is a single serve meal. It's in a wrapper, like a candy bar or a bag of peanuts. You can't dress it up. You unwrap, eat it, and move. And then you kill some ninjas. Just because, fuck it, I want to mention ninjas, because ninjas are the shit. Man, I could metaphorize all day. A novel is a cross-country trip on no time limit. A screenplay is a trip to the corner store in ten minutes. A novel is a fat man enjoying a seven-course dinner. A screenplay is a supermodel wolfing down a Big Mac and throwing it up in a urinal before her big shoot. A novel is a stampeding auroch. A screenplay is a hummingbird that flies backwards. I think I've lost all sense of meaning, here. I'll stop talking about that. Point is, I enjoyed the process, I have an idea for at least two other movies to write (one horror), and I learned a lot about novel-writing by writing a screenplay (a lesson in brief, yet powerful, language). Game-writing continues apace. Turned in a second draft for a Werewolf book, and it looks like I might score some quickie Vampire work as well as another Mage gig, plus a little something I can't mention (if it even happens). So, yeah. Now, be a good supplicant, offer me prayer, and go buy yourself some Blasphemies and Armory, because both hit shelves yesterday. Do it. Or I shall punish you and your loved ones. 01/20/06 Snippet nummer zwei: Harriet moves in fast: she delivers a series of punches to Miriam’s gut. Then, POP, a punch to the face. Miriam’s lip splits, bleeds. HARRIET The one person in the world that your gift doesn’t work on is yourself. That’s very sad. MIRIAM (drooling) Please... don’t hurt him. HARRIET I’ve read between the lines in your diary. Sometimes the text skirts obviousness, other times the ambiguity is troubling. That said, I’ve figured it out. Miriam says nothing. HARRIET No smart remark? No witty comeback? Still no comment. Miriam just blinks slowly, heavily. Well, I finished it. She is done, this screenplay. Clocking in at 107 pages, approximately 107 minutes. I'll tighten it more. Tomorrow. 01/29/06 Screenplay snippet. Page 5. INT. TRUCK CAB - NIGHT The truck cab is expansive, clean, shiny. The only ornamentation is a pair of dice (not fuzzy) dangling from the rearview. The driver, LOUIS CAHILL, is in his late 30s, maybe early 40s. His face is weathered, but kind. The truck RUMBLES along as Miriam sits silently. LOUIS Where you headed? MIRIAM Nowhere. Wherever. LOUIS You don’t care? MIRIAM Not so much. Away from that motel. LOUIS And if I’m going to another motel? MIRIAM Long as it’s not that motel. I just hit page 90 of the piece today. It goes. I'm very pleased with the result. 01/24/06 Screenplay, boom, fifty pages out of one-twenty. It goes fast. Furious. Fun. I do not get flummoxed. (Doesn't Flummox sound like... some kind of Lewis Carroll creature? Like, maybe it leg-wrestles the Jabberwocky or some shit. I don't know.) What else? Man, I dunno. The wedding thing is kicking into high gear. Ordered a cake. Bought a camera (a hot-shit 8MP Canon Powershot S50). I'm getting the ring this week. Tuxes soon after. Invitations are in the works thanks to the Maid of Honor (also known as the "Best Lady"). From last Saturday, the wedding is four months off. Zoinks. Holy shit, Daddy's getting married -- and to a girl he doesn't deserve, to boot. Oh, right, also: Battlestar Galactica. Man, that's a great show. What the hell is going on over the last couple years where TV is getting so brave and edgy? It's like, television isn't afraid to be ballsy, and a lot of it is happening on smaller stations or even cable. Battlestar is on Sci-Fi, which is home to some moderately-okay sci-fi, but this is a powerful-good series. Very human. Not at all campy. And holy dark. Within the first like, ten minutes of the miniseries, a Cylon snaps a baby's neck between her fingers. It only gets darker from there. Quick note, though, if you decide to rent it, because this will confuse you mightily. It confounded me for like, a week or more. I rented Disc One of the first season of the series, right? I get it, we put it in, and it makes no sense. The show starts off very in media res, so much so that you're lost. So, we pop the disc out mid-episode, and the disc says: "DISC TWO." I figure Netflix just screwed up. I reorder the disc, send it back. Same thing. Here's the trick: The miniseries counts as disc one of the first season. Even though it's a whole separate set and nowhere is this clear, you have to rent the miniseries first. Which is fine, had they actually, ohhh, marked the discs that way (not Netflix, but whatever Big Production Company makes the discs). Oh well. Still, it's killer. Rent it. 01/19/06 Dear Blog, Okay, so, writing a screenplay is some of the most fun I've had writing in years. It feels easy. Slicker than gooseshit on a glass window. Don't get me wrong, maybe I'm kidding myself. Diarrhea is easy, too, but that doesn't mean it's good. The screenplay might be crap. And that marks, officially, the third time I've referenced feces in this post. I should go back to writing the screenplay. By the way, I've updated my Resume. Check it out, if you care enough. Love, Chuck P.S. Kakadoodypoopy. 01/17/06 Funny = here. I, uh, definitely didn't say any of those things. I'm really professional. Shit, nobody else is, sure. But I'm like, a total fuckin' pro. So. Uhhhh. Yeah. 01/12/06 As a writer, you encouter a number of paradoxes, both about the craft and your own personal relationship to it. In fact, part of the craft is simply navigating this Mobius strip of thorns. Perhaps at some juncture I'll begin to list the many conundrums and idiosyncrasies of the process. For now, I'll leave you with one. I've already rambled on at length about the conflicting advice for writers looking to sell a novel-length manuscript. I have encountered two more pieces of "advice" that fight with one another for dominance. First piece of advice: "A literary agent is likelier to take you as a client if you already have a novel published." Second piece of advice: "A publisher isn't likely to look at your manuscript unless you have an agent." To me, this sounds a bit like that old saw about finding work: "You need experience to work here, but the only way to obtain the requisite experience is by working here." At which point you disappear in a disgruntled puff of inability. What those two pieces of cruel advice tell me is that a writer must possess two particular qualities to persevere in this business. You gotta be crazy. And you gotta be lucky. I know I'm the former. I have some evidence, however small, that I am occasionally the latter. We'll see. Today I finished a list of 50 potential agents, rated in Excel from 1 to 10 (1 being Agents Who Might Like My Shit and 10 being Agents Who For Some Reason Are About As Accessible As The Ass End of Pluto, The Planet Not The Cartoon Dog). I have already sent out one query letter already, this one via email. It's actually surprising how many won't let you send via email. Writers ain't rich. Nobody likes to waste paper or postage. Why not harness the magic power of electronic mail? Another inconsistency among agents is how response times vary wildly from agency to agency. One guy will tell you he'll get back to you in two weeks (nice considering, hey, a query is just a one page letter and the response is merely a request to see the whole manuscrupt), and another won't get back to you for three fucking months. Uh, yeah, I might be dead by then, could we put some hornets in our pants and get moving? Cripes. Anyway, I'll be sure to regale you all with the steps and missteps in this oh-so-humiliating and befuddling labyrinth. We'll be right back, after these messages. Fellas grab your nut-sacks, chicks squeeze your breasteses. 01/10/06 I have thoughts. These thoughts are barely connected. But they exist nevertheless. So, unto you, I deliver. Writing. Writing continues. Most of the way through the Pure book at this point. Also finished recently: Tome of the Mysteries (Mage book, previously called, "Gaze Into My Pants"); Shadows of the United Kingdom (previously called, "The Big Book of Bubbledick"); and the book still referred to as "Bloodlines 3: The Fermented." Chicago just came out (not that I have my goddamn author copies yet), and coming very soon are: Blasphemies, Legacies: the Sublime, Bloodlines 2, and Armory (yay, paycheck!). The novel is in works, I've written the query letter and have put together a growing list of potential agents to ping with the letter. The screenwriter meeting was rock solid good stuff -- the guy's not at all some Hollywood douchebag, but a salt-of-the-earth smart-geek like the best of them. Dead or Alive 4 is a hot little fighting game. A good party game, no doubt. Beautiful. The fighters still look like plastic doll fighters, but that's not the graphics, that's the way the Japanese demand it. The backgrounds are elaborate and beautiful. We beat the story mode with everybody, thus unlocking the Spartan-458 combatant -- which, if you didn't know, is a female Master Chief-suit scrapper from the Halo series. Holy shit, she's cool-looking. If Halo 3 looks even remotely like that, I will spackle this world with ejaculate. I mean, it's dumb that there's a Spartan warrior in the middle of this retard fighting championship, don't get me wrong -- and yet, it appeals to my geekly sensibilities in so many ways. It's like watching a movie where the blue lion from Voltron fights Holden Caulfield from Catcher in the Rye, or where Superman plays air hockey with Dr. Who and the fucking Trix Bunny or something. It's stupid. But that doesn't stop your enjoyment. Oh! Oh. And one of the throw-moves is where the Spartan sticks a goddamn plasma grenade to your enemy's chest and then hurls them away as it explodes. Yes. Yes! Fight Night 3 Demo is now downloadable on Xbox Live. It's the shit. I don't like boxing, at least not to watch, but the game is very fluid, very natural -- no HUD, and the graphics are so frighteningly realistic it's eerie. It looks like you're psychically controlling two actual boxers. They trickle blood from eyes. Slow-mo shots shows flesh ripple with hits. Skin is pockmarked and bruises. Yikes. Sirius Satellite Radio is hit-or-miss in quality, whether in sound, programming, or technology. It's pretty cheap if you get a deal (and uber-cheap for us, because Michelle's parents gave it to her for Christsticemas or whatever that holiday is called). I mean, though, let's be honest, we got it for Howard Stern. I'm not a slavering fanboy of Stern's, but I continue to respect him and what he does as an artist and marketing machine, and his new show does not disappoint. It's a far better show than what existed on FM (er, "terrestrial") radio, and feels altogether more natural. That said, one has to wonder, because he's not a force of resistance inside an oppressive environment, does his newfound freedom also evaporate his edge? So far, no, but time will tell. Still, the guy's got newly-out George Takei as his announcer. Live all week. It's the best thing on radio, ever. Takei in 2008. Writing, Part II: I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Writing is easy. Being a writer is hard. I know people don't think so -- and mind you, I'm not complaining, I'd rather be a writer than anything else, but that doesn't mean it's a cakewalk. I think endemic to writers is a level of busted self-confidence. I don't know if that is what feeds the writing, or if the writing feeds the lack of confidence, or if somehow the two are toothily intertwined, like the snake biting its own tail. But traveling the path of the writer is frought with danger and indecision. Your destiny is so painfully your own, at no point (at least no point that I've yet reached) does someone take your hand and lead you down the path. No time to relax. It's like being a shark: swim forward perpetually, or drown. This year, I don't intend to drown. The urge is always there -- simply sink, simply give up. I can't do that. I can't manage it, not without putting a knife taped to a bullet and covered in strychnine straight through the uppet soft palate in my mouth. I expect this year is going to be bumpy. I'm going to need to get some more work, both writing and maybe something hourly after Feb/March (when my money stream dries up again until May/June). It's scary. I'm scared. And yet? It's exciting as shit. The Honeyed Moon. We booked part of our honeymoon. We found a sexy little hacienda inn and spa out in Sonoma, CA, right on the plaza. It ain't cheap, but we're renting a room that's nearly as big as our condominium. It overlooks a vineyard. Has a stocked fridge. Whirlpool. Balcony. King-sized bed. Chaise lounges. Opulence. Luxury. Monkey butlers. All right, maybe not monkey butlers. Still. Wine, food, and mind-blowing relaxation. Mmmm. 01/06/06 Oh Jesus, fine. Here I am, America! You can stop throwing trash cans through windows and looting the Circle K for Pabst Blue Ribbon and Starburst. I'm here, I'm back, I'm not dead, my wisdom comes straight through the Internet like a hollow-point bullet fisting your skullwomb. So shaddup already. I had plans. Really, I did. I was going to get on here, and I had a lot to say. I was going to tell you about my holidays (which were deliciously numbing). I was going to tell you about all the cool swag delivered unto my person (Sealab 2021 Bizarro action figures? Damn yeah). I was going to regale you with lists of the Most Bestest and Utterly Worstest Shit from 2005, with bullet points and fucking bold headers and like, goddamn red lasers that etch Powerpoint presentations onto your goddamn ocular nerve! I had tales, dammnit. Lunch with a screenwriter! Solstice with Tittie Toppers! The White Stripes, Satellite Radio, Zombie Preparedness, and Nine Discs of the Alien Quadrilogy! It was pathos covered in ethos and given a nice hat to wear to Church, by gum! I had plans! Lesson for the new year: Plans sometimes fall apart. Shit, people, I got busy. The holidays are crazy. It's like herding bees. Like I have time to take a minute and sit down and throw my genius onto the public domain? I didn't see any of you sending me money. I only got thousands -- thousands of billions -- of emails begging, screaming, whining for me to post something, anything here. Just a tidbit, some of you said. Even a 'r0xx0r!' or a 'blah-blah-bullshit-I'm-a-writer-and-I'm-cool!' kind of crapgasm. And yet, not a single one of you assholes offered me money. You think I'm rich? You think I have money stuffed in my asshole that I can just poop out and fling at the heavens? I shake my fist at you. So, Oh-Six. I've said it before, regret is useless. Looking back on past failures is only good for a moment's recognition, at which point you either hike up your trousers over the crack of your ass and get back to business -- careful not to retread the same sad errors -- or you meditate upon your own weakness. Which is, really, on par with laying your head in a puddle of piddle, which is, really, full-on useless. Rumination on success, however, is just as tireless and meaningless. Success is worth examining, but not for lingering. Tap-dancing time and time again on your own god fortune is not only vain, but a good way to cultivate a stagnant life, innit? What I'm saying is this: 2005 was a good year for me, mostly. An imperfect year, but I've yet to see a stretch of time worthy of real perfection, so that's not a failing by my standards. With 2005 done, capped, canned, there's nothing else to say. I'm proud that I survived a year in exile, writing for money and not starving or losing the roof over my head. I'm proud of the lady I love and the friends I keep. What regrets I have are few and barely worth the whisper it would take to name them. So, yeah. Oh-Six. Eyes to the future, mates. And it's going to be a good year, yes it is. I'm getting married. I'm going to California. I'm going to keep writing. The marriage thing, that's emblematic of other things, too. Marriage is a relationship amplified. It's a monkey made into an ape, a boy turned to a man, a pamphlet about time-share whirlpool bathtubs turned into James Joyce's fucking Ulysses. That's what I'm doing with everything, this year. I'm going to amp it. Kick things up a notch. The writing will continue, but so begins the eventual winding down of my roleplaying writing career. All else will take a turn, an upswing, an orbit hook around the moon and right into God's Goddamn Eye. I've got a novel. I'm going to sell that novel -- or, at least, put every effort into forcing it onto the shelves of America's Upstanding Readership (the estimable A.U.R.). This is not the year that it all explodes -- I do not favor explosions, for so quickly are they over and then gone -- but this is the year that it ticks upward, bump by bump, notch by notch. Love. Language. Life. Oh-Six. Everything progresses. Join me, one time, won't you? 12/20/05 It's all about the monkey. I mean, it just is. You go to see King Kong, and the best thing about the movie is the hugomongomonstrous ape that dominates the film. He's awesome. He looks like an actual giant monkey. He acts like a big Silverback gorilla. Every facial movement, every thump of the chest, every knuckle-to-the-ground lope -- it's all real. Turns out, Peter Jackson did not use CGI to create the effect of King Kong. They actually went to Skull Island and got themselves a huge fucking ape and trained him to act. What I'm saying is, it's a pretty solid movie. It's also the only pitch meeting that must've went like this: "It's Titanic meets Jurassic Park, really. It's got romance on boats. It's got T-Rexes and Raptors. It's got class struggle. It's got a remote island." The movie isn't perfect. First, it runs a little long. It doesn't necessarily feel long, but Jackson is a bit overindulgent in the shots. He lingers. Too often. The running time really doesn't become the problem, but all that lingering threatens to move into mawkish oversentimentalism. Still, I'll cut the guy a break: he's been making movies forever with one single intention in mind, and that was to remake this movie. It was his sole purpose, and now it's done. As a side tangent, I always wonder when the mainstream media will catch onto his earlier films. At what point will the world learn that he made movies about cannibal aliens, Sumatran rat-monkeys, and heroin-addled puppet-fucking? Is Earth simply not yet ready to know? Anyway. I've consumed a glut of pop culture over the last few weeks. Here are some quick capsule reviews of the shit my eyes and brain have consumed. Colorado Kid, Stephen King. Tiny itty-bitty mystery novel, paperback, purports to be a pulp mystery tale. It's not. It's actually a rather engrossing look into the nature of human mystery, as well as a reflection upon how that mystery is delivered through storytelling. Entire book takes place as a conversation between three people. That's it. Spoiler warning, though, so stop reading now if you can't handle the truth: Don't expect him to solve the mystery he lays out. No concrete answers are given, and that's arguably one of the novel's key points. Grab this one. When King doesn't phone it in, he tells stories so well it's crazy. They're sloppy, in a way, but that's fine. Because it's not about plot, it's about the experience. Plus, bonus, you can read it in like, ten minutes. It's really not a big book. Land of the Dead. Y'know, I sort of thought this movie would suck. The commercials were terrible cheesy. And all the ideas I heard behind it (Uh, zombies begin to develop their own society?) sounded crappy. But it's actually a pretty solid movie. It vacillates (sometimes too much) between cheesy B-movie and serious movie-with-a-point, but it hits both cylinders well, so...? Definite parallels to recent American military exercises (ahemcoughIraq) and the struggle betwixt rich and poor, or culture versus culture. Good stuff. Not great. Rent it up. Unleashed. Shitty name, great movie. The film's original name (Danny the Dog) was far, far better. Any movie that pairs Jet Li with Morgan Freeman and Bob Hoskins, I mean, holy fuck. Every movie should have those three guys in it. And Jet Li should kick people while Morgan Freeman plays the piano and Bob Hoskins spits Cockney vitriol. Hell, every TV show should have these three guys. I demand it. I also demand ice cream. The 40-Year-Old Virgin. Like Wedding Crashers, it's a guy's romantic comedy that ends up having more heart than you gave it credit for. It's hilarious and endearing, crass and sloppy. The movie is all over the place, but it seems to know how to color just so far outside of the lines. The improvisation is great; from the looks of it, a helluva lot of that movie was made up on the spot (dialogue-wise, not plot). Oen of the year's best comedies, hands down. Arrested Development, Season One. I don't know what to tell you. Smartest, most absurd television show ever. It's nearly cancelled by Fox yet again (this is what, the third time it's been cancelled?), but in a way, I'm fine with that. Let the show go out on a high note instead of meandering into uselessness. At least we got (almost) three seasons. I mean, what other show gives you a retarded Charlize Theron? None other, my friends, none other. (That's the third season, though.) Man, rent it. Or, if you know me, borrow it from me. Or I'll kick you in the neck. 2006 Guide to Literary Agents. Fuck you, book about literary agents. Just for once, I wish one of these books would give me concrete information on what to do or not to do. Every other page is conflicting information. It's like I'm reading the Bible, for God's sake. Page 10: "Dude, totally give them your publishing credits, because agents and publishers want to know you're capable and practiced." Page 12: "Seriously, man, don't waste their time with bullshit about your publishing credits. I mean, really. What are you, an asshole?" Page 14: "Smear your own crap on the pages, and wad it up like a Fruit Roll-Up, and send it to them in a mason jar filled with vomit. Agents love that, man." Mr. & Mrs. Smith: Another Netflix conquest. (I rent movies, and I exercise during them. About two movies per week, that way.) Not a bad movie, surprisingly. Slickly directed, hot action. Problem is with the two principals. Both feel a little like they're phoning it in. Moreover, the characters are written with nearly too much disdain for one another. It's hard to buy into a relationship that feels so hotly resentful -- or, more specifically, it's hard to buy into the endearing part of that relationship. I could go with it if it was a War of the Roses hate-fest, but it's not, not really. Despite the parts that didn't work, it was a fun movie, either way. Awright. I guess that's it for now. More later as the swallowing vortex known as "The Holidays" approacheth. 12/11/05 Last night, I was chopping broccoli (cue the "Choppin' Broccoli" song from SNL) and I came to a point in my choplery in which I decided that I should also include part of my thumb with the meal. Not a huge part, mind you, just the very tip. So, upon deciding this, I let the Santoku knife slide through the top of my thumb, just above the nail. As it turns out, this was a retarded idea. I don't recommend it. First, I failed to actually remove the tip; instead, I let a flap hanging off, in essence making my thumb a convertible. Second -- and this is the one that really blew me away -- cutting into your thumb hurts like a bitch. It feels, roughly, approximately, nearly like, say, sliding a knifeblade through the tip of your thumb. Weird. I mean, what the fuck? Who knew? The cut looks ugly, but it's really not that bad. Aye, but here's the problem. When you do something like that to an extremity, to one of your, er, "dangly-bits," that extraneous limb begins emitting a signal. It becomes an antenna -- or perhaps projects an invisible tractor beam. The function of this mysterious unseen force is that it draws objects to your thumb (or, if the object is immovable, it draws you to the object). Then you bang your thumb, which, in case you didn't know, hurts like a bitch. And it often reopens the convertible thumb and lets it "breathe." By breathing, it often spits blood. So. There's that. Really, this is a cautionary tale for your webizens out there. Thinking of cutting into your body? Well, the thumb is off limits. I can't speak for other extremities (toes, nuts, that fingertip-sized growth under your right nipple), but the thumb? Man, tricky fucker. Don't mess with the thumb. 12/04/05 Quick! Insane ascetics and mad monks of my cult of personality, assemble! The CHUD.COM contest is almost through, and I'm not winning! Nine votes in my favor, but thirteen for some other dude! This must not be. I demand you go and follow one of two courses of action. Either, a) make sure you're voting, and getting everyone you know to vote or b) go to this enemy's house (He of the Thirteen Votes) and eat of his flesh! Cook him upon the mighty George Foreman grills I provide to all my cultists! Squeeze out his fat and masticate his tender, lean manloin! Awright, that went somewhere I didn't anticipate. I mean, sure, it usually goes somewhere I didn't anticipate, but still. It sort of snowed outside. Like, it's this half-a-dick kind of snow, mostly ice, more annoying than fun, more pallid than pretty. I keep hearing rumors that we're going to get some sort of sucker-punch snowfall here tomorrow night, but so far the weather reports aren't quite matching up with the word on the street. We shall see. Not much else going on, my little sycophants. Christmas approacheth. Blah-de-blah. 11/30/05 My drooling zealots: Go HERE to CHUD.COM and visit the message boards and vote for me! ME! (The Final Showdown of the Skeleton Key story contest is in place, and hey, you can help a brother out. I mean, if you honestly don't like my tale, vote your conscience. But know that if you do, I'll come find you. And I'll pickle your toes like olives and feed them to my dog. Shit, I'll feed them to both of our dogs, and then they'll have a taste for your meat.) 11/28/05 Today is apparently "Cyber-Monday." My fiancee would prefer you call it "Cyborg Monday." And I agree. That is all. Oh, no, it's not all. Go to my Pop Culture page, and check out my review of the new XBOX. Do it. 11/23/05 Sweet Jump-Ropin' Jesus. She is finished, this screenplay treatment. Man, that's fucking hard work. I mean, it's probably only hard because I've never done it before. Get a few more under my belt and I wager it'll go a lot easier, but still. Part of is simply because it hasn't been in my nature to over-outline. Outlining material is, to me, a little bit of a buzz-kill. In a lot of ways, writing a story is as much a journey for me as it is the reader, and if the story surprises and thrills me, it should in turn (er, hopefully) thrill the reader. Screenplays are a little different. You write a novel, you can kind of be all over the map. Some of the greatest books stumble drunkenly about, and that's pretty much a-okay. But a film is more precise. It's as much about plotting as it is character. Plot holes in a novel can be explained in a novel by a few lines, but in a movie you really only have dialogue and the visuals to confirm reality. It's tough stuff. Also tough is adapting something. Like, okay, this piece was adapted from a novel I wrote (or nearly wrote -- I got 65k deep and found myself utterly lost in regards to getting to the ending I had imagined). Newsflash: You can't cram a novel into a movie. Not without sacrificing a lot of the plot. Which is, at first, painful and confusing. ("But I can't lose the scene where she rambles on endlessly about fate versus free will and the nature of the universe!") Then, as it goes, you start kind of getting into the sacrifice. It's like being addicted to cutting yourself. Just one more slash here. Another slice there. Ooh! I can lose both my pinky fingers. Totally extraneous, those damnable digits. I mean, I'm sure this is in part because I wrote the thing. Were I adapting someone else's stuff, it's probably easier to trim and compress. Still, it's like a game. How can you maintain the mood and theme -- as well as all those pesky key character points -- while still chainsawing whole hunks of fat from the plot? Cut too much, and you've severed a critical limb. Be too conservative with your cuts, and the movie bloats like a water-logged corpse. Fun stuff. Painful, but fun, and a definite learning experience. What's more interesting is, now I can finish the novel if I want. I'm going to have to nearly rewrite it from the ground up, but that's not altogether impossible. And, I can fill back in some of the bloated stuff, because again -- in a novel, that shit works. At least, to a point. So, we'll see. This journey is just beginning. I've no idea where it'll take me. I mean, I figure the likelihood of my screenplay being purchased is about the same as an ice cube not melting inside the Devil's asshole. But, one never knows. Plus, hey, maybe this will allow me to put it back in novel form and see where it goes. I've grown as a writer from all of this, and I haven't even written the goddamn screenplay yet. Woo. Oh, the new Sexbox did arrive yesterday afternoon. It's a lovely system. The dashboard is a thousand times more intuitive and useful than it was with the first Xbox -- actually, I spent my first hour and a half on the machine just playing around in the dashboard, no joke. Lots to do there. Download movie trailers, game trailers, game demos. Plus, I gave the whole dashboard a Penny Arcade theme (which came as an option built into the system, so good on the Penny Arcade boys, wow!). The games themselves are staggeringly pretty. It isn't all about the graphics, though -- the games seem cool. Call of Duty 2 in particular is fackin' awesome right out of the gate. A bigger and better review to come, including a few gripes about the machine, too. Later, haters. 11/22/05 Well, Good Lord Willing and the Creek Don't Rise, we should have a shiny pearlescent (or, less nicely, "semen-colored") XBOX360 here by the end of the day. I'm looking forward to it. It's a split Christmas gift to one another for my fiancee and I (which is, perhaps, the most joyous part of it all; further evidence that I'm marrying the right person, because giving each other the XBOX was her idea! Brilliant! She's awesome!). Buying the device seems like the right move. Our DVD player has been acting wonky on and off, and will likely require replacing shortly. This will replace it. We have HDTV and Dolby Surround. This will work with those. I have an iPod and Windows Media Center on my PC -- the 360 connects to those, too. It's got some great online offerings both free and not-so-free. So, it seems a good time for the console to drop into our tender, greasy little palms. That said, I do have to wonder if it's the right console for everybody. Next-gen gaming is awful tech-intensive. If you aren't connected to broadband, if you don't possess a high-def television, then is it worth the cost? Probably not until you see a killer app that you just can't exist without. Halo 3, for instance, but that won't be around until... er? Let's just say "Jesus O'Clock" and be done with the speculation. Anyway. I'm sure I'll post a more thorough review when the time comes that I've tasted its tech-nectar. Writing continues unabated, though by now that's so the status quo I shouldn't even have to tell you that. It'll be news when I report that ferrets ate my hands and I can no longer write, but even then, I figure I could stick a coffee stirrer in my mouth and tap out some short fiction. ("Bob wass born. Bob dyied. Teh end1!") The screenplay treatment is nearly done. Tomorrow, I cap it in the head and send it off to Stephen, see how it looks. I had to gut the novel from whence it came, but that's kind of fun, in a way. Adapting the story while keeping the core themes and ideas, but molding the plot into a 2-hour possibility. Oh well. More later. 11/17/05 I would say that this is shameless self-promotion, except I didn't instigate this promotion. The ever-lovely Vampire developer, Will Hindmarch, posted this and then pointed me to the entry. So, hey, awesome. The background is, I decided to send in a short story to the CHUD.com contest, sponsored by that movie, The Skeleton's Key. Blah blah blah, post a ghost story, people will vote, you might win some crap. So, I did it on a lark and then forgot about it. Well, they posted the voting poll yesterday and Will caught it, and posted that journal entry on the WW page. So, there you have it. Go to CHUD's site and vote for me. And then you can all come over my house and watch Veronica Mars on DVD with me on the new TV. And we'll braid each others' hair and eat Snacky-Cakes or something. Oh, be aware -- registering for the CHUD message boards seems to provide a response as swift as glacial movement. 11/16/05 For someone who loathes math, my life involves a lot of numbers. A mere pittance: XBOX360 hits on 11/22. Give allergy shots to the little dog every two days. 0.2 ccs, 0.4 ccs, 0.8 ccs, 1.0 ccs, repeat. She weighs 17.6 lbs. I've lost 12 lbs. I write 2000 words a day, minimum. I try to stay under 2000 calories a day. I get paid five to seven cents a word. A granola bar has 110 calories. A bowl of cereal, on average, has 300 calories. One page of a screenplay is generally equivalent to one minute of screentime. I'll be meeting with the screenwriter on 12/28. I have 512MB of memory, but need another 512MB. Three Netflix rentals at a time. Season one of Veronica Mars. DVD of Star Wars, Episode III. HDTV is 720p resolution ideally. My current writing assignments are, respectively, 6k, 24k, 32k, and 40k (word counts). An average walk burns 200 calories. Rent prices, gas prices, electric bills, car loans, cable bill, dollars and cents. Bank balances. Software versions. Wedding dates. Wedding costs. Guest list: under 40 people. Times. Dates. Digits. Decimals. Blood, spurting from nostrils, three milliliters per two seconds. So many goddamn numbers, they're eating my brain like angry ants. Anyway. Veronica Mars is the best TV show you're probably not watching. There's no way to objectively declare this for certain, but I believe it's the best show ever (or, at least, Season 1 is the best season of TV ever). I cannot recall a bad episode. Not one. All shows, even the best, have stinker episodes. Not this one, I guess. It's like the mad bastard love child of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Wonderfalls. Not much else. Writing, working, life. Wedding planning. Screenplay treatment. City of Heroes. City of Villains. Can't complain, is what I'm saying. 11/04/05 Good snidbits (combo pack of "snippets" and "tidbits," fresh from my fingers) of a Joe R. Lansdale interview over at SlushPile.Net: Slushpile: You are an extremely prolific writer. What do you attribute your productivity to? Lansdale: Discipline and a love for the work. And, of course, kids who need things. Slushpile: Please give us an idea of your writing habits. How do you approach your writing? Are you someone that writes every day, for regular hours? Or are you more of a writer who starts and stops, writing in phases? Lansdale: I write in the mornings, generally about three hours. Sometimes I write other times, but rarely. I mostly take weekends and holidays off. Even though I have a general time of three hours, I actually shoot for three to five pages daily. I get that, and feel like it’s good or I’ve had enough, I quit. Even if I should get it in thirty minutes. If I get it, still have juice, I just keep going until it runs out. That way I have some ten and fifteen page days, but mostly I write a small bit each day. It adds up. Those who write just when they are in the mood, never learn that the mood can be created by habit. Slushpile: What is your single-best, most-important, can’t-live-without writing tip you would offer to aspiring authors? Lansdale: Put your ass in the chair and write. And read a lot. And not in one genre. Slushpile: What is your single-best, most-important, can’t-live-without publishing tip you would offer to aspiring authors struggling to break into print? Lansdale: Stay with it. 10/30/05 The work keeps on rollin' in. I picked up another 20-25k of work on a Werewolf book. The book is more or less announced, but doesn't have an official name, as yet. So, I'm just calling it The Purity Test. If you can't infer from that what the book is about, you might want to check with a doctor regarding the mule that kicked you in the skull. (Hint: It's the Pure Tribes, stupid.) 10/28/05 Horror movies can rock. But when they don't rock, they suck. And when they suck, they suck hard. So, I'm here to help you navigate the crap-filled waters and pick a good horror movie you might not have otherwise considered. I'm not going to get too detailed, just a few words and notes here and there. You'll just have to trust me, by golly. The Darkness: Spanish-made movie, in English. Stylish and spooky. Has an ending that will punch your kidneys through the upper soft palate of your mouth. And I don't mean like, some gore-spattered shock ending. I mean an awful ending, an ending rife with nihilism, an ending that seeps through your soul like sepsis. Exorcist III: Note the Roman numeral, and take especial note that it doesn't say 'II.' The first Exorcist movie was so scary, women had miscarriages in the theater (apparently true). The second Exorcist was so crappy, women had abortions in the theater just to stop their children from being born into a world where such god-fucked movies get made. This Exorcist, the third, was really a solid entry. Taut and scary, it is the heir to the throne. Original author William Peter Blatty wrote and directed this one, which wisely pretends the second one never existed. The Devil's Backbone: There's a reason why I have a poster signed by director Guillermo del Toro. It's because the guy is a fat, jolly Mexican god, and I offer him worship. He can go from frenetic, fast-pasted action-horror (Blade II, Hellboy) and then turn out this tiny itty-bitty Spanish language ghost story that takes place at a small school for boys in the middle of nowhere. Creepy, effective, bone-chilling but kind of nice in the end. It's not just a great horror movie, it's a great movie, period. Mothman Prophecies: It's not as crypto-goofy-weird as the book is, but it has a fear factor all its own. And, as a reward, Richard Gere does not immediately detract from your viewing experience. Bonus. Phantasm: "We gotta stomp the shit out of that tall dude!" Ah, Angus Scrimm as the "Tall Dude." And weird Oompa Loomps from beyond. And shiny balls with drillbits that bore into people's heads. It's a good one, this movie. Bonus points for seing the second one after. Neither make a helluva lot of sense, but it doesn't matter. Rosemary's Baby: This isn't really an underrated horror movie -- it's just a classic that bears viewing. Most people may have forgotten about it by now, which is a mistake. A mistake for which you shall be kicked in the boobs. I don't care if you're a man or not. You still have boobs capable of being kicked. See this movie. Session 9: This movie is sloooow, but it's worth it if you can push through it. It's got David Caruso, and I hesitate to tell you that for fear you'll run away. But trusts this tricksy Chucksy. See this slow spook-fest set in an old asylum. Weep! WEEP! Dog Soldiers: Best werewolf movie in the modern age, hands down. Ginger Snaps: Wait. Maybe this is the best werewolf movie in the modern age. I don't goddamn know. See 'em both. Make your own comparisons, what am I, your babysitter? Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me: You're saying to me, "But this isn't a horror movie!" and to you I reply: "Bullshizzle." This movie is creeptacular. It's so chilly, I crap icicles. Crapcicles. Or something. David Lynch has this horrifying way of taking a relatively normal thing and raping your very conception of that thing. He's a genius in his way. Hell, for the ultimate in horror, see Eraserhead if you can find it. Two words: horse fetus. That is all for now, my Halloweenies. 10/27/05 So. The Exorcist prequel. Ahhh! Those horror or film aficianados already know the question: "Of which prequel do you speak, Herr Doktor?" For those not in-the-know, two prequels were filmed. They are, for all intents and purposes, the same movie. I mean to say -- quite literally, they filmed one movie with one director, and then had a second director come on board, re-cut it, re-shoot a number of scenes, and even hire new actors and insert new characters. The first director was Paul Schrader, and his was called Dominion. Schrader, as you may know, is the guy responsible for writing films like Raging Bull and Taxi Driver. The second cut of the movie was "directed" by Renny Harlin. It is called, simply, Exorcist: The Beginning. Apparently, the film company financing the movie was convinced that Schrader's version was too complex and not scary enough. So, they brought in Renny Harlin. Harlin, as you may know, is the guy responsible for directing films like the one crappy Die Hard, Deep Blue Sea, and Cutthroat Island. I won't try to bag too much on Harlin. As much as some of his films are a bucket of dogshit (Cutthroat Island being listed by many as one of the worst films of all time), he did make some fun ones. That said -- I mean, c'mon. Fucking Paul Schrader gets replaced by Renny Harlin. If that's not proof that Hollywood deserves to eat itself, then I don't know what is. Anyway. I saw the Schrader version. It wasn't bad. Not the best movie I've ever seen, but a solid and genuinely complex horror movie. It features a curious look at faith and evil, one that does not offer easy or twee answers. Part of the problem is, I think, Schrader's film existed only as a rough cut. They let him do some post-production on it, but some of that looks like... well, see the above metaphor, "bucket of dogshit." There are a few CGI hyenas and one CGI snake that look like something a 12-year-old could do on his graphing calculator. In the dark. While being punched in the nuts by a Doberman. And the Devil in this one is a little too obvious. In the first film, El Diablo Jerkoff isn't overt. Well, er, okay, so he possesses a little girl and has her masturbate herself to a bloody deluge with a crucifix, sure, right, fine. But the Devil here is more mythic, more iconic and unholy -- lots of floating around with greater malevolent mobility. That's fine for some movies (Prophecy, anyone?), but here it feels clumsy and not-so-scary. Still. Good movie. Recommended with reservations. I'm dying now to see the Harlin version. My bet is that it's way glitzed up, much slicker, and dumber than a bag of dipshits. If you let him, Renny Harlin will film the Bible with trucks exploding. All of this calls to mind that: a) I think I'm going to force the lovely fiancee to sit through the original Exorcist, since she ain't done seen it. And b) You know what? Exorcist III was a pretty good movie. Two words: Big scissors. Actually, letter 'b' there calls to mind something else: I might could do a list of some relatively underrated horror movies. Y'know, in the spirit of Jack-o-Lanterns and razor-laden Peanut Butter Cups. Mmmm. Razors. I'll do that. More later. 10/26/05 Okay. A more meaningful post. Here you go. First, where have I been? I was in exile from my exile. I took some temp work because White Wolf isn't publishing any of my books until winter (Dec/Jan). Since I don't get paid the majority of a contract's worth until the book hits shelves, that left me with a kind of monetary gap over the next few months, whereupon my finances would dwindle to nothing more than a jar full of sticks and bugs. To circumvent that, I took on a monthlong temp assignment, which was to sell cell phones, which was to become painful on the level it would be to jam a coffee stirrer in and out of one's penile slit. In and out. During the assignment, White Wolf paid me for Chicago, which was a far greater paycheck than I'd figured it would be, which set me ahead and negated the need to do temp work. I quit that temp job, took another small one (1-2 days), and now I've returned. Or I left again. Or I exited the between. I don't know. I need more goddamn coffee. Second, writing. Writing has been slower because of the aforementioned exile-from-exile. But, I've been getting stuff done. The screenplay is in "treatment" mode, which is an outline on par with a small novel (20-40 pages long; approximately 33% of a screenplay's actual length). Screenplay writing remains somewhat Byzantine, but I'm managing. I'm also working on a 40k assignment for Vampire, which is coming along nicely (over half done). Meanwhile, I picked up two more assignments -- one tiny one (which we will heretofore call Gaze Into My Pants (And My Pants Gaze Back), and one larger one (which will furthermore be referred to as Bloodlines 3: The Fermented). Third, more writing. I told you I finished a novel, yeah? Well, I did. I've now printed out "Part One" of that piece and plan to go through it. In the interim, I think I'ma hammer out some letters to agents, see if I can snag representation. Funny, I seem to write a novel every year, at about this time. Last year was 60k of a novel I didn't finish, but is now migrating toward a screenplay. Year before that, it was my Hilarious Weather Control Conspiracy Novel, which I did finish, and is probably funny, but is painfully not good (at least, so says my memory of it, I dare not read it again for fear of spiritually crushing disappointment -- have I mentioned how fragile the writer's ego is?). Fourth, more writing, more egos. I sent in several submissions to a local horror writing contest (run by the same dudes who ran the screenwriting competition). I won 2nd place in their "Short-Short Story" competition. This is not exciting for many reasons. One, the story is dumb. I mean, it's interesting, because it's about mutant chimpanzees. Sort of; you'd have to read it to understand the context. Two, from the looks of it, only two people sent in Short-Short Story Submissions. In case you can't do that kind of complex math in your head, let me illustrate this for you: That means that Second Place is also roughly equivalent to Last Place. It's kind of a compliment wrapped in a slice of insult. Like, someone gives you a nice pretty flower, and then sticks their thumb in your eye. On one hand, hey, a flower. On the other hand, oof, my goddamn eye. Fifth, City of Heroes is pretty much the shizbomb. Whatever a "shizbomb" is, I don't really know, but it's fun. I get on for probably no more than an hour a day, and play with some close friends at night. It's a great deal of fun. Light, fast, and about as straightforward as a game gets. The costume / character creation is damn near the most amusing thing I've ever done in a game. The permutations are seemingly limitless. You do not see the same hero twice. I am also on the beta for City of Villains which is of equal fun, yet encased in a slightly better game system. That is all for now. More missives from the exile as the week marches ineluctably forward. 10/23/05 Yes, yes, it's been a little while. Daddy's been busy. A more salient post tomorrow, to be sure. In the meantime, I'll let you know that sometimes, my brain says horrible things to to my mind, or maybe it's vice versa. Usually I keep these things inside. Today, that ends. I deliver unto you some of the things that have -- quite involuntarily, mind you -- gone through my head over the last several weeks. These things have little reference or point-of-connection. They just are. Accept them. I'm not suggesting that these things are somehow right, only that we must admit them and acknowledge them. Like the urangutan in the room who's going to rip your arms off and beat you to death with them, as if you were a monkey's timpani. It's better this way. I present to you: Five Bad Thoughts That Went Through My Head At Some Point a) That lady's vagina smelled like a homeless man's foot. b) He was busy masturbating his German Shepherd with a dish rag. c) Sometimes, the Buddha looks like an asshole. Not a literal asshole, but I mean to say, like, a jerk. (It's because of the "I know something you don't" look on his face. Presumptous sonofabitch, that Buddha!) d) Suppurating anus. e) I don't like how old folks' homes smell a lot like pee. I don't blame them. I just don't like it. That is all. Better update tomorrow. 09/20/05 Writing fiction of any length is, at least in part, about making and keeping promises. Promises are what keep the reader reading. You can promise very specific things: "By the end of this, I will tell you who killed Mary." Or you can promise vague things: "I will give unto you sadness and success, tribulations and accomplishments." Hitchcock said many things that hint at this idea. Even in his comment, "There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it," he notes a promise: the promise of the bang. And so it goes with writing fiction. You must promise things, and then you must deliver on those promises. You needn't deliver on them in expected ways, of course, but you must always answer them. You cannot let promises go unfulfilled. Doing so only frustrates. That said, you must also make promises you're not sure you can keep, even though you must keep them. Upon every page should be some question, some unspoken threat or promise that forces the reader to continue on. It's like perpetually saying, "Join me on page one hundred, and I'll give you five dollars." If you don't have the five bucks, lie. Then find a way to scrounge and save before page one hundred. Anyway. I speak of this because I have just finished a new novel. It is nearly 90,000 words. I began it on August 1st, wrote 60,000 words in August, and the subsequent 30,000 through September. It's an odd piece of fiction. In many ways unlike anything I've written before, though upon reading it, it's not precisely unlike me in the grand scheme. It works. I'm happy with it. So happy, as a matter of fact, that once all my ducks are in a row with other projects, I am going to edit this sucker into a second draft and sell it. Note that I didn't say I intend to try to sell it. I fully intend to sell it. Do or do not, said Yoda, there is no motherfuckin' try or shit. This is the first novel I've written that, upon its completion, I am ultimately satisfied with. I've not mastered the craft and the form, to be sure, but all of what has come before has allowed me to continue to improve my game. I've written, what, five completed novels before this? With each one I got better, learned new lessons, and figured out how not to be so stupid. This newest piece is the result of that persistent improvement. 09/28/05 Fifty Things I Learned While In Colorado. Numbers 1 - 10. 1. I figure I have a lot for which to thank my father. I look at parts of me and my life, and I can see where his mark -- as inextirpable as a slash from a Sharpie marker -- have guided me right and true. I also figure there's a shitpot full of stuff for which the old man should apologize. My hopes are (and this is how I'm leaving it), we're even. 2. The Denver Airport has a subtle air of menace. Maybe it's all the murals depicting death and terror in one form or another. 3. Robin Hobb can still write a damn fine book. Round of applause for Shaman's Crossing, everybody. 4. For a long time, I figured my Dad didn't really know anything about what I did. I knew that, on some level, he gathered the mechanical side of it: "The boy writes words," but beyond that, I figured the details were fuzzier than Peter Cottontail. At first, I thought he proved this again. When I showed up in Colorado, his single perfunctory question regarding my career is: "Are you still writing?" I battled down a snarky answer. (Which may have sounded like, "Nah. I've only been writing non-stop since eighth grade. But it hadn't gotten me laid often enough, so I quit two days ago. Now I work on a lobster boat!") That was it. No more questions. Except, then we met one of my Dad's buddies out there, an old dude named George. I'd met George about... five years ago. First thing George asked me was, "How's your play or your movie or whatever coming along?" George does not seem the psychic type, nor did he take a moment to listen to whispered intelligence from an earpiece crammed in his head. I am left with the conclusion that, to my surprise, Dad does listen to me and know what I'm up to. He just tells other people about it, not me. 5. Here's a favorite game of my father's. You can play along at home. Turn on the TV. Whenever you see someone who may be gay, utter this sentence: "Queer." Bonus points for, "Think he's queer?" You could combine this with a drinking game, and it'd be two fists of fun, right there. 6. The trip only confirmed why I'm marrying my fiancee. We go in tandem when encountering such situations, like a pair of Splinter Cell attack-spies. We are unified in tough and awkward situations. Soon, we shall learn Kung Fu. 7. When the sun comes up in September, Colorado heats up to about 85 degrees. As soon as the sun goes down, it drops to about 40 degrees. Fast. 8. Oh, Colorado also has some of the prettiest sunsets you'll see. Like someone dropped a can of blue paint on a bonfire, and then let it burn across the mountaintops. 9. I think I'm addicted to writing. When I don't do it for a day, I get shaky. I feel disloyal. 10. My family -- every last member -- is in some way batshit. That does not preclude my love for them. It just means they're batshit. 09/27/05 Fifty Things I Learned While In Colorado. Numbers 11 - 20. 11. My father's number one enemy right now? China. Yep. The whole country. He does his level best to buy things not made in China. If he asks someone at Wal-Mart, "Was this grill made in China?" and the Wal-Associate says, "Nope," my father becomes angry when he discovers the ruse. He will go back and yell at the Wal-Associate. Dad believes that China is going to destroy America. I don't entirely disagree with him, though I think we probably differ on the ways and means in which it will happen. He pictures a more apocalyptic scenario, featuring the economic collapse of America. I think we're just going to become like Europe: old, doddering, and in debt to the Great Dragon. 12. My father's number one weapon against China? Tractors. Actually, I don't know that's really his plan for defeating the "Orientals." I just know that he loves the shit out of some tractors. If there is a tractor on the side of the road, he will identify it in a way that communicates implicit knowledge about all tractors of all time. "Look! A Case 440 with a Double-Wide Comb Bar. It's got a six-piston conveyor clog and a monkey extractor." You'll note that, unlike my Dad, I know dick about tractors. 12.5. Tractors probably don't have monkey extractors, but they should. 12.6. (Y'know. In case of monkeys.) 13. The air in Colorado is drier than a vacuum-packed cracker. Nosebleeds. Cracked lips. Cottony tongue. 14. The air in Colorado is thinner than Kate Moss after a cocaine clusterfuck at Prince's house. Wheezing. Panting. Dizzy head. 15. It's weird being in a place where I'm more likely to run into a bear than I am the Internet. 16. Coyotes and dogs have either, a) some kind of tacit agreement, or b) a rivalry in which dogs are king. To protect livestock, farmers can put out a single dog, and the coyotes will never cause a problem. Take the dog away? Dead sheep. 17. Dad isn't picky. He will buy a broken watermelon, soak it in vodka, and ask you to eat some of it before dinner. 18. Seeing black people on TV without homes, waterlogged and bedraggled, does not tug at my father's heartstrings. It either becomes a big blind spot, or a reason to opine about how New Orleans needn't rebuild. Somewhere in there will be a story about how my Uncle Steve thought the place had a stench. As if a stench is reason enough to abandon people. 19. Flying is still scary. Y'know, 153,000 pounds flying at 500 mph approximately 40,000 feet in the air. If that's not magic, I dunno what is. 20. Coagulated algae is capable of smelling like someone took a shit on top of a dead body and then let it sit in the sun for four days. 09/26/05 Fifty Things I Learned While In Colorado. Numbers 21 - 30. 21. It's not impossible that my father will be killed by a mountain lion. He has had two close encounters with them recently. One time, he fell asleep in the hammock, which is conveniently located at the edge of a grove of trees on the downside of a small mountain. He woke up at one point to see a mountain lion, no more than six feet away, skulking around. It looked at him, and he looked at it. Then it wandered away. The other time, he and his wife went up way back on their property (and then off the property) to sit on some rocks that overlook a wide and deep valley. On their way back down, they found fresh mountain lion tracks in the mud. Those tracks (note the word "fresh") were not there when they went up to the rocks. 22. It's also not impossible to think that, if attacked by a mountain lion, my father would wrestle it. He has little fear. He doesn't even take a gun with him. I guess wrestling a whitetail buck to the ground and hogtying it despite three broken ribs gives you that kind of frontiersman confidence. 23. Corporate douchebags sour my milk. Try sitting in front of a triumverate of such bags-of-douche on an airplane for four hours. Listen to their inane pop culture conversations, which they cannot help but botch. When they mention "Courtney Cox" for the seventy-fifth time, or try to figure out what that movie is called where "Mark Wahlburg plays a rock star" (the movie is called, uh, Rock Star), try as hard as you can not to kick out the window of the plane and hope it sucks their faces off. 24. Every night at my father's is drinking night. Warn your liver if you go to visit him. 25. Staying up till 12:30 in the morning, half-numbdrunk, with your father, isn't so bad. He tells funny stories. He's somewhat complimentary. You can reminisce and forget about a lot of shitty stuff. He'll also tell you his views on God, religion, and how it relates to life. All of these ideas of his are surprisingly liberal, something that as a rule, he is not. 26. Dad will also clamp up when you start talking about ghosts. 27. Driving on roads nearly two miles up, without guardrails, is maybe a tiny itty-titty bit scary. 28. Magpies are pretty birds. I had never conceived of them as such. Then again, I hadn't ever really realized just what the hell a 'magpie' was: I figure they were just another type of greasy crow. But compare the stark white against the pitch black, and it makes for an elegant bird. 29. Without hesitation, my Dad will take you to a dinosaur museum, even if he's 62 and you're 29. 30. I think most dinosaur museums are probably for shit. 09/24/05 Fifty Things I Learned While In Colorado. Numbers 31 - 40. 31. The moon is goddamn huge in Colorado. I do not know why this is. Is it because the elevation is higher, already a mile up if not nearly two? Does the moon like Colorado more? I don't know what it is. But when the full moon rises over the mountains and mesas, pregnant with white light, you nearly want to drop to your knees and offer it prayer. 32. Many animals like to leave behind scat and tracks, but never show their faces. Of poop and footprints, we saw the remnants of black bears, coyotes, foxes, and yes, mountain lions. We did not see any of the above animals on their own, however, only their leavings and passage. 33. Deer are at least slightly concerned with property rights and land ownership. There is a dilapidated, possibly abandoned stable near to my father's house. One of the walls is mostly gone, and that open side faces the road. If you drive by this little ramshackle shack in the middle of the day, you will see two buck deer (those are the "boys," for you city folk) just... hanging out. Every day they go there. Just to chill. Smoke weed. I dunno. 34. There are no more cowboys, and yet people still insist on wearing the raiments of these mythical dipshits. 35. Jonathan Apples taste like the honeyed nectar dripping from an angel's vagina. In each Jonathan Apple is contained the Platonic ideal of all apple taste, everywhere and always. 36. Riding on a four-wheeler is kind of cool. Driving a four-wheeler is mega-super-mega-cool. 37. The number of fish you catch (A) is in direct inverse proportion to the metric weight of anguish you suffer from fishing (B). If A goes up, B goes down. If A goes down, B goes up. This leads me to believe that fish equals happiness. I can prove it on paper. 38. My father is a good man, an earnest man. He is also imperfect. 39. I cannot help but look for Arabs in airports. I don't mean to. Welcome to modern living. 40. My father still has the secret gift of communicating with elk. He makes this godawful whistle, this keening banshee's wail, and then the elk will do the same thing back to him. This is called "Bugling." Calling it "bugling" makes it sound nicer than it is, like labeling a dog fart "Oboe Music." 09/23/05 Fifty Things I Learned While In Colorado. Numbers 41 - 50. 41. The Japanese are excellent at sexing chickens. 42. Mule deer are cuter than whitetail deer. It is the batlike ears that do it. 43. I am as much not my father as I am my father. Looking at him, it is easy to see a distorted reflection of myself, like what one might find in a circus mirror. I can identify some parts; distorted but nevertheless present. Other parts are wholly unrecognizable. I'd like to think that the traits I share with the old man are all his good qualities. I can't promise that to be the case. 44. An analogy: My father and his wife are to yard sales as two flies are to a pile of shit. 45. Colorado has approximately all types of land configurations: mountains, canyons, lakes, reservoirs, fields, verdant valleys shoved betwixt bone dry mountains, orchards, vineyards, scrubland, desert, forests. Still missing? Jungles. Colorado needs some goddamn jungles. 46. My father's margeritas make you feel like someone hit you in the face with a cactus. 47. Colorado has no good music. Country music comes in crystal goddamn clear wherever you go, though. And country music, as you know, isn't music. It's some dude yowling about his lady, his pick up truck, his coal mine, whatever. 47.5. Scratch that -- Colorado has no music at all. 48. Racism, for being so purposefully discriminating, is utterly indiscriminate. My father can hate all the black people he wants, but somehow still love Chuck Berry. 49. On the Western side of Colorado, there are three black people. This means there is approximately one black person per 16,500 square miles. Even this is capable of incensing my dad. 50. I love my fiancee very, very much. It takes unshakeable will to marry me, and by proxy, my family. 09/06/05 From John Stewart, consummate funnyman and truthsayer: "There's a lot of confusion over blame and pointing fingers and the response to the obviously horrible tragedy of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, and whether or not the government did enough, whether or not there was miscommunication, some bureaucratic bungling. So let me just say this. The short answer is: Yes. The long answer, of course, is: YEEEEEESSSSSS!" "The real question is in the four years since 9/11, you have to ask yourself, has the government’s advancements, procedures, etc. made us safer, given us more comfort that they will have an effective, or more effective response to catastrophic events? And I think it’s very clear the answer is: 'Oh shit, we're in trouble.' "Now for people who are saying, 'Well, let’s stop pointing fingers at the president, the left-wing media is being too hard on him' — no. Shut up. No. This is inarguably — inarguably — a failure of leadership from the top of the federal government. Remember when Bill Clinton went out with Monica Lewinsky? That was inarguably a failure of judgment at the top. Democrats had to come out and risk losing credibility if they did not condemn Bill Clinton for his behavior. I believe Republicans are in the same position right now, and I will say this: Hurricane Katrina is George Bush’s Monica Lewinsky. The only difference is that tens of thousands of people weren’t stranded in Monica Lewinsky’s vagina. Although, this is an interesting point, her vagina at the time was also known at the Superdome…Or, do you prefer the Big Easy? "But that is my point, so please, stop with the 'Well, people are carping on the president.' He didn’t even stop his vacation for three days, I mean, please, just shut up." Last night, he also had a good point about the administration harping on this "blame game." Well, as he mentions, usually the ones worried about the blame are usually the ones to blame. Anyway. Other random update besides my political vitriol and utter detestation for those currently in power: I'm still working, I'm busy as all fuck. Working on a super secret project, a screenplay, just finished final drafts for Blasphemies, am working on another unannounced Wolf project (20k), and an planning for a big Vampire assignment (40k), and editing short stories, and all kinds of other nonsense. Since none of my books are coming out until December now (at which point I have 5-6 books coming out in quick succession), my coffers are dwindling. I'ma need to get a temp job or something for a month or three. We'll see. More on that later. That's about it, for now. 09/05/05 Rant, begin. If you're one of those people who still holds a candle of ignorance in defiance of the darkness of truth, and you still support the President you helped elect, stop it. Stop it right now. Think about this. Consider it. Our president is ineffectual. He is smarmy. He dresses like a cowboy, but acts like a trust fund baby. He is not you or I, he is the pinnacle of white, rich America. (And, it's no wonder after hearing Barbara Bush's scathingly retarded comments on those lucky flood victims.) How can one sit idly by, with two of America's biggest tragedies happening on this fucker's watch? Anybody? Hello? And trust me, this isn't some rant against Republicans. I can dig the GOP. Chuck Hegel or John McCain run in 2008, I might goddamn jolly well vote Republican. But this guy, Bush, is a crappy Republican. Assy. Shitty. He is God-fucked with lameness and deserves pain in his basket. So, here's the thing. If you still support him, you still argue in his defense, do me a favor? Keep it to yourself. No, I don't think he caused the hurricane to hit those people or that city. But I think he and others not only failed to protect it in advance, but failed to handle it after. You dare try to defend his actions to me, I will rip off your elbows and stuff them up your ass. If you're not mad about all of this, you might as well be dead. Rand, end. Fun stuff, coming tomorrow. 08/15/05 A quick note here about entitlement. See, our generation, the ubiquitous twentisomethings, has been recently called the "Entitlement Generation." Why? Because we feel ourselves entitled to a number of advantages that, perhaps, our forebears were not. Higher salaries, the normal spread of benefits, sane and safe work hours, and so on and so forth. The title is something of a derogatory moniker, suggesting that we are somehow... greedy? Overly desirous of things we potentially do not deserve? Unwilling to pass whatever preconceived bullshit gauntlets that have been laid before us? Forget that noise. Wear the name like a badge of honor. Pin it to your lapel as a sign that you're not willing to take any shit from whatever jackass company or corporation for which you work. Tell 'em you won't dance for peanuts, then slug 'em in the pancreas. See, guess what? We are entitled, jerks. It's like this. Employment is a contract, yeah? It's a symbiotic relationship between the corporate body and the employee cell. The cell works as a tiny part of the body to make the body work properly. That said, should the body decide, ohh, to treat itself or the cell poorly, the cell may very well rebel. It may cease to do its function, or it may subvert its function 180 degrees and begin actively harming the body, like a cancer cell in the corporate brain. This contract, this symbiosis, is simple. You ask us to do something, we tell you how much we want to perform that task, and you either pay us to do it (thus accepting the contract) or tell us to fark off and suck algae (thus rejecting our bid for the contract). If at any point, either party breaks the contract, symbiosis becomes parasitism, and boom! It's done. Either the contract must be renegotiated and all things must realign, or oh well, game over, good bye, didn't we all have a nice time? Some companies are not fully cognizent of the depth and breadth of this contract. They see employees as expendable -- cells able to be sloughed off when they are no longer needed or are consuming too much of the body. This is fair, to a point, because it is most certainly the company's right to set whatever parameters it desires and requires. Ah, but some companies overstep and midjudge, yeah? They say, "No, we won't pay you what you potentially deserve." The corporation thinks its employees should be thankful, and that such thankless thankery counts as some kind of gratis credit toward the entire reward. "Oh, we won't pay you as much, because you are lucky to have this job in the first place." It's as if one's fortune on a paycheck is measured not merely by money or benefits, but instead by a nebulous kind of karmic credit. Bullshit, jerks. It don't work that way. We're just as lucky to have the job as you are to have us. So, pay us what's right. Otherwise, you'll suffer. How will you suffer? No, no, no, settle down, we're not going to blow up your offices or go stalking down the cubicles with a Mossberg Mariner 12 gauge pump shotgun. Hardly. What we're going to do is quit. We're going to find a job that is better for us and is willing to consider us as equal partners in the contract. And maybe we'll steal some goddamn office supplies, like the voracious hyenas that we are. Example: My loverly fiancee works for Tyco. As time has gone on, the company has piled more and more responsibility upon her shoulders. This responsibility is supervisory in nature, despite the fact she has no technical authority as a supervisor. Moreover, they have not increased her wages. So, more work, more responsibility. Also, her position was once a population of three, now it is a population of just her. So, on top of the more work, greater obligation, she also has less of a support system in place. So, what did she do? She told them, "Hey, if you don't throw me a bone here, give me a title or a raise or some damn thing, I'm going to quit. My resume is already out there." And they said, yeah, yeah, that's hard, it's like we have to move mountains, and we have to sacrifice a baby deer to the hungry gods of Human Resources, not to mention partake in a hundred billion Byzantine dance maneuvers, so, uhh, we'll try but we're not promising anything. That was approximately a month ago, and since then, no offers have been made. Today, Michelle (see under "loverly fiancee") gave them her two weeks notice, because another company was willing to hire her on for the same position, but significantly more money. I am very proud of her for making this magic happen. The current job is scrabbling now, trying to figure out what they can do. Note above where they knocked her position from three people to one, meaning Michelle was the entire tentpole upon which the whole canvas rested. Without her, it all flops down, suffocating everybody in the department. But you know what? Fuck them. Hey, they decided that they didn't want to partake in the joyous equilibrium of corporate symbiosis. They thought they held all the cards, but the reality was, they only had a handful of jokers. The Entitlement Generation? You bet your ass we're entitled, jerks. Ha! 08/08/05 Here you go. Shit, who knew? So, I'm one of the three. I have no idea what this means, but I don't think it can be bad. I've considered screenwriting before, but only in an abstract way, much in the same way one might consider being a Great White Hunter or a Mad Journalist on a Rocking Ether Binge. It's not something I've truly felt was an option, and yet I'm not altogether certain why. Maybe it's because I'm on the wrong coast? Guess it doesn't matter now, because I'm-a write me up a screenplay. Don't know what being the mentee to a mentor means. I don't know if "mentorship" equals sporadic emails giving me faint, laconic praise: "Yeah, good job on Page 5. Nice. Fuck off." Or will the screenwriter move in with us, madly spouting about the Third Act from within our humid pantry? No goddamn idea. Looking forward to finding out, though. Here is the dude's website, though, if you're interested. This is all just further proof of my naive theories on the universe. If you meet the Universe (or God, or Buddha, or Jesus, or the Big Dog in the Boneyard, or the Great Spirit of the Happy Hunting Grounds) halfway, the universe will meet you at the other half. You've gotta put yourself out there, stick your neck out, but if you do? If you're honest about it, and you really want it? Well, shit, you might just get a little something close to what you want. I don't mean to suggest that this is fool-proof. I've received more rejection notes in this last year than I know what to do with. But getting the White Wolf gig and nabbing this screenwriting thing, well, it's all just a matter of putting yourself out there, good or bad, right or wrong. Perhaps a better way to put it is, if you see the white rabbit, follow him down the hole. It's better than what's topside. In other equally delicious news, I think we're nearing the process of announcing our Super-Sekrit Project. That is to say, a friend of mine have been working on something since March, and it's a killer. It's game-related, it's wholly unique, and so far I think it pretty much kicks the world in its uterus, and then makes a purse from its downy wombfolds. In the purse is stored our genius, and soon we shall open it for all to see. Like Pandora's Box, a great deal of evil will come forth from its pursey gloom. But, also like with the Box of Pandora, the last thing left inside is... hope. No, I've no idea what the fuck I'm talking about, either. Whatever the case, it's good stuff. He and I have always worked well together. Even when we disagree, it's a clash of competing good ideas, which is the friction that starts and stokes the fires of creation. Plus, most of the time, we're right on the same page, which is comforting. So, all this points to something. Don't know what yet. But no amount of purple bullshit prose on my craptacular blog can do it justice. With that in mind, I leave you now to eat some Cheetoes, clip that gnarly toenail that keeps scratching your bedmate's calf at night, and maybe ponder what I've said. 08/06/05 Ah, that yesterday. Yesterday, she's a silly bitch. Sometimes I say to yesterday, "Hey, yesterday, what were you thinking being all silly like that?" And then I slap her in her face, and she calls the police, and they put me in the drunk tank again. Yesterday I had a somewhat conflicting tug-o-war within the pulpy chambers of my lunatic heart. It was an ugly battle, a fracas of tooth and nail. See, around, ohhh, 3pm, I went to get the mail. I go, get the mail, and return with an envelope addressed to me, by me, in my handwriting. This is called an SASE, or the Self-Addressed-Stamped-Envelope. See, just last week, I sent out my second-to-most-recent short story ("short" meaning 13,000 words) called Dog-Man and Cat-Bird to the rather well-esteemed journal, Fantasy and Science-Fiction Magazine. Let's be clear. I didn't expect to get in, not really. I mean, this is the brass ring. The crown royale. The high mucky-muck of journals that unequivocally pays more than I make at The Wolf. Still, I like my story. I think it has a bedpan full of potential, I really do. My affianced bride-to-be helped me revise it, and her help was of paramount importance. What returned from that process was a viable second -- and hopefully final -- draft. So, I sent it via the archaic means of printing it out in manuscript format (nearly 70 pages), and shuffled it off. Well, it came back already, easily the fastest turnaround for an SASE-sent submission. With it came a tidy little note saying, "Sorry, story just didn't interest me," and that was that. Rejection. Hey, I'm used to it. I send stories out and they come back, rejected. I dig it, and a rejection is better than nothing, becase at the bare minimum, a rejection means I still have the balls to send my crap out into the world. Sure, my balls are bruised and kicked. One testicle is unraveling within my callused sack, but what can you do? It still means I get into the ring and fight the good fucking fight. This time, the rejection hit me a little harder, which is foolish. I loved the story, but at this stage, F&SF Magazine is so goddamn far out of my league, it probably isn't funny. Why the sudden sadness? Is it because I truly love this story and I demand others love it, as well? Maybe. I don't always like what I write, but I liked this one. So, yeah. For about an hour, I was a mopey girl. Jaws drooping, tears that tasted of salty sorrow drizzling down my unshaven cheek, lower lip quivering like a backhanded child. Then, I got some other news. Apparently, I'm one of the 15 semi-finalists for the Stephen Susco Screenwriting Competition. I sent in a pitch for a horror script (unwritten). It was a nationwide contest, held locally (by the Writers Room of Bucks County), and I decided to try it out back in May. I wasn't going to, because, hey, I have never written a screenplay. But two things sold me. First, my sister called me and told me I should enter it (she's actually the one who pointed it out to me in the first place). Second, the final judge is this dude, Stephen Susco. He's written various horror movies, most recently the American adaptation of The Grudge. I looked at his bio, and one of the first screenplays he ever wrote (unproduced) was an adaptation of Blue World, a short story by Robert McCammon. If you fools don't know how much I love me up some McCammon, well, shit, why are you even here? Seeing that, I figured it was some kind of sign, so I entered. And now? I'm one of the semi-finalists. It's pretty cool. Even if I don't end up being one of the three, at least I know I got farther than a lot of dudes. Plus, I get a year's subscription to Script Magazine, which ain't half-bad. Maybe this will work out. Maybe it won't. Either way, I now have the slight seed in my head that, boom, maybe one day I'll write me up a screenplay, see what the fuck happens. That details the war of emotions that came part and parcel with the silly bitch known as "yesterday." The End. (Oh, I updated my writing resume page. Go. Masticate my progress.) 08/05/05 I love it when "The Media" is unaware of something that's actually happening. I think, especially in regards to "Entertainment Journalism" (read this aloud and exaggerate the air quotes), that the media is in love with its own power of information. It believes that it helps to create and steer buzz, when in reality, buzz cannot be manufactured. Buzz exists independently of what the media thinks. Pop culture is a living beast. You can't leash it. You can only leap bodily upon its back and ride it until it throws you into a wall. What I'm trying to say is, I read this article in Entertainment Weekly (the online version, though often enough it gets reiterated in print). It basically asked: "Who the hell is Dane Cook?" See, because on Wednesday, something unprecendented occurred. Cook's new uber-comedy album, Retaliation, debuted at #4 on the Billboard Charts. For perspective, a comedy album hasn't been in the Top 5 of the Billboard charts in 26 years, when Steve Martin did it in 1978. Moreover, no comedy album has ever debuted and opened to that high a position on the sales charts. Point being, Entertainment Weekly (and various other journals) was unaware of something that was happening regardless of their information or influence. Dane Cook was a popular comedian. He has the buzz, and he has a cultic legion of slavering comedy fans. See, but by asking, "Who the heck is Dane Cook?" EW unconsciously admits that the joke is on them. We already know who the guy is, dipshits. It's you, the "seasoned entertainment journalists" who didn't know fuck-all about the comedy stylings of the Su-Fi King. All I ask is that motherfuckers pay attention. Christ. Anywho. I may have made a decision on which energy drink tickles my pink testes the most. I have purchased a 4-pack of Sobe Adrenaline Rush, which has done me well and kept me chugging through the day. Hey, anything to get the word count, yeah? (Soon I'll be pulverizing crackrock in a mortar and pestle and stirring it into a can of Pepsi. There's an energy drink for you. Cracksi. Or Peprock. Or just, "Go Juice.") I took on another assignment, due in November. Forty-thousand words for my friends at Vampire: the Requiem. We'll call it Circle Gets the Square, and alongside Big Book of Bubbledick, I have some good autumnal work to hammer out. I could use more, though, to keep my pace up. Was there something else? Probably. Hell if I can remember. Instead of endeavoring to recall what it was, I'll instead just throw down a smoke bomb and slink off into the shadows. For I am a verboninja. Poof, bitches. 08/02/05 Well, fuck-a-duck. Leak in our bathroom from above last night drove me to very little sleep, nor much productivity this morning because, well, it was still leaking. It's all fine and good now, and will be taken care of, and the leak is done, but my night and morning are damaged. Not irreparably -- I at least was capable of getting some shit done. But, still, fuck-a-duck. Fuck that duck in his beakholes. With a fiery rhino dick. Not much else going on. Had a lovely, if busy, weekend. The Werewolf game of Route 66 draws to a close this weekend. Sunday saw the penultimate chapter, which rocked some cock. I'll go on and describe the whole game later on, doing a summary recap. But all players have created memorable characters, each of which is good-news-gospel. Oh, and I'm still on my completely non-scientific bullshit self-study of energy drinks. I've had, since last entry, a Starbucks Doubleshot Espresso drink, and a Sobe Adrenaline Rush. The Starbucks is delicious, creamy, and has all the fat of Lou Ferrigno's asscheeks crammed into that tiny can. Seriously. This shit can't be good for you, which is an indication of just how good it tastes, which is to say, sweeter than an angel's tit-milk. It'll also knock your pants off with a good boost of caffiene. The Sobe Adrenaline Rush was similarly good-tasting. Not quite on par with the Starbucks (see earlier note: "angel's tit-milk"), but it was tasty nevertheless. Citrusy, sort of. I drank it on a largely empty stomach, and it kicked every cell in my body to an upright, standing position. This drink wired me to the gills, boy. I felt like my skin was crawling with happy spiders. Both drinks get a solid A- from me. That is all for now. Move along. 07/28/05 Dane Cook's new CD, Retaliation is out. If you're smart and have any kind of humor stored up in your mindparts, you want this. If you're a humorless dog whose soul is a wad of gray cloth, then the album might not be for you. Go and suckle on wheat paste, dullard. The album is actually a double CD and a DVD, which has so much value, it explodes in your hands and covers in you joy. I don't have any kind of formal review, only that it's rock solid comedy from an up-and-coming master of the craft. Not much else to say. Took a new Werewolf assignment. Small, 20k, nothing too exciting. For a meaningless code name, we'll call it The Big Book of Bubbledick, which probably means nothing, because I just made it up. Oh, and Justin Achilli is going to apparently be on G4's Attack of the Show tomorrow talking about the World of Darkness. Watch it, and be amused. Oh! I've totally been trying these "Energy Drinks" that all you kids are hopped up on these days. I figure, what the hell, I like energy. I also like delicious Energon Cubes, but those are too expensive for me, and I don't feel like battling Soundwave and his goddamn Buzzsaw tape-bird. Anyway. So, I've never had a Red Bull, but there are all these other types to try, and I figured, fuck it, I'm-a drink some. I've had three so far: Vitamin Water, Jones' Energy, and Monster Energy. Vitamin Water was good. I don't know that it's really an "energy" drink, per se, but whatever, it's water that's been enhanced with like, a billion vitamins. I drank it. It was red. There are other colors, but this one was fruit-punchy. It had a faintly vitamin-y taste (if you don't know of what I speak, go, nab a vitamin, and suckle in your mouth for about 30 seconds), but it's still pretty good. I felt nothing afterward, no surge of energy, no boundless power throbbing in my heart-box. So, I'll give it a B. (EDIT: Looking back at the bottle, it says it's flavored with "Dragonfruit." That's fucking fantastic. The Fruit of the Dragon. The Serpent's Apple. The Pomegranate in the Coils of Ouroboros.) Monster Energy. It tastes like someone strained urine through a cum-soaked gym sock. Sometimes you drink it and it has a tiny hint of goodness in the taste, it's like, a little voice calling out from your taste buds that tells you it's seen the Ghost of Mountain Dew playing around your tonguescape, but then that feeble glimmer of good taste is buried under the aforementioned Piss-plus-Semen-plus-Gymsock sensation. It just isn't good. I drank half of the big-ass can (cited as "1 Serving"). It didn't do shit for me. No energy, only a queasy feeling of oral violation. You look at the back of the can, and it's got about a thousand ingredients. I don't know what Taurine is or why I need it, but it was in there. Along with a bunch of sugar and sucralose (i.e. Splenda). Why both? No idea. The taste haunts me. Like someone took a shit in a Robitussin bottle. Eck. I give an F+. (EDIT: Heh. Go to www.monsterenergy.com and you'll find the Monster Energy website. Did all the douchebags on the Internet coalesce in one location? Probably not. View this page as a prime example of the eXXXtreme Marketing Grotesquerie that has plagued this nation for far too long.) Now, Jones' Energy. Little can, medium sugar, and a mild confluence of vitamins (Niacin, B6, B12, Pantothenic Acid). It tastes delicious. Lightly berrylicious. The bubbles tickled my happy centers. While I received no grand surge of energy from drinking one, I do find that my mind is more clear, and my normal level of tiredness is somewhat mitigated. Could be coincidental, I mean, hell, this dude's no scientist. But I've drank a few of these things so far, and so far it's the only one I'd say is definitively worth the purchase. Totally gets an A-. So, I'll continue, try some others, see what I can see. I'm sort of guessing they're all going to taste like the ass-end of a bulldog. More later. 07/23/05 This is where you'll find an interview. With me, apparently. So, go. Read. I may post the transcript here eventually, for no reason except to embrace my vanity. In the meantime, whet your appetite with these Korean croquettes: 1 cup grated carrots, 1 cup grated potatoes (coarse-grated), 3/4 cup finely chopped onion, and 2 minced garlic cloves. Mix them bitches together until it's a vegetabley morass. Then, do something else. "Something else" means throwing together 2 eggs, 1 cup of flour, 3/4 cup water, a teaspoon of salt, and a liberal dash of pepper. Blend it until gooey. Then, take that crap, and mix it with the other crap. So, you'll stir the goo and the vegetable morass together until it's one big liquid clump of batter-shellac'ed veggie bits. Get yourself a medium skillet. Put it over medium-high heat, and warm up about a half-cup of vegetable oil. When it's all bubbly and sizzly, drop tablespoons (three or four at a time) of the veggie-goo in the oil. Brown on both sides. Soak on paper towels. There you go. Korean vegetable croquettes. I don't know what's Korean about them. There's no Kim Chee, no sesame seeds, no lunatic god-king dictators addicted to Hennessy cognac. 07/07/05 I. Uhhh. This is very strange. At first, it's sort of funny. Then it's disturbing. Then maybe it's a music video. With laser battles. And psychic skull madness. Uhh. It's very strange. 07/06/05 There's this website, Shadownessence, right? A solid World of Darkness fansite, great fora, lots of conversations safe and sane. Well, they're holding a raffle over yonder way, and one of the prizes of this raffle is Mysterious Places, signed by yours truly. It's like, $3.00 to jump in, and there are other prizes signed by two other authors (Ordo Dracul, signed by Matt McFarland and Hunting Ground: Rockies by Rick Jones). I'm also accepting a small position over there, a title they call "Hunter Vilicus," which is frankly a title I wish I had at all my jobs. "Hey, Chuck, what's your role here in the company again?" "I AM HUNTER VILICUS, FOOL." And then I'd evaporate their viscera with a jaunty snap of my fingers. Since that won't happen, I'm taking the role there. It's kind of a forum moderator deal, with some added bonuses of helping guide their Hunter: the Reckoning section. So, that's all good. Maybe I'll even get to write some post-mortem Huntery goodness, who knows? Hopefully, I'll have time to keep up and help them do a good job. Other stuff, little surprises, might be popping up on that site, too. Early yet, to tell. To visit the site, click here. What else? Not much. Holiday bungled the week a little bit, but it's all good. Game coming up on Sunday (still Werewolf), and I am foaming at the bit for that day of tasty dice-rolling clawfulness. Finished Gilmore Girls Season 3, spot on awesome, one of the best shows out there (and guest starring the occasional Bruce McCullough from Kids in the Hall!). On TV, if you're not watching FX's Rescue Me or 30 Days, then it's like you're a ghost to me. Two brilliant shows. The former, which I've lauded before, is Denis Leary's masterpiece. The latter is the docu-show by Super-Size Me creator, Morgan Spurlock. Brilliant shit. Educational, hilarious, provocative. Oh, and Batman Begins. It's the quintessential Batman flick, hands down. Can't recommend it enough. That's about the small and large of it. I'm going to go back to editing a very long short story of mine, a little piece called Dog-Man and Cat-Bird. I don't often enough enjoy my own stories when I'm finished with them, but this is a piece I'm pretty happy with, and of which I'm more than a little proud. We'll see if I can't punch it into shape (with the help of my affianced lady) and send it to some places. Y'know. Places that don't care that it's just over 13,000 words. Oops. 07/04/05 Happy 4th of July. Blah blah, America is awesome, blah blah, destroy the pinko Commies. Or something. It's a good country, one of the best, and will continue to be provided we don't fall too deeply in love with our own awesomeness. That way lies Nationalism, which is one step above Patriotism, and is for jerks. Enough of that red, white, and blue malarky. Do you have an XBOX? A PS2? A PC? If you answered "yes!" to any of those questions, you will do something for me. It won't hurt, worry not. It'll feel quite good, at least for the most part. You will go out and rent or purchase a game. This game is called Psychonauts. I won't endeavor to bore you with a Psychonauts review, other than tossing at you a few words about how totally freaking awesome this game is. One of the best ever. It's from the dementobrain of game creator Tim Schafer, one of the godheads behind awesome games like Grim Fandango and Day of the Tentacle. It's the best platformer I've ever played, and has a compelling story. Best of all, it's genuinely laugh-out-loud hilarious. So, get it. And try not to destroy your game console during the game's final (and painfully difficult) last level. Michelle and I beat the game in tandem, which is one of the finest points about playing games with her, is our ability to team up and switch off and punch all games in their nuts. One does the thinking, the other does the button mashing, and all is well in the world. This is why I am marrying her. Well, that and she hates tomatoes. I, too, loathe the bulbous red fruit that tastes of watery pink phlegm. Not much else going on beyond that. Saw Team America, very funny, not perfect, but it worked. Finished up my emergency Werewolf assignment, some 5k over, but that was okay-ed by Mister Developer. Working on the next assignment now. Life continues apace. Carry on. 06/29/05 I have an herb garden. No, I don't kiss men. I just happen to like the taste of fresh stuff in my meal. Plus, hey, for a lazy bastard like myself, herbs are the perfect thing to grow. Stick 'em in the ground, keep them wet, they'll last through the goddamn Apocalypse. And they grow like mad. I've got basil. Here's what I did with the basil. This is pretty easy. I cut up chicken (about 1 lb., chicken breasts, defatted) into little strips. In a fat-bellied skillet ("wok"), I cooked up some sliced garlic (3 cloves) and about six chopped green onions. All over Medium-High heat. I sizzled those sons-of-bitches for about 2 minutes. Then, I added a half-an-onion (chopped), and three diced red chile peppers. Another two minutes. Then I flung the chicken in there. Cooked it up right nice, I did. When that's all done up (y'know, chicken isn't pink), you toss in there about 1/4 cup of soy sauce, unless you have fish sauce. Then you do half fish sauce, half soy sauce. But I don't like fish sauce, because... well, shit, it smells like rotten fish. When we moved into our current home, I accidentally spilled some of that outside, and you know what? It made our front walk smell like goddamn zombie vagina for like, three days. I don't put anything that smells like undead poontang in my food, I just can't. But here's the trick. Y'know why you put fish sauce in food? Not for the fish taste. For a salt taste. That's pretty much it. So, for substitution, you can add in a teaspoon or two of salt instead of fish sauce. Boom. Anyway, back to the meal. Once you've cooked the soy sauce in there, and you're about done, you take 3/4 cup of chopped basil. Fresh. You can add some dry in there if you want, but don't fuck around with it, use mostly fresh. Throw it in there at the last minute, stir it up, let it cook for another minute, and then take it out. You don't want to cook basil for long, because the flavor leaves it. Serve it over steamed jasmine rice. What you have there is Chili Basil Chicken, or Gkai Pad Gkaprow. Oh, another tip when you're harvesting your fresh basil. Leaves, not stems. If taking from a live plant, pinch the leaves from the top down. That leafy madness will grow back super-fast, like in a few days. So there, that's what you do with your basil. What's that? You aren't on this site looking for recipes and cooking tips? Fine. Fine. General updatery: I got a new assignment for a book I'm going to call The Book of Hungry Singularities, that's about 14,000 words. Got another small emergency Forsaken assignment, due in the next few days, should be fun. Finished my 35k of Blasphemies, just have to look over it once more before sending off to Herr Doktor Skemp. Got my redlines back for Armory, which was a blood-soaked mess, I mean, it was red and runny like a stab victim. And it was all my fault, my writing in it was an ugly monstrosity of the human language. So, I fixed them and sent them off. Other projects, secret projects, projects that whisper dark things in my ears in the earliest evil of the morning, they all go fine and well. Wedding is getting planned quite nicely. Official date is now May 20th. We have the restaurant booked for that day. We've designed our centerpieces, more or less. We've got our guest list about 90% of the way. It's all going smoothly, which is a sure indication that some kind of awful flim-flammery is going to rise from the bitter furnaces of Hell to jam up the works, but that's to be expected. My luck, the government will make marriage between heterosexual non-Republicans illegal. Oh, I'm just kidding, I love Republicans. And no, they didn't pay me to say that. And no, one isn't standing behind me right now with a semi-automatic rifle that they made legal again. And no, they aren't threatening to have my home bought by Wal-Mart in the interest of the "public good." I love the GOP. That is all. More recipes and bullshit later. 06/28/05 Here's what you're going to do with your cauliflower. You're going to take it, and you're going to chop it into florets small and large. You're going to stick that shit in some kind of square or rectangular baking dish, big enough so that you can lay down the cauliflower in a single layer. Then you're going to put some garlic in there. Optimally, use fresh cloves. Smash 'em, mince 'em. If you don't have that, hey, just use the stuff in the spice jar. Then you're going to squeeze some lemon over the whole thing, getting it on each piece. Olive oil, after that. Drizzle that shit on each floret. Finally, you're going to put more crap on there. Salt, pepper. Sprinkle, don't go crazy. Put it in the oven at 400 degrees. Bake for about fifteen minutes. When it comes out of the hot womb of your oven, put some cheese on there. I used Parmesan (not fresh) with a blend of Asiago and Mozzarella (fresh). That's what you're going to do with your cauliflower. Tomorrow, I'm going to tell you where you can stick your fresh basil. 06/16/05 My Aunt Mary passed away this past Tuesday. Not much to say about it that wouldn't otherwise sound glib. I'll only say that it is incredibly sad that she is gone, and I will miss her dearly, as will all of the family. She was quite beloved. If we are all lucky enough for there to be a Heaven, she will be there when we arrive. 05/31/05 In and around our home, Mother Nature wages an incomprehensible battle. Outside my window, as I type this, two little dark birds are assaulting a bigger raptor bird. The big bird is besieged by the littles. Inside, we have the Antpocalypse. Our bathroom is an unexpected graveyard of ants. Every day, new dead ants. We find them on the floor. Sometimes just a few, other times dozens of black ant corpses. From time to time, we find living ants carrying the dead back to little cracks in the wall -- the same breaches from which I believe they came. This morning, a new twist upon the bathroom battlefields of the Antpocalypse: seven dead ants in the toilet. Some mystery is happening here of which I cannot answer. But I want to. I want to. Anyway. Stuff. So much to say, so little time to say it. A wedding happened in Vegas this weekend that I sadly could not attend, but early word says it went well, and I got some cool pics from the affair thanks to the wacky world of digital camera phones. Pictures beamed through the air, thank you, Sister Technology. Congrats, for sure, to the groom and bride, Coleman and Julia. Wedding plans of our own are ramping up into full gear. I imagine we're looking at the 20th or 27th of May, 2006 for the official date. Other items are falling into order accordingly, which is good. Other things remain variable, in marital flux until we can capture the elusive questions and pin them to a corkboard like one might do to an errant butterfly. It progresses, nevertheless. We are all but certain that our honeymoon will occur with us bloated and booze-sodden in the California Wine Country, because that just sounds nice. And, hell, let's be clear, the honeymoon is the end goal. The honeymoon is the couple's reward for putting up with all the nonsense of a wedding. It's restful bliss after madcap planning and psychofueled ritual. This is partly why I feel the Wine Country is an excellent idea, because Wine has always been a good friend. Wine will massage our backs, feed us grapes, kiss us to sleep with its sour juicefulness. Wine loves us. And we will in turn love Wine. What else? Had a loverly and sudden Memorial Day pick-a-nick at a friend's yesterday, in which there was meat, and fire for the meat. I'm selling a bunch of Jyhad / Vampire: the Eternal Struggle cards on eBay (actually just finished 20+ auctions, made a couple hundred bucks so far). I'm continuing to write the current White Wolf book, and got most of my redlines back for Armory, which were bloody, but not unfair. I guess that's about it. I was going to give you my thoughts on Revenge of the Sith, but what can I say that hasn't already been said by someone, somewhere? It rocked on toast, but could've been a hair's breadth better if George Lucas weren't such a lunkhead when it comes to silly things like, oh, writing and pre-planning. Sith unfortunately doesn't do what many reviewers suggest, which is validate the earlier two films. If anything, it shows that a movie like Phantom Menace, which I enjoyed, is also completely extraneous, like a toe on one's forehead. Also, the new Nine Inch Nails album, With Teeth, worth picking up, for sure. Lots of cock-hard aggro rock with actual instrumentation as opposed to Reznor recording the sound of a stream of urine hitting a tin roof and incorporating it electro-delicately into the music. Musically, Reznor remains a genius. It might not be popular to suggest that, it might seem tired and cliche and has-been, but fuck it, Reznor knows how to mix the shit. Lyrically, Reznor's always been a bit of a chucklehead, but it works. He hits the same motifs here, featuring the same words and ideas (belong, decay, down on your knees, fuck, fucking, fading away, hurts, betrayal, etc;etc;), and its fine. But you don't listen to nin for the lyrics, not really. You can make up that angry dark shit in your head. The music, on the other hand, cannot be conceived of until you have heard it. Only then it is unlocked, like a reward at the end of a video game. 05/23/05 Vampire: the New Blood is temporarily dead. We'll say it's in torpor. Will it awaken from its comatose slumber? Maybe in September. Until then, a we're +1 to our Gamer Count, as one of the Old Guard comes home from law school for the summer. So, we're starting something new. We're going to play Werewolf: the Forsaken. A pack of bikers. Riding up and down Old Route 66, smearing blood on the highway and putting the boot and claw to the ass-end of Pure Werewolves and God-fucked spirits. Should be a good time. The tracklist for this game, which I will roughly refer to herein as 66, is ready to go: Track listing: Werewolf: the Foresaken 66. v o l u m e 1 Beginning June 5th. 1.) Battle Without Honor or Humanity: Tomoyasu Hotei 2.) Faster, Faster: Bree Sharp 3.) With Teeth: nin 4.) Hurt: Johnny Cash 5.) Murdermile: The Kills 6.) Red Right Hand: Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds 7.) Crane / White Lightning: RZA & Charles Bernstein 8.) That Certain Female: Charlie Feathers 9.) Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down): Nancy Sinatra 10.) Blackbirds: Erin McKeown 11.) I Am A Man Of Constant Sorrow: Soggy Bottom Boys 12.) Frenzy: Screamin' Jay Hawkins 13.) Life and Death of Mr. Badmouth: PJ Harvey 14.) Getting Smaller: nin 15.) Stagger Lee: Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds 16.) Fool's Gold: Bree Sharp 17.) Explosivo: Tenacious D 18.) Club Foot: Kasabian 19.) No Regrets: Von Bondies 20.) No, You Don't: nin 21.) Up Jumped the Devil: Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds 22.) (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction: Cat Power I'll also be putting together a Concrete Blonde mix, but that's just expected. It'll be nice to finally give their new(est) album, Mojave more reason to play. Anyway. More tomorrow, including thoughts on the new nin album, the new Star Wars, a general update on all things Exile, and other crap that falls into my head like birdpoop. 04/27/05 Worth mentioning, click here to check out some streaming audio of the entire new NIN album, as posted by Trent hisself. Can you say Dave Grohl on drums? Say it. And then grin a blood-smeared grin. Other quickity-snap-clackity-clack notes: I won't be writing a novel for White Wolf. Blessedly, it has little to do with me or my work, it's just a circumstantial thing. Mind you, that doesn't stop it from being disappointing and more than a little depressing, but hey, it's a hard-knock life. I am almost done my current White Wolf assignment (which I'll just reveal here is World of Darkness: Armory, as the book has been announced already on the WW Livejournal). Nearly 50k in 30 days, pretty good so far. Halo 2 maps, out. Get them, play them. Find me, Gametag = Weaver42. Fiancee rocks, birthday was sweet, Dane Cook is the shiznit, as it the comedian Robert Kelly (who I'd heard of, but never heard). Thank you to all who delivered unto me some manner of birthday glee. My iPod is farking sweet. I am now looking for jobs. Probably part-time. Freelance income remains reasonable, but unsteady, and some kind of work will be nice. My exile remains, however, for the moment, because the job market is for ball-kicking only, it seems. Werewolf: the Forsaken is a damn fine game, put nicely together, very good. A little dry in parts, but you know it's a good game when reading every page gives you a new idea for a game you'd like to run. I am selling some books on eBay again. Signed copies of Lancea Sanctum and Ghouls for those interested. That is all, for now. Peace out, Whiteys. 04/22/05 My birthday is half-over, I am a hair's breadth from 30, and I am listening to an iPod Shuffle. This iPod is mine. My fiancee -- She Who Shall Be Called Miss Awesome Of All Time -- procured this iPod for me, and it is cooler than freezer-frozen shit. All you people out there who have poser digital music players, bite a nut. Do it. Bite it. My iPod is a dog that vomits up spiders and the spiders eat your crappy MP3 player and digest it and crap it out onto their Web of Madness, and all you can do is sit in a cooling puddle of urine and cry hot tears. That's all you got. Take it. The day has been wonderful in many a-way. Miss Awesome also cobbled together a delightful clay statuary of this retarded thing I used to draw called the "Meatloaf Effigy," who is, basically, a big wad of meatloaf peppered with dog hairs, and who talks, but says little more than "Mrgphrlrb" and things of that sort. I used to send her these little cartoons, crafted indelicately with Photoshop, and now she has given me one, and he is as awesome as the iPod, if not more awesome. If the iPod is Jesus, the Meatloaf Effigy idol is God. No, I don't know what that means either, but you'll just have to puzzle it out on your own. Other awesomenessess include: Free copies of Werewolf: the Forsaken and Hunting Grounds: The Rockies, and a new XBOX controller. The new controller is actually a used controller, because it's the Big Manly Sized Controller. The Chunky Controller for Man-Hands. I need it. The little controller feels like one of those notebook paper Cootie-Catchers the girls used in grade school to portend your fate. It just felt too delicate, like my hands (which aren't even that big) were just going to crush it like fragile air-blown glass. The big controller feels like I'm driving a boat. A powerful boat that shoots plasma harpoons and has a pair of gigantic muscled-up arms that pick up other boats and throw them away. This is what I want out of my controller. This is what I now have. And it was free, because I traded shit in. I haven't even gotten to the fact that tonight, we're going to see Dane Cook with a pair of the finest friends and Miss Awesome's brother. So, it shall be goodness personified. It shall be happiness made into a hat and worn for all to see. 04/18/05 Sometimes, when you're out and alone in reality, weird shit happens. Par example: I went for a walk today at a park near to where we live. Nice day. Warm. Lots of shade interspersed with sun. So, I'm walking along, and there are, of course, various others walking. Ahead of me, I see an old man. Blue slacks pulled high, polo shirt tucked tight. Baseball cap on his head the color of seawater. As he approaches, he makes a bee-line for me. As if I am a planet and he is caught in my gravity well. He not only approaches -- he comes and stands directly in front of me. He says, "There were these ducks." Not knowing exactly how to respond, I say, "Where?" "Back thatta way," he says, and thumbs behind him. He is smiling broadly. You could thatch a roof with his emergent nosehair. "It reminds me of a poem by Ogden Nash." "Okay," I say. Then he recites the poem: "Behold the duck It does not cluck. A cluck it lacks. It quacks. It is special fond Of a puddle or a pond. When it dines or sups, It bottoms ups." Both confused and impressed, I only respond with: "I used to like Ogden Nash. I really liked his poem, The Turtle." The old man nods sagely, and then recites that poem: "The turtle lives 'twixt plated decks Which practically conceal its sex. I think it clever of the turtle In such a fix to be so fertile." I tell him he's got quite a memory. He nods beneath his 'New Zealand' cap, and says he knows all of Nash's poems and limericks, and that he writes poetry himself. He recited a quick poem about an arrogant skiier. I'd love to recall it here, but I'm brainless. It had "slope" and "dope" rhyming. It wasn't an altogether awful piece of simplicity. He then asks me if I write, and I tell him I do, that's sort of odd. He asks me some questions about what I write, what I like to read, etc;. Then he tells me I should read these mysteries by some guy named Stewart Kaminski (sp?). They're 1940s noir-pulp-humor, and he said they're particularly funny, and that the main detective has a Swiss midget friend. Then the old man shakes my hand and goes on his way. Life is a little weird. *** Aside from being accosted by weird-but-fascinating old dudes, this weekend was r0xx0r to to the c0xx0r. Lovely weather, good times had with the lady and I, lots of niceness. Drank wine and watched Sideways (turns out, it's the only way to watch that film, which was great), went on walks, ate (er, drank?) Rita's Mistos, went shopping, wandering, dining, and so on and so forth. I have a job interview on Thursday -- it's a communications manager position for a film society. Not exactly right around the corner, but the pay is reasonable and the job sounds pretty all right. So, we'll see. In the meantime, I continue on, my exile unabated. 04/11/05 Well, shit. Ghouls is coming out soon (next month), and guess who isn't on the credits list? That's right, me. Just some office fubar, some administrative snafu, but I will not be listed on the credits of the first printing. It'll get corrected in subsequent printings, but fuck, those early adopters will be clueless as to my intervention. That said, not many peeps probably pay attention to the credits list, so it's not the end of the world. I'll just track down every copy and write my name in there. In blood. Not my blood, though, I mean, c'mon. I also don't have my copies of Lancea Sanctum yet, which saddens me. Because I want to touch them. And hump them like a slavering hound. In better news, I am working on a big ol' assignment now (on top of House of Vomit), which I'll call Wily Cheung Dragon's Shopping List. It's a nearly 50k assignment, due in a month. I'm already about 15k deep, so I think I'll be good to go. *** The New Blood happened on Sunday. Good game, all told. Lots of angst over feeding, hunting, punishment, sires, and -- oh yeah -- one half-dead teenage girl in a hotel bathtub. Good times. *** Saturday was a loverly day spent with the Nigh-Missus. The lady and I went to a little town called Skippack and wandered amok in one big bee-yoo-tee-full 70 degree sunbeam. Fun shopping, eating, and then later I made a Thai Pork dinner which was worth its weight in madness and cat blood. April 22nd (coincidentally my birthday), the lady and I, her brother, and some friends will be going to see Dane Cook at Villanova. It should be fun. And funny. And gigglesome. And chortlebred. As I said, good times. 03/23/05 It is assumed that writers are in control of their fiction. Yesterday, I wrote a story that ended differently than I expected. I did not foresee this change in the end coming. It literally happened as I wrote it. I did not think about it. It went against my plans. And I think it's better for it. Writers are in no more control of their fiction than scientists are of their experiments, or doctors are of their patients. The fiction, I assure you, is in control. *** In other news, Time of Judgment just won itself an InQuest Award, best supplement or something like that. I don't think we authors get anything, but screw it, I'm just happy to have been one of the two dudes who hammered the nails into Hunter's coffin. It was an honor, and now I feel our efforts were justified. Also, the White Wolf website (www.white-wolf.com) has a preview of the Lancea Sanctum book