I have a soft spot for the current incarnation of the British show Doctor Who that can be distilled down to a comment made by the title character during the recent Christmas special. When told by a villainous type than someone “wasn’t important,” the Doctor replied, “I’ve never met anyone who wasn’t important.” That sort of unabashed optimism and compassion, … Read More
The Finn Substitution
Some have brewed a ha-ha about a new edition of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that removes what is euphemistically called “the N word” and replaces it with the word, “slave.” This has brought all kinds of interesting trivia to light (“the N word” is used 219 times in Finn, “slave” is not actually a synonym for it, … Read More
Saved by Darkness
In 1978, I was as hardcore a geek/nerd/dweeb as a boy could be. Star Wars had come upon the world, legitimizing those of us who read books with spaceships and monsters on the covers (and got beaten up by our cousins for it, but that’s another blog post). Starlog magazine was hot. TV had The Six Million Dollar Man, The … Read More
Meet the Queen of the Lot
This is the final post on films I watched over the Thanksgiving holiday. I watched other films (Leatherheads, Pandorum, Coffee and Cigarettes), but there isn’t much to say about them. I’m ending on a high note, though. A while back I stumbled across the work of Henry Jaglom, a filmmaker who’s been forging his own indie path for forty years. … Read More
Do I want to know Me and You and Everyone We Know?
Madison, WI poet Lisa Marie Brodsky recommended Miranda July’s 2005 film Me and You and Everyone We Know, and I finally watched it over the holiday weekend. It’s an indie film in the broadest sense, made by an outsider artist and about outsider people, some of whom do things so confoundingly odd that you wonder if they exist anywhere but … Read More
What lies (er, hops) at the heart of The Maze?
One of the best thing about holidays? Catching up on movies! Over the next few days I’ll be writing about some of the more interesting flicks I saw over the long weekend, starting with 1953’s The Maze. I remember watching The Maze at my uncle’s house in Columbia, TN when I was a kid. I was too young for post-modern … Read More
Pictures from World Fantasy Convention 2010
A few pictures from World Fantasy. I was too busy to take very many, unfortunately. Me and my tablemate Travis Heerman, author of Heart of the Ronin, at the mass signing Saturday night. Me and Amelia Beamer, author of The Loving Dead (which I reviewed here). Amelia also interviewed me for Locus magazine. Me with Tom Doherty, head of Tor … Read More
The Loving Dead: zombies with one thing on their minds
When it comes to the living dead, I’m strictly vanilla. I want my zombies slow, shambling, mindless and prolific. I have no time for zombies that run, or speak, or suffer from a virus and aren’t really zombies. So I began reading Amelia Beamer’s The Loving Dead with a bit of trepidation, since her zombies are not only virus-spawned (and … Read More
Helsinki Homicide: ice cold crime without "girl" in the title
Scandanavian thrillers are all the rage right now thanks to Steig Larsson, but I’ve been a fan of this sub-genre since Peter Hoeg’s novel Smilla’s Sense of Snow and the original Norwegian version of the film Insomnia. Larsson’s Millenium trilogy may be the Hunger Games of its moment, but recently I discovered another Scandanavian author, from Finland, whose crime novels … Read More
Help! I need a catch phrase!
One of the most fun parts of being an author is signing books for readers, but I often find myself stuck for clever wording. Sure, “best wishes” and “thanks for reading” are acceptable fall-backs, but I want something unique and fun. George Romero, for example, signs everything, “Stay Scared!” My problem is I write both horror and fantasy, so I … Read More