I love detective movies, and my tastes pretty much line up with the accepted canon of greatness: The Big Sleep, The Maltese Falcon, Out of the Past, Laura, The Thin Man, and so forth. And I have a soft spot for cross-genre mashups: Blade Runner, In the Mouth of Madness, Angel Heart. But one of my favorites almost always gets … Read More
The cover of Dark Jenny
At long last, here’s the cover art for Dark Jenny, the third Eddie LaCrosse novel, due out next spring. The artist is Larry Rostant. As you can see, it goes in a whole new direction for the series. So what do you think?
Meet the One-Eyed Monster
(Lily’s shelter mug shot) This summer I mentioned we got a cat. Apparently my prior comments on cats made this news surprising. So here’s the scoop (and the litter box is over there! Badda-BING!). I’ve gone on record many places as saying I hate cats. The last cat I lived with introduced herself by launching claws-first at my crotch (I … Read More
If it’d been an Ellison, it woulda bit me
There’s an old bit of wisdom that says, roughly paraphrased, if you pick up a snake and it bites you, it’s not the snake’s fault. My wife is an avid science fiction reader, but she’s never been to an SF convention. When her favorite SF author Harlan Ellison was announced as the guest of honor for local convention MadCon, she … Read More
"The process is its own reward" *
“If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, you don’t know what you’re doing.” –W. Edwards Deming I get asked about my writing process a fair bit, so I thought I’d share an example of how I work, from initial draft to final revision. I’m not making any claims that this is the only way, or even … Read More
Working titles (and titles that don’t. Work, that is.)
My most recent novel, The Girls with Games of Blood, was the first one to hit shelves with my title on it. I’m not complaining, mind you. Titles are funny things, and they have to be balanced between appropriateness, marketability and simple comprehension. But I thought I’d describe the titling process as I’ve experienced it, since I’ve just settled on … Read More
I walked into a bar…and he saw the end
Recently I read a novel that annoyed me no end with its capricious disregard of its own genre rules. And I worry that in it, I saw the end of the current boom of fantasy/paranormal novels crossed with the hardboiled detective form, which depresses me because hey, I write that kind of book. The novel (unidentified here because it’s symptomatic … Read More
Survival of the Dead and how to keep a series interesting
Some background on me and George Romero’s zombies: I saw Night of the Living Dead one Saturday afternoon when I was in high school. The Memphis TV station, apparently thinking it was some innocuous old B&W horror movie, did not edit it. Forget the graphic intestine-eating: I’d never before seen a movie where the hero died such a pointless death. … Read More
Return of the Verdilak
Lately I’ve been reading multiple books at once, a chapter here andc there of completely unrelated things: the second Denton novel by Kenneth Cameron, No-Man’s Lands by Scott Huler (about retracing the journeys of Odysseus), an unbelievably detailed book on the making of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and a novel for which I’ve been asked to do a … Read More
The profit motive (or, the prophet motive)
Recently on my Facebook/Twitter feed I posted a bit of Roger Ebert’s review of the new Julia Roberts movie, Eat Pray Love: “[To like the movie] I guess you have to belong to the narcissistic subculture of Woo-Woo.” I quoted it because I found it funny, and should make clear right now that I have neither read nor seen the book/movie … Read More