My oldest son and I just finished watching the first season of the original Star Trek series. We watched the episodes in “production order,” meaning the order in which they were filmed. That way, we could see the growth of the show, the way the actors find their characters, and how the Enterprise itself is more and more developed. … Read More
Tropology: Heroes and Girlfriends
It’s a common trope in novel series that the tough-guy hero who solves mysteries and kicks ass will get a new love interest each time out. The gold standard, of course, is James Bond, who often gets several new women in every book or movie. But it goes all the way back to The Odyssey, in which Odysseus manages to … Read More
Duck Dynasty and the Quack of Hypocrisy
“I never, with my eyes, saw the mistreatment of any black person. Not once. Where we lived was all farmers. The blacks worked for the farmers. I hoed cotton with them. I’m with the blacks, because we’re white trash. We’re going across the field …. They’re singing and happy. I never heard one of them, one black person, say, ‘I … Read More
Happy birthday, Joseph Conrad!
Today, one hundred and fifty-six years ago, Joseph Conrad was born in Russia. He was Polish, but became a nationalized British subject in 1886. In 1899, his masterpiece Heart of Darkness first appeared in print, serialized in a British magazine. There’s a simple, almost unbelievable fact hidden in the above paragraph. Conrad was Polish, did not learn English until … Read More
The apocryphal soundtracks to some of my books
It’s no secret that music is a big part of many of my novels, from inspiring the titles to influencing the plots to being part of the story itself. I’m not alone in this, I’m sure. Recently my friends at Facebook’s Heroic Fiction League, Nathan Long and John R. Fultz, posted “playlists” of YouTube videos, songs that either their heroes … Read More
Interview: Andrew Brasfield, songwriter of Cold Wind
When I began planning Time of the Season, my holiday-themed e-book chapbook, I already had two of the stories. Both the title story and “A Ghost, and a Chance” had been around for a while. But I wanted to write something new, and I’d gotten such a good response from my novel, The Hum and the Shiver, that I decided … Read More
The Indy Challenge: Melissa Olson on Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
Today the four Indiana Jones films are released on blu-ray, along with a host of special features (including the awesome TV special, The Making of Raiders of the Lost Ark, which I’ve had on VHS for decades). To commemorate this, author Melissa Olson (Dead Spots) and I have agreed to swap blog posts defending the most maligned entries in the … Read More
Maria Scholl, the overlooked great science fiction heroine
A while back I wrote about Meg Coburn (Mira Sorvino) of The Replacement Killers, the forgotten great action heroine. Now I’m spotlighting Maria Scholl, the overlooked great science fiction heroine. Scholl, played by Cox Habbema, is one of the main figures of Eolomea, a 1972 East German (i.e., Soviet-era Communist) SF film directed by Hermann Zschoche. In a nonspecific future, spaceships … Read More
Blogging, bullying, and the big pile-on
In this blog post at Why Advertising Sucks, the author talks–in angry, pithy language–about how quick people on the internet are to criticize. He writes, “People behind a computer are your judges, not knowing you, not knowing your life.” That’s true, and it’s not news. But it got me thinking about the part of it that bothers me the most. Anyone who’s … Read More
At Apex magazine: No Mortals Allowed
Over at Apex magazine, you can check out my article on vampire and werewolf secret societies, “No Mortals Allowed.” Leave a comment there if you like it!