The Scary Parent

Star Wars Galaxies

2009-07-05T21:02:00.001-07:00

I just found out that Star Wars Galaxies, the MMORPG developed by Sony Online Entertainment and published by LucasArts, will be doing a game update this fall based on Death Troopers. Check out this conceptual art. The Wookiee in the background is seriously giving me the shivers.

Elvis is in the Building

2009-06-28T05:49:00.000-07:00

Phil Hale has been one of my favorite artists since I was in high school. He's probably best known for doing the art for Stephen King's The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three, but he's also done a ton of book covers and fantasy art over the years. Most recently he painted the first and only official portrait of Tony Blair during his time as PM.

Anyhow, in the Dreams Come True Department, I received an early 40th birthday present in the form of this original Phil Hale oil painting of Elvis Costello. It was apparently commissioned for a British rock magazine but never used. It now hangs in my dining room. And my little world is a brighter place for it.

That's What She Said

2009-06-22T03:09:00.000-07:00

"Boiled down to its essence, good story often comes out of a character who is trying to restore the status quo, but whose efforts constantly pushing things further out of whack, until they reach a crisis. This is not necessarily because she makes bad decisions, but because of who she is -- it is what makes her an interesting character, and familiar to us...we who so often seem to make things worse when we mean to make them better."

--That's What She Said: A Style Guide, by Veronica Villaviciosa

Vorhees a Jolly Good Fellow

2009-06-21T16:08:00.001-07:00

From the moment that my dad caught me watching a grimy old Betamax copy of Tobe Hooper's Texas Chainsaw Massacre back in sixth grade, I've never really felt like I had to defend the crap that I watch, read or listen to. At the same time, I've always kind of enjoyed rattling on about it -- which isn't the same as recommending it, obviously. When questioned by those with better taste than mine, I've always kind of shrugged and grinned and tried to compensate for my lousy judgment with sheer moronic enthusiasm.

I was never a huge fan of the Friday the 13th franchise. I'm sure there are lots of people out there who are, but to me it was always the Burger Chef of the early '80s slasher boom -- seedy, sleazy, an unapologetically capitalistic move, with none of the relentless faux-Midwestern gracefulness of John Carpenter's Pasadena masterpiece. But last night I stayed up late watching this year's Michael Bay remake, prepared to hate every second of it, and I have to say, it held my interest. Not because it was any good (it wasn't, really) or even particularly scary (at one point during an interview with the director, you can see that he has a copy of Herb Gardening for Dummies on the shelf behind him, and I posit to you, how could anyone with that book direct a scary movie?) It contains actual lines of dialogue such as: "Dude, your tits are so juicy" and "You have perfect nipple placement," and despite what the filmmakers seemed to have thought they achieved, the suspense is kept to an absolute minimum, like a special effect they couldn't quite afford.

I even scoured the bonus footage to try to figure out why in God's name I felt compelled to watch this whole mess, and I think what it comes down to, depressingly enough, is not the quality of workmanship, but the continued deterioration in my tastes. Like otherwise sane grown men who start tinkering in their workshop or watching World War II documentaries on the History Channel, I seem to have become developed the inexplicable ability -- desire, even -- to watch Jason stalk around dispatching pert-breasted animalistic twenty-somethings with a bow and arrow, a machete or a screwdriver.

In the bonus making-of documentary, the filmmakers blather out the usual baloney about honoring the obligatory sacraments of the Vorhees mythos -- the hockey mask, the machete, the psuedo-morality of Jason's endless revenge fantasy. But the fact is that, viewed now, from a perspective of thirty years down the road, these things have taken on a bizarrely profound, almost sacred quality. They're almost like religeous artifacts that have been passed between so many hands that they've become both instantly recognizable and oddly impossible to analyze. The last rays of sun off the lake, shining through rusty screen door of the cabin, the imagined smell of mothballs and pine, of rusty tap water, the creak of the old wooden dock and the humid breath inside the hockey mask -- there's a universal end-of-summer hopelessness to these elements that transcends the innately greedy clumsiness of whatever the producers have tried to do by "rebooting the franchise" with a shot of a topless girl waterskiing, or an Asian dude named Chewie getting stoned, or even a line of dialogue like, "You have perfect nipple placement." In other words, like Taco Bell, it's almost impossible to fuck up. And for that, I suppose, I'm grateful.

In Four Months I'll Be 40

2009-06-18T02:35:00.000-07:00

Here's a poem from Jim Harrison about the whole business:

BARKING

The moon comes up.
The moon goes down.
This is to inform you
that I didn't die young.
Age swept past me
but I caught up.
Spring has begun here and each day
brings new birds up from Mexico.
Yesterday I got a call from the outside
world but I said no in thunder.
I was a dog on a short chain
and now there's no chain.

I Ate NY

2009-06-18T02:17:00.000-07:00

When I was there on Sunday. And this is what it tasted like.

Chewie Chooses Which...?

2009-06-15T08:49:00.000-07:00

I was in NYC yesterday on a top secret mission -- soon to be disclosed -- and in the meantime I acquired the first Advance Review Copies of Death Troopers and No Doors, No Windows. Which one does Chewbacca like best?

But Chewie, look behind you!

I think he'll just have to read them both and decide...

Father's Day is Coming

2009-06-12T06:39:00.001-07:00

And this T-shirt is all I want. You can get it for me here.

Thank you.

I Can't Tell What's Cooler

2009-06-11T14:22:00.000-07:00

The fact that this painting exists, or that it was done 500 years ago.

Another lacuna in my education, filled.

Heavy Luggage

2009-06-10T15:02:00.000-07:00

I just got back from a trip to the Pacific Northwest. More than half of my immediate family now live in Washington and Oregon, and it was great to see them -- we hung out, went boating and tubing on the Columbia River, laughed a lot and stayed up late drinking good bourbon.

Also, I got out to Powell's Books in Portland. When I lived out there, I went to Powell's at least twice a week. This time, I only got to spend an hour there, but it was enough time to check out a bunch of stuff I've been wanting to see for a long time, including (but not limited to) Mark Millar and Tommy Lee Edwards' graphic novel 1985, Jim Harrison's new poetry collection In Search of Small Gods, Elwood Reid's second novel Midnight Sun, a New Directions paperback of Fitzgerald's The Crack Up and a first edition 1931 hardcover edition of veteran screenwriter Ben Hecht's short story collection The Champion from Far Away for -- wait for it -- six bucks.

I would be remiss also if I didn't mention a little used bookstore in Richland, Washington, called The Bookworm, where I found Joe Haldeman's classic The Forever War for seventy-five cents...as well as replacing a long-lost mass market of Harlan Ellison's collection Strange Wine for just under a buck.

So yeah, I came home from the West Coast with a stack of books -- not counting the ones I brought with me to read on the plane. I know that I had a great time while I was out there, but just in case I forget how great it was, I've got some terrific souvenirs.

ThrillerFest Confirmed

2009-05-24T20:03:00.000-07:00

So it's official -- I'll be at ThrillerFest at the Grand Hyatt in NYC, July 10-11. I've never attended before, but I've heard that the most important thing is getting a good seat at the bar. One of the many cool parts of the experience is that on June 10th I'll be participating in a panel called "Do You Love Your Villain Too," which according to the schedule is about the importance of believable characters. After that I'll be signing books. And scouting out future villains...

My Heroes Have Always Been Failures

2009-05-23T20:29:00.001-07:00

Let me begin by defining my terms -- when we talk about famous failures in literature, we're not really talking about failures, are we? After all, the true failures are the ones nobody knows about, lapsed into permanent obscurity, forgotten by the ages. No, the failures that I'm talking about are the men and women (all right, mostly men) who died thinking of themselves as botched experiments in humanity, the recognition of whose success is almost always after they've become worm food.

Those kind of failures.

Yes, Fitzgerald got me started thinking about this whole phenomenon. But the more I weighed it, the more I realized that, like the man himself, I'm fascinated with the idea of the reach that exceeds the grasp, and many of the writers whose work I read most compulsively can squeeze into this template rather cozily, or at least with the help of a little social lubricant. Poe, yes, and Hemingway, who beat his brains out depression and a bottle, Faulkner and poor, amazing Richard Yates, whose Boston apartment I tracked down a few years ago, just up the street from the bar where he continued to assassinate his liver. What is it with these guys? And more importantly, what is it with me -- am I actually romanticizing such a self-destructive lifestyle?

In fairness to myself -- hey, even I need an advocate -- it's not the lifestyle itself that proves so magnetic over time. At least, not just the lifestyle. Those names in my own index of American literary psychiatric collapse -- the crack ups, in other words -- share a compelling inability to bend to the fashion of their time...they wrote what they had to write, regardless of whether or not the critics adored it, or the public bought it, and in the end that rootless feeling of operating in a void, of following their gut regardless of how unpopular it made them, probably drove them into the bowels of emotional bankruptcy, substance abuse and other bad habits.

In the end, it's not the writer, but the work. And thank God, the work endures.

Every Boy Needs a Hobby

2009-05-21T20:00:00.000-07:00

I'm on a Fitzgerald kick right now, a major one. It started with The Pat Hobby Stories, which I'd never read before. Talk about your late-period Fitzgerald -- it doesn't get much later than this collection of short stories, which originally appeared in Esquire right up to (and immediately following) Scotty's death in 1940. The crumbled literary giant was living in a suburb of Encino at the time, soldiering along for the studios whenever he could find work, drinking his pay and doing rewrites on projects like Madame Curie and a weeklong stint on Gone With the Wind before David O. Selznick fired him for rewriting the dialogue.

From what I could glean, Fitzgerald gave screenwriting his full attention, bearing down with the same determined effort that he put toward his prose, but he was never as good at writing for Hollywood as he was writing about it. His doomed script-doctor, Pat Hobby, is a terrifically funny and sardonic main character, an aging holdover from the silent days ("once a good man with structure") dropped into a proto-Entourage studio setting that rings absolutely crystal clear seventy years later. Fitzgerald called Hobby "a rat" but in these tales he's still sympathetic and the stories themselves are so compelling that I ended up on eBay trying to track down the original pre-WWII Esquires in which they appeared...magazines that, appropriately enough, provided the last few dollars for Fitzgerald. At the height of his career his short stories had commanded thousands of dollars; now he was turning out these perfect little vignettes, making just enough to pay the rent and put his daughter through Vassar. An honorable labor, and one whose fruits -- wonderfully -- can be enjoyed today by anyone with a library card.

"Someone has to fight the fight": Dispatches from the Real World

2009-05-19T09:58:00.000-07:00

I wanted to thank everyone again for thinking of my dad, who is down in Sri Lanka working for Doctors Without Borders. Your thoughts, prayers and good wishes have been much appreciated.

With the fighting in Sri Lanka seeming to come to an end, my dad is planning on coming home on May 28th.

Several of you asked for any updated information I got about his time down there. I received this email this morning:

"extremely busy now. worked all nite last nite but got some sleep today and really unable to work much in hospital due to the masses of patients begging to be cared for. doing things that never can be forgotten and probably not talked about in polite company. but bottom line is someone has to fight the fight.
so happy the fighting has stopped and that we are getting surgical reinforcements so that i can leave without feeling like hell. there will be months of work just to get the acute phase over with where i am, then the rehab and reconstruction phase will hopefully began."

Again, I just want to express my appreciation to all of you who voiced your support for the work that DWB is doing and has done under unbelievable and horrific circumstances. I know that my dad feels fortunate to have the opportunity to help make things better. The solution to inhumanity, it turns out, is simply humanity.

How Short is Short?

2009-05-18T10:46:00.000-07:00

Some kind-hearted person once said, "It's not the size the counts -- it's what you do with it."

I've written short stories, plenty of them. And some of them were very short. Some of the shortest, around a thousand words or less, appeared here on the blog a couple years ago...I went through a kind of phase, you might say. They were fun, one-sitting type deals, as quick and vital as a muscle twitch.

The question is, how short can a story be, and still be considered a story?

A few weeks ago my buddy Rob Swartwood invented a new word for this style of micro-narrative. He called it "hint fiction" and decided to have a contest on his blog, open to everybody who wanted to submit a story, twenty-five words or less. He even landed himself a bona fide celebrity judge, Stewart O'Nan, author of Snow Angels and Last Night at the Lobster.

And the world took notice.

In no time at all, Rob was flooded with entries. The contest wasn't just a success, it was an event. And it seemed like everybody was talking about it. Places like Media Bistro and The New Yorker were writing about Rob's "hint fiction," and faster than you could say "book deal," Rob's agent was fielding a publishing offer from none other than W.W. Norton. As in, The Norton Anthology of Hint Fiction.

Of course, publishing is full of writers and PR people that give entire chunks of their skeleton to get within a mile of this kind of buzz. To Rob's immense credit, he's taken a level-headed approach to all of it. Since the deal became real, he's has made contact with some of literature's heaviest hitters, and I happen to know that he's putting together a murderer's row of hint fiction. Frankly, I can't wait for it to come out -- Rob says it's going to be a Fall, 2010 title -- and I'm beyond thrilled for Rob and the way that his brand-new term has ignited such enthusiasm. For a compendium of small stories, this one is going to be big.

By the way, if you want to see my eleven-word contribution to the cause, click on over to Rob's page -- you'll find it there.

My Other Me

2009-05-17T04:42:00.000-07:00

My pseudonym finished the first draft of his novel the other day. He's pretty excited about it. I cautioned him about the untrustworthy sense of euphoria that accompanies the completion of a first-draft. "You'll start questioning yourself in a day or two," I said. "By the time your agent gets back to you, you'll hate it."

My pseudonym reminded me that I'm the same way when I finish a draft, and he's right, of course -- what right do I have to take the wind from his sails...or his sales, for that matter? Who knows, his manuscript might actually sell. I passed it along to my agent out of sheer goodwill and wished him the best.

"Thanks," he remarked, and I couldn't tell if he was being sarcastic or not. After all, he didn't have to remind me how pseudonyms can sometimes surprise you. Everyone's favorite example, Richard Bachman, started out playing farm league but by the time he was through, his sales were as big as Stephen King's. Ed McBain made a lot of money for literary author Evan Hunter. More recently, an excellent writer named Peter Abrahams found New York Times bestselling success with his pseudonym's new novel Dog On It, a mystery narrated by a dog. It's a fun book with a great voice, and Abrahams' pseudonym deserves all the success he's getting.

Of course, I feel obligated to remind my pseudonym, it's also possible that my agent will hate the book, that publishers will reject it, or if--against all odds--it actually gets published, the reading public will ignore it utterly. At this, my pseudonym just shrugs and tells me he'll probably just write another one anyway, just for fun, and if he doesn't, who cares? After all, he reminds me, as my shadow, he's just a slight tilt of the sun away from slipping back into blessed nonexistence.

"Despair is Everywhere": Dispatches from the Real World

2009-05-10T19:06:00.000-07:00

If you read my blog, you know that I work in the health care field; when I'm not parenting and writing horror novels, I'm an MRI technologist, which is as close as I'll ever come to medical school.

I come by the vocation fairly: I grew up in and around hospitals and hearing OR stories at the dinner table. My father is a retired surgeon. He worked for forty plus years in general and vascular surgery, and a couple years ago he retired from practice.

Now he works for Doctors Without Borders, and at the moment he's working with a handful of other surgeons and anesthesiologists down in Sri Lanka. If you've been reading the news lately at all, you know it's not going well down there, not just for the government but civilians and foreign aid workers as well. My dad doesn't have much access to computers or the internet, but tonight I received an email from him.

"Conditions here are undescribable. It is a little better now that many have been transferred away. Still there are many patients without beds. Despair is everywhere."

My dad is due back stateside in a few weeks. I haven't seen him since February. My family and I are planning to fly out to his home in Washington State in June to visit and catch up -- to hear in more detail about what he's experienced down there. And while I'll obviously be very happy to sit down and see him, I'll be even happier just to know that he's back safely.

I write horror and suspense by choice, and every so often it's good to be reminded of the schism that separates fiction and reality -- what's cathartic and entertaining, in other words, versus the forces of tension and (let's face it) terror operating in the wider world.

These are things that fiction can't protect us from. All we have is each other.

NO DOORS, NO WINDOWS - First blurb

2009-04-29T13:51:00.000-07:00

It's not out until October, but No Doors, No Windows scored its first blurb today, and it's a doozy:

"NO DOORS, NO WINDOWS draws us into a fearsome, doom-haunted world that closes down like a trap. A knockout book!"

--Peter Straub

To say that I've been a huge fan of Straub's for twenty years is to badly understate the case. Let's just say that I spent years trying to unlearn his monumental influence on my work. Getting a blurb from him is like sitting in with Pharoah Sanders on a late-night set in a dark jazz club. What else can I say?

Color me ecstatic.

Torpor and Lassitude on a Saturday Afternoon

2009-04-25T13:52:00.001-07:00

Some of us have to go in to work tonight.

And some of us are cats.

Philly Book Festival

2009-04-19T06:18:00.000-07:00

What do you do after you work the midnight shift till 7 AM, sleep for three hours and wake up with one eye glued shut? Well, if it's 70 degrees and sunny with moderate winds, you pack up the kids and head off to where the wild things are -- i.e,, the Philadelphia Book Festival.

We got to Philly around lunchtime and wandered around the Free Library. After grabbing some sushi at Whole Foods, we returned to the Children's Department where I ran into Susan Orlean, who was there to read from her new children's book Lazy Little Loafers.

Here's Susan and me just seconds before the small atomic bomb exploding between our faces vaporized the entire festival:

At Susan's reading, I also met up with Rob Swartwood , and he loaned me a copy of Wells Tower's Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, which I can't wait to dig into. I also scored some paperback goodness off the used book stores outdoor tables, bringing the day's haul up to a not-so-even five.

Let's take a look, shall we?

Along with Everything Ravaged, you've got Donald Westlake's God Save the Mark, Charlie Huston's Six Bad Things and a Thomas Ligotti collection The Nightmare Factory, which I've never heard of before, but just happens to be the title of my favorite iPod playlist.

All this and no parking ticket. Can you beat that?

Back from the Dead, Again

2009-04-15T20:31:00.000-07:00

So the question is, where does this guy go?

My blog postings have dropped dramatically in the last couple months. It's not that there isn't anything happening...quite the opposite, really. I look back at the months where I was posting ten, fifteen, even twenty entries, Mr. Happy Blogger Man, while my actual writing output more or less flatlined.

I've been working hard on the new novel that I started over two years ago, and have repeatedly set aside for more pressing (ie, bill-paying) projects...and I'm about to put it aside again. And this is okay. In the past I've been paranoid about setting these things to the side for fear of losing momentum, and while this is a legitimate concern, I'm not as worked up about it as I used to be. My change of philosophy is partly due to necessity -- you can't sign a book-contract with a deadline and ignore the thing to keep tinkering with your own little toy truck. But also, I've discovered, throughout the long pre-publication road for No Doors, No Windows, that some extra time, space and daylight can actually be beneficial for a work in progress. There was a time not so long ago when I thought that a book had to be written at roughly the same breakneck pace that you hoped it would be read, but I'm not sure that nostrum holds true for everything. In fact, I'm pretty sure it doesn't. So I'm letting the novel breathe for a couple months and taking a hundred and eighty degrees in the opposite direction. It'll be warming up soon and I'll be retreating to the basement office, seeking out cool shadows where the dark things dwell.

Meanwhile, the best way to keep current with me is on Facebook. If you haven't already joined me there, think about, maybe, huh?

Vachss Populi

2009-04-05T05:58:00.000-07:00

I don't know how you feel about Andrew Vachss -- up till the other day, I couldn't remember how I felt about him. It had been a long time since I'd read a Vachss novel (I think it was probably Blue Belle, back in, oh, 1988?) and I remembered enjoying it, although the ironclad ubertough first-person voice of Vachss' narrator Burke was sometimes so hardcore that the sophisticated seventeen-year-old headed-off-to-college smartass that I was back then probably found it a little over-the-top at the time. (I try not to have many regrets, but I do wish I could have gotten out of my way a little more often back then and allowed myself to enjoy the things I actually liked.)

Anyhow, I came back to Vachss the other day, just in time for what appears to be the final Burke novel, Another Life, and it's just as galvanizing as I remember, and totally up-all-night absorbing. The plot, such as it is, revolves around the abducted infant son of an unimaginably wealthy Saudi prince, and the length that various shadowy pseudo-government types will go to to get the child back, all of which pivots, naturally, on Burke and his underworld-wired, super lethal "family of choice." Burke's contacts will give him whatever he wants or needs if he helps them get the kid back.

So much for the plot. But the real reason to read Vachss is for the prose. Here are two examples, drawn from the same page:

"Max can feather-brush a nerve juncture and put you down, temporary or permanent. His target's vulnerabilities stand out for him like candle points in a crypt."

And this almost surreal description, just a couple paragraphs down:

"Frightening Wesley wasn't possible. The human-skinned demons who assembled him from spare parts of terror-traumatized babies left fear out of their creation. They ended up with a thing fueled by a chemical coldness not found in nature."

This is showboating, but it's showboating of the very first water. Vachss's Burke knows much more than he lets on, and he knows how to let the details seep through stealthily as well. Like here, on the very next page, with this description of the Saudi prince, a man whose wealth and power literally knows no bounds:

"The Sheikh had never developed liar's skills. He had no reason to learn them, and no one to practice them on. Why lie when anything you say becomes the truth?"

And listen to the way Vachss, in a single sentence, zooms down with the rack-focus precision of a pinhole camera in the hands of meth-demented Orson Welles:

"The Mole reconfigured the torn-out pay phone in the South Bronx as Clarence lounged against the metal pole, one hand inside his dull-khaki coat."

Reading those lines last night, I felt the same high-voltage spinal charge I experienced (but couldn't quite permit myself to enjoy) as a high school senior. Like the very best of his breed, Vachss writes like a demonic auctioneer of souls with a brown recluse spider coiled up inside his mouth. I just joined the International Thriller Writers, and registered for ThrillerFest in July in New York City, but the fact is that I don't read as many thrillers as I'd like. But Vachss is something else again. He's a rat-starved reticulated python that goes wherever his appetites take him, a code-blue trauma patient whose Type AB negative worldview just happens to fit in the "crime and thriller" section of the bookstore shelf. Like George V. Higgins and other stylists whose obsessions led them into the American criminal demimonde (a term that the ever pretentious seventeen-year-old me no doubt would have adored), Vachss can sometimes get lost in his own thorny prose, but more often than not, its just so damn much fun to hang out with him that you just don't care.

Of course I want to know how (and even if) Burke and his people get the Sheikh's baby boy back. But that's not really the point. The point is the Voice, and in the case of Another Life, the Voice hauls the freight.

Dude, it's Drood

2009-03-29T03:32:00.000-07:00

I'm a slow reader and I tend to avoid long books, which is an awful and off-putting thing to lead with, but there you have it. All of which makes my affection for Dan Simmons' 770-page write-your-name-across-it-sideways doorstop Drood all the more inexplicable. Herewith, an arguably overlong and sporadically deranged account of the last days of Charles Dickens, as told by an increasingly unreliable Wilkie (The Moonstone) Collins, complete with tours of the 19th Century London underground, opium-smoking ancients, scarab beetles that may or may not be burrowing through the brains of English literature's greatest writers, illiterate children being walled up in hidden staircases, screams in the night and green-skinned women with ghastly tusk-like teeth. All of this, plus a decidedly skewed take on the origins of Dickens' last, unfinished novel (which I've never read).

Like the laudanum that Collins, our first-person narrator, swills down by the glass, Simmons' prose can be parodoxically numbing and electrifying, sometimes within the same stretch of paragraphs. The result is weirdly compelling and frankly irresistible. Although I haven't tackled Dickens since college, Simmons' version of the guy is almost Hemingwayesque in his superhuman lust for life, right up to the point where body and mind threaten total collapse. Wilkie Collins is the perfect Salieri to Dickens' Mozart, a craven, constantly jealous compatriot wallowing in immediate material success, whose voice is perfectly suited to the shadowy world of writers, drugs, obsessions, hypocracy and the off-hand classicism of the age. The book is more than a bit loony, invoking big italicized slabs of ancient Egyptian invocations and multiple exclamation points, but in all it's like being swept up in a massive tornado that has just sucked up a public library and a Halloween spook show, all in one.

Authorial aside: Drood is probably not the perfect book for an novelist at work on his own seemingly unending work-in-progress, since (to me at least) it encourages a somewhat dangerous "everything into the pot" style of fiction to which I'm already unfortunately vulnerable. It's difficult enough for me to avoid inserting brain-hungry scarab beetles into my own work, and the prolonged exposure to Simmons' fictionalized literary giants, opium-gulping ghouls and London-stalking lunatics has probably, irrevocably warped the credibility of my current project. Ah well.

Olaf Snacks

2009-03-18T08:32:00.000-07:00

Here's a delicious recipe for the Count Olaf enthusiasts out there.

Ingredients:

12 Ritz crackers
1 jar peanut butter
1 apple
12 blueberries

Slice apple into 12 thin slices. Apply peanut butter to crackers and stick slices in place. Top off with blueberry, affixed with small dab of peanut butter. Eat.

New Blah-blah

2009-03-12T17:06:00.000-07:00

So, March is half over and I haven't posted anything new here. All I can say is that it gets pretty quiet when I'm working as hard on something as I am right now. I've got three projects in the works at the moment, one of which I can't talk about, and two others -- my YA novel Wakefield (currently awaiting a rewrite) and a non-supernatural thriller called The Sound of Her Voice, which I really must finish before I turn ninety, but they'll have to wait for now.

Meanwhile, if you want, here's a series of interviews I did at the New York Comic Con last month. If it looks like my eyeballs can't keep still throughout the interview, it's because I keep alternating glances between my interviewer and the camera. I guess I'll have to learn how to master this skill before I get invited on Good Morning America, huh?