'The Hunger' makes me even hungrier

Okay, this is a day late, and hopefully it won't be a dollar short.  I'm working like hell trying to get Bittermint done, but like everything else it just gets bigger the more I pound at it.
A while back I bought a trade paperback based solely on the cool cover, which had a very creepy image of a man's distorted face.  It was a collections of short stories by a guy I had never heard of, David Nickle.  I went through the book in less than a week, which with the time I have to read is damn fast.  I then had a new author to watch.
These days I'm watching the TV series 'The Hunger' when I get a chance, and the other night I saw a familiar name in the selection, 'The Sloan Men.'  Sure enough, the opening credits marked it as based on Nickle's work.  I got to meet Mr. Nickle earlier at Horror Con, and I shook his hand and thanked him for writing the book.  Seeing his name and his story gave me one more little tangible reminder that writers do actually get published, and sometimes their stories do get picked up to make TV shows and movies.  I'll have to admit that the number of my stories that would be suitable even for cable might be a bit slim, but I'm not done writing yet.
Comic Palooza is coming up this weekend!  Yay!!

Ever since last week's post, I've been pondering the point I tried to make, and when I re-read it just now, I have to concede that it got away from me.  It wasn't that I was complaining how awkward of a fit the world can sometimes be, but I was trying to say how my tastes make me who I am, and yours make you who you are.  If I listened to more Journey and less Dio, I might not have gotten the idea for a story about what a person's first few minutes of the afterlife are like.  If I didn't read Richard Matheson, who knows what I would write?  If I don't fit in the world, well then the world can damn well live with it, or change.
I'm posting this a day late, and yesterday was Mother's Day.  I hope everyone had a good one, and that good memories ruled the day.  If there were bad ones, give them their day in court.  That means let them have their say, but also lay out the evidence against them.
I'm hoping to have the rewrite of Bittermint done before Comic Palooza, and I'm also working on a not-so-short story titled 'Blood.'  I may turn it into my first experiment in chopping a long story down to a more marketable length.
More to follow.

Having rare tastes

The other morning I was headed in to work, (not my happiest part of the day) and while I was channel-surfing on the radio, I caught a song I hadn't heard in a while.  Run To The Hills, by Iron Maiden.  I was a Maiden fan way back in middle school, and for a while I bought every album of theirs that I could get my hands on.  This was way back when you actually bought a flat disk the size of a dinner plate, and then played it on a record-player.  Eventually I switched over to cassette tapes, and these days I'm grudgingly buying MP3's off Amazon.  I still miss getting to hold the album in my hands and stare at Derek Riggs's cover art.
Those days back then were when I did most of my exploring of what life has to offer.  Not all of it, and not even as much as wish I had.  I let a lot of opportunities go by that I wish I had taken advantage of, but I also found magic.  I listened to Iron Maiden, Deep Purple, and Black Sabbath.  I read Stephen King, H.P. Lovecraft, and Dean Koontz.  I discovered House of Mystery, I watched The Legend of Hell House, and I saw a weird martial art that had a really bad reputation become one of the latest crazes.  I played Dungeons and Dragons, and I started to sneak out of the house in the middle of the night to go walk around the neighborhood because I couldn't sleep.
None of those things gave me much to talk about to the kids I went to school with.  I made a few friends who became a gaming group, and my best friend in those days was also a Maiden fan, and that was the bunch I hung out with.
These days I still like good heavy metal, intelligent horror, gaming, and the little bits of reality that Mr and Mrs North America seem to try their damnedest to sweep under the rug.  I have a larger group of friends with tastes like mine, and even when our tastes don't match exactly, nine times out of ten we still get the appeal that the story, movie, or hobby has for the other person.  The dialect may be different, but the language is the same.

That same morning that I heard Run To the Hills, a co-worker in the break room was reading the sports section and asked if liked boxing.  I already knew better than to try to explain that I like boxing as a martial art, but that if I've ever watched a match, it was playing on a screen somewhere in the background of a restaurant I was at, and I didn't look at the people's names, I just looked at each fighter to see if they were heavy on their feet or if they overextended their punches.  So I dodged the issue with a simpler truth, I don't watch television.  Cue awkward silence.
Now here's the point: was it awkward for me, or for him?  I've been like this my whole life, this is who I am.  I've also known people who read the sports section, watch TV, and who don't read.  I don't speak their language, but I know it when I hear it.  I can usually find something in the thread of conversation to go with and keep it going.  Those times when I can't, or decide that whatever I'm working on writing at that moment needs my attention, the conversation dies.  The other person has no more clue about what to say to me than he or she would if a die-hard Trekker asked them to get in on the Kirk vs Picard debate.  I dislike the 'us' verses 'them' mentality because it falls short of the truth that we're not that damn different, but from the other side of the mirror, are we?  Just what do the muggles think of these strange people?
What, you think I have the answer?  I just work here.  Now let me get back to writing a ghost story where a man in post-revolutionary days is haunted by his living son.

Buried treasure, on Netflix and everywhere else.

Think about the concept of buried treasure for a minute.  You have something valuable, be it gold coins, untraceable bearer bonds, (coupons attached) working prototypes of Apple's next three widgits, or a dozen copies of the Vanessa Williams issue of Penthouse in mint condition.  You have them in your hands, you have them where you can pour over them and just speculate about everything that you could do with them, and then you go dig a hole in the sand, drop them in, and cover them up.
What the hell are you thinking?
I haven't researched the reality of this concept, so for all I know, there might have been sane reasons for people once doing this.  Maybe Long John Silver and his crew were worried about the heat coming down on them from their last heist and decided to ditch the stuff on a nameless island and then just feign innocence when they were boarded by angry sailors who wanted their issues of Penthouse back.  Maybe.  But tell me that if you buried something  like that someplace where you couldn't keep an eye on it, that you wouldn't break out in a cold sweat from time to time at just the thought of someone coming along and saying, 'Hey!  See where the dirt's disturbed?  Let's dig right there!'  Then tell me and try to keep a straight face.
I've been a fan of the old ' The Nightstalker' series since I was a kid.  I can't remember the first episode that I saw, but I remember the series coming on late at night, and damn near my whole day would be spent in anticipation.  What would the monster be?  What would it look like?  Would it be one of my favorites, or was there a chance I would discover a new favorite?  Each time the series came to it's end I would feel like a bit of beauty had left the world, and each time when it was put back on the air I would regain a bit of the hope that I once had.  As time wore on, some episodes became favorites, and some just became parts of an incredibly cool TV series.
The other night when I couldn't sleep, again, I turned on the Blue-ray player that a friend got us for Christmas and connected it to Netflix.  This is the first Blue-ray device my wife and I own, because we like to be dragged into the modern world one step at time.  Browsing through the horror offerings, I stumbled upon an old friend.  When I ran through the episodes by title, one didn't ring a bell.  Getting more info, I couldn't believe it.  Here was an episode, 'Firefall,' that I had never seen before.  Somehow in all the times I had faithfully watched the series on broadcast TV, I had missed this one.
Watching it brought back all the reasons that I love 'The Nightstalker.'  Darren McGavin was THE smart-ass reporter.  He feigned cynicism, but when it came down to it, he always stuck his own neck out to do the right thing, usually falling on his ass sometime in the process.  His editor, long-suffering Tony Vincenzo, was every person who has ever stuck his head in the sand or turned his head away rather than look an ugly truth in the face, which was why he had to suffer.  Watching that episode and others, you see all the attention that went in to each one.  The scene where the rich older woman quickly raises her car window, only to lower it right back down at a gesture from Richard Kiel.  The fact that in 'The Vampire,' the title woman never says a word.  The flames that dance behind the doppelganger as he taps on the windows of the church.  There was also that creepy, soul-rending music that would go right into your spinal cord if you were watching this stuff late at night with no one else in the house.
That's treasure.  Makes me feel kind of silly to have never sat down and gone through the whole series before now.
Today my lady love and I went down to the Alamo Drafthouse and saw Joss Whedon's 'Cabin in the woods.'  I thought I had an idea of what it was about from the trailers.  It turns out that my idea was superficial at best, and the film was damn good.  Definitely worth seeing.

Edit:  Since I used Darren McGavin's real name, I should probably give Simon Oakland his due for perfectly playing Kolchak's editor/foil.

I love Sundays

It's almost one o'clock in the afternoon.  I slept in this morning, relaxed in bed for a bit after one of my wife's cats finally managed to wake me up, and then my wife made me lunch/breakfast.  Now as I'm writing this, I'm also going back and forth to work on Bittermint and browsing on Fearnet.  This is turning out to be a good day.
Putting Bittermint together has made me remember all the years when I was a hard-core gamer.  My friends and I would play AD&D from whenever we got together at someone's house on the weekend to however late we could stay awake. (My insomnia usually gave me an edge there) Looking back, I realize that it never really occurred to me that I was running almost all of the campaigns.  It just seemed to me that we all were having fun, and to me fun was all the planning and deciding what to put in, and creating something for my friends to explore.  My particular group of buddies always seemed to take great pride in wreaking havoc with all my beautifully-detailed cities and villages, like the time they took over a small, walled town and were completely surprised when the local lord sent troops in to take it back.
It was natural, me being the one to make all this stuff.  I still remember the first game I ever saw played.  My 5th or 6th grade TAG teacher had one of the guys in my class run a quick adventure so all of us could see how it worked.  The group was exploring an old dungeon at the behest of a wizard, and her character fell down into a pit trap.  As she was plummeting into the dark, she looked back up and yelled, "You stupid wizard!"  Of course, a couple of fireballs shot down after her.  I thought this weird game, which was somehow played without a board, was the neatest thing in the universe.  But I also wondered just how the wizard could hear her, since he was nowhere near.  I wondered where the dungeon was, and whether there was anyone living near it.  How do you think you would react if you were a medieval peasant, scraping your livelihood from the soil and never knowing exactly how next years harvest will turn out, and all these armed strangers keep heading out to that old set of ruins over the hill?  Some of them come back, some don't.  The ones that do, often drop gold coins at the tavern in town, just to buy a mug of ale to wash the taste of that hellish underground place out of their heads.  They've got all those swords and all that armor and magic, and you've got your little home-made knife.  But you're hungry.
Time to post this, and see what this new blogger format looks like.  Crossing my fingers.

PS:  Seems the '&' is not allowed in post labels.  Why?

Buying comic books on a lazy Sunday

On the way home from lunch today, I suggested to my wife that we stop at half-price books.  We used to make a regular habit of dropping in.  I even think that was one of the places that we went on our first weekend together.  Then we moved where there wasn't one just down the street, other ways to pass time were discovered, (including my current addiction, World of Warcraft) and life went on.
One of the first section that we hit was the graphic novel shelf.  I don't know exactly when comic books started to be collected into these larger volumes, or when longer stories were finally able to get printed in the format.  I've never researched it, much to my shame.  But damn is that a game-changer.  Books like V for Vendetta and Watchmen are seriously epic storytelling.  These days we can have story arcs that would have taken years to tell in the slimmer books, which would have lost most of their audience back then.  Even me.
When I was a kid, I used to save up my change for the weekend.  Then after sleeping until noon on Sunday, I'd walk over to the drugstore and head to the rack at the rear of the store where the treasure was, to the comic books.  I could, and did, spend hours pouring over every single one.  That's where I got some of my first tastes for horror, in House of Mystery, House of Secrets, and Weird War Tales.  They even had some of the larger-sized ones like Creepy and Eerie.  This was during the comic code time, so the illustrations weren't as gory as they might have been.  But having read some of the reprints Tales from the Crypt and others, I really think the writing was better.  This was where I first broke ground, this was where I first learned the rules and basics of what terrified people.
So this Sunday I got to grab a bit of that ancient magic, that secret, eager thrill of anticipation.  I picked up 300, which I had never read.  I also got some non-graphics like a Stephen King anthology and Battle Royale.  Can't wait to read them.

On Stolen Valor

A few years back, a law was passed to make it a federal crime to wear medals that you hadn't earned or claim decorations that you hadn't been awarded. (I know I'm simplifying it, because for purposes of this discussion, it's the intent that matters)  Basically, if you wore the damn things, or claim that you got awarded the Medal of Whatever, and you hadn't, you were in deep shit.
When I first heard about this, the news reawakened an old, battered sense of pride that I hadn't felt in years.  I was a bit iffy on the second war with Iraq even when it was going on, and once all the digging was done, it turned out there were no damned WMD's, and Bush passed the buck by saying, 'Well gosh, I had all this intell that said they had some!', I was pretty well sick of it.  Note that these are my feelings on the war itself, not the people who did the fighting and the dying.
I had heard more than a few stories about idiots passing themselves off as a decorated Marine, a SEAL, or a who-knows-what, and then getting caught.  Every single time, I wanted those idiots to be stuck in cammies with a big USA flag on them and be dropped into BF Nowhere in the Middle East to see all the warmth and love that would get them, or to get sent down to Central America to fill enough sandbags to recreate the Great Wall of China.  Hearing that it was finally going to be illegal made me feel better than proud, it made me feel good.
Life went on, and I went on with it, thinking about a million other things.  Somewhere in the back of my head, part of me must have still been chewing on that issue.  The first look at something usually isn't the most honest.
In a couple of days,the Supreme Court will start deciding on whether this law is constitutional or not.  Though it still sticks in my gut that people get to play make-believe with places and events that real men and woman bled for, I'm hoping they decide against it.
There is a difference in most people believing something is reprehensible, and it being illegal.  What these people are doing is telling a lie about something that can usually be checked, and all it takes is one non-believer to get the ball rolling.  If they did it to get elected, then let the truth come out and let the people judge.  If they did it to add weight to whatever argument they were making, that only weighs it in the other direction.  If they did it to look like a hero, put them on stage in a dunce's cap and with a sign that says, 'Liar.'  When you make a law about something, the government can send in people with guns.  In my mind, that's not an appropriate response to this.
When someone lies about being decorated, what measurable harm does it do?  Who dies?  Who bleeds?  Who loses money?  We may raise them up in our heads and our hearts, but is that a reason to send people with guns?  If they do it to commit fraud and get benefits, then prosecute them for fraud.  The argument that it cheapens what the real veterans did sounds too much like the claim made by the folks who want to keep same-sex couples from being able to dress up, go to church, and say their vows in front of the world.  What I did, I will never forget, whether other people admire or revile me for it.

Full disclosure: I was a Marine, I served in Operation Just Cause and Operation Desert Storm.  The only individual decoration I was awarded was a meritorious mast, and it was awarded before either event, and was more for not being an idiot than anything else.