Seeing Spots

Originally published at Seeing Spots. You can comment here or there.

I kept seeing commercials for “The Ruins” with a King blurb calling it “the best horror novel of the new century,” and I was all, “What about Heart-Shaped Box? Daaaaang, that’s cold.” Plus I’d never heard of “The Ruins.” Called a few horra-minded friends, nope, they hadn’t heard of it either. After discussing the merits and drawbacks of the fine view up our own asses, I volunteered to get the book, because I am a sucka and a martyr. And nosy.

On my Sony Reader ™, natch. Anyway, The Ruins was published in ‘06, so I guess that wasn’t THAT cold of a cut. I’ll de-bristle. And it was aiight. I could tell twenty pages in that the movie would be Screamin’ Pretties In Peril, doing a real disservice to the book, which focuses more on the psychological states of the Pretties in Peril.

I have two good projects on tap and both have FAR DISTANT deadlines, hotdamn.

Here:

Regional Dialect Meme:

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Originally published at Seeing Spots. You can comment here or there.

Since I’m once again dying of jealousy that I won’t be at WHC this coming weekend, I’m entertaining myself by proving why I shouldn’t attend such events anyway. This is what I’d be doing + what I’d say if I were on certain panels.

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First up: Vince Liaguno from Dark Scribe is a class act.

Second: David Niall Wilson has been posting interviews with each of the Sirens contributors at Macabre Ink.  My interview (my first!) went live today, and Loren Rhoads and Maria Alexander both gave great interviews, as well.  Christa's is coming soon!

David Niall Wilson gives Sins of the Sirens an in-depth review at Macabre Ink. 

Wil at Horroryearbookdotcom is disappointed because he didn't find a "new female writer" worth his time.  (He also calls stories that appeared in such places as The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror and Hot Blood, and many stories that received honorable mentions in YBF&H, "stuff better reserved for their lockboxes."  Trunk stories.  Heh.)  He even finds time to insult Nancy Kilpatrick for no reason at all - she's not even in the book.

Vampire poet Derek Clendering appears only to have read half of the book before his deadline at Dark Scribe (he doesn't address anything by half of our authors.)

Ayup.

Right, so this morning I finally finished Shadow of the Colossus.  I'd bought it when it came out, played through eight colossi, and finally was just so depressed that I quit playing.  I hated killing them.  They'd done nothing to me, and they only seemed interested in protecting themselves.  As soon as Wander left them alone, they went back to doing their colossal thing.  I just felt rotten and cruel, and that resurrecting some dead girl wasn't worth what I was doing.

But I really *did* want to see the ending.  I was bothered for the year-plus away from the game - I wanted to see some kind of retribution.  I wanted the ending to be that the colossi were, perhaps, the souls of other resurrected loved ones, and that the finale would be that our sleeping princess would rise as a colossus herself, or something.

I was late meeting friends the other night and when I explained that I had to beat a colossus, was asked how the game was.  I told them it was depressing: you, Agro, and the colossi are the only things in the world, and you develop a real emotional attachment to them.  Hell, I even loved that you could pat Agro kindly, and made sure to do it often.

At about 6:30 this morning I'm playing and an event took place in the game that made me absolutely wail, no no no, no!  I threw a total tantrum - I pitched the controller at the (empty) dog bed, declared that I hated this game and would not play any more, and then went out on the porch and *wept.*  Over pixels.  And I do not give a fuck that weeping over pixels is stupid - it's no different than weeping every time Gage gets hit by the damn semi truck.

Anyway, I eventually gathered myself and finished the game.  I won't spoil it for anyone who cares.

I love fighting games - Tekken and Soul Calibur.  I like wild hack-n-slash mayhem like Otogi 2 and fast, fun things like Shinobi.  But this is the first game that's ever engaged me emotionally to the point that first I had to quit, and then I had to cry.  Thanks, game designers, for fucking me right up.

My contributor's copies of Sins of the Sirens came today, and my oh my, they're pretty books.  I love the cover art!

In case anyone was wondering, my contributions are:

• "The Wild," the second story I ever had published.  It appeared only in Carpe Noctem Magazine in 1998.
• "Close," my Edegawa Rampo homage, which appeared only in Damned: An Anthology of the Lost.  From Tracy Vonder Brink's review of Damned for Joe Bob Briggs' site: "
  
• "Close" by Mehitobel Wilson would make a great "Tales from the Crypt" episode. A hotel employee devises an ingenious way to spy on amorous guests with some unforeseen consequences. It's deliciously nasty.
• "Parting Jane," which appeared only in A Walk on the Darkside.
• Aaaand "Heavy Hands," a brand new story wrenched out of me by our illustrious Everson.

My east-coast ass missed the signing at Dark Delicacies last week.  If you missed it, too, dig this:
FEB. 23, 2008, 3 PM
Maria Alexander and Loren Rhoads will perform live readings from Sins of the Sirens (and, of course, sign books) at Borderlands Books in San Francisco.


Apologies for all the pimping, but I figured that after nearly ten years of publishing, it was about time I learn HOW to pimp.  I've never bothered to do it before.

(I also never bothered to vanity-search, which is why I never saw that awesome mention of "Close" until tonight.  Hee!)

Unrelated:

Me bleeding (seriously, I have no idea what cut me and I said "haaayblut!") and being randomly cinematic:



And the trailer for the short film adaptation of "The Mannerly Man" - no, seriously -

MANNERLY MAN (trailer)


Yeah. I know. Jonathan Miller made some dude *crouch on a pole and act,* wut.

I sneezed over 40 times in the last five minutes.  I say "over" because I started counting after a handful (ew) of sneezes.

Then I blew my nose really, really hard and something black with a lot of frondlike legs came out.  Huh.  Wonder how long that's been there?

I didn't see a single human being on Christmas day.  I saw, instead, dogs and ferrets and cats and a long, involved dream about jellyfish and horned gryphons in a Hong Kong shopping mall.

And it was, oddly, the first Christmas I can recall on which I felt really connected to my friends.

And the first one in which I had some kind of caterpillar up my nose.

Yay holidays!

I'm thrilled to be a part of SINS OF THE SIRENS, a four-author collection from Dark Arts Books.  My fellow authors are Loren Rhoads, Maria Alexander, and Christa Faust.  Hella good company, I must say!  My contributions include a couple of rare reprints and a - holy shit - a brand-new story.  I'd taken a couple years off from writing, but John Everson and some other friends kicked my ass and made me write something for you guys.

Learn all about it RIGHT HERE, and preorders are awesome because you get free shipping if you do it through Dark Arts by Dec. 31st.  There are story excerpts as well!

It's also up for preorder at Amazon, here:


Woohoo!

Also, Maria, Christa, and Loren will be reading and signing at Dark Delicacies on Jan 19th:
2:00pm
Dark Delicacies
4213 W. Burbank Blvd.
Burbank, CA 91505
1-888-DARKDEL

I won't be there because I live waaaaaay on the other side of the world, goddammit.

And in totally un-writing-related news, I finally got my Etsy jewelry store store up and running.  There's a lot more stuff to come, but I have about eight minutes' worth of good jewelry-shooting light a week, so photographing the pieces has been troublesome.

But if you like sparkly stuff, go look!

Wow, and also, fuck.

For once, I'm really glad I've talked about a story concept to a friend.  Usually I keep my mouth solidly shut until the story's been written.

For a couple of years now, I've had in my mental idea-file the plan to write about four people laying face-down in the park.  Why are they laying face-down?  I don't know.  Nobody does.  So a crowd gathers, and asks, and speculate to one another, and bother the facedown people (that's how I thought of them, the "facedown people," and it was the "facedown people story" whenever I'd mention it.)  Eventually the reason why the foursome were laying there would become clear to the spectators (but not to the reader), and others would be compelled to lay down too. Blah blah surreal thing, blah blah statement on gawking & getting into people's business and how if you get burned by what you discover, that's your own damn fault.

So.  I'm supposed to be doing a story.  I was writing one, and then the VA Tech shootings happened, and that made the plot of my story not only completely inappropriate, but too sad for me to finish.  So I switch to the facedown-people story.  Slow start.  Which is a good thing, good thing I didn't pour too much energy into it, because this morning Robert, with whom I've discussed the story before, emails me a video.



HOLY SHIT.

?!!

Holy SHIT.

Also... shit.

I don't think I've ever heard that song before, and I not only don't recognize the video but don't know where I could have even seen it (unless it was on a tv in the pool hall and I just idly watched it and absorbed it without realizing?)

I'm glad as hell that I've discussed the story with Robert and that he happened to find this vid today, though. This would have been a thousand times worse if I'd written & published the story, and THEN found out about it. Holyshit.

But now I'm scared to write anything at all, in case it's a direct 100% ripoff of something I genuinely don't remember having ever seen. FUCK, PEOPLE. Argh. That's so scary!!