Live From MidSouthCon 29!

I'm surrounded by Storm Troopers and Hogwarts staff and even a few Ghostbusters.  So I'm either hallucinating (again) or I'm at the Con.

It's been a blast.  I've managed to meet Laura J. Underwood and Angelia Sparrow, and a few others. I sat in on a humor in horror panel and listened to the adventures of some real-life ghost hunters. We've got a bid in on a brilliant piece of artwork down the Artist's Room.  Tonight is the Darrell Awards ceremony.

It's busy but it's fun.  Here are a couple of pictures, just to give you an idea of who's wandering the halls:

Guest of Frank Tuttle (lol) strikes a pose

Small Con-goers meet a fully animated R2

Who will you, in fact, call?

Will post more later, have to get to a panel now...

More Con Ramblings -- WITH EVIL!

Well, I've packed up my business cards, my zoot suit, my spare eyeballs, and my extra skin in case the skin I'm wearing starts turning green early.  So I'm as ready for MidSouthCon as I can possibly be.

As promised, I'll be blogging about the Con, and posting pictures.  If I spot you at the Con with your Kindle you'll be immortalized in medium-resolution pixel fame on my blog, right above a snappy caption.  Show me one of my books on your Kindle, and I'll bump you up to a hi-res image and shower you with praise and as many of those little packages of crackers restaurants put on tables as I have in my pockets at the time.

Yeah, baby, that's how I roll.

I'm really looking forward to the Art Show, which I think I neglected to mention before.  There will be an entire room devoted to SF and fantasy artists and their works, and I saw some amazing items there last year.  Sadly, security in the room was competent, and I didn't manage to leave with any art, but this year I'm bringing money, just in case.

And of course I'd be remiss if I didn't notice people in costumes.

Do I wear a costume?  No.  Mainly because my usual workaday appearance is cartoonish enough.  I'm a middle-aged white dude with greying hair and what is kindly referred to among smaller folk as 'a few extra pounds.'  Sticking orange horns on my head or wrapping myself in a cape isn't going to fool even the most myoptic of observers that I'm anything but a bookish IT guy who refuses to act his age.

I do like the costumes, though.  It adds to the fun, looking up and realizing you're standing between a towering Klingon complete with filed incisors and a pair of slave Princess Leias.  And while some of the costumes are last-minute affairs worn just for grins, quite a few people devote considerable time and effort to their rigs.  Who doesn't enjoy a free art show?

The news people will drift around, of course, spend a few minutes laughing up their sleeves at us, get a brief clip of Storm Troopers mugging for the camera.  And in most cases media coverage doesn't go any deeper than that; after all, they're just looking for a 25-second short to stick between News and Sports.

But there's a lot going on, behind the elves and the aliens.  An industry  is rewarding its fans for their support, and giving the writers and the artists and the editors and the publishers a peek behind the curtain.

It's great fun.  Hope to see you there!

MidSouthCon 29

Science fiction and fantasy fans are a unique breed.  We have a subculture all our own.  And like any subculture worth its weight in fluff news stories and the occasional police report, we have our culture-specific gatherings -- in our case, cons.

'Con' is short for 'convention.'  There are numerous science fiction and fantasy cons scheduled for many times and places all across the world, but when I say 'the con' I mean MidSouthCon.  MidsouthCon is nearly 30 years old, and is held in Memphis, Tennessee, former home of Elvis.  This year the Con is at the Hilton, which has yet to be renamed the Frank Tuttle Hilton.  I suppose they're waiting for the opening ceremony at the Con for that.

Click the con link above if you're curious.  I went last year, and had a blast, so naturally I'm heading back this year too.

Part of my reason for going is business.  I like to see what other writers are doing, hear publishers talk about the industry, listen to authors talk about publishers.  There are panels about everything from aardvarks in fantasy to zombies in romance, and you'd be surprised who leads the panels sometimes.

I've also been nominated for the Darrell Award, and as a self-aggrandizing hog for attention, there's absolutely no way I'd miss being there in case my name is called.

I'm going to take my camera and blog all about it, so be on the lookout for that.  And if any of you are planning to make MidSouthCon 29 in Memphis this year, please, look me up!  I can usually be found clinging to the pant-leg of a hapless publisher or being escorted to the lobby by Security.  In the case of the latter, please wait until the tasing wears off before initiating a conversation.

Those things sting no matter how many times you've endured them.

Hate-Filled Spew

I'm messing with you.

I can see how many times each of my blog entries is read, you see.  And I've noticed a distinct correlation between inflammatory titles and the number of hits.  So I decided to test my observations with this blog entry.

Thank you for your kind participation.

Of course, if I wanted to actually write a hate-filled spew, I'd find no shortage of material or targets.  Heck, as long as professional idiot Glen Beck has a TV show, the field is bursting with ripe, tender targets.

And I do owe you something for clicking.  Hmm.  Very well, gentle reader.

There.  A quick Google session, and I found that just yesterday Beck was ranting about how rival network MSNBC was a tool o' Satan.  Which is funny, because I'm pretty sure the Prince of Darkness could pull in better ratings.  The average re-run of a three year old episode of 'SpongeBob SquarePants' scores more viewers than MSNBC's highest rated show, and if you're the singular embodiment of all the evil in the universe, you've simply got to do better than that.

Beck then went on with some bizarre rant about end times prophecies and famine.  Well, Beck should take a close look at his best buddy Rush Limbaugh, and that should pretty much alay any fears about famine, because Limbaugh is still finding the caloric equivalent of an entire Denny's each and every day without any apparent difficulty.  Let's not start worrying until Rush loses a couple of chins, mkay, Glen?

Honestly, I wondered how Beck and Limbaugh stay on the air.  Then I went to Wal-Mart and had a look around at the mouth-breathing troglodytes waddling through the aisles and it all made perfect sense.  Again.

Does that satisfy the minimum requirements for a hate-filled spew?  Please say it does.  Don't make me drag Michael Vick into this.  That makes my right eye twitch.

Enough.  I've got work to do, and by work to do, I mean a new NCIS to watch.

Peace out, fellow babies.

Now for the Nook!

I have a Kindle e-book reader.  I love it, too -- Amazon sells more e-books than I'll ever be able to read, and I can grab anything I want with a couple of clicks and be reading it in minutes.

But the Kindle isn't the only game in town.  Barnes and Noble has the Nook, and now Barnes and Noble has e-books for the Nook written by none other than me.

So if you've got a Nook and the subliminal mind-control programming built into this blog post is working, you're now feeling a powerful urge to head on over to Barnes and Noble and load up your Nook with my books.  

Helpful guy that I am, the links to Nook e-books are below.  Don't fight it.  Browse...buy....obey....

The Banshee's Walk -- Markhat's latest case starts with a possible land-grab, but ends with his discovery of a banshee.  Does the banshee's cry sound Markhat's doom?

The Cadaver Client -- Rannit's most skilled finder is hired by a dead man to locate the wife he left behind.  Or so Markhat is told -- but do even the dead tell lies?

Hold the Dark -- When Markhat's world falls apart, he's left with nothing but a burning desire for vengeance, even if it costs him his soul.

The Mister Trophy -- Will a rich man's trophy room re-ignite the War that Markhat still struggles to forget?

Dead Man's Rain -- A dead husband.  A rich widow.  Scheming heirs.  And one very haunted mansion -- all brought together for one dark and stormy night...

Of course, all these titles are also available from Amazon, for the Kindle (just click on the cover pictures to the right).

Want a format other than Nook or Kindle?

No problem.  Head on over to Samhain Publishing.  They've got my titles in every format imaginable, including plain HTML and pdf.

What I'm Reading Now: Pale Demon

Nope.  No spoilers here, because I'm only a quarter of the way through the book.  So don't feel like you need to hit the back button if you're a Kim Harrison fan who hasn't read Pale Demon.

If you're a fantasy reader who isn't already a Kim Harrison fan, you should be.  She writes a great yarn -- fast-paced, unpredictable, imaginative, and just plain brilliant.  Her Rachel Morgan character is every bit as much fun as Jim Butcher's Harry Dresden.  And from me, that is high praise.

The Rachel Morgan books are the books I thought Laurell K. Hamilton was going to write with her Anita Blake novels.  I stopped reading the Anita Blake books after book three, I think it was -- too much were/vamp romance and angst and not enough, well, anything else.  Anita is in love with this guy, and this guy, blah blah blah.  If I wanted Twilight with an R rating I'd -- well, I have myself beaten to a pulp, that's what I'd do.  Twice.

But Harrison has avoided the bogged-down-in-drama pitfall.  I love the way she takes a simple premise and weaves a whole book around it.

I'm not giving anything away that isn't on the book blurb by saying this much.  Rachel, Jenks, and Trent wind up taking a very unlikely three-day road trip across post-Turn America.  There may or may not be assassins on their heels.  Trent and Rachel may or not be at each others' throats most of the time.

I'm only a quarter of the way through, but man is it good.  Magic is flying.  The tension is palpable.  The stop in St. Louis?

Somebody please make a movie out of this.

Most of the time, when I read a book, I find myself picking it apart, chapter by chapter, word by word.  If it's good, I want to dissect it, see what makes it tick.

I can't do that with Pale Demon.  The pages won't let you not turn them.

I'll probably read it a second time with an eye toward stealing Miss Harrison's pacing tricks.  But for now, I'm just sitting back and enjoying the ride!

The Little Things

Writing is a solitary pursuit.  There is me.  There is the keyboard.  There are dogs, and desks, and chairs.

But mostly there is a lot of silence, some eye-rubbing, some frowning.  All that is interspersed with furious spates of typing, followed by more frowning, stabs at the DELETE key, and then it's back to silence and eye-rubbing.

Rinse and repeat until you hit 100,000 words.  Then start all over with the editing, which looks just like the writing except for the muttering and the scribbling of cryptic notes on a paper notepad beside the keyboard.

My point is that it's easy to forget why, exactly, you're hunched over a keyboard for hours on end.  I get so wrapped up in the process, sometimes, that I forget all about the most important part of the scene, which is of course the reader.  Sneaky of me, wasn't it, to never mention the reader?

Because all this eye-rubbing and typing is nothing -- less than nothing -- if no one ever reads the book.

But people do.  I just got an email, minutes ago, from a reader who just finished the most recent Markhat book, The Banshee's Walk.

This intrepid soul finished Banshee while they sat in a rental car on a hill in Hawaii, waiting for the tsunami to hit the coast.

I'm not a big fan of the water.  The nearest coast is more than 400 miles from me, and that's just the way I like my coasts. Because if I was anywhere near the beach and I heard a rumor of a rumor that a wave more than knee-high was on the way, I'd be hijacking planes and heading for the Himalayas before you can say 'run-on sentence.'

So for me to learn that someone out there chose to read 'The Banshee's Walk' while nature threw a deadly temper tantrum across half the planet, well, I am deeply and profoundly touched.

So thanks for the email, Mo.  I am thrilled that you like the Markhat books, and I'm honored that you or anyone for that matter devotes some of their time to read the things I write.

It makes all the scribbling and the muttering truly worthwhile.

The Ghost of Freddy Jackson

People ask me things all the time.  Mostly it's "Why did you just run over me?" or "Don't you think you've had enough to eat?", but sometimes I'm asked about things that go bump in the night.

No, not that.  Get your minds out of the gutter.  I'm talking matters paranormal here.  Specifically, ghosts.

Do I believe in ghosts?

No.  Or yes.  It's too early to say.  Because what I do believe in is evidence.

And there are solid pieces of evidence which appear to support the supposition that deceased persons do indeed make the infrequent visit to this side of the veil.  I'd like to discuss just one such piece of evidence now, which is a photograph taken in 1919 that may depict the face of one Freddy Jackson, deceased but notably not absent.

Freddy Jackson was a soldier in the British Royal Air Force in World War I.  He served as a mechanic, maintaining combat aircraft aboard the HMS Daedalus.

Freddy didn't die in battle; instead, he had the (rather common) misfortune to walk into a moving airplane propeller.  He died, and was buried, and that should have been the end of his tragic if all too common tale.

But on the day Freddy Jackson was laid to rest, his squadron mates assembled for a group photo.  No one noticed anything out of the ordinary until after the photograph was presented back to the squadron.

They quickly realized that Freddy Jackson's face is there among them, plain and clear.

The photo is below.  Freddy's face has been enlarged; he appears to be peering out from behind one of his fellows.  The men of the squadron were adamant that the face is that of Freddy Jackson, deceased, who was being laid to rest when the photo was taken.

I've found nothing to contradict their assertion.  And remember, this was 1919.  Photoshop was sixty-plus years away.  Photography itself was a cumbersome art, and while fakery was indeed being practiced it was usually obvious and often clumsy.

This image is neither.

Is it the face of a dead man, returned to join his squadron for one last time?

I simply don't know.  But I find it intriguing.  More than intriguing.  It may even be suggestive of a phenomena beyond the realm of traditional science.

What do you think?  Do you have odd photos or ghost stories of your own?  If you do, and you'd like to share them, email me!  I love ghost stories, and I won't breathe a word of it here, if you ask that your experiences be kept quiet.

That's all for today.  The Secret Writing Project is proceeding nicely.  Ask me what that is too, but know that I won't tell!

Glenn Beck, Man of Intellect and Wit!

I don't listen to Glenn Beck or Fox News for much the same reason I don't shove sharp pointy things in my ears -- it hurts, and it serves no good purpose.

Even so, a headline sneaks through sometimes, as happened just now.  "Glenn Beck: Japan Earthquake might be a message from God."

First of all, Glenn needs to check his boundaries, because making ludicrous, asinine statements ascribing mass deaths to a petulant deity is Pat Robertson's territory.  Robertson is probably not happy that Beck beat him to the punch, and he might just decide to get himself a chalkboard and start scribbling nonsense about Masons and the Trilateral Commission on it in a tit-for-tat retaliation that could lead to a <gasp> Chalkboard Showdown of the Paranoid Delusions!.  Okay, that might actually be funny, especially if someone out there made a mashup video out of them going at it laid over a Nine Inch Nails song backtrack.

Seriously, though -- ten thousand people are dead, a nation lies in ruins, and Glenn Beck wants to gloat and make scary noises about divine wrath?

Glenn, I know you're not a big fan of bad ol' Science, but you might want to Google the Interwebs someday for 'Ring of Fire' or 'tectonics' or heck even 'Remedial Geology.'  You'd look less stupid.  And you could certainly stand a reduction in Stupid, pal.

I simply don't understand the popularity of Beck and his porcine running buddies.  Rush Limbaugh?  A huge fat oxy-addict with obvious insecurity issues and the brains of a fruit-bat.  Hannity?  A noxious little wisp of flatulence right out of Limbaugh's massive nether regions.

Why does anyone waste their time listening to these prancing imbeciles blather?

Beck's time at Fox is obviously on the wane.  That alone says something -- when Fox News hints that maybe your grip on reality is slipping, it's got to be because you just showed up in the studio with a live stingray strapped to your head and lit fireworks stuffed up your pants while you swallow live snakes and claim to be Batman.

Even then, I think you could get a pass, if your ratings were good enough.  It certainly hasn't stopped  Bill O'Reilly, who thinks tides are inexplicable, unpredictable supernatural events, and that each and every sunrise is a random chance event.

So why does it bother me that an idiot such as Glenn Beck spouts nonsense about the tragedy in Japan?

First of all, because it's a stupid thing to say, especially when people are hurting.  And people are hurting, Mr. Beck.  But I guess that doesn't mean anything to you since they aren't Fox viewers.

Next, it bugs me because I know that despite the blatant and profound idiocy of the statement, people out there were spitting tobaccy into their Dixie cups and nodding in beady-eyed agreement.  And that bothers me because these people breed.  We have enough stupid people already, thanks. We don't need another million trailer parks full of them.

Finally, it bugs me because Beck is actually getting paid to spew odious crap such as that.  The man gets a check.  Granted, no matter how much the check is for, it isn't enough to buy him brains, but still.  Stupidity should never be rewarded -- certainly not with talk shows or public forums.

In the end, it doesn't matter what Beck said.  Morons say moronic things, and the Japanese are neither helped nor hindered by some wild-eyed crying idiot sputtering into a microphone half a world away.

But still.  Why so many ignorant voices?

Oh.  Fox.

Never mind.

Movie Review: Battle Los Angeles

Will aliens never learn?

By now, you've probably seen the trailer for Battle: Los Angeles.  The trailer looked great -- a sky filled with marauding alien aircraft, strange figures moving stealthily through the smoke of battle, the pound and rattle of heavy artillery and automatic weapons fire.

As a sucker for effects-filled run-and-gun alien smash-em-ups, I awaited the opening of this movie with unseemly glee.  I was there opening night, crossbow loaded and ready to (quietly) dispatch any cell-phone talkers in the theatre, eager to finally see a movie that rivaled Aliens for sheer effects-laden fun.

Battle: Los Angeles did not disappoint.

There's no long windup.  We are briefly introduced to the small Marine unit we'll be following throughout the movie, and then the aliens just drop out of the sky and wreak epic havoc upon the city of angels.

We're also told the same thing is happening across the globe.  Cities are being wiped out as the aliens drop into the seas just off the coast and begin their deadly march inland.  No warning, no demands, no communication of any kind -- they just smash down, stand up, and start the slaughter.

The Marines are ordered to head beyond the defensive line, into the battle zone, to rescue a number of people trapped in a police station.  Go in, get them out, get them back to safety.

Of course, things don't work that way.  But enough said about that.

The action is intense and non-stop.  I mean it.  Non-stop.  These poor slugs don't get a minute of peace.  And the effects are miraculous; short of actually blowing the crap out of a none-too-affluent section of LA, including the freeways, I have no idea how they did this.  The look of this film is amazing.  I swear I was covered in a gritty layer of concrete dust by the time the credits rolled.

Do our brave Marines survive?  Does the obligatory child survivor oif the attack make it?  Do we finally show these upstart aliens how we do things downtown?

See the movie.  You'll have a blast.

That was the good.

Now for the ugly.  There may be spoilers ahead, minor ones, but if you're sensitive to these things please stop reading now and look to your right and click on a book and buy it.  Yes.  That one. Now buy another...


Nearly every alien invasion movie ever made shares some of the same dumb-headed flaws, which I shall enumerate below:

1) The aliens want our water.  Yes.  Our tasty, tasty H2O.  Forget the fact that the cosmos is literally awash in the stuff -- there's even plenty of ice on the Moon, for Pete's sake -- but apparently ours comes from sparkling artesian springs and lizard-faced space bugs just find the stuff irresistible. NOTE TO MOVIE MAKERS -- anybody with a high school chemistry lab can *make* freaking water.  Anybody with a space armada can just fly around and scoop the stuff up.  Fighting for it is just dumb.  But not as dumb as using water for fuel.  ANOTHER NOTE TO MOVIE MAKERS -- The amount of energy (chemical, kinetic, thermal, what have you) available in water is well-known.  You can break the chemical bonds between H and O all you want, but you're not going to power starships or weapons with it.  And even if you could, just grab it from places where heroic Marines won't fight you to the death for it.  Duh.

2) The aliens want our women.  Maybe they don't have any of their own.  Or maybe the entire alien attack fleet is composed of loser aliens who couldn't get dates.  But seriously?  I think maybe this speaks more toward the social lives of the script writers than anything else.  That wasn't a part of Battle: Los Angeles, but I wanted to mention it anyway.

3) The aliens want to eat us.  Again, the critters in Battle: Los Angeles showed no desire to do anything to humans but shoot them in the head.  Which is refreshing, since people don't taste too good and anyway they blew up all the liquor stores, so where would you get enough red wine to go with your meal?  Silly aliens.

Of the items above, only #1 applies, and that's if you count a news report blathering away in the background in a single scene.  I dismissed it, and enjoyed the movie despite it.

Favorite scenes from the movie:

1) The impromptu alien autopsy, conducted by a veterinarian and a seriously disgruntled Marine on a still-living alien.  Cutting up a twitching, chittering space baddie with a k-bar knife, looking for interesting organs to shoot -- that's just good fun.

2) The driving-an-armored-vehicle through a mob of surprised aliens scene.  Think octogenarian at a street market, but with .50 caliber guns blazing.  Hey, aliens!  What weighs six tons and just ran over your freakin' head?  This guy!

3) "We already ate breakfast."

So I give Battle: Los Angeles two furiously grinning thumbs-up.  It was loud, it was fast, it was fun.