Data Stream Lost

What is the significance of the image above?

None. Sometimes a wooden skull superimposed against the sky is simply a wooden skull superimposed against the sky.

Hey, I never promised I'd start making sense.


It's been a busy week for me. Taught my last Summer Writing Course on Thursday evening. The Library has plans to start an adult writing course in January of 2013, so if you're in the Oxford area and you have an interest in listening to me babble for an hour and a half once a week for a month or two, hit me with an email and I'll keep you posted on dates and other specifics.

Since the new Markhat novel Brown River Queen sold a couple of weeks ago, I've started on the new Meralda and Mug novel, All the Turns of Light.  I'll keep posting here about my progress or lack thereof. I would welcome emails of encouragement, especially if they arrive as credible threats to my physical well being. I'm having a hard time writing these days, folks. Maybe it's the heat, maybe it's my own innate slothful nature, combined with a complete and utter lack of any discernable work ethic.

Sure, I sit at the keyboard and pound away. Like I've done all afternoon, just now.

I deleted it. Every word. It was awful, and no amount of editing was going to fix it.

They say every writer has a million bad words inside they have to write down before the good ones start emerging. I thought I'd gotten rid of the bad ones already.

Guess not. You learn something new every day, which as far as I'm concerned is a compelling reason to stay in bed with the covers pulled over your head.

That's my pal Thor. We call him Thorazine sometimes because he's nuts. But in a good way. Like any German Shepherd dog, he's attentive and protective and always, always eager to please. He's at my feet right now, half-asleep, ready to get up and play should I do anything but type.

Thor's a rescue dog. All of our dogs are. He was a year old when we got him, and it took him about 15 minutes to fall utterly and completely in love with Karen and I. His former person gave him up because he stopped being a puppy. News flash, idiot former owner. That's what dogs do. Stop being puppies.

I hope Thor doesn't remember Former Idiot Owner. I bet he does. But he seems very happy here, and this is his home, forever.

Thor is the second GSD (German Shepherd Dog) I've had the pleasure of knowing. Maggie, bless her soul, was the first. She was twice Thor's size, and he's no dwarf. Honestly, Maggie was the size of a small horse. I'm not exaggerating. She frightened people from considerable distances, even though she was a gentle, kind giant.

And she loved me. As, perhaps, only a GSD can. Once upon a time -- I won't go into the details -- I found myself face to face with an angered redneck, of the gap-toothed and tattooed variety. The guy was puffed up and ready to fight.

Until Maggie, who never had a moment of formal training, squeezed her massive frame through a partially-opened pickup truck window and joined me, at my side.

Redneck lad went from furious to calm and submissive in a heartbeat.

Maggie never growled. She never bared her teeth. She never breathed hard. She sat, right by my side, but we all knew that if Redneck started trouble Maggie would be the one to end it.

I walked away unscathed. Maggie obeyed my 'girl, truck' command like she'd been trained by the Mossad.

Maggie is buried, along with seven others, here on the property. She died of sudden acute kidney failure. 

I think of her daily. As I do of the others. They were all amazing animals, all our friends. All rescues, all strays, all judged worthless by the wide, wide world.

Which just shows what the wide world knows.

You may have seen this pic before. It's a steampunk gun. Okay, truth time -- it's a Nerf gun I modified so that it appears to be a steampunk gun.

I like making things. It's relaxing. Throw some Pink Floyd on the stereo, grab the super glue, dump a bin of spare parts on the workbench, and get busy. It's therapy, people, for minds that don't respond well to any other kind of therapy.

It's a bit like the gun Markhat now carries. You know, the gun Evis and his pals created in the catacombs beneath Avalante. First they created gunpowder, which allowed them to create cannons. Then some bright tech thought 'You know what? Scaled down, a man could carry one of these!'

And thus the handcannon was born. Markhat first carried one in The Broken Bell. Haven't read it?

Then get thee here and grab a copy! Look, it's got magic. Gunplay. A film noir detective. Intrigue. Adventure. Love. Hate. Hope. Despair. 

It's five bucks. 

Give The Broken Bell a try!

That's my bike.

She's a Honda Rebel. 250 cc, so we're not talking hog here. She'll do an easy 85, though, so she's no scooter.

Karen has a similar bike a Suzuki GZ250. Both get around 68 MPG. We ride them to work when the weather is nice, and kick around in the country on the weekends. 

I'd never ridden a motorcycle before buying the Honda. I laid her down the very first day, when I learned the hard way that making a turn into gravel at speed is a good way to test your protective motorcycle gear. I walked away without a scratch; the Rebel has a tiny ding in her gas tank, and since I've learned to ride a bike.

The first thing a motorcycle teaches you is speed. More precisely, the significance thereof. 

You're in a car. You're doing 65. You're bored, you're listening to the radio, you're thinking about work and a thousand other things.

Get on a bike. Do 65.

Oh, boys and girls. You suddenly understand, down to your bones, that this speed can and will kill you.

There's no illusion of safety. There's no deceiving simulation of your comfy couch in your living room.

The wind is screaming past your helmet. It's grabbing at your jacket. It's pelting you with bugs and debris, the tiniest of which sting like bullets.

The bike is roaring and shaking. Every miniscule bump in the road causes you to jump and lurch. The seat slams your butt with every rise, every dip.

The cars you barely glance at, when you're one of them, are each driven by Death himself. Because -- and this is true, gentle readers -- NONE OF THEM SEE YOU. 

They don't. I don't know why. I see motorcyclists, when I am driving my car. I recognize them as vehicles, and act accordingly.

And if you do too, I salute you.

But most don't. They go right on texting, go right on changing their radio stations while they pull out four meters in front of you, or merge right into your lane.

Just to survive, motorcycle drivers have to be twice as good as car drivers. Three times as good. Four times faster.  

That's why you'll see bike drivers waving at each other, when we meet on the road. 

We share a common fear -- that of the old lady in the Cutlass Supreme, who will turn in front of us and tell the Highway Patrol she never saw that awful motorcycle, it just came out of nowhere.

Here's me at my last book signing.

Hold the Dark is old news. I've written and sold and published two more books since then (The Banshee's Walk and The Broken Bell). But I like that photo, since it proves I still have hair.

And now, for an audio segment!

Click here for a new segment of Out on the Patio!

Hope you enjoyed the audio segment. I promise that's the last installment of 'Big Dogs Howling.' 

My friend Elsye Salpeter, author of Flying to the Light, just sold the sequel to Cool Well Press. So congratulations, Elyse! Well done!

See you next week!

And the beat goes on . . .

Some afternoons you write.

Some afternoons you take old barn lumber and make wearable skull masks, complete with display stand.

No wonder people worry about my mental state.

Normally, when I build things, I spend a lot of time making scale drawings and building it in my head to make sure all the pieces will fit before I make any cuts.I measure and mark all my lumber carefully, and check everything twice before the first sawdust flies. On this piece, I just went nuts with a jigsaw. No measurements, no straightedges, no squares. I just laughed maniacally and cut.

Surprisingly, the pieces fit together. You can't see them in these photos, but I even made my own square-head nails.

Total construction time: less than three hours, including the stand. Cost: zero dollars.

I'm not done with it yet. The wood needs some aging. And a bit if subtle finishing, to get the look I'm after.

What does one do with a life-sized but anatomically inaccurate rendition of a human skull, you ask?

Wearing it to work is out. Ditto for trips to Kroger or the bookstore.

So I'll probably put this up on eBay in a week or two as 'folk art.' If it doesn't sell there, my truck needs a dash ornament, and just by adding a stiff spring I can have the world's largest folk art skull bobblehead!

If nothing else, it served to let me build something, no matter how ridiculous, which I need to do from time to time.

Maybe now I can get back to writing!

Markhat News!

And so a great hush fell over the land. Everywhere, creatures fell silent and still. Squirrels halted in mid-scamper. Wolves paused in their howling. Woodchucks stopped doing whatever it is that woodchucks do.

For there it was. The email that would determine the fate of the Markhat series, in the inbox that held the email that would determine the fate of the Markhat series (repetition emphasizes content).

The woodchucks grew restless, eager to resume their tireless efforts at establishing a stable fusion reaction (they're a lot smarter than they look, people). The wolves gave me the stink eye, fearful that Sarah Palin might be sighting in on them from a Stealth helicopter. The squirrels complained bitterly, because re-establishing a sustained scamper isn't nearly as easy as it looks.

So I opened the email, and . . .

. . . and . . .

BROWN RIVER QUEEN, the new Markhat novel, has been accepted!


Yes, that's right, the 7th Markhat title will be making its way to a bookstore near you soon.  This is another full-blown novel, not a novella or a collection of short stories. The old gang is back, with a new face or two as well.

At the moment, it looks like we're heading for a March 2013 release date. I will of course keep you posted here.

Thanks for all the support! Now let's all go hug an Ogre in celebration!

Belfast: Both Barrels

According to the latest news out of the sewage-encrusted wasteland that is Northern Ireland, the Belfast City Council put dog Lennox down after holding him hostage for two years of sham court hearings and clumsy lies.

Here's a quote from the official TheLennoxCampaign page --

Official Statement From Lennox's Family:

We would like to take this opportunity to thank you all again for your messages of support. We are sorry to say at the present time Belfast city council seem to be intent on killing our boy. Despite previous assurances otherwise, we have been denied the opportunity to say goodbye. We have also been told that we cannot collect his body and bring Len home. We have been informed however that we will receive "some" ashes in the mail.


Keep in mind that poor Lennox was a service dog to a special needs little girl. Keep in mind the Belfast City Council (spelled 'Baby-stomping Nazi bastards') dragged this whole wretched mess out for two years, while they kept Lennox in a despicable little wire cage surrounded by his own feces (and yes, there are photos).


In the end, the Belfast City Council wouldn't even let the Barnes family say goodbye. 


I suppose the Belfast City Council's offhand promise to mail 'some' of Lennox's ashes to his grieving family counts as rare fine charity in merry old Belfast. I imagine each member of the Belfast City Council (I want to make sure Google remembers what the Council is destined to be most famous for, thus the repetition of the words Belfast City Council) was teary-eyed and filled with pride when they magnanimously offered to mail the innocent dog's remains to the grieving little girl.


I suspect they'll send the envelope postage due.


Send it postage due, and then levy charges against the Barnes family for 'storing illegal dog-breed ashes' or something equally inane.  This is, after all, the Belfast City Council we're talking about. 


Because that's the kind of cruel, sadistic, unfeeling, vindictive, unreasoning, cold-hearted, psychopathic, puppy-murdering, bloodthirsty, evil-minded, rotten, despicable, worthless, cowardly, vicious execrable foul vile depraved repugnant malodorous inhumane barbarous stinking hateful reprobate maleficent bags of crap that make up the Belfast City Council.

I'm not even doing them justice in the paragraph above. They snatched some kid's dog after showing up at the wrong address, they decided Lennox was a pit bull when his Belfast-issued license and a DNA test clearly showed he was a perfectly legal 7 year old bulldog/lab mix, and then they kept the poor dog in a cage until they murdered him, two years later, with an offhand note saying 'Nope, no goodbyes, we'll mail you some ashes, are we good now?'


How do you even convey the depth of such blatantly cruel behavior?


I suspect that Lennox either died in his deplorable confinement or was put down months ago. I suspect the Belfast City Council was afraid to reveal this, after the media firestorm surrounding Lennox became apparent to even their dim, ratlike little minds.


Internationally-renowned dog trainer Victoria Stilwell recently traveled to Belfast with an offer to take Lennox away to the US at no expense whatsoever to the Belfast City Council.


The Belfast City Council refused to even speak with Victoria Stilwell. Consider that for a moment -- fat-headed career politicians refused to cavort in front of cameras. With a celebrity. Does anyone else find that strange?


I suspect they refused for two reasons -- first, not one of the Belfast City Council members is capable of completing a sentence without lapsing into a violent alcoholic rage. And second, because they knew Lennox was already gone. Lennox's ill-treatment was apparent in the few photographs leaked from his pathetic quarters. I believe Lennox died through abuse and/or neglect, and that's why the Belfast City Council refused to meet with Miss Stilwell or let the Barnes family say goodbye. 


They'd already killed the dog.


Which makes them liars as well as heartless villains.


It's too late to help Lennox. Unless the legacy of his horrific mistreatment at the hands of the Belfast City Council, the ignoramus judges, and the truly incompetent 'dog experts' that made up the whole wretched tale causes some change in the dark heart of Belfast, Lennox will have died (badly) for nothing.


So, by all means, put Belfast at the top of your holiday destination list! Belfast, famous for its exports of boils and goiters, where the authorities are so friendly they'll quite possibly mail you the remains of your pets a couple of years after they murder them. 


Belfast, city of delights, if by delights you mean bloodthirsty dog wardens and a City Council bent on casual slaughter of all dogs, whether they are a prohibited breed or not. 


Belfast, where pride trumps reason, where compassion is something that happens elsewhere, where they'll mail you the ashes of the one you loved.


Belfast City Council, you people are rotten to the core.

Dragons, Books, and Something New!

Life is change. Or change is life. Or is it time is money?  Stitches in time save goats?

I can never keep all that eldritch wisdom straight.

Regardless of my lackluster grasp of homilies, I'm going to do two new things in today's blog.

First, I'm going to talk about someone else's book for a change. Hey, stop all that clapping and cheering, I can hear you, you know.

Next, I'm going to introduce a segment I call 'Out on the Patio.' This will be an audio segment, recorded out on my patio, in which I blabber on about whatever inane subject strikes my fancy. There will be a link below.

Why am I doing this?

Mainly because I wanted to give you guys a change of pace. You come here week after week and read my rants and raves, and if I keep doing the same old same old I'll wind up boring you.  That's the main reason.

Also, I went to great lengths to purchase this nifty chrome-plated Blue Snowball professional microphone, and aside from a few ill-fated sessions of singing along with musical legend Billy Idol the Snowball hasn't gotten any use. My plan was to start a podcast. I still plan to do that, but I have to first get over this stage fright, and the 'Out on the Patio' segments seem like a good way to do this.

Finally, you'll all get the chance to marvel at my thick Mississippi accent. Mock away. But I'd really appreciate it if, when you're done laughing, you'd zap me an email and let me know how the sound quality was.  Too soft? Too loud? Muffled? Distorted? Made your dogs bark and your ears bleed?

Let me know!

First, let's talk about a book I just finished, Dragons of Wendal by Maria Schneider.

Before starting Maria's book, I plowed through several zombie novels and a couple of 'extreme' horror anthologies. To say I was aghast at the poor quality of these books would be a vast understatement. Formatting problems? All over the place. Grammar errors? Right, left, and rife. Bad storytelling? Oh yeah.

Dragons of Wendal was, if you'll forgive the analogy, a breath of fresh air. Spot-on perfect formatting. Impeccable grammar. Engaging characters, skillfully drawn, in a story that was by turns funny, frightening, and even (gasp) romantic.

Zoe, the heroine, is smart and plucky and accomplished. Her world is filled with magic and peril, but it is not just another Standard High Fantasy knock-off complete with red-faced blustery innkeeps and wise old whiskery mages. I loved Zoe's world. It lived and breathed, and visiting it was great fun.

I don't do spoilers, so I'd better shut up. Look, if you like my stuff, or Pratchett, or classic high fantasy with a modern twist, grab Dragons of Wendal. It's only $2.99 at Amazon for the Kindle; there's also a paperback version there for just a few bucks more.

And now for my audio debut!

Out on the Patio

You guys are my guinea pigs -- er, valued pre-release focus group. Let me know what you think by emailing me franktuttle@franktuttle.com!

Thanks. And stay cool out there!

Even Legumes Get the Blues

Maybe it's the heat.

And it's heat we have, in spades. The outside temperature Friday reached four hundred and eleventy hundred billion degrees, in the shade, beneath a bag of ice, wearing a suit made of ice cream.

And that was before things really heated up in the afternoon.

Even the snakes aren't biting. Instead, they squint and promise to hide under your pillow sometime in November. Even the omnipresent Jehovah's Witnesses have curtailed their soul-saving operations, figuring, I suppose, that this weather is so close to Hell as to make them functionally indistinguishable.

Whatever the reason, I just can't get my aging aftermarket brain in gear lately. I sit down to write. My brain stares at the screen for a moment and then wanders away, leaving my fingers to tap out sentences such as "The gyro hast regretted a frigid assemblage of melodious corn, forsooth."

That's not exactly going to wow the editors at Cool Well Press.

So what, you and I both ask, is your problem, Frank?

Heck if I know. I'm eating. I'm sleeping. I'm getting plenty of exercise, if by 'plenty' you mean 'as little as humanly possible,' and if by exercise you mean 'not exercise.' But that's fine, because I HATE exercise. I'm not even keen on being corporeal. It was fun for the first fifteen or twenty years, but you get arthritis and let's see you wax rhapsodic about it.

Maybe it's the slow book sales this summer. I see a sales rank dip down below 200,000 on Amazon, and suddenly just vegging out in front of the TV while 'America's Got Talent' proves America has little if any talent seems like a perfectly valid use of my rapidly dwindling supply of time.

Too, we must not discount prevailing public opinion, which may be summed up as 'Frank is inherently lazy.' There is considerable evidence to bolster this assertion. In fact, if the evidence for the existence of Bigfoot was half as pervasive, we'd all be waving to him as we met him on the street, three or four times each day.

I've tried positive affirmations, but I can't help but snicker at the things even while I repeat them to myself. YOU CAN BE ANYTHING! SEE THE FUTURE YOU WANT AND IT WILL BE THE FUTURE YOU EXPERIENCE!

Really? I want to be a 1999 Chevy Camaro.

I don't see any tires. I have lungs and not a small-block V6.

Bah. So much for that.

I know the only way out of the doldrums is through them. I have to keep typing, even if sentences such as "Gimlet races only brace the luckless vapors of solitude" are the only ones I produce.

I'm just tired. Maybe the weather will break. Maybe I'll find my center. Maybe the peach tree out back will start sprouting money.

The corpulent echoes of upright men sashay past, flags at half-mast, hats bespoke, ornery knees clicking...

Fifty Shades of Mug

I am writing in the wrong genre.

The buzz these days is all about the book Fifty Shades of Grey. I'm told Fifty Shades sells eleven billion copies per second on Amazon alone, and total sales of the book by all markets combined exceed the number of sentient beings in the populated universe by a factor so large mathematicians have been known to explode just trying to describe it.

This is in direct contrast to my own titles, which sell at a rate we will charitably describe as 'slightly slower.'

I took to a mountaintop recently to ponder, among other things, the reasons and causes for this inequitable disparity in sales. Okay, it wasn't a mountaintop, but sitting on that extra couch cushion does give me a commanding view of the foyer.There I sat, in a position of deep thought, through two entire episodes of Lizard Lick Towing.


And then it came to me.

My books feature very little of the content that made the author of Fifty Shades so rich they are now picking out a new sun because our current one is simply 'too yellow.'

Look through all my books. Spankings? Nope. Salacious romps in luxurious Wall Street offices? Um, no.

Even Markhat, who is a wise-cracking world-weary private eye, never gets any naughtier than a kiss now and then. Or, if he does, there's no way he's going to talk about it.

So maybe I need to move with the times. Maybe Markhat's next adventure should be entitled Steamy Rannit Nights, or Naughty Mama Hog. I have to stick with the three-word title motif -- you had noticed that, right? Well, it's a thing. All Markhat titles have three words. If there's a reason for that, it escapes me.

Of course, I'll also need to rename the new Mug and Meralda book. It was going to be called All the Turns of Light, but now I'm trying to decide between Pants in the Wind or Mug's Curious Encounter With a Rather Un-inhibited Philodendron Named Honey LaLove. 


Why not jump straight aboard the gravy train, though, and go with Fifty Shades of Mug?

I might even release a new version of All the Paths of Shadow - -see below!

And here's a Markhat title, renewed for the adult market!

Yes, the sky's the limit now!

Or you could just buy one of my plain old un-sexy books, linked below:

Frank's Amazon titles!

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to research dirigibles...

That's Belfast! (A Save Lennox Post)

First, a bit of background.

Two years ago, in Belfast, a big black dog named Lennox was seized for the crime of being big and black.

Lennox never bit anyone. Never chased anyone. Never had a complaint spoken against him. He had a proper license. He had a good home. The Dog Wardens (that's apparently what Belfastians call the otherwise unemployable and the feeble-minded) were only at Lennox's home because they went to the wrong address. But because the Belfast Dog Wardens deemed him big and black, they also decided, using all six of their brain cells, that Lennox was a Pit Bull, a breed prohibited in Belfast.

What followed was a travesty. Photographs surfaced showing poor Lennox cowering in a tiny cage, surrounded by piles of his own feces. The official response by the Belfast City Council to these photos was a shrug and a puzzled 'Wait, what's wrong with fecal matter at one's feet?'

Two years passed. Various judges heard the claims of good behavior and non-Pit-Bullness. One of the Dog Wardens even perjured herself by claiming she was terrified of Lennox, despite a number of photos which showed the woman sitting calmly with Lennox, petting Lennox, even letting Lennox give her big sloppy dog-kisses.

A series of increasingly-corpulent Belfastian judges listened to all the evidence and wobbled their ponderous chins like Jabba the Hut sucking down a fifty-gallon drum of jello before blurting 'Off with his head!'

They even brought in a so-called 'dog expert,' who, after a brief interval of pointing at crows and insisting they were Welsh Corgies, claimed Lennox was not a Pit Bull, but was a settee, and could be dangerous, maybe, I see a lamp, what's a Pit Bull anyway?

You can read my previous comments on the matter here.

Today, though, marked the end for poor Lennox. The final judge, who I will not grace with even a name because I don't believe in adding Google points to bottom-feeding slime-worms, decreed that Lennox be put down at once.

His family won't even be allowed to say goodbye.

That's Belfast.

You've got your grossly incompetent, profoundly moronic Dog Wardens, who equate big and black with deadly slavering killing machine. You've got your City Council, who spend two years refusing against all evidence that the Wardens might have made a mistake. And you've got the absolute worst judges this side of the Fifth Galactic Arm, because they heard the evidence but clearly didn't understand enough of the big words to see what an idiotic case the Wardens and the Council brought against poor Lennox.

That's Belfast. Stupidity powered by arrogance compounded by incompetence.

Two years, they kept this poor friendly dog in a tiny metal cage. Two years, they put his family through Hell.

That's Belfast.

By now, I imagine poor Lennox is gone. And I imagine that the Belfast City Council and the Dog Wardens and the pudding-headed judges are all relieved that the whole business is history.

Except it isn't. You backwater, inbred Belfastian buffoons are about to learn, the hard way, what sort of impact negative press on the Web has on blighted little slums such as the one you call home.  There are those of us out here, well beyond the heaps of garbage that line your borders, who won't let people forget who and what you are.

So by all means, let's talk about Belfast. Let's talk about their tiny little cages, their ignorant and cruel civil servants, and the nasty air of casual cruelty that hangs over the whole wretched place like some persistent, noxious fog.

Because that's Belfast.

Rest easy, Lennox. None of this was your fault. No.

That too belongs to Belfast.


PS--
Please copy and paste this blog, or at least the URL, to the Lord Mayor of Belfast, email addy below:

lordmayorsoffice@belfastcity.gov.uk

Please be advised that the customary title for the Lord Mayor of Belfast is 'Peaches.' Or 'Twitface,' if you're feeling nobby.

Something Custard This Way Comes

One bit of writing advice I always give is this -- once you've submitted a piece, forget about it and start something new.

This advice doesn't play particularly well when I offer it to the checker at the grocery store, but other writers see the value in it. There is nothing to be gained from obsessive worry over a title that is now on an editor's desk. You can't hurry the process. You can't affect the outcome. All you can do is chew your fingernails down to your elbows and waste a lot of time.

So I started my new book the very day I sent out the old one.

But today, some eleven days after the submission, I find myself doing the very thing I so often warn others against. No, not licking outboard motors, but obsessing over a submission.

Now, eleven days in this business is nothing. Eleven weeks isn't even considered a long wait. I once waited eleven months for a yes or a no on a short story (it wound up being a yes). So getting impatient after eleven days is somewhat akin to starting your car in Dallas, driving a block, and wondering if you're in Alaska yet.

Thus, in order to purge the evils spirits of doubt and dismay which bedevil me, below are the most likely fates my manuscript has already suffered:

1) My submission is being passed from editor to editor as each bursts into great raucous gales of laughter and screams of 'Is he SERIOUS?'

2) The publishing house has decided to pass on the book, and they're taking out a full-page public rejection space in the New York Times just to make absolutely sure I get the point.

3) They ran out of synonyms for NO.

4) They've hired the entire clown cast of Ringling Brothers Circus to pile into a tiny car and drive to my house and throw 919 pies in my face, each accompanied by a cheerful shouted "We regret that your submission does not suit our current needs" followed by a nose honk, a squirt of lapel-flower seltzer,  and another thrown pie.

5) See #4 above, but with musical accompaniment by the Blue Man Group.

These are the things that fill a writer's unkempt head. I'll dream of clown cars, I swear I will.

It's All Good Fun Until 20 or 30 Kinfolk Get Gut Shot

Like 17 million of my closest friends, I've been watching the History Channel's 'Hatfields & McCoys' mini-series.

The first episode, which opens during the American Civil War, raised the bar on casual, almost recreational murder. The second episode teetered on the verge of self-parody, as pretty much everyone turned on everyone in a hog-fueled free-for-all of unkempt facial hair and petty yet brutal violence.

I'm not sure what's in store for us tonight. I can only assume that some point an entire basket of warm and fuzzy puppies will be brutalized to the accompaniment of period-authentic fiddle music.

I'm not slamming the script or the production values. I'm not slamming the production values because they're unimpeachable. The actors all look like they've spent the last five years doing heavy manual labor in the same clothes they're wearing. The beards are lush and properly grizzled, even those on the women, the chickens, the trees, everything. The weapons and use thereof are correctly portrayed. I'm pretty sure I even smelled pig manure in a couple of scenes.

The script can't really be attacked because the producers did their research, and as far as I know their portrayal of all parties involved is accurate.

What's my problem, then?

The Hatfields and the McCoys all have one thing in common -- they're awful, awful people. All of them. Men and women, boys and girls, spoons and forks. There's not a hero in the bunch. Even the old granny women are lurking in their rockers, Bowie knives at the ready, just dying to draw some Hatfield or McCoy blood.

I did get a chuckle when I realized every barn-dance scene resulted in at least one disgusting, pointless murder. Not because I find disgusting pointless murder humorous, but I've always been suspicious of barn dances because putting that many hillbillies and that much high-octane corn whiskey in the same vicinity simply cannot end well.  Which makes 'Hatfields & McCoys' the natural antithesis of 'Hee-Haw.'

Will I watch the final episode tonight? Probably, because A) I have weak impulse control and B) if the whole thing culminates in a Tarantino-esque orgy of death and blood at a barn dance I'll have joke fodder for weeks.

Yes. I'll watch it and I'll shave immediately afterward and I'll go to bed stone cold sober, and if a barn dance breaks out anywhere near me I'll wrap myself in the Internet and turn up the volume on some Industrial Darkwave to drown out the sound of fiddles and musket fire.