This morning I signed a contract for a new novel. If you've been following closely on Twitter, I've been letting some details slip out in terms of research, and I think that I even mentioned titles but let's dive in a little deeper. The book is called THE DROWNING CITY, a direct follow-on to QUEEN OF NO TOMORROWS. Yes, it's about Cait MacReady and the cast that I assembled in the last book (minus the titluar Queen for reasons that would be obvious if you've read it -- no spoilers). Yes, it's being published by Broken Eye Books out of Washington state. I mostly know what the book is about. That is to say, I have the plot basically laid out. There's some threads that are crossing and I'm not s
I was reminded of a picture I'd taken, back eighteen years ago now. Little more, actually. March 28, 2001. It's a hallway in my wife's paternal grandparents' home. I'll reproduce it for you here. I suppose the date matters, if nothing more than a yardstick of technological progress more than anything else. Here. There's not too much to it, right? Solid single-source lighting and a lot of shadow. Underexposed, really. Blurry. Some halation/doubling/smearing from where I moved for that fraction of a second. I suppose if I looked at the metadata, I could figure out how long the exposure was, etc. That's not the important thing for the conversation at hand. What matters is that it's a technologi
Saw JOKER. Spoilers follow. It was beautifully shot, well-acted, locations curated and lit and retro-aged perfectly. Great costuming and sense of other place that mostly stuck aside from a few really notable exceptions. I think Joaquin Phoenix did a good job with the role. I think. It's tough because it's the kind of role that will elicit all manner of "it must be great acting because it looked so arduous and awkward and painful" but I don't know that it really rang. The script was kinda funny in places, mostly too-heavy in others. Unfortuntely, it centered around not just a visualization/realization of the character that I really don't care for. Also, giving the Joker an origin is like givi
The Eastern Columbia building, Deco tomb obelisk of empires. Got my panel assignments for the upcoming World Fantasy convention coming up in just a couple of weeks. Let's take a look, shall we? Oh. I'm...moderating a panel? That can't possibly be right. Hold on. I need to sit down. Damn, I'm already sitting. Let me pass out on the couch for a moment. (Time passes, imperceptibly for you but glacially for me.) Okay, right. I'm back. So, yes, I'm moderating "California Screaming: Modern Golden State Horror Stories and Writers." Join horror writers as they discuss modern stories set in Calfironia. What makes California a unique setting for horror, both psychological and supernatural, and what ca
Not going to lie. This was a big trip. If you've been reading along (and I know that each and every one of you are, since I'm having the server feed all the pings back to my Apple Watch and I haven't gotten a bit of sleep since that happened) then you know that this has been one of those periods of turmoil in my career and there isn't an asterisk in the world that's big enough to park next to that word to convey the ambivalence of my feelings on the issue, that is unsettling to say the least. The payoff on this one hits late, so stay with me. So, yeah, going up to the HP Lovecraft Film Festival (hereby shortened to HPLFF because who's got the time?) in Portland was a nice break. I get to han
Okay, so this is gonna be a weird one, replete with psychic spelunking and Jungian wrestling with if not the angel then something almost as uncanny. This may not be your cup of tea. That’s okay. I’m writing this for me more than anyone else. As all the other stuff that I write, it turns out. I mean, that’s a realization that I’ve put off having for some time, even if it’s been absolutely true since I started writing fiction nearly thirty years ago. I’m doing it for me. Only I hamstrung myself by worrying about success and selling (not even selling out because how can you sell what nobody wants to buy?) I’ve wrestled with that debilitating, crippling dilemma for too long. So I’m doing my best
