Originally published at LonPrater.com. You can comment here or there.

Tonight I finished the first draft of The Whisperer in the Willows, an unholy mashup of Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows and H.P. Lovecraft’s Arkham in the near future.  Rat and Mole are replaced by Nat and Cole, a homeless man and his slightly learning disabled protege.  Badger is now Rodger, an academic with something to hide.  Joad (nee Toad) is no longer obsessed with fast cars, but rather dark secrets and eldritch mysteries.  All around them, the world is grinding to a halt as the reign of man creaks to an end and the Great Old Ones struggle their way into the world.

Throughout the book, Grahame’s values of home, friendship and kindness are put to far worse tests than his simple river gentlefolk ever dreamed of, and some of them even manage to hold firm to their life and sanity!

It weighs in at 238 pages, or approx. 60K words.  A short novel, then, but a novel nonetheless.

::sighs contentedly::

It’s really weird, what with the concept, and hanging on to Grahame’s style, tone and theme. Probably too weird to be salable, except to those who get a large charge out of Lovecraftiana.  But damn it was fun.  Well, off to a couple of first readers.  If anyone out there is a big fan of HPL and would like to take a gander at it, I’d of course be happy to return the favor.

Now for a couple weeks gloriously OFF.  Time with the kids and visiting family I’ve not seen in too long.  Some video games, reading, amusement parks and camping are in store, no doubt. Then I’ll be ready to edit my industrial fantasy fix-up novella “Dirt: A New Promise Concerto” and of course begin primary research for my next novel project, which I probably won’t start actually writing till fall.

Somewhere in there I need to work on marketing my stuff.  No one can accept or reject what never leaves my hard drive.  Time to get those shiftless stories out and earning their own keep!

Originally published at LonPrater.com. You can comment here or there.

<kibbitzing>

Joseph Paul Haines states his case, and I tend to agree with him, particularly when it comes to being a creative businessperson or hobbyist.  Should you consider ways to make your product more appealing to the masses?  Sure, consider away, and to the extent that it does not diminish your unique end product, knock yourself out.  But do not be a slave to the market’s current fetish.  Especially not under the mistaken idea that “once I’ve made my fortune writing stuff I don’t care much for, THEN I’ll have time and traction to write the weird little stories that only I could write.”   You’d darn well better care about the stuff you’re writing now–it’ll show if you don’t.

One point I think could have been elaborated on more in JP’s post was that there really is room for both in a career (or business or hobby).   But finding your niche should come first.  Build that audience.  Do one thing and do it really well. Later, if you are of a mind to, use the leverage created by your successful niche to branch out into other areas THAT MAKE SENSE and are consistent with what your niche expects.   Don’t make the mistake of assuming that just because you do one thing well, you can do anything else just as well and under the same business shingle.  Get a pen name (open or secret), but make sure that your brand actually stands for something.  (Remember HQ and how at the very end you could hardly tell if you were in a home improvement retailer,  a pet supplies store or a bulk discounter?)

But if you’re a creative person, I’m inclined to think you should be very careful about when in your career you  explore wildly different arenas under the same brand.  The decision to diversify should never be based solely on whether or not it will make you money.  There’s gotta be some other drive there, and I would think that established niches need some measure of protection from the new and experimental ones.  Don’t whore your brand name out.   If John Scalzi suddenly decided to start selling hand-knitted kitty booties instead of science fiction–well, maybe with his savvy and audience he could pull it off.  But it would be the exception to the rule that it is usually a  smarter idea to broaden your existing niche or create independent spin-offs than it is to just go adding in *random stuff you also sell* willy-nilly.

And there is another time that diversifying may be the best course as a creative businessperson.  When you are just starting out and can’t actually be called a creative businessperson yet because you your product base hasn’t really been defined or built a customer base yet.  Absolutely, consider yourself a creative businessperson (and for FSM’s sake, behave like a professional!) while you are still in the very earliest stages.  But at this point, I’d argue, what you’re doing isn’t so much diversifying your portfolio as DISCOVERING your niche. Experiment, find what works, try to understand why it works.  See where your bliss is taking you and how many folks want to come along for the ride. Then make damn sure you give them the ride of their lives–every single time.

</kibbitzing>

Originally published at LonPrater.com. You can comment here or there.

* Received penultimate copy of Talebones today.  ::glumness is::   Gonna take my time with it this time around, rather than jumping right in like I usually do.

* After hearing Punch Brothers last year, I made a note to seek out the band its prime mover had spawned from,  Nickel Creek.  Got a hold of some of the CDs and I was able to give a devoted listen during my workout today.  Wow!  These are people who know every single sound their instruments can make, and use that knowledge to take you on an ecstatic emotional romp.  Talk about lifting my spirits–there are songs and crescendos on here that had me shouting out and scaring the other people–not to mention groundhogs–on the path.  (Those who know me know I’m what they call fairly inhibited about responding to music.)  And at the other end of the spectrum, there were songs of such despondence I had to really focus on keeping my pace up.    I’m pretty sure Nickel Creek will be a heavy hitter on my playlist when I finish this novel and start mulching for the next one.

* Seeing forward motion in my emails for Triangulation: Dark Glass and Tales Out of Miskatonic University makes me happy.

* Due to a near-mutiny inducing snafu involving a flubbed iTunes download of Spongebob’s The Yellow Album, I find myself with two free song downloads, and no idea what I should get.  What two songs would you pick for me?

Originally published at LonPrater.com. You can comment here or there.

Slept in today, or what passes for sleeping in. (Since when is 10:30 the latest I can sleep, anyway?)

Went for a walk in one of Dayton’s “metroparks”.  Nice trails, one of the surprising up-sides of an area virtually falling apart from the inside.  Some city planner, while otherwise asleep at the switch, made sure to set aside plenty of tracts of well-wooded greenspace.  They aren’t as free of car-noise and such as the place I liked to go in Connecticut, but I suppose they’ll do.

After, I found a peaceful spot near the Mad River (where else to write about Rat, Mole and Toad’s homeless Arkham analogs?) and knocked out 8 more pages to end chapter 11.  This brings the whole she-bang to 222 pages. Pretty much on track with the source material.  One last chapter is all that remains.  Whereas in The Wind in the Willows, the last chapter was “XII. The Return of Ulysses”, in this version it is a bit more obviously Lovecraftian:  ”XII. The Return of Nyarlathotep”.  Hoping to knock it out over the next few evenings.  No more writing today though, unless I get a strong second wind.  38 pages in 3 days is pushing it for me!

Some folks have been doing a First Lines memes lately.  In that spirit, here’s the opening paragraph of The Whisperer in the Willows:

I. THE RIVER BANK

Cole had been working very hard all the morning, camping in his online world collecting enchanted weapons to sell. First the swords, then the muskets; then on to daggers and staves and arrows, with his barbarian and a Glaive of Lifeloss; till he had dust in his throat and bleary eyes, an aching back and weary arms, and was very, very close to pissing all over himself. But the global depression meant no one was buying virtual toys with actual money, it penetrated every bank account and dark and lowly household with its spirit of fearful privation and languor. It was small wonder then that he suddenly shoved his ergonomic chair away from an expiring laptop, said some choice expletives and also “I’m done with this!” and bolted out of the apartment without even bothering to snatch up the past due notices that hung upon his door. The Moroccan neighbor shouted at him imperiously, and Cole made for the steep little stairs that led out of the ramshackle building and into the sun and air. At the bottom of the stairs he unblocked and unlatched and unbolted the front door, working busily and muttering to himself, “It’s over! I’m ended!” till at last, pop! He burst out into the sunlight, and he found himself blinking in the dank warmth of Arkham.

Originally published at LonPrater.com. You can comment here or there.

Between FB and LJ, 9 folks chimed in.  8 for Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, 1 for Octavia Butler.  But with plenty of commentary on not leaving Kindred alone in the dust, regardless of the vote.  Not to worry, Octavia will still get her turn later on this year!

Thanks for helping out me decide,  folks.  I’ll start reading Hills this weekend.

Originally published at LonPrater.com. You can comment here or there.

I’m torn as to which of these from my shelf I should read next, so I’m putting it out there on the internets for a vote.

In this corner, we have Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House.

First published in 1959, Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House has been hailed as a perfect work of unnerving terror. It is the story of four seekers who arrive at a notoriously unfriendly pile called Hill House: Dr. Montague, an occult scholar looking for solid evidence of a “haunting”; Theodora, his lighthearted assistant; Eleanor, a friendless, fragile young woman well acquainted with poltergeists; and Luke, the future heir of Hill House. At first, their stay seems destined to be merely a spooky encounter with inexplicable phenomena. But Hill House is gathering its powers-and soon it will choose one of them to make its own.

And in this corner. . . Kindred by Octavia Butler!

Dana, a modern black woman, is celebrating her twenty-sixth birthday with her new husband when she is snatched abruptly from her home in California and transported to the antebellum South. Rufus, the white son of a plantation owner, is drowning, and Dana has been summoned to save him. Dana is drawn back repeatedly through time to the slave quarters, and each time the stay grows longer, more arduous, and more dangerous until it is uncertain whether or not Dana’s life will end, long before it has a chance to begin.

Place yer bets–err, votes, folks!

[Synopsis info from bn.com.]

Originally published at LonPrater.com. You can comment here or there.

Y: The Last Man, Vol.4-10.  Like a handful of  must-see seasons of the best possible TV.  Sad to see it end.  Mature themes and mature thoughts in abundance.  At its heart, it had so much going on it could be the source of somebody’s Master’s thesis.  (Probably is already.)  But the parts that got to me the most were the humor, the strength of the characters’ affection for eachother, the surprising plot twists, and one of the dominant themes: the ways gender and race and sexual orientation and  religion and politics and fear all keep us fighting one another, and how it’s all such a senseless, fricking shame because in the end what matters most is love.

Elfquest, Vol. 1. Nostalgic fun re-read.  It’s aged fairly well, all things considered, though the highly expository storytelling style felt to me like the comics version of 19th century literary motifs.

Strange Adventures of H.P. Lovecraft #2. Everything a weird tale about H.P. Lovecraft should be:  disorienting, weird and madness-inducing.  I’m lovin’ it.

Originally published at LonPrater.com. You can comment here or there.

My haibun (a Japanese style poem linking haiku with prose poetry, for those who aren’t poetry nerds) “Banshee” is now up at Chizine.  I’ve also set up a link to it on the Free page of my site.  Go forth and enjoy, plus there’s a lot of other great offerings this month as well.  Take your time, sit and visit with the ChiZiners for a spell.  Guaranteed to unsettle you, if you like that sort of thing.  (And admit it, you do.)

Originally published at LonPrater.com. You can comment here or there.

Generation Loss by Elizabeth Hand.  A damn fine read.  Features a disturbing (and disturbed) protagonist with “as many words for hangover as the Inuit have for snow”.  There is simply so much going on in this sharply focused (and yet subtly developed) novel, it feels like I’ll still be digesting little bits and pieces of it for weeks to come.  Lyrical and deft in its artfulness, this book simply rocked my world.

Originally published at LonPrater.com. You can comment here or there.

I haven’t read as much nonfiction over the past couple years as I used to.  Another area I’m interested in intentionally  reading more of.  So I figured I’d see what’s new in brain science/psychology, a field in which I’ve always had more than a passing interest

How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer is like a toybox full of many interesting things.  Seems like every time I turned the page, new exciting concepts jumped out to amaze me from the emerging neuroscience/psychology intersection.  Highly recommended, and on so many different levels.  It validates scientifically many things I have always thought to be true about the way our whole Western reason/emotion dichotomy works, while at the same time shattering that whole paradigm.  Reading this while listening to Daniel Goleman’s Social Intelligence on audiobook (still in progress) provided something of a lagniappe, as many of the concepts are reinforced between the books, though coming from very different angles of attack.  Not only that, but Lehrer’s no dry science writer.  The lede stories are interesting and his style makes the best use of creative nonfiction techniques where appropriate.

I’ve always been interested in epistemology (the philosophy of how we “know” and “think” things, how can we be certain that what we know is true?).  This book fed my brain and gave me much to think about regarding my own decision making processes.  One of the most fascinating things for me was the analysis of certainty-bias, with absolutely fascinating studies that shed light upon the nature and tenacity of  political partisanship/religious affiliation, as well as the rigorous hoops our brain jumps through to protect what we already believe from any contrary evidence.

Too much here to really even summarize, but I loved every page of this nonfiction book.

Originally published at LonPrater.com. You can comment here or there.

Ah, modern love….

Originally published at LonPrater.com. You can comment here or there.

That makes three that I know of–two women and one guy.  Shelley will be converted, once she gives in and reads the first, I’m sure.  ;)

Being a person with the dubious morals of your neighborhood pusher, I lent my neighbor F. Paul Wilson’s THE TOMB.

She finished it in a day and immediately put books 2-5 on order.  I’ll say it again:  If you aren’t reading Repairman Jack, you are missing out on some of the best paranormal thriller action going!

What about you?  Are you an F. Paul Wilson/Repairman Jack fan?

Is there a particular series or author you “push” on anyone who will listen?

Originally published at LonPrater.com. You can comment here or there.

* I’ve seen the cover of Triangulation: Dark Glass and it is made of awesome.  A crisper revision of my WotF story “Deadglass” will appear within.  Look for it in to be released one month from now, in conjunction with CONFLUENCE ‘09.  Sadly for me, that’s a con too far.  No hope of being there for the release.  And it’s going to be such a gorgeous book!

* All of a sudden I’m busy with writer work!  Received galleys to proof on the aforementioned “Deadglass”, plus “Symphony for the Aligning Stars” (Tales Out of Miskatonic University).  And both are now done and turned in!

* Got to hang with Charlie Finlay, Rae Carson and Jaime Voss the other night at a signing/reading for the last of the TRAITOR TO THE CROWN trilogy.  A great time, apart from some weirdly bad service from the Turkish restaurant.  The books are about the American Revolution, with espionage by witches, plus demons and zombies!   What’s not to like?  I’ve been waiting for this set to complete, and now it is in queue.

* Had my girls this weekend and the theme park junkies were out in full force.  Hours in the sun at water park and connected amusement park left me a tired, sore-footed, sunburned Dad.  But damn is it a good sort of tired.

* One of my favorite albums from the early ’90s is Songs from the Rain by Hothouse Flowers.  Just an awesome bit of musical amazingness from Ireland.  It came up on the ipod today and I got swept up into it again.  Imagine my surprise to look them up and see that they are doing a US tour this year.  No  place close to me, alas.  I hadn’t heard a peep from or about them in over a decade.  Looks like they put out a few more albums since.  Anyone know whether their other stuff holds up as well as this?

Originally published at LonPrater.com. You can comment here or there.

Ugh.

Had some writerly/computerly turmoil over this weekend.  Started doing the old “submit stories to people who might buy them” thing, and encountered a problem.  Back when Vista was all I could get on a new computer, I opted to run Ubuntu instead.  Felt adventurous and I’d always wanted to learn a little about Linux.  Ubuntu had Open Office on it, and I’d been using that primarily anyway on my last laptop before it died.  Open Office worked fine for RTF docs at the time, which all my stories were in.

Flash forward a couple years.  As I start submitting these stories, I notice the format is going crazy.  Randomly switching from single to double space. Headers that were obviously on LSD…

So I did some research.  Turns out Open Office no longer really supported RTF.  I know, right? So I converted all my stories (grudgingly) to DOC. I checked they were all formatted correctly, and then saved.  I reopened the files: Still good.  Then I submitted them to markets electronically.

And that, kiddies, is where the magic gremlins live and thrive.  Because apparently, based on the emails I sent out, the formats have all regained some measure of their former dicked-uppedness.  Even though they were now in DOC.  A weekend of submissions going out and they all look like a typesetter sneezed for as much as I can tell on my end.

Kept me up all night, I’m not kidding.

Decided to give Vista a[nother] shot.   Desperate times and all…. It’s sat on a partition of the laptop unused for most of the past two years, except occasional excursions into molasses-time to do iTunes.  (The biggest criticism of Ubuntu I had before all this was the lack of itunes and webcam/Skype support.  Now, I’ll be fair and say Ubuntu itself is fast and easy to figure out for basic purposes–hence its popularity in netbooks, but if they can’t find a single word processor that can be taught Standard Manuscript Format, I’m Audi.)  After some consulting with a buddy, turns out what I needed to make Vista work–now that it’s had time to get out of “customer sponsored beta-testing”–was simply a RAM upgrade.

Got R Done and whammy-zammy, Batman, the Vista side is running fast!  It’s like having a whole new computer!

And then of course, in my abrupt abandonment of Ubuntu and Open Office’s unwriter-friendly issue, I discovered Windows 7 was out for testing.  OF COURSE I WAS SKEPTICAL.  But three IT guys I trust, plus the little dude at Best Buy all said they’d been running it just fine.  And I do have a problem with not being able to resist cutting edge techie stuff that’s free.  (I’ll never learn….)

Giving Win7 the old college try on the partition formerly occupied by Linux Ubuntu.  It is incredibly fast.  Thus far, not even one crash.  It has a bit more of the sense of fun that only rarely peeked its head out in earlier editions.  The themes and backgrounds have personality.  One of the pictures that came up on the desktop slideshow looked like the Space Needle and its reflection in the Science Fiction Museum in Seattle.  I’m fairly sure that’s what it is, anyway.

Win7 is very fast, and the most intuitive Windows yet.  It seems like they’ve learned something from Ubuntu and Mac (as usual) and  netbooks AND THE FLUSTERCLUCK THAT WAS VISTA’S EARLY RELEASE. There’s a neat feature where if you drag the window all the way to the left or right, it automatically takes up that half of the screen.  Makes it great for comparing documents, websites, etc. when you have the two windows on opposite sides.  Also good for file transfer.  If you drag the window to the top of the screen, it maximizes.  And the fun part is if you grab the top of a window and shake it, all the other windows fall away.  Shake again, and they’re back.

There’s a bit of coolth in the Show Desktop function too.  Roll over the button and you can peek behind all the open windows.  One huge improvement is the reduction of all those constant PITA reminders and “just making sure you wanted to do that” messages.  They wore me out.  There’s still some in Win7, but they’re like shy wallflowers now.  You hardly notice them.

And fast!  It is much faster than Vista, and at least as fast as Ubuntu was on my machine for booting, shut down and file transfers.  Yes, I did compare times with the extra RAM in.  I’m no more Anti-Ubuntu than I am Anti-Windows.  I only care what works and doesn’t cost me an arm and a leg for the privelege.  Oh, and using Wordpress website admin over the web was very draggy on Ubuntu.  Especially in regard to keyboard responsiveness.  Not so with Win7.  As I wrote this blog entry, I was transferring 16G of iPod music and movies over to this part of the partition.  Not a bit of lag!

So anyway, probably more Win7 geekery coming as I play with it.  It’s on a 50GB partition, with Vista still safely ensconced in the remaining 100GB.

I’ll keep the weeping and gnashing of teeth over my poor crap-formatted story submissions to a minimum.

Originally published at LonPrater.com. You can comment here or there.

My 20-year high school reunion happened this weekend and I wasn’t able to attend, though all the fun-havers and reminiscences were certainly on my mind.  To wit, a couple pics I dug up from this time of year in that storied era:

Prom 1989!

That would be me, youthful heartbreaker Catharine Cochran (who was a much better writer at 17 than I would be until well into my thirties), Sean Morrison in the shades with his date, and Mal Simmons with his.

And now, for my next trick, Rocky, watch me pull a really old picture out of my hat!

(Again?)

Nothing up my sleeve…

Of course, in that pic I was blind as a frickin’ bat. The coke-bottle lenses on my Navy issue BCGs or “birth control glasses” were tucked safely into my socks. 

Originally published at LonPrater.com. You can comment here or there.

Finding Your Voice Writing in Fragments and Pieces Workshop

And only 30 bucks!!! What a bargain.

::begins preparing next great American “Tw-ovel”::

Originally published at LonPrater.com. You can comment here or there.

A heads up for anyone interested–

Chaosium is offering retailer returned copies of Frontier Cthulhu at about half-price!

This anthology was a finalist for the Origins Award, and comes slam-packed full of pulpy goodness ranging from the Creepy Colonial period on out to the Weird West.  Here’s the TOC.

• The Long Road Home by Paul Melniczek
• In Waters Black the Lost Ones Sleep by Angeline Hawkes
• Where Men Had Seldom Trod by Lee Clark Zumpe
• Something to Hold the Door Closed by Lon Prater
• Terror from Middle Island by Stephen Mark Rainey & Durant Haire
• Children of the Mountain by Stewart Sternberg
• They Who Dwell Below by William Jones
• Wagon Train for the Star by Scott Lette
• Incident at Dagon Wells by Ron Shiflet
• Ahiga and the Machine by Robert J. Santa
• The Dead Man’s Hand by Jason Andrew
• Jedediah Smith and the Undying Chinaman by Charles P. Zaglanis
• Snake Oil by Matthew Baugh
• Cemetery, Nevada by Tim Curran
• The Rider of the Dark by Darrell Schweitzer

Originally published at LonPrater.com. You can comment here or there.

I’m not much of a daily writer.  Sometimes, I go a month or more without actually making new words on the page.  I have more of a binge and purge muse.  She is always on the job, stirring the pot, but when it comes to making new copy, she only works in fits and starts.  I think and plan and mulch my subconscious, even outline on occasion, and edit a lot. Then when the urge to write is there AND I have a large block of time to do it in, I sit down and write.  Usually, if I have a couple hours, I can drop anywhere from 8-16 pages.  This is why writers’ retreats (formal and self-created) can be so productive for me.

For a long time I kicked myself for not being one of the BIC2000 (Butt-in-Chair, 2000 words a day).  But over time I realized I’m not doing too bad, all things considered.  I have periods each year where I do write every day.  The single biggest thing I’ve noticed that keeps me from writing is the guilt feeling that I should be writing (new fiction, specifically) every day or else I’m just not doing it right. Over time, I’ve come to the realization that for me, writing whatever the hell I want (rather than something contracted) getting an average of a page a day over the year is pretty good.  Probably the best I can aim for, so long as I keep a dayjob and some kind of family and social life.  In previous years, I’ve only managed about 50-60,000 words a year, with an occasional blip around that lofty goal of 90K.

But I just looked at my stats, given it’s midyear and all.  So far, all is well.  193 pages (in SMF) of new copy logged, plus 1 salable poem.  Seeing’s how June isn’t over and the year not quite at half-done, I’m actually a bit ahead of my 1 page per day average.  Not bad, considering I’ve only had 16 actual writing days this year.  Average day is 12 pages.

Most of it on the unholy mashup novel, but some on a new short story from start to finish and yet more to finish an older short story.  Also, an older, unfinished novel (or novella, I think)  got some of my attention at the beginning of the year.  I think it’s this transition over the past couple years from short stories to novels and longer works that makes me kind of crazy.  The feeling that I rarely finish anything equates in my brain to the feeling that I’m not actually accomplishing anything.

I know this isn’t true, but typing END on those two short stories sure did feel good.

The place I’m sucking more and more these days is marketing stuff.  I have a back log of inventory which is tended by an equally binge-and-purge clerk.  Every couple of months I try to get religion and put those stories out there into the wild and make them fend for themselves.  

 My daytime work involves significant editing (a big honking textbook) so I ought to be counting at least some fraction of that  as “writing” work I get paid for.  I guess all in all, I’m not doing too bad. Plenty of room for improvement, but not enough room to wind up and kick myself.

Much.

Originally published at LonPrater.com. You can comment here or there.

At the end of last year, I noted that I had only read 3 novels (of 19) by women authors, and so set out to broaden my horizons a bit more in 2009.  (Pun only realized after the fact, heh).  Loosely, the goal is to double the number in 2009, but not to read any book just because the author was a woman.  There needed to be some other aspect in play as well that made me want to read it.

So I listened to THE HOST while working out earlier this year; Shelley and I were supposed to read this together but she got stuck in her own TBR pile and so I had to go it alone.    I picked up Octavia Butler’s KINDRED, which is still on my TBR shelf, a lonely woman in a sea of F. Paul Wilson, Arturo Perez-Reverte, Howard Waldrop, Michael Burstein, Tim Powers and Jay Lake, plus a bunch of zines and a bit of nonfic.  Then promptly set about reading whatever struck my fancy next through the year. Figuring the right mood would strike and sooner or later, I would know it was time to launch into KINDRED.  Meanwhile, I kept my eyes open whenever I went bookgazing to note any titles by women authors that caught my eye.

When the Small Beer sale happened, I saw Elizabeth Hand’s GENERATION LOSS on the list, and remembered being interested enough to read a review or two last year, but never had actually seen it in front of me when I was looking to buy a book.  See, what I think is more a factor when I go to buy a book or decide what to read next, more than the gender of the author, or whether they are a tranny Venezuelan midget of unusual shoesize or whatever, is the attractiveness of the story–or rather of the story as it is being sold to me.  (Plus all the memes and meta-stories that may surround the book and its concept.)

Which got me to wondering: How much of the overwhelmingly male gender bias of my own reading selections is based  on how differently a man’s book is often marketed, and how much ( or little?) is based on differences in the kinds of stories women tell.  Maybe some of my more feminist-aware friends could illuminate me on this, or how to forensically investigate?

Short story long, I picked GL out of the Small Beer sale lineup and it arrove over the weekend.  A gorgeous volume. When it got here, I thought I was going to set it on the TBR shelf, but it called to me immediately with the glamer of a new and shiny thing.  Given the timing ( I had just finished reading a nonfic book not yet reported here), I launched right in to it.  Chapter 1 kicked some serious ass; this is writing of personal intensity and a confidence of skill that borders on brashness.  I’m stoked to read more, but running a bit late this morning for work because I was up too late reading.

Anywho, just wanted to capture this while I ate my breakfast.  Off I go.

Originally published at LonPrater.com. You can comment here or there.

But I’ve had a good life all the way.

Yesterday was a wonderful, momentous, phenomenal day.  Twenty years before, at the ever-so-worldly age of 17, I woke up for my first morning at the Navy boot camp in  Orlando, Florida, where a growling chief with a baseball bat and a metal garbage can (remember those?) served as the only alarm clock I’d ever need.

To celebrate the occasion,  Shelley did the incredible.  She surprised me with a planned out, awesome day.  My brother Chad and his Shellie were up visiting from Tennessee, and the four of us spent the day tooling around in a rented convertible, listening to Jimmy Buffett, The Offspring, Blue October and the sound of wind, glorious wind in our faces.  At the end of the day, there was an amazing dinner with my friends from Indiana Horror Writers at Rock Bottom Restaurant and Brewery in Indianapolis.  Sara Larson gave a very nice toast (which thankfully drowned out my bro’s version!), the lovely Danielle Friedman graced us with her company (and tabletalk quickly turned to intestines, natch!), Michael West had some good news I’m not sure I can repeat as of yet, Jerry Gordon and Jill (who I don’t get to see enough of, but the promise of poker may change that!), Maurice Broaddus with Sally and the entire posse, Natalie of the last name that escapes me, Brian Shoopman, and a passel of others I am leaving out only for the sake of brevity and poor memory.  What a great capper to a great day!

There is yet more fun to be had today, before the fam drives back to moonshine country, but if you were there and you’re reading this, thank you so much.  You have no idea how touched I was that you all showed up to surprise me and share in the celebration.

I feel truly blessed and lucky in the afterglow of that fantastic day. Thank you Shelley for putting it all together behind my back.  I love you so much!

If the next twenty years slip away even a fraction as happily, they will be twenty damn good years….