The poll results are in, and this month it’s a blowout — 81% for an excerpt from Dragon Stones. It looks like my advice to “vote early, vote often” was really taken to heart by readers in April! So, without further ado, here is a randomly-selected scene from Dragon Stones:
Auction for Soldiers’ Angels
Anyone who has been reading here for a while has no doubt seen comments from Kristen Tsetsi, a fellow small-press/self-published author. You may also remember my short review of her terrific Operation Iraqi Freedom novel Homefront last year. Now Kristen is preparing an eBay auction to benefit Soldiers’ Angels. From the Soldier’s Angels website:
Soldiers’ Angels is a volunteer-led 501(c)(3) non-profit organization providing aid and comfort to the men and women of the United States Army, Marines, Navy, Air Force, Coast Guard, and their families.
I’ve given one copy each of all four of my published books (just the novels, not the anthologies) to the auction, which also includes a number of other books (including vintage books such as a 1953 copy of The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway), photographs and other artwork, jewelry, and more. Rather than reiterate everything that Kristen will be listing, I would encourage you to visit her blog and view the variety of items that people have donated to the auction. It’s for a good cause, and Kristen always has something there worth reading.
Short Story: The Patter of Little Feet
No random rejections, reviews, or scans of early childhood scribblings this week — it’s the last day of my vacation! But rather than let Sunday go home empty-handed from Scribblings, here’s a randomly selected short story from the unpublished archives. Any resemblance to Night at the Museum is purely coincidental, as this story predates it by many years; any resemblance to the “Zuni Fetish Doll” episode of the old Trilogy of Terror television movie, on the other hand, is less coincidental, although I play the scenario more for comedy than for horror.
One interesting thing about this story is its reliance on the Internet for a few plot points, making it probably one of the first stories I wrote that did so. Another issue that befell this story is that, as I used to do with all my books and stories, it was originally stored in Microsoft Binder format — a format that has since been abandoned. Although there is an extractor that is supposed to be able to pull the contents of a Binder file out into their component files, it didn’t work all that well on this file, and I was forced to reconstruct it by looking at the binary (gibberish-filled) Binder file itself, and piece the story together that way. I think I got all of it, but I’m not completely sure (although I do know that the ending that’s there is original and complete). The moral of this story is to be wary of weird minor proprietary file formats, or else to make sure you always keep (and can run) a copy of the original software that created the files.
And now for our feature presentation, “The Patter of Little Feet”!
The Early Years: What Is That Thing?
Today we have another example of “Why Jim didn’t draw his own comic book panels”, in the form of what appears to be a home-made folder cover from the early or mid 1970s:
Scene-Of-The-Month Poll: May 2009
Scene-Of-The-Month: April 2009
The votes are in and the readers’ choice for a “scene of the month” is A Flock of Crows is Called a Murder, which squeaked in ahead of Dragon Stones by one vote. Pulling down a copy of Crows off the shelf and flipping through it to a random page, I now present not one scene, but two, back-to-back; because that’s how we roll around here.
Together, these two scenes form the pivotal section of Crows that could be described as “the part where everything starts going straight to hell”.
Random Rejection: Mindmares
This week’s random rejection comes to us from the small press magazine Mindmares. The story in question, “Feeder”, is about how much May loves her sweet little birds, and the lengths to which she goes to provide them with yummy suet. Given that this story comes out of my splatterpunk days, you can sort of imagine how she goes about it.
“The Lord of the Rings” Film Trilogy
This isn’t actually going to be a review of The Lord of the Rings films, for a couple of reasons:
- It’s common knowledge that LotR is the Best. Movie. Trilogy. Ever.
- Everybody has already seen them anyway.*
*If by some misfortune you haven’t seen them and haven’t read the books, this post will contain major spoilers.
So, no, this is not a review. Instead, it’s an anecdote, which I hope you will find amusing, about what happened when I finally managed to get my wife to sit down and finish watching the films.
The Early Years: Jack-O’-Lantern
A while back my parents sent me a big package full of old school papers and such, whence I got the, um, amazing space battle drawing that I posted a few weeks ago. Reaching into this package today, I discovered this small exercise in giant block-letter printing, in which the moon has what may be an overly familiar relationship with a pumpkin:
Viscosity 