Posted inAmbulations Blather

Jumping the Zombie Shark!

I saw this (Zombie Sudoku) in a bookstore today.  Had to take a photograph and share with you all.  Sorry it's so blurry.  I was crying a tear for my genre. But really, I should have seen this coming when "hard" sudoku became superceded by "evil" sudoku in many puzzle books.  While technically, "satanic sudoku" should have come next, it was only a matter of time before "zombie sudoku" took the place of that. But I think it would have been much more challenging to release "parasitic sudoku" or maybe "bacterial infection sudoku" instead.  Or maybe just "leech sudoku".  Yeah,…
January 3, 2012Posted inAmbulations, Blather
Posted inBlather

You call it ‘disturbing,’ I call it…

This recent comic from Dan Piraro's bizarrocomics.com made me laugh. And as a "horror writer" and also a writing teacher, I can also identify with both the analyst and the analysand in many ways. But there's a lesson for the writer in this. My analysis here is that it is neither the axe, nor the obsessive gaze of the man on the couch, but the bow tie that makes this comic work so well. All good stories have conflicts that generate tension and here the tension is apparent, between the man with a weapon -- held in a way that…
November 25, 2011Posted inBlather
Posted inBlather

Peter Venkman, Ph.D. — Busted

I spotted this trove of Halloween dolls inside a crane toy at a restaurant the other day and had to take a photo.  That's Peter Venkman (aka Bill Murray) from Ghostbusters, right in the middle.  His sarcastic smile has been flattened by the cartoonery of it all...and this disturbed me a little, so I took a photo. But then I looked over the photo again and realized why it really struck me as so creepy.  It is downright odd for the hero of Ghostbusters to be trapped inside a glass cage, surrounded by monsters and ghosts and skulls... he should…
September 22, 2011Posted inBlather
Posted inBlather

The Incredible Shrinking Writer

"To be small and to stay small."  -- motto of Robert Walser, creator of The Microscripts New discovery this morning:  Robert Walser, who was so fixated on writing small that he apparently began boiling the written word down into an "eccentric shorthand" -- a code of his own invention -- which compressed stories and poems down into very small scraps of paper and items like calendar pages and postcards. More art than prose, the Microscripts collection is available on Amazon.com Apparently he fit a complete novel, "The Robber," into 24 pages of paper -- which Benjamin Kunkel calls "a beautiful,…
August 19, 2011Posted inBlather
Posted inBlather

Guest Blog at Disquieting Visions: “It Is Not What It Is”

Bonus blather: Head on over to Gail Z. Martin and crew's "Disquieting Visions" weblog, to read my guest blog essay, "It is Not What it Is"...where I rant about my dislike for this phrase, and the role of horror in dispelling such worldviews. Gail is a terrific fantasy writer, and kindly invited me to contribute to the Disquieting Visions blog, as a sort of update to our very fun, chatty podcast interview she did with me about horror for her "Ghost in the Machine" series on her own website, shortly following the publication of my collection, Proverbs for Monsters. Her…
March 29, 2011Posted inBlather