Val Kilmer got the swine flu! OH NOES!

Holy crap. So, NYers, did you hear (and you can go see NY1 and so on for details, I don’t have links on hand heard it on the radio – but now links below, wheee) that the MTA has a second “doomsday” budget? They’re soft-threatening that if they don’t get money it will mean not only a second fare hike (behind the one that is already planned to $2.50) but also more cuts in service.

And by “cuts in service” we apparently now mean “possibly shutting down late night service.” Head of the MTA said “nothing is off the table” and also apparently said he has a plan to fix everything but that it was secret.

Commence outrage.

This was, of course, a political move. From the NYT:

” Asked if he would consider shutting down the subway late at night to save money, he said, “One can’t say that anything is off the table.”

He said that he had not discussed an overnight shutdown with the president of New York City Transit, Howard H. Roberts Jr., and that there were strong arguments for maintaining all-night service.

A transportation authority spokesman, Jeremy Soffin, later clarified those remarks, saying, “We are not actively studying a nighttime shutdown of the system.” He said running fewer trains at night was a more likely option.”

And from 2nd Ave Sagas (good blog btw):

“It all comes back to those 468 stations. The system simply wasn’t designed to stop. There’s nowhere to store all of the rolling stock; the cost of securing the system would be immense; and the cost in labor or time in shutting down and starting up the system basically negates — and is generally believed to outweigh — the cost savings of a shut down.

Of course, that’s hardly good news. The MTA can roll back subway service to two trains an hour on nearly every line from 2 a.m. to, say, 5 a.m. It doesn’t even need to add complementary Night Owl bus service. It will make taxis a more alluring alternative and will add significant time to off-hours workers’ commutes. In other words, it’s a second Doomsday.”

Hi. I’m here today to talk about something that affects us all, but that we don’t talk about often. It’s a silent, debilitating issue that we all need to start paying attention to more often. Someone has to step up, and I suppose it falls to me.

I’m talking about clown on clown violence.

Yes, you read that right. It’s not a joke. It isn’t funny.

Oh, sure, it starts innocently enough: a little song, a little dance a little seltzer down some pants, yes. But soon enough there’s a bit of extra shoving to get into the car. Then someone steps on his feet, making a poor clown trip early. Subtle. Nasty. The stuff nightmares are made of.

Who believes a clown, anyway, when they tell of the violence they suffer? No one. they laugh. “Oh he’s just crying on the inside!” they bray and stomp off, telling their friends about the funny funny man in make-up. No, now he’s crying on the outside. Because it doesn’t matter to the world. He’s just a clown and it’s just another clown beating him up. It isn’t as if it was the strong man or anything, no.

And so it gets hidden. Buried down deep. The days spent “accidentally” getting hit in the face with bowling pins and the nights that are full of knocks from elephants. Elephants that are too well trained to go smashing into someone without meaning to. Not without … instruction.

But if telling someone doesn’t help, then what is a clown to do? Eventually they show up, big white face with one giant black eye. “Did you hurt yourself?” they ask, jokingly. He says no, because he’s learned it doesn’t matter what he says, and blames it on a pratfall into a door.

Clowns aren’t just a pack of fun, happy people who juggle and tumble. No, they’re a pack of wild men, having more in common with Lord of the Flies than the Flying Graysons. They prey on each other like wolves and have gang colors. You might not notice them, amidst the polka dots and stripes and glitter, but they’re there if you learn where to look. But you never do learn, do you?

No, we all just turn a blind eye on the affliction of clown on clown violence. It’s time for that to stop. Together we formed the Trapeze Artists, Trapeze Accidents Society (T.A.T.A.S.) and stopped bar slippage by 30% last year alone! People Against Too Many Objects Flaming (PatMof) managed to reduce the number of juggles gone up in smoke by at least 15% over the least two years and don’t forget the success that Oh Crap, Bears! (OCB) found in reducing the number of untrained bear trainers that have been mauled inside the three rings. We’ve made a difference in the past. Now it’s time to do it again.

Clown on clown violence is no laughing matter.

Think of the children.

Even Man-Thing cares.

(found via charmed1ofdoom)

I want to write a slasher film called DEWEY DECIMATION, where the evil slasher dude went evil and slasher-y when he held too many books and the late fees got out of control.

So he decided he would show them! He would show them to death!

It can star a bunch of hot librarian women who all … I dunno, sexily stamp books and shelve things and use card catalogs like they mean it.

Also it can feature lines such as:

“Late fee, fi, foe, fum! I’m gonna kill me librai-ons!” (He’d have, you know, an accent to make that work. Shut it.)

“File this under Non-Fiction, True crime!”

“Hey, fuckface, you’re about as useful as Library of Congress Classification!” (this should be followed by a sweet-ass high-five)

I need like 30 million dollars. Phone lines are open.

(We’re still waiting for Strange Angel to come out – but I have another book coming out soon (August) and I want to talk about it for a minute.)

Many of you think of my fiction as horror and fine, sometimes it can be. And I know not all of you like horror. Hell, I don’t always like it myself. A few summers ago I cast around thinking about what I wanted to do, prose-wise. I was at a bit of a dead end. I needed to try a novel.

But what?

And it hit me, and I’ll go into exactly how it came to be another time, but I wanted to play with my childhood. I write here all the time about stuff from my childhood. Turbo Teen, just last week, all the Jem jokes and … well … everything.

So I made a novel out of it. No, seriously. No horror, at all. Nothing of the sort. It’s more like exactly what you read here – except fiction. It’s a travel novel. It’s a quest. It’s a tale of three friends and their search for their missing friend. It’s a parable, a fairy-tale for 30yr olds.

It’s called Stays Crunchy in Milk.

And for the first time I am going to unveil the book’s cover blurb:
————————-
They were four: Wereberry the strawberry werewolf, Choco-Ra the chocolate mummy, the Creature From the Fruit Lagoon (his friends call him “T.C.”), and Cherrygeist the… well, she was a ghost. At least, until she wasn’t. One day, she wasn’t there at all. And then they were three.

Three friends who have sworn to search for her to the ends of the world and beyond – to find and save her.

Through familiar lands to places startling and unknown – across looming castles, endless battlefields and simple brick roads – these three friends will hunt and search and scour every inch. Along the way they’ll have to rely on a whole lot of luck and a little bit of charm, but mostly each other.

A fairy tale for the super-sugar generation, STAYS CRUNCHY IN MILK is road novel packed with 100% of your recommended daily allowance of essential action and adventure. And it’s a delicious part of a nutritious breakfast.
————————-
Over the next weeks and months you will see the cover, the interior art plates (yes there are interior plates), and I will talk far more about what this book is and what it means to me. We’ll open pre-orders and announce contests and special events. This is going to be big.

But it can’t be big without you. Honestly. So I hope you’ll join me on this ride. I promise that if you like the essays I write here you will like this book. So come along.

(via CNN) Bea Arthur dead at 86.

Bea Arthur, the actress best known for her roles as television’s “Maude” and the sardonic Dorothy on “The Golden Girls,” has died of cancer, a family spokesman said Saturday.

She was 86.
Spokesman Dan Watt said that Arthur died Saturday morning at her home in Los Angeles, her family by her side.
She is survived by her sons Matthew and Daniel and grandchildren Kyra and Violet, he said.
No funeral services are currently planned, Watt said, adding that the family asked that donations be made to either the Art Attack Foundation or PETA in lieu of flowers.

In part one I talked about how the how concept kicked off.

Part two saw me discuss the start of the novella series.

This will wrap everything up.

So yeah Book One was out and getting decent word and I was working on Book Two. Except something in it didn’t click for me. I couldn’t make the plot work quite right anymore and I had also written myself into a corner, to boot. It was a bad week or two there. I spent a lot of time on the phone to friends, bitching about how I just needed to solve these few little problems and everything would be all right.

Except the solution didn’t happen for a while. And then something else did. You see I found a solution to my plot issue, not the corner I wrote myself into. Fixing that plot problem though … well, I had an idea for how to end the series and it needed a pretty big plot left right near the end. I won’t spoil any story here for people who haven’t read the thing yet but it was a biggish left.

And it didn’t work where I had it. It would have, in fact, blown up the book and sunk it pretty badly. Right at the end. So I found a way to shift things around and move the left further up. Which had some ripples. Suddenly my plot for Book Two was half-gone and all my notes for Book Three became mostly unusable. I had to go back to the drawing board.

Now remember how these books came out every 6 months? Well there is a bunch of time there for production. The book had to be laid out, proofed and printed and … everything else. But that ate up a large part of the 6 month break. We were already close to the wire.

If I replotted everything I would lose a chunk of time I didn’t have. If I didn’t replot everything I would sink the entire series by being bad at my job. I replotted. I called Vince and warned him and got to work.

I then took a week off my day job and wrote all of Book Two in a single week. Well, except for the first little opening bits. The crushing deadline forced me to just stop thinking and get some work done. Insane, sure, but doable every now and then.

So anyway! The rest of the series came out, pretty much as planned, and we sat and judged it all a worthwhile experiment. Except it felt like a good idea to collect it and release the whole story at once. We decided to wait a while, then had to fit it into his schedule for publication and then deal with a delay or three.

Along the way I decided that beside getting the original short story back into place I would do something for the end. I wanted to give people a reason to consider rebuying this stuff. I thought of a few different stories I could do and tried a bunch of them on for size, but only one actually fit. So I worked it up and slid it into place.

It’s utterly different from the rest of the series, on purpose. Just as, to me, the series is utterly different from the short that it started as.

Still, I spent years working in, thinking about and dealing with Strange Angel and now with this new book out it is done. I’ll miss it, partly, and partly I’ll be glad it’s over. But either way it is a testament to trying new concepts in my storytelling, to having some fun and building characters that you may or may not like but you’ll enjoy.

And it’s almost out, as of this writing. Like – I hear a delay but also hear any day now. Maddening. As soon as it is out I will link it here and so on.

Anyway. I hope you enjoy it.

I come today not to praise Turbo Teen but to simply question him. Do you remember Turbo Teen? It’s one of those cartoons I loved as a kid and then locked away and nearly forgot. Oh, sure, I would remember bits and dribbles of it from time to time but I would blank on the name and go back to fondly recalling Mr. T and the T-Force (They had a bulldog! With a mohawk!) instead.

So yeah, Turbo Teen spent a while lost in the swirl of memories that happens to people when they cram their heads too full of pop culture nerdism. Some people drop the name of the woman who worked with Thundarr the Barbarian (Ariel) and some drop Turbo Teen.

But in thinking back about Turbo Teen I grow oddly disturbed by it. And I want to explore why. Come with me, won’t you?

Turbo Teen was a kid named Brett Matthews. He was driving along one night in the rain and swerved off the road right into a secret government lab! Don’t you hate it when that shit happens? I swear, every time I take a wrong turn in the night I’m in a government lab or alien base or your mom’s place. It’s crazy!

Read the rest of this entry »