Archive for books

Books and pinching.

September 21, 2007 books, wtf?! No comments

Have you picked up a copy of The Dead Walk Again! yet? Tons of zombie fun, including a zombie western by me.

Of course if you aren’t into zombies (and what the hell is that about) you might like Fairy stories. So you could pick up a copy of Bad-Ass Faeries instead.

Just a suggestion.

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Then of course you can also go to Huge Crab From their FAQ: Huge Crab has taken the responsibility of the overwhelming taks of logging and captioning the internets supply of Coconut Crab and other Hugecrab. to tell the Web browsers how to display the file. Yup. Pictures of big crab.

Stuff and things on a Friday

September 7, 2007 books, comics, gadgets, stuff and things, YouTubed No comments

Round table today:

(via B via Wired) Shrinkmytunes is a strange beast. It can double your storage – by reducing the size of your mp3 files. Yes you take a quality hit but it would seem to be a small one. A worthy price to pay for twice the storage on a new iPod Touch?

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(via Newsarama) Jim Shooter is going to be writing Legion of Super-Heroes again. And for many of you, who gives a fuck. Sure. But for me? Well damn it. He used to be a great writer and wrote some of the best stories out there concerning this little book. This little book that happens to be one of those things that captured me as a child and that I still adore so very much.

And yet he hasn’t written too many great things since the last time he worked on the book. That happens to be about 30 years ago. So. Who knows. Argh! The mystery, the angst, the waiting! Whatever. Like I won’t be right there for it.

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I’ve been re-reading Don Quixote – the Edith Grossman translation. It’s my favorite translation to date and the book is just…

Look, it’s every bit as wonderful as everyone tells you it is. It really is.

It’s the type of book that makes you want to learn the language it was written in just so you can read it right. Grossman does the book an incredible justice with her translation, though, and it is just a stunning novel. It’s funny, dramatic, tradgic, insightful… it’s the first modern novel! It has a helm on the cover! Work with me here, folks.

Also? It rocks.

So, seriously, for $11.53, if you’ve never read it or only read some bits in school or whatever? Buy it. It’s worth your money.

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And now it’s time for a Japanese game show moment! This time it’s cleaning a tilted floor, with the guys in bug outfits. What is this overall show? Who can get me DVDs of it? For seriously.

Horrorfind and hover boards.

August 7, 2007 books, movies, stuff and things, writing No comments

I won’t be at Horrorfind Weekend this year. My first miss in a while. And I will miss it, it’s become a great weekend for hanging with good friends and drinking. Oh, and selling books.

Speaking of if you are there, hit the Die Monster Die! table. You can pick up all three Strange Angel volumes, they might have some copies of Crazy Little Thing laying around and more.
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Of course, you can also go and buy a copy of The Dead Walk Again. Zombies! Lots of zombie fiction, including a story by me. The first one of these was a best seller at Shocklines and the single biggest zombie book at the Horrorfind it debuted at.

So you might want to buy one now, just in case – I’m not sure how many will be making it to the show, frankly. But people are already wanting copies. So.
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If you are going to Horrorfind, have a drink for me.
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In other news: We now have levitation, according to the Telegraph.

(from the start of the article, click above to read the rest)

Levitation has been elevated from being pure science fiction to science fact, according to a study reported today by physicists.

In earlier work the same team of theoretical physicists showed that invisibility cloaks are feasible.

Now, in another report that sounds like it comes out of the pages of a Harry Potter book, the University of St Andrews team has created an ‘incredible levitation effects’ by engineering the force of nature which normally causes objects to stick together.

Professor Ulf Leonhardt and Dr Thomas Philbin, from the University of St Andrews in Scotland, have worked out a way of reversing this pheneomenon, known as the Casimir force, so that it repels instead of attracts.

Their discovery could ultimately lead to frictionless micro-machines with moving parts that levitate But they say that, in principle at least, the same effect could be used to levitate bigger objects too, even a person.
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So where is my hover board?

They can start to levitate shit now, right?

I mean, they said they can!

So where is it? I want a hover board. Right the fuck now.

You can keep the damn shoes, I never liked those shoes.

But I demand my right, as an American, to kill myself while floating on plastic. I demand this right!

Build me a hover board!

Now!

The Dead Walk Again!

August 3, 2007 books, writing No comments

So for the last while I have pimped other books, or mentioned movies and so on. You know how it is, when I find something I think is cool I share it. Well today I am doing that again. Except what I think is cool this time is an anthology I am in.

  • A zombie anthology!
  • Stories by me, Laszlo Xalieri, D.J. Kirkbride, James Chambers, C.J. Henderson, and more.
  • Actually the James Chambers story is a cool novella, so it’s a bunch of good shorts and a good novella. Even better.
  • I do like bullet lists.
  • My story is a Zombie Western.
  • It also, kind of, is a Frank and Eddie story. For reals.
  • D.J. Kirkbride’s story makes me laugh. A lot. I love Kirkbride’s fiction. And you can enjoy it too.
  • Laszlo’s stuff is not only a great story but there are two of them! I liked them both. I kind of named one, actually.
  • My story is called High Noon of the Living Dead. Frank and Eddie, a western and a zombie story.
  • I ain’t fucking around.
  • It also has Ode to Brains at the back, because some zombie poetry is always needed.

All right, enough with the lists. Here’s the scoop. The Dead Walk Again! is one of those anthologies that I am just proud to be a part of. So I will unhesitatingly suggest you buy it. The stories are good, the zombies are fun, and the book is worth reading. Hell there is a story about marriage. One involving bowling. You already know about the western.

There ya go, then. The Dead Walk Again! the new anthology from Die Monster Die! books. Enjoy it.

A “new” Feynman book.

August 2, 2007 books, celeb No comments

Gah, did I just break down and order a book? I did. Classic Feynman: All the Adventures of a Curious Character.

This is the thing. I own the two volumes that make up this book (Surely, You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! and What Do You Care What Other People Think?) but both of my copies are old now and showing it.

Worse? This hardcover edition comes with a CD with a new live talk by Feynman. Fuckers. They made me buy it. But man, if you haven’t read the two this comes from… get this. Feynman wasn’t only one of the most amazing physicists ever, he was one of the more amazing men to walk to planet. He was also funny as hell, mischievous, interesting and downright good at telling a story.

Plus a new forward by Freeman Dyson, and a closing article by Alan Alda. Damn. Yes, I admit it. I am a Feynman geek.

Crooked Little Vein, DVD sales, rampant consumerism.

July 26, 2007 books, movies No comments


Woohoo! Crooked Little Vein will apparently show up at home today!

There are very few first novels I’ve been looking forward to as much as this one. From the book desc:

Michael McGill is a burned-out private detective who suddenly becomes enlisted by an army of presidential goons to retrieve the Constitution of the United States, but not the one we all know about. This would be the real Constitution (the one with invisible amendments) created by some of the Founding Fathers as a fallback for their great experiment. Along the way, McGill gains a polyamorous sidekick named Trix, gets scared to death by what men do with warm salty water, and descends into a world where crime, sex, and madness all seem to be the same thing.

Go to Amazon, and you can read the first chapter, if you want. I don’t want, I want it to surprise me when I open it.

Sadly I’m still not quite done with The World Without Us, which just gets better and better as I go. But I’m almost done with it and then on to Crooked Little Vein. Woohoo!

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So it’s summer which means sales and also means “ARGH! I don’t have enough money!” So I thought I’d help that along and pass on some cool sales Yendi found.

There’s the Random TV sale. It has a bunch of season sets for 40-60% off. So, yes, you can buy a season of Reba for only 18 bucks. Woo?

Then there are the Sooperheroes. JLU seasons for 60% off, Batman animated (the older cooler stuff) for just as cheap! Then it has shit like Beast Wars, and old Speed Racer seasons and the Hellboy animated movie and all sorts of goodness.

Finally there is a sale on A-dolt animation. Hysterical this is both Adult Swim seasons as well as anime. It amuses me to see a Ghost in the Shell box set next to Harvey Birdman next to Inuyasha. Maybe that’s just me.

Anyway. Yeah. It’s that time of year I sit and browse Amazon.

I swear I’ll have something interesting to type later. It’s early yet.

Whata tweeest.

July 22, 2007 books, movies, NY Life No comments

Do you read books and watch movies for the destination or the journey?

It’s a serious question. Some people love M. Night Shamalamadingdong’s movies. Some people love Harry Potter. In both cases it seems that they put the plot, the twists, above the getting there.

I value the journey above everything else, personally. It’s why spoilers don’t bother me much, if at all. Knowing that the boat sinks doesn’t … bad example, didn’t like that movie. Uhm. Knowing that at the end of the book or movie something happens, knowing what that something is, how the story ends doesn’t ruin a story for me. The story, for me, is how they get there, what happens and where it all goes.

Some things seem to be nothing but the twist at the end though. Nothing but the plot and they getting there isn’t as important. I’ve seen it recently with a lot of people reading Harry Potter. “The writing isn’t what’s important” I saw someone say. Which means the plot twists and turns must be all that is. I’ve seen a bunch of people say they are not written really well but… and that “but” kills me. It seems to wrap up a lot of things. People who only read a series of bad books to see what happens, because even though they don’t enjoy the story, they want to know how it ends. Why does it matter? If it’s bad and you don’t like it, why do you care?

Sure, I’ll have conversations about climax and anti-climax and structure and twists and plot points: these things are needed in storytelling, I am not saying they are all rubbish. Just that they are ways to tell the story – not the story itself. And that seems to be missing for a lot of people.

And then it was Saturday.

July 21, 2007 books, music, NY Life, writing One comment

Good morning, intardweebs.

Week 7 of hammering at novel. About to cross the 80k mark. Still a few thousand words to do this weekend. Then two weeks to go.

Then I get a week off writing (no columns, no prose).

Then I start a novella and a bunch of shorts. And editing the novel.

There’s also another project that will hopefully happen at the same time if I’m lucky.

Harry Potter holds no interest for me. Enjoy it if you like it. May it be everything you want. Me? I’m waiting on Crooked Little Vein: A Novel by Warren Ellis and Spook Country by William Gibson. Those two excite me. Been waiting on them since they were announced.

But first I have to finish writing my own book. So back to that. Have a good day, intardwebs. I’ll be around. Writing. Blasting music (last 3 songs? Slow Dog by Belly, You Turn the Screws by Cake and My London by Lady Sovereign). Causing trouble.

World Without Us

July 19, 2007 books No comments

So I’ve been reading The World Without Us by Alan Weisman. I don’t remember where I first heard of it, I think bookofjoe possibly.

Anyway it is a fantastic read. Imagine all humans suddenly vanished. A plague or the Rapture or whatever you want. Not a holocaust, but a simple vanishing. What would the world do? The planet? How long would our traces remain and how would they vanish over time? What would happen to the climate (and no he doesn’t come down hard on Global Warming or not, he looks at both sides and thinks)? How much have we affected things already?

It’s well written, fairly gripping and just all around fun as hell.

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