My short story "The End of Her World" shows up near the end of the latest issue of Dark Recesses Press April .PDF...
http://www.darkrecesses.com/DRPApril2008.pdf
Wow, what planet was I on when I didn't mention that here?
I liked Sharyl Nantus' story, in this issue, too, btw.
I'm busting it at the day gig hard until Thursday.
Thursday, I'm off to Los Angeles for Book Expo America.
Thursday Night, I'll be signing books with oodles of other awesome authors at Dark Delicacies Bookstore. (http://www.darkdel.com/). An awesome line-up of writers that is, to be sure. Come by and say hey if you're in the Burbank area.
At BEA, I'll be at the Wizards of the Coast booth on Friday from 2:00-4:00, signing books. Then, on Saturday, from 11:30-12:30, Rob Rogers and I will be hanging at Author Alley signing more books.
Also, if you're reading this, and you're going to be at any of the event looking for me, bring me some coffee. I'm going to need it. Two creams, two sugars. Stat.
I pulled a muscle in my shoulder at the gym this morning. It hurts.
In telling this story, a common theme of the stories of men hurting themselves will appear.
So, I was at the end of my workout, and had just one more exercise to do. Bicep curls. Easy enough, right? I go over to the dumbbells. the weight-level I was on was being used by others right then.
I could have a) gone five pounds lower; b) gone five pounds higher; c) waited for the other guy to finish with the weight i wanted; d) found an alternative means of exercising those curling biceps.
Naturally, I should have just waited for the guy to finish with the weights, or found a different way to curl those biceps. At the very least, I should have said to myself, "Self, 'tis the end of my workout and I'm tired, and I can survive just going five pounds lower this time."
But - drumroll please - there was a *hot girl standing there*!
I was not interested in this girl. I had no desire to flirt, or chat, or in any way, shape, or means ingratiate myself with this hot girl. In fact, I'm pretty sure I was way too old for this hot girl. This is not the point however.
I still did the dumb thing. I went five pounds higher. I know I would have not done this if a hot girl had not been standing there.
And, of course, I pulled a muscle in my shoulder.
Why do we do this, men? Why do we insist on trying to impress women even if we aren't actually interested in them. If I was married with twelve children, I'd have done the same thing. If I was married to Angelina Jolie with twelve children, I'd have done the same thing. If Helen of Troy was waiting anxiously for me to return from the gym, I still would have reached for the heavier weights. When I am ninety and some hot twenty-something girl is in the weight room, I will likely still do the same thing.
Because I am a man.
Because that is what men do.
apparently, an unnamed magazine i have submitted to exactly once sends back editorial comments with every piece.
i... hesitate to go into the whole thing and quote from it (and don't even ask me to name names! No way!), but i will say that if you want to berate a writer for multiple paragraphs about his total misunderstanding of an ethnic group that's comprised of primarily native americans, while also admitting that you don't recognize the technical term for native americans of mayan descent.
hm. maybe i used the proper name for that ethnic group...
this is one of the many reasons why standard editorial feedback is a bad idea. if an editor likes a story and wants to encourage the writer, then it's a good idea. if it is standard, it is very likely going to reveal more about the editor than the writer's work.
turn the last thing you read into a haiku:
my bills are too big.
i wish i was reading books,
cereal boxes.
the best and kindest thing you can do for all your favorite media artists is simple. media (books, magazines, websites, music, films...) is the original virus.
give your favorite media to someone that you think might like it.
blurbs from neil gaiman, harlan ellison, and whatnot are all lovely things. but they are not as lovely as a blurb from you to your best friends. those are the best blurbs of all.
even better than a blurb? imagine if your best friend was handed something and told, "here is the virus that i am giving you. be infected with this art."
i explains it because folk be looking at me funny when i randomly give 'em something and be like, "hey, check it out. pass it on if you want, or give it back. whatever."
the directions say - on the internet - take this highway down, easy enough, right?
not right. the internet calls it one thing. the road is not the road is not the road.
it's first called 183 - which is not the highway - and then you take this road down to places that point and say there will be this highway off that way somewhere in the distance (though the map says you're on the road the whole time), and then this road merges onto a major thoroughfare - er... TWO major thoroughfares because the highway twists like vines as lanes spin up or down around each other - and the roads bend and warp until at last - at *last* - the road bears its own name on a sign.
this road is not an exception. roads bend and twist and warp and break and remain unlabeled or wrongly labeled.
also, citizens intentionally give outsiders the wrong directions with a smile.
driving in austin is like verbally wrestling with a hipster. this is, of course, a spitting contest to see who can get the other one more lost in specific references.
like, if you were really worthy of driving on these roads, you'd know them by heart, already. if i cut you, you'd bleed paint lines. if you smiled, your teeth would be paved with blacktop. your skin would be tattooed in road signs.
if you were one of us, you'd wear this hip city so close to your skin, you wouldn't even need a car. you'd just happen to be in whatever place was hippest, hottest, and most-littered with abandoned fliers of events that have all become obscure references.
austin streets are as hipster as the population.
today at 2:00, i will be at this location
http://storelocator.barnesandnoble.com/storedetail.do;jsessionid=CE603D3DB933E1D773083480126C33CC?store=2928
that's on brodie lane in austin.
there will be chocolate. there will be books. there will be both martha wells, and rob rogers.
and, as long as i recover from my hangover (happy birthday, Ruth! Woohoo!), i will also be there.
i should be A-OK by then.
j m mcd - "Hey, how are you doing? Um, I'm at KickButt Coffee right now, in Austin."
A_ K_ - "I thought you weren't coming down until tomorrow? You're in Austin *NOW*?!"
j m mcd - "Yeah, I just noticed that the e-mail said I'd be down tomorrow, not tonight. I pulled it up to get your directions, and noticed that I'm a day early."
A___ K__ - "I thought you were coming down tomorrow!"
j m mcd - "I had thought, since traffic can be so hellacious that I would come down today instead of tomorrow, so I wouldn't risk being late for the signing. In fact, I had thought that's what was always happening. I just now looked at the e-mail, and realized that I'm a day early. I suck. I'm terrifically disorganized."
A___ K____ - "Yeah, I thought that was weird how you were planning on coming down the day of."
j m mcd - "Yeah, 'cuz it can take either three hours, or eight hours, depending on traffic, and I didn't want to risk being late for the signing tomorrow."
A___ K____ - "Yeah, it's fine..."
Yeah. I suck and wrote the wrong night in the e-mail.
I need a personal assistant. Who works for free. (How can I can I acquire an intern? I need one.)
while i was driving down to austin, i overheard a gentleman say that mexicans are coming up here to take our jobs.
seriously, that's the stupidest thing anyone can say about the illegal immigrants. it sounds like a comedy skit.
dude is sitting in a DQ, with his wife and kids, and his franchise-owner shirt on his back.
i can see it now. "pablo" crosses the river in the dark, with all his possessions on his back. he dodges vigilantes, coyotes, dobermans, and cops. he shuffles to the highways and barely escapes getting hit by a semi. he eventually gets a hitchhike up to a city, to a bus station, and eventually he finds himself at a small business in central texas. he waltzes in, and makes a beeline for the owner's box.
the owner says, "can i help you?"
pablo says, "get out of this office right now. you don't work here anymore."
the owner says, "excuse me?"
pablo places his belongings on a chair. he looks around the office. "this is a nice office you got here. i'm really going to like working here."
the owner, coming to a realization looks at the mexican immigrant, from his duct-taped shoes to his sweaty, travel-stained clothes. "Oh, you're a Mexican, and you've come up here to take our jobs!"
"Si, muchacho. Now get out of here. According to our Democratic President, I come up here, and I take your job!"
Yup, that's exactly what doesn't happen in the real world.
Mexicans started coming up here because we had a sever shortage of people willing to pick crops back in the forties and fifties. Thus, we had a guest worker program. Then, people panicked. Because brown-skinned people were coming and going at will and taking jobs Americans could have!
Then, we stopped the guest-worker program. Which did absolutely nothing to stop the farmers and workers who knew each other really well by now from getting the job done, anyway. Then, we started to panic because pedophiles and terrorists and gangs are going to slip into our country in the night and cause all sorts of dangerous, scary, un-American things.
Instead of treating our neighbors like potential enemies, lets start treating them like potention friends. get rid of that dumb, expensive, ineffective wall, already, red-wing lunatics. if you want to end illegal immigrant workers, find ways to legalize what will occur whether that vein in your forehead is about to pop out from your yelling or not.
i was clearing out my car to get ready to do a signing in Austin, TX with Martha Wells, and Rob Rogers.
i'm leaving tomorrow for my cousin's place.
we'll be at this store at 2:00 pm on Saturday.
whilst clearing out my trunk, these are all the books i found.
what the heck were they doing in my trunk? i don't even remember!
is something living in my trunk and raiding my bags for books, hoarding them, reading them, eating them like extra socks?
i think so.
i'm off work every monday no matter what. this means, that i'm hard at work every monday trying to be a brilliant writer.
yesterday it didn't quite work out for me. i gave up around nine o'clock after a full day of slamming my head against a computer screen and only coming up with blood to show for it.
then, i dug through my recent and forthcoming short stories to figure out which one i should read at apollocon.
i discovered something that makes me squint and go "rrr..."
my best short story - my interstitial steampunk/death/futurismo fantastickal tale is currently unsold. it's out on submission.
strange horizons passed on it. i usually send stories to strange horizons first, even if i'm not sure if the fit is right. the fit wasn't right. i had to hack the story down pretty bad to get it in submit at clarkesworld - about 1000 words, actually - but after gutting the story to get the 4000 wordcount rule, i was unsurprised to see it rejected.
i'm waiting patiently for the third place i sent it.
and i want to read it at my next convention, because i think it's probably the best, strangest, surrealest story i got. if it isn't sold anywhere, i don't feel right reading it.
which depressed me. but it didn't depress me as much as banging my head against a keyboard all day and only coming up with a couple hundred words that weren't total garbage.
whinge whinge whinge.
go read a good book, or watch some anime, while i clean the blood off my keyboard!
I had skinned a thousand rabbits by the time I was ten. I had seen thousands skinned. My father and I made frontiersman caps from the rabbit pelts. We sold them on the side to kids at the stations that wanted to play cowboys and Indians.
Seeing all those dead rabbits and staring all those lidless eyes does something to a boy.
I had nightmares about a man with no skin. He wore the dapper attire of a landed gentleman of the nineteenth century. He wore a tall black cap. His leather boots were the brownish-green color of the bacteria tank toads. Everytime Plog moves, the boots squish, chirp, and croak like a chorus of frogs. His suspenders are made from the same stuff, but I don’t know if they croak when he wraps them over his shoulders, straps his smart trousers over his narrow waist.
I’ve never seen Plog take off that top hat. Maybe he has bunny ears under there, maybe not. I never considered that he might until one of my ex-wives mentioned that the hat would be an excellent hiding place for bunny ears.
The clothes – though smart – really ought to be caked through with blood and ooze from the exposed muscles and tendons and bones. Plog has no eyelids, and that’s what is really creepy, to me, that he never blinks and never sleeps.
Here’s what I don’t tell anyone. When I see my reflection in glass, I can usually see Plog standing behind me, watching. Then I turn, and he’s not standing there. I turn back, and he’s gone from the glass.
I dream of him all the time. He’s sitting in my subconscious at the head of a table full of trussed up friends and family, asking me if I want to say grace before we eat Grace, and laughing at his own jokes alone. His frog boots... (the journal entry ends abruptly here. likely, the author wandered off to other pursuits. however, there is a small chance the monster crawled through the canvas and struck suddenly, before the author could express his impending doom like a fictionist ought to do.)
she's a pretty girl
she's a very pretty girl
with her leaf-green skin
and her eyes like silver sins
her ruby lips smirking dares
and jeweled serpents in her hair
and if she winks at loathsome you
do you know what you will do?
your swallowed heart will skip a beat
you'll hold a breath from head to feet
and the final thing you'll know
in your eyes that are aglow:
she's a pretty girl
she's a very pretty girl
with her leaf-green skin
and her eyes like silver sins
her ruby lips smirking dares
and jeweled serpents in her hair
and if she winks at you...
