Inky Horizons

And I've always felt my job as a writer is to make readers connect with things.

Haha, found this on teh Innerwebz. Click to enlarge:

Time to start "Thanksgiving" a little early....

So these four Democratic Senators who want to hold up heath care.

I'm thinking a collectible action figure line with Harry Reid as the center piece. He can be fully poseable and service Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman. I'm guessing full ball-cupping action. This can be riffed off the old G.I. Joe kung fu grip. Minimal added cost.

The Mary Landrieu action figure can stomp his testicles with her heel until Reid coughs up an IOU for $100 million. I'm guessing leather for Blanche Lincoln as she scores his back with a cat o'nine tails while he begs from his knees for her cloture vote.

A smaller group set of the remaining Democratic Senators can be purchased. This would be a mold of them waiting around for reconciliation. They could all have puzzled looks of "WTF" on their faces.

I'm sitting propped up on the bed, writing. I can look out the window and see them running through the backyard, the wind rippling their shirts, the gold maple leaves falling on their upturned faces.

Chester runs with them. Ears and red tongue flapping. He stops to bark at the blue sky.

Everyone (as in professional writers of all stripes) is hacked with this move by Harlequin to include a vanity press in their business model. I must say I'm with the people who are kinda hacked. This move by HQN is beyond ridiculous, and reeks of opportunistic greed.

RWA, SFWA and MWA have given HQN a long middle finger. Today I got an email from HWA they are onboard, too. Good. I haven't heard from WWA yet. I'm not a member of that organization, but I hope they make the right call. I was thinking of writing them and asking what they thought because I want to be a member someday if I sell enough westerns. I can't belong to a writing org that thinks this is a good idea.

I know some people are defending HQN. Yes. I know the publishing models are changing. I get that. But let's face facts. Either professional writers stand together and make sure the publishing models move in the direction we want them to, or we sit back and keep our yaps shut. So far, everyone I know is fighting back, and I'm glad.

IMO, this decision by HQN sets a bad precedent. You send your manuscript to a reputable publisher and it gets rejected. Fine. So they tell you to send it to another department across the hall and spend 8K of your own money to see your novel in print.

Hey, if I had $8K lying around I sure as hell wouldn't spend it on a vanity press, haha. I'd blow it all in Vegas on hookers, liquor, guns and craps, maybe. But not vanity publishing. Just me. I'm funny that way.

I know I'm goofy (don't say anything) but I like the editorial process. I like working with an editor to make my story better than it already is. Here's an example:

This weekend I got a rejection letter. Instead of throwing a hissy fit and collapsing in a corner of the room and sobbing (okay, there was some of that) I realized the editor wanted me to work on an aspect of the story she was concerned about and re-submit. Now let us think about that for a minute. She wants to print the best possible story she can, and I want to sell her one. It's almost like we're working toward the same goal! And even better...she didn't charge me for this advice. She gave it freely because she respects writers. Even more importantly, she respects herself and the magazine she represents.

Guys, it's quite simple:

Money flows to the writer.

All too often, the simplest ideas are still the best. ;)

It's 1:12 am right now and I have just completed a new version of my Haxan story "Vengeance is Mine".

I think my beta readers are gonna hate me. And if it ever gets published...maybe some fans.

Tomorrow the Senate will hold a procedural vote on cloture. If Reid doesn't deliver ALL the Democrats and both independent Senators (including Joe Lieberman) then health care is dead.

As in "door nail" dead.

The Republicans want to kill this bill. If Reid can't get 60 votes there's NO WAY health care can pass this time. If Reid gets sixty votes, then some kind of health care bill will almost certainly make it to the president's desk. It may be watered-down, but Obama will likely have a bill to sign.

It's that huge.

The main problem? We're depending on Reid. Yikes. Plus the fact we're counting on Lieberman to vote the right way. Double yikes.

Knife-edge doesn't begin to describe how precarious this is.

Man, I hope they do this.

How many times do we have to go through this End of the World bullshit before people wise up?

Or is that asking too much from the human race...?

Every time you write a story you create a world.

It's a simple idea at its core. You are taking the reader by the hand and saying, "Here is a place I want you to visit. A place you will believe in. Something will happen here. I want to share it with you."

Writers talk about worldbuilding all the time. Especially genre writers. But I believe every writer creates a world when he writes a story. It is a microcosm of what might be, or what is, or what was...but it is a world, make no mistake about it. No matter how long or how short, that story you present is part of a world.

Of course, we are familiar with the big examples. Dune by Frank Herbert comes to my mind when we're talking about world building in SF. You can live in that world. It's full and rich and there's weight to it.

Dune is a real place. You can live there.

For fantasy I always think of Middle-Earth. Deep history, language, races, culture, creation story....that's a living, breathing world. You can live there, too, thanks to Tolkien's imagination.

All of fiction is rich with worlds we can live, and believe, in. And, with some stories, there are worlds you don't want to live in. They are too mean and nasty, such as 1984 by George Orwell. But, even with their crushing horror, they are no less fascinating.

But these are obvious examples. I'm arguing every story has a world, even if it's only background support. For the story to work, the world has to work. Even if it's no more than window dressing, or a simple stage which allows the story to progress.

A story can't exist without a world. If the story is about non-existence, that framework in which the story exists must be believable. Otherwise, the reader will feel cheated.

So the long and short is, every time you write a story you make a world. The trick is to make the world believable enough to support the story you are trying to tell. I'm not saying this is easy.

I'm simply arguing it's necessary.

Hooray! The hits keep a'comin', haha. My NEW Haxan short-short "Three Wise Men" was accepted and is now up at The Western Online.

This was kind of experimental for me. I don't often write short-shorts. This one clocked in at 1300-words, but I enjoyed writing it. I hope you like it, too. Please, click on the banner below to see the story and let me know what you think, or let the editor of the magazine know.

Thanks, guys! :)

I'm sorry I haven't been able to keep up with you guys. I've been working on a story revision and things have fallen by the wayside a little too much. I apologize.

But I wanted you to know my new dark erotica SF story is now up at Three Crow Press. Just click the banner below if you want to read it. And, please, while you're at it, check out the rest of the fiction, too!

Hope you like it! :)

I liked it. I liked the existentialism, the surrealism, the science fiction, philosophical and bioware underpinnings. I thought the overall story was well-written and neatly done. Production and direction all clicked.

The original Prisoner was a concept that left itself open to reinterpretation. This new program did a good job of that, while at the same time bringing new ideas to the fore. I liked all the actors, and the scenery of the Village, filmed in Namibia, was stark and powerful.

I realize some people might not "get" this show. Not because they're dumb, or anything like that, but because they're used to watching television and not having to think. TV, at its core, is great at elevating mediocrity and making us believe we are watching something special. A sleight-of hand, or better yet sleight-of-mind. But, occasionally, a program comes along that actually challenges the viewer to wake the F up, and pay attention, and exercise those self-reflection muscles.

The Prisoner was such a program.

I liked it a lot.

Okay, this is pretty damn cool. Summakor is a company created for the new series The Prisoner which is currently being shown on AMC-TV.

They have a website, Summakor does. Obviously a sort of an extra-content thing, but, man, is this freakin' cool. They make for pills recoverable comas, among other bio- and spy-tech things.

CHECK OUT THE SUMMAKOR WEBSITE

This brings back memories.

I updated my website. Lots of new links, essays, more extra content on the Haxan Page about Marwood's Sharps Rifle and his horse, and a brand new sample story (actually a sample poem) just for you.

Hope you like it. Thanks for making it all possible, guys, I appreciate it.

CLICK ME! :)

Not bad so far. They need to move on with the story. A little of that paranoia garbage goes a long way. But I like the look and directorial shock of the show, the main characters are good, the Village is sufficiently creepy (especially at night when hit has a garish Nighthawks quality) and there's sufficient mystery and nods to the old series to hold (and pique) my interest.

And those big F'ing Rovers are awesome. One sucked a guy down into the water!

So far so good, but I'm picky because this is television. So. Yeah. Anyway, I know you're astonished because this is me we're talking about and I'm actually watching television.

Another episode comes on tomorrow night. I'll give it a peek, too.

They've hit the ground running. It remains to be seen if they can keep up the pace and hold my interest.

I'm just, well, I'm worried this is going to turn into some never-ending Lost bullshit, is all. But, we'll see how it all shakes out.

"Be seeing you!"

I listened to it again recently. Man, I forgot how great this album is.

I've been making a list of ideas and projects I want to incorporate for my haunt next year. Nothing outrageous, but small projects I can work on through out the year. I also have a list of hardware and tools I will need, but this is the list of the actual haunt stuff so far:

Witch Jars (I can use Mason jars for this. The older the better.)

A table with a white sheet, bloody handprints and maybe a face print in the center. On the table will be a static meat cleaver, skull, and cutting board slopped with blood. The table will be behind a rope so ToTs can't touch it. In fact, we will either gate or rope off the main yard decorations like this

An empty hangman's noose swinging in the wind from one of our trees. Ideally, I would like to corpse a torso and hang that, but that is likely a project for the future and not on the agenda for next year (corpsing a torso, the hangman's noose I can do easily enough)

Mummy (easily done, foam boards cut and glued together with paper, wrapped in olive or khaki cloth)

I so want to Corpse a Skeleton (this would be the Big Project)

There's a field next about a quarter mile from our house. Farmer Brown grows corn there. I have to check with him and see if he will let me have some of his cornstalks for scenery after he harvests

A heart in a frying pan for the table scenery; blood splattered utensils and plates

Tombstones; graveyard, lights at the far corners of the yard to throw their shadows upon the house

A LOT more spider webs and silk. Also thinking about gathering dead leaves and strewing them around the driveway for that extra creepy look

The soundtrack for my haunt: Kammerheit's Star Wheel playing in the background (this will really scare the hell out of the trick or treaters and add a TON of atmosphere to the haunt)

A green floodlamp in the garage, the garage door up about eight inches with the green light spilling out with fog; the light can also be seen from the three windows in the garage washing over the front lawn and decorations there

A red light in the upstairs bedroom so it can be seen through the window from the outside, and see if I can work out a lightweight cheesecloth "ghost" to spin around on the fan in the bedroom and hang it so it can at least be glimpsed from the outside.

Blue lights for the porch lights

I may dress up next year, haven't decided. I'd like to work something in with my old karate gi and I have an old Samurai sword I can peace-tie, no problem there

...............

I know it seems like a lot, but most of this is pretty small potatoes. Aside from one or two big projects, most are easily done and quite inexpensive. It's not the cost that makes a haunt, it's the atmosphere. I learned that this year. We are thinking the best time to buy a lot of the hardware is in the spring when places like Home Depot and whatnot have their sales. Other things can be gotten from Goodwill and the like. Frankly, the cheaper and rattier, the better it will look in the semi-dark. You can rarely go wrong with this sort of thing because there is no right or wrong way to set this up.

Huh. Apparently some magazines still want hardcopy submissions. Go figure, haha. So I've got to catch up on that, and then some email ones.

Well, that's the plan, anyway. I'll get the hardcopy stuff prepared so I can mail it off tomorrow. (Seriously? Stamps? *sigh*)

I wish the weather was better. I miss sitting on the back porch and working from there. I prefer being outside.