Richard Dansky's Blog, page 11

Things I Think I Think About The Following

It’s terrible.I really, really wanted to like it. The premise sold it as the bastard child of Millennium and Silence of the Lambs after a drunken hookup, and I have been waiting for another show to seize the mantle of metaphysical batshit craziness that Millennium owned for years. Unfortunately, it appears the show was adopted by CSI Miami, and spoiled rotten.Genius serial killers need more of a rationale than “he’s a genius”. And “he boinked my wife after I went to jail for killing a lot of people” is kind of an ex post facto thing.James Purefoy’s charismatic English professor/cult leader/serial killer may have brainwashed all his cultists with Poe stuff, but really, it feels like you could pass most of his exams just by reading the Classic Comics versions.If your weekly reveal is that someone unexpected is a cultist, the audience very quickly comes to expect that everyone’s a possible cultist.Apparently being psychotic and liking Poe turns you into Sam Fisher, even if you’re a chunky rent-a-cop who breathes hard after climbing a flight of stairs.Seriously. Poe? Leave the guy alone already. I want a serial killer who fetishizes Seabury Quinn or somebody. Maybe Kenneth Robeson. E.C. Tubb Nice house for an English professor.No wonder they had so much trouble catching this guy the first time around. The Washington Generals do better strategizing than the special task force assigned to stop the cult Kevin Bacon plays Kiefer Sutherland playing Jack Bauer. Lots of “he’s not playing by the rules but, by God, he gets results by beating the crap out of people and ignoring procedure!” action Cultists like to hide in abandoned houses wearing creepy masks in case Kevin Bacon comes along The only genuinely creepy stuff I’ve seen so far has involved the kidnapped kid. Which is creepy on multiple levels.There’s definitely an acute Terry O’Quinn shortage here And I’ve stopped watching.

Snowbird Gothic Stories - "Losing Altitude"

Because I’ve been asked a few times (and because I have a compulsive need to talk about my own work), I’m going to start posting a bit about the various stories in SNOWBIRD GOTHIC - where they came from, where they appeared originally, what inspired them and so forth. (I'm also going to refrain from posting endlessly about how it's now #485 on the Amazon rankings list for Short Fiction Collections With Trees On the Cover, which I figure is a win for everyone.)The first one I’d like to talk about dates back to 2010. It’s called “Losing Altitude”, and it was published in a one-off magazine called Stranded.

Stranded, for those of you who didn’t see it, was a gorgeous production put together by Andrew Losowsky in the wake of the Icelandic volcanic eruption that disrupted travel across Europe for an extended period of time. And by “disrupted”, I mean “shot down every airport in Europe, to the point where the British navy was sending ships to the Continent to bring people home”

For my part, I was in Newcastle, working with the fine folks from Ubisoft Reflections on Driver: San Francisco when Eyjafjallajökull blew its top. As the cloud drifted eastward and predictions of travel delays got more dire, I found myself in an interesting spot. While I’d been in England, the trade paperback edition of Firefly Rain had been released, and my wife Melinda and I had made plans around my return. Specifically, the idea was for me to fly home on the Friday that ended my trip, get picked up at the airport by the missus, and then drive down to Wilmington, NC, for a vacation weekend cum book signing

Once the airports closed, that wasn’t going to happen.

I did try to make it out. Newcastle airport closed before London’s did, meaning that my flight home was still theoretically active even though the puddlejumper to it wasn’t. So I bolted for the train, rode down to London, and arrived at King’s Cross just in time to hear the news on the BBC that all airports were being closed indefinitely. This necessitated a conversation with American Airlines, which started with “When do you think you’re going to get me out of here”, escalated to “The airports are too closed, I don’t care what your computer says”, to finally “IT’S A VOLCANO. TURN ON THE GODDAMN NEWS. I SWEAR I’M NOT MAKING THIS UP!” Then I got a hotel room, split the next week or so between furiously pounding away on dialog edits for Driver and wandering London alone or in the company of esteemed and marvelous friends like Adam and Dr. Lorna Tinworth, Rhianna Pratchett, and Andrew Walsh

So as far as getting stranded went, it could have been a lot worse. The folks at both the bed & breakfast and the bookstore were both very understanding once Melinda explained that no, I really was in London trapped by a volcanic ash cloud, and yes, we did intend to get down there as soon as possible after I got back. Meanwhile, I relocated to a mostly empty business hotel out by Heathrow - mostly empty because all the business travelers who’d normally stay there had taken advantage of company funds, hopped the Chunnel Train to Paris, and flown out of there before the ash cloud borked them

I also spent a lot of time in deep conversation with our company travel agent, who kept re-booking me on flights that were then canceled as the airports stayed closed, and otherwise reading  up on what exactly ash clouds do when planes fly into them. Hint: It’s not pretty. The ash is really extruded volcanic silica, which is to say “glass”. When it hits a nice hot jet engine, the glass melts and sticks. The glass then tends to accumulate, resulting in a jet engine that has been turned into a very large paperweight, not at all suitable for propelling a giant metal cylinder through the sky. Also, there’s the whole issue of “flying through a cloud of tiny shards of glass at high velocity”, which tends to do bad things to sensitive instruments.

And while I was doing this, word was passed to me that Losowsky was looking to put together a magazine created by folks whose travel plans had been disrupted by the eruption. I wrote to him, expressing interest, and he wrote back almost immediately

Excellent. Then I shall give you two options:

Write a proposal for a console game or an RPG based on trying to find ways to get home via alternative modes of transport, trying to beat everyone else to the last few tickets. Make it as entertaining as possible, outlining increasingly outrageous obstacles in the player's way. You could also write it as a narrative from the POV of a player, or as a dialogue between players, if you prefer.

Set a (not too gory please) horror story inside either the volcano or the ash cloud

My head full of glass-coated jet engines, I picked the latter. It came out in a rush, largely in one sitting, and I can honestly say I’ve never written anything like it before or since. It’s all dialog, with two characters who are never named or described but whose “desperate” scramble to escape the ash cloud turns into something very different.

Stranded came out in September of 2010 and ultimately raised almost $1500 for charity. It was a gorgeous magazine, a hodgepodge of everything from volcano-themed cocktails to people sharing pictures of their volcano-emergency beds, to my elegantly illustrated story. A year on from the eruption, Losowsky posted a follow-up note, mentioning the moneys raised for charity and the various places the magazine had been mentioned, and that was that

Fast forward to February, 2013. Snowbird Gothic comes out on Monday, February 4th as I fly to Toronto for work. As the week ends, Winter Storm Nemo sweeps in and blots out air travel in the eastern US and Canada. I find myself stranded in Toronto, though just for one night this time, and the nice lady at American Airlines works with me to get me out via Dallas instead of trying to connect through snow-plagued New York.

But for a minute, I think back to the last time I had a book come out, and the story that came out of that particular travail, and I have to smile.

It's ALIVE!

Ok, technically it's live, but work with me here.

I'm very proud to announce that my first original collection of short fiction, SNOWBIRD GOTHIC, is now available at the Necon E-Books website. NECON also publishes folks like Tim Lebbon and Charles Grant, so I'm very pleased to be in that company.

What I Did This Week

So it's been quite the week for announcements. Here they are, all gathered in one place:
It can be told at last - the fine folks at JournalStone will be publishing my videogame ghost story Vaporware this year. Vaporware is the story of what happens when a game development project doesn't want to get canceled, and the manuscript has already claimed the life of at least one e-reader.My first short fiction collection, Snowbird Gothic , will be out shortly from NECON E-Books, and by "shortly" I mean "any day now". It features wonderful cover art from my friend and coworker Richard Case ( Sandman , Doom Patrol ), as well as a plethora of stories both long and short, some of which have never appeared elsewhere. And if you're curious about content, rest assured these are all stories my brilliant wife Melinda referred to as "the creepy stuff". While you're at it, if you're a horror fan you owe it to yourself to check out the selection at NEB, as they're doing a marvelous job of mixing newer works with classics from authors like Charles Grant, Les Daniels and Darrell Schweitzer.The wizards at Apex have put up my devotional in support of my story "Coin Drop" in the Dark Faith: Invocations anthology. There's also an ongoing discussion of the piece at Goodreads.I am pleased to say that I have once again been accepted to give a series of game writing roundtables at GDC in San Francisco. I'm also once again helping shepherd the Game Narrative Summit, which once again will be full of excellent speakers like Corey May, Jay Posey, Noah Falstein and many more.Saturday I'm doing a livecast discussion with the ridiculously sharp Marty Smith of ScentTrail about gamification as it relates to his ongoing charity efforts in the fight against cancer. I'm just hoping I'll be able to keep up with the questions.Sportsthodoxy, the sports blog I share with the estimable Jim Kiley, his brother Sean and new fella Dustin Clingman, just had the best month of its existence, traffic-wise. Thanks for reading, folks, and I hope our brand of high-minded snark and cheap Ray Lewis jokes continues to amuse.The media embargo has been lifted on my current videogame project, Splinter Cell: Blacklist (due out in August) and the response has been overwhelmingly positive. You can check some of it out here.There's another review up at GreenMan, this time a look at wonderful modern fantasy novel Stray Souls by Kate Griffin. I'll shortly be contributing another piece to my irregular column series, Brief Lines, as well; the first two are up here and here.And that's about it for this week. Next week I'm off to Toronto to work with the folks at the studio there; hopefully the pace will be slightly slower. 
Then again, what the hell. Full speed ahead!

And Now For Something Completely Different...

This, my friends, is what happens when you turn my brilliant and lovely wife Melinda, our friends John and John, and myself on Melinda's family farmland with a videocamera so we can go looking for sasquatch.

Here's a hint: We don't find him.

The Sorbet Also Rises: Papaya-Strawberry Chunk

Tonight's Frankensteinian creation: Papaya-strawberry sorbet with dried and fresh fruit chunks. Since both the papaya and the strawberries were a little tart, I added more simple sirup than usual, which was probably a good idea - there were a lot of fruit chunks. The end result was quite sweet, but there's enough chunky stuff in the matrix to break up the sweetness to an acceptable level.

It was my first time working with a papaya, which was interesting, as I had precisely zero idea what to expect. I'd only really encountered papaya previously in dried-and-cubed form, useful for my annual holiday orgy of candy making, but not so much a good guide for dealing with a real live fruit stuffed with roughly four zillion caper-like seeds. The last time I saw something stuffed this full of fertility, it was on a nature doc about the mating habits of the Humboldt squid. But I digress

On the downside, I'm clearly going to have to adjust my strategies dealing with the ice cream maker itself. It's too cold coming out of the freezer, meaning that the second the sorbet base hits the interior, it freezes. This in turn means that a layer of frozen sorbet-like substance builds up around the edges, ultimately immobilizing the blade. There are a couple of ways I can attack this, but in the interim it means that I basically get to hand-churn the sucker, which I am quite certain is something that precisely zero of the other people liveTweeting Finding Bigfoot are doing once they satisfy their not-actually-finding-sasquatch jones.

But I digress. And possibly, I dessert.

In Other News...

Installment #2 in Brief Lines, my irregular short-take review column over at Green Man Review, has gone live. Watch me do battle with novellas by Robin Hobb, Mick Garris and Catherynne M. Valente! Thrill to the stunning adverbs!

You get the idea.

Announcing SNOWBIRD GOTHIC, my first short fiction collection

I am incredibly pleased to announce that my first short fiction collection, SNOWBIRD GOTHIC, will be published shortly by the fine folks at NECON EBooks. The collection contains both new stories and previously published works, including a few deep cuts that have been gone from print for a good long while. And because I like you, here's a  look at the cover art, done by the legendary Richard Case (who also happens to be a hell of a nice guy).

Some Things I Think I Think About Seven Psychopaths

It's a very writerly movie.And by "writerly", I mean "long, chewy monologues" and, more to the point, the whole thing is about the writer character, whose inability to write is set up as the biggest tragedy in a film full of death, murder, bereavement, cancer, psychosis, and dognapping.Sam Rockwell is brilliant. Then again, Sam Rockwell is always brilliant.Colin Farrell is largely inert. Most of his acting is done with his liver and his eyebrows I think we're past the point where independent films have to demonstrate that they're edgy by throwing random ethnic or other slurs out there. Woody Harrelson's character was plenty spooky without suddenly dropping into cut-rate Tarantino mode.Everyone in this movie wants to help the writer, be the writer, or hang out with the writer. People kill and die in their quest to help out the writer put together a script that he demonstrably has contributed absolutely nothing to. Now, speaking as a writer myself, I'd love it if people were tripping all over themselves to inspire me, but I feel I need to bring something to the process, too.Generally, when a friend of mine stands revealed as a psychopathic murderer, I don't say "You know what? Let's hang out and do peyote" It seems very obvious that the sum total of the direction given Christopher Walken was "Wear a cravat". Which is not necessarily a bad thing.Ultimately, it felt like a lot of great lines that didn't add up to a movie.No matter how you slice it, there aren't actually seven psychopaths in this movie I look forward to the day when Jean Reno's character from The Professional returns to save us all from the flood of talky, self-referential hit men

Brief Lines

The fine folks over at Green Man Review have given a column, and the first entry in the sequence is now up here. The column is called Brief Lines, and I'll be doing short reviews of a bunch of works grouped - in theory - thematically. The victims the first time out are all horror authors, including Robert McCammon with a new vampire story. Oddly enough, I'd just had another McCammon review published at GMR, this one for a bit of werewolfery. Small world. Or at least, short reviews.