Jeff Carlson's Blog, page 13

Grampi Bob vs. The Good Cheese

This is the amusing family anecdote of our Grampi Bob versus The Good Cheese.

My mom, Patti, is a retired ski bum living in Colorado. Her spunky ski/SCUBA/bike/hike boyfriend Bob Kearful is a handful. He's got more energy than a basketful of mice, more physical coordination than a twenty-year-old, and more sly brains than a pack of wolves.

We call him Buffalo Bob or Grampi. The two of them have all sorts of adventures, but none more hilarious than last week's encounter at King City Market…

Mom is a fantastic cook. She and Bob are both health-conscious and loaded with free time. When they eat, they eat organic or top brand or both. But you wouldn't know it to look at 'em. They're ski bums, remember? Bob likes to wander into the grocery store wearing a pair of shorts over his long underwear and sneakers, plus a ratty black coat and his SSHS cap, which stands for Steamboat Springs High School. With his elfin smile and bright eyes, he can look like an escapee from the loony bin… And I say that with love and respect, Grampi.

Last week he walked into the store looking for a snack. Not just any snack. We're talking QUALITY.

Unable to locate the primo deli section, Bob approached a corpulent fellow in a blue smock who was restocking loaves of bread. In his sixties, this guy looked like an employee who'd been around the ol' turnip truck a few times and knew every inch of the store.

"Excuse me," Bob said. "Where is the good cheese?"

The employee looked him up and down and said, dubiously, "Are you gay?"

What?

My intent is not to set off a firestorm debating gay rights or to sneer at Small Town Heartland USA. My question is: What the heck was going through this employee's head that he would make such a remark regardless of how Bob was dressed? Was his remark a condemnation or an invitation?

Bob laughed at him and found my mom, who'd found the cheese.

Meanwhile all of us are still marveling???? Is cheese code for something we don't know about?????

Awesome Fan Anecdote

One of the best parts of my job is meeting book people — readers, reviewers, book store employees, and book store owners.

In February 2008, skiing somewhere along the Continental Divide, Diana and I took a side trip to Leadville, Colorado, a beautiful, isolated mountain town upon which I'd visited 600,000 starving refugees and martial law in Plague Year. From that description, you wouldn't think I'd be a popular guy, but the fantastic Carol Hill, owner of The Book Mine, loved the book and had invited me to come for a book signing.

How can you say no to someone when you've visited the apocalypse upon their back yard?

Carol and I stay in contact. Even after I detonated a 50 megaton doomsday bomb over Leadville in Plague War, she keeps the books stocked in a special Local Interest display. Love it!

This week she emailed with the following anecdote:

I just sold the Plague trilogy on Sunday to a young woman who was looking for something apocalyptic. "Something grim," she said. So I told her these books are not only grim, but partly set in Colorado, including a lot of scenes right here in Leadville. Then she asked, "Are they gross?" I said something like, "Well, yeah, some parts are pretty gross." With a cheery smile, she said, "Perfect!" and snatched all three books off the shelf. I've never heard of "gross" being a criteria for a book before. Now I'm wondering about your fans….

Aha ha ha ha!!!!

Eight Days A Week

My e-sales on BN.com and iPad are no great shakes. The vast majority of my success has been on Kindle. Thinking I'd try a little shake-and-bake to pep things up, I decided to lower the price of the Long Eyes collection to 99c for a week.

No sooner had I made this move — I mean within hours — Amazon reduced its price to match.

Shazam! That's cool. I was thinking of doing the same there as a little promo in celebration of a recent flurry of success overseas.

So here are the flags! Turkey! Czech Republic! Netherlands! Spain! [image error]

And cover art!

It's an international party! A dazzling array of color! Like candy! Like lottery tickets!

With exclamation points!

Hooray!

I'll let it run to next weekend. Long Eyes is on the Dollar Menu, folks… the price of a McDouble and four times as filling… with none of the nitrates or preservatives…

More Fun From Overseas

My story "Planet of the Sealies" in is the current issue of Pevnost Magazine in the Czech Republic under its new, slightly incomprehensible title "Planeta Skokoanku."

Awesome!

As usual, the super geniuses at Pevnost have done a nice job with the lay-out and an interior illustration. I only wish I could read it.

That's my nephew!

You would not want to meet Trent Mahler in a dark alley if he was a bad guy. It would be like running into Dr. Bruce Banner when he was angry… i.e., the Hulk! Fortunately, Trent is a good kid.

Check this out:

A Smorgasbord Of New Cover Art

Happy New Year! I've been sitting on some of this while contracts were finalized. Now seems like a good time to feast your eyeballs.

First, my story "Planet of the Sealies" will be appearing in the Dutch anthology Horizon 3.

Would you want to be the little astronaut down in the corner or would you not want to be? I guess it depends on whether or not those crystalline eggplant monsters eat flesh or not… Bwah ha ha ha.

In Turkey, the Plague Year trilogy has sold to Arunas Publishing. It will likely be several months before they release their first edition, but of course I'll post the cover art when available. Exciting stuff.

In Spain, I have a new book-and-a-half. First, La Plaga is now available in paperback. Here's the slightly different cover…

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Meanwhile, my publishers in Spain have also released Plague Zone in hardcover under its new title, Epidemia. I love the sound of that. And, look, that must be what the nano weapon of the mind plague looks like as it's feasting on your brain tissue. Gross!

So it's a salad bar for your eyes from overseas.

Enjoy.

This is amusing…

"Christmas With The Zombies" from Jessie Smith, who also has a popular and totally inappropriate adult song here…

You know how I like inappropriateness. But be warned!

Afterword for "Pattern Masters"

Late as usual! But here as promised is the afterword for one of my more disturbing stories…

The technology is dated now, but people still use cameras with film, and I continue to see photo processing departments in drug stores.

"Pattern Masters" is one of two stories I wrote before my wife Diana and I went digital. Because I'm a disturbed monkey, I constantly wondered what would prevent me from taking an envelope full of pictures that weren't mine. The drawers where the photo department keeps the finished envelopes are self-serve. They alphabetize them. You're supposed to find your own, then bring it to the register with the rest of your shopping.

The cashier never bothers to check whose name is on the envelope. He just rings it up.

So… Would other people's photos be more interesting than mine? Were they having better vacations, bigger homes, crazy sex on camera, or training ninja dogs able to walk a high wire above gasoline-soaked flaming metal spikes?

All writers are voyeurs. We like to get into other lives and times, or we wouldn't be writing, and most artists I know are the same. Whether they paint, sculpt, act, or sing, we share that urge capture some aspect of the human experience.

Eventually I got to know the girl in the photo department enough to ask what she saw. "This must be an interesting job," I said.

"Sometimes," she said. But mostly she just sat by the same machine, wearing the same white gloves, looking at almost-the-same groups of people standing in almost-the-same groups and smiling.

I thought that was interesting, too. There were patterns in our lives that most of us didn't see — only the girl at the photo counter. Mundane or not, the pattern was there.

One of my childhood friends is a sculptor. He's gone on to design artwork, statues, and other structures in city parks, inside libraries, in front of Target stores, and at the tram station outside the Denver Broncos' stadium, but first he suffered through a long stretch of poverty as he developed his portfolio and his reputation.

As a wedding present to Diana and I, he presented us with a four foot salmon left over from a fountain he developed for a sidewalk near California's state capital buildings.

"This is cool," I said. "Can we put it in our yard? I mean, is it weather-proof?"

"It's cement mixed with epoxy," he explained. "If it was bigger, you could use it for a shield against a nuclear blast."

So that's how Sauber's statue was born.

Afterword for "Planet Of The Sealies"

* * SPOILER ALERT * * * SPOILER ALERT * * *SPOILER ALERT**

As promised, this week I'm posting another afterword for the next story in "Long Eyes," but be warned! This one is especially, tantalizingly full of spoilers!

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Like a lot of my stories, "Planet of the Sealies" began with the setting. First I had a place. Then I added people and problems.

This bleak future was the offspring of a very simple chore combined with yard work. We live on a good-sized lot with mature mulberry trees, which I trim myself, partly to save the money, partly because I enjoy the exercise and working with my hands, and mostly because — at least in California — the most prevalent philosophy toward mulberry care is to cut them back every fall. I mean all the way back.

Personally I think this is a scam invented by pruners in order to generate more work for themselves. Yes, mulberries are fast-growing trees, but I see mulberries that have never been trimmed, and they look like trees. That's nice. Alas, the original owners of our home bought into this scam. For decades, they had their trees shaved year after year. By the time we moved in, the mulberries were barely more than thick, six-foot stumps. Of course they grew in a bushy mess! No one ever allowed them to shape into trees, and there was nothing left on top but scar tissue.

Over ten years, I've encouraged the trees to become trees again and reach for the sky, but it's involved some careful work, sort of like banzai training, except with the judicious application of a chainsaw. Occasionally I've had to clear out large parts of their branches in order to make room for the larger upward growths.

Then I hauled truckloads of biomass to the dump.

The dump was a fascinating place. It was miles wide, like a strange, endless prairie where the bulldozers roam and seldom was heard a living sound except the scavenger birds. Maybe more interesting, there are no prairies on the California coastline. We live near the eastern, inland shores of the San Francisco Bay Area, where the waterline is surrounded by dry, rolling hills, gullies, and watersheds.

So where did this prairie come from? I started to do some research. Back in the 1950s, when the region really began to boom after World War II, guess where the city and state governments realized would be the easiest, cheapest places to use as landfills?

The low spots.

See, what you do is find a good hill where you can bring trucks and throw the garbage down the hill. Keep doing this until the low spot fills in. Bulldoze it to pack it down. Keep filling. Then move on to the next low spot.

And those watersheds that happen to be downstream of the gullies you've just filled? Heck, those birds, fish, frogs, raccoons, and squirrels won't care! Oh, wait, the watersheds flow into the ocean next. And the toxins that leak into the Bay will swirl around and end up on the beach where the people go with their children…

The blind stupidity of the situation bothered me. Yes, a technological civilization will generate refuse. Understood. You can't recycle or burn it all. But you don't shit where you eat, especially not when that old saying can be meant literally.

The dumps aren't only full of inert junk like plastic. They also become the home of everything we throw into our household garbage — cadmium, copper, nano silver, mercury — and the feces of our babies and our elderly. Yes, there's a small, growing movement toward cloth diapers, which have their own problems with increased electrical and water use, not to mention adding to water treatment demands, but do you realize how many disposable diapers a child goes through from birth to two- or three-years-old? Have one. You'll find yourself up to your elbows in poo on an hourly basis, my friend.

All those diapers, thousands of them each year, combined with millions of batteries and old appliances and light bulbs… that kind of mess wasn't something I could leave alone. So I sent Joanna Löw and her clone sisters underground to investigate.

* * * SPOILER ALERT * * * SPOILER ALERT * * *

Story trailer for "Pressure"

Forgot to add this "story trailer"…