Orrin Grey's Blog: Shovel Murders & Monologues, page 68

Mignola, Wellman, and Modern Myth-building

So, last week could have been more awesome. But at the end of it, I got some good news, some of which I can talk about and some of which is still up in the air at this point. The thing I can talk about is this:

My piece on Mignola, Wellman, and Modern Myth-building went up at Indie Pulp this morning. I could obviously ramble on about Mignola indefinitely, but I really enjoyed writing this one because it covers a topic I've been thinking about for awhile, and that was really percolating in my h...

The Changeling (1980)

Over the weekend, a co-worker loaned me a copy of The Changeling (1980). I'd never seen it before, though, for awhile, I thought I had, but I was thinking of this movie, which I swear I saw on TV under the title "Changeling," though I can't find any evidence to back this up. Anyway, I loved it. (The Changeling, not Doppelganger.)

There are a lot of kinds of ghost stories. One of the most common kinds in movies is the detective story version, the "this ghost is haunting me and I've got to figur...

Vampire Awareness Month

My contribution to Vampire Awareness Month is a review of Guillermo del Toro's first feature Cronos and has gone live this morning. So far VAM has been a really cool thing to be a part of, and there have been a lot of good, thoughtful posts on a variety of vampire-related subjects. I encourage everyone to take a look at the whole shebang. I'm personally partial to Tom English's two posts on the literary vampire here and here.

Giant Monsters from the Sea

All three parts of my epic(?) Godzilla Movie Marathon are now up at Innsmouth Free Press. The verdict? Godzilla movies really aren't actually very awesome after all.

Speaking of giant monsters from the sea, though, (and of things that actually are awesome), Guillermo del Toro's next movie is finally going to be At the Mountains of Madness! Now, I learned my lesson a long time ago about when the proper time for chicken counting was when it came to movie news, but this is something of an excepti...

When It Pours

A lot has been going on for me recently. Much of it I've already talked about here. Some of it I haven't yet, and some of it I won't be able to for maybe some time. But it's been keeping me busy, and always in ways that I'll say for sure I can't rightly complain about. There'll probably be more news and other stuff coming, in similar veins, in the near future.

I don't want to abandon my posts here, though, nor turn this into a journal that's just a chain of news items, so I'll try to make sure...

Exciting News

I finally get to crow about some very exciting news today, so here it is: I sold an essay to Strange Horizons! Yes, that Strange Horizons. It's an expansion of this post, a personal exploration and taxonomy of supernatural fiction and what it means to me. And it's slated to come out around the first week of September. I'll talk a little more about it when it actually comes out, but for now I'll just say that I'm very proud and very excited about this one, and I can't wait until it goes live!

Comical Book Stories

I've gotten the luck of checking out a couple of comics in the last few days that are worth talking about at some (minor) length. First off, thanks to the good folks at Dark Horse, I was fortunate enough to get a free, unbound, black-and-white preview copy of the first issue of the new Baltimore series by Mike Mignola, Christopher Golden, and Ben Stenbeck. Ben Stenbeck remains one of my favorite of the non-Mignola artists working in the Hellboy/B.P.R.D. gestalt, and the story itself is intrig...

A Winner is Me!

Wow, it was a big weekend for writing-related news. First, I sold my story "Letters from the Monster Show" to forthcoming YA ezine Scape, which I'm pretty excited about. They'll be launching in January, though I don't know yet whether I'll be in the first or second issue or what. I'll keep you posted.

Meanwhile, my story "Nature vs. Nurture" won the readers poll for Innsmouth Free Press! Thanks to everyone who voted! And, if you happen to follow that link to make sure I'm not pulling your leg,...

Conless

It's looking like I won't be making it to any conventions this year. I already passed on ConQuest (which is local) and Readercon (which is not), and World Fantasy's not looking much more promising. At this point I'm tentatively eyeing World Horror in 2011 since it's in Austin, which is reasonably close to thinking about being near my part of the country, but that's a ways off and I'm not sure.

I had a blast at Readercon last year and wish I was going again so I'd have the chance to hang out wi...

The Things That Slip Away

A number of opportunities to do short posts about things have slipped by me, and there are some things I'd wanted to talk about that I've probably forgotten, so I thought I'd toss out something with a few links in it in the hopes that it prevents me forgetting even more stuff that ought not be forgotten.

First, the reminders: There are only a few days left to vote for your favorite story in the third fiction issue of Innsmouth Free Press, so go cast your vote if you haven't already. And while ...