Magen Cubed's Blog, page 46

I reject your reality and substitute my own

It's nice to be other people for a change.

When I was a kid, I used to change my accent to something else. A random accent, something I'd picked up from movies or television, or from people walking down the street. I would practice it for a little while, alone in my room. Get used to the way the words felt on my tongue, the way my teeth clicked when I said things a certain way. Really try to nail the inflections, the pauses, the consonant and vowel sounds. Then I would go out to the store, or to a restaurant, and use that accent for an entire day.  Just on strangers, never my family or friends. (Because, well, that might seem silly.)

Sometimes I think people bought it, other times they ignored me. But when I got really good at it, and people really seemed to fall for it, it was exciting. I almost felt like a different person. Sometimes I even had answers ready for where I was born or how long I'd been in town if asked. I rarely had to use them, but it never hurt to be prepared. And, yeah, sometimes I did it on into my teens and 20s. When I was waiting tables or tending to a cash register, and faced with a stranger I'd never see again.  Just to see if I could do it, just to see if I could trick somebody. And sometimes it still worked.

I must make it sound like I was unhappy with myself if I was going to go through all the trouble of pretending to be somebody else. I wasn't particularly happy or unhappy, not really. Not any more or less happy than the average person was with themselves. It's kind of hard sometimes to objectively gauge the bodies we're stuck in, the voices that come out of our mouths, the thoughts that race around our brains. What seems like an amazing feat of genetic engineering and evolution to one person seems like a mole or a freckle or an upwards inflection to another. It's all a matter of interpretation.

I was trying to figure out just who it was that was crammed into this body, to whom all of these racing thoughts belonged. I was learning to be a story-teller. It was like a game to me, or a puzzle to solve, because only I knew who I really was. Everybody else was subject to my facade, my made-up story, the lies I told. The only person we ever really know with any certainty is ourselves, and I liked having everybody at the mercy of my whim. I could be whoever I wanted, if only for an afternoon. So even if only one person out of ten believed my lie, really believed it, I still felt like I'd won.

At the end of the day I'm still Magen, with her boring old story and her boring old accent.  (A vague North Texan twang if you listen hard enough, especially when I'm singing.) But if you didn't know that, you would have to believe whatever I wanted you to. And that's what makes the game worth playing.

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Crossing the Rubicon

So I was sitting around pondering these stupid books I keep writing and thinking to myself, "Self, how would you go about making your second novel even more ridiculous than the first one?" Because the first book has psychedelic dream sequences, hardcore Japanese amputee fetish porn, faceless children and boxes made of flesh and teeth. There's a certain standard I'm going to need to uphold as I follow the further adventures of Casey Way, career insomniac coffee-junkie and sarcastic jackass with a heart of gold.

The answer: Introduce a morally gray detective character, who swaggers around like he's just fallen out of a pulp book but he's just a few bubbles off. Except make him a German priest who doesn't believe in the Devil, reads too many Ian Fleming novels and likes tequila. Bit of a dry sense of humor, that one, smiles a bit too much than could otherwise be healthy for a guy of his occupation. Have him Obi-Wan Kenobi his way all over Casey's useless self and get him to do something constructive with the hand he's been dealt, no matter how crappy. Watch him constantly make Cold War references and smoke cigarettes, and slowly become the kind of guy you'd like to go pub-crawling with, because you could throw up in his car and he wouldn't give you a hard time about it. Because he's Karl. Fun Karl. He'll be the God-father to your children, and still not mention Tijuana in the Best Man's speech at your wedding.

Then give him these bony, ridge-like scars on his back, like the spines of some big beastly thing hiding under his skin. Make sure he doesn't like to talk about them, because of this time he doesn't really remember, because they may or may not be the lasting evidence of something that crawled out of him when he was twelve and killed his abusive father.

So. That's one way to go about it.

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Hero Filmmakers: How I learned to stop reading literary critiques and love pop culture.

While everybody else was in literary theory class, I was reading comic books, listening to Ozzy Osbourne, and watching horror movies. I was always an arts student, spending hours in studio classes covered in charcoal dust and intaglio ink. As not to say that I didn't read the classics growing up: Homer, Shakespeare, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Nathaniel Hawthrone, The Bronte Sisters, Charles Dickens. And when I say growing up, I do mean literally, growing up. As a child, especially between ten and fifteen, I was an autodidact. Sandwiched between books on Greek hero mythology, psychology, alchemy, cosmology, fairy tales and theoretical physics (you know, the stuff I read for fun), I was reading literature. I read so much literature that by the time I was in the throes of puberty, punching numerous holes in my ears and listening to metal until I blew out my eardrums and quite a few brain cells, I went back to what I loved from day one: comic books and movies.

Then college happened, and I was still studying art and film while everybody else was talking about prose form and theory. Not that I didn't write all the time, and didn't still read, because I did, and I still do. Obviously I still write, if you can't tell by the pages of crap I've filled this blog up with. But that's where I have trouble fitting in with other writers. I learned to write from visual mediums, strips of film and panels on pages. As a teenager, when I was drafting the first stupid idea I had for an alien cyberpunk mecha novel, I saw it in scenes and sequential illustrations. I picked real people to represent that characters in my head, with weight and physical presence, so I could get the hang of seeing people with gestures and quirks and facial tics, and train myself to write them in a convincing way. That way, when I started sketching them out on paper, they already had personalities to fill them out and familiar characteristics for others to recognize in them.

For me, writing was always a mixed medium of sight and sound, audio and visual. There was a time when I caught flack for it from other writers, who felt I should be reading and discussing proper literature before I try to writing any on my own. (Me? Writing proper literature? What blog have you been reading?) For a while, I bought it. I let them make me feel bad or inferior or "non-literary," just because I reading genre stuff and comic books, and taking a lot of cues from the filmmakers that inspired me. When other writers were talking about their "hero authors," I just had to be quiet in the corner and twiddle my thumbs. Nobody wanted to hear about Warren Ellis and Alan Moore. I didn't have any heroes as far as they were concerned.

But then I grew up a bit, started hanging out with more artists and genre writers, and realized that a hero is a hero is a hero. Whether your hero writes literature or horror novels or comic books, makes movies or writes scripts. So these are my hero filmmakers and writers, the guys whose work I love and admire, and has influenced the way I think and make stuff.

Rob Zombie : Musician : Director : Comic Book writer

Favorite films: House of a 1000 Corpses, The Devil's Rejects, Halloween, Halloween II

Why: I love the way he blends genres and themes within movies, and the grungy sensibility his settings and characters have. You may not like any of his characters, but you won't forget them either.

Guillermo del Toro : Director : Producer : Writer : Designer

Favorite films: Pan's Labyrinth, Hellboy, The Orphanage

Why: His amazing wealth of talent as a filmmaker/special effect makeup artist/writer, and his beautiful, wholly other-worldly character/set designs. I will basically watch anything this man has worked on in some capacity, and I'm always impressed

Robert Rodriguez : Director : Producer : Composer : Writer

Favorite films: From Dusk til Dawn, Once Upon a Time in Mexico, Machete, Sin City, Planet Terror

Why:  This man has mastered making big movies on the cheap. He has a very specific vision for everything he wants to do and does it, even if he has to do it on his own. I can't say I'm wowed by every movie he's ever made (I don't watch kids movies, sorry), but his style and voice is so clear in everything he does. (As an aside, my cousin used to be a set-builder for Troublemaker Studios. I'm a Kevin Bacon degree from Robert Rodriguez, and this pleases me like you wouldn't believe.)

Quentin Tarantino : Director : Writer : Producer

Favorite movies: Reservoir Dogs, Kill Bill Vol. I, Death Proof, Pulp Fiction, Inglorious Basterds

Why: You'll either love Quentin Tarantino or you'll hate him, and I admit I have moments I'm not sure why I love him. I can't even really quantify why I keep seeing his films, other than I find them so ridiculously enjoyable, no matter how ridiculous they are. His characters and dialogue just fill me with stupid glee, and his visual style just hooks me in every single time.

Kevin Smith : Director : Comic Book writer : Screenwriter : Producer

Favorite films: Clerks, Clerks II, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, Dogma, Zack and Miri Make a Porno

Why: I will fight anybody who tries to tell me why I shouldn't like Kevin Smith. No, I don't love or agree with every thing he's ever done, but I love his films. I love his characters, I love his style, I love his opinions on comic books and nerd culture. I grew up watching his movies and listening to his rants, and he just speaks to me on a lot of levels. That, and Red State. Red State Red State Red State. Add that and Divine: The Series to Magen's Summer Indie Horror Must-Watch list.

David Cronenberg : Director : Writer : Mystical Deity

Favorite films: Videodrome, M. Butterfly, Eastern Promises, The Fly, Dead Ringers, The Dead Zone

Why:  If you have to ask that, get off my blog. And can I just say, I'm counting down the moments until A Dangerous Method comes out? Viggo Mortensen as Sigmund Freud and Michael Fassbender as Carl Jung? Excuse me, if anybody needs me, I'll just be in the corner, salivating uncontrollably.

I'm sure people out there will scoff at my list, or prepare long emails about why I'm wrong and these guys are all idiots. Such is the nature of the internet. But instead of doing that, I invite you to compose a list of your own. Then we can compare, and discuss our influences, or scoff just mutually. Whatever. A good time will still be had by all.

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X-Men: First Class and Me

Oh, Marvel Comics.

You were my first true love. Unlike Power Rangers and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which I invariably outgrew and let go of, Marvel Comics stuck with me. Ever since I was five, and got my hands on an X-Men annual where Sabretooth went on a murderous rampage and Maverick had to find Wolverine to take him on, talk him down, and bring him out of the cold, I was hooked on The House of Ideas.  X-Men, The Avengers, Fantastic Four, Spider Man: these were the stories I was reading, the Saturday morning cartoons I was watching. These were the writers I was learning from, the people I wanted to be like. From 1991 through 2005, comic book store clerks from Texas to Florida knew to sit up when I walked in and point me to the latest Dead Pool, Excalibur, Uncanny X-Men and Generation X. Some of them even knew me by name.

I was less than five-feet-tall, and I was a girl on a mission. No bit of trivia was too esoteric, no character too unknown. I was writing literary critiques of issues to the letters to the editors pages, getting into arguments with fully grown adult nerds about character arcs and story progression. I could even explain the entire Summers family tree to you, alternate timelines and children included. I lived and breathed Marvel Comics.

Then something a little silly happened, and comics, well. Comics went broke. Publishers were bleeding money left and right, printing far more than comics than there were readers. Putting out variant cover after variant cover hoping it would increase sales, and inadvertently flooded the market in the process, making collecting useless. After a while, comics started becoming less about telling amazing stories and more about just trying to break even. But, hey, there were always action figures (which I still have, by the way) then there were movies. Movies that made a lot of money and brought a lot of fans, new and old, the initiated and uninitiated alike, into the fold. And some of them were actually pretty good, and got me interested in comics again.

Then a lot of my favorite titles got cancelled. A lot of my favorite characters were shelved, deemed "unmarketable." The ones that survived were rewritten, reshaped, repackaged, becoming something I didn't recognize or identify with anymore. That, above all else, broke my heart. You can take my titles from me, but you take my characters? What's a girl to do?

So like most things from my childhood, slowly but surely, little by little, I let go of Marvel Comics. I stopped following, stopped reading the news, stopped coming around the comic book stories. Sure, I still saw the movies when they came out. Like a bad boyfriend, I stopped what I was doing every time Marvel Comics came back around, made the papers, got a little attention. I participated in fandom a bit, maybe got a little excited from time to time, but it was never the same. Like all bad boyfriends, before long Marvel was up to the same old crap, and I would get tired and leave again. Sitting in a Marvel Comics writers panel at San Diego Comic Con in 2009, listening to a writer give a snotty response to a fan's question and telling the fan that comic books are about making money and nothing else, kind of clinched it for me. I went back to reading indie comics from small publishers, where writers still seemed to give a damn, and forgot all about Marvel for a while.

Then I heard about X-Men: First Class. After Wolverine: Origins had turned into a such train wreck, I wasn't impressed with the idea behind it. I told myself Don't see it. You'll only be disappointed. You always end up so disappointed. But the cast looked so good I decided to throw caution to the wind and see it anyway, at a Sunday matinee in a half-full theater. (So I think The Fassbender is a treasure. Wanna fight about it?) I expected to hate it. To my surprise, I didn't.

Okay, so, it was nowhere near perfect. Like the previous X-Men films before it, it basically went through the canon I remembered from the late 80s through the 90s with a black marker, replacing names and dates with new material and interpretations. And, yeah, my beloved Moira MacTaggert was replaced with a generic American CIA agent and Mystique was watered down to a doe-eyed puppy and Emma Frost — well, that wasn't Emma Frost, I'll tell you that. I could make a few of arguments about the treatment of PoC and sloppy writing and silly plot devices. But for a story about one of my favorite friendship dynamics throughout the history of Marvel, that of Erik Lehnsherr and Charles Xavier — one of the few things I truly do cherish about the previous film adaptations — well, it was kind of amazing.

Since I was a kid, their relationship has always been something I enjoyed. The deep love and understanding they forged in their youth. The philosophical divide over human-mutant relations. The tragedy of the inevitable chasm that grew between them, as Magneto radicalized mutants and Charles still clung to the idea of peaceful co-existence. And that even for all of these things, these impossible obstacles, stripped of their differences, they remained friends. They would fight to stop each other at any turn, but at the end of the day, they still cared for and respected each other. A lot of things have happened between them in the many decades and incarnations of X-Men canon, but when I was reading them, Charles was still there to catch Erik when he fell. And Erik, for all his flaws and his anger, he still loved Charles for that.

So to see that, the spirit of that relationship I cared so deeply about, so perfectly summed up and wonderfully portrayed on screen (did I mention I love The Fassbender?), well. It kind of resonated with me.

So maybe it wasn't perfect. So maybe it hasn't made up for a losing a lot of what I loved about Marvel Comics. But strip away the silliness and the costumes and the super powers, it was a story about two characters. It was a story about heart, and two men who become friends only to lose one another to the tides of politics and history, and for that, I'm a little less mad at Marvel Comics. For now, at least, they have my attention again.

(But seriously, though. That wasn't Moira MacTaggert. That was a Moira-Bot in the shape of Rose Byrne. You can never convince me of anything else.)

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Gotta do the night work

You're locked in the house with something wearing the face of someone you love. Your boyfriend or girlfriend, husband or wife. This is someone you trust, the mother or father of your child. This is someone who would never betray you. But you're locked in the house with this person, and there's no getting out, and there's something wearing this person's face.

You try to talk yourself out of this feeling, this nagging, itching in your gut that tells you to run. The voice in your ear sounds different. The breath on your neck, the hand on your shoulder. This is something wearing your loved one's skin, something hot and predatory and hungry. You try to hold your breath and tell yourself no. No, it's fine, you're tired, you're seeing things. You're overreacting. But you can't get out, and this thing won't let you leave.

You confront it. You argue. You tell it to please, convince you it is what it says it is. Please, tell you you're not crazy. But it can't, because it wants to kill you and your child, and it can't lie to your face. So you fight. In your fear and your desperation, you swallow the knot in your gut and you fight. You reach for the cast iron skillet on the stove-top and you crack your husband or wife across the head. Its skull splits and it drops, bleeding red all over the floor at your feet. You take your child and you run for the front door. For freedom.

Through the door is your bedroom. It closes behind you. You're trapped in the house with the body of the thing wearing your loved one's face, and every time you try to leave you end up back where you started again. And after a little while, the thing wearing your husband or wife comes back. Like nothing ever happened, stepping over the body of the last thing you killed. It smiles and kisses you on the cheek, and lies to your face.

Every time you kill it, it comes back.

There's nowhere to go, and the bodies are piling up.

This is the scenario from the next story I'm working on. You know. Just in case you were curious.

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Come on, get down

"Slow your breathing, Casey," Paul said soothingly. "Allow every muscle to relax, from your head to your feet. Feel your eyes and your face relax, your neck and your shoulders. Can you feel it? I'm going to count back from ten to one, Casey. With each number you will become more and more relaxed. Slower and slower, deeper and deeper, until you're completely relaxed. Is that okay, Casey?"

Casey took a deep breath. "Fine."

"Good."

Paul's smile was audible. Casey exhaled. He felt himself begin to slip, loose inside his clothes and from the couch. The watery unbalance of his equilibrium told Casey that he was falling, sliding in liquid descent between the cushions and the upholstery of the sofa.

"Ten, nine, eight. Slower and slower…"

Casey felt limp like a ragdoll and falling through the floor. Through the cracks of the floorboards and the spaces between levels, all concrete and pink cotton candy insulation. His eyelids twitched. He took another breath.

"Seven, six, five. Deeper and deeper…"

He dropped freely through the floors of Paul's high-rise office, through the steel and wood. Gravity pressed down onto Casey's chest and caught in his clothes and hair, fluttering at his back. He fell through plaster and carpet, light fixtures and glass, through to the ground floor and everything underneath it.

"Four, three, two, one…"

Casey gasped and felt his back strike solid ground.

So, after over a year of work and sweat and tears and sleepless nights fretting over symbolism and faceless children and people with holes cut in their middles, Flesh Trap is done. 70,602 words, 147 pages, sixty-two chapters. It's a mystery book. A horror book. A psychological thriller. A psychedelic trip. A tragedy. A love story. It's a lot of things, about a man named Casey Way who sees death in his dreams and must tumble down a rabbit-hole of his father's design to stop a rash of deaths and disappearances that begin on the twentieth anniversary of his father's murder. It's a dark and bloody ride and everybody's invited.

The serial is coming, complete with illustrations, a soundtrack and supplemental materials. It's going to be a mixed-media experiment in fiction and terror, powered by me and my small army of volunteers. The official unofficial trailer, by soundtrack artist and atomic vaudevillian Reverend Civilian, is up for your viewing pleasure. More news to come this summer as I prepare for a September release, so watch this space.

You may not know about Flesh Trap yet, but you will.

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I know the Reaper on a first-name basis

I have met all my deadlines. Rejoice, for I now have free-time.

In the spirit of free-time, I'm assembling a small army of writers, artists, musicians and creative types to help out with Flesh Trap. My debut novel is in the last stages of tweaking and fine-tuning, cutting out any silly business and adding in some "deleted scenes" to make this the tightest, most heart-felt and possibly crazy story I've ever tackled. Six new chapters and four thousand more words so far, compounding the insanity of paranormal murder mysteries, smart-mouthed death omens, hardcore Japanese amputee fetish porn, violent patricidal hallucinations, faceless children, venus flytraps, and killer thought-forms running loose snatching up anybody that gets too close. Oh, and a love story at its heart, because I like to keep things classy like that.

Here's the rundown: I want the novel to be ready for public consumption by August for a early-mid September launch, at its own .net, complete with illustrations and music. I'm releasing it as a free-to-read weekly serial with supplemental material provided by my rag-tag team of friends and volunteers, as a big mixed media project. Consider it an experiment in horror fiction and media-based publishing, using the power of truth and love  to conquer traditional publishing and create a unique piece of work . Or, you know, something like that. Music, art, maybe even some supplemental fiction from contributing authors (because I love me some fanfiction), anything to help round out the experience.

My mutual friend Anna has volunteered her talent to illustrate some characters and scenes, which I'm so thrilled about. We've had some discussions about quadruple amputees and medical fetishism that leaves me very hopeful about the future. In the meantime, atomic vaudevillian Reverend Civilian (who contributed the lovably weird reading of Single Singularity) is hard at work workshopping the shape and feel of the novel soundtrack. What he's shown me so far is really dark and weird and exciting, and I have the utmost faith in his ability to craft a great collection of songs. There's even talk of recording an audio book, but that's a topic for another day.

So watch this space.

You've got to stand up for yourself, son

Image by Lars Jensen

 

For twenty years Casey Way dreamt without sleeping. He slipped into the spaces between death and waking where his father still walked the streets and behind Casey's eyelids. It was his father that woke Casey, dreaming of David Way's face as raw meat, lips peeled from straight teeth and nostrils flayed open to the bone. He sat down beside Casey on the 3:25 cross-town bus with the squeak of plastic upholstery. From his seat, Casey watched sunlight filter dirty-gray through the sweat-filmed glass, a halo around his father's missing face. He felt nothing.

"Hey Kiddo," his father spoke with a skeletal mouth.

"Yeah, Dad?"

They were alone on the bus. It made his father's bony smile seem somehow colder.

Casey was thirty-two -years-old and staring into the cavities made of his father's eye sockets. The last time Casey had seen his father he was twelve-years-old, made of a boy's skinny geometry and freckles that faded had with time. In his mind his father still towered over him in broad shoulders and large hands, made of steel and stone beneath his Oxford shirt and tie. Strong like Casey had thought of buildings as strong, from his good posture to his straight nose, the definition of his jaw to the blue of his eyes.

"You know it wasn't your fault, right?" The bus's empty gut lurched. Flesh hanging from his father's cheekbone dangled above his collar, a dangerous pitter-patter of blood. "I would've just ruined her anyway."

"Yeah, Dad," Casey said. His hands felt sweaty against his jeans, alternately hot and cold from wanting to rip the meat from his father's skull or push it back into place, preserving the semblance of his character. "I know."

So we remember Casey Way, right?

Insomniac library cataloger mystery boy? The one who sees his dead rapist father in his dreams and is trying to keep his life from spinning out of control, even as people start dying and his boyfriend leaves him and his sister is the only one left who believes he isn't going insane? Because the hole he can't fix in himself is reaching out and sucking other people in, the way his father did to him and his sister as children, and Casey is the only person who can stop it, even if it costs him his life?

Yeah, that Casey Way.

I've been writing a novel about him, actually, since April of 2010. It's called Flesh Trap. I think I probably mentioned it. I finished the last revision in February and then started fine-tuning it through March. Then I took a break, because it felt like my brain was going to explode, to work on outlining the second book. Because I'm stupid and allergic to sleep and hobbies. Because Casey's story doesn't stop in Flesh Trap, where he's still just a boy, a man who never quite grew up, never quite got all the way there just yet. He was still angry, at himself, at his father, at his therapist (who is probably trying to kill him, as it turns out), at anybody who would hold still to take his rage.

He still has to forgive himself. Accept himself, grow up. He still has to overcome the trap that he's created for himself, the shadow of his father still hanging overhead, and get out of his private Hell alive.

That's where Flesh Trap ends and White Bull begins.

In the follow-up Casey is a little older, a little wiser, and a little more accepting of himself. He's carved a healthier relationship out with the sister he's felt responsible for his entire life, and he's living for himself and for the man he loves and has kept him sane. Marriages and families and adulthood are all staring Casey down, and maybe he's ready for it, maybe he isn't, but he's still bound to the past. He still sees these holes in the world, these scars that people leave behind when they can't fix what's wrong with them. Casey knows these people when he sees them, because he still wears the scar on his chest where the hole used to be, the hole left by his father that swallowed up people for twenty years. He still fears that he is his father's son, a destroyer that will tear his own children down with him, in a cycle that he can't break no matter how hard he tries.

At night he still hears the barking dogs that belong to a little girl named Emma. Emma,  who sees Casey for what he is, who's hurt by the same forces that hurt him and his sister as children, and who's trapped by the monsters her mind conjures. And maybe, just maybe, if he can help Emma, and he can prove to himself he is not his father's son, he can be free. Maybe he can have his own family, and his own life, and live free of shadows and traps and monsters.

That's where White Bull ends, and where Nightmare Child begins. But that is another story for another day.

Just know that we'll all be seeing more of Casey Way, very soon…

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Wait for the summer

April came by and ran past me in rough drafts and deadlines and one big messy blur of a weekend in Irving where I got to shake some hands and sell some books. Then May stumbled in with my birthday in tow and a boat-load of bad ideas about virginal murderers and The Four Horsemen hanging out in the Oklahoma panhandle during The Dust Bowl and nightclub for people with animals living inside of them. My 25th birthday came and went, with a few odd adventures at bowling alleys and some lovely gifts. (Melissa Dominic sent me this amazing little handmade card. She spoils me, I swear it.) Now most of my rough drafts and tidied up and tucked away, and I'm sorting through all these bad ideas for projects to work on during the summer that's just around the corner.

For those of who you have signed up for The Summer Sessions 2011, thanks so much for the interest. At last count this morning I have fourteen names on the list, and that is truly exciting. Last year there were just eight of us, so I'm really happy to see so many more people contribute to this project. Sit tight, I plan to send the first email to everybody on June 1st, so we can get the ball moving on this.

Then in June there's trips to Florida to spend July 4th with Melissa and her mother. There will be adventures and beaches and bowling alleys and aquariums, and laying around on the couch watching bad television. Then in July and August I'm supposed to be moving, with any luck, packing up and relocating to Austin. It looks like my summer is booked up tight already, and it hasn't even started yet.

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New fiction

Greetings from the internet, where  you sleep all day and they hung the jerk that invented work, not unlike In the Big Rock Candy Mountain. I have been kind of quiet lately, but I swear it's for a good reason. (This time. Scout's honor.) I've started working again, and while it certainly isn't the most glamorous or lucrative position, a job is a job is a job. Shortly I will be beginning the process of moving from Fort Worth, my home of ten years, to my birth place of Austin, which I dearly miss and wish to return to. I expect to be down there looking for rental property by July, and packed up and relocated by August.

It's going to be a lot of moving and shaking going on, and I think I'll be writing less in the middle of it. I still have to turn in my story for the Dark Continents Publishing anthology Phobias, which I'm in the last stages of editing and revising. It's about a physicist who accidentally punches a hole in space-time with his mind and a bunch of crap comes crawling out of the cracks. I wasn't too sure if I liked it at first, but I think it's coming together. Then of course there's Flesh Trap, which I'm still working on for a summer release. (Like I could ever forget this one, having spent the last year toiling over it.)

But for today, I have some new fiction coming out with Fantastique Unfettered, called The Dollhouse. It's a story about a guy who wakes up one day to find a neighborhood of people living inside of him. I hear it's pretty good, so you should definitely check out Fantastique Unfettered Issue Two.

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