Ed Gorman's Blog, page 143

JOE FRANKENSTEIN

JOE FRANKENSTEINGraham Nolan and Chuck Dixon, creators of the Batman villain Bane, bring you the first in a series of horror/adventure graphic novels. Comic– Tampa, Florida, United States Campaign HomeUpdates / 16Comments / 37Funders / 70Gallery / 29 Share This Campaign: Follow Embed Email This project will be the first in a series of 120 page, full color graphic novels to be published by IDW Publishing in 2013.                      
            Joe Pratt is seventeen and in his last year of living in a foster home before moving on to the rest of his life. He’s delivering pizzas now but has no clue as to what he wants to do about his future.
           
            All of that changes when he’s attacked by a houseful of vampires and rescued by none other than Frankenstein’s Monster. The Monster reveals to Joe that he is the descendent of Baron Victor vonFrankenstein . The most famous undead creation the world has ever known has been watching over Joe since birth; staying to the shadows to protect him from… The Bride.

What We Need & What You Get
Although we have a publisher to handle the printing and distribution of the book, there is no page rate or monetary advance. To create 120 pages at this quality level requires a lot of time so your contribution to this project will supply Graham and Chuck with the funds necessary to create an exciting new property, and even more important...the ability to keep the lights on in the process.
 Lots of goodies and perks and even a personal visit from the artist and writer are available in exchange for your donation.
 The project is already in the creative process. Graham and Chuck have begun work on the first volume for publication by IDW in 2013. Visit joefrankenstein.com to see more artwork, model sheets and other updates.
The ImpactComics have really changed in the last 20 years. They've gotten darker and humorless. We want our project to reflect a time when comics were not only exciting, but fun to read. JOE FRANKENSTEIN is an all ages graphic novel in the same vein that Harry Potter was an all ages book. Kids and adults can read it and enjoy it on different levels.
•JOE FRANKENSTEIN is the kind of stuff that Marvel and DC are no longer publishing so we have taken it upon ourselves to do the kind of comics story that we, and a large part of the reading public are clammoring for.
•Your kind and generous support of this project will enable us to produce the art and story in a reasonable amount of time. Our goal, if fullly funded, is to have the books in your hands by Halloween of 2013.
•Nolan and Dixon have produced comics and graphic novels for all the major comic publishers for over 25 years so you can be assured this will get done and it will be really cool!
Other Ways You Can HelpIf you can’t contribute this time then please alert the countryside that the Monster is coming. Visit the Joe Frankenstein page on Facebook and share it on your own page. Mention it in blogs, message boards and use the Indiegogo share tools right here on this page!
For Our SupportersWelcome to TEAM JOE! As an added thanks, you will receive e-mail updates with exclusive content that no one else will see!
Check out the website for more images: www.joefrankenstein.com
THE 10 DAY SPRINT!Anybody that donates at the $200 level will also receive an original layout page hand drawn by Graham Nolan! These are 1 of 120 original layouts which is the first and, arguably, the most important stage in the production of a graphic novel. This is where all the thought goes into the visual storytelling of the book! Compare these with the finished pages to see the creative process unfold!

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Why I Love Stephen King by Derek Haas

A Kid and a King: ‘Chicago Fire’ Co-Creator Derek Haas on His Love of Stephen KingNov 14, 2012 4:45 AM ESTCrime novelist Derek Haas, who co-created the NBC drama ‘Chicago Fire,’ writes about his enduring love of Stephen King, in particular his 1982 novella collection ‘Different Seasons.’2inShare (0)

Author Stephen King appears on Good Morning America, where he talked about his latest thriller on November 10, 2009 in New York City. (Ida Mae Astute / ABC via Getty Images)Since I write books about crime and espionage, and created and edit a website promoting genre short fiction, I’m often asked which thriller authors influenced me the most. It’s a legitimate question, and I could pretend that I grew up ripping through the pages of Hammett and Chandler, that I devoured Westlake and McBain, that I fell in love with writing because of Christie and Spillane. But I would be lying, and any good detective would see through me like a sweaty witness in an interrogation room. I’ve read all of those writers as an adult, after I started writing genre fiction, and I’m disturbingly envious of their talent, but they had nothing to do with me picking up a pen.In graduate school at Baylor University, I studied all the greats: Hemingway, Steinbeck, and Faulkner; Williams, O’Neill, and Miller; as well as poets going back to the Dark Ages: Chaucer, Spenser, and Shakespeare; Donne, Wordsworth, and Coleridge; right on up to Ginsberg, Eliot, and Frost. I even took a genre early-novels class and read Shelley, Walpole, and Poe. Yet, again, as awestruck as I am by the talent of the giants of literature, they didn’t set me on the path that would consume my adult life.No, I have one writer to thank for my career and, in particular, one book of four novellas.When I was young, my father would always have paperbacks lying around. In the living room, in the bathroom, on his bedside table, these books littered the house like vegetables waiting to be picked and eaten. I always enjoyed reading, but by age 12, my taste hadn’t developed much further than kids’ books I ordered in some school magazine. I’ll never know what it was about the cover of Stephen King’s Different Seasons  that made me pinch it off my dad’s bureau, but I swiped that book, took it back to my room, and changed my life.for the rest go here:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles...

King divided the book into four seasons for four novellas, and the first offering, which stood for spring, was titled “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption.” I had no idea who Rita Hayworth was, what Shawshank meant, and probably wasn’t too hip as to what “redemption” was for that matter, but I remember being riveted by the story of a man wrongly cast into prison and finding hope in the bleakness. I turned on my closet light and sat in there well after bedtime, flipping pages until my eyes watered. What I most remember was the epiphany I had: that writing didn’t have to be flowery and obtuse and obscure, that a great book could be written as though the author were sitting around a campfire, speaking in his own voice, having a conversation. He didn’t have to impress with vocabulary; he could dazzle with the story itself.The second novella was titled “Apt Pupil,” and centered on a kid who discovered that an old man in his town was a Nazi war criminal. Prior to reading this, I had only a vague notion of what a Nazi was, but I remember being scared out of my mind as I raced through the pages. It had a dark, twisted ending, another new revelation for me. Hell, all the books I read before this one usually ended with Johnny throwing the winning touchdown pass, or the Hardy Boys solving the mystery of the Old Mill. The bleak ending was so shocking, it opened my eyes to the possibility of the storyteller surprising the reader, zigging when you thought he would zag, a notion I keep in the forefront of my mind as I write.The third story was titled “The Body,” but you might remember it better as the movie Stand By Me. More than the first two, this novella pushed me down the writing path. It focused on four kids who hear about a dead body on the railroad tracks and go on an adventure to find it. I don’t know if it was because I was the same age as the kids in the story or if it was because it alternated so seamlessly between side-splitting comedy, heartbreaking tragedy, and pulse-pounding suspense, but that novella spoke to me in a way that no book had. It is a masterpiece of storytelling, and if you’ve never read any Stephen King, do yourself a favor and check out “The Body.” It should be taught in writing classes alongside any of the previously mentioned greats.
RELATED STORIESStephen King: Tax Me, for F@%&’s Sake!Remedial Reader: The Essential Stephen King Back ListKing Announces ‘The Shining’ SequelThe last novella was titled “The Breathing Method” and was a weird horror tale about a decapitated woman delivering a baby. I can’t say much about this one. I never went back and reread it, but as a 12-year-old, I was fairly terrified by the detached head, still going through the breathing exercises as the body, a hundred yards away, squirted out a child. Kudos to King, that image has stuck with me all these years.As famous, prolific and ubiquitous as he is, I still think Stephen King doesn’t get his critical due. He’s one of the titans of 20th-century fiction, and I’m not at all reluctant to call him the greatest influence in my career. His books are often pinnacles of tension, pace, and craft, and I absorbed all I could about storytelling from his canon. If you read  11/22/63  last year, then you know he hasn’t lost a step in nearly 40 years of putting pen to paper. I remain, as I did when I was 12, in awe.My final message to you parents: don’t always put your books on a shelf, out of the reach of your children. Leave a few lying around the house. Encourage your kids to read outside their comfort zone ... and yours. You might discover you have a novelist on your hands.Like The Daily Beast on Facebook and follow us on Twitter for updates all day long.DEREK HAAS is the author of the new thriller The Right Hand, as well asThe Assassin Trilogy: The Silver Bear, Columbus and Dark Men.  Derek also co-wrote the screenplays for 3:10 To Yuma, Wanted, and The Double. He is the creator and editor of popcornfiction.com, and the co-creator of NBC's Chicago Fire. Derek lives in Los Angeles.

Follow Derek on Twitter at @popcornhaas
Buy  The Right Hand  now. For inquiries, please contact The Daily Beast ateditorial@thedailybeast.com.

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Psycho Part Two

Production #9401: The Making of PSYCHO - pt. 11





Ed here: Thanks to Todd Mason for this link from the Classic Film Union

By M Patton

While things were humming along nicely at the offices of Shamley Productions, the company that Hitchcock set up on the Universal lot to supervise the television show, things were less serene at the Hitchcock offices on the Paramount lot.  The collapse of No Bail for The Judge meant that the hunt for material that might catch Hitchcock’s fancy had to begin again, and that had become a difficult task over the years. (In 1959 alone, the Hitchcock offices logged some 2,400 submissions of material, of which only 30 made it past his assistant, Peggy Robertson, to Hitchcock himself.)

            But nobody actually submitted Psycho to Hitchcock.  Robertson, as per usual, scanned Anthony Boucher’s “Criminals at Large” column in the New York Times Book Review and circled his rave for Bloch’s novel. (Boucher, whose opinion Hitchcock respected, was part of a large, loose network of literary types – critics, agents, editors – who helped scout material for Hitchcock’s films and television show.)  Robertson also read the February 25 memo from script-reader William Pinkard, but she didn’t show it to Hitchcock, knowing that if her boss also liked the book, the objections of studio brass would amount to nothing more than one more obstacle on the path to getting it filmed.
            And Hitchcock, who spent the following weekend reading and re-reading the book at his Bel-Air home, liked Psycho.  He liked the novel’s wry, mordant humor, its workaday settings (which contrasted strongly with the glossy precincts in which most of his films were set), and he liked the emotional shocks delivered by having one sympathetic character brutally murdered and revealing another sympathetic character to be her murderer, and a psychotic, cross-dressing serial murderer to boot.

For the rest go here:
http://fan.tcm.com/_Production-9401-T...

Thank you, Mr. Boucher So it's 1985...

   


Thank you, Mr. Boucher
So it's 1985 or so and Carol and I are with Marty Greenberg and Bob Randisi at TSR Games  & Publishing in the wilds of Wisconsin and one of the people we meet there is Pat McGilligan our editor (Bob  I sold him on a sf novel that Bob would do alone when the time came, me busy with another project) and he was a likeable, witty guy I sort of left in memory right there in Wisc. So then it's the early 1990s and I read this rave review of a biography of Alfred Hitchcock by Patrick McGilligan and I think nah, impossible. Patrick's a common name for micks; McGilligan even more common. But as usual I'm wrong. He's not in Wisc. He's in Hwood and he's doing very important books about film history.

So what does this have to do with Anthony Boucher? I was looking through the Psycho chapter of McGilligan's Hitchcock bio the other night and came upon a fact I'd forgotten. Psycho was submitted to Universal where three readers wrote coverage on it. They all came to the same conclusion. Psycho a feature film? Are you kidding? If Hitch's people saw the coverage they probably didn't bother to show it to him. Why waste his time on something so unfilmable? But Hitchcock was a fervent fan of Anthony Boucher's Sunday mystery reviews in the New York Times. Boucher loved the book, Hitchcock ordered a copy immediately and the project was soon underway.

Thank you, Mr. Boucher.

The Five Best Charles Bronson Performances

The Five Best Charles Bronson Performances This article was posted on Classic Film and TV Cafe by Rick29
During the early 1970s, Charles Bronson was the biggest star in the world--well, pretty much everywhere except the U.S. However, he quickly attracted the attention of American studios and became a boxoffice attraction stateside with films like Death Wish, St. Ives, and Telefon. Before his unexpected international stardom, he headlined quality low-budget efforts (Machine Gun Kelly) and made memorable impressions in supporting roles in movies like The Magnificent Seven. Sure, he starred in some stinkers in the 1980s, but let's forget about those and focus on the five best starring performances from the underrated Charles Bronson:

The original Death Wish. 1. Death Wish.  Morally repugnant? No. Ethically questionable? Probably. Highly manipulative? Definitely. This 1974 controversial vigilante drama may be difficult to watch at times, but it's well-made and acted with conviction. Film critic Judith Crist noted Bronson's "superb performance" as the everyman who gradually evolves into a one-man jury. Even Rex Reed wrote: "People who are tired of being frightened, endangered and ripped-off daily in New York City are going to love Charles Bronson in Death Wish as much as I do." The less side about the Death Wish sequels, the better.


Mr. & Mrs. Bronson in From Noon Till Three. 2. From Noon Till Three. Playwright Frank D. Gilroy (The Subject Was Roses) wrote and directed this clever satire about celebrity. Bronson plays Graham Dorsey, a minor outlaw who spends an afternoon with an attractive widow (Jill Ireland--Bronson's wife). Her later account of their romantic interlude--imaginatively enhanced--spawns a bestselling book, play, and song. She becomes wealthy and he winds up in prison where no one believes that he's the famous Graham Dorsey. Bronson creates one of his best characters in Dorsey, who is equally charming and conniving. Ireland gives her best film performance.
3. Once Upon a Time in the West . Sergio Leone's Spaghetti Western masterpiece is an ensemble piece about the final days of the Old West (though, with its three-hour length, each of the four main characters get plenty of screen time). Bronson is a standout as the enigmatic Harmonica, whose motive for seeking vengeance against Henry Fonda's nasty villain isn't revealed until the film's grand showdown.

Remick on the phone in Telefon. 4. Telefon. Bronson portrays a KGB agent who teams with an American spy (Lee Remick) to uncover a network of programmed assassins--apparently normal people who turn into killers after listening to Robert Frost's poem "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening." Sounds preposterous? Perhaps, but it's immensely entertaining and Bronson hits all the right notes as the dogged pursuer with a photographic memory.
5. Hard Times.  Bronson plays a drifter during the Great Depression, who meets a hustler named Speed (James Coburn) and becomes a successful bare-knucled fighter. It's a quiet Bronson performance, but he and the fast-talking Coburn (along with Strother Martin as their "cut man") make a fine team. TIME critic Jay Cocks called the film "a tidy parable about strength and honor" with Bronson's "best performance to date."
Honorable Mentions:  The Great Escape and The Magnificent Seven (two excellent films included here only because Bronson's screen time is limited); Red Sun (an international Western more fun than it has a right to be); and Breakheart Pass (a Western mystery set on a train).
Posted by Rick29 at 9:00 AM 10 comments
 

Just back from Mayo

Three days of the most intensive health-testing procedures I've ever had. Exhausting physically and mentally. All to see if I was strong enough to survive and prosper from a Stem Cell Transplant. Conclusion: the cancer has significantly advanced into bone but not bone marrow. So: completely different approach with types of cancer meds, complete change in diet (need to drop 20-25 pounds), aggressive exercise program and a rethink of the first cancer I had which was thyroid and which for years has been causing (Mayo feels now) both my considerable weight gain and terrible fatigue. All this directed to my March 1, 2013 Stem Cell Transplant up there.

Thank you everybody for all your supportive e mails and best wishes. I really appreciate it.


Best Ed

GONE THIS WEEK

Carol and I will be up at Mayo in Rochester for most if not all of this week. I won't be blogging until I get back.

The Curse-Outlining

In almost thirty years of selling novels I've heard one complaint again and again from my agents (four) and editors (numerous) GORMAN YOU WRITE TERRIBLE OUTLINES. I've tried; I remember Graham Greene lamenting that he felt he'd wasted so many years before learning to outline. Good enough for Graham Greene, Good Enough for Ed Gorman, Cedar Rapids, Ioway. But my outlines continue to be pretty bad. So whenever I see a sensible piece on the subject I read it. This one makes sense to me. (Thanks to fine writer and admirable person Lynn Viehl for the link.)


  Effectively Outlining Your Plot
by Lee Masterson
Have you ever had an idea for a novel, and then just sat down and began writing without knowing exactly where the story was going?

It happens to everyone at some point, but most people begin to realize that the events in your plotline get confused, or forgotten in the the thrill of writing an exciting scene. There are those who continue to write on, regardless, fixing any discrepancies as they work, or (worse!) those who do not check that events are properly tied in place to bring their stories to a satisfying conclusion.

And then there are those writers who believe that creating a plot-outline is tantamount to "destroying the natural creative process". The belief is simple; by writing it out in rough form, you've already told the story, so the creative side of you will not want to write it again.

Whichever type of writer you are, creating a simple, inelegant outline to follow s not the same thing as already writing the story, and it could save you an enormous amount of time and rewriting later.

The purpose of an outline in this case is to be certain that your storyline is not straying too far from the original idea. It is also a useful tool if you need to determine if your idea is big enough to be developed into a novel-length work, and not left as a short story or novella.

Your outline should be a simple reminder that, no matter how many events or characters or situations arise, your main theme will never get lost in the jumble of scenes.
© Copyright Lee Masterson. All rights reserved 

For the rest go here:
http://www.fictionfactor.com/articles...

Forgotten Books: Bruno Fischer 2fer-House of Flesh & The Evil Days

One way you can tell you're getting old is when the good girl in the Gold Medal novel appeals to you more than the femme fatale.

Somebody wrote me about a review I'd written a few years ago of Bruno Fischer's House of Flesh. In my review I was agreeing with science fiction writer Dave Bischoff's contention that the book is a mystery that combines gothic elements with some really horrorific moments. It's one of Fischer's best novels, a very sleek, dark whodunit that lags only at the very end because he runs out of suspects. There is a particularly nasty scene wherein dogs set upon the remains of a dead horse, the carcass having rotted before they got to it. The word "flesh" has multiple meanings in the novel. And nasty is the operative word for long sections of the book. 

Before responding to the letter I decided to look through the book again. Held up very well. But as I read it I realized that Fischer had made the good girl so appealing--smart, funny, winsome, clean cut--that the protagonist seems sort of dotty to obsess over a rather odd woman whom he finds unattractive (but inexplicably sexy of course), aggravatingly mysterious and frequently irritable. 

I know, I know--this is noir land where gonadic response to fate is not only standard but mandatory, thanks to the Law of The Crotch as writ large and eternal by James M. Cain.

The only way I can explain this misjudgement is my age. But an evening with the sweet, amusing good girl promises so much more fun than a few hours in the clutches of The Dragon Lady...

By the time they plant me Ill probably be reading those old-fashioned Harlequin romances. The clean ones.

-----

The Evil Days by Bruno Fischer

Bruno Fischer had one of those careers you can't have any more. There's no market for any of it. He started out as editor and writer for a Socialist newspaper, shifted to terror pulps when the newspaper started failing, became a successful and respected hardcover mystery novelist in the Forties and early Fifties, and finally turned to Gold Medal originals when the pb boom began. His GMs sold in the millions. His House of Flesh is for me in the top ten of all GMs.

Then for reasons only God and Gary Lovisi understand, Fischer gave up writing and became an editor for Colliers books. But he had one more book in him and it turned out to be the finest of his long career.

Fischer shared with Howard Fast (Fast when he was writing mysteries under his pen names) a grim interest in the way unfulfilling jobs grind us down, leave us soulless. Maybe this was a reflection of his years on the Socialist newspaper. The soullessness features prominently in The Evil Days because it is narrated by a suburban husband who trains to work each day to labor as an editor in a publishing company where he is considered expendable. Worse, his wife constantly reminds him (and not unfairly) that they don't have enough money to pay their bills or find any of the pleasures they knew in the early years of their marriage. Fischer makes you feel the husband's helplessness and the wife's anger and despair.

The A plot concerns the wife finding jewels and refusing to turn them in. A familiar trope, yes, but Fischer makes it work because of the anger and dismay the husband feels when he sees how his wife has turned into a thief. But ultimately he goes along with her. Just when you think you can scope out the rest of the story yourself, Fischer goes all Guy de Maupassant on us. Is the wife having an affair? Did she murder her lover? Is any of this connected to the jewels? What the hell is really going on here?

Sometimes we forget how well the traditional mystery can deal with the social problems of an era and the real lives of real people. The hopelessness and despair of these characters was right for their time of the inflation-dazed Seventies. But it's just as compelling now as it was then when you look at the unemployment numbers and the calm reassurances by those who claim to know that the worst is yet to come.

A wily little novel that rattled me the first time I read it and rattles me still on rereading.

Spooky Thoughts for Halloween

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 27, 2007
The subject was what scared us. We both agreed that because of our our age bad health for our loved ones scared us most followed by bad health for ourselves. From there our lists became idiosyncratic.

Number three for me was anything that alters context in a sudden, violent way. You're sitting on a city bus and a guy you suspected of being a junkie jumps up and begins vomiting blood. A sudden assault such as the time when I, in my early twenties, met girl at a pool party who told me to pick her up at seven for a movie. She told me to honk once and she'd hear me. Late summer, long shadows early. I was sitting behind the steering wheel when two large hands pushed through the open window and seized my neck, strangling me. After total panic and terror, I managed to open the door and shove it hard enough to move him back a few feet so I could break his hold. Her just ex-boyfriend of course. She hadn't mentioned him. I took my softball bat (yes I played and badly) with me when I got out of the car. He didn't cower exactly but he did begin apologizing and then he started to cry. He loved her, he was crazy at the moment, he was sorry he'd grabbed me. I'd been there myself so I understood though I still wanted to bend the bat over his head. I didn't of course. I mention this here because four hours later I was still shaking. Virtually my entire body shook. I've never been so shaken before or since.

A close number four is anything that involves tight spaces. I am claustrophobic to a disabling degree. I still have sweaty moments on elevators; can't have medical tests that involve being fed inside a tube-like device without taking tranks heavy enough to knock me out; and I have the occasional nightmare of being buried alive thanks to material I read once for a hsitorical novel--this was on obsessive fear people had in the 1800s. And it was warranted. Premature burial was not that uncommon back then so people asked to be buried with bells in their coffins, strings up top they could tug on, even friends to stand vigil for forty-eight hours to listen for any cries.

As for simple fears, I'd say Robert Bloch still wrote of the spookiest one. Midnight. A frantic knock on the door downstairs. You in your pajamas with your flashlight reluctantly answer the knock--only to find a fully-garbed clown standing on your porch. His crazed eyes apparent. That would sure do a job on me.