Hal Johnson's Blog, page 26

A garland of quotations XLVI

Your secret Santa craves these books!

Do not try to induce sleep by laboriously seeing that your bed is soft and smooth; for sleep is the rejection of life.
•Al-Ghazali, The Beginning of Guidance (1111).

If someone were to tell me I had twenty years left, and ask me how I’d like to spend them, I’d reply: “Give me two hours a day of activity, and I’ll take the other twenty-two in dreams…provided I can remember them.”
•Luis Buñuel, My Last Sigh (1982).

Were my memory as faithful as my reason is then fr...

Profiles in "Courage" II

[It behooves me to remind everyone that earlier this year Macmillan released my book of alternate-history scenarios, Impossible Histories , and those who read it say they like it, even behind my back; even people who don’t like me, such as Library Journal; and you may like it too.]

Peredeus

Sometimes there’s no escape for you and you’re just screwed, like a film noir protagonist. History is filled with examples of people in just such a predicament, and ahistory is even more filled with examples, i...

Truly Wordless Comic Panels

I write, for a living, books

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Dan DeCarlo!

A garland of quotations XLV

Your secret Santa craves these books!

We all have strength enough to endure the trouble of others.
•La Rochenfoucauld, Reflections (1665).

Trust him little who, without proofs, trusts you with every thing; or, when he has proved you, with nothing.
•Johann Kaspar Lavater, Aphorisms on Man. Translated from the Original Manuscript of the Rev. John Caspar Lavater, Citizen of Zuric (1787).

I cannot conceive of a wisdom that lacks distrust: according to the Scriptures the beginning of wisdom is the fear of...

A garland of quotations XLIV

Your secret Santa craves these books!

Harry Hippo stood on his head
Everybody was doing something.
It was truly the best circus anybody had ever seen.
•Jerry Walters, Dumbo on Land, on Sea, in the Air (1972).

The clowns, emphasizing positive lessons by performing negative acts, are thus more like sacred priests than mere clowns.
•Alph H. Secakuku, Following the Sun and Moon: Hopi Kachina Tradition (1995).

Snoring or acting as if asleep when one is not…acting as if devoid of judgment…uttering senseless ...

A garland of quotations XLIII

Do these books make great gifts?

Signs point to yes!

Of all Sun Myung Moon’s sins, I thought, his attacks on America were the most vile.
•Nansook Hong In the Shadow of the Moons: My Life in the Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Family (1998).

Thus in the beginning all the world was America.
•Locke, The Second Treatise of Civil Government (1690).

The ancients did not discover America, but they invented it.
•Eduard Ebner, quoted in de Camp & Ley, Lands Beyond (1952).

No English pioneers. No French. No European pi...

Ask me to write the foreword or introduction to your next book!

Many years ago I wrote an foreword (it was to this book), and at the time I assumed I would just be dashing off prefaces left and right from then on, an assumption that proved false, I have never been asked to write another,

You, dear reader, could change all that. If you have a book, fiction or nonfiction, I will gladly write a foreword or introduction for a low low price, probably something like a $15 gift card to bookshop.org, or even just a friendly smile. Just ask and I’ll give you a forewor...

A garland of quotations XLII

99¢ book sale! 3 days left!

Anything done for the first time unleashes a demon.
•Dave Sim, Cerebus #65 (1984).

Blood for a blow is interest indeed.
Methinks I am grown taller with the murder,
And, standing straight on this majestic pile,
I hit the clouds, and see the world below me!
Oh, ’tis the worst of racks to a brave spirit,
To be born base, a vassal, a cursed slave.
Now, by the project labouring in my brain,
’Tis nobler far to be a king in hell,
To head infernal legions, chiefs below,
To let them loose...

Fifteen short pieces

[A gentle reminder that I write books, in the twin hopes that you will enjoy them and that I will not die forgotten.]

My weirdest, funniest novel, only 99¢!

We have discovered an ecstasy more profound than laughter; it is forbidding other people to laugh.

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One implies one, but two implies an infinity, as can be proved by mirrors.

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There is power in doing something once, and power in doing something a thousand times, but there is no power in between. The well-traveled cosmopolitan and the backwoods...

Media Roundup and "Valuable" Prizes!

Hi! If you’re reading this, perhaps you wish I would scatter my metaphorical seed profligately to the four winds. You are in luck!

Most spectacularly, and releasing today, I am a guest on the wonderful monster-themed podcast Uncle Monster’s Spooky Time Fright Hour.

It features an original short story (by me) and a lot of gabbing about the featured monster, the woodwose by me and the Spooky Time “zoo crew”. NSFW, unless you work somewhere weird, but if you work somewhere weird (or aspire to) you w...