Stephen Graham Jones's Blog, page 249

Mongrels werewolf on Bitten

Third ep of season 3, a newly longhaired Clay and an about-to-shift teen werewolf:

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Couple Weeks’ of Westerns

I think I fell into a tailspin of rewatching—and watching for the first time, in some cases—Westerns over August because of a couple of things, that happened right close to each other: I read Joe R. Lansdale’s Paradise Sky, which was and is amazing, and I rented Forsaken, which is also really, really good. Anyway, instead of trying to thumbnail-review each, I’ll put covers of what of them I can remember below, here. The two standouts for me are The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and the original 3:10 to Yuma—but this reminds me: the real reason I guess I watched these. It was research. I needed to know a lot about John Wayne movies, for a big thing I was writing (done with now). So I watched way too many John Waynes. Can’t remember them all, quite. What I found? I still so, so hate The Searchers. How can a movie that ends with just riding through an Indian encampment and plugging Indians be at the core of American pop culture? He said ironically. And, Shane. It’s kind of good innocent fun—do I remember correctly that it was the first movie to use wires to simulate the effects of gunshots?—but what’s especially revealing to me, it’s the dynamic between the free-range, ‘old’/original ranchers and the homesteaders. We’re of course supposed to side with the homesteaders, as they’re wholesome and underdogs and have cute kids and nice dinners and all that. But, those old ranchers, who are resorting to underhanded ways to keep their ranges  . . . → → →

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The Lone Changer

Art based on Mongrels, by the talented and cool Jolyon Yates: For more Mongrels-y art, here’s the click.

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How to Mount a Horse

if you’re just super cool, and have been hired on this movie (3:10 to Yuma, 1957) probably expressly for some trick-riding. But, man: this is something you don’t see anymore, right? I mean, both that running mount followed by just beating it across the road and the needless showmanship—the kind of celebration of an art that’s not in the public eye so much anymore. This would be an indulgement in today’s westerns. But back then, it was, I suspect, a pretty big part of the reason people might go to a western. Anyway, 3:10 is a beautifully-written, wonderfully-produced, excellently-acted (I was running out of adverbs) film, no doubt. But right here’s where I stopped and, were it a VHS, risked stretching the tape, just from how many times I cued ahead and then backed up, cued ahead and backed up. In wonder:

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Werewolves Out in the World, Part XVII

Is seventeen a prime number? I can’t think of anything that divides happily into it, anyway. Well, except the sixteen before: I II III IV V VI VII VIII IX X XI XII XIII XIV XV XVI And let’s start this time with a couple snapshots in words of Mongrels:   And here’s the yellow book in my kind-of homeland of Lubbock, Texas. Cool to be up there still with Keene and Hill and Hendrix:   And, wow, thank you, John:     Happy to come in behind Bird Box:     Happy too for the library bar codes—cool for Mongrels to be circulating:     Thanks, Rich:     And, wow, man, a dead man’s hand of books, sort of:       Y’all all read Molly, right? Right:     Here‘s a link to what she’d tuned into. And, wow, what an honor:     Thanks for the write-up, Matt:     And a cool write-up it was, thanks:     Another father-daughter read? So, so cool. And, Monica Drake: also so, so cool—very good writer, and, near as I know her, a pretty good human, too:       It is all we’ve got:     Was cool, doing an interview where I couldn’t answer in/with a paragraph. Had to scrunch everything down, like. That should always be the case:     And here’s a rare pic I snapped, of the last signed copy (Boulder Bookstore the other night—I forget what I was picking up, but something wonderful and perfect, surely):    . . . → → →

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Blair Witch

I have to share my favorite #BlairWitch anecdote since the (really good) sequel is coming soon. pic.twitter.com/rsOBAsEf1O — BenDavid Grabinski (@realbdgrabinski) July 29, 2016

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Stranger Things

Dug it, of course. How not to? Just done with it a couple nights ago, I guess (binge-watching: not for me), and am now peeling through all the links I’d saved back for when spoilers didn’t matter. Was going to write something about what worked, what didn’t—very little didn’t—but then Chuck Wendig did hisTerrible Minds thing and scooped us all: “Ten Things Stranger Things Taught Me About Storytelling.” And here’s some of the other Stranger Things things I can now finally get to clicking on: Stranger Things featurette: Winona Ryder takes you behind the scenes Stranger Things creators on mixing Spielberg, Carpenter and King How the New Movie Adaptation of Stephen King’s ‘It’ Is Responsible for ‘Stranger Things’ Stranger Things was rejected by 15 to 20 networks before landing on Netflix And, it’s way past my pay-grade or web-IQ, figuring out why those third and fourth links won’t indent like the first two, and why one of them auto-sized bigger than the rest. And I’ve got to get to writing anyway . . . But, before I’m gone into storyland: what excites me most about Stranger Things, it’s that now we can maybe expect a lot of fish maturing very quickly in that pond-becoming-a-lake-becoming-a-sea, now that there’s more food possible at the surface . Meaning, not just more like this, but more that are trying to innovate past this. And that’s how magic happens: many failing and failing hard to clone the success, but one fish just closing its eyes and flopping past the bank altogether, and becoming  . . . → → →

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Picking Up Things Instead of my Pen

This post is not endorsed by facebook. Nor twitter. Though it is because of twitter I’m writing it. Just noticed I’m up to about 7100 tweets. So I did what any rational dude would do: opened my calculator app, multiplied “7100” by a guessed-at average tweet-length of 120 characters. Where that gets me is: 852,000 characters. So what I did then was open the latest novel I’ve written, which I’ve now pared down to 97K words or so, and did a character count on that: And that’s not counting spaces, as I was trying to be generous—also, I was trying not to get suddenly despondent. Still, the numbers don’t lie: since November 2010 (gulp), I’ve written nearly two novels’ worth of words just in tweets. But, yeah, let’s say retweets are counted in that total, and chip a big chunk of characters off such that I’ve now just written one fairly long novel’s worth of characters, that add up to words, that add up to sentences and paragraphs and scenes . . . involving characters, which, to me, are people. Not just exactly thrilled with that: I’m losing people, here. And, before you get nervous, no, I don’t want to be one of those users who logs onto social media to badtalk social media. Social media serves whatever its purpose is, which I think this pretty much explains: I’m one of the ones eating those donuts, I mean. Yes, I’m the farm animal in this pretty terrifying meme (it conjures “Bloodchild” for me): But, too? It’s fun  . . . → → →

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13th Night

Was a good signing line for this last night. It’ll forever be my first comic book signing line, too. And this’ll forever be my . . . first published comic project, I guess (“Werewolves on the Moon,” a chapter of Mongrels adapted to a ten-page comic, is coming out in an anthology at some point, but it was turned in better than a year ago, I think). Anyway, the specs on this: the First Folio‘s on tour, and its only Colorado stop is here at CU Boulder. So they hit me up to write a script for it, which I did over a weekend in a series of planes, as I was on tour for Mongrels at the time, and then the talented and capable Scorpio Steele worked the story and script into something he could pencil/ink/color/letter (and he added a lot of historical details I didn’t have internet connection at 37K feet to be looking up), and this is the result: Also on the project—enabling the project—were CU librarian Deborah Hollis (the comic was her idea, and some of the characters as well), Pop Culture Classroom’s Ilya Kowalchuk (handling the educational aspects: this book’s going into classrooms everywhere), and CU’s very own William Kuskin, ramrodding it at all stages, and just generally making things work—AND sketching out the initial moves of the story, long before I hired on (five kids, some tunnels, all that). That comic book course I teach here at CU some semesters? Kuskin staked it out, and then MOOC’d it as  . . . → → →

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The Stanley

One of the cooler group-photos I’ll ever get to have been in, I suspect, since, I mean, it’s too late for me to photobomb The Right Stuff or Reservoir Dogs, or sneak into that hot tub with Steve McQueen, or jump off the roof behind Joan Didion’s Vette: And, for reference, here’s the original: So cool that Pablo Kiolseth remembered the right way to hold his hands at the front of the shot. Though, had I been actually thinking ahead, I’d have had my Zelda F. hat on, I guess. Or at least a James Joycey suit. And, here‘s what the what was.

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