Stephen Graham Jones's Blog, page 269

Long Live Hellbunny

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Just calling this post that because of the season. And because of course I love Hellbunny. Anyway, I never did a write-up for how cool World Horror in Salt Lake City was. Got to meet Robert McCammon and have him sign my Boy's Life (to my son), got see Ellen Datlow some more, got to hang out with Joe Lansdale again, and meet Karen, got to watch a movie Adam Blomquist had with him (The Blood on Satan's Claw), got to meet Jonathan Martin (of "An Evening with My Comatose Mother"), got to hang out with Orrin Grey again (first time since last WHC, but I think we'll see each other again at Readercon), got to have to strange, strange experience of sitting at a table alone in a restaurant, reading a book quite happily, then looking over the top of that book and seeing the guy who wrote it standing across the room. Michael Rowe, Enter, Night, which I can't recommend enough. Then at the Stoker Awards, got to hear Alan Moore's acceptance speech read (by Scott Edelman and Rocky Wood) and see Richard Matheson on video, accepting for Best Vampire Novel of the Century: So cool. Also, talking cons, I'm at Starfest here shortly. And, check this guest list: could there by anything cooler than being in a list with Dee Wallace? And maybe I'll run into John Noble or Jonathan Frakes in the con suite. And then just not be able to say anything. And I think I'm on a DigiFest panel or two  . . . → → →

Ten Obvious Truths About Fiction

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little list I made, up at Litreactor.

Couple three links

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New interview up, from Lance Olsen and Trevor Dodge's Architectures of Possibility: After Innovative Fiction. Here. New story up at Juked, my first one to feature Mr. Rod Serling: "Submitted for Your Approval." Piece of flash horror up at This Is Horror, "Evolution, 2:00am," and it's got the coolest illustration ever. But you got to click to see it. Too, anybody remember that story (also from Juked) "Zombie Sharks with Metal Teeth"? Some news there I should be able to say soon. And, speaking of current/now news, "Rocket Man" from Stymie — this is my zombie-baseball story — has been selected by Paula Guran for Prime's The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror. And, after many long years of wishing, I'm finally in the Weird Tales family. I'll now see HPL and Howard and all them cool (unsocial) cats at the big fireplace in the smoking room of the secret house in the next dimension. My story there's right after the excellent Laird Barron interview. A zombie piece, of course, but a pretty different one. The middle part of it some of you may have heard me read from some podium at one time or another, "The Age of Hasty Retreats." The full piece is "Notes from the Apocalypse," and it's got some way-excellent illustrations as well. Here's the excellent (clickable) cover:

The Edge of Dark Water

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Way the Baptists saw it, that dunk in the river made it sure you was going to heaven, even if before or later you knew a cow in the biblical sense and set fire to a crib with the baby in it — Lansdale, this book When I'm pushing Joe R. Lansdale's The Bottoms on somebody, I'll usually tell them that it's in the same vein as To Kill a Mockingbird, kind of. Except it's exciting, and has blood, and scary stuff. And those people, they usually come back and tell me, yep, that's about the sum of it. And: where can I read the rest? Which means they're ready for A Fine Dark Line, Sunset & Sawdust, that line of books — they evoke the region better than anybody else writing, and they're also snapshots of a particular time, but they're never that kind of nostalgic that whitewashes the era or gets all syrupy with sentimentality. And, though Lansdale does tend to stick to the East Texas he knows, that's not at all to limit him to being a 'regional' writer. Even (just) a 'Texas' or 'southern' writer. No, the issues he's dealing with, always, they're big, they're human, they concern us all. What he's always dealing with is how to be a good person in this world. And, sure, there's blood, there's killing — the imagery in Leather Maiden's far from pretty — but there's always a kind of ethical boundary in his work, too. It doesn't make you feel safe — that would be an insult (to Lansdale)  . . . → → →

Kittens

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New and super short story up at the always-cool Spinetingler. "Kittens."

Willie, Waylon, and me

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Or, really, I guess it was Jason (Heller), Jesse (Bullington), and me. Last night at the Broadway Book Mall—Ron and Nina of Who Else books hosting us, Mario Acavedo moderating, all put together by Mike Hance. Not sure how many people showed up, but it was a standing-room-only kind of situation. Looked a lot like: Too, anybody wanting the books we were signing last night—Taft 2012, The Enterprise of Death, Zombie Bake-Off (and probably the rest of our catalogues as well)—they're order able now and forever through Broadway Book Mall. And, I say 'forever' because we're all there pretty regular, will keep signing whatever stock's in store. And, thanks to everybody for coming out. Was a good time. In somewhat related news, I hear Zombie Bake-Off is a featured title on the info desk in the gold room at Powell's. Which of course just means—as if we don't all already know this—Powell's rocks. In unrelated news, I'm burning through The Weird at an accelerated clip, and loving every page.  

Z is for Xombie

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Don't get me wrong, I love Demon Theory, I'm forever lost in it. But still, I always wondered what a novel written with that kind of syntax might look like if somebody took out the footnotes. And then what if they also took out the screenplay language stuff? What would be left? Just straight-up story? Zombie Bake-Off, pretty much. To back up again, though: the big hurdle for me and graduate school, at the MA level anyway, it was that I had this big prejudice against dialogue. I felt certain you could tell and novel and tell it wonderfully by simply paraphrasing all the dialogue. Yet there are conventions, there are norms, there was, evidently, stuff to be hammered sidewise into my head, whether I wanted it to be there or not. And, no, Lord of the Barnyard hadn't been published at the time. Had it have been, I'd have held it up as my standard, my proof, my defense: 402 beautiful pages, and never a quoted line of dialogue (no unquoted, either—all paraphrased, indirect). But, as things went, I reluctantly started letting my characters actually speak on the page. Complete revolution for me. Then, a year or two later, I even started using actual real quotation marks. I was a complete sell-out of/to the person I'd been trying to be. But that's growing up, too, I kind of suspect. If you don't have any regret, any secret fondness for the way things might have been, maybe even should have been, then you're still lucky enough to  . . . → → →

Zombie Bake-Off

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from the back jacket: "It's time for the annual Recipe Days bake-off in Lubbock, Texas. Soccer moms and grandmothers gather to show off their family recipes, learn new secrets for the perfect shortcake, and perhaps earn a chance to be on the famous cooking show, How Would You Cook It, Then? When the bake-off is crashed by a federation of pro wrestlers — including American Badass, Jersey Devil Jill, Tiny Giant, The Village Person, Jonah the Whale, the Hellbillies, and the fan favorite Xombie — all hell is set to break loose. Your heart beats faster as you anticipate who will come out on top in the ultimate showdown of the century: soccer moms or pro wrestlers. Anything can happen. An infected batch of donuts has transformed most of the wrestlers into mindless brain-eaters and the doors of the convention center have been chained shut, leaving the survivors locked inside, forced to fend for themselves against the hungry dead. Possessing the intensity of a shotgun to the face, Zombie Bake-Off is a stripped-down masterpiece of blood and doughnuts from celebrated author Stephen Graham Jones." from me: I wrote this when I was hungry. I wrote this long before I was studying zombies. I wrote this in 2007. I wrote this side-by-side with its screenplay. I love this cover. I was missing Demon Theory when I wrote this. I didn't want to ever do Demon Theory again. I always wanted to be a racehorse namer. I found that being a pro-wrestler namer's close enough. I used to  . . . → → →

Wi7 New Orleans 2012

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This was my first bookseller's con. Surely not my last, now that I know these kind of goings-on actually go on. It was completely different from the cons and festivals I usually hit, too. For one, nobody was dressed like Data, or Boba Fett, and there were no remote-control robot fights or Bat'leth instruction sessions or zombie defense demonstrations, and there was nobody in steampunk hats or goggles. The name tags, though, they were galaxies better. Not that I'm against the lanyard-with-alligator-clip shuffle, but, too, I didn't even really know there was another shuffle going on: a neck-strap that attaches to both sides of the badge-part, keeping it from always flipping the wrong way? And a clear pocket you could stuff schedules and room assignments and whatever in? It rocked. Also, when you leave the hotel, it barely (see: 'perfectly') fits in your back pocket (should you be wearing jeans). It could probably function as a flotation device, even. This nametag, I would never shortchange it, never underestimate it. So, whoever chose those: thanks. I'm keeping mine forever, going to try to re-use it. Though, next time: maybe make our last names as big as our front names? There was a lot of squinting in New Orleans, and it wasn't just from having to drag out of bed before noon. But cons aren't nametags, cons are people, of course. And these booksellers—they're really not that different from the people with Klingon foreheads I usually meet in hotel lobbies. They just love books, they're lost in reading.  . . . → → →

Weird Fiction Review Interview

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That's a mouthful of a subject line, yes? No worries, though. In the actual interview, there's zero internal rhyme. Unless that's specifically what you're looking for. In which situation there's little to no rhyme at that particular station. Though there will be a lot of fashion. And now my brain seriously hurts, trying to think of rhyme-words. It's not my first calling. It's not even my last resort. It's more like my least likely (meaning, I'm sure, 'most likely') dungeon. So, click here to go there. I mean, I talk about Weekly Word News, yeah? I've always been under the impression that anything about WWN is automatically pretty decent.