Release Schedule

This has been cut and pasted from my LiveJournal posting, so excuse me if some of the information seems reduntant to you reading here.


Okay! First things first.

1. I will not be doing a NaNoWriMo project this year.
2. There will not be a new Jack Collier story this December.
3. I’m going to totally change how I post fiction on the internet.

Now for the good news. The reasons for the first three are as follows.
1. I’ve got enough projects going right now thanks.
2. There is a new story that’s going to start in November.
3. You won’t have to wait so long between your next fix for new Jack stuff.

Now for a fuller explanation.
1. I’m writing (or rather re-writing) the story that I was so hot for in September before my computer crashed. You may remember that I was very excited about the whole thing. My friend Sarah and I are just now editing the first four Jack Collier Stories, which probably means we won’t have them all done by Thanksgiving like I wanted. She might have her part done, but I doubt I’ll get my half done by then. If I do get it done, I’m going to get the first four stories sent to an On-Demand printer so those of you who want a paper copy can have one. This will be going on between other things I’m doing. So, no time for love Dr. Jones a new story.

2. Christmas Noir, the first story, will be reposted in its new form. The new title is Hard Boiled Christmas and you will have three options if you want to read it. I’ve got versions of I’ll come up with something in a minute over at Wordpress and Blogger, and I’ll be posting the new story at those two locations starting December 1st. The third option is that I have set up a new LJ just for the man himself. If you you LiveJournal, you can friend Jack Collier which where the new version of the story is going to be posted as well. Or you can just keep reading here. When done, I’m also going to be posting Wonderland, Liberty’s Child and In the Cabinet in their cleaned up versions there and here as well.

3. The new story (which still doesn’t have a proper title) is going to be posted in my LJ, but I’m going to try a new tactic. The new story is going to start in November, and instead of posting a piece every day, I’m going to do it once a week. The new story is seven parts long, about five pages each. I think if I post on the weekend then you can read at your leisure. We’ll see how that goes. If it works, the even newer story (the one I’m working on now) will be posted in a similar fashion, only it’ll take longer than 7 weeks because the new-new story is longer. I'm also thinking that after HBC I'm going to post the re-furbished stories on a weekly basis too. I haven't decided yet.



These new stories though... they’re different.
Particularly the short one for November, it’s not going to be what you’d expect. Well, the three people I asked to read it so I could bounce the idea off them, they know what to expect. That should be a shock, or maybe not. I haven’t let anyone pre-read any of the Jack stuff before this, but this one made me a little nervous so I needed a few extra nods of approval. Good thing I did too, saved that story from having to be re-written, which is something I don’t think I could have done frankly.



And who knows, maybe after I’ve done all that I’ll even get my gumption together and send a book out to get rejected by dozens and dozens of publishers and/or agents! Who knows, right?

Right?

Yeah, probably not.


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Now playing: John Williams - Remembrances
via FoxyTunes

Let me ask you something

I would have known this story was bullshit earlier if I’d know that the part of town she got “mugged” in was Pittsburgh’s Little Italy. Even knowing that I was suspicious. It’s easy to say “bullshit” now, but I’ve been busy all day and details were amazingly hard to find because only two or three places were touching this story with a ten foot pole. I wanted to have details before making up my mind as to whether or not this story was indeed the bullshit it has proved to be.

Part one: Does this even sound a little plausible?
Does a black man tend to go into Little Italy at night? I don’t think so. We’ve got Greektown in Detroit, but I assume it works the same way. Those spots are filled with some racist motherfuckers. Just truth I’m spewing here. In fact, someone from that area says that they don't.

Does a black man go into Little Italy at night to mug a white woman? I doubt it. You could walk down the street in Greektown naked but for a thong made of hundred dollar bills and no one would bother you. The Greeks of Greektown, they don’t like a fuss. I’ve been told most the Little Italy’s in this great nation are the same. Crime is low for outsiders in these places. Chinatowns tend to get the same thing. Crime doesn’t happen to the honkeys in those places, like ever.

NOW! Does a black man go into Little Italy, at night, to mug a white woman, and then decide to attack her based on her political views? I can’t rightly say, I’ve never been mugged myself. I’ve always looked like the sort you maybe don’t want to bother. However, I can’t imagine you’re average mugger being a political animal. I can’t imagine a man who has decided to hold you up for money saying, “Since I've got you here, how do you feel the free market structure has affected the economy? Are you in favor of Greenspan’s hands off approach to regulation? Do you think I would be here mugging you under a different economic system?” I’ve always seen the relationship as a very simple one. A guy points a weapon at you and demands money, you give him money, you both run away. I sort of doubt that having gotten the money the guy would then raise his stakes and go for battery to mix with the assault charge.


Part Two: I’ve seen the real thing.
Okay, so I’ve been a bad, bad person in the past. For good reasons, all in a good cause, but I have been a mean motherfucker. I have gone and talked to the boyfriend of the girl who’s hair I stroked and who’s eye I put ice on and had a conversation with him. A conversation can be a person talking to another person, the other person doesn’t really have to say anything beyond “Yes, I’ll never go near her again, please stop slamming my head in the door now!” Not all my friends have always been what you would call good judges of character. Not their fault, they were young.

So I’ve seen abuse, close up. I’ve seen what being smacked around by a not so strong teenager can look like. It doesn’t look like that in my experience. I’ve actually had a black eye like that myself once. It’s embarrassing to tell you, but I actually did walk into a door. Well, actually I bent over and smacked my face on a half fridge door and got a cut jut above my eyebrow and blackened my eye a little. Fortunately, no one thought I was lying because no one could believe a guy would make up such a lame lie.

So, I’ve seen what one on one contact of the variety described here looks like.

Now the other half is that I’ve known a person who decided to smack herself around and try and blame her father. She smacked her face into a table a couple of times, which produced some bruises around her face. Long thin bruises that looked like she’d smacked her face into the side of a table a couple of times. She also refused to let a doctor look at her until social workers demanded it so they could properly charge her father with abuse. She fell apart pretty quickly too. It’s an attention seeking ploy, I would not be surprised if this woman has done this in the past.

I have known these people, I have dealt with their drama, I have eaten their pain.

And you folks wonder why I never leave the house? Pfui!



Part Three: How dare they?
Seriously, a big black man attacking a poor defenseless white woman who just wants to work for McCain? When republicans are actually attacking reporters and people against Prop 8, when they really are slashing people’s tires, when they really are putting up lynched effigies of Obama and replacing Obama signs with confederate flags? Now they invent a story about a big black phantom who attacks white women while delivering political sermons? How fucking dare they?

It’s not bad enough she lied about being attacked, but she had to make it a black man who robs people and then decides to go for the gusto after realizing the person he robbed is a McCain supporter? Just, fucking disgusting!

A 6 foot tall 220 pound black man has a lot more to fear from a 100 pound white woman than the other way around. The black man knows he’s marked from the beginning. If some asshole who so much as wearing the same color shoes as he is pulled something he could get arrested, beaten, maybe even killed. To invent that sort of story is just beyond the pale.

And the McCain camp jumped right on it. They couldn’t get the word “mutilated” out there fast enough. Not bad enough they decide to prop up an obviously false story, they decide to turn it into “They’re KILLING our women RIGHT NOW!” sort of hateful bullshit. You know, real Americans, pro-America Americans, the Americans that like-likes America don’t need this kind of bullshit.

Fucking racist assholes sling their bullshit at real Americans? Fuckers.

If I wrote bullshit four hundred and eighty-seven times, we might begin to approach how much bullshit this encases. And this is pure bullshit, don’t think we’d put any pig crap in there as filler.

Fancy and I have standards!

Don't get it

You know what I don't get?

I don't get the hate for the Twilight series from guys my age. I've seen a bunch of screeds against it in the last couple of days and it always seems to be A) a Male and B) around my age or older. Now first, why is a 35 year old man even reading Twilight? That is so far out of the demographic that it makes my head hurt. I mean it’s written for 15 year old girls, isn’t it? Wishing no offense to those of you who are openly this way, all the scenarios I've been able to come up with for why these guys are reading these books and then complaining about them end with the word "swishy" or some other such pejorative.

And then they act like this is the dumbest book series that has ever been invented and then complain that now they’re making a movie out of it. Then they go on about how the character arcs are too involved and they won’t be able to fit the internal monologues into the movie and I’m back at the word “swishy” to define them.

Seriously guys, telling me how dumb they are and why they’re dumb won’t make me rethink kicking you out of Club Hetro. You read the books, you then tried to pretend you didn’t really like them, you can just stay in that closet with your shoes. You can’t complain the gay away. If you touched one of those tainted books for any other reason than to get the super manly Jack Higgins book under it, never mind actually opening and reading it, then you are lost to me.

Actually, I should be careful about that, I know at least one gay man who might just kick my ass for suggesting that homosexuals would read vampire romances instead of the Ian Fleming and Raymond Chandler he actually reads. He insists that Bond is a total closet case and he may have a point. Still, it’s an easy foil for straight men.

Also, while I’m being outrageously offensive anyway, I fucked your dad and made your momma watch.

See, I know nothing about the books besides what Syd has told me. I’ve spent all my time watching Dirty Harry movies, reading Mickey Spillane novels and playing Halo so I don’t have time to read about vampires anymore. I’ve also been lifting weights, talking to other guys about boobies and looking at naked girls on the internet. You know, manly stuff.

Actually, the reason I haven’t read them is because I’m just so totally not the demographic and what I’ve heard about them hasn’t made me want to read them. I will freely admit I don’t get the whole vampire erotica thing, that’s between ya’ll girls and those guys among you who are into the vampire thing.

It’s actually been very easy to avoid these books really. Syd borrowed some from a co-worker, and upon reading the first one declared it to be crap. She then read the rest of them because she said they were “fun crap” and that made it okay. They’re vampire romance novels, and more Mary-Sued up the ass than Harry Potter was. So why would I read them? I mean, romance novels are kind of a no-go territory in the first place and vampires haven’t been in the least bit interesting to me since the genre splintered into the “Girly-man” variety of Anne Rice and the “Kung-Fu banana” crap of the Blade movies.

So you see, I haven’t read these books because I’m a guy. However! I’ve already admitted to reading Jack Higgins books, which I’m willing to bet good money aren’t any better than the Twilight books. I’m not willing to read the Twilight books to compare, but I’ve read enough crap to be able to know something is crap just by looking at the face of someone reading it.

But what’s wrong with crap? Mark Twain wasn’t any kind of darling of the literary community until the end of his career, well after his reputation was secured through sheer volume of sales, and then he was simply looked on as a sort of National Treasure. Twain wrote what was considered at the time to be populist crap. It seems to have done quite well though. A lot of people liked it then and seem to like it now. I like all sorts of pulp stories, and there is a lot of crap there. Let’s not pretend, for every Hammett or Chandler there are at least three dozen no name guys who deserve to be forgotten forever. So long as it doesn’t make up the whole of your diet, literary crap is fine. It’s like a nice piece of cake.

I’ve gotten a little off my point here, which is okay if you’ve got that kind of time. Still, why are guys my age complaining about a book written for their daughters (holy crap! Guys about my age have 13-16 year old daughters) and complaining in such a way that it becomes obvious that they’ve read the whole series? I only find myself asking why they kept reading if it was so terrible and it was so offensively bad, and then I start to think that maybe miss thang protests too much.

Really though, I don’t get the hate. If it’s a dumb series than so what? I know a few people have put it on a pedestal, or at least I have been told. I’ve never met anyone who didn’t say that they found the books to be fun crap, but they have said they know people who took them seriously. Hey, whatever. Takes all kinds to make a world.

My point is that I don’t get the hate for this series. I particularly don’t get it because so much of it seems to be attacking the books for being what they are, fluffy insipid vampire pron for the bobby-sock set. By all reports, these books do what the audience wants and... why are you looking at me like that? Bobby-socks... yeah, it’s a real term. Teenage girls wore them with saddle shoes in the forties. Don’t look at me like that! Chicks still wear them now. You know what? Fuck it! I’m not explaining my references anymore.

Merriam-Webster says it means “keenly alive and exuberant”

Okay, watch this ad...



I see what they're trying to do... but this ad is so keenly alive and exuberant. Actually, it's not bad, it just seems like it needed three more meetings and maybe actually talk to a member of the target audience and see what they thought.

I think it's because it comes from the Ad Council, who I wouldn't trust to inform kids of the importance of not setting their genitals on fire for fear they'd do such a ham handed job of it that crotch fires would go from .01% of the under 18 population to 80% in a couple of days. Mostly I state this because besides one or two, (The crash dummies really) almost all their ads are either so damn square they have no impact or they're so over the top and they exaggerate so much that no one would ever listen to them. Most their drugs ones are just a bad joke.

This one is fairly straight forward, but “knock it off” sort of sounds like something your mom would say. You might as well shout “Hey! You kids still use that hep-lingo right? You use those groovy phrases, right? Totally tubular and radical!” to them and see how far that gets you.

Also, you know, fuck the Ad Council because they rejected my anti-smoking idea.

It was really simple too.

Shot of a cancerous lung and a VO says “Cancer!”
Then you show a shot of someone coughing VO: “Emphysema”
Show a guy smoking in a crowded restaurant next to a guy dressed like Travis Bickle.
VO: “People armed with Colt 1911 .45 automatics.”
Focus on the Travis wanna-be as pulls out the gun and fires five rounds off screen. He then looks at the Camera.
Travis: “Smoking. It’ll fuckin’ kill ya.”
Then a black screen with red CG and the VO reads “Smoking: It’ll fuckin’ kill ya!”

And that nearly Shakespearean piece of brilliance was turned down! Can you believe that shit? You could bleep out the fucks! Never even got made for a rough cut. I suppose I shouldn’t let it bother me, I mean PSA’s are all pretty keenly alive and exuberant anyway. But I got an award... for Norway a PSA once and it stings seeing bad ones made when R-Man* hasn’t been picked up by the big guys.




*A super hero that tells people about recycling, again WTF?! Why is this not their flagship character?

Last of the current run

And again, should I have have used this one as the header? I don't know.

8

Important

You know in this entire election cycle, I've still not heard what either candidate will do in case of a Zompocalypse.

No one has fully addressed the menace of Space Nazis either.

And Cthulu? Hasn't even been brought up.

However, since I filled in my ballot and mailed it back already, I don't care anymore.