This weekend I fled the Great Black Swamp and visited the Old Country to celebrate Easter and my Dad’s 85th birthday. Apologies to my Minnesota friends: we flew in on Saturday night and out on Monday morning and there wasn’t much chance to see anyone.
I provide historic evidence of this historic trip beyond the historic jump.
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1. I released my dirty white canvas sneakers out from their winter storage facility (i.e. I excavated them out from under a pile of Walter Scott novels that had collapsed in a bookalanche) and wore them into work today. So it’s totally and unashamedly and legally spring. Skeptics will require proof of these assertions, as well they might.
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The thing I couldn’t talk about here is this thing here. I’ve signed with Lou Anders at Pyr to do three more Morlock books. The contracts were dated March 25–Fall of Sauron Day! Coincidence, or destiny?
This will actually be a trilogy, not three standalone books. Each book will have its own story (because I believe in plot resolution) but each book will depend on its predecessor(s) more than the three books of Morlock in exile did. It’s not a prequel trilogy, though. It’s an origin story. The trilogy as a whole is titled Tournament of Shadows. The first book, which should be out next year, is called A Guile of Dragons. Which is about as much as I should say, since I’m not done with it yet, and talking about a story before it reaches a certain point always screws it up for me.
et cetera et TSE cetera.
… but does it mean what it says? On my way out of my late class tonight, I saw this sign.
Although, like the universal world, I am on Twitter, I don’t usually post my tweets here. For one thing, some of them are parts of particular conversations that don’t make much sense without a context (e.g. “BUT YOU SAID YOU LOVED ME! #ihateyourguts”). Others are things I post here or on Facebook anyway. And I have my LiveJournal post automatically a message to Twitter when there’s an update–so if I automatically posted my tweets to LiveJournal, wouldn’t that be like crossing the streams, creating an information Narcisso-catastrophe that could destroy the internet? I’m not willing to take the risk.
But one of these Twitteriffic memebursts broke out last Friday: Poetry Improved by Custard. Some of them made me laugh, and then I scribbled out a few that made me laugh, and I copy them here in the shy and tender hope that they might make you at least smile. Some of them are so obvious that they occurred to other people (e.g. the Ginsberg one) but a couple of these approached retweetability.
And of Orlando I will also tell / things unattempted yet in custard rhyme #PoetryImprovedbyAddingCustard
Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite custardity. #poetryimprovedbyaddingcustard
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by custard. #poetryimprovedbyaddingcustard
Custard does more than Milton can / to justify God’s ways to man. #poetryimprovedbyaddingcustard
The custard’s lovely, dark and deep / but I have promises to keep #poetryimprovedbyaddingcustard
Come live with me and be my custard! #poetryimprovedbyaddingcustard #whymarlowewasstabbed
For all sad words of tongue and pen, the saddest are these, “Custard, again?” #PoetryImprovedbyAddingCustard
Custard alone has looked on Beauty bare. #poetryimprovedbyaddingcustard
Push off and, sitting well in order, smite the sounding custards. #poetryimprovedbyaddingcustard
Yellow matter custard, dripping from a dead dog’s eye NOW WITH EXTRA ADDED CUSTARD #poetryimprovedbyaddingcustard #ormaybenot
1. Last Friday was the best Fall-of-Sauron Day ever. No, I can’t talk about it. But someday the world will know, and then it will say, “What is he talking about again?”
2. You know how it is when somebody writes some incredibly dumb thing about your profession and you grit your teeth and say to yourself, “I’ll have to write something in response to that. But first I’ll lie down for a bit,” and then three days pass and then when you get up, someone else has written something about the piece, saving you the trouble, you see, like a good old-fashioned Fall-of-Sauron-Day miracle? That sort of thing? Never happens to me.
3. The Blog Gate has been even more than usually sparky lately, with great pieces on the-book-vs-the-movie (using I Am Number 4 as a test case) by Andrew Zimmerman Jones, Matthew Surridge’s “attempt at an appreciation” of the underappreciated and utterly unhinged R.A. Lafferty. But the most interesting post recently might be the one by web-editrix and verbal wonderworker C.S.E. Cooney on writers’ nights. It’s fascinating to me because it’s so far removed from my writing life, which is solitary as a hermit’s, or was, until people found out I was a hermit. I don’t even have beta readers, really–which puts me in the sub-Dante scale for writer’s sociability. All this is due to accident rather than design, though. (And it wasn’t even my blowtorch, which makes the whole thing–no, maybe that’s too much detail.) Claire’s post is a fascinating map on how to do it different, and better.
4. This is the first year when I was a nominator for both the Hugos and the Nebulas. I don’t know why, but this fills me with avuncular pride for the nominees. The Hugo nods haven’t been announced yet, but I snuck in with a ballot right before the deadline last week. And the avuncular pride is already there, waiting only for the announcement to burst forth like a dead walrus from a luggage compartment.
I rewatched Batman Returns recently. It’s a visually beautiful movie. It reminded me constantly of an over-the-top production of an opera–an impression helped along by a lushly operatic soundtrack by Danny Elfman. For visual effects CGI can’t rival, the movie has the young Michelle Pfeiffer, frequently in skin-tight rubber, if you like that kind of thing–and Michael Keaton with a collagen-assisted beestung lip, if you like that kind of thing. Every scene is a visual explosion: whether it’s the most spectacular Batsignal-hits-the-sky scene ever filmed, or thugs machine-gunning a Christmas tree, or a hundred cats licking a shattered Selina Kyle as she lies convulsing in an alleyway, or myriads of penguins mounted with rocket-launchers converging on downtown Gotham, or a gigantic rubber duck floating ceremoniously through a dark sewer big enough to be a train-tunnel. Everything is wildly vivid, oversize, Gothic, stylized, intense.
And, apart from that, everything is boring.
Springy thoughts in the Great Black Swamp.
… but I’ve decided to close the comments on this blog permanently. It’s not you, reader: it’s the spambots. More than 99% of the comments here are spam, and it seems utterly pointless to spend my time weeding through them.
If you have something to say to me (and you actually exist, and are not a spambot), I’d still like to hear from you: on my LiveJournal, on Twitter, or on Facebook.
