You Cannot Defeat Me! Your Mental Google-Fu is Weak!

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One of the interesting things about (Getting older? Not being a kid anymore? Surviving?) is that memories tend to accumulate, fragment, and occasionally, resurface in weird ways. Last night I had a bit of animation stuck in my head. Like an earworm only there’s video involved too. I only knew that it was from an old kids’ show and involved a little alien creature who spoke entirely in rebuses. And I couldn’t for the life of me remember where it came from. I was racking my brain over every ancient cartoon series I could think of. (Linus the Lionhearted? No. Tom Terrific? No. Hoppity Hooper? No. Rocky and Bullwinkle? No, not even R&B).

Let me place what happened next in context: I remember plots and storylines. Anything. Books, tv shows, whatever. Mrs. Ogre doesn’t. Many times she’ll be going, “I know I’ve seen this episode before, but…” and I’ll say something like, “Oh, that’t the one where the bad fairies show up.” Doesn’t matter if I saw the thing twenty minutes or twenty years ago. That’s the sort of thing I remember, but I was drawing a complete blank on the little alien. Then Mrs. Ogre blinked and said, “Beany and Cecil?” And danged if I didn’t realized that she was right before she’d finished saying it. Now that I had enough to go on, Google found it: Strange Objects, ca 1962, starring “Beeping Tom” the space alien. I was seven. Mrs. Ogre wasn’t more than 4 1/2. She remembered it, not me.

I think that worried her a bit.

Friday PSA

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Okay, so it’s more of a self-serving announcement. Maybe we need a new desgination for that. Maybe SSA? Anyway, here’s the deal–Scott Andrews at Beneath Ceaseless Skies has just released The Best of BCS, Year 3. Here’s the ToC:

  1. The Ghost of Shinoda Forest · Richard Parks
  2. Dying on the Elephant Road · Steve Rasnic Tem
  3. Bread and Circuses · Genevieve Valentine
  4. Walls of Paper, Soft as Skin · Adam Callaway
  5. Mr Morrow Becomes Acquainted with the Delicate Art of Squid Keeping · Geoffrey Maloney
  6. Butterfly · Garth Upshaw
  7. Red Dirt · Ian McHugh
  8. The Nine-Tailed Cat · Michael J. DeLuca
  9. Letters of Fire · Margaret Ronald
  10. Fleurs du Mal · J. Kathleen Cheney
  11. Gone Sleeping · Heather Clitheroe
  12. Dirt Witch · Eljay Daly
  13. Silent, Cold, and Still · Kris Dikeman
  14. The Angel Azrael Rode into the Town of Burnt Church on a Dead Horse · Peter Darbyshire
  15. Playing for Amarante · A.B. Treadwell
  16. The Suffering Gallery · Matthew Kressel
  17. In the Gardens of the Night · Siobhan Carroll
  18. Beloved of the Sun · Ann Leckie

 From the BCS web site: “The Best of BCS, Year Three  features such authors as Richard Parks, Garth Upshaw, Margaret Ronald, Matthew Kressel, Geoffrey Maloney, and World Fantasy Award-winner Steve Rasnic Tem.

It includes “Walls of Paper, Soft as Skin” by Adam Callaway, named to Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2012, edited by Paula Guran, as well as three stories named to the Million Writers Award Notable Stories of 2011 and four given Honorable Mention in Year’s Best Science Fiction 29, edited by Gardner Dozois.”

 

Special offer going on– buy The Best of BCS, Year Three from Weightless Books between now and Oct. 19 and get a free copy of Best of BCS, Year One or Best of BCS, Year Two.

You can also pick it up at all the usual places, Amazon, B&N, Smashwords…..here’s the thing–proceeds from the sale of The Best of BCS, Year Three go to pay BCS authors and artists for their work and keep the magazine going. Two subjects near and dear to my heart, it has to be understood.

Okay, commercial over. Thanks for your patience.

 

Anticipation….Wait For It….Part 2

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The quest for a cover for Yamada Monogatari: Demon Hunter continues. Publisher, Designer, and I were trading images back and forth in email yesterday. We may have found something that’s going to work. The Designer and I like it, so if the Publisher is agreeable we may have our starting point. I think it would be very difficult not to produce a great looking cover with this particular image, so I’m feeling optimistic. Once I have something “official” to show I’ll put it up here, but that probably won’t be for a little while yet.

In the meantime, and for your amusement, here’s the rough draft of the cover copy. It’ll probably be changed. Or not. Hard to tell with these things:

“In an ancient Japan where the incursions of gods, ghosts, and demons
into the living world is an everyday event, an impoverished nobleman
named Yamada no Goji makes his living as a demon hunter for hire. With
the occasional assistance of the reprobate exorcist Kenji, whatever
the difficulty–ogres, demons, fox-spirits—for a price Yamada will do
what needs to be done, even and especially if the solution to the
problem isn’t as simple as the edge of a sword. Yet no matter how many
monsters he has to face, or how powerful and terrible they may be, the
demons Yamada fears the most are his own.”

And, apropo of nothing, I thought I had a decent grasp of the early years of Rock & Roll. How the hell did I manage to miss Link Wray? Srysly.

Anticipation….

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There’s a lot that has to happen before a book is ready for its close-up, Mr. Demille. As I noted earlier, I just turned in the final manuscript for the Lord Yamada collection last month. It has to be reformatted for printing, flap and/or catalog copy written, the cover art chosen and the cover designed….

Speaking of that, we’ve already run into a slight snag. When my publisher and I first talked about doing this particular collection, he already had a piece of cover art in mind, and the assumption was we’d use that when the time came. Well, to cut to the chase, when the time actually did come, it turned out that the cover art was licensed to a gaming company and wasn’t available. So…we have to find another one, and soon, so his designer can get to work on it. Since we’re kind of under a time crunch to get everything ready, I’m also looking. Maybe I’ll find the perfect cover first. Have to say, though, that so far that has not happened. I have no doubt we’ll get everything done in time, and I’m looking forward to seeing the result. There’s a certain mixture of excitement and dread  that comes from seeing a book cover for the first time, at least when it’s your own.

It’s your baby. You care what it’s wearing out in public.