Read this—lived in this—two or so weeks ago, but haven’t had a spare minute at the keyboard until now, just because of what Bob Seger calls deadlines and commitments. But it’s been cycling through my brainpan this whole time. Jeremy Robert Johnson’s last book, the collection We Live Inside You, has some pretty persistent parasites popping up and burrowing in through the stories. I kind of fear Skullcrack City may be just such a parasite—a story you thin…

From UNM:

“This collection showcases the best writings of Stephen Graham Jones, whose career is developing rapidly from the noir underground to the mainstream. The Faster Redder Road features excerpts from Jones’s novels—including The Last Final Girl, The Fast Red Road: A Plainsong, Not for Nothing, and The Gospel of Z—and short stories, some never before published in book form. Examining Jones’s contributions to American literature as well as noir, Theod…

It’s what the new theme’s called. It’s made for showcasing cars—photographs, at least—has a cool built-in slider I can use if I set a featured image with each post. but, the drawback is that it then plants that featured image large-size at the top of every post. So, I fiddled with this, fiddled with that, re-learned CSS and had the usual fun parsing PHP, and this is what we got for now. what’s cool is that—I don’t think I have a screenshot (I didn&#…

I wonder what it’s like to read this if you’re not, say, exactly forty-two. Being forty-two, however (just like Ernest Cline), this was perfect. It rewards all the obscure trivia I prize, makes being into X set of movies and Y set of comics cool. And, it even goes what’s Z for me: videogames, which I don’t know as well as Ready Player One does. I mean, yeah, I haunted the arcades in the eighties like the rest of the world, knew Galaga (I’m even in a rec…

Four or five days late, but, you know, I was finishing a novel. So. Three of my best reads from 2014 weren’t actually 2014 books, as it turned out: John Scalzi’s Redshirts, Jeff Lemire’s The Underwater Welder, and Megan Abbott’s Dare Me. But, from 2014, it’s got to be Lev Grossman’s The Magician’s Land, Matt Kindt’s continuing MIND MGMT, Tod Goldberg’s Gangsterland, Steven Pinker’s The Sense of Style, …

Those are the three letters I’ve been tagging onto the end of each writing session since forever. Everybody do this? I can’t not do it. Just a way a laying claim to the blank page, like. Same way you leave your jacket on the seat in the theater, saying you’ll be right back, that this stands for you, that you’re not leaving, you’re going to finish this thing. However, after a while I did learn to teach each of my Pages or Words or WordPerfects or whatev…

Is a serial- or spree-killer who wears a mask and kills ‘misbehaving’ teens a slasher? If not, then what of Ghostface and fifty other killers, right? But, the slashers we know and love, they usually have a signature weapon, don’t they? Michael’s got his knife, Jason’s got his machete, Leatherface rips that chainsaw to life every chance he gets. But there’s weapons of opportunity, too. Jason’s hardly above getting the job done …

tried to add The Faster, Redder Road to the menus, and it somehow broke all the secondary menus. I deleted it, but the breakage persists. So, either I’ll reinstall this WordPress or re-install the theme or nab a new theme, I suppose. And hopefully soon. But right now I’m writing a novel. Sorry for any inconvenience. In the interim, you can can click on ‘Posts’ (or, about anywhere) on the top_nav menu, then use the Search box to find the book pages and wha…

Not a ‘new’ book . . . yet. Just a book I’m writing right now. May never even finish it, who knows. As for when I started—tab, tab, tab—it looks like:

And, not really keeping this as journal of this book or anything. I have done that once, with “Where the Camopede Roam,” but that was just a seventy-two hour commitment. This has already taken longer than that.

Why I’m doing this, it’s . . . you know how when you teach fiction writing, you&…

I’m there now. Or, I’m here:

https://ello.co/sgj

I like the smiley face a lot more than the birdhouse, and I like the distinct non-blueness of the whole thing so far. Feels a lot like a Tumblr, really, but I got on Tumblr like fourteen years too late. G+, though, I’m still one of the holdouts who doesn’t understand why that didn’t become the new way (okay, because Google was spookily tracking every move of my mouse and selling it upstream).

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