For a long time now I’ve gone to bed early
For a long time now I’ve been writing “title shot” in the back of every book I read, along with a/the page number. Most, anyway. All it means is that this (page) is the first time the title of the book appears in the book itself. Just something I’ve been tracking for years and years, with the idea of going back someday, synthesing all the ratios (“if a title’s to appear in a book, it’s usual…
Just a couple of quick links:
- Wooden Spoon’s posted a cool Demon Theory review
- In anticipation & celebration of Halloween, that fifth page of the Demon Theory quiz-thing‘s been very updated
- I just last night rung that 100-page bell on the novel I started a few days ago, which has a title still probably too tentative to say, as it might lock me into it or something. Anyway, about it: the rule this time around’s that nobody can kill anybody, and there can be
Just thinking about what I said in that last post, about how I don’t do reviews because I’m pretty sure I’d set my standards impossibly high, just so I could shoot down every book in my path. That may be a little too broad a statement, though — I don’t mean to suggest that all reviews that burn a book are similarly motivated. Granted, some reviewers just have bad attitudes (Tobias Wolff, of course, in “Bullet to the Brain,” shoots one of them …
Well, I mean, yeah, because he’s got titles like THE LUST LIZARD OF MELANCHOLY COVE and PRACTICAL DEMONKEEPING. These are what originally got me peeling his books up from the shelves back whenever ago. Years already, I guess. Too, though, I’ve yet to read a CMoore book that hasn’t made me smile, and then impressed me too, somehow. Like this, from A DIRTY JOB, which I just finished ten minutes ago:
- “Oh, goddamn,” said Minty Fresh (damn on the dow
JUKED #4 (print) is out. Just showed up in my mailbox today. Very pretty. In there with a couple of people I know, even: Alan Rossi and Patrick Whitfill.
The story is that “Zombie Sharks with Metal Teeth”-one. A story about a man and his mouse. Which, that’s not figurative language there, though I guess when you get right down to it, that mouse isn’t your standard ordinary everyday boring mouse. Who’d want to write about that?
Click the image to t…
…Editor Y:
In today’s trend-oriented publishing climate, you need to either be the celebrity-of-the-moment or you need to have a bulletproof plan to plug into what’s hot, what’s guaranteed, what there’s already an audience for. And, sir/madam/etc., that you don’t already know my name from the tabloids should suggest that, while not infamous for killing or raping or stalking somebody, which is pretty much the standard for literary poten
Of all the footnotes I cut from DEMON THEORY, there’s an OLIVER TWIST / ANIMAL HOUSE one that I maybe miss the most. There was this fun, ceramic-pig oriented Pynchon-one too though, I suppose, which scuttled through PLAYBOY and I forget all-where. And more and more. This, though, it’s one that I never actually put to paper, only considered: getting to LOST via MILLENIUM via X-FILES or something — Terry O’Quinn seems to be in about everything I like. E…
Which is a fancy stupid way of saying that DEMON THEORY‘s back on Amazon, thanks to Melanie at MacAdam/Cage. not quite searchable yet, but there again, anyway, mostly alive. So, to everyone who’s been asking why the world hates them and me this much, as to bury the book in a database: we’re the favored child again, with all things available. click the Amazon banner here to go the DEMON THEORY page.
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Just a quick note that Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape, edited by Barry Lopez is out. I have either twenty or twenty-one definitions in it, can’t recall (twenty-one, I think, which may be the most, who knows — my copy’s loaned out already). Anyway, click the pic to go to Amazon’s page. Also, the first line of Publisher’s Weekly’s review: “How to define an arroyo, badlands, eddy, a muskeg?” I think I did badl…
The schedule just posted for the Texas Book Festival, and it looks like I’m on two panels:
- 11:30 – 12:30, Capitol Extension Room E2.026: “Literary Fiction: Texas Rising Stars?” With Ben Fountain, Dao Strom, and Dominic Smith, and Patrick Beach moderating. (DEMON THEORY)
- 3:00 – 4:00, Capitol Extension Room E2.010: “Writers League of Texas Presents the Violet Crown & Teddy Book Awards,” moderated by John Pipkin. (BLEE
is the NYT bestselling author of 30 or so books, +350 stories, some comic books, and all this stuff here. He lives in Boulder, Colorado, and has a few broken-down old trucks, one PhD, and way too many boots. More