Moody Blue Tuesday

Ross Lockhart noticed my review of “Chick Bassist” and was kind enough to put up a shoutout on Facebook. Good guy, Ross. Fine writer. I have the two Books of Cthulhu that he edited and am going to embark on that adventure soon. But first I need to finish the books ahead in the queue…

Yesterday, while waiting for cabs, I read through Dennis Etchison’s Bradbury/Matheson. I had this to say initially:
Bradbury/Matheson by Dennis Etchison

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

EXCELLENT pair of interviews with titans of weird fiction. The Matheson portion is much longer and deeper but both are illustrative of the men’s personalities and approaches.
The interviewer wisely chooses to interject little of his own personality into the proceedings, instead letting his subjects speak for themselves.
A good deal of the content concerns both authors relationships with Hollywood. Very interesting indeed.

View all my reviews

 

That’s it in a nutshell. Ray bitched through most of the thing, though not without a sense of humor. Matheson got nostalgic, after a fashion. He spent much more time in Tinseltown than Bradbury, and knows the lay of the land better.

Before I left for my appointment with catheter doom, I had a small epiphany and tied together the parts of an epic I’ve had knocking around for a couple of years, entitled Cassilda and the King (<click to listen-a new tab will open). The King, of course, in this case, is the infamous Chambers-created KIY, the veritable wearer of the pallid mask his ownself.

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apres le Deluge

Dropped a load of capsule reviews on Amazon and Goodreads yesterday, uploaded two new tracks. Working on one more tune and the cover for Fear and Loathing in Innsmouth, which I’m trying to get out by Xmas. The tune is a long prog/classical piece ostensibly about the King and Cassilda, whose story I’ve been reading recently.
The new tunes are milf, a fusion-y piece with beautiful clean guitars, and Tansy, named after the heroine of Fritz Leiber’s Conjure Wife.

It goes to eleven

“Those of you who have followed my musical postings for a while will understand that I am completely jazzed about becoming eleventh on the Reverbnation Rock chart in Tucson,” he says drily. “It is kinda cool to be recognized for something, even if it is pitiful.”

Talk about mixed emotions. Anyway, it’s true. After a mini-ad-campaign featuring my version of Carol of the Bells, my “band” climbed up the heap of Tucsonan rockers and made it to eleven. That was Sunday. Actually made it to nine briefly…I’ve been resting between twenty and fourteen for a couple of months, which tells me that there’s not much activity there.
Which explains why I “climbed up”. There’s no there there, and that’s the pitiful part.
The song is pretty good, I think. I spliced two different versions together to make a more interesting sequence, and then ran a rhythm section under and a heap of guitars over and around. You can listen via the link in the tune title above.

Heh. I was afraid to try it, because Trans-Siberian Orchestra, but I think I found a comfortable pocket, especially during the last two-thirds of the track.

Fate Accompli

Did quite a bit this month. Feeling kinda proud of myself. In november 2008, I wrote a 62,000 word novel and created a cd’s worth of material while simultaneously quitting smoking mid-month. That was pretty productive.

In January 2001, I wrote two short stories in an afternoon and saw them both get published. That was good too.

One day in the mid-70s, I sat down with a couple of pencils and a pile of notebook paper and wrote a novel. About the same wordage as the above. That was the single most productive day of my creative life.

I had a month kinda like that. I wrote a 46k novel (Betrothed to Yog-Sothoth), finished a thirteen-year-old manuscript (Fear and Loathing in Innsmouth) with 15k words, thereby qualifying for a Nanowrimo win, wrote another 10k’s worth of two short stories, and topped that off by composing, performing, and producing a baker’s dozen of new songs, which I’ve just now finished posting to Reverbnation.

I’ll post them onsite soon. The jukebox is taking shape too.

So…I’ll enjoy the feeling while it lasts, and try not to break my arm in the process.

“before Crazytown” has sold more copies than I expected, though not very many in real terms. Fear and Loathing in Innsmouth should surpass it. I’m probably going to offer that as a print book also, though maybe not right away. Crazytown is champing at the bit too.

Surf the wave, me.

 

Encapsulated

I finished a book last night and a piece of music this morning. Here’s the review of the book:

From Goodreads:

The HAB Theory by Allan W. Eckert

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Finally getting to the end of the Hab Theory. It’s a long book, and the end honestly plods a little bit. It’s a bit anachronistic, in the mode of Arthur Hailey and that bunch.
Not a bad book but not a GREAT book, which is what it wanted to be. A bestselling topper to such things as 334 and The Sheep Look Up, with a new twist on the global disaster thing.
But too much focus on developing sorta stereotype characters made me picture everyone wearing dacron polyester and hoping there would be fondue.

Carnival Knowledge

Note:

It’s been decided by the powers-that-be (namely me) that my December ebook will be Fear and Loathing In Innsmouth. January will be the “abed chronicles”, depicting my harrowing experiences in the hospital a couple of years ago. And perhaps CrazyTown if all of the i’s have been crossed and the tees dotted.
Letters from Outside will fit in there somewhere, as long as I’m in finishing mode. Not going to open it for contributions at present but that’s still a possibility somewhere down the line.
Other volumes due in 2015 include “Milk“, the medical satire (Space Merchants meets Bug Jack Barron); Blue Easter (at long last); and Fallen Earring (the Hendrix novel).

In the Air

I’m still working on the jukebox utility for my website proper, but I have a lot of new music and I thought I’d share the Reverbnation url so you can hear some of it. Unfortunately this version of wordpress doesn’t have the ability to share the html5 widget. Currently, “moderan” is #14 in the rock genre in Tucson. I broke into the top 20 two months ago and haven’t left it yet. Weird. I had a couple of songs with a lot of pageviews–Blood Will Have Its Season, inspired by and named after the Joseph Pulver, Sr. book, and Nostalgia, which I did a Facebook test-promotion on. For five bucks (one day’s promo)  I got 941 impressions, 44 clickthroughs, 18 listens, and two positive email comments. Joe Pulver shared the tune on his timeline, and a lot of his fans went to the page afterward.

The newest track is called Don’t Let Me Down. It isn’t a Beatles or Bad Co. cover, but an original quasiballad. Some of my best guitar-wielding and some mighty sax-sounds (which were originally guitar).

I’ve also published an ebook at Smashwords this week. I’m finding Smashwords to be tricky to satisfy as far as format, but 3/4 of the people that click the teaser are buying it, and that’s damn good. Go ahead, check it out. You know you wanna…before Crazytown. It includes the original versions of some of the stories from Crazytown.

Fear and Loathing In Innsmouth will be next. I’m doing the cover myself, and a complete rewrite, saving maybe ten k from the original. I’ve abandoned plans to do a full webcomic for now, but that’s never dead. Just dormant.

Sorry to both of my fans about not posting for a year or so. I’ll be good, I promise.

 

Medfirst Dive

Yeah, that’s what I’m doing every morning. The surgery went well, and the incisions are healing, but there’s still three deep cuts in my abdomen and they hurt like a bitch. So I get up and render myself virtually insensate right away, and will for the foreseeable future.

That actually led to a spark of creativity yesterday. I played my Madden game for a while, then got to thinking about what else I could do. I had most of the pieces of a song that had been destined for something called the Summer Solstice Challenge at writingforums.com, before it became apparent that my hernia surgery would have to become a greater priority than it had been.

Didn’t get the thing done in time for the contest. It had been set up for vocals and stuff, but I’ll not be able to do those for quite some time, and so I fashioned a lead part out of out-takes from earlier versions, made a new melody figure, and reassembled the thing.

Dawn of Steel 

is the name of the piece. It’s just over ten minutes long, a shred/symphony of sorts. Lots of detail, downloadable only from this location.

Enjoy.

I’ve also begun the first of the stories for another Crazytown collection.