Cat Soup

These days I seem to have only videos to share on this blog. However, this video is worth watching. It is the perfect, surreal, morbid blend of Hello Kitty and Time Travelers. It's about 36 minutes long, but I recommend you watch it, if only for the terrifying visit to the evil gourmand's house half way through.

United Breaks Guitars

Don't piss off creative people:

Willy Wonka Makes

Honestly mind blowing - watch this NOW:

Pico Iyer on Happiness

http://happydays.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/the-joy-of-less/

We don't need no

School is finished. At 12.15pm today the bell rang, and the Principal came on over the speakers, her voice echoing through the largely empty halls and rooms, announcing in sepulchral tones that the summer had officially begun. I headed down to the office, where I handed in keys, final grade reports, envelopes with completed exams and envelopes with the materials for kids who needed to make up their exams over the summer. I gave some hugs, some firm handshakes, and then emerged blinking into the sun light, into the summer, into the illimitable potentiality that is unemployment in June.

I might write another book to pass the time if I don't get snapped up quick. I might devolve into a lurking Lovecraftian horror that rarely leaves his bedroom. I might become fanatically obsessed with workingout out and tofu. One never knows! 

However, one thing is for certain. Going to have to go back to telling people I install ambient lighting in military installations for a living, because telling them I'm a teacher is now out.

First Sentences

Here are the first sentences from each of my novels:

Crude Sunlight: Evening was approaching by the time Thomas arrived in Buffalo and parked outside his missing brother's building, the sky a deep shade of blue that darkened to cobalt toward the east.

Unreal City: Jonathon Min entered the Hall of Knowledge, and gazed down its length at where the Aggregate Artillect sat.

Falls the Shadow: When you’re hunting demons, you can’t afford to make mistakes.

Fae: Afterwards, whenever she thought back to that night, she remembered first and foremost the screams.

The Dangers of Research

Wait, how did it become 11pm? I was just about to go downstairs and have a cup of tea and some Petite Ecolier cookies, but now it's bedtime and all my plans have come to naught! 11pm, you see, has become the magic hour in which Phil goes to bed and lays his head down on his pillow and waits in the dark for something to happen. Inevitably nothing does, and I fall asleep around 1am, but still, like Confucius said, it's the journey that matters, not the destination. I'm not quite sure I believe him, however.

Either way - yes. Blogging. In Which The Author Expounds on the Divers Dangers Inherent in the Field of Research. Especially when pertaining to a new book. See, the problem with researching something that is still very much in the conceptual phase is that the idea mutates, grows, changes, leaps off into new directions. And each permuation and twist is accompanied by a sense of exhiliration. Yes! This is brilliant! A novel in which a Tony Soprano like necromancer rules a swathe of some great American city. Ah, let me download every Soprano episode ever made, and buy some text books on organized crime and police procedure. But wait--police precedure is strangely fascinating. How about a detective instead, investigating a massively corrupt police department and city? Like an old, grizzled Wolverine type, in a Sin City styled city? Brilliant! But wait wait wait--what if... huh. China Mieville. Perdido Street Station. A fantasy city. What if instead I had the detective in a fictional, fantasy metropolis? Modelled on... Ancient Rome! Sixth century Rome, to be precise, after the Empire has fallen. With some 11th century Byzantium thrown in for flavoring. A decadent, sprawling city of menace and magic. And forget the detective--back with the Soprano necromancer!

See how it jumps around? And if each jump, each twist, is accompanied by excited book purchases... well. Danger, Will Robinson, danger. 

Though, on the upside, I do tend to learn all sorts of random things in the process. Which is hardly a bad thing, now, is it?

Cluster Ballooning

How fun does this look?