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Brain in a Girl-Shaped Jar  As always, July 4 = getting buzzed and watching Goodfellas. Shooting people for money and status in Brooklyn basically sums up America, after all, does it not? Current music: That solo from Layla is stuck in my head now. via ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} proudduckling:XKCD has one of its nail/head moments Current mood:  amused.
I said I would finish PSS before my birthday. Today it went into the hands of the beta readers. Go me. Go me. Current music: Skip Spence - Cripple Creek. Here's the official Table of Contents for Haunted Legends, the Datlow/Mamatas joint coming in 2010 from Tor books. All these stories are based on urban legends and "true" regional ghost stories. "Introduction: Saying Boo" Nick Mamatas "Knickerbocker Holiday" Richard Bowes "That Girl" Kaaron Warren "Akbar" Kit Reed "The Spring Heel" Steven Pirie "As Red as Red" Caitlín R. Kiernan "Tin Cans" Ekaterina Sedia "Shoebox Train Wreck" John Mantooth "15 Panels Depicting the Sadness of the Baku & the Jotai" Catherynne M. Valente "La Llorona" Carolyn Turgeon "Face Like a Monkey" Carrie Laben "Down Atsion Road" Jeffrey Ford "Return to Mariabronn" Gary A. Braunbeck "Following Double-Face Woman" Erzebet YellowBoy "Oaks Park" M.K. Hobson "For Those in Peril on the Sea" Stephen Dedman "The Foxes" Lily K. Hoang "The Redfield Girls" Laird Barron "Between Heaven and Hull" Pat Cadigan "Chucky Comes to Liverpool" Ramsey Campbell "The Folding Man" Joe R. Lansdale As is traditional, it being the first nice weekend of June, I acquired an awful sunburn. However, I also acquired $130 thanks to Summer Bird, so I can't hate. The Belmont track was interesting. And ambulance followed every race, which was eerie and made me think of Eight Bells. There were a lot of barn swallows, which was pleasant and made me think of home. When I said so, some random guy told me how much Darien (and Six Flags only Not Really Darien Lakes) sucks. But he bet on Mine That Bird so what the hell does he know? Today I realized that I needed to change the name of the male lead of PSS (it was Nick in the original draft). I asked gettingshitdone for help."How about Eddie?" he said. Eddie was the name of the male lead in another aborted novel of mine. "I don't know... hmmm.... maybe." It wasn't quite sitting right but I just wasn't sure why. It wasn't until several hours later, when I walked by a True Blood billboard, that I realized. Besides the pure righteous fucking fury that arises in me due to the abortion debate, there's there additional frustration of dealing with people who DON'T KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT GODDAMN BIOLOGY opining with their bare face hanging out: 1. It's not a goddamn homunculus, you morons. There is not an accomplished pregnancy and a unique new individual present the minute the guy slumps in an exhausted puddle on your unsatisfied belly and falls asleep. 2. Lou Gehrig's disease is not congenital, and therefore there is little or no risk that the world could have been deprived of Stephen Hawking via late-term abortion. 3. Having a D&E and having a Ceasarian section to deliver a live, and technically viable if someone coughs up the money to pay for heroic interventions to keep it breathing for three weeks, snowflake baby, are not equivalent in terms of risk to the mother, because one kind of involves slicing open her abdomen. 4. Seriously, do you people want me to go into business stealing your kidneys and selling them on the black market in Russia? Hero doctor George Tiller, provider of late-term therapeutic abortions to women with dangerous pregnancy complications, was shot and killed as he left services at his church today. The police are looking for the following suspect (nicked from Daily Kos): " white male in his 50’s or 60’s with grey hair that is balding in the middle. He is about 6’1” and about 220 pounds and was wearing a white shirt and dark pants. The suspect was last seen in a light blue Ford Taurus, possibly an early 1990’s model. It has a K-State vanity plate and a Kansas license plate number 225 BAB." Prepare for the violent and underground aspects of the culture war to get even hotter, as these dead-enders continue to be baffled that our "white, Christian" nation doesn't rise up and overthrow Obama and all liberals as in their jerkoff fantasies. Update: They have a suspect in custody. Current mood:  enraged.
Recently finished The Little Sleep  , and I have a lot of things to say about it. Unfortunately, I suspect that some of the things I say may make some alleged people roll their eyes and possibly even think less of the book, so let's get it out of the way up front:Even if you don't give a fuck about any of the issues I discuss below, this is a great, fast-paced mind screw of a PI novel, Philip K. Dick and Raymond Chandler run through the "will it blend"? experiment for the reader's amusement, with a dash of Motherless Brooklyn thrown in on top. With that out of the way, it's also a brilliant, subtle vivisection of some of the dark veins that run through the core of masculinity as it's constructed in modern American culture. Other writers have used noir to poke at the edges of toxic masculinity - the alienation, the hostility, the dance of giving and receiving violence. The Little Sleep doesn't just poke around the edges, though. We open with a classic scene: a private investigator's office, in which a beautiful woman is meeting our hero for the first time. She's socially, aesthetically, and financially out of his league. She's a bit arrogant, a bit of a local celebrity. But she needs him. She's desperate. Then he wakes up. No, really. Mark Genevich is a narcoleptic, due to a nasty car accident that also left him with bum knees, nasty facial scarring, and a host of other problems. This makes it a little difficult for him to pursue his avocation as a private detective, since he's prone to forgetting things that happened and remembering things that didn't. He reacts to this in a frustrating yet brutally realistic way - he accuses everyone around him of lying, projecting, and withholding information, desperately cobbling together a mental landscape in which his injuries aren't really quite totally crippling, he really doesn't need to depend on his widowed mother just to keep him alive, and he isn't really an alarming, disruptive, and sometimes physically dangerous presence in the lives of his friends. Yet he remains slightly, poignantly self-aware. He often admits when he's lying or hallucinating. He cracks wise, not just to cut powerful enemies down to size, but in wry acknowledgment that he himself isn't all he's cracked up to be. Still, he can't quite renounce the illusion of control in the face of adversity, and so at first he constructs a fairly typical narrative to hang his case on - a spoiled femme fatale, her indulgent father the DA, incriminating photos. In pursuit of this fantasy he stalks and harasses an innocent, barely post-pubescent woman, lies to his mother, and eventually unwittingly instigates a suicide (or is it?) But slowly a very different reality asserts itself, almost against his will. And he, to his credit, eventually begins to adjust to that reality. But that means sacrificing resentments, confronting old ghosts, and admitting, at last, that he's not even close to in control. All the things that a lot of men would rather kill their whole families than do. Like I said, it's subtle. Yet it's done well and it leaves me extremely curious as to what the follow-up is going to look like. Phantom  : now available for pre-order.
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