FULL BLEED: HALF WAY UP, HALF WAY DOWN
Yeah, just pulling this title from "Only Fire" by You Drive. Giving it a listen this afternoon. Heck, you can too. That's the beauty of Bandcamp.
Recommended for fans of coldwave and maybe oh, I don't know, the Chromatics.
Yep, that's me. Music influencer and thought leader. Kidding. I got called an influencer by a hopeful vendor at WorldCon and I wanted to march straight back to my hotel room and scream into a pillow for ten minutes, as I'd obviously failed in my attempts *not* to become such a thing. But hey, maybe getting paid thousands of dollars to endorse products while trading in anything like integrity is the way of the future.
Again, just kidding. It's the way of the present.
In convention travel news, I'll be attending the HP Lovecraft Film Festival/Cthulhu Con in Portland in the coming weeks. Never been to one of these, much less a Lovecraft/Cthulhu specific convention, so I'm interested to see what kind of crowds come out to these. As you've probably guessed, I'm not a "traditional" HPL fan. I mean, I acknowledge his importance to fantasy and horror writing, as well as science fiction (which he spent an awful lot of time writing and doesn't get a lot of credit for.) But I'm not reverential. Nor am I eager to tear him down just for the fact that he's there.
It's not like QUEEN OF NO TOMORROWS is a straight-up weird horror/mythos book, either. While, there's certainly elements that are going to be comfortably familiar to weird horror readers, that's not all there by a long shot. But mixing in a second genre, in this case the crime novel, always upsets people who just want the one thing. This is what my daughter would call a power-move. She'd call it that, but it's not really right. See, the last time I did this sort of thing, it was a weird western series called STRANGEWAYS (v.1 - cowboys versus werewolves, v. 2 - cowboys versus vampires) which you can order your very own copies of right here.
But selling it as one or the other thing, horror or western, just made people confused. Why not have it just be the one thing? Because I wanted to reach for something else is why. And boy did I get the sales to show it. Actually, I have no place to complain. It sold about as well as any original graphic novel by a self-publisher in the direct market can expect to. Not well, not horrible. Just that I printed too many.
So yeah, split genres. 'Cause that's what I want to read. Something that isn't hidebound.
So look for me if you're in Portland in a couple weeks. I'll make sure you get something nice for your troubles.
What else is going on? Working out the plotting for CINDY SAYS, which is a much longer and more substantial work than even QUEEN OF NO TOMORROWS (which itself is pretty short for a novel). So that's a lot of juggling and making sure there's enough going on to justify it even being there. Going to try something new with my writing process for this one, as well. I mean, QONT was short enough that I could keep most everything in my head at once, at least when I settled what it was. And with short stories, that's dead easy. Longer works require a lot more juggling.
I'll also be hitting the promotional trail for QUEEN OF NO TOMORROWS once I know the final street date for the book. Never done this much publicity (such as it is) for a book before so I'm sure it'll be interesting.
Forgot to add here that I'll be writing a piece for The Means at Hand, a new site that talks pretty intelligently about crime fiction, as sprawling a subject as that is. Surprising no one, I'll be talking about magic as crime in, specifically, QUEEN OF NO TOMORROWS, but I might cast a bit of a wider net than that. My buddy Costa runs the site so I'm hoping he'll go easy on my normal parade of half-baked thinking and malapropisms.
Also working out the details on something with the project name SOLARCHY. I hope I can announce something more than that maybe after the show.
Other than that, it's the same 'ol, same 'ol. Watching TWILIGHT ZONE while doing laps on the elliptical, getting in grilling while it's still grilling weather (aw, who am I kidding? It's always grilling weather up here), trying to decide if I want to keep playing WORLD OF WARCRAFT or not. But I've been trying to answer that question for several years now.
