words

Who is Jamie Nash?

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Well, for starters, he’s a guy I know online. Not remarkable, you say? How about this, then:

He’s one of the writers for this comic book, on stands now:

Blackbeard

I picked up the first issue this week, and it’s terrific.

And he’s the writer for I WAS A SEVENTH GRADE DRAGONSLAYER, upcoming for 2010. Here’s the trailer:

He also just put out a raucous short film spoof of the movie PARANORMAL ACTIVITY (warning: NSFW due to language, but damn it’s funny.):

AND! He also writes and directs a webseries spoofing the reality TV Ghost Hunters-style supernatural investigations shows, right at ParaAbnormal.tv. Here’s part one of the first “case” in which the investigators look into a haunted sex tape.

“Hi, I’m Tony. I’m an internet-certified exorcist.” lol

That’s who Jamie Nash is. He’s the dude who makes me feel like a slacker.

Reviews of Child of Fire part 2

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More reviews, including an online copy of the starred PW review. Oh, and if you were to pop over to Amazon.com to post a review of your own there, I wouldn’t exactly object.

Reviews:
Continue reading

Randomness for 10/20

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1) Dead man lies on balcony for days in plain view of neighbors… who didn’t call the police because they thought he was a Halloween decoration.

2) The Genreville book club for October runs this week. The book is Seanan McGuire’s Rosemary & Rue, which I haven’t read because it just came out. Apparently, it’s selling quite well, though, so if you read it and want to participate, head over now.

Anyway, this is interesting to me not just because she sat next to me at my panel at Comic-Con. The book club actually starts off with a note from Rose Fox asking the author to refrain from commenting because it stifles the conversation.

And that was the basis of my original desire to make no mention of reviews in my blog. Maybe I should do a review link-farm post, and back date it so it doesn’t turn up on friends lists or something. Yet another thing to add to the to-do list.

3) “I sold my family downriver for a manuscript.” via Bookslut

4) Do Americans want bipartisan support of health care reform? Sure. Do they want bipartisanship at the expense of the public option? No, they absolutely do not. A majority of Americans want the public option, whether it garners any Republican support or not. via Ezra Klein.

5) Man, it’s going to be tough for this dude to find a new job in this economy.

6) What happens when a man loses job and the healthcare that goes with it? What if the man’s wife and the mother of his three children has cancer and needs chemotherapy they can’t afford? He joins the Army.

400 and 2,222

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This is my 400th post on my blog, and the 2,222 post on LiveJournal. Those numbers don’t come around every day, so I’m going to do a giveaway.

Josh Jasper (aka sinboy) once suggested I make a replica of a ghost knife (just a replica, of course, you couldn’t cut through steel with it) but my efforts at making the sigil came out crappy. So I’m going to give away copies of Child of Fire.

So it’s post 400! And that second number up there has four twos, and if you add two twos together, you get four. And you get to do that twice. So I’m going to give away four copies of my novel (that’s how much brown paper I have left, anyway).

Here are the “rules.” The first two posts on the blog and the first two comments on LiveJournal get them. WordPress holds new comments for approval, so don’t fret if your comment doesn’t appear right away. I’ll tell you you’re getting one, you’ll send me your address, and it’ll ship it. You can keep it, donate it, gift it, whatever you want. You don’t have to read it right away, and you don’t have to review it online (although come on, people, I live and die by this stuff). It doesn’t matter if you already have a copy and just want a second. You ask and I give, no strings attached.

The books will be signed and inscribed any way you like and I’ll ship it anywhere in the world.

I got the idea for this because Del Rey sent me ten copies of the Advance Readers Edition to sign and return to them to use as prizes. I was surprised that they still had some lying around, especially since I asked them to send a bunch to this or that reviewer, and I know several didn’t get it.

No matter. Want one? Lemme know.

Update: All taken. You can still buy one, of course.

quote of the day

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“I won’t mince words here: SFF publishing in the US today is the Klu Klux Klan [sic] of the publishing world. It’s anachronistically misrepresentational in its racial mix, religious mix, cultural mix.”

— Ashok Banker

seen via nihilistic_kid

The Post Sci-Fi Era

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Welcome to it! Apparently, “sci-fi” has become the mainstream of cultural expression, mostly by being dumbed-down crap. Not that it has to be that way, mind you!

via bookslut

Randomness for 10/15

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1) Fifteen things to know about L.A.

2) Can you tell the difference between Dustin Diamond’s tell-all memoir of his time on SAVED BY THE BELL and Papa Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls? Take the quiz!

3) What, exactly, is a chachbag? Only a special, select few will know.

4) Posted by everyone, but what the hell: Vampires are popular because women want to have sex with gay men. Honestly, this strikes me as deeply ass-headed, but I’m too busy and tired to unpack it.

5) Miss Manners to “moderately successful novelist”: Do not put a DONATE button on your website.

Dammit

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I was so close to finishing my copy edit this morning. This evening, maybe. I also have to work up the dedication and acknowledgements.

Still. So close. Ah, well. I expect I’ll make a couple last decisions after work today and put it in the mail tomorrow, well before deadline.

Also, there’s nothing like a rigorous copy edit to make you question the strength of your relationship with your mother tongue. Apparently, I need to work a bit on the difference between “each other” and “one another”.

Remember last June?

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I hope you do.

Anyway, I wrote a post about a book called Meditations on Violence: A Comparison of Martial Arts Training & Real World Violence, which was not only about the way real fights differ from what we expect, but is also about how we deceive ourselves about what we can do and what we can’t. My original post is here: blog / LiveJournal.

Well, last night I had another “Meditations” moment: For quite a while now, I’ve been a morning writer. Physically, I’m a night person, but I could never get anything accomplished at the end of the day–too tired, too distractible, too many other things to do. For years, I’d come home from work and get nothing done on my projects. Once I started waking early and writing before work, I was much more productive.

But why, exactly, was that? Did I say tired and distractible? That’s just me defining myself as a person who can’t do some perfectly reasonable thing, and last night I walked out of my day job after a full day’s work and my usual morning writing session to head to the library.

There, I put in another two and a half hours on the copy edit. I expect to finish the whole thing today.

Can’t write/revise/whatever at the end of the day? Why do I tell myself these things? And how long is it going to take for me to break that habit?

Vampires and crosses

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There’s something I alluded to in my Big Idea essay that I meant to expand upon. Unfortunately, it didn’t fit the theme of the essay, so I’m inflicting it on you here.

Writers, do not make your vampires cringe away from/burn at the touch of crosses and crucifixes.

Why? Well, let’s talk about honor killings. Seriously.

In Jordan, as much as one-third of the murders of women are honor killings. Women who are raped are not treated as victims–they’re treated like criminals and killed.

In our own culture, we’re still trying to get past the idea that women are at least partly-responsible for sexual assaults against them. We still still have people who want to what a woman was wearing or what she did to cause the assault. It’s taking a long time to excise that attitude from our culture, but I like to think that most people, if they stop to think about it, understand that you don’t blame the victim.

And here’s why I think these two topics are related: You (man or woman) are walking home from work at night when someone jumps out of an alley, drags you in and kills you by draining your blood. Or maybe you (man or woman) meet someone sexy and interesting and decide to invite them back to your place; once there, things go way too far and you end up the victim of an attack.

And how does God treat you afterwards? God burns you every time you touch one of his symbols.

I know, it’s a trivial thing, really. It’s a silly vampire story, and it isn’t a patch on the real misery real victims endure. Still, it’s a relic of an older, awful time, when crime victims were held at least partly culpable for their victimization. It enshrines a culture where the highest, most exalted being repudiates someone because of a thing they had no control over, because of a choice and an action that fell on someone else.

It turns God into a blame-the-victim asshole. Really, the Supreme Deity really ought to get his public relations department to work on this.

If I weren’t an atheist, I’d be seriously annoyed. As an atheist, I consider it simply inconsistent characterization and a cultural relic of awful times. Also as an atheist, I have to admit that, while I consider vampires dangerous and scary, I don’t think of them as “evil.” Certainly not more evil than a shark or a tiger–they’re hungry, and people are their prey. As soon as The Lord starts turning away crocodiles with the power of faith, I’ll accept it with vampires.

So, God=one of the good guys. In theory, at least, right? Then maybe he should stop setting fire to crime victims who come too near him in our stories.