Paper Fruit

I have a longish essay about The Bride up at Pornokitsch.com. It’s first entry in my new series, Pygmalia, which is all about Pygmalion stories as you might guess:

The Wiki for The Bride describes it as “an adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein” but that is a completely ridiculous claim. It is more accurately described as “a film starring Sting as Baron Charles Frankenstein and the girl from Flashdance.” While The Bride generously nods at Frankenstein as well as various cinematic adaptations of the tale, it is entirely it’s own thing. A glorious thing, to my mind, and one that makes few concessions to viewers who come to it without at least a passing understanding of Frankenstein, but its own thing just the same. For the uninitiated… imagine a fanfic of Frankenstein that picks up in Frankenstein’s lab before he destroys the mate for the creature, but a dark, inverted fanfic where the writer had an axe to grind with My Fair Lady, including deciding that in their version of Frankenstein, Clerval survives to play a sexed-up Colonel Pickering to Baron Frankenstein’s Professor Higgins.

It’s a great film in a lot of ways, but a dark one too. Read the whole thing at the link above, and feel free to leave a comment. Even if you have nothing to say about The Bride, while I have the first few months of this figured out but I’m taking recommendations for Pygmalion treatments to write about, especially comics and short stories. Cheers!

I’m happy to announce that Films of High Adventure is back! That’s right, remember when Jesse and I used to watch turkeys like The Craft and then write up our thoughts and feelings in a vaguely amusing fashion? Or think we were in for a turkey, and then praise films that withstood the test of time? Like… I dunno, those were pretty few and far between actually.

Anywho, we’re back on it, doing it once a month for Pornokitch. The first installment is up: Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. Most enthralling, dude.

Next Thursday, keep your eyes peeled for the first in my new series, Pygmalia. I’ll deconstruct The Bride and rant about the patriarchy.

Yikes! I wasn’t expecting this so soon in 2015, but Vermilion is… imminent here in ARC form,out in the world, digital and hard copy.

If you are a book reviewer, and would like to receive an uncorrected ARC for review, please contact Ross Lockhart at publicity[at]wordhorde.com. Also, if you know any book reviewers into some or all of the following, maybe send them this way, or at least spread the word: gender fluidity, weird westerns, steampunk-y things, sickness, death, and dying, sea lions, vampires, San Francisco, hiking, the Rocky Mountains, trains, bears, the Mr. Vampire franchise from the 1980s, ghosts, punching things, Big Trouble in Little China, friendship, sanatorium culture a la The Road to Wellville, hysteria, adventures, snow, mountains, sexual tension, mysteries, and… uh… I guess that’s enough to go on.

Thanks, and happy reading!

First: thank you, everyone who posted a new review of A Pretty Mouth yesterday. I’m at 25! Yay achievable goals!

Okay. Onward: I’m so excited to announce the existence of (and the imminent open reading period for) Swords v. Cthulhu, the followup to Stone Skin Press‘s Shotguns v. Cthulhu. Most exciting, for me, is that… I’ll be (co-)editing it with Jesse Bullington! My first anthology… aww… no, more like AWW YEAH!!

In short, we’re looking for adventure romps in which sinewy muscle and cold steel are pitted against the minions of the Great Old Ones, stories combining movement and violence with the existential despair at the heart of Lovecraft’s work; the cerebral cohabitating with rowdy action sequences. We’re also actively encouraging writers of color, women, GLBT writers, and other traditional outsiders to the Mythos to contribute. We want to have a Table of Contents as diverse as it is kick-ass, so please—if you want to submit, do, and if you know a writer who you think would be perfect for this, please tell them.

The full guidelines are here, on the Stone Skin Press site. Go forth—sally forth, even—and write us a tale of high adventure (and depressing weirdness)!

I have now officially completed and turned in the manuscripts for the two novels that will be coming out this year: my debut, Vermilion (in April), and The Pleasure Merchant (in November). But before that time, I’d really like to get A Pretty Mouth up to 25 reviews on Amazon. I learned last year that good things happen with Amazon’s algorithms when you have 25 reviews for a book, and as A Pretty Mouth is already at 18, I feel like this is… achievable.

If you’ve read A Pretty Mouth, whether you kinda liked it, or totally bazonkers loved it, I’d so appreciate it if you took a few minutes to put a review up on Amazon. (I assume if you hated it, you’re not reading this—but if you did hate it, and are reading this, go ‘head and review, I can take it.)

I am truly grateful for all the attention A Pretty Mouth has received since its publication back in 2012—new readers still seem to be reading and enjoying it, which is wonderful! I know books have an excitement life of six months to a year, so the fact that people are still discovering A Pretty Mouth is astounding to me. But, the sad truth is that while it’s always exciting and touching to hear personally from someone who enjoyed your work… it’s generally more helpful (if you’d like to see more from that author) if that praise is put into review form.

Anyways, I’ll keep this hat-in-hand begging short and sweet. Thanks in advance, no worries if you’re too busy or can’t even remember what A Pretty Mouth was about. Happy New Year, and watch this space for news about forthcoming projects!