Dispatches from the Flying M

Work update

Here's what I'm working on these days:

Spider-Man: Requiem has been turned in.  It'll be on sale right before Halloween.

I've finished checking the copyedited manuscripts of 30 Days of Night (on sale in late July) and River Runs Red (late September), and the galleys of CSI: Miami--Right to Die (June).

I'm about 10 chapters into a spec novel--a book written with the hopes of selling it, rather than something sold before being written.  I haven't done one of these since Missing White Girl, and this is in a genre I haven't published in before, so keep your fingers crossed.

I have another novel proposal--a trilogy, actually--with my agent, about to go on the market.  Cross fingers for that one too.

I'm still working on the comic/game project that I will be able to reveal any day now, on which I'm both writing and editing.

I'm working on some other comic stuff, including a major crossover.  Details to come.

Tomorrow I'll be starting the actual writing of Cold Black Hearts, the follow-up to Missing White Girl and River Runs Red.  It's more purely horror than the other two, but still retains elements of thrillers, and like those others begins with the feel of a thriller, but quickly introduces the supernatural.  It's set in borderland southwestern New Mexico.  Also unlike the other two, it focuses more closely on a single character and has a smaller cast of additional characters.  And atypically for me, that main protagonist is a woman (I did it in Witch Season, but most often my protagonists are men, or, as in the case of River Runs Red, male and female co-protagonists).  Cold Black Hearts is due in August, and will be published sometime in 2009.

I think that's it for the moment.  Feels like plenty from here.  For a change, I have no tie-in work in the immediate future, just originals.

And I'm about half done with the spring firebreak outside...lots more cuttin' to do.

New interview and review

NVH (New Voices in Horror) Magazine has posted a review of Missing White Girl, and a brief interview with me, in their April issue.  Check it out here.

Astonishing

One of the "defense contractors" supplying arms to the Afghan military and police forces, through a $300 million federal contract, is 22-year-old Efraim Diveroli, who has been supplying, among other things, ammunition manufactured in China in 1966.  Surprise--it doesn't work all that well.

Diveroli was found in possession of a falsified driver's license, making him appear four years older than his actual age.  He has been arrested for fighting with a parking valet.  An ex-girlfriend had to get a court order against him for domestic abuse reasons.  His company's VP is a 25-year-old licensed masseur.

And yet, the Bush administration considered him a reasonable guy to go into the arms business with.  I guess we're lucky he wasn't given a cabinet position.

The whole bizarre tale is at the New York Times.

The cost of Iraq

4,000+ U.S. soldiers dead.
33,000+ U.S. soldiers killed or wounded.
More than half a trillion dollars spent, and counting.
The last 12 months have been the most deadly for U.S. soldiers since the war began just over five years ago.
The war is good only for companies like Halliburton, KBR, and Blackwater, making billions off taxpayer money.
It's past time to end a war that never should have begun.

Cochise Stronghold

Yesterday, showing off our part of the state to a guest from San Diego, we visited Cochise Stronghold, the area where the great Apache chief Cochise (after whom our county is named) held off the U.S. Army for more than a decade, largely thanks to the rugged landscape.  From the Stronghold's higher reaches it was possible to see soldiers coming from miles away, and easy to blend in or fade away. The day was perfect, warm but not overly hot, and not terribly windy (a situation which has changed overnight, with pummeling winds blowing out of the East).

Here are some photos from the Stronghold.  From below, it's not hard to imagine being a U.S. trooper feeling Apache eyes on you as you enter the canyon.  From above, you can see far into the valley.

  This is a type of yucca appropriately called Shindagger, because the leaves are like needles pointing down and jabbing you in the shins. Another of the Stronghold's peaks is in the distance.
 

  After the Stronghold we went up through the small town of Dragoon, into beautiful Texas Canyon, where we visited the Amerind Museum.  The museum houses a spectacular collection of Native American artifacts and artworks from throughout North and South America, all on grounds of incredible beauty.

Almost next door to the museum is the Triangle T Guest Ranch, where we indulged in a cowboy lunch, along with some Brothers of the Third Wheel, motorcyclists who ride trikes instead of two-wheeled cycles.  We ended our day in the Texas Canyon/Little Dragoon Mountains area with a trip to local roadside attraction The Thing.

Happy Easter

Happy Easter, to all who celebrate it!

Iraq and Public Policy

Two interesting statements on Iraq and how it affects our national security, now and in the years to come:

One by Josh Marshall of TalkingPointsMemo.com, whose training is as a historian, and
one in yet another speech by Barack Obama.

Marshall's is about John McCain's innate unfitness to serve as Commander in Chief, based on the fact that in spite of the fact that he's a Vietnam veteran and a former POW, he's utterly in the dark--willfully or otherwise--about the world today.  Choice quote:  "Hillary Clinton has stipulated to McCain's qualifications as Commander-in-Chief; and Obama, implicitly, does the same. But his record actually shows he's one of the most dangerous people we could have in the Oval Office in coming years -- not just because he's a hothead in using the military, but more because he seems genuinely clueless about the real challenges and dangers the country is facing. He's too busy living in the fantasy world where our future as a great power and our very safety are all bound up in Iraq."

Horton

One of the first books I ever owned was Dr. Seuss's Happy Birthday to You!  And one of my most prized possessions now is a thank you note he sent me when I was a bookstore manager in La Jolla, where he lived (and where his wife Audrey could often be seen around town, driving the Cadillac with the "Grinch" license plate).  I only met him once, at an ABA convention far from our mutual hometown, but I've read most of his books (some of them many, many times) and consider him one of the all-time greats.

Here's the note--the Cat is printed on the paper but the word balloon is in his own hand, as is the Ted Geisel signature. It hangs on my office wall, just to the right of my desk.

So it was with great interest that I went to see Horton Hears a Who last night. Suffered through it, actually, not because the movie was bad but because the theater was so cold that I literally wore my gloves through the entire movie.

The movie itself was mostly entertaining. Horton is voiced by Jim Carrey, doing a bit that once was the exclusive province of Robin Williams--if there wasn't a lot of improvisation in it, it was cleverly scripted to sound like it.  There were voices and shticks galore, even at one point a Henry Kissinger gag that would no doubt fly over the heads of most of the intended audience.  Steve Carrell, Will Arnett and Carol Burnett also did terrific voice work.

I like CGI animation most when there are no people involved--they still can't get people quite right, and it calls attention to the process, rather than inviting me into the world.  There was a trailer for the upcoming Disney/Pixar Wall*e, for instance, which looked great as long as it was focused on robots, and then artificial when people showed up.

For Dr. Seuss, CGI works beautifully (and there were some bits of 2-D animation worked in, in pure Seussian style, as well as a hilarious anime sequence).  I don't think I've ever seen the world of Dr. Seuss presented as purely as it was here, realistic in its depiction of such an imaginatively unrealistic world.  But there were no details that I could see that were left out--no bits of the real world working there way into the Seuss world.

So if you're a Seuss fan or you have a kid or can borrow one, go see it.  But depending on where you see it, you might want to wear thermal underwear...

Side note--we saw yet another Iron Man trailer.  Obviously it's not a call that can be made without seeing the movie itself, but visually, and from what little can be seen in the trailers, it looks like Iron Man will be a serious contender for the best superhero movie ever made (with the exception, of course, of the 1960s Adam West Batman).  We saw some of the armor in person at Comic-Con last summer, and it looked great, and on screen it all looks just amazing.

The Wire, revisited

David Simon on The Wire's final season, from Huffingtonpost.com.  Wire fans, check it out.

Obama's "Catholic speech"

Barack Obama gave a speech today in Philadelphia that will be widely compared to JFK's "Catholic speech," in which he declared to the world that while he followed the Pope on religious matters, he followed the law and the Constitution on matters of state.  Mitt Romney tried to overcome concerns about his Mormonism with a similar speech, but his speech was more laughable than laudable in many of its aspects.

Here's the text of Obama's speech. 

If you haven't seen the broadcast, take a look, and read what might be the most significant single speech on the topic of race delivered in this country for the last hundred years.  Certainly since the passage of the Civil Rights Act. 

Obama doesn't remind us that one out of every nine black men from 20-34 years of age in America is currently in prison.  But that's a staggering, sobering statistic, and only by taking on the issue of America's racial divide can we hope to turn it around.  Even if Obama's campaign were about nothing else, that would make it worthwhile.  In fact, his campaign is about a lot of things.  This is one of the most important, but not the only issue.  It is one, however, that he's uniquely qualified to talk about, among the candidates, and it's worth hearing what he has to say.