Category: news

Four or five days late, but, you know, I was finishing a novel. So. Three of my best reads from 2014 weren’t actually 2014 books, as it turned out: John Scalzi’s Redshirts, Jeff Lemire’s The Underwater Welder, and Megan Abbott’s Dare Me. But, from 2014, it’s got to be Lev Grossman’s The Magician’s Land, Matt Kindt’s continuing MIND MGMT, Tod Goldberg’s Gangsterland, Steven Pinker’s The Sense of Style, …

For the weekend, anyway. And, I’m thinking this is my third time in the Midland Reporter-Telegram? I showed up once when I was about twelve, though I cannot begin to suspect what for. Oh, no: maybe it was for Old Settlers Days in Stanton. And maybe it was the news, not the paper. I was cutting cowchips with my knife, to win the big (throwing) contest. Which, I did, but not that year. Anyway, MRT is also the first place I was ever published. I was about twelve then as well. My littl…

My second or third year teaching, somebody caught me in a hallway, asked me my thoughts on how detective fiction’s put together. And, listening to myself answer—of course I’d been reading noir and p.i. and crime and thriller forever—I realized that I only knew detective fiction as a reader, not a writer. And I say ‘only,’ but not to diminish. Rather, to highlight that how I learn about a thing, it’s by doing that thing. So, dissatisfied with my …

Man, the links and updates get away from me. I can usually remember to stuff them to the right, here, under Interviews/Stories/Off-Site, but I don’t always remember to put them here. So, doing it now, here. What I can recall from the last two weeks or so (will try to make all the images links):

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Back in the late nineties, I’d see Stephen Dixon stories all over and flip back to his author bio at the end of the journal or whatever not because I didn’t already know it, but for the rush: it always said he had some three hundred stories published. I had maybe six at the time? Three hundred was an amazing, impossible, never-get-there kind of number. And I’m not there yet. This isn’t that post. Though I did just total up my stories from print- and e-mags a…

saw this at BizarroCon this weekend. it’s one of one. the rest coming soon.…

Update, Steve. Got to remember, got to remember:

• City of the Dead is easily the best haunted house I’ve ever been to. I learned both NOT to get lost in the backtunnels visitors aren’t supposed to stumble into, and also to NOT let my wallet chain get caught on the wall when Leatherface is chasing me

• hit two movie premieres recently: Monkey’s Paw in LA and Winter in the Blood in Austin

• I was on HuffPost Live, talking “Terrifying Television.” was fun

Thanks to Jesse Lawrence for the heads-up on The Final Girls. Excited. ABC gave us HARPER’S ISLAND, yes? One of the best miniseries ever. And, this premise of a final girl support group is something I’ve been playing with for a while myself. So, this’ll either make it obsolete—which is great, I should have been faster—or it’ll show me what not to do (not hoping for this outcome at all). Anyway, looks like good people all around. Excited. Also, for thos…

Just talking World War Z. Which, I mean, I was doing that anyway, so, you know, it all worked out:

http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2013/06/27/how-world-war-z-stands-up-to-the-zombie-film-genre

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Man, check this out:

My students’ most recent project suite on @stephengjones72‘s fantastic novel, Demon Theory: gbdh.sadiron.com/demon-theory-p…

— Chuck Rybak (@ChuckRybak) April 23, 2013

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