Category: SGJ

First, as this is just all about the end of THE DESCENT, then, yep, it’s just chock full of spoilers. So stop here if:

• you’ve not seen it
• you’re going to see it
• and you don’t like to know how a thing’s going to end

Not meaning to say THE DESCENT has a gimmick-ending or anything — we don’t change perspective and slowly become aware that these are just action figures in a toy bin. But the two endings it does have, in being at odds with each oth…

Looks like, in pre-celebration for TURISTAS¹, Demon Theory pulled two reviews this week:

• 
&

• 

Cool places each, though the reviews are kind of opposites of each other.

Anyway, it’s none other than Mike Bracken on the Toxic Universe one. Which, I mean — for my first novel, I remember telling somebody that it would only be complete when I knew that Gerald Vizenor had read it. And then, bam, it was suddenly complete before it was even publis…

hey, way down in that Halloweenie post I wrapped up by lamenting that there were no pics leftover of my shirt. Turns out it was a lie. There’s this one (click it to enlarge):

The farthest-back person in the room’s my friend William J Cobb, and the frontmost is Jay McInerney. I’m in the middle of an imaginary line between them, posing with a coke (there was no sweet tea). Right in front of me’s Amanda Eyre Ward. Or, hey: just look for the guy in the goofy red sh…

Showed up at the wrong bookstore Halloween night to do a DEMON THEORY signing — kind of awkward when you’re wearing a Jason mask, carrying a big fake knife — but finally found the right one, had a blast (notice all the LISEY’S STORYs behind me there, yeah?). Rented FEAST that night as well, though of course had to watch HALLOWEEN instead, just because I’m sentimental, and half-trying to study it, I suppose, to see where there’s room for Ro…

Just a couple of quick links:

• Wooden Spoon’s posted a cool Demon Theory review
• In anticipation & celebration of Halloween, that fifth page of the Demon Theory quiz-thing‘s been very updated
• I just last night rung that 100-page bell on the novel I started a few days ago, which has a title still probably too tentative to say, as it might lock me into it or something. Anyway, about it: the rule this time around’s that nobody can kill anybody, and there can be

Just thinking about what I said in that last post, about how I don’t do reviews because I’m pretty sure I’d set my standards impossibly high, just so I could shoot down every book in my path. That may be a little too broad a statement, though — I don’t mean to suggest that all reviews that burn a book are similarly motivated. Granted, some reviewers just have bad attitudes (Tobias Wolff, of course, in “Bullet to the Brain,” shoots one of them …

Well, I mean, yeah, because he’s got titles like THE LUST LIZARD OF MELANCHOLY COVE and PRACTICAL DEMONKEEPING. These are what originally got me peeling his books up from the shelves back whenever ago. Years already, I guess. Too, though, I’ve yet to read a CMoore book that hasn’t made me smile, and then impressed me too, somehow. Like this, from A DIRTY JOB, which I just finished ten minutes ago:

• “Oh, goddamn,” said Minty Fresh (damn on the dow

Editor Y:

In today’s trend-oriented publishing climate, you need to either be the celebrity-of-the-moment or you need to have a bulletproof plan to plug into what’s hot, what’s guaranteed, what there’s already an audience for. And, sir/madam/etc., that you don’t already know my name from the tabloids should suggest that, while not infamous for killing or raping or stalking somebody, which is pretty much the standard for literary poten

Of all the footnotes I cut from DEMON THEORY, there’s an OLIVER TWIST / ANIMAL HOUSE one that I maybe miss the most. There was this fun, ceramic-pig oriented Pynchon-one too though, I suppose, which scuttled through PLAYBOY and I forget all-where. And more and more. This, though, it’s one that I never actually put to paper, only considered: getting to LOST via MILLENIUM via X-FILES or something — Terry O’Quinn seems to be in about everything I like. E…

• if someone at a party gets some kind of news that makes them drop what they’re drinking, the glass won’t shatter
• if two people are fighting and one of them has a pistol, then that person with the pistol will win. Which is to say we won’t have to have that shot of the gun sliding away
• if anybody’s carrying a bag of groceries, then not only will it have toilet paper instead of a loaf of French bread, but the bag won’t be paper either
• if a character is despon