New Comic

I've done a lot of book and collectible buying in the past month or so. I bought some more fiction by Michael Chabon. I really enjoy his work. He's quite the writer.

Latest pickup on the comic book front is a copy of TALES TO ASTONISH #25. It has a great Jack Kirby cover and was mainly picked up as part of my quest to collect the Silver Age work of Steve Ditko.

Short Story Mentality

I'm trying to make some time to create a short story. I've gotten a bit rusty when it comes to writing short fiction. Short stories are a lot of fun to write, but sometimes they're just hard work. I've been writing novel-length fiction for so long that I'm having a hard time getting back to working in the short story format. It takes a completely different mental attitude to create a short story--in some ways it's far more difficult in that I am unable to accept a leisurely pace in the creation process.

As I daydream and try to get back into that groove, I'll also pine away for the mountain vistas that I've neglected for so many months. I'm hoping to get myself back to the southern peaks as soon as I can.


Mill Creek Falls--in West Virginia. Remains one of the prettiest waterfalls I've ever seen.

Potato Knob in West Virginia. I don't get into technical climbing, so this is about as close to that as I'll go. This wall of rock is what's known as "Class III" climbing. It looks like it's straight up, but there are plenty of handholds. You can get hurt if you slip, of course, but you'd have to be careless or a terrible klutz. I went up this section in quick order.

This was taken along a cliffside trail in Hanging Rock State Park in North Carolina.

High Country Places

Just a some spots I've passed in my wanderings through the high country of my native South. It's been far too long since I've gone hiking or backpacking. Carole and I haven't even had time to go camping in our travel trailer because of my writing commitments of the past year and because we spent so much of our vacation effort going to Yellowstone last year.

I really need to get back up to my mountains. I miss them terribly.

Shopping 101

Well, we went shopping today. Carole and I went to see her mom as we try to do at least once a week. There is a mall near her house so we stopped off there to do some Christmas shopping. It wasn't too bad, I have to say. The traffic was bearable and it was easy to find parking and there wasn't an absolute crush of humanity in the mall itself. So it was actually a pleasant experience.

I suffer from SDD--Shopping Deficit Disorder. Like most men I'm just not into shopping. I don't understand how women get such a kick out of it. So I try to find a nice place where I be a bit of a vegetable and watch the human beings and maybe read a book. This was easy to do because they have a Borders Bookstore in there and we nabbed some cookbooks and novels as gifts and--since two of the books were MY gifts--I read part of one of them (Chabon's THE YIDDISH POLICEMAN'S UNION: A Novel). Looking forward to Christmas morning when I can unwrap that one and read it for real.

I also like to go into malls from time to time because they're the best places to watch people. All kinds of people. Especially pretty women. All the pretty women go shopping in malls. Yep, I'm a lout. "Is that all you care about? Looking at women's breasts?" my wife complains. No, there are always their asses, too.

The food court. We stopped here and had a tad to eat.

This was some kind of Santa bubble. People were lined up here and they'd go inside and have photos taken of their kids sitting on Santa's lap. I think the crazy thing was sponsored by the movie studio that makes those damnable Narnia movies.

I called this one "The Orca Dress". Carole was not amused.

We found a store in there that sells absolutely nothing but Hello Kitty shit. For real.

This is the Borders Books where we spent some money buying Christmas gifts for ourselves and for others. It was really busy in there. I was impressed.

Music of My Youth

I liked the music from the late 70s and early 80s. I enjoyed keeping up with pop in those days. Not for decades, now. Because I'm an old man? Couldn't say.

These guys had me ready to start a revolution. Alas.

Debbie Harry: what a beauty.

YOW!

If you can learn and perform these tunes, I'll be totally impressed:

I always liked this one because it mentions Tibet and Palestine.
(Yes, I know a number of nations have been "created" since. Still a cool song.)

If I Only had a Gort

"If I Only Had a Gort"
With apologies to Yip Harburg

I could wipe away the towers, that crowd out all the flowers and crush trees of every sort.
And the cities I'd be scorchin' while yer countries I'd be torchin'
If I only had a Gort.

I'd unravel every nation without any bit o' patience, For the citizens of course.
With the panic you'd be knowin' you would feel yer life a-goin'
If I only had a Gort.

Oh, I could show you why Civilization's end is sure. I could think of killings never known before. And then I'd sit, and kill some more.

I would make yer navies nothin', their ships all full of stuffin' The seas bereft of ports.
I would dance and be merry, and yer towns-o I would bury,
If I only had a Gort.

Get 'em, Gort!

We are ruled by corporations.

The Giant Load of Sawdust

Sawdust.

I've actually written about sawdust before.

I'm surprised how many people don't even know what sawdust is when I mention it. These are folk, I suppose, who've never used a saw or seen a lumber mill. I've always been around it--whether building shelves in my dad's bookstore or sawing wood for a building project, or using the stuff as filler in a garden, or when visiting an actual sawmill. I love the smell of it, especially from yellow pine lumber.

I know a little about sawdust. At least I know what it is.

In addition to using it as filler and fertilizer in a garden, sawdust has a ton of other uses. Some companies take it and mix it with resins and turn it into particle board. There are outfits that transform it into pellets and sell it as fuel for steam turbines. Some places burn it in furnaces. You can ferment it and make wood alcohol. I've even been told that it can be made into various types of adhesives.

One thing that I don't know much about is the subject of economics. About the only thing I do know is how one makes a profit. You buy low and sell high. Or higher than you bought, at any rate. If you buy something for ten cents and sell it for twenty-five cents then you did well. That's about all I know about economics.

I've long suspected that our entire economy is based on a shell game. Or that it's all some kind of super-sized Ponzi scheme. (Well, I have to admit that I am knowledgeable enough about economics that I know what Ponzi scheme is.) Sometimes the process of business in the USA just seems like a con to me. It doesn't make sense and it doesn't add up. The numbers are just too large and watching the prices of what is sold compared to the information that I have for how much that object cost seems completely impossible.

What got me really dwelling on this subject occurred some years back. In those days I was making a living hauling molding paper (old comic books) up and down the eastern seaboard and selling that stuff as collectibles. I did pretty good at that for a long time. On one of these trips I was driving my van filled up with thousands of pounds of moldy paper ("valuable comic books") and decided that I needed to pass the large truck in front of me. As I got closer to that large truck and its high and canvas covered load, I began to notice flakes and bits of sawdust flying toward me. It was coming from the load the huge truck was carrying. I figured that they were carrying lumber.


I was wrong.

As I passed them I noticed that the truck was hauling not lumber but just plain old sawdust. And not just sawdust but ragged sawdust. This stuff was more like flakes than dust--the mill must have used a ragged blade or else these were wood chippings that had been run through a grinder to be sold as just that--snowflake-like chips. The truck had a driver and another worker riding along. He must have been a paid assistant, I figured.

Okay. Huge truck hauling big load of sawdust with two employees. Big deal. I drove on.

Later, either that truck sped up or I slowed down. Neither matters, but what they did was pass me. So I rode along again behind them while being showered intermittently with flakes of sawdust that were crawling out from around the canvas and mesh holding it all in. In a while either I sped up or they slowed down and I passed them again. No biggie.

This went on for quite some time. The two of us played leapfrog every twenty or fifty miles. No harm. If not for the flying sawdust I'd hardly have noticed, and they probably never noticed me at all.

For about two hundred miles this went on. Finally, I had to veer off of the Interstate I'd been sharing with this giant load of sawdust and they kept on going. I watched them vanish as I went right and they went on north. That's when it hit me:

The whole project with the sawdust didn't make any sense to me. Yeah, it was a fairly big load of dust. But they were probably hauling almost as much air as they were wood. The sawdust was, as I said, of relatively bulky dimensions and not the smaller, easily packed stuff. And then I started to think of the cost of the diesel fuel they were burning to move that damned sawdust for hundreds of miles along a Georgia highway (we were in Georgia--I don't think I mentioned that). And the driver was being paid. And probably the guy riding along with him.


It occurred to me that it was just about impossible for there to have been a real and actual profit in the moving of a buttload of plain old sawdust across the state of Georgia. It just did NOT make any economic sense to me. How many sheets of particle board could it make? Not that many, really. How many pounds of fuel pellets could be produced by the stuff? Not enough to justify the expending of all of that diesel fuel--surely not! Suddenly it made no sense to me, at all. Someone was paying good money to transport a lot of sawdust a really silly distance for reasons that were a mystery to me.

Like the USA economy in general, it just did not freaking compute. It was like part of a huge scam. A silly rip-off being perpetrated by one shyster on a crowd of yokels.

So this bothered me for quite some time. As I drove along, hauling my load of moldy paper across the eastern seaboard, stopping now and again at comic book shows to sell it.

America.

Someone explain it to me.

The Year with No Christmas Tree

Well, this year will be our first one ever without a Christmas tree. The townhouse is going to be messy with painting and new carpet/flooring going in. So a Christmas tree was just too much of a hassle for us. We didn't want the headache. If we still had a kid in the house, it would have been different. But let's face it--Christmas ain't the same when you don't have a child in the household. The holiday is just tons more fun when you can watch your son's face light up when he looks at that tree and opens the presents on Christmas morning.

When they grow up and leave you alone in the house, the effort doesn't seem worth it.

Alas.

The tree we picked out last year in Sparta, NC at the Crazy Fox Christmas Tree Patch.

So what we'll do is...well, we'll do without. We're gifting ourselves with new furniture in fits and starts. We bought the china cabinet last month, and my new office desk two weeks ago (which we haven't even assembled due to the painting/flooring deal) and a new secretary today. Still a few pieces to go.

The new secretary at the bottom of the stairs.

Well, there it is. We'll go to Carole's mom's place on Christmas morning to exchange gifts. She'll have a tree, so it'll be almost like old times. But no trip to the mountains this year to search out and choose our own evergreen. All things come to an end, I guess.

Carole, at our favorite Christmas tree farm, last year.

Merry Christmas!

I like to post this at Christmas, or at least send it as an e-card. It's very sweet. Enjoy:

Fantastic Four #28

Yesterday I read some good news for the family of Jack Kirby. As those of you who frequent this blog will know, I admire Jack Kirby quite a lot and I've always been horrified of the way he was stripped of the acknowledgment that he created most of the characters that generated the success of Marvel Comics. With few exceptions, one can point to virtually all of the superhero comics of Marvel's early days and find the hand of Jack Kirby solely involved in their creation.

Yeah, yeah, he's supposed to be "co-creator". Even Ernest Hemingway had an editor. Big deal.

The first things that I recall actually reading were comic books. And the first two comic books that I ever read were illustrated and written by Jack Kirby. Either my mom or my dad bought me a few comics at a local bookstore on Norwich Street before I was even old enough to go to grade school. The first of these comics was Fantastic Four #4. I was amazed and read the damned thing to pieces.

I wanted to read some more of this stuff, so my mom took me to the used bookstore where she'd bought that one and I found another issue in the stacks. This one was Fantastic Four #12. Of course I loved the issue and never forgot the story and those amazing images.

After that, though, it was mainly Disney comics and Jesse Marsh adaptations of Edgar Rice Burroughs' JOHN CARTER. These were the only comics I could get from relatives and family members for a time, and so I didn't get to see any more superhero comics until we moved to Atlanta and my dad opened his first bookstore. And then, brothers and sisters, I had so many comics to read it should have been a crime.

The first superhero comic that I can recall reading after my dad opened his store was Fantastic Four #28. It was probably only a year old at that point, and once again I found myself hooked on superhero books. This time there were no limitations because soon my dad had about a quarter of a million of the damned things stacking up in his warehouse and I could read them at will. And there was a drug store down the street from our house that had the new ones on the stands. And my pals all read comics and their big brothers read comics and we'd all sit around talking about them and trading them and reading them.

Today I finally landed a reader's copy of Fantastic Four #28. It's not an investment quality book, but I just wanted to hold it in my hands and look at it the same way I did when I was a kid in the third grade in Decatur Georgia.

Yep. It brought back some good memories. If I close my eyes I'm still living on Mead Road and my pal Wayne Culver lives one street over. We're probably going to go walk to the hobby shop and look at the latest Aurora kits and see if the new issue of Famous Monsters is on the stands. Maybe he found some new Outer Limits trading cards I don't have. And we'll talk about the Fantastic Four, of course.

My own copy of Fantastic Four #28, featuring Jack Kirby's Fantastic Four and some of his other creations, the X-Men.

A Ray of Hope

Sometimes a little good news.

If I Were a Zombie

If I Were a Zombie:
(With apologies to Bock & Harnick)

If I were a zombie,
Ya ha deedle deedle, bubba bubba deedle deedle dum.
All day long I'd biddy biddy stalk.
If I were an undead man.
I wouldn't have to work hard.
Ya ha deedle deedle, bubba bubba deedle deedle dum.
If I were a biddy biddy geek,
Yidle-diddle-didle-living dead.

James R. Smith as zombie, image courtesy Stuart Gardner.

Revisions

I'm currently working on minor revisions on THE LIVING END. I have to finish these and get them back to the publisher with all due haste.

Generally, when I revisit a novel that has already been written and accepted, the editing process is largely a tedious and sometimes maddening experience. But with THE LIVING END I'm having a good time revisiting the characters and reliving the story.

As a rule, I don't sit around crowing about my work. I know writers who do this and their personalities grind on my nerves. It's a very undignified way to act, and these folk are among my least favorite people. And this is one of the main reasons I stopped attending writers gatherings and genre conventions. I just got sick of the unjustified bragging going on, and I just couldn't tolerate hanging around those ego-mad chumps, each of which were constantly crowing about their rising accomplishments and how they were going to take the media world by storm.

That said, I have gotten a huge kick out of seeing that THE LIVING END is every bit as good as I had hoped it would be. It's a different kind of horror novel. The story is something that I've always looked for in the genre, but never quite found. I rounded up all of the logic holes that appear in this type of story, closed them up, and built a really solid foundation. THE LIVING END is an excellent work that I would compare to the best horror tales around these days.

OK. End of the hype.

For now, at least.

They're Out There

I've actually met this kind of guy. They seem to keep popping up:

Dinosaurs and Giant Mammals

I read an interesting article about mammal diversification and gigantism that took place after the dinosaurs kicked off. I've always thought it was cool how certain species trend toward huge size as they elbow the competition out of an ecological niche. Or an ecological corridor in the case of something like Indricotherium or Deinotherium. Amazing creatures.

Scale illustration of Indricotherium with a modern African elephant and a human. These guys were getting up toward the general size of a respectable sauropod dinosaur. All that mammals needed was room to spread their wings, so to speak.

Deinotherium was a far larger animal than I had known before I read the recent articles about the early explosion of size in terrestrial mammals.

Hanging out with a tame hadrosaur a couple of weeks ago. Being careful not to step in the dinosaur poop lying around.

THE LIVING END!

Official announcement time.

I signed with Severed Press (of Australia) for my zombie novel, THE LIVING END. They're looking to publish in early 2011. I'll post more details as I can find the time.

The guys in Australia do know their horror fiction and were early passengers on the zombie bandwagon. Or, heck...they were probably driving it.

My zombies and dogs as delineated by Mark Masztal.

It Will Happen Here

Carole took this one of me and Andy at Mammoth Hot Springs. Not too many years ago energy companies wanted to tap the thermal aquifer beneath Yellowstone National Park to run steam turbines to create electricity. This would effectively have destroyed most, if not all, of the thermal features in the park.

Until I get a chance to go back west and visit Yellowstone and other National Parks in those amazing places, I'll be poring over the photos we took and reliving those memories. For years I have realized that our remaining wild lands are existing on the verge of destruction. It's only a matter of time--and I'm convinced short time--until they're all either outright destroyed or ruined beyond only the application of peace and time to restore.

And, of course, restored only in the absence of Mankind.

Looking at our parks and wilderness areas, reduced to relatively small patches of territory around the Earth, I can see now that saving it all is an impossibility and that the final destruction of our remaining ecosystems and the living things who dwell within them is a lost cause. For these artificial boundaries that we set up to indicate a park or national forest or protected wilderness are ephemeral and easily destroyed through the same legislative acts that created these tenuous boundaries.

To see what can and will happen one has only to look to recent history in places like Rwanda and the Sudan. There, National Park boundaries were ignored and overrun by desperate people displaced by poverty and warfare. In short order they became wastelands where animals were nothing but food for the raving hoards of weapon-carrying humans and the forests were felled for fuel and housing, the waters fouled. So much for parks.

Think it can't happen here? It can, and will. Already I read of timber poachers who creep into National Parks to surreptitiously fell old growth trees in the absence of rangers. We can't afford rangers, you see, and there are more than enough desperate assholes in the USA willing to rape their own parks to cut down ancient hardwoods to sell for enough money to buy a big screen TV. Bears are shot for body parts to sell to rich Asians who believe in old superstitions that instruct them that consuming such things will increase their potency and likelihood of conceiving a male heir.

Even in Yellowstone, which showed me the power of Nature, the park is constantly under threat. Land owners and gun rights madders are whipped into a frenzy of insanity over the existence of wolves and bison which they see as threats. These idiots don't understand that they're being used by energy and real estate interests to weaken laws and regulations that protect these creatures. Without those protections rich men can become even richer mining the earth and mowing down the forests and building atop the places that now serve as home for the creatures that are just in the way of their profits.

Our parks are doomed. Our forests will be cut. Our rivers will be fouled. Our fellow creatures will be exterminated. All of this will be done for money.

And the only thing one can really do for it is to see it all before it's gone. So if you want to witness an unspoiled mountain vista free of urban sprawl, then I suggest you get yourself to such a place and hike into it with all due speed. If you want to see a free-roaming herd of bison living as they once did before Man arrived on the scene, then I think you should rush out to one of the few parks left that afford you this chance and lay your eyes upon it. If you hunger to walk through virgin forests of old growth trees then you'd best hurry up and do so, because between timber companies and invasive pests and climate change and mysterious diseases I fear we're going to see the end of such places in quick order.

Mother Nature does fine art with super-heated water and mineral deposition.

If these hot springs were ever tapped, they would be destroyed.

The ever-changing pools at the top of Mammoth Hot Springs.

Hot springs and mountain vistas.

One of the amazing roaring features we witnessed on our Yellowstone trip.

This huge buffalo was using a dust wallow on a steep slope above the valley.

It was the beginning of the rut and this bull was staking out this cow and warning everyone away. Later that same day, I watched a group of motor bikers pull up beside an enormous bull bison sitting in a wallow beside the road, walk up to him, surround the animal, as one of the idiots reached out to touch the almost one-ton buffalo. Humans can, and will, destroy everything that they can get their mitts on.

Telephoto shot of part of one of the enormous herds we watched in Hayden Valley.

A bit of the hundreds-strong herd in Hayden Valley. Once upon a time, the west was all like this for thousands and thousands of miles. We've destroyed 98% of it, but that apparently is not enough. That remaining 2% must, apparently, also go away.

View of 10,300-foot Mount Washburn, which I had climbed a day earlier. It has one building on it, and would, some would argue, be better off if it could be covered in subdivisions and gas stations. I am reminded of Highlands NC and the hideous sprawl of houses wrecking the slopes every time I look at an unspoiled mountain.

Extinction Events

The birds in my novel THE FLOCK are Terror birds, also known as Phorusrhacids were an extinct form of the modern type we know as ratites. These are almost all large birds that are flightless. Most of them today are much smaller than the Terror birds and are herbivorous rather than carnivorous. Why the herbivores thrived while the flesh-eaters died out is a matter for paleontologists to puzzle. About the closest we have to the Terror birds these days would be the Cassowary which is considered the most dangerous living bird, having killed a total of two human beings in the past few hundred years. I've read that they do occasionally chase down and consume insects and small reptiles, thus making them omnivorous rather than strict herbivores. Like most of today's amazing creatures, they're near extinction.

Recently, I read that the eggshell of the extinct Aepyornis, the heaviest bird known to have ever lived, gave up its DNA. This is, I suppose, something of a genetic coup, but I don't know if it means that the species can be resurrected. From what I've read on the subject, I rather doubt it. Still, it's interesting to know that the DNA of these critters can be recovered and studied, if not actually used to recreate the lost animals. Which is a shame, of course, because unlike the Terror birds who exist only in my novel, ratites such as Aepyornis and the moas of New Zealand were killed off by humans and not by the normal means of Natural Selection.

Hometown Jinx

For some reason I have never been able to generate any exposure for my writing here in town. I've tried getting the local press to cover my various releases, but nothing doing. Today (November 21) I held my first hometown signing for the release of the trade paperback version of THE FLOCK. The store (Park Road Books) was a nice enough shop, and they were kind to give me space and promote the appearance. But for the first time ever for one of my signings, I didn't sell a single book. Not one. Oh, well. It was bound to happen.

So it goes.

Looking forward now to some signing events out of town. We're planning Atlanta, Asheville, Boston, etc. Better luck points north, west, south and east than here in Charlotte.

Worst.
Signing event.
Ever.