My Blog

Even the horse is overwhelmed.

Go here: http://www.freefantasybook.com/

The “Last Book Sale” post, that is. I think. I deleted then reposted all the pictures, and they seem to be okay now. So, the one or two of you who were interested can go back and look. G’head, g’head. Let me know if glitches remain.

My pal Cat Connor just tagged me and, well, when you’re it, you’re it. Sooooo:

Ten Interview Questions for The Next Big Thing:

What is the working title of your book?

Which one? Okay, fine, the three Most Close to Being Readable:

a. The Ship to Look for God

b. Partholon

c. Frank Vaughn, Killed by his Mom

Where did the idea come from for the book?

a. Ship- from an offhand remark, along the lines of “My luck, I’ll get to Heaven and God won’t be there.”

b. Partholon- from those weird anthrax letters in Florida, DC and NYC.

c. Frank- from a bizarre trip I took across the south in 1965.

What genre does your book fall under?

a. Ship- epic fantasy, but not high fantasy. Says a lot about my geekdom that I know what that is.

b. Partholon- post-apocalyptic.

d. Frank- magical realism

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

a. Ship- Tommy Lee Jones for Otto, Javier Bardem for Ferdinand (No Country for Old Men reunion) and Hayden Panatierre for Claudia.

b. Partholon- Kiefer Sutherland for John Rashkil, Shia LeBouf for Collier.

c. Frank- Freddie Highmore for Butch, Gerard Butler for Dad.

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

a. Ship- Otto dies and wakes up in Heaven, discovers God is not there, so joins a group of misfits building a rocket to go look for Him.

b. Partholon- Campus policeman John Rashkil survives a biological attack on the northeast US, only to face a bigger evil rising from the ruins.

c. Frank- in the summer of 1965, a ten-year-old accompanies his manic depressive and wildly violent Dad on a Homeric journey across a changing South.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

Partholon is under contract with Rebel EPublishers. As for the others, who knows?

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

a. Ship took about a year because I was having so much fun writing it.

b. Partholon took about three months.

c. Frank took about six months.

Now, ask me how long it took to do the revisions. And how many revisions. Go on. Ask.

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

a. Ship is like a very upbeat Lord of the Rings.

b. Partholon is in the I am Legend arena.

c. Frank is The Great Santini written by Homer.

Who or What inspired you to write this book?

a. Ship- the fun of replacing the old “harps and fluffy clouds” trope with a crazy Heaven filled with people who just shouldn’t be there (Doc Holliday??).

b. Partholon- hard to say. An inner conviction that, even in the worst possible situation, some people will do the right thing. Or at least attempt it.

c. Frank- it’s a story that just had to be told.

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

a. Ship- a lot of interesting characters keep showing up, from a Zulu chieftain who drives a Delorean to Rousseau, who tries to keep Otto from finding God. Did I mention the epic battle at the end between a hodgepodge of desert tribes led by an Indian lancer against a semi-futuristic army of angels or demons or something, we’re not quite sure what they are?  No?

b.  Partholon- action. Lots of it. Brutal, harsh, and no prisoners.

c. Frank- the title refers to a murder that happened in Lawton, OK in 1965. The murdered kid shows up.

Okay! That’s mine. Now for the next victims:

Sara J. Henry

A. S. King

Jose Bogran

EJ Knapp

Deanne Roy

These are the rules:

* Give credit to the person / blog that tagged you

* Post the rules for the blog hop

*Answer these ten questions about your current WIP (Work In Progress) on your blog

*Tag five other writers/bloggers and add their links so we can hop over and meet them.

Not sure what’s happening with the picture uploads.Dang internet. Bear with me…

I was tooling around the internet and came across this: http://www.addisonsauction.com/thelastbooksale.html Larry McMurtry is selling 300,000 books? So, I went.

I left Tuesday morning, 7 August, about 0830, and got to Shepherd AFB, TX on Thursday night, the 9th. About 1530 miles, 2 1/2 days, across Tennessee, Arkansas, and Oklahoma. I would have left on Monday, but my pickup truck, Nellie Bell, blew her coil packs the previous Thursday, seventy-five miles away from home, mind you. I had to leave her at the Ford dealer, rent a car, drive home, yell at the mechanic for the next three days, drive back to the dealer on Monday, drop off the rental, pick up Nellie, and then drive home again. So I was already 150 miles into this before I even left Virginia.

Incidentally, this is the only time in recorded history when an extended warranty actually paid off.

So, anyways, checked into VQ, passed out, got up the next morning and drove to Archer City, TX. Which looks a little different than the Shenandoah Valley:

Man, was it hot. (Texas, August. Get a clue, d.)

Booked Up,  Larry McMurtry’s store, is smack in the middle of Archer City, about two blocks away from the end of town (which is marked by the DQ):  

Yes, the sun went supernova while I was taking this picture.

Drove right past, I did, because I was counting on crowds of book freaks to be hanging out in front to guide me in. This is the only crowd I saw:

Where was everybody? I parked to get out and ask that very question, and who was the first person I see?

Yep, Larry McMurtry himself, walking around like he lived here or something. Or was just some regular guy, instead of a god-touched giant among authors. So, I mentioned to him that it seemed a bit odd that an Immortal would take on human form and walk among us:

He pretty much stayed away from me, after that.

Booked Up consists of four stores: the main one, brightly pictured above, and three other warehouses scattered hither and yon. I registered in Warehouse 2 with the auction staff:

The woman squatting below eye level is Larry McMurtry’s writing partner, Diana Ossana. She’s probably looking for her Oscar.

So, I started checking out the book lots for sale:

Holy inkwells, Batman, there sure am a loooooota books to go through! But I managed it, hitting all four warehouses in about five hours, marking out eight lots for bids. Each one had 175-200 books in them. Each. Questions of logistics presented themselves, such as, how in the blue blazing hell am I going to load 1600 books into Nellie Bell and drive them back to Virginia?

Eh. Worry about that later.

There were some interesting side items, like the Goodspeed sign up above, which once hung over a storied Boston bookshop, a place so storied that I’d never heard of it. ‘Course, I’d never heard of Archer City, TX, either. That’s right. In all my decades of patronizing bookstores, and for  all my admiration of God McMurtry, I didn’t know, until the auction notice, that Mr. McMurtry was a book scout, let alone owned a fabled bookstore.

I am, mostly, out of touch.

There was other stuff in the warehouses, like this board hanging up in the back storage lot of Booked Up #1:

See any signatures you recognize?

Some Larry McMurtry arcana in the front, none of which I could afford:

This was taped up inside the window of Warehouse #3:

Larry McMurtry uses a typewriter. But not White-out.

I took several breaks, mostly inside the Wildcat Cafe:   which has the best waitress in America, Mary Ann. She said the Cafe was staying open until 7 each night for the duration of the sale. They usually close at 2. In the afternoon.

Around 5, I wandered over to the Royal Theater for barbecue and a showing of The Last Picture Show:

 The barbecue was great, and all the free beer you could drink, which was greater. There’s Larry McMurtry standing up in the back, celebrating the free beer: 

Larry McMurtry introduced the film: , telling us stories, like how Peter Bogdanovich ordinarily wouldn’t have bothered with such a low-key hick town film, but he was between pictures and didn’t have anything else to do. Which proves your best work usually happens when you’re not paying attention. The film was shot in Archer City and it was a hoot recognizing places on screen you’d just been (like there were a lot of places to chose from; I think they shot the whole thing in about a one-block area). I saw it when it first came out back in, oh, what? 1902? and thought it a pretty bleak and depressing film. Time has not changed my opinion, which makes me wonder how many people in town were a bit PO’d at Mr. McMurtry when it came out.

Went back to VQ, passed out, came back the next day for the auction itself:

That’s Mike, the auctioneer, and you have to feel sorry for a guy who has to sell over 1500 lots in two days. He did a pretty good job, with a couple of glitches here and there brought on by the speed of the lot sales, some going in about twenty seconds. A few went for some pretty steep prices, $1500 and up, but the majority went between $100- 250. I got outbid on my first lot and on the Thomas Wolfe that Larry McMurtry had put on a separate list, called the McMurtry 100, so I took a break and went next door  and started talking to this guy:

He’s Matt McLemore, Larry McMurtry’s nephew, purveyor of fine hunting and fishing equipment and Lonesome Dove-themed t-shirts (bought three). We got into a conversation regarding sports and he said, “Say, are you interested in some books? I’ve got some in the back.”

Boy, did he. A whole room full, about a 1000 titles. Must run in the family.

I spent about an hour going over his shelves and bought six:    SF anthologies, my weakness, and cover art. A Jack Vance. A Harry Harrison, who recently died.

I wandered back to the auction just in time to buy my very first lot, for $100. Proud, I was, and I figured it’d be about three hours before the next lot I wanted came up so I took a break and headed over to the Wildcat, running into Mr. McMurtry again:        He was happy to see me:

I then went to Dollar General at the other end of town and bought three big plastic bins for the lot I purchased. If I ended up buying the other lots, I’d probably need nine more bins, so better wait and see because twelve big plastic bins stuffed with books and stacked up in Nellie Bell’s bed…they’ll ride all the way back to Virginia without mishap. Yeah, they will.

Went back to the auction pretty sure I was about a half hour early, and discovered they were on the last three lots. Mike the auctioneer had gone into warp speed, blasting through the remaining lots in about 2/3 of the time I calculated, passing on several lots, leaving them unsold. Kudos to him, but I was miffed, especially since three of the passed-by lots were ones I wanted. Coulda had ’em for $50 each.

Yes, I am an idiot.

But, it’s probably a good thing I didn’t get them because, when I packed my one lot, the three bins took up 3/4 of Nellie Bell’s space. No way I’da got nine more bins in there.

Sometimes idiocy pays off.

While I stood in line for, oh, six and a half days, to pay for my lot, I got to talking to other attendees. There was a buyer for Powell’s Books, a museum director, and an archeologist at Big Bend National Park, who had done his thesis on a 17th Century massacre of Spanish missionaries by the Comanches and the Ouachitas at Menard, Texas. He dug up the site and then tested the bullets he found, figuring out which were Spanish and which were French, and reconstructed the attack from that.

Cool.

I went back to Shepherd AFB, checked out the next morning, spent a couple of days in my old neighborhood in Lawton, Oklahoma:

(more on that later),

and got back to Virginny on the 16th, driving through some hellacious downpours.

Overall, a good time had by all.

Like you don’t know.

Which is why a lot of us horror fans are a bit frustrated these days. See, horror ain’t horror no mo’. It’s diluted, become something else: deep sociopoliticalanthropological ambiguities resting on atavistic urges deep within super-id-and-conscience alienations; lots of made-up monsters no one ever heard of, or campy takes on new ones; rot and smell and body fluids and vomiting and ooze and S&M. That’s supposed to be scary.

It’s not. It’s annoying. Or disgusting. Doesn’t raise a single chill.

The last horror story I read that actually made me turn on the lights and look out the window was F. Paul Wilson’s Nightworld. Nothing much since, although Red Dragon and Silence of the Lambs elicited similar responses (that Harris guy can spin a phrase or two). Now, admittedly, I may have missed some recent good ‘uns, what with the death of libraries and book shops, but most everything I’ve seen lately falls within the atavistic urge/disgusting category. It’s like horror writers have forgotten what’s scary.

Let’s remind them.

Definition first: “A painful and intense fear,” according to Merriam’s, which I think an exquisite way of putting it. Problem is, that applies to a whole bunch of other things, like the government and traffic and American Idol, none of which is actually Horror (although you can make a case for Idol). Those things evoke only a sense of horror, which ain’t the same thing at all. There’s remedies: you can vote differently, avoid driving in DC (recommended), or watching Idol (highly recommended).

Horror, itself, has no remedies.

Real horror occurs in the moments prior to the liberal spreading of body fluids, the fangs sinking in necks, and the zombie feeding frenzy. Something approaches through the misty woods, there’s a footstep on the stairs, a coffin creaks open—that’s when you lose bladder control, your knees give out, and you sink helplessly to the ground. Please God, no, this isn’t happening, this can’t be real, this is a joke, I’m asleep so wake up! WAKE UP!…right there, at that moment of denial, in the grips of an unfulfilled hope: horror.

One of the scariest moments I ever read was in Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine: Lavinia, terrified, finally gets inside her house and locks the door and she’s safe, safe. Whew. Then, behind her, a man clears his throat…

Painful and intense fear.

Let’s see more of that.