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7/19/08 News of the Word! Let's see. Fear-Maker's Promise has been nominated for an ENnie Award. So, that's sweet. Lords Over the Damned is getting some noms, too, though it's surprising that it didn't earn the Prettiest Motherfucking Book Award (er, "Best Production Values"), but so it goes. Voting starts Monday. Hunter: The Vigil approacheth. My copies are, I believe, en route, which is exciting. Did a podcast interview this past Wednesday. When that's up, I'll ping you crazy kittens. Cobbled together a new treatment for Secret Film Project. Also, will soon start to work on Secret Short Web Film Project. Now-- News of the Nerd! Hellboy II was lots of fun--definitely a version of Changeling: The Movie. Though, really, that's the film's core problem. It deviates too much from what I come to expect from Mignola's world. His world isn't fantasy, really--it's more a paranormal, occult world. This world is blatantly fantastic. Which is fine. And it's cool. But it's not really... "Hellboy." (I've actually come to find a particular look found in modern genre film bothers me, and that look is one of cleanliness. Seriously. Nothing is every really dusty, nothing ever really looks used. This was part of the issue with the look of the new Star Wars movies; stuff needs to look like it isn't a movie prop, or a crisp CGI product.) Wall-E is phenomenal. The most subversive children's movie in a long-time. Loved, loved, loved it. Go read Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. Will maybe be seeing Dark Knight at a stupidly late-ass showing tonight to avoid crowds. Also, to give enough time to watch the Avatar: The Last Airbender 2-hour finale-fest. Also, in non-nerdly news, we have a pet praying mantis, whose name alternates between "Mister Mantis" and simply, "Stinky." I confronted him a couple weeks ago on our fence, and he leapt up onto my hand and used my body as a bridge so he could get to one of our flower pots. He now lives in those flowers, and has for many weeks. I feed him from time to time--I go and hose off an ant hill, which drives the ants crazy, and I drop ants near Stinky, and he eats them like popcorn. Seriously. He's all like, *grab*, NOM NOM NOM, and then he licks his kung-fu bug claws off and then grabs another one, repeat. That is all. Oh, our washing machine broke. Not surprising, given its age. I don't know how old it really is, but its aesthetic is that of a wood-paneled station wagon, so you can bet at least three decades. The resultant flood wasn't a delight, but thankfully our basement floor simply eats water, which is a nice effect. So, now, new washer. Hurray. 6/16/08 I think my fingers are bleeding. *checks fingers* Yes. Yes, my fingers are bleeding. Hey! Guess what, I've been working. A lot. Hence the digit-blood. But before I get into all of that: Drum roll please. That's right, another mention on Robert McCammon's author site. That's twice I've been mentioned on there, which I recognize does nothing for me professionally, but it does wonders for me, personally. Obviously, McCammon is my hero. He's why I write. So a mention on his site, I'll take it. And I'll giggle about it. And then I'll do a little dance on the skulls of my enemies. Back to the topic at hand: I've been writing a lot. And developing a lot. And also, writing a lot. Seriously, it's been crazy. I think I've worked on about 900 books in the last 6 months, with about, hrrm, twelvety-billion words provided. It has not been that egregious, no. But my work has been profound in its quantity (though I dare not speak for its quality). Hell, the measure of word count I did for three of the five clanbooks alone is above 150,000 words. Plus, other books, plus an SAS, plus an ARG, plus redlines and ancillary developer word-stuffs, plus, plus, plus. Basically? I vomit words. I do. I can't help it. I regurgitate pages upon pages. It's a sickness. It really is. The Hunter: The Vigil spoilers have begun, so you could go over to White Wolf's website here to check out what's going on. You could also go to this link, right here if you wanted to see me get my Interview Groove on. I've got a lot of work coming up. More word count for the Wolf. More developer work for the Wolf. Met with Lance the other day, so we'll move back toward some script development. I think we'll be doing a cool web-based film project for the fall. I've got a novel in my head that really wants to write itself. I just need more time. Anybody have more time for me? More time so I can heave all of this verbage up out of my guts and lungs and brainholes? Pretty please? Oh, I updated the resume. So, click above if you care to behold the approximately 70 books I've worked on for White Wolf. I need help, I really do. At an average of about 25-30k per book, that means I've written around 2,000,000 gorram words. That, my friends, is crazy talk. 6/15/08 I'm mentally constipated. Or, at least, this blog is. Quite a lot to talk about. So much, in fact, that it's all backing up in the system. The pipes are bulging. I'd better vent it soon, or it's going to go kersplat. And nobody wants to be covered with my mindfeces. The biggest thing, really, is Colorado. We're back. And have been for like, ohhhh, over two weeks, now. I could offer you a blow-by-blow of the trip, but I cannot promise that it would be in any way interesting. I do have a Flickr Photostream Set that gives a bit of context and a taste of narrative. The overall deal is, we went. We felt very tiny, caught in the shadow of the profound. (Go ahead. Try to grasp your ego in when mountains tower above you--or when a several thousand foot drop threatens you from underneath.) Went to Dad's house. Tried to measure the work that needs to be done there, and could not easily measure it. While there, we took a long walk down a serpent's path, occasionally leaving the path to try to find what we were looking for. Luckily, we did not find bears, or more specifically, These Bears in particular did not find us (oops). At the bottom, we found a bridge over the creek, and into the turbid waters, I upended Dad's ashes -- a gray swirl into the dark water, and then just dark water. The man is at his Happy Hunting Ground, and we were not attacked by bears. And, also good: the TSA did not flinch when I explained that I had "human remains" in my one checked bag. They did not believe my father was actually powdered anthrax or anything of that sort. We did a lot. We saw a lot. We ate a lot. Oh, and we drove a lot (seriously--drove over a thousand miles whilst out there; everything is exactly 45 minutes from everything else). We tried to enjoy the trip as much as we could, because, I think, that's what we were supposed to do. It was hard at times, but happy, too. And sad. And sometimes a little overwhelming. And sometimes tiring. But it was good. And now we're home. Happy father's day, all. 6/07/08 *wipes cobwebs away* Whoa. You people are still here? *winces* Oof. Sorry about that. Is this thing on? *mic feedback* I have quite a lot to say as soon as I find the time to say it. But, for the moment, this will suffice. Yesterday began with a death. Went to a funeral for my sister's father-in-law, who passed away earlier in the week during his sleep (sad that he's gone, but at least it is the coveted way to exit this earth). And then, yesterday ended with a birth. So, to the Mad Karabin Monks, I'd like to welcome their first little babs into the world, Illyana Katherine Karabin into the world. Welcome, nearly-nine pound wonder. And congrats, Karabins! 4/21/08 Dear Pennsylvania, My birthday is on Tuesday. If you don't know what to get me, get me Obama as the Democratic candidate. Please? Pretty please with American Politics on top? Thanks so much! Hugs and kidney punches, Little Chucky Wendig, Age 8 and a Halfsies 3/12/08 The weather today was perfect. By which I mean, it conspired to be both seasonally and thematically appropriate. I drove north today, about two hours, into the deep heart of Middle of Approximate Nowhere, Pennsylvania, and along the way I witnessed a staggering variety of weather. Sun. Clouds. Bright blue. Gunmetal gray. Rain. Snow. Heavy winds. A bit of ice. Rain with sun. Snow with clouds. Rain with clouds. Sun with snow. Flurries. Squalls. Buffeting blasts. The weather wobbled and wavered like a stop sign in hurricane gales, vacillating between Winter's Last Gasping Grasp and Spring's Desperate Struggle to be Born. Thematically, it bound itself to my erratic moods with mechanical precision. I drove up to the Ass-End of East Egypt, PA, to officially probate my father's will. I am now the executor of said will. Mostly, it's like ripping off scabs. You know how burn victims suffer great swaths of skin turning to scab? It feels at times like pulling it off, a great fibrous carpet of fleshy topography, ripped from its mooring upon muscle and bone. And the blood flows fresh. By which I mean, it just stirs up shit. It draws all that bad stuff to the surface once more. It's not that it's any mystery or surprise that my father's dead. I haven't suppressed it. I think about it every day. I sometimes get kind of weirdly weepy at almost-inexplicable moments (most recent: watching Ultimate Recipe Showdown on Food Network, no, seriously). Days come and go where I expect him to call, or I think of calling him. I'm surrounded by artifacts of his life. The occasional dream. The persistent thought. No mystery, no surprise. But going up there and making it legal, I don't know. Not to get heavy-handed with the metaphor (this is where you say, "Too Late"), but it's like hammering another nail in the coffin. The whole will and estate thing really distills a person down to pure data, like some kind of financial menu or capitalist binary code. And it's sad. Then again, I'm happy the process is at least moving forward. We had been waiting on some... problems (remind me to tell you about it someday, Dearest Internet), and with some roadblocks cleared out of the way (or at least identified on a map so you can drive around them), it does feel good to get moving on the whole shebang. And during the drive, good memories surface. Not-so-good memories surface. Images of death. Vignettes of life. Sun, rain, cloud, blue, gray, wind, still, calm, just keep driving. Happy, sad, happy, sad. Turn on the radio. Turn it off. Listen to one song. Spend ten minutes talking to myself. Keep on driving, keep on driving. So, that was my day. A bit hollowing. Time to move up and move forward, though. Coming soon, something less morose. Something about politics. Something probably about video games or changelings or Indiana Jones or barnyard pornography. Promise. 2/28/08 You're welcome, Internet. 2/24/08 Link of the Day: Garfield Minus Garfield Barnyard Porno Spam Tongue Twister of the Day: "Authentic Fuck Flicks with Farm Sluts Fucked" You may now return to your regularly scheduled Intertoobs. 2/18/08 Subject: Wild, unstable sluts get off in stables. It's almost poetic, really. Like something e.e. cummings might write (and, given his last name, are we not to believe he might've had an excellent career penning Porn Spam?). wild unstable sluts get off in stables. Really. Unstable? Stables? That's art in language, my friends. Unfortunately, it's also a sign that I've been receiving an egregious dumpload of barnyard porno-spam lately. Seriously. Every other email in my one inbox has to do with banging a horse or buggering chickens. I have no idea what I did to get on the radar of that particular Spambot, but somehow, they think me a farm-fresh pervert. (And I'll note: it's specifically farm animals. No emails about doffing a dog or licking a lion's loins. Oh, no. These emails want me to fornicate with domesticated livestock.) Eh well. I've no great uniting theme to this post, so I'll just barf up some basic updatery-doo: One: My culinary adventure continues: I have eaten escargot. The wife and I went out for Valentine's Day to celebrate our love, and we did so by wolfing down snailmeat. Snailmeat is actually pretty good. It tastes like really good mushrooms. Texture of mushrooms, too. Which begs the question: why not just eat mushrooms? Because you don't get to spear mushrooms and pluck them from their shell-encased homes, that's why. Easy to imagine oneself as a Giant Man Beast, plucking peasants from their huts and snarfing them into our crushing maws. Fun times. Anyway. Our snails were drizzled copiously with a basil-garlic butter sauce. Tastegasm. Two: Just finished the final text of Hunter: That Book About Witches about, ohhh, fifteen minutes ago. I'd say the whole Hunter: The Vigil thing is coming along quite nicely. It's a game with many faces, and I love them all. And going back and re-reading a lot of it, boy, it's a fucked-up game. The writers have really outdone themselves in making my jaw drop. Fucked. Up. Stuff. That "Wood Ingham" fellow has a way in particular of making me gape. Three: Wills and estate planning is for the birds. You know what you do with your money before you die? Spend it. Or throw it out of a helicopter or blimp. That'd be about as accurate as letting the law handle it. Maybe moreso. Four: Rock Band is muy fun. I am a drum god. And by "drum god," I mean, I beat the game on Medium and am working on Hard, but Expert makes my brain (not to mention my right foot and both wrists) hurt. Five: You are hereby requires to say the words: Obamaicans and Obamamentum. Say them. Right now. Out loud. Realize that we can make up whatever nonsense words we want. We have that power. Language is our magic. OBAMAMENTUM! OBAMAPOLIS! OBAMALICIOUS! By the by, I like Obama, even though he's a radical Muslim (er, he's not, people, so stop forwarding me that email like it's somehow magically true). The guy gives good speech. He gets my Hope Gland all-a-growing (and no, my Hope Gland is not something dirty). I like McCain, as well. Only concern there is, the guy's like, 90. Clinton, though, I don't think she's really ready for primetime, despite her claims to the contrary. Something about her sits false with me. All that being said, we can only improve from our current administration. Though, really, you could put a diseased brainstem in a chair, cover it with cookie crumbs and then put a pair of Groucho Marx glasses over it... and it'll probably handle world affairs with greater aplomb than our current Chimp-in-Chief. Six: Headline: Next plague likeliest to emerge from poor tropical countries. No shit? That's revolutionary news. Because, didn't Ebola totally come out of like, a Vancouver coffeehouse? Malaria comes from some guy who fucked a monkey in Lichtenstein. It's true. Listen, news media, seriously, stop reporting on things I already know. Headlines get lazier every year. Next one I expect to see: FOOD CAN BE EATEN, or maybe, SKY EXISTS ABOVE HEADS. Thanks for the tip. Seven: I am weary. I need a vacation. A real vacation. That is all. 2/10/08 It has been an awesome week. Just a hoot, I'll tell you. That whole "executor of the will" thing just got leagues more complicated and annoying, I have some kind of Mongolian Death Plague choking out my bronchial tubes, and I have to reassign various small and not-small chunks of books to various writers who hopefully will be able to do the work given to them on relatively short notice. Whee. Head, meet desk. What I'm trying to say is: Anyway. So, the week prior to last, we at Der Wendighaus, Inc. did up a little experiment. I decided to see what it would be like to cook and eat vegetarian all week. I mean, is it viable? Is every meal going to end up a glorified side dish? Are meat replacement protein products worth a damn? Four full nights of dinner, five days of lunches. Lunches were easy. PB&J sammiches, or hummus on pita. Boom. Done. Dinners, here's what I did: Vegetarian Chili with veggie burger crumbles. Penne with homemade pesto sauce, portobello mushrooms and strips of "tempeh." Moroccan red lentil soup. Tofu stir fry with a garlic chili sauce, served over Bhutanese red small-grain rice. Conclusions? The vegetarian chili was anus-burningly hot. On its next go-round I diluted the leftovers with another can of crushed tomatoes and a can of black bean soup. Totally did the trick. Whipped up some cornbread, covered it in a dollop of sour cream, and boo-yah. Dinner is served, and the anus is saved. The penne with the pesto goodness, well, that part went just fine. I love pesto, and I got a new food processor (a bigger one), so it came out quite nice. Very walnutty. So, tempeh? Tempeh. Tempeh. If you don't know what this is, it's basically a smooshed brick of partially-fermented soy product. It has the look of roofing shingles. Now, I'm to understand you can soak it in salt water or something before cooking, but the instructions on this package of tempeh just said to slice it and fry that bastard up. So I did. And it tastes... eehhh? Not awful. But nowhere near pleasant. It's very grassy, like I'm eating a brick of alfalfa that's maybe passed through two of a cow's myriad stomachs. It was made worse by the fact the portobello strips were delicious. They're excellent meat substitute: heavy, beefy, heady. So why buy tempeh? Maybe you want that "I just ate a part of my lawn" mouthfeel. Otherwise, leave it alone. The red lentil soup was good. No real surprises there. The stir-fry? Tofu's gross to handle, though this is no surprise to me, having cooked it many times before. The fact you kind of have to towel it off like some sweaty, pale-bellied boxer isn't altogether pleasant. ("I coulda... pant... been a con... pant, pant... contender.")But, outside of that, you cube it, and it magically absorbs the taste of everything else. It has almost supernatural powers of flavor-consuming spongery. But the biggest conclusion of them all? Veggie burgers are unmercifully delicious. I crave one right now. I always kind of thought veggie burgers had to be useless, like non-alcoholic beer or a short-sleeved straightjacket. Oh, mmm, sure, meatless meat. Can I buy a car with no wheels? A hand with no fingers? How about just half-a-testicle? I was so wrong. What an asshole I've been! Veggie burgers will forever be vacuumed into my eager maw. And shit, they're healthy, too. Now, I should clarify: I don't plan on becoming vegetarian. I just know that we as people eat too much crap. We shovel too much meat into our mouths, too many processed awfulness brined in cancer-causing hell-chemicals. I figure, hey, at least once a week I'll make something either vegetarian or seafoody. That'll amp up our healthfulness here in the house a wee smidge. I also don't have any moral compunctions regarding the consumption of meat. Cows, pigs, chickens, they're all cute. But they're delicious. Ducks are double-cute, and double-delicious. Those who think that the murder of animals is somehow anathema to man's moral nature or somehow flies in the face of the ecological weave and weft, well, you best smack yourself in the face and recognize some things. Our progress as a species is carried on wheels greased on the blood of animals. We wouldn't be were we're at right now if it wasn't for the killing and harvesting of the world's creatures. There's simply nothing moral about it. It's an amoral issue. Now, I'll agree that you can frame a vegetarian lifestyle on the moral quandary of not meat, but the meat industry. Sure. The meat industry is pretty brutal. It's about speed, not safety. It's about doing what's best for the profits, not what's best for man's health. The meat industry loves to feed its animals the same dead animals. It loves to pump them full of freaky hormones. Deformed chickens? Let's eat them! Half-tortured pigs? Shove 'em in my belly! Cows with brain diseases? They can't get to our grocery stores fast enough! See, but the moral issue falls apart a bit, here, too, because you can actively choose to vet your meat providers. Go to a local butcher or a local farm. You can buy free range chickens or grass-fed beef with some extra work and some extra money. What I'm saying is, if you're vegetarian, more power to you. And if it's because you can't stomach the thought of eating animals, hey, no problem. Just don't confuse your personal preference on that with my personal preference on that, which is that I like to and will continue to eat animals--hell, I've eaten animals I personally have killed. Man, I think I got way off track there. Veggie meals are mm-mmm good. There. Done. Hah. Oh, and now it's a blizzard outside and I can barely see our yard. That's interesting. All right, this blog entry has gone on long enough. Der Wendighaus, out. 1/28/08 Pant, pant, pant. Okay. Nosferatu is done. It's send out of my grubby hands. Next? Equinox Road, plus, scads more development on all the delicious Hunter books. Plus, we'll get a new treatment out this week to Lance's manager since it looks like the impacted colon that is the Writer's Strike will maybe start to loosen and evacuate. Any time I get to use an "impacted colon" metaphor is a good goddamn day, I must say. Okay. Got that out of the way. It seems a good time to discuss my new KitchenAid Artisan Standup Mixertron 9009, which comes in a loverly shade of pistachio. The wife got it for me for that holiday where everybody gets everybody stuff and sometimes thinks a little about Jesus before wolfing down gobbets of honey-glazed ham, and let me tell you: This Thing Has The Power To Whip Your Soul Into Shape. It's just that good. You throw stuff in there and the whirling ceramic paddle just obviates it, just makes its existence null and bloody void. It'll mix anything. Flour? Concrete? Monkey skulls? Glass marbles? Dark matter? Throw it all in the bowl. Stick it on 6, let it whip. Next thing you know, mmm, you've got some batter, just put it in the oven and bake the cake that destroys the Earth. I made some coffee cake in it. See, I don't really like baking. Cooking, I like. I love. Because it's like a Jackson Pollock painting: a dash here, a splatter here, flavor off, add some of this juice, toss in some of these pine nuts. I know that being a professional chef is very much about consistency, but being a home cook is at least a little bit about chaos. And that's okay by me. But baking? That shit's like math. You plug in the wrong number and your quadratic equation is going to bite you on the ass -- oh, and your cake's gonna suck. Texture of a mousepad, flavor of floor cookies. No good. Still, though, the coffee cake turned out all right. And I thank the mixer. The mixer, it just handles stuff. It reaches out, and it tell you in a comforting tone, "Don't worry, Chuck. Let me do that. Just dump that right here into my stainless maw. Let me do the work. I'll chew. You relax. Yum." So, y'know, thanks to the superrad wife, I'm gonna be hip-deep in baking goods. I got a killer recipe for marshmallows, of all things, and I'm-a-try that. Plus, mashed potatoes. Plus, simplicity: just take some ice cream, and mix it up in the bowl with some kind of internal filling: Butterfinger bits or gumballs or radishes or fingernail clippings, whatever piques your geek. But you know what piques my geek? Tell 'em, Marty From The YouTubes (Which Is Nothing Like Jenny From The Block): 1/16/08 Well. Trying to find some normalcy, so I'll post about vampires and other bugaboos. Rich Thomas, on the White Wolf Livejournal, went moonbatty and started throwing around the names of upcoming books like Chinese stars. As it is with me and my pleasantly insane workload, I'm on a lot of these books. The books I'm on as writer that he mentioned? Midnight Roads, Dogs of War, the Vampire: The Requiem Clan Books (I worked specifically on Ventrue, Gangrel, and Nosferatu), and some nameless Changeling books (but I'll tell you here, I continue my Changeling spree with Rites of Spring, Lords of Summer, and Equinox Road). The books I'm on as developer? Hunter: The Vigil, baby. Finally leaked, announced, and my name attached to it. So too is my name attached to its supplements, only one of which is named (and whose first drafts are due today, you pesky writers): Slasher. Oh, and Tribes of the Moon, too, for Werewolf, but you knew that. Books I might be on as writer or developer? EVE RPG, thanks to Russell Bailey. Night Horrors. Two Hunter: The Vigil SAS's (Storytelling Adventure System PDFs). And, as developer, the coveted fifth Hunter book. (Oh, and Hunter's getting a board game? I'm not really involved in that, but... a board game?! Brilliant. Love it. Do it. Want it.) Plus, we still have an optioned script out there who ekes with painful slowness toward a greenlight (please, please, please, Movie Jesus, bless our film with your Movie Jesus Magic), and I just tossed some notes to Lance today on a project that's been bouncing around in our hands and heads. Needless to say, I'm busy. But a good busy. A sane busy. The kind of busy where I can remove myself from the world a bit and concentrate on work, on fanciful notions of vampires and vampire hunters, of demons and diseases and lost highways and maybe even a space battle or three. Ahhh, escapism. I'm sure it's totally healthy. 1/13/08 Time, she'll kick you right in the twat. Really, she will. She'll steal everything you have if you're not looking. Point is, embrace what you have now, not later. You'll come to realize that opportunities to live and love are with you in the present and while they'll likely be there in the future, they may not be. Got something you want to do now? Do it. Got something you want to say now? Do it. No time like the present. Carpe fish, seize the fish. Or something. Anyway. You may care to read this, you may not. Here's the entire text of the euology I spoke for my father during last week's memorial service. Still can't believe he's gone. I keep expecting to get a phone call from him, or to make plans to go visit him. As I said, time has little mercy, so... Right. Eulogy. I write every day. I sit down at the computer and I commit my butt to the chair and I write bare minimum two thousand words. It takes discipline to attack the blank page, the blank screen, to accept a deadline and to never once fail to meet that deadline. It’s something my father taught me, this discipline. He was always clear about the value of work, the value of effort, the sacredness of a commitment. But even still, sitting down and writing this… speech, this eulogy, is the hardest commitment I’ve ever taken. But, I committed, and I finished it, because if I didn’t, I suspect he’d come back to life just long enough to kick my ass into shape. My father always hated mourning. Hated funerals. Hated how you sit here and stir up all the sadness and grief again. To him, I think it was like kicking over a beehive. He did not want to be mourned, and so today we shall not mourn him. Today, we shall celebrate him in story and prayer and poem. We shall applaud his life, and all the bad things he made good, and all the good things he made great. See, Dad was to me and many others both legend and hero. As a writer, I’m a storyteller, and I tell stories because of my father, because his life was all about both the telling of stories and the living of stories. Any time I get together with friends or family, the stories come out, some old favorites, some new to the telling. Funny stories. Stories of triumph and accomplishment. Stories like how my father, my uncles and I wrangled a pissed-off bull elk back into his pen with a nothing but a shotgun, a pair of ski poles and a home-made Nylon lasso. Stories of all my father’s hunting trophies and miraculous shots, of his many stunts and fistfights (all recalled with a wild and vibrant gleam in his eye), or of his engineering feats performed in service to his work. Stories like how despite his detestation of all things cat-related he saved a starving kitten from the barn, a kitten whose mother and siblings had been killed by a raccoon or possum. Stories of how he stood up for the little guy. How he made sure people were paid what they were owed. About how he did what was right regardless of cost. My father is those stories, you see, and that’s how he lives on: in the stories we shall forever tell of him. The Vikings—a tough race of old-school bad-asses, just like Dad—believed that there was one path to immortality, and that was by being remembered in all the legends and stories. A Viking warrior was set on a boat which was then cast aflame—a cremation, of sorts—thus earning his place in the stories, ushering him forth into immortality. We can all help to keep my father immortal by remembering the limitless stories in which he was an undeniable presence. I’ll tell you what my father believed, though. He had a lot of ideas about a lot of things, and they were all worth listening to. In regards to religion and spirituality, he had kind of a pantheistic outlook that coupled God and Nature together: one could not be taken away from the other. He always told me that he believed in the God of the Land, and what a blessing that was, to die and return to the earth and to become a part of the plants, and the animals that ate the plants, and the hunters who took those animals to feed their families. And so I’ll read this short poem, a poem that has taken many forms over the years but is said to have come from an early Native American blessing: Do not stand at my grave and weep; I am not there. I do not sleep. I am a thousand winds that blow. On the mountain’s rim, I am the snow. I am the sunlight on ripened grain. I am the gentle autumn rain. When you awaken in the morning's hush I am the swift uplifting rush Of quiet birds in circled flight. I am the stars that shine at night. Do not stand at my grave and cry; I am not there. I did not die. I’ll say this last thing: my father was both legend and hero to me, but he was also something else, something a thousand times more valuable. He was my friend. This was a relatively recent occurrence, having happened only over the last five years or so. It used to be that he’d call and check up on me with the standard battery of parental questions: how’s the car, how’s the job, how’s the weather. But it was only in these last several years that the parental checklist kind of… dropped off and was replaced by genuine conversation. He’d call me maybe twice a week and we’d just shoot the shit for a while. I’ll miss that most of all about him, but it gives me great strength and solace to know that he had found genuine happiness and serenity in his last years, that he was able to fulfill his dreams and reach a very real place of peace. In honor of him, we should not only remember him, but we should all endeavor to find that place of peace, to reach out and hold happiness to our chests as he once held us to his. 12/27/07 I am a disciplined writer in that I wake up every day and I write around 2,000 words. The other morning, I woke up and had to write my father's obituary. To be fair, a large part of it (the administrative details) were written, and I had to adjust some of the language and add some details. And yet... nothing I've written has been so difficult. Not just because a life like my father's is easy to encapsulate, but because it's my father. Writing something like that is irretrievable and indelible. It makes a mark. It's so wretched, so final. It's as if before the writing and printing of an obituary, there's still a chance, a mysterious and magical and miraculous chance that it's all wrong, it's all a fluke, it's all some mad Houdini stunt and my father won't really have passed away at all but is instead out there, laughing and shooting the shit with friends and family. Anyway. I wrote and modified the obituary. And today is the day it goes into the paper and online. Below is that obituary. Charles R. Wendig of Danville and Collbran, Colo. passed away Saturday, Dec. 22, 2007, at his home near Washingtonville. He was 64. Born Nov. 7, 1943 in Doylestown, he was the son of the late Alfred and Florence (Fortmann) Wendig. On Sept. 29, 2004, he married the former Barbara E. (Bray) Belledin and they have celebrated three years of marriage. A native of Bucks County, Charlie graduated from Central Bucks High School in Doylestown. He retired in 2002 as plant manager of Penn Color in Hatfield, and was a gifted mechanical engineer. He had an innate ability to make or fix just about anything. He was an avid hunter, and especially loved his hunting trips out west. Those trips led him to his second home in Colorado, where he and Barbara enjoyed times together. He was a member of the National Rifle Association and the Loyal Order of the Moose Lodge in Doylestown. He will be remembered as a great mentor to the children in his family, and an inspiration to all those who loved him. He was lovingly referred to as "Uncle Chick" by his many nieces and nephews and was a great uncle many times over. Surviving in addition to his wife are a son and daughter-in-law, Charles D. and Michelle Wendig of Richlandtown; two daughters and a son-in-law: Tracy L. and Robert Collie of Buckingham and Kimberley Beaton of Easton, Maine; two stepsons, Kris Pankotai and his, wife, Jamie of Washingtonville and Kenneth Pankotai of Danville; two stepdaughters, Catherine Martz and her husband, John, of Washingtonville and Constance Raborn and her husband, Scott, of Pittsburgh, Calif.; eight grandchildren, and one great-grandchild; two brothers and their wives, A. Daniel and Marilyn Wendig and J. Stephen and Christine Wendig, all of Buckingham; a sister and her husband, Dorothy Wendig McNamara and Terence Skelton of Doylestown; and his former wife, Christine (Shustack) Wendig of Buckingham. A service of memory and to celebrate his life will be held at 1 p.m. Saturday, Jan. 4, 2008, at Leaver-Cable Funeral Home in Buckingham. The family suggest contributions in his memory be made to the American Cancer Society, 1948 E. Third Street, Williamsport, PA 17701 or to the Last Chance Ranch Equine Rescue, 9 Beck Road, Quakertown, PA 18951. I miss my Dad and hope that this is not the final step of his journey but just another signpost along the way. Thank you to those who have written or called with such nice things to say. The Obit Online 12/22/07 My father passed away today at 3:00pm. I was with him when he died, as were many of his friends and much of his family. It was unexpected, but fairly swift. I loved him very much, and I am very sad. 12/12/07 EDIT (3:22PM): My Dad's in the hospital. More on this tomorrow: I think he'll be all right. Not sure if it's related to his prostate cancer or is some other bag of nastiness. Might be gallstones, might be a tumor. Hopefully, it'll all figure itself out and he'll be all right. (Back to your regularly scheduled Terribleminds entry.) Yeah, bitches! That's how you punt a deadline in the kidneys. Pant, pant, pant. Holy crapshit. I just sprinted through 70,000 words. Seriously. I had about 10k written when I started the rest on November 21st, which means between then and today (whatzat, 23 days?) I wrote 60,000 words. Not legendary, but no small feat. Given the fact of a day job. Given the fact of editing and developing some big ticket books. Given doing research for some film treatments. Given, given, given. And how, how did I do it all you writers out there who don't grok this voodoo? Discipline! And Meth! No, really, just discipline. It goes like this: Ass in chair. Write. Set a goal. Write to goal regardless of how shitty it is, because you can always revise. Handle 2,000 words a day, which is about an hour's worth of work, and boom. Sometimes you'll do more because you'll be en fuego. Other times you'll drag your sorry ass across the finish line, masturbate gloomily, and hate yourself for the next four hours. These things happen. Motor forth. This time, I actually did something a bit different, and I'll definitely do it again for bigger assignments: Excel. Yeah, the spreadsheet. Yeah, I'm a loser. But I tracked my progress and subtracted it down day by day, and divided by the number of days left on my deadline (which, by the way, is December 21st, which means I blasted into completion a good nine days early) and saw what I had to accomplish daily to hit the goal. And soon, 2k a day winnows down to 1.5k a day, and then you feel all the awesomer for writing 2.2k or something when you only had to hit a smaller target. Bam. Boom! Slaow! Flaow! Karate chop! And now I'm both buzzing and sleepy. Odd, that. Part of me wants to get up and dance and fight and laugh, another part of me demands that I lay down and sleep until Christmas. Mind you, all of this sounds good on paper. But there remains the possibility that I just wrote 70,000 words of Fetid Sewage. I'm competent and quick with the word count, but I don't know if I'm actually good. Hopefully, it won't suck. That's the goal. Not sucking. A low bar, I know. Anywho. Not much else to say. Christmas approaches, and it's a season that more and more would be made better if we just made it Thanksgiving II and focused on the friends, family and mealtimes: I like gifts, both giving and receiving, but it's a fucking tornado out there, man. I literally reached out the door the other day to grab an Amazon package, and ten angry shoppers--zombified and off their leashes--bit my hand off, and then fought over the bones for an hour on the porch. I had to shotgun them down. Then hose off the porch. Then construct a new hand from squirrel tendons, burlap and pipe fittings. Literally. One of our big gifts is already out of the way here in Der Wendighaus: the lady needed a PC for her new job, so I got her a PC that pwns all other PCs (not true, but it sure seems like it). Fat-ass monitor (22 inch), Half a TB of hard drive space, big graphics card, lots of memory, a Smoothie machine, a time capsule, a monkey cage, and seven maids a-milking. The goal was, even though it's predominantly a business machine, to get a computer that won't enter decrepitude any time soon. Plus, we may eventually cram a TV tuner card in it and make it another DVR since the old one went all 'splodey on itself. Huh. Pwns. How do you pronounce that? I've heard it said where it rhymes with "owned," but has a 'p' on it, so, "powned" or "poned." I've heard it "pawned." I've even heard that real l337 motherfuckers pronounce it "owned," and if you're too dumb to know that they have a 'p' and no 'o' there, well, that's your own problem, n00b. (Is it true that it comes from a videogame mis-spelling, some kind of Engrish like All Your Base Belong To Us?) Oh well. I'm out. I'ma go get a snack. I promise to write sooner next time, especially if you send me money. Oh! The Second Nerdtivity, right here. (Click it, go to Flickr, read the notes. I command thee!) 11/14/07 I'm sorry, I'm seeing another blog. Yes, it's you. Yes, you've gotten fat. And you smell a little like Cheeto dust. ... Well, okay, no. I'm just farkin' busy, okay? I'm developing my little ass of. I'm writing my little ass off. I'm revising the little ass of my scripts. Busy, busy, buzz, buzz, buzz. Or some shit. I've updated my Resume to include... well, more crap from from my wordhole. Biggest update is that the script ekes forward toward what we hope will be a greenlight for a Spring 2008 shoot, but we'll see. I think it goes out for casting soon, and if we hook someone, we're in like Flint. Weird that the writer's strike affects me more than it just disrupting my favorite TV shows, though. I'm not a Guild member but I can't work as a scab, so, no submitting scripts, no treatments, no pitches, nada, zip, zoinks. That's all for now, skirts and suits. Find me in my spare time on XBOX Live, Gamertag: Weaver42. 10/12/07 Right, okay, sure. It's been a month. I haven't called. I haven't written. We didn't go out for pie like we said we would. I get it. It's you, crying in your pillow. Trying to call me, but I've crushed my insolent phone beneath the heel of an angry boot. You know what? Toughen up, cookie. Shit's hard in this life. Daddy's been busy. Daddy's been earning so you have diapers to wear and tacos to eat. Daddy's been in the shit. Then again, Daddy's now gonna go live himself the sweet life. That's right, I now have myself a bonafide Sugar Momma. The wife has decided to kick to the curb about five to seven years of mundane advancement within the job she's currently in and is today giving notice. She is, of course, giving notice so that she can take a much bigger, much better job with a much cooler title and rad-ass benefits. They gave her the job yesterday. We consumed Victory Custard. We bought a Ben-Ten toy. We squealed in glee. Now, Momma's the one doing the big earning. Momma's the one keeping you shitheads in diapers and tacos. So, you best thank her, or I'll kick you in the butthole, wear your sphincter like an anklet. Beyond that, lots of stuff. On the writing front, I've been... oh, psychobusy. An emergency 34,000 words for Clan Book: Ventrue? Yup. Applied word count toward Lords of Summer? Ayuh-huh. Continued freelance development of not one but many books? Nod, nod. Script synopses, one big one with footnotes, and several little ones, to enter into the various hands of Hollywood? Sho' nuff. Plus, another 70k of another Clan Book coming right up, if you please. Plus, I'm hip-deep in pop culture pudding. Let's see. On TV, I'm loving the cloying sweet guts out of Pushing Daisies, a thoroughly unconventional TV show that is equal parts Amelie, Lemony Snicket, Big Fish, Toys, and anything Seussian. I was loving but grow concerned for Reaper, a show so funny I burp up exultations of gassy glee at its humor-factor, but a show whose canned, recipe-driven premise is going to get tired in T-Minus two more episodes (hence, they need to bust up out of that). Oh, and with TV-on-DVD, we finally picked through the carcass of Freaks and Geeks and found it so delicious it's amazing that it couldn't survive (but therein lies my answer: sometimes, stellar TV shows are gnawed apart by their numerous lessers, like a pack of hungry Marmots besieging a proud lion until there's naught left but cat bones). Oh, and I shan't fail to mention Book Three of Avatar: The Last Airbender, which is the best cartoon ever. Video games is good times right now, too. Halo 3, well, what can I say? It lives up to the hype. Excepting the first level of the single player campaign, which was dull and not at all immersive (and apparently doesn't care to explain how you got there, only vaguely referring to some novel or comic book series that might not even exist yet -- hey, here's an idea, Pop Culture People: I like when you take your story and you spread it out into other media, but don't make it necessary for me to get the "real" story, you gigantic assbastards). Half-Life 2 I've already played, but I had to run out and giggle and perform the Sin of Onan over The Orange Box. So far, the standout part of the five-games package is definitely the short-but-super-rad Portal, which is easily one of the funniest games I've had the good fortune of playing. The real winner is Best Game Of The Year, Possibly Best Game Of The Last Ten Years, Bioshock. Well-written, immersive, beautiful, art-decoful, scary, gross, weird, and with an ending that actually brought a tear to my dry and jaded eye. In comics, Walking Dead and Y The Last Man are a-thrillin' me. In books, well, I'll only mention: Robert McCammon's newest hits shelves in a week and a half! Squee! Giggle! Snort! Sweet unmerciful fuck, a new McCammon book? Life is goddamn good, people. The Man did not retire, ohhh no. He's a writer, after all. Prone to depression and overexaggeration, perhaps, but not prone to quitting the pen-on-paper, fingers-on-keys thing. You know why? Because writers have an organ that other people find to be vestigal, and it lives nestled somewhere under your appendix and to the side of your duodenum, and you can't pull that shit out of your body with anything short of an acetelyne torch and a melonballer. It's in him, whether he likes it or not. So, Queen of Bedlam. Soon. Watch this space for my review. Oh, hey, lookit that. Al Gore just won the Nobel Peace Prize. Go, Al. Don't jump into the presidential race, seriously. At this point, you're well above that, sir. Do not leave your Cloud Palace to become King of the Shitnecks. Welp. Time to go. Poof. 09/14/07 On one hand, you have the thing that seems right. On the other hand? The thing that feels right. What do you do? This is not an easy question to answer. What seems right appears that way because it has perhaps a pragmatic veneer, a coloration of the correct. But on the other hand, maybe your gut tells you different. Instinct leaps within you like an ass-shocked horse. Bzzt! The horse kicks. Bucks at its ropes. Despite popular theory, the gut is not a universal indicator of truth. It isn't always right, the gut. The gut houses an innate sense of unkenned wisdom, but it can also be home to cowardice, vice, and indolence. Sometimes, the gut knows the right way. Other times, it just knows the easy way. Don't fall into the trap of expecting your instinct to reward you with the proper path when all its really doing is high-fiving your ignorance or setting foot on the Path of Least Resistance (also known as The Path of You Doing Whatever You Want Anyway). Alternately, pragmatism is not the universal indicator, either. Pragmatism is good -- to a point. Pragmatism does not leave room for risk, and risk is what gets you eaten by the shark. But risk is also what gets you the golden idol. What is life without a little risk? Of course, life with constant risk, or uncalculated risk... Rewind. A little history. Months back, my "day job" asked me to go full-time. Dichotomy: what seemed right was different than what felt right. What seemed right was pragmatism. Go full-time. Get security. Benefits, woo-hah. Stable income. Mind you, my hours are close to full-time there, so it's not really about the money. (And, by and large, I get paid more writing, hour-to-hour, than I do at a desk job, but writing money comes in on its own schedule, carried with the whims of hummingbirds and honeybees, wildly unpredictable.) I chose full-time, but not immediately. I'd maybe wind down some of my work, see what happened. So, those many months ago, I told the day job peeps that I'd go full-time on September 10th. September 10th has come and gone, and... ... I ain't full time. The gut won out, here, though not without some infusions of pragmatism into its gurgling chambers (the gut does not like pragmatism, and it churns and squirms like a vampire made to sit on a hemorrhoid ring made of garlic bulbs). See, I'm following my dream, but at this point it's not like I'm following it blindly into a dark grotto. I've got a torch. I can see the way, if only I have the courage. If only the horse does not buck his ropes. Months ago, when I said yes to full-time, some things were different, too. Did I have an optioned screenplay? Was I developing like, a half-dozen books? Did I have unexpected writing contracts, one of which for a high-profile and high-word-count book? Some dreams are ephemeral, as insubstantial as a tuft of angel pubes on a light wind. (And yeah, I just went there. Angel pubes. That's what you get when you come here to Terribleminds, people, and if you don't like it, then go back to Youtube and watch that video where some dude gets hit in the nuts with a cat.) Other dreams, though, they have weight. Proof of their existence. It's like you have a dream about a unicorn and that shit can't be real, right? But then you wake up, and what's that under your pillow? Holy sweet fuck, a unicorn horn! It was real all along! Now you have justification to hunt that unicorn down, and steal his blood for your secret power! Consume the unicorn's heartsblood! Gain his vigor! Become the stallion! Wow, no. Hold on. Let me refocus. What I'm saying is, my dream has some weight these days, not unlike my own gut (which houses both instinct and, apparently, about 20 extra pounds of cheeseburger meat or something). So, the gut wins. The dream wins. The writing continues, full-bore, full-steam ahead. I'm gonna kick this motherfucker in the teeth. I'm gonna kill me a unicorn. Hope you're all here to watch. I'm-a eat its heart. 09/13/07 A more substantial post tomorrow. In the meantime, watch It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia tonight, FX, 10pm. Funny times. 08/25/07 Yesterday's afternoon encompassed rabbit rescue and rehabilitation, and with evening came the cruel recognition that we are not Certified Rabbit Doctors, and it was perhaps going to die no matter what we did. Upon coming home from work, I found that the neighbor's devil-cat had trapped a youngish rabbit against the side of our house and was gleefully fucking with said rabbit. I chased the cat away (normally easy to do, but the cat was not so keen to leave its prize to me), and nabbed the rabbit. Bunny was bleeding from the back of the head and on the side of the neck, and his one back leg seemed less than functional. Wife came home, we took the rabbit inside, cleaned him up a little. He ate some lettuce from sandwiches we had purchased. He drank some water. He occasionally had a little spunk, other times he just sat there, extending his jaw and coughing. A bunny cough? One of the saddest sounds in the world. If it does not provoke a small reaction in you, a kind of sympathetic, pathetic awwww, then you have been outed as a robot. We shall behead you and send the bleeding CPU back to your Robot Masters. After working on the deck walkway for a couple-a hours, the wifey contacted a local group of animal rehabilitators, and they told us that the rabbit would likely die in the next 24 hours. The jaw-opening-and-closing was indications that he'd suffer cardiac failure, and that... wait for it, waiiiiit for it... And that a cat scratch or bite generally causes sepsis in cute, fuzzy woodland creatures. Oh, shit, awesome. Cats have some kind of magical death juice on their claws and teeth? You know what? Fuck cats. More on "fuck cats" in a minute. So, the rabbit. At this point, we had a handful of choices. First, keep the rabbit, let him die with us, and maybe feed him along the way. Second, let the rabbit go somewhere, let nature take its course which is rarely kind but somehow ecologically fair. Third, put bunny out of his bunny misery. We chose option two. We didn't want to let the rabbit go near our place given that it's swarming with cats (see earlier note, "fuck cats"), so we took the bunny to a nearby soybean field. We let him go. And, in what inspired some level of false confidence, the rabbit rather spryly disappeared into the field under the cover of darkness. The assumption is, either the rabbit will live, or the rabbit will be eaten by something that deserves to eat the rabbit. I am not thrilled at the thought, but at least it's comforting to know that if the rabbit dies out there, a fox or hawk or something might feast. If the rabbit dies in a box or in our bathtub, the circle of nature is incomplete. Unless there's a particularly crafty fox who figures out how to get into our bathroom via ductwork, but that seems unlikely. So. Right. Fuck cats. Really, I don't mean that. Cats in and of themselves are fine. They're sick little hunters, and it at times is disturbing how cruelly and gleefully they play with their still-living food, but hey, that's the cat life for you. Maybe there's some biological imperative in there. What I do mean is "fuck cat owners." And that doesn't mean all cat owners, I maybe don't mean you. But, maybe I do. Here's the type of cat owner I mean: Do you let your cat outside to wander? And I don't mean in an enclosed, controlled space, I mean that the cat is considered in some ways to be an "outdoor" cat? Then fuck you. You know why "fuck you?" Because you're a lazy, irresponsible pet owner. You're irresponsible regarding your neighbors. And you're irresponsible regarding your pet. Can I let my dog out to just wander? No. Why? On a basic level, my dog might shit on your porch. He might dig up your flower beds. He might bite your children or try to hump your patio furniture. So why do you get to let your cat do that same nonsense? Worse, if my dog gets let out, he might get hit by a car, might get into a fight with another dog, might get shot, might get lost. Same goes with your cat. Your cat -- theoretically an animal you love, or at least like -- is out in the world and might get killed or contract diseases. Ever had a cat get hit by a car? And I don't mean the kind where, 'Oh, my cat slipped out the door, dammnit.' I mean, 'Oh, we let the cat out on purpose and he got hit.' Yeah, that's your fault, not the driver's. You weren't a responsible cat owner. Cats dart in front of cars, largely because cats are retarded. (No, I'm not hating overtly on cats, dogs are equally but differently retarded.) Some cat owners seem to want a pet that they don't have to think that much about. Then get a goddamn ficus tree. You have an animal. It has a dynamic life and requires certain needs, and it is your job to protect that animal. Keep it indoors. Get the fucking thing spayed (have you noticed that the world has a billion cats in it, and a large portion of them get euthanized?). Hell, get it declawed. ("Oh, but how will my cat defend himself? It's not natural!") Yeah. No. Your cat doesn't need to defend himself if, a) you don't let him out and b) you aren't trying to cornhole the cat when he's sleeping. Moreover, who cares about natural? It's a pet. It's not the goddamn Lion King. Do you think a cat in nature gets a litter box, a scratching post, antibiotics for wounds, and cans of cat food that smell like a tuna took a shit on a dead hailbut? Nature isn't what we're striving for when we have pets. So, to sum up: Keep your cat off my property and away from my goddamn rabbits. 08/22/07 First: Second: The table read? Went really well. Went to a casting agency down in Philly with Lance and his wife. They cast the script (age-appropriate, which surprised me, but it worked out well with the teens) and then... well, they read it. And let me tell you, that's strange. Watching a table read of something you wrote gives it both a kind of legitimacy and a kind of inadequacy. The good news is, heard lots of parts that flowed really well. It's a visual script and that seems to carry well. The bad news, and this is good news wearing bad news clothing, like a wolf in Grammaw's wig, is that there's some room for character improvement, some places to kick the dialogue up a notch, and so on. Nothing was bad, nothing stuck out like a hammerstruck toe, but some things beg for improvement. But that's the point -- to hear the vulnerabilities in the script now, not to let it pass as the bare minimum. So, we delve into some more tweaking. And with that tweaking, we -- and all of you pray to your respective gods, demons, gold idols and pop stars -- maybe get a greenlight on this motherfucker. Plus, we have a treatment for another project going out this or next week. And, maybe a little something else cooking on the cookfire, too. Many irons in the fire. Strike while the iron is hot. Iron fist. Iron my shirt with my iron will. Or something. I probably need a nap. 08/17/07 I love when you bite into a ripe, or overripe, pear, and as the teeth slowly perforate the pearflesh, you get that crazy oozing dribble of nectar. And then you get high on the rush of it, and you feel like you can do anything. And you kung-fu kick the girl at the copier, and you emit some kind of monkey-cry and leap headlong for the window, expecting to crash through, head-first, hurtling to the parking lot below where you land in a crouch. Of course, in reality, the glass is just too strong and your head bonks against it. And that girl you kicked in the jaw? Now she needs dental surgery, which costs like, as much as a Maserati or a black market infant, and she's damn sure not going to pay for it herself. No, she's going to sue you. And you'll have to live on floor sweepings and out-of-date ketchup to survive because your bank account statement lists your assets as "14 pencil shavings and 1 dirty sock filled with thistleseed." Stupid delicious pears. What I'm trying to say is, I've got some updatery-doo for you. I mean, a lot of it. On the writing end, much a-happening: Changeling: The Lost is out now, as are several copies of the first supplement, Autumn Nightmares. In addition, I've got the PDF SAS (Storytelling Adventure System) module I wrote for the game, and that's available at DriveThruRPG or through White Wolf's website. That adventure is called "The Fearmaker's Promise", and if you love me, you'll buy it. (Buy Me Now!!) Damnation City has also hit shelves, and that book is big enough that it has its own gravity. But the only thing that is drawn toward its pull is raw awesomeness. And strippers. Most exciting of all? The screenplay is optioned. Doesn't mean it's greenlit, but I think we have a good shot at it. Lance, with all his mondo connections, seems to have woven a powerful 'glammer' over the minds and souls of Hollywood, and is using it to our advantage. (So much so that we have two other possibilities for projects.) This whole thing just jumped the tracks from "A charming hobby!" to "Holy crap, I might actually make some money!" We've got some sketches coming in. Lance has organized a table-read for the script. It's becoming, well, real. Whodathunk? The house comes along. We've gone crazy with landscaping. I don't know if it's good landscaping, but when you're starting from a yard that was about as attractive as a fat man's zit-laden back, I think we've made stunning improvements. Fence is done, we're working on the decktop walkway, we've got lots of flowers and shrubberies planted. I never in a million years thought I'd know the difference between "coreopsis" and "gaillardia," or "Crimson Pygmy Barberry" and "Rose Glow Barberry," but there it is. I know. And I cannot extricate the info. I'll be old and senile and jabbering on and on about butterfly bushes and foxglove. Thus is my curse. Shit, though. What else? On media fronts, I'm mightily enjoying Flight of the Conchords on HBO. It's a more cogent, humble version of Tenacious D on HBO, and for as much as I love The D, it's a far, far better show. Going to see Superbad tonight. I have high expectations. I had solid expectations for Bourne Supremacy, and that was rock-awesome. A great threequel. Actually, all told, it's been a strong summer for movies, and I haven't even seen all the good stuff. Live Free or Die Hard was waaaaaay too good for its own sense, I really expected it to suck and be an action movie with the 'Die Hard' label stapled to its bulging forehead. But it wasn't, it was actually a gin-you-wine Die Hard vehicle. Go figger. I'm reading a lot, which means I'm not reading a lot (dribs and drabs of like, twenty different things). The only one even threatening to finish itself in front of my eyes is Jeff Long's Deeper, the sequel to The Descent which was the scariest fucking book in the last ten years. Seriously. I made tee-tee in my bloomers. EDIT: I just got my copies of Changeling: The Lost, and it's even prettier than I had hoped. I will woo this book and I will take it to the Homecoming dance. And then afterward, in the limousine (read: a beat-up Toyota Celica dubbed "the limousine"), we will make sweet love together. I will break its tender binding and be the first. Having a kind of Labor Day picnicky-slash-housewarming thing at our house on, appropriately, Labor Day. If I know you, you can come. If I don't know you, don't come, or we'll call security. (By "security," I mean "me with a mean chihuahua and a shotgun, maybe drunk.") I'm sure I've got more updates. Lessee. I love the new They Might Be Giants album. It's in nigh-constant rotation. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs' have an EP out that I have, love, but for some reason keep forgetting to burn to CD. Our Changeling game continues, and more importantly, continues to rock. Best game ever. If not ever, then close to ever. I enjoy watersports. Both the kind where I waterski and the kind where I pee on people for erotic gratification. I killed a white pheasant with emerald eyes, and before he died he offered me the keys to his kingdom. The keys unlock a door to an Airstream trailer in Dustgrove, Arizona, about 500 yards south of the Triple XXX Root Beer Burger Joint. I haven't yet summoned the courage to open that door, but from time to time a whispering voice beckons me forth. It tells me the secrets to my future, and intersperses those fortuitous fortunes with a sprinkling of recipes and charming anecdotes about growing up Inuit in Texas. Yeah, I think that pretty much covers all the pertinent updates. 08/08/07 So, remember how I was writing a script? A collaboration with director Lance Weiler? Well, looks like it just got optioned, bitches. 08/08/07 Some exciting news, possibly soon, possibly as soon as today. Watch this space. 07/23/07 I was going to be a good little Internet addict and liveblog my experiences at DexCon As They Happen!... ehhh, but the Hilton in which I made my temporary home had craptastic WiFi. Spotty like Paris Hilton's herpes. Getting a signal felt like floating around the Mid-Atlantic in a submarine, occasionally rising to the surface so I could communicate with the rest of the world. So, live-blogging failed. Instead, I return to you now, my head full of mush! I will now attempt to extract that mush from my brain with a, a, I dunno, a brainspoon, so that I may hurl it against your monitor. With the appropriate onomonopoetic sound of, splat. The Journey Not much to say here, except: New Jersey is for assholes. Especially the road system. Here's how they designed New Jersey's road system, and this is real, this is factual. I read this in Popular Mechanics like, three or four years ago. They took a chimpanzee, right? And they painted his toes in different colors. And then they gave him a few shots of Jaegermeister. And then they let him run around on a giant white mat. He stumbled and staggered this way and that, his paint-slop toes making all kinds of drunken whorls and clover-leafs. And that, ladies and gentlemen, became the New Jersey road system. Troof. The Arrival Not a great deal of fanfare, but here's how you know you're approaching a game convention: Outside, a girl in glasses and leather pants smoking a clove cigarette. Just inside the door, a lanky and underfed lad in a t-shirt that reads: I AM NOT A ROBOT. That's how you know. The First Game For those not in the know, I demoed Changeling: The Lost three times. It was a purposefully unorganized look at the system. The players had statted-up character sheets without personalities, without looks, without any kind of backstory. Together they created the rough backstory, their Keeper, their roles beneath their Keeper, and then I threw them into the escape scenario and the subsequent "stumbling out" -- i.e. the great egress from the Hedge. Right quick, here's the Seeming/Kith pairings that I used for every session: Elemental (Manikin), Fairest (Draconic), Ogre (Gristlegrinder), Darkling (Leechfinger), Beast (Windwing). First session out, I had a bad-ass bunch of players. Guys who got it, no doubt, which helped ease my transition from "Jerk Who Never Before Ran A Con Game" to "Jerk Who Feels Comfortable With Running Con Games." They leapt into their fae personas. They created a Snow Queen analog as their Keeper, but given that this was California, they made her a cruel Surf Queen -- you know, a vindictive undine living in a reef barrier and an underwater sand castle. That kind of awesomeness. (And one of the players, the Ogre, determined it was his job to turn a single crank for his entire durance. His turning the crank made the tides go. It was when he let go of the crank -- with his hands of three-inch-calluses -- that they were able to cause tidal chaos and escape into the Thorns. Later, he would endeavor to beat a hobgoblin with that very crank.) Highlights? The Windwing deciding he could leap off of Coit Tower and glide down (he could, but the other characters had to cover for the resulting panic from the nearby tourists). The characters discovering the existence of their fetches. The awkward-but-awesome beat-down on a hobgoblin wolf in the Hedge to help another changeling (a Satrap) protect his Hedge vines. Great in-character conversations. Hella fun. One of the players -- the Beast Windwing, named himself "Gull" -- asked me if I had anything going on for dinner. His invitation to hang out and experience "random nerdery" was simply too compelling to ignore. So I joined him for dinner. Interlude: Dinner I sat with this fellow -- Rob, we'll call him, because that's his name and I'm a stickler for accuracy (see earlier story: paintfoot chimp). Three others eventually joined us: another Rob, a Fred, and a Morgan. It became clear over the course of dinner that I was sitting with several of the people responsible for Spirit of the Century. If you roleplay, you know that name. And if you don't roleplay... well, what are you doing here? Go buy and sell some stocks. Nerd. Yes, Rob is Rob Donoghue, Fred is Fred Hicks. (Morgan is Morgan Collins, their Maryland buddy -- and he was a bundle of bad-ass like the rest of them. Rob Bohl is he of the impending “Misspent Youth” game.) Good times were had. Rob bought me dinner, an act which earned him a marriage proposal from me, and since we were in New Jersey it was a feasible thing to do. It didn't pan out, the wedding. My wife is probably sad at this, having now lost the opportunity to have pawned me off, her hands clean of me. Point being, Rob's a fine man. A good egg. A snappy dresser, even. Glad I met him. Theme and Mood The theme of the convention was GameLove. The mood of the convention was GameLove. More on that later. The Second Game Second demo session of Changeling: The Lost was as successful as the first, with the exception possibly of one player who kind of... didn't click with the other players. A nice guy, to be sure, and a guy who new the Storytelling System very well. Hopefully he had fun regardless. Interesting point of fact, actually -- I'd say 90% of all the players in all the game sessions I ran had not yet dabbled in the "new" World of Darkness. This was their first exposure to it, as apparently Changeling: The Lost gives off some kind of delicious pheromone, an odor which they could not resist. They seemed sold on it. I hope that remains true and that they can now go back through the goodness that we've been kicking around since the entire mad world rebooted. Interestingly, the general plot and plans of the characters in this game came close to mirroring those in the other game. Even some of the character concepts built from the barebones sheets came in somewhat similar. Their Keeper was a nameless fiend known as The Tyrant, or simply, “Him.” Highlights? One player determined that his character was the one The Tyrant used to deliver punishment unto the other changelings, thus earning him enmity from the get-go. One of the players, playing the Leechfinger, went with this great “aloof succubus” angle (and whose mortal Mask was black, even though the changeling Mien was not). More tension between members of the group, but that served for a great dramatic urge, too. Interlude: GameLove DexCon is a very indie-friendly convention. Lots of IPR/IGE (Indie Press Revolution, Indie Game Explosion) presence. Various gameheads were orbiting: Fred and Rob of Evil Hat, Rob Bohl, Ben Lehman, Justin Bow, Matt Wilson – list goes on and on. I am woefully underexposed when it comes to this world. Frankly, I’m just not that good of a geek. They should demote me. (It also came to light that, at the con, I was The Man. And not, “You’re the man now, dawg,” no. Not, “Dude, you rock, you’re the man!” Not that. Rather, I was The White Man analog, the well-fed bloat-belly of a Successful Legacy Game Company. Mind you, nobody treated me like that. I was no second-class citizen [nor did they treat me like a first-class citizen as in, “Hey, nice pedestal”]. They embraced me as one of their own. Sure, first they had to put a bag over my head and hit me with lead pipes and kick me with steel-toe boots, but shit, that’s like any Tuesday night at der Wendighaus.) These people are filled with GameLove. The love of gaming explodes out of their every orifice. Eyesquirts of game joy. Paroxysms of playgasms. Gibbering, jabbering exultations to the industry, the rules, the narrative, the dice, the lack of dice. They do this because they love this. They do this because they are this. It was, and is, deeply refreshing. The Third Game The third session was missing some folks. A couple of those who had signed up didn’t show. Thankfully, I had one dude (a teen librarian from New Brunswick who wanted to run Changeling for a teen game group there) show up without registering, and so he was with us for the game. Good times to be had here, too. Very enthusiastic roleplayers. They really jumped into the characters, and seemed to enjoy themselves. They took the session farther than any other, actually entering the second “game day” of play. Their Keeper was a mad Marquis in a massive redwood tree, in which the changelings were held captive. Highlights: The Windwing had his fetch stomped to “death” by the Fairest girl – and they marveled as the doppelganger turned to pumpkin shell, guts, and bloody scraps of burlap before their eyes. The Darkling’s “task” during his durance was to sort through and proofread thousands upon thousands of reports and lists – all of it information about the Marquis’ enemies. When he was done sorting them, the job began all over again. (This was actually seamless from the other characters, too – the Fairest girl was a callous spy for the Marquis, going among the other Fae to learn secret information, and the Windwing’s kept birds were responsible for relaying that secret information from the girl back to those in the tree.) Also cool, the Darkling forged a kind of rough “truce” with his fetch. Interlude: Momentary Violence I was introduced to someone whose name is now gone from me. I was introduced as, appropriately, a White Wolf freelancer. His response? A snarky, “I’m sorry.” I kind of wanted to punch him in the neck. The First Panel First panel: Interactive versus Non-interactive fiction. The difference between, say, writing a novel and writing a game. Since I’ve done both, I was excited. I was also the only one. Nobody showed up. Not even other panelists. I sat in the room for ten minutes, loosely contemplated masturbating in public, then left to find some people to talk to. Fred Hicks Does Not Blink I hung out with Morgan Collins and Becca Badurina (i.e. Dexcon’s den mother who always made sure I was not starving myself) that night after the third game, enjoying their company immensely. Fine folks, there. Then I got roped into a midnight game. Me, I thought, bed. Bed sounds nice. Mmm, bed, mmm, pillows. Sweet delectable sleep. Well, fuck that noise. The game session was technically scheduled for midnight till four in the morning, but apparently, that didn’t matter. Fred was running the game, an incredibly rules-simple piece of brilliance called Beat the Clock. He said, “If you’re tired and you want to go to bed, just choose to die!” See, the game’s basic premise is modeling itself after any Aliens-style “Escape or Die!” movie scenario. You are characters trapped in a claustrophobic environment and one or various forces are conspiring to introduce you to your doom. There remains, by thematic necessity, a time limit. It’s part roleplaying game, part resource management, part competition. (The competition part is hot, hot, hot. You screw the person to your left by literally introducing the conflict they now face – i.e., “A gaggle of alien prostitutes with switchblades swarms the hall in front of you -- what do you do?” It’s GM-less. It’s a hoot. And you set a time limit of, say, 5-10 minutes. Every time 5 or 10 minutes is up, BAM, you increase your doom counter. Any time your doom counters (or other negative counters) hit 12, well, shit. Good night, gracie. You are eaten by aliens or raped by robot monkeys or whatever the central conceit is of that particular session (a conceit that the entire group designs before play). Our conceit was a self-aware submarine whose mad AI had summoned a giant squid to destroy us all. I played an alcoholic chef. Fun was had. Though I still think the game should be called Doom Clock, because, that’s what it is. Interlude: I Come Bearing Gamejoy Fred took me through the entire IPR booth, naming off the many awesome games and their many awesome premises. Many – most, really – sounded great. (I expect they really are great, but it’s worth noting that Fred Hicks could sell water to a dolphin.) If there hadn’t been so many damn gamers scampering around, I might have bludgeoned somebody with the cash register and taken one of everything. As it stands, I purchased: Spirit of the Century, Primetime Adventures, Best Friends, Mortal Coil, and Don’t Rest Your Head. Bastards. Oh, and I met Jennifer Rodgers. My jaw unhinged upon seeing her art work. It fell to the ground. Then it turned to bone dust. I am now jawless thanks to her sketchery. The Second Panel Much more successful, this panel. At first, it was several game industry peeps (including Rob Donoghue and Matt Wilson) just geeking out about the industry, but then a couple other people filtered in. One in particular wanted to actually know how to break into the industry, so he got a brainful of information. My trajectory within the industry is very, very different from those who attended. Interlude: My Wife Is Made Of Win That’s some new Internet slang for you there, kids. I’m dropping it like it’s hot. “Made of win.” It’s got that same piquant freshness of all the lolcats talk: I can has idiotslang! Ahem. Anyway, Michelle joined me for the final night, which was good. She is a trooper, wading hip-deep into the churning froth-capped waters of raw geekery. The Third Panel This one was “my” panel. An hour with me. It was not widely attended, but it was attended. Yes, two of the attendees comprised my wife and Rob, but, hey, I’ll take what I can get. I was able to ramble on about That Thing I Do. I answered some questions. We geeked about all kinds of stuff. I had some dude tell me about his Moros Mage LARP character, blah blah blah. Good times. I also formally announced that I’m developing Tribes of the Moon for Werewolf: The Forsaken, a comprehensive five-tribe book. New, awesome information written by awesome writers. And I’m also developing some other good stuff, too, coming down the pipeline. I told people at the con that if I told them what it was, they’d see a poison dart suddenly sticking out of my neck and I’d faceplant into my dice. Interlude: Health Care It’s hard not to eat like a shithead at a convention. Everywhere you turn, badness. They had a chocolate fountain. They had something called “Sugarfest,” which was a room filled with pixie-stick level confections. But I did pretty all right. I ate reasonably. I kept mostly to normal meals. I never overdid it. My body did not get fatter as a result of this convention, and for that I am pleased. The Great Egress Sunday morning, poof, done, gone. I missed the indie workshop, but by that point of the con my brain was the consistency of whatever black and surly fungus now lurks under our one dog’s armpits (no, seriously, she has some kind of armpit smegma). The drive back was done on a road clogged with cocksuckers. Many felt the need to drive at 90 MPH, cutting me off so as to almost surgically shear off my bumper. They zoomed ahead. Then somehow, we all rolled up to the toll booth at the same time. Nice job, jackasses. Summation Good times had, though I’m weary. Good people met. Mind freshened from the entire experience. While not a huge White Wolf fanbase at the convention, there still remained a pretty good contingent. Not to mention the many folks who used to play the old game and were looking for an excuse to dive into the reboot (and that excuse is now called Changeling: The Lost). I come away, weary but pleased. 07/20/07 You disappoint me again, Starscream. Wait. What? Oh. Right. Transformers. Let me say up front, lest you get other ideas (and you will, oh, you will), I think it was a super-fun movie. The nummy equivalent of eating bad food and loving it, with sloppy meat grease and donut-filling coagulating on your chin whiskers. Good times had by all. But Michael Bay... you know, I keep trying to think of something witty, something pointed to say about him, but the only word that continues to rise up in my morning-addled brain is... are you ready for it? "Dogshit." That's it. That's the only word I can summon. Michael Bay is, by and large, dogshit. His eye is dogshit. His talent is dogshit. His directorial finesse is... I mean, it's a big burlap sack of fresh dogshit. (And that word, "fresh," applies. His dogshit isn't stale, I'll give him that. It's very fresh. Fertile. It'll give life to whatever awful swamp plants thrive in canine feculence.) Michael Bay cares little for subtlety. To him, more is more. If you can have one explosion, why not have three? If you can eschew human character in favor of giant stomping robots, then do it! The guy opens the movie with a Decepticon attack. It contains no suspense. You know next to nothing about the military characters who are about to battle said Decepticon. You only know that the giant robot is going to blow stuff up, and you kind of don't care. You know what I would've done? And every other director worth his salt? You wouldn't show a Transformer in the first act. It'd be all glimpses and weird transmissions. I mean, goddamn, even Independence Day -- a movie that just vomits ridiculous action -- doesn't show you the aliens for a while. You take some time to learn about the characters before watching the Earth blow up. Most of the characters are hollow automatons, given less soul than the ostensibly soulless robots. Bay's military fetishism ("Hey, look, another achingly slow-motion shot of dudes walking into a helicopter!") goes into overdrive, too. You can just picture him at the editing console, busting a nut any time he gets to cut to an F-22 fighter jet. He shudders and squees and then his assistant or second director or whoever has to Kleenex the monitor to get Bay's meth-flavored spooge off the glass so they can keep editing. Worse, the guy can't direct a robot fight scene. Eight out of ten robot scenes are so big and bombastic that you don't know what's happening. You just see colored hunks of metal blurring across the screen, then you'll see some big Decepticon dead. Not every action sequence is like this: Bay handles some of the action with crackhead aplomb. But a lot of it just ends up a mire of visual noise. All the characters lost within it. Ah, but then you have Sam Witwicky, played to the nines by Shia Lebouf (pronounced "Tom Spiznowski"). Shia is a fucking star, man. You can see it. You can see why Spielberg loves him and has him cast in Indiana Jones IV. In fact, all the good stuff about Transformers can be laid squarely at Spielberg's feet. He was involved from the beginning, and was the one to reportedly get that script into the solid condition that remained mostly on-screen (though the ending became a muddy mess, devoid of logic). I only wish that Spielberg had himself helmed the movie. Spielberg knows restraint. Even War of the Worlds makes clear that he has retained the lesson he learned way back on Jaws: less is more, and more just ends up as less. If he'd have handled this film like War of the Worlds, it would be so much more potent, a real jaw-dropper. And yet, I relent. I enjoyed the film immensely. I felt chills skitter up my spinal cord whenever Optimus Prime said any damn thing (even, yes, for real, "My bad"). I loved all the throwaway geek gems. Megatron is disappointed in Starscream! Jazz is a jive-talking blackbot! Megan Fox is hot and tan and ... wait, that's not a Transformer-related thing, is it? But she is hot. Crazy unreal hot. Her character is passable, given just enough to do, but she's unnaturally pleasant to look at. (And she looks as much like a high school student as I do, unless she's like, a twelfth-year senior.) But hot! Did I mention hot? The shame of Transformers is that it is good, which means that it could've been great if it wasn't in the epileptic hands of Doctor Dogshit over there. Didn't anyone see Armageddon or Pearl Harbor, two of the dogshittiest movies ever to be paraded in front of our eyes? (If you were to sit down and watch a double-header of those two films, one right after the other, you know what would happen? You would die. You would die because your brain would kill you. It would grow hands, punch a hole in your skull, and leave your head. Then it would stab out your eyes with a steak knife and ask you, "Why did you do that to me?" Then it would choke you and find a skull that doesn't so clearly hate it.) 07/07/07 Happy 07/07/07, people. Apparently a number of you are getting married or playing the lottery or something on this most fortunate of days. We'll see how lucky you all feel when an asteroid comes crashing into Earth, killing half of us. The other half will be eradicated by the hungry space rash that we all get from the space rock. I'm a "glass is half full" kind of guy, as you can well see. Anyhow. Shortly, I'll copy over some links that'll take you to the various Chuck-centric events at Dexcon 10 at the East Brunswick Hilton in New Jersey. I'm running three four-hour sessions of Changeling: The Lost there, which is a game that has ended up damn near perfect in its execution. Seriously, one of my Major White Wolf Goals was to someday be a part of a Changeling re-imagining, one that harnessed the good stuff about the earlier iteration (The Dreaming) and jettisoned all the stuff that sucked open ass in favor of stuff that did not suck open ass. Perhaps even stuff that rocks one's proverbial socks off. And yes, that's a proverb. Shut your mouth. So, C:tL is good, and I will run C:tL in July before the game's actual release in July. However, the fine people at DexCon were addlepated enough to think that I somehow merited a full hour of what I hope will be termed The Big Wendig Power Hour, Starring Big Goddamn Wendig. I do not know what I am supposed to do during this hour in which an audience gazes at me while I probably gaze back at them. Empty stares meeting one another like two laser beams meeting in space, or two guys whizzing on each other in the public pool. Whatever it is they expect of me, I have a forum. I assume that I'll get up there and address questions about... shit, I don't know. Game-related questions? Writing questions? Questions about my hot bod? My nerves of iron, my fists of steel? My sexual prowess, which was gained by eating the hearts of many Yetis? My acid blood, which was gained by watching the movie Alien like, 200 times in a row? I have answers if they have questions. I just hope they can handle the power of the, uh, Power Hour. Of Big Wendig. Of something. What else? I dunno. Does whitening toothpaste do a fucking thing? I don't think my teeth are any whiter. They're still that... jaundiced tooth-shade that everybody else has. Though, jeez, maybe if I stopped using whitening toothpaste, my teeth would look like grommets of crusty cat poop shoved unmercifully up into my gums. Who knows? It's probably some silly advertising thing, some weasel word that doesn't mean dick. You know: "This candy bar is 25% bigger!" Oh yeah? Twenty-five percent bigger than what? "Than a candy bar that is 25% smaller!" Dirty shitheads. In this case, the toothpaste probably like, whitens your teeth by 0.044% or some itty bitty fraction of a fraction. So legally the damn stuff still whitens your teeth enough that you can't sue them for a billionty dollars because of false advertising. Maybe I should rant about this at DexCon. I'll loudly eschew talking about anything game- or writing-related, I'll just mouth off about toothpaste conspiracies. It'll leave an impression, at least. Oh, in other news, Microsoft is a company I now officially trust with my life. Seriously. I left everything in my will to Bill Gates, that poor hungry pauper who is now not the richest dude in the world. I think the new richest dude is like, Dracula or something. What I'm getting at is, I mentioned how the Xbox 360 took a giant crap on itself a few weeks ago, right? Well, you may have read, but Microsoft stepped up to the plate in response to my complaints. I called them, told them last week that they were forcing me to buy another console (a lie, I already bought a Wii and I don't feel like buying a Blu-Ray boat anchor), and they could suck it. And this week, Microsoft stepped up. They extended their warranty on their console to an unprecedented three years. Huge. Big deal. They didn't have to go that far. The console hasn't even been out two years; they could've just settled on that and it still would've been awesome. But Peter Moore came out all hat-in-hand and apologized and chastised himself and then flagellated his back with a willow branch until it bled. So, Microsoft just saved me money and hassle. Instead of meeting complaints with a kind of corporate wiggle-dance to free themselves from the grapple of responsibility, they stood up like men and shrugged and said, "Oops, we done fucked up." Amen. Microsoft has earned my trust. 06/25/07 TECHNOLOGY MUST BE DESTROYED! So someone must've said when they cursed my household thrice. In a fairly short amount of time, I've had: My XBOX 360 take a shit on itself. My desktop mumble something about "the peaceful grove" before falling into an inert torpor. My cell phone gain a mind of its own and decide that only sometimes will it allow the battery within its body to be charged. So, whatever mad gypsy I pissed off, please stop cursing my tech. It's starting to really dampen my productivity. I do back up, so I'm not entirely smackered. But, I back up once per week, which is traditionally on Saturdays. And the system died on Friday morning. Which means, ayuh, I lost some stuff. Not a huge loss, all recoverable with an extra push for time. But annoying. Very annoying. Apparently, I had detected the subtle shifts in the technoforce, and whatever invisible antennae I possess apparently foresaw the coming Techpocalypse. Because I bought a new laptop a week or so ago. That's the good news, at least. Ooh, shit, maybe the new laptop is causing these problems. It is a Dell, an unusual purchase for me, being the unabashed Gateway fan that I am. Perhaps the Dell is just asserting its dominance, the way a new dog will rough up all the other dogs to declare his primacy. In the pecking order, perhaps the Dell wishes to be king chicken. It's a sweet laptop. Nothing personal to the laptop, but I've had spotty experience with Dell in the past. But this new sucker, it's stocked, locked and ready to punch some cocks. Big screen, lots of memory, good-sized keyboard, an actual graphics card, fat battery. Only thing I skimped on was the hard drive space, but I have a biggun' external hard drive which should cover all concerns. System's got Windows Vista, which is... strange. It's like XP, only prettier and more sensitive. Way more sensitive. Any time I go to do anything, it wants to make sure it's allowed to really do that. I have to sign forms in triplicate. It's like a nervous son, unsure if he's allowed to ask his father for a cookie. "May I truly have this cookie, father? Don't hit me!" It's constantly flinching from my firm hand, this Vista. Then again, that's better than XP, which held my own interests in wanton disregard. Whatever it wanted to do, it does it. "Ehh, I had to download some driver updates and reboot. Were you working on something? I don't give a shit, newbie. Hey, I didn't like that gay screensaver you were using. So I put up a slideshow of JPEGs. You'll like it, it's a bunch of dudes fishing, over and over again. And even if you don't like it, what do I care? I own you, fleshface." Fleshface, that's what he called me. A little rude, you have to admit. Anyway, the old desktop, I'm assuming it's the power supply. And it's an All-In-One PC, which makes it a tiddle-bit tough to crack open and replace the PSU, but who knows? I may try it. Or I may see if someone can do it for me. (Anybody volunteering?) Gateway will repair it, but to do so, I think they want to take a lien against my house, so... there's that. Hrm. I also need a new copy of Word, if anybody has one. I'll give you... well, not much. Candy? Adulation? Secret prayers to give your infernal soul hidden power? Other things are happening, some good, some bad. I'll get into them when I know more. If you have kind wishes, please partner those magical thoughts with The Screenplay, which is now out in Los Angeles trying to kiss up to executives and financiers. Our little baby, out in the world, naive and stumbling about. Our little word-born scriptmonkey. Do well, tiny monkey, do well. And if you're the gypsy who is cursing my tech, quit it. 06/03/07 Mowing the lawn is a kind of peaceful thing. Lots of time to think. Absorb. Zone out. Let the unconscious roll and tumble in its own joyous filth. Lucky me, too, as I juuuuuust beat the rain, man. (Bonus activity: re-read that sentence as, "I just beat the Rain Man." He was all like, "Wapner's on, yeah, Wapner's on," and I was all like, "Fuck your Wapner, little man.") Some brief administrative duties: I updated the Resume tab as well as revamping the Flickr badge at the main page. Don't all go rushing in there at once. You'll stampede. You'll shut down the servers. The Intertoobs will crash and we'll all be left wondering how to get our porn. We'll have to go back to masturbating to the Food Network or trying to see a glimpse of nipple behind the gauze of white static on those blocked softcore channels. Last weekend was, as noted, our first anniversary celebratory celebration. We looked at flowers at Longwood Gardens. We ate crazy good food at Roux 3, some of which was comped to us simply by dint of it being our anniversary (a brief tasty teaser of foods consumed: duck confit and gnocchi, scallops, crispy chicken, sashimi ahi tuna, molten chocolate cakeyness, pomegranite and pear cocktails, and so on, and so forth). We stayed at a delightful little bed and breakfast known as Sweetwater Farm, which blessedly was not a B&B in the vein of B&Bs, because as Ben Stiller says in Flirting With Disaster, "We are not B&B people!" I don't like old ladies forcing me to sit in the parlor with other old people while a cat walks across a not-too-distant plate of scones and everybody's perfectly fine with the feline's fecal toxoplasmosis getting all over the baked goods. This was the kind of B&B where they leave you the fuck alone until you want some attention, like breakfast. Then they attend to you, and then they leave you the fuck alone again. That said, there were a handful of dogs (one of whom was an unofficial tour guide -- seriously, he'd take you to all corners of the many-acred farm, and then he'd needle some chipmunks or aggravate the sheep). As noted, yes, sheep. Horses. Goats. Good times, good times. Flickr and the Livejournal both reveal pics from the expedition. What else? Fence is done on both sides, now. Putting in a fence is like fighting a bear. It's tough. You get banged up. But, if you win, you feel very satisfied. Vindicated, even, as you plant your bloodied boot on the sweat-frothed chest of the fallen ursine. Saw Knocked Up, which is funny enough that you'll void your bowels at least twice, and sweet enough where you'll unconsciously feel your once-thought-dead heart flutter and bumble in your chest. And crass enough, too, where you will have to readjust your unhinged jaw, the jaw having unhinged itself at some unbelievably awful thing or another. Been reading a lot, and I continue to move away from even the ability to enjoy fiction like I once did. It's almost all non-fiction anymore. I've heard other writers say the same, and I have always had a hard time believing it true, but it seems to be true. I'm pushing through Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, which is good at times and at other times is like smacking yourself in the head with a Dickens novel, and since the book is approximately seventy-eleven-hundred-and-thousand pages, it's tough going. Part of it, too, is that fiction absorbs into my consciousness too quickly. While I no longer ape it when I myself am writing, I still find that in reading, say, science-fiction, I suddenly get this awesome hankering to write The Best Science-Fiction Novel Of All Goddamn Time even though I've proven time and time again that I couldn't write science-fiction if I ate the minds and hearts of Robert Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke in some kind of soul-consuming ritual. Non-fiction, though, is neutral. Stylized or no, I don't have the urge to write in that style or to push forth writing some kind of creative non-fiction bullshit. It's funny. At 31, I know I'm not old, and I know in many ways both good and regrettable I haven't changed much. But other times, I recognize subtle shifts in my behavior or habits. Don't know if they're good or bad. Don't know so much if its an earmark of maturity, immaturity or simply a sign-o-the-times, but those shifts are present regardless of their value. Perhaps I should go mow the lawn again to ponder this. But first? The Rhymenoceros versus the Hiphopapotamus! 05/30/07 Top Ten Inside Jokes From This Past Weekend With My Wife 10) "ATMWT: African Tin-Man With Titties!" 9) "It's like the zoo, but with plants!" 8) "That sounds like a Fergie song: 'My punk, my punk, my lovely pussy junk!'" 7) "I think that old man just crapped his pants." 6) "Is it me, or is the Long Trail and the Short Trail the exact same thing?" 5) "Man, it's like the United Nations around here." 4) "Mmm. Bugspray and chocolate." 3) "I think his name is Berkley. Or Buckley. Or Barkley. I just call him 'Buddy.'" 2) "It's like a picnic, but with no food and a bunch of people I don't know." 1) "Happy Annibersary, Happy Annibersary, Happy Annibersary, HAAAAAAAAAPPY ANNIBERSARY!" Moral of the story: I love my wife precisely because I can have lists like this with her. Happy Anniversary, lady! More to come soon on our crazy misadventures this weekend in the Brandywine Valley. 05/13/07 So, the word on the street informs me that a number of the people I know happen to be awesome. Keith, becoming... I don't know what he's becoming, I think he just earned his Masters in Hypnosis or something? Or maybe he counsels dogs? I dunno. Then there's Matt, and I'm told that Matt became a Doctor of Jurisprudence, which I think is nonsense language for "lawyer" or maybe "bee wrangler." Finally, you've got Marty and Sarah, who have again made us all jealous of his potent seed and her comfortable uterus, for they have formed a perfect marriage of biology to create Progeny Number Two. (The girl, Lilith, is a tiny little creature, beautiful with big eyes. Too big, too beautiful, really. It tells me that they've gotten themselves a changeling all swaddled up in the crib. Good luck, is what I'm saying.) Congrats to all ye who have spawned or have gained degrees of some prominence. Let's see. What else to talk about? I may be a guest-of-honor at a semi-local convention (I say semi-local because it's only an hour-and-a-half away). I shall apparently participate on panels. I shall reportedly maybe kind of sort of run a game or three. I may wreck my hotel room and draw 20-sided dice on the walls in my feces. Hard to prophesy the precise details. I'm continuing to write. Scripts, yes. White Wolf books, sure. A little bit of personal stuff, okay, yeah. I'm continuing to develop my first book for The Wolf That Is White, and it is for an existing line and is a book that I believe people have been clamoring for (but what do I know?). We've got one half of our fence up, and it's already working. Because now when I walk by my neighbor's yard and they're all out there doing their thing, I don't have to slap on the politeness mask and acknowledge anybody's presence. With the fence, I am like ninja. I am like ghost. I am like ninja ghost. Gilmore Girls is ending its run, and that's sad. I know, I'm a big homosexual, I hear you. But it's also one of the sharpest shows out there, far smarter than it needs to be. But, if Gilmore Girls must perish so that Veronica Mars must live, then so be it. Spider-Man 3 was good. Probably better than the second, despite what you read. And yet, it also failed to really rock my boat or leave any lasting impressions. One negative of the movie is that, while I like Raimi's nerdy Three-Stooges-schtick, I think in this film he fails to balance that stuff properly against all the emo angst. Year Zero, the new NIN album, continues to impress. Yes, it's the same stuff from Reznor, lyrics-wise (broken, decay, hands-and-knees, violence, etc;etc;), except I like that he kind of takes the personal angle of The Downward Spiral but here he makes it about the group, the masses, the American people. The sci-fi story angle isn't anything jaw-dropping, but it fits the scheme. It plays well with the music. It hates George Bush. That's it, for now. If you're a mother, then happy Your Day. If you're a husband or a son, be nicer to your wives and mothers. 04/20/07 Dear Terribleminds: Artichokes are delicious. The new Nine Inch Nails album demands multiple listens to gauge its measure. My writing resume is updated. I love Avatar: The Last Airbender. Happy Almost Earth Day. Your Mom. That is all. You may now return to American Idol. -- The Wendig 04/19/07 So. 31, or nearly to it. Time to reflect, perhaps. And no, I’m not going to reflect on the Virginia Tech killings. There’s nothing I can say that hasn’t been said, really. In fact, there’s probably not much that I can say about me that’s particularly world-shattering. It’s just been a chockablock year. Since turning 30, I’ve gotten married, bought a house, had rabies shots, eaten sushi, written hundreds of thousands of words, finished two screenplays, taken on more hours at the library, taken on some book development work, traveled to California, paid someone to shave my dog’s asshole, and killed a man in Reno not so much to watch him die, but because he had a shifty look about him like maybe he was trying to steal my Reeboks. (Strange, as I don’t own Reeboks. But I dare not consider this in retrospect lest I be consumed by a tidal bitch-slap of guilt. I am content with this man’s demise, so let’s keep it that way.) Worth mentioning, I suppose, is that I’ve somehow… managed to navigate troubled waters and sail into a pleasant relationship with my father. I can’t say we’re really on the same page about stuff most of the time, but our pages in the book are damn sure a lot closer together than they’ve ever been in the past. Where before I was the beginning of th book and he was the end, now we’re both… I dunno, smashed somewhere in the middle. Maybe toward the third act. It’s odd, because these days he’ll call me just to call me, which is… I said odd already, didn’t I? It’s not bad. Not at all. But before when he’d call, I’d receive the standard litany of questions, asked in such a way that he barely paused to let me answer before getting to the next one. Basic rat-tat-tat of queries included: How’s the car, how’s the girlfriend, how’s the dog, how’s the job, okay, see you, yeah, uh-huh, bye. I could’ve responded with, in order, “It exploded, she’s dead, the dog ate her, and I was fired because I took a messy crap in all four of the copier’s paper trays, okay, yup, uh-huh, bye.” And he might not have noticed. Now, though, he calls to talk. Just ramble on. It’s a natural conversation, not a menu of mandatory topics. Odd, odd, odd. Good. But yeah. Odd. Is he mellowing in his older age? Sure, definitely. He’s got less of an edge. And I don’t mean that as in, “Old Hanrahan, he’s lost his edge, you can see it in the way he pushes his shopping cart full of empty boxes down the long and lonely road.” I mean it as in, “He doesn’t seem so much like he’s going to explode in rage and kill us all.” Which, if you know how many guns the man owns, you’d recognize the potential reality of that statement. (Though, it does continue to be true that during some kind of apocalypse scenario, be it nuclear or zombie-related, I’m traveling to wherever my Dad is at the time. If we’re friends, you and I, well, then dear reader, you can come with me. We’ll get there and he’ll have the sandbags stacked and the guns loaded. The man is prepared for the end of days, be sure of that.) For a little perspective, consider that I think my father disliked me for a goodly portion of the last 30 years. Probably from age, say, 12 to 29. He loved me, sure, but I can’t really say he liked me. He never really understood the whole “writing” thing, either, not until recently. Now he asks about it, seems intrigued by it, even vaguely…proud? What? Really? Shit. That’s crazy. Nevertheless, it appears true-ish. Seems to be a marker of my thirtieth year, so there you have it. That said, maybe I should reconsider this whole, "Gee, I get along with my parents," schitck. Why? Well, as it turns out, my parents tried to kill me when I was a child. Seriously. I just found out like, a week or so ago. When I was a wee tot, they had a water outage or some nonsense, so they tapped my grandmother’s well. (My grandmother, Gram, bless her heart, basically kept food products around for about a glacial epoch. She might have been a botulism farmer for all I know. I remember seeing a plastic container of caramel popcorn on her one table when I was very young, at about age six or seven. That same container of candy popcorn was on that same table in that same spot when I was a late teenager. No, I’m not kidding. Her cabinets were weighed down by bulging cans. Point of this parenthetical note is, it was not the wisest idea to eat whatever my grandmother had to offer. Or to drink her water, as would become abundantly clear.) Well, I guess nobody wanted to take a close look at my grandmother’s well, so they failed to notice the animal that had gone in there to die. Dunno what kind of animal. I like to think it was a possum. Anyway, long story short, I drank this dead animal water (heretofore known as “Possum Liquor”) and it made me deathly ill. I guess I almost died in the hospital. I was like, seven months old or something. Maybe there’s a little part of the possum soul that still lives within me. I’ll call him Little Stinky. Oh well. So, almost dead at seven months, but still living at almost thirty-one years. Here’s to you, life. The clink of glasses, a mumbled toast, and a wink from Little Stinky. 04/15/07 Right now, life is just too nutty to formulate a thesis on any one topic and ramble about it. Just impossible. It's like I have a brain, but it's made up of uncoordinated bees. These bees, they don't get along. They aren't doing some orchestrated honey-loving line dance. It's every bee for himself in this goddamn head of mine. So, I give you: Thoughtvomit. My brain. Vomiting thoughts. And bees. Sweet, sweet bees. I turn 31 in a week. The age doesn't bother me, but the swiftness of time is starting to. We're putting up six-foot stockade privacy fence. Fence is heavier than you think. And you need more of it than you think. But anything to keep out interlopers. We're going to put a bat house on it. I owe batkind (batmankind?) a karmic debt, really, for killing one of them a couple months ago. You can overdo sushi. I still like sushi. But, as it turns out, I don't like it in massive quantities. When you eat sushi, it's a lot to shove in your mouth. You don't take casual bites. You take the whole sushi turd and shove that puppy into your mouth. Plus, I got one with too much wasabi, which as it turns out, isn't even wasabi, which as it turns out disappoints me on some level I can't grasp. Anyway. It felt like a wave of fiery air blasting down my throat and up my nose and into my eyeholes all at once. Yes, I am developing some books for White Wolf. No, I won't tell you what they are, but they'll all be awesome because I know all the awesome writers. Thus is a privelege for having written 45+ of these damn things. Winter is an asshole. It's trying to snow even as I type this. It's rain for the moment. But snow threatens. Like a hyena in the shadows. Waiting to pick off the sick and sleepy. I have a picture on Flickr that is somewhat inexplicably up to 93,000 views. Some mad Blog robot out there must be in love with it. My next highest is at 12,000 or so, and that's apparently impressive given that I think the most viewed photo on Flickr is at 140,000 or thereabouts. I really enjoy digital photography. It helps me in my writing, believe it or not. Allows me to think even more visually. I couldn't give a fucking rat's nest full of rats about Don Imus or Rutgers or Sharpton. I'm tired of people with lax morality attempting to be moral shepherds. If you pee your bed, don't give me advice on how to not pee my bed. Braising chicken thighs in a sweet chili sauce is a recipe for bonerocity. It is not the exact Center of Bonerocity, but it orbits it. I think Promethean is one of the best games White Wolf has ever put out. Matt McFarland and his team of writers deserves a fat sack of kudos on that game for all the supplements. Very happy with it. One day maybe, we'll play it. You know, after we finish Changeling: The Lost, which is rocking my pants and will rock your pants one day soon. Neighbors are overrated. Bricks are cheap, until you need like, hundreds of them. State Senator Greenleaf's apparently favorite book is about canoeing. In Pennsylvania. As if canoeing in Pennsylvania is an experience unique to the whole canoeing ouevre. I have not seen Grindhouse, but I want to. I suspect it'll be a DVD thing, unfortunately. Netflix has not given me my new Avatar: The Last Airbender disc yet, which is like dangling a packet of China White above a heroin addict's head. I know they have it. They know I want it. C'mon, Netflix, let's come together on this. It's raining. I have to take the dog out in the rain. Which is not awesome, not awesome at all. Maybe I'll just kill the dog and save myself the time. Oh, I'm just joking. I can't kill him. He's apparently invulnerable. Poof. 03/25/07 It's been an interesting weekend, is what I'm saying. Sushi. If you know me, you know that the visual of me putting sushi in my mouth is on par with the visual of me sticking the entire Empire State Building up my ass without the courtesy of lubrication. In simpler terms: impossible. And yet, that's what I did this weekend. I ate me some sushi. This is not a metaphor. I do not secretly mean, "I got it on with my lady," or "I went down on a fishmonger's wife." It means what it says. I'm being as honest as I can be, here, people. I ate sushi. And I liked it. Double-take! Spit-take! Fwing! Ptoo! Wha? Huh? Ruhhhh? It's true. I fiddled together some soy, some wasabi, and popped a hunk of raw tuna followed by a hunk of raw salmon into my maw. It was great. The salmon moreso than the tuna, but both were pleasing to my Draconian palate. The two things I figured had to be completely unpleasant about sushi were proven non-existent. First, the smell. I figured, hey, it has to smell. It's fish. It's raw. It'll smell like, I dunno, cat breath, old shoes, unkempt vaginas. But, no real odor coming off of it at all. The second concern was texture. Texture is a meal-killer for me. It's why I don't eat tomatoes. The texture ruins it. Watery. Gooey. Meh. Mushrooms are hit or miss for me, too. Sometimes it's like eating a slug wrapped in boot leather. (But mushrooms have a great earthy taste which counterbalances it -- it just has to be a good mushroom for me to eat it, like Portobello or Shiitake.) So, I figured raw fish had to have a pretty distinct and unpleasant texture. Like eating a rubber worm or something. But, no. Actually, the texture is alarmingly pleasant. Silky. So, that was one part of the weekend. Eating raw fish. It's like someone replaced me with a robot. A robot who eats sushi. Second part is, looks like I'll be picking up some new work for Big Daddy White Wolf. I'll tell you naught about what I might be doing for them, but it's good stuff, and it's big. Some day, I'll share the 411. What else? Lots of home improvement. We did quite a bit this weekend, actually. New garbage disposal. New toilet seat. Hung some paintings. Installed a new light fixture in the foyer. Stained the grout in the bathroom prior to sealing it (color: "Antique White," which is a synonym for "Old Person" or "Dirty Curtains"). Learned some shit about electrical systems which I'll probably forget later (just in time for me to electrocute myself, which is why I've instructed Michelle to linger near me with a 2x4 so she can thwack me away from the embracing current). Oh! Hell, we finally found a breakfast place around here that doesn't suck. We have like, eleventy-billion diners in a half-mile radius, and they're all for shit. Odd, given that diners tend to be almost universally okay -- they walk a fine line, but always produce good, greasy victuals. The ones around here are just trash, though, with the exception of maybe one or two. Finally we found something tucked away, maybe 10 minutes down the road. I had some apple sausage. Michelle had strawberry-stuffed french toast. Life has returned to its balance. And finally, speaking of balance, Mama Spring, she's here. Like a baby bird, my mouth is open, ready for her to regurgitate her delights into my outstretched beak. I love Spring. I love Summer. I even love Autumn. I hate Winter. I'd like to kick Old Man Winter in his hoarfrost teeth and lichen-covered testicles. Winter just steals all the fire from my hearth, man. It really does. It saps me. Spring, though, soon as the first sunny, warm day hits, I'm like goddamn Tigger over here. Seasonal Affective Disorder or whatever they call it? That's me in a nutshell, kittens. Last bit: back on track with a second draft of one of the screenplays. Good times. Ah well. That's it for now. You'll hear more from me eventually. Peace in the Middle East, homies. I gots to bounce. 03/07/07 And here you thought I wasn't busy. Let's see. A writing update, long overdue. Got lots of books hitting shelves between now and May. I won't list them all here, suffice to say you want them, so you'll go buy them, and that will allow people to keep paying me to write this stuff. Also got a lot lined up, writing-wise. Got something under the vigilant eye of Matt McFarland. Got Autumn Nightmares, the first Changeling supplement, and also the second supplement in that line. Got something semi-big a-brewing for Vampire. Maybe some other irons in that fire. Just finished text for The Blood, Damnation City, and World of Darkness: Reliquary. Had ourselves some Changeling playtesting, too, and I'd tell you all about it, but the NDA Collar on my neck would suddenly start to beep (like it is now) moments before it goes off like a circle of firecrackers, popping my head off like a cork. A blood-spattered cork. With ears. Working on the second draft of the first new script. Will have that turned in and again out of my hands soonish. Did I mention that I got rabies shots? Needed because I was "exposed" to a bat in a mousetrap? (A very stupid bat, apparently.) I may have previously linked to my Flickr page. Lots of photos there to peruse, should you care. Yesterday, a milestone was hit -- made it to #1 on Explore, albeit briefly, with a pic I posted. It's not like it's any big deal karmically or anything. Nor will anyone give me any money. But there is a kind of satisfaction implicit. I'm not a good photographer, I'm just fortunate enough to have a nice digital camera, a wide-open SD card, and Photoshop. I've also been keeping up with My Livejournal, which functions as little more than a blog for my photo highlights. If they can be called that. My neck hurts. My head hurts. Lost is on soon. Humperdido. Humperdoo. 02/21/07 I don't like fish. It's not that they're repulsive-looking. I mean, they are. But that's not the problem. Chickens are fugly, too, but I'll eat the hell out of a chicken. Shrimp (or "skrimps") are basically ghastly little sea bugs, and I'll eat them in the right circumstances, too. But fish? It's the fishy smell. The fishy taste. The fishiness of fish disturbs me. If someone in a restaurant orders a particularly pungent fish, as it passes by my table (bathing me in a persistent whiff of the briny malodor), I'll lose a little of my appetite. Bleah. Blargh. So, I don't like fish. Except. I've been thinking. Fish is supposedly good for you. It's got Omega-3s or Alpha-4s or Magic Bean Oil or some nonsense crammed up in there between the tiny bones and beneath the slimy scales. Plus, it's relatively low-calorie and high protein. Good for the heart. Salve for the soul. Whatever. On a lark, I was flipping through an issue of Cooking Light at the same time I was paging through the local grocery circular. And what did I see? A tilapia recipe in the magazine. And tilapia on sale at the store. It seemed that tilapia and I were star-crossed lovers, like Romeo and Juliet (except in this story, Romeo buys Juliet at a slave market and cooks her up in some olive oil an