THERE WAS A CROOKED MAN, BOOK 1
BY EDWARD MORRIS
GET IT WHILE IT'S HOT
WHILE YOU STILL CAN
Sunday, November 1, 2009
And We'll Sink With California, When It Falls Into The Sea...
I would say Halloween was a complete wet firecracker, except I did get to check out an old friend's Halloween party for a while on the 30th... and I fulfilled a promise to an older friend, one that slung me headlong into four more Crooked Man books* following the close of the series. It's going to take a lot of prequels to tie up all these loose ends, but... Thank you, my venerable West African teacher, a thousand, quintillion times, thank you for doing for me as I did for you.
Still, I punked myself. Didn't make the right phone calls at the right times, relied too much on maybes and tried too hard to be too many things to too many people. Kind of sounds like much of my life, when I don't remember how to get out of my own way.
But tonight, I got about 20 good minutes of meditation and loosened some stuff up doing Yoga on my favorite rug. Was able to eat despite the anxiety being at high gear, some of this wonderful lasagna type thing that Serena made and froze in chunks for later. Still good. I love my neighborhood and all the beautiful freaks in it, even the Alan Moore lookalike who likes to shout at cars.
News item of interest: Some self-righteous assholes in CA are suing their neighbors for smoking cigarettes. The comments on that news article ("Want to prove you're white trash and stupid? SMOKE") made me echo several writer friends in that I realized how much the Internet makes me needlessly nervous and agitated and all wound up.
Joseph Campbell said that the world is a living thing, and you can't change it. People are going to do what they're going to do, think what they're going to think, etc., no matter what you do. But that column, and the nasty attitude of the Rob Reiner-worshipping fossilized debutantes (Thank you Trey Parker, Matt Stone and Jello Biafra for the mixed metaphor) in question is yet another in the 64,000,000
reasons why I will never go back to California as long as I live, unless someone is paying my way.
What a vicious, venomous, fake, utterly worthless species of rich people they have down there, and the middle class tries to jump on the bandwagon and follow along.
I have never seen the kind of disdain for humanity that I saw from that crowd.
The year I spent in CA was probably the worst one of my life, (despite the best efforts of some truly compassionate, conscious people who work for a living and are more truly representative of the human population as a whole.)
As long as they clear out all the people who aren't self-righteous, intolerant yuppie viral cells, I'd really love to see the whole state slide into the ocean the way Youth Brigade talked about in that great song. Then me and the earthquake machine I stole from Karl Rove get to head down South and clean house...
'k, truly feeling like the Archie Bunker of Science Fiction now. Thanks for letting me vent. Back to work.
Still, I punked myself. Didn't make the right phone calls at the right times, relied too much on maybes and tried too hard to be too many things to too many people. Kind of sounds like much of my life, when I don't remember how to get out of my own way.
But tonight, I got about 20 good minutes of meditation and loosened some stuff up doing Yoga on my favorite rug. Was able to eat despite the anxiety being at high gear, some of this wonderful lasagna type thing that Serena made and froze in chunks for later. Still good. I love my neighborhood and all the beautiful freaks in it, even the Alan Moore lookalike who likes to shout at cars.
News item of interest: Some self-righteous assholes in CA are suing their neighbors for smoking cigarettes. The comments on that news article ("Want to prove you're white trash and stupid? SMOKE") made me echo several writer friends in that I realized how much the Internet makes me needlessly nervous and agitated and all wound up.
Joseph Campbell said that the world is a living thing, and you can't change it. People are going to do what they're going to do, think what they're going to think, etc., no matter what you do. But that column, and the nasty attitude of the Rob Reiner-worshipping fossilized debutantes (Thank you Trey Parker, Matt Stone and Jello Biafra for the mixed metaphor) in question is yet another in the 64,000,000
reasons why I will never go back to California as long as I live, unless someone is paying my way.
What a vicious, venomous, fake, utterly worthless species of rich people they have down there, and the middle class tries to jump on the bandwagon and follow along.
I have never seen the kind of disdain for humanity that I saw from that crowd.
The year I spent in CA was probably the worst one of my life, (despite the best efforts of some truly compassionate, conscious people who work for a living and are more truly representative of the human population as a whole.)
As long as they clear out all the people who aren't self-righteous, intolerant yuppie viral cells, I'd really love to see the whole state slide into the ocean the way Youth Brigade talked about in that great song. Then me and the earthquake machine I stole from Karl Rove get to head down South and clean house...
'k, truly feeling like the Archie Bunker of Science Fiction now. Thanks for letting me vent. Back to work.
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
THERE WAS A CROOKED MAN #1 READING/SIGNING
When: Thursday October 15 7 PM-9 PM
Where: The Human Bean Coffeehouse
998 SE Oak St. Hillsboro, OR (503)747-6731
What:(clears throat, pops mic)
A weird little railroad town in Central PA that becomes the drain plug for Armageddon.
A girl the hero fell in love with when he was no older than Dante living 'La Vita Nuova', forged into a heroine worthy of the hardest hard SF by brute necessity, thrown back in Time too late, every time, to find her Taliesn again and get the hell home.
Twenty-two years of chasing the shadow with a camera, and realizing that only a lens separates you from it. Nietzsche covered that. (The monster's taking your picture, too...)
All this, and so much more, and more before... Come on down and sit on round. The Reverend has been a-building this here Fire Sermon since he was old enough to type.
Where: The Human Bean Coffeehouse
998 SE Oak St. Hillsboro, OR (503)747-6731
What:(clears throat, pops mic)
A weird little railroad town in Central PA that becomes the drain plug for Armageddon.
A girl the hero fell in love with when he was no older than Dante living 'La Vita Nuova', forged into a heroine worthy of the hardest hard SF by brute necessity, thrown back in Time too late, every time, to find her Taliesn again and get the hell home.
Twenty-two years of chasing the shadow with a camera, and realizing that only a lens separates you from it. Nietzsche covered that. (The monster's taking your picture, too...)
All this, and so much more, and more before... Come on down and sit on round. The Reverend has been a-building this here Fire Sermon since he was old enough to type.
Saturday, October 10, 2009
News From The Front
Blistering day of work today, punctuated by the odd power nap and even odder news articles to cleanse my mental palate, or maybe soil it so much my eyes for the work became fresh...
In any case, I finished The Big Reggae Story I've been trying to do for three years. Originally, it was an alternate history quasi-SF piece that switched lives with Bob Marley and Samuel R. Delany.
It didn't fly. I'll leave it right there. Chip Delany is a polymath and a prodigy. I'm not. I couldn't pull that one off.
But the core premise was sound, and an interesting riff in America in the Fifties about Sun Records down in Memphis, that was sound too. I needed a set of lives closer together to switch, to make the story truly sing. Then I discovered Jackie Opel, a Barbadan transplant whom many reviewers called 'The Jackie Wilson Of Jamaica.' And the premise for 'Higher And Higher' was solved.
5500 words and one power-nap later, I woke and fired up the Facebook demon, to hear that a story I truly, truly believe in that got roundly rejected has been tentatively accepted in an anthology. So maybe there's hope for "Higher And Higher" as well.
Back to work. More to come.
In any case, I finished The Big Reggae Story I've been trying to do for three years. Originally, it was an alternate history quasi-SF piece that switched lives with Bob Marley and Samuel R. Delany.
It didn't fly. I'll leave it right there. Chip Delany is a polymath and a prodigy. I'm not. I couldn't pull that one off.
But the core premise was sound, and an interesting riff in America in the Fifties about Sun Records down in Memphis, that was sound too. I needed a set of lives closer together to switch, to make the story truly sing. Then I discovered Jackie Opel, a Barbadan transplant whom many reviewers called 'The Jackie Wilson Of Jamaica.' And the premise for 'Higher And Higher' was solved.
5500 words and one power-nap later, I woke and fired up the Facebook demon, to hear that a story I truly, truly believe in that got roundly rejected has been tentatively accepted in an anthology. So maybe there's hope for "Higher And Higher" as well.
Back to work. More to come.
Thursday, October 8, 2009
HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME: Made It To 34! W00T!
A lot of writers on my favorite Yahoo group call me "kid". If Samuel R. Delany is right and slogging through a slough of personal nightmare really just means being a writer at my age, then I can't wait to shed the title.
This birthday has been... interesting, somewhat in the Chinese curse sense of the word. As Dick Lupoff just wrote to me, and I couldn't put any better myself, I just got a medical diagnosis I really don't want, but one that is not immediately life-threatening for the foreseeable future.
Despite that, though, I made it. I made it here, where every day is kind of like a birthday. I have the most wonderful woman in the whole world with me, one whose life can't even be nailed down to ...well, anything, really. Serena is the sun in my sky, as someone else put it, and also the best birthday present ever. First & Last & Always.
On this birthday, I am still mourning my grandmother. But Miss Dixie told us all, in one of the two or three great poems she left us at the very last, to let her spirit rest, and heal the wounds we could heal and grow where we could.
I can only say that I am the most blessed human on the planet to have ever had such a wise woman in my life... and that when I look at my sisters now, and my Mom, I can see Dixie shining out just as fine as paint.
I lost two good friends, this birthday. One of them turned out to be faithless, and one such a Lovecraftian monstrosity I can't even begin to explain it here pending litigation. But based on the death-blow one of them dealt me, and the slightly less fatal blow the other dealt to my faith in humanity as a whole...
Well, the writing is just INCENDIARY, nowadays. I have folded even the colors of my two new worst enemies into my own palette, and learned to forgive them because neither of them have any CLUE what the fuck they do. Much like Vanessa. Nothing changes but the year.
When I did that, when I learned to love them, I began to heap coals of fire down upon their heads in the most pagan sense possible. "Alphabet Of Lightning" is the nastiest, bloodiest, most savagely beautiful thing I have ever written.
And the most honest. Though it is over with too quickly for my liking, and glosses over some dead horses I would truly like to flog until there's nothing left but slurry and Jell-O... I have to be honest, and just, fair and complete, rather than attacking two or three folks who are sadly too dead to defend themselves.
However, that doesn't mean that I'll lie, or bullshit, or censor myself, for five seconds. Powersburg in the 1940's is a savage, desolate land, though the intellectual and spiritual beauty of folks like the librarian Anna Connelly go yards toward making it habitable.
And (see posts just below)... I have to start hustling on the Crooked Man launch. We have our first gig, and the second at Orycon by default. I want to engineer TEN. WFC and Radcon and the whole tour. And if that can't happen, I will know the reason why.
One of my literary heroes, Jeff VanderMeer, once used the mantra "Knives Out." For now, that's where I am too. Anybody who actually reads this thing, in the Portland area, please come down to the Human Bean on the fifteenth. If I could work my will, even if twelve people showed up, I would lock the doors, hand out beers to everyone (or whatever you're into) and just filibuster Book 1. We'll see...
This birthday has been... interesting, somewhat in the Chinese curse sense of the word. As Dick Lupoff just wrote to me, and I couldn't put any better myself, I just got a medical diagnosis I really don't want, but one that is not immediately life-threatening for the foreseeable future.
Despite that, though, I made it. I made it here, where every day is kind of like a birthday. I have the most wonderful woman in the whole world with me, one whose life can't even be nailed down to ...well, anything, really. Serena is the sun in my sky, as someone else put it, and also the best birthday present ever. First & Last & Always.
On this birthday, I am still mourning my grandmother. But Miss Dixie told us all, in one of the two or three great poems she left us at the very last, to let her spirit rest, and heal the wounds we could heal and grow where we could.
I can only say that I am the most blessed human on the planet to have ever had such a wise woman in my life... and that when I look at my sisters now, and my Mom, I can see Dixie shining out just as fine as paint.
I lost two good friends, this birthday. One of them turned out to be faithless, and one such a Lovecraftian monstrosity I can't even begin to explain it here pending litigation. But based on the death-blow one of them dealt me, and the slightly less fatal blow the other dealt to my faith in humanity as a whole...
Well, the writing is just INCENDIARY, nowadays. I have folded even the colors of my two new worst enemies into my own palette, and learned to forgive them because neither of them have any CLUE what the fuck they do. Much like Vanessa. Nothing changes but the year.
When I did that, when I learned to love them, I began to heap coals of fire down upon their heads in the most pagan sense possible. "Alphabet Of Lightning" is the nastiest, bloodiest, most savagely beautiful thing I have ever written.
And the most honest. Though it is over with too quickly for my liking, and glosses over some dead horses I would truly like to flog until there's nothing left but slurry and Jell-O... I have to be honest, and just, fair and complete, rather than attacking two or three folks who are sadly too dead to defend themselves.
However, that doesn't mean that I'll lie, or bullshit, or censor myself, for five seconds. Powersburg in the 1940's is a savage, desolate land, though the intellectual and spiritual beauty of folks like the librarian Anna Connelly go yards toward making it habitable.
And (see posts just below)... I have to start hustling on the Crooked Man launch. We have our first gig, and the second at Orycon by default. I want to engineer TEN. WFC and Radcon and the whole tour. And if that can't happen, I will know the reason why.
One of my literary heroes, Jeff VanderMeer, once used the mantra "Knives Out." For now, that's where I am too. Anybody who actually reads this thing, in the Portland area, please come down to the Human Bean on the fifteenth. If I could work my will, even if twelve people showed up, I would lock the doors, hand out beers to everyone (or whatever you're into) and just filibuster Book 1. We'll see...
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
Crooked Man Release Date
PRE-LAUNCH AUTHOR READ
THERE WAS A CROOKED MAN: BOOK 1
OCTOBER 15
7-9 PM
The Human Bean Coffeehouse
Open 5AM - 9PM Daily!
998 SE Oak St.Hillsboro, OR 97123
503.747.6731
I will be reading from Crooked Man 1, saying a few brief words about the collection and construction of this singular, ground-breaking cross-genre experiment, and signing books. (If we run out, I'll pre-sell 'em. Don't worry, most of you know where I live.)
OCTOBER 27
THERE WAS A CROOKED MAN, BOOK 1
OFFICIAL RELEASE
OTHER DATES TBA. I will try to make it to Radcon and World Fantasy Con.
In November, I will be a guest author again at Orycon 30, and will also be letting the Crooked Man out to cause havoc at the Marriott. Stay tuned.
THERE WAS A CROOKED MAN: BOOK 1
OCTOBER 15
7-9 PM
The Human Bean Coffeehouse
Open 5AM - 9PM Daily!
998 SE Oak St.Hillsboro, OR 97123
503.747.6731
I will be reading from Crooked Man 1, saying a few brief words about the collection and construction of this singular, ground-breaking cross-genre experiment, and signing books. (If we run out, I'll pre-sell 'em. Don't worry, most of you know where I live.)
OCTOBER 27
THERE WAS A CROOKED MAN, BOOK 1
OFFICIAL RELEASE
OTHER DATES TBA. I will try to make it to Radcon and World Fantasy Con.
In November, I will be a guest author again at Orycon 30, and will also be letting the Crooked Man out to cause havoc at the Marriott. Stay tuned.
Checking In
I noted how long it had been since I've posted anything on here. Been recapping stuff on Facebook, but...
"By The Rivers Of Babylon" will be in Polluto#6
Ditto "I Drove All Night" in Graveyard Tales, very soon
And "Stairway To Heaven", co-written with Lou Antonelli, will be in an anthology I will comment on as soon as the mailman bears that antho's fruit.
Attended the H.P.Lovecraft Film Festival/Cthulhucon as a guest author, and thrilled to death to hear that they are doing a smaller one in Seattle in March. Met William F. Nolan and Cody Goodfellow and the great editors/filmmakers/see Rolodex Jason & Sunni Brock. The core Bizarro/PLO crowd were there rolling up their sleeves and busting their ass.
What else... Read with Laird Barron, whose live reads are always a smash. My first Cthulhu Mythos story I ever sold, 'Jihad Over Innsmouth' had the room spellbound and laughing (according to eyewitnesses.) Had a hell of a lot of fun on the Humor In Horror panel with Jemiah Jefferson and Marianne Snyder, and S.T. Joshi himself pulled my ass out of the fire during a scheduling hiccup for the other panel. Can't complain.
More to say, but must go round up breakfast. Starting to think about hunting a small animal in the backyard, but raccoon meat is no good and the store's only two blocks away...
"By The Rivers Of Babylon" will be in Polluto#6
Ditto "I Drove All Night" in Graveyard Tales, very soon
And "Stairway To Heaven", co-written with Lou Antonelli, will be in an anthology I will comment on as soon as the mailman bears that antho's fruit.
Attended the H.P.Lovecraft Film Festival/Cthulhucon as a guest author, and thrilled to death to hear that they are doing a smaller one in Seattle in March. Met William F. Nolan and Cody Goodfellow and the great editors/filmmakers/see Rolodex Jason & Sunni Brock. The core Bizarro/PLO crowd were there rolling up their sleeves and busting their ass.
What else... Read with Laird Barron, whose live reads are always a smash. My first Cthulhu Mythos story I ever sold, 'Jihad Over Innsmouth' had the room spellbound and laughing (according to eyewitnesses.) Had a hell of a lot of fun on the Humor In Horror panel with Jemiah Jefferson and Marianne Snyder, and S.T. Joshi himself pulled my ass out of the fire during a scheduling hiccup for the other panel. Can't complain.
More to say, but must go round up breakfast. Starting to think about hunting a small animal in the backyard, but raccoon meat is no good and the store's only two blocks away...
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