All Due Respect...Check it out

I am the Queen of Craig's List. Since 2007 when I realized the impending Writer's Guild strike was going to impact my income, I've been cruising the writing/editing listings on a daily (sometimes more frequent) basis. (Last year half my income came from jobs sourced on CL. Which amazes me.) Even when I don't have time to keep up with all the blogs I monitor, I'm on CL day in and day out. It's a lot like panning for gold. You have to sift through a lot of dross but sometimes you hit paydirt.

Yesterday there was a call for submissions from All Due Respect, where David Cranmer's story, "The Great Whydini" is up. All Due Respect (ADR) is looking for "old-fashioned pulp crime fiction" and their submission guidelines say it best: We are interested in crime fiction. That means fiction about crime. Not solving crime. Not bemoaning crime. Fiction about people who are criminals and maybe a little bit about why they are criminals, so long as you don't go Dr. Phil on it.

In this case, crime doesn't pay. They apologize for that. But ADR looks like a handsome showcase for a good story about bad people.

ThugLit is Taking a Break

Todd Robinson over at ThugLit.com has made it official. The current issue is going to be the last for a long while, maybe even forever. He's been at it for five years and now, he says, the crew (Johnny Kneecaps, Lady Detroit, and Big Baby Thug) is taking a break.

The archives will stay live, so you can always browse through the pulptastic stories that were chosen for each issue.

I always admired the site's slogan: Writing about Wrongs.

I guess this is one time when it's more appropriate to say Adieu instead of Au Revoir.

Weekend Read

iBoy is one of the best books I've read in a long time and it seems to be completely under the radar. It's a coming-of-age story and a super-hero origin story and it's not like anything you've read.

One minute Tommy Hawkins was a normal 16-year-old boy heading off to a friend’s house to talk to her about something and the next thing he knows, someone has called his name and thrown a cell phone from a great height—shattering his skull. The book is set in a gang-infested council flat in England and it is as gritty as, say, the movie Dirty Pretty Things. Bad things happen in this story and the "big bad," a gangster called Howard Ellman, is one of the scariest villains in the YA fiction world.

As Tommy transforms into something not altogether human, the writer does something subtle with point of view that really elevates it above the genre. He doesn't pull punches, but his main character is such a good-hearted kid that we come along for his ride willingly.

If you don't have time to read a novel this weekend, check out Chris Dabnor's flash fiction "The Folly" over at Dark Valentine.

You should also head over to Clarity of Night where a new flash fiction contest is in progress. I have a story up there and so does my good friend John Donald Carlucci. At last count, there were 40-some stories, but they're only 250 words max, so you can gobble them up like chocolates.

Blog Weirdness

I'm the one who oversees the blog comments on Dark Valentine, so I've now experienced the phenomenon of people linking to our site just to get their link juice up. More power to people who want their fame to grow but dudes, could you at least be coherent?

Here are a couple of my favorite comments:

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Are we all speaking English here?

My Favorite color is ... RED

One of the things I do for a living is read scripts. In the last year I've read more remakes and reboots than any person should have to read. It's like seeing my childhood in rewind and I didn't expect that to happen until the last moments of my life when the highlight reel unspools.

I also read a lot of comic book adaptations. Most of them are pretty dreadful. (Seriously, what were they thinking with Jonah Hex?) Every once in awhile, though, I read something that tickles my fancy. Like RED.

I enjoyed reading the script a lot more than I expected to, and when I read a second draft, I got even more excited. Then today I saw the trailer and discovered Helen Mirren (that's Dame Helen Mirren, Oscar-winner) had been cast in one of the best roles in the movie.

Check her out. Helen Mirren kicks ass in the trailer for RED.

Bread Pudding is Food of the Gods

My friend Berkeley has never tasted bread pudding. For someone born in the south, that is practically incomprehensible. (Once, on a visit to New Orleans, I ate my weight in bread pudding, beginning with the signature souffle bread pudding at Commander's Palace and Ending with the classic dessert at Bon Ton Cafe, which was the overwhelming pick of the cabbies I consulted. New Orleans cabbies know food like Chicago cabbies know sports so I wasn't about to miss what Bon Ton Cafe had to offer.) Recipes for both versions are readily available online, so you can easily try both.

Berkeley's birthday is next Tuesday, so I'll be taking her to a restaurant here in Los Angeles, Les Sisters, that is the closest thing to honest-to-God Southern food you can get. In addition to bread pudding, they also serve sweet potato pie, peach cobbler and buttermilk pie. I had to explain buttermilk pie to Berkeley too. Poor, poor deprived child.

If you haven't had bread pudding in awhile, or never, here's the recipe I learned from my grandmother.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Enough bread to fill a baking dish—torn into small pieces
2 cups milk
¼ cup butter
2/3 cup light brown sugar
3 eggs
¾ cup chocolate chips
2 ½ tsp. ground cinnamon
½ tsp. ground nutmeg
1 tsp. vanilla extract

Combine the milk and butter in a saucepan, stirring until the butter is melted. Cool slightly.

Beat the sugar and spices into the eggs until frothy. Add the vanilla extract.

Combine the egg mixture and the milk mixture slowly. (Make sure the milk isn’t too hot or the raw eggs will curdle.)

Mix in the bread and turn everything into a baking dish that has been greased or treated with non-stick spray.

Don’t pack the bread down too tightly or the “pudding” will compact and get really dense instead of staying moist and fluffy with those delicious buttery, crunchy bits.

Bake for 45-55 minutes until the “pudding” is set. Serve warm as is or add a few spoonfuls of whipped cream.

A Blast From the Past!

I was trying to find a link to a story I wrote in InSide Look magazine and one of the things that popped up was a scan of a story I wrote when I was editor of Orange Coast Magazine. It's from 1985. Yikes. The story's about my trip on the Goodyear Blimp, which was one of those events that was just too cool for words. I rode on the Goodyear Blimp. And they actually let me fly it. You can read it here.