L.A. Nocturne II is coming!

My new collection of stories from the Misbegotten universe will be available next month and Joy Sillsesen has designed a really "hot" cover for it.  Joy's "Indie Author Services" is about to offer a steal of a deal on indie book covers so if you're looking for something eye-catching and elegant, check out her site herehttp://indieauthorservices.com/blog/.

Tales of the Misbegotten: Customer Service

As I inch toward completion of my novel Misbegotten, I keep fleshing out the paranormal version of Los Angeles where the story takes place. My main character, paracrimes reporter Kira Simkins, does not appear in this story, but she shares the same basic outlook as the protagonist. Neither is especially fond of the vampires who now run their city.

CUSTOMER SERVICE

Even before the recession hit, I was struggling. My part of L.A. there’s a dry cleaners on every corner, all of them bigger than me, all of them offering coupons and discounts and while-u-wait service. You need a gimmick to compete and even with a gimmick, you have to keep the price down. It was my daughter who came up with the idea of targeting the needs of the paranormal newcomers who arrived in droves after the city went bankrupt.

Illustration by Mark Satchwill

She put up big signs that said “Stain removal a specialty” and “Discreet and Professional Service.”

We bought ads on Voogle, the vampire-centric search engine, and offered downloadable coupons and two-for-one deals and deep discounts to bring the customers in. We stayed open late.

Business picked up.

We never had to deal with the vampires direct, of course, they always sent their renfields. Most of them were pleasant enough, and usually a bit embarrassed to be dealing with their employers’ dirty laundry.

I made it easy for them by being matter-of-fact, but there were times when even I was taken aback by how badly stained the clothes were.

Feminist Fiction Friday--A Celebration of Women Writers

One of the best websites I've seen for celebrating women writers is called A Celebration of Women Writers. Among their many resources are special collections tagged to various themes. Right now the featured Special collection is for pre-1923 Utopias and Science Fiction by women. The online reading guide includes offerings by Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1623-1673), African-American writer Pauline Hopkins (1859-1930), and Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935).  Browse their extensive list of authors to meet more writers, many of whom have been forgotten or ignored.

                   ANONYMOUS WAS A WOMAN

I am disappointed in Harry Knowles

I have been a fan of Ain't It Cool News since the site first went up. I check it out several times a day. I tend to cringe at the writers' cheerful disregard for grammar, spelling, and boundaries but Harry Knowles is a force of nature, a man who took his love of all things pop culture and turned it into an institution as influential as Comic-Con.
And yet today, when the death of Don Cornelius is being mourned across all media, there's no mention of him anywhere on the site. At least not as of 8:41 PST. Not even an RIP DON CORNELIUS.
There's a link to the upcoming HBO movie about Sarah Palin. There's a news story about yet another attempt to reboot Robocop. There's a quick note about Kevin Bacon signing to do a pilot for Fox. All interesting bits of news and infotainment.
But no mention of Don Cornelius.  Really? I wondered if something had run earlier in the day and I missed it when new stories (a link to a movie called Red Lights, a promo for G.I. Joe:  Retaliation) hit the queue, so I checked.
As it turned out, no.  No mention of Cornelius and his signature sign off, "Wishing you love, peace and soul."  No mention of his place in pop culture. But there is a great photo of Karl Urban in his Judge Dredd costume.
Maybe it's a generational thing. Harry was born in 1971, the same year that Soul Train appeared on the air. Or maybe it's an oversight. There is a lot of news on the site today--a story about a Jackie Brown prequel happening, a preview of Volkswagen's new Super Bowl spot, an interview with Sara Paxton about her new horror movie. So maybe there just wasn't room on the site to mention his passing.
Too bad.
If you ever saw the show, then you know what I mean when I say it was "a stone gas honey."
Don Cornelius has left the building.

Fantasy for February--The Silver Summoner's Bell

You may have read my story "The Smallest of the Summoner's Bells," which originally ran on the Dark Valentine website. There are seven of the Summoner's bells and they all have a story and a history and a past. Eventually, I will write all the stories and collect them in one place. Until then, here's the next story.

THE SILVER SUMMONER’S BELL

I felt my brother die.

Two days later a man collecting dung for fuel found Mac’s teeth in a pile of dragon scat. He cleaned and polished them and returned them to me with his condolences.

I sent him away with a fat reward and a knife of my father’s design that was worth much more than the money I’d given him.

No one ever found my brother’s gun.

That was no surprise. A custom-crafted Turnbull gun would be a prize for any collector and trade in such a weapon would have been conducted in the shadows and off the grid. I had passed the word that I would buy it, no questions asked, should it ever come on the market, but so far there had been no nibbles at my bait.

Review of iBoy by Kevin Brooks

 This is a really smart take on a modern “origin” story for a 21^st century superhero. The model is Spider Man (mentioned more than once) but the hero’s transformation is more like the film Lawnmower Man. It’s somewhat inward (as if he’s internalized the Matrix) but this is the rare story where what’s going on around the “superhero” story is probably stronger than the heroics. The writer does something really cool with point of view and it’s so subtle that it takes awhile to register. Gritty and human and scary, the book has an edge but it also has a heart.

The premise sounds a little … silly … at first. After surviving a brain injury caused by a falling cell phone, an ordinary teenager named Tom discovers he now has the capacity to do anything an iPhone can and more and uses those powers to exact a little vigilante justice. There is nothing silly about how this premise works itself out, or anything candy-coated about iBoy’s mission. He wants justice done and although he doesn’t like the consequences, he can live with the results. (He would fit right into the Watchmen’s pantheon of superheroes with damaged souls.)  

The characters are terrific. Tom is only 16 but as he integrates the iBoy powers, he’s forced to confront concepts like “situational ethics” and deal with criminal dynamics way over his head. Tom’s friend Lucy is equally as strong. She undergoes a horrific ordeal and emerges feeling dead and ruined. By the end, though, she has summoned reserves of courage and grace that will stand her in good stead.

Review of Watch You Drown by Chris Rhatigan

Watch You Drown is the first fiction collection from writer Chris Rhatigan, fourteen stories that run the gamut from straight up crime fiction to noir-tinged sci fi.

There are whole novels distilled into some of these stories—hidden histories of loserdom that have brought the characters to one particular moment in time; but we sense that there have been many such moments in their lives and that Rhatigan could have extracted any of those moments and turned it into dark fiction. He has a reporter’s eye for selecting just the right details, and he understands the stresses that have formed and shaped—and in some cases warped—the people he writes about.

These characters are beaten down and fed up and sick to death of being excreted from the world’s asshole. And then one day, despair meets poor impulse control and a bad situation gets worse.

The collection’s opening story, “In the Hard Nowhere” is one such “out of the frying pan into the fire” story and so is “Service With a Smile.” These are stories that seem particularly relevant in today’s economic times, as does “Glug, Glug, Glug,” a tale of a man who did the best he could but failed anyway.

Comfortable writing at length, Rhatigan is equally adept at making a long story short. “Guy with a Barbed Wire Tattoo,” told in kinetic present tense, is a piece of flash fiction as potent as the venom from a cobra bite. “Administrative Segregation” reminds us that even hard men have their limits and the emotion it elicits is not contempt for the protagonist but pity.

Watch You Drown is more than a collection of short stories, it’s a gateway to a world of pulp fiction that Rhatigan rules.

For more about Chris Rhatigan, visit his blog, Death By Killing.