Reunion and Judgment

I meant to mention this earlier, but with all the fun of Conestoga it kind of fell through the cracks. A while back I got to wondering about my short story “Reunion” and the movie deal with Blackridge Entertainment. So I e-mailed Dean for an update, and was beginning to think I’d fired another message into the ether. But no, he called just minutes before I went into my first panel at Conestoga.

The news is that there really isn’t much news. They are still “very interested” in pursuing the project and have not given it up. They’ve paid to have three versions of a script written — a 30-minute script, as originally planned, an hour-long script, and a full-length feature film script. So, the company has made a sizable financial investment, but at the moment there is no real activity. Nothing to start getting excited about, anyway.

Dean assured me the film will get made in some format, and that it will be a quality production. “We’re not talking about something you’ll find on YouTube,” he said. (That may not be an exact quote, but he said it wouldn’t be YouTube quality.)

I have to say I’m pretty interested to see how they’d turn the story into a feature film. Or even milk the story for an hour. The events of the story happen in about 20 minutes. I suppose with some flashbacks to the accident and life before the boy leaves for the city it could be an hour.

At any rate, I don’t think about this project much. It’s my first — and so far only — film sale, so I’ll be very excited to see it when it happens, but for now memory of it only bubbles to the surface on rare occasions.

I do want to turn one of my stories into a script, though. A short script. I’m wanting to enter the Bare Bones Film Festival and I need a short, low-budget film that is set in Oklahoma. Oh, and I need the time to write it. Yeah. School starts in about three weeks and I still need to finish The Fetch and do some more revision of The Puppet King to meet my summer goals.

I did manage to squeeze out a short-short story today. It’s called “Judgment.” I’d been wanting to do a short-short for a while for a certain market, but didn’t have an idea. Deb LeBlanc provided the idea in her Saturday Conestoga panel about getting out of the box. Now I don’t even remember what it was she said, but it sparked a mental image and a story just fell into place around it. It flowed easily today, and I’ve already sent it off to that market (something I may regret; I haven’t sent something off without Literary Buffet looking at it in a long, long time).

Now I need to do one more chapter of The Fetch before calling it a day. The wife actually wants to read the ending, which is a very good thing. She didn’t like Ulrik, but she likes this one.

Conestoga 12 Wrap-up

I’m home! May not seem like such a big deal, but I’d actually been gone for a full week. I left last Sunday for an Advanced Placement workshop at the University of Tulsa that lasted until around 11 a.m. on Friday. That was fun. I learned a lot and still look forward to teaching AP this school year.

There isn’t much to add about Conestoga. I gotta apologize for missing my first panel this morning at 10 a.m. I guess those who were there made up some wonderful stories about what happened to me. The truth is that I just forgot. During the first part of that hour I was having breakfast with The James K. Burk, then I sat in the green room with various people, completely oblivious to the fact I was supposed to be on a panel. And it was a panel specifically about horror. D’oh!

After that, I did manage to show up for the Pens vs. Swords panel, where the Twisted Blades enacted scenes from writers’ stories. That was a lot of fun, and I got to see that Tarod’s arena fight scene in The Puppet King would actually work.

New friends started leaving then. That sucked, but hopefully they’ll come back next year.

I’ve posted pictures. There’ll probably be more later; Diane Kell and Jeanne Stein said they’d send me some they’d taken of our after-party following the author new release reception and of me directing the Twisted Blades.

I didn’t get The Fetch finished during the week I was gone. I did a chapter or two. The workshop just wiped me out every day, and I got back to the motel too late during the con. Yeah, I stayed at the La Quinta across the street from the Radisson where Conestoga took place. That won’t happen again. I woke up with a horrible headache that lasted most of today. No, it was NOT a hangover. Anyway, I’ll have the book done by Friday.

Right now I gotta pull together some Horror World stuff before Whipmaster Nanci gets angry.

Conestoga 12, Day 2 … going into 3

Conestoga has never been this much fun before. Don’t get me wrong, it’s always a great con, but this year has been the best one I’ve ever attended. I’ve been in panels in the big rooms that were packed and standing room only. There are more big-name published authors here than ever before. Lots of my old friends are here (although Craig Wolf is sadly MIA). It’s been the new and semi-new friends who have really made it an outstanding con, though.

Elspeth went way above and beyond this year. She made small color copies of the attending authors’ books and made little pins out of them to hang on our name tags. That must have taken hours and hours, and everyone appreciated it. The green room and con suite were both stocked with goodies all the time and, as always, the con staff has done an amazing job of scheduling, coordinating and still being in a great humor when the event actually arrives.

Melissa Marr, Jeaniene Frost and everyone else involved in the Fangs, Fur & Fey programming con-within-a-con … I don’t even know what to say. That programming track has been a huge hit and everyone FFF drew in has been super nice. The speed dating event tonight — well, last night now — was one of the best con events I’ve ever been part of. It was incredible fun and I met dozens of nice people, if only briefly.

For the speed dating I was paired with Carrie Jones (not the British porn star). I have to buy Carrie’s books now. She is so funny and such a nice person. Her books are Tips on Having a Gay (ex)Boyfriend and Love: And Other Uses for Duct Tape.  They’re young adult novels. She has an urban fantasy called Need coming soon, plust a whole lot of other books scheduled. You should buy her books, too, and help support a really nice gal who lives close to somebody named Stephen King. This is her first convention. She brought Grover. Yeah, from Seseme Street. Go read her blog and (maybe) you’ll figure it out.

The bad thing about these recaps is that you can never name all the people you should. I’ve gotta mention Brian and Diane Kell, who came down from Ohio. Great people! They hung out with me and Carrie after the speed dating, along with others who came and went, like Jeri Ready-Smith, Angie Hawkes and her college boy lover Chris Fulbright. I’m tired. If read just wrong, it sounds like Chris is a lover of college boys … and that’s just too funny to change.

Some of the other folks I just have to mention are Brad and Sue Sinor, Michelle from OKC, who came in with three of my books she’d already bought and read (I still want to clone you!), J. Kathleen Cheney, who I hear scored some awesome artwork during one of her readings, Bev Hale (we talked much shop), and the always gracious Rachel Vincent. And Rachel Caine. And Mark Henry, Mark Del Franco, Deb LeBlanc (who did a great presentation of thinking outside the box in selling and marketing your work, and did an excellent reading). And … Lots of others.

In short (yeah, right), it’s been a helluva lot of fun so far. I only have one event tomorrow. The writers in this event will read a right scene from some piece of work and the … Crap! Forgot their name. Anyway, a local group that does sword fighing will act it out to see if the writer has created a plausable scene. I’m going to read from The Puppet King.

I’m rooming with Adrian Simmons, and have learned a lot more about my Oklahoma Speculative Fiction Syndicate partner. Mike Rowe needs to come hang out with Adrian on his dirty job. It’s 2:16 a.m. now and Adrian just wandered back from a room party with his travel bar.

Time for bed.

Conestoga 12 Schedule

Here’s my schedule for Conestoga this weekend. The entire schedule is available as a PDF at this link. You may notice that some of the Fangs, Fur & Fey panels have different names. I’m not sure which is final, but the different names both get across the message of what the panel is about. I’ve noted the Fangs, Fur & Fey tracks with (FFF).

Friday, July 25, 2008
2:00 PM Urban Fantasy: Not Just For Chicks (FFF)

Saturday, July 26, 2008
10:00 AM Signing • Signing Table
11:00 AM Religion in Fantasy & Horror • Salon F
1:00 PM Horror Reading • Chairman Room, 2nd Floor
3:00 PM Developing Your Property for the Media • Salon G (moderator)
6:00 Speed-dating the Author • Regency Room (Not what you think)
7-9 PM New Release Reception • Regency Room

Sunday, July 27, 2008
10:00 AM Dark UF & Horror (FFF)

Ulrik on sale

The first review of Ulrik is up at Amazon, and the novel is on sale. Amazon has lowered the price by 19 percent. Don’t miss your chance to pick up a copy for over $3 off the cover price.

How to become a werewolf

Last semester one of my students hounded me about how to become a werewolf. I assume he was joking, but who knows? He’s an odd duck, anyway. Nice kid, but his butt seemed to have some kind of allergy to the plastic desk seats. Anyhoo, in looking at my WordPress stats this morning I saw that someone came to my site because s/he put into a search engine the phrase “how do i become a werewolf?” I get asked this question a lot.

So I decided to answer the question at The Werewolf Saga online. Yes, I have finally revealed the ancient, secret magical spell to transform yourself into a slavering beast.

I’ll see you in the forest …

Bugs

There were some bugs in moving my Web sites from my previous host to WordPress. There were several PDFs linked to www.werewolfsaga.com that weren’t opening. These were mostly under Free Stuff and Reviews. Those links have been fixed now, so if you were looking for the excerpt of Ulrik or reviews of Shara, you can get to those now. Thanks for your patience.

The Prometheus Syndrome

It’s funny how things work out. The first novel I ever wrote — way back in about 1988 or ‘89 — was The Prometheus Syndrome. My seventh book published will be the first book I wrote. Didn’t something like that happen with Robert R. McCammon and his novel The Night Boat?

That’s right, a publisher has accepted The Prometheus Syndrome for publication. I don’t have a contract yet, or an estimated publication date, so, all I’m going to say is that it’s a publisher I’ve already worked with. And that I’m pretty excited to place my first full-length novel sans werewolves. Don’t get me wrong, I love my werewolves, but I don’t want to only be known for the furries.

So, what is The Prometheus Syndrome about? Those of you steeped in horror history and schooled in Greek mythology probably can guess the basic premise just from the title. Yes, it’s about harnessing the life force. I think this is a fun novel that isn’t likely to tweak your subconscious too much. Set in the magical decade of the 1980s, when the great Ronald Reagan was still president, the novel features deranged hillbillies, a mad scientist, a zombie, a ghost, and heavy metal.

Of course, the novel was completely rewritten a couple of years ago. As I tell my students, I didn’t pay enough attention in my high school English classes, so my grammar wasn’t so good when I first began trying to write seriously. Also, I originally wrote this novel on my old Smith-Corona Electra XT typewriter. At the time I thought “rewriting” simply meant retyping the manuscript and fixing typos (while making new ones, of course). You young’uns who have never written a novel on a typewriter can’t imagine how lucky you are to have a computer! The next draft of The Prometheus Syndrome was written on a Smith-Corona PWP 3 word processor, which was a fine machine that allowed you to save your work on diskettes. It took about seven diskettes for a novel, as I recall. Of course, those diskettes were not compatible with any computer. When I worked at Conoco I used their copier to scan all my old novels and save them as MS Word files that I could edit, and that’s how the current draft of The Prometheus Syndrome came to be.

I’ll let you know more about the publisher and the expected date once things are put to paper.

Monster Librarian Interview & Review

Bob Freeman’s been a busy dude. Among the many other things he’s been up, he recently did an interview with me for Monster Librarian. It’s a pretty thorough interview and was a lot of fun to do. While I was answering his questions he was busy reading Ulrik. He has these very, very nice things to say about the novel. Here’s a little snippet of what he said:

Within Ulrik, and the Saga as a whole, is an elegant mythology that lives and breathes in a world that the reader can submerge himself into and feel apart of.

For those who don’t know it, Bob is quite the author himself. He’s also an artist. And supernaturalist. You can read all about him in this interview I did for Horror World.