But It's a Dry Heat

Author Archive

You Can Bring a Luddite to an Ebook …

This week I finally popped my digital cherry as it were. Last month, for my birthday, I got a Kindle. Now, after working through my print book backlog, I’m reading my first ebook (Stacia Kane’s Unholy Ghosts).

This morning, while over at Smart Bitches, Trashy Books I came across this little monument to luddite-ness.

The reading public in private is lazy and smutty. E-readers hide the material. Erotica sells well. My own downmarket literary fetish is male-oriented historical fiction (histfic). Swords and sails stuff. I’m happier reading it on an e-reader, and keeping shelf space for books that proclaim my cleverness.

Ah, so basically, the only reason people use ereaders is to hide the fact that they aren’t reading the classics? Okie-dokie.

My experience with my new gadget would suggest otherwise….

After reading the equivalent of 200 pages, I’ve found that it’s a lot easier to read on a Kindle. The device is very light and it (more…)

With Apologies to Thelwell

Last week my husband and I watched The Lord of the Rings movies, all three (extended versions), again.  When we got to part where Frodo is stabbed by the Nazgul on Weathertop, my husband wondered, “So if Elrond hadn’t healed him, would he have turned into a Nazgul?”

“Yeah,” I said. “An itty-bitty Nazgul.  On a Shetland pony.”

The idea immediately reminded me of the art of the great cartoonist, Norman Thelwell. Thelwell is famous for his illustrations and cartoons of children, usually little girls, and their ponies. His work captured the nature of the relationship perfectly.  Which is to say, in most of his drawings, the ponies are running amuck, their young riders hanging on for dear life.

Horsey folk already know this. Ponies are evil. Children aren’t given ponies because they, like their riders, are small. No, children learn to ride on ponies because the little mounts have a gift for teaching children that equines are living, breathing creatures with agendas all their own. Ponies delight in inflicting torture on their young riders, bucking, biting and scraping them off on low hanging tree limbs.

If the Witch King of Agmar really wanted to be a bad ass, he would’ve ridden a pissed-off Shetland pony. Against a Lilliputian equine, Eowyn and Merry wouldn’t have stood a chance. (Click cartoon for a larger version.)

In Which an Author Discovers Stinging Insects

After following the latest bouts of reviewer vs. author, it occured to me that the controversy is driven, in part, by the collision between one of the oldest professions and technology.

Storytelling vs. the Internet.

It reminds me of the fan fiction debates that flare up like the clap from time to time.

For those unfamiliar with the controversy(ies), here’s the run-down:

An author gets a bad review, usually from a blog or Goodreads. The author responds with an angry takedown of the review. More civil authors may accept the review by declaring it “not a review” and posting a definition of what constitutes a review. Others muster their friends, unleashing them on (more…)

A Real Man of Steel

In my spam box today, an email with the subject line: “Forge your love sword this Valentine’s Day.”

As adverts for male enhancement drugs go, this one is at least original, though as always, totally gender inappropriate. That is, unless they literally mean a sword, in which case, that would be cool. Because who doesn’t need a medieval weapon to celebrate the holiday of love?

The imagery, however, should make any man cringe. “Forge,” by definition is either a furnace or oven where metals are heated and wrought, or the process of heating metal and beating it into shape while it is red hot  and almost melty. There’s also “cold” forging, but even that involves the instructions: “Hit it with a hammer.”

Somehow, I think few men are so desperate for the ultimate boner that they’d undertake a process that involved repeated blows to their junk.

Of course, they could be meaning the other use of forge, as in “forgery.” Hmmm.

Friday Sketch Dump, the Un-original Edition

I haven’t drawn anything in months.

Consequently, a part of my soul is starting to die. Meanwhile, my husband got a request for a gate … a gate featuring ye ole coyote howling at the moon motif. Words cannot express how much I loath that motif. This native southwesterner would rather eat glass than draw a coyote howling at the moon.

My husband’s response? “See it as a challenge.”

So today, I picked up an old sketchbook, one with really cheap paper because southwestern cliches don’t deserve my good sketchbook, and stared at the blank page for several minutes. Finally,  I just gave up, picked up a nearby Design Toscano catalog and started drawing some of the stuff out of there. Medusa was the most fun. I’ve always felt sorry for Medusa, getting a bad rap on account of a bad hair day. I’m telling ya, we women, we just can’t win.

Also, because I’m on a Loki kick–he’s inspired the hero in my latest WIP–I did the Google thing and found a hoard of fan sites with Loki/Tom Hiddleston pics. Apparently, I’m not the only one who preferred Loki to Thor.

(The dragon, the horses, demon-rooster thing, and coyote are mine.) Click on the image for a larger version.

Pretty Arts, Not Mine

When I was a kid, I was terrified of skulls. I can’t remember why. Unlike most people, I’m not inclined to nostalgia, the uglier stuff in my past being particularly vulnerable to my mind’s eraser. Not that my skull phobia was particularly “ugly,” more like a silly affectation of a child’s mind. Maybe it was empty eye sockets, sightless forever. Or the big white teeth, laid bare by the absence of lips and gums.

Now, decades later, I’ve come full circle, my tastes leaning hard toward gothic.

A few months ago, my mom came up for a visit and we wandered around the shops of Albuquerque’s Nob Hill. In one shop, I discovered the art of Valery Milovic. It’s rather odd, creepy, and adorable in a warped Tim Burton-esque way. There’s a lovely sense of melancholy to some of her works, and best of all, some are very purple–my favorite color.

Of course, I forgot to get her card and her name fell victim to my brain’s auto-erase function. Anyway, last weekend, my husband and I did the Nob Hill thing, and this time I got her card.

Whatcha waitin’ for? Go check out her gallery!

Hobo With a Shotgun

Oh, Rutger Hauer, once the sexy man-wolf Navarre in Ladyhawke, and now the rode-hard-and-put-up-craggy-faced-and-tired hobo, in Hobo with a Shotgun.

Hobo with a Shotgun is the kind of movie where the most memorable line is, “When life gives you razor blades, you make a baseball bat covered in razor blades.” That dialogue is immediately followed by the aforementioned weapon disemboweling someone.

The movie is a throwback or perhaps an homage to the exploitation–grindhouse cinema–films of the 70s, complete with the over-the-top, cheesy violence and sexuality. Well, mostly violence, unless your idea of sexuality is a few shots of naked boobies. The film actually has its origins as a “fake” movie trailer, submitted by director Jason Eisener to a contest that Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino held to promote their Grindhouse movies, Planet Terror and Death Proof.  Eisener’s entry won and eventually led to the funding to make the full length movie. This little factoid in response to my husband’s question, midway through the movie: “Where do they get the money to make a movie like this?”

It begins when the hobo (Hauer) arrives in town, true hobo style, on a train.  This isn’t a quaint little village that hides a dark secret. Nope, this place showcases (more…)

The Walking Dead (Television Show)

You know what struck me about The Walking Dead?

After watching the first four episodes, I couldn’t name the main character or any of the characters for that matter. Point of disclosure: I wasn’t feeling all that well when I watched the episodes over a course of two nights. And I’m not great with names. But it’s still striking that at the end of the fourth episode, I was still referring to the protagonist as that Sheriff Guy.

So far, I like the show, but I think it may be a victim of high expectations.  I was hoping for something a little … “smarter?” Maybe smarter isn’t the right word, but here’s why it’s the first that comes to mind.

The series opens with a shot of Sheriff Guy, who I now know is Rick Grimes, walking down a deserted road, his patrol car abandoned behind him, an empty gas can in his hand. He reaches a campground, wanders around among the tents and abandoned vehicles. Then, hearing something, he crouches behind a car. Looking under the vehicle, he sees someone shuffling along in bunny slippers. Shuffle, shuffle, shuffle. The mysterious walker then reaches down and picks up a stuff animal toy.

For some reason, this is all the reason Grimes needs to (more…)

Stone Arabia

“You all wanna be looking very intently at your own belly buttons.” ~Capt. Malcolm Reynolds, Serenity.

The above quote kept running through my head as I read Stone Arabia, a novel with a protagonist given to the kind of introspection that is best described as navel gazing.

The protagonist, Denise Kranis, is a forty-something woman living in Los Angeles. The story focuses on her relationship with her brother Nik, a talented (?) but failed musician/artist. If the book’s blurb is to be believed, the pivotal moment in the story–inciting incident if this were genre fiction, perhaps–occurs when Denise’s daughter, Ada, decides to film a documentary about her reclusive uncle (Nik). Except, Ada doesn’t show up until late in the novel. Instead, most of the narrative is taken up by Denise’s thoughts on family, memory–memory being the theme–and her peculiar obsession with certain current events.

The latter being Denise’s most irritating characteristic because (more…)

Troll Hunter

I almost have to like Troll Hunter for one reason alone.

It has no shrieking women. There are some hysterics from a male cast member, but a hungry troll puts a quick end to it. The women are delightfully scream-free. (My reaction to the archetypal screaming starlet is to urge the monster to, “Kill her, kill her now!”)

The downside is that it’s filmed mockumentary-style, with handheld cameras and all the nausea-inducing shaking that goes with film vérité. Besides making sections unbearable for those prone to motion sickness, it means that chunks of the film are just herky-jerky shots of the ground as the characters flee the trolls. The trick is suspenseful once, but gets old fast.

Han (Otto Jespersen) has a problem. He hates his job. (Who doesn’t?) The hours suck, he gets no overtime, there’s tedious paperwork and his coworkers…. Well, he has no coworkers. Instead, he has trolls; it’s his job to manage the trolls of Norway. (Given my experience with coworkers, I might prefer the trolls…)

Hans is a troll hunter for the super secret Norwegian Troll Security Service (TSS). Even today, Norway has a healthy troll population. At least it was healthy. Han’s job consists of (more…)