Mabon 2010
Sep. 22nd, 2010 12:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
greygirlbeastYesterday imploded. Or exploded. Doesn't really matter, because when the colloid of airborne solid and liquid particulates and gases had cleared, well, there was little left of the day to salvage. Nothing was written. Which makes yesterday a Lost Day. With only eight days remaining until we leave for the HPLFF, there's no time for days like that.
I forgot to mention that, night before last, I heard a coyote very near the house. I heard it several times, an oddly eerie sound. I'm still trying to get used to the idea of urban coyotes.
Today is Mabon.
The brightest spot to yesterday, the most silver lining (there were few of either) was the arrival of my author's copies of Haunted Legends, edited by Ellen Datlow and Nick Mamatas. It contains my story "As Red As Red," which I wrote in March and April of 2009. The anthology was released simultaneously in three formats: trade paperback, hardback, and a Kindle edition (though how anyone can read anything on a Kindle is beyond me*). This is a story I'm very happy with— sort of a footnote to The Red Tree —and I hope you'll pick up the collection, which includes a bevy of fine authors.
Please have a look at the current eBay auctions. They end today and tonight. Still no bid on The Wrong Things (2001), my collaborative collection with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
docbrite. These have become very rare, and I have only a handful of copies.
The rumours are true. The 2010 H. P. Lovecraft Film Festival is the last HPLFF, at least for the foreseeable future, as the director, Andrew Migliore, is retiring. You can't blame him; he's been doing this for fifteen years. Aaron Vanek has started a satellite festival in LA, so there will be that. So, yeah. Alas. The end is, indeed, nigh.
Last night, I watched the moon and Jupiter again.
To try to scrape something good from yesterday, late in the afternoon we drove to Warwick and got the new Swans CD, My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky, at Newbury Comics. This is the Swans minus Jarboe, but still. And we went to the market. And coming back home the sun was starting to set, and the clouds were on fire, and I wished I'd brought the camera.
The day ended when I took a Seroquel, that tiny reddish drab of numb, and fell asleep watching Avatar. It's becoming one of my comfort films, because it's beautiful, and it's heart is always in the right place— even when it stumbles —and in the end the humans lose and have to go back to their dying world. A bedtime story for panenatheists (I think I just made that word up).
---
The whole money thing is wearing me ragged again. Of course, at this point, I imagine it's wearing almost everyone ragged. The lifeboat is overcrowded, and we have the teabaggers wanting to punch a hole in the hull. Day before yesterday, I found this animated map— "The Decline: The Geography of a Recession" —based on data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (and other local unemployment statistics). It chronicles unemployment in the US from January 2007 (4.6%) to June 2010 (9.7%). It's sort of horrifying.
Anyway, yeah. I've reached the point where I'm considering asking my agent if she can get me another novelization deal. Frankly, I'd rather eat dog shit than go through that special hell again, but the money was good. Of course, there's no guarantee the money would be good again, and it would derail my actual, for-real, trying-not-to-suck writing.
Now, I need to make an end to this entry, then go find THE END to "John Four."
* Nothing personal, Kindle. I hate all "eReaders" and "ebooks" equally on principle.
I forgot to mention that, night before last, I heard a coyote very near the house. I heard it several times, an oddly eerie sound. I'm still trying to get used to the idea of urban coyotes.
Today is Mabon.
The brightest spot to yesterday, the most silver lining (there were few of either) was the arrival of my author's copies of Haunted Legends, edited by Ellen Datlow and Nick Mamatas. It contains my story "As Red As Red," which I wrote in March and April of 2009. The anthology was released simultaneously in three formats: trade paperback, hardback, and a Kindle edition (though how anyone can read anything on a Kindle is beyond me*). This is a story I'm very happy with— sort of a footnote to The Red Tree —and I hope you'll pick up the collection, which includes a bevy of fine authors.
Please have a look at the current eBay auctions. They end today and tonight. Still no bid on The Wrong Things (2001), my collaborative collection with
docbrite. These have become very rare, and I have only a handful of copies.The rumours are true. The 2010 H. P. Lovecraft Film Festival is the last HPLFF, at least for the foreseeable future, as the director, Andrew Migliore, is retiring. You can't blame him; he's been doing this for fifteen years. Aaron Vanek has started a satellite festival in LA, so there will be that. So, yeah. Alas. The end is, indeed, nigh.
Last night, I watched the moon and Jupiter again.
To try to scrape something good from yesterday, late in the afternoon we drove to Warwick and got the new Swans CD, My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky, at Newbury Comics. This is the Swans minus Jarboe, but still. And we went to the market. And coming back home the sun was starting to set, and the clouds were on fire, and I wished I'd brought the camera.
The day ended when I took a Seroquel, that tiny reddish drab of numb, and fell asleep watching Avatar. It's becoming one of my comfort films, because it's beautiful, and it's heart is always in the right place— even when it stumbles —and in the end the humans lose and have to go back to their dying world. A bedtime story for panenatheists (I think I just made that word up).
---
The whole money thing is wearing me ragged again. Of course, at this point, I imagine it's wearing almost everyone ragged. The lifeboat is overcrowded, and we have the teabaggers wanting to punch a hole in the hull. Day before yesterday, I found this animated map— "The Decline: The Geography of a Recession" —based on data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (and other local unemployment statistics). It chronicles unemployment in the US from January 2007 (4.6%) to June 2010 (9.7%). It's sort of horrifying.
Anyway, yeah. I've reached the point where I'm considering asking my agent if she can get me another novelization deal. Frankly, I'd rather eat dog shit than go through that special hell again, but the money was good. Of course, there's no guarantee the money would be good again, and it would derail my actual, for-real, trying-not-to-suck writing.
Now, I need to make an end to this entry, then go find THE END to "John Four."
* Nothing personal, Kindle. I hate all "eReaders" and "ebooks" equally on principle.
Tags:
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2010-09-23 04:37 am (UTC)No problem. It'll happen some other time.
As much as I like the PNW (and an excuse to visit Powell's), I bet the move to LA will be very good for the festival itself. It's not going to happen for me, though -- I'm trying hard to get out of this country and am almost certain not to be coming back to visit. Hence my remorse/self-kickery. Seriously, I hope you (and everyone else) have a great time there, and get to go again down in LA.
Presently, there isn't.
Do you mean you already checked with your agent and there's nothing available, or that nothing's been offered/passed by you yet? I kind of hope it's the latter!
Don't get me wrong here or anything, but I'd rather that you made some money than that I got to read more of your "actual, for-real, trying-not-to-suck writing". Hope that makes non-offensive sense.
no subject
Date: 2010-09-23 06:32 am (UTC)The festival isn't actually moving. A sort of spin-off has been started by different people in LA. And I don't know. Sure, there might be more movie people, but I fear it will alter the flavor.
HPLFF in LA
Date: 2010-09-29 10:42 am (UTC)I'm the one running the Southern California version of the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival.
I'll be talking to Andrew Migliore, the founder of the festival, this weekend.
I helped start the Portland fest (half of the inspiration), and I've attended all but two of the 15 fests.
Andrew came down for our trial run in LA, and was happy with what I was doing. One of my main goals is to keep the HP Lovecraft Film Festival as wonderful as it has been. Some things have to change, like the theater here is one screen, the Hollywood theater is three. I had to raise ticket prices a bit, too, though the LA folks were fine with it (we regularly pay $14 for one movie anyways).
I know it's hard to trust me, but I'm not an outsider*, I'm one of the "Lurkers", the inner circle of Lovecraft filmmakers who has been working with and helping the Portland fest for years.
If it's any consolation, our friends Sean and Andrew of the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society are interested in helping me out with the festival as well. They're down here in SoCal.
But who knows? I'll be talking to Andrew this weekend (I'm staying at his house, as I have every time I come up for the fest), and I'll see what he wants to do. But I think he's leaning towards letting me take over the Fest. I'm not quite sure what that means, really. I'm hoping that I get the right to premiere new movies, mainly.
* "The Outsider" was my first film, my first Lovecraft film, and one of only three movies that screened at the very first Lovecraft Film Festival in 1995 (with Strysik's "Music of Erich Zann" and "Re-Animator").