Blog

Imposition

I’m in Virginia Beach, Virginia at the moment. Benjamin and I have just done our 6th book event– out of 36. Which does not include the airport signings, of course. We have been subsisting on the kindness of friends and family thus far on the book tour.  We haven’t left the East Coast yet, but already we owe a great debt to Jean & Brendan, Aunt Raschel & Norman, Raisha, Tony, and Benjamin’s parents.  And that’s just the people who have been hosting us.  We’ve been spoiled; we may not need a hotel until Madison, Wisconsin.  We owe still more to everyone who’s turned out at our events, not just to buy a copy of the book, but to be a part of the audience and keep our great ship cutting through the vasty sea of commerce.  It disturbs me, in fact, because I don’t know how I’m ever going to pay all of these people back for their generosity.

Philadelphia Architecture

Here in the land of brotherly love on our book tour. And I just realized my nascent blog was holding up comments until I approved them… oops. That’s fixed now.

Driving around yesterday and the day before, I was struck by how many beautiful (albeit sometimes decaying) churches are in the Philadelphia area. Then I caught a glimpse of the stately city hall in the center of town, and I fell in love. Today before our book event (6 pm, Borders on Broad), I will need to admire the architecture a little more closely and take some pictures. Some of these buildings very closely resemble the brooding structures in my head.

Parsing my phantasmagoric preferences

Maybe I should use this as a space to keep track of stuff that I like, just in case certain favorites and penchants slip through the holes of my porous memory. The other day it struck me that my media consumption trended overall more to the macabre than I’d realized– this during a day that included reading Lovecraft and watching part of a documentary on that worthy, taking in an old episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and playing some Ghostbusters the Video Game. I think the surface similarity of monsters and ghouls that they share is really only that, though, and that beneath the constrictions of genre they veer off in quirky directions. Obviously the Ghostbusters franchise, while involving ghosts and the busting of them, has never been a “horror” property, falling much more on the comedic side of things. The same could arguably be said of Buffy– the vampires were never really that scary. There were frightening elements, but they tended be rooted more in the relationships between the characters and the realities of teenagedom.  Maybe I’m more interested in dark, necromantic situations as a backdrop.  I like an interesting setting, but the characters and emotions have to be compelling foremost– which is why I tend to enjoy Lovecraft only a little at a time, and plan on borrowing his atmospheres rather than his stilted dialogue and flat heroes.

Emanations from the Subconscious

Crazy dream last night in which I played the worst Game Boy game ever, against my father. It was a supposedly vintage racing game featuring a course through a flat brown tunnel. At the end, the winner would discover a loathsome headless horse covered in the skin of a dog– a gargantuan dog, apparently. Not much of a prize.

There was another segment involving an appearance on Jay Leno and me mistakenly, repeatedly calling him Conan, but I refuse to dwell on the dark shelf from which the materials for that part of the dream must have been drawn.