Curmudgeon's Lair

I just passed the 50k mark on the final draft of Blood Hope. It's looking good. My editor likes what he has seen so far.

The Shadowed Princes and Kady's Vengeance are still sitting on the highest rated in dark fantasy list at Fictionwise. These things can be very ephemeral.

I hope to have Blood Hope finished by Monday and turned in for the final editorial go through.

I burned my breakfast when I lost track while working on a scene. I'm beginning to think that I'm back to the point of being able to burn water.

Johnny Horton is one of my favorite singers. These lyrics are very old. I'm listening to Johnny Horton sing it right now.

Now if you want to get the right idea, just put the words "legion of nitwits" in the spots that say the Bismark.

JOHNNY HORTON lyrics - Sink The Bismark


(Johnny Horton and Tilman Franks)

In May of nineteen forty-one the war had just begun
The Germans had the biggest ship that had the biggest guns
The Bismark was the fastest ship that ever sailed the seas
On her deck were guns as big as steers and shells as big as trees

Out of the cold and foggy night came the British ship the Hood
And evry British seaman, he knew and understood
They had to sink the Bismark, the terror of the sea
Stop those guns as big as steers and those shells as big as trees

We'll find that German battleship thats makin' such a fuss
We gotta sink the Bismark 'cause the world depends on us
Hit the decks a-runnin' boys and spin those guns around
When we find the Bismark we gotta cut her down

The Hood found the Bismark and on that fatal day
The Bismark started firin' fifteen miles away
We gotta sink the Bismark was the battle sound
But when the smoke had cleared away
The mighty Hood went down

For six long days and weary nights they tried to find her trail
Churchill told the people "Put ev'ry ship a-sail"
'Cause somewhere on that ocean I know she's gotta be
We gotta sink the Bismark to the bottom of the sea

We'll find that German battleship thats makin' such a fuss
We gotta sink the Bismark 'cause the world depends on us
Hit the decks a-runnin' boys and spin those guns around
When we find the Bismark we gotta cut her down

The fog was gone on the seventh day and they saw the mornin' sun
Ten hours away from homeland the Bismark made its' run
The admiral of the British fleet said "Turn those bows around"
We found that German battleship and we're gonna cut her down

The British guns were aimed and the shells were comin' fast
The first shell hit the Bismark, they knew she couldn't last
That mighty German battleship is just a memory
"Sink the Bismark" was the battle cry that shook the seven seas

We found that German battleship was makin' such a fuss
We had to sink the Bismark 'cause the world depends on us
We hit the decks a-runnin' and we spun those guns around
Yeah, we found the mighty Bismark and then we cut her down

We found that German battleship was makin' such a fuss
We had to sink the Bismark 'cause the world depends on us
We hit the decks a-runnin' and we spun those guns around
We found the mighty Bismark and then we cut her down

On a rocky beach, curled into a fetal ball around a bottle of whiskey, a drunk woke screaming in a desolation of the soul more deep than death. He had found himself this small corner, little more than a wedge of large stones last night when he realized the drink was close to overcoming him, rather than trying to make it home. Josh often did that. Eventually someone would come looking for him. They always did since Aejys took him in. The Vorgeni called him Josh the Sot, or more often simply The Sot and left it at that. No one else invoked as much contempt in the town as Josh.

Sand crusted his grey-brown hair and untidy beard. The bridge of his nose, crooked from a childhood break, was squarish and his chin was blunt like pushed-in clay. He reeked of whiskey and vomit, yet he pulled the cork and got another drag down, causing his stomach to heave again. Josh slapped at the cobwebs of images still lodged in his half sleeping mind. Demons on thin legs pranced through his thoughts and tore him with knives that left no blood in their wake. He twisted and howled again.

A voice echoed in his mind, "Once there were three brothers, Brandrahoon, Isranon called Dawnhand, and Waejonan the Accursed."

Josh screamed and howled, clutching his bottle, gulping at it. He raised his eyes and stared out at the waters, thinking how easy it would be to simply walk out far enough into the tide to let the undertow catch him, to let the terror end, to let it all be over. He straightened and started toward the water, feeling the fear draining out of him as he listened to the waves. Josh kept swigging from the bottle as he walked into the water. Suddenly, seemingly from out of nowhere, a group of children rushed around him and he hesitated.

"Grandfather is looking for you," shouted a little girl, her black hair in two braids and sand coating her buckskins.

Josh blinked and the lure of the water was broken. Yes, he thought, someone always comes looking. Before Aejys, it had been just Branch and his grandchildren and great grandchildren. The old Kwaklahmyn shaman had befriended him when he was a child. Now there were many watchers, as if they all recognized the despair in his soul. But his despair came from within. He had Aejys and others now who cared. So long as they were around he did not feel that void as keenly and could distract himself from his awareness of it. It was only there, pounding in his awareness, when he found himself alone.

Philbin is talking the same old shit. I made a long study on Age of Consent and patterns of courtship in non-western societies and I said that people would misunderstand the nature of those posts.

I have already answered it here.

http://cussedness.wordpress.com/2007/11/19/who-the-fuck-is-mike-philbin/#respond

I will up the date on it so this to today. I see no reason to go over it twice.

http://cussedness.insanejournal.com/14805.html

There is the post from which Philbin derives the quote about pedophilia.

I have a love for cultural and historical accuracy. Which was one, among many, reasons to pick that topic. I understood the risks in discussing it during these anxious times.

Feel free to post links to the material.

I am certain that everyone is familiar with my temper. The only thing that comes close to matching me is a half-starved junkyard dog.

The roll call for the Legion of Nitwits is:

Lawrence Dagstine
Nickolaus Pacione
Nicholas Tillemans
Mike Philbin
Kristy Tallman

Small press authors whose egos are larger than their (non-existent) talent.

One in particular has been hassling me of late: Kristy Tallman.

I am copy-pasting this across my blogs to be certain that she sees it. She has labeled me many nasty things, including a "meth/coke addict." She did that because I discussed the fact that I have been clean for 20 years in comments at Rusty Nail.

Here's what GUD Magazine said about her novel All Soul's Faire

Kristy likes to make her betters appear small. So she posts that picture of me that i have on my website. Well, I’m in my mid 50s and there is no hiding it.

There is no way that I’ll ever look Kristy’s age again. But there is a new picture up at my website (it's at the bottom of the bio) of what i looked like at the start of my professional career. Amazons had just won the World Fantasy award for best anthology and I had sold a trilogy to a publishing company that i would later work for as an editor.

You will not see any of the hard-eyed meanness that you see in all of Kristy’s photos of herself.

My looks have faded with age, but you can’t take away from me the fact that I was attractive enough in my youth that Asimov kissed me. Nor can you take away my talent that has grown better over the years.

I want to challenge Kristy to go back to my website where she stole my picture from, take the worst piece of my writing she has found there, and compare it to the best piece she has ever produced. One full scene each.

There’s plenty to chose from, Kristy. There’s even a couple of typos if you look hard enough. So give it your best shot.

Come on, Kristy. Let me help you. There are two stories on my website that have some tiny flaws in them. I switched one story from first to third and did not manage to correct all the pronouns when I decided to alter the story from one to the other. The other story was switched from third to first.

And again, I missed it in two places. Now, I could go back and fix those, but I want to be fair about this.

Go on and grab them and show EVERYONE how much better you are than I am.

We could post both samples at a neutral spot and have an open poll posted.

You pick the samples, Kristy.

It is the sicker than thou crowd who make the horror ghetto a stinky pond. Just the titles alone are enough to turn off the average reader. Bukkakeworld. Puke of the Owl. Lovely titles, aren't they? (Someone please pass me a clothes pin for my nose or, better yet, a haz-mat suit.)

Not all literary ghettos have this pervasive stench about them. You don't see it in either the fantasy or science fiction ghettos. You certainly do not see it in the romance ghetto.

Yeah, who am I to call it a ghetto. But as the larger literary pond goes, genre fiction, regardless of which genre it may be in, have helped to create these ghettos characterized by poor advances, sales that rarely (if ever) go above mid list numbers, little or no promotion, and so on.

Ghettos are not, by definition, a bad place -- unless you're talking some parts of Los Angeles or Chicago.

Ghettos are under-appreciated niches.

Ghettos are places of safety for those who fit them. The highest form of ghetto is a place where writers are free to find expression far from the relentless eyes of the majority who would wish to apply their morality upon it. The farther from the ghetto you get, the more they turn their predatory eyes upon you and seek to keep you in line with rules that most us do not wish to follow.

However, some ghettos are more pleasant than others. Some even have pretty window boxes with attractive flowers in them.

The sicker than thou crowd are part of that corner of the ghetto that you don't want to invite your maiden aunt into. Philbin and Dagstine are loud-mouthed provocateurs from the sicker than thou crowd, a tiny niche market composed of people who have not yet outgrown their adolescent devotion to the gross.

The problem is that they strive to force feed the public and in so doing they make the rest of us smell like an over filled garbage dump.

I wish that someone had gotten a screenshot of the guidelines to Philbin's anthology of pedophilia. it is fast becoming a legend and no one has proof beyond their own word. I saw it. I remember it. But I did not make a screenshot of it.

Raping baby dinosaurs in one of his stories was one thing. Raping baby humans is another. Now, he and Dag are trying to deny it ever existed. The problem is that the members of the community have long memories.

The admin at Silverthought deleted their posts from that brainstorming for promotion thread in which they spent a long time deriding Rusty Nail and TODP and myself. I consider that an enlightened move on their part.

This is my final post on the subject until one of the members of the Axhole of Imbecile do something stupid again.

Starting tomorrow, I still have questions to answer concerning my writing and I intend to get onto it.

Silverthought publishes books for a niche market that loves the gross. However, i am not going into that part in this post, I'm saving it for a later one.

They are a subsidy publisher selling editorial services, which they call 'partnership' plans. Such things should be avoided. There is nothing you can gain by paying for a high priced editorial services that you cannot gain from having a decent set of first readers and critters.

The market for the gross has dwindled before the jading of the public. At a time when horror stories emerge from the war in Iraq and other places, people do not need to have their sensibilities offended by nasty works of sicker than thou fiction. It's a dead end market.

End of very short rant.

Please note that the reader opinions he has for this are few and poor.