Just a reminder that I’ll be with the New England Horror Writers booth at the Hebron Harvest Fair tomorrow!

Unfortunately, I won’t have any copies of Codex Nekromantia with me. My printer had some problems related to Hurricane Irene (among other things) and the copies that I was supposed to bring will arrive fashionably late on Monday. Crap! But I’ll be there with some free stories to sign!

Do you like parties?

Of course you do, you’re reading this. And as we all know, fans of mine are suave, sophisticated party animals. You have tons of friends. Anytime you want you can go stomp in military boots at a warehouse, or scrape caviar across toast at a swanky penthouse. You can even Get the Led out in somebody’s basement while you sit under halos of pot smoke illuminated by blacklight.

The world is your army ration, oyster or Dorito, respectively.

So why haven’t you come to the party that my publisher’s throwing over at 1889.ca? They’re giving away a truly heart-breaking amount of prizes. If you so much as enter the giveaway, they will have to forfeit their own expensive penthouses and luxury yachts to fulfill their promises. From riches to rags they will fall, bleeding wealth all the way, until they’re rattling around in a thrice-used appliance box, sold to them by the previous tenants as “a great little fixer-upper.”

What can I say? Kindles are expensive. But not as expensive as producing the trailer for Bears, Recycling and Confusing Time Paradoxes. That’s right, we have produced a trailer for the book, and it (and details of the giveaway) is available here: Party Like It’s 1889!

I’m pleased to announce the upcoming publication of Bears, Recycling and Confusing Time Paradoxes: An Anthology of the Guide to Moral Living in Examples! Because my fingers are quite tired of typing the details over and over again and because I introduce more and more errors every time that I do, all of the information can be found here. If I had to type them all out once more, then it would cease to be a collection of entries from the Guide to Moral Living in Examples and instead be described as an LP containing the noises of sweaty men juggling fish in a wind storm.

That would, however, make a badass set of samples. Thud thud slap woosh. Sounds from the wharf.

Now that I have a book with pages to turn, I feel that I should extend that page-turning metaphor to introduce the new site design! The columns are larger and less space-efficient than ever before, and I’ve created a proper homepage instead of the digital equivalent of me writing my name and phone number on your palm in ballpoint. I struggled with widening the columns because it makes the site more difficult to read on mobile devices, but I think I managed to strike a happy balance. Please do let me know if you encounter any crap with the layout on iThingies, small screens or crystal orbs.

Now I’m off to nurse my hangover.

While I was working on a draft of my novel Codex Nekromantia, one of my characters said, in a line long-since deleted, “don’t feel envy for those who don’t make mistakes, for they have never tried.”

That line, and thousands of its friends, were cut from Codex Nekromantia for good reasons, but the sentiment has always stuck with me, and the thought has been necessary on the long process of making very thorough mistakes on the novel. And now, in the month of October, when I swore that I’d always release it, I’m releasing it.

Mondays will no longer be Moral, at least for the run of the book. I’ll instead be updating A Path Fantastic with sections of the novel.

Starting right now. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I’ve enjoyed writing it!

So it begins.

Yesterday I had a run-in with I Write Like, a site which purports to analyze any text and give you the name of a famous author with a similar style. I gave it a spin yesterday and received P.G. Wodehouse, H.P. Lovecraft and Bram Stoker for a trio of Moral Guide entries. My brother fed it some technical data and received Stephen King.

I fooled around with copying and pasting in text until I had an idea of what authors were in the system, and then wrote some text snippets in an attempt to get specific authors.

First up was this to try for Raymond Chandler:

Read the rest of this entry »

My kittens helped me to discover a major flaw in my computer hair removal routine, mostly by overloading the inside of my computer case with their astronomically high weight/hair ratio. Their hair, when combined with the vortices and air channels through my computer, knit a fine sweater for my processor.

Unfortunately, my processor is 100% grade-A American man, and he’s never once been too cold in a room. This is the sort of man that lives on steaks and when his girlfriend puts her cold hands on him she has to go to the hospital for that shit where you heat a frostbitten body part up too fast, and then when they get to the hospital he eats another steak, served to him by his cardiologist.

My friends, wife and I planted a garden this weekend. We put in two 6×10 plots and filled them with yellow onions, garlic, chard, sugar snap peas, and hot peppers of some description. According to a label written by a friend, we’re also growing hamburger trees.

And the fucker bought the hamburger tree seeds whose fruit has fresh onions, not grilled onions. I hate fresh onions on hamburgers. Joke’s on him, I’m not sharing the bounty of my french fry plant.

I also have a project in the works that, while it probably won’t titillate, might capture your attention for three or so seconds, and that’s enough time to implant a latent neuron-pulverizing hook for a pop song.

Like I just did.