Category: Ramblings

A conundrum of success and failure: On HALLOWEEN II

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Years ago, I got into an argument with someone in a video store who tried telling me that Halloween and Halloween II were originally filmed as one long movie. I guess this person hadn’t noticed Jamie Lee Curtis’ rather obvious wig in the “second half” of the film. But the most frustrating thing? After pointing out that both of these films have different directors, this person still refused to believe me.

This is my way of saying that Halloween II seems to enjoy lots of mileage for simply picking up right where John Carpenter left off.

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So you want to know the secret…

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Every once in a while someone asks how I manage to write so much and my answer is always the same: I’ve trained myself to do it to the point where it’s habitual. If I don’t get the day’s pages in, I feel cranky and restless. I feel like time is slipping away and there’s a host of stories I’ve got to get out of me before that happens. It’s from that particularly unhealthy mindset that I learned to be productive. Now I can’t enjoy anything without feeling like I should be writing.

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You Probably Hate This Movie: HOWLING III: THE MARSUPIALS

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Howling III: The Marsupials is a weird and inspired gulp of fresh air. I said it and I mean it. You could watch 400 movies in a year and never see another thing like it. Devoid of any ties to the previous films, you’ve got to hand it to director Philippe Mora for refusing to tread any kind of familiar territory with this–an undeniably fresh take on the werewolf genre.

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A Requiem for MASS EFFECT: ANDROMEDA

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The one year anniversary of Mass Effect: Andromeda passed without much fanfare. Unsurprising, given there’s very little to celebrate. Plans for DLC support were axed immediately (and announced to the fanbase a few months after the game’s release), leaving some of the lingering plot threads to be addressed in future novels. In the wake of a disastrous launch, it was announced that Mass Effect was going into indefinite limbo with future installments scrapping Ryder entirely.

Yikes. 

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On Testing the Anime Waters…

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I’ve never been an anime fan and for many years, it was simply the economics of collecting that kept me at bay. I used to occasionally peruse the anime section of Suncoast when I started buying my favorite films on VHS, and there were plenty of titles that caught my interest. If memory serves, however, those tapes were always priced higher than whatever stuff I was buying, and since I never knew where to begin, I never wound up rolling the dice on anything.

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New Stuff Soon…ish

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One strategy I don’t share in this business is the need to pump out books like clockwork. If you can do it well, then good on you! I both admire and envy you. But I can’t. Sometimes a book just falls out of me, but more often than not it’s a struggle. Books can be like a stubborn child at bedtime: anything but cooperative. And in those instances, it’s real hard to commit to a schedule.

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You Probably Hate This Movie: GHOSTBUSTERS II

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For many years, most of them pre-Internet, I lived inside my own bubble where everybody liked Ghostbusters II. I assume that’s because I grew up in a small-ish town where the majority of my friends were equally large Ghostbusters fans of around the same age. I was too young to be aware of the film’s tepid critical reception, and it wasn’t until I joined Twitter that I learned how divisive it is.

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My ISLAND RED Playlist (Or, No Jimmy Buffet Was Played During The Writing Of This Novel)

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Some people say you should believe in signs. That Serendipity is a thing. When I was writing Island Red, my music selections were so eclectic that I thought it might be fun to include a little “this book was written to the sounds of…” section at the back. As I neared the manuscript’s completion, I got my hands on one of Brian Keene’s recent books, The Complex, and saw he had done that very thing. And while I intended to include my own compilation of track lists at the end of Island Red, I never got around to it, which makes it the perfect topic for today’s blog post.

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Literary DEXTER Is Making Me Love Dexter All Over Again

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I’m halfway through Jeff Lindsay’s fourth Dexter novel, Dexter By Design and it’s fantastic. I’m a notoriously slow reader, but I’ve been trying to be better about that. I’m also fiercely protective of any ongoing series that I enjoy. I don’t like to read more than one installment a year, and I try to savor each while working through it. It’s why I’ve yet to finish F. Paul Wilson’s superb Repairman Jack series, and why I still don’t know whether or not Roland reaches the Dark Tower. I get attached to certain characters, and that makes me reluctant to reach the ends of their stories.

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