Tuesday, February 20, 2007

Twisted Tails in Top Ten

Hey folks ... this just in ... Twisted Tails has finished in the top ten in the 2006 Preditors & Editors Readers Poll.

Coming soon ... Twisted Tails 2. I have just one story in this one, a story I co-authored with Nova Scotia author Ann Dulhanty, but it's a cool time travel story.

Coming later ... Twisted Tails 3. This one's devoted to tales of fear - not horror - fear, like that thing you get when you know you have to fart just as they're calling you up to the podium to speak in front of a thousand people ... all of them perfect members of the opposite sex, all of them madly in love with you ... all of them staunch haters of farting.

Or something like that.

Sunday, February 18, 2007

Odd Sundays at Molly’s

Every odd Sunday (i.e., those Sundays when things seem strange and otherworldly), the literary elite of Fredericton gather at Molly’s Coffee House for coffee, wine, beer and … oh yeah … readings of poetry, prose, and biography.

Molly’s Coffee House, as some of you know, is the setting for Still Life with Muse and Sax, my Beat story about the cruelty of my muse (though, in real life, she’s an angel, but muses are supposed to cause pain) and you would be hard put to find a place more Beat than Molly’s. It’s like a slice of 50’s Greenwich Village or Yorkville. You can almost imagine Jack Kerouac or Jackson Pollack crouched over a table at Molly’s talking existential trash into the wee hours of the night.

Here’s part of the crowd that showed up earlier today for feature writer Betty Ponder.

Here’s Molly, the irascible angel of Fredericton’s literati.

Here’s Alice.

Alice (also a writer) arranges the readings at Odd Sundays at Molly’s.

This is Betty Ponder, the featured writer.

Read more about her at the Writer’s Federation of New Brunswick blog.

Completely out of character, I was sitting with the two most glamorous women in the house (except you, of course, Molly), Susan and Mihaela.

Susan was one of the readers in the Open Set (sort of like a writer’s Open Mike) and will be leaving the city next week to travel far and wide with final destination London. Mihaela is a popular poet in Rumania and, coming soon, in Canada.

I read Driving to the End of the World and was understandably stoned to death by misguided well-wishers.

Friday, February 16, 2007

From Hollywood Experts and Published Authors: Words of Wisdom for Starving Artists

The Hollywood book is finally out!

This book is based on articles appearing in celebrated author, Marilyn Peake’s popular newsletter, The Golden Goblet. Over the years, many well-known writers and industry personalities have contributed to the Goblet, in fact, enough to turn into this valuable book of advice for writers, seasoned or novice.

I’m proud to count myself among this illustrious group of experts in the pain and tribulations of the writing life with an article on my experience with the 2006 Maritime Writers’ Workshop and Literary Festival.

From Hollywood Experts and Published Authors is available as an ebook from Double Dragon Publishing . It’ll be available soon in paperback from Lulu.com.

Here’s the cover blurb …

“This book opens with copyright information from Lincoln D. Bandlow, an attorney specializing in intellectual property law in Century City and the out-going President of the Los Angeles Copyright Society. The remaining pages include a treasure trove of information from: a personal manager for Hollywood actors, a Hollywood teacher and movie extra, a “Fictionwise eBook Author of the Year”, an owner/co-owner of two websites listed among the “Writer’s Digest 101 Best Websites for Writers”, a retired university professor, and other successfully published authors. This book is based on articles published during the first year of “The Golden Goblet” Newsletter edited by Marilyn Peake, and features additional articles by contributing authors written expressly for this book.”

Thursday, February 15, 2007

Save the Trees! Read an eBook this March

Get on the train to the future ... it stops right here in the present where you can throw down the shackles of digital immigrant status and make like a digital native. March 4 - 10 is Read an eBook Week ... all over the world! Check it out in the Chase Calendar. All you have to do is read an ebook ... and you can start calling yourself (Mr), (Ms), (Mrs) (pick one) Cool. How easy could it be?

Check out out the official site for 2007.

Check out the site for 2005 (that's when I was the official spokesperson).

Want to try out an ebook for as little as half a buck? Try some stories from Fictionwise by some weirdo called Biff.

Tuesday, February 13, 2007

Evil Scientist to Go 72 Hours with Sleepy Driver

John Heinstein (Dr. John) in Murder by Burger will be playing with Fredericton’s own Sleepy Driver at the Nova Scotia Community College Yamaha 72 Hour Jam as part of the East Coast Music Awards. He jam will run four days and nights straight at the Palace nightclub in Halifax.

“Beginning Thursday, February 15 at 4pm and taking a final bow on Sunday, February 18 at 4pm, the Yamaha 72-Hour Jam will feature over 100 established and emerging artists back-to-back-to-back, including such names as Charlie A’Court, Matt Andersen, Ghettosocks, Carmen Townsend, The Tom Fun Orchestra, Down with the Butterfly, Spesh K and Full Circle …” and Sleepy Driver.

Not bad for an evil scientist and poetry slammer.

Thursday, February 08, 2007

Characterize This - Brad Parks

There are those who say that, if you were to cut Brad Parks’ chest open, you would find not a heart and lungs and all that strange ticky-tacky stuff that constitutes the average person … you would find a finely optimized open source operation system churning out the next generation of world domination webware.

Bullshit.

Brad has a big heart. He’s the guy who hosts biffmitchell.com, who wakes up in the middle of the night when biffmitchell calls and says, “Holy shit! Biffmitchel.com is down! All my fans in the Western Desert and the strip joints in Bangkok are cut off from my never-changing and totally irrelevant content. What? Turn my computer on? The On button? Oh yeah … it’s coming on. And there’s my website. ‘Night!”

Here's what Brad looks like. See? He's definitely not a machine. He's actually some kinda mystical three-headed creature. But aren't we all just a little three-headed and mystical?

Brad is infinitely patient and infinitely assertive … even though his ultimate goal is world domination, but then, isn’t that everybody’s goal?

Besides hosting biffmitchell.com, Brad has been nagging me to get back to finishing Murder by Burger ever since I took a break from it to write short fiction and other shit two years ago. Brad hates mysteries. In fact, once a month, he participates in mystery book burning rituals in Zeeland, home of the hunt and snag. But he liked the first 60 pages of Burger and wants to know how it ends to the extent that he regularly sends me threatening emails and verbal lashings to the effect: Finish it or die. What he fondly refers to as motivational messaging.

But it worked. I’m back on the book and progress is furious with completion looking like mid to late May. Thanks, Brad, for the kick in the pants.

Coming soon to Characterize This: an old flame, a cruel muse, a murder victim, and more.

Friday, February 02, 2007

Characterize This - John Heinstein

All the characters in all the novels and short fiction I’ve written are were created out of mist, spiritual wellsprings, and the collective unconscious of all the people I’ve ever known. Any one character in any of my stories is almost always a Frakenstienian patchwork of a pair of eyes from this person, a scarred arm from that person, and an annoying open-mouth gum chewing from the fool who sat next to me in an open office space in another life.

Sometimes, I just steal somebody’s identity in total and tweak it to match the story. Over the next few weeks, I’m going to write about some of the people whose lives I’ve plundered for art. If I have a photo, I’ll use it … maybe … maybe not. I don’t have a picture of the guy with the bats flying out of his eyes, but I do have a picture of …

John Heinstein.

John and I have performed together on the big stage in poetry slams and the UNB GroundBeat Performance Series. We’ve also worked together in three different companies, gotten drunk on some of New Brunswick’s most pristine (and dangerous) wilderness rivers (and lost cameras and other shit when our canoes wanted to go in directions our drunken minds couldn’t … yes … always blame it on the canoe), and exchanged many a high-flying idea inspired by rush jobs in the crazy world of software development.

This is what John looks like with hair …

This is what John looks like without hair …

John is the model for one of the characters in Murder by Burger (which I’m hoping to finish by the end of May, 2007). He’s the twisted genius Dr. John Jonathan Toole (aka Dr. John), creator of the cloned hamburger, who gained international notoriety in 2020 when the global public learned that he wanted his corporate bosses to finance his project to clone a 60’s rock band, or as it says in the book …

“Strange as it seemed to him, they weren’t about to fund a ten year project to use DNA from dead rock stars from the sixties to create a sixties rock band composed of Jim Morrison on vocals, Jimi Hendrix on lead guitar, Otis Redding on bass, Joe Cocker (who claimed to still be alive, but nobody believed him) on tambourines, and on drums, why none other than Dr. John Jonathan Toole who, once the band was formed, genuinely intended to take drumming lessons.”

If you knew John in real life … this would not seem a large leap.