Catching Up

I didn't mean to go so long between posts. Work and real life caught up to me in the past week or so. Tuesday through Friday of last week, I didn't do much of anything except sit at the computer and write, so there wasn't really anything to say about those days. I'd set myself a goal of getting to a certain point in the book I'm writing by this past Saturday, because I wanted to take that day off and go down to Cross Plains, Texas, for part of the annual Robert E. Howard Days get-together. If you've noticed the photo just under this post, you know I made my goal (by 3 pages!) and spent Saturday in Cross Plains having a great time seeing old friends and meeting some folks I knew from the Internet but had never met in person. The Brownwood Bulletin even published an article about REH Days, focusing for some reason on the panel I did with Indiana Bill Cavalier. (Thanks to Bill Crider for the heads-up about this.) Indy and I both look quite distinguished, I think. While I was there, I picked up a copy of the new REH collection from the University of Nebraska's Bison Books imprint, BOXING STORIES, edited by Chris Gruber, which restores for the first time the full version of Howard's novella "Iron Men" (the edited version, with 10,000 words cut out of it by Jack Byrne, was previously published in several places under the title "The Iron Man"), along with a good selection of Howard's other boxing stories. This is a very nice-looking trade paperback, with a cover by Gary Gianni.

I spent most of Sunday in the two-foot-tall crawl space under the house rasslin' with balky drain pipes. I got a little claustrophobic after a while. Today was spent going to Home Depot and Lowe's for more ammunition in the Great Plumbing War, as well as stops at a couple of libraries to return books. I plan to get back to work tomorrow and will probably try to do another sprint for the weekend, although I don't plan to go anywhere this time. I just want to get pages done.

Photo by Gene Deason -- James Reasoner, left, and Bill Cavalier, both published Robert E. Howard researchers and enthusiasts, lead a seminar Saturday during Robert E. Howard Days in Cross Plains. The topic was what Howard might have done had he lived longer than age 30.
 

Is this a great cover or what? The book should be available soon from Hardcase Crime. I've read the original Gold Medal edition, and like all the Wade Miller novels I've read, it's really good. 

New Parker Western Novel

Robert B. Parker has a new Western novel coming out. I enjoyed his previous Western, GUNMAN'S RHAPSODY, so I'm sure I'll read the new one. There's a review of it here . And here's a short quote from the review:

"So why has Robert B. Parker, the hugely successful author of more than 30 Spenser novels, written a western? He clearly didn't write it to compete with dark, violent revisionist works like "Unforgiven" or "Deadwood." Nor is "Appaloosa" an ambitious epic on the scale of McMurtry's "Lonesome Dove." Rather, Parker seems to have written "Appaloosa" as an exercise in pure, old-fashioned storytelling, and on those terms it succeeds quite well. Parker takes material we have all known for years -- gunslingers, saloons, shady ladies, shootouts, Indian raids -- and brings it to life with writing that is fresh, fast and sure. "Appaloosa" is by no means profound, nor is it meant to be. But it is the work of a master craftsman, and reading it is exciting and fun."

Sounds good to me. (Thanks to Duane Spurlock for the link.)

Mickey Spillane Injured

I got an email from Lynn Myers this morning informing me that Mickey Spillane was injured recently in an accident:

Mickey Spillane had an accident at his home last Friday. He's home now after spending the weekend and most of yesterday in the hospital, and according to wife Jane Spillane, Mickey tripped over a cat and fell down the steps at his home in Murrells Inlet, SC. Prognosis is good, but he will be laid up indefinitely. If you would like to send Mickey a card (no flowers please) his address is:

Mickey Spillane
Box 265
Murrells Inlet, SC 29576

Since Mickey is one of my all-time favorite writers, I'll definitely be sending him a card.

Gunga Din

We watched this movie tonight, and even though I'd already seen it at least five or six times, I still thoroughly enjoyed it. This is one that really holds up. The pace is a little slow at times, especially for somebody used to modern movies. On the other hand, the action scenes are well staged and photographed so that you can actually tell what's going on (as opposed to the close-up, quick-cut, confusing action scenes common in today's films). My daughter Joanna is becoming a Cary Grant fan (although she likes him better in comedies and romances), and she allowed that GUNGA DIN is a pretty good movie. I think Grant is great in this one, as are Victor McLaglen, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., and Sam Jaffe. This is still one of my all-time favorites and a grand adventure movie.

Dryer Update

Well, it appears that I fixed the clothes dryer. Of course, if you consider that it took at least two-and-a-half days, nearly seventy bucks worth of parts, and the time and gas used chasing down those parts, it might have been more cost-effective just to go buy a new one. But dang it, I fixed the thing, and I'm going to be proud of that! (For the record, the heating element burned out, and that blew the thermal fuse connected to it. I would have discovered this sooner if any of the diagrams I found on-line of this particular model had actually been correct.)

Birthday

Just thought I'd mention that today is my 52nd birthday. I used to hear my brother-in-law talk about how no matter how old he got, he still felt about 16 inside. I know how he feels. In a lot of ways I never grew up. Or as I've said to my wife many times, "Just how much maturity do you expect from a guy who makes up stories about cowboys for a living?"

Of course at other times I feel like I'm about 102, such as when I've spent a couple of days trying to fix our clothes dryer and the blasted thing still doesn't work. If there are any plumbers or appliance repairmen out there who work cheap, come on down! Have I got some work for you!

In the meantime, the writing continues to go well, and I'm reading THE GOLDEN GROTTO, a Shadow pulp novel from 1933.

Pitch Black

A lot of you reading this have probably already seen PITCH BLACK, since it came out at least five years ago. But I'd never seen it, so on my daughter Shayna's recommendation (she's an even bigger science fiction fan than I am), we watched it tonight. I enjoyed it quite a bit and thought it was a very well-made movie. There was a lot of genuine suspense and some surprises along the way. As we were watching it, I made the comment that Vin Diesel is a pretty good actor in the right parts, but later it struck me that that was an unfair assessment. You can say that about almost every actor. Hugh Grant as Riddick just isn't going to work. It's enough to say that Diesel is very good in PITCH BLACK. Shayna liked the sequel even better. I'm thinking we'll probably get around to it soon.

The work is still going well, even better than yesterday, in fact.

Off and Running

Between sawing boards and climbing in and out of the four-foot-square hole in our utility room floor (to be fair, Livia did a lot more of both those things than I did), I started writing a new book today. I really love the first day at work on a new book. New characters, new situations and settings, and a new voice and style from the last one I did. Sure, it won't be this much fun all the way through, but for now I'm enjoying it a lot. I'm even anxious to get back to work on it tomorrow.

Richard Wheeler continues pinch-hitting admirably for Ed Gorman with a nice essay about how it used to be physically harder to writer books before computers. He's absolutely right. My first two novels were written in longhand, with a fountain pen, in spiral notebooks. Then they were typed and revised and typed yet again. I'm convinced computers made me a better writer. On some stories in the old days, things didn't get changed that probably should have simply because it was too much trouble to retype the whole thing.

For the past couple of days I've been reading MORGAN THE PIRATE by Robert Carse, the Dell paperback novelization of that 1961 Steve Reeves movie I mentioned a while back. I'm going to be writing a review of this one for a magazine, so I'll reserve comment on it for now other than to say that I'm enjoying it so far.

No movie tonight, but my daughters came home from the library with a DVD of GUNGA DIN. Joanna asked, "Isn't this the movie you said you liked?" (I had mentioned it for some reason not long ago.) I haven't seen it for years and am very eager to watch it again. It's one of the relatively few movies from that era I've seen on a big screen. In the Seventies, one of the theaters in Fort Worth operated as a revival house for a while, and I vividly remember going to a double feature of GUNGA DIN and THE OUTLAW with a couple of friends of mine, Bruce Washburn (now my brother-in-law, as a matter of fact) and Leland DeBusk, who unfortunately passed away a year or so ago. I think we were the only customers in the theater. Another time we attended a Marx Brothers triple feature in the same theater, and it did better business, including three guys who came dressed as Groucho, Chico, and Harpo. They showed up at every Marx Brothers revival in the Dallas/Fort Worth area, always in costume and in character. I must have run into them a dozen times over the years. I like the Marx Brothers but never had the urge to attend their movies in costume. Closest I ever came was when several of us all wore fedoras to a CASABLANCA revival. Come to think of it, that may have been a little odd, too . . .