Last Minute Christmas Excitement!

I thought I’d have some exciting news to announce by now, but it looks like people are playing the keep-Daniel-waiting game.  So.  Here’s some lovely bleakness to go with the weather outside.

Stocking stuffer: The Twelve Terrors of Christmas by John Updike, as illustrated by Edward Gorey.

DTED: December 4, 2010

Argh.  This winter is getting into my bones already, and it’s barely December.  I’m sitting in my room with three layers of clothing and freezing to death.  I don’t think I’m going to be able to feel my fingers until April.

So what’s new in Daniel-land besides this cold snap rudely dumping him into full-blown wintermode?  Let’s hit some highlights.

In case you haven’t realized, I have a major obsession respectful nerd-crush on Coilhouse and way back in October they held a fundraiser/merchandise sell off to raise money for Issue No. 6.  So I bought a mug, because I am secretly a creepy old lady who collects mugs.  No joke, I have about twelve different mugs in my house and no glassware.  And only one teapot.  Something is wrong with this picture.

There was also Thanksgiving, where we got to visit my lovely sister’s house and I tried Brussels sprouts for the first time in my life.  Apparently I missed that gauntlet as a child (as well as liver.  I don’t think my parents ever made me eat liver).

I also finally broke my seeing-movies-in-theaters drought with Harry Potter, at midnight, in costume.  Nerd up.  No, you don’t get any pictures.

On the homefront, this plot keeps kicking my butt and I’m learning more about medieval tincture laws than I thought possible.  It’s all strangely fascinating.  Hopefully I’ll have some exciting news in a few weeks so look out for that!  Foreshadowing is fun!

DTED: Halloween Edition

Busy and not busy.  No time and all time.  Curious and curiouser.

I would say things have been hectic but I have a different definition of hectic than most people.  To those, my life has just been video games and horror movies between bouts of sleeping and going to work.  To me, it’s been a careful construct of time to wring the most from the various Halloween-themed happenings in my various video games while juggling the Netflix return queue so I never keep a movie more than a day and still finding time to keep updating my messy tumblr and less-messy-but-still-kind-of-a-wreck livejournal and on top of that hammer out a sprawling apocalyptic fantasy trilogy plot that apparently wants five parallel plots because Daniel can’t write anything simple.

It looks like this, by the way.

29 pages of it so far.  Yeah, my handwriting is pretty terrible.  I know, thanks.

I’ll admit, I was never a real big plotter guy before–I’m still really not.  My tendency is towards character and description, with plot a sort of backdrop (which explains my partiality to long quest-type epics, because the plot is so easy).  To keep from inciting long rambling opinions of mine, I’ll say I still believe character trumps plot easily–well-fleshed characters doing nothing is way more exciting than a terrific plot acted by cardboard–but after writing Noise and struggling with all manner of plots, I said hey, maybe you should do that thing people have been doing forever and try writing down things you want to happen before you start a draft?

Man, it’s like I’m learning things or something.

Anyways, here are some other tidbits I’ve picked up to wish you a merry Goth Christmas.

A merry animation of “The Tell-Tale Heart”

“Reticence may be an elderly doctrine to preach, yet from the artistic point of view, I am sure it is a sound one. Reticence conduces to effect, blatancy ruins it, and there is much blatancy in a lot of recent stories. They drag in sex too, which is a fatal mistake; sex is tiresome enough in the novels; in a ghost story, or as the backbone of a ghost story, I have no patience with it. At the same time don’t let us be mild and drab. Malevolence and terror, the glare of evil faces, ‘the stony grin of unearthly malice’, pursuing forms in darkness, and ‘long-drawn, distant screams’, are all in place, and so is a modicum of blood, shed with deliberation and carefully husbanded; the weltering and wallowing that I too often encounter merely recall the methods of M.G. Lewis.” A quote from M. R. James, an oft-forgotten horror writer credited with the creation of the “antiquarian ghost story” and greatly influencing such others as H.P. Lovecraft, Stephen King, and Ramsey Campbell.  Project Gutenberg’s got his collection “Ghost Stories of an Antiquary” for perusing.

And I’m shoehorning this in here as well: the haunting melodies of Caspian:

DTED: September 29, 2010

So, this is my excuse for being MIA:

Just as I was curing my Oblivion addiction I fell into Minecraft (literally fell, like down a mineshaft) and it’s been one big retro-Lego crazy construction time over here. For those who don’t know, Minecraft is the brainchild of Markus Persson and is described as “placing blocks while running from skeletons.” Or as the community might call it “a Lego time machine that turns hours into minutes.” At the risk of taking a bazillion pictures of half-finished projects, I’ll just leave it at this:

For real, less-blocky news, it was mah birfday a couple of Saturdays ago and my friends threw a very decidedly steampunk party. Actually, they were throwing the party anyways but when they realized it coincided with my birthday they promised to bake me a cake. I’m being really bad with taking pictures, I know, which is a real shame because their house is absolutely breathtaking. All manner of curious contraptions and dusty typewriters and twine-bound books stack up along the walls and the whole place just snuggles down into the very quaintest nooks of your heart.

My query letters still return zilch, of the two that have actually found their way back to my inbox, and I’m prepping a second round to some others in the time that isn’t spend mining for more iron or researching castle battlements to make more period-correct curtain walls around my house.

Also, I’m making up a language for my possible zombie epic:

Qa ynt rkthgaqer mr rankk mthrqa mrthqqrehqrur ra gthaygqqryq kthexa gthymthrqgnkk urrkyqrr

Don’t worry, it’s supposed to look like madness.

P.S.  I think everyone should hear/watch this.  Basically an obsession of mine right now.

News: The Yelping Crowd

It’s a day for new blogs all around.  Maybe it’s the Eternal September in all of us.

My disdain for tumblr isn’t quite up there with Twitter, but it’s close.  Perhaps it’s the ADHD-glorified format, the vomitsplatter of self-glorified shutins, the slavering mass of unlistening gristle reblogging in a vile spew of barelywatched media crap, but I think it’s a hallmark of a new social nihilism.  I mean, I kinda wrote a whole book about this.  Anyways, that’s my explanation for why I’ve been revisiting my old account at doombabble and holding the ugliest of mirrors up to that wreck of language.  Most likely I’ll get bored with this whole experiment in a week and move on to something else like that zombie epic I need to figure out.  It’s disposable like the rest.

If you’re actually in the mood for someone with quality taste, may I direct you to angelmeat, the gorgeous fledgling blog of my LJ friend who dragged me back into tumblr-ing (that’s a word)?  Seriously, if you’re going to follow someone, go with her.  I’m a mess; she’s all poise.

And in the vein of LJ friends, (I told you it was the season for new blogs!), my friend hellaine has started a blog specifically for her pastlife stories as a professional groupie and you should totally read it.  And this comes from the guy who doesn’t care much for memoirs and true-life stories.  Check it out.

Is that it?  Anybody else make a blog out there while I wasn’t looking?