Including some self-promo, handbell choirs, and a confession about the nerdiest things in my attic.

First, stories!

1. My terrorism-and-toads story “Bufonidae” will be appearing in the inaugural issue of Phantasmagorium, edited by Laird Barron! It seems like this horror number might be available around Halloween, which is handy, so stay tuned.

2. John Langan and Paul Tremblay’s anthology CREATURES is alive! (It’s not actually in all caps, I think, but I like to type it that way and then imagine I’m a newscaster in a 1950s monster movie.) Covering thirty years of monster stories, the Table of Contents is pretty awesome. Alongside this august company is “Keep Calm and Carillon,” my horror story about a handbell choir.

The anthology is available now online and at booksellers in various places.

2.5 (On another Tremblay-related note, I was flattered to see he enjoyed Mechanique, though I would like to go on record as being against bringing back hissing in movie theatres, since I think that’s a danger to the public in case of a sudden influx of snakes in the building.)

3. I generally don’t talk about process, because it’s widely variable by project for me and it makes me feel a little unqualified to pretend I know what I’m doing all the time, but over at Clarkesworld, I do a little talking about style, approach, and how I clearly stayed home a LOT in college. (Bonus appearance of the best mural ever!)

4. And over at BookBanter, I answer some questions, including what advice I would give to aspiring writers, which is the write-a-million-words advice, because that is advice I believe in.

Related: I went home a few weeks ago to spend some time with family. Part of the weekend included me cleaning out some things from the attic. Alongside the historical costumes (now passed along for someone else to enjoy) and clothes so out of date they were cool again (now passed along for some hipsters to enjoy), I found a box of my old writing.

It included a few pages of the Star Trek tie-in novel I wrote when I was 11 or 12 (in ProWrite!) and printed out from my dad’s dot-matrix printer. I had hand-drawn a cover that I attached to it. It was about Guinan using her alien powers to bring Tasha Yar back from the dead for necessary plot reasons I cannot remember, and the time-paradox problems that ensued. It was called “Obfuscation.”

I showed my mother.

“Oh, that’s sweet,” she said. “How old were you? Eleven?” She paused, thinking. “Yeah, I remember you didn’t leave the house much that year.”*

I kept it – it’s tucked safely away underneath the X-Files spec scripts I wrote in high school, which we speak not of. The box is big spanning grade school through college; I’m going to guess it’s one million words. I’m glad I wrote them, and I’m extra glad they are being kept somewhere far, far away.

* This is true of any year.

One of the weirdest things you can do to a kid with an overactive imagination who does not at all resemble me in any way is show that child a movie trailer. That anonymous child will extrapolate the entire movie in their minds using that trailer as a touchstone, and then when they go see the actual film, they will either be vaguely baffled at a good movie that isn’t THEIR movie, or they will see Bram Stoker’s Dracula years later and have a bad taste in their mouth forever, because seriously, what the hell, Bram Stoker’s Dracula. What the hell.*

I’m still a sucker for previews, though. I have especially become fond of artsy-fartsy trailers that stray from the “And of course, some of this!” type, especially because “some of this” tends to be “needless 3-D explosions” or “terrible jokes about how being married takes all the joy out of life because women are harpies” or “harried women on a desperate quest to find love with a man who will resent them based on extremely recent evidence.”

Sometimes, a conceptual trailer can be a little odd. I still remember sitting in the theatre and seeing the first trailer for The Fifth Element, where the camera pans back along some endless, amazing spaceship, and then it pivots and is a huge 5, and the music sweelllls, and the words THE and ELEMENT flank the 5, and then it goes black, and you’re left in the theatre looking around like, “Well, I do enjoy sci-fi, I guess…and, uh, numerals…”

Then I went to actually see The Fifth Element and it was a camp wonder that had absolutely nothing to do with the numeral spacecraft in any form. Well-trailered, movie!

But artsy-fartsy trailer development has improved in the intervening years, especially with the rise of high-concept (and high-budget) TV shows that recognize the importance of fan-friendly promo even as they scramble to prevent spoilers from leaking.

In related news, this is the trailer for the second season of Boardwalk Empire!

For those who didn’t watch this series last year, it was a meticulous historical recreation and had a cast packed to gills with talented actors (and also Paz de la Huerta), but as much as I enjoyed the performances and the dialogue in particular scenes, it just never came together for me with any sense of overarching narrative urgency. I mean, I am all for a TV series that is all people sitting in rooms talking, all the time (that is my favorite thing), but this show felt like people were always sitting in rooms making appointments to talk later, and also occasionally someone would get shot or have sex, and somehow it just never gripped me.

Which is funny, since this trailer does a fantastic job of lining up all Nucky’s enemies in a really smart, creepy way, and shows how all his maneuvering in the first season to be the nexus of the trace might backfire this season when they all start gunning for him at once. Basically, despite being aware of what it’s trying to do (and despite that green-screen at the end, sigh), it’s still singlehandedly making me think twice about watching the second season.

Bonus: spoiler-free! Dash cunning, HBO.

However, for my money, the reigning conceptual TV-series trailer is the trailer used to promote the first season of Lost to UK viewers. They abandoned any glimpses of plot in favor of a character-sketch music video; it’s marketing genius, and I continue to enjoy this trailer much more than I ever enjoyed the actual show.

I will probably be saying that same thing about Boardwalk Empire by October, but in the meantime, that trailer has done its job but good. See you in the fall, show.

* I cannot BELIEVE I have not QTTed Dracula yet. I will have to remedy that pronto.

Between Steampunk World’s Fair last weekend (which was a blast!), and WisCon this weekend (blast anticipated!), I am falling a little behind on the media-consumed section.

This month in general has been a little thin on the ground, entertainment-wise. Usually over a weekend I can rack up half a dozen movies, easy. Since Thursday, my media consumption has been the first third of Conan the Destroyer I had TiVoed and watched as I packed for World’s Fair, an episode of Extreme Couponing that gave me the vapors, and about five seconds of an episode of The Office that someone next to me was watching on the subway this morning. Then I fell asleep. (It’s been that sort of week.)

Tomorrow, a dentist’s appointment (THAT was well-planned!), and then packing for Thursday’s flight out to Madison, where I might eventually cave and just sit in the bar watching the SyFy channel just to get a bad-movie fix. (I have some actual con-type things planned, though – more on this tomorrow, I hope!)

If I’m lucky, they’ll be showing High Plains Invaders! For half a second I thought they had just remade Copperhead (it’s one of THOSE Westerns), but I was mistaken!

The page for this 2009 movie explains that “The Old West won’t know what hit it when cowboys and aliens square off in the ultimate showdown.”

(As I was checking links I saw that High Plains Invaders is actually available to watch right now. Movies, why must you taunt me?!)

I am a pretty big sucker when it comes to watching fairy tales. Ever since the days of Faerie Tale Theatre and The Storyteller back when I was knee-high to a goose, pretty much every time I hear about a TV show or movie based on a fairy tale, my reaction is, “Oof, that’s probably going to be awkward! Still, I’m there.”

My taste in this arena is even more questionable than in most others. (See also: the competing Snow White remakes, Hansel and Gretel: Demon Hunters – oh, it’s real, and it’s happening – and SyFy’s abysmal Beauty and the Beast, among a dozen others.) Your adaptation can be a wonderfully costumed games of Actor Bingo (Hallmark’s Arabian Nights), a hidden gem (The Polar Bear King), a cheeseball epic (The 10th Kingdom), your college video project, or an absolutely unbelievably terrible miniseries (Hallmark’s Snow Queen, YOU PUT THAT FAIRY TALE DOWN RIGHT NOW). I will still watch it.

It is a testament to how strong this instinct is that I intend to watch this show:

…for at least the two episodes they give it before TV audiences get sick of Jennifer Morrison’s non-acting and/or having to think about vaguely literary things for even a moment and/or a child and his endlessly prophetic and pithy advice, and ratings tank, and they yank it. (If it lasts longer than two episodes, I’ll renegotiate with the show based on the levels of non-acting delivered by Jennifer Morrison.)

If nothing else, it will drive me to finish the last leg of Faerie Tale Theatre Episodes I am Willing to Sit Through, so, still helpful!

P.S. Completely not this show’s fault, but it is an indelible byproduct of my early adolescence that the very idea of acting in a fairy tale adaptation immediately makes me want to write a love letter to Lucy Punch, because of her unforgettable Sally Peep in The 10th Kingdom.

The thing about a miniseries as sweeping as The 10th Kingdom is that you really do end up with a cast of hundreds. Some of those people are playing it straight, some of those people are just excited to be there getting paychecks and yoinking free food from the catering cart, and some of those people are in that miniseries purely to mess with you (“Does he KNOW the camera’s on?”). Besides the leads, these actors come and go.

It’s remarkable that in a miniseries where Scott Cohen logged more than half a dozen Ham-Off hours, and Daniel Lapaine tried to top it by being the literal Human Golden Retriever, Lucy Punch looked at her script and said, “So I have four scenes? Can I win the Ham-Off of a ten-hour miniseries in four scenes? LET’S FIND OUT.”

And then SHE DID.

You’d think by this LJ that I am not watching any television right now! That is not true. I am, in fact, watching my normal amount of television, and even more so, since Camelot, The Borgias, and Game of Thrones all started up within a few weeks of each other, ensuring I would never leave the house again.

My opinion about the three fantasy and/or historical dramas that premiered this spring, summed up as succinctly as possible:

And the thing is this: neither Camelot, nor Game of Thrones, nor The Borgias, is terrible. (Well, maybe Camelot. We’ll get there.) Game of Thrones and The Borgias both have some excellent acting, which is 85% of what I look for in a show. David Oakes, seen above making a truly marvelous bitchface, is one of many other actors bringing amazing stuff to every episode of their respective shows.

Here’s where the trouble starts, though.

To talk about how great David Oakes is in the Borgias (and he really is), I have to talk about how great he was in Pillars of the Earth, which I have still not finished recapping. Also, it seems odd to talk about The Borgias when I haven’t yet talked about how I first saw Holliday Granger in Sparkhouse back in 2003 when she was OUTSTANDING in a part that could have been a disaster, and how pleased I am to see her on something that doesn’t require a PAL converter, or watching the later seasons of Robin Hood (where, I will never stop reminding people, Richard Armitage, who had played her stepfather in Sparkhouse like four years prior, played her love interest).

So, fine, speaking of under-appreciated actors coming into their own, we could talk about Camelot, where Philip Winchester and Eva Green are doing the heavy lifting in the middle of one of the oddest casts on television, including the prepubescent Jamie Campbell Bower and the always-off-putting Joseph Fiennes, who has thrown his hat in the Ham-Off ring (against, I am assuming, his more talented brother, Ham-Off veteran Ralph) to mixed results. However, that requires discussing a show that releases this image as a PRESS PHOTO:

And a show that thinks this photo represents it in the best possible light is not a show I am ready to recap right now, you know?*

So, I could recap A Game of Thrones instead, but I just can’t.

Also, did you know that the week before last, at least two of these three shows had graphically-depicted rape in them? I heard rumors that Camelot also had one, but by then I was a little tired of rape as a plot device, especially inserted into the Game of Thrones narrative in which I am told the whole initial point of the scene was Not-Rape, thank you very much for THAT, HBO, and so Camelot is still sitting on my TiVo, where I look at it from time to time and make Juan Borgia face at it and then just go to bed early.

Short version: Yes, I plan to review them all…as soon as I can pull it together. Also, expect a lot of concurrent reviews of things that came out between 3 and 8 years ago, because that’s how my mind works.

* I mean seriously, that is not a screencap. That is a Showtime-stamped OFFICIAL PRESS PHOTO, which means someone looked at this photo, and instead of saying, “This looks like rehearsal,” they said, “Such ACTION! Such DRAMA! Quick, get this to the Associated Press! Now let’s see that audience just ROLL IN!” And someone else stamped it, and sent it to the publicity department, and THEY signed off on it and sent it to the press, and the press, snickering, made it available, and now you have to wonder what on earth is going on with this show, seriously.