Look What I Found In My Brain!

Sprinting For The Deadline

2010-04-25T05:11:00.003-04:00

I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.- Douglas Adams"C'mon, pencil! Make words!"- SpongeBob SquarePantsMany of us, when faced with a deadline, tend to push it. For some writers, there's a certain creativity-enhancing rush to be found in putting a story off until the very last minute. College tends to foster this kind of work habit, and after a couple of semesters

The Care and Feeding of a Convention Writing Workshop Track

2010-04-25T04:57:00.002-04:00

Right now, I'm in the process of putting together the writing workshop track for Context 23. The convention has grown considerably in the past four years, and all our data points to that being the result of expanding the writing programming.A decade ago, Context had a writing workshop that was similar to the type of writing workshop offered at many conventions. It was a Milford-style critique

Exploring Amazon

2010-03-25T05:31:00.001-04:00

Some of you may be unfamiliar with Amazon.com rankings. Amazon and Barnes & Noble both rank books according to relative sales position. The book ranked #1 is the vendor's top seller overall at that moment in time. Amazon lists nearly 8 million books; if a book hasn't sold any copies since they instituted the ranking system, it just doesn't have a rank at all, so if you see a book with a

Reading in the 21st Century

2010-02-02T04:49:00.001-05:00

If you've been following my column at Horror World -- heck, if you've taken a look at any of my fiction and nonfiction -- you know that I have a deep and abiding gadget lust. I love playing with new computers and peripherals. Other women may get excited over shoe bargains, but my heart goes pitter-pat when MicroCenter has a sale. Likewise, any casual observer should realize that I love books:

Order Chimeric Machines, get a limited-edition hardcover free

2009-08-12T19:31:00.003-04:00

For just the month of August, when you buy a copy of the signed, limited-edition hardcover of my collection Chimeric Machines direct from CGP, you'll get a free hardcover copy of the signed, limited-edition, award-winning anthology Five Strokes To Midnight, which features authors like Christopher Golden, Tom Piccirilli, Gary A. Braunbeck and Deborah LeBlanc. The book was nominated for a World

NEW! GUNDARK ENERGY DRINK!

2009-07-23T14:57:00.004-04:00

DO YOU ENJOY THE KICK OF ENERGY DRINKS?BUT DOES THE POPULARITY OF RED BULL MAKE YOU FEEL LIKE A SHEEP?DOES THE PRICE OF ROCKSTAR MAKE YOU FEEL LIKE A CHUMP?DO YOU WORRY THAT YOU'VE BECOME A MINDLESS, TWITCHING SLAVE TO CORPORATE CAFFEINE PEDDLERS?THERE'S A BETTER WAY!MY NAME IS LUCY, AND I'M HERE TO TELL YOU ABOUT THIS GREAT NEW ENERGY DRINK I'VE DISCOVERED CALLED GUNDARK!YOU WON'T FIND IT IN ANY

On the $1.9 million filesharing fine

2009-07-04T19:32:00.000-04:00

Recently, it was all over the news that a woman was fined $1.9 million for illegally downloading 24 songs. Which is of course a miscarriage of justice, an outrage, crazy, appalling, whatever you want to call it.In reality, the RIAA and related groups have mostly stopped suing people ... part of my day job is processing the big scary cease-and-desist emails they send to the university I work for.

Shy Writers and Crunchy Numbers: An Author's Introduction to Advertising

2009-04-05T12:23:00.006-04:00

As I said earlier, the most basic purpose of book promotion is to let people know that your book exists, why they might want to pick up a copy, and where they can get it.Some authors aren't keen on promotion. They might make a brief announcement on their blog, webpage, or mailing list, then put their noses back to grindstone, focusing on The Work. They rely mostly on the kindness of strangers,

An Author's Introduction to Advertising - Part 2

2009-04-05T10:49:00.003-04:00

(<< Go Back to Part One)Some people hate advertising in general and despise Web ads in particular. I can certainly sympathize; my inbox overfloweth with spam. I fondly remember the good ol' days of Netscape 1.0 when the Web was a cozy, ad-free place mostly populated with hobbyists and college students. And I'm well aware that Corporate America has done damage around the world by promoting

GUD news! Win a free copy of SPARKS AND SHADOWS!

2009-01-05T14:36:00.004-05:00

Greatest Uncommon Denominator magazine just posted their review of my collection Sparks and Shadows. Overall, they seem to really like it, and I'm entirely pleased, because all this time I was pretty sure they were going to hammer me into oblivion ;-) No, really; they're a tough crowd over there, but reviewer Debbie Moorhouse sums up her review with "Dark, funny, and romantic by turns, Sparks

An open letter to the Barnes & Noble at Polaris Mall

2009-01-04T20:15:00.006-05:00

Dear B&N,I like your store. Really, I do. Ever since chain stores drove most of the indie booksellers in the Columbus area out of business, you've been the most easily accessible bookstore in our part of town (The Book Loft is hanging on, God bless 'em, but we don't get down to German Village that often). Your store is spacious and pleasant, the restrooms clean, the coffee smells good, and I

Restaurant Review: The Pub Polaris

2009-01-04T18:53:00.008-05:00

The day after Christmas, a restaurant opened at the mall on Polaris Parkway*. It's a new offering from the Tavern Restaurant Group called The Pub Polaris , and it purports to be a replica of an English pub. Some friends and I tried the place out today, and overall we give it big thumbs-up. The ambiance is nice and the seating is comfortable, although if they're really trying to maintain the

Movie Review: Grand Prix

2009-01-04T00:23:00.001-05:00

by Gary A. BraunbeckIn 1966, director John Frankenheimer turned out a pair of films that could not possibly be more different in subject matter and execution: Seconds and Grand Prix. Frankenheimer did not want to make Grand Prix, but was forced by the studio to do so after Seconds died a miserable death at the box office. Grand Prix, on the other hand, was a tremendous hit, and remained

Movie Review: The Swimmer

2009-01-04T00:16:00.001-05:00

by Gary A. Braunbeck1968's The Swimmer (based on the short story by John Cheever) was a labor of love for its producer/star Burt Lancaster. In it he plays a businessman who, at film's start, has decided to spend a bright summer Sunday afternoon making his way from pool to pool, swimming his way across suburbia to his own home. He lives in an upscale and trendy community where

Book Review: Magic Bites by Ilona Andrews

2008-11-22T14:08:00.005-05:00

I just finished Magic Bites, the first novel from Gordon and Ilona Andrews. I bought it after I met Ilona at WisCon in 2007, whereupon it got a bit buried in my pile of books to be read. Which was a shame, because this was a very entertaining book, and I like a whole lot about it.Magic Bites manages to fit both the popular definition of urban fantasy and my personal definition. The plot, in a

Book Review: The Somnambulist by Jonathan Barnes

2008-11-22T13:58:00.008-05:00

I picked up a copy of The Somnambulist by Jonathan Barnes at the World Fantasy convention in Calgary. This is a dark urban fantasy about a magician/private investigator named Edward Moon who uncovers an apocalyptic cult in Victorian-era London. It's an extremely ambitious, clever first novel, and while I did not find it as rollickingly funny as some of the blurb-providers did, it's overall a

Book Review: Storm Front by Jim Butcher

2008-11-22T11:52:00.003-05:00

I watched The Dresden Files while it aired on SciFi, and while I thought the show had some problems, I found it entertaining enough to seek out each week. Also, it seemed to me that each episode got stronger as the season went along. So I was a bit disappointed that it got cancelled. Anyhow. Nearly a year later I get around to reading Storm Front by Jim Butcher. Overall, it's an entertaining

Quadrophenia

2008-11-10T19:33:00.001-05:00

by Gary A. BraunbeckBy its musical structure alone, The Who's Quadrophenia opened my eyes and my intellect to the endless possibilities offered by the metaphor; add to that its compelling and challenging narrative structure, and you've got something that, to my mind, qualifies as a masterpiece. Quadrophenia centers on a young kid in 1960s England named Jimmy. Jimmy comes from a

The Manchurian Candidate

2008-11-10T19:22:00.003-05:00

reviewed by Gary A. Braunbeck1962's The Manchurian Candidate A lot -- a lot -- has been written and said about The Manchurian Candidate, the film that put John Frankenheimer on the map as a director. How effective you'll find the film today depends on your personal level of cynicism. Candidate -- a satire in the truest sense of the word -- deliberately sets out to make the

Movie Review: Seconds

2008-11-05T19:24:00.000-05:00

reviewed by Gary A. BraunbeckSeconds is arguably director John Frankenheimer's best film. Based on the excellent novel by David Ely, in it we meet middle-aged bank executive Arthur Hamilton (John Randolph in a masterfully shaded performance) whose life is so miserable he walks as if the earth might open at any moment and swallow him whole. His job drains him of humanity. His

Movie Review: Sorcerer

2008-10-22T14:53:00.006-04:00

by Gary A. BraunbeckSorcerer, made by William Friedkin in 1977 after his triumphs and numerous awards for both The French Connection and The Exorcist, was his own Apocalypse Now: a film that went over budget and took three times as long to film as originally planned, but one denied Apocalypse's subsequent fame, notoriety, and audience interest.A remake of Henri-Georges Clouzot's The Wages of Fear

Mass Murder

2008-10-22T14:48:00.002-04:00

by Gary A. BraunbeckFormer FBI agent Robert Ressler -- he's the man who gave us the term "serial killer" -- defines "classic" mass murder as involving one mentally-disordered killer in one location who kills 4 or more other people more or less at the same time.These days, mass murders are taking place more and more in public places like schools and businesses, but it used to be more common for

Nunzilla's School of Reading Comprehension

2008-10-21T19:55:00.006-04:00

by Gary A. BraunbeckI read very slowly.When I was in the second grade at St. Francis de Sales School in Newark, Ohio, our English teacher, Sister Mary Elizabeth, required that we read aloud on Mondays and Fridays. Coming from a hard-core blue-collar background, reading was not something that was encouraged in the Braunbeck household. Not that my parents discouraged it, but because both of them

Life is material; you just have to live long enough to figure out how to use it

2008-10-14T11:32:00.000-04:00

by Gary A. BraunbeckThere's a great line from William Goldman's novel The Color of Light: "Life is material; you just have to live long enough to figure out how to use it."William Faulkner maintained that any child who managed to live past the age of seven had enough material to write books and stories for the rest of his or her life and never see the well run dry; Flannery O'Connor said much the

On writing about child abuse

2008-10-14T09:41:00.001-04:00

by Gary A. BraunbeckEverything is bigger to a child; not only physically, but perceptually and emotionally, as well. A dollar found becomes a discovered treasure. A harsh word becomes a deafening declaration of war. A heap of dirty clothes in the corner becomes a nasty, fanged monster after the lights are out. A paper cut is a knife in the stomach. And a hug from a parent in times of fear becomes