Mile Hi Con! And Stuff!

This weekend is Mile Hi Con in Denver!  I will be there!  Possibly with bells on!  All the traditional activities — Networking with Authors in the Bar (this is the con where this is an actual program item), Carrie and the Midnight Hour, signing, readings, panels — are on the schedule, which is on the website.  I’m looking forward to the break and hanging with my peeps.

Book Chick City is has an interview with me up, including a short discussion of Kitty’s House of Horrors, and a book giveaway.  Check it out!

And here is the song that’s been stuck in my head for the last couple of days.

quick post

• Had the big Halloween party over the weekend and costume pics should be on the way.
• Watched most of “Wolvesbayne” on the Sci Fi channel, and it actually kind of rocked a little bit.  It had a contemporary urban fantasy feel, decent characters.  Lots of cliches but they were put together well.
• I’m rapidly losing patience with “Lie to Me.”  Sloppy characterization, sloppy writing.  I’d have already stopped watching if it wasn’t for Tim Roth.
• “Castle,” on the other hand, just keeps getting better.
• I was reading about someone driving around the town where they grew up and all the places they remembered, and realized that’s an experience that as a military brat I’ll never have.  I mean, I still drive past where I went to high school.  But elementary school?  The city pool we went to every summer in Grand Forks?  The public library in Severna Park where I discovered Robin McKinley?  Not so much.
• This week I wrote about how to use the Dungeons and Dragons alignment system in your writing.  Because I am a geek.

Whip It

Things I loved about this movie:

1.  Roller Derby!  Roller Derby is a complex, fast-paced sport involving lots of strategy.  And hip checking.  Denver has a kick-ass league, the Denver Roller Dolls.  I’ve seen ‘em, they’re awesome.

2. Zoe Bell!  Zoe Bell is in it!  Yaaaaaaaaay Zoe!

3.  It’s a movie about women that isn’t about getting the guy.  It’s a movie about being a smart and unconventional teenage girl.  It’s about how going to college is cool.  It’s about how being tough is cool.  I want to show this movie to every high school girl in the entire country.  More movies like this, please.

Other than that, it’s pretty much a really straightforward sports movie — underdog team, main character discovering her true talent, the bad guy on the other team, getting in trouble with the parents, the final championship bout, Mom actually comes to watch, etc. etc.  But how utterly cool, seeing a typical straightforward sports movie with all women?  And there’s two extra scenes at the end, after the championship bout, that edge the movie a little further into awesome.  There’s a lot of story packed into two hours, here.  And it has a great cast.  I had a good time.

What, was there another movie you thought I was going to go see last night?

my favorite werewolf movies

I was sure I had done a post on this already, but I checked, and I haven’t.  So here they are, my favorite werewolf movies:

An American Werewolf in London.  There’s a reason it’s a classic.  It’s pretty much textbook on how to walk the line between horror and humor, and knocking the audience from one to the other before they realize what’s happening.  Part of how to do that?  The scary bits have to be really scary.  The scene in the tube station?  OMG yes, that’s how it’s done.

The Company of Wolves.  A funky film from the 80’s, this deals with the fairy tale side of werewolves, which on the whole is much broader and more interesting than the 20th century movie version of werewolves.  Based on stories by Angela Carter.  Really lovely.

Dog Soldiers.  aka  Aliens with werewolves in Scotland.  Another win because it’s really truly scary.  That opening scene, the ordinary couple having a romantic camping trip?  Have you noticed that horror movies where the victims don’t scream are a million times scarier than the ones where they do?  I love this one because the characters are all so competent — and it doesn’t matter, they’re all doomed anyway.

Ginger Snaps.  Is amazing because it takes the werewolf metaphor in a totally different direction.  Grrrl power, indeed.  I think it falls apart a bit at the end, because it falls into the old-school werewolf movie trap — when you make your main character a werewolf, and insist that the werewolf has to die tragically in the end, there really aren’t too many places for the story to go.  (One of the things I decided when I started writing the Kitty books is that it wasn’t going to be about the tragic life of the tragic werewolf who dies tragically.  She’s a werewolf, get over it.  Then, the story possibilities are wide open.)  Oh, and I’ve only seen one of the sequels, but didn’t care for it at all.

current costumage

Tis the Halloween season, and costumes are afoot.  I’m jumping on the bandwagon and attempting something Steampunkish this year.  And I’m finding myself getting in the spirit and scavenging from my own collection for just about everything.  I’m a terrible packrat, and this year it’s really paying off.

I made a gadget/piece of jewelry/thingy:

It’s a funky magnifier, yeah?  I few years ago I went on a beading kick and acquired a bucketful of beads.  I also found a cool Victorian-looking magnifying glass.  The small magnifier is from my field geology class in college.  The entire costume has the hat and boots I picked up in college, my Han Solo gun holster from when I dressed up for the premier of Episode I, and the pants I got just last month.

We’ll see how it all turns out next week.

hello, winter

It snowed 3-4 inches Friday night and it’s been below freezing all weekend. (Rockies game postponed, even.)  Trudging in the snow with Lily yesterday, I realized that Colorado is one of the lucky places in the world that has four well-defined seasons of equal duration.  The trouble is, they don’t all happen when they’re supposed to.  Spring and autumn usually have a couple weeks of winter thrown in, spring will last as late as June and autumn arrive as early as August, and sunny summer days can happen all year round.  Never a dull moment.  Now where’s my wool blanket?

I’ve posted a sneak peek of the opening of the Cormac short story “God’s Creatures over at Genreality.  Check it out!

news and next year’s schedule

I’m starting to set up signings for the next book’s release, and a few other appearances.  Here’s what I have so far:

• January 9, 3 pm, at Who Else! Books, now at the Broadway Book Mall, at 200 S. Broadway.
• January 16, 2 pm, at Mysterious Galaxy in San Diego.
• March 20, 3 pm, also at Who Else! Books, to sign Voices of Dragons.
• In June, I’ll be a guest lecturer at Taos Toolbox, an advanced writers workshop.
• I’m planning on being at the World Science Fiction Convention in Australia next September.  Because, dude!  Australia!

Also, my latest short story, “Watching,” is now available in the anthology Zombie Raccoons and Killer Bunnies.

I think that about covers it for now.

lessons from reading

I’m jumping back and forth between reading two different books right now.  One has spectacularly good dialog.  The other has quite bad dialog.  Reading them side by side has been striking.  (I’m not going to say what the books are out of a sense of propriety and not wanting to piss anyone off.)  The bad dialog is people standing around telling each other things they all already know for the sake of infodumping for the reader, which is bad enough, but they’re not even talking like real people in real life.  It’s so very very stilted.  The good dialog reveals setting, a historical time period, social class, family history, personality — and all of it sounds like I’m eavesdropping on real people who don’t know I’m there.  It’s gorgeous.

Writing really good dialog isn’t easy and takes practice.  Avoiding writing truly bad dialog actually is pretty easy:  read it out loud.  Have you ever heard anyone talk like that?  Can you imagine someone actually talking like that?  If the answer is no (assuming you’re not writing about an alien species), then you need to go back and fix it.

it’s an honor to be nominated

Bitten By Books is running a poll to decide the favorite paranormal author of 2009 — and I’ve been nominated!  Go, vote!  Make comments!  Spread the word!

In other news, the Smart Bitches have identified another urban fantasy cover art trend.  I always feel simultaneously pleased and disturbed when I see Kitty books in these cover line-ups.  They usually do show up in the line ups….

live

Bands/singers I’ve seen in concert:

They Might Be Giants (twice!), the Moody Blues (with the Colorado Symphony), Crosby Stills and Nash (no Young, sorry), Chicago, Sting, Sisters of Mercy, Weird Al Yankovich, Pet Shop Boys (my favorite!), Dresden Dolls, Debby Harry, Cyndi Lauper, Erasure, the Cure, Depeche Mode (which means I’ve seen the holy trinity of 80’s new wave emo bands), B-52’s, the Bangles, Kittie, and various opening bands of varying quality (including the Young Fresh Fellas opening for They Might Be Giants, which was amusingly recursive).