I'm not sure where the perception came from or when it started, but I have the unshakeable sense that I grew up believing that every book I'd read was written by someone who had already passed on. The classics solidified this, I'm sure, and by the time I hit 6th grade, Tolkien and Twain put the final nail in their own respective coffins.

It surprised people to learn that I didn't start reading books on my own until I went to college. Between 6th grade and college, all I read were comics, which, while entertaining, do tend to train your brain to absorb information in a pretty specific way. But between the efforts of Professor Gilzinger and Professor O'Connor, I discovered my true love of the written word. One gave me science fiction. The other, Robert B. Parker.

For those who haven't yet had the pleasure, Parker is responsible for the Spenser series of detective novels (upon which the show Spenser for Hire was based). O'Connor had suggested I read him for his skill at dialogue. It wasn't required reading. It wasn't part of the curriculum. But he made the suggestion and I took him up on it and I've been grateful ever since.

A couple of months ago, I was sitting in the waiting room someplace and sifting through their copies of People magazine when I saw that Robert B. Parker had died.

That's when it hit me; that realization that he'd been alive all that time. Of course, if I had thought about it, it wouldn't have surprised me at all. I had read dozens of Parker's novels and checked the new releases for the latest Spenser book whenever I went to the bookstore. But my brain never made that connection. It was commonplace for me to go to the bookstore and get a new book by a long-dead author. It didn't matter so long as the book as new to me.

But seeing the news there hit me quite a bit harder than I'd imagined. Spenser was a role model for me in those formative years. He taught me a lot about autonomy, about self-reliance, about being who you were and never apologizing for not being anything else. As time passed, I'd had the occasion to recommend those books to others. I'd like to think they liked them.

My old friend Don and I would talk about these characters as if we knew them. And, if we're being honest here, there was a span of time where it felt like Parker was going through the motions. He's published the first Spenser novel back in 1971. How long could he keep it fresh? So I tried the Sunny Randall novels on Don's say-so, and I felt it was all derivative of Parker's earlier, and quite frankly better, work. They left me cold and I stopped reading after the fifth or sixth book. I have yet to try to the Jessie Stone novels.

This afternoon, I finished reading Rough Weather, a Spenser novel I picked up from Barnes & Noble's discount section a few days ago. I have to say... it hurt to turn that last page. I'd absolutely devoured the book. Parker was back in fine form and these characters, these people I'd known for more than 20 years, were so alive and vibrant that I had to keep reminding myself that they died with their author. They just didn't know it yet.

Tonight, as I sat down to right this, I checked Parker's site and discovered that there are two more Spenser novels I haven't yet read. One of them will represent the last Spenser novel he ever wrote, and the last one I'll ever read. Even typing that hurts me.

I didn't know Parker personally, but he made a measurable impact on my life over the past 2o+ years and it saddens me to come face to face with the feeling that something very important to me is coming to an end. But more, I'm a little upset that I took the man's continuing presence for granted. I bought too much into the adage that people only really get famous after they die. In today's disposable world, I don't see Spenser staying relevant for very long. He was very much a product of his age, much like the man who created him.

About the finest compliment I've ever received as an author came from a fan who described my work as "the love child of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Robert B. Parker." If there's any truth to that at all, and you've enjoyed any of my work, I urge you to go read an early Spenser novel (perhaps The Judas Goat or Ceremony, or maybe Early Autumn or Looking for Rachel Wallace) and get started on an amazing journey. In the end, you may thank me for it, and I can think of no finer way to say thank you to Parker than to pass his work along to others.

May you rest in peace, sir. You shall be missed.

I don't even know where to start.

It began, I suppose, when I had the bright idea to resurrect the long-dormant superhero universe I'd begun all those years ago. I put the word out and put the band back together. We started a new magazine. "I, Hero." You may have heard me mention it if you've spoken to me for more than five seconds in a row.

It was supposed to be a print-on-demand thing. Someone would order a copy, we'd tell the POD printer, and they'd print and ship one copy. Except it didn't go down like that. They were quoting us a four-week turnaround time every time we wanted to order something. That's not "print-on-demand." That's "print-when-we-feel-like-it." And I didn't take kindly to that. No, sir. So I got together with my partner and we bought the printing equipment so that we could do it ourselves, forgetting that the whole point of wanting to go the POD route was to avoid an enormous outlay of cash up front.

Oops.

But just like that we were in the thick of it, and we couldn't count on that one little magazine to justify the expense of the printing, cutting and binding equipment. If we were going to be publishers, we'd have to be in for a penny, in for a pound. So I started with the usual suspects. I went to the folks whom I knew could deliver. In a matter of months we've signed almost ten new writers to New Babel Books, accounting for more than a dozen new titles to be put out this year.

In the midst of all this, my video production business has never been so busy. I'm working around the clock, taking everything that comes my way, and figuring I'll get a nap in sometime in 2086. But hey, when you're a freelancer, these are the problems you want. It's always a game of feast or famine and I know this won't last forever. Hopefully New Babel Books will keep us flush when the pendulum swings the other way.

Oh, and about iHero... We'll be making a pretty significant change in the way we deliver our content this year. We committed to do "I, Hero" as a six-issue limited series and we'll honor that commitment. After that, New Babel Books will begin to put out full-length novels in the iHero Universe. We'll put out anthologies, too, but the bottom line is that we're done swimming upstream.

It's a little crazy that someone who spent so many years in marketing and advertising failed to see how badly I'd handicapped myself with our chosen format.

Tell people you run a superhero magazine and every single one of them will call it a comic book. Which it ain't. Try to explain that you publish a sci-fi/fantasy magazine with a very specific focus (superheroes) and you'll get blank stares. Tell them you run a literary magazine that has prose stories in a superhero setting with spot illustrations and they still don't get it. It's only when they see the thing that it clicks. And let me be the first to tell you how many times we went around the block on the size of the magazine. We were caught in an endless logic loop.

"Let's make it the size of a comic book so it can go on the same racks as comic books."

"But then people will think we're a comic book."

"Okay, so make it a standard magazine size and put it in bookstores next to literary magazines."

"But our core audience is likely to be fans of superheroes."

"And they read comics."

"Right. So let's make it the size of a comic book."

"But then people will think we are a comic book."

Lather, rinse, repeat.

In the end, what really decided the issue was simple math. Twice as many people do searches online for "superhero novels" as opposed to "superhero fiction" or "superhero magazine." Why not give people what they're already looking for instead of trying to make our gorilla act like an elephant?

The other consideration was competition. In the comic book market, Marvel and DC Comics have a stranglehold on 70% of the market share. The next biggest player has 5%. iHero Entertainment, with our one little (very special) non-comic superhero magazine would always be struggling to capture a fraction of one percent of the pie. But superhero novels? Almost nobody is doing it. Fewer still are doing it well. It's a market we can dominate.

And... and...

Geez, look at the time. Nearly 6AM as I type this and I should have gone to bed hours ago. I really just wanted to poke my head in and give a quick update.

LINGO aired its last episode. My work in the film industry has taken a backseat while I build the new Tower. My girlfriend and our dog moved to a new city.

Nothing went the way it should these past few years. Does it ever?

Change. Change is the only constant.

Stay tuned.

Originally published at Madman's Mutterings.

Hello, hello and Merry Christmas to you all! I can't believe we're already doing another Christmas show! Didn't we just do one, like... a year ago? Time flies like reindeer!

Here's what's rockin' around the Christmas tree this time:

The 12 Days Of Christmas - Straight No Chaser
Last Night (I Went Out With Santa Clause) - Big Bad Voodoo Daddy
Feliz Navidad - Los Lonely Boys (Spanish)
L'Enfant Au Tambour - Nana Mouskouri (French)
All I Want for Christmas is You - Fluxus Artists
My Only Wish This Year - Britney Spears
Christmas (Baby Please Come Home) - Mariah Carey
Last Christmas - (Chinese)
(1989) - (Korean)
Christmas Eve (Sarajevo 12/24) - Trans-Siberian Orchestra
A Natale Puoi - Alicia (Italian)
Love Christmas - SES (Korean)
The Christmas Song - Owl City
White Christmas - Takahashi Ai Mika (Japanese)
Jingle Bells - Glee Cast
- Bobby Kim (Korean)
Merry Christmas Eve - Better Than Ezra
Angels We Have Heard On High - The Brian Setzer Orchestra
Christmas song - Declan Galbraith (German)
Merry Christmas - The Ramones
Happy Birthday - BoA (Japanese)
Here Comes Santa Claus - Elvis Presley

[podcast]http://traffic.libsyn.com/hellolingo/LINGO_47.mp3[/podcast]

Merry Christmas to all and remember to check out our Facebook fan page! Next time: THE BEST OF LINGO SHOW! Want to hear your favorite LINGO song on the Best Of show? You pick 'em, we'll play 'em!

Originally published at Madman's Mutterings.

Hello, hello and welcome to a veritable mish-mash of global pop goodness. This week's a bit of odds and ends, a hodge podge, if you will, and we offer it up with the same steaming bowl of excellence you've come to expect. Listen and enjoy!

Here's rocking the hizzouse this week:

Wonder Why - Julian Perretta
Quien Te Quiere Como Yo - Carlos Baute (Spanish)
- Monkey Majik (Japanese)
Ensemble - Coeur De Pirate (French)
Our Song - Taylor Swift
Con Le Nuvole - Emma Marrone (Italian)
Unendlich - Silbermond (German)
Call Me - (Korean)
HAPPY DAY - China Dolls (Chinese)
Eclipse (All Yours) - Metric
Valerie - The Zutons
Colgando en tus manos (feat. Martha Sanchez) - Carlos Baute (Spanish)
Kiss - standing EGG (Korean)
Estate - Negramaro (Italian)
New Day - Tamar Kaprelian
Hold On Loosely - .38 Special

[podcast]http://traffic.libsyn.com/hellolingo/LINGO_46.mp3[/podcast]

Thanks for tuning in this week, and thanks to everyone who sent in songs. Remember to check out our Facebook fan page! Next time: THE CHRISTMAS SHOW! Send us your music and thank you for listening!

Originally published at Madman's Mutterings.

I came to LJ tonight to find an old post. It took me a while to find it.

In the looking, though, I browsed through some old posts, saw names both familiar and forgotten and I felt a pang of... something. Missing. Nostalgia, maybe.

It always hits me like this when I read posts from years ago and see the new default icon of people I've long-since lost touch with, or see replies from friends who have long-since de-friended me.

It made me happy, too, to find so many of you are still the same. I met more than a few of you through this place. I'm glad we're still friends.

I miss you, LJ. Even writing this feels like whispering a secret into a hole in a tree. Who is left to hear it?

There are only so many times you can tell the same story. For my long-time readers who have had to sit through the various incarnations of this tale, I apologize. I've been promising a friend or two to recount the story as best I could and finally decided to dig back into my personal archives and reprint what I'd already said. No sense in reinventing the wheel. The events haven't changed, after all.

What follows is taken from my private journal, written several years ago, as the events occurred. I must warn you that there's a bit of profanity later on. Navigate away if such things bother you.

April 29, 2004

Harlan Ellison slugged me once.

It was some 15 years ago at a convention in New York. I'll spare you the details, but the truth of the matter is that I told Harlan Ellison that I wanted to be a writer and he slapped me across the face in response.

He told me to be a plumber. To get myself a trade. "Thirty-five years I've been in this business," he said, "and for thirty-five years I haven't eaten!"

So when I went back the next day with a book on plumbing, we both had a great laugh over it and he autographed it for me.

To Frank - Read and learn. Your friend, Harlan Ellison

Harlan Ellison warned me, most emphatically, that I should not pursue a career in writing. And knowing now what I could not know then, I believe that his advice was sound. Oh, not for me. But for 99% of the people who approached him at those conventions, wide-eyed, eager, and of mediocre talent, he would be doing them a brutal sort of favor.

I didn't see it that way at the time, of course. But I didn't yet have the discipline necessary to do this well. That would come with time. More than a decade, in fact.

Fast forward 15 years and my cell phone rings. It's Harlan Ellison.

I'd called his office not an hour before in the hopes of eliciting a blurb from him for the back cover of Valley of Shadows. I didn't get Harlan when I called. He wasn't in the office. I got his secretary, or personal assistant. So I outlined the story for her very briefly, and very badly, and she took my name and number.

Not an hour later, Harlan Ellison rang me and he launched right into it.

"You try to teach kids," he began without preamble, "you try to raise them right, and look what happens. Your mother and I are just beside ourselves over this whole six-book deal thing. Where did we go wrong?"

And I'm laughing. I'm laughing so hard it hurts. I've been waiting 15 years for this call. And I tell him so. I tell him that this has been my motivation as much as seeing the book in print. I've been waiting for a decade and a half to call this guy and tell him I made it.

So we talk for a while and it's good. It's not a fan/author thing. It's almost a peer thing. It's what I've been waiting for. I've been 30 feet from him at conventions and have refused to say hello because it wasn't time yet. I made a promise that the next time I saw him, the next time we spoke, I wouldn't just be another nameless fanboy. I wanted some sort of equal footing. I wanted his respect.

I got everything I wanted from that conversation. Everything except a blurb, of course.

He declared it some time ago, and quite publicly, that he wasn't doing blurbs anymore. Not for anyone. And I knew that. I knew it was a longshot. He told me he gets five or six bound galleys a week that just lay about the place.

And we keep talking. He asks what the book is about, and I tell him. He groks it right away, and he makes me an offer.

"Tell you what," he says. "You have your publisher send me the book once it's in print and I'll see if I have time to take a look at it. I'm not making any promises, but I'll see what I can do. If I find time to read it, and I like it, I'll write you a blurb for the next one. How's that?"

I thought that was more than fair. I also told him that it would be an honor for me simply to think of the book as being in his possession. He thanked me for the compliment, and I thanked him for the offer and we chatted a little more.

Right before we hung up (and knowing his fondness for superheroes), I told him I was the creator of the world's first complete superhero tarot deck.

"Superhero tarot?" he asked, and I could hear him sit up straighter.

"Yes, sir," I said.

"I'd be happy to let you send me a copy of that," he said, and we both laughed.

So Harlan Ellison called today. I'm sending him a copy of my tarot deck, and, when it's ready, a copy of Valley of Shadows.

Harlan Ellison slugged me once.

I don't think I've ever properly thanked him for it.

* * *

December 15, 2004

Harlan Ellison just took me to school.

He called me at home. This is the third time he's done so and it just never gets to be "normal," you know? It's like the President of the United States showing up on your doorstep and asking for a cup of sugar. Like he's regular folk. Which he ain't.

"Do you have a copy handy?" he asks.

It takes me a second to realize what he means. He knows why he's calling. I'm still struggling with the fact that it's him on the other end of the phone. It was all so much easier before I knew what he'd written and done and accomplished and exactly how truly and utterly gifted this bastard is. His prowess with words is so damned colossal that I keep waiting for it to separate from him and go eat Tokyo.

My book. Valley of Shadows. He wants to talk about the book I sent him. Geezus. I scramble a bit and grab my nearest copy and tell him I've got it in hand.

"I started reading this and I thought, 'This is good. The kid's got chops,'" he says, and I get this feeling of warmth that spreads through my chest. It doesn't last long. "Then I got to page 11..."

Oh, man.

"You see at the bottom of page 11 where it says '...he canted his head to the side?'"

"Yes?"

"You can't cant your head any other way, mother-fucker!" he shouts. "That's what the word means! It means 'to the side.'"

I don't remember what I said to that. I may have mumbled. Or groaned. I'm pretty sure I covered my genitals.

"Page 12. See where it says he knelt down?"

"...yes...?"

"You ever try kneelingup?!"

And so it went. For an hour. Harlan Ellison took me to school and used my poor freshman novel as the textbook for what one should not do as an author. He was, as is his wont, unmerciful. He was not, however, unkind. He ripped my prose apart and every positive thing I'd ever felt about myself as a writer was torn down, ground into a fine paste, and used to make his bread. But I learned a lot. Not just about the craft. Of course that was part of it. But about publishers and the things they should have caught, too. He talked about the difference in the markets between then and now. He talked about the laziness of the current breed of authors and I felt a certain shame at being one of them.

But even as its happening, even as I realize I've lost all hope of ever getting a blurb from him, even as I realize that after all these years, the closest he'll ever come to reading something of mine ended on page 12, I recognize that I'm getting an education for which any writer would kill.

I'm talking to a guy who's literally won every award a writer can win for his craft, and he's done it several times. He used to sit around with the likes of Ray Bradbury and Rod Serling and he's on the phone telling me personally that I suck. It sounds absurd to say that I was grateful for it, but I was. I am. I'm a better writer because of it.

November 6, 2010

Harlan Ellison is dying. Or at least he thinks so. He's canceled all future appearances and he's got the suicide switches ready to torch his unfinished manuscripts when he goes.

The Grim Reaper may have written the book on death, but Ellison wrote everything else.

It makes me more than a little sad that the majority of the world will never know the intensity of the light that will someday -- perhaps someday soon -- go out. Ellison's intelligence is a fierce and palpable thing. Read his prose and you understand that this is not work for the lazy or casual reader. This is work on an order of magnitude unto itself. So when the last crop is harvested and the fields razed, I'll be among the unhappy few who realize the depth of that extinction.

None of this is meant to sanctify the man. I've watched him reduce fans to tears. I've seen people hurl profanities at him, call him a heartless bastard, and he's shrugged and said, "What? They're right."

He is cantankerous, rude, curmudgeonly and downright mean and not one of those things changes the fact that he's among the finest writers ever to have lived. I'm grateful for what he did for me.

And that, finally, is all I have to say about Harlan Ellison.

Unless he calls me again.

Originally published at Madman's Mutterings.

Andorian female, wearing a classic Trek uniform.

Watercolor on paper. October 23, 2010.
With many thanks to the amazing photos of:
http://chonastock.deviantart.com/

Sometimes I forget I am also an artist.

Originally published at Madman's Mutterings.

Hello, hello and welcome to a very special episode of LINGO! This one's got it all, kids. Apathy, the end of the world, Big Brother, outright profanity and a pair of angels to see us home. This episode gets a special [Profanity Advisory], kids. You've been warned!

Here's what's shaking the pillars of heaven this week:

I Don't Care - Fall Out Boy
La Notte - Moda' (Italian)
Gibt's Doch Gar Nicht - Der Wolf (German)
How Far We`ve Come - Matchbox Twenty
Wo Ha Ni (I Hate You) - MC Hot Dog (Chinese)
I Wanna Know You - KREVA (Japanese)
Angel - 2PM (Korean)
- Mr.Children (Japanese)
Teenagers - My Chemical Romance
One Kiss - (Korean)
Se Me Va La Voz - Alejandro Fernandez Ft Tito El Bambino (Spanish)
Just The Girl - The Click Five
- 23_45 & 5ivesta Family (Russian)
Angel - The Corrs
Elektrisches Gefhl - Juli (German)
Rebel Yell - Billy Idol

[podcast]http://traffic.libsyn.com/hellolingo/LINGO_45.mp3[/podcast]

Thanks for tuning in this week, and thanks to everyone who sent in songs. LINGO couldn't exist without you! Remember to check out our Facebook fan page! See you soon!

Originally published at Madman's Mutterings.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUrXs2vrfAs&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]

It's almost over! It's almost here! The fundraising project over on Invested.In is in it's final hours and we're just weeks away from the launch of the new magazine from iHero Entertainment.

I've posted the above video in other places. Facebook. YouTube. The Invested.In site. But this blog here was always supposed to be more than just a platform to hawk my various professional projects. It's supposed to be a place where I can talk about what those projects mean to me.

If you'd told me six months ago that I'd be re-launching the magazine that launched my career, you would have walked away with a face full of Coke Slurpee. It wasn't a subject I much liked talking about. That magazine did a lot for me, personally and professionally, but watching it fail... and being responsible for that failure... was one of my bigger disappointments. "A learning experience," they call it. "Character-building" is another word they like to throw around. But I took the loss hard and it was a loooooong time before I wrote again. In fact, it was just a few months ago that I wrote my first piece of superhero fiction since the magazine folded. That's a gap of nearly five years. So sitting down to write the story for the first issue of our newly-minted magazine was a little daunting.

Of course, I'm not starting off small. No, no. That would be too easy. I'm not that guy.

The magazine, a magazine of superhero fiction for those just joining us, usually contains stories of varying lengths, from shorts to serials. And those serials never contain more than three parts, spread out, one after the other, over three issues. So what do I do? I decide to write a six-part, universe-altering, foundation-shaking, mind-bending serial that will touch every single character in our universe. It's a game-changer. It's a giant rolling ball of Armageddon, told in the most human way possible.

You sit down to write a story like this and you stare at the blank screen for a good long time before you start. It's like looking at a room full of intricately-aligned dominoes. You need to know where to start to get everything to topple in the right order and not leave the rest of the room left standing. But once you do, once you figure out which little tile to nudge over, the experience is pretty damned special. It's more than a feat of putting one word in front of the other. It's a feat of engineering, of architecture. There's a reason they call it "world-building."

Now, before it sounds like I'm going to break my arm patting myself on the back, the thing I'm really trying to convey is the high one gets from doing something one loves. It's a feeling I've been missing. And it's nice to rediscover the simple joy of superheroes. I'm the kid that spent his childhood running around the front lawn with a towel tied around his neck. I'm the kid that used to sit on the bottom of the pool, holding his breath and pretending he was Aquaman.

So to stand here at the precipice of this new dawn, to watch the light of our new endeavor creep toward the horizon... it's like returning to Oz, or Narnia, or Brigadoon. It was a land of magic and wonder and we made it. We populated that world and we made it spin and then we walked away. The universe, though... it kept going. And now we return, finding our characters five years older, finding them changed, and we get the same joy of discovery that you will.

The "we" that I'm referring to is Sean Taylor, Tom Waltz, Matt Hiebert and Andy Massari. Brothers all. Each of them gifted in unique ways and I literally could not do this without them.

In just a few weeks, we'll launch again and we'll be around for six issues. Beyond that... well, that'll depend on people like you. Buy the magazine and we'll keep doing it. Don't and you just may end up with Slurpee in your shorts.

You can pre-order the magazine, and much more, by following this link. It would be mighty fine if you did.

Thank you, and keep dreaming. If you happen to dream of flying, we have a mighty fine sky for you to fly in.

Originally published at Madman's Mutterings.