The Bodhisattva

I really appreciate the opportunity to spit pirate for a couple of sentences and along with announcing a new contest at BookSpotCentral I get to briefly tell my latest tale involving my tribulations of bringing books to our readers.

Shiver my timbers!

Pirates. Pirate stories. Pirate stories being written by people like Michael Moorcock, Sarah Monette, Liz Bear, Steve Aylett, Rhys Hughes and more? There are some writers in this anthology that people need to be sampling if they don’t already have a bookshelf full of their books! The VanderMeer’s don’t mess around and with Fast Ships, Black Sails they don’t look to be falling off anytime soon.

Find out more and ENTER the contest at BookSpotCentral!

Big thanks to Night Shade Books and Jeff VanderMeer!

Please check our contest page to keep up to date with all of our active giveaways!

I hate these things, they are viral traffic tools and if we are all being completely honest nobody that does these things even bother reading another blog they don’t already read because of it. That said, it gives me a great opportunity to post something prompted to me; as naturally I’m a blogger, and we specialize in reaction not creation.

First, the random rules

1. Link to the person who tagged you.
2. Post the rules on the blog.
3. Write six random things about yourself.
4. Tag six people at the end of your post.
5. Let each person know they have been tagged.
6. Let the tagger know when your entry is up.

I’m a part of Generation X - my teachers told me so (specifically) - not the cool Chris Bachalo title, but we are unruly, which is to say we don’t follow rules yet we do often claim a right to rule. But I’m a Aquarius, and the balance must be recognized, so I’m going to ignore half of those rules.

1. I have an odd fascination with cereal, if I had to do it over I wouldn’t be in the process of building a reading-culture Empire and I’d just review cereal. Cereal makes milk good, and for that it deserves further study and yes, worship. I used to have a friend that would go the next town over (hour drive) to get his specific brand of cereal - he was a pioneer.

Think about it I could send review samples for super cheap!

2. You, yes you. It was all with the best of intentions, sometimes you just get caught up you know? It’s all love and it’s all good now if you are wondering.

I’ve become terribly nostalgic, I have always been a bit of the soft romantic (but devious in my past mind you - no doubt about that) though probably a post-modern romantic and what you will find is that the more adjectives or descriptors you have to add to that base the more you lose. The base is good enough.

Don’t be too smart to be happy is something I wish somebody I admired told me a long time ago.

3. It took me about 25 years to grow the hell up. Don’t get me wrong, we are talking Thrawn level smarts over here from birth, but it took me 25 years to realize not to say stuff like what I just said in this very sentence.

4. A couple weeks ago I was going through the Stars and Stripes newspaper, which is a paper for the Armed Forces and I got to the middle part which was literally like high school yearbook style pictures for like 4-6 pages and I was looking at it and I thought it might have been promotions or a death count for a year, and as I started reading the little bio info - 90% of these guys were from one unit. I grew up in a Military community, and I just want you to picture the people you hang out with, their wives, their kids, their husbands, the people you see everyday at the PX, the gym, on the road, eat dinner with, whatever - and like 40 of them lose somebody in this war.  I was incredibly moved, and I said High School yearbook above, and that’s about how young they are.

I have a profound respect for anybody in a U.S. Military Uniform and those from other countries in support - during times here our elected leaders may not be something we can be prideful about, it is these people (a lot of them are kids) who do and always have best represented us.  Never be ashamed about what made our country great and any other countries that question that don’t want to talk about their track record of ever doing anything but talk. Most of them have this right and exist because we were nice enough to give them their country back after they couldn’t defend it themselves.

Most of these guys should be in school, playing X-Box, blogging, spending time with their families but they chose to serve, and it should humble the rest of us, it does me. I’m not sure how many in the Military read SF/F books, or BookSpotCentral, or this blog, but if you do - my deepest admiration and thanks to you and your family.

Next time fellas we may just let Putin keep them.

5. It is my honor to  currently be working on something very cool for the 38th Novacon.

6. I will not pass this along and tag others as I fear the people I tag will ignore it and expose my lack of proficiency in battle meditation.

Well, You can see why I don’t post more often. Cereal, X-books, nationalism, Conventions, Star Wars, pride, war and guilt - if there was still a writer’s strike I’d have an excuse.

This is what I’m talking about right here.

Seriously, along with George R.R. Martin’s a A Dance with Dragons this is the book I’ve been anticipating the most for years. The blogosphere is full of situational hyperbole, but I’ve got this documented, baby! In January 2007 where I also mention it was on my list the year before!

This is what we are talking about…

Over at BookSpotCentral I have posted an exclusive look at Caine Black Knife the third book featuring Caine by Matthew Stover being published by Del Rey later this month! An excerpt of the first part can be viewed elsewhere, but we have that and the second part, Gifts.

GO CHECK OUT THE SAMPLE!

Everybody who had read Heroes Die and Blade of Tyshalle knows the deal - hard-hitting, intense, smart SF/F from the NY Times Bestselling novelist of the novelization of Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith (where he restored childhoods!)

I’ll have a review up very soon (within a week) - I just love this guy, and I have to thank Zach over at the BSC forums for leading me to the Stover books some years ago. Some time ago I reviewed - and did no justice -Blade of Tyshalle here.

I want to thank Del Rey/Random House for choosing BookSpotCentral as a venue to bring this beauty to readers!

There’s quite a bit of Star Wars material out there on the bookshelf (as one could imagine) but you won’t find many pockets explored and uncovered better than the contributions by Karen Traviss. Traviss, besides being a fine writer (check out her own, non-SW book for great SF) has just been able to not only play in the Lucas sandbox but cultivate and add to it.

We all know what Order 66 is, and over at BookSpotCentral yesterday I announced a chance to win a copy of this book recently published by Del Rey.

GO and get more information on the book and on how to enter!

I want to thank Del Rey for giving us an opportunity to present this to our reader.

Please visit/bookmark our contests page to keep up to date with current contest (currently we have 3 active)- good luck to all who enter!

As a VALIANT fan this is an extra cool contest to present for me. It’s about time we have more contests with books with pictures and along with that we have a limited lithograph to offer. We will have two winners, each will walk away with a new copy of newly released Archer and Armstrong: First Impressions hardcover from VALIANT ENTERTAINMENT that not only reprints the early issues by Jim Shooter and Barry Windsor-Smith but also offers an all new story by Shooter as well as extra behind the scenes features!

The Grand Prize Winner will also be walking away a sweet limited edition lithograph illustrated by Bob Layton. It depicts another VALIANT character, X-O Manowar:

Get more information on both prizes and how to enter at BookSpotCentral!

A big thanks to VALIANT ENTERTAINMENT and Greg Holland for making this happen!

Being a Detroit Lions fan is really something unique as I don’t know if we can even be considered NFL fans as we haven’t really played in the league (though we have played at the league) for some time now.  I mean if you consider our recent Golden Years were helmed by people named Scott Mitchell and Erik Kramer and you just begin to fully feel our pain.

That we wasted the career of perhaps the second greatest runner in history (I believe to the first to be Bo Jackson - all things equal  O-line, system, etc - , healthy, the guy is better than anybody who has ever played the game) is just the icing. I remember sitting there watch Barry just throw up 1200+ yard seasons for most years without a damn tight end of a damn full back, a system where he put together the most ridiculous year in College Football history (go look at the numbers his Heisman year - it’s almost looks like Fantasy). The Run and Shoot, remember that? Atlanta called it the Red Gun, Houston used to run it get like 4 1000 yard receivers (or damn near it) with Moon, Duncan, Jeffries, Hill, Givens, Lo White and company and what it amounted to was entertaining but it’s kind of like watching MLS - they aren’t really playing Football.

So Matt Millen finally gets canned. Let me say this he was a great play-by-play commentator for the NFL, which kind of makes his ascension as the President of an NFL team a bit like somebody like Tor handing over their publishing operations to me - not smart, because all we would do is announce our new Robotech line to be followed by our announcement of acquiring DC Comics so I can put Darwyn Cooke on Phantom Stranger, China Mieville and Skottie Young on Batman, and convince Allan Moore I want to see his Twilight, that will feature a spin-off  Warren Ellis run in Checkmate (which I’d be bringing back). We’d leave Geoff Johns where the hell he is because that guy is a force already.

So, back to Football…(Tor get at me - Robotech is sweet!)

You know it’s bad when the first sign of progress is the canning of the president of your damn team of the last 8 years and it almost feels like we don’t have a schedule, we  just happen to be on other teams’ schedules and in a league where parity is the catch phrase we seem to be exception. I mean even as bad as the Rams and Raiders have looked recently, these are teams that have won the Superbowl in recent memory.

Let me tell you how far I go with this squad - when Bennie Blades, Jerry Ball and Chris Spielman were our heart and soul. When I used to read Becket Magazine in 1990 and there was an article about the future of our Heismaned-out backfield with the addition of Andre Ware as our first round pick to go along with Barry.

Back then we were losing but their was excitement, some sense of hope, and I hope that is restored with a new regime. There is a lot of nostalgia for me being a Lion fan as two of my best friends from my childhood had favorite teams in the division, the Bears and Tampa (when they were in that division). We are the Berman’s pronounced NFC Norse, and win or lose, we need to be leaving the field black and blue as signs of effort.

We need to be on a schedule.

_{*As it is this may work in both ways, as to be honest sport play-by-play has taken a severe turn for the worse over the last few years , so somebody give Millen a job.}

No case of Mondays here, as over at BookSpotCentral for those feeling a bit down due to the economy, work, or more importantly your favorite football team losing over the weekend, Jay Boogie is is back to give everybody a chance at some good reading by one of the best in this business. Jeffrey Ford is a PTPer, but even more, he’s like the Bo Jackson of fiction as he excels everywhere he goes (if I ever see him walk up a wall in centerfield I move for the creation of the church of Jeff).

What we have are two sets of his Well-Bulit City Trilogy recently republished by Golden Gryphon Press with sweet new covers by John Picacio. Remember that BookSpotCentral - earlier this year - offered an exclusive look at the first two chapters of the World Fantasy Award winning first novel in the series, The Physiognomy, here.

Get more information on the books and how to enter at BookSpotCentral!

Over at BookSpotCentral I just announced another chance to score some more Autumn reading. Something for the fans of short fiction, A Field Guide to Surreal Botany, an anthology published by Two Cranes Press and edited by Jason Erik Lundberg and Janet Chui.

To get more information on how to get in on this contest and the book - check out the announcement at BookSpotCentral!

I want to thank Two Cranes Press for aloowing us to bring this to our readers!  Be sure to keep up with all current BSC contests at our contest page.

More progress, as I get back to content, post-Empire building!  I just put up my interview with novelist Adrian Tchaikovsky over at BookspotCentral. Adrian debut’s Empire in Black and Gold was published by Pan Macmillan in July and it kicks off his Shadows of the Apt series.

Earlier this month BookSpotCentral hosted an exclusive chapter to his debut.

This was a bit delayed and it is entirely  my own fault as I got caught up having to do some grunt work building BookSpotcentral, but here it is:

Check the interview out!

Enjoy!

Lots more stuff coming from me - a book review, a comic, review, more contests, more features, more exclusive excerpts - and that’s just me; who knows what else the BSC Crew is bringing putting my contributions to shame!

Yesterday I put up a review of Duane Swierczynski’s and David Lapham’s original graphic novel, Batman: Murder at Wayne Manor, over at BookspotCentral. It’s a interesting little book and as I’ve said before, I lvoe the OGN format and think it allows for the highest value in terms of creativity from sequential art (the pretentious way of saying comic books!). Lapham is an all time favorite creator of mine and Duane Swierczynski is a terrific crime writer so I was looking forward to this one. An Interactive Mystery with these two and the Dark Knight?

GO READ MY REVIEW!

Enjoy!

I just announced another contest at BookSpotCentral! This is an opportunity to win one of my previous Forgotten Friday picks, The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril, written by Paul Malmont. These are signed by the author and I’m very pleased to be able to present these.

Get more information on the book and contest at BookSpotCentral!

I want to thank Mr. Malmont for for allowing us to present this book to our readers, truly one of the real fun experiences of the year for me.

So, I collect pulps and I wanted to share a couple of recent purchases. Pulps are basically the heart and soul of everything we label as genre in American Fiction. Certainly many influences are taken from film these days, but I think you’ll find that a lot of those classic westerns or crime noir films so often cited as influenced from novelists to comic book creators are also derived from pulps. I could  name people like (and unlike) Alan Moore, Frank Miller, Jonathan Lethem, Michael Chabon as people who have obvious pulp thoughts infused in examples of their writing, but it would be silly as it would be much easier to list those that somehow avoided the influence itself.  How many character were influenced or gave a nod to Conan? Elric and Cerebus are two of dozens. Agatha Christie who has more books in circulation than just about anybody had stories and debuted characters in pulps. The O.G. Edgar Rice Burrough’s stories’ can be found in several from Blue Book to Argosy and more - be it John Carter of Mars or Tarzan. Ender’s Game came from a much later publication (the 70’s) but originated in a magazine. There are chapters to Dune in 1960’s magazines and it is in pulps where you will find works by people like Clark Ashton Smith, Robert Howard, L.  Ron Hubbard, Asimov, Heinlein, A.E. Vogt, Henry Kuttner, Leigh Brackett, C.L Moore, Poul Anderson, Michael Moorcock, Jack Vance, Lovecraft and more.

I generally stay in the 20’s and 30’s myself as those early Weird Tales Brundage covers are too enticing, but recently I scooped up a couple of  1950’s pulps that I had to have because one I believe contains first published work by Philip K. Dick, the other is another early story by him. Both are issues of Planet Stories from 1952. Here they are:

The first is Beyond Lies the Wub The second contain PKD’s The Gun. Speaking to what I said above PKD may be the most mined SF writer in terms of film, not to mention a visionary in the field.

Pulps are in my mind generally very undervalued. There are examples that do have hefty premiums (ahem. . . see first Tarzan - August 1912 All-Story Magazine), but for the most part we are talking first or early works of some of the minds that would be the foundation of not just Science Fiction, Crime of Fantasy - but Fiction in general. When I look at my pulps it’s a very odd feeling as one of the more common cyclic discussions that occurs among genre fans - especially Fantasy fans are the cover choices of books - often comparing U.S. editions and viewing them as less favorable to the subdued covers of the same books from the U.K. or another European publisher. I usually find myself in that camp but when I look at pulps it makes me wonder, why? Pulp collectors and especially Golden Age comic book collectors, while being drawn to keys, are very much motivated by covers. As odd as it sounds, there are books that carry a premium just because of a cover (one example are the grey tones I mentioned here, and here). I guess it’s not that hard of a reach to believe, the people who could have legitimate nostalgic feeling for 1920’s-30’s Conan or Spicy Mystery (a.k.a. sweetness) have to be dwindling. For me, pulps are bigger comics with consistently better covers; often times painted covers.

Back to the non-dilemma, I know that pulp covers have the types of covers that would make me second guess a current book purchase. Then again, I see cover like on Malmont’ s The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril and I see what is exactly the type of cover I dig, kind of like Eric Powell’s Goon covers. It makes me think of some of the cover choices of novel covers and why they seem rather odd at best and at worst juvenile (when having content that clearly is not exclusively juvenile) and yet I can’t ignore that many pulps covers have to come across as  juvenile to most people, but for some reason it’s a part that seems to be missing today. The best part, the part that says something is going down in here and we aren’t afraid to let you know. Some would say the element is fun, or adventure, and sure, that’s part of it -  but I think the word I use is something different, something we are scared to admit draws us. . . something probably very similar to beauty.

Over at BookspotCentral I just put up an exclusive look at forthcoming work from the wonderful Zoran Zivkovic. Impossible Encounters is slated for a an Autumn release from AIO Publishing.

Here is a synopsis of the book:

“A nuanced mix of the ordinary with the surreal, the mundane with the sublime, this mosaic novel quietly twists trusted concepts. With simple yet fine prose, this story unfolds as a series of otherworldly meetings. After death, a man encounters not a light at the end of a long, dark tunnel, but a hall of portraits and, locked in a room, the most extraordinary artwork of all. Other colorful characters include a young man who finds himself atop a mountain, a bookseller that services the most ordinary of requests from a highly unusual patron, a banker who meets his maker on a train, a priest who receives absolution from the devil, and a dying author who finds hope in the most unlikely of conversations. Long before the last page, readers may find the world has been turned inside out.”

CHECK OUT THE CHAPTER!

I want to thank AIO Publishing and Mr. Zivkovic for choosing BookSpotCentral as a venue and I hope readers enjoy!

Just wanted to let people know that we got most of the back-end stuff done for our full relaunch as BookSpotCentral! From a visitor perspective, it probably just amounts to minor, not noticeable changes from the soft launch but we did add a nifty new background to the top of our forum.

I kind of went over the particulars for our reads in a recent post over there that doubles as a round-up of content, that I usually do here, but will be doing over there every two weeks now. It also has all the particulars people may need/want to know to easier/better utilize the new site.

I’ve got some cool new features coming now that we are basically set to go!

We would ask our readers to - if they can - change their existing links to us to reflect the change in location and name and for any who don’t already to consider doing so! If you experience any difficulties with the new site please email us at the site or jump on the forum and pm us and we love to hear about it.

All of our information is accessible via clear buttons on the main page but if anyone needs any more info please contact us via the site.

I thanked people in the round-up post linked above, but I just wanted to add a big thanks for the patience of our readers as week took a bit of  time to get all this done and thanks to our contributors who held the fort down!

Over at BookSpotCentral.com I just announced a contest giving our readers a chance to win a copy of her novel, Dogs, signed by Ms. Kress. 

As you know may know I have previously announced that  have the exclusive sample to the first four chapters of Dogs and have also in the past  hosted a piece of short fiction by Kress at BookspotCentral. You can get all those and contest the details at the contest announcement! CHECK IT OUT!

Big thanks to Tacyhon and Ms. Kress.