I’m heading down to Portland for the Lovecraft Film Festival May 11-13. I will be on a panel about Lovecraft and women. I need your help!
I am looking for writers, editors, artists, publishers and fans to briefly e-mail or post below on any of the following:
- Recommended Lovecraftian stories/movies/games with female protagonists.
- Recommended Lovecraftian stories and novels by female writers.
- Why are women in Lovecraft’s stories mostly peripheral or non-existent?
- What would a feminist Mythos story look like?
- Lovecraftian fiction has generally been the realm of male writers. Do you think that is changing and how?
- Anything else you can think about that relates to this topic.
I intend to talk about Lovecraft and women in his fiction, Lovecraft and the female speculative writers of the time period (such as C.L. Moore), and Lovecraft and women today.
If you want to meet up at the festival, shoot me an e-mail to let me know.
Innsmouth Magazine: Collected Issues 1-4 is available for the Kindle and it is free until tomorrow (goes up to $3.99 after that). I’ll work on creating an ePub version in the summer.
Innsmouth Free Press writers continue to do good: Orrin Grey’s short story “Black Hill” was originally published in Historical Lovecraft and now gets to appear in The Book of Cthulhu 2. Orrin is my co-editor for Fungi and he deserves to be in a big, mass-market paperback format.
Talking about Fungi: We have a table of contents! We’re just waiting for a few contracts to come back.
Finally, I am on the long-list for this year’s Vanderbilt-Exile Short Fiction literary competition with a story featuring giant penguins, snow and insanity. Yes, I was inspired by you-know-who (hint: Mountains). However, big penguins are not far-fetched at all. We’ve found the remains of penguins taller and heavier than emperor penguins: the Kairuku lived in the Oligocene period and would have been super intimidating.
For more information on giant prehistoric penguins read this Guardian article.
Exile: The Literary Quarterly is a Canadian journal in print since 1972. Below is a nice YouTube video explaining what they’re about.
I recently saw the Dark Shadows trailer. My thoughts? Is Tim Burton on acid? Like, really bad acid. Burton has turned that old show Dark Shadows into a comedy. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, Dark Shadows was a Gothic soap opera which aired in the late 60s (complete with vampires, witches and the like). It was very successful, spawning multiple tie-in books and even a movie. The soap was revived as a TV show in the early 90s. It was never a comedy unlike, say, Fright Night. The trailer makes me think poor-man’s Addams Family or Austin Powers, actually.
The new Dark Shadows is obviously meant to be a parody of the old show, however, this approach seems head-scratching because:
- Old fans of the show are going to be majorly pissed.
- Horror fans will probably shrug this one away.
- Younger viewers who have never seen the show will have no idea what this is parodying. It’s not like most 20 year-olds who saw Pirates of the Caribbean have been watching Hammer films. Their idea of vampires is True Blood and Twilight. Jokes about old-fashioned vampires (including stuffy old clothes) will fall flat.
- Leslie Nielsen already did the Hammer/Lugosi parody in Dracula: Dead and Loving It. He was latching on to the Bram Stoker’s Dracula popularity of the time period (so he also lampooned that film) and thus it made sense to launch such a spoof. (Love At First Bite also employed a similar approach; Dracula is evicted from his castle and moves to disco-loving New York). Though Buffy mixed humour with its vampires, it had a more hip and youthful attitude than the avenue Burton has picked.
So, from a marketing perspective, I’m wondering if the studio is just trying to lose money. I mean, with the Vampire Diaries on TV and the whole Twilight thing, lovelorn vampire Barnabas Collins of Dark Shadows would seem like a horror-romance box-office wet dream. I’m also confused because the original poster artwork seemed to be taking the movie in a serious Gothic vein (as seen on the right) though maybe that was just a fan poster.
On the other hand, if we are remaking shows and movies of years past I have some suggestions that could use the comedy treatment:
- Twin Peaks. The daddy of shows such as Lost, created by David Lynch and Mark Frost, showed us complex scripts and plots could draw the public’s attention. Though the show focused on the murder investigation into Laura Palmer’s death, there is no reason why this couldn’t be turned into a comedy! Hey, we just need to bring the guy who played Mini-Me to play the dwarf in the Red Room. Somebody get me a scriptwriter!
- Highlander. Yes, it sucks to be immortal. Oh, all the sword fights and the angst. But if we cut the ponderous dialogue and add some physical comedy, I think we can have ourselves a movie. Better get the CGI people in here for some fancy special effects of laughing decapitated heads.
- Logan’s Run. We cast Zack Effron and some comedic sidekick as the people trapped in a society where people are doomed to be killed at 30. Hell, who wants to live beyond 30 nowadays! I mean, that’s old.
Here is a trailer for Dracula Dead and Loving It, which is a vampire comedy:
Here is Love At First Bite:
Here’s the Gothic Dark Shadows of the 90s:
Flaubert once famously said “Madame Bovary, c’est moi”. Sometimes I feel like saying “Cthulhu, c’est moi” because most of my fiction – and that includes the Lovecraft stuff – steals from my real life experiences. Take “Flash Frame,” which last week got the audio treatment from Tales to Terrify. The story appeared most recently in The Book of Cthulhu. I have previously talked about its setting and elements, which are inspired in part by a real Mexican movie theatre and my experience as a journalist.
“Collect Call” is another Lovecraftian story which draws from my youth, focusing on two friends who find a copy of the Necronomicon in Mexico City. The story should be up shortly at Expanded Horizons.
Talking about Lovecraft, the anthology Future Lovecraft was recently reviewed and scored good marks. The anthology also got a mention at the World SF blog.
We should call Canadian e-book pirates Ice Pirates! Remember the 80s? Aw, man. That was a bad-good movie.
It was a weird afternoon yesterday. A reporter from the CBC who had read one of my blog posts on e-book piracy phoned me to ask for comment. I was semi-coherent after the end of a long day and terribly hungry. Now that I’ve had time to eat and nap, I’ll write a bit about this.
My opinion on e-book piracy boils down to this: lack of exposure, not piracy, is a writer’s worst enemy (you can read more about this here). E-book publishers are worried about pirates stealing their precious books, even going as far as forbidding libraries access to their titles, but there is no proof piracy hurts the bottom line or that digital rights management (DRM) curbs e-piracy.
DRM technology does not stop pirates, it does not deter them and it does not do much for publishers, instead annoying the consumer, locking the consumer in a single platform and quite possibly hurting publishers. In fact, according to a recent study by Rice University, removal of DRM restrictions can decrease piracy.
“Because a DRM-restricted product will only be purchased by a legal user, …”only the legal users pay the price and suffer from the restrictions,” the study said. “Illegal users are not affected because the pirated product does not have DRM restrictions.”
Ironically – despite the occasional freak-outs of some fiction authors – the most popular e-book titles are not non-fiction. This month, the five most pirated e-books at Pirate Bay were Windows 7 Secrets and 7 Weeks to 50 Pull-Ups: Strengthen and Sculpt Your Arms, Shoulders. The second title is available at Amazon.com and seems to be selling well-enough in KDP format (it also seems to be selling well in paperback).
Then look at the case of the parody book Go the Fuck to Sleep, which became a best-seller thanks to pirated copies floating around the Web. A study by O’Leary showed piracy “actually spurred, not hurt, sales” for the titles they tracked. More studies are needed about piracy and sales but I see no e-book apocalypse on the horizon.
For small publishers, indie authors and the self-published crowd I insist that obscurity is the biggest enemy. However, there are other things we should be worrying about more than piracy. For example, the refusal of many publishers to offer e-books to libraries or even the algorithm that makes Amazon discount the price of a title. (Smart technology sometimes yields bizarre results.)
And the biggest issue that keeps me awake at nights has nothing to do with pirates. It’s distribution. The turf wars between bookstores, publishers and distributors are getting pretty wild. For example, Amazon removed Kindle versions of IPG Books due to distribution disagreements just a few days ago. Poof. Gone.
It’s not like I’m talking as someone who has nothing to lose with piracy. A few months back I joked that it had taken the pirates more than usual to upload copies of Future Lovecraft to their sites. I mean, usually they have the e-books in 48 hours, so having to wait four days for them to show up was a bit odd.
Anyway, my own pirate strategy has been to offer free copies of our titles to people who ask for them (hoping they’ll review it or tell others about us). Why? Because I really don’t think worrying about the Russian site that has all our titles does me any good. Do svidaniya.