Zombie Lapdance

This has been a pretty good year for my writing. I’ve had nine fiction publications in 2009, which is my best showing by far.

For anyone reading who is a struggling writer, hustling your butt to get a short story published, I should note that none of these stories were written in the past two years. The average age was probably closer to four years. And I sold most of these stories in 2008, or much much earlier.

In short, the publishing accomplishments of this year represent the work I did 2 to 6 years ago. Hope that gives you a little sense of scale.

One of my stories that I under-publicized was "Prey Play," which came out on Fifth Di… They only keep their stories up for a month, and unfortunately that month was September, when I didn’t have time to breathe, let alone crow about my accomplishments. I can’t even find a Google cache of that story any more.

This year the Zombie Lapdance blog logged over two million visits!

Now, I’ve looked over the post list, and it doesn’t look like that’s likely unless looking at every reply is counted as a separate visit. That means that a blog post with 1500 visits and 6 replies counts as 9000 visits toward the total. But whatever, I’ll take it.

Also, over Thanksgiving I found out that my sister checks my blog three times a day. Doing some quick arithmetic, that means that she herself was responsible for at least 50,000 of the total. Thanks for doing your part, Thora!

So what can we expect in 2010? Certainly there will be more activity on the fiction front. And very soon we will be having a taco-meat photo quiz. I just need to finish carving a trophy with a depiction of cabeza de res.

I’m going to finish up the post with a listing of all the stories I published this year with a summary and relevant links. Because you deserve to start the new year by reading an awesome story.

I hope everyone had a good year, and I hope that 2010 (the year we make contact) will be even better.

"Hometown Horrible: The Legacy of a Wisconsin Writer Revisited" – Pseudopod 2009
This is an audio podcast with an excellent performance by Elie Hirschman.

"Murder at Doty Station" – Black Gate Magazine 2009
This is a spinoff story to my unpublished novel. Like the novel, it takes place in the Patchwork Kingdom, but twenty years earlier.

"The Gaping Corpse" – Black Ink Horror #5 2009
This story was heavily influenced by the works of Joe R. Lansdale. It tries to re-imagine the vampire myth in the most upsetting manner possible. It’s the third in my series of stories playing with voice (it’s in second person imperative).

"Beneath the Red City" – Innsmouth Free Press 2009
This was conceived as a grand unified field theory of paranoid conspiracies, a natural outcome of listening to too much Art Bell late at night. It’s also part of the obligatory fooling around with voice series (second person present tense). You should keep in mind while reading this that the apartment building described here is very much like a place I used to live in.

"A Natural History of the Pancake Badger" on The Town Drunk 2009
"Pancake Badger" hails from the "Monster Attacks" series. It’s one of my few sci-fi sales and involves Catholic schoolgirls and the city of Beloit.

"Anasazi-35" on Fusion Fragment 2009
You can think of this as a sequel to "Pioneers and Indians." It features a return of Sunset MacClaine, one of my favorite characters. This story explores a hypothetical spime economy and the effectiveness of consensus government in a crisis situation.

"Prey Play" – The Fifth Di… 2009
This story started as a dream. In the dream, hyenas were driving around a savanna in a jeep, hanging off the sides and whooping it up as they ran down antelope. Meanwhile, a couple of lions watched from a nearby bluff, bemused by the excesses of youth. This is no longer available on the "Fith Di…" site, but you might still find a cached version somewhere.

"The Call of the Bailiff" – The Book of Tentacles 2009
A story that parodies the horrible Sean Penn vehicle "I am Sam." Only with more ancient ones.

The Elves Hate You – Drabblecast B-sides
This is an abbreviated version of the story, with 50% fewer characters and jokes. But it works a lot better that way on audio with Norm Sherman’s brilliant reading.

Let’s get right to it. Drabblecast is awesome. I know, I’m always saying that. This series of spoken word flash fiction, self described "strange stories for strange listeners; such as yourself", now has a separate feed, a proverbial B-Sides (RSS) of stories that are simply too amazing and out there for the already totally bonkers Drabblecast main-feed (RSS).

I am proud to say that my story "The Elves Hate You," is now a part of the B-sides feed. Now, you can either add the B-sides to your regular schedule of downloaded podcasts, or if you have a media player that doesn’t do the Mac-proprietary *.m4a format, then you can simply open the webpage here, and your browser will probably start playing Norm Sherman’s amazing performance of the story automatically.

There’s a lot to recommend this particular performance. Norm Sherman always does a great job of adding extra production value and sound effects to his stories, and his imitation of an elf’s musical laugh is itself worth the fifteen minutes or so of time investment this story represents.

Also, Jan Dennison made this totally awesome, and eerily accurate picture to illustrated the story.

This is actually the third publication of "The Elves Hate You." You can still get it as a PDF in the Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine Best of Horror Anthology. So if you like "The Elves Hate You" and you think to yourself, "if only I had the extended version of "The Elves Hate You", with almost 50% more jokes," then that wish is only one short paypal transaction away.

Every now and then, someone comes along with a theme for an anthology that’s nothing shy of brilliant. That’s what’s happened with the new anthology from SamsDot Publishing called The Book of Tentacles.

I’m fortunate enough to have the opening story in this anthology. Well, technically, Camille Alexa has the first thing in the anthology, but it’s a poem, so I don’t think that really counts.

My story is "Call of the Bailiff," which is one of those sardonic Cthulhu stories that you seem to see everywhere.

Have you ever seen the movie, "I am Sam"? For your sake I honestly hope you haven’t. It’s one of those films where an established actor plays a retard in the hopes of getting an Oscar. Unfortunately, Sean Penn went full-retard in "I am Sam" and only got a pity-nomination for his role. Sean Penn’s character is a retard who fights the courts in order to retain custody of his non-retard daughter. The point of the film being, that it doesn’t matter how retarded you are, your love makes up for all that retardation.

This is a deeply retarded film.

I was so angry at the schmaltzy sentimentality of "I am Sam" that I thought, why not take out the retard, and put in a character that’s even less competent to raise a child? Initially the story was going to be about Satan fighting the legal system to retain custody of his daughter, but nobody believes in Satan anymore, so I made it Cthulhu.

I also highly recommend that you check out the website for the Book of Tentacles anthology, TentaclePower. It’s not just a website, it’s a full-on multi-media tentacle extravaganza. I even supplied them with some of my tentacle art for the art page.

Yes, we all like the tentacles.

If you’re like me, you take a certain amount of satisfaction from eating processed meat from a can. This processed meat seemed to be largely grain filler.

This processed meat says that it was "slaughtered according to Islamic law."

More reassuring words have never been spoken.

More ice cream from the Korean mart. This mochi came with its own plastic prong to help you pick up the frozen sweet without getting the rice powder all over you. The rice-dough covering the ice cream was the most soft and flexible thing I’ve ever eaten.

I’m trying to think of a way to describe it that doesn’t use scrotum imagery, and it’s hard.

This had no English-language ingredient list, so I have no idea what it is. Maybe it’s squid jerky with barbecue sauce?

Breakfast at Juan in a Million on Caesar Chavez. This is the famous Don Juan breakfast taco, possibly the king of all breakfast tacos.

Does it seem disingenuous to call something a taco when the pile of filling completely obscures the tortilla on the bottom and has to be eaten with four additional tortillas?

A donut shop has opened along my way to work, making me one of the most fortunate souls in the world. Here’s the Highland Doughnuts version of a sausage kolache and a sausage croissant.

This stick of carny food belies a wonderful secret.

It’s a deep-fried Snickers bar!

Once fried, the bar transmogrified into a reservoir of molten chocolate and liquified nougat, with a small school of peanuts swimming within.

I had a culinary adventure last week while without my camera, so I’ve had to draw a picture. I was at the T&S Chinese Seafood shop on North Lamar, and I felt obligated to order the chicken feet.

Before the hot bowl of stewed feet arrived, I wondered aloud to my food frakking deputy, Julia, if they clean out under the toenails before cooking the chicken feet. The answer is no, they cut off the tips of the toes.

After stewing, everything about the feet plumps up. The weird scales that chickens have on their feet have gone spongey, and the bulk of the edible parts of the chicken feet, the cartilage and pads on the bottom have gone soft and delectable.

There appears to be no dainty way to eat these. Most of the meal was a process of discovery, figuring out what parts of the feet are edible and how to get at them. I found that if I picked up the chicken feet with my chopsticks, I could use my lips and incisors to nibble at the juicy bits. I particularly liked sucking between the toes.

Remember that dried lutefisk that I bought in Cranfills Gap? Well, I finally found a use for it. It’s now a Christmas lutefisk!

This way I get all the nostalgic value of lutefisk without actually having to eat it or go through the long preparation process.

I talked to my Grandfather about making lutefisk and it turns out that I was wrong about the lye. At this point there is no lye, the lutefisk is technically just "stockfish," which is just dried fish flesh. The lye comes later in preparation and is the chemical process that makes the dried fish plump up into something vaguely resembling a re-hydrated fish.

According to my Grandfather, lutefisk is soul food. People don’t eat it because it’s good. Here’s how he recounts the origin story of lutefisk:

"The Vikings would take the lutefisk along with their long sea voyages. They would throw the ‘stockfish’ the dried fish into the bilge under the decking. And it would slosh around down there and be fine. They wouldn’t eat it until they ran out of food. They would leech the lye from their stove ash, and soak the lutefisk. And then they could eat it. Sort of."

When my grandfather was a kid, they would sell the lutefisk in its dried state. They would just leave it stacked up outside the store. The dogs would come along and relieve themselves on it. And nobody would care.

But even if you don’t have any lutefisk to help you celebrate the holidays, Merry Christmas!

The publication of Anasazi-35 has stimulated some interesting conversations, so I think that it deserves a little more attention. I’m going to post several exegetical articles, covering different aspects of the story. Today, I’m going to talk about how Anasazi-35 approaches technology.

So a few years ago, I had this roommate who owned one of the first Blackberries. Right after he got it, he came up to me as I was minding my own business, trying to conceptualize how the world will work in the near future, and he shoved the phone in my face and said, "Imagine something that this thing can do, and it can do it."

Needless to say, as an aspiring science fiction writer, this was a very threatening statement. So I replied, "Can it cross-correlate facial recognition with social networking and reputation systems?"

He scowled at me and stalked off to work on the problem.

The lesson I took from this experience is that it’s a fool’s game to anticipate front-end applications. It’s likely that anything you imagine will either be totally wrong, or i will become reality long before you can get the story published.

When I wrote Anasazi-35, I took it as read that there will be near ubiquitous and practically invisible computing and networking. The exact interface won’t be as interesting as the way that social groups will use that ubi-comp for collective organizing and decision making.

That’s why I didn’t describe how the characters interact with their networking hardware. A lot of people who’ve read this didn’t like that. They wanted to hear about the mirror shades and the brain implants and the laser retinal projectors or whatever.

Personally, I think that would have been a huge mistake. There’s no interface I could imagine that wouldn’t sound dorky six months from now. Hell, it would probably sound dorky now.

And on top of that, the characters themselves would be taking the technology for granted, so there’s no point in having them dwell on it. Could you imagine a modern novel that described in detail how to use an iPhone? "He took an oblong tablet out of his pocket. It was no larger than his wallet, yet it had the processing power of an 1980s era Cray supercomputer. By pressing his finger against the glowing cartoon animations on the face, he could access software that would turn his ordinary voice into a perfectly tuned melody."

Here’s another interesting little incident at the Bizarre Bazaar.

I hope I don’t post any more cute animal pictures, no matter how popular they make this blog. But honestly, who doesn’t love a friendly duck?

This duck was at the Bizarre Bazaar down at Fiesta Gardens. It seemed perfectly happy waddling around in the crowd, begging for scraps of funnel cakes and corndogs. It actually came when I whistled! And then it nibbled at my hand, tickling me and covering me with duck spit.

It even let me pet him, and I can tell you that a duck belly is even softer and fluffier than you imagine.

If you know anything about my food-frakking deputy, Julia, you know that she frequently has uncontrollable cravings for octopus.

You know, I’ve had octopus a lot, and I keep forgetting that they have this weird butt nozzle.

Julia and I tried to follow the preparation directions on the back. Which didn’t go perfectly. First it said to rub salt on the octopus until a white foam appears. Didn’t really see that. Then it said to lightly poach it in water.

By the time I was frying the tentacles in Korean barbecue sauce, I was already wishing that I had marinated them overnight and then stewed them for a couple hours.

But the tentacles turned out colorful if nothing else.

On another night, we satisfied my craving for croaker. At most Korean groceries, half the fish freezer is filled with croaker, so I had to see if it was all that great.

Julia found a recipe for sweet and sour croaker. It involved slashing the side of the fish and dusting it in rice flour.

For the vegetable, I sliced up some pickled Japanese radish.

It was sweet and crisp, not unlike the pickled squash I had recently, or maybe I’m just cuing in on the similar color.

Then the croaker sat in the oil until crisp.

I completely botched the sweet and sour sauce. I should have added the starch gradually, and not used the entire thing. Instead, I poured in a cup and a half of potato starch and the whole wad gelled into a rubbery paste. Chalk that up to a learning experience.

But I would have to say it was a pretty decent fish. The meat peeled off the bones easily and it had a subtle, almost homey flavor to it. This would be a good fish for when you have company coming over.

The other night Julia and I walked down 37th street. Every town has one random street where all the houses have a lot of holiday lights. In Austin it’s 37th Street, although it looks like that block is approaching its Christmas display nadir. A lot of the houses weren’t participating, and the ones that were, were only marginally interesting.

But there were a few highlights and a few Austin touches. And by "Austin Touch", I mean that people put some lights on some total junk and called it a holiday display. Like this lawnmower for instance:

Or this:

I also liked the twenty-foot aluminum foil shark thing.

Behind a house at the end of the block was the stuffed animal petting zoo, an event organized by the Stuffed Animal Rescue Foundation. It was hard to maintain my cold, bitter countenance as these animals looked up at me with their limpid eyes.

Each stuffed animal had a tag telling its backstory. Never have I wept openly in public. Until now. My heart, which had been like a stone, has split asunder under the weight of their sorrow.