Tell Your Invisible Friends

I know you don't exist, but if you did, I would strongly encourage you to go out this evening to Square Books, where Ace Atkins will unveil his action-packed new thriller DON'T LET THE DEVIL RIDE. Happy publishing date, Ace, or "pub day" as in-the-know literary types probably call it with their smug eggheaded ways. And because you don't exist, dear "blog" reader, you can bring all your friends, who also, just from using logic, don't exist, because you won't have to worry about seating, as none of you exist! Now, I'm not saying that Ace Atkins fans don't exist. They exist by the carload! I can vouch from experience that Ace Atkins fans will cram Off Square Books (the annex where readings take place) full to bursting. Ace and I were trying to figure out, in fact, how many of his book events I have moderated for him over the years. We can't put it together, quite, but at least 8 or 9. One I particularly recall is from 2015, due to our in-depth discussion of Clyde the orangutan, which left the crowd enthralled and begging for more. And I've never missed an Ace Atkins book event in at least 13 years, though, sadly, I can't make it tonight. But that's okay, because the acclaimed and gifted novelist Michael Farris Smith will be putting Ace through his conversational paces, well, well, well, I guess Michael Farris Smith is Ace's new best friend. :(

A Whisper in the Night

"I heard something like a hoarse whisper behind me while walking the dog the other night, and when I turned around...THIS..." So goes McNeil's caption for the above photo. Now, if this "post" were more artfully presented, I would have moved McNeil's photo of the owl down below the text alluding to it, so that the owl might work as an astonishing revelation, worthy of the drama of McNeil's caption. The fact remains, however, that though I no longer claim to have "stopped 'blogging,'" I am still very, awfully lazy. Just to let you know, in a possibly related matter, I continue to read old comic books every night in bed as a perhaps superstitious ritual tied to my recuperation. I've been reading a few issues of one with the poorly punctuated - not to mention misleading - title KID COLT OUTLAW. Mostly, this "outlaw" seems to go around helping cops, based on the little I've seen of him in action. Can't say I care much for Kid Colt. He's no El Diablo! In fact, as I was texting to Tom Franklin a while back, though DC had the milquetoast reputation and Marvel was theoretically what the cool kids enjoyed in the 1970s, the DC western comic books feel meaner and grittier than the Marvel ones. Yes, yes, I'm as shocked as you are. Let's all calm down. The main takeaway is that one Kid Colt character blurts out, "Well, I'll be a double-dyed hoot-owl!" Why anyone would dye a hoot-owl once, much less twice, is a mystery I intend to leave unexplored. In conclusion, between typing this sentence and the one before it, I happened to find a typo on page 1,256 of JOSEPH AND HIS BROTHERS: "world" where "word" is clearly meant. Ironically (?), a fitting typo for a translation of Mann. (See also.)

McNeilileaks

Wow. I see it has been 569 days since I last leaked one of McNeil's emails in everyone's favorite recurring "blog" feature "McNeilileaks." Let's get to it! (The next two similarly exhortative sentences are from McNeil's email, as is everything that follows.) "Alright. Here we go. You can read up on the massive catapult that shoots satellites into space - without the use of rocket fuel - on your own. I don't need to get into it here. The company is called SpinLaunch. My concern is that once you get this satellite gizmo wound up to 1,000 mph in your doodad box, what happens if it breaks through the wall and instead of going into space starts heading toward Kansas City? If it has enough 'momentum,' or whatever, to go 600 miles up into space - how far will it travel laterally if it escapes?"

Famous Tootsie Pop

Given recent events, I have different books going at the same time now, and given those same recent events, one of the categories is "books I read in a doctor's waiting room." It's not the same as either book in the other two categories, if you are making a chart. There can never be an overlap. Each of the three (so far) books needs to be of a different size, and to have different qualities. The one I read while taking my blood pressure, for example, requires a sturdy spine, like me, so it can lie flat on a table, like me. I don't lie flat on a table. But we all lie flat on a table one day. That's not the point. What was I talking about? Oh yeah. So I was sitting there reading this one novel in the waiting room when, by a big coincidence, the narrator mentioned the problem for which I was about to see the doctor! Not only that, he cited a probable cause for the problem. And this cause was something in the proximity of which I had recently loitered! Now, this is the kind of coincidence that McNeil and I talk about all the time, all giddy from delight. So when I saw the doctor, I said, "Hey, could this thing be caused by this other thing?" And he said "No." So that was a bust. And the coincidence wasn't so great after all. So why are we here? I don't know. It does give me the liberty to mention that Megan and I have been discussing the devil a pretty good bit lately, and then she asked me a question about the Tarot (an entirely separate discussion, although there is, of course, a card with the devil on it. But that's not what we were talking about for a change). Anyhow, I looked up what Jesse Moynihan has to say about another card, the one under discussion, and I was like, "Huh! Okay!" Then I opened JOSEPH AND HIS BROTHERS to the passage I had been reading... and the devil, in that passage, talks about the VERY SAME IDEAS I had just been reading in Jesse's pamphlet! I'm not saying Jesse is the devil. Far from it! So that was another coincidence. This great tale of life as it is lived in our lively times isn't over yet. Because I had TWO doctor appointments today! I had enough time in between them to stop by Square Books. I was happy to see that Richard Howorth was not just trying to protect my fragile feelings when he said that my books aren't 100% out of print... just 99.999999%! I added that part. They had a big old fresh stack of MOVIE STARS, my troubling masterpiece of short fiction. Lauren Graham raves: "Funny, poetic, vivid, unique. Jack Pendarvis has crafted a collection of gems." I'm not lying! It's on the cover! Go see for yourself. Pick up a few copies for the family. While supplies last! I signed the whole batch, and wrote secret messages in a couple of them. It's like Willy Wonka all over again! Ran into Tom Franklin, who was walking down from the second floor of the bookstore with a young woman to whom he introduced me as "Via Bleidner, Kim Kardashian just bought her book for Netflix." Oh! On the way out of the store, I saw a big poster for the novel I said I couldn't tell you about yet. But I can now, because there's a big poster right there at the front door of Square Books. It's DON'T LET THE DEVIL RIDE (the devil again!), the latest from Ace Atkins! The owl I have been sitting on since January 22, 2023, is... I can now reveal... the owl in the famous Tootsie Pop commercial. Well, I haven't seen the published book yet, just the manuscript, but Ace says he "thinks" the owl is still in there. And I guess you think the story is over. WRONG! Because as I waited for the second doctor, once again reading my "waiting room book" in a different waiting room... well, first I should tell you that I saw a raccoon using a walkway last night. A walkway that a person would use. Like, a narrow sidewalk of sorts. So, anyway, I'm reading this novel again and the narrator is astonished to see "a raccoon using a sidewalk." All right, that's the end.

Not Literally

Hey! Remember January 22, 2023, when I was reading a manuscript with an owl in it, but I couldn't tell you about it yet? That is not to be confused with a couple of months ago when I was forced to sit on an owl for a while. Not literally! I did not literally sit on a literal owl. But none of this is the point, exactly. You see, I'm reading another manuscript RIGHT NOW with an owl in it! And once again I can't tell you about it. It's not even a manuscript. It's the first part of a projected first draft of a manuscript. And it's by the same person who wrote the first manuscript alluded to above, whose identity I can never, ever reveal until roughly two weeks from now.

Am I Ready to Be Rich?

Funny email from Ward McCarthy, who alerts me that Warner Brothers Discovery (for whom I ironically [?] work now) is rebooting DINNER AND A MOVIE, a slab of packaging originating in the 1990s. I scoured the "internet" for the purposes of this report, to see if there was any evidence that I was one of the co-creators of that work. "Click" here if you would like to see the single puny scrap of corroboration available anywhere on the world wide "web." I wrote Ward back to ask if he was ready to be rich, a hilarious response on many levels, because once we were greeted at Rob Schneider's door by his faithful yes-man, who asked us, before even introducing himself, "Are you ready to be rich?" We were ready to be rich. Alas, the riches were not forthcoming. I hesitate to say more about the circumstances, which involved a different project completely, except that as we sat around with the yes-man, he would say things like, "Okay! Get this! What if our characters had a GIANT bottle of sun tan lotion? Like as big as a house??????!!!???!!?" But that's another story. The other way my remark was so hilarious is due to the fact that DINNER AND A MOVIE was a virtually anonymous work-for-hire, which we did because the other stuff we were doing was so boring, and the prospect of receiving future monies from such an endeavor is hilarious indeed, resulting in sidesplitting chortles from two old chums such as us, you may be sure.

Kitty... I Love You!

It happened. The other night I finally came across, indisputably, the greatest old comic book among all the old comic books that Tom Franklin has recently given me. As you have already guessed (you haven't), it is about Fly Man. That's right, he has all the powers of a housefly. In addition, he has powers of a couple of other insects thrown in there as a bonus, as well as powers that, while unrelated to insects in any direct way, I chiefly associate with Ant-Man. Now, this Fly Man comic book I've got here came out in 1966, and I really don't know who came first, Ant-Man or Fly Man, but I'm too damn tired all the time to find out. Pardon my strong language. Oh, yeah, he shamelessly rips off Green Lantern, too. But not the way you think! So, Dr. Theresa was trying to sleep, and I was lying there next to her, unable to control maniacal bursts of laughter as I lay there next to her, reading Fly Man dialogue, the sincerity of which I could not measure one way or another. It was beyond definition and reason! With your kind permission, I will quote a few examples here: "IF THERE'S ANYTHING I LOATHE, IT'S A DEDICATION CEREMONIES POOPER!"... "HA, HA, HAA-AAA! HAVE A TON OF BRICKS, ONLOOKERS!"... For context, Fly Man's head appears on a Mt. Rushmore style monument with some other superheroes you've never heard of. The bad guy blows it up, which leads Fly Man to exclaim, "UH-OH! THE BROKEN CHUNKS OF MY OWN STONE FACE... WHIZZING DESTRUCTIVELY TOWARD ME!"... "IN THIS TEENSY SIZE, I CAN SPEEDILY WHIZ IN AND OUT AMONGST THE HURTLING FRAGMENTS"... If you haven't caught on yet, the writers of Fly Man are masters of the adverb, as seen in Fly Man's next word balloon: "BLOCKBUSTER STREAKED OFF, WHILE I WAS BUSILY PROTECTING MYSELF!" Here's Blockbuster, the bad guy, spraying some junk into Fly Man's face, followed by Fly Man's response: "HAVE SOME ESSENCE OF TEMPORARY PARALYSIS!"... "THAT FIENDISH FRAGRANCE HAS PURLOINED MY MOBILITY!" Just a couple more. "WAIT! THAT PUSSYCAT! ORDINARILY, I'M ANNOYED WHENEVER IT KEEPS CONTINUALLY BRUSHING AGAINST ME!" And on the next page, Fly Man says my favorite thing of all, "KITTY... I LOVE YOU!" The backup story in the issue, sadly, does not feature Fly Man. But it does reward us with this bit of dialogue: "OWWWWW! HOW DARE YOU USE CRAB-MAN'S HEAD FOR A TRAMPOLINE?!" The last thing I'll mention is that the publishers run a contest for the readers of Fly Man, including this caveat: "BUY THIS MAGAZINE FOR THE NEXT THOUSAND YEARS TO SEE IF WE PRINT YOUR MASTERPIECE!"