Tuesday, April 1st, 2008

Time	Event
8:55a	Urban Haiku As some of you know, my first love is poetry. It's what I studied in college, and I wrote a collection of poems as the senior honors thesis for my creative writing degree (a degree roughly as useful as a cowcatcher on a fencepost). I taught poetry workshops, I published in little magazines, and I did more readings than I could count. Alas, the need to keep body and soul together have increasingly led me to forsake poetry in favor of prose, simply because prose pays so very much better. But, in honor of National Poetry Month, and in light of the fact that so many books of poetry have lately topped bestseller lists (not to mention the flurry of recent film rights sales -- who else can't wait for David Fincher's adaptation of Margaret Atwood's Morning in the Burned House? Or to see what kind of twist M. Night Shyamalan can put on the end of Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken"? Maybe he'll take the road more traveled by!), I've convinced my publisher to let me do something novel -- only, ha, as you'll see, also decidedly not novel -- for the fourth book in my Marla Mason urban fantasy series, which comes out next April, just in time for the 2009 National Poetry Month. That book, currently titled Untitled Book Four, will be composed entirely of haiku. Herewith, a few excerpts, from the Heroic Prologue: Marla Mason will kick your ass if you screw with her town. Your ass: Kicked. For real, she'll straight up punch you in the face. With fists hard as adamant. What, you think because you're a monster or some shit she won't kick your ass? She'll kick your monster ass. Her boots are covered in monster ass. Trust me. She once turned a guy inside out just for asking her what time it was. He wasn't even a monster or nothing. She had low blood sugar. So if you come to her town, you'd best bring her a muffin or something. (Also there are three books before this one. Help a brother out and buy.) As you can see, I owe a great debt of influence to the poems of Basho, for his willingness to subvert traditional haiku subject matter, and to Allen Ginsberg's innovative American Sentences for some of the syllabic playfulness. I think you'll find the book a quick read. Like all the previous books, it comes in a bit over 300 pages in paperback -- but there's a lot more white space in Untitled Book Four than the others. Enjoy April. Do something poetic. (9 Comments | Comment on this)
4:20p	But seriously, folks... My essay "Not Now, Sweetie, Daddy's Worldbuilding" is online at Clarkesworld (along with great fiction by Jeff Ford and Jeremiah Sturgill). My latest collaboration with Nick "Don't Call Me Nicky the Greek" Mamatas, titled "The Dude Who Collected Lovecraft," is online at Chizine. Go read -- it's in the spirit of Robert Bloch's "The Man Who Collected Poe" and Kim Newman's "The Man Who Collected Barker," but it stands alone, assuming you have at least some vague notion of who Lovecraft was. Thanks to the kindness of Amelia Beamer, who came over on Saturday to watch River so Heather and I could get some work done, I've made awesome progress on the fourth Marla book -- did about 8,000 words that day, two and a half chapters, and got my momentum back. (Sunday was less good -- I wrote, like, two pages. But River was having a fussy day. I did manage to bake muffins, so it wasn't a total loss!) The book is really ramping up now, with only 20,000 words or so to go. I have a single-spaced sheet of paper outlining the events, in sequence, that are still to come, and it doesn't even fill an entire page. I should be able to finish this book by May after all. Last night we took River to Baby Brigade at the Parkway and saw Juno (finally), which was really cute. Also: good pizza and quesadillas, and a baby who was cheerful through the whole film, practically! Though he didn't sleep. He mostly just babbled. Almost no screaming, though, so it's a win. (3 Comments | Comment on this)

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