Enter the Octopus

Author Jeffrey Thomas is best know for his creation Punktown, an offworld colony ruled by shadowy corporate interests and inhabited by myriad intelligent races, of which humanity is only one. In addition to his Punktown novels and short stories, Thomas has written many other works of horror, fantasy, science fiction, including a Nightmare on Elm Street original novel called The Dream Dealers. Learn more about Thomas’ work at http://www.jeffreyethomas.com

ETO: Would you mind introducing yourself to my readers?

JT: I’m Jeffrey Thomas, a writer of lies meant to postulate false futures and disrupt one’s healthy sleep. I am also or have been an artist, a publisher, a husband (repeat offender), a father, a company drone, an inhabitant of Massachusetts, a confused soul adrift on the sea of life’s heaving bosom.

ETO: When did you start writing?

JT: When I was very young. It started mostly with creating my own comic books. I remember being hospitalized with a hernia at six, and being frustrated because I wanted to name the comic book I was working on WAR but I wasn’t sure how to spell it. (Now that I think of it, maybe that was the genesis of my novel BLUE WAR. Hmm.) As I like to relate, the word balloons and commentary in my comic books began to crowd the pictures out until they no longer remained. I completed my first novel (called SIX TO SIX) at 14, a story of Earth colonists on another planet (a genesis of PUNKTOWN?) mixing cultures with a simian-like native race, spawning interspecies gangs of discounted youth. It was sort of PLANET OF THE APES meets A CLOCKWORK ORANGE.

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I’m spending the last few days of 2008 examining where and how I spend my time, and whether any of it truly makes me happy. I suspect that there will be more than a few changes afoot for me in 2009.

For a start, I think that I’m going to close down a few extraneous channels of communication. I’m getting spread too thin, and there’s just not a lot of me to go around right now. I’ll be taking a long, hard look at various social mediums like MySpace, Facebook and Twitter, not to mention the way that I use my email and my phone. I’ll probably be cutting some of these loose, and the ones that I keep will probably not be used as often.

For another, I think that I’ll probably be narrowing down the kinds of business opportunities I pursue. Money isn’t everything, and some things just aren’t worth the time involved to see them to fruition.

I’ll also probably be cutting back on some of my reading. Books that fail to engage me after a reasonable amount of time are going to Goodwill. I’m not investing any personal time into reading something out of any sense of obligation. This includes books sent to me for review, either here or in other publication.

I’m also going to re-evaluate my personal relationships, and where necessary, seek to minimize the amount of time I spend on pointless, one-way interactions. Sure, it’s nice to know a lot of people, but are all of them people I want to know?

Meet former Scientologist and now all-singing, all-dancing avatar of eternal chaos Extremo the Clown. He paints, he sculpts, and terrorizes the streets of Portland, Oregon with his horde of puppets and giant sculpted art car.

While I’ve never met Extremo personally, I must profess a great admiration for his ability to inject a little surrealism and nervous laughter into the lives of workaday Americans. The clown archetype is a powerful one: they’re truth-tellers and holy men, although the insight they bring is often hidden under layers of misdirection, and often the message is very much unwanted. Take a look at Heath Ledger’s “Joker”, for instance – he describes himself as an “agent of chaos” and works to reveal the transitory nature of order.

Check out this great interview with Extremo here, and when you’re done be sure to befriend him on MySpace.

lulz.

Looking for a last-minute gift suggestion for the picky reader on your Christmas list?

Try The Sun and The Moon by Matthew Goodman, published by Basic Books. A tale of human gullibility, fanciful tales, bat-winged Moon Men and the birth of tabloid press, The Sun and The Moon has something for just about everyone: history, culture, science fiction, hysteria and plenty of wry humor.

Here’s the product description:

THE SUN AND THE MOON: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth- Century New York.

The Sun and the Moon tells the delightful, entertaining, and surprisingly true story of how in the summer of 1835 a series of articles in the Sun, the first of the city’s “penny papers,” convinced the citizens of New York that the moon was inhabited.

Six articles, purporting to reveal the lunar discoveries made by a world-famous British astronomer, described the life found on the moon—including unicorns, beavers that walked upright, and, strangest of all, four-foot-tall flying man-bats. The series quickly became the most widely circulated newspaper story of the era. And the Sun, a brash working-class upstart less than two years old, had become the most widely read newspaper in the world.

Told in richly novelistic detail, The Sun and the Moon brings the raucous world of 1830s New York City vividly to life—the noise, the excitement, the sense that almost anything was possible. The book overflows with larger-than-life characters, including Richard Adams Locke, author of the moon series (who never intended it to be a hoax at all); a fledgling showman named P.T. Barnum, who had just brought his own hoax to New York; and the young writer Edgar Allan Poe, who was convinced that the moon series was a plagiarism of his own work.

An exhilarating narrative history of a city on the cusp of greatness and a nation newly united by affordable newspapers, The Sun and the Moon may just be the strangest true story you’ve ever read.

With the BORDERS chain of bookstores facing financial difficulty it would seem only logical that they’d be looking to save money where they can.

So imagine my surprise yesterday when I received this coupon printed out with the receipt I got for a last-minute Christmas purchase:

If you’re having trouble reading this, the coupon is good for $5 off a minimum purchase of $5 or more.  Basically, it’s a coupon for five bucks worth of free merchandise. Now, I know that it’s just about impossible to find something priced exactly five dollars, but I imagine that I could – with a strategic candy or bookmark purchase – get pretty damn close. So close, in fact, that I can scarcely see where they’ll do anything but lose money on my visit. I assume that I’m not the only person who got this coupon, and I certainly didn’t spend a lot of money to get it. As a matter of fact, I used a 40 percent off coupon with my initial purchase.

I love BORDERS, I really do, almost as much as I love free stuff, but is this the right tactic for a struggling company to take?

Just a short book trailer I put together for this project. See what you think.

I’ll have a lot more to say about this later, but if you’re looking for a little fun, try Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman’s Bones of the Dragon, due out in January. Good light reading in a heroic fantasy vein.

Being a big fan of all things Dracula, I’m wondering how I missed out on Justin Gustainis’ “The Quincey Morris Supernatural Investigations”, a series of modern occult investigation novels starring the great-great-grandson of the original character from Bram Stoker’s tale. Fortunately, the author clued me in with an email me this morning.

The newest volume, Evil Ways, is due out in January from Solaris publishing:

In Evil Ways, the next Quincey Morris Supernatural Investigation, children are being murdered for their organs – again. If this evil weren’t enough to contend with, it also appears that someone—or something—is determined to kill Quincey’s friend. “white” witch Libby Chastain.

Quincey Morris is dragged into both of these cases, little realizing that each is a part of the same horrific plot against humankind. When he finally puts it all together, Quincey gets a chance to save the world. Here’s hoping he doesn’t blow it.

Sound interesting? Good! You can read an excerpt now at the always-excellent Fantasy BookSpot site.

When you’re done, drop by Justin Gustainis’ website here.