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12 Days of Halloween: Day 11, Insidious Chapter 3

10/21/2017

The heart and soul of the Insidious series has always been the luminous Lin Shaye, who is soft-spoken and elegant, much like my mother in law, and who commands a quiet air of sadness and loss, as I'm sure my mother in law felt upon meeting me for the first time. Chapter 3, although really a prequel and freestanding from the first two films, is no different, as Shaye, as kind-hearted psychic Elise, seems to carry scenes even in her absence. The rest of the cast, attractive and reserved, fall in line nicely as well, with all the hallmarks of director and writer Leigh Whannell's series: a good script, beautifully shot, with lots of humor and quirkiness.

Early on we meet teenage Quinn, who visits newly widowed Elise to try and get in touch with her recently dead mother, and although Elise is not able to reach the spirit, Quinn reveals that she has been trying on her own. We see Quinn's unbalanced home life, with a young brother and a dad played by Dermot Mulroney, who hasn't aged since playing Dirty Steve in Young Guns, and I don't know if that's a compliment or not. Quinn, flustered by her extra responsibilities, is late for her college audition, flubs her monologue, and is then hit by a truck, breaking both legs. All in all, not a great day.

He's no Liza, but it works.

Bedridden, in a kind of Rear Window with demons who are struggling to breathe sort of thing, Quinn realizes that the spirit that is trying to communicate with her isn't her mother, but a terrible, gasping wraith who died in the apartment over hers and is trying to get her to commit suicide and join him in the darkness. Later, Elise explains to Quinn's dad that the demon got half of Quinn's soul after the accident, a completely random-ass detail that made me demand "WHY?" out loud. Sadly, my inquiry went unanswered. Still, the movie moves along at a good pace, and we are introduced to series favorites (?) Specs and Tucker, the bumbling paranormal fake investigators who will eventually join Elise on her ghost hunting escapades.

Deep in a trance, Elise meets the demon disguised as her dead husband, and it attempts to get her to kill herself. Elise, however, is done with the demon's bullshit and goes full-on Ripley Get-Away-From-Her-You-Bitch-Mode. Which, I don't have to tell you, is a hot, hot senior citizen look.

"s-s-s-s-snausages?"

even Quinn's mom, and a recently deceased crazy cat lady show up to help kick some ass, but, in the end, it's Quinn herself to reject the advances of the demon and then he sprays a bunch of dirt and dust out of his mouth, like today when I dropped the Dust Buster and it exploded. But I think the demon spat out fewer goldfish crackers. The end of the film is replete with a This-is-the-start-of-a-beautiful-friendship scene between Elise, Specs and Tucker, which is very cute but is also a lot of foreshadowing because I'm not sure a grieving widow would sign on initially to spend a lot of time with these two:

OK, fine, maybe Specs.

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12 Days of Halloween: Day 12, Blair Witch (2016)

10/20/2017

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"Dude, what's my name?" "Don't worry, Brah, I'll be screaming it again and again later."

Friends, if you've ever watched the original 1999 found-footage horror classic The Blair Witch Project and thought to yourself, "wow, this could really benefit from the addition of a $400 drone from BJ's," then Blair Witch is the movie for you. Not me, though, it was awful. In fact, throughout the entire film I kept marveling that they still make horror movies that are this bad. The director, Adam Wingard, has been at the helm of the roundly admired You're Next and V/H/S which adds a real layer of WTF here.

"Ugh, Dad, this bed and breakfast looks like shit."

,The tape is what sets up Blair Witch- not a sequel, that would be 2000's flaccid Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, which, incidentally, looks like fucking Citizen Kane when compared with Blair Witch- a mostly taped, somewhat not taped account of Heather's brother, James, who was four at the time of her disappearance, and three of his friends gearing up to search the same woods where his sister went missing. The idea here is that James, and his lifelong bestie Peter, remember Heather and her disappearance so vividly, which is.....ok, I have a four year old. He can't remember if he peed within the last fifteen minutes. Anyway, it doesn't matter. The first 20 minutes of Blair Witch is James and his friends inexplicably showing off their newfangled drones and GPS's, and then meeting up with a couple of weirdos who agree to show them where the original tapes were found.

OK, then it gets dark and the rest of the film is just the campers screaming one another's names. Spoiler alert: James! Lisa! Peter! Lane! Thalia! Ashley! Heather! There are some brief asides with a gross infected foot and a giant Stick Man you can barely see who kind of looks like Groot's deadbeat dad from a distance. The Parr House is found, and, man, someone would really make a fortune flipping this place. A little water damage, yes, but lots of dungeon space, spacious attic, etc. The witch may or may not be there. It may or may not be Heather. James may or may not become the witch/Rustin Parr. Who knows.

"Lady, hey, you dropped ur purse."

Look, I'm old enough to remember the Blair Witch Project opening. It was the beginning of found footage horror, a real hit or miss medium, which was a hit because it was different than anything else at the time. We didn't know what we were seeing-- are those kids dead? Is this real? I mean, then, ofc, Heather, Josh and Mike were mugging on the cover of Time and it was like, oh, I guess they're alive, cool. The original film doesn't stand up for continued showings, but that's fine, it is iconic, it changed the landscape of horror. Blair Witch adds almost nothing to the cannon. You can't see anything, you don't know what the hell is going on, and by the end you're just pissed off. Still, I mean, look, a great way to fake your own death would be to tape some shit, scream, and let the camera fall on its side. Then just run away. You're welcome.

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So, My Dad Died. It's OK, He Sucked.

9/27/2017

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I had a really bad dad. Yeah, that’s a pretty abrupt statement, but I don't want you to get the wrong idea about this essay; that first statement will not waver. The last paragraph will not be about me or my dad learning lessons about each other and having a laugh that freezes in its frame as the words “A Miller-Boyett Production” appear across our joyous faces. My dad doesn’t learn things, unless you count people’s weaknesses and how use them for personal satisfaction and gain. Or that no movie of worth was made after 1951, the year of The Man From Planet X was released. Or that there sure are a lot of ugly children in his neighborhood. He grew up in a multi-ethnic household and managed to be illiterate in English, Spanish and Tagalog. So, you know, his commitment to not learning things game is proper.
I was at my therapist a while ago, and, looking over my file, he said, “You had a really difficult childhood.” This was not a question.

I probably laughed or at least shrugged and screwed up my like face like, “I gueeeeeesssss?”

Before then, I didn’t think of it as hard. We had a nice apartment and enough food and new clothes. My mom and dad, much to my sister and my chagrin, were not divorced. Only once was I ever turned down a birthday wish, and that was for a cat, a dream deferred because of my father’s mysteriously convenient “asthma,” the kind that only affected him when he was fielding pet requests from his second born or about to be drafted to go to Vietnam. Later, I was allowed to own a Chihuahua that I’d paid for with my babysitting money. The dog was large and gangly and missing hair in great patches, with a temperament that rivaled my father’s own during any prize fight featuring Sugar Ray Leonard. The breeder explained these issues away by saying that the dog had been over bred to maintain its unique blue color, but we knew that the truth was closer to this: the dog had been born to one of the uglier chihuahuas and some kind of ugly terrier, and possibly Cerberus.

My dad never put hands on us; it was more psychological than that. For instance, it took me a long time to be able to read a magazine in any house, even my own, without assuming that a man was going to pop out from somewhere, possibly a closet or trapdoor, to yell at me for “sitting around.” For him, there was always something else to be done, or fixed, or gotten rid of. He detested clutter. Every Saturday morning, from about four to 18, We awoke to the loud, varied records he was playing. Like, The Bee Gees and Disco Duck, or Joe Tex’s Bump No More (With No Big Fat Woman). Or Just really weird shit. My sister tells a story from when before I was born of my maternal grandparents visiting and my six foot four stoic, Irish grandfather sitting smoking on our living room sofa as my dad subjected him to the soundtrack of the film Hair in French with the volume turned up to 11. Anyway, my dad would play his weird music and do a sad, strange, rhyme-less dance and fucking dust as though his life depended upon it. And I would eventually stumble from bed in my Strawberry Shortcake or Garfield nightgown and try to get to the bathroom unnoticed- always a failure, as, no matter how loud or obscure the music, my father would always have the awareness to spin on me and say- not good morning, not how did you sleep?- A PLACE FOR EVERYTHING AND EVERYTHING IN ITS PLACE.

Had he been the caretaker at the Overlook Hotel, I’ve no doubt I’d walk into his study at one point to find a manuscript filled with A PLACE FOR EVERYTHING AND EVERYTHING IN ITS PLACE typed again and again before he started chasing me through a hedge maze with a croquet mallet. I must add, though, as ugly and shocking as that scenario might be, it pales in comparison to the Christmas when my mother accidentally sat on his Rollie Fingers baseball card, creasing one corner ever so slightly, because at least if he or I had died, I wouldn’t have had to hear him going on and on about how my mother’s careless ass had ruined my chances to attend Harvard.

And, speaking of big, fat women with whom he didn’t care to bump (no more,) my father can be very closely linked to my eating disorder of thirty plus years, by which of course I mean, my father is to blame for my eating disorder of thirty plus years. Despite his faux equality platitudes about how women were stronger and smarter than men (uttered, I believe, as foreshadowing that he planned on doing nothing of use for the rest of his life outside of getting angry at the news or selecting american flag t-shirts suggesting that “assholes” “try and burn this,”) he never laid eyes on a woman in real life or on television for whom he didn’t have some kind of criticism, from the mild (“terrible legs,”) to the cruel, (“Did you see that cashier? Eating all the profits, looks like,”) to racist (“Look at senorita over there. Too many burritos.”) To a woman he fancied- generally white, blonde and large breasted- he would “take her,” as though that’s what she’d been waiting for her entire career, to be taken by a self hating Mexican shipping clerk in his mid to late forties who only attended church to pray that the Dallas Cowboys would win playoff games.

So, yes, he was a bad dad, so much so that whenever he used to pull some horrible shit, my mother, now nearly four years gone, would shake her head and say to my sister and I, almost wistfully, “now, there’s a man who should have never had children,” as though she were witnessing his antics as a stranger on the subway and not a woman who had chosen to have two children with him, two children who were us. I don’t know if I’m a good step/mom, but I know that I love them, and that I say I’m sorry when I screw up, that I still teem with my father’s sad, angry blood everyday, and that I am trying to do better.

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Movies That Are New To Me: The Shallows

5/31/2017

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"OMG, it's so implausible."

So, yeah. Haven't been back here in a year- was drunk a lot, then not drunk, then binged The Walking Dead, and that was about it. I may or may not have eaten a nectarine. The blog lay barren for most of that year, the only exceptions being spam from from a business that wanted me to know if I was pleased with the size of my cock (I AM,) and a message from a guy who wanted me to know that I'm wrong for hating the awful film Rudy. I almost answered the latter but I didn't because I knew it would just become a big thing where it would be like "hey, ok, do you really want to have a conversation about representation in film, etc, or do you just want to tell me your reasoning over and over until you finally say 'ok let's agree to disagree'?" Idk, he talked about *the male gaze* a lot, which is funny because I don't remember saying anything about the male gaze in my review, and he ended by telling me that I "seem educated" and that he hoped I have "a splendid day," which is basically code for *I'm being civil, so if you dunk on me you're irrational af.* I mean...uhhhhhh. I don't think Rudy is a sexist movie, man. I think, like so many movies, it barely *acknowledges* women outside of the most basic stereotypes. But anyway, that was bullshit, on to the next one.

Still awful.

Speaking of gazes, though, today I saw an awesome movie in which 3/4ths of the film is slow motion Blake Lively taking off a wet-suit and 1/4th slow motion camera up Blake Lively's butt-crack- and it was magic, baby. Magic.

"we're gonna need a bigger whale."

I don't know why I slept on The Shallows when it came out last summer- again, maybe I was drunk- but believe me when I say that it has all the things you could ever want in a movie, including but not limited to:

1. Cell phones that work on secluded Mexican beaches.
2. Futuristic FaceTime Technology to tell the story of Blake Lively's dead mom, uptight dad, baby sister and her lamentable decision to drop out of med school
3. Blake Lively's underwater collision with a seagull that she eventually names "Steven Seagull."
4. Blake Lively eating a small crab and then vomiting it up.
5. Steven Seagull eating said vomit.

Blake Lively plays Nancy, a young Texas woman dealing with the loss of her mother by catching bitchin' waves on the secret Mexican beach her mom frequented while pregnant with her. We see evidence of this in yellowed Polaroids, all marked *1992,* the year I was still doing The Running Man to Father MC's 'I'll Do 4 You' and 'Real Love' by Mary J Blige. Nancy doesn't speak Spanish and her vacation buddy has stood her up to go have sex somewhere. She's caught a ride to the beach from a kindly man; when he asks her how she'll get back to the hotel, she answers, "Uber."

She meets a couple of locals and out-surfs them in a big fake feminist montage in which the locals admire her and call her pet names that call attention to how white she is because I guess the audience can't tell with their own eyes that Blake Lively is whiter than a bleached asshole. They offer her a ride home and she declines, opting instead to catch the dreaded "last wave." She dicks around for a while and then catches sight of the massive carcass of a Humpback whale, which, for some reason she wasn't alerted to prior by the stench or the cloud of screeching birds. She paddles over to check it out and gets taken under by a wave, getting crashed and scraped into the coral below. That's another hilarious thing about this movie- Nancy is constantly taken down by smaller, peripheral injuries like coral and birds and rocks and jellyfish. This reef is to Nancy as a firework and dildo factory might be to Inspector Clouseau.

"hey, girl, hey."

A giant Great White knocks her off her surf board. Bitten on the thigh, she takes refuge atop a tiny island with her injured seagull friend. The Seagull is like her *Winston,* if Winston could shit out of spite and then steal your cheeseburger and scream about like an asshole for fifteen minutes. As stated, Nancy was a med student so she immediately takes off her conveniently shaped necklace and earrings and begins to suture her bite. Handy! As a writer, my best defense against predators is to bellow bad similes at them.

This is a good time to mention the absolutely massive size of this shark in contrast with Nancy's thigh injury. Now, I'm no Richard Dreyfuss- in fact, his lawyers have insisted that I stop claiming to be on loan and mortgage applications- but I feel comfortable saying that a shark that's more than half the size of a Humpback whale would inflict a wound you couldn't patch up with your shit from Claire's.

After a danger fraught night, Nancy notices an obese local drunk man passed out on the beach, because of course, and screams to him until he's roused enough to steal the wallet and Iphone from her backpack. She screams some more as he ventures out into the water to purloin her surfboard and is almost immediately bitten in half and spat back on shore, where his torso scrapes forward pathetically for a while, presumably looking for more to steal. Nancy's two local surfer friends return for the day and she screams at them and waves her arms as they're both killed. And in this scenario lies one of the reasons why The Shallows is an entertaining movie: the antagonist is just kind of a dick. Late in the film, Nancy posits into the GoPro of a dead surfer that the shark is terrorizing her because she wandered into it's feeding ground, but by this time the audience knows that that shark doesn't give a buttery fuck about eating. Or else maybe it would EAT THE WHALE. Or the fat man on the beach. Or the two grown men it killed within seconds of one another. No, this movie expects us to believe that the shark took an exploratory bite out of Nancy and tasted something more intriguing than quinoa and BluePrint Cleanse. Also that a white woman traveling accompanied in Mexico with family at home who are already worried about her would go 48 hours missing without a search party being called, but that's another story.

"DO YOU HAVE ANY SUNSCREEN NANCY?"

So, eventually the shark gets impaled or something; by that point its means of death is basically superfluous as we've already seen it leap from the water in flames, heard it growl and yell (dear god keep those captions on,) and watched it and Nancy do a live action version of the Techno Jellyfish Dance Party from SpongeBob SquarePants. Nancy survives and goes back to medical school and one year later we're shown she and her little sister surfing happily in Texas as their taciturn father watches from the beach. We know that she returned to medical school because her little sister teasingly refers to her as "Dr. Adams." I guess Adams is her last name, idk, I'm not the DMV.

If I may self-servingly wrap this up and tie it off, when I was researching (LOL FOREVER) The Shallows, I found a lot of sources trying to categorize it as a *feminist movie,* which is....no. It certainly represents a type of woman- tall, blonde, thin, white, pre-med- and it's a cool, fun-ass movie in which all the characters who aren't Nancy are only the faintest of silhouettes, but you know, I guess the message could be 'hey, I overcame the death of my mother and being a hot-ass genius to eventually outsmart and kill a shark. The difference between this movie and Rudy is that a coach implored my stepsons to see Rudy, and to come away with the bigger picture, how to live one's life and never give up, *the movie itself* implores you to say that, which is in direct contrast to The Shallows, which seems to demand "WERE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED BY THE BUTTCRACK AND FLAMING SHARKS?" Which, to me, is more honest. No one should base their life on a movie that isn't The Thing starring Kurt Russell, anyway, right? Right.

RIGHT!

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LOL, Beastmaster, I Remember Like Two Things About You

6/1/2016

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"I love you, Corky." "It's KODO, dick!"

Last night I received a comment on my blog from a piece I wrote late last year, a kind of review/synopsis of the movie Regarding Henry. The gentleman leaving the comment was not pleased, I guess, with my outing of the film as a steaming pile of unintentionally hilarious shit. I want to stop for a minute to say that this didn't upset me in the least. I was surprised, honestly, because my blog is pretty terrible and really unpopular and the only messages I usually get are from HOT RUSSIAN TEENS IN MY AREA who want to connect, and helpful scientists who want to offer me the BEST PRICES on medications to enlarge my penis and thus SATISFY THE WOMAN IN MY LIFE. So, an actual comment that was even sort of about something I wrote was kind of a nice change. He even suggested that he could "go on all night explaining how wrong I (was)" but I guess he had other plans, or something (sad face.) Fortunately for me, it's the internet and I'm a woman, so if I want to hear a dude tell me I'm wrong I have the luxury of going literally anywhere else. At least in this case I was spared the indignity of being called "bitch" or "fatty" or "cunt" or even "cunty bitch fats," and, in some small way, that makes me feel like a winner.

But, that's not the point of all this, which is that I don't dislike the movies I write about. (Except Rudy. Rudy can kiss my ass.)

Case in point: The Beastmaster, a fucking amazing piece of art from the 1982, staring Mark Singer in a fuzzy loincloth that leaves VERY LITTLE to the imagination. My sister and I watched this masterpiece no less that nine billion times with my father, who sat on our 70's brown and yellow flower sofa, drinking Coke and wondering how tall all the actors were in real life. (Spoiler alert: All taller than him.) Still, when I went to write the synopsis of The Beastmaster, which should be as easy as writing my own name, I totally choked. Once on pizza, and then once on remembering the plot of this genius movie. I choked twice. Two times.

Unaided, I can remember very little. I remember Mark Singer. The loincloth. Two ferrets. Tanya Robert topless. A kind of a zombie vampire that sucks people's guts out. Rip Torn's Amazing Eyebrow Situation. And a child being thrown into a fiery pit as a sacrifice. That's it. (Of Note: I welcome all of you who are visiting my site for the first (and last) time because you Googled "Tanya Roberts Topless.")

I don't even...I mean...ok.

So, of course I did what any respected, published author would do when faced with such a dilemma: I went on Wikipedia and looked up The Beastmaster. Within seconds of reading, though, I'm pretty sure my brain wandered off to wherever that sad little bastard goes when I'm supposed to be writing or parenting, some amusement park for brains where it can just do Simpsons quotes and write angry letters to The Walking Dead showrunner Scott Grimple about the season 6 finale in peace. Check it out:

"In the kingdom of Aruk, the high priest Maax [may-aks] (Rip Torn) is given a prophecy by his witches that he would die facing the son of King Zed (Rod Loomis). Learning of Maax's scheme to murder his child as a sacrificial offering to the kingdom's god Ar, Zed exiled Maax and his followers from the city. However, Maax sent one of his witches to transfer the unborn child from the womb of Zed's queen (Vanna Bonta) and into a cow to be born.''

Wow, right? Who farted? But it gets better:

"After his birth the witch brands the infant with Ar's mark, but is killed by a villager who takes the infant in his care and raises him as his own son. Named Dar while raised the village of Emur, the child learns how to fight while advised by his father to keep his ability to telepathically communicate with animals a secret. Years later, a fully grown Dar (Marc Singer) witnesses his people being slaughtered by the Jun, a horde of fanatic barbarians in league with Maax. Dar, the only survivor of the attack, vows revenge and journeys to Aruk to avenge his people. In time, Dar is joined by an eagle that he named Sharak, a pair of thieving ferrets he calls Kodo and Podo, and a black tiger whom he names Ruh."

So, anyway, this film really challenges you to remember and correctly apply profoundly stupid names. We've got Dar and Ruh and the Jun and, best of all Maax, who sounds like a girl who just moved to Hollywood and got some advice from Tom Arnold that the extra "a" will really stand out to casting directors. I should say that I REALLY admire seeing writers who could not have given less of a fuck and were like, "shit, Gary, let's name the guy Toot-Toot and then go get falafel." This is endgame to me, basically. I want to write a seguel to the Shaquille O'Neal movie Kazaam called Son of Kazaam and name every fucking character Kazaam Jr., then take all my fat, fat writer checks to Target.

Oh, and then, omg, the best! The role of Dar's best friend, Seth, is played by actor John Amos, James Evans Sr. from the show Good Times. It was difficult at first for me to accept Amos in a role in which he was not required to constantly threaten his children with physical abuse or inspire Ester Rolle to exclaim "damn" three times, but man, he really surprised me. And his handsome top pony made me think a lot about possible hairstyles for the summer.

"It's fun, here. We have fun. Also, there's this child with us for some reason, so that happened."

So, Dar, along with Seth and King Zed's young son, Tal, a mostly clothed Tanya Roberts as Kiri, a black tiger and two ferrets are determined to stop Rip Torn, who's still sacrificing every kid he can get his hands on while strutting through town looking you if you needed to buy a Gargamel costume for a school play and the only thing still open was Liberace's Crushed Velvet Cultural Appropriation Yard Sale.

"So, no one's gonna mention my new cape, I guess? Fine."

But then he's attacked by one of the ferrets and falls into his own kiddie fire pit. It's a super dignified scene. I can't find it online to share it with you, but just try to imagine if the puppet Madame was having an argument with a raccoon tail too close to the fireplace, but less subtle.

On a sad note, Ruh was meant to be a panther but the filmmakers just dyed a tiger black and apparently they didn't fucking use Nice and Easy #35 because the poor animal died from exposure to the harsh chemicals in the dye. Which sucks. And, look, supposedly Klaus Kinski was initially wanted for the role of Maax, but he wanted too much money and Rip Torn slurped up those sloppy seconds, so you'd think, you know, with all that extra money they saved on Kinski they could just get a damn actual panther or just use the undyed tiger, ffs. A tiger isn't exotic enough for you, Hollywood, you cynical bastards of 1982? I just can't abide laziness- but, now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go back to work on Son of Kazaam. I'm hoping I can get Larry Bird as Kazaam's flatulent neighbor, Mr. Flatulence. LOL. Flatulence.

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My League of Extraodinary Blurbers

10/5/2015

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"Yes, I'll blurb you. Thank you so much for asking."

Well, my book (SHE CAME FROM BEYOND! 10/13/15 on OVERLOOK PRESS) is coming out soon, so I figured maybe I should write something actually kind of useful on my blog, as opposed to going on and on about the film Rudy. There's time for that later, my friends!! A thing I wanted to talk about is Blurbs- how I was terrified of them and how I now love them.

Here's the thing with them, at least the way it was for me: I had this book, I got this agent, and then my agent sold this book to my publisher. And after all the changes and whatever, me, my agent and my editor made a list of all the people we should contact for blurbs. And, blurbs are those quotes from famous people you see on the backs of books or on websites saying how great the book is. So, here's this list, and basically it's the most massive fantasy superstar Christmas list that you can imagine. And, I mean, shit, I guess the reasoning behind this is that your sales will be bigger if you have a bigger name blurbing you. Like, someone will look on the back of your book and be like OH CHRIST IT'S OBAMA! OBAMA LIKES THIS BOOK YOU GUYS! LET'S ALL BUY THE SHIT OUT OF THIS BOOK THAT OBAMA LIKES! I'm not sure if that's the way it actually works, but that's the general idea. I mean, at least once, I've actually seen a superstar writer blurb a shitty book and thought less of the blurber, but I'm kind of an asshole, so whatever.

YOU WANT WHAT? HAHA, NO. NOW JUST GO BACK TO DRINKING BOOZE OUT OF MY HEAD.

Ok, so here's a thing: there's this idea really popular writers don't wanna blog for just anyone because it brings down their cred to some extent. No one ever gave this excuse to me, obviously, but at least one guy, who I won't name, said through his publicist that he "doesn't blurb," which was all well and good until I saw this guy blurbing like four other books. I guess I see it as kind of a high school cafeteria situation, which may or may not be accurate. Maybe, metaphorically, there are different tables and different levels of popularity, and maybe there's this influx of us, little freshman debut novelists sort of bumping around with our trays, looking for a spot. Of course some freshmen are legacies and they can go where they want and all the big senior writers fawn over them. But, maybe, metaphorically, for the rest of us, there are a lot of YOU CAN'T SIT WITH US tables.

Caption unnessesary.

So, my editor sent out a bunch of galleys to a bunch of writers' publicists, and, in some cases, she sent a note out first, sort of testing the waters. We got two blurbs from that, excellent blurbs from Hannah Pittard, the author of Reunion and Lyndsay Faye of the Timothy Wilde Trilogy- both amazing writers and renowned hot-asses. After that it kind of dried up. No one was interested in reading or even responding to my book. At some point during the process, my editor suggested that I write to Joe Bob Briggs, who I had suggested as a possible blurber, as the only contact information available for him was a little form you had to fill out on his official website. So, I did it. I wrote him a really earnest, heartfelt letter and sent it. And...nothing. No answer. I actually sent this letter two more times over the following three months, because, I don't know, glutton for punishment? And wine? Again, nothing. Nothing two more times.

You can't sit with me, either.

But! I did learn something from this! I learned that the most comfortable way for me to get blurbs was for me to get blurbs. To just walk the earth, getting blurbs. Also, I decided to go against the regular, and to leave the cafeteria and scope out the AV Club, the Drama Kids, the Cooking Club. I wrote effusive letters to people who's work I LOVED. Frank Coniff, TV's Frank from Mystery Science 3000. Fred Olen Ray, director of such amazing B-movies as Attack of the 60 Ft. Centerfold. Sarah Blake, my friend and the author of MR. WEST, a book of beautiful poetry that intertwines her pregnancy with her love of rapper Kanye West. Jenette Goldstein, who played Vasquez in the movie Aliens. Stephen Lee, adorable contestant and almost (should have been) winner of the sixth season of MasterChef. All of them not only said yes, yes they would give me a blurb, they all were so happy and grateful to get a personal email. These people made up a very elite team of specialized nerds: My LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY BLURBERS.

If I may, in all their glory:

Chef Lee, not happy about pomegranate seeds.

Fred Olen Ray, and associate.

Millie, and associate (Frank Conniff)

Jenette Goldstein, not here for Hudson's shit.

Sarah Blake, being cuter than any of us have any right to be, frankly.

AREN'T THEY THE BEST? I love them, and Pittard, and Faye, SO MADLY. Something that I had the most anxiety about- getting blurbs- has become one of my greatest accomplishments. Because, ok look, maybe Dave Eggers liking my book (and he didn't obviously; and he probs doesn't even know about it) would help me (maybe) with sales or notoriety or whatever but it doesn't say anything ABOUT ME, or about my book, even. I don't know what a blurb says, honestly, about an artist or a book, but I know that the all the people who blurbed my book are all people whose work has mattered TO ME. And, oh, guess what showed up in my email box last week:

Nadine!

I feel so guilty. This is what happens when I don't get to my email in time. I assume it's too late to read the book and get a blurb back to you. I've been working on my own book and sending out exactly this same kind of letter to potential blurbers, so I feel DOUBLY GUILTY.

At any rate, thanks for the nice words. If you still want to send it, my address is:
XXXXXXXXXX
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Good luck with it. And send me your postal mailing address and I'll send you my book if you'd like to have one.

Thanks so much for all the nice words.

Joe Bob

Ok, then, have a seat.

So, that's that. A really cool thing from a really stressful thing. I guess what I'm saying is...I have a great editor and a great publicist, and they did great by me in getting me two fantastic blurbs from two fantastic writers, but I really had to put myself out there for the rest. I had to be a fan, and I had to be vulnerable. I had to believe in my work enough to stand behind it. And here's what happened.

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Video Walkthough: R. Kelly's "U SAVED ME"

9/14/2015

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R. Kelly released the unintentionally hilarious video for "U Saved Me" in 2004, during his first round of child pornography and statutory rape accusations, and many wondered whether or not the spiritual nature of the song might be Kelly pandering to his audience, or, at the very least, attempting to show that he was still a good guy. Honestly, I have no idea who, if anyone, was fooled by this, but I myself have wondered if Kelly's increasing lawyer bills might be the reason why the video looks like it cost about five bucks to produce. It takes place at one of his concerts, or something, and consists of him acting out various hard luck scenarios with the help of some, um, really modest props. I don't mean to be mean, but I've seen higher production budgets for people waiting to get on a bus.

0:10- Here we see Kelly sitting on stage in a wooden kitchen chair. No. What are you blind? With a simple moment of his arm he has transformed us into his story, a story of a man who is driving! The phone rings! He reaches for it! Wait, he was drunk! Look out for that truck, R. Kelly! Oh, now he's in the hospital, but still in that chair. Now he's the doctor, insisting that the drunk driver's wife pull the plug on her husband. Look at that yanking motion. Rumor has it R. Kelly actually enrolled in four years of medical school, majoring in ADVANCED CORD YANKING, to get that one, effortless movement down pat.

1:23- Where on god's green earth did he find a ROTARY PHONE? The only answer, really, is Grandma's House. So, while R. Kelly was having his fun making his little video, poor Grandma couldn't take calls for at least 45 minutes. That ain't right. Oh, but, anyway, he's an unemployed guy now sitting in that same kitchen chair, waiting for a job opportunity. I guess a newspaper was too expensive? I mean, when I need a job, I tend to, you know, stand up, or something, but I realize that's probably a failing on my part. Why get up and try if you can just pick up the receiver on a phone that never rang and have a random lady say, "we're hiring?" And maybe he shouldn't get that excited until he finds out who's hiring? Maybe Kevin Smith's Ass Wiper needs an assistant, or something. You don't know.

2:08- And here we have R. Kelly, in a rare standing role, as a troubled member of America's Youth. We can tell he's playing a teenager because, not only does he don a baseball cap, he slides the bill ever so slightly to the side, you know, like the kids do. Oh, he was involved in a bad drug deal and was shot four times, all pantomimed with movements slightly more exaggerated than if he actually had been shot four times. No matter, though. He finishes the skit with a triumphant whirl, sending his baseball had, and apparent youth, flying.

3:05- OMG, the best. In the song, he's a sad-sack guy with cancer at the grocery store, and Kelly portrays this flawlessly by rolling a goddamn shopping cart across the stage. An actual shopping cart that someone had to steal and place on stage for him to use. So, anyway, if you're shopping at Thrifty Jr. and all of the sudden your several jugs of diet iced tea get too heavy and you wish you had a cart....you'll know who to blame. R. Kelly has to call his mother and taps out a phone number on his palm. So, the good news is he's moved up to a touch-tone. The bad news is that the phone is HIS FUCKING HAND NOW. Soon enough, Kelly is cancer-free and the doctor is demanding he "GO HOME" and shooing him out of the hospital as he might a wasp.....that's on fire.

3:44-5:26- Kelly, having run though his Gallagher-like prop trunk and now backed by a choir that seems suspiciously similar to what once was the audience, sings and pontificates and performs various other vocal acrobatics about being saved. Keep in mind, that's a lot of saving.

Look, believe it or don't, I don't have all the answers. I do have all the answers to The Simpsons trivia, unless we're talking about anything after season 10, but that's another story. Basically, what I want to say, is that what Kelly is saying doesn't seem like bullshit, it's just how he's saying it. And, the whole time I was just picturing Jesus at home, being like, "Oh, is he calling me on his hand again? Awesome." This video will go down in history as the only time I saw a thing on TV that was so wrong and so messed up that I wished that someone, ANYONE, had been there to share it with, just to be, like, OMG, THIS IS BULLSHIT. SO, thanks for that, I guess, R. Kelly. Thanks, for creating whatever the hell this was.

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Signed Book #6 in Our An Evening With Nadine Darling Giveaway: Martin Amis' HEAVY WATER AND OTHER STORIES

9/13/2015

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So very excited to add Martin Amis' HEAVY WATER AND OTHER STORIES to our big giveaway on OCT 2!

In this wickedly delightful collection of stories, Martin Amis once again demonstrates why he is a modern master of the form. In "Career Move," screenwriters struggle for their art, while poets are the darlings of Hollywood. In "Straight Fiction," the love that dare not speak its name calls out to the hero when he encounters a forbidden object of desire--the opposite sex. And in "State of England," Mal, a former "minder to the superstars," discovers how to live in a country where "class and race and gender were supposedly gone."

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Signed Book #5 In Our An Evening with Nadine Darling Giveaway: Donald Capone's JUST FOLLOW ME!

9/12/2015

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We're so excited include JUST FOLLOW ME by Donald Capone to our big giveaway!

Early December, 1980.Angela Girardi, a nineteen-year-old college student, travels to Manhattan to seek out John Lennon and hand-deliver her mother's unopened suicide note, which had been mysteriously addressed to the ex-Beatle. Angela wants to honor her mother and accomplish this last task for her; only then will Angela allow herself to grieve and move on with her life, In her quest to find Lennon, though, she discovers herself, as circumstances on the night of December 8th change the course of her life forever.

Donald Capone's stories have appeared in Word Riot, Weekly Reader's READ magazine, Thieves Jargon, as well as the anthologies Sudden Flash Youth; The Westchester Review 2014 & 2013; See You Next Tuesday; Skive Quarterly 6; The Ampersand volume 4; Ten Modern Short Stories 2010; and Rebellion: New Voices of Fiction, which he also edited, and which was a finalist in the 2006 USA Book News awards. His comic novel, Into the Sunset, is available on Amazon. He also designed, and wrote the preface for, Letters Home: A Soldier's Correspondence During WWII, which was a finalist in the 2013 USA Book News Awards, History: Military category. His second novel, Just Follow Me, is now available from Pen-L Publishing.

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Signed Book #4 in Our An Evening With Nadine Darling Giveaway: Rusty Barnes' RECKONING!

9/12/2015

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One of my absolute faves in the past two years, Reckoning by Rusty Barnes.

Richard Logan begins his summer day as any fourteen-year-old might: working a farm job bringing in hay, avoiding his hard-headed father, and hanging out with his friends. When he stumbles onto an unconscious woman in the woods, he has no idea that the process of helping her will lead him into the darkness of the deeply held deceits of his rural Appalachian town. Both brutal and beautiful, RECKONING shows the seams and limits of family love and community tolerance while Richard discovers where manhood truly lies.

Rusty Barnes grew up in rural northern Appalachia. He received his B.A. from Mansfield University of Pennsylvania and his M.F.A. from Emerson College. His fiction, poetry and non-fiction have appeared in over two hundred journals and anthologies. After editing fiction for the Beacon Street Review (now Redivider) and Zoetrope All-Story Extra, he co-founded Night Train, a literary journal which was featured in the Boston Globe, The New York Times, and on National Public Radio, ending its ten-year-run in February 2012.

Sunnyoutside Press published two collections of fiction,Breaking it Down and Mostly Redneck. MiPOesias published two chapbooks of poetry, Redneck Poems andBroke. Cruel Joke Press published his poetry collection, I Am Not Ariel in November 2013. Sunnyoutside Press published his novel, Reckoning, in March 2014. His poetry book, I Cannot Be Saved, will come out from Cruel Joke Press in October 2015. His next scheduled book, a crime novel titledRidgerunner, will be published in May 2016 by 280 Steps. An essay appeared in Change Sevenrecently. Recent fiction has appeared in Plots with Guns, Interstice, and in the anthologyAppalachia Now. His flash fiction will also appear in the forthcoming anthology Best Small Fictions 2015. Two poems appear in Crow Hollow 19.

He serves on writing conference faculties and panels throughout the country, including recently with Associated Writing Programs, Somerville News Writers Festival, Writers@Work, The Parlor, and Grub Street Writers, as well as their annual Muse & Marketplace conference. He taught composition, fiction writing, and literature for over ten years at New England universities such as Emerson College and Northeastern University.

If you want to know more, friend him on Facebook, Google+ or check through his recentinterviews. If you'd like to read his poetry and get poetry-related news, visit Live Nude Poems.

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12 Days of Halloween: Day 11, Insidious Chapter 3

12 Days of Halloween: Day 12, Blair Witch (2016)

So, My Dad Died. It's OK, He Sucked.

Movies That Are New To Me: The Shallows

LOL, Beastmaster, I Remember Like Two Things About You

My League of Extraodinary Blurbers

Video Walkthough: R. Kelly's "U SAVED ME"

Signed Book #6 in Our An Evening With Nadine Darling Giveaway: Martin Amis' HEAVY WATER AND OTHER STORIES

Signed Book #5 In Our An Evening with Nadine Darling Giveaway: Donald Capone's JUST FOLLOW ME!

Signed Book #4 in Our An Evening With Nadine Darling Giveaway: Rusty Barnes' RECKONING!

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