scottsigler's blog
Contest: Design the P.U.V. James Keeling
Posted July 4th, 2008 by scottsigler
How much do I appreciate all y'all junkies? Enough to turn over a key part of my fiction to you, and have a contest to see who can design the P.U.V. James Keeling, also known as "The Crypt."
Click here to learn about designing THE CRYPT.
I did a panel at Book Expo America with this cool cat named Derek Powazek (how cool? His whole frickin' arm is a tat of a giant squid). He is the founder of a site called Pixish.com, which lets you set up contests for visual images. I thought it was a great idea for opening up fiction illustration to the people who really give a shit -- the fans.
This is an experiment, and you have to register at Pixish.com. Don't cost nuthin'. The site supposedly handles all the elements of the submission process and the contest, so let's give it a shake down and see what nasty space visions the Junkies can come up with.
Oh and if you're not artistic but have a cool idea, feel free to get help from your non-Junkie friends.
Patriotic Monsters? Happy Fourth!
Posted July 3rd, 2008 by scottsigler
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It's Thursday, which means time for another blog post over at AMC TV. This week I crank up "Hail to the Chief" on the iPod and talk about why Monster-Americans love their country. Click on the link and go find out what makes America such a great place ... for homicidal monsters and killer aliens (yeah, I mean besides the ones from Detroit).
No NOCTURNAL this week, enjoy a good laugh instead. Even Kong (a naturalized citizen) is firing up the 4th of July barbecue. Get over there and comment!
PS: Delivered fifty pages of CONTAGIOUS to Crown Pulbishing today. Not done by a long shot, but getting closer to finishing it up so I can focus on NOCTURNAL and THE CRYPT.
Agent to the Stars
Posted July 2nd, 2008 by scottsigler
Novel: Agent to the Stars
Author: John Scalzi
Rating: Five out of five Siggies
I had just finished FIGHT CLUB and was rolling in the glee of finally finding a novel that I didn't bitch about, I just enjoyed the crap out of it. That filled my book karma quota, which usually means the next three or four books are going to either suck balls or just be so-so.
I picked up AGENT TO THE STARS at Book Expo America. I read Scalzi's OLD MAN'S WAR not too long ago and loved it. AGENT was free (a galley copy, no royalty for you, Scalzi, sorry about that) so I put the dog on the leash and dug in.
Was it possible to go two-for-two with friggin' awesome books? Apparently, it was. Scalzi writes fantastic dialogue. Funny, intelligent, full of the little digs that bounce back and forth between you and good friends. It seems clear he had fun writing this, maybe as much as I had reading it.
AGENT is a fun book. If you liked my short story CHUCKLES MULROONEY, ATTOURNEY FOR THE DAMNED you will love AGENT.
The premise is simple -- aliens finally visit Earth, but theare not the cute E.T. variety. They are smelly gelatanous blobs. They hire a Hollywood agent to introduce them to humanity, to figure out how to show people an alience race that looks far more like snot than Alf. Aliens, snot, Hollywood agents -- you can see the hilarity begin to add up.
Having just lost a dog, I found the dog scenes in Agent to be fantastic. Loved this book. Loved it, loved it, loved it.
Fight Club - holy shit
Posted July 2nd, 2008 by scottsigler
NOVEL: FIGHT CLUB
AUTHOR: Chuck Palahniuk
RATING: Five out of five Siggies
My beloved dog Mookie recently passed on, so I'm taking longer walks with our 10-year-old dog Emma. I read while I walk her , which gives me about an hour of reading time a day. I finally picked up FIGHT CLUB by Chuck Palahniuk. A couple of reviewers have compared my writing style to this guy, but I haven't read him before. I'm a huge fan of the Fight Club movie so I thought I'd check him out.
Normally when someone is a critical darling, winning all dem awards and sech, I find the book to be garbage. COLD MOUNTAIN is an example -- I couldn't make it through fifty pages of this self-absorbed work, which chooses to eliminate most punctuation that tells you who is talking, what characters are doing, etc. Apparently, if you throw grammar out the window (on purpose, not like my daily butchering of the language), then you are an artist and deserving of much praise.
So I had low expectations for FIGHT CLUB. Or to put it another way, I left my guard down, and Palahniuk kneed me in the balls and thumbed me in the eye. Holy shit. This book is an immediate entry into my Top Ten. Even though I'd seen and loved the movie, the book is even better. And even though he plays fast and loose with regular-person punctuation, and that takes some getting used to, it's a brilliant piece of work. I'd say if you like my stuff, you'd like FIGHT CLUB. If your male, you'll probably like it more. If you're male, ages 25 to 40 and you had a public school education, you will likely put it on a shelf surrounded by some little candles.
Quite honestly, I have never, ever, ever read a book that captures how I feel about my culture and my station in life with such brutal honesty and utter perfection. It's a rock-em-sock-em-robot of a story, but there's a lot of modern-day philosphy about what it's like to be a man stuck in a pacifist job when your primitive soul wants to go out and beat the shit out of something.
How much did I dig it? I want to run out and read the rest of his work, but I'm afraid his other books won't live up to the same level of fucking awesome, and that will somehow dull the fucking awesome of FIGHT CLUB. And I refuse to let anyone dull the fucking awesome of FIGHT CLUB, even if I have to knee them in the balls and thumb them in the eye.
SMOD™ = PERRY DAWSEY IN DECEMBER
Posted June 30th, 2008 by scottsigler
Junkie N8man broke the story here, so I talked to Crown Publishing and we are forced to reveal the SMOD™.
That's right, Junkies, Perry Dawsey is back when CONTAGIOUS hits bookstore shelves on December 30. The Secret Mission of Death™ has been me busting ass on the manuscript, because Crown pushed up the publishing date from May, 2009 to December, 2008 to take advantage of the momentum you all generated for INFECTED. That cut five months off my writing time, hence the need for the SMOD™ to meet an aggressive deadline. I'm not done yet, but it's going well.
World's first German podcast novel? EARTHCORE free in Deutsch
Posted June 29th, 2008 by scottsigler
World Conquest: Here we have the US-Canadian hardcover of INFECTED, the hardcover German translation of EARTHCORE, and the UK paperback of INFECTED, which will be in supermarkets and finer porn shops everywhere in the UK on July 10.
Click here to visit the
German podcast of EARTHCORE
I'm not sure if this is the world's first German-language podcast novel, but I'm going to claim it is until someone corrects me. I'm modest like that. In fact, I'm going to get nutty and claim this is the first-ever non-English podcast novel! World Conquest continues unabated.
Richard Levy is an English Junkie (from Derbyshire) who now lives in Germany (Schorndorf) and took it upon himself to podcast EARTHCORE. He's using the German version of EARTHCORE, translated by Michael Krug and published by Otherworld Verlag (and available in hardcover by clicking here).
EARTHCORE is read by Torsten Fuchs, who is just fucking awesome. I don't understand a word he says (except a strange reference to "struedel") but I could listen to him all day. I cue up the episodes and let them run in the background while I write. Music is provided by the band Gebrueder-Roehrich. Rock on, mein freund!
I think this is pretty kick-ass. If you have German-speaking friends, please turn them on to this podcast. Richard is busting his buns to produce this bad boy, so if you know some people lets get them listening in. And, of course, it's free.
Mookie the Violent: 1994(ish)-2008
Posted June 26th, 2008 by scottsigler
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 Mooks in Kraken's Hat: She did not like wearing the hat. She went out and killed a cougar after this shot, she was just that pissed.
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Junkies, it's a suck-ass day. Mookie the Violent has checked out. You know "those people?" The ones who don't have kids, who show off pictures of their dogs as if the dogs were kids? That's the Evil Queen and I. We have absolutely no perspective on life. We are dog people to the hilt. I've been around dogs my whole life, learned to walk months early by grabbing ahold of the tail of our lab-mix "Coachie Boy" and standing as he walked away, pulling me up. In my life, I've had Coach (a family dog), Bunner (the first dog that was truly mine), Booger (dad's dog, hung out with Bunner), Dizzy (who met an untimely demise on a highway), and then Mookie the Violent.
Mooks showed up on my doorstep one day in 1994. I was 25, and like a dumb-ass, I started putting food bowls on the porch for her. And, of course, I let her in the house. She slept in the exact same place that Dizzy had slept, and I was already hooked. One day Mooks stopped coming around. I went to every Humane Society in the area, and found her in one. She was in a cage so small she couldn't turn around, and a Humane Society dude was washing her off with a pressurized hose. She was yelping, shivering, scared out of her mind. He was probably a volunteer and a great guy, and did not need me threatening to break his fucking neck, but at that point I knew that dog was coming with me. I adopted her, and for the past 14 years that dog went with me everywhere. When I was a single guy in my twenties, this dog basically lived in my car -- everywhere I went, she went. She loved the car, it was like her kennel, and she always knew I was coming back in an hour or so. The back seat had a blanket, water, toys, it was a little slice of doggy heaven. |
triangularum mechanicis?
Posted June 25th, 2008 by scottsigler
Oy, I'm so under the gun I can't even figure out my own viral marketing sites. I was never that good a puzzles, anyway. The publishing company Hodder & Stoughton put together some fun stuff for the July 10 release of INFECTED in the UK. Want to help promote the book? Post this link to your site with a typical "what da heck is this all about?" approach.
http://www.epidemiologyconference2008.com/
We've crushed the United States and Canada, and now we invade the UK!
PS: If you can figure out the damn puzzle, let the other Junkies know with a comment, just don't give away the solution in the blog comments so other people can have fun.
NOCTURNAL Episode #29
Posted June 24th, 2008 by scottsigler
Click here to download NOCTURNAL Episode #29
Punnett Diagram for Marie's ChildrenIN THIS EPISODE:
Bryan goes for a ride with the Jessups. Chief Zou lays down the law, but wihtout all that pesky legal code. Doctor Stone Mason and Robin finally nail down the genome of Marie's Children.
NEXT EPISODE:
Still dealing with the SMOD™ and the Future Dark Dog is in bad days. So don't expect the next episode of NOCTURNAL for 2-3 weeks. Quit yer bitchin', I'm going as quick as the speed of light will allow.
INFECTED Chapters 39-40
Posted June 22nd, 2008 by scottsigler
Click here to download INFECTED Chapters 39-40
IN THIS EPISODE:
Margaret, Amos and Otto have a run-in with a new infected victim, and for this one, playtime is no joke. Perry continues his intellectual debate with the Starting Five.
