The Middle of the Dark

Yes, Darby Harn is still alive. I am snowed in for the moment so I decided to take a break from a West Wing marathon (how good was this show?) to update this increasingly pointless blog. I am thinking of wiping the slate clean in the new year and starting a new one. I will be wiping many slates in 2009. I will be that guy on the corner offering to clean your windows for some change except I will be cleaning your slates. Or maybe just mine. I tend to get stuck in the mud when it comes to other people's slates and by now I've said the word slate too much. I work all day, and write all night, and I have no life. In college I studied all the time and worked my ass off to get through because I had to. At work I study all the time and work my ass off because I have to. It's not easy for me and it never has been. The trade off is I have nothing else and when it comes to everything else I missed the meeting. And it costs me, exponentially, the further I go. So, yay. At ...

On the birth of their boy William. Congrats to two of the best people I know. All the best. I wonder how jealous Howie is...

The first ever picture of a planet in a solar system that is not ours: The skinny. This is just the beginning.

Newsarama offers a really good op-ed on why the next Batman film could - should be - called The Dark Knight Returns, and also why the Joker should come back. And be recast. Check it out. I think it may have persuaded me from my position that recasting the character would be difficult in the least. I don't know, however, that a literal translation of Frank Miller's Batman into Nolan's is possible or even feasible; that said, the article is good food for thought. I've always thought Batman's story has to end. His success prevents it of course. Even if Nolan completes his trilogy, which is what we seem to be in for, Warner Brothers will want and rightfully so as many films as they can get. And they should make Batman films to their hearts content. This article suggests a great idea: allowing myriad artists take their own whacks at the character, in various films. Batman has proven his elasticity. But since we're talking about the first true, complete - p...

He's George W. Bush. Apparently. Andrew Kalvaan departs from his rocker in the Wall St. Journal in a suprisingly deluded way and I just have to put my two cents in. The Dark Knight does not have a pro-Bush or pro-neo conservative stance. If you think it concerns the war on terror, and that is a legitimate argument, and if you think Batman=Bush, which is not legit, then here's why you cannot walk away from this film thinking it somehow legitimizes the last 7 years: Batman fails to take the Joker seriously until it is too late. Batman fails to kill the Joker when given the opportunity, and the justification to do so. Batman 'extradites' a non-national from a foreign country where he has no jurisdiction. Batman abuses his power and technology to spy on his own people. Batman's actions only embolden his enemy. You can find a correlative for everyone of those items in the last 7 years, and none of them are positive, and none of them presented that way in the film. T...

Tomorrow is Irish Fest in Waterloo. Neil Gaiman is writing a 2 part Batman story for the comic series next year. Apparently it will bridge the gap between the current R.I.P. storyline, which I'm lost with, and the future of the character, which seems destined to be different than the status quo. The only thing cooler than this is if they found water on Mars. Oh, yeah. Water exists on Mars. Also, liquid (not water) is flowing freely on Titan , Saturn's enigmatic moon.

Season 5 of Project Runway just got WAY less interesting for me. Okay, so the dress didn't really work. But why must they always cut the cute ones? Sigh. I think I liked her so much because she reminds of two friends who have somehow been genetically spliced together in a seamless, beautiful fashion. Auf wiedersehen Emily.

So given the Dark Knight's insane run at the box office (the 'will it beat Titanic?' murmurs have begun) it's inevitable there will be a third. The big question is who the big bad will be. It seems from the film they intended for Heath Ledger to reprise the Joker in some capacity next time around, but as we all know, that will (probably) not be the case. Geoff Boucher writes an open letter in the LA Times today to Chris Nolan offering some advice. Some of it is good. By process of elimination, he id's Catwoman as the only logical choice. I agree with this. Harley Quinn might make some sense if they attempt to follow the Joker thread (recasting just doesn't seem proper), but of all the Batman's rogues, she is the most sensible in Nolan's realistic concept of the character. However, Boucher's choice of actress (I'll let you click the link to see) doesn't do anything for me. Not that she's a bad actress, but what Catwoman needs, lik...

SPOILERS follow for 'The Dark Knight' Right now there are a lot of hyperbolic reviews and commentary swirling around The Dark Knight, and specifically Heath Ledger's performance as the Joker, to the extent that you wonder how any film could possibly live up those kind of expectations. This movie does. You're never left wondering how, or why; it is grand cinema, from artists in their prime, and in one tragic case, the final furious statement of a gifted actor. TDK is not the Citizen Kane of comic book movies; to call it a comic book movie, or place it in that context is diminishing it. The film actually operates primarily in the crime movie genre, and has more in common with films like The Godfather, in its bredth and scope (a staggering cast of characters, multiple plot arcs, the city as a character - and Chicago - I mean, um, Gotham - has never been so interesting) and also Heat, which it actually has the most in common with. TDK is also not the Empire Strikes Bac...

In all the excitement of June, with the floods and other distractions, I never got around to sharing some photos of the trip my brother Aaron took to Kansas City early in the month, to see my aunt Charlene. We were there a very busy 3 days, the highlight of which had to be the World War I musuem downtown. The dominant feature of the memorial is this 30 story monolithic statue that stands on a high hill overlooking downtown. You can go up in a very antiquated elevator (it dates from 1926) to the top and see an extraordinary view of KC. This image in particular inspired me to relocate my next novel from Iowa to Kansas. It also inspired me to research the memorial, which led me to the only-interesting-to-me bit of trivia that the nuclear holocaust film 1983, The Day After, featured the memorial in its coda. What was left of it anyway. That movie made a huge impression on me as it did most people who saw it, and I found myself remembering all sorts of 80's Cold War trivia - '...

I had the strangest dream last night; it went on forever (no doubt a few seconds), the longest sustained I recall having recently. I was in Germany, on vacation or something, with my mother - or my father, I wasn't sure; they seemed to be in between parents and would change with the course of the dream. At the end they were old and unrecognizable. Germany, I can't explain. We were visiting some sort of musuem or gallery. We walked around and someone told us we had spent 162 days inside. A beautiful woman with green eyes said something to me on the way out. She may have been the one to mention the 162 days, but I'm not sure. She spoke with an accent and seemed intent on getting a lot of words in as we left. We went outside, into a cobblestone street draped with banners for some festival, and that was it. The dream has stayed with me all day, mostly because it makes no sense. I used to have very vivid dreams; there is one from when I was 15 that I remember to this ...

Good friend Kat's novel The Alchemy of Stone is due soon, so you should go pick up a copy here at Amazon, where she also has a blog. The book is fantastic; it's strange, disconcerting and features weird robot sex. But don't take it from me. Publisher's Weekly gave it a starred review . Scroll down a bit to see it. Congrats Kat! Update: Justine Larbalestier has a fun post on her blog about the art of blurbing as it specifically relates to Kat's new book, which Justine really likes.

For reals. Dig it. The universe will always amaze. I suppose I should say something about me. Not much to say. My mom is very sick. I'm working 10 and 12 hour days. Gathering material for my next novel. They form, these books, like planets almost; gathering lose dust from every corner of creation, accreting until something round and significant emerges. Sometimes something bigger runs into them and they go boom or become something better. Sometimes the process takes years. Decades. I seriously do not have time to be building novels on a planetary scale. Message to Darby: think moons. Asteroids are also nice.

My brother Aaron sent me this photo taken of the tornado that struck Osage this month - credit unknown, but good Lord, this person had ice for veins. I'm sure most of you have seen the floods/tornadoes/general calamity on the news. Waterloo, Cedar Falls and of course Cedar Rapids and Iowa City, most of all, all led the national news for nearly a week now. Parts of CR looked like New Orleans after Katrina. It's been the worst anyone has ever seen it and while the water has receeded almost into its banks here, many west side businesses are damaged, totaled, still closed. Two bridges remain closed. Most importantly, many homes have been lost. All week I've been left with this fatigue, this residue of anxiety and if I ever thought I knew what it was to be in the center of impending disaster, I had no clue.

After work today I went around on the bike with my camera to get a sense of downtown after the flood; even though the water remains very very high, the river has fallen nearly 10 feet since yesterday, and the bridges reopened this morning. Some of them; Park and 6th street may be out of commission for a while, and the railroad bridge? You can see what the force of the water did to the rail itself: The river broke the bridge in two: On Tuesday the rumor was that the broken half travelled down river and took out the 11th street bridge as well, but this didn't happen. The east side did nearly flood as a result of the breach the bridge made in the levee wall, which volunteers from all over the city secured with very hard work: Sandbags also saved the Fairview cemetery, where the flood waters attempted to end run the dikes. That cast iron fence there in the bottom ? It's nearly ten feet off the ground in most places. The water just two days ago exposed only its very tips. If t...

For as long as I've been interested in politics and journalism, I've always been interested in Tim Russert. Meet The Press is always a big part of my Sunday, and during every Tuesday night this primary season and for every other I can remember, I was tuned to NBC. I was shocked to learn he had died today. Right now MSNBC is running a sustained eulogy delivered by friends and colleagues of his, all of them commenting on his importance as a public figure, and as a man. I will say of Tim Russert that he proves the American dream: we live in a country divided between high and low brow, red state and blue state, conservative and liberal, rich and poor and here was a working class kid from Buffalo that proved smarts, integrity, persistence and objectivity are all American things.

Today I woke up to more rumors - the water had been turned off, the town evacuated - part of it was, anyway - and a few harsh truths. My mom had to see the doctor this morning because of severe pain and very high blood pressure. I'm in the waiting room running down info on the deterorating situation in town on one hand while at the same time gathering the same kind of sense of what was happening to my mom. There are few perfect storms in life, and this was one. Thank God my mom is out of the woods; unfortunately the woods are part of a much larger general foresty region that the docor says is dense and widespread and we'll know we're out of it when we're out of it. Same with the flood. The river level is receding some, but it rained today and will tonight and tomorrow; a tornado just destroyed a boy scout camp in Sioux City, killing four apparently, and now that same system is headed this way. It seems Biblical, the weather these past few weeks. I helped for a fe...

So about noon at work today someone says they've closed all the bridges in town because of the flooding river, and if you live on the east side, like me, it's time to go now. And it certainly was, since one of those bridges, the 6th street railroad bridge, failed and collapsed around that same time. My brother left his work a little bit later and picked me up. We along with thousands of others made this long trek around the city to get over to the east side, eventually finding a way through across Conger. The houses on Sans Souci island, always in danger of flooding, were under water up to the second floor windows. So we made it back, stocked up on bottled water - getting the last cases at the Hy-Vee - and prepared for - what? We weren't sure. Rumors flew and fly pretty fast still; they were turning the water off. The lights. The 11th street bridge failed too (it didn't). So far things are okay, for us, but the river is yet to crest and more rain is coming. W...

Sunday an F4 tornado destroyed most of Parkersburg, a small town about 10 miles north of Waterloo. It killed seven people, destroyed hundreds of homes and businesses, and made a war zone out of several towns. The same tornado persisted for nearly an hour, blazing a path across several counties into Waterloo along Dunkerton road, where it destroyed several homes a previous tornado did in 2000. My house is roughly 3 miles from the path the twister took through the city, and we didn't get a single drop of rain. There was never any thunder, only the sound of an avalanche, sustained, for nearly fifteen minutes; when I was a kid, my mom said tornadoes sounded like trains, and living less than a mile from the train yards, I can finally say, yes they do. They sound like trains from hell. Several people at work were affected by the tornado as well. A lot of people say, that's life in Iowa. One minute, it's blue skies and sunshine, the next it's snow. Rain. Tornadoes. A...

Right out in front of the library in broad daylight, ripping it out of its lock and chain and no doubt damaging it - a brand new bike I worked my ass off for - I hope there is a big giant city bus in your future.

Thank God it's Friday because: There is a new issue of Buffy: Season 8 (I got the last one! Jesus!) There is a new episode of Battlestar. There is a new Star Wars movie coming. This one is animated and now Anakin looks like he escaped from the set of the Thunderbirds . There are only 8 more chapters to go in my revised draft of the novel. There is no cure for dibilitating headaches or unrequited romances except the new Radiohead record is pretty fucking sweet.

Hollywood Video here in town is closing its doors, and today they marked everything down to 90% off. I found a treasure trove of movies old and new in their library - films you take to heart and then somehow forget for a few years like Hideous Kinky or And The Band Played On - and I made off like a bandit. One film I didn't find hiding in the aisles that would have been perfect was Orlando , the '92 adaptation of Virginia Woolf's novel starring Tilda Swinton. The novel and the movie both left such a deep impression I didn't find it again until just recently, when I began work on The Book of Elizabeth . An older Elizabeth features in Orlando (Quentin Crisp does her in drag in the movie, which I fear made more an impression than anything else) but when I close my eyes, it's Swinton I see as my Elizabeth. I discovered in writing the book just how much of an impact the themes and ideas - half remembered, like a dream - the book/movie had on impressionable young me ba...

So now that I'm taking a brief breather while I recharge the old batteries to revise the novel, I thought I'd share some pics from the trip my cousin Matt and I took to Chicago earlier this month. We visited my good friends Matt and Lisa, who are expecting at the end of the summer (congrats!!!) and also took in some of the sights. It was a great time, and great weather. We had great weather today, finally. I biked up to CF, watched some Season 1 of Battlestar on DVD, and naturally, because I'm not supposed to until Sunday, revised chapter 1 of the book. Kerry Wood goes to ice the Astros in the top of the ninth: The Wrigley Building from orbit (aka the Hancock): The shadows of the towers:

Yay! I finished the first draft of my novel The Book of Elizabeth today. My eyes and fingers hurt. I sleep now. Zzzzz... Oh, wait. I do have a lot of revision to do, but that's after I take a few days off. My editor Sean Wallace at Prime Books mentioned the book in an interview he gave over at Bibliophile Stalker: "What's the editing process like? Do you also focus on grammar, spelling, and the like or do you solely focus on the story and the idea? I actually don’t consider myself a traditional editor, someone who copy-edits or proofreads material, but more an instinctual editor. I don’t sit down and figure out why I do or don’t like something, which might sound a little strange to a few people, but that’s how it works out. I can tell you in generalizations why I’m hot-to-trot on a particular project, but I can’t get into specifics. Mind you, it’s easier at sales presentations, because I have a wealth of data to play with, and can sound reasonably intelligent and ...

Endeavour returns to Earth earlier tonight.

1) Finish that novel. That dim light at the end of the tunnel? That's the end! 2) Get back on track with Fables, easy to do with covers like this: I've liked James Jean, who does nearly all the Fables covers, for a long time. I think he'd be perfect to do the cover for The Book of Elizabeth. You can see more upcoming Jean/Fables goodness here and here . You can check out his website too. 3. Start thinking about that next novel! That dark tunnel ahead? That's the start! 4. Listen to lots and lots of Kathleen Edwards. 5. Get out of town. Chicago in three weeks...

Just like Jupiter's moon of Europa, Saturn's moon of Titan likely has an underground ocean. Given how much Titan already resemles primordial earth, this is a huge revelation, and bodes well for the prospect at least of some kind of life.

The director of The English Patient, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Truly, Madly, Deeply among other wonderful films, has died at 54.

The Earth and the moon, as seen from Mars: Also, they're not wasting any time planning a trip to Alpha Centauri, where scientists now believe Earth-like planets reside.

Endeavour lifts at 1:28 A.M. local time. Other space goodies: Scientists have found a once-habitable lake on Mars. And maybe coolest of all, Alpha Centauri, the nearest star to the sun, the same size, age and color as the sun, may have its own earth.

The last episode of The Wire aired tonight on HBO. I don't know how much I've mentioned the show before here on the blog, but I have loved it since the beginning and I agree wholeheartedly with the notion many have that it is the greatest TV show ever. You hear this kind of thing a lot. "It's the best ever." I say it a lot. About all kinds of things. The truth is, The Wire is the best TV show ever, because of its depth, its subtlety, its five year examination of a single American city, Baltimore, that stands now, and may for all time, as a living document of 21st century American society. In its five years, the show tackled a different aspect of the city with each new season, from the corners to the docks, the schools to city hall, and finally to the news room. I enjoyed the way they integrated the paper into the storyline, but it could have been a show itself; if the show had one failing this year, it was not maximizing this plotline. The Baltimore Sun w...

SPOILER WARNING (If you have not read Buffy Season 8 #12 - Ben - DO NOT READ) So. Wow. Where to start. Um, how about with the begining: I picked up my issue of Buffy Season 8 #12 today, expecting no less than my monthly dose of amazing and this month doubled down. No shit wow. So that's Buffy there on the right. And that's another girl on the left. So this is a big deal. So I'm saying so a lot. First off, the New York Times has a big article on the event. Joss Whedon talks there and also at Newsarama which is a much longer and interesting interview. I believe Whedon when he says it's not a stunt. Buffy has never been about stunts, or 'this week, on very special episode of Blossom...'. And this series has moved the landscape enough through its sheer existence to not require any gimmick to draw readers to it (any Buffy die-hards put off by the comic, and there are some, will certainly not come back for this). Joss says its an evolution of the character, except ...

One of NASA's many robotic probes caught this amazing image of an avalanhce of ice and dust at Mars northern pole. One wonders if this isn't something that happens with every spring thaw there. Here on earth, snow and ice continue to bombard us. Somedays it feels like Stalingrad in World War II or something. It's neverending. Every once in a while it warms up to 40 or 50 and then immediately after that we're slammed with rain, snow, or both. It wears you down. I woke up this morning to yet another snow shower and realized it's affecting my mood. I cannot wait for spring, to be back on the bike. Every day feels longer and longer than the last. Anyways, it's Wednesday, which means a new issue of Buffy. I shall be delivered yet.

Um, hell yeah. Not so much with Star Trek, which has been delayed from this Christmas to May of 2009. Apparently the strike left a lot of holes in next summer's schedule, but of course the scuttlebutt is that film has issues. A film with issues doesn't get moved from Christmas to summer. They get moved to January. It will suck having to wait how this new take works out, but we've got plenty to tide us over.

Not much to say other than the winter continues its apocalyptic pace. I'm recovering from the flu, again, and still writing, reading epic amounts of stuff (when I'm not spilling tea all over my research stack, which is what I did last weekend in my convolescence) and every once in a while sleeping. Some quick notes: Caitlin R. Kiernan is a great writer and she has no health insurance. She has some medical issues and the requisite bills and she's having a mini-fundraiser on her website. Kat has an interview with Justine Larbalestier over at the Fantasy Magazine website you should check out. I thought I would post more about the daily progress of the book. I've found it's something I have little interest in sharing for some reason. It's kind of like, come follow me down all my dark alleys. A lot of them go nowhere. That's not true. They don't all lead to where you're going on this journey, but they often suggest ideas for later trips. But the...

Which Buffy the Vampire Slayer Character Are You? Created by BuddyTV I found this interesting because like everyone else I have novels that sleep away, not quite in trunks, but drawers or computer files waiting for the light of day. I especially found Amanda Craig's entry funny, because I too have a big damn space opera on deck, and it too has its roots in The Tempest. Though it doesn't seem as literal as hers does. My favorite cocktail: apocalypse, feminism, and literary vs. genre.

Heartbreakingly sad.

Commence the Peanuts Happy Dance: I've sold my first novel, The Book of Elizabeth , to Sean Wallace at Prime Books . It will appear in hardcover in early 2009. You can read more details here . I see there's also a little blurb at SFScope . The novel takes place in a world where none of our history - none of it - occured. No Roman Empire, no Reformation, no Berlin Wall. No Berlin. A new history has taken its place, except for one little problem: people from our history inexplicably find themselves swept into this alien one, people from all eras of history, poets and gladiators. Poets and queens. One of them is Queen Elizabeth I. As a girl, she hand copied passages of the Bible for her step-mother; now, Elizabeth writes out a copy of the entire book from memory, to keep her own sanity in this strange new world, a world where Moses never went to the mountain, and Jesus never to the cross. Elizabeth learns to cope, to embrace the virgin world; yet she can't avoid her ...

Happy belated new year. I began it with much sickness. I'm still pretty under the weather but I am up and walking around and also at work with such a thin voice a man actually called me 'some Arab' today. I informed him kindly I spoke English and could give him lessons if necessary, as he did not seem to recognize it. Teacher and author Martin Roper has an interview at the Dublin Quarterly. My novel mutates. I think it wants to be a Miyazaki film. Or an Elseworlds graphic novel. (Gaslight Batman or something.) It takes place in a world slightly - slightly maybe isn't strong enough - different version of our world. The history is different, but contaminated. The polluters are people from our history, and the most toxic bit of 'waste' is a document utterly integral to our history, and utterly alien to theirs. My research has led me pretty far from the path I thought I was going down, so there's been some stops and starts, but overall I'm pretty ...