Click on the black bar at the top of the page. Get angry. Do something about it. We live in the Free World. These reprehensible bills should never have made it this far.

Every year I have a hard time staying in the spirit and I do everything I can to keep from going full-on humbug. These are three that are helping this year:

1 - Baby It's Cold Outside, by Tom Jones & Cerys Matthews

My favorite version of this song, bar none. He sounds seductive and desperate, she sounds gorgeous and totally putting up a fight she wants to lose. Even if I didn't already love the song, I'd choose this for the way they seem to actually be enjoying it. I wish I could find a better video, but it's pretty spectacular in its own right too.

2 - A Shameless Christmas Carol by the cast of Shameless

A new one, this was just released a few days ago, but I love it in many boozy ways. And Emmy can still wail!

3 - And THIS video.

Because these are the three things that work for me about Christmas. Sex, Booze and Nightmares.

What videos sum up the holidays for you?

Holy crap! THE DEPUTY, by the excellent Victor Gischler is available for the Kindle and Nook for FREE for a limited time. This is an excellent modern western noir novel - very hardboiled with some humor peppered throughout and you'll dig it. I promise.

You can read more here on the author's blog too.

The Back Flap: Twitchy's Dream


When I was twenty-one, I was living in California with my buddy Rob, unloading trucks on the overnight shift for the largest Wal-Mart in the area. (How I got there is a totally different story) I worked with a whole crew of misfits and weirdos, as is fitting for an overnight crew thirty minutes from Hollywood.

Amongst them was a little Mexican dude we called Twitchy. I think at one point, after I moved back to Idaho, my buddy told me his real name, but I'm not sure I knew it the entire time I worked with him. He was just over five feet tall, slim and had the eyes of a really paranoid rabbit. I don't think he was actually on anything, though it wouldn't be overly surprising, but he seemed to be continually strung out on life in general.

We didn't really chat much with the crew while I worked there, we were kind of the token white guys and the newest to boot, but one night Twitchy started chatting with us about where we were from. When he found out - after a bit of explaining and possibly, charades - what state Idaho was, he got excited and melancholy at the same time, something that can really only be accomplished by a short Mexican at 3am.

There in the darkened hallway leading to the stockroom, Twitchy poured out his hopes and dreams to us. His greatest ambition in life was to move to Idaho, buy a trailer with a porch, a pistola and a cow. Then he could sit on his porch in the evenings before bed and watch his cow. (And presumably use his pistol to celebrate at weddings or chase off snakes or something, he didn't get into that.)

That was the extent of his dreams. After telling us about it, he got a look on his face that was almost heartbreaking in it's simplicity. It was the face of a child on December 18th after sitting on Santa's lap. I'll never forget the little man's simple imagery, how such a small, basic existence could be the pinnacle to a man's existence. In a way, I felt pity. I wanted to become rich and famous. Write a best-selling novel, draw a comic book series, act in a movie, hell, I was happy with the dream of meeting a beautiful woman and living in an elaborate house large enough to need a ladder in the library.

But then and now, I think I envied him more than anything. I often get so caught up in the "What-Ifs" and the "If this, then that"s of my life that I don't stop and realize how lucky I've been. I grew up poor, I remember walking to the grocery store with the last of our food stamps in my hand like they were gold, the nights in my room when I could hear my mother sobbing quietly about bills. At times it was hard and throughout, I had fantasies of making it big, countless, myriad variations, each resulting in a fabulous life for me and my loved ones.

And the whole time I had a wonderful life around me. Family that loved me, friends I could count on. Two full floors of books at the public library. It made me who I am today, and that guy ain't too shabby.

I have a beautiful wife, family that loves me and friends I can count on. I own two dogs that weigh as much as a cow and I have a trailer that I could sit on the steps and watch them poop in front of if I really wanted to. No pistol, but I am starting to teach myself to cook Mexican food, so you never know.

I still dream big, but at the same time, I've learned to love where I am in life, to appreciate how lucky I've already gotten. This is a picture my mom loves, and it could have taken the place of this entire post....

I think it's a great reminder to be thankful for the simple things in life.

There's no Wri in my NaNoWriMo.

I'd planned on writing a novel for National Novel Writing Month, I really had. I have a great story, a couple of thousand words written as a nice, thorough plot, I've even started up with some cover design elements, but last night night I officially decided not to participate.

At least, not in the full spirit and madness of the month. I'll still plug away at Falling Domino when I have the time and the urge, but for me, apart from outside influences and obligations (Inventory and Christmas prep at work, a few other projects) November has become a different acronym:

NeNoFinMo

Neal's Novel Finishing Month!

I have two novels that I'm in the finishing stages of right now; Mr Pale Steps Out, which I wrote last year for NaNoWriMo, and Graves, a zombie novel I started three or four years ago.  Mr. Pale just needs a nice breeze through revision and Graves is about the same. So instead of setting those aside in favor of fresh meat, I'm diving into these seasoned piles of flesh and pounding them into finished dishes in November.

It's hard though. I'm still keeping up with my friends and online acquaintances, tracking their progress and man, I want to join in! I have characters in me dying to get out - to kiss and kill and plot and scheme. But there are those ahead of them that deserve their due first. Writing. What a cool gig.

A Rant About Zombie Movies

 Zombie from Mindspill

I love me some zombies. Like... forever. Well, not forever. My buddy Rob introduced me to them in high school I think, before that, I wasn't much of a horror movie person, but after watching the original Romeros and a few others, I loved 'em. There was something so terrifying about the idea of something dead walking, mindlessly trying to kill you. A neighbor or friend or family member. This once whole person in shreds, wanting nothing more than to kill you. And what a visceral way too - biting. It's so personal and animalistic. I got bit once in... first grade, I believe. A girl named Brittany bit me on my shin for throwing her friend's snoopy toy on the roof of the cafeteria. Then I had to go into the Principal's office, where I had to pull down my pants so the could look at the bleeding wound. Trauma of two sorts, that.

A funny side note, the girl whose snoopy doll I tossed later dated Rob, just one of the many strange but true coincidences that exist in mid-sized vortex towns in the West.

So maybe I had some sort of ingrained fear of being bitten already, but it just clicked. And now, despite being cliche and all over the place, I still dig the undead bastards. I watch anything I can with them, read novels featuring them, hell, I'm finishing up a novel of my own about them as we speak.

Here's my real problem though. Most zombie movies and books for that matter...well... they bite.A lot are just plain BAD. Poorly written, bad acting, no budget, but most importantly, a lot of them lose track of what really makes zombies scary in the first place. In my opinion, Zombies can be scary one of two ways -

1 - Zombies bring out the horrors lurking within the uninfected man. This is touched on in quite a few flicks, if only to have an excuse for some hillbillies to rape someone or for some gunplay rather than as the main plot with the primary characters. It's the classic Post apocalyptic Mad Max syndrome. I understand this, but to me, it's actually more effective in non-zombie books and movies. If I want to see the true animal in a man released in a tense situation I have other options for that. Not that it makes for a bad movie - Dawn Of The Dead is this kind of flick at times.

2 - Trying to survive as humanity actively devours itself. I LOVE this kind of movie, where people are generally good folks, not he-man commandos, just people surrounded by zombies that used to be people. Survivors that have had to watch their loved ones die, possibly had to kill them to survive. These aren't movies about fighting or explosions or heroes, these are movies about ordinary people trying to find safety and not lose their minds and their humanity in the process. There are not a lot of examples of this done well, in fact, most are pretty dire, but The Night Of The Living Dead and to an extent, Shawn Of The Dead are this kind of movie.

There are other kinds of zombie movies and books, of course, but I don't think they're nearly as effective - Cordoned Off Zombie Territory Missions, Smart Zombies That Learn To Talk, Zombies As An Excuse To Pen People Up In One Place For An Entire Film, that kind of thing, but the worst offender in my opinion is Military Shoot-Em-Up Zombie Movies.

It has no emotion, a lazy excuse for plot and it usually exists solely as an excuse to have bad actors kill lurching shapes for no real reason but to hear BANGs. There's rarely any character development - after all, there are elite military stereotypes, there's rarely any real peril as they have unlimited clips of ammo. The only true conflict usually comes from other military or mean hillbillies. I hate this kind of movie.

Now, don't get me wrong, there's a few good exceptions in each of these, (Except magic talking zombies) but for the most part, they don't scare me. Entertain, sure, but they don't make me double check the locks on my door and sleep with a sledge next to my bed.

Oh yeah, and then there's the classic Voodoo Zombie movies... Which I would love, if they'd ever really made a good one.

What about you? Think I'm off base? Convince me! I'd love to be proven wrong about Military Zombies.

 THE HERMIT by Shutupandwhisper

It's been a while. I apologize for the lack of updates here, between work and life, writing has kind of fallen by the wayside. But no more. I need to take the bull by the horns and realize that if I want to be able to write, I need to find the time to write myself, it isn't going to fall out of the sky. Right now, in addition to THE WHISPERING FERNS, a children's adventure written under the name Kristopher McClanahan, I'm finishing up edits and final work on two adult novels and plot breakdowns on the next, a murder thriller set in the 1960's.

I'm pretty excited about the new book for a couple of reasons. I love the idea, naturally, but it's also the second NaNoWriMo novel I'll have worked on, and I'm using it as the kick-off to getting into a writing routine. It's also the first time I've used a very thorough plot as I write. Usually, I'll write up a brief summary, maybe a page at the most and then let the character's take me on their journey. But this book's a little twistier and I'll need a good outline to keep on track. I also think it will help write faster and more efficiently. We'll see.

So stay tuned. I plan to be a lot more active online, both here and my various other locations (Twitter, Facebook, my occasional reviews for Reviews Of Unusual Size)