"Put your makeup on, fix your hair up pretty, and meet me tonight in Atlantic City."
A sunny day today. With the heat index, we made 74˚F. We're having one of those coolish springs, which means more unseasonably cool weather, more thunderstorms, flash floods, and tornadoes.
Today, I was up early, and by about 9 a.m. I'd finished proofreading and marking line edits (about the only "rewriting" I ever do) on "The Man Who Loved What Was" and "Two Monsters Walk Into a Bar. Tomorrow, I'll do the layout of Sirenia Digest 183 and 174, and I hope both issues will go out to subscribers tomorrow afternoon. I did a little work on the Winifred block today, but not as much as would like to have done.
I need to get the geology section written for the next Cretaceous turtle paper I'm coauthoring with Drew Gentry (this will be paper 3 of 4, and an important one), but I'm having trouble laying my hands on some crucial references pertaining to the Niobrara and Pierre Shale formations.
I promised you a list of the authors who had the greatest formative influence on my own writing, didn't I? I figure most of this this has shone up piecemeal in interviews and whatnot, and maybe even in this journal, but someone might find it interesting (and maybe disappointing, too). So, I'll try. It won't be complete, and it might come out slightly different were I to write it just next month, but here we go. Oh, this is an unranked list, okay? I'm just putting people down as I think of them, so please don't comment that you'd list X higher than I did. Danke. Also, I'm listing authors I was reading from, say, junior-high school into college, in the late 1970s and early 1980s. I have not included poets or authors of comics/graphic novels, though some of them were (obviously) very important to me.
01. Ray Bradbury
02. Edgar Rice Burroughs
03. Harlan Ellison
04. Shirley Jackson
05. John Steinbeck
06. William Faulkner
07. Angela Carter
08. James Joyce
09. H.P. Lovecraft
10. William Kennedy
11. Ambrose Bierce
12. Algernon Blackwood
13. James Herbert
14. Ernest Hemingway
15. Peter Straub
16. Harper Lee
17. Edgar Allan Poe
18. William S. Burroughs
19. Jack London
20. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
21. Walter Tevis
22. C.S. Lewis
23. F. Scott Fitzgarld
24. Lord Dunsany (Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18th Baron of Dunsany)
25. Ramsey Campbell
26. Stephen King
27. T.E.D. Klien
28. Richard Addams
29. Lewis Carroll
30. Philip K. Dick
31. Peter S. Beagle
32. Dr. Seuss (Theodor Seuss Geisel)
33. Theodore Sturgeon
34. Flannery O'Connor
35. James Dickey
36. Gabriel García Márquez
37. Thomas Pynchon
38. Clive Barker
39. Dashiell Hammet
40. Daphne due Maurier, Lady Browning
And, you know, I'm gonna say forty authors is more than sufficient for now. Make of this what you will. But the DNA of my own fiction is all tied up in here. These people, they're the ones who taught me how to write and what was important enough to bother writing about.
Last night, we started the latest season of Naked and Afraid, because, what the hell. Every brain needs a little garbage, from time to time.
Later,
Aunt Beast
11:44 a.m. (Note, the plastic woolly mammoth I am holding is part of the British Museum set of prehistoric critters produced in the '70s and '80s, much coveted by collectors of plastic "dinosaurs." Yes, I have the whole set, even the hard to find Dimetrodon)
Today, I was up early, and by about 9 a.m. I'd finished proofreading and marking line edits (about the only "rewriting" I ever do) on "The Man Who Loved What Was" and "Two Monsters Walk Into a Bar. Tomorrow, I'll do the layout of Sirenia Digest 183 and 174, and I hope both issues will go out to subscribers tomorrow afternoon. I did a little work on the Winifred block today, but not as much as would like to have done.
I need to get the geology section written for the next Cretaceous turtle paper I'm coauthoring with Drew Gentry (this will be paper 3 of 4, and an important one), but I'm having trouble laying my hands on some crucial references pertaining to the Niobrara and Pierre Shale formations.
I promised you a list of the authors who had the greatest formative influence on my own writing, didn't I? I figure most of this this has shone up piecemeal in interviews and whatnot, and maybe even in this journal, but someone might find it interesting (and maybe disappointing, too). So, I'll try. It won't be complete, and it might come out slightly different were I to write it just next month, but here we go. Oh, this is an unranked list, okay? I'm just putting people down as I think of them, so please don't comment that you'd list X higher than I did. Danke. Also, I'm listing authors I was reading from, say, junior-high school into college, in the late 1970s and early 1980s. I have not included poets or authors of comics/graphic novels, though some of them were (obviously) very important to me.
01. Ray Bradbury
02. Edgar Rice Burroughs
03. Harlan Ellison
04. Shirley Jackson
05. John Steinbeck
06. William Faulkner
07. Angela Carter
08. James Joyce
09. H.P. Lovecraft
10. William Kennedy
11. Ambrose Bierce
12. Algernon Blackwood
13. James Herbert
14. Ernest Hemingway
15. Peter Straub
16. Harper Lee
17. Edgar Allan Poe
18. William S. Burroughs
19. Jack London
20. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
21. Walter Tevis
22. C.S. Lewis
23. F. Scott Fitzgarld
24. Lord Dunsany (Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18th Baron of Dunsany)
25. Ramsey Campbell
26. Stephen King
27. T.E.D. Klien
28. Richard Addams
29. Lewis Carroll
30. Philip K. Dick
31. Peter S. Beagle
32. Dr. Seuss (Theodor Seuss Geisel)
33. Theodore Sturgeon
34. Flannery O'Connor
35. James Dickey
36. Gabriel García Márquez
37. Thomas Pynchon
38. Clive Barker
39. Dashiell Hammet
40. Daphne due Maurier, Lady Browning
And, you know, I'm gonna say forty authors is more than sufficient for now. Make of this what you will. But the DNA of my own fiction is all tied up in here. These people, they're the ones who taught me how to write and what was important enough to bother writing about.
Last night, we started the latest season of Naked and Afraid, because, what the hell. Every brain needs a little garbage, from time to time.
Later,
Aunt Beast
11:44 a.m. (Note, the plastic woolly mammoth I am holding is part of the British Museum set of prehistoric critters produced in the '70s and '80s, much coveted by collectors of plastic "dinosaurs." Yes, I have the whole set, even the hard to find Dimetrodon)