..:S...P...I...D...E...R...B...I...T...E...S:..

Monday, October 20, 2003

"We had windstorms and droughts and the river that lay alongside my town had the bad habit of flooding. In the spring of my fifth year, a flood brought snakes to the streets. Then hawks came down by the hundreds in a dark tornado and lifted up the snakes in their killing beaks, and the river slinked back to its banks like a whipped dog. We had a dark queen who was one hundred and six years old. We had a gunfighter who saved the life of Wyatt Earp at the O.K. Corral. We had a monster in the river and a secret in the lake. We had a ghost that haunted the road behind the wheel of a black dragster with flames on the hood. We had a Gabriel and a Lucifer, and a rebel that rose from the dead. We had an alien invader, a boy with a perfect arm, and we had a dinosaur loose on Merchants Street...I remember..."
-Robert McCammon - Boy's Life


this is the kind of intro to a book that makes you want to work harder. look at that. look at how this dude is cracking his knuckles and saying he going to write a book with enough ideas for ten books. Look how how many things he's crammed in there. That takes balls and effort and that's how everyone should go about writing a book. up until he wrote this one, he wrote some decent B-movie type horror novels (although "Stinger" had some good desert action, and "Swan Song" seems an awful lot like a third-rate "Stand," and "Baal" i remember scaring the shit out of me when i found it in my dad's stash of horror novels in the garage when i was real young) but here he's decided to strap in and try to give us a modern day Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn.

is it as good as Twain's boys? course not. but not for lack of trying. at least he tried. at least he wasn't one of those talentless fucks content to crank out a legal thriller, slap a stupid title like "The Gavel" on it, and watch the lemmings run out and make a shit movie with a courtroom climax. you know i was SURE there would be a title called "The Gavel" out there but i was wrong. however i did find all the rest of the crap legal titles i tried to think of. we got "Hostile Witness," "Prosecution Rests," "Hung Jury," (not porn) "Court Adjourned," - the list went on and on. did i find there was a book called "The Bailiff?" i can't remember. and the plots are just as easy to write as the titles. watch me:

"The Gavel": there's a bomb in the judge's gavel and a mysterious man in the courtroom tries to start a disturbance so he'll smack his gavel for "order in the court!" and blow himself up. now in theaters...

i just can't take it. 90% of thriller's titles mean nothing. less than nothing. they're the equivalent of priest lingo. phrases repeated over and over until all meaning is drained. you know what else i fucking HATE? when someone in a movie sees something horrible and they mutter, "holy mary mother of god" that's so fucking lame. it sounds so awkward and stupid and you know the writer or director or whoever thinks it what's supposed to be said when you see something horrible. they type those lines on automatic pilot. such lazy bullshit. i actually heard that line muttered twice on TV yesterday, once by Sharon Stone in some horseshit show i was flipping past and something else on HBO. what's my point here? i'm just saying i'll take some reformed horror writer trying to top King's "It" crossed with "Huck Finn" over the entire best seller list any day.

so i finally got my book together and mailed it out. took three post-work all-nighters to gather up, organize and print out the material. i had no idea how long that was going to take. i'd been writing and revising parts and putting them aside for so long now but i'd never lined them up with the page numbers and chapter titles and song lyrics and ironic bible quotes before. done. finally.

now it's time to kick back and listen to the Desperado soundtrack while finishing Enter the Matrix for the PS2. pure bliss. also my fellow bloggggggers have been typing their hearts out lately so i got some good laying-on-the-floor-computer-on-my-chest midnight reading for later. and congrats to scratchymonkey for guessing my stepbrother's name! she wins her choice between two valuable prizes. hey! Trinity was just trying to explain how you can never know if the rock will fall to the ground every time you drop it or whatever the fuck so i tossed her head-first through her goddamn Zen garden.

::: david - 11:50 PM [+] :::
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