BROOKLYNER: "PRUNES AT GUNPOINT"

A new website called Brooklyner just launched and I have a story called "Prunes at Gunpoint" in it.  It's fun!

If James Salter's in the running for short story prizes, everyone else can just give up.  Except like Alice Munro and William Trevor.

Last night I watched True Blood, Breaking Bad, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and maybe something else, I can't remember.  This weekend I saw Fright Night and Conan the Barbarian.  Fright Night was extremely fun... Colin Farrell in particular was eating up his scenes like steak.  And the girl is gorgeous.

Then I read The Book of Werewolves.

Today I got in an elevator and Tom Cruise and Jeremy Renner got in too.  I tried to look anywhere except at Tom Cruise, to avoid seeming like I knew it was Tom Cruise.  Then before I got off I made eye contact and he nodded, like, "I know you know I'm Tom Cruise.  It's ok.  Really."

NEW JOB / MORE

So now I go to work every day of the week for the first time since 2009.  I just started.  My brain is still getting used to the fact that it can't take a nap in the middle of the afternoon anymore.  The job is fucking awesome.  It's what I came to L.A. to do and it's really exciting.

*****

I'm going to try to go see Fright Night this weekend.  I always had a soft spot for the original, and this one is written by Marti Noxon, a terrific writer and producer who Ned & I have been working with this summer.

*****

Glad I got to catch up this week with Amelia Gray, who was in L.A. for a few days and whose novel THREATS is coming out from FSG next March.  An indie/internet writer with FSG... fucking cool.

FINALE

I'm psyched for the Teen Wolf season finale tonight...

HENDRIX / WU-TANG

The Hendrix / Wu-Tang mash-up album is terrific.  This might be my favorite track.  But they're almost all great.

THE MAGICIAN KING

Read The Magician King by Lev Grossman this weekend and loved it, devoured it.  I read The Magicians when it came out in 2009 and was really into that too -- I think I read that in two days also, while I was on vacation.  The sequel is a little better, maybe... one minor observation: the writing is very pleasing in the way Grossman cannily manages to have his cake and eat it too on a scene by scene level.  For example, when the swordsman who's going to train Quentin begins his lesson, he disdainfully takes Quentin's old sword, a semi-useless one which kind of sucks.  One way to play the moment would be to have the swordsman toss the lame-ass sword overboard (they're on a boat) but that would be broad/silly/not grounded in the reality of moment-to-moment interactions (which Grossman's storytelling very much is, despite this being a "fantasy" novel)... a more realistic behavior would be for the swordsman to simply set the useless blade aside, but that's boring and unremarkable, so Grossman plays it like this: "For a second Quentin thought he was going to do something drastic, like chuck it overboard, but he just placed it on the deck next to the two other swords."  A very mundane example, yes, but not a bad one with regard to the way that Grossman manages to go broad and stay grounded at the same time.  He does this on a lot of different levels, all throughout the book.  Funny, exceptionally smart, excellently constructed, and with a few really surprisingly harrowing/disturbing moments.  He really earns the ending, too.

****

My Blackberry is dying.  I need a new one.  The background of my Blackberry is an Avedon photo of a woman's face, up close, actually just the eyes.  And some digital artifact has now appeared on the screen in the shape of the paramecium, or more appropriate a teardrop, right beneath one of the eyes.  It's fascinating but it's also getting bigger and will soon obscure the text of emails I'm trying to read.  But the new Blackberry that just came out has a fucking camera without autofocus??  What the fuck?  Are you kidding?

CORIOLANUS

Hey, cool, I'll see this.



*****

Weird few days... lots of swimming. I've been kind of under the weather for about a month, just feeling ulcer-y and lugubrious. But I get more writing and reading done like that. So, all is well, I guess.

L.A. LIGHT

I assumed the band was Antony and the Johnsons but no, it's a band that sounds exactly like them.  The point is the imagery.  Beautiful stuff shot on a 5D.


LA Light from Colin Rich on Vimeo.

R.I.P.

Various places are reporting that William Sleator has died in Thailand.  This is really heartbreaking.  He was only in his 60s and still writing actively, I believe.  I hadn't spoken with him since sometime late last year, but we were in fairly regular contact by email and gchat for some stretches of 2009 and 2010.  That was following an interview I did with him.  I really admired him, I loved Singularity when I was a kid and then I returned to it when I was older and found that I still loved it.  Same with House of Stairs and Fingers and to some degree Interstellar Pig as well.  He was an incredibly sweet, mild-mannered guy, who was also very kind the one time I met him in person, which was when he came to visit Yale about ten years ago.  He will be missed.

TODAY

Was a good day.  Going to Cru soon, a new restaurant I haven't tried, with one of the executive producers of The Cottage.  Then back home to write more.  Life is good today, got some good news, and got a copy of Bizarro Fiction #5 which is a blast and which you should buy, because it's cheap and awesome and I'm proud to be in it.

Last night I read some fiction and I watched part of a movie with the best title ever: Seduced and Abandoned.  I also watched True Blood (because a friend has a role in it), Curb Your Enthusiasm (because I love it), and a couple episodes of Louie (because it is fucking brilliant, honestly one of the greatest shows of all time, it's actually auteur television).  Tonight, Teen Wolf, which I love, and maybe I will read some Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.