Dansky Macabre

The last time I scraped ice off a windshield, it was about a year ago.

I was in a hurry. Did much of the snow removal with my arm, as opposed to the scraper. It was a tense morning. The roads were a mess, and Mom had been taken back to the hospital the night before during the worst of our one stab at winter.

I finally got the car cleaned off. We took off as fast as I could manage on the roads, which were largely coated in a layer of slush over a layer of ice. Here and there ruts had been worn through to wet blacktop, but you still couldn’t make any kind of time.

We got there a little too late. Mom had already gone. 

Today, I scraped snow and ice off my car. I did so in leisurely fashion, because I wasn’t going anywhere. The sky was blue, with clouds racing overhead, and I  used my arm for some of the stuff in middle because, well, because I felt like it.

Butterscotch does not care what you had planned for it. Butterscotch does as butterscotch pleases.

Buying actual acetate sheets is more expensive but less nerve-wracking than using cut flower wrappers from the supermarket. Also, you don’t have to worry about the weird triangle shapes you get stuck with.

Put the milk chocolate in the freezer before you try to add the layer of white chocolate. Otherwise you get light brown chocolate.

There is nothing that can be done to make chocolate-dipped dried strawberries look appealing. This goes doubly so if you have cats. Trust me on this one.

Graham crackers may look like they break into squares if you pop them in half, but do not be fooled. They are rectangles made to look like squares to fool you and ruin your lovely even sheet you’ve set up in preparation for dumping melted chocolate all over them.

Chocolate blooms a helluva lot less in the freezer than it does on the counter.

All bark recipes say “break like it’s peanut brittle”. Which is great if you know how to make peanut brittle. I now have mental images of going after a thick sheet of peanut brittle with a drilling rig and a team of wildcatters to make sure it fractures just the right way. 

You will never get all of the chocolate out of the bowl. Learn to live with this.

It is possible to do delicate, graceful swirls of white chocolate on a dark chocolate base. It is not possible for me to do so; I instead produce random blobs of white chocolate that have decided to make the leap for freedom from the spoon rather than get strung out into decorative squiggles.

 Normally I don’t do stuff like this, but 2016′s been such a weird and unpleasant year, I figure it’s worth a moment to try to wave a small banner of positivity. 

So, without further ado...

BEST ALBUM I HEARD THIS YEAR:

Drive-By Truckers, American Band. And it wasn’t even close. I’ve probably listened to it a hundred times. Catchy, sad, and raucous by turns, and full of uncomfortable truths. 

Runners up - TILES, Pretending to Run, Marillion, F.E.A.R., Van Der Graaf Generator, Do Not Disturb 

(What? I like progressive rock, OK?)

BEST BOOKS I READ THIS YEAR: Summerlong, by Peter S. Beagle - It broke my heart halfway through a transatlantic flight.

The Ballad of Black Tom, by Victor LaValle - A thoughtful reinvention of Lovecraft that tackles one of the Old Gentleman’s key issues head-on in a way that makes sense within his own mythos, and the first sensible answer to the question “Why would anyone be a Cthulhu cultist, anyway”. Brilliant.

Hammers on Bone, by Cassandra Khaw - Another take on Lovecraftiana, also wholly original but also flat-out fun. 

BEST VIDEO GAME I PLAYED THIS YEAR

There’s a great documentary in the story of what’s happened to Journey. How a band at the end of its rope found a new lead singer in the  most unlikely of places (Youtube and halfway around the world), how their joining together was salvation for both parties, what the impact of a Filipino lead singer fronting a band as A)well known and B)Cool-Whip-Fluff-And-Mayo-On-Wonder-Bread white as Journey was and how it rippled out beyond singalong of “Wheel In The Sky”. On the pressures of replacing, even at several steps removed, a singer as iconic and distinctive as Steve Perry. 

That movie and those themes pop up intermittently in Don’t Stop Believin’: Everyman’s Journey, but most of the time it’s just a feel good story. The band found new singer Arnel Pineda on YouTube and he was great! He met up with the band and he was great! They go out on tour and he’s great! He’s got a cold and toughs through it, and that’s great! It’s heartwarming and pleasant and it’s great to see the much older, much more jaded members of the band (some of whom come across as having smoked so much weed they’re not sure what planet they’re on) cheering Pineda on and encouraging him. 

Mixed in with that is footage of Pineda talking about his personal story, and it’s a rough one. A homeless street kid, a former addict - it all gets laid out, and it’s the most interesting thing in the movie. Pineda himself is a powerhouse onstage, but comes across as shy and thoughtful and a little disbelieving of his own good fortune off it. But too quickly the movie goes back to more positive feedback - Journey is not known for its sad, introspective songs, after all - and the beat goes on.

And then in the middle, there’s one moment of pure magic. Before a show in LA, Pineda runs into Jason Scheff backstage. Scheff introduces himself as “the guy who replaced Peter Cetera in Chicago” and offers words of encouragement, as one of the few who could really understand what exactly Pineda’s gotten himself into. Pineda, for his part, immediately fanboys all over the place, and the moment ends with the two of them singing together. It’s perfect.

On the whole, the film is enjoyable and pleasant, and it’s nice to see a good guy - and Pineda comes across as one - get a win. There’s just so many hints of what else the movie could have been, and wasn’t, that it’s harder to enjoy strictly on its own merits than perhaps it should be.

Beware of Mr. Baker, on the other hand, is a very good documentary about a fairly horrible human being. Ginger Baker is undoubtedly one of the great drummers of all time, having backstopped Cream and Blind Faith and just generally been a goggle-eyed, smack-shooting polyrhythmic demon behind the kit. His playing, frankly, is astonishing; those who know Cream or Blind Faith as something something Clapton are missing something magical. 

And then there’s Ginger Baker the man, and the documentary - which opens with Baker slamming the documentarian in the nose with a cane - pulls no punches, giving equal time to the music on one side and ex-wives, ex-bandmates and Baker’s children on the other. Baker’s a terror, blowing through money, torching bridges on multiple continents, obsessing over polo and always running away. At one point his son Kofi, himself a drummer of no small talent, suggests that it would have been better if Baker had never had kids, a statement of brutal bluntness. 

My favorite book is The Halloween Tree, by Ray Bradbury.

It’s a kids’ book - a boys’ book, really, but that’s OK because I first read it as a small boy, exiled to my room with chicken pox in the third grade and just newly introduced to the idea of “fiction”, and I so, so wanted to be away from that room and tumbling through time with Bradbury’s protagonists, learning the secrets of our long history grappling with death until the final glorious, awful revelation. 

I was terrified of Halloween in those days. Scared of monsters, scared of the dark. Scared of scary stories and of the possibility of ice ages coming back and the bully one year older than me and three times my size, but mostly scared of Halloween because it was a safer thing to be afraid of. This book offered me a way to face that fear, through the story and Bradbury’s mellifluous prose and the shuddery, spidery, perfect art of Joseph Mugnaini. And through facing that fear, and coming to terms with it, and eventually understanding it, I started down the road that led me to writing ghost stories and Vampire sourcebooks and God knows what else.

A lot of people say one book or another changed their life. I know this one changed mine. 

I’ll spoil the end here, because if you haven’t read it by now and you’re reading this post, you’re probably never going to, and if you have read it you know what I’m talking about. At the very end, the four children who have chased their friend Pipkin throughout the ages are told that they’ve been chasing his ghost. That to bring him back to health, they’re each going to have to sacrifice one year off their lives. And Mr. Carapace Clavicle Moundshroud, the gaunt and game guide to the centuries, pulls no punches. He tells them that this is not something to be blithely done, that the decision will feel very different when the bill comes due. That it may not seem much give up 84 for 83, but 42 for 41 is a very different thing. He offers them this terrible, magnificent choice - their friend’s life for a little bit of theirs - and makes it with respect. They’ve come so far, after all, and risked so much. They’ve earned that respect from the man who just might be Death itself, and to his credit, he takes that very seriously.

And then as one, the kids make their choice. Because in that moment, there is nothing you wouldn’t do for your friends, your real friends, and do it unthinkingly because, well, they’re your friends, even if one of them always steals the last slice of pizza or another hates your favorite TV show or whatever else life-or-death insignificance comes between you at lesser moments. 

When I watched Stranger Things this year, I was struck by how much it echoed The Halloween Tree. It’s the story of a good friend, lost. Of the search to bring him back, and the refusal to give up. Of course, Stranger Things adds a few elements - grown-ups, for one; the magnificent Eleven for another - and subtracts the guiding figure of Moundshroud. But the echoes are strong and clear, and I enjoyed Stranger Things that much more because I could hear them.

I still have that copy of The Halloween Tree. It’s beaten up and the dust jacket has been through the wars, but it’s still there in a place of honor on my shelf. I own several other copies - one acquired in a used bookstore, one a gift from a friend, and several copies kept on hand to serve as gifts or loaners. But the original, the first one, that one never leaves.

And it will never leave me.

Like this thing, which is a project for Earplay where I’m getting to collaborate a little with Dave Grossman, which I am incredibly happy about. And then there’s this anthology that just came out, wherein I got to write a little bit about vampires again. 

And did I mention this anthology, where I got to write about the Devil’s Tramping Ground? 

By the way, if you’re playing The Division, the folks on the team have busted their butts to get the 1.4 patch out there and they did an amazing job. Check it out. 

For those who are unaware, I occasionally write book reviews, and have done so for years. I do this for a couple of reasons. One, it’s nice having small, discrete writing projects that I can switch to when I’m stuck on a big one. Two, the stuff I get asked to review is often not stuff that I would pick up on my own, forcing me to diversify my reading tastes outside of sabermetric baseball analyses, Civil War tactical studies and eyewitness reports of sasquatch encounters.

I like to think I’m a pretty decent reviewer. I have my blind spots and tics, as everyone does, but I always try to find what’s interesting in a book, and to approach a review as a way of suggesting who might or might not enjoy it. And even if I dislike something, I always try to keep it about the flaws of the text, as opposed to attacking the writer. 

Which is a long-winded way of saying that I think my review writing is solid stuff, and useful, and hopefully amusing. I’ve even had a few instances where I got notes from authors whose work I reviewed expressing appreciation that I “got it”, whatever it might have been, and as someone who’s been on the other side of that equation I felt that was high praise. But I don’t ever expect to get any recognition as a reviewer; the Pauline Kael of books I’m not and will never be. I just try to make sure that at least the writing’s good, and the reader comes away from one of my bits with a better idea of whether or not a particular book might be to their liking.

But every so often, I find myself singing way above my range on one of thes things. It’s rare. It takes a combination of something really meaty to review and being in just the right space to cut loose. 

I’d like to think the review that just got posted of Peter S. Beagle’s Summerlong is one of those moments. Maybe some of the best writing I’ve done in ages. I’m not sure how that makes me feel, but here you go anyway. 

I think I’ve finally got this Trump thing figured out. Consider:

He’s a rich kid whose dad bought him out of trouble.

He breaks the law. A lot.

He’s a rich businessman who routinely stiffs small businesses and drives them out of business.

He has secret documents that, if they ever got out, could destroy him.

He hangs around with bad dudes, including an ex-KGB agent, mobsters, and Nazis. 

His plans are convoluted and nonsensical, and won’t actually work in the real world. 

He does mean things to small children.

He lies all the time.

He’s great at inciting others to go fight, but can’t take a punch himself.

Finally saw Star Trek: Beyond last night and it is a total mess. It’s a very pretty mess, with some absolutely stunning cinematography and beautiful images, but it was not what I would call a coherent cinematic experience.

And yet, it was a fun mess, and for one reason: 

The movie was on the side of its characters. Compare that to Star Trek Into 9/11 Conspiracy Theory, and the difference is immediately apparent. Into Darkness was on nobody’s side but the scriptwriter’s. He had a point to make, come hell or high water, and the characters’ histories, motivations, personalities, etc. be damned. The characters, such as they existed, were there to get us to strap ourselves into the crazy train of a storyline, and their presence as themselves was ultimately incidental. There was nothing there that Chekhov or Sulu or Uhura or even Bones and Kirk and Spock did - except that one horrible revision of the emotional climax of Wrath of Khan - that demanded that those characters be the ones doing it at the time. 

With Beyond, however, for all its many flaws, the script - co-written by the guy who played Scotty - clearly love and supports the characters, and the characters are half of what makes Star Trek great. (The other half is the relentless insistence on flying straight into whatever weird energy field happens to be in front of the Enterprise at the time, consequences be damned). The script wanted each character to shine; it gave each one challenges, large and small, suited to their skills and personalities, and went out of its way to make them all look good. To make them all seem, for lack of a better word, loved.

So Chekhov got to be smart and good at his job. And Sulu got to be smart and good at his job, and showed a facility for command - a foreshadow of his alternate universe career path - when the time came. Scotty actually engineered stuff and made it go, and new character Taylah got depicted as smart and capable and interesting right off the bat. Bones did some actual clever doctoring, and Uhura kicked ass and figured out all the stuff a comms officer should figure out that no one else could or should. And Kirk felt like Kirk and Spock felt like Spock (especially since most of his  and Uhura’s screen time wasn’t devoted to awkward romantic bickering), and most of all the bond between Kirk and Spock and Bones felt natural and worthy of celebration. 

And so for that I will forgive the nonsensical plot, and the fact that half the fight scenes were shot in such murky darkness they looked like the end of Rollerball, and the fact that the bad guy somehow managed to launch roughly forty gazillion ships from an outpost that looked like it housed maybe a couple of hundred people max, and the weird “oh crap we have two minutes at the end of the movie to explain all the crap that doesn’t make sense” infodump about the bad guy (Idris Elba, who didn’t shout nearly as much as I was hoping for in a post-Pacific Rim performance) and, well, the hell with it.

In no particular order:

Had a mini-class reunion with many old friends and colleagues from the White Wolf days, many of whom I had not seen in going on 17 years. (No, I’m not going to list names, because I always accidentally leave someone out and I feel like a jerk. But there were a lot of them).

Survived largely on chewy oatmeal raisin cookies from my hotel’s “pantry”.

Met and fanboyed all over the charming and endlessly gracious Robin Hobb

Did a whole bunch of well-attended panels on video game writing and finally got to meet & share panel space with the ridiculously smart Christine Thompson. This was the first year for video game writing material at the Writers’ Symposium, run by the estimable Marc Tassin, and the initial responses (apart from one “IDHAQMOACR” guy) seemed very positive.

Had the unexpected pleasaure of running into my old editor from WotC, Susan Morris, and chatting with her extensively. 

Reunited 3/4 of the Bastard Sons of Mort Castle. Don’t ask.

Learned how to play Storium as a live-fire exercise on-stage for a good cause. The best roleplaying games are /always/ about drinking and what lurks underneath the loo, apparently.

Stepped outside the con for a couple of hours to finally meet esteemed sportswriter and long-time online buddy Will Carroll, and was shown the delights of the cidery on Fountain Square while we talked music, baseball, books, True Detective and more.

Showed off the card layout for Squatches and Scotches

Talked to many, many Wraith fans and gave away A) a brand new Wraith 1st t-shirt and B) a ton of original Wraith art by Leif Jones.

Had a lovely if too brief chat with Keith Law, who was attending his first GenCon.

Split a reading slot with the legendary Jo Walton and listen to her read a fair bit of her current work-in-progress.

Got to rekindle the old tradition of going out for a steak dinner with Lucien Soulban, one of my oldest and dearest friends in the industry.

Was suckered into moderating multiple panels by Jay Posey. I will not forget this, Posey. You have been warned.

Made the acquaintance of author Richard White entirely by accident, as he was telling stories about his wild youth in Columbia, MO as I walked into the writers’ green room.

Had some really, really, really good bourbon.

Drove Will Hindmarch back to his lodgings at 2 AM one night, which meant getting to chat with Will Hindmarch.

Admired Ken Hite’s extensive selection of Hawai’ian shirts.

Did not actually get to play any games apart from Storium.

Argued strenuously on a Tolkien media panel that the best way to get anywhere in Middle-Earth is NOT to find the tallest geographic feature available and walk over it single file.

Picked up a six-pack of Mothman beer on the way home. Like you do.

Stopped to see the mysterious Leo Petroglyphs along the way. Like you also do.

A couple of years ago, for reasons involving health, norovirus, serious worries about that fact that my taste buds were no longer function, and the fact that I had built a Fortress of Solitude out of Coke Zero cans on my desk, I gave up both caffeine and soda. Despite living in the south, this has largely not been a problem, except at those moments when I grab lunch at Bojangles and the beverage options are A)sweet tea B)sweet tea and C)damnit, I said sweet tea.

Yesterday, during my mad dash home from Indianapolis, I feel off the wagon. For a series of long and mostly stupid reasons, I ended up having to grab a Coke with dinner. My reactions were as follows: First sip: OH MY GOD THIS IS GLORIOUS. I HAVE MISSED THIS SO MUCH. Second sip: Wow, that’s really...kind of sweet, isn’t it? Third sip: Why is my tongue numb? Fourth sip: I can literally feel my teeth dissolving. Fifth sip: I can now locate my pancreas because that’s where all the screaming and stabbing pain is coming from. Sixth sip: I AM NOW READY TO RUN ALL THE WAY BACK TO NORTH CAROLINA WHEEEE.

When I was growing up, I was not planning on becoming a writer. I wanted to be, depending on whether it was an even or an odd day of the week, either a paleontologist or a geologist. That fell by the wayside a long, long time ago, but with 50 appearing on the distant, distant horizon, I feel entitled to the occasional “what if”.

Take, for example, a drive like today’s run from Durham to Indy, which took me through all sorts of geological fun stuff in NC, Virginia, West Virginia, and Ohio. (Sorry, Indiana, it was dark when I got to you). And I did a little rubbernecking at various exposed strata and formations, and reminisced a little bit about an insane fossil-collecting trip I took in summer camp many years ago where we where whanging on the fossiliferous Oriskany Sandstone formation with rock hammers during a rainstorm, and, well, yeah. 

I asked myself the question: “What would be different if I had become a geologist?”

So tomorrow I load up the car and head to Indianapolis, a reasonably lengthy drive that, with my usual bad luck, will park me at my hotel some time far too late in the evening. It would, generally speaking, have been much easier, if more expensive, to fly in. It also would have been much less time consuming. 

On the other hand, I am sick unto death of airports. Have spent a ton of time in them this year, going to spend a ton more. I am fairly certain that nobody is going to be kicking my back seat as I drive; I’m also fairly certain the person sitting in front of me won’t recline into my sternum because there is no person in front of me. I’m looking forward to some lovely scenery and to being able to stop, albeit briefly, in Point Pleasant, home of all things Mothman. Driving means I don’t have to worry about running out of room in a suitcase in case I find something worth buying - or several somethings. It lets me bring a couple of interesting surprises for people in what will hopefully be safe travel conditions. And most of all, I think it might be nice to get a few uninterrupted hours of being alone with my thoughts without a computer in front of me. It’s been kind of a bad year for quality introspection time, so I’ll cheerfully grab it where and when I can.

The last time I went to GenCon:

Bill Clinton was President.

The show was in Milwaukee

I still needed a safe house

I accepted an invitation to be the Gaming Guest of Honor at a new convention in St. Louis called “Gateway”. At that convention, I danced with Laurell K. Hamilton, drank a perfectly unassuming WotC employee into giggling oblivion, and met the woman who, six years later, I would marry. (She had no idea who I was, nor was she familiar with White Wolf and its oeuvre)

A WWGS warehouse employee backed over a car in the hotel parking lot with our truck. Fortunately, I believe the statute of limitations has expired on that one.

I ran a Wraith game on the brightly lit, very loud floor of the Omni. Roughly 25 people showed up for 5 slots. We made it work anyway.

All the Klingons seemingly ended up at the Hooters downstairs from the mall.

Our hotel concierge explained to me that GenCon was his favorite convention of the year because we apparently tipped well, didn’t destroy the furniture, didn’t get drunk to the point where we threw up all over the furniture, and did not purchase, ahem, professional companionship for the evenings. He then started going into great detail as to what happened the last time there was a fire chiefs’ convention in town, and, well, yeah. We’ll leave it at that.

SENZAR was a thing. Not a good thing. But a thing. 

Fast forward 18 or so years, and I’m going again. I’m looking forward to it, in part because there’s still plenty of old friends I’ll be seeing there, and in part because I have spent much of the last couple of decades gently absenting myself from the tabletop RPG industry, and, with Wraith 20 clutched in my arms, here I go throwing myself into the middle of it. No shallow end for me, no sirree. Wednesday morning I load up the car and roll out vaguely northwest. My route takes me through Pt. Pleasant, West Virginia; if I don’t make it, you’ll know the Mothman got me. 

So.

If you’re going, come say hi. I’ll mostly be at the writers’ symposium, mostly talking about video games.

If you’re a Wraith fan, definitely come say hi. I might have a couple of interesting surprises with me. 

Today was my dad’s birthday. We went out for dinner - Chinese food, of course, because every family has its traditions - with my sister and her kids, who were very brave in the face of dim sum (or to put it in Star Trek terms, Chinese Food But Not As They Know It). After dinner, I took Dad back to his house and did a chore or two for him, and then we sat down to talk. Pretty much all our dinners out end that way these days: back to the house and talk. We didn’t used to do this before Mom passed away, but now, well, things are different, in all sorts of ways.

Tonight, we talked about the stuff we usually talk about. Books by his favorite authors (in no particular order, Taylor Anderson, Raymond Feist, L.E. Modest, David Baldacci, et alia). He mentioned he’d chewed through the latest Destroyermen book in between two chapters of the giant fantasy dagwood he’s reading.We talked about the plants on the porch, and other suitably mundane things. And in between all that, he told a few stories about things he’d done, little windows into his professional life and the history of the family as a whole. I learned about the family connection to the South American knitting machine trade. I learned how my Dad met his once-upon-a-time boss. I learned about the time Dad convinced my uncle, who later went on to become a physicist, that the moon was in fact made of green cheese. Stories I’d never heard before, tucked in with debate over where to stick the cat’s litterbox.

And then we hauled out the bottle of scotch I’d given Dad, or more accurately the bottle with a little scotch in it. It was my favorite bottle, one with a long story behind it, and I’d given it to Dad when Mom passed away “for when he might want it”, whatever that meant. I’m still, honestly, not quite sure. Tonight, I picked it up, and he asked if I was thinking of breaking it out. I said it seemed like an appropriate occasion, and he said he felt the same way. So tiny pours of scotch went into huge water glasses - needs must when the devil drives, and we toasted his birthday with a 29 year old scotch from a distillery that had gone under nearly four decades ago.

He slammed his, then coughed, then asked me for some water.