It's Canada Day. Everyone love Canada. And… go!

I don't love anyone on Valentines day. I can't East at Easter. Religious or civic, I have no holiday-specific muscle. For me every holiday is "Day-Off Day." Let's be honest. No one can dance for grandma every time she waves her gun. The corker is Victoria Day. What can we say about ole Vic? Hard on the eye, but good for a day off.

Anyway, there are real things to celebrate. It's beautiful. July rocks. I've been deep in projectitis, and so my garden has gone "English" the birds did most of my work, and a fine job too.

Michael Jackson took a moonwalk last month, along with Farrah Fawcett. That was a pause. I was in a studio with the cans on my head recording the series "Shelldon" when a tekkie burst in to announce that MJ had gone walkies. Later in the day at another studio, while I waited with the other actors for an audition, the overhead telly kept spilling repetitive patter about him. A couple of actors threw in two cents worth of poopiness. Man, I feel sick when someone honks at me in traffic. I can't imagine what it would have been like to live with all that opprobrium. Especially for a cat so literally thin-skinned. It's pretty clear he didn't come to earth to be like every other person. If I was him, I'd be pretty happy looking back over my gig. All that experience. He was the red violin. We're here for the whole orgy, right? The crap, the flowers. That I think about MJ at all, tells me he wasn't only himself, he was ours and as something of mine or of me, I wish it a sweet new existence.

Yeah, it doesn't take much to get me going all existential. A friend of mine, packed up the palace of bones last month as well. Local actress, Lorena Gale. I met her on a winter tour of a Lillian Hellman play in New Brunswick in the eighties. I will never forget how vehemently declared that she would never play a maid again. This chick had willpower. Years later we met again in Vancouver, and she had taken domain over her career. She was your ally on set. She wasn't afret of nobody nor nothin'. She rocked it. Bugger. Bugger. Bye, Miss. I know you wearing something you can dance in again.

If your TV gets a few channels, chances are that right now she is in there speaking.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorena_Gale

Life is short. Don't bother with stuff you don't want. Do your thing. Do it like mad until it's Day Off Day.

Time for: Whatcha Readin???

Well this last few months I have read literally hundreds of short stories, by all the authors who sent in work for Escape Clause. You can see all the selectees on the inkoinkartinc website. Some of the stories that stuck in my mind were not selected, but I will be sure to look out for stuff by Marshall Payne, Leslie Walker, Joe Dornich, Maura McHugh, and Guy Immega, to name a few off the top of my head.

Of the published variety, Recently I read Kristine Katharine Rusch's Duplicate Effort, the latest in her retrieval artist series. If I were a brazillionaire, I would start making these puppies into movies, prontississimo. I was absolutely blown away by M.T. Anderson's Octavian Nothing. But it is so harsh in places that I haven't cracked the second book and I don't know when I will. I have thrown Steven King books across the room for reasons of pet death, and never picked them up again. It's a miracle I got through Octavian Nothing.

It's trippy about violence in books and on screen. I think I have a fairly high tolerance. If there's humor involved certainly. I love Tarantino, I love Iain Banks, I love Alaistair Reynolds. But once there's violence done to animals, I'm out. I can't apologize for it. And then there's just… what… a certain brand of cruelty. I couldn't say exactly what crosses the line. But there sure as shallow actors is a line.

Also read Michael Muchamore's The Escape-- a prequel to his Cherub Series, about secret agents who are kids. This one sets up the beginnings of the Cherub organization. Set at the beginning of WW2, when the Germans are just invading France, it is my favorite so far in the whole collection. These books are loaded with violence.-- Go figure. I started the next one in the series, and it's a little harder to buy. There's a huge section set in New York City but the dialogue-- and he writes good dialogue normally, is not remotely American. It's a pet peeve. But also funny in the wrong way-- like the Brit company I saw performing Seven Brides for Seven Brothers in Toronto in the eighties. So wrong, it was right: But Liz-er! (Eliza)

Lastly I read Odin's Voice /Odin's Queen by the amazing Susan Price. (The Sterkarm Handshake) Had to order these books online as they don't seem to get distribution over here.

http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/p/susan-price/

Set in the future, a very believable future earth has relegitimized indentured servitude. (read in tandem with Octavian Nothing, it's not such a stretch) One girl born free and privileged suddenly becomes a slave when her father loses all his assets and commits suicide. That's the spoiler. Go buy them. Your brains will thank you.

Now I'm reading Douglas Coupland's, The Gum Thief. I keep wanting to phone Kevin, my best friend, and read him excerpts, (it excerpts really well) and I bet he would even tolerate it, because he's nice. I have to keep reminding myself that he can actually read all by himself.

Escape Clause has a new URL: http://www.inkoinkartinc.com/

Submissions are now closed. We'll be opening for subs again sometime in Oct. 2009. Thanks everyone who submitted. Clelie tells me there is some boffo material. Expect acceptances/rejections @ April 10. The names of the new contributors will be posted on the website once contracts are signed.


Probably because of the great wisdom I have been accruing, I am sprouting another wisdom tooth. This has meant three days in the embrace of Uncle Ibuprofen. Touched by an uncle.

That's just wrong, Kit. Wrong.

I don't take any pharma normally, and boy-howdy is it ever noticeable what it does to my dreams. Last night I dreamed that a bunch of kids and I found this stash of drugs in a boarded up room and we bashed all the bags in (brown powder) and had drug lords chasing us through our palatial estate. I ended up in Mum's rooms-- It's always hilarious to see what my parents are going to be in my dreams. They are never the same twice, and never bear resemblance to the people that spawned me, or those that raised me. This time mum was a stiff upper-class, surgically altered, tall, iron-grey matron. She told me to find her apartment, number 88 and sell it.

Out I went into the structure, a labyrinthian hive/luxury hotel hybrid. Corridors. Stairs. Hullo Freud, call for you on line one. Doors closing. Doors opening. In one room I passed, someone had just committed suicide. Down. Down. My parent's apartment, which they had been renting out, had been the home of a serial killer. He had hung his victims up like piñatas from the high studio ceiling, and now, at his estate sale, this Madame De Farge type character, (but arty and modern-- like a gallery owner,) had the victim's clothes hanging from the ceiling in the same positions their bodies had been. The clothes were on sale.

Everything must go!

I briefly contemplated buying a totally cute sweater. Then I had a really clear vision of the body that once occupied it.

Anyway, it leads me to wonder if horror writers take ibuprofen. Or Coca cola-- I've only had it a few times in my life, and it has the same insidious effect on my dreams. Writing as brain chemistry. I have heard it said that personality itself is nothing more than your bodies' chemical collection. Adyashanti, this Buddist guy, said that personalities are just the various perfumes that Oneness uses to notice its'disparate attributes. -- I paraphrase. Nuthell: Our precious individuality is nothing stronger than a smell.

Anyhow. This is no time for philosophy. It's time for WHATCHA READIN'!!!


THE NIGHT WATCH by Sergei Lukyanenko: Sauerkraut, vodka and magic.


Currently I'm reading this translation of a spec fic book called 'The Night Watch'-- originally in Russian. The cover totes it as "…Harry Potter in Gorky Park"--

I have no idea what syntactical anomalies dapple the Russian language, but 'The Night Watch' is a pretty purple read. There are sentences standing on their heads, pronouns so stranded you have to read back to guess which 'he' or 'she' is in play.

" …was the boss really telling the truth?
Could this really be aimed at me?
Probably he was…"

I doubt it would have gotten itself published first as-is in English. But it does grow on you. The protag is a passive hero, compared to North American tastes, and somehow saner because of it. The back of the book says "Now a hugely successful movie." You think: 'hunh? I missed a successful genre flik???' But, oh, happy day, I found the thing in the video store. It's dubbed into English, probably by the original Russian actors, judging by the accents. The special effects are great. The plot is a total salad. All three Nightwatch books seemed to have been tossed in there. When I broght it back to the video store, video store dude said: "I didn't get it." There you go. That's some deathless prose.

Then I bought a copy of Twlight-- the film that turned my neighbors eleven-year-old girl into a hormone bomb overnight.

The video store dude said: "It's good. But they got vampires wrong."

Stephanie Meyers, you have been told.

Stay tuned for more me-perfumed mindless drivel!

Wrestling impermanence

"Nothing lasts forever, just ask a Ford Pinto."-- Dexter, from the series "Dexter"

Yuh. Thar she blows. Another month flies off the calendar. I shouldn't count, should just let 'er rip, and turn my back on the clocks. But then I'd never get to work on time.

An ex-boyfriend of mine had this weird take on good things. He'd enjoy a cookie, for example, and never want a second one because it would cheapen the good time had by the comesting of the first. "You have a cookie, and then it's gone," he'd say. He'd often sit around with a Mona Lisa mug-on, and if you asked what he was thinking he'd go: "I'm having a moment of happiness." Neat guy.
I wonder if he ever left his mom's house.

Bloggity bloggity blog.

I finished Giles Blunt's "No Such Creature" last week and I would love to play all the parts in it. Of course they are all men. Pff. Anyway, I hope someone makes films out of his novels. Heath Lamberts-- that's who should play the old Falstaffian, Max, or Magnus http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ ... LAMBERTS05 --Of course,
Heath's dead, which is a pip. The young guy-- should be played by Mark Hildreth. http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0383926/ Mercifully Mark is still alive, but if he doesn’t play the role in the next year he'll be too old. Impermanence! Blast it!

I finished "The General," another of Robert Muchamore child-agent books. I like them a lot but I hope actual children don't read them. I feel a bit of a traitor on that score. I just don't like the idea of 11 year old ninja gun aficionados as anything but an abstract. A schoolteacher friend of mine who loves the Justine Larabalastier books, Magic's Child et al, http://www.amazon.ca/Magics-Child-Justi ... 1595140646 fervently prays that no teenage girls dip in and get all romanced by the idea of having a baby so young. Like that. On the flipside, I'm thinking, if you're not talking to your choir, no one hears you at all. People find their own.

Now I'm reading Cory Doctorow's 'Little Brother'. Love it.

Thanks to the Internet and the telly, everything you've ever declared is still crouching somewhere, ready to sproing back in your face. Take, for example, my self-published novel. Yesterday our ESCAPE CLAUSE website crashed, all manner of distressing drama erupted and I googled myself for the first time. I found my old self-published book, larger than life on Amazon.com, complete with a review that says:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great premise but SO many typos.
"Very clever premise and fantastic bones, but RIDDLED with typos that made it hard to get into at points, and confusing in a number of parts… Nevertheless, a fun read that I enjoyed a lot more than a number of better-edited books I've seen recently… "

Now, that's precisely the sort of publicity you don't need when you are putting out a new book as a publisher. So I thought I'd reprint the salient bit here. I'm sick like that. I remember Anderson, my poor editor, despairing as I wrote over her corrections. _Boy, she sure gets wired over picky-picky details-- who cares where the commas are?_
I'd go, "Hey Anderson, is anal retentive hyphenated? Hawhawhaw." (She didn't think I was cute at all.) This was pre-Helix me, when I still wrote in Germanic style compound words, liberally spackled with badly spaced dashes. Now, of course, I realize that it isn't just Anderson. It's empirical. It's endemic. It's the writer personality. Anyway, if you would like to join me in mocking me: a.) get in line and b.) buy the book. I will sign it--although that me, as we knew her, died. I make a point of dying every day in the interest of deniability.

http://www.amazon.com/Thirteenth-Fairy- ... 1553955463

If you're still worried about the taint of a former self-publisher, breathe easy. Clelie Rich is the brains of Escape Clause. I. Get. The donuts.

Right now, in my Tabitha pants, I am doing this Henson show with two actors I have known for 10 years, Kathleen Barr and Ian Corlett.-- Both of them have offspring in the show as well. Young Alexander Barr-Marr and young Claire and Philip Corlett, are these amazing wee copies of their parentals; confident, talented, competitive, already deeply eccentric little actorettes. In the future, when they can take it, I plan to mock them with my memories. It isn't fair is it--the circle of life.

SUBMISSIONS FOR ESCAPE CLAUSE

This is Ink Oink Art Inc.'s first annual speculative fiction anthology.

If you're looking for this, you probably know that the proper website is down today-- but here is most of the pertinent information.

Escape Clause:

Who we are: a predominantly, but not exclusively, Westcoast anthology of speculative stuff—fiction, poetry, and art. We’re published by Ink Oink Art Inc. and edited by Clélie Rich. Our splendiferous cover is by Thomas Anfield, and our interior illustrations by Lee Tockar. Our writers so far include award-winners Eileen Kernaghan, Linda De Meulemeester, and Rhea Rose. We’ve got space left, and we’re looking for new friends. Original unpublished work only, my lovelies.

What we want: short fiction (2000 to 5000) for which we will pay $200; and poems up to 50 lines in length, for which we will pay $50. We’re looking for character-driven pieces; for whimsical, absurdist, elegant, horrific, heart-felt, energetic, sad, scary pieces; for hard sf, sf with a bit of give in it, fantasy, and everything in between. Pick one or all of the above. If you’ve put your heart into it, we want to see it. Just respect the word limits.

How we want it: one story per submission please, or up to five poems; as an attachment only (not in the body of the message) in either Word or RTF, with your name/[PTY or FCT]/title in the heading, and send it winging through the ethers to escapeclauses@shaw.ca

Reading period: January 15th to February 28th 2009.

Who's publishing? Well, me. I'm Kit St. Germain, I'm a writer/actor and I live in Vancouver B.C. In 2002, I self-published a novel. It was a real learning curve. One thing it taught me was that I wasn't the genius I thought I was, and that I had to find out what the real world rules were-- because everyone else was playing by them. Shortly after the book, I joined the writing group, Helix,(nothing to do with the former online magazine) and I've been there since. Not to put too fine a point on it, the ladies beat me up but-good, and I know I'm a far better writer for it. As I told the folks at Strange Horizons, these girls are so pithy they are practically an orange. I know, I know, I should've been in a writer's group for five years and THEN written a novel. Yes, yes, we're all sooo clever five years from now.

So here we are, I got an insurance reserve cheque and I thought: _Any idiot can renovate their kitchen. It takes god's own egg-splattered numpties to make books._ So that's what we're(I'm) doing. The main reason I want to do this, is that I am surrounded by utterly extraordinary people-- writers, actors, artists, and there are so many more I have met in the ethers. I want to establish the mother of all geeky kitchen parties and bonk a cover on it. And then do the same thing next year, and the next.

Already signed on are award winners Eileen Kernaghan(Helix), and Linda DeMeulemeester(winner of the Silver Birch award for the Secret of Grim Hill) New to me is Ari Goelman whose submission got me fired up all over again. (although I must emphasize that I am not editing, or choosing or anything) The prolific C. June Wolfe, author of 'Finding Creatures,' joins us, as does the charm queen, the ineffable Rhea Rose whose sense of humor and a dash of daredevil shines through everything she does.


Clelie Rich is everyone's go-to person to find out how a thing is really done-- She's an expert's expert, and now she's ours.

Thomas Anfield(cover) is a loquacious(He paints for a living, but people should be paying just to hear him talk) much loved local performance artist and a painter -- take a look at his site http://www.thomasanfield.com/

Lee Tockar is a fellow actor(have a look at the IMDB Movie base) who spends his bench time with his nose pressed into his sketchbooks meticulously handwriting children's stories and illustrating them with a skill to rival Maurice Sendak's-- I've known him ten years. He lives in luminous cocoon of creative electricity. I can't wait for everyone to meet him. I'm so glad we could get him while we can still afford him!

We will add to this site as we go along-- we'll be posting bios and things so keep an eye peeled(ick) and welcome to Escape Clause.