I’m very happy to report that you can now pre-order Cemetery Dance #58, featuring my story “Inheritor.” The issue doesn’t actually ship for a couple of weeks, but it’s been a long time coming and I’m very excited to see it’s almost here. You can order directly from the CD website or wait until it actually hits the stands. Here’s the cover and table of contents.

Fiction

“This Old Man” by Charles L. Grant
“The Inner City” by Karen Heuler
“Inheritor” by Ian Rogers
“Bones” by JG Faherty
“Hell on the Homefront Too” by Stephen Graham Jones
“Excerpt From Scavenger by David Morrell
“Cut” by Dena M. Martin
“Darkness, as a Bride” by Sarah Monette
“In the Faith of Our Fathers” by Gerard Houarner

Non-Fiction

“Tributes to Charles L. Grant” by Various
“Charlie: A Writing Life” by Thomas L. McDonald
“A Conversation with T.E.D. Klein” by Rick Kleffel
“A Conversation with Stephen Graham Jones” by Rick Keeney
“A Conversation with David Morrell” by Steve Vernon
“A Conversation with Robert Masello” by Michael Burstein

The Usual Suspects

“Words From The Editors” by Robert Morrish & Richard Chizmar
“The Mothers And Fathers Italian Association” by Thomas F. Monteleone
“Stephen King News: From The Dead Zone” by Bev Vincent
“Mediadrome” by Michael Marano
“Collecting Modern Horror” by John Pelan
“Where Are They Now featuring Daniel Rhodes” by Rick Kleffel
“CD Reviews” by Various

I’m very excited to be appearing alongside some authors whose work I greatly admire, like David Morrell and Sarah Monette. Also, this issue is a tribute to Charles L. Grant, one of my favourite horror writers and a major influence on my own work, who died in 2006.

This is certainly one of my biggest publishing events to date, so I hope you’ll all pick up a copy.

Dead Letter Press has posted a big production update on their forthcoming collection Bound for Evil. 66 stories. Over 333,000 words of fiction. Yowza!

The book has just gone to the printer for an early March release.

• Currently reading: Duma Key, by Stephen King

I sent off submission #301 last night, on account of a rejection I received from On Spec, one of few Canadian genre markets out there, and one I’ve been trying to crack for some time.

Oh well, I guess it could be worse. My town’s water supply could have been contaminated by a meteorite.

I see a short story here…

Just sent off my 300th submission, a story called “Gone” to a mag called Doorways, a new market for me.

300 stories sent out over five years, most of which over the last two. Not too shabby. Now if I can just bump up the number of acceptances.

Tonight is bachelor’s night. Kathryn, her older sister, and her cousin went out to see 27 Dresses, leaving me to amuse and fend for myself. So I made scrambled egg sandwiches, and now I’m off to watch Muriel’s Wedding.

Well, I didn’t say it was a traditional bachelor’s night.

Today on my lunch break I went to the post office to mail off a story. While I was getting out of my car, fishing change out of the coin-holder, I happened to notice an elderly woman waiting at the curb, in front of what I presumed was her car. I got out, put some money in the meter, and she smiled at me and said, “Excuse me, young man, might I trouble you to assist me.”

She wanted me to help her over the snow bank that prevented her from getting to her car. I of course helped her, then, while I went into the post office, reflected on how long it’s been since I did a simple good deed for someone like that. It’s been awhile anyway. Felt pretty good. I didn’t rescue a baby from a burning building or anything, but I still had a pretty big smile on my face.

The story I dropped off was “Swing,” which I sent to The Dalhousie Review in Nova Scotia.

While I was out, I also picked up the new Stephen King novel, Duma Key. It’s next on my reading pile after I finish Brian Keene’s Terminal, which I’m enjoying quite a bit.

On my blog rounds I noticed that Erik Smetana, a talented writer and one of my Horror Library peeps, said some nice things about me on his new website. He must have gotten that cheque in the mail. Thanks, Erik!

Speaking of HL, I heard that Horror Library, Volume 2 has made the preliminary ballot for this year’s Stoker Awards. There’s no guarantee it’ll make the final ballot, but it’s very exciting news just the same. Congrats to everyone else in the anthology. It was certainly one of my publishing highlights of last year.

I’ve never been one to propagate celebrity gossip, but I found myself strangely upset at the news Heath Ledger died yesterday. I’ve only seen a few of his movies, but I thought he was a decent actor, and he did a good job of staying out of the idiot-media spotlight. So I was a bit surprised to see how many blog entries were devoted to Ledger’s death, especially those who were angry at the amount of coverage it received on CNN, Fox, and the various other U.S. news organs. All I can say is, um, it’s America, folks, are you surprised?

The part that really bothered me are the reasons some people listed for why Ledger’s death shouldn’t be receiving such coverage. Here are the ones I read so far:

1) He played a homosexual in a movie.

God forbid we should lament the death of a man who wasn’t actually gay, but only played one in a movie! Imagine the uproar if he actually was gay! Oooh!!!

2) He wasn’t a soldier fighting in Iraq.

Hey, I’m against the war, but I support the troops. It’s not even my friggin’ country, and I support the troops. We have a bunch of our own in Afghanistan right now working on a difficult mission, so us Canadians can sort of relate. It’s important news when any of them are injured or killed, but at the same time there are some people who take this annoyingly righteous attitude whenever any news story comes along that bumps the war from the top of the headlines. How can you say *insert news story* is more important that our brave children fighting in Iraq/Afghanistan?! The truth, of course, is that no one is saying Ledger’s death, of any other news story, is more important than anything else. I’m not going to get into the pissing contest about whose death is more important because quite frankly, nobody wins those things, and all I’d probably end up doing is getting into a screaming match with some idiot I don’t even know. Let’s just agree that every death is tragic, okay?

3) He wasn’t American.

I don’t think anyone covers the celebrity gossip with as much fervour as the U.S. media, which makes it kind of ironic when fellow Americans blast the media – their media – for how much they cover the death of a celebrity compared to the death of an important person, like the aforementioned soldiers in Iraq. That’s fine, it’s amusing to watch both sides go at it, but the part that bothers me is that I’ve actually read on more than one blog that they shouldn’t be covering Ledger’s death as much as they have because he was an Australian, not an American. One blogger said he understood the need to plaster Anna Nicole Smith’s death all over the news and web, but why were they paying attention to an Aussie like ledger? He’s, like, not even from our country?

Yeah, and he never fought in a war, either, eh?

Everyone’s entitled to their own feelings, of course, but I have to say some of these comments made me pretty ill. Everyone seems to want to turn it into an issue about media, or politics, or the war in Iraq – anything but what it really is, the death of a young man who seemed to have a bright future ahead of him.

I understand that celebrity news of any kind isn’t really that important, and I’m certainly not going to go up against anyone when it comes to the brave soldiers fighting in Iraq, but at the same time I still don’t think the nastiness is called for. It’s the one thing I really don’t like about blogs. When things are good, it lets you see a side to people you might not normally see, but when it’s bad, it lets you see a side you wished you never saw.

Pretty sick, people.

(I should add that these comments were not made by anyone I link to or anyone on my LiveJournal friends list. I was sent to the blogs by a friend who linked them in an e-mail with the subject header: “GEEZ, MAYBE THEY SHOULD JUST EAT HIM”)

• Currently reading: Terminal, by Brian Keene

I heard on my drive home that Heath Ledger has died, possibly of a drug overdose. Very sad. Not that I knew the guy, but I thought he was a decent actor, and it looked like he was going to bring something new and interesting to the Joker in the forthcoming The Dark Knight. The worst part, though, is that he just had a baby girl not too long ago. Damn.

My wife and I had a date last night: dinner at Karma’s Café, then a movie, I Am Legend, which we both enjoyed, although there were few minor plot holes. Not enough to ruin our enjoyment of the film, but enough that we both noticed them when we discussed it afterwards.

When it comes to films adapted from books, I’m not one of those people who has a hissy whenever the movie deviates from the source material. I’ve heard so many people piss and moan about how The Lord of the Rings was ruined for them because some minor character wasn’t included in the film version, or because something wasn’t realized the way they always pictured it in the book. Boo-freakin-hoo.

I’m pretty good at treating the movie and the book as separate entities — especially since it’s usually a given that the book is better than the movie, anyway (not always, but usually).

All that aside, I was pretty happy with the changes made in this version, which was actually the third time Richard Matheson’s novel has been filmed. The setting of the novel is the west coast, whereas the movie takes place on the east coast, in New York City. In the novel, Neville spends his days hunting vampires, staking them, and tossing the bodies in a giant pit on the edge of town. In the movie, Neville drives around hunting deer, renting movies, sort of looking for the vampires — which aren’t really like vampires, but rather the “fast” zombies seen in films like 28 Days Later — but mostly spending his time working on a cure.

My only real problem with the film were the vamps themselves — or “dark seekers,” as they are called (blah, I didn’t like that name). I thought it was a bad choice to render them almost entirely in CG. It really didn’t make sense to me, seeing as how this was a big budget Will Smith movie. You’d think the studio could afford to either a) use traditional make-up effects on real actors, which would have looked a thousand times more real, or b) shelled out a bit more money and done the CG better, because I’ve seen humans rendered in CG that looked a lot more real than these vamps, which looked like something out of a video game. Even the vampire dogs. The undead mutts in Resident Evil looked a helluva lot more real than these pups, which were entirely CG. The only thing I can think of is that the studio had the money, but they didn’t have the time. So the CG had to be produced on the fly. Again, it’s not a huge issue, since you don’t see the vamps too much in the film, but I was expecting a bit more.

Next up: Cloverfield (which, incidentally, I keep calling Cloverleaf, and makes me wonder if the mystery monster isn’t some giant pissed-off tuna)

In other news, I finally used my new laserjet printer the other day. To print off a story that had just been rejected, no less. I had to buy a new printer last week because my old didn’t work with the new computer (thanks a pantload, Vista).

The really big news of the day is that I’m finally starting work on my first novel. I’m not going to give away too many details of what it’s about, not even what it’s called — not yet, anyway. First thing is to go through all the notes I’ve taken for the past year or two and get organized. Then I can truly begin.

I’ve got a pot of Tim Horton’s coffee and my Winamp stocked with about 80 Tragically Hip tunes. I’m ready to go.