Check out my new “Lost” article, “The 411 on ‘316,’ or What Was Lost is Found Again.”

Swing on over to BIFF BAM POP! and check out my review of Joel A. Sutherland’s debut novel, Frozen Blood.

It seems that the videos I’ve been posting lately are quite popular. My web stats have been higher than they’ve ever been since I started posting them, and I’ve received more than a few e-mails along the line of “Ian, you are such a media whore, why weren’t you doing this sooner?”

All I can say is I didn’t have a camera with a digital video feature until now. So don’t worry, I promise to make up for all the lost whoring.

For one, I thought it would fun to start posting video reviews of the movies I’ve been seeing lately. This seems like a no-brainer for me since I like talking about movies, but I don’t have the time to write actual reviews, not with so many other writing projects taking up my time. I like to think it adds another element to the website, something visitors can enjoy when there isn’t any writing news to report. I’ll try my best to be amusing.

This first review was recorded in a pub in Ottawa. Kat and I were visiting her sister and brother-in-law, and we decided to catch a flick. Strangely everyone was up for seeing Friday the 13th, which I wasn’t expecting since I never pegged Carrie and Glenn as horror fans. Anyway, we checked it out and were pleasantly surprised. My review is linked below, followed by a second video that Kat shot after we left the pub and went mini-putting.

Ian’s review of Friday the 13th

Ian gets a hole in one

Now that I’ve got video of me getting a hole in one and another of me getting a strike in bowling, I figure I’m now required to get video of my dominating all of the pseudo-sports. I’ll let you now how it goes.

Kathryn also shot a video of me singing a song I came up with just before the movie. I have this strange skill of being able to come with alternative lyrics to virtually any song on the spur of the moment. Said lyrics are often sexual (I’m known for a particularly dirty version of “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch”), but every now and then my creativity takes me outside the realms of smut. This was a ballad about the history of Jason Voorhees sung to Blondie’s “Dreaming.” Will it ever see the light of YouTube? I’m thinking about it…

In writing news (yes, I do post some from time to time), I received a nice rejection from The Fiddlehead. I can’t complain when the editor says, “I thought this was a riot, the dialogue in particular.” Unfortunately they didn’t feel the piece was right for them, which is always a problem with the lit mags. Some will take humourous stories. some won’t.

Also, I stumbled upon a tentative ToC for Best New Tales of the Apocalypse, featuring a reprint of my apocalyptic Peterborough story “Everything Gets Bigger After Nuclear War.” It will be published by Permuted Press sometime later this year.

Other lit links:

Stephen King on J.K. Rowling and Stephenie Meyer

What did they mean, ‘delve deeper’? (The Realities of Being Published)

Why is everyone picking on us? (Are publishers responsible for Canadians’ lack of awareness of their home-grown authors?)

James Van Pelt on Art and Competitiveness

Richard Chizmar on the future of Cemetery Dance Publications

Phew. I think that catches me up. Although I’m due for a roundup of new Weird Desk links. I’ll get to those in a day or two.

If this isn’t enough to keep you busy until then, why not try out Ground Zero. It’s the best way to find out the thermal damage caused by a nuclear explosion to some of your favourite cities. Finally, a fun use for Google Maps.

• Currently reading: Under My Roof, by Nick Mamatas

I was recently invited to submit an article to the pop culture blog BIFF BAM POP!, which covers movies, tv, video and comics. My subject was one on which I’m fairly knowledgeable, the TV show “Lost.”

Apparently they liked the piece enough because they’ve made me their official “Lost” go-to guy. Entertainment Weekly has Doc Jensen, E! has Kristin Dos Santos, and BIFF BAM POP! has me. I am so in their league. I’ll also be writing book reviews.

I’m not sure how often my “Lost” articles will appear, but they will probably be posted to coincide with the airing of new episodes, as this first piece was posted this morning to coincide with tonight’s episode, “316.” My article is titled “Is Lost Still Lost?” and deals with the fundamentals of the show and whether it has “lost” something by moving at least part of the action off the island.

I hope you dig the piece, and if you do, be sure to check out the rest of the site as there’s some really great stuff there.

Some new videos:

Bowling Part 1 – “You can’t trust machines”

Bowling Part 2 – Ian makes the strike

Also, The Barking Dog thought that “Psong” in Murky Depths #7 was overshadowed by some of the other stories, but was still “readable.” Beats being unreadable, I guess. I’ll take it!

• Currently reading: World War Z, by Max Brooks

I’ve seen this meme around lately, and I was planning on skipping it since I couldn’t think of even ten things interesting about myself much less twenty-five, but my wife insisted. She did it herself and said if I didn’t follow suit she’d kick my ass or make me unload the dishwasher, something like that. She said she didn’t think she had twenty-five things, either, but once she got going it was easy and she ended up having to cut her list back. I told her it’s probably because she thinks so highly of herself, then she threatened to kick my ass again, and now here I am.

1. I’m ambidextrous. I write with my left hand by default, and as a result I’m a bit out of practice with the right, but in high school I would write with both hands quite often to the freakish amusement of my peers. “Write with your left hand. Now with your right. Wow. Okay, now bite the head off this chicken.”

2. I have a double crown. More freaky stuff that probably would have gotten me burned as a witch a few hundred years ago. I always have to mention it to the person cutting my hair because if they screw up it looks like I have a bald spot. I can’t complain since it beats having an actual bald spot, but it’s still annoying.

3. When I was thirteen years old I had a comic strip in my local paper, the Whitby Free Press. The strip came out just as I was starting high school and I got ranked like you wouldn’t believe. In retrospect it’s a nice little credit to put on my publishing resume, but at the time it was the bane of my existence. The strip was called Styx & Stone and it was about a snake and his pet rock. The kids at school nicknamed me Styx, after the snake, and because I was skinny. (An amusing aside regarding the linked article: I didn’t supply most of those quotes. The paper made them up. Most clearly evidenced by the fact that “I” refer to the strip’s characters as “Snake” and “Rock,” instead of by their actual names. And I would never have said that books work only with reality. Ahh, the media.)

4. I developed an early infatuation with redheads when I was a kid collecting comics. My first crush was Jean Grey of the X-Men. Even when she turned into the evil Dark Phoenix, I just thought it made her sexier. In typical fashion, I ended up marrying a blonde, but she’s way hotter than Dark Phoenix, and without the evil (most of the time, anyway).

5. Although I listen to pretty much every kind of music, my favourite is doo-wop. Lesley Gore, Linda Scott, Diane Renay, Connie Stevens, Brenda Lee. It makes me feel warm and happy. Sometimes I even dance. Okay, most of the time.

6. Not only do I talk to my cat, but I also talk for him. Among my family and my wife’s family, I am known for “the cat voice.” It’s kind of low, kind of husky, and very sophisticated.

7. In the six years or so I’ve known my wife Kathryn, I’ve christened her with something in the neighbourhood of 200 nicknames. She abhors 199 of them.

8. I hate spiders. More than anything. It disturbs me greatly to know that there are spiders that actually feed on birds. WTF?

9. My favourite architectural structure is the lighthouse. They figure prominently in my fiction. My wife also loves lighthouses. One more sign that we were meant to be together forever. I asked her to marry me at the lighthouse in Cape Spear, Newfoundland, the easternmost point in North America.

10. Although I like things that are banana-flavoured (banana cream pie, banana bread, etc.), I don’t like bananas themselves.

11. One of my all-time favourite TV shows is “Twin Peaks.” If it was a real place, I’d move there. Although I’d probably stay out of the woods.

12. The only time I was ever in the hospital for anything serious was when I was eleven years old and slit my knee open playing soccer. I got three stitches and accidentally kicked a nurse in the face when she was putting Novocain on my knee and hit a reflex.

13. The worst job I ever had was as a security guard. Most of the people I worked with were cop wannabes who had no problem putting themselves in life-threatening situations for eight dollars an hour.

14. I’m related to the late folk singer Stan Rogers. When people meet me for the first time, and they find out my family is from “out East,” they invariably ask if I’m related to Stan. Beats being asked if I’m related to Buck Rogers.

15. All through my twenties, I weighed an unwavering 130 pounds. It’s only been in the last few years that my metabolism has finally taken a breather and allowed me to put on some weight.

16. The first movie I ever saw was Alien.

17. I have a cat named Thor. When I met my wife Kathryn, she introduced me to one of her friends who has a cat named Loki. Even stranger: both of our parents had dogs named Molly. True love, baby.

18. I created a website on deleted movie scenes that was reviewed in Entertainment Weekly. They gave it a B+.

19. My first foray into publishing was a short story called “Black Iron Shadows.” It was published in a small ‘zine created by two friends, Melanie and Todd. The ‘zine was called imelod, and although most people figured the title came from a combination of their names, they couldn’t figure out where the “I” came from. Now you know.

20. I hate cell phones and refuse to own one. Kat and I have one that we used for emergencies, but we never leave it turned on.

21. Although I’ve travelled all across Canada, I have never been outside of the country, except for one trip to Nova Scotia in which we cut through the upper portions of New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine. That’s it.

22. My favourite writer is Stephen King. Big surprise, eh? I’m sure some of my writer peeps will think I’m taking the safe way out by not naming someone more obscure and therefore more artsy, but King is the one who consistently impresses and entertains me, and he’s probably the one who influenced me the most and set me on the path to becoming a writer myself.

23. I love milkshakes. Favourite flavour: banana chocolate.

24. I am deathly afraid of the ocean. I’ll go in up to my knees or so, but I will never swim in it. I blame the scene in Jaws where Roy Scheider mentions that the majority of shark attacks occur in three feet of water about ten feet from shore.

25. My favourite season is autumn. I was born in autumn, I met Kathryn in autumn, and we got married in autumn. It’s the only season with an alias: fall. There are places on the planet where it’s like winter all the time, and spring, and summer, but there is no place where it’s autumn all the time. If such a place existed, I would be living there.

If you haven’t already noticed, I’ve uploaded some new images into the random splash page generator. So feel free to refresh to your heart’s content.

I also updated the photoblog with an image from tonight’s outing to the local bowlarama.

Yes, that’s what we do in Peterborough.

When there isn’t a tractor pull or any cows to tip.

• Currently reading: Mr. Majestyk, by Elmore Leonard

Visitors to my website at ian-rogers.com or ianrogers.ca may have noticed a number of changes over the past few days.

As a webhead by trade, I tend to dicker with the design of my site on a fairly regular basis. My problem is that I’m never completely satisfied with it. One of my long-running issues is with my home page. Although it has been standard practice in the past to have some sort of splash page or graphic to welcome people to the website, most people these days, writers especially, are cutting to the chase and making their blogs the first page of their website. Which is fine, but I’ve never been completely comfortable throwing my visitors right into the fray. Most of the people coming to my website already know I’m a writer, but I still like having that buffer.

Maybe it’s because I like graphic design, maybe it’s because I like including a nod to my photography, but I’ve always had a splash page (which is a sort of pre-home page graphic). It’s changed quite a bit in the six-plus years I’ve had this site, but it’s always been there, and I’ve always gotten compliments on it.

The problem with having a splash page is that it requires visitors to make an additional mouse-click to get to the actual content, be it my writing journal, my bibliography, etc. Some web purists will tell you that this is a no-no, that web surfers have the attention span of grasshoppers, and they need their content now now now! I agree with this in principle, but again, I’ve never felt comfortable with adopting this method for my own website.

I’ve tried to compromise. For the past few years my home page has been a photo/news combination that I’ve been mostly happy with. The problem is that I’m always trying to make everything fit without making the page look too busy. The journal, which I think of as the heart of my website, is supposed to be the busy section. The home page is supposed to be the warm welcome. The lull before I swamp you with information on acceptances, coming releases, and what Thor ate for dinner last night. But over time I kept piling more and more information onto that page — stories available, online fiction, journal updates, etc. — and eventually it turned into something I didn’t like. A change was in order.

The objective of any website is to deliver information, preferably in an attractive, entertaining manner, without overloading the visitor. There’s a lot of information on my journal/blog, and I felt the best way to break it up was by sorting it into smaller cells of data. You see those boxes on the right side of the page? You may have noticed as you cruise the rest of the site that I only include three of them on the other pages. I did this because some of those pages, like the Bio and the Contact pages, don’t have very much copy on them, and having a bunch of sidebar boxes tends to make the page look lopsided. The journal page is the only section where I can post all of the boxes, which I do feel add a nice element to the site.

In fact, part of the recent site update included adding a second column of boxes to the journal page (as you’ve no doubt already noticed). I did this because I didn’t want visitors to have to scroll down to see them all. The main draw of this section is the latest journal entry, which is at the top of the page, so I had to make sure that all of the boxes, or at least the most important ones, were also at the top of the page. Scrolling down is necessary on every website, due to the amount of content, users with lower screen resolution, etc., but I like to make things as easy as possible for my visitors. I was somewhat concerned that having an extra column of boxes would make the site look too busy, but I’ve seen other websites, specifically those of writers like Cherie Priest and John Scalzi, who have managed to pull it off. (Having said that, I have eliminated a few boxes which I felt were unnecessary, like “Coming Soon,” which can be found under the “Forthcoming” section of the Bibliography, and “On the Web,” which I bumped over to the Contact page.)

The trade-off to the extra column of boxes was to create a home page that was purely graphical. To make it a bit more creative and flashy, I added a random image generator and populated it with a bunch of my photos (click back to the home page and refresh it to see). I have tried many different ways of posting news on this page, but folks, it simply doesn’t work. So I’ve decided to post nothing at all, to let my photography serve as an introduction to my writing, and I think it works. Actually I like it a lot. I’m not the only writer doing it this way, but seeing as how the majority are turning their blogs into their home pages, I do feel like this is a bit old school. But I like that, too.

Ultimately there is no one way to create a website. This is the one that works for me, and after many iterations, I think I’ve finally come up with something I can stick with.

For a while, anyway.

• Currently reading: The Gum Thief, by Douglas Coupland