Guns and sex change operations.

It’s been another one of those busy weeks, so I haven’t updated this journal in a while. I spent much of the week in meetings with my counterpart from Japan reviewing a project we collaborate on. We got a lot of work done, so that was good, but I felt drained at the end of the day, so my extracurricular work projects have been suffering a little.

My day at Storytellers Unplugged was Tuesday. We’re posting short fiction for October, so I put up The Illusion, one of the flash stories I submitted to the Wee Small Hours contest last year. Check it out if you have a moment. It’s about 900 words, so it won’t take much of your time.

I read Joe Hill’s Heart-Shaped Box last weekend, then almost immediately sat down to write a review of it for Cemetery Dance. It’s a first novel (a term I have come to realize usually means first published novel and not often first written novel), and it’s a doozie. It’s about an aging rock star with a fondness for young Goth women and collecting bizarre one-of-a-kind items. He’s pretty much cured of this hobby when he orders a ghost from an online auction and gets exactly what he ordered. There’s a whole lot more to the ghost than first meets the eye—it’s not just a random ghost, let me put it that way—and its arrival and the events that follow send Jude from one crisis to another. I thought I knew where Hill was going with the book, where it would end up. In one way I was right (geographically) but my predictions about what would happen when he got there were totally wrong. It was like that throughout the book—every time I thought I knew where he was going, he went somewhere else…and somewhere better. Put this one on your must-buy list for February 2007. I won’t have to remind you; the publisher’s promotional plans take up the entire back cover of the galley.

I’m currently reading The Black Dahlia, which so far (halfway through the book) is less about the eponymous victim than about one of the two officers on the case, but it’s an excellent novel. Early Ellroy, before he decided sentences could be no more than three words long. Next up: I received a galley of Dan Simmons’ The Terror, which is a very heavy book, literally. Simmons has never disappointed me, so I’m really looking forward to tackling this one.

Last night we got to go on the shooting range at the Citizens’ Police Academy. We had a choice between a Glock and a Sig Sauer 40 mm, so I picked…the one they gave me, because I don’t have a clue about guns. We had to load our own magazines (10 bullets, I discovered that they will go in the clip the wrong way). They gave us a silhouette target at 25 feet. I managed a score of 87, which was probably at the low end of the group’s scores. This is Texas, after all. The question “how many of you have shot before?” (unanimously answered—I have fired a rifle in the past) should have been “how many of you have shot someone before?” and some of the women, including a little old lady, scored in the high 90s. All I can say for my performance is that it was fun, and my silhouette man is no longer an eligible organ donor, since I took out his spleen, liver, stomach, pancreas and intestines. Probably his heart, too, though I can’t say that for sure. We got to take our targets home, so I’m thinking of posting mine on the lawn for Halloween!

I’ve been working on a total revamp of a story that I submitted to the MWA anthology the year before last, which I haven’t read since. I’m changing the gender of the protagonist and adding a supernatural element. At least, I think that’s what I’m doing. So far, all I’ve managed is the sex-change operation. Unlike my silhouette guy, this patient is probably going to live.