Author: Tim Pratt

WhiskeyHorror: A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night

Published by Tim Pratt on May 13, 2015

We drank perfect manhattans with bourbon and sazeracs with rye, and watched Farsi-language vampire movie A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night.

I enjoyed this one a lot. At first I thought it was going to be a gloomy, stately, minimalist affair – the long shots of ruined buildings, the fact that it’s shot in black and white – but there is a ton of quirky humor in this film. (When you have a vampire woman skateboarding down the street of a desert town wearing a hijab – the filmmakers are having fun.) I loved the vampire’s preferred method of stalking, mirroring the movements of her intended victims, matching her pace to theirs – it was creepy, and funny, and maybe also suggested an attempt to better mimic humans.

The villain in the first third of the film is ridiculously over-the-top, a complete caricature of a sleazeball drug dealer and loan shark and pimp – he has neck and face tattoos and smacks around a prostitute and has fish tanks and animal heads and blankets with pictures of tigers on them in his apartment – but I stopped rolling my eyes after a while and just rolled with it instead. He’s supposed to be irredeemably awful; that’s why it’s fun to see him get eaten… and it makes some of the vampires later (and less morally defensible) attacks more disturbing by contrast.

The film *is* minimalist in a lot of ways. The James-Dean-esque male lead and the vampire fall in love without a lot of talk, and the most erotic scene they share involves him piercing her ears. We don’t get much in the way of backstory for the vampire (or anyone, but especially her), and there are a lot of moments when affectless characters gaze affectlessly into the distance… but it works, especially when there’s a very expressive cat sitting between them, calling attention to their blankness in an amusing way.

There’s also a whole lot of effective acting, too, with gazes and body language over words. I’d argue that the climactic moment of the film comes late, when the hero paces back and forth on the side of the road, struggling with a moral choice, and then making a decision – his entire struggle takes place silently, with no discussion or verbal agonizing before or after; it’s all in the way he moves.

The movie was filmed in Kern Country CA, not in the Middle East, but that area has a lot of empty places and dilapidated things and also palm trees anyway, so it works well as the setting for the nowhere-town of Bad City.

And it’s the first ever Farsi vampire Western! I’ll be watching director Ana Lily Amirpour with interest.

My Patreon: A Story a Month for $1 a Month

Published by Tim Pratt on April 29, 2015

The short version is: I’ve set up a Patreon at www.patreon.com/timpratt. For as little as $1 a month, you can read a previously unpublished story from me a dozen times a year. (Give more if you’re feeling rich and generous or want goodies.) For those who don’t know, Patreon is a crowdfunding site, but rather than raising a bunch of money for a big project all at once (a la Kickstarter), it’s for people who want to give regular donations for open-ended or ongoing projects on a recurring basis. You become patrons, basically. I expect to make the first story available to supporters in the next couple of weeks.

The slightly longer version is: I’ve been thinking about doing this for years. I tweeted back in late 2013 that I was thinking of doing a story-a-month subscription service via Patreon, but my interest goes back much further. I’ve watched with interest things like Bruce Holland Rogers’s ShortShortShort story subscription service and Caitlin R. Kiernan’s Sirenia Digest “monthly erotic vignette subscription service,” and her subsequent collections. I’ve been thinking for ages: “Wow, I should do something like that.”

I love writing novels, but writing short stories is the closest thing I have to a calling. It’s my favorite art form to read and my favorite to write. I’m also pretty good at it. I made my name as a story writer.

The problem is, as I’ve become more successful as a writer, my time has been given more and more to novels. I’ve gone from writing twenty stories a year to maybe two or three, and then mostly only when commissioned. It’s a loss I’ve felt keenly, but, well, it just makes more financial sense to write novels.

Wanting things to make financial sense is important since I have a family to feed and all that, but it doesn’t always make for the best artistic decisions.

So I’ve been contemplating story subscriptions as a way to justify writing more short stories, but I hesitated for various reasons. The main ones are, I already crowdfund a project at least once a year, and didn’t want to be constantly going “Pay me pay me pay me” on twitter and facebook. The organizational aspect was also daunting. But with Patreon I can set a really low threshold to entry for backers — a buck a month gets you access to new stories — and a lot of the organizational stuff is handled through the site itself. It’s also an ongoing thing, so I won’t feel the need to beat the drum constantly to get interest. I’ll send out this initial announcement, and will probably mention on social media when I post a new story, but it won’t be an annoying bombardment.

Another reason I hesitated is, since I can reliably sell stories I write on spec,why don’t I just do that? Write more stories, and send them out to magazines, instead of only writing stories when they’re commissioned? The simple answer is… I can do that, but I haven’t been. Without a deadline, writing stories on spec simply goes to the back of the queue of things to do, and so, I never do it. With a monthly deadline, and people waiting for stories from me, I’ll actually prioritize doing this thing I love.

So, if you support my Patreon: Thank you for helping me psychologically trick myself into writing more stories.

Here are links to some free stories, if you want to see what you’re getting into: http://www.timpratt.org/?page_id=10

WhiskeyHorror: As Above, So Below

Published by Tim Pratt on April 28, 2015

We drank Black Saddle 12-year-old bourbon, which is ridiculously good and the bottle is empty now and now I am sad.

We watched As Above, So Below, that “attractive archaeologist obsessed with the alchemist Nicolas Flamel goes into the Paris catacombs with some local urban explorers in search of the philosopher’s stone” movie.

The good: the Paris catacombs are cool. Urban explorers as horror movie protagonists? I like that. Spatial horror is always welcome, and that’s pretty much all this movie is: passages that don’t lead where they should, weird loops and doubling-back, being frightened and lost in the dark. The bit with the burning car. The shot of their emergence from the manhole cover.

The bad: the whole last third of it, basically (apart from the burning car and the manhole cover). The nonsensical and also cheesy answer to “What is the philosopher’s stone really?”) The fact that the surviving characters did not emerge into an Evil Mirror Version of Paris full of demonic mimes and baguettes that eat you. (That would have redeemed everything else for me, honestly.)

Mostly it made me want to rewatch The Descent, so we’re doing that next time.

WhiskeyHorror Double Feature: Dead Snow 2 and The Woman in Black

Published by Tim Pratt on February 25, 2015

There have been two WhiskeyHorrors since my last report: one last Saturday, and one on Tuesday night. So much horror. So much whiskey. (Well, the usual amount of whiskey.)

Both times we mostly drank the 10-year-old Bulleit reserve, which is delicious. Also a bit of Monkey Shoulder blended Scotch, which I hear is hit-or-miss depending on which batch you happen to get, but our bottle is very good with soda and even tasty by itself over ice.

Saturday we watched Dead Snow 2: Red vs. Dead, which was an improvement in pretty much every way over the first one — funnier, more lively, equally gruesome with better effects. It picks up immediately after the end of the first film… except all the Norwegian people now inexplicably speak English. (Guess it was a condition of giving the director actual money.) Martin Starr was amusing as the leader of an American “Zombie Squad” (though I wish the two women on the squad had been better written and fleshed-out) and the business with the tank was great. Recommended if you like funny zombie stuff and dead Russians hitting dead Nazis with shovels and, uh, generally enjoy films that involve snow.

Tuesday was rather more serious: we saw The Woman in Black, with Daniel Radcliffe being pale and sad in the English countryside as blank-faced children committed suicide all around him and in the past also. As the father of an adorable blond moppet myself, the film certainly gave me some terrible twinges. Stately and deliberate without being dull, with a good mix of jump scares and tension-building-dread stretches. At one point when Radcliffe’s character was Making A Plan to deal with the supernatural menace I complained that in many old ghost stories there’s not a damn thing you can do; the ghosts are just there, and will remain there, and there’s not a ritual you can conduct to put them to rest. I suppose I’ll adhere to local norms and avoid spoilers but suffice to say, I was pleased with how Radcliffe’s plan turned out. The ending is an utterly bleak downer — and yet because it’s not as bad as it could have been, it actually manages to feel weirdly hopeful!

We’ve also been watching the From Dusk Till Dawn TV series, which is total gonzo fun, very cinematic, well directed, engagingly acted, gross, grotesque, funny, smart, pulpy, and narratively complex. We’re four episodes in, and I can’t wait to watch more. (Note: not for ophidiophobes.)

Queen of Nothing Kickstarter

Published by Tim Pratt on February 24, 2015

As springtime grows near, a young man’s fancy turns to thoughts of… Kickstarting another Marla Mason fantasy novel.

I just launched the campaign to fund Queen of Nothing, which will be the ninth full-length book in the series (tenth if you count short prequel novel Bone Shop). (At this point, I’ve crowdfunded more of these novels than I published traditionally, which is frankly mind-blowing to me. My readers are amazing.)

If you want to contribute, or learn more, you can check it out here:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/timpratt/queen-of-nothing-a-marla-mason-novel

It’s going to be a grand blend of mythic fiction and contemporary fantasy, with a lot of evil-god-punching, and all the usual snark and jokes and moral ambiguity and ass-kicking and calamitous mistakes that characterize the rest of the series.

Want to read about Marla? Here are links to some free stories set in her world.

Thanks, as always, for your support.

WhiskeyHorror: The Den

Published by Tim Pratt on February 11, 2015

WhiskeyHorror report:

We drank Larceny, a wheated bourbon from Heaven Hill distilleries, with ice and the odd splash of bitters. Pretty tasty stuff.

We watched The Den, a recent found-footage (sort of) horror movie, quite tense and disturbing, with a nice mix of mounting discomfort, dread, jump scares, and graphic horror. (Plotwise it’s basically “Chatroulette, with murderstalking,” or “Hostel Online,” though it’s less torture-porn-y than the Hostel movies; which isn’t to say there’s no gruesome violence, because there is a bit.) The lead character was a bit passive/ineffectual for much of the film, to the extent that I said, “Wow, I wish she’d do something,” but as things became more imminently dangerous she did step up and make some impressive moves, and I ended up liking her character a lot. (I’m not saying things turn out well for her — it’s a horror movie, not a thriller where order is restored at the end — but at least she made the bad guys feel a degree of her pain.)

As we finished watching American Horror Story we needed a new show to add to the rotation, and after poking around Netflix a bit found Darknet, which even fits a bit thematically with The Den. It’s a Canadian anthology horror show (non-supernatural, for at least the first few eps anyway). Each episode has several intersecting storylines, with a non-linear approach to chronology, and an emphasis on twist endings which range from the silly to the delightfully creepy. (Of course, once the twist-ending thing was established, we started to see the twists coming, or at least to look for them.) It’s an amusing show, organized around the common thread of a website devoted to the macabre and murderous and disgusting. (Sort of 4chan meets the Morbid Reality sub-Reddit.) Fear Itself is still the better Canadian anthology horror series, but Darknet is fun.

Awards Eligibility Post

Published by Tim Pratt on January 8, 2015

My views on people posting lists of their award-eligible work have evolved. I used to think it was a little gauche, and advocated instead posting lists of works you loved, and urging people to nominate those.

Then some people very gently (more gently than I deserved) pointed out that I expressed that view from a position that was actually a locus of several overlapping forms of privilege. Particularly for new writers (who don’t get as much attention), and women writers (who are culturally pressured not to crow about how great they are, no matter how great they are), and writers of color (who can suffer from both issues and then some), it’s a way to raise the visibility of their work, and that’s something that needs to be done. Plus, a year is a long time, readers forget stuff, so there’s a utility to these lists.

For me, though, I dunno, I like getting awards, but I’m a nearly 40-year-old white guy who’s got his Hugo already, so here are some 2014 SF/fantasy works by women/people of color/new writers/all of the above you should nominate instead. (It’s not a very long list. I don’t read as much work in my genre as I used to, since most of my pleasure reading is crime/mystery.)

One-Eyed Jack by Elizabeth Bear. A triumphant return to the Promethean Age universe and one of the weirdest contemporary fantasies I’ve read all year. (Bear has won a few awards, too, but not for my favorite series, so give her some more.)

“Mothers, Lock Up Your Daughters, Because They Are Terrifying,” Alice Sola Kim. A powerful story by one of my favorite short fiction writers.

“The Mothers of Voorhisville” by Mary Rickert. Genius work by a genius writer. She has a novel, too, The Memory Garden, which I haven’t read, but come on: It’s Mary Rickert. It’s gonna be great.

Glory O’Brien’s History of the Future by A.S. King, a weird and warm and heart-wrenching YA about petrified bats and difficult friendships and how to live now in the face of the onrushing future.

Phantasm Japan, edited by Nick Mamatas and Masumi Washington, which didn’t seem to get as much attention as the SF volume The Future Is Japanese from 2012, despite being similarly great. (Disclosure: I have a story in this one. Probably the best story I published last year.)

All the stories in Flytrap #11. (Yes, I co-edited it, but I didn’t edit the fiction; Heather Shaw did.) “The Philiad” by Domenica Phetteplace is probably my favorite, but Jessica May Lin’s “Pickup Artist at the End of the World, Plus Stuffed Bunny” is also particularly great.

Go forth, read good art, and make good art, too, if that’s your deal.

2014 Year in Review

Published by Tim Pratt on January 1, 2015

I feel bad saying so, because I know this year was a psychotic uplifted grizzly bear armed with neurotoxin-coated machetes for a lot of people, but — 2014 was one of the best years I’ve had, personally.

The rest of this is mostly for my benefit, because I enjoy looking back on the past year, so forgive the self-indulgence, and feel even freer than usual to skip reading it.

I have continued the changes I made in 2013, which are mostly related to being less of a misanthropic hermit and more of a social animal, and as a result, I can’t remember when I’ve ever felt happier, more balanced, or more personally fulfilled. (For a long time I resisted the notion that I needed anybody, believing I was such a natural introvert that if I had books and whiskey I could happily forget the existence of the rest of humanity, but it turns out: nope. Ah well, it only took until I was in my mid-thirties to figure that out, could’ve been worse.)

I continued the habit I began partway through 2013 of writing down three good things that happened every day (with occasional notes on less-happy things, when they have sufficient mass to seem unavoidable). It’s got the same pleasures as the daily journaling I used to do two decades ago, but with rather less comprehensiveness, so it’s easy to keep up, and it does actually seem to make me happier.

Exercise and eating better also continued (funny how it’s easier once it becomes a habit), and while I could still stand to drop a stone or two, I’ve been maintaining pretty well, holiday excesses notwithstanding.

2014 highlights include:

The establishment of WhiskeyHorror, wherein my friend Katrina comes over and we drink assorted whiskey things and watch horror movies two or three times a month, always a high point of my week.

My wife getting a new job she didn’t like and then getting a new new job that she LOVES which includes vast quantities of free beer.

Many trips to Golden Gate Park, where my wife does dancing and me and the kid wander and frolic on the playground.

Road trips to Santa Cruz to hang out on the boardwalk, including one day with our friends Scott and Lynne and their son, while they were down from the frozen North.

A trip to North Carolina/South Carolina for my college sweetheart Adrienne’s wedding. Basically being buzzed the whole time with my boy D, drinking on patios. Hanging out with my high school sweetheart Amily. Sometimes you can go home again, for a little while, even when it’s not home anymore.

Lots of afternoon coffeehouse writing dates with my friend Erin. A few fine afternoons drinking beer on patios or bourbon in bars or cider in living rooms with people I adore.

Our friend Daryl came into town on book tour and we went out to dinner with a bunch of people including Aussies Garth and Sean, with much sangria vanquished, and some karaoke bourbon funtimes after.

Hosted a couple of barbecues and a rather epic birthday party.

Seeing my kid play a wolf in a school play. Rawr! And doing gymnastics at his gymnastic camp’s show.

The usual street festivals, notably Eat Real!

Playing ten million games with my kid, and also hosting some grown-up game nights too. Running a D&D game again!

Going to a few shows, notably the Three Drink Circus show at the Hotel Burlington in lovely Port Costa and our friend Jeff’s first art show at a gallery that had a big slide so my kid was even entertained.

Wonderful houseguests, including D and Jenn, who were gone too soon, alas, but such joy while they were here.

Writing stuff:

We published an issue of Flytrap!

Did a successful kickstarter for Lady of Misrule (and a failed one for Flytrap, ah well)

Did many writerly events: read at InsideStory Time, and at FreeMade SF (with my friend Ais playing ukulele in a Catwoman costume while I read my Batman fanfic “Batman and Wife”), our Flytrap launch, two book signings/readings at Endgame, Litquake, Litcrawl, talked to a writing class at Stanford.

Wrote a bit under a quarter of a million words, actually my least-productive year in terms of word count since I began keeping track in 2011. But I did some stories: “That Time Hell Froze Over”, “Mother of the Bride”, “Larping the Apocalypse 2: The Nano-Plague”, “Sorcerer’s Honeymoon”, “Manic Nixie Dream Girl”, “A Wedding Night’s Dream”, “The Maiden’s Kiss”, “The Real and the Really Real”, and “Hunters in the Wood”. All sold (though a few were Kickstarter-related chapbook stories), some published, some forthcoming.

Wrote a few books: Liar’s Island, The Tesla Protocol (sequel to The Stormglass Protocol), and Lady of Misrule. The first two are done and delivered; the last one still needs some heavy lifting on revision but should be done in a couple weeks. Also did a ton of revisions and copyedits and so on, which is part of why my word count is low for the year. (The other reason is laziness, of course.)

There were bad things. The IRS hounded us for money we didn’t owe for most of the year. We lost my friend Jay to cancer. In general I wrote too many obituaries last year. I could come up with others. But here at the beginning of the year I am trying to focus on the positive: the good that went before, the good yet to come.

I hope there is goodness ahead for all of you.

Pretty Pictures

Published by Tim Pratt on December 28, 2014

I have art! First, the cover art for Lady of Misrule, painted by the incomparable Lindsey Look. Should be available for purchase in a couple of months (though Kickstarter backers will see an e-book sooner.)

Next, The Deep Woods, coming from PS Publishing early next year — artwork by the great Galen Dara.

Finally, the artwork for Liar’s Island, out from Paizo next summer. Painted by Michael Ivan.

I am a lucky writer.

Big Book Sale 2014

Published by Tim Pratt on November 24, 2014

The piles of author copies in my house have gotten out of control again, so I’m doing a book sale. Hey, just in time for some major gift-giving holidays, how about that.

You can get signed and/or inscribed copies for cover price (rounded up so we’re not counting pennies), plus $5 shipping per book for mass market paperbacks and $7 each for trade paperbacks/hardcovers. The listed price includes shipping costs for the US.

For shipping outside the US, add an extra $10 to the listed price. (Overseas shipping has gone way up in recent years.)

Write to timpratt@gmail.com or post in the comments here saying what you want and telling me if (and how) you want them signed and/or personalized. I’ll do the math and tell you what you owe me and where to send the PayPal money.

First-come, first-served, which is why you should comment or e-mail instead of just sending money — I’d hate for you to pay for something I already sold. (First-time comments are moderated here, so don’t worry if your comment doesn’t show up immediately, I’ll address them in order.)

I’ll run the sale for a week and a half or so, until midnight PST on 12/3/14, coincidentally encompassing various black/cyber/etc shopping days.

Here’s what’s available. First editions, unless otherwise noted, with the number of total available copies in parentheses.

Marla Mason series:

I have ONE (1) complete set of the Marla Mason novels to sell: that’s Blood Engines, Poison Sleep, Dead Reign, Spell Games, Broken Mirrors, Grim Tides, Bride of Death, and Bone Shop. The first four are mass-market paperbacks, the last four are trade paperbacks. I’ll throw in a couple of the short story chapbooks too. $125 for the lot. Alas, it is gone.

Now for one-offs:

Mass-market paperback of Blood Engines, $12 (10 9 copies available)

Mass-market paperback of Dead Reign, $12 (7 copies)

Mass-market paperback of Spell Games, $12 (6 copies)

Trade paperback of Bride of Death, $21 (4 copies)

Standalone novels:

Trade paperback of Heirs of Grace, $22 (10 8 copies)

Hardcover of The Constantine Affliction (as by T. Aaron Payton), $34 (10 copies)

Trade paperback of The Constantine Affliction (as by T. Aaron Payton), $20 (10 9 copies)

Trade paperback of The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl, $19 (1 copy)

RPG fantasy novels:

Mass-market paperback of Pathfinder Tales: Reign of Stars, $15 (10 9 copies)

Mass-market paperback of Pathfinder Tales: City of the Fallen Sky, $15 (10 9 copies)

Mass-market paperback of Pathfinder Tales: Liar’s Blade, $15 (10 9 copies)

Mass-market paperback of Forgotten Realms: Venom In Her Veins, $13 (6 copies)

I’ll do an RPG bundle, too: Venom In Her Veins, City of the Fallen Sky, Liar’s Blade, and Reign of Stars for $50 if ordered all together, while supplies last etc.

Collections:

Trade paperback of collection Antiquities and Tangibles and Other Stories, $21 (3 copies)

Paperback of poetry collection If There Were Wolves, $15 (2 copies)

Trade paperback of collection Little Gods, $21 (Not the first edition that includes the poems, but the more attractive offset edition) (3 copies)

Anthologies I edited:

US hardcover of Rags and Bones: New Twists on Timeless Tales (edited by me and Melissa Marr), $25 (4 2 copies)

British hardcover of Rags and Bones, $25 (4 2 copies)

Trade paperback of Sympathy for the Devil (edited by me), $23 (4 copies)

That’s it. Make your wishes known.