Blaze!

At the grocery store last night I passed by a display of books, one of which is Blaze, by Richard Bachman. The author's name is in a big size, probably 48 point, and at the bottom it reads "With an introduction by Stephen King," and King's name is somewhere around 42 point, nearly as big.

I laughed. Does anyone out there not know that Richard Bachman is Stephen King? That the book Different Season was basically an "outing" of King as Bachman? I have trouble understanding why they're trying to sell this book as anything other than a Stephen King novel. I'm not even a King fan and I know this whole relationship. (Then again, I seemed to know that A.N. Roquelare was Anne Rice almost five years before the Beauty series was republished under Rice's name; Rice had admitted it in an obscure erotica writer's magazine about the time Lestat was hitting the shelves but the mainstream press seems to have missed it.)

From the Stephen King FAQ: Why did you write books as Richard Bachman?

WHOMP! There it is.

Caprice Starr just found her place in the universe of ideas.

I was listening to the audiobook edition of Silence of the Lambs the other day. I think I know what her evil twin sister's name is going to be, as well.

[I would explain the subject line, but it would seem that PumaPaw Productions has gone off-line. Very sad. It comes down to this: if you're a furry, you probably have that print somewhere.]

For Palm E-Book users only: Magic of the day.

Your magical incantation for the day:

echo 'http://subterraneanpress.com/index.php/magazine/summer-2007/audio-wax-by-elizabeth-bear/' \
> exclusion.txt

plucker-build -bpp 8 -f Subterranean_summer_2007 \ 
-N "Subterranean Summer 07" -p . --exclusion-list=exclusion.txt \ 
--staybelow=http://subterraneanpress.com/index.php/magazine/summer-2007/  
http://subterraneanpress.com/index.php/magazine/summer-2007/

Work and Family

Omaha's on schedule to work nights most of this week, so I've been getting to work first thing in the morning and leaving in time to pick up Kouryou-chan from her summer school schedule at 3:15, then over to get Yamaraashi-chan from the YMCA at 4:30.

I like these times. They give me a chance to hang out with the girls together and individually, and to cook and do ordinary domestic things with them. Yesterday I made my pasta sauce and we had tortellini; today I made a risotto with farm vegetables and prosciutto.

Yesterday, we also watched Godzilla together, the Matthew Broderick version. It's a Roland Emmerich film, so it has lots of bangs and explosions and a moral to the story, much like Independence Day and Stargate. I worried about the level of violence, but Yamaraashi-chan's been exposed to so much of it at her mother's house and she's old enough now to start taking in some of that with, literally, parental guidance, and Kouryou-chan... well, Kouryou-chan got all upset because (and this is the big fault of the Emmerich Godzilla film) she understood that the battle was between men who wanted to keep their city and a big animal who really was innocent of any moral culpability. Godzilla has an unfortunate tension: it's man versus nature, but the "nature" here is a living creature that shows its maternal worth toward the end of the film. Kouryou-chan grokked that; she understood that the outcome of the film, while inevitable, simply wasn't fair and couldn't be fair. Nobody wins in Emmerich's Godzilla: it's just that someone has to lose.

In the end, it is a big, dumb monster movie without much personal violence (and no interpersonal violence), so on the whole it was fun to watch. We also talked a bit about the skill of special effects in 1995 (i.e. why did it rain throughout the whole darn movie? Because it was easier to animate, and cover up glitches with raindrops) and the obvious bluescreening in a couple of scenes; we also talked a bit about the character development, and how to "read" a movie, how to watch it for hints and foreshadowing.

Today, Yamaraashi-chan and I played a few rounds of Pente, the five-in-a-row board game. She wasn't very good at it. We also flipped through a few pages of Cute Overload before something crashed the browser hard. I've told them to hit the showers and get ready for bed.

I'm not getting much writing done this week, I'm afraid. Too much work and family.