Need something to do on a the last dismal Friday in your 2012 November? Local author Todd Grimson and Schaffner Press have put together a night of music and reading on Friday 11/30/12. It is a free event and folks should go check it out!

The shindig is going down in celebration of a new collection of Grimson short stories, “Stabs At Happiness”. Event is happening at the Jack London Bar (529 SW 4th Ave) in Portland, Oregon. Various authors will be reading shorts from the collection, live bands from 9:20 till close. Should be a good way to close out the month :) !

Yelp/Location info for Jack London (basement below the Rialto)

www.yelp.com/biz/the-jack-london-bar-portland

www.rialtopoolroom.com/

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Review- Stabs at Happiness: 13 Stories

I have a thing for Todd Grimson, his novels are sharp, clean, and tracking the pulse of cool before the cool folks know what they are looking for. His groundbreaking vampire novel ‘Stainless’, and the stylish Voodoo-chic of ‘Brand New Cherry Flavor’ are solid works deserving the attention of horror and speculative fiction fans.

Grimson is not to be pigeon holed as just a novelist. Over the years, his Short Stories have been published in various magazines and compendiums. ‘Stabs at Happiness’ is a new collection of shorts is comprised of previously published work, both under his own name and varied pseudonyms.

There are thirteen stories in the collection. As with all Short stories, readers will find that certain shorts resonate more with them than others. I found myself commonly wishing that there were more to the stories, that they were a single chapter of a book I could pull from a shelf and consume liberally. This does not read as “incomplete” only that i wanted more. and am greedy. Others were not much more than a lengthy character sketch, which many people I know would love. As such approach this collection with gleeful skepticism, you may not be dragged into every tale, but those which grab you won’t let you go.

Stand outs from my reading:

- “Brighter and Brighter”, a none too lengthy ride with a man and a child in an old Plymouth. Blood recently spilt and a code of ethics in the way of an easy escape, their conversation raises mixed feelings of honor vs post crime cleanup. I cant tell if I like the driver, or if I want some one to cap him.

- In “P not Q”, a man leaves a bunker in the heart of the desert, freshly showered and dedicated to the underground project he is part of. Picking a man up at the airport, turns out to be more confusing than the underground org is expecting. I was as confused as the characters on this, but it was enjoyable.

- “Lamentations of Babylon”, Kimberly and Jean-Luc, in a stormy paranoia, traverse a world of beat poetry and film snobbery. It is a mess of human douche baggery, combined with the fall of Assyria. An excellent read, but might require an open wikipedia search for folks unfamiliar with the above key points…

- The title work “Stabs at Happiness” is a total ClusterF*ck of awesome. It is not for everyone.. Read on.. It is angsty, erotic, a fair amount of disturbing. The main character Nikki is a little bit Lisbeth, a little bit Wednesday, and a lotta bit Trinity sans matrix. If you do not care to read about strap-ons and a sad sad boy, you may skip it.. But it is very good.

- The true shining gem in this collection deserves to be stripped out and novelized. “Batista’s Lieutenant” is a Cubano tale that spans multiple years/decades. The characters are vibrant, the story engaging. The trouble is the short story format. This deserves a re-treatment as a full novel, or even a novella. I hope the author gets some additional feedback and gives this story the respectful treatment it commands.

Pages: 216
Publisher: Schaffner Press
Published: 2012
ISBN-10: 1936182440
ISBN-13: 978-1936182442

Ho-ly e-book gold.

Feng Shui Assassin is tailor made to be converted to a cult movie; This book demands a sequel that will probably never come, which is a damn shame. It was written (per the author) after some long pub discussions, which means auto-win right?

Harvey Barker is in London, hunting the board members of the Valentine Trust. Blamed for the death of his environmental activist sister, his goal is to destroy them one by one. As with any murder plot, the question of how to do it without getting caught is paramount to success rate. Harvey had this nailed down.

Harvey is a Feng Shui Assassin. Chi that flows easily and unfettered brings luck and grace to a persons life. Chi that becomes stagnant can bring misfortune and unhappiness. Adjusting objects in space to create pools and eddys of negative chi, Harvey’s specialty is helping nasty things happen to people by muddying their flows. His work leaves no tangible mark tying him to a crime.

Harvey opens the book by turning a high power broker against himself, altering the flow of his office to make a dead pool.

Detective Amanda Morgan is investigating the suicidal jump of a high power broker. His plummet from office to pavement makes no sense. She cant put her finger on the root of it, but knows something is off. She is determined to break this case, proving murder rather than suicide.

—

I know, i know.. Feng shui as a murder tool? It is a campy thought and it really works well. The author has created a fairly vivid world. Amanda has some killer scenes that would rival her against any blockbuster action heroine. The assassin himself is particularly cool. The evil henchmen are evil badasses (origami weapons master, yoga/chakra ass kicker)

Perceived issues: There were some editing problems in this book. There is a major antagonist character who was painfully annoying in a couple chapters right in the middle of the novel (he really could have done without his monologue). It ended rather than had promise of a continuation that would be well deserved.

Available on amazon for 99cents, you cant go wrong.
It you wanna save a buck, grab it for free off smashwords

www.smashwords.com/books/view/165

I have received a few personal questions recently asking about site stability.

I will be very transparent about all of this. It has been very frustrating. I am sure that the cause of this instability has lost me some professional standing with a few contacts. It has raised enough frustration that I am actively considering a simplification of process by migrating to a Blogger interface.

• Initially this was a simple issue. My old web host nearly went out of business, and I was migrating to a new host. This did not go smoothly and required about 6 months of active headaches.
• During this time frame, My wife and I had an incubation going on which occupied a great deal of personal free time.
• Since January, FNORDinc has been hacked a couple times. Between mass spam SQL injections to existing posts, and base64 script insertions, visitors were finding themselves blasted with popups and ad sites, when things loaded at all..
• I have not yet decided to migrate yet, but one more  hiccup and I may just throw up my hands. I just do not have time for all of the repairs. I am spending time maintaining and resolving that I should be investing in other endeavors. By migrating, I would keep my domain, but minimize the effort required by me to be online. I would however damage 6 years of trackbacks.

  I would also embed myself firmly into a built social system (google+) and it is cheaper… all bonuses so far as I am concerned.

I will be taking the opportunity to do some formal clean up. There is a lot of trash on my site.. time to remove it. This should increase usability, minimize potential future  migration times, and hopefully remove some potential security holes.

You should see changes going forward, I just ask for your patience.

‘Die, Famous!’ surprised the hell out of me.

Found at Goodwill for a whopping $1.99, I bought this novel with no thought that it would be capable of spanning generations as a classic, only that it would be “crappy-goodness”. The cover caught my attention, the synopsis baked the overall premise into my brain. Cha-ching, 2 bucks spent. I figured it cant be worse than actual reality tv, which has a strange magnetism that both sucks me in and nauseates me. .

I was wrong on a number of levels. ‘Die, Famous!’ is witty, well written, epitomizes the reality culture and mind set. I couldn’t stop reading it. It was well approached, giving a perspective to all characters via reality tv confession booths, but the core story follows a single man. He has been given four hours to tell the tale from start to finish, confessing all details. Instead of chapters, you are given a countdown of this four hour period.

The plot centers around thirty-two reality tv all-stars being dropped into a new game with no explanations regarding the end goal. None of them know where they are located. only that they are in a city in a desert. the city is an amalgam of various cities in the world- Paris, New York, San Francisco- with tourist stops miniaturized and typically made of trash and recycled materials. Holed up on the main floors of a building, the players find that non-player areas are filled with old paper and electronics, refrigerators and fridges, rotting food and spilled chemicals. Knocking holes in walls often provides secret caches of viable food or materials, hidden in the trash. Then they start finding weapons along with the food.

This novel is part ‘Battle Royale’, ‘Lord of the Flies’, ‘House of Stairs’ , ‘Jersey Shore’, and MTVs Liquid Television. It kept me entranced, wondering how f*cked things could get, and concerned as I grew to like a number of the characters. There was the right amount of commentary, action, gratuity, and in the end I had not figured out whodunit. It is nice to have something that is just edgy enough that it is uncomfortable, but just familiar enough that one can become fully engrossed and engaged.

It doesn’t hurt the book that it is filled with clever text and descriptions that made me stop and wonder if this novel is being overlooked only because it is independently published and has such a high price tag (a freakish $19.95 for a trade paperback, free shipping only in Canada). See the below excerpt.

Background – Destiny and Sanity are both players in the game, inserted into the world after the other players have been in play for a week or greater. Sanity is a confusing love interest, which spawns the following:

Destiny was a tough nut to crack.
And Sanity, she was elusive.
Because if she wasn’t pulling me close or pushing me away, then I had a moment to think rationally about it, and at those rare moments I felt bad for the way in which humanity callously toyed with the emotions of the yo-yo, a simple creature of wood and string that maybe only wanted to be left alone.

 

• Pages: 256
• ISBN 978–0-9812366–2-9
• Pub­lisher: Dirt Star­ling Press (2009)