I was awful excited to finally publish a story in a format I could hold in my hand, so indulge as I indulge, please. So, there I am eating some breakfast and looking at the sweet new cover of the Comet Press anthology down there under the soup. I had gotten used to a tiny, temporary cover that wasn’t nearly as interesting…
life size
And now I like to delude myself that the new awesome cover (down there! no, not the soup!) kinda, sorta, accidentally depicts the climax of my story. Now I’m not delusional enough to pretend that man + cigarette = gun is new to the crime genre or anything, but that is what happens in my goldfish tale, I swear! And probably in every other story in the book, too. Of course, my hero is cradling a football-shaped fish bowl in his other hand to make him unique, so I’ll have to scribble that image on the back cover of my copy, too. But, seriously, the more that I stare at this, the more I wish I would have had the hero try to light his cigarette off the end of this smoking gun. Is that even possible? How cool would that be? Maybe somebody could try it for me. I know you see it a lot in the movies where someone will light something with the gunshot itself, or more often, put out some candles, lightbulbs, hard looks. But does the barrel really get that hot? And/or would somebody suspend disbelief if they read this on the page? What the hell. I’m using it.
Yes, Death Panels are real. Real fun.
Hey, while we’re at at, another fun fact about The Death Panel! Back when the hard-boiled elves were slaving away getting it ready to roll, our editor asked us if there was anything we wanted to change before print. And I got so excited about my first bio ever that they were actually gonna slap in the back of a real live book that I wanted to give a shout-out to my blog that had other old writings and movie reviews and goofy stuff. So I asked her to please put “buglove.blogspot.com” in there. Then I started to think about this a month later. Uh oh. Turns out maybe I had named my blog “buglove” back in the day, but the website was actually at spiderbites.blogspot.com. Oops! Yeah, clearly I hadn’t logged in there in some time. So I was panicking, resigning myself to my screw-up, when a more rational friend of mine was like, “Slow down, Holmes. No problem. Just scoop up that other blog address and type some stuff on it real fast.”
Great idea! Wait. Somebody already did that. Somebody loves bugs as much as I do? No, it’s even worse (or better) than you think. This mysterious somebody signed up for Blogger like seven friggin’ years ago, called the page “buglove,” then posted exactly one sentence about…wait for it…getting a bug in his sandwich.
Or something like that. I’m totally serious here. If anyone actually read my bio in Death Panel then had any interest in this blog I was pimping, they would click on this address and instead read something to effect of…
“Yo, you want to get a bug with your steak? Eat at Joe’s! Burp!”
You got to love that. And after this thing was posted, the mysterious somebody must have cracked some knuckles and smiled proudly, knowing a life’s work had been completed. Then turned off the computer. Fast foward seven years. So, anyway, hopefully people who stumble onto “buglove” will read the comments below this bit of wisdom where I tried desperately to leave some breadcrumbs back to my actual blog. Or maybe they won’t and just decide I’m the kind of idiot that wants someone to read this one ancient sentence about my lunch gone wrong almost a decade ago. Either way I’ll take the fly in my soup. It’ll probably be funny later in life.
