Holy Recaps, Batman!

Some of you may have caught the first episode of Gotham last night, the police-procedural-cum-superhero-origin-show about the early days of Gotham City before Bruce Wayne became Batman. As an avid fan of both noir and comic books, I've been looking forward to this show for a while, and I'm excited to announce that I will be handling the weekly Gotham recaps / reviews for Tor.

My overview of the pilot episode is already up (though admittedly, it's rather long and overly-detailed — not unlike the tepid episode itself), so please stop by and add your comments, then join us in the weeks to come!

In the meantime, to tide you over to next week's episode, here's a supercut of every instance of Bruce Wayne's parents being murdered on television and film:

Help Me Raise Money For Suicide Awareness & Get Free Stuff!

That's me and Mike to the left, circa 1999. Mike was one of my first friends I ever had, very much raised as a brother to me. He lost his life to suicide nearly five years ago now, and while you learn to deal with loss as time goes on, it never really goes away — you're left with questions and loss and one big hole that will never ever get refilled. That's part of the reason that I'm so sensitive and vocal about mental health (aside from own struggles); because I know what that suffering is like on all sides, and I don't think anyone else should ever have to experience those things.

I had other friends who'd lost loved ones to suicide, but Mike's death was really the first time I was forced to deal with losing someone so directly close to me, and especially in such a way. Unfortunately, when it comes to dealing with loss, I've gotten my fair of share of practice in these last five years, and Mike's wasn't the only one of those that could have (maybe, possibly) been helped, or stopped.

I could go on and on about this, but since suicide has recently been in the public eye, I've decided to do something different. The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention hosts walkathon fundraisers every year to raise money for research, education, and outreach programs about suicide. The Out of Darkness walk (as it's called) in my hometown is not just for Mike, but it is taking place right around the anniversary of his passing. I want to raise some money for the walk, in the hope that even though its too late to save my friends, it might make a difference in someone else's life, so that they don't have to suffer the same.

So here's the deal: I've put together a sweet little package of music and eBooks, all various things that I've created, and they can all be yours with a donation of any amount to the Hamden, CT Out of Darkness Walk for the American Foundation for Society Prevention (Go Team Mikey).

All you have to do is click here to make your donation, and the download should start right away! (It's a pretty hefty ZIP file, because all the music is uncompressed)

Thanks in advance for your support. It means more to people than you realize, and I hope you enjoy your little rewards. Here's what you'll get:

eBooks:

• Fixing a Hole, a one-act play about two friends and a hole at the end of the world. Mike lived for theatre, and shortly his death, I wrote this as a kind of elegy to him, and a reflection on our relationship.
• EndProgram.txt, a darkly comedic (or maybe just sad) short story about the death of a robot. Originally written and conceived in the 5th week of the Clarion Writer's Workshop under the guidance of Kelly Link and Karen Joy Fowler. 

Music:

• If You Really Want To Hear About It, the unreleased EP from my college band the Roland High Life. Six tracks, plus two bonus b-sides. Track 2, "Your Last Fall" was written before Mike's passing...but listening to it now, it feels frighteningly prescient.
• Three new cover songs recorded especially for this occasion:
  • "The 59 Sound" by the Gaslight Anthem, changed to "The 69 Sound" in honor of the recording of Mike's beloved "Let It Be";
  • "I Was Meant For The Stage" by The Decemberists, one of Mike's favorite bands, this song could just have easily been written from his point of view, especially given how he had committed his life to theatre. At the reception following his funeral, some of Mike's friends played a haunting video of him singing this song at karaoke (my parents actually thought it was a song he had written). Recording this was the first time I've listened to this song since then;
  • and "You Were Cool" by the Mountain Goats, an unreleased track, with a few lyrical changes, as John's protagonist lives in his version of the song (also Mike wasn't really known for wearing high heels back in high school, although I did think about changing it to something like "stalking down the concrete hallways / in your tight jeans / back in high school," but then I didn't). Still, the lyrics remind me a lot of Mike growing up, and what I wish I could say to him now.

If you have any trouble with your download, please let me know.

Legal stuff: all content made available in this offer is available free and will not used for personal profit or gain. All files, content, intellectual property, etc. is the legal property and copyright of Thom Dunn and is made available through a Creative Commons Attribution Sharealike4.0 International license, with the following exceptions: 

• "The 59 Sound" is copyright 2008 Brian Fallon / The Gaslight Anthem
• "I Was Meant For The Stage" is copyright 2003 Colin Meloy / The Decemberists
• "You Were Cool" is copyright John Darnielle / Mountain Goats

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Dear Star-Lord: Who Is Your Daddy And What Does He Do?

Continuing my apparently never-ending coverage of Guardians of the Galaxy for Tor.com, this week's article suggests some theories about the identity of Star-Lord's mysterious absent father, as alluded to at the end of the film (oops, sorry, spoilers). Check it out, and share your thoughts in the comments below!

Oh, and also, there's this:

You're welcome.

GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY Review! (plus awesome Star-Lord rap song)

I had the pleasure of seeing an advanced screening of Guardians of the Galaxy last week which was, well, everything I dreamed it would be from the very first preview I read of the first issue in 2008. You can read my full review over on Tor.com (with whited-out spoilers, for those of you worried about those kinds of things).

You can also listen to this totally sweet Star-Lord jam by nerd-rapper extraordinaire Adam WarRock (although I personally would have preferred it if he had sampled from "Hooked on Feeling" or one of the other delightfully anachronistic songs from the movie soundtrack like he did for his Firefly mixtape, but that's a minor gripe).

AHHHH Creepy Photographs Of Children's Nightmares AHHHH Now I'm Going To Have My Own Creepy Nightmares AHHHHH

This is one of those things that's both awesome and awful because it's so damn disturbing but so, so cool. "Daymares" is a photography collection by a New York-based photographer named Arthur Tress. Originally displayed (hung? gallery'd? what's the verb here?) back in 1972, "Daymares" featured staged re-creations of children's nightmares, as described to the photographer by the children themselves. The result is a collection of some of the best horror-movies-as-still-photography that I have ever seen. It's like the real-life version of the Miss Peregrine / Hollow City series, only 8,000 times creepier. From his original Artist Statement:

DAYMARES is a series of photographs that attempts to interpret the dreams and fantasies of young children through the medium of documentary photography. Dreams or nightmares were collected by conversations with children in schools, streets, or neighbourhood playgrounds. The children would be asked means of acting out their visions or to suggest ways of making them into visual actualities. Often the location itself, such as an automobile graveyard or abandoned merry-go-round, would provide the possibility of dreamlike themes and spontaneous improvisation to the photographer and his subjects. In recreating these fantasies there is often a combination of actual dream, mythical archetypes, fairytale, horror movie, comic hook, and imaginative play. These inventions often reflect the child's inner life, his hopes and fears, as well as his symbolic transmutation of the external environment, his home or school, into manageable forms (...)

The purpose of these dream photographs is to show how the child's creative imagination is constantly transforming his existence into magical symbols for unexpressed states of feeling or being. In fact, we are all always interchanging or translating our daily perceptions of reality into the enchanted sphere of the dream world.

Emphasis added, because I love it. And I swear, this is not just my clever scheme to trick you into reading one of my stories or something (although dammit that'd be a great story idea...OOOH fiction brain working now....).

You can check out some of Tress's eerie images below, or you can buy a coffee table book of the entire photography series, in case you're the kind of person who enjoys scaring the living hell out of your house guests. Personally, I just wish that I could read the kids' original descriptions of their dreams...

Then again, maybe I'm better off.

I Watched a 17-Minute Preview of "Guardians of the Galaxy" So That You Didn't Have To

Let me tell, it was a tough sacrifice to make, but I was willing to make a martyr of myself for the betterment of all humanity and write about it on Tor.com, like a herald for the quippy James Gunn-ian world soon to come.

So I DID IT FOR YOU, OKAY?! You're welcome, by the way.

Free eBook of "Stuff Every Geek Should Know" (featuring an essay from Yours Truly, because 'natch)

The fine folks at Quirk Books have just released Stuff Every Geek Should Know, the latest in their ongoing sampler series of free eBooks. These samplers often feature snippets from Quirk's other offerings, along with fun little teasers and games, but Stuff Every Geek Should Know is chock-full of brand new content from writers including Eric Smith, Kyle Cassidy, E.C. Myers, and, oh yeah, me! I've had comic books and scripts published, and plenty of non-fiction, but this is technically my first eBook from a real official fancy publisher. Here's the official blurb from Quirk:

Packed with tips, articles, and how-tos on everything from performing Jedi mind tricks to creating your own cosplay gear to wooing the geek of your dreams, Stuff Every Geek Should Know is an indispensable guide to life, the universe, and everything geeky. Featuring content from Quirk's nerdiest titles plus all-new, never-before-seen good stuff from the geekiest bloggers in the known universe. Chapters include: 

GEEK SKILLS FROM POP CULTURE: How to survive a haunted house, perform the Vulcan nerve pinch, decode ciphers, and master other survival skills. 

GEEKS IN ACTION: How to make amazing YouTube vids, create comic books, handle yourself in an online multiplayer game, and generally get your geek on. 

THE GEEK GATHERING: How to have the best convention experience of your life. 

GEEK LOVE: How to craft an online dating profile, plan a geeky marriage proposal, pass on geek wisdom to your kids, and otherwise enjoy the human emotion of "love."

You can download the book on Scribd, Amazon, Nook, Kobo, or iBooks, for all your e-reading pleasure — and tell your friends to do the same!

Here's the Official List of "Twitter Slang" According To The FBI

First government defense organizations tried to create an algorithm to understand sarcasm on the Internet. Now, in their latest effort to understand what all the kids are talking about with their hip lingo, the FBI has compiled an official (83 page!) list of "Twitter slang", presumably so that they can more easily spy on outraged high schoolers on Tumblr or something, which in turn will help fight terrorism, because America.

You know, because apparently that Quantico education doesn't teach you that the number "2" sometimes stands in for "to," "too," or occasionally, "two."

And so without any further ado, here is the FBI's complete list of Twitter Slang, including things like "PMFJIB" (Pardon me for jumping in, but) and "KMT" (Kiss my teeth) which are apparently real things that people on the Internet have actually said.

FBI Twitter List

Writing Process Blog Tour: June 10, 2014

I'm on vacation this week, but my Clarion comrade / favorite robosexual Patrick Ropp tapped me for this Writing Process Blog Tour, so as long as my fiancé is still napping, of course I must oblige.

Me and Patrick (with Eliza Tiernan in the middle) battling to the death in a  water gun fight against Robert Crais & Kim Stanley Robinson

1. What am I working on?

Too many projects, all the time. I'm working on a novel, tentatively titled either The Good People or Dirty Old Town, which I usually describe "Magical Realist Irish Folklore Punk Rock Noir Set in Modern-Day Boston." Yes, I know, it sounds like pretty much the most stereotypical Thom Dunn project imaginable — but hey, write what you know, right? This story started as a short story at Clarion, though the idea had been bouncing around in my head for a while.

I'm also working on a play based on a short story I wrote (which I'm also editing to send out) called Autojektor, or Experiments In the Revival of Organisms, which I similarly describe as "Gay Russian Zombie Jew Ballet," and thus requires no further explanation. Then there's Evil Academy, a young adult graphic novel series I've been working on with my friend Dave about a private high school for aspiring supervillains. It's a black comedy, with each storyline basically taking the shape of a "Very Special Episode" of a high school sitcom, but it goes to some pretty dark places, and at the center of it explores what it's like to fight against the system when the system that you're inside of already claims to be fighting a system, but is still a system in and of itself (I don't know, I have authority issues).

Just a little sneak peek at Dave's artwork for Evil Academy

2. How does my work differ from others of its genre?

That's a great question that I'm not sure how to answer without coming off as pretentious about my own work, but sure, I'll try. Because of the nature of my hypomanic brain, my stuff tends to be, well, pretty ADHD, and/or very high concept. I draw as much from (post-)postmodernism as I do from magical realism and speculative fiction. Coming from a background in theatre, I tend to use a lot of snappy dialogue as well, regardless of the medium I'm working in. I like to think I'm pretty witty, too, even when I'm going to dark places. On the more thematic side of things, I've always leaned towards stories about outsiders and people or cultures who don't quite fit in, even amongst their own subversive subcultures. The outsiders amongst outsiders, I guess. I've also had that inclination, but as I've gotten older, it's made me more attuned to diversity and inclusion in my work. I pull a lot from my own subcultures of indie / punk rock and comics / nerdy pop culture. Of course, I've never felt completely comfortable in those worlds either, which probably explains my I gravitate towards characters that don't fit in to a world that already doesn't fit in with the rest of the world. I also draw a lot from my Irish-Catholic upbringing — I'm agnostic, but I have an intimate understanding of Biblical symbology (I'm less interested in blatant religious metaphors than I am in the archetypal symbols that have permeated all religions and cultures), and I draw a lot from Irish literature as well, whether it's folklore, oral traditions, or the black humor of writers like Martin McDonagh.

I also just got this sweet 1985 Word Processor, though I haven't quite figured out how to fit it into my workflow yet.

3. Why do I write what I do?

I think I kind of covered this above. But I write because I have to, because no one is telling the stories that I want to experience. That's kind of a cliched answer, but there is a lot of truth to it. I'm a very curious and also very empathic person, so a lot of times, I'll happen upon a situation — something I read in the news, or a story told to me by a friend — and I start to wonder how it got to that point, or why a person might have made those decisions (or, sometimes, how the opposite situation could have worked out). And I want to know the answers, and I want to understand them, even if I don't like them. So I write to make that happen.

4. How does your writing process work?

As far as "where ideas come from," a lot of mine spring up when I'm reading things in the news or hearing about my friends' lives. I read or hear or see a story, and (as I said above), I wonder how it got to that point, and then I start to wonder, "Well, what if...?" Sometimes it's "What if this horrible person was actually the good guy?" or "What if this technology had gone this way instead?" or "What if she had left for the party on time?" and then I extrapolate. I hook into a person caught in a situation, and then I go from there. How did they get there? Why? Where do they go from here?

As far as the actual act of writing is concerned, I do most of my first drafts by hand in a composition notebook. This prevents from self-editing too much; I get into a flow, and then I just keep pouring stuff out. Sure, there's a lot of crap that comes out that way, and only so many times you can scribble out a page, but I write a lot of notes to myself in the margins, that are often as simple and straight-forward as "Make this better" or "Less shitty next time" or "No, you idiot, of course she's going to lie about that." Then I start to type it into my computer using Scrivener (which has made my life / writing so much better and I could not recommend more highly) or a simple .txt file in PlainText on my iPad, taking my margin-notes into consideration as I go. A lot of these early by-hand drafts read like plays, even when I'm not writing a play — there's a lot of dialogue, with a mention of some action whenever it happens, which I then flesh out when I'm actually​ typing it into the computer. 

Also I just kind of compulsively consume liquids as I go. The art of WHICH liquids to consume, well, that's a delicate balancing act.

I think I was supposed to plan ahead and tape some other people to write this for next Tuesday but uhhhhh I forgot to do that. So if anyone wants on, let me know!

Me Am Do Talk Good

I found this fun little link on Twitter the other day: a quiz that proclaims to be able to guess which English dialect you speak, along with your native language. I like to think I have a pretty solid grasp on the English language, in all its bizarre permutations (except for verb tenses of "lay"; I will never get those right), but the results, as they say on the internet, shocked me.

Most of the questions are either "Which picture best portrays this sentence" or "Which of these sentences is correct?", and as I went through it the first time, I was pretty liberal and considerate with my answers. A few of the questions allowed for more than one answer, so I selected more than one — considering some of the sentence structures that were not immediately instinctual for me to use, or were not my personal preference for grammatical comfort, but where nonetheless "right," or at least, not explicitly incorrect. Also a lot of it was in passive voice, which was mostly just frustrating, because whatever dialect I do speak, it certainly isn't passive voice.

The results? Apparently I speak with a "US Black Vernacular / Ebonics" dialect, and my native language is Portugese.

Hrm. Okay. Well that was not what I was expecting, especially having grownup in the famously "accent-less"* (according to us, and no one else) state of Connecticut. I know that I sometimes slip into Hiberno-English (especially when I've been drinking), and that my love of hard-boiled fiction narratives sometimes seeps into my otherwise cheery demeanor (I could be talking about how much I love ice cream on a sunny day, but I occasionally imagine myself doing it while standing in a dark alley wearing a trenchcoat to hide my face and smoking a cigarette, with a flask of whiskey hidden in my breast pocket).

So I took the quiz again, this time being less forgiving in my answers, and as predicted, I speak in a "US Standard English" dialect, with "American" as my native language. OKAY SO FINE I'M PREDICTABLE AND I WAS JUST BEING DIFFICULT BEFORE. Either way, it's a fun little quiz to take (if you can ignore the poor writing), so check it out when you have a chance.

*And yes, I know that this should be "dialect," not "accent" — right? Or should it? Okay, so maybe I don't know, but I think it's supposed to be dialect but most of us say accent anyway. THE POINT IS, I've been told that the indicator of a Connecticut dialect is a softening of "t"s in the middle of words, so that they sound like "d"s instead. You know, like the way we say "Conedikit."

Oh, Marvel Cinematic Universe, WHY WON'T YOU LET ME LOVE YOU?!

Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. TV show has had a rocky first season, but this past week's tie-in episode to Captain America 2: The Winter Soldier was totally also. And also emblematic of everything that's wrong with the show in the first place. Because I'm incapable of turning off my critical writer mind and simply enjoying a lighthearted situation secret agent series, I have articulated my frustrations with Agents Of Stupid Hydra Infiltration, Everything Lame and Dumb (see what I did there?) in a new article for Tor.com. So check out, and share your thoughts in the comments, 'natch.

(but seriously this show would be so much better if it had more Hasslehoff)

A Retrospective Look at Jane Austen's Brain-eating Habits

Can you believe it's been 5 years since the release of Pride & Prejudice & Zombies?  And just over 200 from the release of the original novel? Well, to celebrate, the folks at Quirk Books (who published ...and Zombies and its followups, as well as many other fine collections of pulped trees) asked me to do some digging and explore the past, present, and future of their massive mashup mega-hit -- where it started, how it worked, and what it did for the company over the last 5 years. The short answer is that it basically launched their entire fiction line, which is now tremendously successful -- and also served as an accidental omen to our current pop-culture status of zombie overload (seriously! They beat the trend! But barely). For the long answer? Check out my 3-piece retrospective on Pride & Prejudice & Zombies on the Quirk website.

Plastic Paddy's Wake (and Bake)

  To celebrate the occasion of St. Padraig's Day (specifically the 73 people arrest at UMass Amherst's "Blarney Blowout" this past weekend), I've taken an old traditional Irish song and updated for the dudebro crowd. You're welcome. 

"Plastic Paddy's Wake (and Bake)" on FiveByFiveHundred.com

That Was The Homophobic Girl I Poured A Beer On And Then Got Her Kicked Out Of The Bar That Was

This is a story.

(I assume there is a parallel universe where someone wrote this from the opposing point of view and called it "That Was The Homo That Poured A Beer On Me And Then I Got Kicked Out Of The Bar")

Upcoming Stuff & Events & Things (Nov. '13)

Hello, website! Long time, no update! I swear that one of these days I am going to actually train myself to just make brief updates here as they happen, instead of these info dumps. ANYWAY. I've got some stuff going on, because of course I do. It goes like this:

• Saturday, December 7, I'll be returning to MORTIFIED and performing some hilariously terrible songs that I wrote when I was 16. The performance will take place at Space 538 in Portland, ME; tickets are $8 in advance and $10 at the door. Do I know anyone in Maine that I can even embarrass myself in front of? I don't know, but I can tell you that it is definitely worth it to go to Maine to laugh at my terrible, terrible songs.
• I've also got 2 new short plays in the 4th Annual Boston One Minute Play Festival, January 4-6 at Boston Playwrights Theatre. They'll be directed by Megan Sandberg-Zakian and Meghan Mueller, which I'm sure makes my sister proud in some way.

Meanwhile, in addition to my normal duties at Five By Five Hundred, I have a review of Eric Smith's new book The Geek's Guide To Dating on Tor.com, and some coverage of SpeakEasy Stage Company's world premiere production of Make Up Your Mind, a brand new play by Kurt Vonnegut even though he's dead.

And then, ya know, the youge (like, the slang/shortened word for "usual," but spelled phonetically? Is that right?): Workin', writin', so on and so forth. Tonight at the Huntington we start performances for The Cocktail Hour by A.R. Gurney, which is directed by Maria Aitken, a favorite of ours at the theatre. Here's a little video I made for that:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xa_ckErMzAY]

I also wrote some fun stuff about ghost stories at the theatre on the Huntington's blog which is still worth reading even though it's after Halloween, as well as two pieces of flash fiction in this "Quantum Shorts" competition that you can go read and vote for so I can win some monies: I Kill Dead People and Not Dead Yet (which was the basis for my story in Grayhaven Comics' Fifth Dimension anthology).

Wow that's a whole lot of dead stuff. In that case, I should end this on a happy note, which is that Maurissa Tancharoen both listened to and enjoyed my song "I'll Fight A Whedon For You"; unfortunately, her husband Jed was less than impressed.

So now I've pissed one Whedon and armwrestled another, which only leaves Zak for me still to cross. But overall I think that means that I've successfully become a Whedonverse villain?

Holy crap, I'll be 28 in 2 weeks.