So, I’ve been busy again. Also, I kinda liked having the KingStoopids thing on the front page for a month. But, mostly, I’m just busy. Like now. But, I’ve got a minute, I guess.

Professionally speaking—because, like, that’s an adverb which applies to me and all—there might be a bit of news, at least on the horizon. For one thing, something I’ve been largely ignoring for about a year now was this idea of molesting the primary plotline of Night of the Living Dead into a play. Which I wasn’t thrilled with. Partly because it’s definitively hacking something already out there; partly because it’s already been done, reportedly as a musical [I dunno]; partly because I’m getting kinda sick of zombies; partly because, while I’d changed a lot of things present in the original and in Savini’s remake, I still wasn’t thrilled with the outcome. So I think I’m giving up on that. Also, my computer kinda puked hard and, if I managed to save the .fdr, I have no idea where it is now.

But that’s okay. NotLD having been pretty well greenlit simply because I’d agreed to write it, and people willing to have been in it simply because I was the one doing all the dialogue and whatever else I’m supposed to be so good at, the title and plotline in general were apparently kinda irrelevant. So this should be amusing to those who have been coming here for the last ten years or so: NotLD being abandoned, I instead pitched the basic idea from Lurkers, and they loved it. For those who haven’t been here since 1998 or earlier, that was this thing I’d thrown together over the course of six hours sitting at Perkins, with an ashtray, so someone looking to shoot a studentfilm could go out and make it. That being Hutch, which was a flake, it never went anywhere and I nearly completely forgot about it. Until tonight. When it came up again.

So, the thing now is to rewrite that, since it was originally supposed to have been a film set in the present day of 1998. Now it’s supposed to be a play set in the present day of 2008. That it’s a play is immaterial, since the only need to have moved the camera in the original version would have been to keep people awake. That it’s set ten years later changes a lot of things, like predictive conversations about whether they’ll ever manage to ban smoking in restaurants and whether there’ll ever be more disappointing a president than a hillbilly known primarily for fucking a fatchick; those questions have been answered.

The idea now is to notice that the world, and more importantly the local scene—wherever you are—sucks beyond our ability to have predicted it ten years ago, and a few bleak predictions for 2018 which’ll probably turn out to have been shortsighted by then. The only real trick is that, here in 2008 as it actually is, no one really hangs out lurking in restaurants all night anymore, because the sort who do are insulted by smokingbans. And I’m not sure you can have a play based on a chatroom in any conceivable way.

So, there’s that. And, now that I’ve admitted it, it’ll probably find some way of unhappening. But, we’ll see.

In loosely related news, I went out for a limp to see what I could come up with for the play while I wasn’t sitting here banging it all out. And I got Hunter to grab a backcover shot, since people keep complaining that the back cover of a given book never has a shot of me on it. Even when I used Swyndle’s sketch for News of the Stupid last fall. So, now, I’ve got this shot instead. Probably, I’ll use it on the back of the next book which probably will be Imbecilese. In fact, I’m pretty sure it will be; what I’m not sure of yet is which of about five ways I could write it will prove to have been the one I ran with. I suppose I’ve got a few months to think about that, since I tend to write monologuistic/raconteuristic books like this in November as a matter of law.

More unprofessionally—which never happens, which lets me write everything off—I got approximately to the end of DeadRising a couple days ago. Technically, I finished the game. Realistically, I went into overtime, waded through several thousand zombies in a tunnel, destroyed a tank shooting missiles at me, and then died instantly when the guy driving the tank never let me hit him at all. I think I know how to kill him; but my last savepoint was before the damned tunnel, and I’m simply not in a hurry to go kill that damned tank again. Also, DeadRising is one reason I’ve decided to hate zombies. Which is funny. Half the reason I wrote Paroxysm was because I’d never seen a zombiefilm exhibit more than two or three dozen stuntmen with necrotic skin moaning at the survivors, and I wanted something extant to at least describe a situation in which thousands upon thousands of zombies could coexist at people. The XBox360’s ability to coat lowpoly figures with decent textures in realtime has made that possible after all, and got me to really, really hate the undead. Gropey little bastards.

On the other hand, now that I can play most XBox games, including the ones designed for SDTVs, I tracked down Stubbs the Zombie and played the hell outta that. Sure, it’s a stupid retropolitan satire designed for people young enough to find it hilarious and old enough to keep Jack Thompson from whimpering about it, cannibalism aside; but it’s kinda fun, and worth it if only for the cutscene with Eddie Stubbs spoofing Patton in front of the flag with a speech containing only the word ‘brains’. And of course the little eastereggs which neither apologise nor demand a lot of attention, like the sign in the copshop reading something like FRIENDLY FIRE. Remember: Shoot Civilians, Not Cops. Stuff that, you know, I’d do. If it were up to me. Though I’d probably make boring, realistic games in which a zombie biting you once was lethal, and in which shooting even the largest, most annoying levelboss in a mall full of zombies once was also lethal. I hate levelbosses; they’re stupid beyond words. Almost as stupid as getting bit by crowds of zombies and only running into trouble when you have no more gallons of orange juice in your pocket.

I could go on, but I won’t. Mostly because I could probably save it for Lurkers or Imbecilese, where people’ll figure it’s reasoned and intentional. The fools.

More later....

Tags: Books | NotS