The Hills of the Dead

Hey, Folks! I was recently a guest on the SFFaudio Podcast, discussing Robert E. Howard's Solomon Kane story, The Hills of the Dead. You can listen here: http://www.sffaudio.com/?p=49705 There's a reading of the story by Paul Boehmer, followed by our discussion. I first read it years ago, along with the other Solomon Kane stories, and this one stuck with me the most. The Hills of the Dead is the one I tell people about, even years later, mainly because it's got the most innovative disposal of vampires I've ever seen. To think this was written in the 1930s and I haven't seen rip-offs is impressive. If you're a hardcore horror person, maybe it won't feel so unique. At any rate, go listen to the podcast!

Solomon Kane Trailer

Some of you may know that Robert E. Howard, creator of Conan, is one of my favorite authors. Another one of his heroes, Solomon Kane, will be featured in his own film at the end of this year. The trailer looks great. It's taken some liberties with the source material (who's surprised?), but it feel quite Kaney. Take a gander:



You've got a good three months before it comes out. Plenty of time to read the book:

Andrew Wyeth And Stuff

I just found out that Andrew Wyeth died a couple of days ago. Raise a glass to a master. I chose to post his Trodden Weed because I love the boots. You can imagine Solomon Kane wearing these, marching off to kill a witch.

I finally moved on a bit with The Inner Workings of the Artificial Mind. I finished a draft of Chapter 9 and I'll shortly ship it off to its readers. You may or may not recall that the book is a bit of an experiment. Normally I won't send anything on to a reader until I think it's as good as it can get. With this novel, I'm sending it out less than perfect, partly because some people were curious about the writing process and partly to get myself into gear and work on the thing. I sent out Chapter 8 in September, so I'm a little behind.

Only a few days left to vote in The Sofanauts Awards: http://www.micropoll.com/akira/TakeSurvey?id=1118390

And finally, I think I post way too much eighties music here, so I want to put on some newer stuff. Here's a tune I like from Ellie Lawson. It comes with a homework assignment. I need you guys to comment and tell me if you can play the entire three minutes and forty-two seconds of song or if you get an abbreviated bit from it. I ask, because when I ran the Iron Maiden song the other day, I could hear the whole thing on my MacBook, from where I posted it, but only heard thirty seconds from my desktop PC. I used Firefox on both computers, but I wasn't signed into the blog as me on the PC. It was posted on imeem by the imeem jukebox, maybe that had something to do with it. Anywho, let me know, and here you go:

Gotta get up from here - Ellie Lawson