Hey, I Got Interviewed

At www.gumbowriters.com... here's the direct link.

The Spindlies Revealed

Look upon the face of evil.

According to the Berkely site upon which I found this picture, they are CELLAR SPIDERS.

To wit:

Pholcus phalangioides
Family Pholcidae
"Daddy long-legs," "cellar spider"

The common synanthropic cellar spiders in California are European invasives, native pholcids are much smaller. Pholcus can be distinguished from Holocnemus by the grey/brown concolorous abdomen. Their webs are irregular tangles.

Hey, thanks Europe. We save your asses in two World Wars, and you dump your extra cellar spiders in our laps by way of gratitude.

I should also point out that, since I don't live in a cellar, these spiders have taken a collective wrong turn. I do notice them down in the laundry room. Perhaps the spindlies down there kicked out a group of them, and they've resettled elsewhere, a la Khan in Star Trek II, or Australians.

I've blown the lid off this mystery. Now that I know they're cellar spiders, they can no longer hide in the shadows under an assumed identity. (I mean really... "spindlies?" Who comes up with this shit?)

And, thanks to global warming, it hasn't gotten cold enough in LA for them to hibernate or die or whatever the fuck it is spiders do during the winter time. It's almost December, and I'm dealing with a spider plague. At least in Chicago, I could count on (snow on the ground) = (don't have to deal with spiders for the most part). Around here, it's all spiders, all the time. Oh, how I suffer for my art.

I have seen the depths of villainy, and it is in the face of the cellar spider.

Also... what the fuck do they eat? Microbes?

Return of the Spindlies

So... the other day, I bemoaned the fact that I was plagued by an unending swarm of the skinny spiders I've been calling "spindlies" for lack of a better, more official term.

I posted that blog, and... the spindlies disappeared. I didn't see a single spindly in the days that followed. This was odd. Were they like a dream creature, in that I just had to face them down to make them go away? Were they embarrassed by the publicity? Or was it mere coincidence? Who the fuck knows?

Naturally, I wasn't going to complain that there were fewer spiders in my life.

Little did I know, they hadn't gone away. They just stepped back to regroup, and plot their most daring raid yet.

Last night, I wrote until I ran outta juice and played some Fallout 3 until I got tired. I went into the bathroom to brush my teeth.

Brush-brush-brush... brush-brush-brush...

From the corner of my eye, I noticed a strange movement. I turned my head --

-- and there was a spindly on my arm!!!

I started screaming the f-word really loud. But since my mouth was full of toothpaste and the toothbrush was still hanging out, it sounded more like "Musshh-fuuuuuuh! Fuuuumin-fuuu-guuuugh!!!" I slapped at my arm like it was on fire.

I ran out of the bathroom, yanked off my shirt and stomped on it. I gave it a few seconds, and shook out said shirt. No spindly corpse fell out.

I went back in the bathroom and looked on the floor. Again - no corpse.

Unless I've failed in locating its body - and that's a possibility, since they're so, y'know, spindly - the fucker is still at large in my lair.

I know this wasn't some random thing. First they're all over the place, then they vanish, and then one lands on me, and I'm expected to take that as coincidence? I've got two words for that: bull and shit. I'm convinced the spindlies went to the kind of care in planning this operation that would rival the most top secret mission undertaken by the Allies in WWII.

I don't think I'm going out on a limb by saying I think a guy should be able to brush his damn teeth without worrying if spiders are gonna drop on him or not.

Fuck the spindlies. Fuck them up their spindly asses.

Very Intense Dreams

Last night, I wrote five pages and found myself getting sleepy really early. I'm always trying to catch up on sleep, so I figured, why fight it? I jumped in the sack, out like a light.

But then I woke up in the middle of the night. I'd gone to bed too early. I tried just lying there in the dark, but no dice. All that does is fill the void with thinking about the job, whatever script I'm working on, etc. So I read some Howard for about half an hour. His writing is so powerful I can't think of anything else; it's a great way to clear the clutter in my brain while waiting for sleep to return. I finally grew drowsy again.

When I shut off the light and closed my eyes, I'm instantly got pulled into slumber, a sensation so powerful it was almost like a drug. Here's the thing, though -- I wasn't totally asleep. I could hear the other people in my building, and I had the freedom to open my eyes and look around the room. When I closed my eyes, however, I was plunged into a very intense dreamscape. I was able to go back and forth between REM-level dreaming and looking-around-the room wakefulness, which I did several times. It was exactly like standing in a pool and being able to submerge your head or stand up in the air at will.

I'd never experienced anything like that before.

This went on for what seemed to be a long while. The dreams themselves had very little narrative, but were generally set around Hollywood and its environs. It was almost like a sandbox-style video game. It was a magnified version of Hollywood, taking place in a night so black it was subterranean... not to imply a nightmare, though. I went into buildings and met people and did stuff, but none of it was like... I'm fucking supermodels or battling ninjas. It was reality, in fast cuts, plus twenty percent, if that makes any sense.

I woke up again, this time as the first sun crept into the lair. I closed my eyes, and this time I was out for real. No shenanigans or weirdness - I just passed right the fuck out. And the dreams followed me. It was like an intense workout for my subconscious.

My alarm went off, and I got out of bed with a rare regret. Usually, I jump up, read Hagakure and go about attacking my day. A part of me longed to recapture this experience I'd had. Just as well, though - that way lies madness.

One would think that, from the work my brain was putting in and the stop'n' start nature of the sleep, I'd wake up all bedraggled and shit. But that's not the case... I feel rested in a very, very rare way, calm and balanced but alert and engaged. I wish I could experience this every night, but then again, it wouldn't make what happened to me last night special.

I have no idea where this came from, or what triggered it.

And, oh yeah, it's my birthday. Weird, huh?

Dracula: The Un-Dead Site

The official site is now up, here: www.draculathe-undead.com.

Not much there yet, but more to come between now and the novel's release in October '09.

Whoo-hoo!

I Got a Bad Case of the Spindlies

I fucking hate spiders, and I've gotten a ton of them in the lair, lately. As in, I'm killing three or four a night. And they're getting bolder.

Luckily, they're all "spindlies." I don't know what else to call them; the species designation escapes me. They're as skinny as daddy long legs but, instead of a round body, they have super-thin little bodies kinda perched at the top of these thread-like legs. They are 0-level spiders.

Spindlies don't really bother me. When I see one, I just kinda kill it and go on with my life. But man, I'm getting a LOT. In the shower, in my closet, on the wall, in the windows. Last night, I came home and there was one sitting on my laptop.

That crosses the line.

Maybe they're seasonal spiders, and now is their time of the year. Or maybe some eggs hatched somewhere. I don't care, I just want them gone. Like I said, I'm not exactly living in terror, and they sure beat the hell out of a plague of black widows or Peruvian bird-eating spiders or something. But I would prefer to live without spindlies, thank you very much.

Let the Right One In

I went to the Sunset Laemmle 5 last night and caught the 9:55 show of Let the Right One In.

There's been huge buzz in town and online for this movie, so I was jazzed to catch it. You don't get too many Swedish vampire movies these days.

Since Dracula: The Un-Dead has been a big part of my life for a while, and especially lately, I've given thought to what makes vampire stories/movies so enduring and multi-faceted. I think the core of it is the fact that you can add vampires to any given genre or sub-genre and create something new. Even Bram Stoker's Dracula is basically a Victorian romance... with vampires. I bring this up because Let the Right One In is probably the first "coming-of-age movie with vampires" movie I've seen. No, scratch that, you could throw Lost Boys in there, but it's still more of a teen movie than anything. Here, the kids are twelve.

The movie's about this wimpy kid named Oskar growing up in Stockholm in 1982. He gets picked on by evil bullies and has no friends, so he spends a lot of time hanging around by himself on a jungle gym in the courtyard of his apartment complex. He's gotten his hands on a hunting knife and, when we meet him, he's working up the courage to use it on the head bully.

One night, he's out there stabbing a tree and calling it names, practicing for the big day, when a 12-year-old girl named Eli asks him what he's doing. Oskar turns around, and she's standing on top of the jungle gym, wearing nothing but jeans and a shirt even though it's the dead of winter.

They become friends. And that's where the rubber of the story hits the road...

Let the Right One In was directed by Tomas Alfredson, and it is beautiful. Mad props to the DP Hoyte Van Hoytema. It's based on a novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist, a book I'm gonna read. He also wrote the screenplay and got sole credit, which is rare. (Well, rare in Hollywood).

This movie does a brilliant job of creating night in winter. It made me think of Chicago. There, dealing with darkness and cold is a fact of life for half the year. But I've only experienced that twice since moving to LA, once in Montana in December and once in New York in early March. I miss it and I don't. Let the Right One In nails it to such a degree that I was pulling up tons of memories of tromping through snow at midnight, and watching the movie became a very visceral experience.

In that regard, it reminds me of 30 Days of Night, which I liked a lot.

It also reminded me of Near Dark, in the very grungy and real-world way the story deals with vampirism. The word "vampire" is only used once, and at a key moment. Also like Near Dark, it touches on how fucking boring it is to be a vampire sometimes... we get a scene where Eli is just sitting around with her cards and puzzles, and earlier she cracks a Rubik's Cube in record time.

There's an aspect of Fright Night, in that both movies kinda have the same logline: A vampire moves in next door. Again, Fright Night is a teen movie.

It also plays like a gender-reversal of Twlight. But, again, teen movie -- one of the most original things about Let the Right One In is the age of the main characters. We've seen permutations of this story with high school-aged characters, but never pre-teens. Oskar is really still a kid. The closest analogy might be Cronos, though it's still not a direct match, as the girl in that movie is maybe eight, she's a little kid.

And while I was watching the film, I was thinking of Gun Crazy. Because to love a vampire is to love someone who is an addict and a serial killer, and is thus qualifiable as insane. Eli lives with an older guy. Like the other characters, you think he's her dad -- and he might be. As the story progressed, though, I started wondering if he just wasn't the "original Oskar," a kid who fell in love with a vampire, and just kinda hung around until he was worn out. So even though the relationship Oskar and Eli have is kinda sweet, there's also a back beat of sick dread in watching this kid get drawn into her orbit. There's a moment in act three when Eli saves his ass. I was glad she showed up, but at the same time I kinda sank in my seat, thinking: "Damn, now he owes her." And it isn't played as a heroic beat... after the shit hits the fan, they just sit there facing away from each other.

She is still a vampire, and this ain't a swoony teen romance like Twilight. I think this kid is fucking doomed.

On a cool side note: like I mentioned, Let the Right One In keeps it very real and pragmatic, but it does maintain the more fantasy-vampire rule that they can't come in unless invited, hence the title. We've seen that before, it's a trope. But this movie finally answers the question of, "What if a vampire went inside without being invited?" Oskar even teases her, asking if there's a force field or something. She's like, no, I can come in, but watch what happens when I try...

The movie's already been picked up for remake, with Matt Reeves (Cloverfield) directing. I really liked Cloverfield, so... while I'm not convinced the world needs a remake, it could be in worse hands.

Despite that, keep an eye out online. Watch the original first if at all possible. This is a great film.

Dead Right There

Worked on it all this past weekend, hit page 27 before I burned out yesterday.

This is some serious high-octane shit. It's feeling like another RUN.