It's all timey-wimey.

Ack! New Skullduggery?!?

Eeeeee! I got the e-mail saying it's shipped, and should be here Wednesday the 5th! This is me: [link]

I finished Something Wicked This Way Comes! I thought it was great, and I really need to read more Bradbury. Jilli, talk to me about how much you love Charles Halloway, because I'll bet you do.

Charles Halloway is almost as cool as my dad. In fact, Charles Halloway is eerily similar to my dad, which is one of the HUGE reasons I love that book.

I may want to run away with the Coodger and Dark Pandemonium Shadow Show (and believe me, there are a lot of days I want precisely that), but I will always want to be able to talk to my dad.

Which would be some of the thinking behind my seriously considering asking my dad if he'll record himself reading Something Wicked This Way Comes and "Homecoming".

In fact, Charles Halloway is eerily similar to my dad, which is one of the HUGE reasons I love that book.

I suspected as much.

I'm not sure if it's that my dad is becoming more like Charles Halloway as the years go by or if I'm just noticing more similarities. But I know my dad would be delighted to spend the rest of his life in a library after hours.

In Stephen King's Danse Macabre, he has a section about Something Wicked This Way Comes. In it there's a quote from Ray Bradbury about how after the death of his father, he re-read the book and realized it was a huge love letter to his father. I always, always think of that.

When the vampire/werewolf paranormal romance thing has run its course, this is really the only logical next step:

The Gods of the Night are incarnated for the first time in 65 million years, summoned to protect humanity from an all-encompassing evil that is coming in 2012, at the end of the Mayan calendar. While currently incarnated as deadly, handsome men, they have the ability to assume their prior forms—those of gigantic dinosaurs.

Aw, Leisure Books. Truly the pinnacle of romance publishing.

I would like to gather together all the people that think 2012 is a significant year in the species' survival, and ask them to walk through their belief system. And then I'd walk through a couple counters--probably verbatim from a couple websites, to most clearly indicate that this information is out there for any taker.

I would filter off anyone (::sob::) that had a change in their belief about the end of the world, and hand the rest to the portion of the entertainment industry that cannot resist playing into this bullshit.

I'd tell them "This, this is your audience. Until you come up with a storyline that's an interesting twist on the "2012 is when we stopped writing down the calendar" explanation, or some product that's just so much fun the ridiculous premise doesn't significantly hamstring it (good luck with that...), please restrict your advertising to them. Leave the rest of us alone."

And then I'd cut off all communication and travel between their 2012 believer/panderer enclave, except for one button. They hit their button to tell us they have a story that's so good, we should look. If they fail to entertain, we kill the executive producers. If they succeed, the entire cast and crew can come over to our side.

We also have a button. Starting 2013, anyone on the outside can hit it at any time. It sets off a klaxon and strobe lights for a three minute period everywhere in the 2012 enclave. That button works forever. The "we have a story" button stops working at the end of this year.