Tag Archives: Michael Knost

Pixel Scroll 5/22/22 With A Capital ‘T’ And That Rhymes With ‘P’ And That Stands For Pixel

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(1) EMPEROR STARDUST RETURNS. For last night’s Nebula Awards ceremony Henry Lien returned in his Emperor Stardust persona and supplied a rocking musical introduction to The Andre Norton Nebula Award For Middle Grade And Young Adult Fiction category. Not an easy title to versify, and the Emperor also did a wonderful job of making the nominees into lyrics as well. He begins —

It’s the Andre Norton Nebula Award

And if you read these books you’ll totally be floored…

(For a captioned version see the official Nebula Awards Ceremony video starting around the 46:00 mark.)

(2) EVERY BOOK A WINNER. Popular fan artist Alan White will be holding a garage sale next weekend in Las Vegas. No wonder the poster is so gorgeous.

MADNESS ENSUES as 4000 paperbacks and several hundred hardbacks magically disappear for prices unknown in modern times! YOU, yes YOU can have a commanding library of dang near every possible genre author in a matter of minutes! Here’s your chance to beg out of social events by saying, “Sorry, I have books to read”. Here’s your chance to wonder “What the hell am I going to do with all these damn books?” while your mundane friends complain “Looks like a fire hazard to me”. Oh, the pity of it! This event runs all day Saturday beginning at 10AM sharp. (I plan on sleeping till 9:50am). And on Sunday until 2pm or the shelves are bare! Will this sale be an astounding success or a calamitous disaster? If you don’t show, you won’t know!

(3) STEVE VERTLIEB MEDICAL UPDATE. Steve Vertlieb was rehospitalized after developing a blood clot in one leg, and underwent surgery on May 19 to deal with it. The initial reports are favorable.

(4) IMMEDIATE ANALYSIS. Cora Buhlert is already on record with “Some Thoughts on the 2021 Nebula Award Winners – and Two SFWA Uproars”.

…The 2021 Nebula Award for Best Novelette goes to “O2 Arena” by Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki. This is a win which makes me very happy, because not only is it a good story, but it’s also (to my knowledge, at least) the first Nebula win for an author who lives and was born in Africa. Coincidentally, it is also the first Nebula win for Galaxy’s Edge magazine, which normally doesn’t get a whole lot of awards love….

(5) CHRIS BARKLEY’S HUGO PACKET SELECTIONS. Best Fan Writer nominee Chris Barkley has posted a collection of links on Facebook which he calls “A Sampling of The Best of So Glad You (Didn’t) Ask 2021: The 2022 Hugo Awards Packet Edition.”

I have assembled, for your reading pleasure, what I (and my editor Mike Glyer) consider the best of the columns I wrote this past year. Mind you, in re-reading them, I was tempted to rewrite some of them or insert a few more snarky comebacks to spruce them up a bit.

But …no.

My nomination as a Hugo Awards Finalist is based on these works and I offer them to you again, dear reader, unaltered and unabridged.

A link to each column that was submitted for the 2022 Hugo Awards Voter Packet will be linked below in the comments.

(6) HOW A MENTOR DISCOVERED ARISIA – AND OTHER SFF REALMS. The Horror Writers Association Mentor of the Year award recipient Michael Knost posted on Facebook the acceptance speech he really wanted to give.

I changed my Mentor of the Year Award speech during the Bram Stoker Awards ceremony at the last second as I recognized I was too emotional to deliver it. As I wanted to recognize my first mentor. I know I ugly-cry so I wanted to spare everyone. But I’d like to say what I wanted to say then, here. I apologize for the long post.

I hated school growing up. I hated education, reading, writing, and everything that went with it. I had great teachers, wonderful people, but I didn’t like school one bit. Then I met my fifth grade teacher, Mr Bill Marino.

He caught me in the hallway one day after lunch and handed me a classic science fiction novel—a yellowing mass market paperback. He must have seen the disappointment on my face and said, “I just want you to read this. There’s no tests, no book reports, etc. I just want to know what you think of the book. AND, while you are reading it, you will be exempt from all homework that the other students have to do.”…

(7) FRIENDLY DJINN PERSUASION. “George Miller reveals first trailer for ‘Three Thousand Years of Longing’” and SYFY Wire has the essence.

… Based on a story by A.S. Byatt, Three Thousand Years of Longing marks Miller’s return to fantasy filmmaking after first delving into the genre with The Witches of Eastwick 35 years ago. The film tells the story of a solitary scholar named Alithea (Tilda Swinton), who arrives in Istanbul for a conference and finds herself in the presence of a millennia-old Djinn (Idris Elba). The Djinn offers her three wishes, after which he will be granted his freedom, but of course, Alithea is an academic, and she doesn’t necessarily believe the Djinn’s gifts — leaving him to regale her with stories of his long life in an effort to convince her….

(8) MEDIA BIRTHDAY.

2008 – [By Cat Eldridge.] Fair warning: usually we avoid essaying anything that I don’t like. I got special permission to do this film. You are warned! 

Just fourteen years ago, the last installment in the Indiana Jones franchise so far, Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, premiered on this date. (The untitled fifth Indiana Jones film is a sequel to this film and our Indy will be, if he’s the same age as Harrison Ford who plays him, eighty one years of age. A fine vintage for a globe trotting whip bearing archaeologist.) 

Directed by Steven Spielberg who had directed all of these, from a screenplay by David Koepp but, and this is a huge but, Jeb Stuart, Jeffrey Boam, Frank Darabont, George Lucas and Jeff Nathanson had previously attempted to write suitable screenplays and failed. Yes, consider that for a moment — the screenplay you see is one of legions done. And the one considered most filmable. God help us. We can blame!  At least we know that we can curse George Lucas and Jeff Nathanson for the story we see here.

According to the publicists, it was intended to pay tribute to the SF B-movies of the Fifties. Well in my opinion it failed at that. Aliens. Crystal skulls. Nuclear explosions. Gateways to other, well, somewheres. WTF? I really think that Indy Jones is at his best old-fashioned pulp adventure, not SF. Bah humbug. 

Well it cost nearly two hundred million dollars and the appeal of Harrison Ford proved irresistible as it made four times that at the box office.

And critics mostly loved it though there were some who decidedly loathed it with all their beings. 

Jeff Beyer of the Chicago Daily Herald did notice how bad the story was: “Normally it’s a terrible thing if a film only gives us one good character … except when it’s Indiana Jones, with a whip at his side. A terrible story can’t totally ruin Jones. Thank God.”

Lori Hoffman of the Atlantic City Weekly in her review took note of the long break between this film and the last one: “While we can never go home again completely, ‘Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull’ reminds us of why we fell in love with Indiana Jones in the first place.” 

David Denby of the New Yorker gets the last word as he sums up my feelings towards this film: “Crystal Skull isn’t bad — there are a few dazzling sequences, and a couple of good performances — but the unprecedented blend of comedy and action that made the movies so much more fun than any other adventure series is mostly gone.”

Audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes are as ambivalent as I am giving it just a fifty-three percent rating. 

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born May 21, 1859 — Arthur Conan Doyle. I’ve read all of the Holmes stories a long time ago and that was a delightful undertaking indeed. My favorite isThe Hound of the Baskervilles as it allows him to develop a story at length. Favorite video Holmes? Jeremy Brett.  Least favorite? The one who went on to play Khan. Just really didn’t work for me at all.  Looking at ISFDB, I’m see there were more Professor Challenger novels than I realized. And the Brigadier Gerard stories sound suspiciously comical…  (Died 1930.)
  • Born May 21, 1900 — Wallace West. His first two short stories were “Loup-Garou” in Weird Tales, October 1927 and “The Last Man” in Amazing, February 1929. He published continuously through the Sixties though only averaged a story a year. Interestingly his first two novels were about Betty Boop in the Big Little Books format: Betty Boop in Snow-White: Assisted by Bimbo and Ko-Ko and Betty Boop in “Miss Gulliver’s Travels”.  He wrote four genre novels, only a few of which are available from the usual suspects. (Died 1980.)
  • Born May 21, 1934 — Shirley Boone, 88. Ok, she’s here for but one role. She played the construct of Ruth, Kirk’s old Academy flame, on the “Shore Leave” episode of Trek. I really, really love that episode. Other than that episode, she appeared in a horror film, It’s Alive, and her last roles were three in I Dream of Jeannie before retiring from acting at age thirty-six.
  • Born May 21, 1938 — Richard Benjamin, 84. He’s here because he was Adam Quark on the all too short-lived Quark series. He also was Joseph Lightman in Witches’ Brew which was based off Fritz Leiber’s Conjure Wife novel (winner of the 1944 Retro-Hugo Award at Dublin 2019) though that’s not credited in the film. And he was in Westworld as Peter Martin. Finally he did a stint on the Ray Bradbury Theatre which I just essayed as Mr. Howard in “Let’s Play Poison” episode. 
  • Born May 21, 1939 — Paul Winfield. Another one taken far too soon. He’s best remembered as Capt. Terrell in The Wrath of Khan, but he was also in the Next Gen episode “Darmok” as the signature character.  He showed up in Damnation Alley as a character named Keegan and in The Terminator as Lt. Ed Traxler. Oh, and let’s not forget that he was Lucien Celine In The Serpent and the Rainbow which surely is genre. (Died 2004.)
  • Born May 21, 1960 — Andrea Thompson, 62. I’ll not mention her memorable scene on Arli$$ as it’s not genre though it is definitely worth seeing.  Her best genre work was as the telepath Talia Winters on Babylon 5. Her first genre role was in Nightmare Weekend which I’ll say was definitely a schlock film. Next up was playing a monster in the short lived Monsters anthology series. She had a one-off on Quantum Leap before landing the Talia Winters gig. Then came Captain Simian & The Space Monkeys. Really. Truly. Her last genre role to date appears to be in the Heroes: Destiny web series. 
  • Born May 21, 1964 — Kat Richardson, 58. Her Greywalker series is one of those affairs that I’m pleased to say that I’ve read every novel that was been published. I’ve not read Blood Orbit, the first in her new series, yet. Has anyone here done so? Her Blood Orbit novel won an Endeavour Award which is given for a science fiction or fantasy book written by a Pacific Northwest author and is given by a panel of judges chartered by Oregon Science Fiction Conventions, Inc. 
  • Born May 21, 1968 — Karen Lord, 54. A Barbadian writer whose first novel, Redemption in Indigo, won the Carl Brandon Parallax Award, Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature and a Kitschie for its inventive use of Senegalese folklore. I’d also recommend The Best of All Possible Worlds novel as it’s as well-done as her earlier novel, and different and fascinating in its own right. Unraveling is her latest novel.

(10) NEWS FROM NEW MEXICO. Margaret Atwood and Emily St. John Mandel are two sff writers who spoke on day one of the Santa Fe Literary Festival reports Yahoo!

…The Handmaid’s Tale author Margaret Atwood, …spoke about the leaked Supreme Court memo that suggested the US could imminently overturn Roe v Wade. She was unimpressed with justices who defend such judgments by self-identifying as Constitutional orginalists.“If you take the original Constitution [as it is and apply it], a lot of people are going to lose their rights, including all women,” she said, as well as “people who don’t own property”….

On day two, local author George RR Martin made a revelation which was reported by The Independent (registration required).  

George RR Martin has revealed that when Game of Thrones, the hit HBO show based on his epic fantasy novel series A Song of Ice and Fire, was first being pitched to television networks it was sold as: “The Sopranos in Middle Earth”….

(11) BE FREE. To celebrate the movie’s 40th anniversary, Parade has come up with “21 Things You Might Not Know About the E.T. Movie”.

3. The scene in science class when Elliott frees all the frogs, saving them from dissection, is based on Spielberg’s own past. He was apparently so aghast when asked to cut open a frog in school that he released several of the amphibians.

(12) GROWING UP EVIL. In a Nerds of a Feather film review Arturo Serrano says “’The Innocents’ is a disturbing look at how evil is born and nurtured” and his concern about these characters is contagious.

…Ben’s case merits attention for its own reasons. He’s on a trajectory parallel to Ida’s, one where raw id is unhindered by morality, but what fuels his cruelty is his mother’s abuse. He has actively been taught to cause harm. We can more readily understand why he’s the way he is, but when paired with Ida, we are made to wonder how children of such drastically different parents can become equally monstrous. The spark of the whole conflict is precisely Aisha, whose superpower is what the other kids lack: empathy.

The movie achieves all this with incredibly few lines of dialogue. Most of the weight of the storytelling is carried by the camera, handled with confidence to make a shiny forest creepy, a boring building ominous, and a clear pond loaded with tension. With such versatile skill for shot composition, lighting, framing, camera angles, and the sheer brutal power of great acting, the need for visual effects is minimal….

(13) FRESH MAGIC. Nerds of a Feather also gives us Paul Weimer’s “Microreview [book]: Rise of the Mages by Scott Drakeford”.

…I have to give Drakeford good marks for imagining a fantasy world that is not a stasis frozen in amber and where the only discoveries are re-discoveries. There are people seeking not only the lore of the past or lore from outside, but making new discoveries of their own (particularly Ban, Emrael’s brother). Societies are never static, there may be forces slowing progress and change, but the “everything has been the same way for a thousand years” is a trap that Drakeford avoids, on cultural, social and technological axes….

(14) KEEP WATCHING THE SKIES. “Blood moon eclipse to occur Sunday night” reports MSN.com. Never mind — like the first comment says, “This was last week, dopes.”

…What this means is that the moon will turn a blood-red-orange color late Sunday night until early Monday morning.

The reason for the red color is the exact same reason sunsets appear red….

This has inspired Michael Toman to send me these lyrics:

A Crimson Shade of Doo-Wop Lunar Activity

Blood, Blood, Blood, Blood Moon /

You heard me crying on my fresh-fried phone /

A lone stranger, with his sad tune, on the Night Tide Dune/

With no love of my own…

Wop Bop a Mary Lou Bop Apocalypse Rag Wham! /

“Blooooooood  – – – Moooooon!

Toman adds:

“Unsolicited Shout-Outs to GRRM in Santa Fe, NM and Howard Waldrop, Who Knows Where or When?”

PS. “Appearing next, ‘Live!’ on our All-Star Cavalcade Show, Howard W. and The Mar-Velles!”

PPS. “And the Wind Cries ‘Waldrop?’ Or was that “Westeros?”

(15) A VALHALLA FOR CARTOON CHARACTERS. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] The latest trailer from the game where all the Warner Bros and DC characters fight each other in one epic battle. “MultiVersus – You’re with Me!’”.

In MultiVersus, the Multiverse is at your fingertips as you battle it out in intense 2v2 matches. Up against Batman & Shaggy? Try using Bugs Bunny & Arya Stark! This platform fighter lets you play out your fantasy matchups in a fun co-op or head-to-head fight for supremacy. MultiVersus is an all-new free-to-play, platform fighter videogame. With an ever-expanding cast of iconic characters and legendary universes, MultiVersus will feature multiple online modes, including a team-based 2 vs. 2 format, 1 vs. 1 matches and 4-player free-for-all, along with upcoming content-filled seasons.

[Thanks to Andrew Porter, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, John King Tarpinian, and Chris Barkley for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day P J Evans.]

Horror Writers Association 2021 Specialty Awards Winners

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The Horror Writers Association (HWA) announced the recipients of its 2021 Specialty Awards.

SPECIALTY PRESS

The HWA Specialty Press Award goes to Valancourt Books.

The HWA Specialty Press Award is presented periodically to a specialty publisher whose work has substantially contributed to the horror genre, whose publications display general excellence, and whose dealings with writers have been fair and exemplary.

The award was instituted in 1997, largely due to the efforts of long-time HWA member and specialty press aficionado Peter Crowther.

Valancourt Books was founded by James D. Jenkins and Ryan Cagle in 2005 to make neglected and out-of-print books available to new generations of readers at affordable prices. Over the past 17 years Valancourt has published over 500 titles, with an emphasis on 18th & 19th-century Gothic fiction and 20th-century supernatural and horror fiction. Recently Valancourt debuted three new series: Paperbacks from Hell, focusing on lost paperback horror of the 1970s and ’80s, Monster, She Wrote, focusing on classic horror by women writers, and Valancourt International, which translates horror from around the world.

The origins of Valancourt Books date back to 2004, when the press’s founders James D. Jenkins and Ryan Cagle had to drive 28 hours to access some rare Gothic horror texts that were only available at one library in the country. With modern publishing technology, they figured there had to be a better way of doing things, and so they started Valancourt Books with the aim of making rare and out-of-print books available to new audiences at reasonable prices.

For its first seven years, Valancourt focused on scholarly editions of 18 th and 19 th -century texts, from the seven legendary “horrid novels” mentioned in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey to rare Victorian “penny dreadfuls” and late 19 th -century popular fiction by authors like Bram Stoker, Marie Corelli, and Richard Marsh. These scholarly editions feature introductions, notes, and contextual materials edited by top scholars from around the world.

More recently Valancourt has moved into more modern horror fiction, rediscovering forgotten mid-century authors like John Blackburn, Gerald Kersh, and Charles Beaumont, as well as some of the lost horror greats of the 1970s and ’80s, like Michael McDowell, Elizabeth Engstrom, Bernard Taylor, and Michael Talbot.

In 2016 Valancourt launched two popular series: The Valancourt Book of Horror Stories and The Valancourt Book of Victorian Christmas Ghost Stories, and more recently three exciting new series have debuted: Paperbacks from Hell, which reprints lost 1970s and ’80s horror novels with their original iconic covers, Monster, She Wrote, which spotlights women horror writers, and Valancourt International, which publishes horror fiction in translation, including The Valancourt Book of World Horror Stories, which was a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award and World Fantasy Award.

Many of Valancourt’s books have been adopted for university courses around the world, several have been filmed or are in production, and many of them have been translated and published throughout the world.

For more information on Valancourt Books and the titles it publishes, please visit www.valancourtbooks.com.

THE RICHARD LAYMON PRESIDENT’S AWARD

The winner of the Richard Laymon President’s Award for Service is Sumiko Saulson.

The Richard Laymon President’s Award for Service was instituted in 2001 and is named in honor of Richard Laymon, who died in 2001 while serving as HWA’s President. As its name implies, it is given by HWA’s sitting President.

The award is presented to a volunteer who has served HWA in an especially exemplary manner and has shown extraordinary dedication to the organization.

Sumiko Saulson (they/them), Social Media Manager for the Horror Writers Association, is an award-winning author of Afrosurrealist and multicultural sci-fi and horror whose latest novel Happiness and Other Diseases (book one of the Metamorphoses of Flynn Keahi) is available on Mocha Memoirs Press.  Other works include the non-fiction title 100+ Black Women in Horror Fiction, novels Solitude, Warmth, and Moon Cried Blood. Their short stories have appeared in numerous anthologies including Tales For The Campfire, Clockwork Wonderland, Tales From the Lake Vol 3, Beasts and Babes, Scierogenous 2,  Colors In Darkness: Forever Vacancy, and Slay: Tales of the Vampire Noire. Their poetry has appeared in Infectious Hope, Siren’s Call Magazine, and HWA Poetry Showcase VII and VIII.  They are the editor of the anthologies Black Magic Women (2018), Scry of Lust (2019), Wickedly Abled (2020) and Scry of Lust 2 (2021), and the collection Black Celebration. They are a comic zine maker and author/illustrator of the graphic novels/comic books Agrippa (2013), Dreamworlds (2016), and The Complete Mauskaveli (2020).  They are the illustrator of Living a Lie (2015).

Winner of the Afrosurrealist Writers Award (2018), Grand Prize 2017 BCC Voice “Reframing the Other” contest, 2nd Place Carry The Light Sci-fi/Fantasy Award (2016), 2017 Mixy Award, 6th Place in the Next Great Horror Writers Contest (2017). They are the recipient of the 2002 STAND Grant for First Time Directors, 2016 HWA StokerCon “Scholarship from Hell”, 2018 Ara Joe Grant for Zinemakers, 2020 HWA Diversity Grant recipient, and 2021 Ladies in Horror Fiction grant.

Sumiko has an AA in English from Berkeley City College, writes a column called “Writing While Black” for a national Black Newspaper, the San Francisco BayView, writes for Search Magazine, is the host of the SOMA Leather and LGBT Cultural District’s “Erotic Storytelling Hour,” and teaches courses at the Speculative Fiction Academy.

THE SILVER HAMMER AWARD

The winner of HWA’s Silver Hammer Award is Kevin J. Wetmore.

The HWA gives the Silver Hammer Award to an HWA volunteer who has done a truly massive amount of work for the organization, often unsung and behind the scenes. It was instituted in 1996, and is decided by a vote of HWA’s Board of Trustees.

The award is so named because it represents the careful, steady, continuous work of building HWA’s “house” — the many institutional systems that keep the organization functioning on a day-to-day basis. The award itself is a chrome-plated hammer with an engraved plaque on the handle. The chrome hammer is also a satisfying allusion to The Beatles’ song, “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer”, a miniature horror story in itself.

Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr. is the author, editor or co-editor of twenty-seven books, including Bram Stoker Award nominees Uncovering Stranger Things, The Streaming of Hill House, Devil’s Advocates: The Conjuring, and Eaters of the Dead: Myths and Realities of Cannibal Monsters. He is also the author of over a hundred articles and three dozen short stories found in magazines and anthologies such as Cemetery Dance, Mothership Zeta, Nonbinary Review, Midian Unmade and The Cackle of Cthulhu. He is the co-chair of HWA’s Los Angeles Chapter, has twice co- chaired StokerCon and served as StokerCon’s volunteer coordinator, in addition to serving as curator for the HWA blog Halloween Haunts and chair of the Lifetime Achievement Award committee. In his other life he is a professor of Theatre Arts at Loyola Marymount University where he teaches horror theatre, horror cinema, Japanese theatre, African theatre, Shakespeare and stage combat.

MENTOR OF THE YEAR

The HWA Mentor of the Year is Michael Knost.

The HWA’s Mentor Program is available to all members of the organization. This popular program pairs a newer writer with an established professional for an intensive four-month long partnership. For new writers, the Program offers mentees a personal, one-on-one experience with a professional writer, tailor-made to help them grow in their writing and teach them how to better market their work. For experienced writers, the Program allows mentors a chance to pay forward the experience and encouragement other writers gave them when they were starting out. In addition, there is the added benefit of growing as a writer oneself through the act of teaching others. In short, the Program benefits all who participate, regardless of their roles.

Inaugurated in 2014, the Mentor of the Year Award recognizes one mentor in the Mentor Program who has done an outstanding job of helping newer writers. The award is chosen by the current chair of the Mentor Program.

Michael Knost “epitomizes what a mentor should be. He is always willing to help writers improve their craft, as both an HWA mentor and outside of the program, as both a teacher and an editor. Writers who have worked with him, or trained under him, universally praise Michael for his honesty, knowledge, and encouragement. This is probably recognition that is long overdue, but Michael’s contributions to the HWA, and the horror genre’s up-and-coming writers, has always been recognized and appreciated.” – JG Faherty, HWA Mentorship Program Manager.

Michael Knost is a Bram Stoker Award®-winning editor and author of science fiction, fantasy, horror, and supernatural thrillers. He has written in various genres and helmed multiple anthologies. He received the Horror Writers Association’s Silver Hammer Award in 2015 for his work as the organization’s mentorship chair. He also received the prestigious J.U.G. (Just Uncommonly Good) Award from West Virginia Writer’s Inc. His Return of the Mothman is currently being filmed as a movie adaption. He has taught writing classes and workshops at several colleges, conventions, online, and currently resides in Chapmanville, West Virginia with his wife, daughter, and a zombie goldfish.

[Based on a press release.]