I came across this blog entry by Dave Rust, who’s been hosting a midnight “Bedtime Stories” event at Convergence, where he’s been playing stories from Escape Pod, PodCastle, and Pseudopod (including my short story “The Skull-Faced Boy”). I can’t say I’ve ever heard of an event like this before — sort of a “virtual reading,” no author required. It’s an interesting experiment.
The same blog also contains this behind-the-scenes tidbit about the Golden Compass movie, courtesy of one of the animators who worked on the film: “Now, for those who thought the film ended abruptly or didn’t match the book very well, Vin told us that originally the film did include the final three chapters of the book and followed it very closely. The studio made the decision to have the film re-edited by an action movie editor to ‘speed it up.’ They also cut out the final three chapters because test audiences felt it was ‘too downbeat.’ 50 minutes were cut out of the film and many scenes got shuffled around creating continuity errors and plot holes that were not in the original picture. The hope of most the people in the production is to see a Director’s Cut of the film come out on DVD which restores the original ending and puts things back in their proper order.”
Speaking of Pseudopod, my short story “The Disciple,” which appeared on the podcast last year, looks set to be reprinted soon. “The Disciple” appeared back in 2002 in a first-rate Lovecraftian anthology titled Dead But Dreaming. This was my first anthology appearance. Unfortunately, Dead But Dreaming fell victim to the infamous “anthology curse” that plagued my early book appearances. For what was supposed to be my first-ever anthology appearance, the publisher paid me for the story (quite well, in fact), but due to a production error they neglected to actually include my story in the book. For Dead But Dreaming, my story made it into the book, but the publisher went out of business the week the book was released and only 75 copies were ever printed. I was offered a chance to buy some of them, but I declined, since I already had other publications and some of the other authors in the book didn’t, so I figured I’d be nice and give those other authors first crack at the books, which were quickly snapped up. I’ve been kicking myself for this ever since, as those rare copies quickly started selling on eBay for upwards of $300. So I guess the moral of the story is: Always buy books with my stories in them. Or something like that. For my next anthology appearance, my story made it into the book and the publisher printed thousands of copies — but most of those were promptly obliterated in a freak warehouse fire. It was around that time that I started to wonder whether the universe had some objection to me appearing in anthologies. Fortunately, subsequent projects have gone off without a hitch. Anyway, back to Dead But Dreaming. A new edition of the book looks set to be printed by Miskatonic River Press. One of the editors states in this forum post, “We hope to release in the next few weeks. Stay tuned for more information.”
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