Oh yeah, so I live in Santa Monica now. I really love being able to walk to the beach, and I’ve been heading over there every evening to catch the sunset. Though Santa Monica is a bit out of the way as far as L.A. geography goes, particularly when traffic is bad. For example, last night it took me two and a half hours to battle my way across the city to get to Skylight Books to see Steve Erickson. Amazingly, it was worth it. He read an excerpt from his new novel Zeroville, in which the protagonist is a guy named Vikar who’s so obsessed with film that he’s had Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift tattooed on his shaved head. Vikar has come to Hollywood in hopes of finding other people who are as into film as he is, but he’s constantly disappointed. In the first section, a hippie confidently misidentifies the actors on Vikar’s head, and Vikar beats the guy with a cafeteria tray. In the next section, Vikar gets the drop on a burglar and ties the guy to a chair, only to discover that this burglar knows way more about film than Vikar does. It was hilarious.

I also recently went to see Alice Sebold (at the Hammer Museum) and Nick Hornby (at Book Soup). Alice Sebold read the first chapter of her new novel The Almost Moon, in which a middle-aged woman suffocates her elderly, infirm mother. Someone asked how Sebold’s own mother had reacted to the novel, and Sebold noted that her mother had received from a friend a T-shirt that reads: “I am not a fictional character.” (Speaking of amusing T-shirts, the best one I’ve seen recently says: “Videogames ruined my life. Fortunately I have two extra lives.”) At Nick Hornby’s reading, he had just been in a shop and found some sort of head lotion for bald men, which delighted him, and he jokingly offered that any bald men who bought his new book would, as a free bonus, receive a dollop of head lotion. Hornby’s new novel, Slam, concerns a shy teenage boy who unintentionally impregnates a girl he barely knows. The protagonist, a huge Tony Hawk fan, has memorized Tony Hawk’s memoir and is able to hold imaginary conversations with his poster of Tony Hawk, and in these conversations Tony Hawk speaks using only material from the memoir. Someone asked if Hornby had gotten Tony Hawk’s permission for this, and Hornby said of course, and that Tony Hawk was actually a fan of Hornby’s writing, which made things very easy. Although Hornby also said that it was probably a little weird for Tony Hawk to read the new novel, since material from the memoir about Tony Hawk’s first sexual experience shows up in the conversations between the protagonist and the Tony Hawk poster.

Wow, you never know what’s going to pop up on the internet. I just stumbled across this Russian-language electronic-music-accompanied audio rendition of my 2001 short story “The Prize.”

Hey, the new trailer for I Am Legend looks pretty sweet.

For those who don’t know, this movie is an adaptation of a terrific novel by Richard Matheson.

The December issue of Realms of Fantasy, which includes my story “Transformations,” is now out in bookstores. (At least, it’s at Borders in Santa Monica.)

There’s now a topic over at the Realms of Fantasy message board for discussing the December issue, which includes my story “Transformations.”

Here is the latest (and almost certainly the most purple) Realms of Fantasy cover. Once again they put the authors’ names on there, which is always fun, and look, they even put my name first. I initially thought that this must be because they think I’m terrific and special, but a more thorough analysis reveals that they put the names in alphabetical order and made the common mistake of thinking that my last name is “Barr Kirtley” when it is in fact just “Kirtley.” No big deal (especially if it means I get to be first), though this sort of thing does worry me that any potential novels I might happen to publish in the future are going to be routinely misshelved.

Just heard that ogre_san has received his contributor’s copies of the December issue of Realms of Fantasy, and he reports that my story “Transformations” made it into this issue. The issue also includes fiction by Graham Edwards, Sandra McDonald, Joe Murphy, and Von Carr.

Escape Pod editor Steve Eley will be in L.A. this coming weekend for a podcast expo, and he’s planning a Sunday brunch where Escape Pod listeners can mingle. I’m planning to go. If you’re an Escape Pod listener and you’re in the area, you should think about coming. If you want to come but are not an Escape Pod listener, why not maybe listen to this story and this one too and become an Escape Pod listener? And heck, while you’re at it, give a listen to this year’s Hugo-winning short story.

Ursula Le Guin reviews Jeanette Winterson and notes, “It’s odd to find characters in a science-fiction novel repeatedly announcing that they hate science fiction. I can only suppose that Jeanette Winterson is trying to keep her credits as a ‘literary’ writer even as she openly commits genre. Surely she’s noticed that everybody is writing science fiction now? Formerly deep-dyed realists are producing novels so full of the tropes and fixtures and plotlines of science fiction that only the snarling tricephalic dogs who guard the Canon of Literature can tell the difference. I certainly can’t. Why bother? I am bothered, though, by the curious ingratitude of authors who exploit a common fund of imagery while pretending to have nothing to do with the fellow-authors who created it and left it open to all who want to use it. A little return generosity would hardly come amiss.”

On a personal note, I heart both tricephalic dogs and the word “tricephalic.” That word kind of reminds me of how I recently heard C. S. Lewis’s “liar, lunatic, Lord” thing referred to as a “false trichotomy.” Holy crap, I can’t wait until the next time I can work “false trichotomy” into a conversation. Unfortunately, that will probably not be for approximately 17.8 years.

So I went and saw Resident Evil: Extinction. It wasn’t as good as I was expecting (and I had very low expectations), though my reaction is probably colored by the fact that I went to see it at the massive Dome theater at the Arclight and sat near the front, and I actually had to hold my hands over my ears for most of the movie to keep my eardrums from exploding like a shotgunned zombie heads. The trailer, with its sweeping vistas of a dessicated Las Vegas, had somehow led me to expect something along the lines of Beyond Thunderdome, but Extinction is much, much, much more modest in scale. It’s basically the tale of ragtag band trying to survive in a future world where just about everybody has been wiped out or zombified by a manmade T-virus that apparently selectively targets those with no perceived appeal to the youth market.

I went and saw this one in spite of its lousy predecessor, Resident Evil: Apocalypse, because the original Resident Evil flick remains one of the most intense movies I’ve ever seen, though that’s almost certainly only because I hadn’t slept for three days prior to seeing it and I was in a near-hallucinatory state of fatigue. I think that even for the well-rested that movie is illogical and disjointed, and in the state I was in the movie was really messing with my head. And for some reason I still can’t fathom, it seemed like half the audience was walking in and out of the theater throughout the whole movie, and it was extremely dark in the theater, so all these people kept tripping on stairs and stumbling/lurching toward me just like the zombies on screen. It was all I could do not to leap up and start swinging. By the time I left the theater and walked out into the parking lot I was pretty paranoid and hopped up on adrenaline, which is probably a good thing because it may have saved me from being run over by a careening minivan. Ah, good times.

Anyway, I love zombie movies, so I still got a kick out of Extinction. It had its moments. (Though many of those moments were lifted straight out of other movies — notably Day of the Dead.) The first scene and the last scene were nice touches. The action was gruesome to behold (though not as gruesome to behold as the brief and painfully perfunctory scenes in which the characters express deep emotions). I guess if you’re not doing anything some afternoon and really want to see a low-budget postapocalyptic zombie action movie, this one’s an okay way to pass a few hours.

Life on Hollywood Boulevard proceeds apace. I’m going to miss it here. (I’m moving next month to Santa Monica.) Why, in just one evening stroll last week I witnessed: a) A shirtless guy cruising along on a bicycle, and resting calmly on his shoulders a cat dressed in a devil costume. b) A red carpet with a cadre of sorta trashy-looking models with logos body-painted over their chests, where a person scanned in vain to try to identify some part — a wrist, a kneecap, a toe, anything — possessing some semblance of naturalness. I was put in mind of Jonas, the interstellar sailor from Book of the New Sun who at first appears to be a man with a few mechanical parts, but turns out to be a robot who’s had to replace almost all of himself with human parts. c) A diminutive Russian woman who got pulled over and booked for a hit-and-run DUI. The frame of her car had been completely torn away from the right front wheel, which lingered, skeletal and lonely. d) The torch-wielding host of Survivor (don’t know his name, don’t care) filming a promo where he bickers with a transvestite.

…And that’s not even counting the regulars, such as the costumed characters who prowl about outside Mann’s Chinese Theater. The best of these is the giant black guy who paints his skin a sparkly bronze and dresses like Conan except with crimson/black bat-wings. The silver robot tuxedo guy with the digital lightshow chest is pretty good too.

Ah, another satisfied customer. Okay, not so much. Of course I am speaking of visitors to my website. Now, you may remember me griping about the staggering numbers of horndogs out there on the internet who somehow manage to stumble across my “Blood of Virgins” page by doing Google searches that are decidedly not “surreal romantic short stories featuring dragons.” Well, we have a new winner in the category of “No, my website is definitely not what you were looking for,” and I think this one’s destined to stand for a while. Someone managed to come across my “Save Me Plz” page by searching for “stories how she used her strap on on me,” due to the fact that my page contains such distinctive keywords as “stories,” “she,” and “strap.” Great job, Google. Seriously. I mean that. And of course this visitor departed instantly. Dang it. I hold out this sad, naive hope that somehow, someday, someone who visits my website will be like, “Hmm … what’s this? Geez, I was looking for German dungeon porn, but these science fiction stories look kind of interesting too. I think I’ll explore the site a bit.” Alas, today is not that day.

So the other day I passed a crowd of protesters assembling in front of the local KFC. The protesters held signs advising that KFC slashes the throats of live chickens and also boils chickens alive. One protester was in the process of donning a chicken outfit, and another was dressed as a blood-spattered Colonel Sanders. I was sorely tempted to amble over and join the protest. Not only do I too hate KFC (though largely due to their history of giving me absolutely crap service), but of course I’m always up for some good rabble rousing, and also the female protesters were all really, really attractive. I silently weighed these factors against the fact that I had been on my way to the grocery store to buy chicken, and perhaps the vague feelings of hypocrisy that might ensue should I be required to undertake the otherwise hilarious task of hurling a bucket of chicken blood onto the uniform of an unsuspecting teenage KFC worker. In the end I passed on by, motivated not only by the whole hypocrisy thing, but also by the fact that, to be honest, I was getting kind of hungry.