Got a new story up at Spinetingler Magazine. “The Ins and Outs” is about one paranoid New Yorker who is rather disturbed to discover that they really are out to get him.

It was originally inspired by a challenge issued by Paul Guyot, to create a story containing both an armored car and children’s clothing. I came up with an idea, wrote a few pages – and tossed it in a drawer. A couple of years ago I was trying to get back to writing more, so I pulled it out and completed it. The people I showed it to seemed to like it, so I looked around and decided Spinetingler was the best place for it.

Then-editor Sandra Ruttan approved, so here it is.

My original idea was for a sort of superheated Cornell Woolrich kind of style, and the plot does show some Woolrich influences, right down to the deus-ex-machina ending. I could never get the voice down, though. It always sounded like an H.P. Lovecraft story, so in the end I ran with it. Writing like Lovecraft is easy, but I defy anyone to write like Cornell Woolrich.

I had some problems with some of the rather serious elements in what’s essentially an unserious story, but nobody else seemed to feel that way. What do you think?

I got tired of the butt-ugly Wordpress theme I was using, so I dug up a snappy new one – what do you think? I’m now like 50% sexier.

Of course, there were… issues. To get the Search function to work, I had to upgrade Wordpress, and that turned out to be a MAJOR headache, resulting in the site going down for a couple of hours. But now there’s an automatic “upgrade” feature, which if it works as well as the automatic plugin installer, well, then it works like crap.

Incidentally, I took the header picture (”Barber’s Books”) this afternoon. That building is on the corner of 8th Street and Throckmorton in Fort Worth – across the street from my office. There really is a bookstore there, but it’s down from the corner, and it’s basically a foyer, a staircase, and an attic – but it is, after all, a bookstore, so I go there about once a month.

The picture came out juuuust the way I wanted, and the clouds sure cooperated, didn’t they?

Here’s a different view:

A terrible story from Australia:

Ward, who was arrested a day earlier for drink driving, spent four hours in the searing heat between the mining towns of Laverton and Kalgoorlie, suffering third-degree burns where his body touched the metal floor, the inquest heard.

A sad end, cooked to death in the back of a police van. And here’s the part that caught my eye:

…guards Nina Stokoe and Graham Powell, who provided Ward with only a 600 millilitre bottle of water and did not check on him throughout the journey, had breached their duty of care.

Just to be clear: I am not an Australian prison guard. Nor am I a Canadian photographer or an English novelist, but those are stories for a different time.

A while ago Doug Hoffman had a writing contest at his Balls and Walnuts blog. The rules: all entries had to be 75 words long. Not 75 or less. Exactly 75. This tight constraint made for some interesting entries. Here’s the best I could do:

He turned. Too late, I saw the gun.

Wait. Back up.

I was the shadow, he was the subject. Go where he goes, see who he sees. Get paid.

He wasn’t supposed to have a gun, but that’s life.

A hole through my jacket. A little blood. Him, running towards me, stumbling, shouting. “No! I thought you were her husband!”

Then I held a gun, too. “You’re a lousy shot,” I said.

I was better.

What surprised me was how easily I fell into the rhythm of a crime story, even in just a few sentences. Quite possibly it’s a sign that things have gotten a little too familiar, and I need to write something else for a while.

Voice actor Maurice LaMarche – the voice of The Brain in Pinky and the Brain, the voice of Orson Welles in Ed Wood – has declared today, March 22nd, William Shatner’s birthday, to be International Talk Like William Shatner Day. If you don’t know how to talk like William Shatner, here’s a brief instructional video:

So go now… and talk… like William……… Shatner.