Michael and the Tower of the Elephant

Happy New Year, everybody!

Next week we'll get into 2015 movies that I watched (and didn't watch), but to close out this week and open up the year, here's a link to a short article I wrote for GW Thomas' Genre Writer blog.

You know GW from his awesome guest posts here, so it was fun to be able to write something for him when he put the call out for pieces on favorite science fiction, fantasy, and horror stories. I had to think long and hard about it, but kept coming back to Robert E Howard's "Tower of the Elephant." Visit GW's blog to see why.

Ian Fleming’s Seven Deadlier Sins: Self-Righteousness

No Dickens today, because we would have been covering Thomas Edison's silent version and he skips right over this year's scene even more than most adaptations.

Instead, I'd like to point you towards the Literary 007 blog where they're doing a series on Ian Fleming's idea of the Seven Deadlier Sins. These are evils that Fleming felt were more worthy of punishment than the traditional list. The proprietor of the site asked if I'd like to write an entry and I eagerly snatched up Self-Righteousness. I hope you'll go read as I speculate on Fleming's relationship with the sin, point out examples of it from the novels, and explain why I agree with Fleming that it's an especially odious offense.

Guest-blogging | That F'ing Monkey

I've been wanting to try guest-blogging at some other blogs for a couple of months now, but hadn't gotten around to seriously thinking about it or approaching anyone yet before my buddy Ken from That F'ing Monkey asked if I wanted to chip in for three posts. Ken and his wife just had a baby boy and he knew that when his son arrived he'd need a break from the blog to focus on being a new dad. It was awesome timing, but I would have agreed even if I hadn't already been thinking about it.

Ken's idea was for me and him and Brandon (the other regular TFM contributor) to imagine that we were guest programmers on Turner Classic Movies and pick three films to talk about. We'd introduce them, talk about why we liked them, and give some background information and trivia if we wanted. I was totally into it.

I'll let you visit TFM to read my posts (and Ken's and Brandon's), but the films I picked were Alfred Hitchcock's silent version of The Lodger, the under-appreciated British horror classic Night of the Demon, and Tom Berenger's hilarious Western parody Rustlers' Rhapsody. Click the links or each picture below to go to the appropriate post.







My main criterion at first was simply that I wanted to choose from three different movie eras, but I ended up finding a recurring theme that tied them all together. I explain more about that in the Rustlers' Rhapsody entry.

Anyway, thanks so much to Ken for asking me to participate. It was a lot of fun and I'd love to do it again.