A collection of short stories where the humour runs dark and the slipstream bubbles up.
...imagine if Raymond Carver called up George Saunders and Joe Lansdale, and they all went drinking with Neil Gaiman.
“… it's clear that Terlson is way ahead of the curve in terms of crafting an engaging premise that reaches for elevated territory and reinvents enduring archetypes of action and suspense.” J. Schoenfelder
"Sometimes brutal, often demanding and always complex, this novel will repay the reader who likes their assumptions challenged and is happy to walk away from a book with minor questions unanswered but the big ones definitely dealt with! It’s likely to satisfy those who enjoy Hammet and/or Philip K Dick and who like their fiction very noir indeed." Kay Sexton
"I love a novel that you can't put down, and this is one of them." L. Cihlar
Thursday, September 9, 2010 at 11:28AM Coming back from Toronto I felt inspired to do some new work - not for a client, but just for myself. This blog is mostly about fiction, okay, the odd movie and travelogue too - but I thought I'd post a few of the pieces that have been falling off my pen lately.
Let me know what you think.
A while back I took a lot of photos of some Monarch Butterflys (butterflies?) that were emerging from their cocoons. The colours of these bugs are amazing.
The next couple are of a favorite guitar, which I no longer own - that is the problem with being a poor musician (writer/artist), to get your next guitar you always have to sell your current one. I loved my Gibson - I hope whoever has it now also loves it.
A variation in colour. I like looking at old Japanese prints for colour pallets.
And one last one.
A bluesy guitar neck.
Monday, September 6, 2010 at 01:02PM 
OK, I am screaming like the fanboy I am. Just found out that Joe Lansdale is on twitter. Also found out that he is working on a screenplay for Savage Season. Is the world ready for a Hap and Leonard movie... yes, I think they are.
Tuesday, August 31, 2010 at 01:49PM 
Well, it's been a few years, but I am back in Toronto, the place where my career started. Quite good to be back, this time with a different agenda than in the mid-eighties. I am getting my son set up in residence as he begins college. For me it was illustration, for him, comedy writing and performance. Completely different, yet in some ways kind of the same.
I imagine breaking into comedy being like, well, damn difficult (as was illustration). Your friends back home don't really know what the hell you are doing (art? comedy? wha?), and there's a bunch of creative types trying to do just what you're doing - and probably none of their friends or family get them either.
But I think the boy is going to do just fine. We had a convo about how talent always needs ambition, and I think he has both.
For me, I'm seeing the sites (showing him a few of my favorite spots, if they are still standing) and basically fighting traffic. Damn, where in the hell did all these cars come from?
Going back west in a few days, plan to drive through Michigan and listen to Joe Lansdale. I am not driving Joe, but he's coming along in the form of the audio book (Vanilla Ride).
Tuesday, August 24, 2010 at 09:31AM 
I get what all the fuss is about regarding The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Sometimes I will pick up a book that has garnered a lot of press, just to see if it's worthy (oh geesh, that sounds high anf freakin' mighty).
I swear that every second person I ran into, knowing that I am a writer, said, "Oh man, you know what you HAVE to read?!" And before they even said it, I knew it was going to be a Steig Larsson book.
Someone even dropped one off at my house, so I could resist no longer (these books are like the Borg). 100 pages in, I wondered what people were talking about. I found it interesting, the writing was fairly good, not super deep, but very readable. 200 pages in I started to get it. It was the sort of book that I couldn't wait to dip into, find out what was happening. 300 pages in I knew my sleep might suffer. I'm almost finished now, and looking forward to reading the next. What I really like is the slow intriguing build that drew me in - it wasn't the huge page turner that I'd hear about, though to be honest I rarely like those. The characters get under my skin, in a good way, and even though the mystery seems like on plucked from Agatha Christie, I really want to find out what happened to that girl, dammit. And what's going to happen to Mikael and Lisbeth... and I think I need another fix right now. Okay, okay, I give up, I'm hooked.
