Vice City Is My Bitch

Yep, after neglecting the girlfriend for days on end running guns, running drugs, running people over, Vice City is at long last my town. Once again, my obsessive compulsive gaming disorder just wouldn’t let me walk away from the game without getting 100% completion, an act of supreme tediousness, but with large, LARGE payoffs, like the AH-64 attack helicopter, or the Rhino tank. It was a good game. One of the best I’ve played in years. I get on my knees and worship at Rockstar’s feet, for a game like this shall not soon grace a console again.

Which means that it’s time to start working on other things.

No, not games.

There’s the question of employment. I suppose I’ll have to schmooze off friends (Are you reading this, people?) or troll through the magazines once more and churn out turgid reviews for Cleo and Her World. Sigh… it’s a living, I suppose.

Me: So, tell me why you prefer to have your armpits unshaven.

Militant Lesbian: IT’S A STATEMENT AGAINST THE FASCIST, PATRIARCHAL REPRESSION FOISTED UPON US BY THE GENETIC DEFECT KNOWN AS MAN!!

Me: Couldn’t get a date for the highschool prom, huh?

ML: FUCK OFF!

This sort of thing will never appear in my author’s bio.

And of course, there’s the ACTUAL writing.

The third novel Suzy & The Shifters (Originally the first novel was going to be titled that, but then my agent and the publisher both had misgivings, as they felt it sounded like a cheesy 50′s band and I said, “YEAH! COOL ISN’T IT?!?” And they began to seriously question my credibility, thus we have Shift for novel one. Suzy & The Shifters works better as an anthology title anyway, since it is about Suzy and her various shifter friends) is still waiting for completion. I’m in no big hurry, because novels one and two have yet to see the light of day, but I’m pretty sure it’ll come to pass eventually, and I can stop being an obnoxious, pretentious wannabe novelist and be a pretentious, obnoxious novelist. The Suzy unicorn short story is nearly done. The Jen serial killer story has more or less written itself in my head. The Canadian Anthology open spaces has rejected my Suzy story, but they said they liked the way I write, so they’re breaking their own rules and asking for a third submission, since the submission date has been extended to April. Since they liked Jen so much, I guess I’ll just crank out the Jen serial killer story (SOMEONE! HELP ME! I SUCK AT TITLES!) and give them that. In other writerly news, Flashquake.com, the website that publishes stories of 1,000 words or less, has told me that they’re considering Famine & Pestilence Go To Dinner and to sit tight for the final result. Anyone who hasn’t read it, just e-mail me and I’ll send you a file, since I think I’d get in trouble with them AND my agent if I start posting stories here.

Ah, and then there’s Nowhere…

This is going to be fun. The first issue is nearly done. I have to wait for the girlfriend to finish up her four issue mini-series with an American Indy comics company, but once that’s done, she’ll pencil issue one, possibly do the cover, and then we’ll shop it around to the various publishers and see if there’s any interest. I sure hope this doesn’t turn into one of those things where the comic comes out before the novels do. Then EVERYONE would accuse me of pulling a Gaiman to a ridiculous degree. I think it’ll be a fun title. We’ve got two Elf brothers, one a super-cool assassin type by the name of Fenoril, and his younger sibling Judas, who is sarcastic, video-game and geek-movie obsessed spellcaster (Remind you of anyone you know? Of cooooooourse nooooot…) who’s ultimate battle cry when conjuring up fireballs is either “SO THERE!” or “Shooooryuken!”

Then there’s the popculture junkie/amazon Cheryl, who learned everything about the world of man through cable television (When she gets angry, she screams “Kaneeeeedaaaaaaaa!!”) and C, the vampire chick who prefers taking her blood in ice, 7-11 style with the paper cup and protective plastic lid on top, straw included. I think it’s going to be utterly deranged since we already deranged Scottish bands with songs like The Bitch From Ipanema (Opening lines, “Tall and tanned and young and lovely, that BITCH from Ipanema she dumped me, and when she told me we’re done, I went and screamed Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgh!”) the infamous One Dollar Man, a deranged Chinese merchant (“I sell you good gun! One dollar only! No find gun like this for one dollar, but you, I sell you, one dollar! Buy gun, stupid white man, I sell cheap!”) and Spanky the Ouija Monkey (“Spank me or I’ll kill you.”). Oh and a clone of Jesus running around, hooking up with frat parties and break dancing on the pool or cheating at chugging contests by changing the beer to water as he drinks it.

“Chug, chug, chug! Jeeesus! Jeeesus! Jeeesus! GO!”

The arc of the story has more or less been figured out. In a perfect world, we’d tell the entire story in about 100 issues or so, with three major arcs. We’ll see whether we can make this happen or not.

Oh well… anybody looking for freelance work?

I Know What I Wanna’ Do When I Grow Up:

Work for Rockstar Games. They have the FUNNIEST radio commercials I have ever heard in my life. They’re comedy geniuses…

I love GTA: Vice City. I really, REALLY do. Particularly now that I don’t experience system crashes and game freezes anymore. The scope of this game amazes me. And the fact that I can gun people from a helicopter then jump out of it, run into the offending house with colt python and start shooting survivors just adds to the coolness. Hey, they’re drug dealers, so it’s all good…

Still stuck in gaming mode, though I see the end sometime within the next 50 or so hours. Currently trying to put out fires. Yes, you jack a firetruck then run around dousing out flaming cars. Unfortunately, just when you do that, flaming people come out, and then you have to douse them too.

This wouldn’t be such a problem if they did the Buddhist monk thing and quietly burned in front of you so you could line up the firehose and nail them with it. Noooo… they have to run away from you screaming “AAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH!!!!” and you have to chase them down the street and try not to run them over. This is harder than it seems.

Oh yeah, yesterday morning while munching on a McRatlands breakfast, a rat fell from the sky. It was the most amazing thing; I think a bird just decided it didn’t taste so good or something but the damn thing just hit the pavement not more than a few feet away, and I think it had already been partially eaten. Mother nature is cruel indeed, but not quite as cruel as a rocket launcher aimed at the middle of a night club dance floor with your motorcycle already warmed up for the big getaway afterwards…

Dear God, Stop Me From Killing Again! Naah, It’s Too Much Fun…

Grand Theft Auto III finally bit the dust earlier today.

Grand Theft Auto: Vice City begins, and it is already exponentially cooler in one major way:

THE EIGHTIES!

It’s like being trapped in a psychotic version of Miami Vice, oh my GOD, I love this game so much… The nostalgia trip alone of hearing “Billie Jean” and “I Wear My Sunglasses At Night” on a virtual radio with a DJ intro and everything was enough to make me drive the car to side of the road and listen in a fit of nostalgic apoplexy…

It’s all there, man! The neon, the pastel colors, the tasteless clothes, I feel like I’m 12 again except now I can shoot and run over the people who were so much cooler than me. AND I can now say they look like dorks and people actually agree with me! WOW! VIDEO-GAMES ARE A MIRACLE! A MIRACLE!!

This is so rad. This is totally awesome! Only a nimrod would, like, say this is grody, and if a nimrod says something is totally grody, it’s like, gag me with a spoon fer sure, what do they know? They’re nimrods to the max…

Must return… Hookers in dire need of fatal beatings…