First Review!

Fiction
A Rope of Thorns
Gemma Files. ChiZine (Diamond, dist.), $15.95 trade paper (350p) ISBN 978-1-926851-14-3

Sacrificed to the bloodthirsty Aztec goddess Ixchel, flamboyantly queer outlaw Chess Pargeter is reborn and filled with a god's dark power in the powerful sequel to 2010's A Book of Tongues. Ixchel takes Chess's ex-lover Rev. Asher Rook as her hexslinger consort, and they create the magical city of New Azteclan in the desert and summon all hexes there. Meanwhile, Chess and ex-Pinkerton detective Ed Morrow are pursued south by the vengeful revenant Mesach Love, with fast-growing, magical Weed covering the ground in Chess's wake. A slow start yields to a spectacular blend of Aztec religion and Western gunslinging in a richly detailed cycle of blood and sacrifice that eventually draws in the great Pinkerton himself. Potent mythology, complex characters, and dollops of creeping horror and baroque gore establish Files's Hexslinger series as a top-notch horror-fantasy saga. (June) See review in its natural habitat, here (http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1-926851-14-3).

So yeah, that's nice to wake up to.;)

Easter weekend went fairly well. Steve and I took Cal up to his grandparents' house on Sunday, where he impressed them with expanded language, relative good behaviour and, on the way back, an impromptu serenade in which he delivered five pitch-perfect, front-to-back renditions of "I See The Light" from Tangled in a row. Then Steve went to bed and I ended up watching this demented silent movie on TCM called The Godless Girl (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Godless_Girl), a Cecil B. DeMille epic which starts off as an ill-matched zealot-on-zealot love/hate romance between devout and uptight Bob the student body president vs. Judy the teen flapper atheist, but eventually becomes a searing expose of the juvenile penal system. There's also a 'ho with a heart of gold named Mame and a comedic second banana named "Bozo". Apparently, it was one of Hitler's favourite American films.

Okay, time for some oatmeal and tea...

New ROPE OF THORNS Interstitial: Gods and Monsters

This was, hands down, the hardest post to write: Ixchel vs. Tezcatlipoca, and why neither is exactly "your friend". Find it here (http://musicatmidnight-gfiles.blogspot.com/2011/04/rope-of-thorns-supplemental-3-gods-and.html).

Okay, Yeah: NO.

So...somebody at scans_daily's been posting chunks of Caitlin R. Kiernan's The Girl Who Would Be Death, a Vertigo one-shot that evolved out of her being asked to write about "a cult that worshipped Death [of the Endless]". I sort of vaguely remember her talking about the contortions she went through in order to get it done/on the page, and seem to also recall she doesn't hold it in high esteem/happy memory, but I'd never been able to get a hold of it, so I tuned in. It's good. Very Caitlin. Definitely takes place in the same universe, but...

...not what people were looking for, obviously. Which must be why they spend much of the comments slagging on her for being "the very model of a Promoted Fangirl" (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PromotedFanboy).

Hey, all: You know what Promoted Fan(people) are? They're people...who love the same stuff you do, but...difference is?

A) They keep on going after a chance to do something with it, no matter how many times they're rejected, and
B) When they finally do get that chance, they're talented enough to take advantage of it.

That would be the entire, absolute difference. And that would also be at least one of the reasons none of said scans_daily commenters are fit to shine Ms. Kiernan's shoes, with their tongues or otherwise.

Amended to add: Because you know what this is really all about, as per usual? The self-serving, puerile fan-culture idea of why do we have to have a power structure, power structures are EVIL, who would ever want to be part of that, unless they too were EVIL? Yes, yes, babies: Those evil, evil people who make the stuff you like. The stuff which would not get made unless people got together and formed EVIL publishing houses, distribution companies, production companies, tech houses, PR firms, etc., etc. The stuff that you apparently think everyone should be utterly happy to spin out of their asses like silk, only distribute to their "friends" across an information-wants-to-be-free! platform, and never make any type of tantamount-to-prostitution professional living off of.

Except...some people don't want to do that. And because some of these dirty whores are talented, you may still want what they're selling. For which you will then have to pay, just like you pay for medicine, light and heat, goods and services, all that. Eeeven though "all" they're selling is narrative entertainment, story, fantasy, escape--the stuff you could supposedly "do yourself". But don't.

And one of these days, you're really, truly just gonna have to learn to live with that concept.