Soupy Twist!

So I’m back from outer space from a week-and-change sabbatical from work and the Internet. June 2nd marked my ten-year wedding anniversary, and my lovely wife and I had company in the form of a couple of our best and oldest friends, Reyna and Gavin, down from Minnesota to help us celebrate it. The week was mostly filled with games, in-jokes, giggling, good food, the occasional bad movie, a lot of A Bit of Fry and Laurie, and lots of us taking them around Kansas City. I’m happy to say that I seem to know the place pretty well by now, and their appreciation of it helped me to appreciate it even more. Hopefully we sold them on it enough that they’ll be moving down here at some indeterminate point in the (hopefully near) future.

Among the things we did that we hadn’t done before included attending our first First Friday at the Crossroads, which was an adventure. (Thanks to Gavin for actually fixing my car and preventing us from being stranded under some overpass and eaten by hobos.) Also, we finally made it to the new Sea Life Aquarium in Crown Center. It was pretty good, though mostly geared toward kids. Nothing in it is as amazing as this map, though. I hope they paid whoever drew that a billion dollars.

Over the week I also saw a couple of movies in theatres: Snow White and the Huntsman and Prometheus. Both were quite pretty, but I didn’t care for either of them. I should probably say more about why, but, really, everyone is talking about why they either did or didn’t like Prometheus, and I don’t really know what I’ve got to add. (Yes, Michael Fassbender was predictably great. And Charlize Theron did her best in both pictures, though she had a lot more to do in Snow White.)

Quite a lot happened out in the world and on the Internet while I wasn’t looking, and there’s no way I’ll ever catch up on all of it. Probably the piece of news that shook me the most upon my return was that Ray Bradbury had passed on. Of course Bradbury was a giant to me, a person who was hugely influential on my path as a writer and as a reader, and probably on myself as a person, and the always-eloquent Richard Gavin has posted a better reminiscence of the man than I ever could, even if I weren’t busy playing catch-up.

In other and less sobering news, Ross Lockhart has posted the final table of contents for The Book of Cthulhu 2, and there I am, in the enviable (and somewhat daunting) position of being smack in the middle between Fritz Leiber and Michael Chabon. (A place, I’ll admit, that I never, ever expected to see my name in all my wildest imaginings.)

I also missed a couple of exciting launches while I was away. Eric Orchard unleashed the second issue of his brilliant all-ages horror comic Marrowbones, which you can pick up here (along with the first issue, if you missed it). And Ian Rogers launched the website for his forthcoming debut collection Every House is Haunted, complete with pre-order info. I’d recommend plunking down the extra coin for the limited edition hardcover because, frankly, the extras that come with it sound amazing.

There’s probably quite a lot more that I should mention, and even more that I don’t even know about. I haven’t really talked about Spectrum, for instance. But I think this is probably long enough for the time being. Hopefully it won’t be quite so long until the next installment.