S.G. Browne

I have too many things to run through on this last Friday of February to talk about just one thing, so I’m canceling Fiction Friday and installing the inaugural entry of Attention Deficit Disorder Friday so I can get to everything on my list.  Now where did I put that list?  Ah, there it is…

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As I mentioned on Wednesday’s blog post, “Softland,” my short story about a family of luck poachers, appears in the eBook collection The Mother Load, which you can get for free by pre-ordering a copy of James Melzer’s Escape: A Zombies Chronicle Novel.  The collection also includes stories from Jeremy C. Shipp, David Moody, and the other bloody names on the pregnant lady to the left.

Here’s a teaser from the opening of “Softland:”

Grandpa only had one finger left and it was pointing at the door.

He was leaning forward in his chair, his gaze turned away from the marathon of Gilligan’s Island reruns, that single, remaining digit on his left hand pointing across the room.

“Someone’s comin’,” he said.

Before I could reach my Smith and Wesson sitting on top of the television, the front door crashed open.

Let me back up.

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Back up to last Thursday, when I received my author copies of the United Kingdom version of Breathers, which is scheduled for release next Thursday, March 3rd. Conveniently, that just so happens to be the two year anniversary of the launch of Breathers here in the states.

So to celebrate, I’ll be throwing a party. Okay, not really a party. But I’ll be giving away free stuff.  To be specific, signed copies of Breathers, Fated, and the UK version of Breathers. So stay tuned for a blog post next week with the details on how you can get your hands on some signed books.

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I’ll be signing books tomorrow (that’s Saturday, February 26th for those not keeping track) from 1:00PM to 3:00PM at the Barnes & Noble in Dublin at the Hacienda Crossings shopping center, off of Interstate 580 at the (surprise!) Hacienda Drive exit.  So if you’re in the area, come on out and say “hey!”  And bring mimosas.

Last April, I was approached by my buddy, James Melzer, to submit a short story to an eBook collection he was putting together as part of a promotional launch package for his upcoming novel, Escape: A Zombies Chronicle Novel. The idea was to offer up a collection of short stories for free to anyone who pre-ordered a copy of his novel. I liked the idea, so I said “count me in.”

The Mother Load is an eBook collection of never-before published stories from Mur Lafferty (“Style Won’t Save You”), David Moody (“The Deal”), Jeremy C. Shipp (“Spider Clowns From Planet X”), Wayne Simmons (“Mary’s Boy Child”), Matt Wallace (“Knowing”), and yours truly (“Softland”).

I won’t give away what any of the other stories are about, but “Softland” is about a family of two brothers and their grandfather who live in central California and who have the ability to steal luck. It’s also the story upon which my next novel, Lucky Bastard, is loosely based. Though with a different storyline and different main characters.

So how can you get a copy of The Mother Load? That’s easy. Just pre-order Escape: A Zombie Chronicles Novel by James Melzer at any of the following online retailers:

• Amazon (Print Edition)

• Amazon (Kindle Edition)

• Amazon UK

• Amazon Canada

• Borders.com

• Indigo Canada

Once you’ve pre-ordered Escape, YOU MUST FORWARD YOUR PURCHASE RECEIPT TO EscapeNovel@Gmail.com.  Once you do this, you will receive a .zip file that contains The Mother Load in .mobi, .epub and PDF formats for your eReaders within 24 hours.

The collection also contains an excerpt of Escape so you know what you have to look forward to.  You can also check out a synopsis and learn more about Escape: A Zombies Chronicle Novel by visiting the Official Website of James Melzer.

That’s it.  Any questions, let me know.  Happy reading!

Set in 1975 in Scotland, PA, with a soundtrack almost exclusively comprised of Bad Company songs and with everyone driving around in muscle cars and sporting bad fashion and long hair, Scotland, PA is a darkly comedic take on Shakespeare’s tragedy MacBeth.

James LeGros (Chad Palomino from Living in Oblivion) plays the title character, only instead of MacBeth, he’s Joe McBeth, an underachieving employee at a fast-food restaurant named Duncan’s, owned by Norm Duncan, who has made his fortune by selling a chain of donut stores. Duncan has repeatedly passed over McBeth for promotion while ignoring McBeth’s ideas for improving the store, including a french fry truck and chicken nuggets with dipping sauces.

At the urging of his wife “Lady” Pat McBeth (Maura Tierny of ER fame), McBeth kills Duncan so that they can take over the restaurant, which, of course, they call McBeth’s. (The similarities to another famous fast food chain are impossible to miss.) But when Lieutenant McDuff (Christopher Walken) shows up to investigate Duncan’s murder and suspicion gradually shifts to them, the McBeths begin to unravel.

Also starring Kevin Corrigan as fry cook Anthony “Banko” Banconi and Amy Smart, Timothy Levitch, and Andy Dick as a trio of gypsy hippie “witches,” Scotland, PA is a smart and amusing social satire on fast-food and the 1970’s. Don’t expect to hear any of Shakespeare’s dialogue (except occasionally playing on the radio in the background). But if you don’t take your Shakespeare seriously and enjoy good dark comedies, then go out and rent this one.

In honor of Valentine’s Day, I thought I’d review a movie about the personal connections that arise from the senseless and painful reality of human existence. And a movie that has the word “heart” in its title.

I Heart Huckabees (2004) is a film that’s difficult to describe. I’m not sure I can do it justice. Even director David O. Russell, in an interview, said he described the film to the people who financed the movie as:

“Dustin Hoffman and Lily Tomlin are existential detectives who you could hire to investigate the meaning of your life. Their clients include Jude Law, Naomi Watts, Jason Schwartzman and Mark Wahlberg. Their nemesis is Isabelle Huppert. Hilarity ensues.”

Jason Schwartzman is a neurotic (surprise!)  environmental advocate fighting against the development of a big-chain department store (Huckabees), for which Jude Law plays a scheming, corporate-ladder-climbing executive, with Naomi Watts, the iconic face and voice of Huckabees, as his live-in girlfriend who has superficial tendencies. As mentioned, Lily Tomlin and Dustin Hoffman are the existential sleuths who attempt to help Schwartzmann solve a coincidence by teaching him about the universal interconnectivity of everything.

Mark Wahlberg (in a great role) is an anti-petroleum, bicycle-riding fireman who believes Tomlin’s and Hoffman’s optimistic approach isn’t working for him. So he teams up with Schwartzmann and the two of them go off on their own to work with Isabelle Huppert, who teaches them that life is meaningless and that they must disconnect from their problems in order to avoid the misery of human existence.

And you thought this was going to be a love story.

This is definitely one of those films that you either love or you hate. Obviously, I fall into the former camp and consider this one of my favorite films. It’s a quirky, playful, intelligent comedy about the meaning of existence with terrific acting, great dialogue, and an original story.

Just don’t expect a whole lot of hearts or romance.

Having just finished up reading Big Machine by Victor Lavalle, which I’ll review next week, I now have the task of picking another book to read from my To-Be-Read pile, which is really more like two piles plus half of a shelf on one of my bookcases, which comes to a grand total of twenty books.  And that doesn’t include a couple of PDF books I have on my computer.

For the sake of fitting what I could into a single picture, here’s a sample of what I have to choose from:

The stack isn’t indicative of the order in which I plan to read all of these, but includes:

Ravens by George Dawes Green
Gator A-Go-Go by Tim Dorsey
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
Spook by Mary Roach
Juliet Naked by Nick Hornby
I Am Not a Serial Killer by Dan Wells
The Big Nowhere by James Ellroy
A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick
The Informers by Bret Easton Ellis

It also includes my favorite title of the bunch, The Apocalypse and Satan’s Glory Hole by Timothy Long and Jonathan Moon, which has been on my stack for much too long. (Hangs head in shame.)

So what’s on your stack to read? And can you beat twenty books?