Black is Traditional

I'm brushing my six-year-old's teeth last night and he asks me if I know anything about "this movie that's coming out" about a girl who has a boring normal life and then all of a sudden she goes through a doorway and she sees her parents except they're not her parents and they want her to sew buttons over her eyes and they say "black is traditional."

And immediately I think Coraline.

Not that I know anything about the movie or the Neil Gaiman book except what I remember from working at Borders way back when and what I read about the posters on Ain't It Cool last week, but it all clicks, and I ask Jack what he knows about this movie, and it turns out they're running the trailer before The Tale of Desperaux, so we go online and check it out. And there we stand in front of the computer, me and my son, watching this incredibly creepy awesome playful thing scroll out in front of us.

I finally got to Borders today, the same one I worked at back in '01, and actually pick up Coraline, and tonight we read the first three chapters before bedtime. And it's everything I want it to be and more. I keep waiting for the moment when it's too scary -- I'm somehow sure that moment will come -- but as of right now Neil Gaiman somehow manages to master the impossible task of making the terrifying both funny and familiar and profoundly unsettling at the same time. My kids are held rapt and so am I. I can't wait to dive back into it tomorrow. Compounding the envy that I feel for the book is its offhand similarity to NO DOORS, NO WINDOWS, which is coming out next year and also features a long dark doorway leading back to the horribly familiar.

Oh well. Good thing there's room for all of us on Oprah's couch...

Cookie D'oh

Veda, our five-year-old, produced what has to be next year's Christmas card -- a disturbingly skinny but otherwise well-rendered Homer Simpson, drinking under the Christmas tree. Note the pile of empties immediately behind him.

Nothing in my house contributed to the verisimilitude of this image. Ahem.

Uh...it's called Deathtroopers!

This is what I love about working in the Star Wars universe -- you get to be scooped on your own blog.

Earlier today, Lucasfilm announced that my forthcoming Star Wars horror novel will be called Deathtroopers, and that it will take place immediately before A New Hope. So there you go.

I had the time of my life on this one, I have to say. I'm doing the final edits now, and I've tried to make it into exactly the kind of book you'd want to read if you were a child of the 70s who grew up with the original Star Wars trilogy and really digs horror in the vein of The Shining and Alien, with a little dose of William Gibson mixed in.

I hope when it comes out next November, you'll enjoy it as much as I do.

Meanwhile I'm looking forward to my first visit to Skywalker Ranch.

The Screaming Contest

No, it's not the title of my next book, although that's definitely a thought (we'll get to that below). No, in this case it's what happens when your five-year-old and your six-year-old both go in for a flu shot at the same appointment time.

We brought Jack and Veda in this past week for the shot, and although both were apprehensive about it, the mood crumbled into total whimpering rat-bastard panic when the nurse finally walked in the needle. And it was big.

Right now I'm listening to David Foster Wallace's essay "Consider the Lobster," and he talks a lot about the difference between pain as a simple neurological event versus suffering as an actual psychological construct. Granted, he's talking about lobsters and the ethical question of cooking your dinner alive, but I was thinking about these same questions as I watched both my normally composed children dissolve into an almost infantile state of unvarnished pain.

In that moment all the social conditioning that they'd begun to evince throughout early childhood and development was just totally fleansed away, and although it was over a few moments later, I was temporarily flabbergasted at just how personally we as individuals process pain, and what it reveals about us. Eventually, as adults, we learn to compartmentalize, to listen to reason and bear up to most of what needs to be endured with an understanding of why it's necessary...but that's a learned process. And my children--as grown up as they'd started to seem--hadn't learned it yet.

Afterward, in an attempt to make her smile, Christina told Veda that she won the screaming contest. And for the rest of the night Veda believed it, to the extent that she actually walked around telling people that she had won a contest.

The lesson: when it comes to metabolizing various states of discomfort, it's easier to think about winning a contest than the abstraction of being protected from the flu.

Postscript regarding titles: Right now I'm in the process of having to come up with titles for both of the novels coming out next year. The Black Wing will no longer be called The Black Wing; Untitled Star Wars Horror novel will also get a new title. Right now there are a couple of frontrunner possibilities, and I'll let you know what they are just as soon as I get them confirmed.

Talk about pain.