Yep, it’s that time again. Another month is gone, so here’s the round-up of last month’s dreams as shared on Twitter. Guest stars included Will Smith, Marie Severin, Rik Mayall, Kristen Bell, Archie Bunker, and more.

November 2014

I dreamt I’d just critiqued someone’s story in a workshop, and the other writers, instead of critiquing that story — critiqued my critique! Nov 30

I dreamt I wandered Comic-Con’s exhibit hall in a suit, couldn’t figure out why, then realized I was supposed to be at my mother’s funeral. Nov 30

I dreamt I was at a convention when an agent cornered me and asked me to send him my novel. Now THAT’S a dream! Nov 28

I dreamt I was in a battle during medieval times … which I and my friends escaped by hopping into a Jeep. The anachronism then woke me. Nov 28

I dreamt I was bodyguard to a famous rapper, and we headed to make peace with his equally famous rival, which turned into a tense meeting. Nov 28

I had a dream that involved Rik Mayall as the People’s Poet from the Young Ones … but alas, now that I’m awake, I remember nothing more. Nov 27

I dreamt I was part of a panel discussion on the Rolling Stones, during which Mick Jagger showed up to say everything I’d said was wrong. Nov 27

I dreamt I was Reese from Person of Interest, about to go undercover (but where?) by donning an outrageous mod Austin Powers-like outfit. Nov 24

I dreamt I was exchanging emails with my (dead IRL) friend Bob Freedman about getting together for dinner, then woke and remembered. Damn. Nov 24

I dreamt I was on the Canadian border in the Pacific Northwest, looking down with @ShearmanRobert on a waterfall making Niagara seem puny. Nov 23 (more…)

I was reading the July 1932 issue of The American Magazine over at the Comic Book + site, and learned some important medical news … I’ve been using Listerine all wrong!

Seems I’ve been gargling with the stuff all these years, when what I should have been doing with the product is dousing my hair with it and massaging until I can “feel the scalp tingling and glowing.”

Or, based on the photo above, having my loving wife massage my scalp for me.

Somehow I’ve got a feeling that won’t be happening …

I was reading the September/October 1954 issue of the comic Dream Book of Romance (as one does), and came across a moment that had me cheering.

In the lead story “Woman of Shame,” after Nancy’s father dies, she drops out of college and takes a job as a night club “snapshot girl” in order to support herself and her aged mother. (more…)

I may have let my season tickets to Next lapse once I no longer had that Syfy salary funding three trips to Chicago each year, but that doesn’t mean I’m not still interested in what the ever-changing restaurant has in store for 2015. I’ve been lucky enough to experience five menus there—Sicily, Kyoto, The Hunt, Vegan (twice!), and Bocuse d’Or—and have never been less than wowed.

Here, as just announced over on it Facebook page, are the three cuisines Next will be tackling next.

January – May

Next: Bistro

4 Years after opening with our Paris 1906 menu we embrace the more casual side of Parisian dining culture. With the great flood of 1910 behind them, Parisians embraced the Bistro. In 2015, Next will as well.

Every week we will introduce new items on our evolving 5-7 course chalkboard menu — we will also have specials and supplements on a daily basis.

Casual, delicious, and filling for the cold Chicago winter. And the kind of menu you’ll want to revisit every few weeks.

$80-$120 per person.
Please note: optional supplements of $ 15 – $ 75 will be available to order in the dining room. (more…)

As if I wasn’t morose enough yesterday, it having been my late father’s birthday, I also learned that Rocky Wood, former president of the Horror Writers Association, and one of the nicest guys you could ever meet, had succumbed to ALS, with which he’d been diagnosed in 2010.

I didn’t think I’d ever taken a picture with Rocky, but it turns out that Ellen Datlow caught us at the Stoker Awards weekend in 2009.

Rocky and I had many lengthy conversations over the years across many continents, several on the subject of Stephen King, something he knew more about than anyone in the world, even King himself. I’m going to miss those talks, and I’m not alone. His contributions to the horror field in general and to the smooth running of the Horror Writers Association in specific cannot be measured. (more…)

My father, Barney Edelman, should have turned 82 today. But instead, I lost him on January 27, 2009, when he was only 76. I’m missing him, and one of the ways I’m dealing with that is by communing with his artwork. Luckily, he left behind a lot of it.

I’ve shared many of Dad’s paintings with you before, and here he is with four more, a quadriptych of birds he painted to fill a large wall in our new home.

He was an artist his entire life, and his output consisted of far more than the oil paintings I’ve previously posted. Earlier this year, I brought home more than 100 pieces of his artwork, and this morning I looked through them again. Here are just a few. (more…)

A week ago, I told you I’d reread a unpublished novel manuscript of mine—one I’d stopped marketing years ago after multiple rejections, including one which had it sitting with a certain editor who shall not be named for four years before a decision was made—and saw enough good and true in it that I decided I’d try to revise it up to my 2014 standards.

Having come to that conclusion, the first thing I had to do was digitize the book. Sadly, though every other short story or novel I’d ever attempted, whether completed or not, published or not, existed in electronic form, this one didn’t. Even though I searched through all my files in every format, I never found it. (Was the universe trying to tell me something?) So I spent three days OCR-ing the 378-page manuscript, which turned out to contain nearly 94,000 words.

Then, on Thanksgiving, I sat down and started revising the first chapter, which I continued doing Friday, and yesterday as well. But as I moved forward, attempting to collaborate with last century’s me, I soon realized …

No. (more…)

Friday, I finished a new story—my sixth of the year, so yay, me!—and sent it off to market.

Yesterday, I reread the full manuscript of a novel of mine—one that three major publishers sat on for a combined nine years—in order to decide whether it was worth revisiting.

And today, having come to the conclusion that, yes, there is enough good and true and real in for me not to abandon it, I’ll begin the work of bringing it up to my 2014 standards. (Or trying to anyway.)

What do I mean by that?

I’ll let Kenneth Koch explain.

While in the basement looking for an electronic file of the piece so I won’t have to re-key in every word before beginning revisions, I came across my copy of one of my favorite poems, a poem which, among other things, will show why I’ve vacillated for so long about whether or not I should try marketing this work again.

It’s Koch’s “The Art of Poetry,” which to me rings true about all writing, not just poetry, and you can read the whole thing over at the Poetry Foundation site. I urge you to do just that, but the relevant section explaining my hesitation is this: (more…)

I learned of Mike Nichols’ death yesterday, which set me to thinking of my second cousin, the actor Herb Edelman. (At least I think he’s my second cousin. Perhaps he’s my first cousin once removed. I’m not entirely sure how genealogists parse these relationships. He was my father’s father’s brother’s son, if that makes things any clearer. Probably not.)

The reason thinking of Nichols had me thinking of Herb is because it was their accidental meeting that got my cousin into the acting business. Per Wikipedia, after getting out of the Army, Herb “enrolled in Brooklyn College as a Theater student, but eventually dropped out. He later worked as a hotel manager and as a taxicab driver. One of his fares was director Mike Nichols, who in 1963 cast Edelman in his breakthrough Broadway role, as the bewildered telephone repairman in Neil Simon’s Barefoot in the Park.”

An interesting factoid. But you might ask, where’s the serendipity?

Here’s the serendipity. (more…)

When it came time to choose where I’d eat during the recent World Fantasy Convention—and you know me, I hate to waste a meal on a hotel restaurant—my number one choice was Rose’s Luxury, judged by Bon Appétit as 2014’s best new restaurant in America. Getting the chance to eat there represented a different sort of challenge than most popular restaurants I’ve been to, which have involved using my Internet-fu to snag a table the instant reservations for the date I needed became available online.

Rose’s Luxury, however, doesn’t take reservations. Which results in the kind of wait one Yelp reviewer recently experienced: “We waited in line approximately 1h45m before putting our name down. After that was another 2h30m wait to get a table.” And another, who waited even longer: “I waited about 5 hours for a table on a Saturday night, starting from lining up outside at 4:30 to being seated around 10:00pm.”

There seemed to be only one way to avoid that kind of wait—arrive around 90 minutes before the restaurant opens, guaranteeing you’ll be part of the first seating. That will keep wait time to a minimum. I was up for standing outside the restaurant before it opened—hey, I had no problem getting to Franklin BBQ three hours before it opened, so 90 minutes was nothing to me—but would I find others foodies at WFC who’d think the experience worth the wait?

I did!

Here I am with Rajan Khanna, Jenn Reese, Liz Argall, Greg van Eekhout, and Barry Goldblatt after we’d ordered and eaten EVERY FREAKING DISH on the menu that night.

But let’s go back in time, and see how the night began … (more…)