Writing vs. Music: Back Catalog

None of my records are available legally as downloads. Currently, the only Gruntsplatter track on iTunes, AmazonMp3, etc., is a remix I did for Aidan Baker back in 2005 for a limited CDR he sold on tour. You can check it out here. It was obscure 6-7 years ago, and yet it lives on. It probably has a mustache and gambling habit by now, who knows. Thus, I spent the better part of the past weekend researching digital distribution.

This is really the only part of this post that has anything to do with writing. Back catalog, it has renewed value in the eBook era. The work is suddenly infinite and offers another road into a writers world. The more GOOD roads you have available the more likely someone is to pull in, get their mustache trimmed and yank the lever on your slot machines.

With this new collection I am putting together, I’ve been thinking about that. Truth be known, I have no idea which of my releases are or aren’t available anymore. Everything I did was on a virtual handshake. I never signed anything, payment was a % of the pressing, there wasn’t no business related need for follow up from either side. They were the relationships of comrades rather than business partners.

I’ve paid only passing attention to “the scene” for years, once it became a “scene” really is when my attention started to drift. It’s been six years since I’ve released anything significant. How many of the old guard are even still around? How hard would it be to track any of  my stuff down now? Relatively hard. A big thanks to Cold Spring out of the UK, Justin seems to stock about everything that is still available.

So, when this new release comes out I’m hoping to have some previous material available from places that are easy enough to find. I’ve started looking at Bandcamp, and CDBaby, as a way to make legit digital copies available.  Bandcamp I find particularly interesting because you can put up odds and ends as well. It never occurred to me to do this until I started reading about authors taking control of their back catalog and making it available as eBooks. It may be the first instance where the way things work in small press publishing actually makes more sense than the way they work in underground music.

I’ll keep you posted…

Dragging The Rivers Of Sleep

Cripes, I didn’t realize how long it had been… Back in May I announced that Fall Of Nature Records had approached me about doing a collection of out of print tracks for them.

That collection will be called “Dragging The Rivers Of Sleep.” Now that I have sorted out the title a mere 7 months later, I have a real fire in my belly to get the remaining tracks nailed down. I have to work from an idea, I always have.  While it may be absurd it took me this long, I couldn’t slop some tracks together and call it good, there had to be something else there.

Next month will be 6 years since “The Aberrant Laboratory” came out, the only thing since then was a compilation track in 2008, but that was actually recorded in 2002. If Karl from FoN hadn’t approached me Gruntsplatter may well have stayed asleep.

I have about 2/3rd’s of it figured out. What to do with the remainder,  I keep going back and forth on that. The material here is by and large from 1999 forward, where as “The Organ Harvest” (Audio Savant 2004) CDR of rarities was 1994-1999.

More details as I have them. This is as good a time as any to say I will be doing a little new Gruntsplatter material this year for something I can’t talk about yet.

2011 Reading List

Physical Books
1) Michael Cisco – “Secret Hours” (Mythos Books)
Purchased this at Mythoscon after being blown away by Michael’s reading, the book did not disappoint. There is more Cisco in the queue for the coming year.
2) Nick Cave – “The Death Of Bunny Munro” (Faber & Faber)
More thoughts on this here.
3) Joseph S. Pulver, Sr. – “Blood Will Have It’s Season” (Hippocampus)
2011 was Pulver’s year it seemed, and this collection is a great indicator as to why. He takes the weird tale into the grimy places. I have his second collection “Sin and Ashes” near the top of the TBR pile.
4) Tom Piccirilli – “A Choir Of Ill Children” (Nightshade Books)
More thoughts on this here.
5) Tom Robbins – “Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates” (Bantam)
Recommended by a co-worker. I enjoyed it.
6) Robert Aickman – “Painted Devils” (Scribner)
7) Jerzy Kosinski – “The Painted Bird” (Pocket Books)
Worthy of its own post, but I never got around to it. Outstanding, and interesting to see a style I enjoy so much employed in a more “literary” context.
8) Sean Yseult – “I’m In The Band” (Soft Skull)
9) Phillip K. Dick – “Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said” (Gollancz)
I’d never read any PKD before. A couple of people mentioned something I’d written reminded them of his work, so I wanted to check it out. This one is my wife’s favorite so I started here.
10 ) Ann Radcliffe – “The Mysteries Of Udolpho” (Dover)
More thoughts on this here.
11) Adam Golaski – “Color Plates” (Rose Metal Press)

Kindle
12) Gary Braunbeck – “To Each Their Darkness” (Apex)
13) Gary McMahon – “How To Make Monsters” (Morrigan)
Really enjoyed this, will be following McMahon closely.
14) Fritz Leiber – “The Black Gondolier” (E-Rads/Midnight House)
more thoughts on this here.
15) Bram Stoker – “Dracula”
I’d never read it, and I was curious about the epistolary form. It was more engaging than I anticipated. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised, but ended up liking it quite a bit.
16) Matt Cardin – “A Course In Daemonic Creativity”
This is a fantastic FREE book, looking at the Muse as creative engine and what that means both subconsciously and mechanically to the creative process. Definitely recommended.
17) H.P. Lovecraft – “The Ultimate Collection”
18) Edgar Allan Poe – “Complete Work”

Last year I think there were 32, but “…Udophlo” is a long read, and the complete Lovcraft and Poe are epic. I didn’t read all of those, but attacked them in chunks, and will continue to. It’s been great to go back and revisit that stuff.

The Fritz Leiber collection was the biggest eye opener, his work is just fantastic, and I have more here to ingest. As usual, I bought far more books that I was able to read, but I’m well set up for the coming year.

Writing update

Spent the better part of the last few days working on a new tale I had been stewing on for awhile now. A comrade of mine once referred to a “Michigan Gothic” element in some of my stuff, and I think this one falls squarely in that category. It still needs work, but this draft is 6200 words or so and I’m feeling like it is in a pretty good place.

I’ll let it sit a few days and comb through it again, but it’s nice to have it all down.

Also recently finished section one of a rewrite of the previously referred to “thing in the corner.” That process cleaned up and expanded the initial short story. It will likely end up closer to a novelette. Sections two and three are congealing. I hope to start back in on that next week.

I’m prepared to credit the arrival of autumn for my recent good fortune.

Spookatorium Podcast 028 – Halloween Episode

Our 4^th Halloween episode, this time we have fiction from Orrin Grey & Ambrose Bierce. In addition we look at the life of clairvoyant Marinus B. Dykshoorn.

All the show notes and additional information available at the official site for Professor Gruntsplatter’s Spookatorium

Episode 028 – Spookatorium

Exhuming The Spookatorium

As mentioned in a previous post, I started working to relaunch my old podcast recently. Last night the first new episode in three years went live.

In this episode we look at Cotard’s Syndrome a psychological affliction where the sufferer believes themselves to be dead, missing organs or simple non-existent. We’ve got some publishing news from Gray Friar Press, Dark Regions Press, Tartarus Press and the new Phantasmagoria Journal. Then it’s into the catacombs beneath Paris, and a secret workshop in the dome of the Pantheon with UX and arguably secret society urban explorers and preservationists.

Author Richard Gavin speaks on the ideas behind his bleak tale In The Shadow Of The Nodding God from his collection Omens published by Mythos Books, and gives a reading of his vignette Notes On The Aztec Death Whistle. In addition to Omens, Richard has two other collections of short stories available - Charnel Wine & The Darkly Splendid Realm are available from Dark Regions Press.

Music this time
THE BIRTHDAY PARTY
WESTERING
RASPUTINA
PAIN TEENS
CELTIC FROST
PHALLUS DEI
FAITH & THE MUSE
SLOPPY SECONDS
GOATVARGR
GOD BULLIES
ABANDONER & ANGEL OF DECAY
MALARIA!

Professor Gruntsplatter’s Spookatorium 027

Revisiting Udolpho

I’m reading Anne Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho. Published in 1794 this tale, most succinctly summarized on Wikipedia this way -

“The Mysteries of Udolpho follows the fortunes of Emily St. Aubert who suffers, among other misadventures, the death of her father, supernatural terrors in a gloomy castle, and the machinations of an Italian brigand. Often cited as the archetypal Gothic novel.”

I’m at about the half way point of this 620 page beast and one thing keeps occurring to me. What would a modern editor have done with this book?

Udolpho, the rotting castle referenced in the title, doesn’t come on the scene until just over 200 pages in. The language is overwrought, and the repetition of words is legion. I wake up in the morning and the first words in my head are “melancholy countenance” because they appear so frequently in these pages.

This book is 217 years old, and I am quite enjoying it. Even with all the “flaws” that modern editing and writing pound the desk about, the book has survived and influenced those that followed across genres. I wonder how temporary fiction of today will appear on the spectrum of history? What role does the trim the fat, clean as a whistle, approach to editing play in that?

This is only one example of many. The books that have wriggled into the collective unconscious often disregard the gospel. Many predate any gospel. (here is another post on the matter). That isn’t to say history won’t preserve the reduced fat storytelling of the current day, but In 217 years whose tendrils of influence will be visible in the literary canon?

Will it be those that wrote beyond the rules or never needed the rules to begin with? Story existed before, and has persevered through, different schools of thought on form. It existed before we  started building fences and genre’s and check lists about how story should be conveyed. It existed before writing. Not a revelation by any means, but a reminder worth considering.

Spookatorium

I spent yesterday re-animating the old Spookatorium Podcast site. I produced 26 episode of this from 9/06 – 10/08. I had been thinking a lot lately about bringing it back and now there it is.

I’m still formulating the first new episode, but in addition to what the show was, I’m looking to incorporate some of the authors and stories that have come to mean so much to me. We’ll see how it shakes out. The plan is to set a more realistic schedule. The last time I did this I started out weekly, it was too much. This incarnation will likely just be a monthly show.The feed is in place now to listen to the archived shows. Once I have the new content up I’ll hassle with getting it on iTunes. Stay tuned.