Gay Books: editions on Amazon

Had to happen, and we're thrilled that it has: the original DreamCraft editions of books like DEATH'S HEAD and THE RABELAIS ALLIANCE are starting to change hands at Amazon.com ... they're described as "rare, autographed" ... which is absolutely true. In what I think of as "the DreamCraft years" I signed every copy -- thousands of them, and many of them with personal messages, depending on what people wanted.

When we changed to Lulu.com for manufacture, obviously, I could no longer autograph copies, ince the books are made in and shipped from locations across the world. (Why did we change? The numbers being produced and shipped exceeded the ability of a local hands-on studio; DreamCraft did a great job, but there's only so much human beings can do ... Lulu.com is 100% automatic, robotized ... human hands never touch the book. The first fingers on the book you order are YOURS, when you open the package and salivate. And the change was a good thing, because it meant the advertising and social networking we'd been doing for some time was paying off ... people were saying, "Hey, Keegan's back!" They were buying books -- in fact, they were buying so many books, DreamCraft had to outsource. Enter Lulu.)

So, there hasn't been an autographed Keegan edition, now, in something like eight months, and the time is absolutely right for the older DreamCraft editions to start changing hands through book dealers on the Internet.

Mind you, beware: Amazon bookstores are right now carrying tip-top condition DEATH'S HEAD UNABRIDGED and RABELIAS ALLIANCE, but because they're rare, signed, and hand-cafted (for which read: absolutely beautiful and unique), they're expensive.

Our price for these books is in the $23-$24 bracket. The collectible (!) is worth five to ten times that much. I'm (to use the British term) gobsmacked at the prices, and at the same time very, very gratified to see this happening.

I still have the ambition to give up the day job and write full time, and lately I'm starting to believe that it not only can happen, but WILL. If you've been following this bog for the last few months, you'll have come with us through the trials and tribulations of independent publishing on the web, seen some of the mistakes one can make, and shared the small triumphs. We're having a blast; it's big fun, and I think this feeling carries through to readers, who tune into the fun. Nice. Very.

So, if you're at Amazon.com looking for Keegans, you'll be finding the old GMP and Millivres editions, and you'll also start to see the old DreamCrafts. Beware of the price ... check out the price from our website (Mel Keegan OnLine) and know what you're paying, and what you're paying it for.

If you want the collectible: go for it. But you could also get four or five of the new editions, for the price of the collectible. Your call.

Next on our agenda is the hardcover issue of WHITE ROSE OF NIGHT. That should be available today or tomorrow, and look out for a newsletter from DreamCraft about it. Then, there's a raft of new artwork being done for the "send an e-card" page. We'll make some of the pieces available on the blog here as desktops, and possibly also a screensaver, if time permits.

Next for me personally -- THE LORDS OF HARBENDANE. The book is polishing up so well, I'm starting to get that certain feeling a writer gets, when you know you've got hold of something very, very good. I had this feeling while doing DANGEROUS MOONLIGHT --

Speaking of which, have you looked at the review, on Rainbow Reviews? I'm so delighted. Here's the link direct to its page: DANGEROUS MOONLIGHT on Rainbow Reviews.

We're also on Book Hitch, and thanks to Friend Aricia (hi kiddo, how goes it?), we're on something called Shelfari.com. Now, this, I'd never even heard of till someone sent a message along the lines of, "Great to see you on Shelfari." Here's the link to Aricia's own page at Shelfari: http://www.shelfari.com/o1517966569 ... she uploaded a whole box of books a couple of weeks ago, and (surprise, surprise), we found out that eight of the old Keegans and some of the new ones were already there. Cool. (Thanks, Aricia: I appreciate it!)

Actually, Shelfari.com turns out to be a lot of fun. They have this graphical, animated interface with which you can knock yourself out for half an hour (click to see larger):




For writers going the POD route these days, the Internet is a fantastic playground. In one day, we get visitors from Russia, Ethiopia, China, New Zealand, Poland, Romania, South Africa, Iraq (!), Turkey, Mexico, Brazil, Germany, Switzerland, Japan, Malaysia, Norway ... oh yeah, and the US and Canada, UK and and Aus, too. Show me any other stomping ground that can match this.

From personal experience, I would have to say that gay publishing has never looked brighter. We're reaching people in places in the world that would have been impossible, just a few years ago -- and ebooks make the coverage even wider.

If the United States does indeed, in 2009, turn into a locked-down, repressed, religious extremist, condom-free zone where safe sex is illegal, the draft siphons up any kid not in college, and much of the country is irradiated following the 'Armageddon war' Sarah Palin and John McCain seem to lust for so passionately (see my post, "Palin and McCain: advocating a new AIDS epideic") ... well, it'll be downloads to the rescue. Gay books will vanish from stores across America, they'll be dragged out of libraries and burned, and if you're found owning one, you're in trouble, But --

Do you know how many ebooks you can fit on a flash card the size of your thumbnail? And how easy those are to hide, how impossible they would be to find? Palin and McCain and their cohorts can burn all the gay paperbacks the like; there'll be even more changing hands as contraband. Remember, in school, reading about the Prohibition years, when fortunes were made on booze? Same difference. It'll be the Internet to the rescue in this weird, Orwellian future we see looming after the November polls.

And if you're ever going to get THE LORDS OF HANDBENDANE, I need to get back to work.

Cheers,
MK

Blue genes and gay publishing

As you go by the solstice of winter and don't have anything bright and shiny to look forward to until your birthday (which is a date of mixed blessings: My gods, are you still alive? How old are you? You're kiddin. Be fair, nobody's that old!), you start to ponder upon the meaning of Life, the Universe and similar Jazz. The days are short, gray and bloody damned cold (this is the coldest winter in anyone's memory), and you wonder what you were bitching about last summer, when you were flaked out on any available horizontral surface, chugging anything cold, and begging for a flurry of snow. Of course, come January and February, you'll be saying the exact same things again ... humans are not terribly adaptable.

There's a bright, lurative future for the geneticist who isolates and markets the adaptability gene. They'd sell it by the pill or by the shot, and you'd go get your shot in, say, October, and start mutating for summer. Your body would change shape and consistency between then and Christmas, and by New Year you'd have the body and constitution of a Masai warrior, to whom 110 degrees is peachy. Then, you'd go back to the clinic and get another shot in April, and by June you'd look like a native Siberian or Canadian or Alaskan ... Inuit, or Inupiat, or Yupik ... folks to whom 50 degrees is balmy and warm. On a day like today (the forecast is for 12 degrees Celcius, which is something like 54 in real degrees), with your Inuit body and constitution you'd be sipping on a cool drink, lying on an air mattress by the pool.

Was talking to the other side of the family (in Alaska) at the weekend ... they're having the coldest summer in anyone's memory. They've tickled 60 degrees F on a couple of occasions in Anchorage, and in the Valley (Mat-Su), it snowed last week. In July. Most of Alaska is rain-soaked, and folks are wondering where in the hell their summer went to --

And here's Keegan bitching about the climate, the winter, while "enjoying" almost identical weather. Yes, BUT --

It's what you're used to. You get acclimated to summer, and then it ... stops.

Okay, I'll shut up about it now.

There's a new screensaver at the Tenth Dimension (the members' zone at MK Online). No hunks this time -- next time, guys. Be patient. This one is an SF screensaver which is rated "office safe." You can go ahead and install it wherever, without getting glares. I'll save you a trip to the website, and give you the direct links right here:

Click on this to download the XP self-installer; and...

Click on this to download the file for Vista (This Vista one doesn't instll itself. Extract it from the archive to your desktop, double-click it, and you get a pop-up menu.)

And a very good question from a thoughtful reader, while I'm here. This visitor from the UK asked, why did GMP cease to be, as a publishing entity? It's a long and complex story, but I'll try to be brief. The business was started quite a long time ago now, by a group of people (I think there were five guys, Richard Dipple, Aubrey Walther, David Fernbach, and two others) who were all investors in the enterprise and worked for GMP too. The business started with a couple of books and at its zenith was doing 26 new titles per year -- which was the point where Keegan signed with them. The future looked bright indeed; at that point, I had no idea Richard Dipple was seriously ill. Richard was one of the nicest human beings I have ever known, and his death was not merely a tragedy in human terms, but also for gay publishing. Without him, GMP unraveled itself. The four other founder members went in different directions; two stayed (Aubrey Walther and David Fernbach), but things were not as lucrative as they might have been, and ... frankly, I should think the inspiration had gone. When the joy goes out of something, it turns into work, and sometimes damned hard work. A day arrives when you're glad to let it go. That day came, and GMP passed into the hands of Prowler Press. Now, Prowler was a magazine publisher which had become interested in having a gay book list, and it might have worked out, if Millivres (the big, BIG gay magazine publishing house) had not assimilated Prowler in the perfectly natural process by which huge publishing combines consume their more modest competitors, in order to iron-clad their market share. Here was the problem: Millivres had no interest in running a gay book list. Over the space of several years the last titles (which had already been contacted for at the time of the takeover) were published; anything else was scrapped; on-shelf stock was run down, and ... it was over.

The really sad thing is that with the loss of GMP, gay publishing outside the USA suffered a major blow from which it's never, really, recovered -- or at least, not yet. Many writers (myself among them) are out there on the Internet, breaking trail, and doing very nicely at it. But (and I cannot stress this enough!) writers like Keegan had an existing "name" to tout, when we started self-marketing. MK could quote a stack of titles from GMP and Millivres, and even a credit from Alyson (Breakheart); I could rattle off the reviews I'd received yonks ago. All this builds a foundation under the new Internet book marketing project. Gay books, any kind of books, makes little difference: you have to find readers and get them to part with their money. And it's easier to do this when they either know you already because they have a shelf full of your old books, or they're reasonably impressed with the fact you were professionally published much more than one time.

Not for a moment am I saying that new (gay or otherwise) writers can't make a go of markering their books on the web: they can. Have you heard of a book called "The Didymus Contingency", by Jeremy Robinson? No? Google it. Seriously. It was self-published, he paid Kirkus Reviews their pound of flesh for a write-up (and they have become bloody expensive), and before you know it's he's signing a contract with a pro publisher. Another writer who went the DIY route and succeeded massively was Matthew Reilley: from self publishing to signing a high-six-figure contract with a major UK house, in about three years flat.

I guess what I'm saying is ... new writers have to be prolific, dedicated, incredibly talented, and have quite a lot of money to invest in promoting their books. Then, they need some real, genuine luck. Not everyone has the investment capital, or the luck. And I think it's so sad that a good, solid gay publishing house no longer exists -- a house that's been established so long, the publisher can afford to take a risk on someone new.

This is what happened for me: Richard Dipple took a risk on Mel Keegan. Now, ICE, WIND AND FIRE got some stinking reviews (for being sexy; can you believe that?) but Richard looked at actual sales figures, which were good, and gave me another shot...

That next shot was DEATH'S HEAD. The rest is history. DEATH'S HEAD had a good many teething problems of its own, but David Fernbach and I got through it, and ... here we are.

The bottom line is this: I would love to see another publishing house come along to fill the void left by GMP. I'd be involved with it myself, on some level, if I were given the opportinity. And now --

I have to go back to work, guys! More tomorrow.

What, no periscope jokes?

As promised, sample readings from AQUAMARINE (40% of the book) are on the blog as of, uh, now. There'll only be minor changes between here and the paperback release. The widows and orphans have yet to be attended to (so just ignore them in the typeset you have here; I think there's something like three of the little buggers; we make them disappear, but don't actually ship them to a gulag, so it takes time) and we're still waiting for the ISBN.

Now, ISBN generation is supposed to take about three working days and sometimes takes two working weeks. You see, "ISBN" is an acronym standing for Interdimensional Superstring Boson-type Neutrino," and they're a bloody nightmare to catch. It takes a special kind of cyclotron to generate them. You key in the title of the book, the author's byline, the publisher, publication date and number of pages, then you shoot the request into superspace with the cyclotron, and get ready to "catch" the returning particles. They come blasting back through the fabric of space-time, and where they pass through, they leave micron-tiny fractures (the technical term is "holes") which, when scanned with an argon laser, can be read in binary code. The zeroes and ones of the binary are then converted back into numerals, and voila, you have your ISBN. But it's hellaciously hard catching the ISBN particles, and sometimes they have to fire up the cyclotron two or three times to get a result.

Anyway, all that lies in the hands of professionals. We don't profess to be in charge of the cyclotron, and the ISBN will be delivered when it's delivered.

In the meantime, here's the link to download 40% of the book, and -- enjoy!

ONE WORD OF CAUTION: these chapters and complete and uncut. There's some good, old fashioned raunch. Consider yourself warned! If you're underage, or if you're disturbed by gay relationships, you know what NOT to download, right? Everyone clear about the content of the PDF?!! Okay, here goes:

Download the first eight chapters right here; it's a compressed PDF, sile size is 1117k.

The sample readings will be up on the website in the next week, and the paperback will be about a week behind that. After which, my next project is to get my fantasy novel into the hands of DreamCraft, so it'll fill the temporal gap while I plot myself right back OUT of the deep, dark hole I'm in, with my haunted house novel.

I can't believe I did this to myself. I shot myself in the foot, and this is so rare, for me. The last time I did this was with SCORPIO. You remember the battle at the end of the book? I held hostage a pressurized city, floating in the air over an arctic wilderness ... and I had to get NARC riot troops in there, without punching a hole in the pressure skin, which would bust the city wide open and kill a quarter million people. Oof. I designed the scenario to be a page-turner; I didn't want a repeat of anything readers had seen in either DEATH'S HEAD or EQUINOX. It had to be all-new, and a king-sized challenge for Jarrat, Stone and crew. Visualize this, if you can: the fingers are flying over the keys, the scene is set, the Blue Ravens gather in the ops room aboard the carrier NARC-Athena for the briefing ... all eyes turn to Jarrat and Stone. "Okay, boss," says Gil Cronin, "what's the deal?" The silence was deafening. You could have heard a pin drop. Jarrat looked at Stone; Stone looked at Jarrat. They both looked at Keegan and Stone said, "All right, smart ass, what IS the deal?" It took me three weeks to get out of that one. Jarrat and Stone, and the riot troops? They had it easy. All they had to do was get in there and do what they were told -- by me. As for myself, I think I toasted about a billion brain cells, running scenario after scenario, while every one of them blew up the city.)

Let that be a lesson to me, never, NEVER to leave fine-tuning The End till I'm writing the middle. Ever after SCORPIO, I write the ending of the book in note form (maybe 10 pages which will be expanded out to 50 in the finished version), before I settle on what the fine points of the plot are actually going to be. In oher words, you don't just jot down, "The city is taken hostge, Jarrat and Stone lead the descant troops in there and liberate it." You figure out exactly (not approximately!) how it's going to be done. APHELION was another major challenge, but no real problem, and I've known for eons where the HELLGATE series ends...

All of which made me complacent. Did I get sloppy, planning the occult book? Or did I get too clever? I'm not quite sure, yet. Suffice to say, readers will be getting a full-on, full-throttle fantasy in the meantime, while I, uh, clean up my mess.

Anyway, enjoy the sample readings, and watch out for a newsletter from DreamCraft in the next day or two. There's a new screensaver uploading tomorrow, too. I'll put a link to it on the blog here, also.

All the best,
MK

Mars or bust!

Here's the stuff of dreams: a bald statement which takes a little while to permeate the basic denseness of the human cranium (even mine):

Within a decade, NASA plans to begin building a permanent lunar colony to serve as an outpost en route to Mars.

No, Keegan did not make that up! It's an outtake from a feature article which you can find right here:

WISbsiness.com, Wisconsin's Business News Source.

It's well worth a look ... a quiet little article, no fanfare, no noise, no flashy pictures or videos. Just a plain text feature which frames the future of space exploration in no uncertain terms. There's a saying: "Great storms announce themselves with a single gust of air."

A few days ago I was talking about the 39th anniversary of Man on the Moon, and my own memories not only of the event, but of being a kid in the late 1960s, when even our teachers firmly believed we were headed for the stars, and that kids like you and me (well, maybe not you; you're probably too young to have been there at the time!) could expect to live and work in space.

Alas, Project Apollo turned out to be little more than a Cold War publicity stunt, but several decades down the track the future of this planet, not to mention the people living on it, is going to pivot on the NEED to get back to the Moon. It's all about fuel. You can't get helium 3 here. You CAN get it there. And nuclear fusion ain't gonna work without it. I can take or leave the part about the Lunar base being a jumping off point for Mars. I mean, I would love to see it happen, but I'll be damned if I can see any shrieking, screaming, blue-in-the-face necessity to go to Mars. And that's what it would take to get us there. But ... rust, we have plenty of right here ... and Mars is too problematical to make a practical lifeboat for the Earth, in the next century.

Hang on --

Hold the phone. Keegan's getting a plot idea. I mean, a novel concept ... the pivot point around which books revolve, and without which you wind up with soap opera.

Something mildly phenomenal in an entirely fictional context just hit me. Oooooh, man, there's a novel in this...

[long pause while plot idea gets hammered into the computer; further pause for mug of coffee; slight extra pause for re-reading the last few lines...]

Sorry, guys, but this is how it happens. I was about to remark that Mars doesn't have enough gravity to hang onto an atmosphere for long, even if we managed to give it one, and an idea/image/scene 'happened' in my mind. The story will weave itself in the next few hours, and this one gets added to the list of books I just have to write. Eventually. (Actually, book sales via Lulu and Payloadz are doing so well, lately, once again I'm close to seriously considering concentrating solely on writing; now, that would be a day long remembered. Can't wait for it to happen.)

Back to Mars, though. It's actually fairly easy (or, the concepts are easy, not the technology!) to endow Mars with an atmosphere. Buzz out to the Ooort Cloud, find ice asteroids which are comprised of water ice, shunt them back in here, with the ion engine, crash them into Mars. Instant atmosphere, as the water divides into hydrogen and oxygen in the heat of the impact. Problem: Mars only has 30% of our gravity, and the atmosphere we just pumped in will escape to space.

Sad to say, I know a thing or two about Mars, and why it'll be a bear to go there for purposes of colonization ... much less to convince the people of Earth to spend trillions on spaceflights to get there! I've researched Mars for three books and actually written one of them -- APHELION.

Wraparound cover for the 2008 DreamCraft edition of APHELION

Don't get me wrong: Mars is a fantastic place. I had a load of fun with APHELION, and I'm definitely going to return there for a fictional vacation. Jarrat and Stone might not be there; the NARC books tend to touch down in a location and then go on. (The next stories will involve Rethan, which we visited in both DEATH'S HEAD and STOPOVER, also Aurora, where we were in SCORPIO; but I can't figure out how to get back to Mars. Worse luck. The great Martian citites, and the farming town of Lassiter were fantastic places to write about.)

So much the better that you were just witness to The Epiphany, the actual moment when a new novel was born! (It might not be a big thing to most visitors, but to me, as a writer, it's a "wow" moment. I love those moments.) It might be a few years before you see the novel, but this one? Yeah, I'm, going to write this one. It doesn't have a title yet, but I have a feeling it will by tonight...

Blogging in a time-warp

You might not believe this, but it's been six months since the MK books were uploaded to Lulu (how time flies), and with half a year gone we can start to wragle numbers. I can give you the top-sellers for a start.

No surprise, I guess, if I tell you APHELION is miles ahead of every other title, with the other NARC books right behind it. DANGEROUS MOONLIGHT and WINDRAGE are the next in line ... and the hardcovers are unexpectedly popular. I'd originally thought they would be too expensive, people would leave them alone for no other reason than the sheer cost. They're ten bucks more expensive to produce than the paperbacks, and what can we do but pass most of this right along?

Sales are actually pretty good ... and damnit it, the advertising hasn't actually started yet. The campaign has been designed, it's on the launchpad, but there's always something which comes along to bump it to tomorrow, and next week. No one's fault, incidentally. It's just a bunch of STUFF that keeps happening.

The most popular format for ebooks turns out to be the screenreader format. Feedback from readers indicates our books are perfect for the purpose. Top sellers are the NARC books, with SCORPIO and APHELION running neck and neck, and DANGEROUS MOONLIGHT right behind.

Traffic going through to the website has been above average, with visitors from most corners of the globe, from Korea to Russia. It's also fascinating to see how people find us -- the tracking service we use gives a wealth of info, including the referring links, showing the pathways by which people arrived on the site. Visitors are arriving from Google, Yahoo and some search engines I never even heard of; other folks seem to get the URL in emails from friends; and the link is apparently on a number of websites out there.

To all who're linking to us: THANK YOU KINDLY. It's much appreciated.

Now, to a reader's question. When are the books going to be available in Australia? Well, in fact, they already are. Lulu.com has recruited an Australian digital printshop, and the books are now produced in this country and mailed locally, rather than being manufactured in the US or EU and airmailed in. You can order from Lulu.com direct or from the MK OnLine website, and your books will be on your doorstep in 5 days flat.

Now, the question could also have been read as, 'When will the books be available in stores in Australia?' This one is a toughie -- not because it's difficult to answer but because the details of the answer are hard to choke down! Nope, I don't see any way to get the books into stores, here or in the States. The problem is that bookstores prefer to acquire stock via a distributor, and when a title enters the distribution chain, it's subject to the markup system. The distributor takes the book from us and doubles the price ... gives it to the bookstore, and they double the price again, then add on the 10% GST. Let's say it costs us $25 for us to get the book into the hands of the distributor (which includes manufacture and freight costs, and a small royalty for yours truly and DreamCraft). The book hits the shelf at $110. [barfing sound] At that price, it'd sit there for three months and then be sent back to us as a return!

Sorry, guys, that's how the bookstore industry works, and so long as books start out at $2 or $5 as they leave the printshop, it works fine. Print on Demand is very new, and still a law unto itself. The Internet is its natural environment, and physical bookstores are alien territory.

But POD also gives us fantastic flexibility and control, and so long as readers -- like yourself -- don't mind ordering on the web, the books are about the same price as they'd be in stores. Gay books were almost always a bit more expensive because the printruns are usually smaller. Can't help wondering why printruns would be smaller, mind you. What, gay folks don't read?? I beg to differ, and so do you!

In fact, I'm trying to remember the last time I bought a book in a store. I tend to get books, music, movies, on the web exclusively these days, as do a lot of other folks. Turns out, eBay is a great place to pick up the old GMP titles, and prices are a lot better than they used to be, since they went back into print witj DreamCraft.

(I couldn't believe the US$400 price for an original DEATH'S HEAD, a few years ago. Chin hit knees for a minute there. Much as I love Jarrat and Stone, I couldn't rationalize paying so much. You can get DH and EQUINOX for about a tenth of that now -- which is fair.)

Speaking of eBay, we got the code to put a shopping link on the blog, here: you click through from this page right to eBay and search on EQUINOX or whatever. The sweet thing about it is, having the code on this page means I earn a royalty off the used-book sale ... puts the smile back on any writer's face, I'll tell you. The problem is, the code won't plug-in to the Blogger template for some reason. We still need to get this figured out, and I'll give you an update when we do. I know some readers are trying to hunt down the original GMP editions, and unfortunately, there's nothing left here. Or, if there is, it's packed, like most of my library ... and I don't recall there being much of anything left, GMP-edition-wise.

Otherwise, life and work are same-old, same-old, with the high point of the day being the moment I did NOT drop the boiling tea kettle and did NOT get rushed to the emergency room with third-degree burns to 70% of my body! Thank gods for tender mercies, or I'd have been finishing the edit of AQUAMARINE from the hospital!

I have to work now, guys ... I just noticed the time.

Cheers to all,
MK

The cruellest cut...

Last night I was writing a quick column about the way DEATH'S HEAD was cut by 15% of its running length, according to publisher requirements; I was asked, how do you go about doing thr work, and stretched my memory back over more years than any of us care to tell, to actually remember doing it (shiver). Then, later in the evening we played the DVD of the director's cut of TROY, which is about a half hour longer than the theatrical release ... and I was struck by the similarity in the two editing jobs.

On one hand you have the writer who has to cut the heart and soul out of a book to make it fit covers which had been pre-printed; on the other hand, you have a director who's been told to bring the story in at a certain length, and s/he has to rip through the film and find a way to cut it by about 20% of its length, and do it without compromising the story.

Well, maybe the cuts to TROY didn't compromise the plot, but they certainly chewed into the 'integrity' of the characterization. The director's cut is extremely good. I'd actually missed the movie on the big screen because I was (!) dumb enough to believe the critics, who had nothing good to say about it. I suppose it depends what you want to get out of a movie for your $14 ticket (yup; that's what we're paying locally ... and you bet, a movie's got to be good to be worth the asking price ... it's not like buying a paperback, where you get days of entertaining for your $24, or whatever. With a movie, whether it's good, bad or indifferent, the whole thing is over in a couple of hours).

Maybe the critics who went to TROY were wanting something more, or different from it. More of Helen, less of Achilles? More female nudity, less of Brad Pitt's physique dramatically undraped for the cameras? Okay. I can see how a troupe of het film critics could get upset at the scarcity of female nudity in the theatrical version, while Brad and Orlando get to romp around in sun tan oil and smiles. I can just imagine the puffs of steam, or smoke, coming out of these critics' ears as they sit beside wives or girlfriends who're oohing and aahing over the cinematic beefcake. So TROY was always destined to be rubbished by mainstream movie critics!



There's a little more for these guys in the director's cut. Not only is the movie a lot more bloodthirsty (though nowhere near 300 or PATHFINDER. I'd put it on a par with THIRTEENTH WARRIOR), but there's enough nudie shots of Helen to woo the other side of the fence. There's also a lot of Mr. Pitt, who broods all over the screen and leaves the viewer with a lingering impression of animal magnificence, and also a kind of madness. Was Achilles thoroughly nuts for a while? I'd have to say so -- and if you've read your Homer, the original text of the ILLIAD only underscores the idea. This seems to come across in the director's cut more keenly than in the theatrical cut. Kuods to Brad Pitt on many levels. For having the guts to actually portray the 'hero' as a blood-hungry maniac for a while ... for being a major investor in the movie ... and for living in the gym for months. That physique didn't just happen. One can imagine the buckets of sweat spilled to make it happen.

And as a writer I can also imagine how directot Wolfang Peterson would have wept tears of blood in the cutting of it. A couple of shots, I could have lived without --basically, seeing people's heads get cut in two isn't high on my day's agenda. But violence was only part of what was added back in, in the process of restoration for the DVD.

Cutting DEATH'S HEAD was the same kind of 'tears of blood' chore, a trial by ordeal. (What doesn't kill us makes us stronger. Yeah, right. You know that the guy who said that ended his life insane, locked up in a loony bin? What doesn't kill you can also turn you into such a head-case, the nice men in the white coats come to collect you one day!) Which isn't to say that I went bonkers while cutting DEATH'S HEAD. (Okay, I almost did; but enough sanity hung on by the proverbial thread for me to get to the post office with the manucript!)



Incidentally, if the writers among you would like to know more about how the whole thing was done, you can find the story on the NARC page, on the website.

Speaking of the website, it's actually up at this moment ... still under test in a couple of places, but it's been debugged and is running smoothly enough for me to invite you to visit. The address hasn't changed:

the main page.

The official launch will be in a couplre more days, because there's still a few details to be added in; but it's looking very, very good.