On August 24th Random house officially made the mass market paperback of FIRE AND BLOOD available to the public. You can get your copy at your favorite book seller OR pick up a signed copy at Beastly Books.
This message has been brought to you by the minions of Fevre River.
Howard Waldrop will be receiving a Lifetime Achievement Award from the World Fantasy Convention in Montreal a few months hence. It’s well deserved. There has been no finer short story writer in all of science fiction and fantasy in the past half century than H’ard. No one else writes like Waldrop. And Howard never writes the same story twice.
His best story? Damned hard to say. So many classics.
But one of them, surely surely, is “Night of the Cooters,” a finalist for the Hugo Award and Locus Award (did not win either, alas), and the title story of his second short story collection. Inspired by H.G. Wells and WAR OF THE WORLDS, it is all about the time the Martians invaded Pachuco, Texas.
And now, I am thrilled to announce, the Cooters are coming to the big screen.
Or maybe the small screen. Or the medium-sized screen. But some kind of screen, anyway. Right here in Santa Fe, we have just wrapped principal photography for a brand new film version of the Waldrop classic. “Night of the Cooters” is a short story, and our version is going to be a short film. I’d guess it will come in somewhere between 20 and 30 minutes, shot with a combination of live action and state-of-the-art animation. If you loved the story, we think you will love our movie.
Howard has been part of the project since the start, of course. (The start being some five/six years ago).
The screenplay was written by JOE LANSDALE, and who better? The Sage of Nacogdoches, Texas is a major writer in his own right, author of the Hap & Leonard series and about a zillion other books and stories, writer of thrillers, horror stories, science fiction, westerns, historicals, and all manner of other cool stuff.
Directing, and starring as Sheriff Lindley, is the one and only VINCENT D’ONOFRIO.
If you have seen any television or film in the past thirty years or so, you know the work of Vincent D’Onofrio. He was Detective Goren in LAW & ORDER: CRIMINAL INTENT. He was Private Pyle in FULL METAL JACKET. He was the young fisherman who gets jilted at the altar in MYSTIC PIZZA. He was the alien in MEN IN BLACK. He’s the Kingpin in Marvel’s DAREDEVIL series. And… probably my favorite of his roles… he was Robert E. Howard in THE WHOLE WIDE WORLD (a wonderful film that deserved a LOT more attention than it got). And more and more. You can check out the full list of his credits on IMDB. He’s simply an extraordinary actor, with a range second to no one, and it was such an honor to work with him.
He’s also a terrific director.
The supporting cast includes Hopper Penn as Sweets, Harrison Page as Luther, Martin Sensmeier as Leo Smith, Cristin McCleary as Atkins, Elias Gallegos as DeSpain, Luce Rains as Skip, Jazzy Kim O’Brien as Lil’ Chisum, and Darius Eteeyan as Billy Strother.
And what about the Cooters, you may ask?
The cooters will be supplied for us by Trioscope Studios. Check out their website at https://www.trioscopestudios.com/ for a smaple of their work… or watch their WWII film THE LIBERATORS on Netflix.
The producers of NIGHT OF THE COOOTERS — in no particular order — are Vincent D’Onofrio, Justin Duval, Joe Dean, Taylor Church, Martin Sensmeier, L.C. Crowly, Greg Jonkajtys, Elias Gallegos, Lenore Gallegos, Amy Filbeck, Joe Lansdale, and Howard Waldrop His Own Self.
And me… though I rather think I may credit myself as The Big Cooter.
When and where will you be able to see NIGHT OF THE COOTERS?
Well, that’s hard to say. We shot everything on green screen, so the post production process is going to be a lengthy one. The ball has now been passed to our friends at Trioscope, who will supply the backgrounds and special effects. We are thinking the final cut won’t be ready until early next year. And once the film is complete… well, alas, I doubt it will be showing at a multiplex near you. It’s a short film, as I said, and shorts just don’t get the distribution of full-length features. They hardly get any distribution at all, sad to say. I expect we will enter COOTERS in some film festivals here and there. Maybe some streamer will pick it up. Maybe we can release it on DVD or Blu-Ray. Maybe we can make a few more Waldrop movies and assemble them all into an anthology of sorts, like CREEPSHOW or TWILIGHT ZONE. One thing I can promise: we will be having a premiere somewhere down the line at the Jean Cocteau Cinema in Santa Fe.
Howard never made much money off his stories. I expect his film won’t make much money either. But that’s not point.
Some stories just need to be told. Some movies just need to be made. Call it a labor of love.
I am very saddened to report that we have lost another of our Wild Carders.
I received word yesterday that Steve Perrin, the writer/ creator who gave us Mistral, her father Cyclone, and the ace reporter Digger Downs, died at his home in California. I am told that he died painlessly in the night, from an atrial fibrillation.
Steve had been part of Wild Cards since the beginning… BEFORE the beginning, actually… though he never actually wrote a story for us until the triptych in our latest volume, JOKER MOON, which just came out. I am very pleased that he was at least able to see his story in print and hold the book in his hand before he passed away. But his contributions to the series went way, way beyond that one tale. Steve was a game designer, a mainstay at Chaosium and other game companies, and was one of the creators responsible for such landmark RPGs as RUNEQUEST and CALL OF CTHULHU. He was also the writer and designer for SUPERWORLD, the role-playing game that inspired Wild Cards. Without his game, there would never have been a Wild Cards series.
I first “met” Steve when both of us were in high school (me in New Jersey, him in California), writing amateur superhero stories for the ditto’ed fanzines of the fledgling comics fandom of the 60s. I met him the same way I met Howard Waldrop (who was also writing for the same fanzines) — through the mails, and in the lettercols and comments sections. He was a very prolific writer, turning out far more stories than me and Howard combined, and creating dozens of characters… among them, the very first African-American superhero of the Silver Age, the Black Phantom… who made his debut in a fanzine well before Stan Lee and Jack Kirby came up with the Black Panther.
Perrin was also one of the founding members of the SCA, and loved games. He was a big DIPLOMACY player, as I recall, and later on, with high school and college behind him, he made his career designing and writing role-playing games. There was none better. I have no doubt that if he had decided instead to write for Marvel or DC, he would have been just as successful.
I never actually met Steve in person until the worldcon in San Jose in 2002, but we kept in touch, off and on, over the decades. He was a true ace, and all the gamers out there will miss him, as will our Wild Cards readers, and his fellow members of the WC consortium.
Current Mood: 
sad
Long before I ever dreamed of Westeros, I had another setting I returned to again and again and again in a long series of short stories, novelettes, novellas, and even one novel (DYING OF THE LIGHT). The Thousand Worlds stories spanned centuries and light years and had their own cast of heroes, villains, legends, and colorful characters… none of them more colorful than the trader (and ecological engineer) Haviland Tuf, the protagonist of a long series of stories I collected together in the fix up TUF VOYAGING.
I always meant to write more Tuf stories. At one point, back in the 80s, I planned a second collection of stories (TWICE AS TUF) and a full-length Tuf novel (TUF LANDING)… but, alas, other novels and television and ICE & FIRE came along, and what with one thing and another I never got around to writing them. From time to time, I’ve even played with the idea of a television series about Tuf and his adventures… the stories are presently under option, as it happens, but… well, that hasn’t come to pass yet either.
But I am thrilled to be able to say that Haviland Tuf and his cats (he likes cats, y’see) ARE coming back… in a graphic novel.
We have closed a deal with the good folks at Ten Speed Press and Random House for VOYAGING, an adaptation of my novella “The Plague Star.” The very first Tuf story… well, not the first to be published, that was “A Beast for Norn,” but the earliest in Tuf’s personal timeline. More than that I will not say, for fear of spoiling the tale for those of you who have not read it.
The amazing and inimitable RAYA GOLDEN will be doing the adaptation and the art. It will be the third of my projects that Raya had adapted: she did the graphic story version of MEATHOUSE MAN a few years back (and snagged a Hugo nomination for it), followed by a wonderful version of STARPORT, an unproduced television pilot I wrote in the 90s. I loved what she did with that one, but VOYAGING promises to be even more fun.
….these are rough color tests and they may or may not end up looking like this in the end, but I think they’re pretty close to the final versions which I’ll be working from once I finish up the script…
Here’s Raya on the project:
So I’m doing a NEW graphic novel, another adaptation, but THIS one I’ve had my eye on for almost a decade. It’s not slated for release till 2023 as I actually have to Draw the sucker first, but boy am I excited to bring this one to life. For those of you familiar with GRRMs Science Fiction work will be very familiar with this set of short stories BUT due to the nature of this introduction story I don’t want to talk too much about that yet and if y’all remember the story you’ll remember why it’ll be fun to keep the secret with me! Suffice to say this story is an adaptation that is NOT set in GRRMs usual medieval world of Westeros, but instead in his Science fiction universe called The Thousand Worlds.
This first story is just an introduction to this universe, but HOPEFULLY there will be more volumes to come!
Here is the official description:
George R.R. Martin and Raya Golden’s VOYAGING, VOLUME ONE: THE PLAGUE STAR, the first volume of a graphic novel adaptation of TUF VOYAGING, Martin’s short story collection set in his science fiction universe the Thousand Worlds, to be adapted and illustrated by Golden, which follows a group of unlikely spacefaring rogues on a mysterious mission involving unfathomable galactic fame and fortune (but only if they can survive), to Kaitlin Ketchum at Ten Speed Press, in an exclusive submission.
I’ll be working with a friend of mine from College a very talented artist by the name of Ann Marcilleno
https://annmarcellino.tumblr.com
And I’ll be sharing more info as it arrives, but for now I present the cast of the first volume of VOYAGING; from right to left we have: RANITTAS, MUSHROOM (THE CAT), KAJ, JEFRI, CELISE, HAVILAND WITH HAVOC (THE KITTEN), AND AWHINA
Please help me spread the news and like my illustration page
https://www.facebook.com/rayagoldenillustration
AND my website 😉
If VOYAGING does well, our hope is that Raya will go on to adapt more of Tuf’s adventures into comic form… and who knows, perhaps in time there will even be some NEW tales to tell of our intrepid hairless hero.
As Tuf would say… “Indeed.”
Current Mood: 
bouncy
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