 For those wanting me to get to work on The Novel, I’m currently in research mode and hope to start writing in earnest in the next month or two. In the meantime, there’s a few warm-up exercises I want to do.
Among them is this, a quickie little World of Warcraft piece. It’s for a contest to win two months of playtime, so I thought it would be worth knocking something out. “Red Snow” tells the tale of the battle of Alterac Valley from the point of view of my dwarven hunter character, Ringo Flinthammer. Hopefully it’s not totally incomprehensible, but it’s written for an audience already familiar with the world of Azeroth:
At last, the fire was crackling merrily. The dead tree had caught in the branches of another as it fell, which had kept the dead wood off the snow, and allowed the limbs to dry out nicely.
 And with that, Ringo Flinthammer tromped through the snow to the corpse, while the great white owl watched patiently. Ringo took an axe from his belt and, gripping a dead limb distastefully, brought it down. The desiccated flesh gave off little smell as it parted, which in a way made it worse.
The body was four years dead, struck down in the early days of the Third War, a peasant from the Kingdom of Lordaeron, killed by an infection hidden in grain which was then turned into bread. They were not allowed to rest easy, however: The Lich King’s plague had jerked these corpses back onto their feet like hideous marionettes and marched off to war. Later, a faction of the damned had rebelled against the Lich King and joined the Horde, but at the end of the day, this was still an innocent victim of the cult whose body had been turned into a weapon.
Ringo chopped apart the body of the undead rogue, tossing each piece into the fire, one by one. The dwarf knew the shadow priests of the Horde could reanimate this corpse again, but he would make it as difficult as possible.
Read the rest here. It’s just under 3,000 words total.
 NPR hasn’t yet really perfected their podcasts, but they sure are enthusiastic. One of their newest podcasts is the Open Mic series, a theoretically daily podcast of songs by unsigned, independent and self-produced bands. As with any independents, there’s sometimes a good reason they haven’t been snatched up by a major. But not always.
Send for Help is a San Francisco-area four-piece and the first band to really stand out to me on Open Mic, in a show last week. Check ’em out.
Liz Phair appeared on Sunday’s All Things Considered on NPR:
Liz Phair burst onto the independent music scene in 1993 with Exile in Guyville, a fierce, funny, confessional — and occasionally obscene — portrait of her life at the time. Since then she’s married, divorced, become a mother and, as she puts it, started enjoying her life.
“To be reflecting the same issues that you had at 23 when you’re 36 just seemed false to me, it just rang false,” Phair says.
The new, sunnier Phair has been quite a shock to her fans. They accused her of selling out when she worked with The Matrix, a pop producing team, for her last album.
Her new release, Somebody’s Miracle, also features a cleaner pop sound, but with an edge that fans of Phair’s earlier work will recognize.
Phair and her guitarist, Dino Meneghin, joined Weekend All Things Considered host Debbie Elliott recently for a performance chat in NPR’s studio 4A.
Check it out.
ABC has performed a mercy-killing: Night Stalker is dead.
The premise had promise: I love me some supernatural television shows (when done in an entertaining fashion) and far be it from me to turn my nose up at an iconoclast crusading journalist character.
But other than the pilot (which was apparently the second go-round on one), the series was just … blah. Like hardcore-fans-pretend-they-never-existed bad X-Files episode blah.
The biggest remaining question left by Night Stalker being jerked off the air is … what happens over at iTunes? “Selected episodes” of Night Stalker, along with the complete runs of Lost and Desperate Housewives (and some Disney kids’ shows that only kids seem to have ever heard of) were part of the store’s foray into on-demand television. What will take its place in the line-up? It’s not like ABC is lacking for candidates. Any number of good dramas and comedies are on the network nowadays. Myself, I’m hoping for both seasons of the surprisingly good Boston Legal and the final season of The Practice, which introduced the firm of Crane, Poole and Schmidt (albeit with some different associates and partners than are on the show today) and set up a lot of the plots that are still unwinding today.
And as for Night Stalker, let’s hope, this time around, the death sticks.
Now, I love “Criminal” and “Sleep to Dream,” like pretty much everyone does, but one thing I never expected out of Fiona Apple was a cheerful and yet still good song. Damned if the title track off her new album, Extraordinary Machine, isn’t just that, though. It sounds like it could be the theme song for the hippest, coolest Disney cartoon ever:
I certainly haven’t been shopping for any new shoes,
And I certainly haven’t been spreading myself around.
I still only travel by foot and by foot it’s a slow climb,
But I’m good at being uncomfortable so I can’t stop changing all the time.
I noticed that my opponent is always on the go,
And won’t go slow so as not to focus and I notice
He’ll hitch a ride with any guide as long as they go fast from whence he came,
But he’s no good at being uncomfortable so he can’t stop staying exactly the same.
If there was a better way to go then it would find me.
I can’t help it, the road just rolls out behind me.
Be kind to me or treat me mean,
I’ll make the most of it, I’m an extraordinary machine.
 Can’t you just picture a clockwork girl strolling down a road singing this, accompanied by her comic relief (say, a garden gnome)?
Good stuff, and even better than the first single off the album, “O’ Sailor,” as far as I’m concerned. And yes, the chipper spirit still has a bit of an edge. Of course it does.
Other fun stuff I’m listening to:
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