Appearing in a Patrick Rothfuss blog meets my definition of a fine day. The occasion? Worldbuilders! It’s a fundraiser run by Mr. Rothfuss to raise money for Heifer International (they impress me not for being altruistic, but for their competence in their altruism). What is more, Lord Rothfuss has gathered a might confluence of books and related geekery. Donating makes you very likely to win some fine spoils. Giving and receiving meet in a wonderfully impossible alchemy.

But there is only one day left! Things shut down at 11:59pm of the 21st. Get thee there now!

Donate HERE.

See the remaining auctions HERE.

For every $50.00 donated, I will personally slay one invisible scuttle-goblin. They’ve stolen our car keys and socks, unopposed, for long enough.

My intrepid Christmas vacation journey is a blur of events. Since linear time does not actually exist (a wizard peddling goblin mushrooms in the subway showed me so), chronology…there shall be none. Post-by-post as sense stimuli occurs to me…

So!

After the pirate ship, after crashing the rich peoples’ party, after the little girl threatened me with a doll and a sword, but before I drank my novel in beer form and lost a pound of flesh off my elbow, half-naked on the ice, there was the wand.

A dinner party at the awesome home of my good friends Matty and Sarah, and Matty says, “There’s something in the basement I want to show you.”

Like a good horror movie protagonist, I say, “Alright.”

They have a nifty basement, parts of which would be welcome on a ghost tour, or good for turning night-cams up at your face and screaming on Discovery channel footage of yet another episode where you almost find something. In a little workroom, Matty points to a table full of magic wands. He’s recently taken to the craft of carving them by hand, the unique properties of the sticks he finds guiding their creation (and we get into a little discussion about how creativity is often enhanced by restrictions and complications forcing the mind to problem solve).

“Pick one out,” he says.

Suddenly, I’m in a magician’s shop, in a novel! I give lots of careful, esoteric consideration (the uninitiated would call it indecision). I at first avoid the black wand — it’s just too obvious! — but, as they say, the wand chooses you.

Matty explains how he originally envisioned making the length of this wand a smooth, tapering sort of cone, but a black, rotten vein in the center of the wood caused it to come away unevenly, so he was forced to adapt and give it a more organic texture. I like that better anyway, and a wand with a black-rotten core…well that’s just feeding the mythology my brain is already building around it.

DO YOU, DEAR LOVELING, DESIRE SUCH A WAND WROUGHT BY HAND?

Matty has begun selling them. CHECK IT OUT! There are a few up there now, including one that very nearly chose me. Perhaps it will instead choose you…

I take a cackling mad scientist approach to life. I’m more intrigued with the people and things I help build up, and less about the stuff I tear down. Defining yourself negatively, as a primary MO, is pensive and gritty in the short term, but in the end you’re left with only the shadows and empty space that accumulates in the crawly cracks between all the things you hate, that you stacked up in the DISLIKE pile, pointed at, and shouted, “Me!”

Grave robbing is fair play though.

I’m a Halloween boy, born and bred in the pumpkin patch, but I’ve always loved the Winter holidays. The mix is not so incongruous…or rather the incongruity works. Winter/Yule/Christmas and all the rest have had an affair with Weird Tales for a long time–from Charles Dickens to The Nightmare Before Christmas. It was not so long ago that winter was a deadly time of year. The harvest is behind; the spring is impossibly far ahead; the nights are long and dark–time to gather round the fire and tell strange stories.

So gather, lumplings!

I had the good fortune of working with the creators of Sparrow & Crowe on an anthology of the winter weird, featuring their eponymous occult investigators. If you like to see more of the odd duo, check out their comic book (try out the free software on Comixology–I’d never thought I’d enjoy reading a comic on a phone, but it’s pretty sweet). Also see Sparrow and Crowe in their original appearance as part of the podcasted audio drama Wormwood: A Serialized Mystery (free to download from the website or iTunes).

Best of all, all proceeds from our anthology of winter weird goes to a charity: 826LA.

Check out my story, “How to Kill Santa.” It mixes Christmas, Santa, Norse undead known as the draugr, and hagfish! It’s Steven King’s It meets A Christmas Carol and a dash of Goonies.

Grab a severed hand, stick out that rigor mortis thumb, and LIKE a macabre romance today.

Maybe, if Strangeness in the Proportion was ever to be made into a movie, we could convince Benedict Cumberbatch to play Simon Meeks.

Any other casting choices you’d make?

Remember, remember the fifth of December
Repeal the spirit ban blight
The way I hear it: thirteen years, no spirits
So have a drink tonight

My proper use of “whom” brings all the grammar nazis to the yard.
And they’re like, “You know ‘you’re’ and ‘your!’”
Damn right, I know “you’re” and “your.”
I could teach you, but I’d have to charge.

Give me the misfits.
Give me the malfunctions.
Give me the broken toys.
Give me these charming scars.
These pretty deviations from symmetry.