ZZ Claybourne – Black Gate

Dreams with Eyes Wide: Dark Breakers, by C. S. E. Cooney

Wednesday, February 2, 2022 ZZ Claybourne Comments 11 comments

Greeting, Black Gate readers! C. S. E. Cooney here, hijacking Zig Zag’s post (with his permission).

I’m just popping in to say that Black Gate and Mythic Delirium are hosting an ARC giveaway for Dark Breakers: my forthcoming collection featuring all new stories and novellas from the world of Desdemona and the Deep. Goblins, bargains, battles, body paint, and talking statues abound!

Drop a line in the comments below with a favorite line from one of your favorite story collections, and we’ll put your name in our hat (probably one with sequins on it) to send you your very own Dark Breakers ARC!

Thanks for reading! Now, back to Zigs…

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19 Movies That’ll Make You Think About Life, Love, Reality, And What It Means To Be Human

Sunday, August 25, 2019 ZZ Claybourne Comments 2 comments

Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory poster-small

There’s something about movies that fascinates us, likely because we’re so addicted to dreams we need them even awake. Whether laughing, crying, thinking, or longing, we need these special lenses to show our individual places within the world, to shape, guide, and make us — for a couple hours — want to be more than who we are.

Let’s look at a few movies that do precisely that so well, they transcend their medium.

LIFE

Life perplexes. Life mystifies. It teases, enraptures, amazes, enrages, and ultimately silences. The best films to capture the messy grandeur of life do all those things. The endings may not be clear-cut, the scripts at times largely improvised, characters will behave in ways we might not have predicted, but we love these movies for the heart they provide in an often uncomfortable world.

Amelie

If you’re one who never thought they’d see Amelie featured on Black Gate, welcome to Zig world. Everything is chance, even when we plan. Everything is wonderful, even when we cry. What if you could ensure that a life here and a life there would turn out a little brighter because of something you did? Would you do it? Amelie, by director Jean-Pierre Jeunet, is a delightful fantasy of questions accompanied by a sense of wonder, one that reinforces the truth that just because life isn’t tidy doesn’t mean we can’t tidy our corners of it.

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Transformed: A Primer on Minister Faust

Friday, July 26, 2019 ZZ Claybourne Comments 4 comments

The Coyote Kings, Book One: Space-Age Bachelor Pad (Narmer’s Palette, February 2013)

In a career that has seen the author tackle fan boy culture (both the good and the bad of it), superhero deconstruction, immigration & enculturation, and gritty space opera that fixes what George Lucas tried to do with the Wars prequels, The Coyote Kings of the Space-Age Bachelor Pad (since re-released as The Coyote Kings, Book 1: Space-age Bachelor Pad, as the author is currently working on the hugely-anticipated book 2) began author Minister Faust’s cult journey, and he’s blazed new indie trails ever since. Are you a fan of smart and subversive? Faust is one of the best in the business. One line into Kings and I was hooked.

In advance, shut up. I know epilogues go at the end. My point here, which should have been obvious in my opinion, is that I am telling you some of the end of this story so as to get you to comprehend the mindset under which I am currently operating and during which I am escaping.

Here’s a writer who manages to pack more imagination and mega-wattage of writing into a single page than most writers get out of an entire series, turning every book he writes into a full-body experience. Also? Humor. Faust is funny as hell. Even in what I consider to be his masterpiece, The Alchemists of Kush, a book that can shatter and rebuild you if you let it, he’s fully aware that the broken and confused laugh on the darkest of days. Maybe especially then.

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