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Welcome! My name is Lucien Soulban and I am your host. The door’s always open. My home is your home, as they say, so feel free to look around, kick up your feet and don’t bother putting your drinks on coasters… it’s all virtual. If you’re wondering about the décor, I think it best exemplifies my life. I’ve visited and lived in a modest variety of countries and I’ve always been fascinated by the lost and forgotten ruins of our history. I’ve visited Petra, Pompeii, the Parthenon, the Pyramids and many other places that begin with the letter P*. You’ll find such places and the allure of their mysteries echoed in my writing. I currently live in beautiful Montreal, Quebec, as a proud Canadian citizen of 16-odd years and writing happily for about as long. I am an avid comic collector and essentially a kid at heart with a twisted imagination. *Excluding Pakistan, Palau, Palestine, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Poland, Portugal, The Philippines, Papua New Guinea, Purgatory, Perdition, Poughkeepsie, Pennsylvania… you get the idea. Current News Archives
January 29th, 2012: New Muscle Bound Log
Muscle Bound Log #17 is up! I hope you enjoy the read!
January 22nd, 2012: New Muscle-Bound Blog
A new Muscle-Bound issue is up, talking about the Spartan Race. Enjoy the read!
January 15th, 2012: New Muscle-Bound Post
After a long hiatus, Muscle-Bound is back with issue #15. Please, enjoy!
January 1st, 2012: Happy Birthday to a Special Someone
Three years ago, I was playing with my 9 year old niece and 7 year old nephew in the swimming pool. My niece was trying to drag me to the edge of the pool while my nephew was just swimming around. Finally, my niece reaches out to her brother with one arm around my biceps and the other outstretched to him. And she cries out with dramatic pathos: “Help me, my obedient slave!” Happy Birthday, Christiana. You’re going to make an awesome supervillain.
January 1st, 2012: Happy 2012
Happy 2012, folks. I hope this is a wonderful year for everyone!
January 12th, 2011: Charting Failure
HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYONE! I hope the Holidays were kind to folks?
WRITERS have different ways of dealing with failure or rather, in this PC world of spinning conditions and states toward the optimistic… setbacks. Some writers lose themselves to some form of oubliette, be it alcohol, sex or drugs. Or maybe they follow more spiritual means like religion, philosophies or cultivating a Zen garden. Many simply drop out of the race. The highway of fiction is littered with the corpses of vehicles left abandoned by their drivers. The ones who survive, however, and treat the race as a lifetime marathon seem to derive a certain perverse pleasure in keeping a tally of their rejections. They take pride in it because it’s a form of control in the industry that leaves you feeling merciless savaged and helpless. So you take control by making a game of the rejection pile. So how am I doing in the novel sweepstakes? Well, I’m happy to report (odd statement that), that of my two novels being shopped around, the WWII Horror Novel is at 6 rejections and the contemporary horror novel is at 5 rejections. I’m now half-way behind the pace for J.K. Rowling and the first Harry Potter book. In the race of rejections: Contemporary Horror Novel 5 Rejections WWII Horror Novel 6 Rejections J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter 12 Rejections Richard Adam’s Watership Down 13 Rejections Anne Frank’s Anne Frank’s Diary 15 Rejections Canfield & Hansen Chicken Soup for the Soul 134 Rejections Small victories, right, and the two things these eventual success stories all share are 1) Persistence, and 2) Many rejections, but one person to say “Yes!”
December 2nd, 2010: The Waiting Game
IT’S strange, how the years get away from you. As I leave 2010 behind, I honestly thought I’d be enjoying different circumstances by this point in my life. I figured I’d have a novel under my belt, and that my other novel work would find a home. The rejections have said otherwise, and honestly, the biggest heartache isn’t the rejections alone, but the protracted waiting game. I’d heard the expression “glacial pace” previously, but I never figured I’d be an object lesson in that. Honestly, 2011 doesn’t owe me anything, but as I hit 45 next year, I’m really hoping it’s a brighter go of things. I really wish I could announce “I sold a novel!” But if I don’t, there’s always 2012 and whatever lies in wait after that. I mean, I may be frustrated, but I’m far from ready to throw in the towel.
November 29th, 2010: Farewell Leslie
LESLIE Nielsen passed away this Sunday from pneumonia. And that sucks. We all die and the man was 84, but honestly, I don’t think I’d be as funny a writer without the brilliance of Leslie Nielsen in comedies like Airplane and Police Squad. I loved those movies as a kid and could watch them repeatedly. I still do. His quintessential straight man routine was not only the backbone of the comedies I love and enjoy to this day in him and in his successors, but his style of humor invariably seeps into the comedy fiction I write and into my main characters. In some ways, all my protagonists are him, straight men to the crap happening around them. Farewell, Mr. Nielsen. You made the world laugh and pneumonia hardly feels like a fitting end for you. I expected you to go out with something worthy of your comic timing, but then who knows… maybe you’re still setting us up with the best straight-man punch line yet.
November 22nd, 2010: Juggling My Weekend
It was a relatively productive weekend, even though I didn’t spend it writing, not entirely. Still, on Friday I managed to send off one short story, and another on Sunday while still working on my novel. It was an interesting exercise juggling different voices and genres at the same time. The first short story was comedic horror, the second pure horror and the novel was Steampunk. Regardless, I am looking forward to focusing on the Steampunk novel until its completion, unless, of course, I see an opportunity for more short story work. For now, though, I can’t call it a success. At least, not until I hear back from the anthologies for which I pitched. Their acceptance or rejection will call the fate of this little test.
November 17th, 2010: Color me Humbled
COLOR me impressed and humbled by this kid’s courage: http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/yahoocanada/101116/canada/gay_michigan_student_defends_suspended_teacher Michigan’s Graeme Taylor is 14 years old and openly gay. That alone is impressive considering the venom out there regarding homosexuality and the ongoing spate of bullies targeting gay teens. That he was willing to stand up before the school board and, in an impassioned and eloquent speech, defend a suspended teacher makes this kid a special kind of courageous in my books. He not only defended teacher Jay McDowell (who was suspended for asking a student to remove a Confederate flag belt buckle and for ejecting him and another student for making anti-gay remarks), but talked about his sexuality and how it nearly drove him to suicide at the age of nine. Now, the official stance towards Jay McDowell was that he violated freedom of speech and blah blah blah… honestly… fuck it. Hatred has no place in the classroom, and if this was a matter of racial or religious prejudice, then Free Speech would not have been the excuse de jour. Because it’s about homosexuality, however, then people feel free to obfuscate the truth behind any number of excuses so long as they don’t have to stand revealed for their intolerances. So, bravo to Graeme for his courage and to McDowell for not tolerating bullshit. Freedom of speech was meant to protect speech against tyranny, not to protect tyranny itself.
To contact me: lsoulban@hotmail.com Proudly powered by WordPress | Entries (RSS) and Comments (RSS) |
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