SFPA

6 Jul

kentmcdanielwrites's avatarkentmcdanielwrites

           Last August I rejoined SFPA, which stands for Southern Fandaom PressAlliance.  A couple different times back  in the mists of prehistory, I was in SFPA, the first time, when I was fifteen.  (Dave Hulan was OE first time I joined.) I said it was in the mists of prehistory. I was never the most active (or illustrious) member, but man, SFPA was great for me, growing up in the sixties.  Not only did it connect me to other SF fans, it sort of connected me to the wider world beyond my home town of Metropolis,Illinois (population 6,800), and it introduced me to a lot of people way cooler than just about anybody I knew personally.  I mean, as far as I was concerned (and still am) Dave Hulan, Bill Plott, Al Andrews, Dick Ambrose, Hank Reinhardt, Joe Staton, who once stenciled  an entire issue of my fanzine Outre’ for me, and all the rest…

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WALKING TO CAPE CANAVERAL

6 Jul

kentmcdanielwrites's avatarkentmcdanielwrites

WALKING TO CAPE CANAVERAL

 

Kent McDaniel

  

            Surf washed in, and the darkening sky glittered with stars. On the beach, Alan McVickers lay, grizzled head on his sneakers, bare toes in the warm sand. From the corner of his eye, he glimpsed brown shoes. A large body in tan slacks and blue work shirt loomed over him; Alan was five-ten, and this guy would stand head and shoulders taller. Weary eyes twinkled from the face above, a face Alan recognized with a start.  Those enormous ears. They stuck out from a head round as a bowling ball, a stubble of black hair on top. The mouth was wide, and the nose long, with large nostrils. The last three weeks, wherever Alan was, so was this guy. 

            In Dade County Municipal Court, where Alan watched the cases, he’d begun to notice the stranger, always three or four seats…

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Waitin’ For The Bus/Jesus Just Left Chicago

6 Jul

kentmcdanielwrites's avatarkentmcdanielwrites

By the 1980’s Z Z Top’s new songs were almost novelty numbers. They still put down some pretty nice grooves and some hot licks, but most of their tunes were cutesy little ditties designed to work well with the goofy vidoes they were grinding out for MTV. If anybody looked down their nose at that, the band cried all the way to the bank, I guess. Back in the seventies, though, Z Z Top was playing playing some strange, serious electric blues. They wore cowboy hats and rhinestone getups and marketed their stuff as southern rock, but it was electric blues. And it was good. For my money, their best album from that time was Tres Hombres, and the best thing on the album was an original medley called “Waitin’ For the Bus/Jesus Just Left Chicago”, both songs funky and bluesy.

My brother, Doug, and I played that medley many a night ourselves…

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Remembering Gage Park (a review)

6 Jul

kentmcdanielwrites's avatarkentmcdanielwrites

Remembering Gage Park by William P. Shunas; self-published through Xlibris; copyright 2010. Available at Barnes & Noble (www.bn.com), Amazon.com, and at http://www.Xlibris.com/Bookstore. 

Paperback $15.00-20.00. Kindle edition $7.69

             A fictional memoir, Remembering Gage Park  begins: “I was eight years old when I met   Connor. That was they day he nearly put out my eye. You would’ve thought I’d have learned something that day, but not me.” That hook imbedded, Shunas pauses to describe Chicago’s then-unpaved alleys, Gage Park’s turf protocols for eight-year-olds, and the workings of the Chicago Democratic Machine, before returning to his narrator’s fateful meeting with Connor. Intriguing stuff, and for the rest of the book Shunas continues to intersperse tense scenes with sharply-etched description of Gage Park: the streets, homes, gardens, stores, vacant lots, the people and their culture, the politics and economics. He tells all this through Mike Staron, a semi-tough Gage Park kid…

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“Paradise Lost” by Hank Reinhardt

6 Jul

kentmcdanielwrites's avatarkentmcdanielwrites

     

                                                                                         

                            Or Will Hank Reinhardt

                            Ever find Happiness Living

                            in Birmingham, Alabama?

 

                            By Hank Reinhardt

 

      

                My first encounter with the city of Birmingham, Alabama, was an experience both painful and pleasurable.  Painful: just look at the city.  Pleasurable, it was the first Deep South Con I ever attended.  In fact, the whole experience is worth telling alone, but I’ll shorten it slightly. 

     I had never attended a DSC, but that year Jerry Page had nagged convinced me that I should go.  He had promised that the con committee would have an altar raised for me, that there would be plenty of bheer, and above all, card games.  He had even, he said, imported a special FISH for me, by the name of Lon Atkins.  (Little did I realize that this same Lon Atkins would someday be OE of…

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Preliminary Cover Sketches for JIMMY STU LIVES!

6 Jul

kentmcdanielwrites's avatarkentmcdanielwrites

My novel Jimmy Stu Lives!, a satire set in the framework of a science-fiction adventure, should be coming out sometime next month from Penumbra Publishing (www.penumbrapublishing.com) . Joe Staton, an artist whose work I very much admire, is doing the cover for it. Joe and I were both in Southern Fandom Press Alliance (SFPA ) back in the Sixties (when we were both toddlers), and he actually did the cover for an issue of my fanzine in those days, Outre’.  I no longer have that issue—you know how it goes—but through the miracle of modern technology, I was able to get my hands on a copy of the cover. Ned Brooks, venerable Official Archivist of Southern Fandom Press Alliance, located the issue, Outre’ #3, scanned the cover and emailed it to me, informing me that the issue had appeared in SFPA mailing #14 (circa 1963).  

         So this will actually be…

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Review From Windy City Reviews

6 Jul

kentmcdanielwrites's avatarkentmcdanielwrites

 

Review: Jimmy Stu Lives

DateFriday, June 29, 2012 at 08:54PM

Jimmy Stu Lives! by Kent McDaniel

Reviewed by Ophelia Julien

Super Science Fiction with a Side of Grits

Reverend James Stuart Sloan, or Jimmy Stu as he prefers, is the founder of Nashville, Tennessee’s Church of the Living Lord, a three-thousand member congregation complete with a church on an acre-sized lawn and a televised service. As an inspirational preacher, Jimmy Stu looks to be at the top of his game. Except that he isn’t. During the latter part of his life, Jimmy Stu has begun to lose his connection with the Almighty, a deep slide into despair accelerated by the death of his beloved wife, Debbi. He is haunted by the idea that Debbi has not gone on to eternal life, but instead has disappeared into oblivion. Aware that his television ratings are starting to slip, prodded by a devout…

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Review From Alexiad

6 Jul

kentmcdanielwrites's avatarkentmcdanielwrites

JIMMY STU LIVES!
By Kent McDaniel
(Penumbra Publishing; 2011;
ISBN 978-1935563839; $9.99;
Kindle: $2.99)

Reviewed by Tom Feller

In Robert Heinlein’s 1940 novella, “If This Goes On —“, a fundamentalist Christian leader is elected President in 2012 and proceeds to suspend the Constitution and turn the United States into a theocracy. In Kent McDaniel’s novel, future events have not gone that far, but the separation of church and state is no longer observed, and you might say that the United States is a semi-theocracy.

McDaniel’s story begins in the present. The main character is The Reverend James Stuart “Jimmy Stu” Sloan, founder of the mega-church Church of the Living Lord (COTLL), a three thousand person congregation in Nashville, Tennessee. A widower, Jimmy Stu has lost his faith and decides to have his body cryogenically frozen when he dies.

He is revived in 2140, when the world in some ways is…

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Outre’ #1: Cover, flash fiction, natter.

6 Jul

kentmcdanielwrites's avatarkentmcdanielwrites

Back in the mists of prehistory when I was fifteen, I edited Outre’ #1, the first of six issues of that zine and the first fanzine I ever edited. Probably I should just let sleeping BEMs lie. Lots of zine editors from back in Sixties would rather their first effort remain unseen, and that’s not a bad idea, really. But the Outre’ was distributed through the Southern Fandom Press Alliance (SFPA), and it occurred to me that a) Ned Brooks, SFPA’s archivist, would have a copy of the issue, and b) there were a couple parts of OutreKM1coverit I wouldn’t mind seeing after all these decades. One was the editorial natter at the start of the issue, in which I had retraced my path into SF fandom. The other was a flash fiction (or short-short, as we called them back then) by my pal John Battle, who was fourteen. Ned…

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“The Time Awaited”

6 Jul

kentmcdanielwrites's avatarkentmcdanielwrites

I’m posting a video of this song of ours from our last show at The Heartland. I wrote this one (back in the mists of prehistory), and I’ve always sung it when we play out. It occured to me, though, that Dorothy could probably sing it better, and I suggested it to her. That was a couple weeks before the gig, this was the first time she ever sang it, and she sang it great. (I knew she would.)

I wrote this around midnight one summer night in the early 1970’s, sitting on the hood of my car in front of my folks house on Metropolis Street. It just flowed right out–the way I wish all writing of all kinds would for me. I was writing about experiencing  spiritual renewal after a time of emotional dryness. But some people have told me it makes them think of some Zen searcher finally…

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