Here's an offer I couldn't refuse. This year aside from its regular main stage plays, the Footlight Theatre on Queen St. will be running a short Late Night season to draw a young professional crowd to the theatre.


Season tickets for this Late Night program are curently available for $30. Season ticket holders get 1 ticket to each of the three productions, a free invitation to special VIP events and $5 off a regular ticket to our main stage season. If you are not a member admission is $5-$8 per event plus $10 to come a see the show. There's also a special "date" package (2 tickets per show) for a lower price.

I've signed up so I get to save a few bob, go to some parties and support a venerable local cause. See you there!

Undead on Arrival is now available to order from Amazon and other online booksellers - sort of.

Purchasers of the book are advised not to hold their breath when waiting for the novel to reach their mailbox. Amazon, for example, has an ETA of October.

The reason? Copies of the book have yet to reach American shores (apart from a few advance copies, in the possession of my publicist Peter Handel).

"The book is being loaded up onto a huge ship as we speak," Luath Press' Heather Murray told me in mid-August, "and will set sail on Monday, arriving about 4 weeks from now."

So presumably the slow boat from Scotland is halfway across the Atlantic by now. Good job I'm the patient sort...

Last night was the CP's 10th anniversary, celebrated in noisy style at the Windjammer on the Isle of Palms. This was my first visit to the Jammer, although I've written about the place doubling as a theatre space up until a few years ago.

This is a pub on the beach with a volleyball net, room for a couple of bands (one inside, one outside). Very cool. CP music editor T. Ballard Lesemann played drums with his band, The Sound Affects; there were a whole bunch of other groups there too - The Diesel Brothers, Sol Driven Train, The Stiff Joints... and a musicians from much-loved bands like The Archetypes.

Also there: artists Scott Debus and Philip Hyman, who made a giant pink birthday cake for the paper's cover shoot There was just enough room for a birthday suited girl to hop out - for the photo shoot only, sadly. Ah well, maybe next year.

Philip Hyman proudly pokes his cake (above); The Sound Affects in action (below).

When I'm not writing for the City Paper, I moonlight as an Arts & Travel reviewer for the Post & Courier, Charleston's stuffy local broadsheet.

The P&C features department is an open plan hive of journalistic activity, full of gruff reporters and meetings in brown-decored rooms. News - or at least what the P&C considers news - takes precedence over the arty stuff. So over the past few years the review section's shrunk, and in general I've seen more Associated Press stuff in the paper.

This week you can read two home-grown, short but sweet book reviews on the P&C site. One is for Woody Allen's new book Mere Anarchy, which is funnier than his last seven movies put together - not too hard, I know.

The other takes a look at Americanism by David Gelernter, a strange little book that considers our patriotic belief in the ideal of America as a kind of religion. Hey, I don't write these things, I just review 'em.

According to Amazon, Undead on Arrival has just been released in the UK.

No news from my publisher, Luath Press. No advance reviews. But the novel's available for purchase on Amazon.co.uk.

This week my old apartment complex was sold for the second time in two years.

Okay, it isn't really my complex, but it's close to my heart because it's the first place I lived when I moved to the USA 4 years ago.

Back in 2003, the Ashley Knoll Apartments in West Ashley were a cool place to be. We found it online before we emigrated, booked an apartment there, rented furniture, flew over and went to Walmart to buy some junk to fill it up with (it filled up fast).

After 18 months of complex living, we were ready to buy our own house elsewhere. We'd started to take the two outdoor pools, the gyms, car wash and the mini-movie theatre for granted.

About a year later we visited friends there and the place had gone to the dogs - literally. Sights of hounds humping, dirty buildings and a foul-mouthed resident called "Nature Boy" put us off returning for a long time.

The apartments were bought out in mid-2005 and most of them went condo. The complex became Concord West of the Ashley.

The buildings got a lick of paint, but a few unsavory residents still soured my visits to friends who lived there (no, they weren't the unsavory residents).

Now the condos have been sold again, and I don't know what that will mean for my friends. Although the main gym has new equipment and that lick of paint still looks fresh, the complex hasn't changed all that much since I moved there years ago as a wide-eyed foreigner.

My Folly Beach-based co-producers of All For Liberty watched the rough cut last weekend. They'll be heading down to Miami soon to meet composer Anthony Deritis while I continue to prep my next project.

They'll make notes on the rough cut then get it back to the editor in Florida, while the soundscaping takes place in New York. So the movie's gone from a strictly SC undertaking to one that's being completed all over the place.

I don't like sitting through trailers. These days they seem desperate to give most of the story away - Children of Men gave away a major plot twist; Evan Almighty showed a flood, throwing away the whole is-Evan-nuts comedy angle. If I'm going to spend my hard-earned on a new movie, I don't want to know what's going to happen. So I don't get to a movie theatre too early.

Bad move last weekend, when The Bourne Ultimatum opened. Two screenings at the Palmetto Grande were sold out - the next one wasn't for three hours. And when I did get into that one, all the good seats were taken and I sat up the front. Couldn't tell what was going on for all the shaky camerawork

Doesn't the director know to save the jiggly stuff for the action sequences? If the camera never stops moving, some of the shots are held for less than one second and faces are obscured by other people's ears or backs of heads, not only will the audience throw up in their popcorn from motion sickness but the shifting shots won't have as much impact when Bourne throws down.

Newsflash: gratuitous wiggles and zooms do not make your film look like a realistic documentary-style flick - they just distract the audience and remind them that a camera is filming the action.

So, not a bad movie - but the director needs to calm down, stick to docudramas and give his cameraman some medicine to stop those shakes.

I don't get out much, what with the writing and raising my 7-year-old son and being lazy and all that. When I do escape from the confines of my office/playroom, I like to hang out with the Have Nots! - a comedy improv & theatre company in downtown Chuck.

Last night they after a Comedy Smackdown they interviewed the City Paper's arts and ents editor Patrick Sharbaugh, who leaves for a new job in Japan next week. They made lots of jokes at his expense. Everyone laughed a lot and witnessing their energetic inventiveness was a humbling experience for me. (I like to sit in back wih the drunks, who are great for comedic value too). It was a very memorable send-off for Patrick, who was smart enough to take a chance on me at the paper four years ago.

Now I'm helping out with the arts coverage in the old ed's stead until someone better comes along. I'll also be crashing his regular blog over at the CP website. As long as it doesn't get in the way of my Have Nots! visits, I'll be content.

Now let me see if I get the names right for these members of the Have Nots! ensemble... left to right there's, er, Lee, then Jenny P, then, um, I think it's John... and Brandy. My, that's a lot of beer they're clasping.

Undead on the Horizon

Big news of the week: after several months of futering and postponed printings, advance copies of Undead on Arrival have finally arrived at the San Francisco office of my publicist, Peter Handel.

He says it "looks great" - and he's not one to make stuff up (read his sporadic blog, Rejection is My Middle Name, for proof).

The book's printers, Bell & Bain say that their printer was out of commission for cleaning and maintenance until just recently. That led to a considerable hold-off time for publication and an agonizing few months for me. At least the delay allowed some extra time for several hundred back orders to build up for the book.