I am the bastard you’ve been looking for. I’m the one-armed man,
and I have six fingers on this one remaining hand. I’ve left many wives without
husbands, sons without fathers, and daughters with surprises they won’t want to
explain in polite settings. If you’ve come into this carnival for vengeance, I
can assure you I’m the villain you want to slay. Even if I didn’t do what so
outraged you, I’m guilty enough.
I’ve a crippled soul. Fossilized. Means the flesh won’t get any
older, and if you ask Kitty, the spirit won’t get any more mature. I can’t die,
save by five means. Until death, it means I’ve got what I’ve got and nothing
more. No surgery can fix my busted arm. I’ll have to make do with righty, but
I’m damn good with it. I can fence any two-handed man, or wield a scimitar, or
throw a javelin. And the recreational things I can do with this one hand! Haha,
just ask Kitty.
She’s glaring at me, but she’s charmed. Don’t worry yourself.
You grow to enjoy her claws eventually.
The witch said only five things can kill me. I’ve figured out
three of them, not that I’m sharing the list with you. Some things you want to
keep to yourself. But the other two? They’re a surprise. Or, I guess, one will
be a surprise and the other will be an eternal mystery. I know for certain that
I can’t bleed out and I’ll never starve to death at sea. Some bedroom
adventures leave me supposing I’m immune to asphyxia. I can’t die by the sword,
but that’s no magic – that’s talent.
How do you get a fossilized soul? It’s gorgonic. A little more
than a gorgon looking at you; she has to give you a specific look. I excel at
getting women to give me certain looks. Again, just ask Kitty.
I liked her look so much that I kept that old hag’s head. It’s
in this bag as a last resort. Lot of scum try
to stick up a one-armed men, thinking he’s helpless on his own, or helpless
because he’s got his trousers down in a brothel. You know, life. I let ‘em
rifle through my things, open the bag, look inside, and the brothel gets a statue
for the yard. I feel keeping her head is fair, given that she kept my arm.
“The bastard’s been riding me all day. I only missed one lug
nut on his jeep and the sergeant’s making like I forgot to screw on his…
listen, is it against your code to hear dirty words?”
“We have a policy about this which you might have heard.
Turn the other cheek?”
“Both are already blistered, padre.”
“God gave you four, my nephew.”
“Ha! What kind of priest are you?”
“A new one, for starters. Only giving my first sermon this
weekend.”
“What’s it about? I might come if the internet goes out
again.”
“Not taking yourself too seriously.”
“Well I’m not, it’s just this sergeant--”
“Neither am I. It’s my topic. Thanks for helping me.”
“Where are you going? We were just getting started.”
“So am I. Now I’ve got to go write that sermon. If you get
curious, tickets are free.”
For about as long as I've known her, Danni has insisted that I write all my posts in the bath tub. On her special day, in the heart of her special month, I want to give her the best gift of all: being right.
Click for high definition embarrassment.
There you go. Photographic evidence that I edit in the tub. It's good that I have a window right there for natural light, but damn is it hard to hit backspace with a pruny pinky.
I'm actually away today, celebrating my grandfather's birthday. He does not wish to see me in any sort of tub. But because of the duality of celebrations, I'd like to extend a party game to all readers, no matter when you were born (or now pretend you were born).
The above picture misrepresents at least five things about how I write. There are doubtless more than five, but five in particular strike me. If the readers can guess all five, or some of the actual five and some other things more amusing than the actual five, then I'll post something even more embarrassing about myself than a photo with a Mac Book in the tub. Something about blood, nudity and a fresh hotel room.
You have until Thursday to guess. It's open to anyone, and everyone is allowed up to five guesses total. No one person has to get all five; you only need five points amongst everyone who plays.
This weekend my flash "Shark Cafe" is appearing over at Karen
Berner's blog. Of all the absurdism I've ever written it might be the
piece of which I'm most proud, because it never gives into how
ridiculous a restaurant specializing in hot brewed shark is.
How
do you brew shark? Is it immoral? What are the dangers of shark
deficiency? All these questions and more are largely ignored at this link.
Nowadays it’s impossible to imagine the world without
apocalypses. The imps built palaces in the sky to rule from above and were
dashed by comets. The gremlins thought it was their turn, built automatons to
do all the heavy lifting for their empire, and the autos turned on them. An
electrical storm reduced the autos to blank statues, humanity thought it was finally
their turn, and in the middle of a perfectly nice day reality ripped open the
sauropods came back. It’s as natural as seasonal cycles. Yet if you consult the
oral legends of the oldest races, the centaurs and the nine-legs, and the
remaining records of the gremlins, you find common references to a First
Apocalypse.
All land once floated on the back of a World Turtle, which
swam either among the stars or in what today we call the oceans. A big
son-of-a-something, and healthy, such that all the world’s plants grew from its
shell. Since it was green, most of the flora were forests. Thick jungles that consumed
lumbering beasts, toughening the sauropods and cyclopes, so that all life was
hardy, ruled under the Four Gods.
And there were gods, captains of this Great Ship World Turtle.
One would wander down to its slippery head and whisper, “I feel like inventing ‘East’
today. Find a new direction and name it that.” And it would comply, because
turtles are prone to peer pressure.
So one day the Goddess of the Sky climbed down the World
Turtle’s neck and whispered, “You notice that yellow thing up there that makes
days possible? Swim over to that. I want to know what it’s like.”
Then she climbed up to the highest point on the World Turtle’s
shell for the best view of the sun. But while she mounted, the God of the
Depths climbed down the World Turtle’s neck. He whispered, “That nasty thing’s
hot. How about we dive? See what’s under the waters of the world?”
Then he scampered off to the apex of the shell, expecting to
get the best view of his desires. Yet as he ascended, the Goddess of Mystery rode
the rivers between the plates of the World Turtle’s shell down to its ear. She
cupped its beak and whispered, “Why did we ever start going forward? We never
saw all of what was at the beginning of creation. Can’t you go backwards for
just a few eons so I can see everything back there?”
To the World Turtle’s credit, it both began to dip under the
waves while it about-faced, seeming to concede to two demands at once. Upturning
so dumped a thousand sauropods into the surf and enraged the God of Boldness,
who had been teaching them beach sports. He tumbled down the World Turtle’s
slope, jabbing a javelin into its scalp to hold on.
“What do you think you’re doing?” he chastised. “We’re
making headway. We might see where creation ends if you just kept the bearing.
We need to find what else is out there.”
The Goddess of Mystery hadn’t yet departed, and so contested
his virtue. Their argument whirled into a tempest, the ferocity of which was only
split when the Goddess of Sky and God of the Depths coming roaring down at each
other. The desires of the four were irreconcilable, and none were willing to go
second. They argued for so long that some of the lesser critters had to develop
free will just to go on living, and they would have kept going forever if the
World Turtle hadn’t stopped. Its continental body drifted, listless, unable to
obey so many commands.
The Four Gods quit its head, unable to argue the World
Turtle into submission with three dissenters. After it became obvious none could
coerce each other, they split separate ways. That’s why none of them had
alibis.
Tragedy struck at dusk. Jungles suddenly wilted to
nothingness. The continental shell cracked and powdered into soil. Countless
species died from the sudden shock of our world being born. Mortals rushed to
the great head and found it dangling under the tide. Someone had drowned the
World Turtle.
There were only four capable of such feats, though no one
saw which God did the deed. Sky accused Depth, Depth accused Mystery, Mystery
suspected Boldness, and Boldness pointed fingers at them all. They dragged each
other to Celestial Court
and have spent all known history simultaneously arguing four homicide cases. It
is very difficult to out-argue someone who is nigh-omniscient and exists
outside time; more difficult still to reconcile four such people who are all
intentionally playing obtuse for argument’s sake. Allegedly we’ll know when
they reach a verdict, as they’ll restore order to this world – or it’ll be
another apocalypse.
For the cyclopes, sauropods and other beings, it was a
confounding dusk. There was all beloved life, drifting on a dead turtle, with
no supervision from the Gods, and mildly curious how their fellow surviving life-forms
tasted. It’s small wonder things went wrong after that.
At last, some good news in publishing this week: PayPal has
backed off its pressure on Smashwords over erotica. Previously they had threatened to pull functionality from Smashwords if they continued to sell certain
kinds of erotica, or refuse to process payments related to those works.
According to Smahwords-boss Mark Coker on their blog, PayPal will not segregate against any form of legal fiction.
Even if your way is with a St. Bernard.
Coker bravely and wisely aired this topic on the net for
weeks. The official Smashwords blog became a chronicle of every development in
his struggle with PayPal, letting people know in detail the censorship that was
at risk and changes of people’s favor. Generous to his clientele, Coker credits
activists and authors who spread the issue’s prominence with convincing PayPal
to back down. I suspect there’s more to it, though, and would pretty happily buy
a book on how negotiations went up to this settlement. We can’t undervalue the
tactics and appeals that work in convincing independent bodies about issues
like censorship.
This is an important precedent, for if Coker really
negotiated with the biggest electronic-era payment service to not press moral
issues like this, then operators of smaller services will be less likely to
challenge publishers, since they have less a chance of winning, and additional
chances of simply forking business over to a bigger competitor.
One still marks the grim flipside: that PayPal’s operators ought
to have the right to choose what transactions they facilitate. By “winning” and
coercing them to continue services, Smashwords has won for the rights of authors,
but hopefully not discouraged the rights of business owners. I’m inclined to
overlook this because PayPal’s operators were convinced of their own will –
though for anything more specific, again, we might need a journalist to write
us a book.
Dana Carvey does not necessarily endorse "Daddy" incest-porn.
Paul Biba and other bloggers complained of our cultural
double-standard, some mistakenly thinking it merely Puritanical. It’s not. It doesn't take Church Lady to be grossed out by rape-porn, and anthropology and ethnology have revealed that
hunter-gatherers killed in public and rutted in private. The different handling
of sexuality and violence is as old as society. Of course it keeps showing up,
especially when we broach fringe issues, which encompassed all of PayPal’s
targets.
To some degree this was about double-standards, but in a vital
way it wasn’t: liberty of fiction is an All-or-Nothing game. Either authors are
allowed to write fiction about anything, or they’re not. Either the right
exists or it doesn’t. It’s that terrifyingly simple. Either you can write
incestual smut, or you don’t actually have freedom of expression – just
temporary allowances based on the tastes of others.
There’s never been a year in my adult life when I haven’t
thrown a book across the room, but I’d never ban their publication. Seeing the
markets support that notion is heartening. Sometimes, especially with recent
motions of the Big Six, Department of Justice, and Amazon, you can forget the
markets ever move in positive directions.
It means getting up early, but he'll soak in Epsom salts for half an hour before anything else. When he lies in the tub he'll take the first cocktail of pills, letting them digest on an empty stomach long before breakfast. He'll eat breakfast lying down because sitting up is so taxing, and he has so much sitting ahead of him. So much sitting, so much standing, so much carrying that no one else seems to think about. He'll think about it as he swallows the second cocktail and fastens on his back brace over his bare skin. The back brace is always under a t-shirt, which is always under a jacket, even in Spring, so that no one will see it. They will see him stagger, and some will catch him wheezing. They will mock him as a smoker, or a feeb, or a freak, meaning none of it, none of them caring about the truth. The utter ambivalence of his fellow children allow him to fit in, pretending to be normal. He will keep doing this every morning. It's only two more years to graduation.
When the bait came loose, Mrs. Hardin reeled the line back
up and jabbed another steak onto the hook. She had an entire bucket of them and
wouldn’t share a one, even though I’d smuggled a hibachi in my rucksack.
I looked across the swamp; so far the meat hadn’t attracted
more than gnats.
“You sure that’ll fetch an alligator, Mrs. Hardin?” I asked.
She spooned some cow drippings around the side of our raft
with all harpoons. “Crocodile, Maya. We’re hunting crocodiles.”
“Well now what’s the difference between an alligator and a
crocodile?”
As though to answer, a scaly back rippled through the film of
the swamp. It swished a needlessly long tail as it swam toward our raft, which
suddenly felt far too small.
“Crocodile tried to eat my husband, Maya.” Mrs. Hardin
picked up a harpoon in one hand and a shotgun in the other. She waited at the
end of the raft, stirring the bloody waters with double-barrels. “An alligator’s
what actually did it.”
The beast is slain anew. At 489 pages in the preposterous Standard Manuscript Format, The House That Nobody Built has now gone off to theta readers. I've collapsed paragraphs, goosed dialogue and re-wrote whole chapters based on the generous feedback of my original beta reading crew, and presently can't improve the draft any further. It's up to outside sources to get me the rest of the way to what I earnestly believe will be the best thing I've ever produced.
One reason I can't improve it any further is that the old Writer's Exhaustion is looming again. The agitation has stirred up my neuromuscular syndrome to disturbing degrees, and at the urgency of some smart people, I'm going to claim a victory on the book and take a little time off. It's a good opportunity to read Ursula K. LeGuin and P.G. Wodehouse for the first time.
I've tried to keep the compositional process open, since there seem to be so many readers who are interested in how work gets done. I'm happy to field any questions, especially the embarrassing ones. I nearly led this post with a photo of all the rewritten chapters printed out, marked up in various colored pencils, and rearranged on my bed. That may show up later.
Because I keep my process open, I want to ask you folks about this site. I've managed to keep it going daily for over three years with over 1500 pieces of fiction, even during surgeries, cancer scares and novels. Recently I've been wondering how much longer I can keep it up, especially if the novels take off, and how much my readership really wants new Bathroom Monologues every day.
I've added a new poll to the site. Please be as honest as you can, and don't spare my feelings. How often do you visit? Do you enjoy what you read here? Enough to pass it on? Is there something you wish I'd provide but don't, or something I do provide that you wish were more frequent?
I assure you that the Bathroom Monologues are not going anywhere. It's just that, especially with my latest health scare, I want to take stock. Thank you all for all you are.
It's a well known fact that a man is entitled to the sweat of his brow. But in societies of advanced capitalism, a man (and many women) engage in enterprises of the multi-brow variety. The farm-owner who creates fifty jobs may not perspire much, yet is he not entitled to the sweat carried out in his operation, on his property, by workers who only perspire because he invented the niche in which they toil? Naturally he does. Yet how is he to collect his share of their mutual salty solution? That is where our product comes into play. Through advance polymer technology, the Ethical Rig has automated dispatachable arm-units that will track every employee in an establishment, and at periods set by the owner, will lower a polymer bin across their foreheads and scrape away a pre-set percentage of perspiration. The busy businessman need only punch in a few numbers and trust that his employees' brows will be divided of their sweat ethically and scientifically. And because the Ethical Rig is neither sentient nor biological itself, it will never sweat and thus will never require rights to the profits of its brow. All it is concerned about is keeping your sweat stockpile at the desired temperature.
You may have noticed the weird story I posted yesterday. It was surreal even for my tastes, and came about when a certain track came up while editing. Ed Harrison's "Surface" is perhaps the most stirring song on the preposterously evocative Neo Tokyo. With your assistance, I'd like to play a little experiment.
Writers, readers, general thinkers: load up the song below and close your eyes. In a few minutes, please share what this song brought to your minds. I doubt it'll be what my Surface was, but am keenly curious for just what you get out of it.
This is a follow-up to Music for Writing. Because it's easier on me minute-to-minute than composition, editing my work often takes more hours of a given day. I can do more of it before my syndrome kicks back. Between January and March I got my beta readers' copies back and set about editing my first full novel in several years, and so amassing a supportive musical library was pretty important. I can't edit in silence anymore than I can compose; I need to block out the real world to tinker with the fictional one. Like Music for Writing, I'm hoping to share how certain music helped in this process. Please share your own favorite artists and albums in the Comments. You never know who you might help.
1. God is an Astronaut’s
Discography
Though an egregious repeat from Music for Writing, I have to
tip my hat to these folks again. I honestly don’t remember a single track that
I listened to, though I went through five albums in just one day of editing. No
band I know organizes an album with such consistency and flow, and no band I
know is quite so useful at blending into the background of my thoughts.
Whereas in composition they could set sweeping or oppressive
moods, here, with the volume turned down slightly, they became an excellent
tool for keeping me alert. The trick is all its musical valleys lulled me into
relaxing, and moved so slowly that I wasn’t conscious of how they carried back
up, so that sometimes I managed to excite myself psychosomatically. There are
so many siren-like moments in those songs, none as jarring as a police car,
rather exhilarating in precisely the way I need when trying to convince myself
to streamline one more fight scene.
2. Roque Banos’s
Machinist OST
This album is more of a scalpel than a knife. You do not edit a love scene to “Trevor’s
Lair.” Alright, maybe you do – and if you do, let me read that sucker. But I only
turn this on for scenes of loneliness, eeriness, Horror before Horror arrives,
and old-fashioned mystery. Banos channeled old Twilight Zone and Hitchcock
soundtracks, even importing the wonderfully ridiculous theremin that strikes me
with a suburban sense of unease. Though I wrote about a prison rather than
suburbia, there were four particular chapters what Banos’s vibes drew me into
the proper frame of mind to revise. It’s also just plain fun to read your
creepier material out loud with this playing in the background.
3. The Final Fantasy
13-2 OST
However lame it makes me seem, “Paradox” was the battle
theme of these edits. Not editing during fight scenes, but the rallying track I’d
put on as I paced my room and convinced myself to spend more time at the
computer. By about the 0:50-mark, the inspirational swells goaded me into
trying to get these characters out alive. Worked every humiliating time.
At four discs, this was clearly a collaboration effort,
though resting primarily on the compositions of Masashi Hamauzu, Mitsuko Suzuki
and Naoshi Mizuta. I had to trim out the high number of vocal tracks from my
playlist as lyrics only distract me (though some of the English lyric tracks
are hilarious). Whatever you think of the franchise, it has a great history of
music design, and this is one of the strongest entries. Both the “Knight of the
Goddess” and “Paradigm Shift” tracks were useful at gearing me up to resume
writing after short breaks.
4. The Vanquish OST
I’ve played and beaten Vanquish, and I’m still surprised
there was three CDs of music in the game. Masafumi Takada and Erina Nawa’s
three-disc compilation that scored an unusual Japanese action game, relying on
some military themes, some rock and techno, utilizing many of the same
slow-to-fast patterns and percussive rhythms even with synethetic instruments
to mimic ambient sound patterns popular in Hollywood war films.
The first track (naturally titled “Title”) is like splashing
water in my face. On several 8:00 AM’s, I queued it up directly after splashing
real water into my face, relying on Takada and Nawa’s tunes to carry me editing
into noon. For a three-disc set it follows remarkably well, and I seldom
realized I was on another disc until I paused. I discontinued using it not
because the music got stale, but because I associated it so strongly with
marathon sessions that I began to resent it. I recommend listening, but in moderation.
5. Michael Giacchino’sLost OST
Giacchino makes sweet and sweeping use of his orchestra,
which is particularly calming when played at low volumes. It seeps into the
background, blocking environmental noises and coaxing concentration the best of
anything I’ve used since Akira Yamaoka’s Silent Hill albums.
Giacchino earned bonus points from me with his penchant for
punny track titles (“The Eyeland,” “Thinking Clairely,” “Charlie Hangs
Around”). There are certain songs that benefit as strongly from association as
anything I can recall, with “Locke’d Out Again” always pulling me into the
emotional space of watching Terry O’Quinn in full pathos. That’s a handy tool.
6 & 7. Uyama Hiroto’s A Son
on the Sun and Supergiant Games’s Bastion OST
In the final week of editing my nerves were shot and Writer’s
Burnout was alarmingly close. I’m used to going to bed with my hands shaking;
it’s less comforting to wake up with them doing that. My neuromuscular syndrome
didn’t want the book to end, and I applied every trick I could to get around
it. One of the best things I did was dump all my old music, which I’d spent
months of emotionally attaching to long hours of work, and try new albums set
at very low volume, as though overheard from another . Does music from other
rooms calm anyone else? I have a serious mental compression issue there; it
puts me in the headspace of leaving a party that’s gone too long, sitting out
the rest of the evening and kicking the shoes off my swelling feet.
Okay, so I’m crazy. At least I own it.
I bounced between these two albums in particular. They have
little in common other than not sounding like normal music, and having no words
(tracks with words, naturally, were pruned). Bastion is a patch-work of Cajun,
Middle Eastern and Asian influences, while Hiroto’s tunes are the most tranquil
stuff. For me there’s a less rational common denominator: many of the early
tracks on both albums keenly sound like the end of a day.
If you haven’t disregarded me for babbling about imaginary
parties and days ending, then hopefully you’ve figured out why this kind of
music is so damned useful to an overstressed mind. I couldn’t fool myself or my
syndrome into believing the work was over, or even convince myself the work was
as close to being over as it was. I could, however, use breathing and music to
let myself know that this would be alright – it would only be a few pages, a
few changes per page, a few alterations per song. At my sickest in months, I
sat back in my chair and worked at the pace I could manage. The music helped. I
can’t ask for more than that from music.
Go to the Bestsellers' section. Pick a book, any book. Buy
it and go home. Open to the first page, and open a word processing program.
Begin transcribing the book word for word.
If you correct some grammatical errors, you might be a copy
editor.
If you clarify phrasing and streamline events, you
might be a full-blown editor.
If you can't help but wreck the whole novel and change the
directions it goes, you're a writer.
If you pour your critical thinking into interpretation of
those words rather than changing them, then God bless you. You're the audience
and we need you to get back to that bookstore immediately.
"No. No, and it's nothing to do with abhorring child death.
Children are selfish, whining, smelling, self-soiling, infinitely needy little
shells of humanity. I guarantee the child Adolf Hitler would not woo me with
his cuteness or tiny mustache. I'd leave Hitler alive because I know we can
beat him. He takes his advantages and commits his atrocities, but eventually he
mismanages his militaries, undervalues the Americas, and shoots himself in
despair. It is only briefly tempting to throttle the infant Hitler and prevent
a Third Reich, a second World War, and the invention of the word
"genocide." But the Europe you leave without Hitler is still a Europe bitterly anti-Semitic, economically ravaged, and
endlessly bellicose. Looking at the child playing and finger-painting, you are
forced to realize he does not take advantage of history. He was an agent. World
War I hasn't even happened yet and you think you'll leave the world a sunnier
place. I fear that a more cunning person or politic will fill the Adolf
Hitler-shaped void in history. The replacement will come from the same
underground discontent, and the same well of hatemongering crackpots who would
slaughter and unify.What you're
gambling upon isn't even that they'd seize power. It's that they won't have
more progressive military plans, that they won't capitalize on the nuclear bomb
before the U.S.,
and that they won't start the Final Solution earlier. You are gambling that
what replaces this child will be something we defeat. As much as I grieve for
what he grows up to set in motion, I can't trust the motion to tend itself."
Lita: What was that comedian’s name? On the radio before?
John: Was he a comedian? I thought he was just a storyteller
with a nice audience.
Lita: Okay, but what was his name? I want to look him up
when we get home.
John: I don’t know. Fredrikson?
Lita: It was not even close to ‘Fredrikson.’
John: Fred, maybe? I don’t know; I suck at names. Okay?
Fredrikson? Flintstone? He grew up Catholic.
Lita: Was it Catholic?
John: He said he’d been one for twenty-seven years and…
eleven months, maybe. Contrasted that with being a Buddhist for three weeks. He
kept making those tired jokes about Catholicism making his personality fear-
and anger-based. He converted because he… Don’t look at me like that.
Lita: Don’t look at me looking at you. Keep driving, and
keep doing that. Keep emptying your mental pockets. I’m testing something. Why
did he convert?
John: He met a Llama who held his hands and touched
foreheads with him, and he only articulated that it made him feel good. Blessed
his rosaries for him. He needed it because his dad was dying, I think from
cancer, and his wife was dying from some lingering injuries following a car
accident they were in on I-95 where their car flipped five times.
Lita: You’re sure it was five times?
John: I remember. And he was really angry that both of these
deaths were coming up at the same time, and full of dread, and he considered
suicide for a minute, and I got pissed at him for looking at life and God like
the only meaning was in everyone living forever and never getting sick, which
stands as the most willfully naïve bullshit of all time. And his wife had to go
to a hospice three times.
Lita: Three times?
John: She was in one for four months, he said, though I got
confused since he said you were only allowed there for a few weeks, since they
expect you to die. So maybe the four months was actually adding up all her time
there, or it was that this case was really that extreme and she kept surviving.
And I liked the story where she was high on morphine, and sitting up in bed,
and wanted to “surprise” him, but could barely speak, and that this did
surprise him. Very funny, though probably only works out loud. I was trying to
work out if you could pull that off on the page.
Lita: You remember trying to translate a joke about his
wife’s morphine haze from stand-up comedy into writing?
John: Well, yes.
Lita: And what’s his name?
John: Burke? Something longer. Burketson?
Lita: This is eerie. You’re a writer.
John: So what?
Lita: That novel you just finished isn’t five hundred pages
of calling everyone “the guy in a car accident” or “the wife on morphine.” You
use names to mark and remember everyone in every situation.
John: …But it’s the only thing I don’t remember about him.
You’re making fun of me.
Lita: Some days I want to climb inside your head and pedal.
John: This is abstract mockery. This is the Cubist version
of hazing.
One upon a time there was a little girl named Little Red
Riding Hood whose grandmother was kind of sick. Her mother sent the girl to her
grandmother’s house with a basket of food and medicine. Wanting to be over with
it as soon as possible, and so took a shortcut through a woods that was clearly
marked as a wildlife preserve.
On her way through, a wolf stopped her. He complimented, “What
a big basket of goodies you have.”
I don’t like Erotica. I spent zero dollars on it last year (last decade, too). The trends in cover art annoy me, the proclivity for boilerplate bothers me, and never in my life have I grasped the appeal of reading words about fucking. Fucking is quite possibly the most redundant and boring subject in all prose. I get more from reading tax law.
I told you all that to tell you that I support the sale of Erotica. Recently Paypal’s operators threatened to stop processing payments with Smashwords unless it stopped selling certain books. According to Smashwords-boss Mark Coker, the big ones were, “erotic fiction that contains bestiality, rape and incest.”
It’s not all Erotica. Bestiality, rape and incest, plus some pedophilia that Coker proudly declared his company already refuses to distribute. Pretty gross to the average person, and you can imagine that most Erotica writers trumpeting “rape” probably aren’t making artistic hay with it. The current trend of titillating Pseudo-Incest novels with “Daddy” in the title? Yeah. But it doesn’t matter.
Fellow readers and writers, don’t argue that it’s Erotica Vs. Moralists. It is a moral issue that people be allowed to write fiction about sex as they desire, and when not infringing upon the rights of others, that they be allowed to share, publish and charge for it. I am morally for freedom in fiction.
It is PayPal’s right not to facilitate sale of these products; it would be dangerous to legislate otherwise. Yet it’s bigger than this. We are treading on principles. Works classified as “Literary Fiction” have already been flagged for Terms of Service violation. One week in and we’re not in the realm of hypotheticals anymore, Toto. Readers and writers remember Amazon de-listing LGBT books in2009, and we are still living in a period when libraries ban classic books. This is more disturbing to me than Vladimir Nabokov getting banned; I fear for an aspiring no-name Vladimir Nabokov Jr. out there, whose career has yet to begin, trying to build a platform, who got told to click UNPUBLISH today.
But even if no Vladimir Nabokov Jr. got that message today, it doesn’t matter. This is not about a stranger deciding what is and isn’t titillating writing, and thus banning the next Gore Vidal or Norman Mailer. This isn’t about such pressures expanding to some day to suppress LGBT fiction, though it is easier to imagine than I’d like. And this is not about a corporation coming after me some day. If biases go unchecked then there’s a good chance someone will hate my transgender character, or that a snake has a crush on her, or that I depict succubae doing what they do and still place them on the “good guys” side. My novel is a safe distance from PayPal striking against rape-porn, but even if I was the next target on their list, it wouldn’t make a difference. This is unacceptable no matter where you are. That is morality.
Lo takes the steps down two at a time. He’s nearly skipping at he reaches the platform; it’s only one stop away, and then he’s a smash and grab away from being rich. The Firebreathers don’t even know about the stones yet. Nobody does.
He’s so excited that he almost runs face-first into a yeti. One of many yetis, the hair of their backs dyed silver and blue. Gang colors. He whips his head to the left, pretending to be interested in ads for musicals and vodka as he skirts away from them. They can’t know. Nobody could be dumb enough to clue in the yetis.
The fattest of the yetis stares at Lo. He swallows, and arches his posture, and intensifies that sudden and acute interest in garish posters promoting musicals. He sticks his hands in his pockets, fingering smoke bombs and shaking his head. A musical set in a slum. Man oh man, what will they think of next?
Except the fattest yeti isn’t staring at him. He’s relieved for exactly two thirds of a second. On the third third of that second, he notices scaly bodies of lizards in trench coats descending the stairs. Smoke billows from their mouths and only two have cigars. God-damned Firebreathers.
As he shifts like he suddenly needs to pee, Lo is uncertain. Is he most anxious that someone tipped off the Firebreathers? Or most anxious that he’s stuck on the platform between glowering gang-yetis and Firebreathers? He flinches around too quickly and errantly catches the gaze of the fattest yeti. In the moment, he certainly needs to pee.
“Uh. Ha, man, right?” He gestures forward, to the adverts. “Musicals. Best thing about the city.”
The yeti produces a pair of brass knuckles, which is ridiculous since his paws have no use for them. They are for show. Lo thanks all available gods when it becomes evident the fattest yeti is showing them off to the cigar-chopping lizards.
“A love story. In a slum. That’s so… groundbreaking.” He realizes his position and immediately dreads. He is half a car-length between the Firebreathers and gang-yetis. He will have to enter through one of their cars when the train arrives, if they’re all alive by the time it rings in.
He casts his eyes down, briefly entertaining throwing himself onto the rails. He casts them down in time to see a black-clad hand clutch the concrete. Five more do the same, and six black-cowled ninjas climb onto the platform before him. He backs away until nearly falling onto the adjacent tracks.
The ninjas rise. They eye him. They turn around, awaiting the train and checking their iPhones. One of the Firebreathers murmurs a curse in liz-speak, and Lo doesn’t have to turn around to recognize the sound of a yeti cocking a shotgun. He doesn’t have to turn around to recognize the sound of the train pulling into station, either. It is going to be a long night. As yetis jostle him forward, a furry torrent carelessly herding him toward the train, he realizes it is going to be a very long night. He wonders if the conductor will let him ride on the roof.
I propose that on every 29th of February that the SyFy Channel, or whatever it shall rename itself to, shall run a marathon of Quantum Leap. I further propose it not advertise this marathon, nor recognize it as an unusual event, nor even name it to the public. Rather, let anyone who happens upon this marathon every four years and happens to notice the date and title simply get what would be one of life's greatest puns.
“All love is equal!” You keep saying that, getting yourselves so excited that you won’t read the fine print. Soon you’ll get your Gay Marriage without the far more important right of Gay Divorce.
You know many centuries it took to get Straight Divorce? Don’t take it on faith that you can just break up with your significant other, especially not when a bunch of legislators hate you. Lobby for it now. In fact, it’s more important you get the right to Gay Divorce before Gay Marriage, because if Gay Marriage is anything like Straight Marriage, then it’ll be populated with shortsighted experiments that need our truly most sacred institution: telling him to get out and give you half his stuff.
Divorce is an institution that’s created more millionaires than the liquor industry, and it’s significantly helped that industry too. It’s your right, and by telling Conservatives that you’re more interested in splitting up with your spouse than marrying him, you’ll show them you have common ground. Hell, get divorced a few times and they might even nominate you for president.
It's almost March 2012, so of course we're all talking about the best movies of 2011. If all the complaining on Twitter is any indication, I'm once again happy to have skipped the Academy Awards. Naturally I disagree with some of the winners. More naturally, I don't understand what some of the categories mean. But nothing shall dissuade me from telling a sizable democratic body of people who devote swaths of their lives to film that their mass conclusions were wrong. So here we go.
The Robbed Award
Going to the movie that got no play last year
and is still on my mind more than whatever won Best Picture
I Saw the Devil
The Too Little/Too Late Award
Going to the movie I missed by several years,
but have now seen and wish I'd been on the bandwagon for at the time
Ostrov/Octpob
The Embarrassment Award
Going to the thing that did everything film is supposed to do
better than pretty much all the films did that year
Portal 2
The Raddest Scene Award
Going to the raddest scene in a motion picture
The Reveal and Follow-Up in Scream 4
The Dark Horse Award
Going to the movie that was way better than you all led me to believe it would be
The Perfect Host
You're Actually All Great At This
Going to the best ensemble in a motion picture or TV show,
since one TV show smoked all the movies this year anyway
Breaking Bad
The Frank/Nixon Memorial Award
Going to all actors who performed as well or better
than Frank Langella did in Frost/Nixon
For the fourth year in a row, nobody
The "There's No Such Thing As The Best Movie of the Year" Award
Seeing as there is no such thing as a best movie amidst a field of comedies, dramas, musicals, period pieces, speculative fiction, animation, blockbusters and an international film market we're both not watching enough of as it is, the award that simply goes to whatever movie brought me the closes to both crying and laughing last year
We first saw Dad's ghost the night of his funeral. He wandered the parlor, complaining about coloration and the tone of the priest and Mom's neckline. Mom took it the hardest, which is understandable. We had a priest over the next morning to commit an exorcism, but it didn't take. We had him come for repeats the next two days before it became evident that wasn't working. Mom got some gypsies to hold a seance to no avail. We got a Methodist, and a Unitarian, and even a Rabbi who seemed to think his cigar would help. None of it helped. We had doctor of dark arts flown in from South America, and all we got out of the deal was Dad stamping his feet upstairs, saying he'd never seen the appeal in hardwood. Eventually we ran out of options and resigned to doing nothing about him. Two days later, he'd vanished. No stamping, no ranting. We couldn't figure out why doing nothing had done the trick, until Mom remembered: Dad'd been an atheist.
A man in a brown suit and burgundy tie appeared at the door. He held a tidy briefcase. Rudolph squinted at him from his tangle of plastic tubes and bed sheets.
Brown Suit asked, “Are you Carl Rudolph?”
“You’re late if you want to sue me.” He smiled crookedly. “I’m done with lawyers.”
“This isn’t litigation, Mr. Rudolph.” Brown Suit strode across the hospital room, retrieving a manila envelope from his briefcase. “I’m here on behalf of the estate of Neal Jennings. He left a proviso to deliver this letter on your... well.”
“Jennings did that? What did he want that he didn’t have thirty years ago?”
“I don’t know, sir. No one has read the contents. His will is quite specific.” Brown Suit handed over the envelope. It slid through Rudolph’s arthritic fingers and rested on his chest. He looked at it with half-lidded eyes.
“Did he specify you wear such hideous fashion?”
“In fact, he did.” Brown Suit snapped his briefcase closed. “Thank you for your time, Mr. Rudolph.”
He left Rudolph to watch the envelope rise and fall on his ribs, following his breathing. It was address-side up, made out to him in big, blocky letters.
“So I could read it if my eyes went, Jennings?”
He prodded the envelope. It was several pages thick inside. What on earth had Jennings written?
“The last word. You knew full well I couldn’t rebut you this way.”
What would that word be? More of Jennings’s theosophy? Pleading that it was actually God in the details and that holding hands would solve it all? Urging him to go dunk his head in an Indian river before he died? To donate to some charity that was probably corrupt?
“Or…”
Or they could be pages of remembrance. All the Trotskyist political arguments, and the absinthe that made them worthwhile. The continental train ride to a lecture they skipped out on halfway through. Walking into a London hotel room to ask if they could check out of this bore already, only to find Jennings checking into the maid who would become his second wife.
The women. Goodness, the women. Just thinking about all that collective suppleness stiffened parts of Rudolph that had been medicated numb for weeks.
He pressed the tip of his middle finger on the center of the envelope. It was damnably thick.
Would Jennings have sentimentalized so much about gilded times? What if he had confessions? The rotten investments he’d tried to hide. Rudolph had forgiven him decades ago, but how bitter would it taste to read Jennings apologizing for it now?
Or finally calling Rudolph for plagiarizing him in his second book. Jennings had never exposed him. Would he sue him from the grave and steal the inheritance of his grandchildren?
“They never visit anyway. Still…”
What else was there to reveal?
He squeezed his eyes shut.
“Goodness, I hope he doesn’t come out as gay. We were….”
An acrid pain between his ribs reminded him. Decades ago he could have worried about what was in envelopes, but not anymore. Be it a lawsuit, an answer or love letter, there wasn’t time.
His hands didn’t work like they used to. He peeled open the envelope’s seal with the first knuckles of his index fingers, then shook out the papers onto his chest.
There they were: five in all.
Rudolph lifted the first. He saw no words.
He held it closer to his face. No, nothing typed or in Jennings’s chicken scratches. It was blank.
He shuffled through the papers. Every one was blank, back and front. Had Jennings padded it to look ominous, then left no omens?
No. The last page wasn’t blank. There were two lines of text in the very middle. They read:
Some of the most encouraging mail I get is from readers and fellow writers asking about my process. If you’ve read the BM’s for long, you know I hang my writing process out there. I like to share my failures, successes and insights. If everyone was candid about their processes, the whole field would benefit. Recently an aspiring writer sent me five questions in researching artists for her own book. These are the answers I gave her. Please consider fielding these questions on your own blogs.
1. what inspired you to be a writer?
-I loved storytelling from my earliest years, so I was always open to it. The big shift came when I was bedridden with health problems at age 13. There were many long and excruciating nights when reading or listening to audiobooks literally gave me the will to live to morning. The desire to make it to the next page, and to find out what happened next, was vital. A sense of gratitude to the form definitely shaped my desire to become a writer.
2. what is love according to you?
-Love is a lasting condition in one person toward another person, creature or object, recognizable by frequent supportive concerns for their various well-beings, including but not limited to medical, financial, artistic and spiritual well-beings. These concerns can be positive, such as the joy that my sister just got a new job. These concerns must be strong enough to act upon; if you won't do things for others, then you don't love them. Love can be familial, romantic or friendly. Most of my passionate loves have not been erotic, but simply friendship.
3. what are your writings to you?
-They are my beloved creations, little different to me than the world would be to God. I must do right by them, be honest with them, let them play themselves out, and never interfere so much that their experience is compromised. While I write some veins of satire and social commentary, I never let such influences overtake the sanctity of the work itself.
4. how will you define yourself as an artist?
-Experientially. There is too much complexity and emergence in writing copious prose for me to prescribe a singular meaning to all my work, at least at this stage in my career. If there is a summary, it’s that I define myself as I ponder, compose and edit. The prescriptive definitions will always come in second, even when they’d be more convenient.
5. what do you think are the qualities in you which others do not have. and because of which you can write?
-There’s a temptation to say I’m crazy, or goofier than average, and so am more inclined to write jokes about Noah’s Ark and giant plants throwing rooms at people. But really? It’s a couple of decades of critical thinking about, and practice focusing on, how my prose works. Experience sets most forms of expertise apart from the hobbyists and layfolk; I think most people could become just as competent in their own ways if they wrote and read as much and with as much scrutiny. The love of language, of style and structure, and an appreciation for pleasing elements largely came through experience. Most of my other traits influence what and how I write more than that I can write at all. For instance, my neuromuscular syndrome saps my energy, puts me in constant pain, and has limited some of my social interactions, so I look at healthy people as pathetic or crazy. That’s spurred me to write, but is it why I write, or simply why I depict people certain ways? Perhaps my only other significant quality is that I know enough about the world as people see it, and enough about what’s occurred in fiction, to be able to freely express my thoughts in prose in ways that seem creative because I have a certain grip on those two things.
Yesterday the LA Times ran an editorial about Global Warming. I was fine with that. They'd like schools to teach facts about it correctly. I strongly support that. But a few paragraphs in, I just about lost my mind. I came across one of the worst examples of a bad writing habit, and for any younger writers out there, I want to point this out so you don't repeat it. I'm not singling out the LA Times or these particular authors, though my language may occasionally express how little civility I had left when they invited Hitler to the Global Warming debate.
That is a lie so big that, to quote from "Mein Kampf,"
it would be hard for most people to believe that anyone
"could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously."
1. In the above selection we see that the LA Times Editorial Page quoted Adolph Hitler to support their argument. This fact alone is issue #1. When the author got to, “to quote from Mein Kampf,” an editor should have hit them with a ream of printer paper and asked, “Why?” Why on God-damned earth would you feel compelled “to quote from Mein Kampf” in a Global Warming editorial?
2. In addendum to the pure absurdity of quoting Hitler in support of anything, it must be recognized that they were quoting him on a topic of debate that emerged decades after he died. They were not actually quoting his opinion on Global Warming denialism because, unless he was more successful in the occult than previously believed, he didn’t have one. So they were quoting one of history’s most monstrous leaders out of context.
3. What the Editorial Page mangled was Adolph Hitler’s notion of “The Big Lie.” The articles is actually hyperlinked to the Wikipedia entry for The Big Lie instead of Mein Kampf, despite putting the hyperlink exclusive on the title “Mein Kampf.” This caused a small capillary in my forehead to burst.
4. But beside hyperlinking liberally, there lies the issue of the mangling. “The Big Lie” was supposed to be a fabrication so bold nobody would doubt its veracity, because nobody would believe you’d stray that far from truth. This is a ridiculous stretch in application to Global Warming denialism. Not only do millions of my fellow liberals believe denialists are obviously errant from the truth, but none of the layfolk I’ve ever talked to believed such denial true simply because the claim is so bold it must be true. They believe arguments, propaganda, skewed or incorrect data, and conspiracy theories. If you ask, you’re much more likely to hear, “I just don’t see how people could do that. The planet’s so big.” So what the editorial page was really doing was misquoting Hitler to say, “They’re wrong and we don’t like them.”
5. It’s saddening that I got to #5 before touching the actual quote. Their line reads as an abysmal, “That is a lie so big that, to quote from "Mein Kampf," it would be hard for most people to believe that anyone "could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously."” There is no reason that the content of “it would be hard for most people to believe that anyone” should not be contained in the original quote itself, except for shoddy re-contextualization. The result is not only using Hitler as a valid source for social criticism, but doing so in a way that makes it seem like you might be fudging the Furher on this one.
6. We’re deep into the list, but you really must understand that they were quoting Hitler for cred. Mein Kampf is an old famous book. By quoting it, you are saying, “I’ve read old famous things by old famous people, so I am smart.” I know this because I’ve read too many Freshman term papers that tried to do this, though first-year students usually don’t quote a genocidal asshole. If you lack quality of argument and resource, you at least quote Hamlet, The Constitution or The Bible – those old things that a lot of decent people like. Regardless, the needlessness of quoting a decades-old non-contextual source reeks of needy bragging.
7. Needy bragging about Hitler.
8. Of all the articles and books written in support of the theory of Global Warming, and of all the lectures and rants recorded about it, the LA Editorial Page opted for Hitler. Not a sociologist who's studied data on misconceptions and deceptions. Not a climatologist. Not an American politician. Not even a school teacher, about whom the editorial was supposed to be sniping.
I swear I’m normally a nice person, especially about writing snafus. All of the above could have been mistakes, or the product of thinking at 2:00 AM. I’ve certainly faltered like that in the past. But I beg you – journalists, bloggers, aspiring writers – don’t do this if you can possibly catch yourself. It may kill some mildly unhinged person like myself.
