7 Lines from Last House in the Sky

So last week while I was running between medical tests, Tony Noland and Icy Sedgwick both tagged me in the "Lucky 7" game. The game requests you go to either page 7 or 77 of your manuscript, count down 7 lines, then copy the next 7 lines to a post. I wasn't sure about this, both since I was exhausted and it only seemed possible to do well if the passage was unintentionally funny.

But the passage on page 7, 7 lines down, 7 lines long, is actually a pretty good snapshot of one of my characters. So here's a taste of The Last House in the Sky:

     “Randy, put on some trousers. I can hear you being naked. You’re always too naked."

     He reached down and adjusted himself. “I didn’t bring trousers. I brought a distraction.”

     “Then put on your bed sheet.”

     He sat up and checked the cell’s lone cot. It was an oak plank; no sheets, mattress or treat. “No. Give me yours. I didn’t want to come this south anyway; the climate disagrees with me.”

With good luck, you'll be seeing more of Randy soon. They've got to get out of that jail.

Bathroom Monologue: The Sea in Which the Most Men Have Died

Foreman manned the left oar and Aftman manned the right. They propped their boots up on the parcel at the bottom of the boat. The fog swirled thick, but they knew this lake. They’d served on the estate for years.

Foreman said, “The last riddle Master gave to me was this: what is the sea in which the most men have died?”

Aftman puzzled this over. Stalling to come up with a clever answer, he asked, “What did you say?”

“Well I figured the Dead Sea, on account of the name.”

Aftman winced. “I think that’s rather a metaphor, friend.”

“As much he said. When he finished flogging me I went to the study. I came back to him with the Red Sea. Moses drowned a whole army in there.”

“That’s a good one.”

“But he had me flogged again. He said near Greece and Africa they’ve got all sorts of seas that have seen all sorts of wars, and so have soaked up many an army’s lives.”

“Master was a well-studied man,” Aftman nodded mournfully. He kicked the bundle. “I would have guessed that one near Jordan, what’s mostly salt. A body can’t swim in it, you see. They sink and die.”

“You’d have lost some skin on that, friend.” Foreman smiled. “That’s actually the Dead Sea. And I’m afraid that you can swim in it. Most everybody floats because of the salt. Picked that up in the study.”

“Well dash it all,” Aftman kicked the bundle again. “Then we both guessed the Dead Sea and were both wrong.”

“Yet only I lost the skin.”

“Like you’re the only one to be whipped. I’m still raw from last night. You would have killed me had he lashed one more time, you know?”

“I didn’t mean it that way, friend.” Foreman straightened a little, as though proud. “Funny thing. Before you came to me with this chore, I was working on a new guess. I think I’ve got it right this time.”

“Did you?” Aftman asked, letting go of his oar. He stooped and fastened the lead weights onto the parcel. “What is your new guess, friend?”

Foreman stooped with him and they boosted it together. The Master’s left leg stuck out of the bundle as they lifted. Both hesitated as though to stuff it back in, then they chortled and dumped it over the side. As the Master’s body disappeared in the drink, they took up their oars and Foreman hypothesized for his housemate.

“Now I think the sea in which the most men have died is idiocy.”

Bathroom Monologue: Zine Works Redux

Dale's cell vibrated on the desk, scampering over the surface like the plastic was coming to life in little bursts. He set his teeth and vengefully finished the paragraph, taking not just enough time to get back on track, but more than enough to get the wording to his standard. Finally he hit the period button with a little too much force, and picked up the phone.

"Hello?" he said, sounding unnecessarily annoyed.

"Dale!" The voice on the phone screeched. "Dale! I'm trapped in a magazine!"

"Fred?"

"In a magazine! No idea how!"

"It's okay, Fred. Calm down." He rubbed the bridge of his nose. This should not have been logically acceptable to him, but they both did a lot of drugs. "Look around yourself. What magazine are you in?"

"There are a lot of words, and a huge picture."

"What's the picture of?"

"I think it's a woman. Or an armoire. It's abstract."

"That could be any magazine. What about the words? What are they writing about?"

"Mostly ads. I think part of it's a story. Really short."

"Fiction is dying in print."

"I'm trapped in a magazine! Help!"

"Is there anything else in there?"

"Uh. A cartoon?"

"A cartoon?"

"Black and white. It's a lion on a cell phone."

"Is the caption ironic?"

"No duh it is!"

"Is it ironic but not funny at all?"

"How'd you know?"

"I just resubscribed to The New Yorker. I think you're on my coffee table. I'll get you in a minute."

Dale switched his cell off and looked at the monitor. He read the paragraph to himself a couple of times. Fred could wait – he knew better than to read Dale’s stuff without asking.

Bathroom Monologue: Retweet This

RETWEETs are perfect. There has never been a better form of communication, and never phrased better, or I would have written it. Instead I clicked RETWEET and my work is done. The world is mended.

I believe every single word and the implicit meaning behind every single image attached to whatever I RETWEET. Its politics are mine. Its opinions are law. The only thing I would change is making it my work.

I have never RETWEETed something by accident.

My Twitter clients have never malfunctioned and RETWEETed something without my consent.

I have never RETWEETed something so my peers would like me better. I have never done anything so my peers would like me better. I think ties have unmatched utility.

I have never RETWEETed something I disagreed with to show what the opposition thinks. In all those cases, I have never tweeted shortly before or after that, granting the RETWEET context. Every RETWEET is its own island of unquestioning support.

RETWEET this.

Bathroom Monologue: Virtues Bug, OR, It’s What’s Inside That Counts

As dusk whisked over their cave, Mummy Nine-Legs ascended to the ceiling and unfastened a few spools of humans for supper. Little Bug had never had his own human yet, being so young, and danced on all nine of his legs in anticipation. Yet when Mummy Nine-Legs handed him his bundle, and as he split it open, he dropped the fermented cadaver to the floor.

“Mummy, I want a good human,” he whined. “This one is covered in warts and moles, and she’s got an overbite like she’s all teeth.”

“No one is all teeth,” said Mummy Nine-Legs, “It’s what’s on the inside that counts.”

She took Little Bug’s prey and slit it down the belly for the babe to see. And indeed, inside the cadaver was as lined with lipids as any thin girl, and her liver was ripe and swollen. Her lungs popped in his mouth. By the end of their meal, he even found he relished the way her teeth settled in his gullet, and he realized how foolish he’d been. It really was what lay inside people that counted, and particularly when they lay digesting inside him.

Bathroom Monologue: I Deserve a Say

"I deserve a say. I have a right in this because I’ve spent the last forty years saying I don’t. When you wanted to enlist, I said it was your choice. When you didn’t want to get married, I said it was your choice, and so I slept in hospital parking lots every time you broke your stupid arm, because I couldn’t go in, because you decided. When they said the water was going to rise and you said the media exaggerated, I listened to you and said it was your decision, because secretly I figured if you were going to drown then I might as well too. So it was your decision.

"Not this one. Not this one, because of all the other ones. Because I love and you suck at making these decisions. So no, you don’t get to go to the doctor alone tomorrow, and if he says there are options, you don’t get to ignore what they are, and if they hurt, you’re going to grit your teeth, because for forty years I’ve grit mine. Your decisions aren’t going to be my mistakes anymore. I have the right. I deserve a say, and I say we’re setting the alarm for seven because your crippled ass has an appointment and I like coffee before I drive."

Bathroom Monologue: Atheist’s Prayer Equivalent

During my most recent medical emergency, several of my Christian friends publicly announced they’d pray for me. When this happens, there’s always at least one atheist friend who, usually when we’re alone, asks what he or she is supposed to do. In today’s case, it was a ‘she’ who feared she fell short as a buddy because she wasn’t paging a higher power to fix me.

I always have the same answer, and was honestly looking forward to delivering it this time.

“Do a fundraiser? After all, money is a higher power you believe in.”

Like these friends typically do, she got really mad at me. She ranted about delusions and fooling yourself and how she’d have to do actual work. She, like most of my friends in this circumstance, switched from feeling bad for me to feeling angry with me. Her apparent inadequacy disappeared in a puff of self-righteousness.

It always fixes them. It’s good to give.

Why I write daily, at FFDO

This weekend I have an essay up at Fridayflash.org about my creative process and why I don't just write daily, but publish daily. I've been blogging at The Bathroom Monologues every day for about five years. Estrella Azul was curious as to exactly why I do it.

It's mostly about learning to criticize your inner critic, and letting the ideas you actually want through. It's also about frequent failure and my sundry insecurities. So if you'd like a glimpse of my process or psyche, click on through here.

And thank you for reading.

Bathroom Monologue: Tell Me About Her

Tell me about her.

Whenever I made waffles, she’d steal my fork. She’d pair it with her own, turning them upside down, turning them into stabby feet, and have them march over the waffles as she narrated Mothra’s latest attack on Japan. She pretended to snore whenever I explained Mothra was a flying-type monster.

Tell me about her.

She licked the roof of my mouth too often when we kissed. She didn’t know how to kiss very well, but she was awesome at that one trick.

Tell me about her.

She was five feet and five inches in bare feet. She was a hundred and nineteen pounds in the winter.  She wore corrective lenses because she was nearsighted. Ever since she was a kid... this isn't right.

Tell me about her.

She once waited on a rope line for two hours to greet George W. Bush as he got off his plane in the next county over. It was raining and blustery, and she put up with all of it just to fake him out and pull her hand away as he reached to shake it. She did the whole “running her hand through her hair” thing. Afterward she had to talk to a guy for half an hour. She fell asleep in his office.

Tell me about her.

She loved sad movies and never cried at them. She'd lean forward in her chair and squint, and groan skeptically, and sometimes chew her upper lip like this didn’t make sense. When we got home she’d buy the screenplay. She only read screenplays alone. They’re what made her cry.

Tell me about her.

She loved hating sports. She would say she was going out, or upstairs to read, or simply promise to stay out of the living room, and within five minutes of starting time she’d plant her ass on the couch. I’ve never seen her so animated as when she was complaining about the rules being arbitrary and the game being dumb and the losing team being treated unfairly. Never. Well, maybe it’s a tie between that and sex, but I don’t have witnesses to how animated she got during sex. I have a Superbowl party of witnesses to her throwing a bowl of popcorn at a blind referee.

Tell me about her.

She always got tired. She got tired when we were in school – she fell asleep during a midterm and snored her way to a C+, so we didn’t think much about it. I drove. I shoveled the driveway. When I think of all the things I did instead of her, without really talking to her, or asking why, or making her ask why… She just got tired. It was a quirk. Except it wasn’t a quirk.

Tell me about her.

I don’t know how.

Bathroom Monologue: Gifts of Spartans and Concubines

So it's Jupiter and Juno's wedding day, and various presents arrive. There are garters of stars, armor that repels war itself, and a mysterious box from Pandora, which neither of them finds funny.

Two gifts are the most curious. At 10:00, three hundred of the grisliest Spartans ever seen march to the altar of Parnassus. Each is clad in full regalias, tower shields and immaculate spears.

At 10:01, three hundred of the most beautiful concubines seen under the sun march to those same altars. They perspire ambrosia and have such golden hair that mines close in despair at having been rendered obsolete.

Jupiter asks of his bride, "What's up with those people?"

Juno rolls her eyes. "The men are from Mars. The women are from Venus."

The two gods were banned from the wedding. The Spartans and concubines were kept around.

Bathroom Monologue: The Culture Machine, OR, The Five Star Scheme

“Star ratings were a conspiracy hatched by an Illuminati that seeks to de-luminate you. It’s clickable, skimmable, nonsensical and diabolical – that natural next step from awards shows. They are the neuro-cynics who make you cede your minds to their widgets.

“Annual awards slowly tricked you into thinking great stuff comes out every year. Hey, a Man Booker shortlist. Did you watch the Emmy nomination livestream? And some movie wins every year, and now ten films get nominated! Culture is so saturated with congratulation that you never have the opportunity to reflect on the last work of art that profoundly altered you. Now simply mattering in an annual cycle bestows greatness.

“And now – now it’s even easier, because everyone votes on Amazon star ratings and Metacritic User Reviews. You don’t even have to review it. Just click! Four of five available stars? That’s pretty good, and since most users are too stupid to use anything but the top and bottom of the scales, thousands of products get high averages. Good for companies, good for actors, good for authors, as you’re gradually convinced that all five-star books are the same. You don’t need truly exceptional works, because Breaking Dawn really is as good as Brothers Karamazov. Heck, it’s rated a tenth of a point higher by the average reader! And who are these readers? The five-star scale doesn’t care, because democracy doesn’t care who you are. It’s about registering to vote. Registering to churn the culture machine.”

Bathroom Monologue: “But when we look around us at the state of literacy – and in particular at all those signs for “BOBS’ MOTORS”….” –Lynn Truss, “Eats, Shoots & Leaves”

But Carmen couldn’t wait, not with that sign in the window. Her mother was an English teacher, damn it. She told Samuel that she’d pay and stormed into the gas station. She saw the clerk and was fixing him with her stare before she was even at the counter.

“I want to speak to the owner,” she said.

“I’m one of them,” he said, taking off his hat. “What can I do for you?”

“You’re Bob, then?” she said, glancing at the “BOBS’ MOTORS” sign in the window.

He nodded and shrugged at the same time.

“Like I said, I’m one of them.”

“One of them?” She gawked. “How illiterate are you?”

Another man came in from the back, this one taller, his overalls stained with oil.

“What’s going on?” he asked.

Bob answered. “I think the lady wants to speak to us about literacy.”

The other man rubbed his hands on his overalls and looked at Carmen.

“There’s a rack of paperbacks by the door if that’s what you’re after.”

“No,” Carmen said, almost stamping her foot. “The sign on your store is incorrectly punctuated. If the store belongs to Bob,” she pointed at the man behind the counter, “then the apostrophe goes before the ‘s,’ not after.”

“Well, yeah,” said the guy in overalls. “But it doesn’t. It belongs to all of us Bobs.”

Carmen took a moment on this.

“You’re Bob?”

“Yeah. Bob McClane.” He gestured to the Bob behind the counter. “That’s Bobby Green. His dad’s Bobby Green Sr. I’ve got a cousin, Bob Jaffey. All four of us have a stake in the place.”

“In Bobs’ Motors?” she asked, regretting having not let her husband come in to pay.

“Yeah,” said both Bobs.

She looked down into her purse.

“Twenty dollars of unleaded, please.”

My Foot Stopped Working

So on Thursday the 3^rd I was in the hospital. I’m going back this week for updates and more tests. It’s nothing serious; I just can’t feel my foot, and if the condition spreads, I’ll never walk again.

We’re calling it “neuropathy” for now. It feels like nothing serious because of how I’ve been jerked around. The podiatrist gave me non-prescription drugs that did nothing and seemed annoyed that I wanted to know why my toes had gone numb. My regular doctor was too busy to see me; his physician’s assistant was willing, then too busy, and on our make-up, caught a cold and left work early. It took me four tries to see anybody.

But man, fourth try is the charm! They drew a dizzying amount of blood for three pages of tests. I’m fielding a new unit of measurement for blood: “the Tarantino.” Sally extracted at least a Tarantino from me to see if this is a blood disease, diabetes, hepatitis, MS, or, well, I hadn’t heard of half these things. Eventually the joke became that maybe I was pregnant (it doesn’t know where to grow in me, you see). I promised to name it after Sally if I was.

So now I’m editing my next novel and waiting for a phone call to find out if something is enormously wrong with me. Is this just my foot, or will it spread? Will that symptom turn out to be the tip of an iceberg? Hurry up and wait.

I’m going to blog about this going forward. I believe in publicly exposing our most sensitive moments. While fiction is my favorite means of self-expression, this is a gaping wound in my life. Every living person walks around pretending they don’t have gaping wounds in their lives, and so I’m going to show mine, in the hopes that more people don’t feel so uncomfortable or driven to hiding theirs. Hiding what’s eating you is a terrible idea, not only because you often avoid the kind of reflection and feedback that might help, but because human history is littered with people who hid that their fuses were burning until they blew. Whether it’s closeting your depression, or shouldering cancer on your own, or a marriage that needs scrutiny and only receives silence – there are too many ways we hurt ourselves. I’ll happily embarrass myself to do a little good for somebody else.

If that makes no sense to you, we can talk about it.

Bathroom Monologue: Paper Vs. E-Books

Your book is made out of dead trees.

Your Kindle sucks electricity.

Your book doesn't work in the dark.

Your Kindle needs to be plugged in or it goes dark.

Your book is the same book every day.

An e-tailer can't rescind my paper copy of 1984.

If my Kindle falls apart, they’ll send me a new one.

I love the smell of my old books.

I love the grayscale on my reader.

I like to make notes in the margins.

I like never losing my place.

My book never runs out of batteries.

My Kindle never runs out of stories.

Yours is worse.

Yours is worse.

Both are risky in a bathtub.

#NaNoReMo: National Novel Reading Month

February will be National Novel Reading Month. It’s a simple idea. We’ve all got at least one classic book we think we ought to read and have put off too long. Last year people flocked around the hashtag as they put away classics; I finally read Jane Austen, and am hoping for better results this year. I have six titles in mind, and the literary guilt may actually be killing me.

Check your shelf. Check your conscience. Isn’t there something long removed from the Bestseller’s List you think you ought to read? Be it for craft, for history, or some gap in your personal English canon. #NaNoReMo is about catching up with the classics.

One thing that bothers me about National Novel Writing Month is it isn’t located in a country. “National” is a poor word choice for a program that’s clearly international. Yet it’s popular, so #NaNoReMo will double the dubiousness. Not only can you read it in any nation of your choice, but your classic doesn’t have to be a novel. Want to brush up on Virgil or Ovid? Go for it. The rule is to read a classic.

We’re using a personal sliding scale for "classics." Some people don’t think Jules Verne is a classic author. I don’t like to talk to those people, but they exist, and so they can read someone else. But if you do think he’s a classic writer who deserves your time, then it’s your choice.

It begins on February 1^st. We’ll be on the honor system; nobody cheat and start reading now. In advance you’re welcome to hop onto blogs and Twitter to chat about your potential choices. Our hashtag is #NaNoReMo. Then join us throughout February as we discuss our progress through our chosen classics. If it works the cross-pollination of encouragement will increase our reading lists as well as encourage us to finish reading great works.

I’m actually asking for advice on my choices. Each is too big to expect to read together.

• George Elliot’s Middlemarch
• Alex Haley’s Roots
• Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables
• Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations
• Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities
• And the book that lost to Austen last year: Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita

I’ve wanted to read them all for years, and have owned a copy of Roots since 2007. Wolfe and Bulgakov seem the most likely to entertain, while Les Mis has the greatest mystique with all its hype and plethora of adaptations. I can’t mention the book on Twitter without someone gushing. And I’ve never read Hugo, never read Elliot, never read Haley, and was only ever exposed to Dickens’s Christmas Carol. It’s a lot of literary guilt.

Is there one of the above you’d most like to subject me to, or read me digest? I know how much people enjoyed watching me squirm over how insufferable Pride and Prejudice was last year.

Bathroom Monologue: The Only Thing Worse Is the Cure

I have never encountered an illness like that of the Young Master. What more rational name there is than “illness,” I am unaware, though it is an admittedly uncanny affliction.

Never had I wished for a thing so as to continue in my employers’ service when they announced they were expecting. The Master and Mistress had gone to great strains to conceive, importing all number of chemicals and powders, and seeking all number of blessing. One night I even witnessed the Mistress reading an occult tome, though the next day she ordered our precious blind cook to burn it and toss it out with the morning dregs.

The Mistress conceived it was time for me to retire. I could not deny the charges of my posture, of my trembling hands whenever I carried a tray of dinner to the Master’s upper study, and of my liver was deteriorating in much the same pattern as had that of my father and two forebears. It was only upon extreme begging of their charity that they allowed me to serve in reduced capacity through the birth and entry of a new member unto the household.

The Young Master was born of perfect health. I checked him myself as the doctors swarmed our Mistress, chanting of “internal aberrations," though I cannot recall her ever complaining of such conditions before. I carried the Young Master out of the room so he might not witness such pain as his first experience on our earth. It would be unseemly.

In the weeks that followed, the Master spent his days either in utter solitude in the upper study, or with the Young Master. How he stared at the the child, I sometimes feared he was going vile. I was almost relieved when he took ill and could no longer visit the lower floors.

It was by these emergencies that I was charged with finding wet nurses for the Young Master. Never have I heard of such trouble. Six we went through, six sturdy women, every one of them documented and with fine history. Four suffered anemia after their initial visits, and the other two were bedridden from unknown malignities.

We had such weather the night our Master finally slipped away. Nearly all the staff remained by his door, and it remains a regret that I could not join them, yet the Young Master required attention. I had to call upon a wet nurse of no documentation, who swore upon her life that her malignity was exclusive to her person and in no way transferable. Had I not been so shaken, I never would have admitted her, and yet?

The Young Master took to her breast immediately and found no complaint. Her milk was as fine as any of the women who had attended him before. No illness beset him that night or any night afterward, whereas, and I appreciate the sound of irrationality about it, but the wet nurse’s sallow malignity seemed to dissolve by morning. Even the boils on her neck waned. By Friday, she was comely for her age. I’ve had letters from her since that claim a total remission.

A coincidence, if not for this personal factor: since the Young Master came into my hands, these fingers have never been so steady. The pleasure of snapping one’s fingers is a thing I had forgotten, and now reclaim. I stride through these halls with endurance and posture unknown to me for fifteen years at the most conservative. And the pain in my liver? I have not felt it bleed in nigh on a month, and I should, for the Young Master takes to prodding at it whenever I carry him about his estate.

Census of the staff confirms my conviction: arthritis is extinct, and malignity seemingly out on vacation, while every able-bodied servant has taken to bed or had to excuse himself. I took my census to our precious blind cook for advice of one who thinks without the clouded vision of sight. Her answer shook me to my core, for after I asked her, she looked upon me for the first time in our long tenure together, and I realized that was her answer. She saw me, and it brought a tear to an old man’s eyes.

She has no more notion of what to do with the Young Master than I. Is this a condition that can be cured, and is it something that even ought to be cured?

So I must indulge in an indiscretion. Tomorrow, before the authorities arrive to take the Young Master into their care, I will shuttle him to the insane asylum on the other side of the mountain. I have known numerous educated men who claimed insanity to be an illness of the mind. Well if this is true, then after I push the Young Master’s pram through those halls for an hour, I may find several dozen cured and grateful minds with whom to discuss how best to serve him.

My apologies to any orderlies who catch the annual chill from our visit. I hear it is quite savage this year.

Click here for Part 2.

Consumed Podcast #14 is Live: Locke Lamora, Jo Walton, Battlestar Galactica, more

For the second episode in a row we managed to get all three hosts together: Nathanael Sylva, Max Cantor, and myself. This time we had an insane jumble of topics, two thirds of which we cut right before air. Still, we managed to cover a lot of distance, including the most book talk the podcast has ever seen, covering Scott Lynch's Lies of Locke Lamora, Jo Walton's Among Others, and Shirley Jackson's classic The Haunting of Hill House.

Eventually we shift to the television shows Max and Nat have been binging on, particularly Battlestar Galactica and Justice League Unlimited. Surprisingly, it's the superhero cartoon that gets more praise for its depth, while Max struggles to balance the narrative achievements in Battlestar against its racial and plotting issues.

We saved the weirdest part for last, discussing Frog Fractions, a free videogame that starts out parodying educational games and becomes a genre-bending work of art that I could only compare to Tristram Shandy. I'm not even sure how much Max left in of this conversation, because it goes to a lot of paces, including self-publishing, Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett, how pigeonholded Romance is, whether editors help or hinder creativity, and... well, you should really just hear it.

You can download the episode for free right here.

Bathroom Monologue: Pigpun

There is a physician’s office at the end of the sty. It is open only Mondays and Fridays, when something funny is put in the slop. On those two days per week a particular pig puts on a pristine white coat and polished stethoscope and tends to the medical issues of her fellow cloven-hoofed kind. She has a PhD from out of state, an overturned slop bucket for a desk, and a banner with her motto: “Do No Ham.”

Bathroom Monologue: In Defense of Looper

Foreword: I haven't actually seen the movie. Allegedly I'm watching it tonight.

“Anyone fighting them must cross a certain skepticism: how is it that the mob, rather than a government or major corporation, controls time travel? We don't associate mad science with bowler hats and tommyguns. We certainly don't associate them with theoretical physics and R&D.

“To this skepticism, appreciate that whoever time travels first will control it retroactively. History will be changed, and it was.

“What do we associate with mob organizations? Moles. Spies. Inside men. Bribes. Things disappearing off of trucks.

“The mob didn't invent time travel. It had two financial backers, and one covert sleeper, in a Pentagon project out in New Mexico. Or it did, in a timeline we'll never remember. What we record is that they pulled the time machine out of the ether, and always had exclusive access to it, and every scientist who ever had a hunch in the right direction has been missing for time unknown.

“That's the devil of it, because it was a such fringe project that before an oversight committee could take it seriously, it was rewritten into a line where it had always been and no one could ever touch it. That's how we remember it because every time we've thought different, they've changed our past. We live in a gerrymandered present.”

100,000 Hits

I don't run many milestone posts, but I had to do this one. Sitemeter has long been flawed, but it's been monitoring my blog for so many years that I've grown attached to its often incorrect, often low-balled numbers. Usually the number on my page and the embedded counter don't even match up. Thanks to you, yesterday the counter finally ticked over 100,000 unique visits to The Bathroom Monolouges.

It stalled out at around 99,000 several days ago, and I thought Sitemeter was finally going belly up. A shame, really, since it'd be a wonderful way to ring in 2013. I love round numbers.


While it's a milestone, it's also an excuse to thank you. Thank you for every visit, every reading, and every comment you've left. Thank you for laughing, even when inappropriate, and cringing, especially when appropriate.

The Bathroom Monologues have been a weird rabbit hole to descend into. Between hits 1 and 100,000 I've made my first pro-rate sale, gotten my first partial-request, done anthologies and writing conventions. I'm deep into writing a second novel while still figuring out the best home for the first. A lot of a career has ticked away as you've clicked. Thank you, sincerely, because you've made much of this art worthwhile.

10 Things I Learned About How I Read the Internet in 2012

1. If you’re ranting, I will skim. I am not interested in vitriol, particularly because I’ve read so much of it that it all sounds the same to me. I want claims, evidence, and information. I can tell when you’re bending facts, and every time you make a leap of logic in order to continue attacking the opponent, my hand is getting closer to closing the tab.

2. If I’m tired or had a long day, and I have to use my scroll button at all in order to get to the point of your post, I will close the tab. More interesting was the discovery that this most frequently occurs on bad blogs and The New Yorker website. At my most generous, I will tab over and return to your work later. I don’t know when stream of consciousness and images became such a problem, but jeezy-creezy, learn to organize information.

3. Hell is somewhere north of Youtube’s comment section.

4. As much as I love long-form journalism, I don’t want to read it off a screen. 2012 was the first year where text on my monitor started to blur from reading too often. Even before eyestrain became a serious health problem, I hated clicking through five or eight NYTimes.com pages for a single article. Somehow the digital space has not reproduced the desire to consume great lengths of text, especially not when I’m spending so much time editing my own on that same screen. Will a tablet or Kindle change this? I don’t know. The Kindle does seem gentler on the eyes.

5. List posts are starting to work on me, but in tenuous fashion. Clearly they work enough for me to write one that includes discussion of them. I used to disdain them as the lowest possible thought, but now I’m so immersed in internet culture that I recognize a little of their utility. Now it’s merely any list that has two useless, redundant, boring or common sense items in a row that will get me to ditch out. Maybe I’ve already done so to you.

6. If there is a pop-up ad begging me to sign up for an RSS feed or mailing list, or to LIKE you on Facebook, I will close the tab immediately. You do not throw advertising in my face before I’ve read your content.

7. I don’t need gurus or motivational speakers. Seth Godin is for other people. When these things work for other people, they make me happy because those people are finding satisfaction. When those people try to turn me into a follower, I tune out.

8. Dozens of people will unfollow you if you tweet about trying to find a liver donor for your dying cousin.

9. Dozens of people will retweet you in an effort to find an Alzheimer’s patient who wandered from home.

10. It’s still big a mixed bag. Bring on 2013.

Why I'm On Facebook

Bathroom Monologue: The Original Tuesday

The meteor shower began Tuesday and ran into August. Isaiah only noticed them on his morning drive to work, with his left arm propped in the window, rolled down to enjoy the blow-by breeze. A shooting star cut his arm quite severely and he needed two band-aids once he got into the office.

Every morning the shooting stars found ways to cut Isaiah. They sliced his neck and gashed his brain. Soon he couldn’t type because of the bandage around his right hand. He wound up leaving the band-aids over his eyebrows because, even if they’d healed, the sting of removing tape from the fine hairs was too much for him.

Soon. Soon his office mates mocked his plethora of band-aids and gauze, and the special glasses needed to correct his vision after one comet collided with his eye. Some doubted his stories. No one else saw the meteor showers, but no one needs to see you cut in order for you to bleed. This, Isaiah learned.

There was a comfort to his adhesive, self-healing armor, and once Isaiah thought about it that way, he didn’t see why everyone didn’t want adhesive, self-healing armor. He replaced his socks with fresh gauze, and tailored shirts of hospital linens, and whenever he spilled something on himself he merely applied antiseptic and dressed the emergent area, and would then go back to eating his meatball sub and reading about the rites of mummification.

One Tuesday (after the original Tuesday), Isaiah removed his brain using a chopstick and a dental pick. Immediately nagging thoughts ceased to worry him. No longer was he affected by the peer pressure, or the second-guessing of his father, or by upcoming elections. Somehow it was only after pulling his amygdala out through his nose that Isaiah realized there had always been upcoming elections, and would always be upcoming elections, and no matter the result, he’d never been too satisfied with them, and so he would return to calculating obscene equations and reading about the lovers of pharaohs.

That was, no doubt, what made Isaiah remove his heart. It was easier than the brain on account of the passages between his ribs being more plentiful and generally broader than his nostrils. No sooner did he remove his heart then he found it much easier to talk around women. The ancient Egyptians did not believe the heart to be the seat of lust, but they were all dead, being ancient. This was another revelation he’d experienced since removing his brain, and he enjoyed explaining these things to the many women he met as they sheltered from meteor showers.

Women found him exceedingly clever these new Tuesdays. No other man had thought to bring a star-proof umbrella to the office, and so every lunch break he had his own personal harem clustered around him, at least until they made it to the deli. Then his harem scattered and took numbered tickets. It felt nice to be so popular.

Being so popular, Isaiah took more risks. He donated all his blood at a local drive, and several more organs for kids who needed transplants. He didn’t understand why people would want still more organs, but if so, then fine, have both of his kidneys, and both of his lungs, and all of the bone marrow you can eat, little medicinal vampires. He soon forgot why people wanted these things at all, and read long into the night of his occult texts to decipher why, and failed to decipher it, and decided their words had become deceiving because he tended to read them by the light of the meteor shower. There were no other lights these Tuesdays.

He came in second in the office footrace. He took a pottery class and sculpted himself a new face to wear over all his band-aids. One time his heel snagged on a sewer grate and his bandages unraveled until there was nothing left of him. Isaiah balled himself up and forced himself to go to work. He was out of sick days, and he thought the vampire in Accounting fancied him. He wondered if he might offer himself to wrap around her for when the months turned cold.

Then came August.

Bathroom Monologue: I hope my death inconveniences people.

"It was only this morning that I realized. I always thought I was more easy-going, just bury me and chat, think about the good times, and please God, let someone tell a joke during a eulogy. If you’ve ever been at a funeral, you know jokes during eulogies are the greatest public service west of clean water.

"But I was driving down the turnpike to work, and it kind of bubbled up in me. I wasn’t behind a funeral procession or anything. The morning was orange, and I was tired as every day I ever drove into the station. It simply stirred up in me.

"I hope my death inconveniences people. Not necessarily that an aneurysm makes me plow my pick-up into a fruit stand, but my family. I feel I’ve put enough hours into my life that I deserve to really shake up the people I leave behind. Let them cry and gnash their teeth and feel uncertain how the world will be without me. Not me to contribute to the household budget, or shovel the driveway, you see, but the uncountable, unquantifiable shitstorm that is the loss of a guy who worked really fucking hard and deserved you to feel like hell now that he’s gone.

"Never realized how badly I wanted to be mourned. Kind of fucked up."

#BestReads2012

Welcome to Best Reads 2012! If you've got a list of your own on a blog or tumblr, give us a link in the comments and I'll add you to this post.

This was a great year for my reading. My New Years Resolution was actually useful for once: to give up on books that made no engaging impression. I read some things that infuriated me, or non-fiction that I strongly disagreed with, but that’s good for me. What I didn’t do was wade through 600-page tomes of sloppy prose and stale characterization. That let me blaze through more inspiring books this year than in any recently remembered one. I actually ran into a problem mid-summer where I’d read so much fiction of incredible quality that merely good fiction few too unambitious and made poor impressions on me. That’s an unusual problem for me.

And so I’m very happy to run a list of those books that shook me up the strongest this year. These are my favorites. There’s no order to the list because I wouldn’t even say most are better than each other – they’ve different, with different appeals and strengths that don’t compare easily. Fantasy, SciFi, YA, comic books, literary fiction, classics, bestsellers… it’s been a good 2012 for reading.

Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny

The most ambitious success I’ve read all year. It begins with a dynamite premise: in the far future, a space colony is ruled by a caste of humans who have deified themselves by hording the only technology from the old world, living as Hindu gods in hedonism over a superstitious world. To embrace this rich concept, Zelazny leaps from style to style, his intros written like holy sutras and poems, some chapters done in punk or pulp narration, some in the style of religious retrospect, a seduction in monologue, then omniscient narration of a god turned predatory animal. One chapter features a dozen ellipses and paradoxes; the next ten don’t have a single one.

Beyond the success of seamless style adoption, Lord of Light also has the utmost faith in its readers. That premise of false gods? We don’t even know what they really are until deep into the novel, up which they might be real gods, or this might be a surreal fantasy.Halfway through you won’t even be thinking about the things you’ve figured out that the text hasn’t said, but has presented so many gaps that you’ve filled in. The ending is the greatest achievement, because there are at least two gigantic secrets on the final page that Zelazny never tips his hat about, but if you’ve been paying attention to their technology works, will rock you back in your seat. We’ve all seen twist endings. Precious few writers leave so many secret twists for you to find if you’re thinking.

A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. LeGuin

I dearly wish I’d grown up with this, because if you gave me Ged’s story at the same time as Bilbo’s, I might cherish them equally. It’s beyond succinct – it’s almost a true “good parts” version of an adventure story. Not too much time in Wizard School, not too much exposition on anything, with highly invested and personal stakes that take us around an incredible archipelago. It’s only a shame the later books in the trilogy didn’t land for me. I respect LeGuin writing them in different styles and taking them in different directions, but it was only this story that got me. It reads like it’s made only from 100% premium ingredients. And that dragon showdown?

Let the Right One In by John Avidge Lindqvist

As I said on the Halloween episode of Consumed, take whatever version of this you want. The Swedish move features some of the best child acting I’ve ever seen, Let Me in is a high-end remake, and the novel is the most robust version of all of them. It’s equal parts classic monsters (vampires and ghouls need their prey) and familiar monsters (child prostitution, bullies going too far), without choosing one as better or easier. The true achievement is that in an excessive harmful world, finding a kindred spirit validates continuing to live. It’s not a mere love story between two kids, but a story of two kids who are everything to each other: playmate, philosopher, leader, hero, boyfriend, distraction, confidant, and most crucial to the childhood experience, personal enigma.

Akin to Lord of Light, it also deserves a shout-out for its ending. In this case it’s because, four hundred pages in, there were still at least five different ways I could see the book ending. It doesn’t build up a solitary resolution; there are so many messy parts that can collide. What’s delivered is the best kind of ending: the one that is fitting to the characters.

Strangers in Paradise by Terry Moore

It seems like I always have a comic book on my list, but that’s because geniuses are attracted to the art form. Randall Nichols sent me this for Christmas two years ago, I believe in an attempt to embarrass me in front of my family when I unwrapped it and they all saw the sexy cover.

It may be the first Romantic-type work to make my #bestreads list, though according to conservative definitions, it’s not a Romance. Love is a prime motivation for most of the characters, such that the story is really about what this emotion does to people who can’t effectively approach or change each other. Love for a dying friend, love for a friend who can’t reciprocate, love you don’t understand – all told idiosyncratically, and as affecting when it’s funny as when it’s defeated.

Among Others by Jo Walton

In the Hugos this year, I actually voted for China Mieville’s Embassytown, yet Among Others is the contestant that’s stuck with me the longest. Based largely on Walton’s own childhood, the novel is the diary of a troubled girl. Something – we’ll find out what – severely hurt her leg, killed her sister, and caused her to be taken away from her mother’s custody. Yet as maudlin as some entries are, others are flighty in exactly the way teens actually are: naively judgmental, ignorant in the way of someone who never gets to talk to other people about sex or drugs or culture, flipping between enormous topics with only passing interest.

And then there’s the layer of her claiming to see fairies and know magic. She could be in a Fantasy world that no one else knows about, or crazy (we suspect her mother is, if she isn’t an evil witch), or a helpless teen mythologizing her own life to make it more livable. Her voice is so artless that figuring out the truth is slippery, right up into the end.

Embassytown by China Mieville

I’ll stand by Embassytown, though. It’s perilous SciFi, the kind of gutsy stuff precious few writers will even try. In a pocket of subspace, humanity has met and ghettoized an alien species that is truly unlike us. They speak from more than one mouth, they modify intent through external organs, and they have no capacity to fabricate – they can’t lie or even construct fiction, and host contests for who can get the closest to saying an untruth.

It’s Mieville, though, so it isn’t about bad-bad humans and goody-good aliens morally shaming us. Rather that alien culture is dangerous and has its own troubled histories, and we colonists are an external force driving social change. There’s a lot of Marxist stuff packed into the novel’s cheeks, but again, it’s Mieville. His language penchant for atypical characterization make even the most didactic passages worth studying.

The Leftovers by Tom Perrotta

Marketed as “The Secular Rapture,” Perrotta presents a world where one day, millions of people have simply vanished. No apparent cause is ever discovered, and there’s no commonality between the victims. The novel is about dealing with loss, and we watch a cult rise, a family fall apart, a man turn into a drifter, and a mother turn into a walking ghost. Unlike 9/11, this is something we can’t punish anyone for or beat. The event is a crucible, resonating with the many ways in which humans lose, and the many ways loss affects us. It has a bit of a Mitch Albom ending, but I hardly minded. Perrotta had certainly earned it.

Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch

The only author on the list that I actually met this year, and a very nice one. I would not have expected a friendly volunteer firefighter to have written this incredibly cynical novel about a hundred thieves and politicians backstabbing each other, but I’m glad he did, because Lynch has an incredible balance of wit and world. He pulled off flashbacks that I actually liked, for crying out loud. It’s easily one of my favorite recently-published Fantasy novels, and one of the strongest debut novels I’ve read in at least a decade. It even possesses strengths of picaresque, so often being about specific cons or ploys that only mushroom into something bigger later.

It’s the road novel without the road, but with mob bosses who raise sharks and dump their enemies in kegs of horse urine. And yet, for all its incredible (and sometimes, incredulous) cynicism, my favorite scene is a precious moment where two vagabond boys you expected to enter a blood feud give each other peace offerings and try to talk out why they don’t understand each other. How come mediation only showed up in one of the darker Fantasies I read this year?

More Best Reads!

1. Katherine Hajer
2. Cindy Vaskova

3. Johann Thorsson
4. Chaz Dillon
5. Elephant's Child

6. Chuck Allen

7. Katherine Nabity

8. Maria Kelly

9. T.S. Bazelli

10. Beverly Fox

11. Sonia Lal

12. Linda Wastilla

13. Danielle La Paglia 

14. Alexia

15. Claire McAlpine

16. Dorothee Lang

 

Book Reveal: David's Christmas Present

So yesterday we played the annual Bathroom Monologues Christmas game. I set up a word puzzle, this time being sixteen clues to the twelve letters in a book title. Four clues were red herrings. We had a few players on the blog as well as a few more on Facebook and Twitter, but no one got it this year before my brother - which is fair, since it was the title of his Christmas present. Some people, Richard Bon in particular, got very close. Let's go down the rabbit hole on the answer.

1. It's on the tip of your tongue. It's also in it.

-The letter 'T,' which Elephant's Child guessed. You move the tip of your tongue to pronounce the 'T' in 'tip,' and it's one of the letters in the word 'tongue.'

2. There are four red herrings in this puzzle - letters that don't belong. This is one of them.
-So naturally, this isn't a letter.

3. This letter is something two Christian afterlives have in common.

-Either the 'H' or the 'E' common in both 'Heaven' and 'Hell.' In this case, it's the 'H.'

4. The 1st, 4th, 5th and 7th presidents of the United States all had this letter in common - on a personal basis.

-'George,' 'James,' 'James' and 'Andrew' all have one letter in common: 'E'.

5. If #4 is a red herring, then this letter is one of the three initials from the document that severed the colonies' ties to Britain.

-This is just a red herring, but it would have been 'D,' 'O' or 'I' - the famous Declaration of Independence.

6. Commonly used to freeze things, but you have to keep it under high pressure.

-There are a few plausible answers, but the one in mind is liquid nitrogen. Nitrogen has a single-letter periodic abbreviation: 'N.'

7. This is a letter that occurs more than once in the phrase "red herring."

-Either 'R' or 'E.' This isn't a red herring, and our letter of choice is 'E.'

8. If #7 is a red herring, this is the only vowel in a certain form of precipitation. Do we have any today?

-It's winter in New York, so it would probably be 'snow' or 'sleet,' and thus, probably either 'O' or 'E.' It's the most obvious answer: 'O.'

9. What marks the spot?

It would have been 'X,' but this is a red herring. That's our third red herring.

10. Vote yay or nay.

'Y' or 'N,' the most obvious, right? And now we know it's 'N,' giving us the word 'Neon.' Maybe I'm being too cheeky.

11. Honey producing insect.

-A 'bee,'  or, 'B.' Richard Bon tore up a lot of this list last night, and nailed all of the final five letters to figure out it'd be 'Bible.'

12. Four Romans get drunk at a bar. Three get kicked out. Who's left?

-The punniest: four minus three is one, and in Roman numerals, that's 'I.'

13. If #12 is a red herring, then this is the first letter of the northmost country in Africa.

 -Did you think it was Morocco? Algeria? Tunisia? Actually a red herring in itself, but our final red herring.

14. The only letter used twice in the one-word title of the bestselling book of all time.

-Everyone got this one. It's 'B,' from 'Bible.' While some of you would call up a double 'L' or 'E' from 'The Holy Bible,' I knew David wouldn't, particularly since the final word of the secret book's title is becoming obvious by this point.

15.  The only consonant used twice in the name of an animal famous for spitting.

-'Llama' gives us 'L.'

16.  Once you use it here, this letter will be the most common one in this title

-'B' and 'E' appeared twice so far, but 'B' doesn't make so much sense here, does it?

Leaving us with John Kennedy Toole's The Neon Bible.

The clues you couldn't have known are that my brother loved John Kennedy Toole's other novel, A Confederacy of Dunces, and while we were painting the house earlier this year said he wanted to read what else Toole had written before his death. But you were on relatively similar footing, since he forgot he said that to me. He always forgets when he mentions books like that. It's how I know what to pick.

Thanks to everyone for playing!