Teaser Tuesday: The Year's Top Ten Tales of Science Fiction

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly blog hop hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. My book for this week is The Year's Top Ten Tales of Science Fiction, from 2009. You can guess how long it's been waiting on my shelf for me to read it.
 
The collection was edited by Allan Kaster, and this two-sentence excerpt comes from James Alan Gardner's "The Ray-Gun: A Love Story."

"In his mind's eye he imagined the incident again, only this time he casually somersaulted to safety rather than stumbling into a tree. That's how you're supposed to cheat death if you're carrying a ray-gun:
with cool heroic flair."






Gardner's short is just great, a logical progression from the Spider-Man influences it implicitly and explicitly drops. The anthology contains a lot of award-winning work, but the quality of the humor and humanity is a great start. I'm looking forward to meeting Gardner at EerieCon this weekend.

Everyone is welcome to Teaser Tuesday. The rules are as simple as:
• Grab your current book
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• Avoid spoilers! Don't give too much away or you'll ruin it for the very people you're suggesting it to.
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers

Bathroom Monologue: A Trail of Space Smut

They left the front door ajar. In the gap you can see one red stiletto-heeled shoe sitting on its side.

Two stumbling steps inward and you'll see another red stiletto-heeled shoe. There's also a press-on fingernail, with red polish, on the first stair. Looks like that came loose fumbling for the handrail.

Between the front door and the stairs: a slime trail. Translucent, green, two feet wide. It stretches up for four steps, where an imitation fox coat is strewn.

It's a tail of the trail. Three steps up, there's a pocket book.

Then an exoskeleton scalp-plate.

A pair of torn fishnet stockings.

A chrome breathing apparatus oxidizing in our atmosphere.

The crown jewel, on the very last step: the torn wrapper from an "ultra-thin" condom. The slime trail grows thickest there, leading away and consuming two halves of a discarded bra, several superfluous dermal spines, and a lipstick stain. The trail ends at the bedroom door.

You don't want to see what they left in there.

Fixing the Versatile Writer Award

Last week Steven Green gave me the Versatile Blogger/Writer award, and Richard Bon re-upped it with a shout-out. This marks at least the sixth time someone has been kind enough to think of me in their listing: I’ve previously received it from Marianne Su, Larry Kollar, Stacey Turner, Mari Juniper (who is apparently alive?) and Helen Howell.

It's been interesting to receive this award so many times. I mean, it's flattering. It's damned flattering, and thank you, it's staving off suicide, but it's interesting because over time the Award-game has lost all its game-properties. Now you just pass it on.

Well I'm not just passing it on, my friends. If winners can remove rules, then this winner is adding some. In honor of my sixth receipt, I’ll pass this on to six sundry bloggers, but they must answer six sundry questions.

1. What's the last sentence (from any of your work) that made you feel pride in writing?

2. What’s the last work of fiction that left you envying the creator? In what way did you envy he/she/it/them?

3. In your entire life, what have you most catastrophically failed at cooking or baking?

4. What field of science most frequently inspires you?

5. What task most recently frightened, grossed you out or otherwise intimidated you, such that you got someone else to do it?

6. Who is your favorite dead author? Or, if there is no single such person, name six of your beloved dead authors (in no necessary order).

As for the six writers I’d like to label Versatile this morning, in no necessary order:

-Laurita Miller

-TS Bazelli

-Craig Smith

-Lisa Vooght

-Carrie Clevenger

-Mark Kerstetter

If my six sundry targets answer the questions, then I guess I’ll have to as well. Since I have a writing convention next week, it’d be a great way to return home, and something fun to do on the train back. I’m only sure about #3.

Bathroom Monologue: The Best Movie Trailer You’ll Never SEE

Black screen. Somber and sober music plays.

In classy, wispy font, the following materializes on screen:

“From the producer of BLACK HAWK DOWN”

These words fade out. After a second, they are replaced by:

“And from the writer of ROCKY”

These words, too, fade out. After a second, they are replaced by:

“And from the Governor of CALIFORNIA.”

As these words fade,
the somber music swells in an orchestral imitation of a guitar riff,
though we must not sully the trailer with actual guitars.
Splash the title logo in style that reminds us of MGM.

“EXPENDABLES 2.”

And in much smaller font, where the “TM” would normally appear,
simply write:

“You’re Welcome.”

Bathroom Monologue: Black Knight > King Arthur

This was originally a joke to amuse a friend on the ride from the train station. At her insistence, I’ve transcribed it for posterity. I figure it’s at least as accurate as a SyFy TV Show.

So my favorite story of King Arthur pertains to the Black Knight. I don’t know if you’ve heard it – I first read it in an illustrated kid’s book that was hardly canon, and I’ve probably embellished it since.

King Arthur was king. Sword from the Stone? Merlin being all Gandalf? All these knights bowing to the crown? Okay, so good times in Camelot.

But! This one knight out in the wilderness refused to surrender his territory. He wore jet black armor, flew no standard, and absolutely spanked any loyalists who came to give him crap.

And Arthur’s like, “Well if I’m going to be king, I’ve got to smack a bitch.”

He saddled up and rode for the wilderness, and Merlin came along because Arthur was probably hosed. Arthur rides up, waves the Sword from the Stone, and goes, “Let’s do this!”

The Black Knight will “do this” all day long. He trots out in his huge set of black armor, gets in Arthur’s face, questions his parentage and leadership and probably the divine right of kings. A real democrat, that Black Knight.

Because they’re a couple of dudes with a couple of swords, they decide to fight it out. Bad news: Black Knight is really frickin’ good. Like, the real deal. He’s parrying, he’s knocking Arthur on his ass, he splits his helm, and cuts him up like he wants leftovers for sandwiches tonight. He even shatters the Sword from the Stone, leaving Arthur unarmed and probably wetting himself.

The Black Knight rears up for the kill, but the sun hits his eyes. It’s by sheer luck that Arthur gets the broken sword up, and sinks the shard into a weak spot in the Black Knight’s knee padding. It’s an instant gusher, and the Black Knight staggers off bitching about flesh wounds.

Merlin’s like, “Yo, whatever, time out,” and drags the Glorious King of All England right the hell out of there and to a shack in woods. This is a really good shack, run by a really good nurse. And that nurse is all crushing on Arthur, and soothes all his wounds, and maybe wants to do more, but the king is having none of it. It doesn’t matter that Merlin saved his butt, or that he took the Black Knight to a draw, or that the wilderness nurse is totally into him. He’s terminally depressed.

Merlin gets a little plan. He smacks the Glorious King of All England upside the head, points to the lake and says, “Walk it off.”

Arthur walks over to the lake. In the lake is this amazing godly-nature-nun. And she’s like, “Hey!”

And Arthur’s like, “Eh, I shouldn’t be alive.”

And she’s like, “It beats the alternatives. Get a job.”

“I’ve got a job, but I’m unworthy of it.”

“Get a girlfriend.”

“I’ve got one, and she’s really hot, and I don’t know her name.”

“Oh for the love of God,” she says, “take a sword and go away.”

And she throws a sword at him, and it’s really sweet, with a really sweet blade and a really sweet scabbard. It’s, like, the Excalibur of swords, which is probably why they called it that.

Merlin sneaks up behind Arthur, hugs his shoulders and says, “You should give that Black Knight another shot.”

Arthur’s rocky, but he’s healed and thinks if he punks the Black Knight then maybe he’ll prove he deserves the crown. He rides to the battle field, and the nurse from that shack meets him, and says she won’t let him fight alone. He says they should go steady. She says she’s Guinevere. We all act surprised.

So the Black Knight did not have a magic girlfriend who healed him. He hobbles out in his armor, goes, “Let’s play.”

They fight it out, and it goes way better for Arthur this time. The Black Knight’s still nimble, but all his blows deflected off Arthur’s armor. Finally Arthur chops through the sucker’s sword and knocks him on his ass. At swordpoint, he gets the Black Knight to surrender.

“You should run with my round table,” Arthur decrees.

Black Knight defers. “I don’t roll like that. I’ll be your man in the wilderness. I’ll lay the law down out here.”

Arthur doesn’t turn that down. He goes to celebrate, showing off his sweet Excalibur to Merlin. He says how he thinks it could cut through anything on earth.

“You think that’s cool?” Merlin asks, rhetorically. Being the wise man archetype, he only ever asked things rhetorically. “The sheathe makes you invincible.”

This hits Arthur right in the gut. Of course he won: he was an invulnerable kid in his prime beating on an injured middle-aged hermit. He’s about to turn around and confess to the Black Knight when Merlin grabs his collar.

“Art, check yourself,” the wise man instructs. “King’s got to do some hairy shit. Now the hairiest shit’s been done and all that’s left is finding Lady G an apartment in Camelot. Let’s bounce.”

The book never said what changed Arthur’s mind. Maybe it was fatigue of fighting, the lust to rule, or PTSD from what by all accounts was a legendary ass-kicking. All I know is that ever since I was a kid, I always liked the Black Knight better than King Arthur. He got screwed.

The 10 Most-Watched Movies of All Time

I was reading Time Magazine this week and came across an interesting chart in Richard Corliss’s column, “Truly Titanic” (April 16, Page 66-67). After analyzing what movies had earned the most money (they’re all recent, and not all of them terribly good), he listed “The Real Top 10,” those ten movies that had sold the most tickets in North American box office history. Better even than a Real Dollar chart, it plots just how many times someone paid to see the film.

1. Gone with the Wind (1939) – 202,000,000
2. Star Wars (1977) – 178,100,000
3. The Sound of Music (1965) – 142,200,000
4. E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) – 141,900,000
5. The Ten Commandments (1956) – 131,000,000
6. Titanic (1997) – 128,300,000
7. Jaws (1975) – 128,100,000
8. Doctor Zhivago (1965) – 124,100,000
9. The Exorcist (1973) – 110,600,000
10. Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (1937) – 109,000,000

If you have the data for world-wide most-ticketed movies, please share. But if I’d seen this data before, it had certainly not struck me. Does it strike you?

Effin' RomComs, right?

Firstly, five of these movies feature female leads. Arguably Titanic is split between two leads, the romantic couple, but I’d include it, while Snow White, Exorcist, Sound of Music and Gone with the Wind are inarguable. This rises against the traditional claim that people won’t go see movies with female stars. Every so often we get an exception, like Kill Bill, but they seldom start trends in the mainstream studios. Here, five of the top-attended movies are stories about women. There’s a spark of hope that you could get at some real change from here, even if you then had to acknowledge that one of your modern box-office queens is Twilight.

The second thing that caught me is it features two Horror movies. As a fanatic, it made my chest swell. I would not have guessed The Exorcist would be so big, not that it lacks all the necessary triggers, nor that it lacks a vast tail of cultural infamy. Jaws, on the other hand, I always expect to pop up on these sorts of charts. Ahh, Horror more mainstream than Saw.

The third and perhaps weirdest thing is that Snow White is the Disney flick to hit the list. That was his first feature film. Traditionally name-value creators and franchises build across their lifetimes, or at least crest further in. This goes not just for film (Nolan’s Dark Knight trounces the gross of Memento), novels (Stephen King didn’t even make big bestseller lists until Dead Zone) and videogames (Mass Effect 3 is just the most recent sequel to set the record in sales for its franchise). Walt Disney’s work was spectacular, though, and you might see this as an Avatar-like phenomenon, where people wanted to see 3D for the first time more than they ever wanted to see it again.

This man made some money.

What everyone takes away from this is that despite Star Wars Episode I: Phantom Menace and Transformers: Dark Side of the Moon grossing over a billion bucks a-piece, fewer people have actually gone to see them than the classics. The present population is bigger, arguably people have more time, and some movies certainly become flashpoints for their year, yet since E.T. in 1982, people have only really gone to theatres to see Titanic in numbers that rival the all-time draws.

Are we split up into niche-films that have polarized most film-going habits? Does this make us sad, because our blockbusters don’t reach as many people? Does that vindicate people who think modern movies stink? Does it spur us content-creators to try harder?

I don’t know, but even though I’m not in film, I’d really love to know what it means to my fellow artists.

Bathroom Monologue: Safe House, Green House – for Icy Sedgwick

It is two dozen miles north by northwest of Gotham, and five miles of overgrown dirt road from the nearest pavement. There are a total of six houses in the entire area, though only two that the state acknowledges as legally habitable.

Google Earth barely recognizes it. The town doesn’t get postal service or internet. On the best day only one cell company gets one bar of coverage, if you’re standing on top of the tallest boughs. The trees have gotten a lot taller in the last few years; a little taller with each of her four visits.

The people who live in those inhabitable houses think she’s the witch of this region and tend to her needs to appease her wrath. They strew fresh soil around her hard and upkeep the walls even when their own cave in. The Ivy House must be maintained, or the plants she leaves behind will eat them. They cannot warn outsiders, for they will not make it through the woods. Half their clothes were picked from static branches, with blotches of blood or spats of hair left from the people torn out of them. They know what awaits disobedience.

She sees this as the perfect hiding spot for breakouts from Arkham. Her house has sheltered her on six separate escapes. He has never caught her here, and it has swallowed a dozen detectives and masked crime fighters. No one else can make it to the Ivy House, and she never stays too long. She doesn’t want to spoil a good thing. She’ll only stay there a day, drinking sunshine, and then a night, to make some horrific appearance for the locals. It’s her form of upkeep.

Teaser Tuesday: The Warded Man

I'm trying out the Teaser Tuesday game this week. Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly blog hop hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. This week I'm reading Peter V. Brett's The Warded Man (Del Rey Books), which so far seems entirely worth evangelizing. My mini-excerpt hails from Page 97:



"Elona sat on the chair's arm,
laughing and leaning in,
her hand on his shoulder.


Leesha wished
she were a flame demon,
so she could spit fire on them."
 






I think we've all been there, right?

Everyone is welcome to Teaser Tuesday. The rules are as simple as:
• Grab your current book
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• Avoid spoilers! Don't give too much away or you'll ruin it for the very people you're suggesting it to.
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers

Bathroom Monologue: Against Hemingway

There’s a popular quote about writing from Ernest Hemingway:

“There is nothing to writing.
All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”

For some he remains a literary role model. So blunt; so honest; so uncompromising. His work bleeds the self they think he was. He produced a popular metafictional character. And because he produced some worthwhile words, people see him as a reason to drink and write, to dwell without checks or balances, and so-on.

I wish to bring something to his fans’ attention:

Ernest Hemingway is dead.

He blew out his brains with a shotgun.

They did not publish the wallpaper he bled on.

Please bleed responsibly. Getting help is substantially more important than fetishizing grit.

Bathroom Monologue: The People You Meet in Hell

"The girl whose glasses you mocked in third grade. The first person you ever beat in a fight. The first person who ever beat you in a fight. Every lover you cheated on. The sickly grandmother you never visited. Everyone you ever cut off in traffic, and the homeless people you stepped over, and the orphans who starved waiting for your call. They all remember, and they're waiting."

Bathroom Monologue: Indicators I Got Old This Year

-Put several items back in the grocery store in order to afford lettuce

-Began making my bed rather than just wrapping the sheets around myself when I got tired

-Marathon editing sessions began to hurt my eyes and vision;
concerned party said, “It looks like your mascara is running”

-Finally began giving up on bad books
rather than seeing every one through to the end

-Finally began giving away or selling
lots of books and other media I’m not using anymore

-Learned how to cook waffles for myself

-Spent a full weekend filing

-Calculated my LDL for the first time

True Stories of John: Friday the 13th

You don’t know me if you don’t know that I love Friday the 13^th. It is one of the few series in human history that is great without being good. It's marred by an undue reputation, for it's not a conservative vengeance trip. At its face-burning, bed-impaling best, it is the id eating itself, reveling in the things it punishes, and it stars the hardest working man in show business. I never imagined a hockey mask could so define Horror, and yet it has, doing for my generation what horns and a pitchfork did for the Medieval world.

So when Michael Bay said his Platinum Dunes would remake Friday the 13^th, I was excited. He couldn’t screw it up worse; it was already bombastic, prurient and downright dumb in every way his stuff was, only lacking the budget. He could just paste together the fun parts from a few of the movies and have a winner. Give me the hockey mask, machete and teens who should know better, and you’ll get this liberal pacifist’s money every time.

They set to release it on Friday the 13^th, 2009.  I looked forward to it throughout January, with such intensity that even friends who hated Horror were excited for me. Yet it was a rough period in my household, and the closer we got to that Friday, the less I thought I could justify the price of a ticket. As the sky grew orange and the shades of the trees around my house swelled, I resigned my dream. I’d just stay home and polish some short stories.

I was opening Microsoft Word when the power went out. My desk faced the windows; down the street and around the lake, every house had gone dark. My battery back-up beeped in protest as I stared outside. Dusk rushed in, turning the surrounding forest into a silhouette.

I saved everything on the computer, shut down and gathered candles. This was obnoxious, but hardly fate. I could sketch plots in my notebook and maybe finish reading the Poe’s Children anthology before bed. I was carrying the books down the stairs in search of a flashlight when I witnessed perhaps the craziest thing I’ve ever seen in my life.

Light flickered through my front windows. I peered through the curtains and found headlights. Actually, I found a figure in those headlights. It was a large, stocky man in washed out coveralls, carrying an axe over his head. He was in the street, and I swear he was looking right at me.

It took me a few moments to realize it was a neighbor home from construction work. Ironically, I only realized this when he unpacked the chainsaw from his pickup truck.

But that was enough for me. I told God and Michael Bay that they had won, I told my family goodbye, and got in the damned car. I’d go to the stupid movie instead of sitting in the dark all night. I was laughing to myself when the radio buzzed on. The Talking Heads’ “Psycho Killer” was playing.

I drove very fast.

Bathroom Monologue: No Thanks

“He could have thanked me.”

“He could have thrown his catheter at you.”

“I was holding the door for him!”

“To the stairs!”

“I was being polite!”

“He was in a wheelchair!”

“Well I couldn’t push the button for the elevator. You’d already done it.”

“That’s so far from the point that it hurts a little.”

“Was I supposed to hold his catheter?”

“No, you were supposed to leave him alone.”

“We’re just supposed to ignore the handicapped now? Way to be progressive.”

“Why don’t you go hold the door to the stairs for a while?”

“Are we leaving?”

“You are.”

What Makes You Put Books Down?

Yesterday I discussed my resolution to stop reading bad books midway if they don't improve, breaking my lifelong habit of finishing everything. It was wasting my time, keeping me from works I enjoyed, and maybe even making me some enemies. This leaves me with two questions for you, exalted audience:

1. Do you abandon books?

2. If so, how do you decide what to ditch?

Do you look for particular qualities in your Science Non-Fiction, your Horror, your Paranormal Gothic Romances or whatnot? I've noticed the most people ditching books for having too many typos early on. Sloppy writing, sluggish pacing, and generally being boring are other common complaints, but I don’t know if these are reliable, and they worry me for my genre.

Yesterday I mentioned how I find the first hundred pages of George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones to be the dullest in the series. Excluding the prologue, they are a static period that introduces character upon character, where the biggest actions are riding and eating, and where most everyone stands around being discontented in some way until I just wanted to punch them. The book only hits its stride a few hundred pages later, where it becomes one of the best works of contemporary Fantasy I've yet read.

If I ditched all books because the openings were unappealing, I’d have missed out on some great late nights under the lamp. Right now I'm tearing through N.K. Jemisin's Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, and I can't properly express how much better the second hundred pages are than the first. Once the double-soul stuff comes up? Yeine becomes much more interesting, as do the gods around her.

This concern for A Game of Thrones and Hundred Thousand Kingdoms extends to all Speculative Fiction. I really couldn't have figured that either book would improve as drastically as it did from what was laid out early on; their early periods are handled like typical setup periods. In all the contemporary SpecFic I’ve read since graduating college, fewer than ten novels hit the ground running. You know the typical start, don't you? Tell me if this sounds familiar:

The prologue doesn’t plug into the first chapter. World-building is overwhelmingly described more than it is depicted, you're told about characters rather than watching them behave, and there are inevitable hefty tumors of dialogue between people we don’t care about yet. We're supposed to care when authors set up conflicts, but because we're not really into the narrative yet, it feels more like consuming a documentary than an action flick. Exposition rules this zone, and unless that exposition is cleverly written or about something highly unusual for the genre (think Terry Pratchett, or Weiss & Hickman), it’s a chore to read.

You all know this stuff. This is the rite of passage into The Good Parts. Secondary World fiction particularly need you to set up the stage; once it’s set, the characters will (God willing) do cool stuff. And usually they do! While only ten books may have hit the ground running, many more turned out well.

Until I had this resolution, I unthinkingly put up with weak openings while simultaneously nodding at an industry that ranted about pacing and exposition. It’s either hypocrisy or paradox. I’m not sure which.

But this leaves me with the big question: what do you look for in your openings? Are you good at spying out which books will pan out well? What are your reliable indicators?

Broke My New Years Resolution

In November and December of last year several of my peers and professional authors beat me up over my reading habits. I finished everything I read, no matter how much I hated it. And for years I wrote reviews of all but five of the books I’d finished.

This was, they explained, “life-shorteningly dumb.”

The negative reviews potentially made those authors my enemies before I’d ever met them, and I’d wasted my time by completing books I didn’t enjoy. Sometimes I’d tried to study how novels were failing to better my understanding, but no matter the approach, I never actually got much out of analyzing a book that stunk. And because often I hesitated to read at all when the present book was bad, I slowed down my overall consumption.

Thus all I got was a lugubrious experience with the option of additional negative experiences some day should an author find the review and take it personally. There are nightmare stories of major authors whose careers were hampered not by authors, but the author’s vengeful agent or publisher. It’s something to think about the next time you bag on Dan Brown.

My 2011 resolution worked great: to write a damned novel. I’d gone too many years without a new one. If you’ve been following The Bathroom Monologues for long, you know I conquered that bastard. I’m drawing up skeletons for additional ones now.

So my 2012 resolution was to put some books down. If it didn’t show promise, insight or improve toward the end of the first hundred pages? Then give it back to the library, or lend it to a friend who might like it better, or just shelve it.

Also less of that secondary policy of mine: shelving a book over and over again, to give it another chance in six months, or when I was in the mood for Gothic Horror, or whatever caprice would inevitably strike.

With over a hundred unread books in my closet, shelves and hard drive, keeping old ones was bloating the list. Also, historically? Most of the books that didn’t appeal on the first go usually didn’t fare better on the third or fifth. I had to get the guts to fire some novels from my employment.

It’s April, and I’m uneasy about the policy. Outliers still haunt me. It wasn’t until my fifth reading that the brilliance of Animal Farm struck me. I stand by my belief than the first hundred pages of A Game of Thrones are the dullest in the whole series; what great characterization I’d have missed if I gave up on it there.

It’s April, and I’ve finished eleven books. I’ve discarded six others midway through and feel no guilt, because regret has been paved over by the good works that have taken up more of my free time. It’s better that I got to P.G. Wodehouse’s Mr. MullinerSpeaking and Tom Perrotta’s The Leftovers sooner, or so I insist to myself when the outliers start a-haunting.

I’ve reneged on the resolution three times so far. One is obvious: for National Novel Reading Month, the activity devoted to catching up on classics, I slogged through all of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, which led both to much personal groaning and much public scorn for my lack of taste. True to form, I reviewed it. I’m not afraid of Austen’s publishers, and probably not afraid enough of the damage this could do to my reputation. 

The best news is that in this period I’ve felt roughly equally bad reviewing what I disliked and ditching books that failed to impress. Why is this good news? Because if I can even convince myself of the parity, then I can make an easier dash for the exit on the next clunker.

Doubts and outliers still haunt me, though, and I’ll have some questions about your reading and unreading habits tomorrow.

Bathroom Monologue: A reader writes in that hippos aren’t herbivores and eat people

Hippopatmus Amphibius photo from BS Thurner Hof, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nilpferd_auftauchend_0505012_.jpg

“Hippopotami are mostly herbivores. They have been caught eating carrion and have killed enough people that they’ve at least swallowed a few on happenstance. But their intestines aren’t set up for breaking down meat: eating it makes them barf and go nuts. Like, worse-than-mating-season nuts.

“If you fed a hippo nothing but meat it would die from malnutrition, and in the mean time, go drunk-driver-except-the-driver-is-the-car levels of nuts. Please, take this as a writing prompt.

“Now, none of this is to say that hippos won’t absolutely ruin you. They’re territorial, cranky when horny, swim faster than you, run faster than you, have wonky vision issues, and are enormous. Carnivores have the reputation for murder, but a hippo will kill the heck out of you. Herbivores can still be dicks.”

John Wiswell Died on Easter

Easter is by far my least favorite holiday. Not for a gripe against Jesus, or about Christianity and Paganism, or that weak-willed whining of adults who as kids had the labor of twice a year dressing for church. It was on this holiday in 1981 that Dr. John Wiswell died, and that sort of a thing sticks with a John Wiswell.

I grew up hearing he was my guardian angel. I also grew up hearing he was an atheist. He was a sickly man who couldn’t get out of bed on his own, and he almost left my grandmother for another woman. They couldn’t have kids and adopted them to build a loving family, and he kept a harmful emotional distance from them. For most of my childhood he was a photo on my father’s desk that Dad wouldn’t talk about. My paternal grandfather managed to exist as a highly contradictory set of myths, myths that were retold and reappropriated every April.

All myths tied to the central Easter story. I spent most Easters at my grandmother’s; I’m told my birth saved her life, coming so shortly after the loss of her husband. That’s one of many things I heard from her, or my father on the drive to Maryland, or my mother on the drive back. That Easter story had a damnable habit of changing.

There’s a 1981 Easter dinner, my Mom and Dad sitting at John Wiswell’s dining table, John telling his son he wasn’t good enough for his wife. In some versions he was joking; years later, after my mother divorced him, more versions pitted John as serious. I remember one Easter Story where he was so excited over the prospect of a grandson, arguing over the best place for him to be born, though I also recall one about him spending that morning in the basement workshop, alone, refusing to tell anyone what he was doing. The most common is the 1981 Easter dinner where a family member came out as gay, and John was so visibly shaken that he went upstairs to lie down. In every version of the Easter story he went upstairs to lie down, and he never returned.

It was a heart attack that left my grandmother a widow for my entire lifetime. She’s looking at her 95^th birthday this summer. That’s one of the ways I mark my life: I’m the length of time that the sweet old lady has been without John Wiswell.

None of the John Wiswell Easters are necessarily true, but they combine to a very good primer on how people’s agendas define history. Even when I was too naïve to really doubt each contradictory tale, I understood they came because my father was particularly morose that weekend, or my grandmother felt particularly nostalgic, or from whatever was behind my aunt’s cloudy eyes. I appreciated and internalized all the myths.

Perhaps I internalized them too well. In recent years I’ve tended to fall very ill around Easter, and this mortality leads to inevitable morbidity. On a recent Easter, after having dinner with a wonderful lesbian couple, I actually had to excuse myself and go lie down. Staring at the plaster ceiling, uncertain if I could sit up, it was hard not to dwell on the myths of John Wiswell.

So around Easter I tend to fall ill, and I tend to grow grim. It’s not a gripe against Jesus, or my health, or even against any John Wiswell in particular. It is a long habit, no better than Samuel Clemens thinking he’d go out on the comet he rode in on. Actually, it’s worse – at least his was zany.

But contrary to a lot of secular thought, we don’t get to pick our myths. If this day means anything to you, then I wish your order of myths treats you well.

Bathroom Monologue: John's asked to talk someone’s husband into practicing the route to the hospital for when she gives birth

"Hey, there's an eight pound tumor shooting out of ____'s crotch. Do you really want to rely on a satellite telling you to turn left, or do you want check the drive once or twice? Because that's the situation, and the stakes are as steep as a placenta splattering off your windshield."

 (Actual names withheld because I don't want them to kill me)

Bathroom Monologue: In Sheep's Clothing Redux

Lobo stalked the herd for two hours. They were lazy things, like bleating clouds drifting across the field. He salivated, but couldn’t give in. If he attacked too soon, they’d scatter and he’d only get one of them. If he was smart, he could knick sheep from the periphery of the flock for days. Forget his pack and their rules. The life of a lone wolf was sexy.

He kept his muzzle down, hiding in the willows. One gamy sheep straggled from its herd, its dim face nuzzling the grass. Lobo panted. It was far from the most tempting of the flock, but Lobo was good for any meat.

It strayed further and further, almost straight to his hiding spot. Its head bobbed around, mouth never opening for a bite of grass. Lobo wondered if it was developmentally challenged. Then its head flopped back. Lobo stared in horror as the top of its head came to rest against its spine, as though a convulsion had broken its neck.

That wasn’t it. Instead, jutting from beneath the sheepskin, a grey wolf’s muzzle protruded. The sheep head and hide were a disguise, draped over a she-wolf. She bared her fangs at Lobo’s brush.

She growled at him. "You look like a bottle cap."

"What?"

"Screw off."

Lobo remained down. The she-wolf in sheep’s clothing padded up to his willows. He felt foolish now, seeing her shapely wolf’s legs protruding out from under the sheep hide.

“I see you, moron. This is my flock. Get out of here.”

“No way,” Lobo whispered. “You get out of here. You’ll spoil everything.”

She threatened, “I’ll cry wolf.”

“So you’ll be busted.”

“I’ll just put the mask back on. They’re not very bright.”

Lobo rubbed his nose in the dirt. He wasn’t good with inter-wolf conflict. It’s why he was trying the loner deal. “We can share. There’s enough sheep for both of us.”

“They’re not for eating.”

Lobo looked at the pudgy critters. Two of them ambled into each other and their fat deposits jiggled. “They look like they’re for eating.”

“Listen, once upon a time I thought that way. I dressed up like them to get in. But they’re really nice. They play games. We jump over fences to make kids fall asleep. Plus, sheep fur is harder to digest than you think.”

Lobo growled as low as possible, wanting to threaten her but not alert the others. The she-wolf was unmoved.

“Last warning,” she said. She jerked her head forward and the sheep mask fell back over her face. Its eyes were actually pebbles. Lobo couldn’t believe he hadn’t noticed it before. “Get out of here before I tell my friends on you.”

“Just you try it. Some day I’m going to eat you by accident.”

The she-wolf turned tail and ambled back into the fold. Sheep-walking didn’t look so hard, Lobo thought. All you needed was a costume and to trot around like you were drunk. After a moment, Lobo couldn’t even tell which was her. Wolves weren’t much brighter than sheep.

A particularly mouthwatering sheep emerged from the herd. He was bursting with meat, at least twenty times the size of his friends. Lobo had to bite his paw to prevent himself from pouncing the husky thing.

It ambled towards Lobo’s brush. The ground shook under its weight. Slowly, Lobo’s feast-enthusiasm turned to anxiety. There was something wrong with the giant sheep. Its legs were tree-stump thick and grey. Its hide was messy, almost like a patchwork of dozens of sheep-sheddings.

Lobo squinted. He wasn’t much of a thinker, but there was something off about the giant sheep’s head. It drooped straight down like there was no skull under it. Plus, he didn’t think there was a nose or mouth. If he didn’t know better, he’d think it was a sheet of paper with the word “FACE” written on it.

The giant sheep paused before Lobo’s brush. Lobo looked up and saw under the paper. Two massive nostrils glared back down at him, exhaling a gust of wind. The hippo in sheep’s clothing grunted.

“Baaaa.”

“Are… are you kidding me?”

“I’m a vegetarian, but I have a four foot mouth. You want to try this?”

Lobo whined up at the massive nostrils. He wormed away on the ground, head bowed, never getting back up to his paws. There had to be easier meals out there. Maybe he could eat the willows.

Bathroom Monologue: Nice Life, Ugly Poem

Life’s a character study,

full of short stories,

little of it novel,

all of it poetry (though poetry’s unpopular).

A genetic serial,
a historical fiction,

the unauthorized true story,

its binding invisible,

pages dog-eared only when lived by a dog.

Some editions issued in audio,

available in green paperback,

and quotable spare change;

the e-book’s cheaper, but it’s not the same as going outside.

If living the biography’s overwhelming,

crib notes will be made available via headstone.

Bathroom Monologue: When You Lose

“Kid, you’re in your first year, and he’s had eight decisions in his last nine matches. He’s taller by two inches and heavier by twenty-five pounds if he skipped breakfast. He’s never been choked out, and he’s only submitted once, and that was to the current champion. I don’t mean to douse your spirits when I say you’ll lose. You’ll lose. But you’re faster than him, and he leads with his right because his left elbow has bothered him in the last two matches. It won’t save you. Tonight, I’ll probably be taping ice packs to various parts of your body. But you can go out there and make a spectacle. Make people look at you. If you do something ludicrous, you’ll be replayed across Youtube and TV. It doesn’t matter if he shrugs off your spinning kung fu kick – in fact, if he knocks you out right after it, you’ll be a sensation. You never should have been put in this fight, but you can make sure everyone remembers you after it, and that’ll mean you keep your career.”

Bathroom Monologue: The Vampire Mirror

"Not polished silver and glass; this model features a liquid crystal screen with twelve discretely embedded micro-cameras registering heat, air patterns and ambient coloration. If you have crumbs in your beard or your mascara is running, all the better, for these are tangible and scannable clues as to how you look. Using processors that would make Steve Jobs blush and software typically reserved to FBI suspect sketching technology, it auto-fills details of the human body based on what’s most likely to be there. Is it real time? Not yet, for now it’s surreal time, but even our first-generation technology is sensitive enough for Dracula to floss using its reflection."

“Would you drink apple juice if you knew a sterilized cockroach had touched it?” –Everyone, paraphrasing Jonathan Haidt

One of the questions Jonathan Haidt asked people for his book, The Righteous Mind, was if they would drink a glass of apple juice if a sterilized cockroach had been dipped into it. Haidt explains that the cockroach has absolutely no disease or hazardous particles on it; it does not affect the juice in any tangible way. So would you sip?

The press’s response has largely been that this question belongs at a slumber party, not academic work, but it got me thinking. My snap reaction is that I wouldn’t, because that’s gross. As an adult I’m supposed to pretend I have deliberated responses, but I know and want to out snap-reaction thinking.

A few seconds later I thought about sitting at a table with some squeamish friends. I envisioned that all of these friends (not naming names) would refuse and squirm in their chairs. And my contrarian nature would seize on the harmlessness of the juice, compelling me to drink it just to tease them. Removed from the circumstances, I realize I’d gleefully haze my friends for the same inhibition that I’d otherwise have.

Then I thought of those times when I couldn’t afford food. Would I drink it then? You bet your food stamps I would.

Right now I have food in my house, but no fruit or juice. Might I supplement my vitamin intake tonight with this cockroach-touched juice? It’s quite possible, especially if it wasn’t apple juice. I don’t like apple juice.

Or if I’ve just read one of those reports about how juice is sugar-heavy without the digestible fiber to offset it? I’m a sucker for those, affecting my drinking choices for short periods of time afterward.

And what am I getting out of the deal? Does a doctor offer me five bucks to drink a glass of sterile-cockroach-touched juice? In that instance I think I wouldn’t, believing there’s no way a doctor would pay me money for something that didn’t have a secretly questionable chemical in it.

But if the doctors swore upon pain of litigation that the juice was clean? Then I’d probably take the fiver.

What about days when I’m feeling sicker, when the syndrome is heavier, and my thinking slows and I get generally cranky? I’d be much less receptive to the roach-juice, just as I’m less receptive to trying anything new in those periods.

Never mind the setting, circumstances or who made the offer (if Dick Cheney dipped it, you’re looking at a different outcome than if my germophobe sister did). I couldn’t help thinking about personal circumstances, things like mood or recent personal issues that could sway me in that case, and that do routinely sway my behavior. Had I not been in a receptive mood when I first heard about Haidt’s book, I probably wouldn’t have looked it up and have added it to my next buying list. I believe most human beings are arbitrary like me in these regards. We’re not randomly capricious, but we bring more into situations than absolutist answers account for.

You, dear reader, have factors that would influence how you’d respond to this post today as opposed to next week, and next month, and while you have the worst flu of your life, and right after you get the best hummer of your life. What mood are you in?

Bathroom Monologue: Miss Anthrope

They had the top half of a centaur, but fewer and clumsier legs. They were slower than sauropods, and kept getting trampled under them. They had neither the artistic nor scientific know-how of gremlins; the few golems they built were uninventive knock-offs. They had the sex drives of imps, without their carnal creativity. Their offerings in entertainment were few.

They were susceptible to influenza, tentacalia or vampirism. And they made woefully generic vampires, the only new trait being that some of the young ones sparkled. There was nothing special about their immune systems. Succubae and incubae could eat them by the bed-load. At best, they were junk food.

In many ways it was a two-eyed cyclops, lacking their size and strength, but including their gluttony and cruelty, and thereby leaving them socially unappealing.

Really, they were generous to let the humans live. It’s sheer luck they took over the world.

Bathroom Monologue: John’s Mass Effect 3 Ending *SPOILERS*

JACK in control of a biotic high school was hilarious, so why stop there? After not dying in the final battle because they played no visible part in it, Jack has to expand her school. She buys what used to be Manhattan for some shiny beads, since its previous owners are dead and can’t really prove who owned what anymore. She hires GRUNT as her new Gym teacher, TALI for Computer Education, and GARRUS of the grand calibrations for Mathematics. So subsidize their education system the kids manufacture the caustic Turian and Krogan food since, you’ll recall, those races are now stuck here and can’t eat anything we do. Menu options are divided into healthy “Paragon” and more expensive but more entertaining “Renegade” sections. McMordin’s soon spreads into the first post-apocalypse fast food chain, with trillions of enthusiastic customers, though the sign outside “ONE MILLION REAPERS GOT SERVED” never changes.

Bathroom Monologue: Almost Clever

Abner shouldered into the door and turned the heavy key in the knob’s lock. Then he threw the deadbolt above, and latched the sliding bolt above it. He kicked the doorstop down for additional resistance, wondering if he had time to install a bar like those old French castles used to have.

When he decided he didn’t have the time, he trudged into the living room and dragged out the heaviest chair he owned, wedging it under the doorknob. Abner surveyed the mess with approval for a few seconds before thinking better, and ran back into the living room and dragged out the chest of drawers, heaving the oak monstrosity up behind the chair just in case.

He leaned against the wall, panting and perspiring into the floral wallpaper. He rested his head against the security panel, fingers hitting the code to turn it on. Even with the syndicate after him, he’d never felt so safe as just then.

That’s when the bomb went off and took down his entire apartment complex. Mercifully, the explosion was so needlessly huge that Abner never had the moment to register that he was unsafe. He died feeling almost clever.

Mass Effect 3 Podcast

The new episode of Consumed is online, featuring myself, Nat Sylva and Max Cantor. This week's episode is explicitly and entirely devoted to discussing Mass Effect 3. There's a controversy around the ending, but we approach the game holistically, discussing:

-Squad choices and New Vs. Old characters
-Writing, and the game's problem with urgency in a crisis-plot
-Rushed development cycle and DLC
-The altered conversation system
-Multiplayer, and getting eaten alive in it
-The incredible ambition of the series overall
-And hey, that game has a beginning too.

Other topics beg not to be spoiled here. It's about as detailed a discussion of ME3 as you'll find on the internet. I don't think there was anything we all agreed upon.

You can download Spoiled: Mass Effect 3 here.

As a bonus, we included three editions of the podcast with three different endings. How different are they? That depends how different you thought Mass Effect's endings were.

Bathroom Monologue: LOBBYGAGGING (Proposed Neologism)

Many match-making programs feature a lobby system that puts partially-completed groups of users into a chat room while they wait for enough members to join. Most of my exposure to electronic lobbies are in videogames, waiting to fill up a team so we can go lose at Left 4 Dead. Yet in every game or other program in which I’ve ever been shunted into a lobby, there’s come at least one time when no one else joins no matter how long I wait or what settings I tweak. This has happened on game consoles, PCs and Macs, on indy games and blockbuster titles. You wait around until it’s obvious nothing will change, then start up a new lobby, which fills up shortly, and it becomes evident the previous lobby somehow fell out of priority in the system.

I feel like anyone who messes around on the internet has been stuck in such a spot. It’s destiny; no multi-user code is perfect. But a persistent problem that causes users to be stranded in a lobby, itself lagging while they are forced to lollygag, deserves a name. In fact, I think it deserves exactly one name.

Ladies and gentlemen, from henceforth please call this event “LOBBYGAGGING.”

We all win if this works out.

Bathroom Monologue: Gaia Man

The sun nudges his hips. Tides lap at his face and hips, tugging at him, sedimenting his hide, begging him to play. In youth, he liked nothing more than the waltz with the heavens across that spray. Now, he doesn’t have the will to get up.

He’s so tired. Just one hand feels like it weighs a billion tons, and his joints are locked in fossils and granite. When he tries to stir and put on a show for the elements, he finds his fissures are deeper than ever, shooting pains down the tectonic plates of his spine.

He collapses into the geography, simply unable to rise with this day, this year, this age. He’s been so tired for so long that he can’t remember the last time he really did something in the world, yet before he grew old, didn’t he do enough? Can’t those civilizations living on his hide figure it all out without him?

His legs are too vast to move, and it’s so warm beneath the grass and shores. It’ll be cold if he gets up. He’s earned the right to warmth. Even his eyelids, hanging sheets of shale, are so wizened he can’t tell if he’s opened them. He doesn’t ask to dream. He just wants to lie down and let the stupid humans do it for themselves for once.

True Stories of John 20: Naked and Bleeding in a Hotel

In September 2011 I shared a writing prompt based on real life. It was a sentence I spoke out loud in a hotel in Maryland:

"I've only been in this perfectly nice hotel for ten minutes and I'm already naked with blood on the floor."

I promised to tell the truth behind it if enough people wrote stories inspired by the line, or if everyone nailed Danielle La Paglia's birthday challenge. Well, last week you all nailed the latter. Now it's time for me to fess up.

It was the first day I realized just how old I am. I passed through a grand lobby with a complimentary piano, took the wide elevator by myself, and slid into an air-conditioned hotel room replete with HD television and a view of a busy metropolis - and my first thought was, "Joy, they've got an ironing board!"

There's no good way to confess that I ironed the sweat out of my clothing. It was a toiling sojourn in 100-degree weather and I only brought so many shirts. When I realized how easy it was to freshen up my button-down, my t-shirt followed, and then my underwear. Don't you judge me. We all do stupid things when we're alone, I just confess them, though I may also take them further than others.

If I loitered any longer my body would register that the travel was over and collapse, so I waddled into the bathroom to get shaving out of the way. I've got an Irish potato face, the pores begging to betray me on any stroke of a razor. This time my skin held up until the last swipe, at which point my chin opened up with what I still feel was unnecessary vigor.

I spun around and bent to get toilet paper to stop the bleeding, but the sudden motion just made it worse. My blood spattered onto this otherwise pristine beige floor. One drop hit my bare knee and gave me unwanted perspective about a naked fat man bleeding in his hotel. It got funnier when I smelled the iron burning my used underwear. It kept getting funnier all night, even after I got clothes on again.