Liebster Award, Take Two (Thanks Katherine!)

You can tell the Liebster Award has made its circuit of our community as it's come back to me. I first handed it out on December 23rd after Mark Beyer bestowed it upon me. Katherine Hajer was kind enough to give me a second dipping.

Now I've already handed it out and given the random facts, but Katherine has given me eleven new questions to field. I had a lot of fun with these, and I hope you will too.

1. Chocolate or vanilla?
   Chocolate to excess. At any given time at least ten pounds of me is chocolate, even if I haven’t eaten it recently. It owns real estate on my ass.
   
   
2. Tea or coffee?
   Tea, especially black tea or raspberry tea with raw honey. It’s become a key instrument in freeing me for soda. I’ve never liked coffee.
   
   
3. What colour is Thursday (and why)?
   Caucasian. G.K. Chesterton didn’t write much fiction about people of color.
   
   
4. What's the first thing you remember?
   The Big Bang. It’s a false memory, but you can’t pre-date it.
   
   
5. If a stranger were to open your fridge door and look in right now, what would be the first thing they noticed?
   Me shrieking in terror at an intruder. Then the bat swinging down.
   
   
6. What made you decide to start writing a blog? 
   I was already writing Bathroom Monologues for years beforehand. An agent recommended every author have a blog, and I figured, I wasn’t really doing anything else with all these bits of prose. What was their purpose if not to share them?
   
   
7. If your home got featured in a house & home sort of magazine, how would you describe your decorating style?
   Lysol.
   
   
8. What was the last book you read that you recommended to other people, and why?
   I’ve tweeted about Tom Holt’s Blonde Bombshell multiple times, posted a review to Goodreads and on Facebook. Before I’d even finished it, I bought it for someone’s birthday present. If it actually got remaindered, I’ll be depressed. It is madcap absurd, about a bomb destined to blow up earth that gets a conscience and a libido, a genius tech engineer who’s paranoid unicorns are following her, and all because we’re the scum of the universe who had the audacity to invent the addictive nuisance of music. Every page is sharply written. You can read my full review of it here.
   
   
9. What's your idea of the perfect Sunday?
   Wake up early but rested, probably around 8:30, when not much is going on and there’s ample light. It’s one of my rare off days from exercise and physical therapy, and the one day per week I get to eat red meat. Tacos and pasta simmer while I exercise a bit, and read some incredible author. If football doesn’t come on soon, then curling had better. One or two friends stop by, but not for too long, because I’m usually a cognitive hermit. Either from then or from my relations on the internet, brave new things are discovered, like GIFs of rampaging Godzilla toys, some obscure Japanese wrestling match, or an author that someone threatens my life if I don’t try. I do try it and my whole week will be better for reading them. And all the while, I accidentally write an incredible amount without having noticed I was working.
   
   
10. Socks or barefoot?
    
11. What's next?
    The perfect Sunday.

Bathroom Monologue: My Kirk/Picard Slash Fiction (Dedicated to Shelly)

Picard: Earl Grey.

Kirk: Don't you... like it hot?

Picard: You make it so.

The Only Thing Worse is the Cure, Part 2

This is the much-requested second installment of The Only Thing Worse is the Cure. For the first chapter, click here.

For the entirety of my adult life, and for whatsoever of my immaturity I can recall, I have been observant to a perpetual war the angels and demons in every wall and fiber of our world. They are here now, in the bricks of this cell, in my mattress and pillow. They are in my hair. They are my hair. They compose the very door that protects you from me. Their battles are legion; they are infinite and infinitesimal. The demons circle around the angels in band of increasing number, as though waiting to strike, while the angels circle around something more central, the nature of which I have never determined. Perhaps it is The Lord Himself, or the Gates of Paradise. Yet they never battle over Him; in any case I have observed, demons leave their flocks for other shores, emitting sparks, static heathens.

I still perceive these miniscule wars, yet for the first time in memory, they do not terrify me. Strange how they ever did; I do not know the nature of the trick. As soon as you pushed that pram down this hall, the emotional reaction has simply severed. I see plainly now that they will not attack us, or undo our world; they merely are. Circles around circles around a neutral enigma.

As my neighbor now realizes he is the splendid Saint Augustine, and his neighbor professes to no longer crave human flesh, I am to puzzle on the meaning of delusions.

Perhaps it is the will of The Lord Himself that insists I see into the matters angelic and demonic, and thereby render unto you this: I see nothing unlike in the boy as to any other boy. He has no excess of angels or demons. Anyone in this house who sees magic in his constitution is still possessed of madness. He is a plain child who would, under other circumstances, require no more than baptism and proper diet.

Yet I appreciate that we are not under other circumstances. Should the manic paralysis of my wardens pass, they will be most cross with your young master, as will any authorities pursuing him. The mind lurches with your devotion to him.

Get him to Jerusalem, or unto any island in the south where the infectiously sick are banished. Upon the latter there will be no healthy jailers for his presence to harm, and I know of one colony that has a printing press with obtuse reputation. Perhaps that is where you can inquire as to your former mistress’s book. I would not have advised its immolation, yet can hardly criticize a man’s hysteria at matters uncanny. How I would have liked to study its demons.

How can such a boy operate? He breathes, his flesh is pink as dawn, his angels and demons no quicker or crueler than those in your hands. What about him could render this clarity unto me, or that copious vomiting unto the wardens? It is perplexing in a fashion I have never felt – that which must be normal confusion in the rest of human history. You have granted me the privilege of feeling what any Christian would consider confusion, and thus made me one with every other thinker on the earth. It is a sore unity. Thank you for the privilege, even if it should be counterfeit.

If you would do one more kindness: take me with you. Take as many from this house as you deem trustworthy, for your pilgrimage in any direction will require fidelity of numbers. This boy, innocent as I claim him, will be pursued. Any sane mind here is in gratitude to whatever gift you carry in that basinet, and even if I were still in mean fate, I would wish the best for a child. Will you let me guide you to that southerly island printing press?

Click here for Part 3.

Bathroom Monologue: Investing in Tomorrows

"Benjamin Franklin is quoted saying that a single today is worth two tomorrows. Now the board of directors defrauded me of thirty-one years of pension time. That amounts to 11,242 todays that I put into a retirement. Where did it go? They say the stock tanked, yet they have golden parachutes.

"I lost over eleven thousand todays. How many did you lose? How fair would it seem if the board spent twenty-two thousand tomorrows in a dungeon somewhere? Fair trade by the reckoning of a founding father.

"I have a very nice basement. By that I mean that it has a black mold infestation and some kind of mammal keeps breaking in through unknown holes. I think they’re raccoons, but they bite more than raccoons are known to.

"Now, I’m a little old to go around kidnapping. I'm only proposing this to our... board? Our Board of Owed Parties. Yes, I like that, don't you?

"So, I’d lease my basement to the Board, if there was interest. How many tomorrows do you think these people owe you?"

Bathroom Monologue: Flag Life

It was stitched, scrutinized, approved, kissed, blessed, and finally erected. Another flag had owned this pole once, but the North had taken the fort, and so the pole was its now. It never intended to yield the perch, with its illustrious breeze permitting in unparalleled sights of both sunrise and sunset, of young men marching needless hours, and thirty years of pine trees growing in the valley beyond. How tall they grew under its watch.

Once there was a forest fire. It couldn’t do anything about it, not even call for help, since it was a flag. It was merely stained by the smoke of many a young pine. The ghosts of sap haunted its pores for decades afterward. No matter how it fluttered, it could not shake this sticky sense, and it never fluttered of its own accord. Flags do not move themselves.

It watched colonels retire. Two of them – one a man with so many wrinkles he must have been born with half of them, and one an optimist who was so forced he’d clearly been learning the trade. The latter colonel stored the flag in his office when it was the shift of the other flag – the replacement. The stand-in. The impostor that stole its breeze.

This, the one true flag, was on duty the morning the madman bombed their fort. Apparently people made bombs out of nails. Two passed through stars its folds. No humans were injured. The madman was kicked in the head many times while the flag flapped overhead, two holes far too few to stop its work.

It was hailed upon. Thrice it froze in caustic hails, sticking the flag pole itself at a permanent full-mast, unable to be moved even by the greatest gales. It was a relief that no one died those days and required it to lower. On the third hail, its nail-tears finally expanded and reached its lower side.

The third colonel, the youngest, the newest, the most apt to quote Moliere, fretted over the fort’s prized relic. The uniform code said to burn it. The younger soldiers said it was a dishonor to something that had flown so long. The older soldiers knew better.

It was an older soldier of a flag. It had no complaints as it was folded, and kissed, and blessed, and set ablaze. It became smoke, like bygone pines. It became breeze, and finally experienced what it was like to stir other things. It joined what had always moved it.

Bathroom Monologue: Powers of Detection

He is The Detective and there is only one other on earth like him. When he walks into a crime scene, it doesn’t matter how long the FBI has canvassed or logged it, for only The Detective will see what matters. If he is the fifteenth to look upon a photograph, only he will recognize the setting in the background as the next place they need to go. If a thousand papers are strewn across the desk and window, only he will find the three that matter and give away the motive. If blood is spattered around the carpet, only he will see the pattern that leads him to a hidden crawl space. The facts wait for his observation.

Your years on the force are meaningless. Forensics, procedures, the scientific method itself is fruitless compared to his casual glance because the world was set up for his pursuit. This merely appears like our story, gentlemen. In truth, it is between The Detective and his greatest enemy. We are the casualties.

There’s only one other like him, and that is The Criminal. Author protect us, and please endow our Detective with greater skill.

My Foot Stopped Working: Grossly Normal

The 22^nd was one of the most reassuring hospital visits I’ve ever had. My primary care physician was up to date on my records, listened carefully, brought in equipment to examine my feet and was attentive every concern I had. At one point I told him that if I kept motor control, I’d be happy to deal with the numbness. He put a hand on my shoulder and said, “We’re going to find a cause, so you won’t have to."

If they don’t, then that’s false hope, but damn if that didn’t lift my spirits. At the very worst, he’s great at pretending he cares. I don’t believe he’s pretending. You don’t do that many exercises to somebody’s foot for show.

The MRI found arthritis in my spine. Up until then I’d been ignoring my back pain as much as possible, chastising myself for weakness. It’s funny how a word like “arthritis” can scare you into realizing how bad your back hurts. I went from calling myself a baby to absolutely babying myself.

The MRI results said most of my vertebrae are “grossly normal.” The least reassuring phrasing I could think of, but it’s a positive. I wish they’d given me a copy of the images themselves – they would have made killer author photos.

The arthritis isn’t the cause of the numbness. The doctor said it wasn’t in the proper areas and not severe enough to be messing with these nerves. I’ve got a follow-up with his associate neurologist in February. It’s a month off, too far for my comfort, but it’s as early as possible.

Today nine of my ten toes are numb, like they’ve been wrapped in ice, and most of the ball of my right foot is tingling. The worst was a few nights ago when, mid-exercise, my big toe fell asleep. Days later, it’s never woken back up. It’s weird, but I can move it. I stand by that I’d deal with this if it was all.

#NaNoReMo Megapost

National Novel Reading Month begins February 1st. The rules are simple:

1. Find a classic novel you've never read, preferably one you've been meaning to read for a long time.

2. "Classic" is up to your definition. If you feel Beloved is a Modern Classic, you read it.

3. Between February 1st and 28th, read the book.

4. Join in on Twitter, blogs and Facebook to discuss your journey through the classic. You're even welcome to come back discuss the books in comments threads on this post.

I've chosen Middlemarch, a social commentary on 1800's England by Mary Anne Evans, under the pen name George Eliot. I've wanted to read it ever since missing registration for a class on it in college. Les Miserables came close, but my copy is 1,400 pages, and that's simply too long for me to be sure I'll finish in a month with beta reading, more medical tests, and at least two big road trips. Middlemarch's 1,000 pages as far as I'm willing to push it. It's technically eight books in one - a collected serial. Fortunately, Catherine Russel is picking up my slack, having chosen Les Mis for her own #NaNoReMo!

If you've picked your book, please mention it in the comments here and I'll add you to the post. I'm going to link any blog or Twitter accounts so people can check out reading progress. Feel free to blog across the month as you get insights into your book, or tear through it and move on to still more classics.

#NaNoReMo Readers List
1. Catherine Russell: Victor Hugo's Les Miserables
2. Danielle la Paglia: F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby
3. Tony Noland: Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow
4. John Wiswell: George Eliot's Middlemarch
5. Andy Hollandbeck: T.H. White's Once and Future King
6. John Gray: John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath
7. T.S. Bazelli: Toni Morrison's Beloved8. Eric Krause: Edgar Rice Burroughs's Princess of Mars
9. Beverly Fox: Charles Dickens's Nicholas Nickleby 
10. Paul Philips: BOTH Ira Levin's The Stepford Wives and H.G. Wells's The Invisible Man
11. Janet Lingel Aldrich: Victor Hugo's Les Miserables
12. Katherine Nabity: Truman Capote's In Cold Blood
13.  Ross Dillon: Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man
14. Maria Kelly: Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles 
15. Katherine Hajer: Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon
16. Helen Howell: Bram Stroker's Dracula
17. Icy Sedgwick: Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto
18. Susan Cross: Jane Austen's Pride & Prejudice
19. Cindy Vaskova: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

20.Rachel Frink: Truman Capote's In Cold Blood

21. April L. Hamilton: F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby

Bathroom Monologue: Editing Better

“I'll tell you how to make it better. I can't do crap to make it sell, or tell what this agent prefers, or what resonates more with Heartland audiences. I can only tell you how to improve every single paragraph, and the plot strung along them. Somebody else can tell you what they'd like better. I won't argue with them. They'll be wrong. All of them will be wrong if they disagree with me, but I won't argue. Everybody has an opinion. Mine just so happens to be correct and will guide you to producing the best art. Whether anyone else agrees? I don't see why you’d care.”

Bathroom Monologue: Heat of This Sun

Clark always insisted he was an alien. As young as three years of age he would lead friends on play dates into his barn where he alleged his parents had buried the ship on which he’d reached earth. They never found it, and he never manifested the alien powers he claimed he was supposed to get from sunlight. All it did was earn him the nickname “Unvampire.”

At five years of age, Clark began convincing girls on the playground to let him save them. It was his duty as a more evolved alien god-man. They would pretend to be trapped on top of the jungle gym, or that the slide was on fire, and he would run across the yard to pretend his incredible hearing was picking up their distress. How the fires were slain by him blowing on them was chalked up to imagination.

How the house fire began is still a matter of contention in the county. Clark was nearly burned alive trying to pull his mother from beneath a collapsed beam. The local paper has a heart-wrenching photo of the child kicking a firefighter for pulling him outside and, to quote, “stopping me from saving them.”

The tragedy begat several years of transitive living, with foster parents who all had praise for the boy’s intelligence and drive, but all reported he was simply too outgoing to fit in. He wanted to captain sports teams, be head chef at dinner, and yelled over every argument. His second foster father was an engineer, and tells the story of how the boy redirected sunlight through his glasses into a heat ray unlike anything he’d ever seen. The experiment conveniently destroyed the glasses and half their garage, and was largely thought of as apocryphal until his teens.

At age thirteen he lived at a shared home in a particularly nasty part of Chicago. It was almost as soon as Clark moved in that a series of grisly murders began along the waterfront, each a helpless young man or woman. The sites and times were spaced so that no one was able to create a narrow field of subjects. Not until Clark. With amateur blogging and diligent photo evidence of what was available to the public, he was able to lead the police to the murderer within only two weeks. It was a disturbed homeless man, whom psychiatrists later testified didn’t even know he’d done any of it. He’d squatted only a few blocks from Clark’s shared home.

Solving the gruesome killing spree launched him into a sort of regional celebrity. He was consulted on further cases, though solved none, and charities soon raised the funds to send him to the college he deserved. He had a plethora of glowing references and was admitted at the age of 16 to MIT.

Clark had the knack for engineering and immediately bonded with other top students and professors in key programs. He claimed he’d always loved rockets, and dedicated his post-graduate work in alternative fuels to a roommate, who died tragically from taking the wrong prescriptions. Clark revealed staggering breakthroughs in fuels only a month later, and patented enough that he was able to fund vast improvements in Chicago’s slums. To both orphans and astronauts, he was heralded as a hero. In retrospect, it seems bizarre they let him go up in that shuttle. It was all about stardom and reigniting the American passion for space.

There are doubts. While the alternative fuels initially tested producing no carbon emissions, the temperature of the planet has raised dramatically in the last three years during their adoption. Scientists still struggle to explain the cause. It would be too ironic if he had to wait for Clark to return and fix it for us. He’s already done so much, and we don’t even know what he’s up there looking for.

Bathroom Monologue: An Ode to the Towel

Hark and grace unto this invention: the towel. Yes, you can dip it in barbecue sauce, or nutrients for later sucking, or hail a spaceship with it, but there are other uses.

Here, humanity has said, “I have this wetness all over me and no biological recourse against it. I would dry it with my hair, only my hair is wet.”

And what was humanity’s answer? To create a rectangle of something else’s hair to get wet for you, with as little effort as a brief application and a tap. Or a scrub, or a rub, or a flossing motion that you really ought not to try when other people are around. It absorbs wetness even better than human hair, and is thus an improvement on evolution, a superior portable toupee that you can wear over your head, or around your genitals, or as a cape, unless your friends are judgmental pricks.

They are cheap, efficient, and do a job evolution utterly failed at despite having shat us out of the ocean by several million years of effort. Some will say the towel is an extended phenotype, a necessary invention of our evolved brains. These people are trying to help evolution reach the towel rack. Even fundamental forces of history and biology want in on the towel.

Here’s to it.

Last House in the Sky is Done & Next Big Thing Award

I said there’d be good news today.

Well, Last House in the Sky is done. It’s not a Rough Draft. It’s not a First Draft. It’s in the hands of a test-reader, and off to betas soon after that. My mad love project, sending heists into the post-apocalypse and crossing cars with dinosaurs, is growing on up. With good health and luck, I’ll be querying it by summer.

Recently T.S. Bazelli tagged me for the Next Big Thing question series. I sat down with these last night to celebrate. Let me know what you think of my answers, and how the book sounds to you.

---What is the working title of your book?

“The Last House in the Sky.” People seem to like it.

---Where did the idea come from for the book?

Intense friendship is one of my favorite themes in life and fiction. I love those small units of incredibly diverse characters, who you’d never imagine tolerating each other, yet whose bond is unquestioned. It’s often testy and tested. Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli are one. Lupin the 3rd and Samurai Champloo are prototypes of this. You get this intense samurai, this horny lock-pick, this Noir marksman – they should hate each other, and yet they never turn on each other. I could read or watch those bizarre dynamics for hours.

There was a week, I think it was the summer after college graduation, that I stuck three fictions in a car, with a far off destination, and made them talk until they revealed who they were to me. Soon I had my voices, of the aristocratic sociopath hopelessly in love with a lesbian, and that master-thief lesbian who willfully abuses his affection, and the failed sidekick who hates them both but can’t do better. Then they arrived and stole the sun out of the sky. These three have been with me ever since, and I kept going back to them, knowing eventually they were going to get their own book or series. I just needed to find the right heist.

---What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

A trio of misfit thieves seek to steal the last shreds of civilization from an apocalyptic cult, who'd otherwise waste them blowing up what remains of the world.

---What genre does your book fall under?

Secondary World Fantasy, but also Heist and Post-Apocalyptic Fiction, since the world has suffered a series of civilization-ending catastrophes every 200-300 years. It’s really a Post-Post-Post-Post-Post-Apocalyptic novel. Survivors have almost gotten the hang of surviving by now.

---Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

I’d love a Studio Ghibli adaptation, even though their adaptations are notoriously loose. Anyone who worked on Castle of Cagliostro and Princess Mononoke could make this work in animated form.

Casting people is always hard for me since I don’t write thinking of my characters that way. They’re distinct, they have their own physicality, and so the impulse is to get a lookalike or someone who played a role that’s anything like this before. Let me try to ghost-cast The Trio…

Ninx Anzhel: The boss of a group that pretends it’s democratic. Rosario Dawson keeps coming to mind. I have a soft spot for Clerks 2, and she was a doorbuster in 25th Hour. She can balance flippancy and confidence in the crucial way, and turn it up later.

Randigo “Randy” Chambers: Son of hero-parents. Sidekick of the greatest hero of previous generation. Utter failure, now a nudist and wheelman. Aren’t I insulting someone by casting them? I don’t know. Maybe Kunaal Roy Kapur? Or anyone from Attack the Gas Station.

Egal Vineguard: He’s a triclops, so either I’m asking some great actor to wear a prosthetic over his head or we’re in CGI territory. Perhaps the best shot would be WETA-style cinema magic with Mark Hamill as a voice. He’s an incredible voice actor, and was a bit of the original voice-inspiration for Vineguard. Vineguard is the perpetually upbeat, shrewd and educated man who simply will not stop pursuing Ninx. So, Kevin Kline would be great. Matt Keeslar would make me happy. The triclopes in the part of the world I’ve written are Caucasian, but I’d also love to see (or hear) Souleymane Sy Savane try this. I’m willing to bet in five minutes he’d be the definitive Vineguard-voice.

---Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

I’ll seek representation and send out a package to houses like Tor and Angry Robot – places I’d love to work. It’d be funny if this beat my previous novel to press.

---How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

It was May to September to write the rough draft, interrupted miserably over the summer for all number of events and travel. That was about 90,000 words. I’ve only just finished the perfectly clean draft this month. It’s off to an alpha now, and betas soon.

---What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

Thieves are archetypal in Fantasy, and humorous Heist Fantasy is precedented in the mainstream in both Eoin Colfer’s Artemis Fowl and Scott Lynch’s Gentleman Bastard Sequence. The Last House in the Sky has a harder edge than Artemis Fowl, with more emotional development and maturity along with all the woeful immaturity that makes life worth living. Gentleman Bastard Sequence, which thus far is master-class Fantasy, is still more cynical and political. There isn’t enough of a world left in my Frontier for that much politicking, and is always defined by the personal experiences of these characters. Even the world-building is restricted to what they think and experience; I give plenty of references to the bigger world, and you can connect dots, but there won’t be chapters of exposition on something they barely see.

---Who or What inspired you to write this book?

At the beginning of May, 2012, I was more or less done with edits on my previous novel and waited on theta readers. I knew I’d be in a holding pattern for final edits and submissions to agents and editors, and I didn’t want to spend all that time producing nothing. I had about five novel ideas and couldn’t pick which was best, and so asked friends. One asked what ever happened to The Trio. That incepted me. I’d convinced myself it was their time by that evening.

---What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

Besides heists and road trips through the Post-Post-Post-Post-Post-Apocalypse, driving in an ancient gremlin car among seas of glass, the bones of giant demons, and herds of dinosaurs feuding with carnivorous robots? A triclopic swordsman facing down a bulldozer? Mutually assured sexual harassment? Inter-dimensional lock-picking?

Then there’s this little promise. If you’ve ever read my blog, you know I strive to write from my heart. Weird as it is, this sort of madness is what is closest to my heart. This is as pure John Wiswell as it gets. That means heart, and that means heartbreak, and heartbreak is always funny.

Too Many Humans in Fantasy Novels?

As I began wrapping up the latest draft of Last House in the Sky, a new fear struck me. Good God, I’d made everyone humanoid. It’s terrible when Fantasies squander their secondary worlds with people and people-shaped beings, so many Star Trek guys of the week.

Four main of the characters were human. A fifth was a triclops, who was psychologically different, but physically about a “Star Trek” away from human. Skin tone, size, aerobic make-up and head-shape only go so far. Now he introduces us to imps, with their suicide-fetish and heads full of horns, sphincters and surgical implants that no one will accuse of being human, but still, the overall body is vaguely human-shaped. Not good enough.

Well, but that sixth main character was a decapitated gremlin head. She walks around on prehensile ears or combustion-powered prosthetic bodies. That was less humanoid.

Of course, she invented one of the key antagonists of the book: automatons. Giant spherical drones that suck you through vents. Enormous and hungry construction equipment. A little better.

And sauropods are everywhere. An ankylosaurus gets a big scene. Compsognathus. Brachiosaurs. Hadrosaurs, even Premium Hadrosaurs. Many references to the Tyrannosaurus Rex, the filet mignon of lizards.

Dorads, the sentient balls of snakes that form gestalt consciousness, in this novel to administer drunken church services. Nine-legs, granting a little radial symmetry to the background. Likewise, land-squid. Oh, the land-squid.

I’m still feeling self-conscious about all those human characters, though. I’m woefully failing the arthropod equivalent of the Bechdel Test.

Next time. Next time.

Some good news coming tomorrow.

My Foot Stopped Working: MRI Day

Some time since my original post I began experiencing a similar numbness and loss of control in my right foot. It began with the outer toes, just like the left. As though fearing it's being out-shined, now four toes are perpetually numb on the left and I have to consciously exercise them to make sure when they operate. Today I felt the loss of control in some calf muscles. It's back now, which is a relief. I wasn't able to identify which muscles went out on me.

Breezy.

On Friday I had a spinal MRI. Blood tests came back almost entirely negative, which was great in that I didn’t have any of those diseases, but disappointing in that I didn’t have an explanation. It’s worthwhile trade; it’s simply a disappointment-balance I want to note. In brainstorming other horrible bodily malfunctions we crossed my history of back problems; after I learned to walk again in Middle School, it would go out as often as four times a week on me. So the hypothesis is that some lingering vertebrate problem or pinched nerve is hampering my legs. Seems plausible enough to warrant manipulating magnetism for my benefit. They rarely let you manipulate magnetism when you want, like in traffic or in a queue.

MRIs fascinate and soothe me. A lot of people complain about claustrophobia and the noises – both of which are sensible complaints. If some jerk behind the glass hit a button, the platform could easily crush you to death. It’s the most immediate representation of how medical science puts our lives in other people’s hands.

The MRI operator offered me headphones with four varieties of music: 60’s, 70’s, Hip Hop, or Classical. I chose Classical, and as I was elevated into the ceramic doughnut of magnetism, I was treated to the most foreboding piano solo imaginable. If you imagine a montage in any movie where the main character goes to the hospital, gets tests and gets bad news, this would be playing in the background. I almost hit the emergency button because I was laughing so hard. It got better when the piano was overridden by the MRI noises itself.

The noise-canceling headphones did not work against the brute force of the MRI machine. Those noises bother nearly as many people as the claustrophobia, but I like them. It sounds like someone is hammering in the next room, and several times it’ll sound like a circular saw, only not as constant, instead broken up into deliberate patterns. The noises are loud and startle a primal part of the psyche; but they’re habitual, highly intentional things as well. The cacophony is too deliberate to be ruckus. That’s good science there.

I see my primary care physician about it tomorrow. We’ll find out if the problem lies in my spinal column soon.

Fine, here's a goatee picture.

Bathroom Monologue: Debt Game

It goes like this.

The plumber wants the coins. He doesn’t know why, but he’ll scarcely ever turn back in his furious pursuit rightwards of the shining golden GIFs.

The player wants the plumber to have the coins. They’re a detached score, extra lives, the promise of hidden unlockables, and most of all, rotating motivation to make the plumber run faster into stimulation.

The designer wants the player to want the plumber to have the coins. Getting hooked on this feedback loop will mean the player will play it longer, play it more often, buy the sequels, the t-shirts, the cellphone skin, the tie-in movies. Then the designer will be able to feed his family.

The publisher wants the designer to hook the player on getting the plumber those coins. Employing and taking the work of such a designer means greater profits for the release quarter, shareholder satisfaction, brand awareness and stability. The publisher can turn this into an institution.

The investor wants the publisher to find the designers that can hook the players to do dumb crap. Then the yields will be up, dividends may begin, and the portfolio will be rosier. The investor can watch the publisher’s daily NYSE rating tick up and down with news, reviews and sales figures of the designer’s game that the player is playing. The chart goes up and down and ever rightward, like the trails of someone jumping.

They all have less time than they think. Neither plumber nor investor knows why.

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.