Bathroom Monologue: Unwanted Lovers

"I'd like to start a not-for-profit to prevent romance. Not all romance, but all romance-proper. I'm sologamous; I've been faithful to my right hand for years and have never been swayed to cheat on her. But most of my friends enjoy the company of others, and at first they're very cute about it. They make eyes after each other, give rides, buy little gifts, cover dinner when somebody's short, help out after a long day. All good stuff. Most of the adorable human behavior I've observed as people fell in love. It's once they got into the dirty work that it fell apart. Some time after the first date, the complications of moving your stuff here, and meeting your mom on Wednesday, and helping out after so many long days adds up. What does it add up to? To at least two of my friends sniping at each other and whining to me. Love stinks. What I want is to systematically keep all lovers apart - to keep them precisely just outside the grasp of completion, where absence makes the heart grow fonder and chemicals from the loins make the brain downright stupid. It would save me dozens of hours per month of unwanted-complaint-hours."

Bathroom Monologue: Possible Origins for Him. 18.

To hear today's story click the triangle on the left, or click this text for the MP3.

I’m not myself. People say that and mean they’re in a mood. I’m a person and I mean it when I say it. All hosed down and medicated like this? I’m suffocating in simulated normalcy. The haircut and restraints amount to a costume. Feels a little liberating to not be me. I sold them, you know.

Not me’s, silly. I sold costumes. There’s something about costumes, isn’t there? Store-bought or homespun. Face paint or a plastic expression with an elastic band that slips over the ears. A bikini made from leaves. Green long-johns punctuated with question marks. Straw bursting out of seams and sleeves to form a scarecrow in dire need of a Dorothy. Little Draculas and King Arthurs wearing the same brand of tumble-dry-only cape.

I sold him his first cape, you know.

I thought he was there for someone else. He was too big, too broad-shouldered, too bitter in the eyes as he stalked along the racks. Surely he was a bodyguard, there to pick out a costume for some trust fund brat. Or – he was a little old. Maybe he’d ducked out between hostile takeovers to shop for his kids. Despite our military contracts, we did sell to a lot of private sector jackasses. Rich people buy weird things for their kids, especially in October.

He wanted a weird thing in a non-child size. And had to be fireproof.

“Well sir,” I told him. “This is bulletproof.”

A joke. No laughter. No one laughed at my jokes; my cousins said I lacked execution. I looked into his face and he refused to reflect the smirk. He pulled the cape over his tailored elbow. He pulled the material so taut, like he wanted it to fight him. I never even thought of dressing up in my own stuff before he did that. Only went down into the basement, sometimes with a call-girl, for a weekend or two, and...

I took him to the rear chamber and showed off our laser. Such resilient material requires very specialized tools to cut, mend and process. His eyes reflected the beam. His checkbook was out before I powered down the device.

“No sir,” I told him. “The device isn’t for sale. It’s unique.”

But the check wasn’t for the machine. He wanted everything.

“No sir,” I told him. “The store certainly isn’t for sale. And a check couldn’t cover it if it was.”

A joke. No laughter. His check wasn’t for the store. It was for my tip. He had other people, broad-shouldered and bitter in the eyes, to buy companies for him.

I went out to lunch and fantasized over this check. Was this a gag? How badly it would go if something this large bounced in my account? I laid it out on the formica table while eight-year-old wizards emptied fast food pales in preparation for trick-or-treating. How funny it’d be if I signed the check over and slipped it in a goody bag.

Do you know how much can be accomplished in a lunch hour? Apparently a company can be seized, and an entire floor of a building can be emptied. I didn’t even see the moving trucks, though those do blend into cityscapes.

There were no racks left. No cables. No bolts of bendable titanium mesh fabric. I still fantasize over how they got a two-and-a-half-ton laser through a six-by-three-foot door. None of the people who helped me move it in there are still alive. Most of them are in my basement.

I squatted for a while in a rectangle of immaculate linoleum where a shelf had once laid. They took my shelves, too. I admired just how filthy the floor outside my shelf-sheltered rectangle had gotten. It all looks so clean until they take your storefront away.

They left the filth. A box of pens. The purple garbage can. A few jars of flame-retardant face paint, ones I had open for demonstrations. Picking up a jar, I remembered him pulling that fabric across his elbow. A grown man imagining a costume into military-grade materials, and doing so outside of his home. I felt him pulling it taut while I drew two fingers over my cheeks.

Halloween and a check of that size. You can really do whatever you want. You can disregard the warning label and slather yourself in chemical whiteness. You can go home, go to the basement, and put on that tacky bulletproof tuxedo you’ve been working on, and the squirting flower that melts metal, and all that stuff – and you can keep it on when you come back upstairs. Dressed like you want to be, you can go door to door, a magnum in one hand and a pumpkin pail in the other. You might feel too nervous to take your subterranean act abroad, but it’ll pass. It’ll pass when you recognize his cape on the evening news. Then it all bleeds into a long Halloween.

Bathroom Monologue: In Defense of MacGuffins

He couldn't afford to hit the snooze bar a second time. He'd already run out of time for a shower. Lingering any longer, he'd be late for MacGuffin.

He hit the remote and the television buzzed to life. He hoped news would MacGuffin. CNN was covering Occupy Wall Street again, the youth of America complaining the 1% had tanked their moms' retirement MacGuffins. Their rage helped him, laterally.

He crept to the kitchen for a cold glass of MacGuffin. He paused by the hall mirror to check out his bare abs. He sucked them in. Not too bad. A couple more weeks at the gym and he'd have a shot asking out MacGuffin.

There was something about waking up too tired. It altered his perception of things. He couldn't help looking at his suits differently. His toothbrush, too. The half-full glass of water was part of a set he'd spent two weeks MacGuffining around for. Or. Shopping around for. Yes, he'd shopped for a nice set of MacGuffins.

"Glasses. A nice set of glasses," he corrected, zipping up his MacGuffin. How many work hours had it taken to MacGuffin this thing?

His breath caught. He finished drinking the MacGuffin, hoping it would MacGuffin his MacGuffins. His confusion was only interrupted by the alarm clock going off again. He'd forgotten to switch it off. The shock reminded that he couldn't be late for work. How long had he hunted for that job?

Bathroom Haiku: Basilisk, for @tsbazelli

life of the party.

so many beautiful friends;

they are very still.

The Writing Breather

Does anyone else take a breather after a writing endeavor? It’s not like shelving the manuscript or e-mailing it to your friends. It’s not a vacation. In fact, it’s something you can’t do if you leave the book entirely.

When I finished my manuscript last week, my lists were entirely crossed off. I couldn’t think of anything else to change. So I saved it, then tabbed out. I didn’t close. I left the file open for another two days.

About three hours into the breather I was cooking lunch when I got a sudden twinge about my soothsayer. I wondered if her scene wasn’t raw exposition. I also wondered if I’d spelled her name consistently after changes in the last draft. So I covered the pot and pulled it up. It turned out her name was misspelled half the time, despite my having gone over the entire book paragraph-by-paragraph. Her pages were also painfully dry. I copied, pasted, rearranged, re-worded, and even played some parts out loud in fastening some more naturalistic dialogue until it had punch.

That’s the function of a breather. It’s the equivalent of a smoke break during political negotiations or a four-hour class. I don’t smoke, but I would go outside to mull things in a different environment. The dryness and spelling issues of the soothsayer didn’t occur to me in straight editing. I was preoccupied with too many other things. Only later, cleaning the bathroom or mowing the lawn, would I think to check. It’s a healthy balance against the blindnesses that arise in deep editing.

Over the next two days, miscellaneous weaknesses and inconsistencies kept popping into my head. Sometimes I was nervous over nothing; no, I’d already shortened this passage, or that one had never been as silly as I worried in the first place. But more often, there were actual problems only my relaxed and reflecting mind would recognize. As I made the eighth alteration (unifying the gender of a certain giant spider across multiple chapters), I wondered: do other people do this?

Bathroom Monologue: Crying Werewolf

You know almost everything about them. You know the cycle of the moon. You know what causes it to wax and wane, and how as it grows fuller, they grow hairier and hungrier. You know how bestial ebbs the nature of humanity under the influence of the wolf.

You know that it will survive any number of blows to the head or shots to the heart. You know it will take silver to repel them. You know that so long as they smell you, they will seek another way into your house, behind your back, to your neck when your eyes close.

You know you are safe, because you know they are just stories.

You’re only ignorant of one thing: they are real. The there is one outside right now. That he is clawing his arms as dusk creeps over the land. That your flesh is the only thing that will still his belly.

You’re only ignorant of one thing: he knows you think he isn’t real. And when the moon shows tonight, he’ll rejoice about that. He’ll lament it in the morning as he washes your remains from his fingernails.

Bathroom Monologue: That's Super

To hear this monologue either click on the triangle or this text.

"No, I get it. You had a radioactive piece of my home planet. It was very clever of you, much as it was clever of the umpteen prior opponents I’ve had who pulled it on me. Decreasingly clever each time somebody thought I wouldn’t be ready for it. I’d imagine all the defense shields and laser fields in the cave seem ingenious against mundane intruders, too. But thinking somebody who moves faster than the speed of sound would be impeded by them while you reached at very human speeds to your utility belt? Bruce. I get it. You’re more popular than me. That doesn’t mean you’d win in a fight. Proof? You’re only just hearing this while I’ve already dumped you in the Antarctic and gone home. I think I’ll go have sex with a reporter. I hope that radioactive piece of my home planet keeps you warm. That'd be super."

Bathroom Monologue: Bad Videogame Titles

I first noticed it in iD games. "Doom." "Quake." And now, "Rage." All monosyllabic ominous titles that aren’t particularly applicable to or necessarily used in the games themselves. There's never a quake. And Doom happens on Mars. There's nothing to doom. It's not until Doom 2 that it hits earth, at which point you save the universe from a threat that nobody calls "doom."

It extended beyond iD. Around the tenth entry, you knew it wasn’t the Final Fantasy. Battlefield 3 seemed to feature almost no actual battlefields. At no point did the Raccoon City Police going from door to door, checking folks off.

"Resident Todd? Good to see you.”

“Resident Jemma? Your hair looks lovely today.”

“Resident Evil? Oh shit!”

I'm not asking for high literature. Just competency in game titles. "Legend of Zelda" will do. You always live a legend and eventually meet a dame named 'Zelda.' So it works. “Assassin’s Creed?” The assassins’ guild has a creed in those games. The bar is so low that literalism will do. Elevate things.

Here’s what should happen. You know what Ubisoft should do? Make a sequel to Prince of Persia called Democracy of Arabia. It’d be a revolution in literal titling. "This Fall, the only game featuring truly free movement."

Bathroom Monologue: What the Holidays Mean

The holidays meant more to him than most. They have ever since Gustav got off the ship one soggy November morning. His soles sunk into the soft earth of America. Fealty filled his lungs with his next breath. He pledged allegiance shortly after. He shook the judge’s hand, and thanked him profusely. He began thanking everyone.

Holding a door?

“Thank you, madame.”

Offering another cup of coffee?

“On the house? You’re too sweet.”

Discounting the security deposit for an apartment?

“I’ll never forget you, sir.”

He thanked them through the fourth Thursday of the month, when snow fell and his charity deepened. He spent Saturdays at homeless shelters, dropped his change into every bucket he saw, and gave blood. Too much blood. He found himself going to different precincts and lying about when he’d last given to give more.

It began a cycle. Now every autumn Gustav thanks the giving, and every winter he is filled with good will towards all men. It lasts unto a drunken explosion on the 31^st of December, when his eyes are all glitter. It’s the only night he ever gets laid. Whether by luck or an unchecked alcoholic libido, he doesn’t know.

The weather warms and he hits more hospitals. He gives up booze for forty days and allocates that money toward some nurse’s education, even if he really needs it for himself. It’s a bribe to get him inside birthing rooms, where his chubby hands are sterilized and assist delivering babies. Ten months a year he can’t stand them, but for two, he spanks breath into them and jockeys to hand them to Moms. Sometimes he leaves Cadbury crème eggs behind.

The weather overheats, and hospitals lose appeal. He meanders. He has less to do until about the beginning of July, when he falls in love with his country all over again. He weeps, buys everyone at the bar another of whatever they drink, and will drive a hundred miles to see a bigger fireworks display. Last year he didn’t even realize it was the 4^th until he was stuck in traffic, heading for the riverside show.

These months are slow and sweaty. He tries to occupy himself at the church or hospital. It doesn’t last. Those addictions are dormant. They don’t work in the summer, but he needs something to take his mind off what is coming. It kills him that nobody wants to talk about fireworks on July 6^th.

Gustav needs that distraction, doesn’t get it, and every year this happens. Days climb longer, apex, then dwindle into autumn. As night comes sooner, he trails women home. Hopefully one invites him, but if none do, he’ll find a stray girl on her way back from work. He will go to the sidewalk outside their house. He will go up to the door, and beg his fingers not to push for the bell. By October 1^st, he’ll break in after them. He wishes he could stop stalking, but it’s out of his power. Halloween is nigh, and so few people have Jack O’Lanterns to ward him away.

Blessed November 1^st. After a long shower, he can thank everyone again.

Authorities think it’s an annual serial killer. They can’t catch him, because they don’t think to look for a serial thanker in November, or a serial patriot in the summer. They don’t know what holidays mean. Only he does.

Watch This Space

I've been seeing this for a week. It was taped to my computer tower to keep me on task. Every day, I got to cross off another target.

It's done. The novel is finished and ready for my wonderful beta readers. I'd split it in half. Two-hundred-some-odd pages plus two-hundred-some-odd pages, fluffed up in Standard Manuscript Format to 470. That feels nice for ten months' work.

I've put hundreds of hours into this book. Once I get the feedback, I'll hit it again. I'm determined to make it the best thing I've ever written. Thank you all for the support. When this is done, I guarantee it will be worth your time.

Bathroom Haiku: Tonberry, for @Makani

deadly tonberry.
fiend will stab you as soon as
it gets over there.

Bathroom Monologue: I Won’t Fight for Women’s Rights

"Please don’t try to enlist me to fight for libraries, fair taxation or women’s rights. I am a bad fighter. You are just trying to enlist someone who will go down in one punch for your cause. If you can, please enlist me to sit for racial harmony. To mop the kitchen for cancer awareness. To collect canned goods for the cure. Which is inefficient, since you’d think you’d ask me to collect canned goods for a relief drive. But these things I am highly skilled at. If you want me to fight against domestic violence, domestic violence is going to beat me. That… sounds so bad. But it’s not my fault! I’m not a fighter. I’m an asthmatic."

Bathroom Monologue: You Bitch

“You bitch. I’ve gotten up at five in the ‘A’ and ‘M’ to drive here for forty years. I turned down Cornell for you. Never asked you for a cup of coffee. Now look what you’ve done to us.”

Vincent trudged through her front doors. For the first morning of his life with her, he left her doors open. Let the rain tinkle in here. He had water in the soles of his shoes. Let her finally know what that felt like.

He began up the stairs. Three steps up, he stopped. He didn’t need to go to the office this morning. That was pure habit. He tossed his keys on that third step.

“Twisted my ankle running tours through here. Five times. No tendon left in my right knee.”

He exaggerated the hobble as he descended. He pushed through her foyer, punching at her vintage wallpaper. His flailing slowed near the portraits. Even in this frustration, he couldn’t bring himself to damage the image of her founders.

“What have you given me?” he asked, trying to keep his nerve. This would take a lot of nerve. “Paper cuts. Loose nails in my feet.”

Though the fireplace was dormant, he could feel heat wash across the appropriate cheek. His nostrils flared. His left hand went across where his eyebrows should have been.

“They never grew back. You know that? They never grew back.”

He took a poker and jabbed it into the remaining ashes. The heat mounted until he sweated from his balding scalp. He wondered if any of her victims lingered in these ashes.

“You burned six tourists to death and didn’t have the decency to give me more than a waxing would do. Do you know how that feels?”

He lobbed the poker at the door to the basement. The antique panel sundered, letting him see into the stairwell. His teeth grinded into each other until the TMJ beat him. His joints had been disintegrating when she’d hanged two handymen in that basement. Two! The police hadn’t even figured out how the second could have tied a noose.

“But I did. It was you. You who made the wife shoot her husband right here.” He stamped his bad foot on the old rug with the fake bloodstain. There was no evidence of an actual homicide in the living room, but he knew. Vincent knew everything about her. “You who sucked the Tanner boys into your attic. You who gave the Baskervilles scarlet fever. You.”

He fidgeted with the latch to the grand windows. As though to dissuade him, a gust blew up the cliff face and rattled the panes inward.

“Do you know what you’ve gotten us? What your long legacy of violence means? Bulldozers. Wrecking balls. They’ll be here Wednesday. No more patrons. No more victims. No more overnight parties on Halloween.”

Finally he thrust his shoulder into that window. He’d daydreamed of charging through the foyer and out these damned windows for a decade. To dive into the grey New England bay. This forcing her windows was only a measure of comfort. His emotional severance pay came in the form of rain slashing his brow.

“Cute young couples. Wicked old politicians. Children and photographers and exorcists and skeptics, but never me! What did they do that I didn’t?”

The windows flapped at his arms. He punched one, cracking a square of glass. He looked in excitement to his knuckles. But there was no blood. Not even a hairline cut.

He grabbed onto the windowsill. This was the one room without a veranda. The water in his soles squished as he mounted the window, taking in a view of a drop so familiar it couldn’t terrify. He’d given himself a sciatica washing the windows over this drop. She’d have to do better than some storm clouds and wind to dissuade him.

“Wednesday. That’s it for the both of us. Our relationship. Your relationship to this world ends, not in a landmark, but in the parking lot for a Target. Your cellars will be cemented so they can put in a T.J. Maxx to leach customers from a second-rate big-box store. That’s what America thinks of your horrors.”

She wouldn’t even make it thunder for him. He curled his hands over the tops of the windows and leaned out over the sound. What remained of his hair fluttered in a staccato gale. He breathed it as deliberately as he could, waiting for her to do the decent thing.

“I told your stories. I swept your floors. I dusted your rafters and refurbished your curtains when I could have lived. I loved you. If you ever loved me, you old bitch, do me the favor. Do me the one generosity. Make me your last story.”

He cast his chin up to the sky and leaned out as far as he could, leaning out into the fiction about the eccentric old caretaker who was blown out the windows just before the haunted house was torn down. This way they’d both live so much longer - if she'd push him.

"Kill Mommy" and "Sologamous" Audio Editions at Untied Shoelaces

Untied Shoelaces of the Mind has introduced audio editions of their previous issues. Harriet Whitbread has narrated both my "Sologamous" and "Kill Mommy." Both of her reading were added directly onto the story pages themselves in free MP3 formats. Simply click "Audio**Read By" to listen to or download the stories.

I'm tickled for it, particularly to hear someone with a British accent and stage voice read an American dad giving bad advice to his cowboy-loving son during football. That was the premise of "Kill Mommy". "Sologamous"is the more dignified story of a man who seeks to marry himself to double his insurance.


"Kill Mommy" is here.

"Sologamous" is here.

Bathroom Monologue: Writer’s Self-Doubt

"Is it too many pages long for this many words?

"No?

"Then tomorrow I’ll fear it’s too few. Too many long paragraphs condensing my fiction. Every reader will hate them.

"Except when I scan, I’ll find most are five lines long.

"Will those bloat out on a Kindle screen? Will everyone think I’m wordy? If not, then I’ll fear I have too limited a vocabulary. My expressions are too mundane, not worth interest. And if my prose is unoriginal, then so may be my ideas. Perhaps the premise was neat, but after a few pages it’ll dull.

"That’s the next terror: that I’m using common words to describe what’s been written before. Six sweet friends will assure me that no, I’m an idea machine and this part is funny and this part is quirky and this part has never before been seen in any library

"So roots the anxiety that I’m too unorthodox, introducing too many unusual items for the average reader to follow. Can I only service a niche audience? Which niche audience? How will they find me? How will I find them, and by the time I do, will someone else have come up with all my ideas? What if there is no John Wiswell niche?

"Or what if my novels lack the intangibles, the inarticulatables, the very arbitrary essences that will allow the chosen few who would otherwise enjoy my books to instead drop them as trite? The things I can’t prepare for, plot out, edit in or advertise? What if being good enough reduces to something as simple as, “You can’t be”?"

Bathroom Monologue: Couple of Horrors

It’s not my fault we live in the middle of the woods. It’s not hers, either, but I can use this. We finish Nightmare on Elm Street around 2:30 AM and hustle to get it in the mailbox before the morning mail. That is a quarter mile trek under an overcast of clouds and boughs, so I bring the flashlight. An actual fog rolls between the trees, making Lita shiver despite her coat and long skirt.

“I don’t know why they remake classics,” I say, depositing the Netflix envelope. I close the lid and flip up the flag. “You know, why not just remake crappy movies? Ones that will benefit from new effects or re-writing?”

She inhales through her nose, loud and elegant, and we both know that no matter how many flaws I can find in this remake, she’ll be afraid to go to sleep tonight. It’s not my fault. Not hers, either, but I can use this. I eye the distance to the edge of the road. About three steps. When we get far enough from the mailbox, I shut off my beam.

She hollers, “Turn it back on!”

“Let me find the switch. I’ve lost it.”

“That’s not funny!”

She knows because I’ve done this before. I shamble the three steps to the edge of the road, out of her reach. I can hear her fumbling around for me. Probably for my neck.

I ask into the middle of the road, “What are you afraid of?”

Her reply is stillness. She’s not walking forward anymore. Though it’s dark, I think I see her outline folding its arms. The queen is displeased.

I offer, “This flashlight is old. The batteries might be dead.”

“That is not funny,” she says in a tone that would express ‘That is not funny’ even if it were saying, ‘Please pass the lime jell-o.’

“Come on. You think Freddy is out here?”

“No.”

“Because he can only get you in your dreams.”

“He’s not real.” She unpacks her sentences one word at a time. Very intimidating when she can look me dead in the eye, but not so scary out here. “He’s in a crappy movie. Now turn the light back on.”

I feel air rush across my forehead as she swipes to catch me. I shamble a few paces up the road.

“Maybe Wolfman?” We watched two of the Universal classics last week. They still make great jokes. “Are you afraid Wolfman is out here?”

           

“It’s not Wolfman,” she says too hastily for me to be sure she’s honest. “Your bad knee. You could twist it and go right back into a wheelchair.”

“You’ve got three inches on me and you know Judo. If Wolfman is out here, you’d kick his ass.”

“There is no Wolfman. Turn the light on now!”

Another swipe of fingers, this time against the corduroy of my coat. I try to edge further away, but she’s in range. Fists curl in my lapel and haul me into the center of the road. My cheek mashes into her chest, one of the nicest things I could possibly find out in the middle of the wilderness. Then she elbows me in the ribs and gropes around for the flashlight. I stretch my arm as far from my body as I can.

“Quit it!”

“Quit what?”

It’s hard not to do this. She is the one who doesn’t flinch when we open the bills, but she’s also the one whose grip left welts on my arm at Paranormal Activity 2. 2! God, I love her.

My arm trembles, then fails and bends under hers. I try to worm away, but that arm winds up pinned behind my back.

There’s a click. We can see each other again. There is no burned serial killer or lycanthropic monster. Only a frowning woman with a green scrunchy in her hair.

I actually lean up to kiss her, but she keeps my arm in the hammerlock. That’s fair. It only takes her one arm to pin mine. Her free hand raises to tap the side of my head with the flashlight.

She commands, again unpacking that sentence word-by-word: “You don’t do that.”

“No. You’re right. I should have been much further away before I turned it off.”

Two broader beams illuminate us from around the bend. They advance until she releases my arm, and we stand aside as the Saab passes us up the main road. Its headlights shine on our right sides. Her right side looks so cordial, though her hand still threatens to break my wrist. So I ask.

“You think Wolfman learned to drive?”

I think most girls and women would have said something dismissive. All the ones who got me best, all two of them, would have said, “You’re horrible.”

Lita doesn’t. She gives up my arm and leans down to press a faint smile into the stubble of my neck. The potential for a one-liner is thick in the atmosphere and goes unbreathed. We return to the house chatting about the logistics of a Wolfman Vs. Freddy movie.

I will do this again. I will deserve what comes to me and it won’t be that bad even if I deserve worse. This is because I’ve done it before, when we watched The Descent, and 1408, and Wait Until Dark. And every time when we leave the house for the mailbox and the pitchblack of the woods, she lets me hold the flashlight.

The Bob Ross of Writers

Every writer should watch at least one episode of Bob Ross.
We’re seldom exhibitionists,
so we forget perspective

on what a scattered mess our art is allowed to look like

on its way to completion.

Every writer should also watch a bunch more Bob Ross,
so they remember to finish the fucking thing.

Love,

John

Bathroom Haiku: Fu Dog/Shishi Lion, for @valerievaldes

is it a lion?
is it a dog? no. neither.
it is just bad ass.

Bathroom Monologue: Littlest Psychic Lost

She was the first psychic I ever met. The littlest, too.

At her third birthday party she made the prediction, “I’m going to be a year older.”

As though by prophecy, she turned four a mere year later. Then she predicted, “I’m going to be a year older.”

No one had the gift like my little girl. She always knew I wanted strawberry ice cream for dinner, whether or not I agreed. She always knew what movie we were going to watch. And every year she predicted, “I’m going to be a year older.”

She was only wrong once. I miss her guidance so.

Bathroom Monologue: Nice Costume

Dracula, Mummy,

such neat tights; too bad Wolfman

wasn't a costume

Bathroom Monologue: On the Obese, OR, Big, Fat Rage

To hear this rant either click the triangle on the left to stream it or click this text to download the MP3.

Social responsibility is just a ruse. You were making fun of the fat kid in kindergarten. He was different in a way that wasn’t special, so you mocked him. It wasn’t even him – it was an excuse to hate someone who wasn’t you, and because other children joined in, it was socially reinforced. You were cruel then and you haven’t grown. This whole business of obese people putting extra strain on the healthcare system is rationalization for you being an emotional kindergartener. I’m sure you were well-briefed on the healthcare industry in elementary school and that’s why you were such a dick to Willy, or Robert, or Mandrake. And if he was a fat kid with a name like ‘Willy,’ I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s hanged himself by now. Thanks to humanitarians like you.

Justified by their abuse of doctor’s time and getting sick more often, you berate them, to “change” them. But even if a chubby bastard were to fall on his knees tomorrow and beg you to fix him, would you? No! You’re too busy checking movie times on your iPhone. The extent of your donation to the cause is being heartless.

You think mocking him is going to make him finally buy that gym membership? A chunk of these chunky people are the result of depression eating. A reasonable person doesn’t browbeat alcoholics under the idea that it’ll make them kick the bottle. Smokers get more sympathy than that for willingly sucking on sticks of carcinogenic poison. All the fat guy does is eat more than you. He may do it because he’s got a psychological problem. He may keep weight because of a glandular or digestive problem.

Or he may be rich. There are fat millionaires. Any random fat ass at a buffet may well have donated six figures to a state-of-the-art hospital. He may serve on its board, arranging healthcare resources more efficiently than he’ll ever use them up. He could hire two guys to go build clinics while he pounds Big Macs. Now who is better for the healthcare system: the one who enabled them to have a new MRI machine, or your skinny ass? Which, by the way, is still freakishly ugly.

Yes, the fat guy is ugly, but most thin people are hideous, too. Even supermodels. That’s why they invented Photoshop, so I can masturbate to an ideal that nobody’s trying to live up to. Moles, boils, scars, stretch marks, bad bone structure, bicep flab, chicken legs, post-pubescent acne, hair where you can’t shave – don’t get me started on the list of erection-killing traits you could have hidden under that fashionable tracksuit.

You don’t have some inner beauty the fat guy lacks. He’s got feelings. He’s got family. He’s had heartbreak and loss and one day walked out of a building wondering if he still had a soul. The beauty that culture makes sure we sheathe and hide and wrap in an intellectual condom is in both of you. But seeing either of you naked? That’s like asking if I want second- or third-degree burns. You’re not ethically right, you’re not helping him, and you’re unfuckable despite fitting into those jeans. Shut the fuck up and leave the fat guy to people who care. Give him the decency of ignoring him like you ignore the majority of the human race.

"in the romantic-comedy world there are many specimens of women who... do not exist in real life. Here are some examples:" -Mindy Kaling, New Yorker

"It makes sense, then, that in the romantic-comedy world there are many specimens of women who—like Vulcans or Mothra—do not exist in real life. Here are some examples:"

1. Grown women whose existences can be entirely understood, permanently altered, and tidily concluded within ninety minutes.

2. ?

Bathroom Monologue: A Tough Job, OR, Waited My Whole Life for This Pun

Sathan scoured the earth for a good one. He found it in Job, a rich man with an indecently attractive wife. Cherubic children frolicked in the shadow of his great manor. The man knelt in the window of his room, hands folded over a chest of currencies. This was what his prayer looked like. Sathan snickered.

He sidled over to Almighty. Of course Almighty was everywhere, being omnipresent, but Sathan only fancied talking to the bits that were on clouds. Sitting next to this bit of Almighty, he gestured down at the genuflecting man.

“You like that one?”

Almighty nodded. “I’m all-loving. It’s nice. You should try it.”

“He likes you back.”

“He’s a good man.”

“Of course he likes you,” Sathan said, taking an adversarial posture. “You gave him everything.”

Even with the new posture, Almighty did not turn to regard him. There were other bits of Almighty for watching Sathan; this one was for watching Job. It rankled Sathan not to get the attention of this particular bit.

“He invested in businesses. He helped raise the camels and sheep. His wife went through labor for the children. To say I gave him everything is a gross oversimplification. I never do anything alone.”

“Yeah, yeah, there’s one set of tracks in the sand. All I’m saying is that he wouldn’t be so fond if you took the fun stuff away.”

“I am sure that is all you are saying.” Almighty spoke in simultaneous sincerity and sarcasm, because He was all things.

“I’ll wager you,” Sathan rubbed his hands together, “that he wouldn’t love you so much if you took his riches, killed his family, knocked down his home and covered him with, I don’t know, maybe boils.”

“I am sure you are only doing this in the auspices of a philosophical wager, and not for the entertainment value of human misery.”

“Naturally.”

“You are supernatural.”

“Supernaturally, then.”

“How about I wager you this? The locals, including Job, have done nothing to mitigate a bad flood cycle in the local river or dissuade raiders, so he's likely to lose material goods.His home isn’t particularly well constructed, so it will eventually crumble. His family never takes care of their health, so illness is even likely. Instead of breaking the laws of nature to torture a good man, I’ll let life be exactly what it is. The same life that let him get what you call 'the fun stuff.' I’ll wager you that when it’s done, Job will be exactly who he is. Would you like to take that wager, Sathan?”

Sathan turned his back on the entirety of the cloud. That meant looking at other bits of Almighty, but that felt alright. He could grouse at them.

So he groused. “You’re no fun.”

“Job seems to enjoy me, for now at least. You’ll see how it goes.”

Why Do You Buy Books?

A 2010 study by Verso Advertising sought to graph what made people buy books. They singled out six key aspects that avid readers identified with. The results went:

1. Author reputation (52%)
2. Personal recommendation (49%)
3. Price (45%)
4. Book Reviews (37%)
5. Cover/Blurb (22%)
6. Advertising (including online) 14%

Wisely, the researchers allowed motives to overlap. You know you’ve waited for that new novel from your favorite author to go on sale before you got it. A cover can make you try the first few pages in a bookstore. If friendly recommendations are backed up by professional reviews or Goodreads… you get the idea.

Susan Kaye Quinn recently asked why her readers picked up their last three books. It's a good question. So readers, what are the last three books you bought? What made you get them? Were they paper or e-books? Could the above six motives apply, or are there other factors?

I reviewed my own recent purchases just to check. The first undeniably fits.

1. Booker T. Washington’s UP FROM SLAVERY (Cosimo Classics 2007; originally, 1901)

There’s no question that the author’s reputation drew me to the book. It’s the same effect that moves so many celebrity memoirs, even if Mr. Washington’s celebrity is a little more respectable than most. He lived as a slave child during pre-Civil War U.S., through the Jim Crow period, and became a hugely influential and controversial political figure. Giving his opinions due time is just part of my intellectual back-filling. It was going to happen eventually.

2. Harold Lamb’s HANNIBAL: ONE MAN AGAINST ROME (Bantam 1958)

“Subject” feels excluded from Verso’s six. For instance, I picked up a book about this infamous military figure because I don’t know much about him. The subject matter interested me more than Lamb’s reputation or book reviews. Reviews helped me narrow done which book about Hannibal I’d take, but it was secondary to my pursuit to broaden my understanding about the figure beyond his Wikipedia article.

     3. James Patrick Kelly's BURN (Tachyon Publications 2006)

I technically got this book for the second time. Kelly is well-respected in the SciFi community, well-reviewed, and a winner of awards that leave me green with envy. “Author reputation,” there you go. BURN is short enough that I figured I could give Kelly a shot. But then a certain someone borrowed my copy. And took it somewhere to the vicinity of New Mexico. Two years ago. Last week I realized I’m probably never going to see it again. I also realized Kelly provides the entire audiobook for free in podcast form on his site. Having author endorsement, and having already actually given money to that author, I downloaded my new copy. I guess that’s “Price.”

As I finish the latest draft of my new book, I wonder. What are the three books you bought most recently? And why?

Bathroom Haiku: Cactuar

cactuars can't bleed
their prickly exteriors
defend tender hearts

Lady Kickass & Superman: Why Too-Good Characters Are Still Good

I was on a certain writing forum once. An aspiring Epic Fantasy writer asked our crowd:

“I’ve written too good a character.

She’s smart, fast, generous, and good with a sword.

She’s too resourceful to ever lose. What can I do with her?”

It attracted the typical response: don’t write her like that. She was berated for creating a one-dimensional character and stifling all potential conflicts. “Mary Sue” was typed several times. Somebody even accused her of expecting readers to pay her to pen her own wish fulfillment.

That would have been my response if she caught me on a bad day. But, I arrived lucid. I recommended she write this protagonist into situations that weren’t simply win/lose. The following is closer to what I told her than is professionally flattering.

The gremlin war machines are pouring from the coastline.

They’ve laid siege to the north and south.

Lady Kickass is within half a day’s ride from

a nunnery in the north and a mechanist outpost in the south.

She may not even make it in time to assist saving either,

but she definitely can’t do both. One will be lost.

Which does Lady Kickass choose?

Okay, I renamed her character for the author’s anonymity. But the rest stood then as it does now. Situations abound in life where the stakes aren’t 100% Victory or 100% Failure. It ranges from who you sit with at lunch to how you allocate troops in Afghanistan. You do things for multiple reasons, and only have so much time and resources to accomplish anything at all. Writers always bellyache about there being too few hours in the day. Why not make that a problem for Lady Kickass?

It’s the dilemma of writing Superman. Since college, I’ve realized I love this character. But his bulletproof morality isn’t typically best displayed in a fistfight against someone’s bulletproof immorality. It’s in the decisions he has to make and the person they make him. My favorite thing Alan Moore ever wrote was For the Man Who Has Everything, which revealed the Man of Steel doesn't dream about us, but about living somewhere that doesn’t need him all the time.

I love Superman, at the very least as an archetype. I hold other people’s disdain for him with my own disdain. There is a grotesque demand in Literature, spiraling into all genres, to write “relatable” and “realistic” characters. Too often this means viewing your audience as cretins. They are vile, unimaginative subterranean spawn, all hideous, craven, and incapable of enjoying stories about anyone scarcely above their own level in any way. Something happened in the last five, ten, hundred or thousand years that eradicated wonder and aspiration. At some point, common readers became incapable of finding inspiration in characters who had capacities beyond their own. This marketing insight would mystify Christians and Muslims, whom adore deities and mortals they deify. From Hercules to House, M.D., we know the grubby audience stereotype is at least overblown.

Most of my characters are defined by one incapacity or another. It’s how I generate fictional people. But I’d never stifle the outrageous only for being outrageous. Like most bugbears of fiction, it’s not that a highly capable character is intrinsically bad. It's that you have to earn it, make it entertaining, and generally, make it worth the reader's time. Often that’s as simple as giving Lady Kickass some consequences.

Bathroom Monologue: What Children Should Worry About

-Other children, re: their willfulness, viciousness and vindictiveness

-Being ostracized for wearing the wrong apparel

-Being in any way noticeably different, especially in ways related to any sort of vulnerability

-Global Warming

-The Rapture, Judgment Day, Apocalypse

-People believing in The Rapture who will kill them

-People disbelieving in The Rapture who will kill them

-The rise of other superpowers

-Corporate hegemony

-Terrorists

-Wild animals

-Strangers

-Statistically, family

-That everyone they love and rely upon will go away

-Personal mortality

-General mortality

-The Meaning of Life

-Being gradually forced to become self-sufficient

-Being gradually forced to bow to society

-Emotional trauma from the duel between the forces of mandatory self-sufficiency and obligations to social structures

-That a B- will hurt their GPA

-Getting into a good school

-Getting into a good college

-Getting into a good Masters program

-No openings in the job market regardless of their education level

-Finite materials in an increasingly demanding global market

-Dangerously lax environmental protection laws

-Dangerously lax factory standards

-Syringes in sealed soda cans

-Sugar and preservatives in everything

-That watching any sort of viewing screen, including all those that entertain them, is gradually turning them blind

-Aneurysms

-Anxiety issues

-Scoliosis

-Early onset Alzheimer’s

-The multiple kinds of diabetes

-Sex, re: its performance, who you want it with, its reflection on your character, diseases contractible from it and assorted regrets experienced immediately afterward

-The various diseases you can contract from far more mundane activities than sex

-Cancers triggered by environmental factors, of which they’re largely ignorant

-Cancers triggered by genetic factors, over which they have absolutely no control

-That all their teeth will be bloodily shoved out of their mouths by a second pair

-Learning to operate an expensive, fragile mode of transport that runs on combustible fuel

-Moving out

-Maintaining a job

-Affordable healthcare

-Supporting relatives

-Looming adulthood

-Looking back on this one day and thinking it was so much better than the rest of their lives

Bathroom Monologue: Physics Isn’t Good or Bad

“Science is amoral. Physics isn’t good or bad. It just is. One guy patents the radio, another creates nerve gas. Equally innocent. Cure for polio or the atomic bomb? Totally, equally amoral. Cannot be judged. Must be allowed to continue developing at whatever rate scientists can secure funding. Chopping people’s arms off to measure how quickly they scream? This is science. Fuck off with your ethics. Ethics are fairy-story make-believe. Science believes in materials, like armor-piercing bullets and hobos signing up for human testing. You don’t want us to build a nuclear reactor just because an earthquake might release radiation over your city? That’s wrong of you. And that’s weird, because science doesn’t acknowledge wrong. Unless it’s the wrong of opposing science. You want to send aid to starving countries instead of paying for another moon landing? Well, fuck you. That moon landing is the future of science. So is creating sustainable agriculture for a ballooning world population, but that’s not for you to judge. Those moon scientists and food scientists both want money. Neither is more right than the other because there is no right in science. It’s not your place to project values onto these people. If anything, you should hold both their opinions and keep flinging money at each of them. That may seem like saying they’re both more right than you are, but that’s only if you think about it, and science is telling you not to. It’s wrong to think about it, because thinking about it is opposing science. In a few years neuroscientists will conquer the brain and, based on how you think, tell you what to think. Want a spoiler? It has you paying us for science. That’s good for everyone, or it would be if good were a material.”

Bathroom Monologue: Girl Scout Sales Leader

She bound for a national commendation until they learned she raised all that money selling Girl Scout Nookies.

Bathroom Monologue: The Last Cat on Earth

Toby slipped on the thick leather jacket. He flipped up the collar to shield his neck and cheeks. Next came a second pair of jeans, buckling them over the tails of the jacket. Gloves and construction boots were necessary. He looked out the window as he donned the ski mask. He watched the undead shuffling on the street corners before flipping goggles to protect his eyes.

He couldn’t risk getting a speck on him. He was the last man who could do the job.

He followed the undead through the windows of his house. Two windows on the west wall, then the one next to the porch. Four of his former neighbors shambled along the driveways. Their eyes were blind, noses turned up to sniff. Maybe they could smell him. Or maybe they smelled Mr. Tibbs.

Scuffling rose behind him. Toby whirled and saw the basement door shake. He rushed over to it, but the button was depressed. It was locked. He heard his sister – his former sister – groaning down there.

He frowned at her through the door. She couldn’t do this job anymore.

“I’ll take care of it,” he told her. “Even though you know I never wanted it here. Do you know how dangerous it is?”

The deck door slid open quietly. There was a little whoosh of air, and then the saddest sound left on earth. A keening, churning whine. As much as he hated these things, it made even him feel a little sorry.

It padded around the plastic deck furniture. It arched its spine, so that when it walked between their legs it would rub its sides. Mr. Tibbs was a self-petter, but that wasn’t enough affection. Even self-rubbing, it looked so damned pathetic.

Toby drew a plastic sheet from the living room and closed the door. No sense in letting dander get inside. This was going to be an allergic nightmare as it was.

“I don’t like you any more than you like me,” he said down to it. It didn’t seem to dislike him, but cats lied with their faces. “This just doesn’t feel right. And you're not eating the food I throw out here. What's wrong?”

When Toby didn’t immediately pet the little bastard, it keened again. It sounded almost human. Kickably human. The kind of humanoid sorrow that’d haunted him up in his safely boarded study the last three days. His wonderful, hypoallergenic study with the view of the wonderfully silent, dander-free undead.

The plastic chair creaked as he squatted into it. He laid the plastic sheet over his chest and lap, hands flattening it into place over his jacket. When it was ready, he patted his thigh. Mr Tibbs quirked its wretched head, then began to climb into the last lap on earth. Even now, there was a little affection left in the world. But only a little. He’d kill the bastard if it got any hair on him.