I have never been a fan of Twilight.
Never have. Never will.
When it came to my dislike of Harold Potter (he’s too old to be called Harry anymore, I agree with the soundbite from that new movie with Adam Sandler that has just been released – the one that has Seth Rogen in it) I at least read enough of the series to build up a reasonable dislike.
She is gifted in her art of telling backstory, but as the series wore on, editors grew wary of editing her work, leaving it so that the novels got to be too long for the story they were trying to tell. I stopped reading after the 3rd novel, The Prisoner of Azkaban. And I haven’t watched a one of the movies. Though, I do recall watching a snippet of a Quidditch match on the Sci-Fi channel.
Twilight. I refuse. The whole damned thing, I refuse.
Anne Rice dolled up the vampire a bit, I admit, making them an androgynous night fiend that looked gorgeous all the time. I like her vampires. I really did. Right up until the one where Lestat bit the neck of Christ, or some such shit. The other ones? I really enjoyed them. They were not overly wordy and they entertained the hell out of me. It was sincerely a different treatment for a vampire and it became the standard to which all other goths worshipped.
And you know why I refused? And perhaps it is second hand information that I neglected to follow up on, but if I can find the interview I will link it here, but she was outrageous enough to tell people in an interview that it all came to her in a fucking dream. A dream. So, in other words, she wrote it in her fucking sleep.
So, all of the other writers out there, and I don’t mean me, I mean the poor people that schlep their way through deadend jobs, writing day and night, submitting once a month to whomever would read their work, in the hopes that their work might see print and a select group of people might enjoy what they wrote. These are the writers that would kill to just write for a living, not to make millions and have them made into movies.
Stephanie Meyer talked about it like it was some kind of divine lottery, that she fell asleep one day and a novel popped into her head. All she did was act as a stenographer.

Do I believe that she plagarized? Watch how this pans out and we’ll all see. But I won’t be surprised if it turns out that, if at the very least she didn’t plagarize, it is not completely all of her work.

Here is the link

CopyCat!

Never gonna give your teen spirit up.

Think I’m gonna torrent some Nirvana tonight, after I check out the Rick Astley discography.

There really is more important things for me to be writing about.
Honest.
Like how I submitted a story for publication today. 3rd one this year. Fingers crossed.

But, this video is much, much more important than anything else I could ever say.

I had every intention of writing about Anansi Boys and then I was going to write about the novel adaptation of the recent Star Trek reboot, but as I was wandering the International Tubular Information Grabatron, I came upon this marvellous little video.
So, having posted this, I think I am done for the evening.
Good night, and thanks for watching.

I did not have high hopes for this one.
I tried very hard to read American Gods because everyone on the international Intertubular Electronic Informational Exchangeatron stated that he was the cat’s ass and that Sandman was better than a blowjob. Truth of the matter was, I didn’t see the big deal. When I saw him being interviewed on TV I thought he was pretending to be Fonzie with a word processor. So, I bought American Gods in hardcover. I think I got through two, maybe three chapters. Nothing he wrote got my fancy.
I let him go by and I heard about Anansi Boys and I read somewhere where there was an interview with him where he came close to acknowledging that his writing style was not accessible to everyone and he used the lessons he learned from writing on his blog and reading the comments of his readers to change the way that he wrote. Okay, I thought. Fonzie found a little humility.
But damned if I was forking over big bucks for the hardcover. Not even in a used bookstore. I waited for the paperback. And then I forgot what I was waiting for until last week. I bought it, and put it on my reading schedule (yes, I have a reading schedule – he was up against James Lee Burke and Donald Westlake and everyone got bumped by a Stephen King novella). I took it with me when me, my wife, and my inlaws were scheduled to see Tom Jones at Casino Rama, figuring that when the show was over, everyone else would go gamble and I would park myself behind a couple of double whiskeys and read some Anansi Boys – the booze would soften the blow, I thought.
As a side point, those of you who have never seen Tom Jones and you get a chance, please go. Don’t hesitate because you think it is for old people. The man has panache. He was forced to cancel after four songs (bronchitis) but he had me hooked after the second song. He was just so cool up there, in a well tailored suit, dress shirt unbuttoned down almost to the middle of his chest, and a few tasteful gold chains. Hey, I’m not gay, not in the least, but the dude, he was stylin for a sixty nine year old man. And, even with bronchitis, he rocked the mic as best he could. Damnit, I read a week or so ago some modern rocker couldn’t perform because of a sprained wrist or a damaged pinky finger or some such shit. Tom Jones rocks, but he had to cancel.
But, because he had to cancel, I got a chance to sit behind about five or six doubles and read almost all of Anansi Boys. And, I didn’t need to booze to enjoy it. Damned good story.
When you read the intro, take note of who he dedicates it to

NOTE:the author would like to take this opportunity to tip his hat respectfully to the ghosts of Zora Neale Hurston, Thorne Smith, P. G.Wodehouse, and Frederick “Tex” Avery.

Check those guys out on the wiki and see who it is they are and if you can get your head around them, you will enjoy the book much more. They aren’t required reading, necessarily, but if you can’t read P.G. Wodehouse and create an image of Jeeves and Wooster (at the very least, if you can see Fry and Laurie pulling it off) then maybe the humour and the writing of Anansi Boys is lost on you.

Reviews I’ve read say that the book is about a man coming to terms with his relationship with his brother. I don’t agree with that at all. It’s a tale about a man coming to terms with himself by accepting his father for who he is. Because, the main character, Fat Charlie Nancy (Think ‘Anansi’ and then you get the gist of why his surname is Nancy – and he’s Fat because of some childhood pudginess, but as a metaphor, I think it has more to do with him being too much person for one body ; something you’ll understand more when you read the book).
It also has to do with Afro-Caribbean mythology, which is where Anansi comes from. But, even at that, I think that Gaiman might have been touching on the evolution of literature as well. And the reason why I say that is because of a conversation between two characters towards the end of the book.
Anansi is a spider god and he is a trickster. Tiger is a tiger god and he is ferocious and vicious. First, all the stories were Tiger, because that was how people got ahead in life back then – by being mean and ferocious. But, as men got older, they got wiser and used their smarts. That is how Anansi got all the stories back. Anyway, here is the quote.

“You want to hear a story?” asked the old man.
“Not really,” she admitted.
He helped her to her feet, and they walked out of the Garden of Rest.
“Fair enough. Then I’ll keep it short. Not go too long. You know, I can tell one of these stories so it lasts for weeks. It’s all in the details—what you put in, what you don’t. I mean, you leave out the weather and what people are wearing, you can skip half the story. I once told a story—”
“Look,” she said, “if you’re going to tell a story, then just tell it to me, all right?” It was bad enough walking along the side of the road in the gathering dusk. She reminded herself that she wasn’t going to be hit by a passing car, but it did nothing to make her feel more at ease.
The old man started to talk in a gentle sing-song. “When I say ‘Tiger,’ ” he said, “You got to understand it’s not just the stripy cat, the India one. It’s just what people call big cats—the pumas and the bobcats and the jaguars and all of them. You got that?”
“Certainly.”
“Good. So…a long time ago,” he began, “Tiger had the stories. All the stories there ever were was Tiger stories, all the songs were Tiger songs, and I’d say that all the jokes were Tiger jokes, but there weren’t no jokes told back in the Tiger days. In Tiger stories all that matters is how strong your teeth are, how you hunt and how you kill. Ain’t no gentleness in Tiger stories, no tricksiness, and no peace.”
Maeve tried to imagine what kind of stories a big cat might tell. “So they were violent?”
“Sometimes. But mostly what they was, was bad. When all the stories and the songs were Tiger’s, that was a bad time for everyone. People take on the shapes of the songs and the stories that surround them, especially if they don’t have their own song. And in Tiger times all the songs were dark. They began in tears, and they’d end in blood, and they were the only stories that the people of this world knew.
“Then Anansi comes along. Now, I guess you know all about Anansi—”
“I don’t think so,” said Maeve.
“Well, if I started to tell you how clever and how handsome and how charming and how cunning Anansi was, I could start today and not finish until next Thursday,” began the old man.
“Then don’t,” said Maeve. “We’ll take it as said. And what did this Anansi do?”
“Well, Anansi won the stories—won them? No. Heearned them. He took them from Tiger, and made it so Tiger couldn’t enter the real world no more. Not in the flesh. The stories people told became Anansi stories. This was, what, ten, fifteen thousand years back.
“Now, Anansi stories, they have wit and trickery and wisdom. Now, all over the world, all of the people they aren’t just thinking of hunting and being hunted anymore. Now they’re starting tothink their way out of problems—sometimes thinking their way into worse problems. They still need to keep their bellies full, but now they’re trying to figure out how to do it without working—andthat’s the point where people start using their heads. Some people think the first tools were weapons, but that’s all upside down. First of all, people figure out the tools. It’s the crutch before the club, every time. Because now people are telling Anansi stories, and they’re starting to think about how to get kissed, how to get something for nothing by being smarter or funnier. That’s when they start to make the world.”
“It’s just a folk story,” she said. “People made up the stories in the first place.”
“Does that change things?” asked the old man. “Maybe Anansi’s just some guy from a story, made up back in Africa in the dawn days of the world by some boy with blackfly on his leg, pushing his crutch in the dirt, making up some goofy story about a man made of tar. Does that change anything? People respond to the stories. They tell them themselves. The stories spread, and as people tell them, the stories change the tellers. Because now the folk who never had any thought in their head but how to run from lions and keep far enough away from rivers that the crocodiles don’t get an easy meal, now they’re starting to dream about a whole new place to live. The world may be the same, but the wallpaper’s changed. Yes? People still have the same story, the one where they get born and they do stuff and they die, but now the story means something different to what it meant before.”
“You’re telling me that before the Anansi stories the world was savage and bad?”
“Yeah. Pretty much.”
She digested this. “Well,” she said cheerily, “it’s certainly a good thing that the stories are now Anansi’s.”
The old man nodded.
And then she said, “Doesn’t Tiger want them back?”
He nodded. “He’s wanted them back for ten thousand years.”
“But he won’t get them, will he?”

That is one long, damned quote, and for that I am sorry. But it gives you a flavour of what the humour and the writing of the novel is like.

I’ll write more about this later, but for now, read my entry, digest my hard typed quote, and maybe, I mean, if you feel up to it, read something of mine.

Hanging Baskets

My brother and I stopped collecting comics after about 1991, around the same time that Barry Windsor-Smith wrapped up the Weapon X saga in Marvel Comics Presents. We didn’t talk about it, about why we gave up on comics, but I think it was because the mystery was over. They told us how Wolverine came to be who he was. So we slowly stopped buying comics until they became a thing of distant memory. It was more fun for us to stumble upon an old issue, lying around, tucked away in a bookcase, or better yet, piled up with all the other reading material we put in the bathroom. I’ve never gotten around to it, but I believe every bathroom in a house should have a bookcase. And, the master bathroom should be a small library with reference books when an idea hits you.
Don’t worry. I’ll get to the movie in a minute.
I think we started collecting comics in and around 1982, when Frank Miller did the 4 issue limited series that really started it all. Before that, when X-Men started and he was recruited along with Colossus and Nightcrawler (two characters, I think, that were overlooked for an excellent origin story – especially Colossus ; him being a sculptor and his power that sculpts his body into an organic steel monstrosity…. Dunno. I think he could get a movie all his own – especially if the Hulk can) to fight an island that had captured the original X-men. Then, he was just a guy with claws. As a matter of fact, they did not even call them claws, they called them ‘talons’. And he always referred to himself in the third person. Still, even up to the Phoenix saga, I was drawn to the guy.
I remember, a friend of mine at the time, Hiroshi, and I created our own comic book characters. His were based on fruit, mine were based on strange robots. His fruit based wolverine was called ‘Orangerine’.
Seriously. This is what he and I did for fun.
I think, eventually, I came around to Hiroshi’s way of thinking and created comic book characters that kinda of looked more like upside down eggs with hands and fit that were disproportionately muscular and I called them ‘Ovoids’. I can still draw them, and I just might start drawing them again if my daughter grows tired of the birds and dragons and butterflies that I draw for her now.
I collected the mini series, I collected Kitty Pryde and Wolverine limited series. Though I didn’t think the series was going to amount to much, I gave it a chance because it was, after all, Wolverine. Turned out, Kitty Pryde kicked a little ass. The scene with her coming into her own, spending all night holding up the katana blade, before venturing out to take Ogun on her own, I thought was pretty cool as well. I especially liked the birth of Shadowcat as well. Far better than Ariel. Because, frankly, once Ogun taught her how to fight, that phasing power didn’t seem to wimpy after all.
I collected the regular series and I am sure that I have the first issued wrapped up in a proper bag somewhere in my book collection. I’d never sell it, for sure, but it would be a nice thing to have. You know, just to show the world just how hardcore I am. Or how sad I am, depending on your point of view.
I read up, many years later, about the further origins of Wolverine and the Weapon X program (I kinda like how they went to the roman numeral thing and incorporated Captain America as being Weapon I). I got down with the whole James Howlett thing and I always suspected that Sabretooth and him were related somehow. I got up to speed on my favourite character and I really want the issue where Magneto rips the metal from his very pores. I do have the graphic novel where he becomes a horseman of Apocalypse and gets his skeleton and his claws back. So, yeah, I kept up to speed. But my Wolverine isn’t today’s Wolverine.
My Wolverine is Mariko and Clan Yashida and Yukio and ‘gotcha’ and ’snikt’ and he’s a mystery because that’s what makes him deep and so very, very cool.
So, having said that, I still enjoyed the movie.
The took the patchwork quilt that was his history over thirty something years (he first appeared in the Hulk, with the yellow and blue costume) and made it into a nice, pretty blanket. The opening scenes set the stage, and the montage of him fighting over the decades, and never leaving his brother’s side, learning what it is to kill and relish in not being able to be killed. The montage then changes, at first with Logan (I’ll call him Logan, James Howlett be damned) pulling Victor (I’d have to check my old, old Marvel Universe copies for Sabretooth’s entry, because I think his name was always Victor) away from the door gun to stop killing. Victor is seen as the bad seed and Logan is the better half.
I had a hard time with the whole Wraith, Deadpool and Blob thing – how was it that the big fat guy from the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants was part of the Weapon program? I’ll have to read that up. I mean, Deadpool was cool (I waited for him to look into the camera lens and break the Fourth Wall – and Ryan Reynolds was the guy to do it – but he didn’t), but I thought the whole pooling of mutant powers was a bit much.
I really enjoyed the Silverfox and how that part of the origin played out. As a matter fact, it seemed damned perfect. I even thought the whole idea of carving the happy face into the bar instead of the birthday cake was pretty cool as well. Like it should have been written that way in the first place. I won’t got on about her any more than that, other than to say that the purpose that the character played in the movie wasn’t the one I thought she played in the comic books, but it served a purpose nonetheless.
And how it is that he lost his memory didn’t sit well with me. I liked the idea of him being mind wiped by the program after the adamantium was bonded to his bones and the way that they dealt with the memory loss in the movie didn’t ring true with me either. But it served it’s purpose.
I enjoyed the flick. Watched it once. Don’t think it will be one of the movies I’ll watch again anytime soon. Like I said, it was Wolverine and it was done with good intentions and hard work. It’s just that, well, with no fear of sounding selfish – it just wasn’t my Wolverine, you know?

I have one story to post. I think it needs a rewrite, though. Still, I like it well enough.

Why Grass Is Green

The only reason I bought the magazine is because it had Stephen King writ in big letters on the front cover.
The fact that the word ‘Stephen’ was written in shoe polish on the very shapely forearm of Bar Refaeli, and the surname ‘King’ was written, again using shoe polish as a medium, underneath her breasts, had nothing to do with it.
Seriously.
It was because of the new short story by Stephen King.
I had gone to the bookstore to look and see if maybe Nightmares and Dreamscapes II was out in stores yet.
(it isn’t – only a reprint of Nightmares and Dreamscapes I ; and all because of them making a movie with Christian Slater in the title role ; there’s that and a book of his experiences making movies, plus ‘Just After Sunset’ ; another collection of short stories, a collection I already own in hardcover, and all of the stories are pretty good).
Instead I bought a copy of Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman. I am getting close to finishing ‘Anansi Boys’ and I like it one whole helluva lot better than ‘American Gods’. I’ve almost finished ‘Anansi Boys’ and I only started reading it on Monday. I put down ‘American Gods’ after the third or fourth chapter. He just didn’t make his world something I wanted to believe in. ‘Anansi Boys’, though, is excellent. It kind of reads like Thomas King’s ‘Green Grass, Running Water’ only with an English twist. I know, in ‘Anansi Boys’ the deities are more caribbean than cree, but you will get the idea. Read them both. Just read Thomas King first and then read Neil Gaiman and you’ll see what I see.
So, I buy ‘Neverwhere’ and this copy of Esquire, feeling kinda like I’m buying porn. And I’ve never bought porn. Not once. I scoffed Dad’s stash of Penthouse (which I greatly preferred over Hustler and Playboy – I don’t think Dad ever had a copy of Hustler and if I ever read a copy it was one that was passed through the hands of many boys and the pages probably were dried out and stuck together, like those kinds of books tend to get) and perused them with great interest. But, I gotta tell you, believe it or don’t, no matter what porn I was reading, I eventually went to the articles.
Now, when I say articles, I mean the Forum page and Xaveria’s page. Those are the ones that turned my crank, especially the well written ones. And some of them were well written. Truly. They were written with a goal in mind and the good ones accomplished that goal. Some of them had their measure of mystery (I remember one about a guy having sex with an oriental woman for the first time and him remembering something that an old sailor told him about oriental genitalia being horizontal and not vertical – that intrigued the hell out of me) and all of them were pretty entertaining. I would love to manage to publish a short story in a literary magazine whose beginning went something like ‘I’m a twenty year old male from a small midwestern college and I never thought this would happen to me’.
I also remember a short story that was written in one of them. Damned if I can remember the exact title, but it went something like ‘The Bluest Lagoon’ and it was to be a sci fi sexual take off on ‘The Blue Lagoon’. I don’t remember the male’s name, but the female’s name was Cher. They were abandoned on a planet and left alone with a crotchety old pilot who had gigabytes (well, back in the day, gigabytes was not the terminology, but it’s the word I’m using) of porn. Well, he gets himself all liquored up from time to time, watches the porn when the kinds aren’t looking, and takes care of business to relieve the stress. Eventually, the guy either dies or takes off, and the kids are left to discovery their sexuality through porn. And what it ends up being is that they are completely dissatisfied with the role play and the toys and the movies, until they actually discover the act of sex, which they only enjoy after their relationship develops. And then they have fun with the toys and everything else. I remember the ending especially, because after years of being abandoned, a spaceship comes around to rescue them and the pilot and the captain observe the two kids screwing from orbit.
The pilot turns to the captain and says, “Should we go down and rescue them?”
The captain, who is actually Cher’s father but doesn’t realize it’s his daughter down there (something about when they were in the escape pod travelling at near to the speed of light, she aged significantly less due to time dilation) says to the pilot, “Save them from what?” and then they go on their way and the story ends.
Anyway, all of this is going through my mind as I am walking out of the store. I had read only the parts of the story that were written on Bar’s body and wondered what was inside. The story is interesting, and King does a clever job of playing up the whole indecent proposal thing, making it seem as if it is the whole point of the story, and it is and it isn’t. The story is about morality and what you do for money, but nothing so simple and basic as sex, though sex does play a large role in the story. Sex is about power and domination and that can be the basis of a morality. It is probably the sexiest story that King as written, at least as far as I can remember.
Because, in ‘Misery’, sex played no role. Annie didn’t want him for his body and she had more of a schoolgirl crush on Paul than anything else. But she was a power hungry bitch nonetheless.
‘Carrie’ had a basis in blood. ‘The Shining’ was about insanity. ‘Cujo’ was just fucking amazing – all about all kinds of monsters and not just the ones that hunt you down when you are trapped in a car.
‘Christine’ had a line in it about Archie Cunningham’s parents turning to sex when Archie got ‘difficult’ (if you can call being possessed by a crazy old man in love with his car as being difficult for a teen ; though it could adequately describe puberty for some kids ; a kind of possession by a demon) and Michael Cunningham has an interior monologue that he strongly suspected that his wife was using his penis for a sleeping pill – which I think was a genius line. I think King went from that paragraph to another when he remembered his one happy time with Archie that was totally his and Archie’s. I liked the transition.
And ‘Dolores Claiborne’, the titular character describes sex with her husband as him ‘throwing a fuck into her’. Again, genius use of words.
‘Pet Sematary’ has sex in it, used cleverly as well. And for me, that strikes me as a little embarassing, because of all of King’s books, I think he regards that one as the most personal. I’m none too sure that Tabby was keen on what he wrote there. But, then again, they both plied their trade in the skin magazines, and I don’t think either one of them are any kind of prudes.
As I think about the Stephen King stories that I can remember (without cheating and checking Wikipedia ; but I probably will tonight or tomorrow when I encounter a blank in my memory banks), that’s about it for the sex in them.
But ‘Morality’ has the sex. Not a lot of it. But powerful.
And it also has a message in it, and it sent me to Google and Wikipedia for it. Because one of the characters in the story refers to a work of philosophy called ‘The Basis of Morality’. Stephen King, in my view, is not much of a scholar and I did not think philosophy was his cup of tea (though, he does admit, in ‘On Writing’ about reading Herodotus with the help of some footnotes) but when he references it in the story, it suggests that he not only read it, but thought about it and how to apply it to a story. Now, he could be pulling my leg (as per the African Boomslang snake that paralyzes a character in one of his short stories, the character saved from being vivisected courtesy of an erection he gets when considering having sex with the doctor who was about to do the live autopsy on him – footnote to the story is that the character ended up dating the doctor but they broke up because she could only have sex with him when he pretended to be dead).
At any rate, when I’m done reading Gaiman I’m going to spend some time reading the two works that have ‘The Basis of Morality’ in their title and perhaps find the breadcrumbs that King might have left for me to find. And, if not, the sonovabitch caught me with a Bool (and, if you don’t know what a Bool is, you gotta read ‘Lisey’s Story’ and you gotta read it slow and then you have to buy the audiobook read by Mare Winningham).
For the curious, here are the two links, via Wikisource.
The Basis of Morality
On the Basis of Morality
I’ve bookmarked them to be read later.

And, for the people that like to read this kind of thing, here is my latest work in progress.
It’s inspired by two things.
One, is my favourite song by Led Zeppelin. ‘Gallows Pole’

Oh, yes, you got a fine sister, She warmed my blood from cold,
Brought my blood to boiling hot To keep you from the Gallows Pole,
Your brother brought me silver, Your sister warmed my soul,
But now I laugh and pull so hard And see you swinging on the Gallows Pole

The other, is one of my favourite plays, written by Robert Bolt. ‘A Man For All Seasons’.
I’ve come to admire Sir Thomas More a great deal as a result, despite my rampant atheism. And, the part of the play that inspired my story is this one line, which has been in my head ever since I heard and saw Paul Scofield say it.

More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country’s planted thick with laws from coast to coast — man’s laws, not God’s — and if you cut them down — and you’re just the man to do it — do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake.

I’ve wanted to name our next child, if it is a girl, either Penelope (wife of Ulysses) or Margaret (daughter of Thomas More – he called her Meg) but I don’t think my wife will go for either one.

My story is not a great literary triumph and only one other person has seen a draft of this story, and I’m wondering what her opinion of it is.

The Promise

Other than that, all is well, thanks for asking and thanks in advance for reading.

I’ve been away for a while and I think I am back now.
My job has left me with little time to write. I do sneak into the bathroom at work and jot notes into my Moleskin, but that’s not really writing. Just a way of coping with stress is all.

I have done two things tonight with my computer.
One, was with my computer. I wanted to hype Ubuntu and I wanted to hype Rythymbox the Music player but I don’t think I did a good job.
I would want to tell any Ubuntu user that Amarok has a prettier interface, but for functionality, to use anything else other than Rythymbox would be foolish. I fluttered about with Amarok for a week or more trying to get it to work with my cheap-ass but truly awesome Sansa View player (bought at Warehouse Direct for something like 60$ ; and it’s 8GB and it can play video as well). I loaded up Rythymbox and it stared at me like it wanted to say, “You idiot, why didn’t you pick me in the first place? Because you didn’t want to be seen with me at the Prom? Get over it, I ain’t pretty, but Lord, what I can do for you.”
And, when I did that, I tried to do a recording of my desktop to show how cool it is when it goes all cubey and flits back and forth between workspaces and how I have a cool flame effect because of Ubuntu Satanic, but I don’t think it worked too well. I’ll try to embed the video of the screen capture here and see if it works.
(note – okay, so now I have a Youtube account ; had to in order to get this to work)

And the other one was an idea I had for a story about a superhero whose arch enemy comes back from the dead to have his final revenge. The hero is a Canadian ninja who has shurikens shaped like maple leafs.
Yeah, it’ll probably go nowhere, but it is as much as I’ve written in two months.
I’ve attached it here, too, for you to have a gander at.

The Maple Ninja

I haven’t much to say except that I enjoyed this piece.

97.3 played it for their 5 o’clock favourite and I listened to it all the way home.

These 10 minutes were my whole week.

Alafair was in her room, working on her first attempt at a novel, tapping away on a computer she had bought at a yard sale. I had offered to buy her a better one, but she has said a more expensive computer would not help her write better. She kept a notebook on her nightstand and wrote in it before going to sleep. She had already filled two hundred pages with notes and experimental lines for her book. Sometimes she awoke in the middle of the night and wrote down the dreams she had just had. When she awoke in the morning two scenes had already written themselves in her imagination and during the next few hours she would translate them into one thousand words of double-spaced script.
She often wrote out her paragraphs in long hand then edited each paragraph before typing it on manuscript paper. She edited each typed page with a blue pencil and placed it facedown in a wire basket and began composing another one. If she caught me reading over her shoulder, she would hit me in the stomach with her elbow. The next morning, she would revise everything she had written the previous day and then start in on the one thousand words she required of herself for the present day.

James Lee Burke
Chapter 17
“The Tin Roof Blowdown”

You can go to the page on a computer or to the page of your paper notebook.

You can use a decades old machine for a computer. You can use your grandfather’s quill pen and a special blend of ink.

It does not make your prose any better because if you do not go to that page without the idea in mind that you are going to create something that is your own then do not waste anyone’s time. Do not write because you have issues and you think that the world will learn from them. Do not think that people care about your issues one whit. If you want to tell stories about love and tenderness and loss, write a journal and keep it to yourself so that someone else might stumble upon it a decade from now and manage to write a piece of historical fiction, where a melodramatic trollop is the comedic foil in the midst of the great story they will write.

If you do not go to that page with the same plan of action you would apply to a full time job, do not waste your time. There is no magical eight hours that produces that one fantastic work of fiction. It is hours piled on hours of honest work that produces that one story that manages to entertain a complete stranger for an hour or so. It is no different from rebuilding a car engine, creating a sculpture, planning a backyard project, painting a room, cutting the lawn, or cutting your toenails. It is a job. It requires tools.

It is not the act of creation and it is not your child. Any two idiots with compatible genitalia can get that done in a matter of seconds, excluding the time it takes to take their clothes off or get themselves drunk enough.

Go to the page wearing fuzzy bunny slippers and a batters helmet with two beer cans strapped to it, a single tube connecting them to your mouth so that you have a near intra-venal supply of beer. But if that is your plan, then stick with that plan, and make sure if that is what it takes for you to write, then do exactly that. If looking that silly makes you take it more seriously, then give it all you got. You might need to go into rehab or find a spouse that has no problems living their lives with a functional alcoholic, but that is how you take writing seriously and then you must pay that price.

If you do not go to that page without the intention of filing it with something that will entertain or intrigue someone for those two hundred and fifty words, then do not waste your time and the reader will thank you for not wasting theirs.

It’s not quite morning yet. I will get some sleep tonight. I promise.

But I do have a few more things to say before I go to bed.

I like my computer again. Actually, she seems a bit faster than before, which leads me to believe that it is entirely possible that I might have rushed the first install just to get it working.

Ubuntu will rule the world. I expect that everyone should be using a dual boot of Windows and Ubuntu. I mean it. This version, 9.04, is the easiest thing in the world to setup. The overall install took a while, but it was all done from a single burn of 700MB onto a CD-R and away I went. When I visited wordpress, it prompted me to install all of the missing plugins ( even the naughty ones that I really shouldn’t have if I really support the whole opensource thing ).

So, because Ubuntu is free, I am going to go to their website and buy some swag and support the cause.

Do you realize that you can even get them to mail you a free (and very pretty) copy of their CD? Free! Oh, there is an option for you to have to pay a token fee, if you want 20 or more. But, you can get an operating system mailed to you for free. Does Billy do that for you? I think not.

So, for those of you who visit this journal – yes, I am referring to all three of you – please go here and download a copy and buy some swag and support a good cause.

Ubuntu Swag

Linux – it’s not just for geeks anymore.