Lunatic Fringe

2007-03-03T07:06:00.000-08:00

Google Me Gently
Part 3: An Appeal

From a Bedford, Indiana newspaper:

Phillips - Nicole Christene Phillips of Louisville, KY, formerly of Jeffersonville, IN, died Wednesday, October 9, 2002, at University Hospital in Louisville from injuries sustained in an auto accident. Born on April 12, 1971, she was the daughter of Thomas and Jill D. (Wagner) Phillips.

Surviving are her parents, Thomas and Jill Phillips of Jeffersonville, IN; paternal grandmother, Burnettia Denny of Bedford, IN; maternal grandmother, Vera Wagner of Bedford, IN; several aunts, uncles, and cousins. She was preceded in death by her grandfathers.

She was a public defender in Clark County, IN, and a graduate of Indiana University and University of Louisville Brandeis School of Law. She was a member of the American Bar Association and was active in animal rights organizations.

Services for Nicole Phillips will be at 10:30 a.m. Saturday, October 12th, at North Chapel of Scott Funeral Home in Jeffersonville, IN. Burial will follow in Walnut Ridge Cemetery in Jeffersonville. Friends may call from 2-8 p.m. Friday at North Chapel of Scott Funeral Home in Jeffersonville. The family asks that friends consider memorial contributions be made to the Humane Society.

Oh. My. God.

That is NOT what I wanted to find. My only hope- and this is grasping at straws- is that this Nicole Christene Phillips, born in ‘71, from Indiana, was not the same person I had known. Maybe the People Search had crossed the records of two women with the same name and age. It could happen.

About all I can come up with to support this theory is that the Nikki Phillips I knew didn’t seem like someone who would grow up to be a lawyer. She wasn’t a brilliant student; she was a neo-hippie chick into partying on the weekends. I could see her dropping out to tour with the Dead before I could see her going to law school.

Of course, there’s nothing to say she couldn’t drop out to tour with the Dead, then get her shit together and go to law school. I’m sure it happens all the time. She was sixteen years old the last time I saw her. She could have gone on to become anything.

I don’t want to believe this is her, but I’m really afraid it is. Maybe part of what I saw in her - the light which drew me to her in the first place- was this spark of what she was to become. A public defender into animal rights. A person who did good, who contributed, who helped people (and animals.)

Probably the only way to 100% confirm that Nikki Phillips (who graduated from Glenwood High School in Chatham, Illinois in 1989) and Nicole Christene Phillips (who died in Louisville, Kentucky in 2002) are the same person is by shelling out the $40 for the background check. My peace of mind is worth at least that much, but I can’t really justify spending my family’s money (hard earned by my wife) on something which may or may not tell me something I really don’t NEED to know.

Plus, maybe I’m afraid to know for sure. At least now I have some slim hope that she’s still out there, alive. I wouldn’t even know how to go about grieving for her if I knew she was dead. It’s a strange situation. I never really knew her, but I did love her. The fact that my love was never requited or consummated makes little difference. She impacted my life in a huge way. A lot of who I am as a person, as a writer, and as a husband, has to do with the lingering effect she had on me.

So, here’s the appeal. If anybody who reads this (maybe you arrived here by Googling my name, or hers, or Glenwood High School, or Chatham, Illinois) has ANY information, please post a comment.

Or if anybody reading this has any suggestions on how to research this further (without spending money,) let me know that too. (The only further information I found was from the Mormon-run Genealogy web-site which, surprisingly, supplied me with NCP’s Social Security Number.) I’m not the most net-savvy person in the world, and I’ve simply run out of ideas for places to look. Maybe there’s something at the library that I could look up the old-fashioned way, I don’t know.

Or, if you read this and think “God, dude, give it up. She’s dead, all right? Why do you even care? She wasn’t your girlfriend. You’re married now, with two great kids, so just let go of a past which you never even had in the first place,” maybe I need to hear that, too.

2007-03-02T12:00:00.000-08:00

Google Me Gently
Part 2: In Dreams

For the past twenty years, I have kept sporadic dream journals. This is a great aid in boosting dream recall, and by focusing on my dreams, I was even able to play with lucid dreaming for a while. (That’s way fun.) Throughout this time, I would occasionally have dreams about Nikki Phillips. Don’t worry, this isn’t going to get “ikky.” The dreams were never sexual in nature.

It tends to work in one of two ways. Sometimes I dream I’m back in High School and that Nikki and I are close friends. Then sometimes I dream that we meet again as adults, and “catch up” on old times (which didn’t really happen.) It’s never romantic or erotic. In fact, my wife Lea is often in the dream, too, and jealousy is never an issue. My relations with Nikki are always warm, friendly and casual. There is a sense of acceptance. At long last, acceptance.

To the extent that I analyze my dreams, I look at it in a couple different ways. Either the dream Nikki represents my “anima,” the feminine aspects of my being, or more simply she just represents my past. In either case, I think the dreams express a desire to find peace with some part of myself. Of course, I don’t claim to be an expert at dream interpretation (and generally distrust people who say they are experts,) but that’s what I came up with. I do know enough about dreaming to realize that it’s not “really” Nikki Phillips, just a dream character with her name and face. (And even her face is fading with time.)

About a week ago, I had one of these dreams. In it, Nikki came over to my family’s house for some function (reunion, birthday party, something.) We hung out and caught up, and afterwards I drove her home. That was it. Nothing much happened in the dream, but it left me with a sense of peace and happiness that lingered after I woke up. As I have several times over the years, I wondered where the real Nikki Phillips was now.

I’ve made half-hearted stabs at locating her before, but now I vowed to do everything I could, given an internet connection and a lot of time on my hands. Now I know this sounds all creepy-stalkerish, but believe me, I had no intention of contacting her or re-connecting. My wife is a wonderful, tolerant woman, but I think even she would draw the line at me sending e-mails to a woman I obsessively crushed on in high school. I wouldn’t know what to say to Nikki anyway. I was just curious where life had taken her.

I started with the obvious. Just Googling her name. Of course, there are several “Nikki Phillipses” out there, but none of the ones I found was the one I was looking for.

Then I went on those high school reunion sites. Classmates.com and Reunion.com. Plus, Glenwood High School has an alumni page. These sites only have information on people who have registered on them, and Nikki has not. (I count this as further points in her favor. I felt kinda pathetic registering myself.)

Then I started searching those “People Search” pages. They’re pay sites, but they will give up some information for free. (As a tease, I suppose, for you to shell out the $40 for a background check.) Through one of these, I found a listing for Nicole Christene Phillips, age 35, with addresses in Chatham, Illinois (my hometown,) as well as the towns of Elizabeth, Jeffersonville and Memphis, Indiana, and Louisville, Kentucky.

Back in school, in a moment of stalker-boy detective inspiration, I stole a look at her Permit in Driver’s Ed class. That’s how I found out her middle name was “Christene.” I even remember the unusual spelling.

So the name was exactly the same. The age was right. It had a listing for the same dinky (pop 5000) Illinois town. Plus, I knew from talking to her that she was from Indiana, and had always thought that perhaps she’d moved back after graduation. So this was her, right? Had to be.

With this information, I searched her name along with the towns where she’d lived as key words. Maybe she’d made the local paper for some reason. Maybe she belonged to an organization with a web-site. Maybe she had an on-line profile through her job. Wedding or birth announcement. Maybe she blogged.

Well, I didn’t find any of those things. What I did find was an obituary.

2007-03-01T04:30:00.000-08:00

Google Me Gently
Part 1: A Little Back Story

First, a confession.

During the turbulent years of my adolescence, I fell squarely into the sociological caste classification of “Nerd.” (Those of you who know me, I’m sure, find this shocking.)

But what does “nerd” mean, exactly? In contrast to the pop culture mythology of the era in question (mid-to-late 1980’s,) I:
· Did not wear glasses.
· Was not obsessed with “Star Trek” OR Dungeons & Dragons.
· Was not academically gifted.
· Was not on the Chess Club (though I did dabble in Band, Speech and Drama.)
· Knew very little about computers.
· Never built a robot.
· Did not engage in wacky competitions with my mortal enemies, the “Jocks.”
· Did not look like Anthony Michael Hall.
· Did not secretly pine for my girl-buddy Molly Ringwald, who was really in love with Andrew McCarthy.
· Was not a closet party animal who got the girl in the end.

The truth was a bit bleaker.

I was a socially retarded introvert cursed with a paradoxical combination of abysmal self-esteem and the notion that I was somehow superior to everyone else. I had the usual hormonal overload of a teen-age boy, but due to a total lack of social skills and absolutely no sense of fashion or personal grooming, girls would not talk to me. Good thing, too. I wouldn’t have known what to say to them if they had.

Girls. That was the crux of the problem (and the reason I’m writing this today.) Actually, it wasn’t girls so much as A Girl. Singular. There was really only one, at least at first.

7th Grade. Glenwood Junior High School, Chatham, Illinois. 13 years old. Enter Nikki Phillips.

In the beginning, it was a typical first-crush type of situation. Nikki was a pretty girl who played clarinet in the band. (I played saxophone, badly.) I’m not sure what about her made me single her out, but I grew very quickly fixated.

At this point, my entire concept of teen-age social interaction came from TV and movies. With this distorted view of how things really work, I arrived at the conclusion that writing her anonymous “secret admirer” love letters was the key to her heart. It might have worked on TV, or at least led to a series of comically engaging misunderstandings. Real life, of course, works a little differently.

I’m very grateful that time has obliterated the exact content of those letters from my mind. I’m sure they were mawkishly sincere, heart-on-the-sleeve declarations. I seem to recall, God help me, that I even wrote her a poem at one point.

This all culminated with the revelation of my identity and a request to meet at the bleachers during lunch to discuss the future of our “relationship.” She did meet with me for a short chat, which time has NOT obliterated. In fact, I remember it verbatim. I said nothing. She said: “I know some high school guys who will kick your ass if you don’t leave me alone.”

Good for her.

I remember at the time feeling a great relief that the whole thing was over with. My stomach had been in knots of anxiety for the entire couple weeks since I’d hatched the scheme. I could not even conceive of what I would done if she had said: “Your obsession flatters me. Will you be my boyfriend?” I knew I was doomed to failure from the start. When this failure came to pass, I was just happy I could digest food again.

End of the story? No. That was just Chapter One.

Flash forward a couple years to my sophomore year at Glenwood High School. Fifteen years old now. While many of my peers had moved on from the awkward first flush of puberty, I was still mired in geeky self-loathing. I’d crushed on several other girls in the intervening time, having seriously impure thoughts about every attractive girl at my school (and many of the unattractive ones as well.) None of them were as intense as my Nikki fixation, though. No more love letters or poetry, just near-constant sexual fantasy.

On the first day of my second year of high school, the fates governing the class schedules whacked me in the face but good. In an eight-period day, I shared five classes with Nikki Phillips. Five. It was uncanny. Nobody else was in more than two of my classes. I would have to spend more than half of every day in close proximity to my former crush. Like most teen-age atheists, I was terribly superstitious. I did not take this as a sign that Nikki and I were meant to be together, though. Just as proof that there was an intelligent force at work in the machinations of the universe, and that this force was intent on fucking with my head.

After a few weeks of this new schedule, something equally as shocking happened. Nikki talked to me. And, wilder still, she turned out to be a really nice person. She wasn’t leading me on or toying with me because she found my fawning to be gratifying. (Trust me, I know what THAT feels like.) She was just friendly. I think she might have even found me funny. (I did come on like a younger, less witty, more neurotic Woody Allen sometimes.) Best yet, she politely pretended not to have any memory of the whole mortifying “secret admirer” episode.

Emboldened by this, I did something which even today I’m proud of. I asked her out. Sort of. In those days, I would occasionally get together with friends (just as socially maladjusted as I) and make Ed Wood-ish horror videos. The immortal “Werewolf Bob” series. I offered Nikki the plum role of a Gypsy fortune teller in our next episode. Amazingly, she said yes.

A few days later, not so amazingly, she cancelled.

Rejection is amplified immeasurably by deferment. The loss of hope is made all the more crushing by having been dangled in the first place.

Still, I couldn’t blame her. In the frame of mind I was in back in those days, her turning me down was actually a point in her favor. She was President-for-Life of the proverbial Club Which Would Not Have Me as a Member.

I was at perhaps the lowest ebb of my entire life right then. Depressed beyond words. Never diagnosed as such, never even in therapy, but if there was ever a poster boy for Prozac, it was me. Problems at home, problems at school. My whole life was a problem. If life was a problem, then the solution seemed obvious.

I was fascinated by suicide. To this day I couldn’t tell you if it was attention-seeking, cry-for-help behavior or a genuine death wish. If I had to guess, I would say it was the first one, gradually moving towards the second.

Nikki Phillips became to me an alternative to killing myself. I saw in her the answer to everything that was wrong in my life. Of course, it’s very unfair to put that much responsibility on someone you don’t even really know.

The “Nikki Phillips” I had set up in my head as my personal savior had very little to do with who Nikki actually was as a human being. The fantasy I had constructed was just a projection of my needs. I knew this. I wasn’t so foolish as to believe she could really save me. Or that I had anything to offer her other than a need to be saved. I wasn’t ready for a girlfriend. I was way too wrapped up in my own pain to let anybody else in.

For the entire school year my daily mood was almost wholly dependent on her. If she said two kind words to me or smiled in my general direction, life was bearable. If she ignored me, or gave any sign that I was annoying her, I would lapse into despair. Being forced to see her for five hours every day, I was never given a chance to recover. My heart was like an open wound, the scab yanked off daily so it never had a chance to heal. Given the perspective of time and adulthood, this seems melodramatic. But adolescence has no perspective.

This got to be wearying. At the end of the school year, I decided to go live with my father in a different town. Nikki played a big part in this decision. It was just too painful to be near her on a daily basis. I knew that if I stayed, things would only get worse. Plus, she would no doubt eventually get a real boyfriend. Jealousy could possibly have been the fatal final ingredient in the already volatile stew of my emotions.

(Of course the “fresh start” with my Dad presented a whole set of new problems, but that is, as they say, another story.)

There is a post-script to the high school section of this story. In my Senior year, I wrote her a letter. I confessed my feelings for her, claimed to have moved past them (I had a “real” girlfriend at the time,) and told her that I just wanted to know that she had made a positive impact on my life. She wrote me a very cordial reply, allowed that she’d had at least an inkling of how I felt (it WAS pretty obvious,) and said she could empathize because she’d had a similar crush on another guy in our class. (That stung a little.) The whole letter had a “how nice of you to write, please don’t do it again” tone. I never saw or heard from her again.

End of story, right? Not exactly. If writing that letter had been a stab at seeking closure, it didn’t work. If it had worked, why is it that twenty years later, happily married, I still have dreams about her?

NEXT TIME: There is a point to this, I swear.

2007-02-23T07:28:00.000-08:00

Ghost Creek 2007-2007

Aw, shucks. Is my face red? I think I'm going to discontinue my not-so-long-running serial "Ghost Creek" effective immediately. It was putting too much of a drain on my time and creativity, which could be better channeled into other projects. Like, say just for example, the "Black Monkey" revisions which are going well but with agonizing slowness. Plus, I'm not sensing much enthusiasm from the audience. In fact, I'm not sensing much of an audience beyond my sister. (Hi, Jen! Be seeing you in a couple weeks!)

I was coming to dread working on the thing. If it's boring me, I hate to think of what it's doing to y'all.

So, barring a swell of write-in protests (or strong sales of the 1st Season DVD box,) I'm dropping this project right now. The enormous relief I feel with this announcement convinces me I'm doing the right thing.

If you're starving for closure, the "deal" was aliens were planning a psychic invasion of earth. Faster-than-light space travel is a physical impossibility, but the aliens had perfected space travel via astral projection. The impending invasion was to be accomplished through our dreams. Our hero, Sean Preston (NOT Federline,) managed to steal alien technology at the age of 42. He went back in time to contact his 28-year-old self, who assembled a team of people with lucid dream abilities (called "The Frogwatchers") to combat the invasion. Sean @ 28 had not yet gained the courage his 42-yr.-old self possessed, so he bailed, going back further in time to trade places with his 10-year-old self. I had complex explanations for the abduction and for the mutant frogs and all kinds of surreal action scenes planned, but it just seems kind of pointless now.

Some good ideas there, some of which I may cannibalize for a future project, but for now let's just call it a failed experiment. (The parallel Christian Black tale "Dream Raider" is also hereby cancelled.)

Keep watching this space, though, for new rants and raves and writing news.

Sorry for wasting the time anybody may have invested in this thing.

2007-02-14T14:21:00.000-08:00

Ghost Creek, Episode 5

PREVIOUSLY- Sean Preston, ten years old, traded places with his twenty-eight-year-old self. He awoke in a Chicago apartment, in bed with his older self’s girlfriend, Jubilee Bellefleur. Sean was completely overwhelmed by the accumulation of eighteen years of new knowledge in his older self’s brain, including the death of his mother and the truth about what Sean-at-28 went back in time to avoid.

CHICAGO, ILLINOIS JUNE 1999

“Sean? Sean?”

The man was limp in Jubilee’s arms. She shook him, but he would not wake. He was gone. Out of it. Completely shut down.

“Damn it, Sean.”

Laying Sean down on the couch, Jubilee stood and paced the room for a few minutes, cursing Sean for his cowardice. A deeper, more honest part of her wondered if she would have chosen a similar exit had she possessed Sean’s particular talent.

“Doesn’t matter,” she said aloud. All that mattered was what to do now.

Jubilee picked up the phone. Before she could dial, she heard the tone indicating she had a waiting voice mail message. She dialed the number and punched the code. Listened. Closed her eyes with sorrow. Today, it seemed, was a day for bad news all around.

“Let’s get you dressed, Sean,” she said to the senseless shell which had until recently contained her boyfriend. “We’ve got to go to the hospital.”

***

Moving Sean proved easier than she had feared. He was still silent, his eyes blank, but he obeyed her commands. “Put on these pants, Sean.” “Get in the car, Sean.” “Come with me.”

She led him easily through the hospital halls. There were four people in the room when she opened the door.

Sitting in a chair in the corner of the room was a young Japanese man reading a thick paperback book entitled “Chainsaw Moon.” His own name, Shozo Watanabe, was printed on the cover. Though he had written the book (technically, at least,) he had not yet read it all. There was desperation in his reading, a hunger, as if hidden in the book’s pages was the answer to a particularly vexing question. He did not look up when Jubilee and Sean entered the room.

A young, boyish-looking woman in a wheelchair turned from the window when they came in. She managed a weak smile. Her name was Sally Ross. She wore, as did the rest of them, a look of haunted sleeplessness. Dark circles under her eyes, a certain pallor of the skin.

The eyes of the man pacing the room were rimmed with red. He had recently shed many tears. His name was Henry Leary and he appeared ragged with desperation, like a man on the verge of total collapse. His face crumpled when he saw Jubilee and Sean, but he did not cry again. He seemed to have cried himself dry.

The fourth person in the room was the young girl unconscious in the hospital bed. Henry’s daughter, Joyce. Six years old but wearing the face now of someone ten times that age. Her skin wrinkled, her hair gray, her sleeping features conveying the weight of a lifetime of troubles.

“Oh my God,” Jubilee said when she saw her. “Is she all right?”

“The doctors can’t find anything wrong with her.” Henry sounded as tattered as he looked. “Physically. She hasn’t woken up yet, though. I don’t know if she’ll ever . . .” His voice just gave out into a dry wheeze, as if his tears had drained every bit of moisture from his body.

“What happened?”

“She’s been having nightmares,” Henry said. “So she came to sleep in my bed. She probably thought she’d feel safer. How’s that for irony?”

“Henry.” Jubilee put her hand on his shoulder.

“Thank God I woke up before . . .”

“What’s wrong with Sean?” Sally interrupted, wheeling her chair closer.

Sean was staring at the shriveled girl on the bed, jaw hanging open but otherwise displaying no emotion.

“Well,” Jubilee said. “That’s my big news. Sean has . . . checked out on us.”

Henry’s face snapped instantly from grief to anger. “No,” he said. “You mean he . . .”

“He’s gone, isn’t he?” said Sally.

“You little shit!”

Henry grabbed Sean by the shoulders. Jubilee pulled him off.

“This isn’t him,” she said. “This is the kid he used to be. He’s only ten years old.”

“What’s wrong with him?” Henry demanded.

“His mind snapped,” said Jubilee. “He couldn’t take it. He remembers everything Sean did, and it was just too much for him.”

“We need him!” Henry was frantic now. “We don’t stand a chance in hell without him.”

“We didn’t stand a chance in hell even with him,” Sally put in.

“Calm down,” Jubilee said.

“Calm down? We’ve only got six months left, Warner and Henley are both dead, and Joyce . . .”

He gestured with his hand at his daughter on the bed, waving away words too painful to utter.

“You were dreaming about Him when this happened?” Jubilee asked.

“Of course I was,” said Henry. “I dream about Him every night.”

Jubilee nodded. A presence stalked them in their dreams, taking a different form for each of them. Henry dreamed of a man with a black void where his face should be. Jubilee saw a huge dog with red eyes and flaming fur. Sean had always seen a gray alien with a bulbous head and huge black eyes. They all knew its shifting form was due to flaws in their perception. It didn’t matter what it looked like, though. It was the same malevolent being. Worse, it was but a harbinger. A single emissary sent in advance of the invasion. One was bad enough. They couldn’t imagine the terror a million would unleash.

“We have to get a hold of SAFT,” Henry said. “He’ll know what to do.”

“How are we supposed to do that?” said Jubilee. “Send a telegram to the future? He said he’d contact us again in September.”

“September?” Henry moaned. “Jesus.”

“I know it’s bad, Henry,” Jubilee said. “And I am sorry about Joyce. But we all have to chill out and try to figure out what to do next. Now does anybody have any ideas?”

“My frog turned white this morning,” Sally said. “Just pure white. That’s got to be a sign, right? That’s got to mean something.”

“I’ve given up trying to figure out what the damn frogs are trying to tell us,” said Jubilee. “Mine looks like his brains are coming right out of his head. You want to tell me what that means?”

Henry sat on the bed, near his daughter’s feet. “All right,” he said. “Let me see if I got this straight. Sean went back in time, that’s his thing, right? And he did . . . what?”

“He traded places with himself. Sent his ten-year-old self into the future and took over his own past.”

“OK,” said Henry. “So wouldn’t that change everything here in the present? I mean, if Sean went back to change his whole life around, we wouldn’t even know him, right?”

“No,” Shozu said from the corner, speaking for the first time since Jubilee walked into the room. “It doesn’t work like that. You can’t change the present by going into the past. The present already exists. It cannot be negated. Instead, a tangent is formed. A divergent reality.”

“A parallel universe?” Sally said.

“That is one way to describe it,” said Shozu.

“How can you possibly know that’s true?” said Henry.

“Because it says so, in this book,” Shozu said.

“Which you wrote.”

“The words came from my hand, but not from my mind,” said Shozu. “You know that, Henry.”

“Yeah, well, what else does this amazingly useful book have to say?”

Shozu looked up at the clock on the wall, then back down to the page open before him. He ran his finger down a column. “Today is the 12th, right?”

“Yeah.”

Shozu slammed the book shut. “It says that in ten minutes, some men are coming here to kill us.”

NEXT TIME: The maze. The morgue. The moon.

2007-02-01T13:12:00.000-08:00

Ghost Creek, Episode 4

I know it's been a little while since I've been down to the Creek. Other projects have been competing for my attention and creative headspace, which brings me to some big news and some little news.

First the big- give me a big whoo-hoo because I have actually completed a novel! Actually, one exclamation mark doesn't quite convey how earth-shattering that is for me. So here's a few more: !!! Yes, "The Black Monkey" now officially has a beginning, a middle and an end, and those three parts more or less connect. I would feel more of a sense of completion if this first draft wasn't quite so first-drafty. The vision part is over, and now comes a hell of a lot of revision. I actually enjoy the editing process, and I'm going to tackle it by copying the entire novel out by hand. (My fingers are cramping just thinking about it.)

The little news is that my evil twin, Christian Black (or am I the evil one? I can never remember) is posting a "shadow" version of "Ghost Creek" on the Literotica web-site. It is a parallel serial (with a lot more gettin' busy,) which might intersect with this one occasionally. (If you don't think parallel lines can intersect, you've never been at the corner of Gurley and Sheldon in Prescott, AZ.) His story is called "Dream Raider," and you can find it here. The sad part is that it's better written than mine (at least at the start.) CB's kind of a sick puppy, but that creep can write.

(Of course, if you think erotica is "ikky," just skip it. You won't hurt his feelings.)

So, without further ado (not that I don't love ado,) here's "Ghost Creek":

PREVIOUSLY: In the basement of the mysterious house in the woods, Sean and his friends found a man claiming to be Sean’s future self- from the year 1999. Sean-at-twenty-eight made an offer which Sean-at-ten found irresistible; to trade places. This was accomplished with a kiss. Sean-at-ten awakes to find himself in . . .

CHICAGO, ILLINOIS JUNE 1999

He awoke. There was an overwhelming shock of dislocation. It was like being turned inside out, upside down and backwards. Sean looked through eyes which had degraded over the years. His older self needed glasses, and had been putting off getting them for years. The sudden near-sightedness was only a very small part of the incredible shift of perception. His body was different. Older, taller, heavier, post-pubescent. Eighteen years fell upon him with a crushing weight. There were bad teeth in his mouth, and fingers on his left hand which had been broken years before. He needed to shave; the rough stubble on his face itched with a maddening insistence. These appalling sensations assaulted him all at once.

He sat up in his bed with a start, as if jolted awake from a dream. He became aware, horror gradually mounting, that he was naked and lying beside another naked person. A woman. Sean’s child’s mind shrank back from her terrifying adulthood. She was a black woman, short hair molded to the pillow, eyes swollen with sleep. Sean knew her name was Jubilee Bellefeur, that she was his girlfriend, and that they had lived together for almost a year.

“Make some coffee,” she mumbled into her pillow without opening her eyes.

Sean was afraid to answer. Afraid that if he opened his adult mouth, his child’s voice would betray him.

He crawled from bed and found rumpled clothing on the floor. Sweatpants and a t-shirt with a picture of a young man on it, over the word “Nirvana.” Sean knew that Nirvana was the name of a rock band, that the man in the picture had been its lead singer, and that he had committed suicide several years before. Without even trying to, Sean found that he knew the words to several of their songs.

Far worse than the new sensations of his body was this knowing. Suddenly he knew so much. Eighteen years of new memory, stored in the adult brain, flooded Sean’s horrified ten-year-old mind. He knew about sex. He knew about disappointment. He knew about shame. He knew about disillusionment and heartbreak and failure. Emotional wounds which had long been healed for the man were fresh and new for the boy, as if every scab he’d ever had in his life were torn off all at once.

Staggering from the bedroom, Sean found himself in a cluttered kitchen in a small apartment. He knew it was the best he could afford. He knew he worked as a pizza deliveryman, and the addresses of several regular customers spilled unbidden into his head. So much of the new knowledge was utter trivia. Nearly two decades of sit-com plots and commercial jingles accumulated in his head in a deafening cacophony of useless information.

Beside the front door was a terrarium on a stand. Inside was another misshapen frog. Fat and squat, bulbous and boneless as a jellyfish, with tiny wiggling useless legs and what appeared to be its brain oozing in pulsing white bubbles from cracks in its head. The amphibian sat in a pose of yogic contemplation. It looked at Sean with sharp, intelligent eyes. Sean knew the frog’s name was Jizo. He knew where it came from; where all the mutant frogs had come from. This knowledge would have been horrifying on its own, but it was drowned in the flood of all the other new horrors Sean was suddenly aware of.

Pressing his hands against his skull as if this could contain the explosion which felt imminent, Sean stumbled into the living room. He collapsed upon the couch. Imprinted instinct compelled him to pick up the remote control and turn on the television. The set was tuned to a cable news channel. Sean saw the date posted on the screen; June 12, 1999. A cease-fire had taken effect in Kosovo (Sean-at-twenty-eight had only the vaguest concept of this conflict, so Sean-at-ten was spared at least that much.) The governor of Texas, George W. Bush, had just announced his intention to run for President in 2000 (Sean suddenly held strong political convictions which he could not begin to understand.) The new “Star Wars” movie was breaking box office records (Sean had the memory of seeing the movie, and of being bitterly disappointed by it. He knew who Jar-Jar Binks was.) An alleged serial killer named Larry Jacobs had eluded arrest in Houston, Texas, and was now the subject of a manhunt across the Southwest. (They’re looking in the wrong place, Sean’s brain told him, though how he had come about this certainty was buried too deep for him to access.)

The newscast went to commercials, for cell phones and web-sites, and Sean knew what these things were.

He turned off the TV. It was too much. Sean had been in this new world for less than ten minutes, and he already felt as if he were losing his mind.

If I haven’t already.

It did occur to him that perhaps he was not really a ten-year-old whose mind had been thrust into the body and brain of his twenty-eight-year-old self. A far more likely explanation was that he was in fact an adult man who had just suffered a cataclysmic breakdown; a complete shattering of identity. These weren’t the words Sean used. In his mind, the explanation was couched in much simpler terms:

I’m crazy. I’m completely insane.

The bedroom door opened and the woman named Jubilee emerged. She had pulled on a t-shirt which fit her body tightly, without covering much of it at all. Sean simultaneously felt childish embarrassment and adult lust.

“I thought you were going to make me coffee,” the woman said.

She flashed Sean a look of annoyance, which turned to concern when she saw he was crying.

“What’s wrong, baby?”

She came to him, sat close beside him on the couch and touched his tear-streamed cheek.

“You all right? What happened?”

Sean couldn’t answer. He couldn’t even speak. He was torn between a desire to fall into the woman’s arms and a need to bolt and run from her.

“Did you . . .” Jubilee looked deep into Sean’s eyes. Understanding suddenly filled hers.

“You did it, didn’t you?” she said. “You son of a bitch.”

“Wh . . .”

She shook her head. “Not you. Him. He did it. Or it is you, just the older you. Damn. It makes my head hurt just to think about it. How old are you, anyway?”

“Ten,” Sean managed to speak through his tears.

“Ten? Holy shit. That goddamn coward.”

Sean knew then what his older self was running from. And how right he was to be terrified. More and more knowledge, burying him under his crushing weight.

“I want to see my Mom,” he sobbed.

“Oh, sweetie,” Jubilee’s expression softened, responding to the child within the man. “Your Mom died two years ago.”

And of course Sean knew that, too. He allowed the woman to hold him, falling into her warmth and softness. The man’s eyes closed, draping the boy’s tortured mind with blessed darkness.

NEXT TIME: The Frogwatchers. Chainsaw Moon. Hellhound on my trail.

2007-01-20T12:59:00.000-08:00

Ghost Creek, Episode 3

PREVIOUSLY- Sean and his friends explored the mysterious abandoned house in the woods, finding nothing inside but a mutant rodent-eating frog. Sean led them into the basement, the place where he was kept during his abduction experience. There they found a room drenched in red paint, an anachronistic CD player (the source of the screaming which had led them inside in the first place,) and a strange man claiming to be Sean, who offers them pudding.

BAKERSFIELD, IL. JUNE 1981-

“What do you mean,” said Sean, “you are me?”

“Just that,” said the older man. “I am you at the age of twenty-eight. To save you doing the math, that means I’m from the year 1999.”

“Yeah, right.”

“See, I knew there’d be this whole awkward ‘trying to convince you’ thing, so listen up. When you, we, whatever, were seven, we were riding our bicycle, pretending to be Luke Skywalker in his X-wing fighter, and Dad’s Mustang was the Death Star. We got a little too close, and put a big scratch in the paint. Dad freaked out when he found it, but he thought Tommy Stipe next door keyed the car. We never told him, or anybody, the truth.”

Sean gaped up at the older man. “How did you know that?”

“When we were nine, we found a cardboard box by the side of the road with some newborn puppies someone had abandoned. We knew Mom wouldn’t let us keep them, so we hid them in the shed in the back yard. They all died within a day, and we buried them beside the garden. Again, never told anybody. You want me to keep going? Because I’ve got about a dozen of these,” he looked up at Bobby and Marcy, “and some of them are kind of embarrassing.”

“No,” Sean said. “I believe you.”

“Good.”

“Wait,” Bobby said. “This for real? This guy’s from the future?”

“No,” said Marcy. “I don’t believe it. It’s impossible.”

Sean-at-twenty-eight raised a finger. “You’re right, in a way. Time travel is physically impossible. But psychically, astrally, whatever you want to call it, it can be accomplished by certain talented individuals. See, I’m not even really here. This space we’re in doesn’t literally exist. The three of you are asleep on that ridge up there, dreaming this. But it is real.”

The three kids exchanged baffled looks. None of this made sense.

“So, if you’re from the future,” Bobby said, “what about me and Marcy? What happens to us?”

“Let’s see,” said Sean-at-twenty-eight. “You, Bobby, are a very successful psychiatrist. You and your boyfriend Tony . . .”

“Boyfriend?”

“Yeah, you’re gay.”

“I’m gay?”

“Don’t look so shocked. You told me yourself that you always knew.”

Bobby flushed red and made a slight sputtering noise.

“What about me?” Marcy said.

“You, ah, well, let’s just say you are a very good person who helps a lot of people.”

“What does that mean?”

“I really, ah, I shouldn’t have even told you that. People shouldn’t know too much about their futures. It kind of messes things up, trust me.”

“I can’t believe I’m gay,” Bobby was able to mutter.

“Look,” said Sean-at-twenty-eight. “We don’t have much time. This is a temporary state. I don’t know how much longer I can hold it. Let’s get down to business.”

“Yeah,” said Sean-at-ten. “Why are you here? What do you want?”

“Well,” said Sean-at-twenty-eight. “You ever hear people say things like, ‘if I knew then what I know now,’ or ‘if I had it all to do over again?’ This is a unique opportunity to make some changes in my life. I’m going to finish college this time, do . . . fewer drugs, and most of all I’m going to boink Nikki Phillips in my sophomore year. Plus, I went on the internet and memorized the winning lottery numbers from the week I turn eighteen. Ten million dollar jackpot.”

“What’s the internet?” said Sean-at-ten.

Sean-at-twenty-eight broke into a huge grin. “See? You’re going to have so much fun.”

“What do you mean?”

“I can’t just come back here and slip into my old skin,” said Sean-at-twenty-eight. “It’s a paradox. Two souls, or whatever you want to call them, can’t occupy the same body at the same time without a lot of complications. So this is like a swap.”

“A swap?”

“Yeah. You go into the future and take over my life. I come back here and take over yours. Everybody wins.”

“I can’t . . .”

“Ah, but you can,” Sean-at-twenty-eight interrupted. “And you will. I know you will. I’m you, remember? We’re science fiction freaks. I know you can’t pass up the chance to actually go into the future. 1999, man. There’s no flying cars or men on Mars, but there’s a lot of other fantastic things. Trust me. And you’ll be an adult! You can do anything you want. We’ve got our own apartment. A gorgeous girlfriend. I’m not going to say any more. You in?”

Sean-at-ten but his lip and considered for just a few seconds.

“What about Wilson?” he asked.

Sean-at-twenty-eight shook his head. “I don’t know. They never found him. We still don’t know what really happened. I think whoever took us did something to us to our brain, though. That’s why it’s possible for us to do this.”

“But the dream . . .”

“I sent you the dream,” said Sean-at-twenty-eight. “Another talent of ours. I’m sorry, but I had to use a potent bait to get you down here. Come on, Sean. What do you say?"

“You can’t trust this guy,” Marcy put in.

“But he’s me. I can trust myself, can’t I?” Sean looked up at his older self. “What do we have to do?”

“That’s the weird part,” said Sean-at-twenty-eight. “We have to, ah, kiss.”

“Kiss?”

“Yeah, I know. Ew. I’m not looking forward to it any more than you are. It’s like a fairy tale thing, though. Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, the Frog Prince. I guess the soul can be transferred through the breath, or something. I don’t pretend to understand, but that’s the way it works.”

“You are not going to kiss this guy,” Bobby said. “He’s probably just a child molester, messing with our heads.”

Sean-at-ten shook his head. "I'm ready," he said to himself.

Sean-at-twenty-eight took Sean-at-ten gently in his arms. He leaned down, tilting his head and closing his eyes to bestow the kiss.

“Oh, wait, one more thing,” he said before their lips could touch. “If you happen to run into the forty-two-year-old Sean, don’t listen to a word he says. The guy’s a liar.”

“What?”

But then the man’s lips fastened upon the boy’s with incestuous fervor. Sean-at-ten closed his eyes and the world spun. He had the sense of being dragged into an immense whirlpool, a spiraling backwards plummet into a black void.

And then he awoke.

NEXT TIME: Party like it’s 1999. Another strange frog. Idiot box.

2007-01-16T05:25:00.000-08:00

Ghost Creek, Episode 2

PREVIOUSLY- Ten-year old Sean Preston has been subject to prophetic dreams since an abduction experience three years before. Now he has dreamed of finding his friend Wilson, who was abducted at the same time but was never returned. Following the sign-posts of the dream, Sean leads his friends Bobby and Marcy to an abandoned house in the woods near the rumored-to-be-haunted Ghost Creek. From inside the house, they hear a boy screaming.

BAKERSFIELD, IL. JUNE 1981-

Hands were on Sean’s shoulders. Bobby and Marcy each had grabbed him and were trying to pull him away.

“Let go!”

“You were right, OK?” Marcy said. “But we have to call the police.”

“Didn’t you hear? He’s in trouble. We have to help him!”

“What are we going to do?” Bobby demanded. “If we go in there, they’ll just get us too.”

“Dammit, let me go!”

Sean swung out blindly. The punch landed on Bobby’s soft sweater-padded belly. It was not delivered with much force, but Bobby doubled over with a comical-sounding ‘oof.’ Marcy let go and Sean bolted forward, through the unlocked door.

The light inside the house was dim and oppressive, filtered through shrouding trees and dirty broken windowpanes. The air was heavy with hot summer dust and the smells of old wood and rodents. The screaming had stopped. The dead silence was so absolute it was difficult to believe the sound had ever existed.

His friends were behind him in the house, Bobby red-faced and sputtering anger.

“You hit me!” he whisper-hissed.

“Sorry.”

Missy looked around, surveying the gloom. The room was bare of furniture except for an ancient, cabinet-style television with a tiny round screen.

“There’s nobody in this house,” she said. “You can tell.”

“You heard the screaming,” Sean said.

“Maybe that was just . . .”

The front door slammed shut with a sudden burst of wooden thunder. All three kids jumped, grabbing each other tight.

“Just the wind,” Bobby whimpered.

“Oh, yeah, it was blowing like crazy out there, wasn’t it?” Marcy said. She ran to the door and rattled the knob. “Locked.”

“No.” Bobby bubbled tears.

“It’s all right,” Sean said. “That happened in the dream, too.”

“Yeah?” said Marcy. “Thanks for warning us.”

“Come on,” said Sean. “The basement stairs are just off the kitchen.”

“Basement?” Bobby’s voice had degraded to a squeaking rasp, like an oil-parched hinge.

Sean led and, rather than being left alone, the other two followed. Through a swing-hinged door into a dirt-crusted linoleum kitchen. The light in here was even dimmer.

“There’s a back door, isn’t there?” Bobby said, blinking behind his glasses. “Please tell me there’s a back door.”

Darting movement caught their attention. A small rat scuttled across the counter. It ran smack into the protruding tongue of a fat bullfrog squatting motionless by the sink. The twitching furry thing was pulled into the amphibian’s mouth with a squealing shriek. Two grasping bites and a gulp and it was gone. The frog let out a burping croak and licked its lips. The creature had a disturbing profusion of mutant legs, more than could be counted at a glance. Like some abominable cross between frog and spider.

“OK, I did NOT just see that,” said Marcy.

“Was that in your dream, too?” Bobby asked.

“In my dream, it ate a little bird,” Sean said. “Come on.”

There was a door in one corner of the room. Sean opened it and they all looked down at stairs leading into utter darkness.

“Got a flashlight?” said Marcy.

Sean reached over and flicked the light switch on the wall. A line of bare hanging low-watt bulbs filled the dank concrete basement below with dusty yellow light.

“I didn’t see any power lines outside,” Marcy said. “Must be a generator.”

“No,” Sean said. He descended the stairs.

The basement was empty except for some scraps of wood along the walls. Across the room was a door, painted a lurid red which seemed to glow with a light of its own. They were halfway across when the boy’s scream came again, bouncing about the concrete chamber with ringing echoes.

Bobby shrieked. Marcy grabbed Sean’s arm hard enough to bruise it. Sean pulled from her grasp. He ran forward and opened the red door.

At first all they saw was the blood. It was everywhere. Great red splats covering the walls and the floor. Ribbons of gore dripping from the ceiling, into their hair.

Bobby tried to step back out of the bloody room, but smacked the back of his head on the door frame. He collapsed to the floor with a hiccupping moan. Marcy threw her hands over her face and screamed.

“Not blood!” Sean had to shout to make himself heard over his friends’ terror. “Paint! Smell it! It’s just red paint!”

After a few moments the adrenal spiking of their hearts subsided enough for them to understand. Marcy reached a hand down and helped Bobby up off the floor.

Now they could see the room. It looked like somebody’s Dad’s garage workspace. Tool shelves and work benches. Fluorescent lighting. Another door on the opposite side of the room. In the center was a table with a portable stereo. As soon as they saw this item, the boy’s scream came again, issuing from the speakers.

“It was just a recording,” Marcy said.

“Great,” Bobby said. “So I pissed my pants for nothing.”

Sean went to the stereo. He pushed a button and a strange silver disc was ejected. Black letters on the front read: “Hollywood Sound Effects, Volume 6: Sounds of Terror.” Sean flipped the disc over. The back side reflected sharp lines of brilliant rainbow color when held at an angle to the light.

“What is this?” he said.

“Some weird kind of record maybe,” said Marcy.

“It’s a CD,” came a man’s voice from the opposite door. “Compact Disc.”

The three children looked up. The man was about thirty, not very tall with a mass of uncombed dark hair. He was eating what appeared to be chocolate pudding from a small plastic cup. The resemblance was immediately remarkable. He looked enough like Sean to be his Uncle, though Sean had never seen him before.

“Hey, you kids want a pudding cup?” he asked. “I got a whole fridge full of them. My favorite food in the world, and in here I can eat whatever I want.”

Their gaping jaws could issue no speech. Sean finally recovered enough to say: “Who are you?”

“Well, Sean,” said the man. “I . . . am you.”

He chuckled at their looks of identical stupefaction. “You sure you don’t want that pudding cup?”

NEXT TIME: Sean at twenty-eight. A proposition. Sean’s first kiss.

2007-01-12T06:11:00.000-08:00

Ghost Creek, Episode 1

A New Year and something different with this silly blog. (Less eye-straining look, too.) The sporadic attention I've paid to this thing has been in part because there's not much I want to say ABOUT my writing that I don't already say THROUGH my writing. In that spirit, here's some actual fiction output; an on-going serial that is very representative of my work. I promise I will be dilligent about posting episodes, and that I will do my best to keep them short. Please post comments (the course of the story may be influenced by reader input) and, if you like it, tell yer friends already!

This is very much an experiment. I'm not sure if anyone will even read the thing and, truthfully, I have only vague ideas about where the story is heading. But, writing "without a net" is also exciting to me. So, as my good friend The Lash might say . . . come weez meee and I vill take you on an exciting journey . . .

BAKERSFIELD, IL. JUNE 1981-

Sean Preston, ten years old, squinted at the twisted rusty remains of the derailed train. The accident had been three years before. Everything valuable or dangerous had been removed in the days following the wreck, but the rest of the stuff was just left here to rot. Misshapen tadpoles swam in the pools of orange rusty water which had formed about the train detritus. Sean had caught a few to keep as pets in his bedroom. They grew into five and six-legged frogs which never lived very long.

“It is so muggy,” Bobby said. “I swear, I’m going to wilt.”

“Quit your bitching,” said Marcy. “God, you complain so much.”

Bobby Dent and Marcy Rollins, Sean’s two best friends. He had brought them along because they had been in his dream. It was important to remain as true to the dream as possible.

“Where are you taking us?” Bobby demanded.

“Down to the creek,” said Sean.

“Come on,” said Bobby. “I just got ‘Asteroids’ on my Atari. And my house has air conditioning.”

Sean walked down the tracks away from the site of the wreck. A few moments later, Bobby and Marcy followed.

“You had a dream about the creek?” Marcy asked. “That’s why you’re taking us down there?”

“I remembered something about what happened to me and Wilson,” Sean said. “I remembered where we were kept.”

“Kept?” Bobby gulped.

“Yeah,” said Sean. “In the dream, Wilson was still there. We found him.”

Marcy stopped. “You mean we found his body?”

“He was still alive,” Sean said. “Actually, he was still seven years old.”

“OK,” Bobby said. “Is anybody else freaked out by this? We should not be going down there by ourselves. If you really remembered something, you should tell your mom. Or the police.”

“They wouldn’t believe me,” Sean said.

“They’d believe you, freaky dream boy.”

They had come to the point where the creek ran under the tracks, through the big concrete pipe.

“There’s the creek,” Sean said. “When we get down there, we’ll see a snake swimming in the water.”

“Oh good, a snake. That really makes me want to go,” Bobby said.

“Come on.”

Without waiting for his friends to follow, Sean slid down the rocky hill. At the bottom, he saw the curving ‘S’ of the swimming snake slip from the mouth of the pipe.

“There it is,” he noted.

In his dream, it had been a milk snake, with colorful bands of red, black and yellow. This was just a common garter snake. The dreams often worked like that. Correct in the general but off in the particulars. Like when he had dreamed of buried treasure in his backyard, and had dug up the exact spot only to find a cache of old nudie magazines.

“All right,” Bobby said. “So you were right about the snake. That doesn't mean you're right about everything else.”

“We just follow the trail beside the water for a while.”

They walked down the wooded trail beside the gurgling creek, deeper into the timber than they usually went. Their heads were up, attuned to danger. Older kids, teenagers, also hung out down here and sometimes tormented the younger ones just for sport. There were whispers of darker things, too. The stream was called ‘Sugar Creek’ on all maps but among the children it was known as ‘Ghost Creek.’ Schoolyard rumors told of haunts roaming these woods at night, though anyone who claimed to have been down here in the dark was certainly a liar.

The creek forked and they made a splashing cross to follow the Southward tributary.

“God, are we almost there?” Bobby cried.

“This is where we get off the path,” Sean said.

Marcy looked at her watch. “I have to be home for dinner. It’s almost four now. It’s going to take us at least an hour to hike back.”

“It’s just a little further,” Sean said. “I promise.”

Sean led his friends off the path into the crunching undergrowth of the deep woods. Walking faster as the sights became more familiar. Every tree, every rock, every call of every bird was exactly as he had dreamed it.

“Just over this hill,” he called, breaking into a run.

Bobby and Marcy caught up to him just as he crested the hill. In the clearing below was a house.

“I knew it would be here,” Sean said. “I knew it.”

“That’s where,” Marcy swallowed dry spit, “you were taken?”

“Yes,” Sean cried. His eyes gleamed with tears of joy, or of terror.

The badly dilapidated two-story farmhouse had once been white, but the paint was flaked almost completely away, exposing weathered grey wood. Half the shingles were missing from the roof and a few gaping holes were visible. Every window had at least one pane busted out. The driveway led to a rutted, grown-over trail which might have once been a dirt road. Trees shrouded the property so completely it was not hard to imagine the house staying hidden for years.

“We are not going inside,” Bobby said. “Now that you know this place is here, we should just go home and call the police.”

“I hate to say it, but I’m with wuss-boy on this one,” Marcy concurred.

“You guys can wait outside if you want.”

Sean ran down the hill. His friends called after him, but he barely heard them. The old house held the answers to questions which had tormented him for three years.

Who had taken him?

What had they done to him?

What happened to Wilson?

Why couldn’t he remember anything?

The thirst for revelation outweighed everything else. Before Bobby and Marcy could catch him, Sean had stepped onto the rotting wood of the front porch. His hand was on the knob. He knew the door would not be locked.

From inside the house came a sound which Sean could not recall from even the darkest of his dreams.

A boy was screaming. Screaming for his life.

NEXT TIME- An unusual method for rodent control. A discussion of the weather. Why the caged boy screams.

2006-12-23T18:23:00.000-08:00

'TIS THE SEASON . . . FOR SOUL-CRUSHING REJECTION!

Well, I got a cruddy little lump of coal in my stocking a couple days ago. I finally heard back from "Strange Horizons" concerning "The Eternal Movie." DENIED!

One of my real strengths as a writer is my thick skin and high tolerance for rejection, a talent honed while trying to get a date in high school. Still, this one stung. I felt good about the story, and I really worked hard on it. Plus, we really could have used the money. And, lastly, it's freakin' Christmas! I mean, come on! My birthday's only a couple weeks away. Couldn't they have waited to crush my spirit until then?

Another frowny face- they sent me a generic form rejection e-mail. That sucks. This also reminds me of high school. I liked it better when the girls told me exactly what they found unattractive about me. I used to hand out little "feedback" cards like you find in restaurants. Gave me something to work on. The icy "Uh, no thanks," just rubs me raw.

Oh, well. It's like Lea said: "You can't win them all." To which I of course replied: "Yeah, but I can't win ANY of them!"

Thus ends my pity party. (Jeez, a party would have been nice.)

I am soldiering on. Just started work on a new screenplay, about a female rock star/ actress who uses black magic to become famous. I changed all the names, though, so Courtney Love won't put a hex on me. (Or maybe she already did. I knew sending her locks of my hair was a bad idea.)

For the past six months or so, I have been cycling through all of my 20+ active projects, doing a little work on each one. I am nearly at the end of this rotation, and from there I will knuckle down and actually (gasp) finish "The Black Monkey." Here's to happy writing in 2007!

I hope this blog finds you and yours happy, healthy and in good holiday spirits. May Santa Claus bring you everything you want, and may the Scrooges, Grinches and on-line sci-fi magazine editors pass you by.

Happy X-Mas, War is Over (if you want it.)
Love, Christian

2006-12-11T12:24:00.000-08:00

NIGHT FLIGHTS & FLASHES OF HONEY

That sounds dirty, doesn't it?

First off, I want to tell y'all about yet another piece of flash fiction I've posted, over at DZ Allen's "Muzzle Flash," a new pulp/ noir flash fiction page. My entry's entitled "Honey," and in keeping in the "pulp" spirit, it's a nasty piece of work. (As much violence as I could pack in 300 words or so.) It's also a stab at a "juxtaposition of horror and beauty," which is the best description I've heard of David Lynch's unique appeal. Not that this piece is particularly Lynchian (Lynchesque?) As always, I'd love for everybody to check it out and post all kinds of flattering comments.

I still haven't heard back from "Strange Horizons" about my sci-fi story, which is causing some anxiety. Their submissions page said they usually respond one way or the other after an average of 30 days. It has been 32. Not that I'm counting. Rejection I can handle, it's waiting for it that drives me crazy. Still, I persist in having high hopes. My first "real" publication would be one sweet Christmas present, let me tell you.

I had attempted to post an entry here a few days ago; a long, rambling history of the evolution of my filmgoing tastes. I started with seeing "King Kong" on TV when I was 4 or 5, and went all the way through my adolescence. Fortunately or un-, Blogger chose to swallow everything I had written. (It was probably my fault- I have a tendency to click when I oughtta clack.) I didn't have the heart to recreate the whole thing (sparing you the task of reading it,) but writing all that out did bring up one memory I would like to share.

There was a brief period back in the 1980's, after the advent of 24-hour cable channels, but before late night TV was completely overrun with infomercials. It was actually possible to see interesting things on TV late at night. I know, it's hard to believe now, but trust me on this one. I was a teenage insomniac with no social life, so I was in the right place at the right time to bear witness to this anomoly.

I had two favorites. The first was Cinemax's "Friday After Dark" offerings, which included such classics as "Young Lady Chatterly" and the "Emmanuelle" series. I won't go into any further detail except to say I always watched them with the sound turned WAAAY down.

My other favorite was the USA Network's Friday and Saturday overnight programming block, which they called "Night Flight." "Night Flight" showed all kinds of crazy stuff. Music videos, short films, full-length movies; all of it culty or fringy in nature. I've read fond internet reminiscences of people who recall coming home stoned from parties and stumbling upon some bizarre thing which fit very well in that frame of mind. I didn't do drugs back then (or go to parties for that matter,) but some of the "Night Flight" stuff could produce a contact high all by itself. Old silent movies dubbed over with Pink Floyd music. Black and white Looney Tunes and Betty Boop cartoons, including one where Porky Pig bashes his thumb with a hammer and actually says "son of a bitch." (I swear.) Many other truly strange and beautiful things.

But what influenced me most was an hour-long special on cult movies aired on "Night Flight," circa 1984. Prior to seeing this, I didn't even know most of these movies existed. They showed clips from: "Rocky Horror Picture Show," "Texas Chainsaw Massacre," John Water's "Poleyester," "Repo Man," ("the more you drive, the less intelligent you are,") "Forbidden Zone," (featuring Herve' [da plane] Villechaize as 'the horny midget king of the 6th dimension,') "Liquid Sky," (easily the best nihilistic no-wave aliens-seeking-heroin sci-fi movie of all time,) Fritz Lang's "Metropolis," "Reefer Madness," Jim Jarmusch's "Stranger Than Paradise," the films of Paul Bartel and Firesign Theater, "I Was a Zombie for the FBI," and many others.

Most significantly, this program introduced me to David Lynch's "Eraserhead," showing the nightmare comedy scene where the miniature chickens start oozing blood. The tagline, "If any movie can cause permanent brain damage, that movie would be Eraserhead," was irresistable to me.

I taped the special (on the family's trusty Sony Betamax, of course,) and watched it obsessively. Over the next few years, I made it my mission to watch every movie featured on the special. Some of them were hard to track down, but I eventually saw them all. I still have an affinity for bizarre cinema, and this is where it came from. One hour of television over twenty years ago impacted my filmgoing habits more than any other single influence. (Possible runner-up would be Fangoria magazine.)

After blogger ate my original post where I talked about not only "Night Flight," but every other influence, I told Lea about "Night Flight." God bless this woman. She immediately hopped on e-Bay, typed in "Night Flight," and found someone selling 12 hours of the show, transferred from old tapes onto DVD. (You really CAN find anything on e-Bay.) She won the bid, and that's going to be one of my Christmas presents. I love Love LOVE my wife.
Now if I can just get her to buy me "Young Lady Chatterly."

2006-12-03T14:41:00.000-08:00

. . . BUT I REALLY WANT TO DIRECT, PART 1

Let's just start out with an apology. OK, I am very sorry for the lapse in taste and judgement which led me to dwell on Britney Spear's (lack of) panties. I don't know what I was thinking. I hereby promise that I will never again sully the otherwise unbesmirched reputation of this forum with anything so base as a discussion of celebrity panties, or celebrities without panties. Unless it's Courtney Love. In fact, I hereby and furthermore shall not ever use the words "panty," "panties," "panty-less," "crotch," "commando," or "up-skirt" again. I swear.

Let's move on.

Before the unfortunate detour, I had wanted to discuss movies. This was prompted by my moving from work on a screenplay entitled "Logan County Lazarus," to getting a fresh start on my long-stalled horror/comedy novel "Midnight at the Heaven," which is set in a haunted movie theater. This just weeks after the completion of my science-fiction story "The Eternal Movie" (still no word from the publisher on that, by the way,) set in a cinema which has been launched into space. It seems that if I'm not writing a movie recently, I'm writing ABOUT movies. So what gives?

It's always been an obsession of mine. I love movies. More than that, I love going to the movies. (Haven't been able to do that much recently.) There's just something about sitting in a large dark room with dozens of strangers, looking up at a massive glittering screen. Going to the movies is one of the most prevelant themes of my dreams. I'm not sure if I love these dreams because they remind me of going to the movies, or if I love going to the movies because it seems so dreamlike.

I think it factors so heavily in my writing because, at heart, I really want to be a filmmaker. In my head, the stories are already movies. I SEE them, as images, rather than hearing the words. (Which may be part of the problem with my strangled prose style.) However, there are several factors which keep me in front of a keyboard rather than behind a camera:

1) MONEY. Making a movie, even a "low-budget" one, costs millions of dollars. I don't have millions of dollars. The people who do have millions of dollars aren't so inclined to give their money to people like me. In contrast, writing a novel costs nothing but time. Time I have.

2) I DON'T WORK WELL WITH OTHERS. I do enjoy collaborative processes. My work with Coyote Radio Theater has been very rewarding. Andrew Johnson-Schmit and I have worked together on several projects, and I've always enjoyed that process as well. But I don't know that I would enjoy putting all the blood, sweat and tears into something like writing a film, only to see my vision diluted. In a novel, the author is the undisputed God. In a movie, the screenwriter is, at best, a minor deity. Even the actors are higher in the pantheon. The director of a film is widely considered to be its "author," even if he didn't write the script. Then there are the producers, the studio, the money people, the focus groups, etcetera, etcetera.

3) FREEDOM. Most of my novels, if filmed "as is," would be 12 hours long, X-rated, budgeted at a billion dollars, and would have almost no mass-market appeal. There are many fewer restrictions concerning length and content placed upon a novelist. Plus, novels have the advantage of being able to describe "internal action," to get into the heads of the characters in ways that movies can't do without cumbersome voice-over narration.

4) AN UNPUBLISHED NOVEL IS STILL A NOVEL; AN UNPRODUCED SCREENPLAY IS NOTHING

5) BOOKS ARE BETTER ANYWAY, RIGHT? Uh, well, sort of. While this holds true with very few exceptions for novels adapted into movies, it's really like comparing apples and oranges. Reading and watching are entirely different experiences. Movies have an advantage of being more direct. The imagining has been done for you. I just watched "United 93," the movie about the 9/11 flight in which the hijackers were overcome by the passengers, and I was RIVETED, experiencing the story in a visceral, emotional way which I've never received from a book.

Anyway, I keep writing screenplays. While I have yet to finish a novel, I have actually completed several scripts. They range from the God-awful ("The Electron Kid") to the actually-not-half-bad ("Night of the Unicorn" would make a great cheesy horror movie.) And I have several more in the works. So why do I torture myself? The movie business is much harder for a writer to break into than getting a novel published (or so I gather.)

But, dammit, I want to SEE my visions on the screen. I want to hear actors speak my dialogue. I want to burrow into people's heads with images that they can't skim over. I want to, in the words of the Soul Coughing song "Screenwriter's Blues," "see my name five feet high and luminous."

I'm not asking much, am I?

Next time I'll talk about the movies which have directly informed my writing. Until then, the balcony is closed. (Bonus points to anyone who remembers what that line is from.)

2006-11-30T15:12:00.000-08:00

Fear of a White . . . You Know

OK, after another inexcusable absence, I finally came up something I wanted to talk about here. I've planned out a whole series on what drives me as a writer. Not my name-by-name influences, per se, but more of a general overview of the forces which feed my creativity, shaping it like wind and water erosion shape the land. (That there was one of them fancy metaphors.) This may bore you to tears, but writing these things helps me to define them for my own purposes. You're just along for the ride.

So . . . I had this whole thing worked out in my head about Movies, and how Movies influence me more than books, and I was all set to write it when The News broke. I'm sure you know what I'm talking about. The only headline-worthy happening of the past week:

Britney Spears Doesn't Wear
Panties

I'm embarrassed to admit that this grabbed my attention, and even more embarrassed to admit that I clicked on over to check out the pix. (I won't bother supplying a link. If you're curious, just Google "Britney Panties" and you will get 6 million hits. The photos- and there are many- are all over the place.) Apparently, Britney has been hanging out with Paris Hilton and Lyndsey Lohan, and to be in their club you have to flash your naked genitals at the paparazzi every time you get out of a vehicle.

Personally, I've never found Britney Spears very interesting, either as a musician or as a sex symbol. Her music and her image have always been too obviously manufactured to be in any way exciting. Her recent multiple pregnancies, newfound let-it-all-hang-out-there trailer-trashiness and liberating divorce from that loser-boy HAVE allowed some humanity to peak through the cracks. (That was NOT a pun.) But still, she's not that fascinating of a person.

Furthermore, I have no particular prejudice against the whole "commando" issue. (Called "free ballin'" in men.) In fact, I've always thought it was kind of chic.

So why I am I bothering to mention this on my blog? What did strike me as interesting were some of the blogger comments prefacing the photos. Britney's vagina was described by one blogger as "not for the faint of heart." Another advised viewers of the pictures to "make sure to look at them on an empty stomach." Even the (relatively) high-brow news site CNN.com said "be prepared to cringe." (Also, I believe that was the first time I ever read the phrase "panty-less crotch" in a mainstream news web-site.)

What gives? Why all the vag-hate? I mean, Britney's whole career is built on seduction and tease. Isn't this where the seduction leads? Isn't the vagina the ultimate pinnacle of female sexuality? Isn't it, in fact, the whole point? Why react with disgust? I mean, I LIKE vaginas. (In an entirely non-sexist, Eve Ensler, sacred feminine sort of way, of course.) It's where we all came from, after all. Brit's "area" is not in any way extraordinary. (Though I've never understood the appeal of the "bald" look.) So why cringe?

I don't know. Just struck me as weird. I promise I'll get to that movie discussion next time (in a more timely manner) and won't discuss genitals here until my upcoming 12-part series: "The Penis Monologues." Stay tuned.

2006-11-19T15:07:00.000-08:00

Any Questions?

I can't talk long today (wife's day off!!!) but I wanted to let everybody know that my new Flash Fiction piece, "Six Questions," which is up over at Six Sentences. Check it out and leave a comment so I look cool. Also, if you want a nice little chill, my good friend Angie has a very short excerpt of her novel up over at the Lazy Artist's Lounge. Wicked good.

In case I'm a Lazy Artist myself and don't write anything else this week, Happy Thanksgiving!

2006-11-15T12:20:00.000-08:00

Just Checkin' In . . .

Not much happening here. The Day of the Dead has come and gone yet again. It was a good show, if not as well attended as previous years. We usually do it in the first weekend of November, and now we know why: there are a lot of other things happening in Prescott over the Veteran's Day weekend. (Competition for the entertainment dollar.) If you couldn't make the show, there is a very nice write-up (with pix!) on the blog of a very satisfied audience member.

Another consequence of doing the show a week late: you get through it and realize "holy crap, Thanksgiving's a week away."

In other news, there is no other news. I finally submitted my sci-fi short story and also sent in a new piece of flash fiction. No word yet on "The Eternal Movie," but the flash piece will be up on Six Sentences on Nov. 19. Mark your calendars now. (That one turned out pretty well.) Right now I'm returning to an old project called "Killer's got the Blues Again," which some of you might remember. Heavy revisions on the front end, and writing new material from the last chapter backwards. Hopefully, I will eventually meet in the middle and have a (gasp!) completed novel. After that, Andrew and I are looking at another radio script contest. Just the first step towards our goal of radio theater world domination. (It's a small world, but it is a world nonetheless.)

The kids are doing well, with the exception of Lily's constantly running nose. I thought we'd left all this sniffly business behind when took them out of day care, but I guess not. Lea's got the same bug. Or at least I think she does. I don't really see my wife enough to keep up with her health concerns. She's still working those mad holiday hours. She'll get a break for Thanksgiving Day, but the day after that is known in the retail biz as "Black Friday." (I always thought that would make a great title for a "Die Hard"-in-a-mall action movie. Don't go stealing my idea, now.)

Anyway, the Dyl-man and I have so far proved immune to the cold virus. I credit sleep deprivation and excessive caffeine use. Dylan can thank judicious Halloween candy rationing. Your results may vary.

2006-11-09T07:27:00.001-08:00

Revisions and Propositions

Well, I'm still hard at work editing "The Eternal Movie," (the title seems especially apt as it feels like I've been working on it for freakin' ever.) Props must be given to my good friend Angie for her insightful reading. She very properly castigated me for my unfortunate tendency towards excessive, bloated verbosity, including my misguidedly and madly heedless use of crazily proliferate adverbs, not to mention my redundant, repetitive, superfluous and unnecessary wordiness; a habit, as it were, of endlessly explaining with massive amounts of explication and exposition, with sentences that run on and on and on, never seeming to end.

I really don't know what she's talking about.

Seriously, though, it was great advice. Gave some "new eyes" to look at the thing during the editing process. She also had a lot to say about the structure, ways to turn it from a good story into a great one by removing the top-heavy set-up and starting with the action. Sadly, this would require me to tear the whole thing apart and start from scratch and I'm frankly sick of looking at the thing. So, it will go to the publishers with the structure intact, just about 500 words lighter.

It's a strange feeling paring down a story for submission to a five-cents-per-word publication. Sorta like throwing nickels in the trash. Oh, well. I'm feeling even more confident about the story than before. I just can't wait to be finished with it.

I saw a good movie recently. (That's a rare enough occurrence to warrant a blog entry.) I became interested in seeing "The Proposition" when I heard the screenplay was written by Nick Cave. Now, there are a lot of musical artists whose careers follow the familiar arc of early brilliance, peaking at around their third album or so, followed many years of "milking it." Then there are the elite few like Tom Waits, PJ Harvey and Nick Cave, who unbelievably just keep getting better.

I was curious to see if his brilliance extended into this other medium. (He's also published a couple novels, though I haven't read them.) I'm not sure what I was expecting. Maybe a typical rock star vanity project, like Perry Ferrel's "Gift" or Axl Rose's disastrous "Portrait of the Obnoxious Egotist as a Self-Absorbed Young Heroin Addict." What I got instead was a complex, literate and very bloody western.

The nineteenth-century Australian outback has many parallels to the mythical American West of the same period but, based on this movie at least, was an even bleaker, more desolate and violent landscape. Everything is coated with dust and flies. ("The Proposition" has to set some kind of record for most flies in a movie. The record for most flies ON a movie was of course set by "The Life of David Gale.") The sky is a bleached, baking white. The outlaws are violent men. So are the police. So are the aborigines.
The "Proposition" of the title comes when Capt. Stanley (Ray Winstone,) the man charged with imposing some semblance of civilization upon this hellhole, manages to capture two of the three outlaw Burns brothers. He makes a deal with with middle brother, Charlie (Guy Pearce.) Find and kill his eldest brother, Arthur (Danny Houston- son of John) to save the life of the younger brother Mikey, who is scheduled to hang (on Christmas day!) What follows is an unforgiving tale of loyalty and betrayal.

The violence is extreme, but completely appropriate and morally ambiguous. The scene where the young, simple-minded Mikey (a killer and a rapist) is flogged with a hundred lashes is as hard to watch as anything in "The Passion of the Christ" or Mel Gibson's arrest video. (Great close-up of blood being literally wrung from the leather whip.)

In the center of all this ugliness, though, is the surprisingly tender and respectful relationship between Captain Stanley and his wife Martha (Emily Watson.) Both characters are portrayed with depth and complexity. Cpt. Stanley is a man whose decency is being eroded by his position and the land he has come to. Martha's insistence upon English-ness and her notions of justice seem like naivite until they are eventually shattered.

Adding yet another layer of complexity is the theme of racism. The aborigines are of course victims of casual, institutionalized hatred. More surprisingly, the Irish (including the Burns brothers) are referred to "niggers turned inside out."

This was a really great movie, one that lingers in the mind for days after seeing it. If it were the type of movie that didn't scare Oscar voters shitless, it would be deserving of multiple honors. Nick Cave's script and the score which he contributed to are both poetic and minimalistic. The acting is great all around. Especially Ray Winstone and Emily Watson (for her bathtub monologue alone.) Danny Houston's Arthur Burns and John Hurt's bounty hunter Jellon Lamb compete for the title of most morally void and yet poetically well-spoken character in recent film history. The cinematography, too, is exceptional, for finding stark beauty among all the ugliness. The scene where the two older brothers sit on a rocky ledge and watch the sunset is nothing short of miraculous.

So- "The Proposition." I only get to see one or two movies a month nowadays (not counting kid-vid,) so I'm grateful for substantial fare like this. It might be hard to watch, but I guarantee it's worth it.

2006-11-06T08:08:00.000-08:00

I'm Back!!!

Yeah, I know. Kind of ironic, considering that my last entry here was about how long it's been between posts, but at least this time I have an excuse. I lost my internet connection for a little while there. It was a billing issue with those bastards over at NetScape. They had been electronically debiting our checking account, but then quite abruptly decided that they needed a credit card. Lea and I both attempted to iron out the problem with phone calls to the helpful customer service branch somewhere in New Delhi (where we were repeatedly asked to spell the admittedly exotic name "Smith,") but to no avail. We're on AOL now. Turns out those free trial discs you get in the mail every other day are good for something other than mini-Frisbees.

Tonight I'm going to motor on down to Prescott for the final rehearsal of the Day of the Dead Dinner Show. Road trips strain the gas budget, make for some creative arrangements of Lea's work schedule and push my sleep deprivation threshold, but I'm glad I can still be involved. Should be a pretty good show this year.

Kids are doing great. Dylan's finally getting the hang of the potty training and Lily took her first shaky steps yesterday! (I felt that warranted exclamation.) Lea's working mad holiday hours so I barely see her, but other than that we're all happy and healthy.

So here's where I promise that my blogging will be more substantial and less sporadic from here on out. (Boy it's hard to type with my fingers crossed.)

2006-10-23T09:21:00.000-07:00

I Know It's Been Forever, But . . .

Back when I started doing this whole blog thing, I looked at a lot of other people's blogs and discovered a few cliches which I swore I would never stoop to. The main one being posts which start with the line: "I know it's been forever since I've posted on here, but . . ." followed by lame excuses about being crazy busy, terminally ill, dead, etc. These blogs always end with a promise to be a more faithful blogger in the future. (A statement belied by the fact that the post is 2 years old.)

Well, it HAS been forever since I've posted here and I HAVE been crazy busy (writing, kids, last-minute "Day of the Dead" edits, assorted hausfrau duties, my ill-fated State Senate campaign.) Actually, though, it's been more of a case of a lack of anything to say. My life is pretty routine, and a recent bout of extreme poverty (it's a viral thing- doctor says it might be chronic) has further limited my activities outside the house to not-very-thrilling trips to the park and the library. Not much grist for the web-log mill.

I know my faithful readers (all 2 of you) must be frustrated. My good friend Angie (see her four comments posted on my last entry) was especially vocal in her exasperation. She even took the drastic measure of deleting me from her 'favorites' folder, exiling me to the gulag of her desktop 'Recycle Bin,' an electronic purgatory where I drift in the ether along with her other abandoned interests- like the Milli Vanilli fan-site she used to be so enthusiastic about.

Well, still not much going on worth talking about. I did finally receive my check and free copy from the Canadian smut peddlers. My debut novel is as inauspicious and sleazy as I have feared. Random stock image photo on the cover, with the tag line "The wicked tale of a young woman's descent into depravity." This is somewhat mitigated by the jacket blurb- "Luminous- a tale of grace and power recalling early Hemingway." Thank you, Stephen King. I owe you one.

(Also- a note for any porno editors out there; you can not change a scene from gay to straight simply by converting the pronouns, though in this way you CAN make the scene much funnier.)

Anyway, check's in the bank and we went out for Chinese to celebrate, so I can't complain too much. Right now, though, I am actively searching for a way to wash the 'porn' taste out of my mouth. I'm looking to either enter a writing contest with a cash prize, or submit to a professional fiction magazine (print or on-line.)

In the past, I've gone about getting a story published in the only way which seemed logical to me: 1) Get an Idea, 2) Write the Story, 3) Send it out to everyone who might conceivably publish it. 4) Hope for the Best. This has so far not panned out, so I'm going to try it another way. I'm going to find a contest or a publication which I like and try to tailor a story specifically for the market. We'll see if I have any better luck with this approach.

My goal is to be able to answer the question: "Have you been published?" with a statement other than: "Well, sorta . . ."

Anyway, that's it for now. I promise to be a more faithful blogger in the future. Check back here for a new post in two years or so.

2006-10-02T16:24:00.000-07:00

Confessions of a Flasher

Recently, I've posted a couple of "Flash Fiction" stories on various web-sites, "Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time" and "White Moth." (The latter being a slightly edited version of a story I first posted right cheer.) If you're unfamiliar with flash fiction, definitions vary. Most of the web-sites specializing in this unique genre place the word count limit at 750-1000 words. Some especially sadistic editors place the limit in the 250-500 word range. I've even seen one site with the psychotic limit of 50 words max. (A Flash Horror site has the brilliant conceit of a 666 word max count.)

However you slice it, that's dang short. Especially for someone like me, with a very real problem of diarrhea of the keyboard. That's one of the reasons I wanted to write Flash Fiction, for the challenge. The other reason is that people actually seem to read these things. (Oddly enough, that was one of the same reasons I started writing erotica.) There's not much time investment required to look at something just a few paragraphs long.

There's also something to be said for the brevity and compression, the stripping of the narrative down to the barest essentials. It's almost like poetry, except I ain't no poet.

Some of you might remember my first attempt at Flash Fiction, "Indoor Recess," written for a contest I entered a few months ago. I wasn't quite happy with how that one turned out. I tried to accomplish too much in the limited space I had to work with. Hopefully, these two selections work better. Please check them out (click on the links) and feel free to post flattering comments.

In other news, I've also written a rather tongue-in-cheek (I've always wondered about that expression. How can you talk with your tongue in your cheek?) post for the Day of the Dead Dinner Show blog. So, if you've wondered why I haven't posted anything here for a few days, it's because I've been posting stuff everywhere else.

2006-09-11T16:46:00.000-07:00

Kind of a strange day . . .

Baby's sick, for only the second time since we took her out of day care six months ago. (At day care, both kids seemed to pick up every bug going around town and had perpetually drippy noses.) Lily's got the stuffy nose thing, along with a slight fever, which conspire to make her a very unhappy little oompa-loompa. Fussy and clingy, she only wants to be held. I am typing this with one hand.

Slacked off writing this morning, to watch CNN.com's "real-time" replay of 9/11/01. Unlike most human beings on the planet, I hadn't seen much of this before. I didn't have cable TV back then, so the horrific images weren't hammered repeatedly into my brain. I think, on retrospect, that this was a good thing. From that day, I do remember that Lea was in the midst of the one of her very convincing false pregnancies, so it was like the ultimate good news/ bad news scenario. I might soon be a Dad, but on the other hand World War freakin' III is breaking out.

Given the filter of time, without the "what the hell is happening? are we all gonna die?!?" factor, the footage is still pretty intense. Seeing it on TV (or computer screen,) though, for me reduces the human tragedy to the level of a great disaster movie. The thrill and beauty of pure chaos. The shameful charge of bad news which keeps getting worse. I had cable when Katrina hit, and I had the same feeling then. What is so attractive about disaster? When I was a kid, I used to pray that a tornado would hit so I could experience this feeling first-hand. Am I some kind of sicko, or just honestly expressing an unattractive aspect of human nature?

These thoughts precluded the writing of radio comedy.

The family went down to Prescott this weekend, so I was afforded a rare opportunity to sit down with Drew and go over material for the Coyote Radio Day of the Dead show. Very productive meeting. I came away with lots of great ideas and energy, which I squandered by watching 5-year-old news on the internet. Oh, well. Back to the grind tomorrow.

In other news, I received an interesting e-mail from my Canadian porno connection: "I think there has been a little confusion... The novel 'The Education ofLisa' has already been published by us. I will be sending out your paymentas well as your complimentary copy as soon as I can:)

This means that they published the version on the Literotica web-site, and all my months of editing were for naught. I guess it doesn't matter. At least the check's in the mail. I am now officially a published author. Woo-hoo. Break out the champagne.

2006-09-08T16:23:00.000-07:00

White Moth

A white moth, huge, wings stained with eyes and lines, rests in the corner where the windshield meets the roof. How the hell did it get in the car? How the hell did the car come to stand on end like this? I lie back in the comfortable seat, looking straight up at the black sky, pondering these questions. So sleepy. Christ. I oughtta pull over. Close my eyes for a few minutes. Float backwards for a while.

I snap awake. The moth. It's a big fucker. Never seen one so big. A foot across from one wing tip to the other. Big as a bird. How did it get the car? It's like a dream where you don't remember the thing that just happened, but you do recall the thing which happened just before. We were at a party, Ginny and me. So lit up we actually danced. It was nice. We haven't danced in years. Her smile whispered promises of the tastes we would share at home. On the long drive home, though, she crawled into the backseat and fell asleep. So forget about that. Still, it was nice to dance.

I feel sick. It's not my fault. I'm just not used to this much drink. They just kept pressing them into my hand. I turn my head and vomit blood and glass into the water.

The moth moves; an agitated flutter. Its wings hum. I wonder if Ginny sees it, if she's awake. The rear-view mirror shows her face. She is pale and white in the bright glare of the dome light. Her eyes are open. Ginny smiles at me through the shimmery curtain which has been drawn between the front seat and the back. Her hair floats about her head, bouyant upon a gentle wind. Seems strange that I can see her so clearly. Strange that she looks so white.

She blows me a kiss and a bubble rolls from her lips. Water tickles the back of my ears. The moth flaps its wings, stirring the air before my face. It floats in space turned topsy-turvy.

I read once that moths seek lights and flames because they navigate by the moon. The moth eclipses the dome light. The car is darkened. The moth disappears but the darkness remains. I can't see Ginny anymore. The water in my eyelids is too cold to be tears.

I'm angry for a moment, and seek someone to blame, but this too soon dies. An old song plays on the radio, or maybe it's Ginny singing in the back seat. It is the song we had danced to, or maybe it's not. I can't remember. I try to laugh, but something blocks my throat.

The car dives backwards into the darkness of the lake. I open my mouth and a glorious moth flies from my lips, seeking the moon.

2006-08-30T12:14:00.000-07:00

Netflix "Brick" Pic Clicks-

When I lived in Prescott, I was spoiled by a big-city-quality film buff video store, Show Business Video, upon which I cannot heap enough praise. It was an avenue of exploration for off-beat, independent, foreign and art-house movies that wouldn't even hit the shelves at Blockbuster. Plus, there was a definite feeling of community. Walking into the tiny, hole-in-the-wall shop gave you the sense that you belonged to an elite club. Of all the things I miss about living in Prescott, and there are many, "Randy's" is easily in the top 5.

There may or may not be a place like that here in Flag. I kinda doubt it, but I have not expended the time or energy to find out. Instead, I went the lazy man's route.

Ah, Netflix.

It's sooo easy, and so very addictive. With it's click-of-the-mouse browsing and inscrutable and labrynthine "recommendations" programming, I have built up a movie queue which will take me approximately the rest of my life to slog through. Maybe longer. Do they have Netflix in the afterlife?

Recently, I was forced to endure a cold-turkey period of a couple weeks; exiled due to a maxed-out credit card. As it happens, the first movie I saw post-ex-communication turned out to be worth the wait.

"Brick" is a rare cross-pollination which actually does justice to both of its genre parents. It's both the best high school movie I've seen since "Heathers" and the best exercise in neo-noir since . . . Hell, I don't know. "Memento," I guess. Like "Veronica Mars" meets Sam Spade, only much deeper and richer than that facile pitch makes it sound. This infernal mash-up could easily have been played for laughs, but "Brick" is totally straight.

The dialogue is priceless. Contemporary teen slang, hard-boiled 40's style. At first this is a bit disorienting, but it works much like "A Clockwork Orange." At first you don't understand what the hell anyone is saying, but once you catch on to the context, you have completely bought into the stylistic world the movie has created. This also leads to exchanges worthy of Bogart, like in the scene where the hero, Brandon (played with fitting intensity by Joseph Gordon-Levitt,) is pumped for information by the school's vice-principal:

VP: You've helped out this office before.

Brandon: No, I gave you Jerr to see him eaten, not to see you fed.

Some interesting chords are struck with "The Pin," the local drug lord, who is actually a "really old, like 26" goth geek who lives in his Mom's basement. This scenario is a source of comedy, as the mother (the only parental character in the entire movie) wanders into a tense scene prattling about the superiority of "country-style" orange juice. In another scene, though, "The Pin" wistfully evokes Tolkien, giving the character an unexpected human dimension.

So, tight plot: Following an alarming and cryptic phone call, Brandon explores the downward spiral of his ex-girlfriend, Emily who soon becomes his ex-ex-girlfriend when she turns up dead. Obsessively, doggedly pursuing the truth, despite having the crap kicked out of him half a dozen times, Brandon eventually finds out who killed Emily. Then, in a particularly noir-ish twist, he keeps going, not resting until he finds out why and how and who's behind the killer, as if the unraveling has become his sole purpose in living.

Solid acting all the way around: Joseph Gordon-Levitt looks like the kind of kid who would get all kinds of wedgies in gym class, but plays the lead with all the intensity of Fred MacMurray in "Double Indemnity." Likewise, Nora Zehetner channels Barbara Stanwyck as the requisite femme fatale. Lukas Haas gives "The Pin" all kinds of weird edges and Emile de Ravin (Claire on "Lost") is very convincing as the "lost little girl." The supporting cast is excellent, too. Matt O'Leary makes "The Brain," a Rubick's Cube-solving font of exposition, actually plausible. Noah Fleiss is a sympathetic goon. Meagan Good is deliciously bad as the Queen Bitch of the Drama Nerds. Plus, Richard Roundtree, "Shaft" himself, plays a bad-mutha of a Vice Principal. (Practically the only notable adult role.)

And style, style, style: I especially dug the fight scene lit by the spinning mirror. This is the first film from writer/ director Rian Johnson, but it won't be the last. Bonus points, also, for using "Sister Ray" by the Velvet Underground over the closing credits. The best end-title musical choice since "Where is My Mind?" by the Pixies in "Fight Club."

Check it out. You know I would never lie about anything as important as a film review. When have I ever steered you wrong?

2006-08-26T16:19:00.000-07:00

Howlin' with the Coyotes: A History

One of the most fun, exciting and rewarding aspects of my creative life has been my involvement with Coyote Radio Theater. CRT is an utterly unique Prescott, Arizona radio comedy troupe which performs mostly original material. It is the brainchild and labor of love of my good friend Andrew Johnson-Schmit, a mere part of his master plan to create a community radio station (and a radio community) in Prescott. Andrew's vision, dedication and uncanny ability to energize people is nothing short of phenomenal.

I became involved in Coyote in October of 1999, when the project was in its infancy. (I still call myself a founding member, though I was not there at the very beginning. I hope my secret is never revealed.) By a chance meeting, I ran into Andrew and his wife Angie (also a vital cog in the Coyote machine.) We'd been good friends in Chicago, and they had actually lived with me for a time in Prescott, but at that point we hadn't spoken in over a year. I won't go into the reasons why, except to say it had everything to do with my psychotic ex-girlfriend.

I was delighted to be reunited. That was a very strange period in my life. I was living by myself in a tiny studio apartment, walking to work at a blueprint shop, freshly released from a 10-year relationship of staggering dysfunction. I felt like a man on parole, unsure of what to do with this strange new thing called freedom. I had little human contact outside of work and a shaky "post" friendship with my ex, so it was wonderful to talk to stimulating people I genuinely liked.

We caught up over coffee. Andrew talked about Coyote, his latest and greatest creation, and invited me to come check it out. He was writing all the material at that point, and sort of wondered aloud if I'd be interested in contributing as well. Andrew had read some of my writing, though at that point it was all in-your-face sexual horror stuff so I'm not sure why he thought I had potential as a comedy writer.

I'll never forget the first rehearsal I attended in their smoky cabin up in Prescott's Ponderosa forest. I had thought I was just going to be a writer, but Andrew handed me a script titled "Kyla Jackson: Temp Spy" and told me that I would be playing the part of "The Lash." Panic-stricken, I affected a voice somewhere between Peter Lorre and Boris Badenov. In that moment of terror, I became a permanent Coyote voice actor and invented my signature character. I picture The Lash in my mind as a tiny man in black cape and tights, with a disquietingly large codpiece. Broo-ha-ha-ha-ha.

Desperate to impress, I went home that night and started work on the first Coyote sketch I would write myself. "Night of the Squirrel" was an apocalyptic horror story about rodents bent on world domination, only to be foiled by the hypnotic power of the Don Knotts episode of "Biography." The sketch turned out way better than I could have hoped, still ranks as one of my favorite pieces, and from then on I was "made." Andrew and I wrote the material more or less 50/50 from there on.

We had our first public performance at the late, great Prescott bookstore Satisfied Mind. The audience was small but enthusiastic, and I'm sure had no idea they were witnessing history in the making.

From there it just grew and grew and grew (minus the occasional misstep like the show in the health food deli where the performers outnumbered the audience.)

In November 2000, Coyote had its first annual Day of the Dead Dinner Show, an event which has gone on to become a community institution.

After that, fearing the dreaded label of "respectability," we did a few uncensored shows, allowing us to get all those pent-up bestiality and vibrator jokes out of our system.

For a while, we were even actually on the radio, with a live monthly broadcast of all-new material. A whole thirty days to conceive, write, rehearse and revise an hour of comedy? Oh, the luxury of time! No. Actually, it was quite, quite draining. The show lasted about six months, but was an amazing experience all around.

At some point during the broadcasts, Andrew and I began to automatically "swap" first drafts for the other person to revise. Up to that point, we'd only truly collaborated on one piece, the dueling bi-partisan psychic classic "The Future's Not What it Used to Be." I'm not sure why it took us so long to figure this out, but we finally realized how much each of us could improve the writing of the other.

The partnership has been, for me, very rewarding. Andrew and I have different styles, methods and sensibilities when it comes to writing comedy, but we "mesh" remarkably well. Much of this comes from the fact that we know, trust and respect each other immensely. Equally important, neither of us is afraid to tell the other when something just does not work.

Writing for radio (entirely for the ear) presents some unique challenges. Stephen King, in the introduction to his short story collection "Everything's Eventual," spoke of his own failure to write a radio play and went so far as to call radio scriptwriting a "lost art."

Amateur.

Andrew and I, rather than imitating old-time radio, have instead set out to create something entirely new. That's not to say we completely ignore the past. I haven't listened to very much OTR, but Andrew has. He takes what he needs, cribbing from the masters. I, in turn, crib from him. Then he cribs back from me, and somewhere in there a new form is created. You might call us Raiders of the Lost Art.

(Pause for laughter.)

Seriously, the first (and hardest) rule we learned was that nothing makes a script feel dead like excessive wordiness. Writers love words, that's why we write, and so it's often difficult to pare back the language to its barest essence. Rule #2: narration is a crutch. Not that "voice-overs" are forbidden, but you should always strive to make it feel organic. Above and beyond the other two rules is this: make it funny. And the difference between funny and flat is often just a word or two.

Of course, the collaboration does not end with the two of us. You don't really "hear" a piece until the actors read it. Lines which made you laugh to yourself as you typed them sometimes fall flat when read out loud. Sometimes you get lucky and it works the other way, too. A line you struggled with suddenly comes alive from the actor's reading. In any case, there's always at least one more round of rewrites after the first rehearsal.

I should stop to praise the actors; we've been blessed with some very talented vocal performers. Angie, in addition to her role as Coyote Quality Control, is also an effective and versatile actress. Pam Martin has a great range, which we've exploited mercilessly, and is also a pretty decent writer herself. Greg Fine adds a fine gloss of professionalism, plus a willingness to go into whatever weird gonzo territory we can come up with. (I especially like writing female parts for him to play, as well as gay monkeys.) Then there's me. As an actor, I make a pretty decent scriptwriter. Of course, I do have the advantage of writing myself parts tailored to my limited range.

Then, after the rehearsals (it never feels like we've rehearsed enough) comes the ultimate: in front of a live audience, with sound effects and music. When it all comes together, there's nothing like it.

Right now we're gearing up to write material for the 7th Annual (7? Good grief!) Day of the Dead Show. Andrew and I are still in the exhilarating "brainstorm" mode where all things are possible. This will soon be replaced by the not-as-exhilarating "practical considerations" stage. ("What do you mean nobody in the cast can do a convincing Samuel Jackson impression?") Then the real work begins.

Here are a few of my favorite Coyote scripts (in no particular order:)

"Dead Man Laughing" First performed at the 4th Annual DotD Show. A comedy-western-horror story set in old Crest Top, AZ. (Crest Top, an anagram for Prescott, has become to Coyote what Springfield is to "The Simpsons.") Our only award-winning script to date.

"Kyla Jackson: Temp Spy" Andrew's delightfully non-linear spy spoof series, in which I get the great honor of playing the happily evil villain, The Lash.

"Frederick Undertakes Censorship for the King" My first uncensored piece (check the acronym in the title) about the definition of obscenity in the small, war- and radio-obsessed kingdom of Nuthertucker. Contains Coyote's only instance (so far) of sexual relations with a horse.

"Bad Day to Be Jesus." If Andrew is the Paul in our Lennon/McCartney partnership, this is his "Helter Skelter." "Anybody who does not want to be crucified today, raise your hand." That's it, he's going to hell. (PS- Just because Andrew is dressed in white and barefoot in the cover of our "Montezuma Road" album does NOT mean he's dead.)

"Se7en Deadly Castaways." A mash-up of "Gilligan's Island" and that David Fincher serial killer movie, which fit together with surprising ease.

"Mystery at the Circus Schmircus." Our first long-form script, complete with a well-populated sideshow tent, a courtroom scene featuring a rhyming clown, and a commercial for "Tootie Fruits," the candy which makes your burps taste fruity.

"Video Killed the Rodeo Star." A rare case of "too many cooks in the kitchen" actually turning out a decent script. Four writers worked on the first draft (one of whom was fired soon after,) then Andrew & I whittled it down to a workable size. Imagine our dismay when we brought it into rehearsal only to learn there was a serious lack of female voice parts. Another draft with several cowboys becoming cowgirls, and we had a top-notch Crest Top episode.

"Night of the Squirrel." I still have a soft spot for this one. Milton Squirrel later went on to hawk Zippity Pea-Bu, the caffeinated peanut butter. "It's pea-nutty-riffic!"

"Porn in the USA." My favorite unperformed sketch. In the wake of 9/11, the adult entertainment industry does their patriotic duty. Oddly, the female cast members balked at playing porn stars.

2006-08-24T16:01:00.000-07:00

Lost Tales: "A Love Story from Hell."

I am a complete pack-rat when it comes to my old writing. I hate to throw anything out, even if it is unmistakably garbage. I have, in my voluminous files, several stories written when I was in high school, and sometimes enjoy hauling them out and reading them over. Through the eyes of a (more or less) stabilized 35-year old, the writing of the troubled teen he once was brings both a nostalgic smile and a kind of sadness.

The teen-aged Christian H. Smith (at the time, I believed the middle initial made me sound more distinguished,) while certainly not very polished craft-wise, was at the very least quite unaffected. Even at that age, I was striving to find my own voice, and in fact attempting to create my own genre. The old stories were, if nothing else, completely original. Of course, originality does not equal quality.

I was very into "shock" value, pushing the buttons of my readers, poking taboos in a very confrontational way. Some things never change, right? Well, I hope that as I've grown older, I've not necessarily mellowed, but have learned to challenge my audience in more subtle ways. Attacking them with slow-acting psychoactive poisons, say, instead of with a sledgehammer.

One of the old stories which has been lost in the mists of time is "A Love Story From Hell," which was written in my Senior year in High School. "LSFH" is the story of a mild-mannered young man with the unlikely name of Oliver Crum. He attends the funeral of an aunt (named Mimi) he barely knew. Here he meets and falls instantly in love with a beautiful and mysterious young woman named Cassandra Jones. They go home together. Mind-blowing sex (described by a then-virginal author) ensues.

A few weeks later, desperately in love, poor Oliver is ready to pop the question. He has even has the ring. During a romantic hot-tub evening (after an impromptu bout of underwear-swapping,) the question is on his lips. Cassandra bids him to wait. She has something to tell Oliver which may change his mind. The secret of why she was at the funeral, and how she had known Oliver's aunt. Mimi and Cassandra had been . . . lovers.

Oliver is a bit shocked, but this does not change his feelings towards Cassandra. Not in the least. Cassandra is relieved. Oliver: "Will you . . ." Cassandra: "Wait. One more thing." Then comes the "from Hell" part. Cassandra goes into the next room and returns with the corpse of Aunt Mimi, stuffed and preserved, Mama Bates style.

"Now the three of us can be together forever!"

Oliver screams until he passes out. His cries prompt the neighbors to call the cops, and the next thing Oliver knows he's on CNN. He's exonerated of any wrongdoing, but Cassandra is institutionalized. In the final scene, he visits her in the hospital and finally proposes. Love has won out over all obstacles. I believe I even used the line: "Sure, she was a bisexual necrophiliac, but nobody's perfect."

I listened to the Sugarcube's great first album, "Life's Too Good" repeatedly while writing the story, especially the song "Fucking in Rhythm and Sorrow," and attempted to reflect the band's unique lyrical style in my prose. Like if it was translated from Icelandic and spoken by a vocally-eccentric moon-faced pixie who would later go on to a more successful solo career.

Now, did I mention that this was written for a high school Creative Writing class? The teacher, Mr. Bill Myers, was a fantastic guy. The first teacher to support me in my creativity rather than trying to suppress it. Still, I think I might have driven him towards alcoholism and/or premature baldness, with my insistence on turning out these twisted little sex & horror comedies. This one definitely did NOT make it into the student literary journal.

In later years, "Love Story" went through several revisions and translations. It was actually the very first story I ever submitted to a magazine (I don't even remember which one) and, consequently, my first rejection. I do remember that the rejection letter, in their perfunctory positive statement, said that I had some "nice imagery," but that the story was overall too long and did not fit their needs at this time, thank you very much.

At some point I attempted adapting it into a short film script and even a radio script for Coyote Radio Theater. Neither was produced. Now, I can't find either a hard or an electronic version of any incarnation of "Love Story." It's just gone. Exists only in my memory, in the fond haze of which I'm sure the story is better than it ever was in the hard light of day. So, I guess that's where it belongs.

Sometimes lost tales are better lost. Still, that does not stop one from missing them like estranged children who have drifted off to God knows where.

2006-08-23T14:51:00.000-07:00

INFLUENCES #2- Franz Kafka.

My favorite author of all time. Debating Kafka is a favorite topic among literature critics and academics. His work is so strange, so ambiguous, that any number of meanings can be read into it. Was he a modernist or a post-modernist? An existentialist, a surrealist or a pioneering writer of magic realism? A Marxist or an anarchist? I don't know. Frankly, discussions like that make my eyes glaze over. Blame it on my lack of education, but I typically don't dissect what I read in an intellectual way. I respond, emotionally and viscerally. And Kafka kreeps me out. I read Kafka for the same reason I read Stephen King: for the chills.

Everybody knows the one about the man who wakes up one morning to find that he has been inexplicably transformed into a giant cockroach. ("The Metamorphosis") And the one about the man who must defend himself in an absurd trial where he's not even told what he's been accused of. ("The Trial") But how about the one about the executioner proudly demonstrating the tool of his trade: a machine which inscribes the condemned man's crime into his flesh with needles, deeper and deeper until he is completely eviscerated? ("In the Penal Colony") Or the one about the sideshow performer whose entire act consists of slowly starving to death before a disinterested audience, and who finally grows so thin that he is simply lost in the straw in the bottom of his cage, forgotten about and replaced by a performing panther? ("The Hunger Artist") Or, even kreepier, the one about the unidentified burrowing creature fretting about his labyrinth while tormented by a mysterious whistling noise? ("The Burrow") These are nightmares, placed unfiltered on the page.

Franz Kafka was sickly for most of his life, living in the shadow of a vital and domineering father, stuck in a series of Civil Service jobs which he despised, plagued by failed romances, unrecognized and barely published in his lifetime. He died of tuberculosis just a few years before the rest of his family was killed by the Nazis. In his will, he stipulated that all his unpublished works be destroyed. His good friend and executor Max Brod defied Kafka's dying wish and edited and published his voluminous body of writing. God bless him for betraying his dead friend's trust.

The novels were unfinished, but with Kafka this actually works to their benefit. In "Amerika" and "The Trial," the missing chapters and out-0f-whack chronology only add to the dream-like effect of confusion. (I have yet to read "The Castle.")

My favorite Kafka work is the novel "Amerika," (Kafka's original title was "The Man Who Disappeared," but I like "Amerika" better) mainly because it is the most light-hearted and funny of his writings, and also because it presents a wonderfully distorted view of my home country. Kafka never visited America, the nation presented in the novel is wholly a product of his imagination. This is evident from page 1, when the young immigrant Karl pulls into New York harbor and thrills to the sight of the Statue of Liberty, who holds not a torch but a sword. Exiled by his parents for impregnating a chambermaid, young Karl is at first taken under the wing of a rich uncle, but after a typically Kafkaesque transgression, is left to his own devices. What follows is a series of absurdist episodes, Karl trying to make his way in the strange country, plagued by low-life traveling companions, rejected at every turn. Finally, he finds acceptance in the surreal "Nature Theater of Oklahoma," which is reads like the afterlife as the largest, strangest WPA project imaginable.

I actually attempted to adapt "Amerika" into a screenplay, more as an exercise than anything else. I played up the Monty Python-esque humor and expanded upon Kafka's anachronisms and distortions of place. Plus, I added a lot of my own touches, which I'm sure would infuriate literary purists everywhere. The script is unfinished and will never be made into a film, but was still loads of fun to write. Plus, if you want to really understand a book, I can't think of a better way to do so than to attempt an adaptation. (Still, this is yet another case where the book is definitely better.)

So next time you want a good, scary read, forget the King or the Barker. Grab a Kafka. I promise you'll want to sleep with the lights on.

2006-08-21T09:14:00.000-07:00

The age-old argument: What's worse, a slut or a whore?

Before you get all up in arms about my rabid misogyny, I'd like to clarify that a bit. I'm referring to myself, and in an entirely literary way.

Here's the story: A few years back, a good friend of mine recommended that I check out www.literotica.com where amateur writers can post erotic stories. I wasn't that floored by what I found, (I was shocked SHOCKED! to find that much of it was really, truly awful) but I was intrigued by the thought of putting some of my own stuff up there.

I've always had a love/hate relationship with pornography and erotica, mostly because I've never found anything which I've really liked. I love sex, of course. In fact, I think sex is widely underrated. (Ha ha.) Sex is beautiful but porn, for the most part, is really ugly. Worse yet, it's generic. People say it's degrading to women, but I would submit that it's more degrading to men. Reducing male sexuality to an unaesthetic and depressingly repetitive commodity is really an insult. Male sexuality is every bit as complex and intriguing as female sexuality, but you wouldn't know it by watching or reading pornography. Big boobs, shaved pubes, the conquest of a sexually voracious female, 3 different types of penetration rotated for meager variety, "cum shot," rinse, lather, repeat. Boring.

Then there’s the genre called "erotica." Better, but I’ve still had a hard time finding erotica which does what I believe it’s supposed to do. That is, turn me on. Sometimes the very "artistic" nature of the piece serves to distance me from the sexual charge it should carry. Sometimes erotica over-compensates for the sins of pornography by being too staid, too implicit. And then sometimes, what passes for erotica is just "porno-lite," the same hoary cliches dressed up and toned down.

When it comes down to it, any distinction between the two is arbitrary at best. "I know it when I see it" is the famous non-definition of what constitutes porn. Assuming the nom de porn "Christian Black," I set out to create something in between. Call it "erotic pornography."

My first attempt was a story called "Ding Dong the Bitch is Dead," about a bisexual woman who has a fling with her step-father at her mother's funeral. I thought it turned out fairly well. It was a decent mix of dark humor, pathos and, you know, an explicit blow job scene.

I posted it on the site and the response was short of overwhelming. For one thing, the site administrators in their infinite wisdom placed the story in their disturbingly popular "incest" category. (But they weren't BLOOD relations!) For another, there is a little "feedback-o-meter," where readers can rate the story on a scale on a scale of 1-5. "Ding Dong" topped out at a disappointing 3.72.

Still, I was hooked. The Christian Black thing is gratifying in many ways. For one thing, writing pure sex is a lot of fun. Second, I actually have an audience. Some of the more popular stories have more than 50,000 hits. Nothing else I've written can claim to have been seen by that many people. Plus, the comments and feedback are always interesting. Sometimes friendly and helpful, sometimes downright scary, but always interesting. And lastly, the stories that average more than 4.5 from reader-scored feedback get a sexy little 'H' (for 'hot') next to them in the site listings. At last count, I have 11 'H' stories.

So, flash forward a few years. I'd been happily posting my little pieces of smut, never expecting anything to come from it, when out of the blue I got an e-mail from a Canadian publisher asking for permission to reprint a few of the stories in their fine print publications. For previously posted stories, they would pay only in copies, but for any original submission, they'd pay the princely sum of $20. Saying "what the hell," I signed their on-line release form and promptly forgot all about it.

A few months later, I received a proverbial "plain brown wrapper" in the mail. Lea immediately demanded to know when I ordered porn and I was at first as baffled as she was. Then I remembered. Sure enough, in the pages of the quality publications, "Bedtime Stories," "Wicked Fetishes" and "Rough Boys," (don't ask and I won't tell about that last one) I received the rare thrill of seeing my work in print for the first time.

Of course, the thrill was somewhat mitigated by the fact that these were some of the cheapest, bottom-of-the-barrel smut mags I've ever seen in my life. And I've seen my share. Cheap, B/W pulp stock, the stories illustrated by generic, stock image skank-o-rama porn shots (the kind where the models are paid in crystal meth.) But still, kinda cool.

A while after that, I received another e-mail from the publishers, saying that they were now looking for novels. I have a few serialized stories up on Literotica, and they were all set to publish the one entitled "The Education of Lisa." Payment: One Hundred and Fifty Dollars! They didn't even seem to care that the story wasn't finished. In fact, based on comments in their e-mail, I don't think they'd read it at all.

I responded that I'd need a few weeks to edit and complete the novel. That was about five months ago, and I'm just now gearing to finish it. Perhaps you can sense my lack of enthusiasm.

That's where the slut vs. whore argument comes in. I've been slutting around on Literotica for years now, squandering my "talent" on cheap and meaningless, but fun, little flings. Now here's a chance to "go pro." Squandering my talent for pay. Becoming a whore. (And a cheap whore, at that.)

I have considered the fact that people make a living doing this. I'm sure that there are outlets out there which will pay more than $150 for a porno novel, $20 for a porno story. I just don't know if I want to expend the time and energy that could be spent on my "real" writing by pursuing this. But then again, maybe getting a little bit of income from even a dubious source could actually free up time to "really" write. Could pay for day care, just for example.

I go back and forth in my thinking on this almost constantly, but it always comes back to the "slut vs. whore" question. I'm not a producer of cheap porn, dammit. I'm a writer of erotic pornography. I don't want to be ashamed of anything I write, and I think I would be ashamed to see something I've labored over on a rack next to "Splat" magazine.

If you've read this far, and you're still interested, the erotic pornography of Christian Black can be found here:

http://english.literotica.com/stories/memberpage.php?uid=111531&page=submissions

To save you a little time, these are the good ones:

"Biomechasexual" is probably my favorite story on the site. Pretty decent sci-fi erotica that I feel does justice to both genres. A long-distance space traveller and two perfect sex robots. If science is not working towards the development of the perfect sex robot, I ask you what the hell good is it anyway? http://english.literotica.com:81/stories/showstory.php?id=109318

"Third Person" is an erotic horror novel which I started to serialize here, but stopped due to lack of response after the first few chapters. I will finish the novel someday, just not here. The first chapter contains some of the best "erotic pornography" I have yet to write, and Chapter 3 contains a (hopefully) better-than-Shyamalan plot twist. http://english.literotica.com/stories/showstory.php?id=47815

The "Cassandra" and "Emma" cycles are both pretty good, featuring recurring female characters. Cassandra is the archetypical "crazy chick" psycho ex-girlfriend. You know, where the sex is great but you're afraid of waking up in the middle of the night to find yourself Bobbit-ized. http://english.literotica.com/stories/showstory.php?id=54269 Emma was the star of "Ding Dong the Bitch is Dead," http://english.literotica.com/stories/showstory.php?id=47328 and she has developed into a very sexually aggressive, dominating she-wolf with a gayboy fixation.

The "Four-Play" series is like the "Rashomon" of bisexual porn. A four-way orgy told from four different points of view. http://english.literotica.com:81/stories/showstory.php?id=48835

"The Strange Case of the Quigley Twins" http://english.literotica.com:81/stories/showstory.php?id=204813 and "Pyro" http://english.literotica.com:81/stories/showstory.php?id=210662 are "straight" stories with some sexual content, posted here just so someone will actually read them.

'The Education of Lisa" series, my soon-to-be novelistic debut, is wildly uneven (an attempt to write each chapter in a separate category.) Chapter 5, the "Erotic Horror" installment is the best one. http://english.literotica.com/stories/showstory.php?id=49947

"Awakening Amelia's Malomar" is straight-ahead porn, with a little twist of humor. http://english.literotica.com:81/stories/showstory.php?id=104209

"A Philosophy of Porn" is an essay which contains many of the points I've already made here.

Have fun.

2006-08-19T15:56:00.000-07:00

Confessions of a Desperate Househusband

I wondered how long it would take me to use the "Desperate . . ." crack. It's not nearly as funny as the "Sesame Street" parody, "Desperate Houseplants."

The fact that I'm now making a "Sesame Street" reference might give you some idea of why I'm in a very frustrated place right at the moment. Most of it comes from the sheer chaos of kids and housework. If you have kids, you know the drill. Not only are the little buggers mess-making machines, tiny whirlwinds of destruction, they also make it nearly impossible to concentrate on any housekeeping task for more than five minutes without offering some sort of distraction or mini-crisis. It's easier to get stuff done when Lea's at home to wrangle the rug-rats, but when she's home I like to savor the rare pleasure of my wife's company, and don't like to waste this precious time on housework. Catch-22.

This morning, I knuckled down and finally burrowed through Dirty Dish Mountain (took me 3 hours) and Lea helped tremendously by cleaning the bathroom (gets dirty in unspeakable ways when you're potty-training a toddler, especially a boy still perfecting his "aim.") So I can breathe a little easier. But, of course, there are other stress agents at work:

1) The washing machine broke down. It fills up with water just fine, but that's all it does now. This leaves me to face the equally unpleasant prospects of trips to the laundromat or paying a repairman. I tried to fix it myself, but those of you who know me can imagine the slapstick comedy which ensued.

2) The kids won't take a damn nap!!! You can not imagine how I've come to rely on the couple hours of afternoon peace and quiet which nap-time offers.

3) Dylan's potty training is going agonizingly slow. Pee and poop are not among my favorite substances, and I deal with them way more than I like to. Plus, he likes to challenge me to saber duels ever since he got a toy light-saber as a party favor last week. This wouldn't be so bad, except he insists on playing Darth Vader to my Luke Skywalker. It is a little disturbing to hear a 2-year old say, "You don't know the power of the dark side."

4) Lily has learned to crawl and to pull herself into a standing position. These developmental milestones are accompanied by insatiable hunger for exploration and an intolerance of being restrained. No more putting her in the swing or the highchair to keep her out of trouble. Now I have to keep constant tabs on a highly mobile baby who gets quite irate when you try to steer her away from staircases or choking hazards.

5) Bullshit financial woes. Turns out a single-income household isn't quite the goldmine it's cracked up to be. It still seems more viable for me to stay at home than to go to work, but this section of the biography might be subtitled "The Lean Years."

6) Minor point, but due to me waiting up for Lea to come home from her "girl's night out" last night, I hardly got any writing done this morning. The "Blood World" screenplay has a strong beginning, but damn it's going slow.

7) While cleaning the kid's room, I found a small glass crack pipe inside the floorboard radiator. It's a relic of a previous tenant, but the superstitious part of me can't help but see this as a bad omen. Or maybe it's fate telling me I should take up smoking crack as a way of dealing with the stress.

Well, actually I feel better now. Venting my spleen onto the World Wide Web is actually quite therapeutic.

2006-08-18T14:17:00.000-07:00

Yeah, but the movie was better . . .

Almost invariably when a book is adapted into a movie, the results are disappointing. Vital scenes are cut out or gutted, beloved characters are tragically miscast, "internal" action is awkwardly externalized or, generally speaking, the movie on the screen just fails to live up to the movie in the head of anyone who has read the book. Not that books are inherently better than movies, it's just that something is usually lost in the translation.

(I suppose it works the other way, too. Almost every "novelization" of a movie I've read has been god-awful.)

But there are those rare occasions when the movie adaptation actually surpasses the source material. As someone who is interested in writing both books and movies, I am especially interested in this process. So, since the response to my "favorite short story" post was so overwhelming, here goes another long-winded list:

"Fight Club." Book by Chuck Palahniuk. Movie written by Jim Uhls, directed by David Fincher. Palahniuk (God, his name is fun to type) has so much as said that the movie has a better ending, and it's a testament to the film's power that you can't help hearing Edward Norton's sardonic voice as you read. All in all, the book reads like a provocative if amateurish first novel by a promising author. The film plays like a horrific glimpse into the future, downloaded into your brain via cutting-edge cinema black magic. Plus, the book did not contain the single best use of a Pixies song ever.

"A Simple Plan." Book by Scott Smith. Movie written by Scott Smith, directed by Sam Raimi. A rare case of a movie toning down the violence in the book, with superior results. The story's the same in both versions: two brothers and a friend on a hunting trip find a downed airplane containing several million dollars in presumed "dirty" money. The pilot's dead, nobody seems to be looking for the cash, so all they have to do is wait, right? Of course, it ain't really that simple. Secrecy and distrust lead very naturally to violence. In the book, the protagonist (played by Bill Paxton in the film) turns just this side of Ted Bundy. In the movie, there's less killing, so it's more believable and has WAY more impact.

"Christine." Book by Stephen King. Movie written by Bill Phillips, directed by John Carpenter. One of the weaker (by his own admission) of the King's early novels, turned into a lean, mean killer car movie. Good cast and a great 50's soundtrack also help.

"A Door in the Floor." From the book "A Widow for One Year" by John Irving. Movie written and directed by Tod Williams. Irving's one of my favorite authors, but he has an unfortunate tendancy towards elephantitis. His novels usually start with the hero's birth, cover their entire childhood and adolescence, and sometimes follow them all the way until death. Sometimes this works ("Garp" is the classic example) and sometimes not. This movie improves on the book by only adapting the first (and best) section, telling a story in which the book's protagonist is a young girl, and almost a peripheral character. If you want to know what happens to these characters in the next three or four decades of their lives, go ahead and read the book. Be forewarned, though, there is an extraneous sub-plot involving a serial killer stalking prostitutes in Amsterdam.

"Out of Sight." Book by Elmore Leonard. Movie written by Scott Frank, directed by Steven Soderberg. The movie shifts the focus of the novel, fleshes out the plot (for a change,) plays some twisty, Tarantino-esque games with the chronology, and adds a layer of cool with smooth performances by George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez (!) Elmore Leonard has got to the point where he can turn out these thrillers in his sleep, but the movie is wide awake. (OK, that was bad.)

"Jaws" (Peter Benchly. Peter Benchley/ Steven Spielberg.) "The Godfather" (Mario Puzo. Mario Puzo & Francis Ford Coppola/ Francis Ford Coppola) Two cases of sudsy 70's potboilers transformed into cinema art.

"The Wizard of Oz." Book by L. Frank Baum. Baum had an incredible imagination, but when it came to the prose- not so much. The movie added indelible casting, wonderful songs, gorgeous early color special effects and, best of all, an actual ending.

Open to debate: "Gone With the Wind" and "To Kill a Mockingbird."

So, wanna quibble? Huh? Do ya, punk? If you disagree with one of those, or have a title you'd like to suggest, the "comment" button is right there.

2006-08-16T15:23:00.000-07:00

INFLUENCES- #1 Bob Dylan

Is anyone else out there nearly as stoked as I am? In less than two weeks, the great Bob Dylan will release "Modern Times," his first new album of all new songs in five years. I'm already hoarding pennies in the change jar.

Of course, I don't know if you remember what else was going on the day "Love and Theft" came out, on 9/11/01. Something to do with airplanes, I think. Seriously, I remember walking across the street from the Sir Speedy where I was working to buy that CD at Hastings, wondering if WWIII was breaking loose. (The answer, both yes and no, is a subject for another day.) If there is another terrorist attack on the 29th, I wonder if the DHS will be knocking on Bob's door.

I have been a Bob Dylan fan for nearly twenty years now. Actually, maybe "fan" isn't the right word. Nobody is really just a "fan" of the big D. There are people out there so into Bob it's scary. Thankfully, I'm not that bad. I've heard of people buying on e-bay cigarette butts smoked by Bob. That's just weird. My own collection of hair and nail trimmings is very tastefully arranged, and so falls on this side of "the line." I've also heard tell of people who name their first-born son "Bob" or "Zimmy" or something outlandish like that. Or people who play "The Wedding Song" from Planet Waves at their wedding. Please let me know if I ever cross over into that kind of zealotry.

My first exposure to Bob came when I was in high school. My stepmother Sherry had a Norton poetry anthology and in there with T.S. Elliot and Robert Frost were the lyrics to "Subterranean Homesick Blues." Bob was not only the only rock guy in there, but the only songwriter of any kind. This impressed me so much I memorized the entire song and would recite it William Shatner-style with little or no provocation. At the time I wondered why this didn't get me any dates.

The next step towards total Boblimation came when I duped a copy of my girlfriend's Dad's copy of "Greatest Hits, Vol. 2." The song that really hooked me was "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues." You have to love a song that starts with: "When you're lost in the rain in Juarez and it's Easter-time, too," and ends with: "I'm going back to New York City, I do believe I've had enough."

After that, I started buying the albums in rough chronological order. There was at least one song on every album which completely blew me away. "Talkin' WWIII Blues" on "Freewheelin'." "It's All Right Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)" on "Bringin' It All Back Home." "Ballad of a Thin Man" on "Highway 61."

So why does Bob resonate so deeply with me? The words, obviously. Throw Woody Guthrie, Hank Williams, William Blake, Dylan Thomas, the Beats, the Beatles, Lenny Bruce and Franz Kafka into a blender along with "mystery ingredient X" and you might come close. Although that blend would be heavy on the "X." Who else could conjur the furious barrage of apocalyptic imagery in "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall," or the line "the ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face" from "Visions of Johanna?" Or, if you think he's past his prime, how about the metaphysical comedy of the waitress encounter in 1998's "Highlands?"

But not many people would deny Bob's a great songwriter. It's the "singer" part of the singer/songwriter title that give people the most problems. I know plenty of people (including my wife) who can't get past The Voice. You know, that thin nasal gravel-rattle you can only achieve by singing like Bob Dylan for 40 years. I'll admit The Voice is an acquired taste. It's the instrument the man has to work with, though, and God knows when he's On, he works it for all it's worth. I dare you to listen closely to his delivery of "Desolation Row" on the MTV Unplugged album and tell me you don't get chills. "Right now I don't read so good don't send me no more letters noooo . . ." Go ahead. I double dare you.

So, since I've got Blog-o-listaphillia, here are some of my favorite Bob moments:

BEST ALBUM: "Blonde on Blonde." No. "Blood on the Tracks." No, "Blonde on Blonde." Wait, "Time Out of Mind" is pretty amazing. Dammit, I don't know.

BEST PROTEST SONG: "Masters of War." The early, directly political, pure "folk" songs don't speak to me as much as the later "plugged-in" stuff, but it's hard to deny the impact of this cutting tirade against the military-industrial complex, those who profit (greatly) from death and destruction. Sadly, this song is more timely now than it was in '63.

FUNNIEST SONG: "Bob Dylan's 115th Dream." A truly jaw-dropping piece of stream-of-consciousness achronistic Americana. "Moby Dick," The Beatles and Columbus are all referenced in a hysterically funny breakneck rhyme. RUNNER-UP: "Motorpsycho Nightmare."

BEST SONG TO SING ALONG TO DRUNK: "(Sooner or Later) One of Us Must Know." Believe me, I speak from experience. "I didn't realize how young you werrrre."

BEST BREAK-UP SONG: "Idiot Wind." Sure, the guy wrote "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right" and "It Ain't Me, Babe," but for pure vicious bile and rancor, you can't beat this cut from "Blood on the Tracks." Actually, you can. Try the even more bitter acoustic version on "Bootleg, Vol. 2." Hear Bob say the line "Sweet lady" and make it sound like "you evil fucking whore."

BEST STORY SONG: "Brownsville Girl." OK, OK. Or "Tangled Up in Blue" or "Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts." Bob's got this incredible ability to compress novel-worthy narratives into eight minute songs. I have attempted to replicate this in a short story, with utterly embarrassing results.

BEST LIVE SONG: "Like a Rolling Stone." The version on "Bootleg Vol. 4: Live '66." For the entire concert, Bob dealt with the hecklers with wit and good humor. But when some wag calls him "Judas," the camel's back is broken. "I don't believe you," Bob says. "You're a liar." Then he turns to the band and says "Play it fuckin' loud." What follows is the most blistering, confrontational and out-loud rockin' rendition of Bob's signature tune. Also qualifies as BEST SONG TO PLAY AT TOP VOLUME AFTER BEING FIRED FROM A JOB YOU HATED ANYWAY.

BEST "JESUS PERIOD" SONG: "I Believe in You." Defiant, unwavering faith in the face of popular scorn.

BEST "BOOTLEG" SONG: "Blind Willie McTell." Who would have thought a Minnesota Jew could deliver such a potent evocation of the African-American Southern experience? And then leave it off the album because he didn't think it quite turned out? "I know no one can sing the blues like Blind Willie McTell." Or Bob Dylan, for that matter. RUNNER-UP: "Foot of Pride," if only for the one line: "You know what they say about being nice to the right people on the way up? Sooner or later you're going to meet them coming down."

BEST BOB SONG NOT ON A BOB ALBUM: "Tweeter and the Monkeyman" from "The Traveling Wilbury's, Vol. 1." This Jersey crime story out-does both Springsteen and "The Sopranos."

BEST USE OF AN OBSCURE BOB SONG IN A MOVIE: "The Man in Me," from "The Big Lebowski." Only now, damn it, I picture Jeff Bridges bowling whenever I hear it.

BEST BOB COVER: I still have a weakness for Hendrix's "All Along the Watchtower." Jimi also did a very decent live version of "Like a Rolling Stone" at Monterey.

And, lest you think I'm unaware of the feet of clay:

WORST BOB SONG: "Under the Red Sky." The little boy and the little girl were baked into a pie? What the fuck, Bob?

WORST LIVE ALBUM: "Real Live." Except for an interesting re-working of "Tangled Up in Blue," excrutiatingly unlistenable.

WORST COLLABORATION: "Dylan and the Dead." Maybe it was what they were smoking back-stage, but Bob and the Gratefuls bring out the worst in each other. On some of the tracks, I don't even think the Dead are playing the same song Bob is singing.

WORST BOB MOVIE: (tie) "Hearts on Fire" / "Masked and Anonymous." Bob has less luck with movies than Madonna. I've never seen "Renaldo & Clara," but it's notoriously awful.

God, I've babbled on my Bob blog for a long time. I didn't even mention the surrealistic Victoria's Secret ads, the amazing work of random biography (Chronicles, Vol 1) or the fact that I've been pestering Lea to get me an XM hook-up so I can listen to Bob's "Theme-Time" radio show.

I'll leave it there, though, but rest assured I will give a full review of "Modern Times" as soon as I've listened to it. Providing, of course, that terrorists have not nuked Northern AZ, or wiped out the internet with an EMP.

(PS- Just by typing that last sentence, I have "red-flagged" myself onto a CIA watch-list. Oh, well, might as well go all out. Assassination dirty bomb anthrax Allah Michael Moore Mt. Rushmore Dr. Shoal's gel insert explosive. There. Call it post-9/11 blogger Tourette's.)

2006-08-11T16:49:00.000-07:00

Visions and Voices- Four for a Penny

I am the sort of reader that I'm sure writers hate. That's because I hardly ever buy new books. (Exceptions are made for "Harry Potter" installments, I'll confess.) I have a passion for used book stores, but even better are the book bins at thrift stores and libraries. If I pay more than .25 for paperbacks and .50 for hardcovers, I feel like I've somehow been rooked.

You never know what you're going to find at places like these. The books are unorganized, the arrangement often completely chaotic, and half the time you walk out of the store empty-handed. That just makes it all the more thrilling when you do find a diamond amongst the coal. This is also a great way to discover new books. If you've heard good things about an author, are struck by a jacket blurb, or just think a book has a cool title, just scoop it up. Hell, it's only a quarter. You don't even mind so much if there's water damage, marked-up pages, or a missing cover. (It is kind of a drag when the last several pages are torn out. I still don't know how "Gone With the Wind" ends.) Once I found a pot-leaf in a copy of Carl Jung's "Man and His Symbols." Of course, I marched right down to the police department and turned that in. Heh heh.

Right now I'm reading a short story anthology called "Fiction 100." (Published in 1976, edited by James H. Pickering.) That's right, one hundred short stories. How much did I pay for this doorstop of an omnibus? Twenty-five cents at the Prescott library. Four stories for a penny. For sheer economy, that's tough to beat.

All the major short story writers (up to the 70's, anyway) are represented, arranged alphabetically by author. (I'm up to James Joyce. Can anyone tell me what the hell "Araby" is about?) A lot of the stories I've read before, I'm something of an anthology junkie, but I've discovered a few new gems.
"The Bound Man" by Ilse Aichinger is borderline plagiarism from Kafka's "Hunger Artist," but it's still a mind-bender. "The Signal Man" is a Charles Dickens ghost story almost as chilling as "A Christmas Carol." Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wall-Paper" is a tale of creeping madness worthy of Poe.

Reading the book, I fantasize about what stories I'd include in my ultimate short story anthology. (Yeah, I know it's weird, but that's the kind of guy I am.) Here are a few selections:

"Accursed Inhabitants of the House of Bly" by Joyce Carol Oates- Oates is one of my favorite authors, and as much as I love her novels (especially "Blonde," "We Were the Mulvaneys," and "Bellefleur,) I think she's a far better short story author than she is a novelist. It's tough to pick one story to represent her massive body of work, but a gothic horror tale about lovers transformed into hell-hounds is tough to top.

“The Coup De Grace” by Ambrose Bierce. Talk about being caught in an awkward position.

“The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allen Poe. How can you pick just one Poe? This story, though, is as lean and mean a horror story as you’d ever want to read. Not one wasted word.

“A Country Doctor” by Franz Kafka. Kafka’s another author where it’s hard to pick just one. “The Hunger Artist,” “In the Penal Colony,” or “The Metamorphosis” (kind of the “Stairway to Heaven” of Kafka- often left off because it’s so obvious) would all fit here. I picked this one because it’s such a short, focused burst of pure dream logic.

“Heavy Set” by Ray Bradbury. Sacrilege, I know, to pick this one over so many Bradbury classics. But this one stuck in my craw more than any other. If Oedipus was a gym-rat.

“The Colour Out of Space” by HP Lovecraft. I love “mind-fuck” stories. How about one which forces you to imagine a color not represented in our spectrum?

“In the Hills, The Cities” by Clive Barker. Barker’s “Books of Blood” collections came out when I was about 15. They flipped my wig. Sick, twisted and brilliant. Barker has kind of gone in a different direction since his debut, but his early stuff is still among the edgiest horror fiction I’ve ever read. In this story, the graphic man-man sex is not half as shocking as the main event, a truly bizarre rivalry between two ancient European villages.

“Silent Snow, Secret Snow” by Conrad Aiken. Possibly the most disturbing depiction of childhood madness ever depicted. That’s my idea of a good time.

“Sweets for the Sweet” by Robert Bloch. If only for the final line.

“A Junkie’s Christmas” by William H. Burroughs. (aka “The Priest They Called Him.”) Burroughs is most famous for his splintering of the English language and his really bad impression of William Tell. But when the guy sat down to write a “straight” narrative story, the results were pretty potent. As with any Burroughs, it’s best to listen to him read his own words. Like the voice of Death.

“Royal Jelly” by Roald Dahl. Dahl is mainly known as a writer of children’s books, including Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, but his adult-oriented stuff is as wicked as anything Clive Barker could imagine, and a lot funnier. This one is about infant nutrition.

“The Pension Grillparzer” by John Irving (as TS Garp.) A short-story within a novel, ostensibly written by Irving’s most famous character. Sad, funny and beautiful, it reads even better out of context, as in Irving’s short anthology Trying to Save Piggy Sneed.

“A Birthday” by Lisa Tuttle. A man whose mother has a very troubling skin condition.

“’Repent Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman” by Harlan Ellison. A classic celebration of non-conformance.

“Death Constant Beyond Love” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. One of my all-time favorite story titles.

“The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson. To quote a classic “Simpsons” bit: “A chilling tale of conformity and mob violence, NOT a source for winning lottery numbers.” D’oh!

“The Half-Skinned Steer” by Annie Proulx. Forget Mad Cow disease, this one will put you off beef for a loooong time.

“Bartleby the Scrivener” by Herman Melville. I could go into the reasons why I dig this metaphysical masterpiece, but “I prefer not to.”

“Survivor Type” by Stephen King. The King has written many great short stories, as well as a few duds. I chose this one for its innovative contribution to literature; the first (and only, so far as I know) instance of auto-cannibalism. That’s right, dude eats himself. Without ketchup.

“To Build a Fire” by Jack London. Man make fire. Fire good. Man no make fire, man freeze to death. Dog find another man. (Ooh, damn, I gave away the ending.)

“What Was It?” by Fitz-James O’Brien. Two opium-smoking tenants of a boarding house confront an invisible demon. Ripe for a Cheech and Chong remake.

“The Secret Sharer” by Joseph Conrad. A sea captain with “Fight Club” syndrome.

“A Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner. Just in case you thought Norman Bates was the first one to think of it.

“The Human Chair” by Edogawa Rampo. I read this one in an anthology entitled “My Favorite Horror Story,” where (brilliant concept) current horror writers pick their favorite classic stories. This was Harlan Ellison’s pick. An exceedingly unsettling tale of obsession and voyeurism with, let’s say, a twist. The author’s name, by the way, is a phonetic spelling of the Japanese pronunciation of “Edgar Allen Poe.”

“The Rocking Horse Winner” by DH Lawrence. Who knew Lawrence invented the whole “spooky psychic kid” genre, all the way back in 1932?

“Flipping the Bird” by Christian Smith. As sole editor of my fantasy anthology, I can include one of my own stories. That’s allowed. Bob unwisely flips somebody off following a bar brawl. Bob’s middle finger is shot off. Bob grows a new finger. The finger grows a new Bob. Weirdness ensues.

I see I've leaned more towards the bizarre and the grotesque, towards tales of horror and madness. But that's me all over.

How about you? What goes in your book?

2006-08-05T16:40:00.000-07:00

Kids say the God Damndest Things.

Actual exchange:

Lea: (on returning to work after a very rare 2 days off) I spent most of the day playing catch-up.

Dylan: Ketchup's not a game, Mommy. I Spy is a game.

2006-08-02T15:30:00.000-07:00

Ghost Dog- Nightmares & Dreamstuff:

I had a freaky dream last night and very strange experience upon awakening. I should probably preface the story a little by giving you some background.

I see dead people.

No, not exactly, but occasionally throughout my life I have seen "ghosts." Or something. I'm not sure what they are exactly, but the experience is always the same. I wake up, usually in the middle of a dream, and very clearly see someone standing in my room, beside the bed. Usually it's a person, though sometimes it's a dog or a wolf. In most cases, they fade away almost immediately, though sometimes they stick around for a while. Once I watched a man smoke a cigarette in the closet for two or three minutes before I worked up the courage to say something.

I know, I know, it's just what they call a "hypnagogic phenomena." Though I am awake, part of my brain is still dreaming, right? Maybe, though I have a few reservations about making such a cut-and-dried diagnosis. For one thing, the apparition I see in the room never has any direct connection to the dream I just had. For another, it is almost never a person I recognize. So why would I conjure up random people?

A theory I have devised is that dreaming perception and waking perception are sort of like two separate radio stations. When changing stations on an old-fashioned radio with a dial tuner, you sometimes skip across a signal somewhere between the two other ones. Then, when you go back to try to find it again, it's just not there anymore. I think I'm experiencing something like that. A form of perception somewhere between dreaming and waking, seeing something which might be around us all the time, but which we aren't always tuned in to.

Of course, I really don't know what I'm talking about, so that might just be me talking out of my ass again.

It has happened more frequently in different places I've lived than in others. When I lived with my ex-girlfriend at her parent's house, it happened a lot. (That's where I saw the cigarette guy in the closet.) Of course, that house also played host to a poltergeist, but I'll save that story for another time. (In case you think I'm a flake- I have never seen a UFO, Bigfoot or Elvis.)

It's happened a few times in the new place, and it happened to me this morning.

First, the dream I was having. It started innocently enough, with me on board the "Titanic." (Kate Winslet, unfortunately, was nowhere to be found.) For some reason, I was planning to stowaway on the ship and was looking for a place to hide. Then the dream shifted and I was caring for my daughter, Lily. Except in the dream, she was paralyzed. I was very sad, watching her and knowing she would never walk, and in the dream I vowed to make her life as happy as possible despite her paralysis.

For a parent, that's about as scary as a nightmare can get.

I woke up and I saw a small dog sitting on the bed beside Lily. (Lea was sleeping with Dylan in his room, so it was just the two of us in bed. Or three, if you count the dog.) It was a puppy. I'm not sure of the breed, though I would recognize it if I saw another one. The dog was not threatening, and in fact seemed almost protective of Lily. After blinking my eyes about a dozen times, it faded away. I'm not really freaked out by these things anymore, and my dominant feeling was relief that the dream was over and Lily was safe.

So, I don't know. I awake from a dream where harm has come to my daughter, to find her being watched over by a protective canine spirit. Weird, huh? I have no idea what it really means.

2006-07-28T14:27:00.000-07:00

Do you wanna potty? It's potty time!

Ah, the joys and frustrations of stay-at-home-daddyhood. Dylan, my two year old, is in the potty training "zone," & has nearly mastered the art of the #1. He is very proud of his big boy underpants, (or "underboy pants" in Dilly-speak) and very conscious about wetting them. #2, however, seems to be an entirely different ballgame. One successful poop in the potty & one odd incident behind our bedroom door. (Not sure what that was about.)

I'm not sure how centuries of housewives managed to balance housework, child care and maintaining their sanity. (I hear huffing oven cleaner helps with that last one.) It took me almost half an hour to sweep the kitchen floor today, a process involving considerable distraction, diversion and breaks to soothe the fussy baby. Plus I had to try to explain to Dylan why the Cheerios I swept out from under the table where no longer edible.

As I type this, it's now 2:30- waaay past nap time. Lily is usually fairly easy to get to sleep; lay down in bed with her and hold a bottle for about ten minutes. Dylan, however, will not sleep until he collapses from sheer exhaustion. (Maybe I should get a large rubber mallet.) And, of course, he is disinclined to play quietly while I'm trying to get Lily down. She got in about twenty solid minutes of shut-eye before Dylan's attempts to create new percussion instruments from various items in our bedroom finally managed to wake her up. Now I'm dealing with an extremely cranky baby & a toddler who will finally crash out at about 4:00, sleep until Lea gets home sometime after 6, and then not want to go to bed tonight. Good thing I don't need to sleep.

By the way, last night was the first time Dylan ever walked in on Lea & I as we were "practicing in case we ever want to make another baby." He thought it was hilarious, ("You guys are naked!") but I can see him reliving the moment in nightmares. Thirty years from now, he'll either be in therapy or up on a clocktower somewhere.

Gotta go. Diaper time. Despite my complaints, I have to admit it beats working for a living.

2006-07-26T09:14:00.000-07:00

A writer writes a writing blog but doesn't talk about writing?!?

It occurred to me that claiming to want to reach out to & communicate with other writers out there, and then writing a bunch of silly crap about David Lynch movies, might be sending a mixed message. So, I thought I'd devote this entry to actually talking about my writing.

WHAT DO I WRITE?

I've written numerous short stories, a few screenplays, several incomplete novels (more on that later,) radio comedy scripts for Coyote Radio Theater (check out www.coyoteradio.org it's a blast,) and (I am NOT ashamed to admit) some erotica under the pseudonym Christian Black ( http://english.literotica.com/stories/memberpage.php?uid=111531&page=submissions if you're interested in that sort of thing.) Horror and sex are my two chief obsessions, and I've got sort of a twisted sense of humor, so most of my work concerns some permutation of those three things. Horror-comedy, erotic horror, erotic comedy, or (it's hard get it to all come together, but sometimes I get lucky) erotic horror-comedy.

It might sound odd, but I'd also like to write children's books.

No publication yet. I've submitted a few of the stories to print magazines, and have received increasingly encouraging rejection letters. I haven't made any serious attempt to get an agent, as I've got this funny belief that I have to actually finish a novel before I can earn the right to seek representation.

HOW DO I WRITE?

Every morning, every day, between 4:30 & 5AM. My wife & kids usually wake up at around 7, so I've got about two hours of peace & quiet creative time. At this hour, I often start writing before I'm fully awake, before my body can assimilate caffeine. I credit this for the definite streak of surrealism in my work. In actually sitting down and getting to work, if nothing else, I'm fairly disciplined. The problem is, I seem to have either a phobia or some other kind of pathological block concerning finishing anything.

I am, at last count, simultaneously and actively working on 11 novels, 4 screenplays and numerous "side" projects. I'll work on something for a few weeks or months until I can't stand the sight of it anymore, then I'll put it aside and work on something else. Months, or even years, later, I'll dig out the abandoned project, fall in love with it again, and get a little more work done. Lather. Rinse. Repeat. The eternal freakin' cycle.

This methodology keeps me creatively fresh. I hardly ever get burned out or suffer from writer's block. However, it also prevents me reaching the end of anything.

I've also developed (here's where it gets weird) a very complex system of random factors to choose what I will work on next, and to grant me inspiration when I get stuck. On my desk in front of me right now I have a cup of dice and a deck of 169 playing cards which both key into massive lists I keep, of items & symbols designed to suggest connections to my creative mind. I told you it was weird.

WHY DO I WRITE?

For the fame and riches. (Excuse me while I heimlich myself; I just laughed so hard I swallowed my gum.) If I was doing this for the money, I would have quit years ago. Seriously, in my most optimistic moods I can't see myself as a Stephen King or a JK Rowling. Hell, I can't even see myself as a Phillip K. Dick or a Harlan Ellison (though those are closer to the mark.) In my wildest dreams, I see myself getting lousy sales & mediocre reviews (or mediocre sales & lousy reviews,) but accumulating a small but devoted cult following. People praying to my books in moonlit forest rituals, or poring over them for clues on when to drink the purple Kool-Aid.

Seriously, I just want to connect to the few hundred people who might exist out there in the world who might share a bit of my world view.

So, if not for material reward or public recognition, then why? I could feed you some line about artistic expression, but I would never bullshit you. (Whoever you are.) I've in the past thought of my writing as an outgrowth of my obsessive-compulsive condition (like Monk, only with a deck of cards and a cup of dice,) or as something like drug addiction (withdrawal is a bitch.)

Lately I've come to realize that I write because I'm constitutionally unsuited to doing anything else.

I don't have any college education, I'm not a "people" person and I have no job skills to speak of. My resume would be funny if it weren't so pathetic. I have never had a job which has fulfilled me in any way other than providing a (meager) paycheck. On the other hand, staying at home to raise my kids & writing my crazy little books gives me great spiritual fulfillment (though no paycheck- meager or otherwise.) I'm satisfied with the trade-off, for now, but I would love nothing more than to be able to say with a straight face that writing is my career.

I feel comfortable making all these confessions because I've got the nagging feeling that posting this blog is like whispering into the wind. I'm not at all sure anyone is actually listening. If you are, my friend, give me a friendly comment or two.

2006-07-24T16:26:00.000-07:00

Is anybody out there?

I'm what you'd call a blog-o-virgin. In fact, six months ago I had no idea what a blog was. (It sounded like something you'd peel off the bottom of your shoe.) I am an anti-social, techno-phobic sourpuss, who always swore he had no use for anything like on-line community. In fact, both the words "on-line" & "community" cause me to wince and/ or cringe like a slug in ice-water.

So what brought about my change of heart? A few things. I'm a writer, with chronic incompletism. I hope to talk to other writers out in the world for mutual support, guidance and advice. Plus, I'm kind of an opinionated jerk, hoping to talk to other opinionated jerks out in the world for mutual animosity, misinformation and barbed insults. I'll probably encounter more of the latter, but that's cool.

I'm also a stay-at-home Dad (great thanks to my wife Lea for allowing me this opportunity) with two incredible kids. Dylan, age 2.5 & Lily, aged 9 months. The search for mutual support , guidance and advice applies here, too. I'd love to talk to other parents trying to raise human children in an increasingly inhuman world.

Having no real life of my own outside of the kids and my writing, I am a fanatical movie buff. Of course, having kids has put a serious dent in my moviegoing. The last film I saw theatrically was "Curious George." I wish that was a joke.

Still, most of my opinions concern movies. Here's a random movie opinion: David Lynch is a fucking God. (By the way, if you're offended by fucking shitty language, this is not the place for you. Buh-bye.)

Here, in my humble but utterly inflexible opinion, are the top 5 David Lynch movies:

5) "Wild at Heart." A true wild ride. Hot, sweaty sex (you feel kinda sticky just watching Laura Dern & Nicolas Cage going at it,) way over-the-top violence (Cage pounds a dude's head to pulp against a marble staircase to a vicious heavy-metal riff in the FIRST TEN MINUTES,) a turn-on-a-dime perfect Elvis impression, Willem DeFoe & the ugliest prosthetic teeth in film history and an intense scene of verbal rape ("Say fuck me.") Plus Crispin Glover stuffing cockroaches into his underwear. Fun game: Take a drink at every random "Wizard of Oz" reference. "You got me hottern'n Georgia asphalt."

4) "Twin Peaks"/ "Fire Walk With Me." The first season of the TV show was one of the most amazing things ever broadcast on network television. The second season- not so much. Still, every episode that Lynch personally directed had at least one scene of pure freaky brilliance. The final episode, watched by myself and five other people across the USA, was without a doubt the most surreal thing shown on American TV (with the possible exception of Urkel.) The spin-off prequel movie is a bad movie I love. Bad dialogue, cornball humor, incest nightmares and flashes of cinematic genius. (The nightclub scene & Laura Palmer's murder.) "There was a fish . . . IN the percolator!"

3) "Blue Velvet" I first saw this when I was fourteen & it twisted my head backwards. Dennis Hopper was so evil, he made Darth Vader look like a pussy. (Pussy CAT, that is.) I still get chills when I hear Roy Orbison sing "In Dreams." Sometimes I even hear Roy Orbison in MY dreams, and that's really weird. "You know what a love letter is? A bullet from a fuckin' gun, fucker!"

2) "Eraserhead." Made "Blue Velvet" seem like Velveeta. (You know, bland & cheesy.) This one struck a deep chord, as it was the closest cinematic representation of certain dreams I've had under the influence of a high fever or bad sea food. That might not sound like your idea of a good time, but I'd eat nothing but rotten oysters if I could have "Eraserhead" dreams all the time. Plus the scene where Henry eats dinner with his girlfriend's parents is funnier than "Meet the Parents" & ". . . the Fockers" put together. "They're not even sure it IS a baby."

1) "Mulholland Dr." Ranking this one first may seem like sacrilege to Lynch purists (there are some out there; they're scary people) but this movie has it all: deeply warped humor (check out the mob hit that takes out a vacuum cleaner,) Naomi Watts in a hot girl-girl sex scene, a true mind-fuck of an identity blurring ending, Naomi Watts in a hot girl-girl sex scene. (Listing that twice was NOT a typo.) About the ending: a lot of people have theories, but I truly believe that it's not meant to be figured out. It's supposed to lodge in your brain and fester for weeks, just barely eluding full comprehension. I don't do drugs anymore, so movies like "Mulholland Dr." are the next best thing. "Silencio."

So there you have it, a proclamation of purpose and unsolicited opinions on the films of David Lynch. Please leave a comment, on Lynch or anything else. I'd love to hear from you, whoever you are.