An Unlooked for Update

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As you can see, The Overlord’s on quality control for my newest project: a boardbook without the boards. I’m using the same print company as my previous two projects, and while someday I hope to have a real publisher backing me, until then boardbooks will come just as floppy as “The Hatastrophe” and “The Bump Under the Bed.” “Wanda Won’t” clocks in at 43 words and 28 pages, making it decidedly less wordy than the combined 2,298 words of the other two. Projected deadline is was December 1st, and now I’ve got my fingers crossed for the week of the 4th. I’m fantastically productive when I wait long enough for the panic to kick in.

Radio Blackout

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All three of my watchers have now officially informed me that my post is late. And in every major form of communication too. Online, in-person, and over the phone. For the record, I actually started writing this blog post last Tuesday during my lunch break, but have had to dump it since then. Because I hate to trash content even when it’s useless, here’s the outdated start:

I can always tell when it’s been awhile between updates; my IT Guy feels morally obligated to comment on the last post. The Sister, unfortunately, never feels such qualms, so while the radio blackout on her end is ongoing I officially have no idea if her subscription to my email update list is working, or if she just thinks I haven’t written anything in half a month.

Waste not, want not.

Admittedly, my work ethic has taken a big hit since I’ve moved. This may have something to do with constant access to the internet. YouTube has become the soul-sucking friend in my social group, the one you hate to introduce to your parents because you know they’re going to pull you over to the side later and gently point out that he might be a bad influence. Every Sunday night I make plans to try out a new writing schedule (with the purpose of generating some real stories for the story folder), and every following Friday I tell myself I’ll have a chance to try again next week. I remain optimistic, if nothing else.

Also, I was prepared to announce a short hiatus for the rest of the month while I try out a new writing schedule for the fifth time, but I actually prepared Thanksgiving content a couple months ago — if you can believe it — which means I can take off the rest of the month without looking like I’m taking off the rest of the month. I’m actually for-real working on a project (that mostly doesn’t involve writing), so once I’m back I should have something to say about it. For now it’s just easier to pretend I’m not up to anything. That way, if I don’t make my self-imposed deadline, I get to remain privately unsuccessful.

Finally, for all the folks clamoring and teeming to buy copies of my books as Christmas presents, I’m considering running a sale on my books through the month of December. I’ll officially announce closer to the 1st. At the very least it will not be a Black Friday or Cyber Monday deal, but only because I know myself well enough to realize that I will never do anything business-related during the holidays.

Yearly Redux (One of Many)

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That Cat on Cackler's Lane

I tried to do a live action version of this poetry reading, but the cat wouldn't stay on my lap, even for dramatic purposes. She's currently sitting on the floor behind me, and every time I glance back at her to make sure she's not plotting my demise, her eyes crack open just enough to let me know that yes. Yes she is.

Posted by The Storyfolder on Monday, October 30, 2017

I tried to do a live action version of this poetry reading, but the cat wouldn’t stay on my lap, even for dramatic purposes. She’s currently sitting on the floor behind me, and every time I glance back at her to make sure she’s not plotting my demise, her eyes crack open just enough to let me know that yes. Yes she is.

For example, here’s a very old attempt at this poem. Over a year old, I think. At the very least that’s my mother and father’s basement, pre-construction.

 

And finally, I know I’m an evening early for the All Hallows, but I’m posting this one today because I’m hoping I’ll have a Reformation one for tomorrow. Even though the closer the clock ticks toward midnight, the less likely I am to finish before the deadline.

So much procrastinating, eventually so little time.

A burbling gibber of jabber

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I’m going to hit up the random thoughts I have tumbling around in my skull this evening. Because content.

  1. Business update first. After sitting down at my computer to write yesterday, I spent three and some odd hours re-uploading content. My art portfolio is gone because I decided that that wasn’t what I wanted to showcase on my site. However, I have reorganized all of my category labels and now if you click “art” on the main sidebar, you can view all of my blog posts with art in them.
  2. I’ve been sitting here for half an hour happy-crying over puppy surprise videos. I’m not entirely certain how I ended up on this side of YouTube again. Every time I think I’m over it, they pop back into my viewing cycle. In another two days I’ll be onto the pregnancy announcements, because for some reason it is actually really fun to enjoy other people’s joy.
  3. I’ve been working my way through a collection of HP Lovecraft stories during my lunch breaks (and now over supper – apparently I read while I eat), and there is absolutely nothing like having a Portal parody of the song “Dumb Ways to Die” going in the background to really destroy the atmosphere. Why no, Mr. Akely, there’s nothing suspicious about the sudden tonal change in your letters coupled with an invitation out to your farm in the middle of nowhere. I’ll be there on the 4 o’clock train with all the evidence of foulest play you mailed to me six months before. Be sure to send the outside beings of Yuggoth to meet me.
    1. Sincerely, Mr. Wilmarth of Arkham, Massachusettes
    2. Professor of Literature, Miskatonic University
    3. Amateur Folklorist
    4. Sucker
    5. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-SSdTXNK2mo
  4. This is now the best comment I’ve ever received in my life: “Conceive this internet internet site contains some rattling amazing information for every person.”
  5. There is no where else to go but down.
  6. …
  7. Hmm.
  8. There were other things milling around my head, but they’re gone now. I should probably go write a story.
  9. A rattling amazing one.

The story behind today

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I am so proud of myself for figuring out some of the basic features of WordPress that it’s actually embarrassing.

Honestly, the story behind today’s post starts out and ultimately ends on a boring note: after researching size reduction and media file plugins, I accidentally deleted every single image I have (had) on my website. For some reason I didn’t shed the tears over this like I should have; probably because I suspected, between all the hours of research into shortcutting this process, that I was going to have to delete and re-upload everything anyways. This just forced the issue.

So while I’m plugging away on my media storage back behind the curtain (I’ll be cleaning up files and re-uploading in short bursts; if there are still some images missing into November, they’ll be back before the new year), here’s my slightly more thrilling news: I’ve finally put an email subscription button on my site.

*Cue cheers*

My update schedule has gotten absurdly sporadic, and I don’t plan on hammering my self-control into a calendar-shaped rectangle anytime soon. While I still stick by my one-post-a-week guarantee, some weeks I do more as the spirit moves me and other times I just barely make a single update by Saturday night. So! That was the very long way to say: if you’re tired of manually checking the website (or don’t have an RSS feed), you can now sign up to receive an email every time I update the blog.

*Nero gives the gladiatorial contender the thumbs up; cheering increases*

The second half of my search yielded the amazing news that I can actually enable comments on specific pages – a WordPress component, as it turns out. Despite the fact that this took me nearly two years to figure it, it thrills me to my core. Now all of my stories and poems have a comment section at the bottom of their page. Only having comments on blog posts bugged me because it automatically disconnected people’s reactions from the thing they were reacting to, and inadvertently discouraged people other than my friendly neighborhood IT guy from commenting on the story and/or poem itself. Who in the world is going to bother when commenting is a multi-step process (again, besides my brother; thanks, bro!)?

Next up we have the beginnings of my re-design for the mobile experience. I’m working on switching around how the header menu looks on a smaller screen and blah blah blah nobody cares. Short version: it won’t do what I think I’m telling it to do, but I’ll save the sweet talk for another day.

Finally, we have more behind-the-scenes chicanery. I have 117 blog posts (including this one), and every single one of them needs to be bagged and tagged. Right now my search function is fabulously useless. If anyone wants to re-read a specific post, they’re better off going to Google and typing the name of my website plus whatever topic they’re looking for into the search bar.

Ugh, it’s officially Monday in this time zone. So, uh, ta-da. My weekly post.

Requiem for a missed chance: The Weird Singing Draculas

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Somehow I let Friday the 13th go by without comment. To rectify the gross oversight, here’s a short story, written in October of 1995 (that’s 22 years ago, for the folks who don’t like math):
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The Weird Singing Draculas
By Andrea Lynn Schultz
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Once upon a time, there were these three Draculas, who wanted to sing. Their names were Weirdo, Dodo, and Idiot. One day, they went to somebody’s house. The other monsters said they’d be back for them. At night the Draculas started singing the scariest thing they knew. It was “We will, we will, rock you, sock you, pick you up and drop you.” The person in the house got so scared he ran away. The Draculas laughed and laughed and laughed until they cried. One day the man came back. At night they started singing “We will, we will rock you, pick you up and drop you.” The man ran away again.
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It was finally Halloween night. Finally the guy came back. He had a plan to get the Draculas out of his house. He dressed up as Frankenstein and went into his downstairs bathroom and waited for them to start singing. When the Draculas started singing the man came out of hiding and started singing “I will eat you when I’m ready. I will give you one second to run away from me.” Right at that moment the man’s black cat came running downstairs and hit a fake witch on a broomstick. The fake witch hit a switch that turned on a big Halloween set! There was a goblin, a vampire, and another witch! The vampire’s head hit a bucket with a gooey monster, covered with slime and it fell out. That ruckus made the fake ghost and bat make noise. The pumpkin was lit so it had red glowing eyes. The Draculas remembered what the other monsters said when they left. They got so scared that they fainted. When they wake up, they ran so fast that all that you could see of them was a blur! The man was so glad, but the real monsters came and they ate him. The monsters take over the house. So that’s that.
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The End

ONE-PUNCH (wo)MAN

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During my dad’s training course as a school bus driver, he was told to never cross his hands over each other while turning the wheel. Do it by inches instead, bucking forty some years of personal driving experience. “Why?” he asked.

Fun fact: Six drivers a year are killed when the force of their airbag deploying drives their hand into their face.*

That said, I’m not actually planning on changing the way I operate my mini-mini van whenever I get into a turn lane. You either live like you’re one truly unlucky fender-bender away from putting an appendage into your frontal lobe, or you don’t. For twenty some years my grandmother passed on advice and strict directives on what me and my female cousins should do whenever we drove at night, but besides the common-sense ones, I’ve never followed them. I don’t want to live my life like there’s a rapist hiding behind every bush I park next to. You open that can of worms, and live the rest of your life in fear.

Besides, if I do go because I drove my own hand through my skull, you can put this on my headstone:

Loving daughter, sister, and aunt.
Punched herself to death.

Not a bad epitaph.

*Exact number possibly inaccurate. I heard it from Dad who heard it from his instructor who got his numbers from heaven knows where; I couldn’t find the corroborating studies online. I did however creep myself out this morning while reading a Forensic Sciences article on “Airbag Related Injuries and Deaths.”

Revampira

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Business update today because I couldn’t get my ten-speed into gear. I spent the weekend peddling around Youtube, watching Yugioh Abridged and wondering if this was the culmination of my life’s ambitions (ideally, no; in actual practice: yes).

I have known for some time that my website has been crying out for a revamp. While I like the clean look of the layout of my site’s organization on a desktop, the mobile experience looks like someone vomited a semester’s-worth of creative homework assignments into the navigation bar, put their hands up, and then walked away. I was able to ignore the problem – or at least keep it simmering far back in my mind, where I didn’t have to acknowledge it – right up until I finally joined my generation and got a smartphone.

Personally, I don’t like dealing with such a small screen. I can type 90+ words a minute on a keyboard, which makes my 3wpm thumb-pad typing not only inefficient, but painfully so. Of course, it wouldn’t be quite so bad if I wasn’t so ham-fisted. I have no idea how grown men use smartphones. I’ve got the hands of a child, but I can’t type “don’t” without thumb-mashing out the word “fpm’r” and counting on autocorrect to pick up my slack. Worse is when I accidentally okay “fpm’r” as a real word, and suddenly I’m spending half my screen time backspacing while gently talking the keys into doing what I want them to do, like the mother who just spotted their child holding an uncapped permanent marker.

But never mind all the complaining, I have to do something anyways. Unfortunately, I’m not entirely certain how to fix the problem. There’s the nightmarish prospect of changing static pages to posts while figuring out how to keep them pinned, trying to turn my home page back into my main blog without accidentally losing anything, and, oh yeah, I still need to go through my entire media file archive and exchange every single picture with smaller versions of the exact same file. Which will take ages, but even worse: all that work is a non-starter for a blog post. Nobody wants to hear me whine incessantly about work they don’t actually see. You may not even want to hear me complain about it now, but here I am.

I have some additional notes (I jot down ideas for blog topics as they come to me) about talking Facebook and evaluating the use of visuals as a marketing aspect of social media, but blegh. Apparently I also need batteries (last but not least on the list is literally “Also need batteries”), which is not the best way to make sure that I don’t forget something at the store.

Second to last note, on the other hand, is simply “which is unfortunate as I am very lazy.”

You know…that actually explains a lot.

Fools, We

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I wasn’t going to re-post this for awhile, if ever. And then last night happened.

We’ve got people howling for gun control before they’ve finished collecting the bodies from the square, opposing factions screaming back about ISIS while the conspiracy theorists shuffle along the underbelly of the comment forums, already sniveling about FBI cover-ups, and the mental illness brigade should be out in force soon. Some people see political opportunity as soon as it exposes its rotting underbelly, but goodness knows much of the ranting and raving is genuine. Blind, hopeless desperation scrabbles for a reason why, because it cannot be human nature; cannot look directly at man’s hunger for evil in case we accidentally spot it; cannot wonder if the things we feed the mad dog slavering in the pit of our souls might loose him from his chains. We suckle evil, and wonder why it grows bigger.

I’ve argued with myself about this poem over and over again, wondering when (or even if) I should post it. Not because the things in it aren’t worth saying, but because I don’t intend to set this site up as my soapbox. While my worldview is important to the undergirdings of my themes, character motivations, and world-building, I see myself first and foremost as a secular writer — or rather, a writer who writes secularly. I write to entertain. I don’t want anyone in the entertainment industry to explain their political beliefs to me, let alone try and sway my opinion, and I don’t intend to become the mirror, mirror version in some sort of evil Kirk dimension.

But today I post this anyways, as my one political poem. It’s Law without Gospel, and though I’ve uploaded it as a media file, that’s only to retain the structure for any smartphone users, not because it’s illustrated. I could visualize nothing but a mass of graves, which I couldn’t quite manage to integrate with such a long poem (literally: 12 size font on a 4″ x 21″ Clip Studio canvas). Also, I spent a good chunk of time on the internet hunting down statistics, and if you don’t want to be spoiled about the punchline (such as it is) of the poem, click on the following link before reading the rest of this post.

Fools, We

The breakdown of the numbers is based on a yearly approximation of 1.2 million abortions. According to the Guttmacher Institute (whose latest statistics are from 2014, because abortion reporting apparently takes several years to compile), altogether the states reported only 926,200 abortions for that year. If this number is correct and not underreported*, then it actually takes almost eleven and a half minutes to hit the 20 mark. My apologies for the hyperbole.

(https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/state-facts-about-abortion)

*Per the Guttmacher Institute website, as of Oct 1, 2017: “For the last four decades, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has partnered with the states to collect aggregate statistics on abortions in the United States. States are not required to submit abortion data to the CDC, but the overwhelming majority do.”

States that opt out: California, Maryland
Reporting from physician to state is voluntary: New Hampshire, New Jersey
Reporting form does not specifically include medication (nonsurgical) abortion: Alabama, Florida, Hawaii, Nevada, Tennessee

(https://www.guttmacher.org/state-policy/explore/abortion-reporting-requirements)

Half full? Half empty? Nah. Just half.

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Well, I’ve gotten a whole lot of nothin’ done this evening. I’ve written half a story, but that’s still half a story less than what I need for posting. Of course, I would have more than 2,000 words sitting on my hard-drive if I hadn’t gotten sucked into the ancient and unknown terrors of the Lovecraftian section of YouTube; which is odd, considering that I’m not exactly a fan. I admire the atmospheric, crawlingly-claustrophobic feel that H.P. Lovecraft’s rather poetic prose creates (and I’m a sucker for creepy short stories: Ray Bradbury’s “The Veldt,” anyone?), but my favorite stories are driven by the actions, thoughts, motivations, and dialogue of characters. Lovecraft horror works because he first untethers rationality, explains the indescribable by admitting that it’s indescribable (and thereby forcing imagination to take over — and there is nothing like imagination for filling in the holes better than any description could by either words, art, or computer graphics), and then ultimately tells the meat of the story in lengthy prose after the fact. His characters are inevitably doomed, like sleepwalkers who can’t turn left or right. They’re ghost stories told around a campfire, with the added disorientation of dream logic.

What tethers me to reality is a worldview that sits 180 degrees opposite of anything written by the man who created the Cthulhu mythos. I love a good atmospheric story, but it cannot haunt me when I don’t share Lovecraft’s cosmic indifference.

Now all my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large. To me there is nothing but puerility in a tale in which the human form—and the local human passions and conditions and standards—are depicted as native to other worlds or other universes. To achieve the essence of real externality, whether of time or space or dimension, one must forget that such things as organic life, good and evil, love and hate, and all such local attributes of a negligible and temporary race called mankind, have any existence at all. Only the human scenes and characters must have human qualities. These must be handled with unsparing realism, (not catch-penny romanticism) but when we cross the line to the boundless and hideous unknown—the shadow-haunted Outside—we must remember to leave our humanity and terrestrialism at the threshold.

— H. P. Lovecraft, in note to the editor of Weird Tales, on resubmission of “The Call of Cthulhu”

Philosophically, it makes for neat story-telling. Why wouldn’t something non-human live by non-human logic? Yet my worldview puts humanity at the center of the story. Not a side-note in some ancient evil’s locker room talk; not an inevitably doomed experiment forgotten by the Elder Things; not an existence in a universe that’s utterly unbound by law. Instead, I know that all of history hinges on the cross-shaped conjunction of justice and mercy. I can imagine and what-if to my heart’s content, but when I put the pen down there is no escaping the bounds of that describable reality.

And so I cannot write like H.P. Lovecraft.

But I do not have his nightmares either.