Smile for the Camera, Goobs

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I have, still mostly in my head, a storyline expounding on “We Are Amazing,” except with different names and a much better understanding of who exactly the “We” are. I’m a sucker for stories about lonely people, so it’s my self-declared challenge to give in and 1.) write about a boy essentially orphaned by the divorce of his parents, but 2.) from the perspective of his idiotically happy dog. I typed up some of their story in Microsoft Word one night and, though I liked what I wrote, I knew immediately that the short string of scenes were useless to me; at least for the longer story. Instead of privately purging them from my system, here’s a public and mostly context-less piece of something that will be fleshed out quite differently on the same bat-channel, some other bat-time.

Fair warning: my intention wasn’t to feel out their characters or any similarly useful purpose. I wrote this to make myself sad.

Smell Ya Later, Goobs!

I looked up “highfalutin” and discovered it was a real word

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I found this book meme, and because I’ve run out of homework assignments from my memoir class to post, I decided to use it as a guide for today’s update. I really need to get back on a more consistent schedule. Ah well. I’ll get you next time, Inspector Gadget.

Name three of your favorite books and tell us a bit about them.

  1. “Ella Enchanted.” An enormously entertaining take on the story of Cinderella. Ella’s voice makes me laugh every time I read it. And I’m still a little in love with Prince Char.
  2. “To Kill a Mockingbird.” For obvious reasons, and not so obvious ones. Boo Radley sitting quietly in the dark at the end, Jem and Scout’s very real sibling relationship, stupid plans that go awry, and fathers who know – or at least suspect – more than their children want them to know. It’s an absurdly authentic book, never mind that I hate literature class power-words. Authentic.
  3. “Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH.” A story about secrets within a story about what a mild-mannered mother mouse will do for her children. Oh, and secret labs, near-death experiences, and brilliant rats. I’ve loved this since the first time I read it.
  4. Special mention for “Harry Potter,” “Lord of the Rings,” and a hundred other enormously popular series that everyone and their mom likes. I don’t have particularly refined taste, though I do love a good Jane Austen or Georgette Heyer if long-dead romance authors gives me more class. Oh, and why not tag “Lord of the Flies” on the end of this list; a literary demonstration of original sin, brilliantly and chillingly told.

Name three of your least favorite books.

  1. That one I had to read for class. I can’t remember the name and I wouldn’t tell you if I did. It was a very foul read, full of people being nasty to one another, each giving and taking ugliness in their turn.
  2. That other one I had to read for class. I can’t remember the name of this one either, but the use of first person was poorly done. That may have been a translation problem (it began life somewhere in Europe), but it couldn’t have entirely. The author resorted to cheap tricks to hide what the entire novel was about until the end, which was that some guy wasted his entire life because he had abandonment issues. Boo hoo.
  3. An awful post-apocalyptic pile of garbage that I wasted a couple of hours on a few years ago. Didn’t bother remembering the name of this one either (it involved unlikeable characters acting unlikeably), but I was so irritated by the end of it that I wanted to throw it across the room. As I was in the library at the time, this was neither feasible nor ethical – the book wasn’t mine.
  4. Special mention for Dickens, who haunted my school years like the ghost of homework past. The plot happens to his main characters, who helplessly waft from scene to scene being unaccountably good while the more interesting characters threaten to corrupt them. There are things that I do like about Dickens, but the thickness of his prose could stop an elephant gun at point-blank range.

Name some books you’ve loved since childhood.

  1. “I Can Read with My Eyes Shut.” The first book I remember receiving as my own, my precious. I definitely tried to read it with my eyes shut. And then realized that squinting was cheating and gave it up as impossible.
  2. Just about any picture book by Bill Peet. I can still see that ram skiing on his own horns, and the pig with the picture of the world on his side, and a hundred other images. The stories themselves have stuck with me for years. Many of them – the ones that I remember – were basically about finding your place in a world that didn’t want you.
  3. “The Secret Garden.” It hit that piece of me that loves secret places. The book made me feel the same way that looking at stars does – that someday I too might explore the unknown. The long-forgotten.
  4. The Alanna series makes me think of my sister, who read it at least once a year for ten years running.
  5. And finally, the Star Wars extended universe; I raided my brother’s closet for these, who let me so long as I didn’t open the book far enough to ruin the binding. He was very protective of his books, but he let me have at them anyways, even though a number of them came back with creases down the spine.

Name a book that disappointed you.

  • This is a tough one, but I’ll go ahead and pull out Harper Lee’s second book. I got a few pages in, where she happened to mention oh by the way, Jem died from a brain aneurism, and that was about as much disappointment as I could take for the year. Regardless of how well it was written, so I make no judgments there, not having finished it. It’s like watching Star Wars episode 7 and realizing that Han, Luke, and Leia spent the last thirty years making poor life choices. I know George Lucas swept aside the extended universe with a wave of his almighty hand, but as far as I’m concerned anything written by Timothy Zahn is canon. (But none of that Yuuzhan Vong garbage, because the entire cringing chorus of authors who contributed to that disappointing string of adventures forgot that Star Wars is supposed to be about the good guys getting into dire circumstances and then busting out of it like the immortal heroes they were.)

Name a book that surprised you.

  • “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.” I was in seventh grade and my friend made me promise not to read the description – not even look at the pictures on the cover, she insisted – and so when Hagrid declared to Harry that he was a wizard, I was as shocked and thrilled as he. Follow that up with my favorite chapter break of all time:
    • It wasn’t Voldemort. It wasn’t even Snape.
    • NEXT CHAPTER.
    • It was Quirrell.
    • (I’m not easily tricked by books, but I was so deep in Harry’s perspective that Quirrell had never crossed my mind as a suspect – but not because there weren’t clues. There were beautifully obvious ones that JK Rowling convinced me supported another conclusion.)
  • Also, I realize that that wasn’t precisely what this particular meme question was looking for, so I’ll throw a shout-out to my homey, Bill Shakespeare. For about ten years I hated Shakespeare, and when you’re fifteen that means you’ve hated him forever. The only story I knew was Romeo and Juliet, which is about the most ridiculous pile of clap-trap I’ve had the misfortune to read. The only thing I liked about that play was Mercutio raging on for about five pages, using his last few breaths, not to pass on any deathbed messages to his loved ones, but to tell Romeo what an idiot he is. THANK YOU. Somebody had to say it. As far as I’m concerned, the two lovers got what was coming to them and the Montagues and Capulets should’ve been relieved to be rid of them.
  • But then high school rolled around and I had an English teacher who told my class that Shakespeare was meant to be watched, not read. She started us off with watching “Twelfth Night” rather than reading it. Suddenly I understood how to visualize a Shakespearian play, which made the highfalutin language make sense. And I also discovered that Romeo and Juliet really was a hack-job compared to the rest of his stuff. His comedies were actually clever and the rest epically tragic. Ah, Macbeth, I have a soft spot in my heart for you where you convinced me that Romeo wasn’t as good as Bill got.

Name a favorite graphic novel/comic/manga.

  • Full Metal Alchemist, hands down. We’re talking serious political ramifications, likeable but flawed characters watching out for one another, and a well-developed scientific/magic system that fit in with the world both historically and politically.

Name a favorite non-fiction book

  • “In the Garden of Beasts.” Erik Larson is best known for “Devil in the White City” about a deranged serial killer who operated in Chicago during the time of the World’s Fair, but “In the Garden of Beasts” (set in Berlin during the 30s) is my favorite, probably because of – again – politics. The entire city changed its face and feel in an unbelievably short period of time, and absolutely no one believed the American ambassador when he insisted this was happening whether the United States liked it or not. And they didn’t like it. The ambassador was sent home in disgrace, and lived just long enough to be vindicated. Larson has a fair-minded approach to the way he tells the stories of real people, which is not to bias you one way or the other (to try and make heroes or villains of any person or situation), but to simply present the facts of a person’s actions in the context of the times.

Name a favorite poetry book.

  • Does Dr. Suess count? Let’s say Dr. Seuss counts. Marvin K. Mooney WILL YOU PLEASE GO NOW!

Name a book you’d like to see made into a movie.

  • I want to see Harry Potter made into a cartoon. Twenty to twenty-five minute episodes and just nail the whole series. The relationships, all the humor and cleverness and wizard fights (that involved a whole lot more than two people pointing their wands at each other and just standing there) that couldn’t fit into the movies.
  • Ella Enchanted. Because the version they came out with doesn’t count. I cringed when I watched the previews and I haven’t dared touch it since, with or without a ten foot pole.

What are you reading now?

  • I just read nine Orson Scott Card books in the space of four days. If all of my characters suddenly transform into brilliant children with a penchant for philosophical and/or political discourse, you know why.

I’d say I have a good excuse, but…

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I don’t have any particular excuse for disappearing for a week, though I do have a few defenses I’d like to try: coming down with a cold! Headache every day this week! Discovered that Orson Scott Card wrote an intriguing series about fake gods! Bioshock!

In truth, I haven’t been working on my own writing as diligently as I should this week. Stuck on my own thinking (again) for how to start this one blasted novel that has been haunting me for years, I let myself get sucked into a few good books. But I’d like to think the break has done me good. There’s nothing like stepping into someone else’s world for awhile, and seeing how they build it. And to discover all the ways in which I would have built it differently.

One of the reasons I know I can never give up writing is because it’s such an incessant force in my head. I’ve threatened myself with it over the years (“If I’m not a successful author by age [fill in the blank], then I’ll quit and get a real job.”) but the older I get the more it sticks in me. I rewrite almost anything with a story in it (and I do mean anything – books, sure, but also TV shows, movies, and video game storylines) parsing out what disappointed me or what piece of information I would have exploited differently. This is not to say that the stories I rewrite in my head weren’t good – only that it’s a part of myself I can’t quiet; sometimes because I don’t want to, but mostly because I can’t. I enjoy it too much. And in enjoying the way I think, the more I like to own it.

Here’s the thing: some people write by instinct. One of my favorite short story authors, Ray Bradbury, would wake up every morning with a couple of words tumbling around in his head, and then would write by filling in the space around these words. “May I die before my voices,” is how he put it once.

I do not. I write by a strict adherence to analytically methodical planning, rooted deeply in a genetic predilection for obsessive compulsive behavior. I spend years on ideas, hours on the pros and cons between two synonyms and how they subtly change the feel of a single sentence, and I use words like “analytically,” “methodical,” and “genetic predilection.” My notebooks run thousands of words longer than my actual completed works, and I write things like “frick, get on with it” in the margins of the pages. Somedays I hate the little voice in my head that tells me to go back and make it perfect this time, but most days I am inordinately pleased with myself and how I make my neuroses work for me.

The point is, you must always work with yourself. Perfectionism does get in my way – as evidenced by the novel five years in the planning, whose first chapter I can somehow not get past (I’m up to fifteen versions, at last count) – but it also makes me a better writer. I will never stop being who I am, and while it’s always possible to change habits, I don’t want to hate the attributes that make my writing my own. Just so long as they don’t stop me.

We Attack at Dawn!

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My cat is under the impression that I’m as thrilled by the prospect of getting up in the morning to feed her as she is. Most days I don’t technically have to get up at any specific time (which is pretty nice when I’ve stayed up until two or three in the morning, finishing a project), but my cat won’t let me sleep in past seven. I think she waits until I begin rolling around, apparently waking up, to really start insisting that it’s breakfast time, but it’s hard to appreciate her forbearance even when I do go to bed at a decent time the night before. I’m not a morning person.

And let’s be honest here: she doesn’t actually care about my feelings on the subject.

Her mode of attack is, overall, gentle. She sits next to a piece of bare skin – either my arm or, when I figure out what she’s doing and hide my arms under the covers, my forehead – and ever so slowly reaches out one paw. It descends slowly on the target area, rests for half a second softly, almost tenderly, on my exposed flesh, and then out come the claws.

The View at 6 AM

She has yet to draw blood with this tactic. They emerge from her paws by an almost invisible margin, just enough to prick but not pierce. I jerk out of her reach, roll over and hide whatever piece of tender flesh she just tried to maul in the most loving way possible, and she waits half a minute for her next opportunity. I should keep a snorkel in the bed with me, because I can’t breathe comfortably under the covers for long. Eventually a patch of skin reemerges, she pads over to get a better angle on the situation, and the process starts over.

I have put her off for forty-five minutes this way. I have a semi-official policy that states I have to start getting ready for the day once I’ve fed the cat, so I have every reason to put off this moment for as long as possible. Unfortunately, a couple months ago Harper discovered that the lining underneath my box spring mattress has shredded with age, and, out of either extreme starvation or straight boredom, began eating the lining of my bed. I would like to say that I get up as soon as I hear her start to go to town on that bad boy, but…well, I’d hate her to think that it actually works.

My cat actually has pretty decent manners when it comes to eating random items (she won’t even bug me for people food; I can leave cereal boxes and chip bags on the counter without worrying about her eating through the packaging) but the two exceptions are 1.) the blue fuzzies that live on the undercarriage of my bed, and 2.) curling ribbon. Every Christmas I can count on seeing present trappings in her litterbox, encased in hard excrement but otherwise untouched, because curling ribbon apparently has the half-life of either plutonium, or those Styrofoam cups that are presumably filling our landfills.

Her second strategy is more incidental. Every now and again – whenever I’ve rolled onto my back – my cat will suddenly realize that HOLY CRAP, THERE’S SOMETHING LIVING UNDER THERE and will leap onto my diaphragm as it moves up and down. I can count on getting a gut-full of cat every couple of weeks or so.

Still, this is nothing to the family cat from my junior/senior high years. In my last year at home, after both siblings had gone off to college, every morning at 5 am she’d take a seat on my chest, put one delicate little tabby paw out, extend her claws the barest millimeter, and then hook one of my nostrils.

That cat spent a lot of mornings locked in the bathroom. The door was slightly loose on its hinges, so I’d lie awake, imagining the many ways I could kill her as she beat the door against its frame, confident in the knowledge that someone would give in eventually.

A Gaggle of Nothing

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I’m writing because I feel like I ought to, not because I have anything specifically to say. As you well know, this has never stopped me before, so it’s not going to now.

Actually, now that I’m working on a post, I just realized that I really do have something to say: I can announce that my brother-in-law wrote a book! This is the project I put together that bundle of illustrations for. And because I am terrifically lazy, I’m going to copy-and-paste Rev. Pay’s announcement from Facebook:

Hey everyone, I wrote a book! It’s no secret that I enjoy two things in movies and books: action and good theology. Sadly, they rarely mix. So I sought to write an action driven story whose characters find their hope, not in rays of sunshine or feelings, but in the Risen Savior and the good reasons we all have for believing in Him. Be warned: this is not a children’s book and is, most likely, not for the faint of heart. It is bloody and dark, but not vulgar. I hope it both entertains with action and edifies as the characters struggle with fear, doubt, sin, and death.

If that intrigues you at all, check out the synopsis and maybe give it a shot. If you don’t hate it completely, I’d love some reviews on the amazon site too. Thanks for any likes, shares, reviews, considerations, or prayers. Peace!

If you are interested in purchasing the novel (and/or admiring the accompanying illustrations), you can click HERE for his Amazon page. There’s an ebook version as well as print-on-demand copies available.

In other news, I’m nearly done with my very first picture book. I’m creating a print copy through Createspace, which is a self-publishing company that operates through Amazon. It’ll take a few weeks for the proofs to come in before I officially put it up for sale, but here’s the cover as a teaser:

So I may, on occasion, appear lazy, but I really do something with my time. I went insane and decided to try and finish the illustrations in time for my niece’s birthday, which gave me a week to finish. Crunch-time riddled deep holes into my sleep schedule, but it worked fantastically – she received a copy printed off my home printer. I both love and hate deadlines.

A Public Acknowledgment of my Love Affair with Notebooks

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Here, at long last, is another poem re-post. Formerly known by “Untitled,” I couldn’t take how incomplete that felt and finally created a title anyways, despite how appropriate “Untitled” was to the subject matter. Ah well. Nothing like fussing a piece of creative work to death.

https://thestoryfolder.com/poetry/paper-pen/

Also, I created a video of me reciting it. I started a business page for The Storyfolder on Facebook, mostly because I’d like people to actually see my website, and right now all I can think of to do is throw things at the wall to see what will stick. A friend recommended that I make videos as an aspect of that, pointing out that even if people aren’t interested in a particular subject they’ll watch a short video of just about anything (ah yiss, the black-hole that is the internet strikes again). This is a marketing idea that may not last, but at least it’s worth a shot, if only because I actually like poetry recitations. I won’t say it’s a dying art, but it’s certainly not a common one anymore. It’s such an old – and consequently unoriginal – practice that it’s practically original again.

And the most important note of all: I felt enormously silly admitting that “Pen & Paper” was by me, but saying “[Poem Name] by [Author Here]” is still the best way to indicate where the title ends and the poems begins.

Adventure Time with These Guys

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Sorry about the unannounced update break. I’d like to say I’ve been so busy that I just couldn’t find the time, but as with everything, you can always find the time when it’s important enough. Mind you, I’m still blaming The Sister for it – she came to visit with her kids and totally threw off my schedule.

More honestly, taking time off of work always makes it that much harder to get back to it. On the other hand, my nephew inspired (and practically wrote) today’s post, so it wasn’t an entirely work-free week.

These Guys.

A confederation of heads. My nephew slowly added bodies as the afternoon wore on, though they never did quite catch up with the number of heads. He didn’t explain this one to me, but I’m pretty sure it was accidentally encouraged by how hard I laughed at the head in the barrel.

He explained this setup in great detail, but essentially it’s a raft powered by two jets, one which works by scooping up the sky, the other which uses regular fuel. The ghost pilots the craft using two steering wheels, and the guard in the bearskin hat is there to stop any bad guys. The third guy is not, in fact, a victim of the latter fellow’s derring-do, but is apparently the third member of the team. They keep his head in the barrel (I about busted up when my nephew decided that the most appropriate thing to put in their storage was some guy’s head), and the reason he’s fallen over is because he couldn’t see to put his seat-belt on. So there you go. Strangely, hilariously logical.

And let’s be honest, who wouldn’t want to have an adventure with a ghost, one of the Queen’s Guards, and a headless guy?

To round out this most random of ramble blogs, the following is what happens when you

  1. Have to wait 20 minutes for the toaster oven to finish cooking dinner WHILE
  2. You’re short three voices, BUT
  3. You just figured out that your computer speakers work well enough to layer recordings on top of each other, AND
  4. That my parent’s kitchen/living room in mid-remodel echoes beautifully

Also, recent (and related) discovery: apparently I lift my chin when I sing. Enjoy the nostril shots.

 

For Blood and Money

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Today I post for my brother’s sake, who tells me that he’s tired of looking over his shoulder at work when he checks my website, afraid that his coworkers are going to think that he’s into male underwear models. Of course, he had the audacity to keep referring to Tom Welling as Tom Wellington while he explained this to me, so here’s something to really get people talking behind his back:

Proof of my slow progression into insanity.

And with that taken care of, on to business. This post, despite its unpromising start, is actually an update for my art portfolio. Awhile back my other brother (the in-law, foisted upon me nearly eight years ago through my sister’s marriage) commissioned me to draw illustrations for his book. Yes, my brother-in-law beat me to it. He’s chosen to self-publish, so I’ll be grudgingly announcing his dystopian novel some time in the near future, once he’s done with the last few editing run-throughs. Worse, he’s threatening to finish another one. I have, in fact, promised to murder him if he writes a second novel while I’m still not done putting off my first. Rumor has it that he plans to finish within the month, which gives me a couple weeks to try and beat him to it. I don’t like my chances.

While I’m trying to figure out how I’m going to do the job (strangulation is on the list, though I suspect it would be easier to just smother him in his sleep), let these illustrations distract you. Fair warning: there are very strong horror and gory action elements to his novel, and the pictures indicate as such. My brother-in-law actually paid real live money for them, which is pretty exciting to someone who rarely makes, you know, real live money for any of the freelance things she does yet.

 

Where do Your Ideas Come From? Small Town Super Nobody

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Back in high school, I was a big fan of the TV show Smallville, especially in the early seasons when it worked by a standard freak-of-the-week formula. Superman has always been my favorite superhero (you could count on him to save the day, no fuss no muss, no hand-on-forehead drama), so a show about a teenaged Clark Kent saving the day from that week’s villain was right up my alley. Especially when he looked like this:

“He looked like a TV show teenager, the kind played by twenty-five year-old underwear models, with strikingly dark hair and a rare but truly arresting smile.” Three guesses as to what inspired Jeremiah’s description; the first two don’t count.

I loved the show: impossibly handsome teenager (the actor, Tom Welling, was twenty-four when season 1 aired), last-minute rescues, and enormously fun villains to fight off week after week. But for years I wondered what it would actually be like if a fourteen-year-old had super powers in a small town. The two main conclusions I came up with were as follows:

  1. It almost certainly couldn’t be kept secret, especially if he’d grown up there. How on earth would you stop a toddler from accidentally using his powers? And how would you later stop him from wanting to show off to his friends? One mistake, and that would be it.
  2. Teenagers are teenagers. Give him super strength, give her the power to fly, and at the end of the day they’re still going to spend 90% of their time worrying over pimples and homework and the fact that they’re not popular or no one is ever going to like like them. I don’t mean this to make fun of teenagers (I like the age group a lot; I used to be one, after all) and taking small social disasters extremely seriously is exactly what equips us with the tools to deal with the heavy responsibilities of adulthood. But the juxtaposition of a super-powered being who may one day stave off the literal end of the world crying at the end of an awful dance because they were sure that that was the end of the world has always struck me as comedy gold.

This has lived in the back of my mind since high school. Many of my ideas stew for years before they become of use to me, and this one finally careened off another idea – or more like careened off a minor character in one of the worlds I created back in college. Megalopolis is the center of my almost-parody super world, where powers are common and heroes and villains clock in and out to fight each other. The series I have planned for this world swings back and forth between near-parody and serious storytelling, and Mr. Roboto happens to be a bit player in the grand scheme of the city. He’s an up-and-coming hero on the verge of recognition from the League, an android with super strength, a plethora of robotic attributes, and a penchant for disaster relief.

What most people don’t realize is that Mr. Roboto is actually a two-man team. Teddy does the legwork but Jer runs the missions. They’re both young men in this story, still in their twenties, though Jer is out of college and Teddy is still taking classes, though not full-time. They run an auto repair shop in the city, which is the unofficial hangout spot for all the young heroes and sidekicks who are trying to make it into the Leagues as pro heroes.  Plans changed somewhat, between Jeremiah’s last conversation with Mrs. Grayson and now: Jer never did end up getting his medical doctorate (he worked as an EMT for awhile instead of going through the whole rigmarole of medical school, sacrificing a deeper understanding of medical treatment for the less time-consuming option of hands-on emergency care experience), and he didn’t worry so much about his eventual degree as what he was learning from the classes. He’s got enough schooling for a doctorate, but I’m not sure his studies were ever focused enough to get there – he went at his University with intense focus and practicality, taking whatever he thought might teach him something useful. On Ted’s part, he gets his ASE certification, but I’m not sure that he ever manages an official degree.

At the time of my series, Ted has actually received an invite to one of the Leagues – his first. Unfortunately, the invite only included Teddy. Jeremiah wants him to take it, but Ted’s being stubborn and absolutely refuses anyone who doesn’t recognize that they’re a package-deal. This ticks off Jeremiah, who thinks his little brother ought to be practical and knows they’ll never recognize someone who doesn’t have powers, but Teddy’s right this time: he does much better when his older brother runs the team. Though Teddy has certainly come into his own in the ten years since “Small Town Super Nobody,” he’s a follower and knows it; he’d just as soon sit around and play video games all day. He does much better when he has a boss.

Honestly, I’m not sure any of this is going to make the cut into the series (I’d like it to, just because it’s sort of a fun insight into how the “business” of saving the world works) but I’ve got a lot of other things to accomplish. At the very least I’m glad I took a time-out here on The Story Folder to tell their story. Major or minor, all of my characters have backstories – first because giving weight to even minor characters makes them talk and act more believable, and second because its fun and easy to do. The hard part is writing it down.

And last of all: the name “Mr. Roboto” is, of course, an inside-joke between the two brothers. It is also absolutely hilarious to the Banner High football team, who – once the Dunn brothers break into the big-time – like to tell their wives and children that they named the city’s most popular* hero.

*Debatable. Banner, NJ thinks so, and will argue into the ground anyone who suggests otherwise.