The Uncalled-For Opinions Of Some Stupid Bassosaurs and The Start Of The CAPTCHA Novel

Shut up, Bassosaurs! Nobody's listening to you! Just shut up!

Okay, among other things, yesterday I finished off the first stage in a stupid project that is going to do nothing but waste time and bring me heartbreak and drive away any potential audience I might have.

That's right, folks! It's time to start the CAPTCHA fantasy novel, the chee-Z novel-with-a-map-and-glossary (in my imagination it has one of those yellow DAW books spines) based on the words from those identification thingies that you have to fill out when you post comments. You know what's depressing? I may well wind up using them as a resource for made-up words in the future -- some of these are pretty convincing, as though they'd been lifted from Lord Dunsany or Clarke Ashton Smith. Check it out!

1) Adeshe
2) Adompab
3) Alingons
4) Almist
5) Allist
6) Amatblet
7) Bachnes
8) Bactrin
9) Bessu
10) Bicinap
11) Cargot
12) Cemitica
13) Cheeneup
14) Cituriat
15) Coccho
16) Crupin
17) Cuperae
18) Delde
19) Difyints
20) Disompe
21) Enteaked
22) Epeedayo
23) Estrefi
24) Exteri
25) Fashu
26) Fatel
27) Fiesones
28) Finqg
29) Firommu
30) Flardsh
31) Foloim
32) Flediton
33) Flograt
34) Galhoua
35) Gatonve
36) Gencelp
37) Guinos
38) Heedne
39) Helmiss
40) Hymonufn
41) Icapolog
42) Imbed
43) Imetedle
44) Inding
45) Ingla
46) Ingnannj
47) Ingthest
48) Itionon
49) Joloper
50) Klumm
51) Lazut
52) Lesesth
53) Letelie
54) Luterise
55) Maling
56) Mandsol
57) Mintsten
58) Mislin
59) Mismot
60) Misrete
61) Mumscaks
62) Nhaffh
63) Noman
64) Noolem
65) Ovelogia
66) Ovento
67) Pacarwa
68) Patorti
69) Pedurth
70) Plepiloa
71) Plogu
72) Poter
73) Prout
74) Provapl
75) Pulas
76) Repilsio
77) Ressic
78) Rubhewou
79) Rupence
80) Schipt
81) Sheougne
82) Slitigia
83) Sopshno
84) Slyer
85) Stousime
86) Syncon
87) Tottion
88) Tudings
89) Ukoflen
90) Unchia
91) Unciru
92) Undonart
93) Unsynea
94) Vastrega
95) Vatsal
96) Vithroot
97) Voody
98) Wationso
99) Winglys
100) Woregis

So here's how it's going to work. I'm gonna crank out chapters off the top of my head -- no real worldbuilding, no plotting or character development -- and post them as I finish them. I'll be using a pseudonym as a means of saying, "Hey, this is just a hoot."

I'll post chapter headings here with a link to the full chapters on another website -- and any comments you care to make will be taken into account and used for inspiration for the next chapter. If you're looking at these words and you come up with a good definition for one, post it and maybe I'll use it. If you think I need some giant robots tell me and maybe I'll toss in a fistful of mecha. Any ideas for characters, plot twists, world development, etch. are more than welcome.

When I hit fifty thousand words I'll start tying the whole thing up -- and when it's done, I'll put together a print-on-demand edition just for shits and giggles. If it worked for Raymond Chandler and Chester Himes it'll work for me, or at least it'll work for someone as good as Raymond Chandler or Chester Himes.

Why am I doing this? Because I'm waiting to hear back from readers on my novel and I don't have a fiction project and it's driving me nuts? Yeah, I guess. Because I want to demystify the process of creating a novel and blow out some of the artistic preciousness that I've built up while learning how to write? Hey, that sounds like a great idea. Because Glendon told me this was a ticket to internet notoriety? That would be it.

Over and out.

Hmm. I seem to be functioning again.

I'm taking a break from my usual art policy to give you an image that may be of some interest. I took this object from my wallet, where I've been keeping it as a souvenir of my idiocy.

A year or so I was taking an art class that had a few mentally ill people in it, one of whom was full-blown delusional. Poor bastard had some nasty father issues and a belief that microchips were going to solve every problem the world had to offer. He did lots of Utopian planning and diagrams and was sadly sweet.

Anyway, as is frequently the case he wound up taking a shine to me. (I don't know how often I've wondered what it is about me that attracts criminals, lunatics, children, junkies, animals, and eccentrics -- and why it doesn't attract women.) So one day he pulls something out of his pocket.

"Take this, brother. May it serve you well," he said and put it in my hand.

"What is it?" I asked.

"Acid," he said.

Question: You are in a public place and a stone fucking crazy man -- someone you know and you know is really, really nuts -- hands you something and tells you it's acid. What do you do?

Answer: Pop it right into your mouth without even looking at it. Thankfully, it wasn't a hit of acid. It was half of a plastic frog. What was going through my mind at that moment? I didn't want to disappoint my friend by rejecting his gift.

As soon as I get enough money, I'm hiring an oaf wrangler to keep me from doing that kind of shit.

So I did line edits on three stories for Swill today, including one crime story in the classic noir tradition, one knotty, gnarly character portrait, and one by our first... Look, I'm not going to say real writer. That ain't fair to anyone.

But the first writer whose books I've purchased and have on my shelves has contributed a story to Swill and it is hi-larious, just fat packed with L*A*F*F*S. At least if you're as misanthropic as I am.

There is a real pleasure for me in doing line edits; this gave me the extra thrill of fucking with the prose of someone I read for pleasure. (Note to all: I edit with a heavy hand and the understanding that I'm just giving the author something to consider when doing that last rewrite.) Thank you, Mr. John Shirley.

(And while I'm plugging, Mr. David Byron, who as you may recall has taken a couple of my stories, has asked me to alert you to his new publication, New Voices In Horror Volume One. I don't know much about it but the essay on writing for the web that he's posted at the link is well worth your attention.)

Anyway, I've got a batch of beans and a pot roast cooked, I finished what's hopefully the final version of my business card exterior, I got caught up on some of my shamefully-late emails...

So, why weeks of nothing and then function again? This is a serious issue for me. How do I get myself to work? Was it killing those rats the other night? Do I need animal sacrifice to bring myself fully to life?

Sad fact of the matter is that I'm not a self-starter. I need deadlines, encouragement, both serious challenges and the option of blowing everything off if I find myself swept away by some grand creative impulse. I need juuuuuust the right amount of pressure. School, Swill, the writer's group -- hey, these days requests from stray editors -- all help me stay in that zone of functionality.

I wasn't overtly miserable during my break but it really bugs me to have free time and no volition to fill it with. Of course the fact that the end of the semester coincided with the concurrent ending of two major projects wasn't exactly optimum. The fact that it happened in midwinter did me no favors. I should crank up the SAD lamp the missus got me, he said. I should eat breakfast and take vitamins.

But most of all, I should get to work.

A Return To The Fray and The Shame Of The Closeted Geek

The draftsmanship is weak but I like the mood in this one... Man, I'd love to do more life drawing.

School starts again today. Thank god. (I guess that's the difference between an atheist and an agnostic -- the agnostic might be taking someone's name in vain.) I've got Modern Color today -- this class might be dumped if it cramps my style when I get back into the novel. I signed on because the teacher asked me to -- one of those things where the class is just starting out and he needed some butts in chairs so it wouldn't get canceled.

I might stick it out, though. It's going to be a mix of theory and practice using both digital and traditional media and it sounds interesting, if vague. I can hardly wait to see the syllabus.

My other two classes are going to be Art Marketing and Portfolio Management and Photography. I've barely used a camera -- I don't event take snapshots -- but when I started incorporating photography into my last set of... Jesus, what do I call them, anyway? Prints? Illustrations? Images? Anyway, they changed the way I work and now I need to get some real skills -- half the time I can't even get the damned camera to work.

And as for art marketing, hey. I want some money.

I'm also going to start a club, much against my best judgment. Why start a club? Well, I want to start cartooning. And I can't find any cartooning classes at school. And if I'm left to my own devices I'll never quite get around to doing anything. When I started writing seriously I joined a writer's group; it helped a whole lot. In fact, there's no other single factor that has been more significant in my growth as a writer.

So I want to get something similar going for cartooning.

But you know what that's gonna mean? Hanging out with people who are into comic books and anime.

Shameful confession time here, folks. I don't hang out with people who are, uh. Geeks. I can pass as a non-geek right now -- well, yeah, I'm into comics but they're just part of my whole art thing, and I'm all about mining the seam between pop culture and fine culture and I can talk about politics and history and blah blah blah and in general seem like a fairly convincing adult.

But I feel as if I'm straddling a very fine line and one little shove would push me over and then I'd be spending all my time talking about Bill Mantlo and Rumiko Takahashi and the fucking Skrulls.

And so on to the infinite power. I'm gonna try and class it up a little by calling it a Narrative Art Club but hey. I can call Roxie-the-dog a Miniature Clydesdale but she ain't gonna pull no beer wagon. It is going to be a geekfest. I will be deliberately socializing with people who know who Jack Kirby was -- and who care about who inked him.

Yeah, I'm a pretentious elitist bastard but the whole thing is making me very, very nervous. You ever see that movie Freaks? If you have, you know what I'm talking about.

It's like they're out there, waiting for me in the shadows. I can smell the pulp of their comics; I can hear the rattle of their polyhedral dice. There are science fiction paperbacks. There is Monty Python.

"Gabba-gabba we accept you we accept you one of us!"

Crawling From The Wreckage Just To Think About My Critical Stance.

Got a story edited this morning. Got some writer's group business taken care of -- we've got a new candidate coming up. Now I'm writing a blog post for the first time in what seems like...

Holy shit, it has been a while, hasn't it? Gah. Blargh. Stupid winter break. Once the pressure to produce came off me I collapsed like a deflating balloon -- phthphthphthphth. Like it or not I need a structured environment to function properly. I'd probably thrive in the military or prison.

Damnit.

Anyway, one of the things that threw me off was my last piece of criticism. I re-read it a couple of days after it had been posted and I couldn't help but think that it was the work of a dick. Alternating between snideness and ass-kissing and pompous judgment... Oh, man, it left a bad taste in my mouth -- but at the end I felt like I'd delivered a defensible response to the work. I couldn't challenge what I'd said, just the way I'd said it.

Which is much the way it went back when I did a crit piece on Jurassic Fight Club. I lay out my opinion, then after I've posted it I want to moderate my tone.

I dunno. It makes me wonder what and why I'm doing these critical pieces.

Well, this is the best answer I've been able to come up with.

The real reason I'm doing this is in order to sharpen my critical faculties so I can bring them to bear on my own work. By systematically examining the strengths and weaknesses of works of art -- low or high, pop or fine -- that have had an effect on me I can trace their influences, see how they work, and in general learn from them.

Because of this my approach has its roots in the critical groups I've participated in. I like to start by examining strengths, then look for weak areas. It seems to me that very few works of art that have any scope of ambition are truly perfect and as a creator it's important for me to see how things could be improved.

And that's where my frustration with my critical essays comes in. Look, I think my take on Journal of a Sad Hermaphrodite was a reasonable one -- but I've just finished my first readable draft of a novel. DeLarrabeiti published fifteen novels. I've read widely but DeLarrabeiti demonstrates clearly in JSH that he's a genuine scholar of literature. Who the hell am I to criticize what he's done? I felt the same way when I got some feedback from an animator who worked on Jurassic Fight Club -- who the hell am I to denigrate other people's work?

And I think that's the key -- to avoid denigration. To avoid pomposity. I think that I have worthwhile things to say -- but I ain't an authority, even though I have a knack for sounding like one.

So I'm thinking that even though I prefer to keep my writing on the site as light and trouble-free as I can make it I may have to do rewrites on my critical pieces. They involve the work of other people; it doesn't seem unreasonable for me to show creators whose work I admire and seek to learn from that much respect.

Damnit.

Scribble Scribble 1

Here's how it's going to work: One sketch based on an acknowledged master drawing from Nathan Goldstein's 100 American And European Drawings...

(I'm just starting here -- if I keep this up I'll go non-Eurocentric for the next batch.)

... one observational drawing, usually done as a visual exercise (in this case it's a blind contour drawing -- I never lifted the pen from the page and I only looked at the subject while working)...

... and one cartoon-oriented drawing done from my imagination.

So if you've ever been an art student you've probably had this experience -- a casual acquaintance catches you lugging around a big pad of newsprint and wants to take a peek. And when they see the drawing exercises you've been doing in class they immediately dismiss you -- "Oh, it's all scribble scribble."

I've heard that exact phrase a few times over the years. They never seem to catch me when I've got my portfolio -- it's always a fucking sketchbook, alas for my vast-yet-tender ego.

Anyway, I'm going to take a shot at doing something I should have been doing all along. I'm going to try and make a habit of doing some kind of sketching every day.

Maurice Lapp, the artist and teacher who taught me most of what I know about art, always said that it was important to draw from three sources: The master artists, observations of real life, and your own imagination.

So I've decided to do three fast sketches every day for at least the next one hundred days -- long enough to get through the above-mentioned portfolio. We'll see what happens after that.

When I've got my draftsmanship in shape it has a positive effect on every aspect of my creative life -- and while I'm going through a strong period so far as the creation of images goes, my drawing skills are weak at the moment.

I'm working fast for two reasons. One is that I don't want to take too much time and creative energy away from more serious projects; the other is that I draw too damned slowly and I hope to address this issue.

See, I want to do some cartooning this summer -- hopefully this will get both my draftsmanship and my speed up to the challenge. We shall see...

Crit List 3: Journal Of A Sad Hermaphrodite

Well, I hadn't intended to post another critical piece so soon -- but when Journal Of A Sad Hermaphrodite showed up in the mail, courtesy of James Benstead of Tallis House, it demanded my attention.

I knew going in that I wasn't going to be reading another Borribles book. And honestly, there's no point in referring to the Borribles when discussing Journal. They're opposite works in just about every conceivable way, quality aside.

Journal Of A Sad Hermaphrodite is a mature work. Its prose is polished and lucid to the point of being virtually invisible. (High praise in my book.) It's about writing, about the importance of art in life, about ambition -- in other words, it's about many of the questions that are currently occupying a good deal of my attention. I found it thought-provoking, frequently beautiful, genuinely useful, technically fascinating in its approach, and at times frustrating and disappointing.

But despite that last caveat I know this is a book that I'll return to. It's a wonderful thing for a writer to read. The author clearly sees the act of writing as an essentially heroic one, and the way the book has been constructed makes a convincing emotional argument for this position. It makes me want to write more and to be more ambitious -- and to take pride in ambition.

It would be an act of hubris for an author to make that thematic statement if they seemed to be holding up their own work as an example of greatness. But this isn't the way de Larrabeiti handles things. This isn't simply a novel; it's also an anthology of great writing in both poetry and prose, all carefully selected to support the story and its deeper meanings.

If I'd heard about this in advance I'd have been very dubious. But it works -- and as a result this book is rewarding on a number of different levels. Just as a collection of writing it's wonderful. But that writing has been put to use that isn't clever -- rather, it's deep and heartfelt.

Normally I'd read a book of this length in two or three hours. This one took me all day because I read many passages slowly and repeatedly, savoring them. There's writing contained in this book that is as good as writing gets -- and it's all in service to de Larrabeiti's statement. I'm very ambivalent about appropriation and name dropping in fiction but I loved this.

I mentioned that this book is good for writers; there are passages on how to write and on the enemies of literature that I'm considering tattooing on my forearm for convenient reference.

The plot is slight; it's in service to the theme of the book and as such is serviceable -- but it is badly hampered by what I see as the book's central flaw.

The plot deals with the relationship between a teacher and a gifted student; the book is broken into three interwoven sections -- notes from the teacher, quotes from the student's diary, and selected literary passages.

I found the sections written from the student's point of view to be thin and unconvincing. She remains nameless throughout the book -- and while I suspect that de Larrabeiti did this in order to emphasize her importance as a muse or an anima figure (one of the book's strengths is its use of classic mythology, which is fully and naturally integrated into the story), it seems to be part and parcel of her existence as a plot contrivance rather than a living, breathing person.

This wouldn't matter if everyone in the novel were cut-out figures but this isn't the case at all. She's a perfect foil for the protagonist -- and nothing else, and as a result her portrayal weakens the book substantially for me.

And unfortunately this is exacerbated by trick typography. Each of the three threads in the novel has been given its own typeface. Since the quotes are in the italic version of the protagonist's font they work together perfectly; the student's passages are in a sans serif font that would work well as a display font. It makes brutal reading when used for body type. It just looks ugly on the page -- and as a result it offended the visual artist in me.

I found the typographical experiment to be a failure; it made me all too conscious of the reading experience and not in an enlightening way. On the other hand, who's to fault the decision to make an experiment? I'd rather see a failed experiment than a conventional success, and most of the experiments made in this book succeed.

Despite these petty complaints I really, really liked this book. As I said, I know it's one that I'll reread in the future. If you are interested in the relationship between art and life it's well worth a look. Few perfect books are this good -- de Larrabeiti aimed high and achieved well.

(As an aside, a description of the myth of Narcissus made me conscious of how often our culture has misread mythology. In the myth, when Narcissus fell in love with his reflection he believed it to be the face of a nymph -- he wasn't self-obsessed, he was cursed with features that inspired love. And that made me think of Oedipus, who didn't have a mother fixation -- he just happened to wander into a bad situation. Now I'm gonna have to re-examine all the familiar myths I run across...)

Guess Who's Been Published Again?

Well, it looks as if you'll be able to see my fiction making its first appearance in a genre-oriented publication. The second issue of New Voices In Fiction is out and it also features an interview with Kim Newman, of whose work I am rather fond -- I actually prefer Jack Yeovil but I'll settle for Newman.

Anyway, if you go here you can see a brief slice of the story -- it's another SF bar story, this one with a slightly uglier edge than It's The Little Things. This one concerns an attempt to devise a way for people to think rationally. It ends badly, of course. And there's also one of my author's notes, this one guaranteed to make the missus cringe, despite the qualifier the editor added to the end.

I can hardly wait to hold this in my hands. Neat!