Current Plans

I'm going to try and do quick, cartoony illustrations for blog posts for a while, just to try and get the hang of this kind of work. Once I feel comfortable with drawing cartoons, well. I'm not gonna worry about that now. Don't want to get ahead of myself...

So I seem to have the worst of my depression whipped for the moment. I've been eating and sleeping more, drinking less, and I've been getting some work done.

The new story is something different for me, which will surprise no-one who's familiar with my work. It's relatively short at the moment, sticks to a single close third-person POV throughout, and is quiet horror, of the sort where nine-tenths of the nastiness lies below the surface.

I want to write more short fiction. Hey, selling a story can do that to a person. So my current plan is to run this story through all of my writer's groups, then send it out and write a new one. Lather, rinse, repeat, so I get a new story out on the market every month or so.

And I'm ready to launch back into the novel. I need to start doing the Holly Lisle revision workshop -- the lessons piled up while I was taking my midwinter dip in the Slough of Despond.

I've signed up for Painter -- the graphics application -- and Narrative Screenwriting II this semester. I've got the same major problem with my script that I do with my novel -- good parts that don't add up to a compelling story -- and I'm hoping that by working on them concurrently I'll be able to develop my storytelling skills more effectively. And if they wind up in conflict? I'll drop the scriptwriting course. But I doubt it will come to that.

Right now I'm being hideously tempted by another writer's workshop, the Taos Toolbox. I cannot afford it. I mean, I can't. But it's run by Walter John Williams. Dude is a plot god. I was admiring his plots a looooooong time before I started writing seriously. If you don't believe me, go read Voice of the Whirlwind. So the idea of having him help me learn the mechanics of storytelling is...

Dang. I dunno. Maybe I should apply and see if something weird happens that might let me attend. These kinds of things have happened before.

I dunno.

Brass Knuckles

Here's a horrible secret key to understanding the oaf. If you see something in my room that doesn't seem to make any sense, just think of it as a weapon.

Enough with the mopey-ass posts. It's time for something fun, something amusing. How'd you like to hear about the time I almost got my best friend thrown in prison?

It started in Arizona. This was back around the turn of the century. The missus and myself were visiting her father and his wife, and they'd asked us to go to the flea market with them. I dig a flea market. One of my favorite things, actually. Totally grabs me by the hunter/gatherer handle. This was a different kind of flea market for me -- less books, more weapons.

I dig a weapon. So even if I wasn't going to be buying any pistols or shurikens, I was going to look at them. The guy who ran that stand both impressed me and creeped me out. He was a couple of inches shorter than I was, a hundred pounds heavier, and he smiled all the time and spoke in a high gentle voice weighted with absolute authority. I had absolutely no difficulty imagining him killing me if it came down to it, which made me both like him and want to attack him every time he dropped his guard. We primates can be weird like that.

So I was working my way through his stand, sneering at the ridiculous knives with dragons etched on the blades, longing for the punch daggers that looked like oversized broadhead arrows. And then I ran across the one item I couldn't resist.

Brass knuckles.

I'd heard about them. Read about them. Dreamed about them. But this was the first time I'd ever seen them in real life. The thought of one of my punches directed through metal enchanted me -- no, I'm not gonna get into a fight, I'm a fucking grown-up, but still. CHUNK, right into the facemeat.

So I bought 'em. Fifteen bucks. They were labeled as a belt-buckle, and I could almost figure out how the little pin set on the face might work for that purpose. The guy who ran the stand kept smiling at me as I bought them.

"You can't put this in your pocket," he said. "That's a felony. Don't take it out of the package, it's a novelty item. If you get caught with them loose, that's --"

"A felony," I said. "Don't worry, I'll watch it."

He smiled and nodded, and I was convinced that if he wasn't encumbered by the rules of society he would have killed me right there. I kinda liked it. Made me feel as if I was being taken seriously. As I said, primates are weird.

Of course as soon as I got into the car I had them out of the package and was trying them on. And of course they were too fucking small. For Christ's sake, people of my physical type are the fucking market for brass knuckles. If I were a fictional character, I'd be the menacing butler in a Daniel Pinkwater book, or the guy who knocks Phillip Marlow out in chapter six, or the lead in a crappy '70s sword and sorcery series. Why make small brass knuckles? It was heartbreaking.

All my dreams were cast into the dust, and I was happy to see them there, actually. The missus's family are Jewish, from the East Coast. (As an aside, the plastic plant that writhed and sang Jingle Bell Rock and was referred to as a Hanukkah Bush made it plain that the Abrahamic religions are easily as weird as primates.) Cultured, intellectual, spiritual, artistic, enlightened types...

So I got an extra kick from watching their reactions as they passed the knuckles around. Everybody tried them on, and everybody got this look on their face. And I knew they were thinking about the specific person they wanted to belt, and feeling happy with the mental image the knuckles allowed them to summon. Male, female, young, old -- we were all united in our dreams of carnage and retribution.

When I got back home to California I found out that my music buddy, the Hon. Richard Talleywhacker, fit the knuckles perfectly. So rather than keep them on my wall next to the sickle, the turkey lifter, and the straight razor, I passed them on. Noblesse oblige, don'tcha know.

He was thrilled. Briefly. Put them in his briefcase and forgot about them.

Until he was called in for jury duty, and his briefcase was X-rayed. And they found the knuckles.

"It's a felony to own these. And why were you bringing them to court?"

"They were a joke gift! I didn't even remember they were there!"

"Felony. Felony."

Ah. Brass knuckles. Like pornography, a gift that keeps on giving.

The Watercolor Pad

Here's a grisly little anecdote from the year I spent living with my brother and sister. We rented a mother-in-law cottage in the backyard of a blue Victorian that had been divided into apartments. One sunny spring afternoon I was sulking in my room when either Duncan or Charity (memory fails me on this point) came in.

"Hey," they said. "You got to check it out. Someone threw out a brand-new pad of paper. Good stuff."

So I reluctantly hauled my carcass out of bed and walked out to the trash cans. And sure enough, there was a brand-new eighteen-by-twenty-four pad of Strathmore Series 400 watercolor paper folded in the trash. The front of it was covered with a thick splash of something brown and glossy and lumpy. I figured it for varnish, even though the smell wasn't right. I had to wonder about the mentality of someone who'd dump a pad because the cover was stained.

It wasn't varnish.

My sister got the details from my mom, who got them from our landlord, who was her friend. Seems earlier that week, one of the tenants in the Victorian -- someone I'd never met -- had her boyfriend over for a little party. They'd fucked, and then she went into the bathroom and blew her brains out.

This struck me as a fairly extreme critical statement. And then something else struck me. I went to look at the watercolor pad. I looked at the 'varnish,' noted the shade of brown, the little chips and flecks, the hairs.

Then I took a good sniff. Sure enough...

And this was the beginning of the dance. I had no idea what to do with the fucking thing at that point. I mean, the paper was good. But still. My first impulse was to tear off the cover and keep the paper, but somehow throwing it in the trash seemed disrespectful. I mean, how much of a body do you have to have before you're obligated to think of it as a former person rather than just detritus? I thought about way observant Jews would gather spilled blood to be buried with the rest of the body.

Should I burn it? Throw it out? Bury it? Call the cops or a hospital for advice?

For the next few months, that pad was in full view on my worktable, fixing my mind on the subject of the woman in question, her last night, what had led her to that point. Having been suicidal myself, I found it impossible to set the question aside. Had her boyfriend been abusive? Had he somehow earned that kind of rebuke? Or was she simply a wretched person? One day I'd sympathize, the next I'd regard her with scorn, the next I'd identify with her.

At the time I was single and I was very lonely. I wondered if she'd been pretty. If we would have liked each other if we'd met. If I could have saved her. If we could have saved each other.

I kept looking at that splash of blood. And the lumps. And flecks. And hair.

When I moved in with Karen, she made me throw it out.

A Resolution, Of Sorts

Coming from an art/illustration background, messing around with things like color and focus are more fun for me than actually taking the pictures in the first place.

So this is going to be one of those miserable self-pity posts. Not as bad as some, but still. Oh, well. Sometimes I need to use the blog as a journal, so here comes a bit of self-examination. And hey -- if I wasn't feeling better, I wouldn't be able to write this.

I've been going through an extended period of fairly serious depression, which had disguised itself by synergyzing with the interminable flu. It was a classic Trojan Horse move. And since I experience some of the more exotic varieties of depression it's tricky for me to recognize your garden-variety state of emotional paralysis. If I'm not injuring myself or terrifying passersby, it's hard for me to recognize when I'm in an unhealthy state.

Now, while the missus has been gone, we've been talking on the phone every day. And every time, she's made a point of asking me to do something nice for myself that day. I have to admit, that question -- that whole concept -- leaves me feeling anxious. 'Do something nice for myself.' What the fuck does that even mean?

And then this morning I got a genuinely sweet email from a good friend. The time and date, the reserved nature of the individual in question, and the lack of capitals make me suspect it was a beverage-related missive, though no less welcome for that. One of the things he said was this:

i think you're a really good person who cares a lot about others, and i wish to hell you could extend to yourself the feelings you extend to your friends.

In a previous post, I wrote about my experiences at the Viable Paradise writer's workshop, and how I had a breakthrough moment where I realized that I was no longer capable of hating myself. This has held true -- I don't hate myself.

But that's not exactly the attitude you want from the person who exerts the largest influence on your life, now is it? "Well, at least they don't hate me." And it's not as if the hatred stopped because I liked myself -- rather, I became incapable of maintaining the cognitive dissonance (oh, how I love that phrase) of hating myself while respecting the opinions of me that others have expressed.

In other words, great improvement but it's still far from an optimum situation. If I regard myself as my owner, or wrangler, or keeper, well. I'm awful. If I treated any other organism the way I treat myself, I would be fucking locked up. There was a point recently where I didn't eat for a few days and didn't drink for one. That was a bit of a wake-up call. H'mmm, my palate and tongue have the texture of patent leather. Whassup with that? I had a rather unpleasant image of myself as a solitary old man dying from simple lack of interest in taking care of my own needs.

Yesterday I took care of my nieces. (At their request, I made noodle cake with stir-fried pork, mushrooms, red bell pepper, water chestnuts, and broccolinni. For desert, I gave them each an advent calender with chocolates in the little windows. "By having you open one a day, your parents teach you a valuable lesson about deferred gratification," I said to Ava. "By letting you rip through the whole thing in one shot, I'm thinking that I might be able to destroy your self-control." Ava was horrified -- "I don't want you to do that!" But she ate the chocolate. What can I say? Sometimes I'm evil.)

Being around other people really made me understand just how bad I've let myself get. Between not eating and not sleeping I've managed to put myself into a grotesque state that is neither dreaming nor wakefulness, where every sensory input has a touch of the uncanny. Where the essentially hallucinatory nature of consciousness cannot be ignored. And again, this was a wake-up call.

There's part of me that thinks it's time to sit down and make a list of resolutions. Drink less, exercise more, do some volunteer work -- but that shit never works for me. I do what I do because that's what I do and a list isn't going to change that. What I need is something pervasive. Something that affects my nature, which will then affect my behavior.

I am going to try and figure out a way to change the way I regard myself. I know, lifelong ongoing project -- but I feel as though I'm now in a position to make a different type of effort along these lines. The idea of regarding oneself with affection is profoundly alien to me. When I turn it over in my head it's like a freak exercise in topology or an Escher print or something. It's like trying to imagine fucking myself. That's not how it works -- my dick points out!

But since I've received serious confirmation of my abilities as a writer and artist, I've had a new perspective. As someone who values the arts highly, I can't help but feel as though I'm now responsible for myself as an artist as much as a human being. That the oaf might actually make a legitimate contribution to the culture if I can keep him alive and working. I know this is simultaneously neurotic and hubristic, but like I said, this is an exercise in topology. I need some kind of warp in order to direct regard at myself.

We shall see. We shall see.

Squitches!

Lightroom is a lot of fun -- and I think I'm going to try using it on illustrations as well as photos.

I could easily say something here about the vanity of life, and how the only solace it offers is the sensation of one second running into the next like droplets of oil, greasing one's passage to the grave. But that's just moon talk. Let's get into something real, something earnest.

I'm talking squitches.

When I read this cartoon by Julia Wertz, it sneaked into my brain, where it still hides. From time to time something will remind me of this and it will make me giggle. Click here to read the cartoon. You'll want to read it in order to understand the rest of the story.

(You'll also want to check out her site a little more. Wertz has an impeccable sense of the grammar and timing of the four-panel strip. Can't help thinking that she'd have been big back in the heyday of autobiographical comics...)

So my dad Verle, his wife Lisa, my sister Charity, her two daughters Ava and Una, and I climbed in a big old rental van and drove to Oregon for my Grandma Knight's ninety-fifth birthday. I don't know what your family is like, but we're all compulsive wiseasses. Our time together mostly consists of our trying to crack each other up. Well, Charity said something that reminded me of the squitches and I laughed and she asked for an explanation.

In the enclosed environment, the meme spread rapidly. "Where my squitches at?" was the inquiry on everyone's lips. And as the visit went on and the rising tide of sleeplessness and Christianity and not being able to say the word fuck drove us crazier and crazier (our Oregon relatives are lovely people, but are considerably more conservative than our branch of the family), we started getting a little leaky, started mentioning squitches around people who would have serious difficulty parsing the concept.

Then one night Charity took Ava, Una, and myself to see a movie. (The Fantastic Mr. Fox; I have officially given myself permission to dislike the works of Wes Anderson.)

You know those moments when you're exposed to some aspect of our society, and the floor opens up underneath you and you fall spinning through the void screaming, "Our culture is over"? I get those five, six times a day. But when I go to the movies, sometimes I can get them one after another in a matter of minutes, boom boom boom, when I'm watching the ads and previews. It's a multiple orgasm of hate, and few things fill me with more hate than most media directed toward children.

After the movie, when the whole family was in the van, Charity and I tried to explain to Dad and Lisa what made these particular promos so degraded. We were in agreement that the the new Chipmunks movie was about as bad as it gets.

"The worst part was the female equivalents of the Chipmunks. They were these hairy little hoochie-mamas singing If You Like It, Put A Ring On It," Charity said. "I fucking hate that song. I want to kill it and violate its corpse."

"Yeah, they were real gross," I said. "Imagine the area of the Venn diagram where the 'furry' circle overlaps the 'prostitot' circle."

Then a drowsy voice piped up from the back seat; it was my niece Una. She said, "That's where the squitches was at."

Cornered

I haven't been posting much lately. I've been feeling pretty terrible, and I decided to eschew public self-abuse for a change.

Well, the missus is going away for a couple of weeks. She's leaving Thursday. This means I'll have the option of celebrating Christmas by getting drunk by myself in the dark, thus fulfilling a long-standing ambition.

In order to try and keep from letting my recent paralytic depression waste the next stretch of free time, I'm going to be blogging on a daily basis. I'll lay out my ambitions for the day, and report on how well I did the day before.

So. I'm still recovering from the road trip, so I'll take it light. Today I'll sign up for next semester's classes, go to the bank and find out about another loan possibility, and catch up on the emails I missed while I was gone to Oregon. (I'll fill you in on this later.)

We'll see how I do. I'm reasonably optimistic, considering.

The Oaf, He Ponder

Lisa took this one on Thanksgiving. Interestingly enough, ever since Viable Paradise I've been able to look at photos of myself without cringing. "Huh," I think. "Not bad for a Cro-Mag."

I've been going through it lately. The flu, the onset of my winter depression, a serious shake-up in my artistic self-appraisal, and any number of life-dramas have all hit at around the same time. As a result, I've been unable to function properly for a while now. I'm going to have to drop my classes, which is a massive bummer. I've just lost too much time to make it up.

But I have had time to think productively.

The big decision has been that given my financial circumstances and the state of the novel, I'm changing my priorities. I need work that I can do from my workstation; I think editing and copy writing are my best options. I've been planning on doing the editing program at the UC Berkeley Extension as soon as my novel starts making the rounds of editors and agents.

Nope. I need to make some kind of straight-job my first priority. So next Fall, I start the editing program.

I might feel differently about this if I felt more confidence in the novel, but I've gotten a bunch of critiques from fresh readers recently, and while they vary wildly on the particulars (everything that bugged someone, someone else loved -- this has been an amazing lesson on how little authorial intent counts for), the consistent complaint has been too much deadwood, not enough story.

So I've joined two classes taught by the popular novelist Holly Lisle. One is a free class on plot, the other is an intensive on revising novels. Hopefully, by the time I've finished these, I'll have a better grip on things. Tell the truth, right now I'm not sure whether or not the novel is going to be publishable at the end of the day -- but most first novels aren't, right?

So since my progress on the novel is going to be paced by the course, I'm going to be working on some short fiction. Of course, my recent sale is a source of inspiration there, but I'm also interested in using the shorts as a laboratory to test plotting and outlining techniques. It's all about the skills.

And I've been thinking about my art as well. I failed to complete my report on my trip to the MOMA -- long story short, I found myself respecting most of the work there, enjoying the hell out of much of it, and felt a jealous desire to participate in that world. But that desire was tempered by the knowledge that the work I've done that wouldn't seem out of place in that environment was not the work that pleased me the most, or the work that I most enjoyed doing. While I can pull off fine-arts stuff, I am, at heart, an illustrator rather than a fine artist.

So I came away wondering about what I really wanted from my art.

This feeling was intensified when I was sick and found myself unable to read prose, watch television, or cruise the internet for entertainment. I went through a few fever-addled days of not knowing what I wanted to do, and then I turned to comics and cartoons.

And I was strongly reminded of what had drawn me to learn art in the first place -- and why I've never actually done much cartooning and comics work. (Again, long story short -- I'm not much interested in drawing the same characters over and over and over again.)

So I've been thinking long and hard about what kind of art I like to do, and how to integrate it with my writing. I ain't gonna go into it now -- while I do a lot, I also talk a lot about things I don't do -- but I'm thinking. Thinking hard.

We shall see.