I've Been Published

Here's the current work in progress -- I'm using Painter to render one of my swillistrations. It's really making me conscious of the difference between painting (at which I am lousy) and coloring drawings (at which I'm decent). Totally different skill set, and I want to learn more painting.

Yesterday certainly brought me some good news. My first professional fiction sale went up at tor.com. Click here to read or listen to it. They also used the audio version in a podcast here. So far the reaction has been very gratifying, including plugs from Steve Gould and Nick Mamatas. (Oh! And my VP buddy Ferrett Steinmetz, whose fiction seems to be everywhere. Check out Home Despot, in which the trope of worldbusting gets a good shellacking.)

Now, there's a terrible lesson to be learned from this, one that I hope any possible competitors of mine will heed. It is very simple, and very, very wrong.

An earlier version of Tourists was published in Monday Night Magazine. I was in a writing group with the magazine's founders and they asked me to submit.

But I wasn't satisfied with it. The ending wasn't right, which was a result of the fantastic and realistic elements of the story failing to blend properly.

When I applied to Viable Paradise (which is a fair description of the experience they offer), I knew that I was going to receive critiques on my submission stories. The wannabe in me said, "Send in your best work." The guy who was ponying up nine hundred bucks plus airfare and lodging said, "Get your money's worth. Send in something that needs fixing."

Now this story had already been published, so it weren't going nowhere. But I needed to see it put right. This is the kind of crazy behavior that leads me to suspect that I'm too fucking artistic for my own good.

In this case, it turned out to be the right thing to do. This (extremely weird, convoluted, and personal) story hit Patrick-the-editor just right. And he asked me to submit it to tor.com. And then he published it. And now I are celebrity. Can I haz the lamentation of their women?

That's how it's worked for me so far. I submit, I get rejection slips. When I get published, it's because the editor in question asked me for a story.

So attend closely, you belletrists and scriveners. Do as I do. Crouch in your cave and obsessively hone your craft and cultivate your art. Then emerge shyly, and wait for the editors to come to you. Don't meet their eyes, don't make any sudden motions. They're shy. You don't want to scare them.

Just sit there quietly. And wait.

Sleazy Elephant

"I meant what I said, and I said what I meant. An elephant's sexually adventurous, one hundred per-cent."

Yesterday Pharyngula posted a link to this video. I did not watch it, nor should you. It's an instructional video showing how to masturbate an elephant properly. Perhaps I'm over-reacting here; just knowing that video exists has forced me to revisit a traumatic experience. To my eternal shame -- though I know it's not my fault -- I have borne witness to deviant elephant sexuality. It was far from pretty.

Look, let's be serious. I am pro-zoo, but there are some animals that simply do not belong in a zoo setting. You look at the elephants in their pen, and it's hard to avoid the idea that given the size and nature of their confinement, what you're seeing is the equivalent of making a small group of people live in a goddamned bathroom. Elephants are long-lived, wide-roaming and highly intelligent. It's no wonder that they'd get a little crazy after being forced into a small enclosure for years.

I remember when I was a kid, some lunatic at the Oakland Zoo decided it would be a good idea to put a baby elephant into the children's zoo. While it was behind bars you could reach and pet its head. Which meant that it could reach out with its trunk and pet you. I was enchanted, of course, and the elephant seemed to take a shine to me. I spent a long time talking to it, scratching its head, letting it put its trunk around me.

But when I thought it was time for me to move on, the elephant thought otherwise. It grabbed my arm and stuck it in-between its trunk and its little baby tusks, and it would not let me go. Poor thing must have been lonely, but it was a curious position for me. On one hand, there was a sense of being deeply complimented. My love of animals made this an experience to be remembered and relished.

Still, it was a bit uncomfortable to think that my new friend could easily break my arm with his nose. After a while some keepers came. One distracted the elephant with apples while the other two pulled me loose. I came out of it feeling sad for the elephant, who must have been very lonely.

A few years ago, I went back to the Oakland Zoo with the Hon. Richard Talleywhacker and his son, who was a toddler at that point. The zoo had changed drastically since I was a child, and all for the better. The vast majority of the animals seemed to have been properly housed, and there was a general lack of that prison-camp atmosphere that can make a zoo one of the most depressing treats life has to offer.

Until we got to the elephants.

We wheeled the slumbering Young Master Talleywhacker up the ramp to the elephant enclosure.

"Should we wake the kid up?" I asked.

"Give him a few minutes," Richard said. And then I saw something that made me very glad that innocent child had his little eyes shut.

If your life is anything like mine, from time to time you find yourself staring helplessly at some abomination, muttering, "Please be a hallucination. Please be a hallucination. Please..."

It never is. Hallucinations are nowhere near as weird and appalling as reality.

"Richard," I said. "Is that actually fucking happening, or are my eyes bad?"

"Dude," he said. "Oh, dude. That ain't right."

"God-damn."

At first glance I thought one elephant was pressing its head against the ass of another elephant. Which was true. But where was its trunk?

Where was its trunk?

Oh, noooooooooooo!

Elephant A had its trunk firmly and fully inserted up the ass of Elephant B. I mean all the way. All-the-way.

Thanks to the internet, I can tell you that an African elephant's trunk is five to six feet long and weighs up to four hundred pounds. Now that is what I call a serious butt plug. I mean, an elephant's ass is pretty roomy, but still. And what the fuck do you even call that act? A Serengeti Steamer? Naso-annilingus? Man, I wish I knew Latin.

I had to wonder if either of those pachydermatous degenerates was my childhood friend. As I said earlier, elephants are long lived.

As we stood there, stunned, things got worse. Elephant A pulled its shit-crusted trunk (Dude, I wanted to scream, that's your nose!) s-l-o-w-l-y -- sensously! -- out of Elephant B's asshole. Oh, that was bad.

And then, again, it got worse. When the tip of A's trunk finally saw the light of day, it was clutching a steaming lump of something green. Which A then popped into his mouth.

And then, chewing thoughtfully, he went back for more. He was actually reaching up the other elephant's ass so far he was able to grab the shit while it was still green. It made me want to floss.

"See," I said. "This is exactly why prison reform should be America's number one social issue."

That broke our horrified paralysis. Gently wheeling the babycart around so as not to awaken the slumbering infant, we silently went on our way.

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."