Taos Toolbox

Further Painter experimentation. Well, I've managed to totally ditch the curse of the computer-generated gradient, and yes, this is going to be total van art. Maybe that should be my name -- van Art. (Someone must be using that one already...)

So a few posts back I mentioned that I was being tempted by the Taos Toolbox workshop. (Go on, click the link. Feel the temptation.) Thing is, is that I'm currently mega-broke. My financial situation is brutal and grim. No way I could afford to go. But my experiences at Viable Paradise had been so good in so many ways (in addition to what you'd expect, there was everything from a major emotional breakthrough to a new community to publication) that I wanted more.

Well, Taos Toolbox did not look like it would be the same experience as Viable Paradise. It's longer, there are fewer instructors, and it looks as though much more time would be spent actually writing. It's for people who have more writing experience, or who have been through a writer's workshop already. It looked like a good next step -- if VP opened up the hood and gave me a working description of the engine, it looked like Taos Toolbox would have me get into things with a wrench.

One evening soon after I made that post I was mooching around the house, pacing irritably and picking at the bookshelves as though they were big rectangular scabs.

"What's wrong with you?" the missus asked. Well, that's a hell of a question, but this time I had a fairly brief answer.

"I want to go and learn plotting from Walter Jon Williams," I said. "I can't freaking afford it, but you've seen me have weird luck with money before. I mean, it's not literally impossible that I could get the cash together."

She perked up a little, showed some interest. She's read her share of Williams, and she knew what I meant about plotting. "Who else is going to be teaching?"

"Nancy Kress and Carrie Vaughn."

"Nancy Kress?" (The missus is a big Nancy Kress reader. She's got some Kress in hardback, if you take my point.)

"Nancy Kress."

"Well, go apply then."

So I applied. And I got in. And the missus said, "We'll figure the money out. Go."

See the kind of gal I've got? That kind of thing is swell on so many levels -- she supports me because she believes in me and loves me. Sometimes I'm jealous of me.

So I'm going to New Mexico this summer, where I will acquire what the kids call 'mad skilz.' And it looks like I'll have to work hard if I want to avoid having a general good time.

As Firkin the Cat would say, "Stop licking your asses and attend to me." If you want to be a better writer, and if you want to establish yourself in a supportive writing community, workshops can be very useful. This I know. Right now there is still time to apply to both Viable Paradise and Taos Toolbox.

Come on, folks. I don't wanna do this by myself. Let's pack Taos Toolbox with VP vets. It'll be a blast!

An Unfortunate Vision

More Painter experimentation. What I love about the idea of cloning is that it lets you use photographs, etc, that have low resolution as the basis for high-resolution images.

Night before last I think I got some sleep, but that's based purely on circumstantial evidence. Last night I crashed at nine forty and fell asleep fairly quickly. Unfortunately, I woke up at one. I read for half an hour (The editorial material in James Gunn's The Road To Science Fiction, Volume 5.), then tried to sleep again.

After forty-five minutes it was obvious that I wasn't going down, so I went up to my studio so as to avoid disturbing the missus. At five, I went back to bed.

I focused on relaxing my jaws, hands, and feet. I played Bach's Sheep May Safely Graze in my mind and focused on random visual images. At first they were nothing but phosphenes, but after an hour or so they resolved into a hypnagogic vision of young girls at play.

I'd guess their ages were between four and seven, and they were dressed in brightly colored hippy-style clothes, knits and patterns. The landscape around them seemed as though it was uncultivated and richly green, but the shapes of the plants, bushes and bunch-grass, resolved themselves as a fuzzy glow.

I retained lucidity through the vision, and thought to myself that this was not the kind of thing I usually saw while going to sleep. Unfortunately, I was wrong.

After a while, the girls stopped playing. Instead, they attacked each other savagely, clawing and biting. Many of them lost their eyes, and the sight of their empty sockets weeping tears of blood is still right in my mind's eye.

Worse was the way some of them bit at each other, struggling mouth-to-mouth as they chewed out one another's teeth. I could feel it. The grit of bitten enamel, the wrenching in the gums. I can feel it now.

It seems that while I was experiencing this, I was writhing and making noises. The missus left the bed and set up camp on the couch in the living room. I regained consciousness at eight, and have been almost entirely useless all day long. I wound up watching The Host and weeping.

I believe that my brain and I are due for a trial seperation.

Annelid Avenue

While I would prefer to put up an entertaining post accompanied by artwork every day, I ain't been doing that. Forgive me if the next few posts are lightweights as I try and get back into the routine of blogging.

This piece was done for my Painter class, using the Scatter and Pattern brushes, then modified in Photoshop.

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.