Ghost Rock Update

This was the last thing I was working on when I shut down in mid-January. Hand lettering is something brand-new to me, and I think I might need to work on it as a general skill. There's something about unifying word and image that exerts a certain magnetism...

I'm definitely out of the Vale of the Shadow. I'm busy again, functioning unsteadily but with will and effect. I would have started work on the next issue of Swill yesterday, but I made the mistake of deciding to take out the last major pile of crap in my studio.

What looked like a box and a couple of bags turned out to contain everything from old bank and school records to crumpled sketches and lyrics to a highway patrol signal and a decaying fencing mask, all woven together into a solid mass by a collection of cables ranging from MIDI to USB, with connections ranging from 1/8 inch to RCA, many with adapters of one kind or another dangling from the end. Partially unraveled, it's covering most of my floor right now.

I suppose that if you don't clean a room for three or four years while actively accumulating crap, the results should be predictable. Hopefully, by the time this is done, my gross lair will be a terrifyingly functional media laboratory.

It is a dream of beauty, is it not?

And before I came upstairs today, I uncovered the manuscript of the fucking novel. It just needs a light line-edit and gork-removal before going out, and I will return to that project before I stop working today. Up top is the state of the cover, and just below is the current state of the query. (Sorry to keep you waiting, Neil.) Does this hit the right note of balance between literary and genre? Who the fuck cares -- I managed to fit it on the page.

Gentle because he knows his own strength, patient because he fears his own temper, Matt Cassad stands apart as he wages war with himself. When musicians Lulu and Willy come to visit, Lulu’s otherworldly vocal harmonies blow through reality and propel Matt into a decaying afterlife where he struggles to heal a cosmos that’s half organ and half artwork. Lost in a hallucinatory wilderness, Matt is forced to defend himself against a pair of muggers-turned-monsters. Pursued by their angry ghosts, haunted by his own savagery, Matt is taken in by Corrie, a green-haired woman who says she’s the survivor of a lost Colonial village. Matt is heartbroken when he’s pulled away from her, back to Earth, but he doesn’t go home alone. One of the ghosts invades Matt’s house, screams through the wiring and possesses the appliances. With Lulu and Willy threatened, Matt returns to the afterlife in search of a solution only to find Corrie’s world terrorized by the other ghost. Caught between life and death, fighting for a chance at love, Matt finds three unexpected sources of strength. True friends. True heart. And the power of rock and roll.

American culture, history, and mythology seethe in GHOST ROCK, a novel complete at 53,000 words. Patrick Nielsen Hayden of Tor Books has requested this manuscript and graciously instructed me to mention this.

I’m a writer, artist, and performer living in Berkeley, California. I wrote many episodes of the award-winning, BBC-broadcast cult cartoon Thugs On Film, among other Mondo Media productions. I’ve worked as a writer, editor, and artist in the underground press, primarily for Swill magazine. I’ve studied genre fiction at the Viable Paradise and Taos Toolbox writer’s workshops. I’ve had two short stories published professionally, Tourists at Tor.com, and Deep Blue Dreams in the anthology Future Lovecraft from Innsmouth Free Press, to be re-released by Prime Books. My Amazon page is at (my Amazon page). An interview concerning the artwork done in conjunction with this novel is posted on Scientific American’s Symbiartic blog. And my performance work – which also spun out of the novel – has been favorably remarked upon here and here.

Thank you for your attention,

Sean Craven

My New Superpower

Ah, Amadeus. When the best part of a movie about Mozart is part of Leila from Repo Man, you know something has gone seriously wrong.

Things are definitely picking up. I'm starting to function. I recently edited a novel for a friend, the studio is clean enough so that I'll be able to start in on Swill production today, and I finally acquired a little super-speed to accompany my other gifts. What can I say; if I were a superhero, I could be accurately described as multi-originistic.

I'm not joking -- I have, in point of fact, acquired a low-grade superpower over the last couple of weeks. That's the thing about my brain. It's like one of those British sports cars that is amazing to drive when it isn't in the shop.

It started two Fridays back, and I've had enough time to mess with it so that I can say, yep, it is a real thing.

On Fridays we have what we call band practice, which sense the encroachment of time constraints and general life-pressures has reduced to the hon. Richard Talleywhacker and myself splitting a six-pack and playing the same seven or eight songs over and over and over again every week. It is a form of essential psychological hygiene.

Anyway, one of the songs we do sometimes is a little number called Bucket of Drugs. (It's about not having access to drugs, actually -- "It turns out I'm an idiot who tries to find some thrills/by mixing kava kava with herbal diet pills," that sort of thing. Dates back to a more rudimentary state of my development.)

It has a particularly brutal combination of pace and fingerwork, and we have always assumed that a certain amount of hapless flailing about was part of the charm. That bastard Talleywhacker's guitar has slowly been improving, however, and the broken shamble of my bass has grown more awkward by comparison.

So as the beats leading into the song thumped out of the monitor speakers two Fridays ago, I had a flash of rapid reasoning.

There is a state I enter into fairly readily. My hearing fades, my ability to be interested enough in language to process it goes away, and time slows down. While in this condition, I feel a sense of power and control, and my emotional state is best described as cold reptilian arrogance.

For years this frightened me, but then I found out what it was. The first clue came from the Malcolm Gladwell book Blink, where he described the state and explained that it's the most extreme level of fight-or-flight response before the body simply goes into shock and prepares for a beating.

This fit in neatly with my post-traumatic nonsense. (From the novel: "You are post-traumatizing the shit out of me!") But in that sharp moment of focus before the song kicked in, I experienced a brief moment of frustration at the tempo, then remembered my various experiences of flexible time. And then...

I had a friend once who was into biofeedback. I remember being amazed at his ability to speed up or slow down his heart-rate at will -- until I tried it, and realized it was a simple, obvious, natural function that I had just never tried to access. It's a neat trick, once you get the hang of it. Gotten me through a few stress reactions.

So I decided to try and slow time down. Not as radically as when I go into killer death lizard mode, but just a touch, just a tweak of the controls.

It turns out that it's easy -- I mentally reduced the tempo of the song just as if I had turned a knob. Instead of hitting wrong or off-time notes, I was dead-on aside from a couple of moments when physical fatigue proved overwhelming. It was the hardest playing I've done in a long time -- I could feel the burn all the way to my elbows in both hands, but I played the fucking song right.

And I did exactly the same thing this last Friday. And I've been playing little games and experiments with my sense of time. Right now it feels as if this actually links up with my patience, my ability to disconnect and enter into a flow state.

In other words, my entire sense of the passage of time is controllable to some degree. I can speed up to make decisions and coordinate rapid physical activities and slow down to endure boredom and isolation.

That's pretty good, brain. What else you got for me?

The Departure

Due to a finely-honed reflexive stupidity, I got to the Dallas Love airport about four hours before my flight was due to leave. In a semi-successful attempt at keeping my back from going out on me, I got up every half-hour or so and strolled around the vicinity.

I'd expected more culture shock from Texas, but my only real shock was a white woman wearing a concert T-shirt for a band called Lady Antebellum. I had to wonder how pro-slavery she was, exactly. I tried to assume cluelessness, but you never fucking know, do you? Walking around in front of God and everyone in that shirt -- there were black families right there where they could see her, but she seemed completely at ease. Everyone who thinks we're out from under the shadow of slavery, raise your hands and slap your stupid fucking self right in your stupid fucking face...

Not that it was any of my business, right? Lady fucking Antebellum, I shit you not.

Anyway, during one of these perambulations I felt something uncoil deep within me. During my trip, I'd been on an exceptionally light diet, and, to be delicate, I had no reason to expect an event of the magnitude implied by the heavy, curiously muscular sensations I was experiencing.

A trip to the men's room was in order, but the first one I ran across had a line for the stalls snaking ten feet through a dense cloud of shit-vapor. It was not an acceptable option; there were serious time constraints being brought to bear on my situation. The next bathroom was in a similar state.

The third was tucked under an escalator. Two stalls, one occupied by a pair of pale, scaly cowboy boots with pointed tips. As I hustled as fast as was compatible with dignity, an older black man POPPED out of a supply closet in front of me with a roll of toilet paper in his hand.

"Just a minute! Just a minute!" he said, and blocked my way to the stall. He went in, and the turd inside me squirmed, preparing itself for a show of force. He carefully took the half-full roll of toilet paper off the holder, unwrapped a new roll, installed it...

It was a tense moment for some of us, especially me.

... put the roll of toilet paper on the spindle, put in in place, and took the time to fold a point on the loose end of the paper. "There you go, boss," he said, and grinned at me.

I thought about that Lady Antebellum T-shirt.

When I got into the stall, I quickly dropped my trousers and sat down, only to find that because this was a handicapped stall, the toilet seat was about four inches higher than usual. Between the shift in angle and the extremely dense, clay-like texture of the issue at hand, my game was thrown completely off. It was like trying to force Plasticine through a pastry tube.

From the stall next door came a sharply punctuated, almost percussive hissing noise. Have you ever filled a cup of soda from a dispenser, and hit the button sharply to dispense just a little soda into a nearly-full cup? It was that noise exactly, followed instantly by the sound of a rattlesnake as the heels and toes of the cowboy boots vibrated against the floor in a tattoo that spoke plainly of deep internal discomfort, of ravaged valves and swollen, tender tubes.

Lifting my feet from the floor and balancing on my ass so as to achieve a functional angle, I speculated on the boots. Snakeskin? I've seen albino boas with that kind of patterning before. Maybe some kind of lizard?

As the turd emerged, slick and weighty, it seemed to do so with its own motive power; I had a distinct impression that I was passing a moray eel. It uncoiled endlessly; I'd eaten a bowl of oatmeal here, a meal-replacement beverage there, nothing that would produce a monster like this.

The man in the stall next door hissed and rattled, hissed and rattled. I had to admire his composure; a lesser man would surely have cried out against the clap or his prostate or whatever it was that held him in such a subtly expressive state of agony.

When the eel had dropped from my body, I looked down in curiosity. It was smooth, unbroken, a bowl-filling coil of glistening black. The trace it left on the paper was green.

Blood. This was a blood-turd.

How much blood was that?

Does this make me a cannibal?

When my friends had asked me how I had been, I told them I had thrown up tremendous quantities of blood. See, by using that phrase? They didn't actually think I meant as much blood as I did, so when they asked me if I needed to go to the hospital and I said no, they took me at my word.

"Tremendous quantities of blood." My policy of complete honesty is remarkably deceptive at times. Looking down at the moray, I had to consider that if I'd known I'd lost that much blood, I'd have let them take me to the hospital. Which I would have regretted, especially considering I got through things fine.

Still. That was a lot of blood. A lot.

The staccato rattle from next door was interrupted by the soft shuffle of footsteps outside the stalls, and the piss-hiss was punctuated by a series of soft puffs; I'm a former janitor, and I know what a spray can sounds like.

As the scent of pine drifted under the door, the man from the supply closet sighed, "Whoo-eee," as if he was the only person in the room when he knew damned well he was performing for me, Boots, and Lady fucking Antebellum.

This is a special moment, I said to myself, and filed it for future consideration. This kind of thing does not happen every day, and I had to wonder; was it me, or was it Texas?

Courting Spring Fever

Just a quick one to confirm that I'm alive and functioning.

One of the big advances I experienced this last year involves my relationship to the spring and fall phases of my seasonal shift in mood. In prior years, these were the worst times. Winters were hard, but in spring and fall, my volatility made for both the best and the worst times, and it was quite typical for the worst to follow the best inside the same second. Catastrophic emotional collapses were par for the course.

Following my diagnosis for (among other things) mixed-state bipolar disorder, I ran across this essay by Ayelet Waldman (synchronicity -- she once employed the woman who taught me scriptwriting). One of the symptoms of my bipolar stuff is hypomania, a sort of housebroken variation of mania.

Ms. Waldman's description of hypomania as a superpower struck a chord in me. It also linked up with a notion I've had for a long time now, which is that various odd neurological states are analogous with drug-induced states, extreme meditative states, and so on. A person regarded as being a prophet or being on a permanent acid trip might be healthier and easier to assimilate into society than one regarded as crazy or damaged. Not the most original thought, but I came to it through self-observation.

I've never had a taste for stimulants, not even coffee and chocolate. "I've already got plenty, thanks," has been my response. This has left me jealous of those whose tastes in recreational chemicals keep them working hard. From a careful selection of the morning's tea to an overflowing ashtray to Harry Crews' desktop jar of mixed amphetamines, most writers have something along these lines. I don't even have chocolate milk.

I'm too pressed for time to feel like doing a search, but sometime last year I decided to treat my seasonal hypomania as if it were a condition of intoxication -- one I intended to enjoy, even if I hadn't chosen to ingest it. And I regarded the exercise of my creative powers as the most important element of the pleasure I'd pursue.

Worked. Oh, man, did it work.

When I am in that state, if I have my head on right? I am constantly engaged in specific pursuits during my waking hours, of which I have plenty. I am boisterous, outgoing, compulsively witty, and disgustingly full of myself.

This state is contagious. When I'm hypomanic and feeling good, I'm great company. I radiate a sense of power, purpose, and pleasure to such a degree that strangers go out of their way to make contact with me on the street, just to get some of it to rub off.

All of a sudden, the worst passages of my year became the best.

So right now I'm at the point where I'm still dealing with the depression, but it is definitely lifting. My studio is almost clean enough to start photography, I've been editing a manuscript for a friend and my own is next on the block.

But right now, I am very impatient for my yearly dose of endogenous espresso. All of a sudden things like irritability and acne are welcome signs of the spring thaw, and a tendency toward braggadocio is to be cultivated rather than checked.

Basically, six months of hell is now six months of heaven. All I have to do is figure out a way to either reframe or manage winter, and I'll have a whole year of actual real human life. Wouldn't that just be something?

The Struggle Commences

So this winter I tried a crazy experiment -- I didn't give myself shit about my winter depression. The people closest to me have been patient and supportive, and overall, the experiment was a great success. I accomplished more and suffered less than any winter in close memory. This is supported by the evidence of the blog. (One of the great benefits of the blog has been its function as a history of my mental state -- being able to go back and compare one year to another has been enlightening.)

I'm sick of it. I have a million things to do, and a million debts to discharge, and sitting here, stunned and helpless, has grown tiresome. It chafes.

I have to work on Swill. This one hangs heavy -- I've got that, "Do I remember how to do any of this shit?" panic bubbling around. It's the kind of thing where I'm all, "I can't make a move until I get the cover finished, so I need to get some photographs of decent ground cover which means I have to get the table inside so I have to get all those musical instruments and bottles (moderate social drinking, kids -- the beer was brought here by Warren and the hon. Richard Talleywhacker) and piles of books off the floor which means I have to go through the shelves and pull out some books to get rid of so I can shelve all the fucking books at the same time. Wait a minute, I can't be pulling books off the shelf! I need to work on Swill! I can't make a fucking move until I get the cover done, though, and it's looking awfully bald. I need some good ground cover, maybe photograph a pot of midget sunflowers from half-a-dozen different angles and make them look like a fucking jungle. Yeah, that's it, and maybe scan some dead pitcher-plants. Shit. I have to get that table in here..."

Always remember.

When in trouble, when in doubt,
Run in circles, scream and shout.

I did manage to get something off to Salon, but I kind of hate myself for it. I think I might have been able to place it in a market a friend recently opened up. Maybe next time... but I have a shit-ton of material I've been sitting on.

The novel being foremost, I suppose. For the record? It needs one last round of line-edits, no rewriting, and I was halfway through the edits when the depression slammed shut. I've heard back from five readers, and the responses were, briefly --

"You've finally done what Elmore Leonard said -- you got rid of all the boring parts."

"This ends like a movie. I mean that in a good way!"

"This isn't stream-of-consciousness, this is a word explosion."

"This reads like Kerouac. Now, when I teach Kerouac..."

And, spoken in a tone of deliberate sincerity, "You do understand what you've got here, don't you?"

I've got some idea of what it is, all right. Fifty-three thousand words is short for a novel but it's fucking long for a poem. I'm just afraid nobody but writers and editors will like it.

I have to give some serious consideration to a friend's prose, and unfortunately my inclination is to guide him in the direction of the guy who wrote those great stories about Roy Orbison in plastic wrap and a bitchy, judgmental turtle.

Another friend is dropping off a novel for me to edit. That might help me get kickstarted -- give me a stack of paper, and some dim node in my pre-electronic brain is stimulated. All this digital internet crap just feels like fog, I need to get my hands on something, damnit.

I have to mail out a book on opium cultivation to one friend, and a copy of Future Lovecraft to a stranger who lives in the neighborhood.

And so on, and so forth. But now I need to go make lunch and clean the kitchen.

And then get some pictures of some kind of ground cover for Swill. Which means I'll have to get that table inside the studio... Shit. I'll have to figure out what to do with all those fucking musical instruments.

And those books. Why am I fucking with the bookshelf when I need to make lunch?

I need my tripod. Where is...

(The missus cries, faint from distance and hunger, "Lunch! Lunch!"

I go.)

A Worrywart's Rosary

"This is a serious medical condition," the missus said.

"I know."

"Your mother didn't pay attention to her parasympathetic nervous system, and look what happened to her!"

And there we go. Recently, a wonderful trip was marred by a recurrence of my stress-related nausea, compounded by blood loss from my ulcer. I'm tempted to use this as a source of humor, but it's gradually dawning on me that not everyone in my life finds the subject of my health amusing.

When I did a post-game analysis of the situation, I saw any number of things that I could have done to ameliorate the situation. In the end, stress management comes down to details. The problem is, is that one of my reactions to stress is an inability to monitor my stress. This is one of the things that brings me into crazy person territory from time to time.

(I am in the process of working up a nice handy flyer on Oaf Wrangling 101, but I want to run it by my near and dear for practicality and accuracy before releasing it into the public. If I am going to insist on making my socialization a blood-sport, it only seems fair to clarify the rules.)

But that's the thing. I have a lifelong pattern of psychosomatic reactions to stress. These typically present as a medical crisis -- my skin is peeling off like scabby sheets of typing paper! The doctor thinks I have colon polyps! only to reveal themselves as stress reactions.

Nausea, primarily manifesting as lack of appetite, is one of the big, long-running themes. My mother suffered from this quite badly; it's a little creepy to find myself following in her shoes. I've been hospitalized due to uncontrollable nausea three times.

Honestly, the ulcer and blood loss? That is actually helping me deal with things -- it mandates stricter behavior. It may seem to be a big issue, but if managed properly, it heals and doesn't give me trouble.

But not eating, and then using alcohol as an appetite stimulant seems to be an unreliable but effective means of opening up the wound so I bleed internally, and when that happens I get the chills and sweats. These are worse than the nausea, and at this point I'm basically hallucinating. Drug fans? Imagine really, really, really bad acid, or some exceptionally nasty herbal shit like datura or morning glory seeds. Eight to twelve hours of visions of hell interrupted by vomiting blood, bile, and what I honestly believe to be shit.

Hell, I've paid for worse experiences than that, but still. It gives one pause. But here's the thing -- it means I have to take care of myself. And being involved in a larger and larger social sphere places a correspondingly larger and larger responsibility in terms of self-care. My well-being has never been my private concern, and now it is taking on the feeling of being a sort of public trust.

So managing stress is an issue. But that is only one of the things I'm dealing with right now.

I am easily confused, and find it difficult to sustain coherent thought for the extended periods of time necessary to perform serious intellectual tasks. I am irritable. I have little energy, and that expends rapidly. Interestingly, I have been sleeping more rather than less, and have even found myself taking long afternoon naps, from which I rise wan and crabby. I have extremely vivid memories, bordering on hallucinations, of bad moments from my early years. I am prone to sudden panics and anxieties. And from time to time the profound conviction of a universal negativity and hopelessness grips me, as though existence is a set of jaws.

Then I think, "You're getting press and you're getting smooches and the refrigerator is full and there seem to be a ton of people who like you. Quit bitching."

And I do, and it helps, but come on. This is physically mandated misery, and all I can do is get through it with as much grace as I can muster. But hey, my spring season is due to start any time now, and then I'll be full of all kinds of good crazy energy.

Right now I have any number of things I need to do. All of them are significant in my creative career -- what I've been telling people is that I've been turning the handle on a sausage grinder for the last nine or ten years, and the sausage is just starting to come out. And that 'career' is a thing at this point. Regardless of my degree of success, I'm a real, acknowledged writer, artist, and performer. Don't care if anyone's buying, I know I've got the goods.

So I really should make myself work. But when I do, the results are not good. They reflect the disarray and emotional neediness I'm experiencing right now.

And if I push myself, I stress out. And as has been pointed out to me, that actually represents a real health hazard. That wouldn't bug me so much, but now that I'm seeing myself in the big picture, it does. It causes trouble for other people when I'm not functioning at my best.

But if I can avoid obsessing over my stress levels, my seasonal depression probably won't spike on me.

See, yesterday's post and today's post? These are the kinds of posts I haven't been making for the past couple of weeks because the vague tone of self-pity kind of nauseates me, and that's a source of stress.

Sometimes the word 'blog' seems onomatopoeic. Blog! Blog! Bluh. Bluhuh. Bluooooahhhhg.

Now I have to floss.

Surviving the Land of Do-As-You-Please

Let's lay it right out; when my internet activity diminishes or goes away during the time between mid-January and the end of March, it's due to seasonal depression.

That said, I haven't been unhappy. Right now, my life is better than it ever has been, and the continual sense of being just at the start of something is a big part of that. The difficulties I face aren't of the, "Will I have a place to sleep?" variety. They are of the, "What kind of sheets do I like?" variety. I don't want to seem like I'm bitching.

I have been working every day, but I haven't been producing work that I care to share. In previous years, I would have said that I was completely frozen, when in fact I usually do put in the time. It's just that I don't like what I do.

At this time of year, I'm critical of myself and my work to a degree that is distinctly pathological. The missus recently gave me a copy of a well-reviewed book on the application of neuroscience to decision-making. I got a third of the way through it before my grousing became audible.

"This isn't any better than the crap I've been throwing away!" I said, and then it hit me that yeah, this probably wasn't any better than the crap I've been throwing away, which probably wasn't crap and which I probably shouldn't have thrown away.

This is the kind of thing that's hard to deal with. There is a symptom of mental illness called, 'grandiosity.' I've got it. My sense of self it both grossly inflated and distinctly insufficient, and the fact that I have very real and extraordinary gifts and deficits makes it fucking difficult for me to get a bead on myself.

I could look at a number of different areas in my life and say, "Yes, that is stressing me out. Yes, that is stressing me out." But unless this condition persists into April, there's no reason to assume that I'm dealing with anything other than seasonal depression. And while the symptoms are not fun, they are not threatening me, and my overall quality-of-life is wonderful.

Let me put it this way.

You'll hear me making rude noises about The Lord of the Rings from time to time, but I am by no means resistant to the charms of Tolkien. There is a lovely story he wrote called Leaf by Niggle. In it, near the climax, the protagonist, Niggle, has worn himself completely out in his struggles to be a good and productive member of his community. He's laying in bed, listening to his case being discussed by a number of rather intimidating voices. Then one of them makes a suggestion.

"Perhaps we should try the gentle treatment."

I feel as if the world has decided to see what happens if I get what I want for a change. It is not just one area of my life; there are basic parts of me that I have assumed were broken or missing that are now undergoing radical healing. The great fears in my life are diminishing, and while my future is problematic, it is far from hopeless.

Here is the thing about being a late bloomer. You really get a chance to appreciate it.

And thusly, I finish an unsatisfactory, somewhat insipid and pointless post. But I'm here! I'm alive! And one day soon, I'll write something sensible and of interest, I promise.