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Inferno Interupted

09 Tuesday Feb 2010

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And I opened DANTE’S INFERNO and begged the muse
For enough focus to read the text, though it was illumined
By neither Amazon Kindle nor Mac iPad.…
But midway through my night’s reading,
I became lost in the gaudy woods called Internet.
And headless, undead sparrows Twittered in the trees.
And I was accosted by three babbling beasts,
That tempted my ADD and would not let me again ascend the hill.
MySpace yowled and prowled in sparkly leopard spots.
Facebook growled, opening his mouth wider than perdition,
And the souls of slaves worked Sisyphean farms in his maw.
And, most dreadful of all, YouTube loped and howled,
Her belly full of feral wretches who wrote comments on her distended skin.
I read the idiot scrawl and it said, with no cheer,
ABANDON ALL HOPE, YE WHO ENTER HERE…

 

The Smell of Coffee Attracts the Dead

16 Wednesday Dec 2009

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Being away from everything is like being dead.

Not in a morbid or melodramatic light…just in the sense of being inaccessible and not accessing.

I had this vivid dream, years ago—I was dead. The afterlife was just my parents home. Only for the dead, like me, the ceilings were exceptionally high—small cathedral high, with a sort of inner balcony running a square around the house. And I (and occasional other wayward spirits), existed solely (souly?) in that square.

I walked around the square.

And again.

And existence was looking down—gigantically down—at my family and friends, doing day to day stuff. I am close. But I cannot interact. Cannot quite see it at their level or angle either, just looked down through my square.

And every stupid, little thing has the kind nostalgia that makes it hard to remain standing. They’d brew some coffee, and I’d be like, “Ye Gods! They’re brewing coffee. I used to brew coffee with them like that. I used to drink it out on the deck, with them, like that.”

And this went on. I occasionally took a break to comment on something with a random, wandering spirit, share a few jokes, make a few new Plutonian acquaintances—because I can be a funny-self-depreciating-charming bastard when I’m not stuck in my head—and it’s a few laughs between spooks. But they move on and by the time I turn my head again, for another comment, it’s a different face, or none at all and just me on my little inner balcony.

It was an emotionally engaging dream, that stretched through quite a bit of dreamtime, and was, oddly, very realistic. I really thought I was dead.

But I woke up.

Breakfast probably tasted very good that morning.

Well. Let’s be honest. It was lunch.

It wasn’t a horrifying dream. It was just funny, sad, and nostalgic at turns. There are some BNL songs that feel like that dream.

Anyway, where was I…

Oh yeah…Norway.

I’m away from everything and everyone. And I find myself getting little glimpses of what all my family and friends are doing…but not from the ground angle, and not really interacting. Emails and posts and Skype video—I’m looking down through my little square and saying, “Ye Gods! I used to have coffee with them like that.” Occasionally, at work, I turn away and make a comment or a joke with one of the new faces. And I wave the severed hand I keep at my desk. And I explain that, no, not all Americans have severed hands lying around (just us patriotic ones).

I’m gone. But I haven’t been forgotten (always flattering). And occasionally, my loved ones perform these odd seance rituals involving click-clacking on lettered keys, and they conjure a little, ethereal image of me or sometimes just my disembodied voice or just cryptic textual messages manifesting on the Ouija board computer screens.

The inverse perspective is a sort of post-apocalyptic plotline where I’m the only one left alive, contacting the dead with my own rituals (only in my inner movie, I don’t fuck up Richard Matheson’s book).

And then… My God! Are you having coffee?

So I thought of that dream (on the off chance that I wasn’t laying the parallels on thick). Again, I’m not invoking a death comparison for a sense of macabre angst…but more for the Weirdness of the experience. It’s been Weird.

I’m not sure where I’m going with this.

Single White Writer in Search of Welcome…

07 Saturday Nov 2009

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Well that’s disappointing…

The Oslo House of Literature may not become the writerly hangout I was hoping for.  I’d nested in on a comfy corner table, ready to get some work done when I was told to vacate the seat as the area was only for people who were going to eat (my expensive coffee did not qualify).  I haphazardly gathered my things, went to the other side of the room—more cramped—less table space—less conducive to writing and looked around, trying to puzzle out the now mysterious laws of etiquette in the now alien place—unsure of how to get to work, let alone explore all the wonders I thought were on the upper floors.  What I thought was paranoia blossomed into unwelcomeness.

I watched the waiter fix up the still undisturbed, would-be table, as if a plague rat had died there and liquefied.

No wonder the same waiter gave me the evil eye during my whole first visit.

Maybe all the bindings on the wall were just decorations.  Maybe this is really a House of Dinner—the books more a theme than a function (the way a Rain Forest Cafe allows you to feel like your in the jungle without any actual heat or having to be around animals—you could see books while you eat without having to open them or see the unsightly way they are birthed or the smelly creatures that make them).  I chugged my coffee (a double shot—and now I’m jittery like Rikki-Tikki-Tavi on crack), exited like a piece of riffraff, and walked back to my apartment…which brings us to now.

I’ll have to keep searching for a proper away-from-home writing nest, but for now, I best just get to work.

Pity, as I was looking forward to writing out tonight.

NaNoWrimo Day 1: Day of the Dead

02 Monday Nov 2009

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Did you have a merry Halloween, lovelings?

Did you all hail to the pumpkin song?

Did you recall youth in the cinnamon scents and the sticky sweat/saliva seal of a rubber mask?

Did you look at a Jack O’ Lantern and contemplate metaphors for inner light and the power of a wicked grin?

Did you find the that fine line between a joyous sugar comma and acute diabetes?

I had a night of it, here in Oslo, dressed as a mad-goggled Jack the Ripper. But I still miss Halloween back at home, with friends, in Ray Bradbury’s October Country. Perhaps there will be pics to come. I did manage to snap a few, not in full costume, before I collapsed at about 5 am.

All Saints Day
Right. Back to work.

Today is All Saints Day.

Today is Day of the Dead.

Today was the first day of serious work on polishing my horror novel, Strangeness in the Proportion. The Prologue of the novel begins on the Day of the Dead. So this all seems fitting.

What’s funny is going back and doing research after the fact. I know of the Day of the Dead and have a pretty good general idea of it (one class trip, in junior high involved heading to Chicago during the holiday and checking out a Latin culture art exhibit on the Day of the Dead…it was a memorable trip). But I’m not an expert. In said Prologue, I have some children eating sugar-spun skulls as a bit of imagery (seems like something to do during the Day of the Dead). I’ve since looked it up and found out that…not only are such skulls plausible…they exist.

It’s all connected!

Today was mostly more organization and shoving this freaking book back into my head space. I’ll start racking up a real word count either tomorrow or Tuesday. I have about 100,000 odd words to sift through. My strategy is to sprint through the novel in the first 3 weeks, make the corrections that come to me (or that I’ve noted in the meantime) without dwelling and then taking a week to look at the book as a whole and make further adjustments from there.

Stay tuned for more hints on the misadventures of Simon Meeks, my absinthe addicted, Buster Keaton-stepping, hyper-eccentric forensic pathologist.

I preach death to self-doubt…but that’s not because I’ve purged myself of that insidious demon. To the contrary. Earlier today I felt very small and useless. That’s an ongoing battle. And so….

…the self-doubt kill of the day: I covered the monster in honey and buried it in a fire ant hill. Self-Doubt screamed and begged for mercy. I put in my earbuds and drowned it out with some Danny Elfman and "Thriller", and got to work. Before it died, Self-Doubt mouthed, “I’ll be back.” I told it that’s ok, I’ve got a prodigious and wicked imagination.

*The Belated Demon Doll of Key West*
I promised to retell the story of how I met Robert, the reputedly possessed doll of Key West. Sorry I couldn’t get to it for Halloween, but I’ll do my best to properly tell the anecdote by this coming weekend.

Give your doubts a dismissal…with a bloody axe!

30 Friday Oct 2009

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Happy pumpkin season and witching hour.

Remember to follow the Ignus Fatuus glow.

And ask Stingy Jack for a lantern.

Once upon a time, I won a novel contest. Many and many a year ago…

And now that’s finally heading towards fruition.  My editor contacted me. White Wolf has given the go on continuity and such.  Time to dig out the current draft of the manuscript…shove it back into my head…

November, which is NanoWrimo month, will see me on my own novel scramble. I’ll be polishing about 100,000 words (give or take).  Conan dialogue writing by day and novel by night.

“All work and no play…makes Jack a dull boy.”

Thankfully I won’t have time to type that all over a page or on the walls or ceiling.  That never leads to anything good anyway. Though I can make pretty nifty faces threw axe-holes in doors. But I digress.

So.

Novel.

What’s it about?

Well, while writing twitter-sized micro stories (140 characters a story) I did manage to distill it down to six little sentences:

I met Jane D. at work. She tells me who hurt her. Her hand tightens around mine. She smiles. This is love. This is rigor mortis.

Also…going over my notes…I did manage to find this handy, sophisticated, visual-plot flowchart that outlines the many nuances of the novel.

That’s all for now.  Check back for more.  I’ll surface from the pile of writing from time to time over the month, to update you all on the gory particulars of an unraveling mind and a deadline.  Good luck on all of you participating in NanoWrimo.  Keep me updated.  I’ll keep you updated.  And we’ll all get out of this alive.

Deal?

Remember, carpal tunnel is the enemy.  Stretch!  Limber up.

And self-doubts are little imps best brutalized with pipe wrenches, chainsaws, and falling anvils that you create in your head.  It’s not enough to just say they’re dealt with.  You really gotta anthropomorphize them and imagine brutally slaying them.

It works.

Do it.

I want to start hearing you all comparing self-doubt kills of the week in bloody detail.  I want the kill counts to wrack up with the word counts.  Splatter those pages with gory ink!

Hurrah!

Semper fi!

Kobra Kai!

Do or die!

Go!

 

 

…TO BE CONTINUED…

07 Wednesday Oct 2009

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Where were we?

Ketchup. Catching up.

I let another week slide by between my half-time break in the recap of all that happened during the radio silence—which means more stuff transpired—so let’s quicken pace to get back to the near present, lest we forever mire ourselves two skips n’ a jump behind the Now…

OK…I’m not even going to organize this with conventional chronology. I mean, eventually our molecules are going to separate and information is going to break down and dissolve—it’s individual moments that are important—so screw organization, I’ll just sloppily jot this down as randomly and quickly as it comes to my brain and fingers.

But to give it a structure, let’s lean on the visual and you can participate in a metaphor with me. Picture a funky deck of cards. Each card is an individual moment-memory-thingy, a Tarot of my recent events in Oslo. See the deck? Solid in your mind? I’m shuffling it…I try and impress you with a nifty feat of shuffling prestidigitation…and bungle the whole thing at an adorably crucial moment and—SNAP—cards everywhere. 52 Pick-up!

What do I grab first?

…ah…it’s…

*The Ace of Plastic Bags*
Walking home from the subway, one night, with the Japanese lyrics of a song about a giant robot from a Godzilla movie stuck in my head…I noticed it…yes…the plastic bag was following me.

Through an odd confluence of wind, the plastic bag was more or less hovering, darting a few feet this way and that, at the level of my head, neither falling nor blowing away, in a kind of American Beauty sort of moment. It followed me for several paces like this…

…so I punched it in the face.

Don’t look at me like that. You have to be stern. Otherwise you’re the soft-knuckled fool in the city that all the plastic bags follow and swarm.

…oh my…the next card is ominous…an archetypal representation of minor pestilence…it’s…


*The Nine of Swine*
Had a bug. May or may not have been the Swine Flu. They take that seriously in these parts. I’ve never had a job demand I stay home sick for a week. I wasn’t that sick. I was ready to beg them to let me back. I was in my old, temporary apartment–four white walls in a cramped room and no internet. Got a little reading done. Went a little mad. Had to go to the doctors to get a note so I could get sick leave. They made me wear a mask and took me to the infectious room where other sad sops in masks sat. Boredom was the worst part.

Give a flu a name and people go nuts.

…and the next card is…oh…that is encouraging…it’s…

*The Two of Positive Press*
Sometimes, late at night, I Google myself.

Hey, don’t look at me that way! It’s just an adult game of Peek-a-boo—a bit of reality affirmation—if I type my name (“Marco!”) and something answers back (“Polo!”), I still exist.

I stumbled upon a VERY NICE REVIEW of my podcasted story, “Blood, Snow, and Sparrows”. [Hmmm…that link does not appear to be working…but trust me, it was sweet review. –THE MANAGEMENT]

Also received a comment on a stranger’s blog regarding that same story.

I got another bit of nice press via Twitter. Yes, Twitter. I know. Yes, I hopped on that. Look, as near as I can tell, the Cult of the Trendy and the Cult of the Anti-Trendy pretty much worship in the same way: they let the actions and opinions of others dictate their actions and opinions. I don’t have time for pretensions (or anti-pretensions), only enthusiasms (the difference between pretensions and enthusiasm is the same difference between the nervousness of a high-stakes investor driving his new sports car, wondering if it’s sending the right image to the world—and the pure joy of a kid riding her sparkling new bike in the mud).

Anyway—TANGENT ALERT—people are still figuring out what to do with these new communications technologies. We’re making it up as we go. And some people are using Twitter to challenge themselves to write ultra-ultra short bits of micro-fiction (whole stories in 140 characters or less). Inspired by my fellows, I wrote up a dozen or so over the last week (fiction stories I make up are marked by a #TCTC hash and not to be confused with the bits of my real life that I make up).

I’ve been linking them to a London Times Tweet-Story contest that is still ongoing. At the bottom of the article, it explains how to enter if you’re interested. And I got noticed. I was mentioned as a favorite in another London Times Article posted Saturday.
…and the next card…oh…it’s one of the Major Arcana…it’s…


*The New Apartment*
I am now situated in my new apartment. I like it. It’s cheaper than I thought I’d have to spend. I get along well with my flatmate and his two Italian greyhounds (a mother and her puppy). It’s in an old, charming apartment building and not an ugly new one…and so has high ceilings (which I appreciate after my last cramped room), good space, and my bedroom has a wonderfully large window. My new bed is a year old and apparently belonged to a diplomat prior. I asked my new bed if it would write me references and it agreed. There is a tree outside my window, and I’m at branch level, and it’s close enough to hear the wind-through-the-leaves sound that trees make if I open said window. There’s also a spooky basement that you have to duck down to walk through to get to the laundry machine—there’s groaning stories down there.
…next card…another Major Arcana…


*The Viking Church*
In my quest to see all the locations in my little Oslo Guide, I visited a little cemetery and church, built by a Viking King in 1080—just a walking distance from my apartment. It’s the oldest standing building in the city, surrounded by an old cemetery on a hill.

Better still…they don’t lock the gate at night.

I had the place to myself. Lit bright in the front, near the church, but dark-dark in the back and full of…atmosphere. Now, I am an atmosphere fiend. Some people have chocolate. I have atmosphere. And atmosphere is not a spectator sport. You get what you give and I can create quite a bit with quite a little…at least for myself (First rule of Josh: ENTERTAIN JOSH…if others get entertained too, so much the better). I did not have to put forth much…this was a smorgasbord of lush, creamy, creepy-bittersweet moods.

I went back, a few night’s later for a more extended stay. I wandered about and when my eyes adjusted and I got brave enough, I visited the dark back of the cemetery by the angel statue and a leaky well. Then the place just seemed charming and inviting and I listened to the last hour of the audio reading of Neil Gaiman’s, The Graveyard Book, smoked rum-dipped cigarillos, and explored every inch of the place (or tried to…I’m sure there are more hidden inches to find).

It was a good…moment…very in the moment…no future or past practicalities to muddle the mind. And the end to one of my favorite recently read novels was all the more poignant.

I bottle particularly good vintages of atmosphere and save it for later.

…next card…oh…it’s a good one…it conveys wandering souls and a fool’s prerogative…it is…

*The Ferry Fatuous*
I’m all about the cheap entertainment and the ferry to the various islands in the fjord of Oslo is free (or at least…I already have a monthly travel pass and it’s covered on that). So I decided to X a few more spots in my guide book. I like the ocean and I like boats and it’s nice to know I can take a boat ride whenever I like.

My target was Hovedoya, the first island, but I stayed on the boat for the round trip (past Bleikoya, Gressholmen, and Lindoya) and hit Hovedoya on the way back.

The island is mostly forest preserve with a few boating places and snack shops on some of the shore. I was in search of the ruins of a 12 century monastary that I read were there—wasn’t sure exactly where—but I found it pretty quickly.

Another spot I definitely liked. Very peaceful. Just a small trickle of visitors coming through here and there. Sat on an old well, covered by boards with a slight crack through them—and I wondered what they were keeping down there…

Mostly, the ruins are just free standing walls that from a sort of ceiling-less maze. But one of the turrets was still standing and (since there wasn’t any sign telling me not to) I went up the stone steps…which led to a little space on the second floor about the size of a really good tree fort. A little window allowed me to look outside. I sat there for the better part of an hour, undisturbed.

I’ll have to remember the spot when the weather gets warmer again…I think it’ll serve as a good reading nook.

…next…card…is…uh oh…it’s Death’s younger, less terminal cousin…

*The Phantom of Indefinite Enforced-Leave*
Funcom had a great purge of employees this last Tuesday. Very sudden. It was announced to everyone at Tuesday’s morning meeting. Then, one by one, we were called down to individual meetings to see if we still had a job.

I survived. I was told my place there is pretty secure.

The plan is now for more streamlined teams and—if things get richer and fatter again—to hire back those on enforced leave.

Friday I moved up to the 4th floor. Where once I was in a dark, barren corner (by myself) I’m now around friendly faces (and slowly learning the finer points of socializing again) have a window view, and even a plant. Granted, I distract easily, but I plan on trying really hard to…hmmmm….what?

Well…there’s probably more cards on the floor, but what say we cal ourselves caught up and start a new hand, yeah?

Cheers.

London Calling

03 Saturday Oct 2009

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I’ve been writing Twitter-sized micro-fiction stories over here: http://twitter.com/JoshuaDoetsch

 
And today, one of my stories got mentioned as a favorite in the London Times.
 
Check it out!
 
Not bragging…just very far away from home and can’t post little achievements on my parents’ fridge no more.
 
Next, promised blog entry (the sequel to last blog entry) coming soon. Promise.
 
PS – This week was Banned Books Week. I was originally against banning books…but now I see the perhaps unintentional genius behind it. What better way to get our children to read than to say, "That? Oh…you don’t want that…that’s too dangerous…"