I’ve never really understood the apprehension (and even malice) between “serious” literature and popular (commercial) literature. Each worries about letting the other bleed into it. One worries about becoming the crude property of the masses. The other worries about becoming the exclusive property of pretension.

I think it was Steven King who wrote that literary writing was worrying about how you feel about the work and popular writing was worrying about how others feel about the work and both are about as selfish as one another. I think literary writing can easily become worrying about what a select group of “others” think about the work.

Why not just put them both together? Is that so wrong? The boundaries are pretty artificial anyway (like the academy awards…but no statues). Imagine popular fiction that had real depth. Imagine literature that was interesting (or rather, imagine literature that caught your interest without yelling at you to do a thousand pushups before showing you any of the goods).

One’s all foreplay and the other is messy and premature.

A happy, healthy medium, that’s what I say.

My car is hopefully fixed.

Cause I’m out of food and Lenore is hungry.

I’m eating noodles and tortilla chips with peanut butter – trying to figure out how a dark angel might manifest in cigarette ash – and the sun will soon be up. I’ve considered talking to my voodoo doll. It’s a quirky/fun sort of existence.

Torrie will be here in about an hour, to take me to my wayward vehicle.

You don’t have to get up early – if you don’t go to bed.

I needed to center myself. I needed to center my project. There are ways to reach these levels of mystic tranquility. I decided to make a soundtrack to my book (I do this with stories sometime). It’s a little over 200 songs long (which might end up being a song per page). I shouldn’t take the time to list them all…but I’ll hit random and list the first twenty…

Random 20 songs of the SOULS UNSURE soundtrack:

1. Rolling Stones, “Paint it Black”
2. Nirvana, “Lake of Fire
3. Midnight Syndicate, “Spectral Masquerade”
4. Moby, “The Sky is Broken”
5. Midnight Syndicate, “Winged Fury”
6. Alloy Orchestra, “The Chase”
7. Foo Fighters, “Learn to Fly”
8. Coal Chamber, “My Mercy”
9. Live, “Lightening Crashes” [live version]
10. Guns N’ Roses, “Sympathy for the Devil”
11. Mickey Hart, “Udu Chant”
12. Cherry Poppin’ Daddies, “Drunk Daddy”
13. Gary Numan, “Dark”
14. Midnight Syndicate, “Raven’s Hollow”
15. Metallica (S&M), “No Leaf Cover”
16. Godsmack, “Bad Religion”
17. Smashing Pumpkins, “Disarm”
18. Echo and the Bunnymen, “Just a Touch Away”
19. Beethoven, “Moonlight Sonata”
20. Alice in Chains, “Down in a Hole”

Boris Karloff died this day in 1969.

Yes Dr. Perkins.

Yes Dr. Leonard.

Yes English faculty and program.

Yes I can write an epic poem for you…

WHAT THE F*%K WAS I THINKING!?!?!?

Smile, you baby…nervous laughter is still laughter.

Morpheus

?? Which Of The Greek Gods Are You ??
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Plan B sounded good. Plan B involved waiting until next Fall to graduate and to take the extra time to get more stories published (maybe even self publish a book of short stories) so that I might have better writing credentials when I leave this school. And I’d have extra time to make my thesis come into its own.

Plan B sounded logical…until it met the scrutiny of my advisor. Deadlines are good. Writing work usually happens in the heat of a ticking clock. The best tricks are played in the last minute. I know this…I just try and convince myself otherwise, sometimes.

So now it’s Plan C. Plan C is basically the same as Plan A, only it’s more like Plan A than Plan A was and it follows Plan B.

Plan C has a deadline: March 9th. I need a draft of my epic poem by then. That means some 42 odd days (we’ll round down to 40) of writing. Let’s pretend the end product is 200 pages (I have no IDEA how long it will be). That’s 5 pages a day – maybe around 1500 words a day.

That’s a little over a month of frenzied writing.

So this is my warning/apology that I might not always be available until that date. I might not answer every email or be able to go out and drink. I might go a little crazy. I might howl and lope off into the woods never to return…

But like the priest in the Exorcist says, Thank God my will is weak. So I’ll probably answer some of the emails and drink some of the time. But if not…you all know why.

So here’s to March 9th – a month, to the day, after Ash Wednesday to tell the story about the Ash Angel – and hip-hip-here-I-go…

Don’tLookDownDon’tLookDownDon’tLookDownDon’tLookDownDon’tLookDownDon’tLookDownDon’tLookDownDon’tLookDownDon’tLookDownDon’tLookDownDon’tLookDownDon’tLookDownDon’tLookDownDon’tLookDownDon’tLookDownDon’tLookDownDon’tLookDownDon’tLookDownDon’tLookDownDon’tLookDownDon’tLookDownDon’tLookDownDon’tLookDownDon’tLookDown

I was amidst writing about a little dead girl and a dark angel that gets his highs off of watching innocent souls go to heaven, from an inner-city hospital – when she apologized for falling asleep in my room.

I exited my world of black wings and glowing souls and turned to her and said, “That’s OK.”

She said she hadn’t meant to doze, didn’t mean to doze now; it’s just that sleep often eluded her in an insomniac shuffle and that she just felt warm and cozy and safe, here, with me, and she hadn’t felt like that for some time.

I said I understood…then I looked around, at the voodoo doll nailed to the wall (all gargoyle grins and dangly charms and stone carved rosary), at the skull face mirror with a crack in it – seven years bad in its jaws, at the wood carved death’s head mask and matching and cackling staff, at the glaring rubber raven upon the speaker, at the iron wrought Halloween candle screens, at the eerily churning green glowing globe, at the miniature haunted tree, at the Godzilla figurine (signed in gold pen by the actors who played him), at the erratic and flickering Halloween lights, at the neon Bates Motel sign, at he Jack Skelington and Jaws and Army of Darkness posters, at the cage containing a midnight black serpent – I looked at these things and thought how strange that she should find all of this soothing.

But then…I do too.

I smiled, but my smile was not as big as the voodoo-doll grin.

“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”
-Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing

OK.

The car broke down again. Well almost. It suffered the same symptoms it did the last two times it broke down, so I high-tailed it back to school. So I won’t be going home. And I won’t be having my teeth drilled tomorrow.

I will, however, be going back to the garage where it was “fixed” and getting some answers from them. I have a feeling that will be like pulling teeth.

Apathy, brought on by eating too much pizza, makes for poor puns…