As I type, Lenore is devouring a group of mice. I’ll give the official mouse count later (horrifying!). I am two steps short of heading out the door and up to Eureka (be on campus around 11). I will be there for the weekend.

Oh….but my shoulder is all messed up. I don’t know why…just woke up in pain. The mice are yelling at me, saying I shouldn’t complain.

You’re right guys…could always be worse.

Yesterday I was exhausted (but I said I’d explain why). Wednesday night, I and others (including Daina, Dave, Adrian, and Steve) went to go see Neil Gaiman (my favorite living author) do a signing and some reading in Chicago.

I went, even though I had a draft of the prologue to my epic poem thesis (I was turning it in as a short story) due in my short fiction class on Thursday. Well, the lines were long for the signing and we left Chicago at about midnight. Rather than drive all the way back to Springfield, I thought it better to do the writing and then the driving – so I took Dave and Adrian to Naperville.

At their condo I madly typed on my laptop to finish the prologue (starting at about 3am). I’ve been planning and working on this thesis (outlines and free writing and research) for quite some time…and this was not the ideal situation I had envisioned I’d be in as I started this monstrous project. Oh well.

I had a passable draft at about 6:30 am and left the condo quietly and drove to Springfield (a little delirious but surprisingly awake). I was not so awake when I got to Springfield at 10 or so. I napped for an hour and a half, went straight to work and then straight to the afore mentioned short fiction class to turn in and read whatever it was I’d written…

…and they really liked it. I was surprised…surprised that I liked it as well. I don’t know, some mix of desperation, caffeine madness, and maybe inspiration at meeting a hero…and that’s what I got. Desperation finishes a lot of stories.

So thanks for letting me stay, Dave and Adrian. Hey…if this epic thing ever goes anywhere, you can say it all started in your dinning room.

I did get sleep last night.

I’m at work and exhausted. Too exhausted to explain why. Too lazy to type much. So instead, here are two bits of things I put down in the comments section of other live journal users – two things I decided to dig up and pin to my own journal. One is a set of instructions for improving a very practical skill. The other is a brief history of our world (according to me anyway). If you learn anything…it’s entirely coincidental.

CACKLING: The Subtle Art
A good maniacal cackle is a more subtle art than one might, at first, ponder. There is, on the surface dimension, the overt substance, the laugh itself – start with a god “Mwa” sound. And then let go. MWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAAA!

But subtly comes in the finer points of execution. Rhythm is important. Your syllables should be slow and discrete at the beginning and end of the laugh…but should jumble manically in the interim. Like so – slow-slow-fastfastfastfastfastfast-slow-slow (or some variation thereof).

Subtlety in one’s artifice also manifests in the physical manifestation one brings to the cackle. You don’t just laugh with the mouth, but also with your fingers, let them stretch out, talon like, and spasm. That’s it.

Now, configure your posture to fit the laugh. Some stand up straight and allow their heads to shoot back and release the cackle, perfectly vertical, into space and sky, like a demonic PEZ dispenser. Others prefer to hunch over and cackle with an undulating spine, a simulacrum of Igor or some deranged hobgoblin. Either way, remember that the shoulders can also laugh, like the mouth, and, yay, like the fingers. Pump the shoulders thusly. Yes!

Keep practicing and rehearsing and you too can have a cackle that will curdle milk and form angry mobs in any small village of the Middle Ages…or Texas.

MY HISTORY OF THE WORLD: Part I
As for Adam and Eve…they had a few bumps in their relationship all right. First of all, there had to be some uncomfortable conversations in the morning, about Adam’s first wife (Eve was the second), Lilith. Lilith got bored with missionary sex and tried being the dom. in the bedroom – “Save a horse, ride a cowboy!” – she would yell.

Adam, though turned on in the back of his mind, could not handle the stronger woman and said, “Uh…God…do something!” Well, actually, Adam had one of those S/M masks on so it just sounded like, “Uh…uhhhd…ooo….mming.”

But God is God and he has super telepathy and he freed Adam from the ceiling harness and banished Lilith from Eden and into Darkness. Well, Eden was a posh place and Darkness didn’t have the kind of zip code one would brag about and Lilith did not take this all very well. She shrieked and keened, wailed and keened and transformed into a winged, blood sucking, child eating monster of ancient Hebrew myth and nightmare. She swooped out of the sky to devour her victims. She became the first feminist. Most modern feminists don’t have wings or eat people (just the really militant ones).

Then her black womb spawned countless monsters. Many of these were put up for adoption…but none of them turned out very well – you know there’s little hope for monsters in the state’s crappy child care system, inept public schools, and sluggish bureaucracy.

So Adam and Eve had talks about all this. Then there was the whole apple incident. And they each blamed the other.

“You gave me the apple!”
“You didn’t have to eat it.”
“Why were you talking to that snake?”
“You never take me out to do nice things anymore.”
“Holy shit! We’re naked!”
“We are…must be cold…”

And then Adam and Eve were kicked out of Eden and had to stay in Darkness and Lilith laughed, but not for very long cause she had lots of monsters to feed and the social worker was due that day and the support check was lost in the mail.

Adam and Eve stuck together and had kids (hardly any monsters). But then their sons, Cain and Able, got into a scuffle. Able always ate meat and sacrificed meat to God. But Cain always used vegetables. He was the first vegan. God was not a vegan (he made cows to be eaten…that’s why he filled them with meat). So Cain killed Able and became the first militant Vegan.

God punished Cain by putting a hideous zit on his forehead (the “mark”). And anyone that tried to kill Cain would know that the zit would pop and curse them a hundred fold. So Cain found no relief and it would be some time before Oxy the Zit Zapper (worshiped by the ancient Mesopotamians).

So it was quite a twisted family and God invented Jerry Springer so they’d have a place to go and, ever since, Jerry Springer has shown the monsters and the freaks and the outcasts (many of whom are the children of Lilith). Last week, they had a big, family reunion episode. But Lilith swooped down and ate Jerry Springer.

THE END

Someone once wrote that Hell is a blank screen. Surely I must have sinned something terrible because I spent a better part of the evening in Hell. But redemption lies in the clicking of keys and busy fingers…so I exited Hell one word at a time.

A new story is due, this week, in my short fiction class (as well as an upcoming reading). For both, I’m writing the prologue to my thesis. That’s because, this week, I make the big shift to pretty much working on this epic thing (the one I conned my committee into thinking I can accomplish) full time. I’ve known, from the start, what the first and last sentence of this thing is…it’s just a matter of connecting them and meeting in the middle.

Agony. But, I got the first bit of it written. Which I guess is a big step. At some point you have to roll up your sleeves and realize that art is equal parts craft. That means work. That means just doing it. Daydreaming and waiting for inspiration to strike is all romantic sounding and well and good…but it’s usually a line of BULLSHIT…and, as I illustrated in the last post, writer’s are born to make things up and we can just as easily lie to ourselves (“I need more research before I can write” “I’m not in the proper mood” “I didn’t get enough sleep to do this chapter justice”). A good story is made up of dreaming and work (and caffeine…LOTS and lots of delicious caffeine).

Not to badmouth dreaming…I’m slanted more to the dreamin/art side of things – I’ve just come to realize the importance of craft (otherwise you have all fluff and no skill) and that’s what I’ve tried to hone here in Springfield (though laziness often wins out…but the teachers keep giving me good grades and so I keep being lazy). I already know dreaming…I learned how a long time ago…the trick isn’t so much learning how to dream, as it is not forgetting how, despite “growing up.”

That all being said…I have a lot of research to do this month (HA!). I may have just lied to myself. And I believed me.

In news today…GIANT SQUIDS ARE TAKING OVER THE WORLD.

Also, HERE’S AN ARTICLE by the CBLDF (Comic Book League Defense Fund) on how the current and lasting administration will affect free speech and what someone might do to help. The CBLDF is an organization that raises money to help fight bullshit cases against artists, forms of expressions, or poor comic shop owners that face angry mobs of closet Nazis. Their website is HERE.

Your Superhero Persona by couplandesque
Your Name
Superhero Name	Mullet Man
Super Power	Ability To Fly
Enemy	Trailer Trash Tom
Mode Of Transportation	Giant Hamster Named Skippy
Weapon	Celine Dion Albums
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You are Spider-Man!

What Marvel Superhero are you?
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I sent in my contract to Raven Magazine for my poem “Poe Goes to the Singles Bar.” I finished some other things, final straws, breaking the last, resisting camels’ backs (don’t tell PETA) and allowing me to enter into my Thesis crunch time. November sees me writing my prologue to my epic poem and researching. December will find me a hermit, typing away and suffering cabin fever (sans cabin).

So [gulp] here we go. This is the kind of moment where I start thinking about WRITING – pondering and meditating on the WHY’S – praying that I know the HOW’S. Writers often write about writing, and the clever ones work it into their fiction. I thought about a passage from Shakespeare’s, The Tempest. Shakespeare is really good at hiding essays in character speeches. Sometimes he comments on theatre or himself or his art…

“I have be-dimm’d
The noon-tide sun, call’d forth the mutinous winds,
And ‘twixt the green sea and the azur”d vault
Set roaring war; to the dread rattling thunder
Have I giv’n fire, and rifted Jove’s stout oak
With his own bolt; the strong-bas’d promontory
Have I made shake, and by the spurs pluck’d up
The pine and cedar: graves at my command
Have wak’d their sleepers; oped, and let ’em forth
By my so potent art. But this rough magic
I here abjure; and when I have requir’d
Some heavenly music, which even now I do,
(To work mine end upon their senses that
This airy charm is for) I’ll break my staff,
Bury it certain fadoms in the earth,
And deeper than did ever plummet sound,
I’ll drown my book.”
-Shakespeare, The Tempest

Here, the Bard not only announces his retiring from his “art,” but comments on the power a writer invokes, within his worlds. A writer becomes a goddess in her world. Or…maybe not quite. A writer can conjure storms, command physics, and raise historical figures from the dead…but sometimes a character or a plot moves at its own steam and the wise writer does not force it…but directs it, not like a god then, but perhaps like a sorcerer (like Prospero).

Attempting to bulster my confidence for the heavey writing ahead, I sat down and thought about what things I’ve done with my so potent art:

I have commanded Death deities both young and old;
Animated bulbous pumpkins into stalking horrors;
Found, then lost, the key to all boogey men;
Raised Greek gods from torpor;
Played the strings of a guitar that brings apocalypse;
Put Oedipus on a day time talk show;
Turned Oedipus into a teddy bear, cutting out his button eyes;
Grown a black tree that transmits Halloween;
Broadcasted the Sphinx’s riddles over pirated radio waves;
Collapsed reality around a weary house wife;
Let the Devil put her spin on her story in 666 words;
Discovered the mystical truth of what happens when one graduates Undecided;
Fried pesky vampires on a giant bug zapper;
Lost two enemy archetypes in time and space;
Found and freed a lost angel from a hidden passage of Dante’s dreams;
Sailed in a craft constructed by the dreams of desperate children;
Seen through the eyes of sacrificial crickets;
Gave requiem to a literary figure who got a raw deal;
Explained, to a phone sex girl, why Oprah is a Goth Queen of dark fate;
Cursed a poor soul with the power to “smell dead people;”
Forced the monsters under my bed to show respect;
Resurrected Poe for the sole purpose of picking up women at a night club;
Summoned, with voodoo prayers, a dark feathered muse who would not tell me the truth,
By my so potent art. But I shall never abjure.
My staff, with the voodoo-skull smile, I shall never break.
My book, with ever-empty pages, I shall never close.

“The next century’s task will be to rediscover its gods.
-Andre Malraux

“We have the right, and the obligation to tell old stories in our own ways, because they are our stories.”
-Neil Gaiman

Someone recently had a discussion with me about how “everything how every story has been told.” In answer I can only offer the ten thousand different ways one might say even the simplest thought (with different lenses of genre and style) or reusable, versatile nature of words like fuck. There are always new stories because there are always old stories that people forgot. And then, thinking about that and my potent art – I feel better, anxiety banished, and I have to smile at the fact that, though we are told not to lie as children, I aspire to enter a profession where I get paid to do so.

“That’s my story and I’m stickin’ to it
That’s my life and all that I’ve got
Call me a liar, call me a writer
Believe me or not”
-Jimmy Buffett, “That’s My Story and I’m Stickin’ To It”

“Writers are liars my dear. Surely you have realized that by now?”
-Neil Gaiman, “Calliope,” The Sandman

“Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency…to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is worth any number of old ladies.”
-William Faulkner

Now…I don’t think that last one is entirely true…at least, I don’t think it is in my case. Then again, if the quote above it is correct, that is exactly what I’d say to you…

Well, fiendish thoughts concluded, I think I should get to bed. Sun’s coming up and potent arts (I just love typing that) need sleep. Time to end transmission kids…

Ujournal’s agonizing death brought me over to Livejournal…but apparently Ujournal did something redemptive in its past life…as it is reincarnated at http://www.aboutmylife.net. They’re still pulling files, slowly, from the old corpse into the new form – data-plasma transplant. I’ll be doing the same, taking those entries and bringing them into my live journal. Not that I think there’s a line of people seeking to sift through a couple years of old posts, but I’m glad to have them back.

I’ll start with my first post and move up, starting with (9-3-02)…

Ok…took the zombie test. Voodoo seems the appropriate means of defense in this type of situation. But notice…when I spelled it in the incorrect way (“voodoo” from all those stories and movies), I only had a like a 6% chance of survival. But, when I showed the proper respect and gave the correct spelling of the word (“vodou”) then my chances went up to 88% Respect a loa spirit a day, keeps the zombies at bay.

How long would you last in a zombie movie by zombi357
Username
Weapon of choice
Friend who turned that you had to kill	j_rock76
Chance you will survive: 88%
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Sorry Jeramie…Papa Ghedi calls you back to the grave…

Steven Wright is coming to the auditorium that I work at (at the ticket office). He’s a comedian (had bit parts in many movies, like the pilot in So I Married and Ax Murderer and “couch guy” in Half Baked). We find out, that he has this clause in his contract, that says that all midgets have to be seated in the front row…no kidding. Of course, we are a theatre auditorium and sell most of our tickets pre show, over the phone…which makes one wonder how we are supposed to discover these midgets. I volunteered to ask every customer over the phone if they were a midget (“Mam, you sound kind of short…are you able to ride all the rides at Six Flags?”). My boss said that would not be necessary.

Election day has come and gone…and what is there to say? More than I have the energy for here…maybe a later post.

Today I bought a new, illustrated edition of some of Poe’s stories and poems with an introduction by Neil Gaiman (my favorite living author)…so impulse buy and bombs and credit cards away!

Looking through the pages, I got to thinking the dark tales Poe writes and the things I try and write and the “Whys?” and the “Isn’t that morbid?” and other questions besides. There are dark things that stalk Poe’s world. Ture. “There were much of the beautiful, much of the wanton, much of the Bizarre, something of the terrible, and not a little of that which might have excited disgust” (Poe, “Mask of the Red Death”). But that isn’t the ultimate point, the morbid and the grotesque, those are just some of the trappings but not the ultimate end. Poe, more than anything, wrote about beauty. In his easay about his writing style in “The Raven” he admitted that poetic beauty, not morbidity, was the reason he chose his subject matter for the poem – that, “The death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world” (Poe, “The Philosophy of Composition”).

Election day…I feel like posting news bits (mostly borrowed from Neil Gaiman’s blog). What is happening in this crazy world…

Well, there was a local republican group accusing their apponent in a mayoral race of being “satanic” because he writes horror fiction (story HERE). Never mind that “satanic” does not mean “scary stuff” but implies having something, at least remotely, to do with…Satan.

Obviously these particular horror hating republicans are not aware of the GOTHS FOR BUSH website.

And for all you Lord of the Rings fans out there…did you know that Hobbits did exist? Well…sort of. There’s been a discovery of a “little people” – fossils of a small, relative of man that existed at the same time man did…for a while, and may have facilitated world folklore of “little people.” Check the article HERE and ANOTHER ARTICLE HERE.

Well that’s the news for today – the little Republican who cried Satan – Bush supporters in black lipstick and trench coats – and Hobbits in geological history.

And one final…happy bit. A few weeks ago, I did (at the very last minute) a paper on Shakespeare (I may have wined about it on this very journal). Well…got it back today…expecting to have to rewrite it…and I managed an A.

Thank God…I was ready to change my ways and work harder and everything…