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Joshua Alan Doetsch

~ Author & Scrivnomancer

Joshua Alan Doetsch

Tag Archives: Vincent Price

Where you from?

29 Wednesday Aug 2012

Posted by scrivnomancer in Uncategorized

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

"Where I'm From", bogs, Chicago, childhood home, coyote howls, double-decker pizza, Dunkin' Donuts coffee, everglades, family, George Ella Lyon, grandma and grandpa, grandparents, great grandparents, Illinois, island of bones, Jack O' Lanters, Key West, mark the magician, memories, nostalgia, October Country, playing card games, poem, pumpkin pie, skull beads, St. Anthony, sugar skulls, tropics, vacation, Vincent Price, whence I came, writing exercise

There is a writing exercise you might try over HERE. It takes a George Ella Lyon poem, “Where I’m from,” and turns it into a sort of advanced ad-libs, where by you fill in some info and describe the places/people/events that formed you. My attempt is featured below. If you try your hand at it, post the result in the comments. I’d like to see where you’re from.

EDIT: Thanks to Martine for showing this to me.

-WHERE I’M FROM-
by Joshua Alan Doetsch

I am from the goblin roads, by the bog, where early A.M. mists tickle hands hanging out passenger windows, a thousand degrees colder than the surrounding summer night—from Dunkin’ Donuts coffee and the grinnin’ skull-bead bracelets my mother makes for me.

I am from the house with the shrieking-turquoise garage door, the tropical biosphere interior, impossible anomaly of the Midwest—waxen, Vincent Price sideshow bedroom—glamour photography by dad. From the wooded, backyard deck, the iron fire pit, listening to audio fiction, punctuated by coyote calls that sound like the second, fifth, and ninth steps of going insane.

I am from the whispering leaves, the groans-by-night corn.

I am from Jack O’ Lanterns picked fresh from the patch, at Great Grandma and Grandpa’s farm and playing card games by candlelight through tornado warnings, from my father, Mark the Magician; and my mother, Renee the Potter; and my brother, Nick the Pirate; and my sister, Danielle the Scream Queen—and every cross-hatched eccentricity—Bradford to Bradford—Doetsch by Doetsch.

I am from photographing gators in the Glades of Ever and walking ghost tours in Key West, which is really Cayo Hueso, which is really “Island of Bones,” which is really full of t-shirt shops and frozen drinks.

From the prayers to St. Anthony to find all things lost and the chewed stubs of the whole carrots left out for Santa’s reindeer the night before.

I am from the Catholic cross, the confessional, the Body and Blood. And then from the rum prayers, the happy macabre, the sugar skulls that hummed voodoo hymns to me on every Caribbean pilgrimage.

I’m from October Country, Chicago’s shadow, and Ray Bradbury dreams remixed—pumpkin pie and double-decker pizza that was divine until the restaurant owner was knifed by her son.

From the great grandparents, Lord and Lady of the Patch, who contrived a big sleep of exhaust, in a car in a parking lot—when their minds and bodies began to go—together forever, and the other great grandma, Mima, who was a writer, who told me to write, who died while I was away, waking to our van surrounded by bison in Yellowstone.

I am from inside my head, where I hang it all so prettily upon my hueso walls.

Strange Love or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Twitter

27 Sunday May 2012

Posted by scrivnomancer in Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

#vss, crossroads, flash fiction, fork in the road, Hemingway, micro-ficiton, mood swings, Nicola Tesla, tweet stories, twitter, twitter fic, video game writing, Vincent Price, winds of change

So.

Life has been a burgoo of strange/wonderful/painful/exciting/frightening/unexpected complications and crossroads.

[REMINDER: Fill in revealing details HERE. Or just ask my one-eyed cat. She’s heard it all.]

I’ve been under the sway of intense mood swings lately. That’s not me. Not usually.

My moods are steady. “Distant” and “detached” are not quite the right words…but they might be second or third cousins to the right word. I’m usually the other end of the barometer—people say things like, “You’re stressed too? We’re doomed!” I have my own peculiar set of triggers—we all do—but a lot of the day-to-day (and even not so day-to-day) stuff, that sets many people on edge, rolls off me like water droplets.

Not so, lately.

I know people that swing on these moods. Tempestuous as they get, they seem practiced. I’m not. I’m stumbling like a toddler with an assault shotgun—doing all of those predictable things (even indulgent blog posts!). Part of me is present, going through it. Part of me is removed, fascinated, watching myself play with these new, terrible toys—figuring out which bits might be useful for writing fiction—shouting out commentary.

“Wait, you’re not really going to do that, are you? That is so cliche!”

My instinct is to be outwardly pleasant.

I can’t tell if this is adding new depths to my personality…or just undermining me.

Right. I’m done with it for now. Time to kill the little darlings. Time to get back to shop talk, the craft, the laboratory.

140 Characters In Search of a Story

If I was training someone to write video game text, I would have them write twitter fic. These are stories in 140 characters or less. It’s a sort of narrative haiku in prose. More than the finished product, it’s a good exercise. Write one twitter story a day. It strengthens certain muscles, tightens economy of words. Cramming a story into an impossible space is a logic puzzle. It teaches problem-solving skills. You’ll find a way.

It is all about using the spaces between words, the implied story, showing dots and letting the reader imagine the connections. Want an example? Ernest Hemingway wrote one:

For sale: baby shoes, never worn.

See that? He gives you six words and lets you do all the heavy lifting. But I know what you’re really asking: “Hemingway wrote twitter fic nearly a hundred years before twitter was invented?”

I can only deduce that Hemingway forced Nicola Tesla to take him back in time so he could punch out a T-Rex—igniting a most unlikely bromance and a series of adventures through all time and space. It’s the only reasonable assumption.

Back to twitter fiction. Write one story a day. I’m starting up again. It’s like doing writer crunches. In game writing you have to learn to make do with limited space and arbitrary constraints. Making do is nice, better still if you can reconcile—make the limitations your own—use them to force a line of thought more creative than you might have conjured on a limitless canvas.

Get a twitter account. Check out the #vss hashtag to see what others are coming up with and post your own. You might find it addictive. It’s a level of instant gratification that writing does not often allow.

Not sure how to start? Try summing up a novel you’ve read in 140 characters. This is also a nice way to jot down ideas you have for larger stories. The advantage here is that the note is already put into narrative form—I find this sometimes gives the idea a certain amount of pent-up velocity when I come back to it. If jotting a story note is like planting a seed—shaping that note into a micro-ficiton is like planting that seed in a packet of nutrients and miracle growth.

Here are seven examples of my own:

  • She broke up with me at recess. I worked so hard – it was so good, my valentine. The coronary arteries were perfectly to scale.

  • My doctor told me what to do. He said: “Oo ee oo ah ah ting tang wala-wala bing bang.” I then realized I was suffering a stroke.

  • Clutching flowers and Hallmark card, Oedipus fingered empty ocular cavities in the blind dark. Worst. Holiday. Ever.

  • You can hear it nightly. In the flat over the arcade, a dwarf plays sad plastic kazoo nocturnes to a crumpled photo of her.

  • Exiled for not choosing sides, he roams hospitals, watches kids flatline to glimpse Home opening for their tiny souls.

  • Venereal. 100% lethal. Palpitation. Pain. The tyranny of a sex drive. The living apocalypse had come to the zombie kingdom. They moaned.

  • “You look so familiar,” I say. “Yeah…you’ve been screwing my wife,” says my new dentist, holding something sharp. The sedatives take hold.

This Way to the Egress…

Also, happy birthday, Vincent Price, you magnificent bastard!

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