Shrinking is up and viewable! Much thanks to the BCPL and I can't wait to attend the Toast Among Ghosts celebration next year.

http://www.foundationforbcpl.org/events/a-toast-among-ghosts/shrinking/

Despite an apparent penchant for neglecting blogs, I am indeed alive!

New projects underway, old projects finished up, other old projects spurned, and a desperate need for income has made me begin hunting for a *gasp* legitimate job to perform on the side while I write and so on and so forth.

I recently finished the paranormal suspense/horror novel The Book Without a Name, and in other news I won the Tales of the Dead horror short story contest (The Tales of the Dead, http://www.foundationforbcpl.org/about-us/news/tales-of-the-dead-contest/ https://www.facebook.com/events/680678415412907/permalink/705694932911255/#)! I got to perform a reading around a fire pit over in Reisterstown, Maryland at the Toast Among Ghosts celebration of Edgar Allen Poe, and my story "Shrinking" will be published on the bcpl website.

I will post the link to Shrinking when they publish it/when I manage to find it.

In addition, as I'm entering the "Dear Lucky Agent" contest hosted by Chuck Sambuchino at Writer's Digest, and judged by the venerable Alec Shane, I am including a link supporting the contest! It's a free contest for writers of thriller and horror in which your work may get reviewed by an agent. Which is pretty much the dream.  http://tinyurl.com/zagnp4r

Wyte

A significantly appreciable time later, if you will pardon the emphatic redundancy, I finished the second draft of Wyte. And now for something completely different (and then returning to hack it to scraps with the murderous machete of editing).

I'll just pretend like there wasn't a gap of two months without posts. I'll update as things become relevant or read-worthy, or as frequently as I can.

Other projects to work on include The Book Without a Name and Walk in the Park, possibly Blessing. Also, I may have a horror short story if I can ever figure a solid ending to it, which I suppose I would post here.

In other news, I have: 
        -Rediscovered Chipotle 
        -Attempted paddle boarding (the garish beacon of my freakishly pale, grub-like skin reflecting the sun likely caused satellite disruption) 
        -Become deeply enamored with red box
        -An anniversary tomorrow with my wife. It's been a good year. Perhaps the night shift-induced isolation has inflicted sufficient stockholm syndrome on her, but either way she has been remarkably understanding and patient with my constant nitpicking over obscure details and my desire to slink away and write instead of attend family functions. I also have a library set up. It is magnificent.

In the realms of book-reading I have discovered that Simple Plan is a very well written thriller by Scott Smith and The Road, by Cormac McCarthy is as pretentious as... well... using words like magnificent to describe a bunch of half filled bookshelves of odds and ends that are crammed into a room more notable for its catacomb heaps of empty water bottles and the dusty corpses of vanquished frozen lasagnas. McCarthy is a fantastic writer at times, but I can only take so many. Sentence fragments. Dramatic. Emphatic. Systematic and metaphoric. Portions. Before it becomes so disjointed that immersion is impossible.

In still other news, a lab mouse is an efficient, effective snack from a caloric point of view. Feeling a little sluggish at the gym? One mouse contains about 40 calories, but approximately 4 grams of protein. This is not to endorse or encourage eating wild animals without first consulting a psychiatrist.

Moved

In the wild uncertainty of a world neither known nor understood I can draw a great comfort from the few constants that exist.

Death. Taxes. Miserable interactions with internet providers.

I moved into my new house. It's pretty great. The move has wreaked havoc on my writing time table, however, and on my blog upkeep. Just getting back into the swing of around two thousand words a day. Sometimes even the right ones. Sometimes in the right order. Other times, not so much. But wrong words can be fun too.

Fortunately, in my time away, I've been spared a deluge of topics that are mind crushingly worthless, such as Jenner's genitals (does it matter? I'm not having sex with them), emerging political campaigns (does it matter? No matter what, one of them is going to screw me) and trending hashtags (it doesn't matter.).

Instead, I've been spending my days filled with moving things, accidentally stabbing sofas, trying not to antagonize my brilliant gorgeous and supremely forgiving wife who loves that sofa, and the plight of the lemming. And occasionally, actually managing to read and write.

They're not suicidal, you know. Lemmings. They're just prone to anxiety and if you scare them enough, you can make them stampede in extremely dangerous places.

Some wrong words on a wrong story instead of anything useful, however, are enclosed below. Feel free to skip ahead if you don't feel like reading a tragic story of love found, love lost, ambition and defecation. Any resemblance to my wife's life experience is unintentional* and not at all a real thing*.

The door creaks open on worn hinges, barely a sound disturbing the blackness contained. The room is empty, dark and cool. Vague box-like shapes form the few minimalist contents there-in, and the wash of light from the hallway illuminates only clean floor tiles and sterile white walls. She is alone. She hurriedly slips inside, a quiet anxiety fueling her steps. As her foot crosses the threshold the lights snap into life, taught with a pulsing fluorescent glow that makes everything seem dead and false, washed out, a simulacrum of life. The heavy wooden door softly groans shut behind her, letting out a firm, audible thud as it finds its place. A smile steals a sinuous path along her lips.

“Hellooooo!” She calls out, to no response. A totally vacant bathroom, one that has not been despoiled in the past fifteen minutes, or however long it takes the automatic lighting system to turn itself off. Jackpot.

            With a manic grin she spins around, her hands up in the air, all hips and legs, frenetically flailing her way through a dance she does not know and is pleasantly certain that no one has ever given a name. Her years of training as a dancer lower their head in shame.

            “Hit me baby, one more time!” Oh yes. She went there. The song may have been over ten years old, but fuck ‘em. A true classic never dies. Her smile splits open and surges into a laugh that echoes off the empty stalls and walls.

She flings open the handicap corner stall, wipes for a feverish few moments at the toilet seat with a spare piece of single-ply toilet paper and tosses it into the feminine hygiene receptacle, humming with haphazard enthusiasm along to the song. Even the hygiene box is empty except for the newly wrinkled scrap. College custodians hard at work. She adorns the door’s garment hook with her worn college book bag, packed to unforgiving capacity with worn college books. With a tug, her yoga pants and undergarments no longer restrain her and she plops down on the clean cold white.

She is alone in her sterile kingdom, seated on her porcelain throne, humming with deranged delight. The little wonders see us through. She relaxes, in no rush at all, easing into her processes when a mighty sound blasts across the bathroom.

“Snrrrrrrrrrrrrkgh!” 

It is something between a mighty groan and the fluid garbled inhalations of someone with an acute case of tuberculosis. Her humming stops instantly.

“Wha?” She manages. Waits. 

No sound returns to her but the dull echo of her voice. She peeks under the door. Nothing. No incriminating feet, no judgmental glimpse of boots aiming at her, turned in frowning disapproval at her conduct as someone gazes in to view her shame. No large hooves indicating a reasonable source of such a snorting bellow. She is forced to consider, with grim dread, that the sound had originated from herself, unfelt, unknown, and unwilled.

Back to ground zero on the relaxation process, she notes. Tentatively, she lowers her shoulders from their stressed, vulture hunch and drifts back toward contentment.

“Don’t you know? I still believe, still believe!” She sings to herself, but quieter, more reserved, bursting in with the final chorus line, not in words, but in humming once more. Surely more acceptable.

“SNRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRKGH!” 

She catches herself on the toilet paper dispenser as she topples from the toilet seat, her need to utilize the toilet mercifully and instantaneously quenched.

“The fu-hell-shi-what?” She stammers out, rising to her feet and backing away into the corner, upsetting the toilet brush.

Then she hears it. It starts out low, and starts to grow. Not the Whos down in Whoville, however, no sir. A low, guttural, waxing rush, like waves against a beach. She ever so quietly eases open the door, as if silence now will conceal her. She creeps out, her soft shoes meeting the floor. She stops, looks down, and tugs up her yoga pants. Her eyes navigate the sliver separating the neighboring stall door from the stall foundation, peeking in, checking for any sneaky, hiding inhabitants or lurking, snorting serial killers. Whatever kind of person would commit such a sound. It takes her a moment to discern the tangle of hair and knees and drool from which the sound burst forth, a low, steadily rising, steadily wettening rush of air.

A tiny fellow student is perched on the toilet, open text book in her lap, pale legs bare but shrouded in her tangled messy hair. Her head dangles low against her shapeless chest, her mouth gapes, pooling drool on the open book. Our heroine, realizing she is no longer alone, feels her heart stammer in surprise. Perhaps she should wake the girl. Maybe she should check her vitals. She’s studied nursing for the last three years, perhaps the sleeping girl has stimulated her vagal nerve and passed out from the prodigious effort of pooping. From the unconscious, cavernous mouth a mighty, belching snore rips forth in a tremendous surge of sound and power that betrays its owner's diminutive size.

“SNRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRKGH!”

She takes a step back automatically. In near-reverence she creeps quietly, ever so carefully out the door, letting it slip shut behind her, back into the hallway, a revenant from the sleeping beast’s domain.

Hours later, she finds herself alone once more, driving her tiny blue Hyundai Accent with its forest of air fresheners and a spare pink stethoscope looped over the rear view mirror, howling out Britney Spears to hell and the heavens. There is a two second lull between songs on her CD (It’s not as if vintage Britney Spears hits the radio anymore, no chance of catching it there) which hearkens her back to an earlier time that day. 

She thinks of the messy tiny balled up girl sitting on a toilet, having quite possibly slept through her finals. Having quiet possibly had a brain aneurysm from the force of trying to pass her bowels and now was some necrotic terror waiting in an empty bathroom for the next falsely confident person to enter and plop down beside her.

“Ah, shit,” she shrugs, thrusting her fist up at the ceiling as she double taps rewind. “One more time!”

Insomniacs Anonymous

One need never buy alcohol again. There's a far cheaper alternative that requires only a little patience.

Not hooch, although that kind of fits the bill as well. Toss some apples in a plastic bag in the back of a toilet and you can home make your own jailhouse moonshine if you're willing to wait. 

Although technically, moonshine more frequently involves corn as an ingredient and tastes like rubbing alcohol, while I can only assume that apple whiskey tastes like a hint of rustic pome mixed with dysentery and regret. Of course either of those alternatives would be illegal on the moral grounds that the government cannot properly tax you for poisoning yourself. For your own safety, of course.

Find yourself not in the illegal substance trade but want to experience the same results?

Have a hankering for occasional euphoria? Blackouts? Temporary loss of brain function and balance? Slurred, fumbling words and occasional delusions that border on full-out hallucination? Want to bolster a defiance of social mores? Want to get into more car accidents, but with less guilt? 

Rhetorical questions, of course, because we *all* want that.

Sleep deprivation is the way to go. 

Also, it helps with creativity and makes most social events more bearable, keeps various mental maladies mitigated and makes jokes far more humorous. I'm not exactly a communal butterfly, and the larger the group, the more bolstering it takes. I'm pretty sloshed on it at the moment, so I apologize if I meander.

I'm off in a little town for my wife's sister's wedding. Big crowd, remote place. A lot of older folks, and religious ones of the more judgmental inclination too. Mutterings of hellfire and damnation make a curious backdrop to vivid greens, sticky heat, open water and blue skies. 

"Provincial" is an accurate description.

Helluva view though, and really quite peaceful.

Wedding is in a few hours and figured I could either write or sleep, so I'm writing. And, by the sleep--deprivation metaphor-- I suppose I'm pre-gaming as well. I am not designed for crowds.

Almost done the first draft of Wyte, a full length horror novel about a group of amateur, middle-aged adventurers who wish to escape a generally unfulfilling office life and add the Yamal Peninsula in northern Russia to the list of locations they've seen and conquered. They find themselves confronted with a nature far greater and more terrible than the one they understood, and a presence that is not only aware of them but happy to pursue and conquer them in turn.

Been working on a bunch of other projects too, but the straight-forwardness of Wyte has been incredibly fun to write, and I think it will be good to read, when done. Not as much humor as some of the projects, but a more classical aim at horror.

First draft is hardly the same thing as finished product, but it's progress. From then on, it'll take even more time and patience. Everything with writing does. Patience and a willingness to be entirely cheap. So screw the bars and expensive liquors that taste like the arse end of a hippo, those are only for the grossly wealthy and impatient. Wait a while, instead.

READING LIST: HORROR

I have previously noted an enthusiasm for horror books, movies, stories, and even the word "horror." It is a pretty word and has a nice phlegmatic sound to it. 

(Scary things)

In that vein, I decided to make a list of a few recommendations. I will attempt to avoid any sort of spoilers that could not be gleaned from the cover, name, or most basic plot summary.

Not listed in any particular order, they're all worth reading. I may extend the list if I come up with any new ones.

READING LIST:

The Ruins, Scott Smith

  

    Summary:

      Group of friends go into the Mexican wilderness and end up trapped in some ruins with something that is rather inclined toward ruining their vacation.

      This is not the best horror story I've read, but it's one of the most fun to read in all its grueling glory. Classic horror. Lovecraftian. The characters are beautifully crafted and the plot itself is a fun take on the "five go out" idea. Plus the antagonist is pleasingly malevolent. Plot holes and all, it's certainly worth reading. Movie was fine, but they kind of screwed up a few parts. Namely the characters. And the ending. 

Cujo, Stephen King

      Summary: 

      A massive dog goes rabid and attacks people.

         There are so many King potentials to mention (Carrie, Shining, Salem's Lot, Dead Zone if that counts as horror, Cell, the Stand etc) that it is hard to choose one. Chose Cujo because hot damn. It hits hard at the end and sticks with you throughout. King has his shortcomings, but when he delivers, he makes it count. 

Note: this is a less supernatural-based story than most of King's stuff.

         

The Cobra Event, Richard Preston

       Summary: 

       A bio-weapon is being prepped for deployment in New York City.

       The man is brilliant. Unlike most of the others, this is scary because of the real-world nature of it. Yes, it suffers from an agenda, but the agenda is pretty freaking scary in itself. Semi-thriller, but due to the horrific brutality of even chapter one, I have to say it's horror.

Haunted, Chuck Palahniuk

     Summary:

     A bunch of would-be writers tell the stories of their own flaws while competing for limelight.

     Hands down strongest impact a horror book has had on me. Not at all my favorite horror, but it will make you see the world in fifty shades of jade. Palahniuk puts such disgust and loathing for humanity that it seeps into your skin and makes your stomach turn. And research. Much research too. He's a helluva journalist when he's not scarring minds. "Guts" is the most famous part since it frequently makes people swoon (is swooning still a term?), but the rest just keeps digging deeper and deeper into the depravity that resides within us all. Maybe not in such extremes, but it's there. If you do read it, I would recommend you sit alone in a room and read part of it out loud to yourself. See how far you make it before you feel uncomfortable.

Dracula, Bram Stoker

     Summary: 

     Come on, you know what it's about.

     This is, oddly, my most hesitant entry on the list. It's an exceptional book with a magnitude of impact on the genre that is impressive, but it does have its short comings. It's tough to read, it's full of more latent and generally misogynistic sexual imagery than Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams, and it's sometimes hard to really decide why you're rooting for some of the "good" guys. On the plus side it created one of the most iconic and awesome creatures, and it's just a damn good book. Genuinely creepy.

I Am Legend, Richard Matheson

     Summary: 

     A lone man struggles to survive following the apocalypse. 

     One of my all time favorites. He is an exceptional writer, has a wickedly keen sense of what makes a good story, and IAL has one of the best reversal of expectations that I've seen. Everything he writes is drenched in bitterness, but it rings true to his worlds. Plus, he makes vampires seem... er... real? Or at least plausible. Yes, yes, the movie is cute (mostly because of Will Smith singing Bob Marley to a dog) but it has very little in common with the book. Different plot, characters, setting, morale and theme. Odd that Smith would do that. IAmRobot

And the immortal line: "Once I thought [birds] sang because everything was right with the world[...] I know now I was wrong. They sing because they’re feeble-minded."

John Dies at the End, David Wong (Jason Pargin)

      Summary: 

      I don't... I really cant sum this one up. It should be read. The closest I could get is: sentient drug screws with the user's dimensional ties, but that does it a disservice. It's so much more.

      I tentatively call this horror. My usual regimen of horror doesn't include laughing until it hurts, utter mind-savaging weirdness, or penis jokes. But in the immortal words of Robin Williams: "when in doubt, go for the dick joke." Cracked.com author keeps that terribly strange sense of humor running into the sequel too, all the while telling a gorefest horror that has some powerfully personal moments that are not at all humorous but stick with you.

Jurassic Park, Michael Crichton

     Summary:

     Man clones dinosaurs, opens dinosaur theme park, things go poorly for all involved.

     It's science fiction horror about dinosaurs. It's also startlingly impressive in Crichton's own particular way. You'll either love it or hate it. Yes there's a load of time spent on science, but it's worth reading. Yes there's a lot of time spent on potential morals that can be drawn from the story, but they're philosophically sound. And the story is amazing. 

    It is better than the movie, and that is an exceptional movie. The first movie, i mean. I've vomited spaghettio's that spattered into a better story than the second movie.

Honorable Mentions:

H.P. Lovecraft

Summary:

Things got pretty weird.

      Mostly wrote short stories, and the longer his stories run, the weaker they tend to be. Hard to list him for a specific entry without mentioning a bunch of other good horror short stories. Buy a collection, though. He's the Tolkien of horror. I'd personally recommend The Color out of Space, and Call of Cthulhu. Suffer through the dialogue.

INSULTS

You fornicator of mothers!

A dire insult. Supposedly. I would dare say that most fathers have managed such a feat if you ignore the tentative implications of incest that have sunk beneath the waves of time along with such Titanics as "stymphalist."

This is a public service announcement about the death of insults, of rudeness, of banal, casual cruelty. People claim that instant gratification is the hallmark of the masses today, but that's silly. That's been the moniker forever. Another aborted insult in lieu of a real observation.

The highest casualty of the times is insults.

The internet causes a lot of things, but one of its greatest crimes (and there are a pantheon of great and unwieldy crimes...) is the dearth of proper diction and conviction to malediction. Too many learn too young the simple, laziest sorts of insults.

To quote a few less-than-eloquent youtube enthusiast examples selected at random:

• "your virgin fags who think this ugly hag is hot lmao" 
• "bitch i'm a womyn in days world. open your eyes, only half off us jerk off to literally anything. your gross penis. fuck off." 

And my personal favorite, 

• "The clean dumbbutt roughly pulls dumbbutt's like this. Fart off, you're a stupidface."

Took about 5 minutes of research on a single video, made a few brief tweaks for formatting sake and to condense the last one, which was posted primarily in two word entries.

These are the insults of weary, distracted, low hanging fruit. I love and support rudeness. It is one of my truest hobbies and penchants. There is a powerful honesty to telling someone you don't like them and want to make their day worse, just as there is a powerful and easy defense of ignoring someone's insults because you do not respect them or their opinion. It's like magic, a battle of arcane incantations and mental defenses.

As with many forms of magic, it is endangered. The state of global mockery is unacceptable. When has it fallen from common conversation to call someone a brochity quim? Why not jumentous helminth? Why not excerebrose carnal byproduct?

Yes, some more colloquial vernacular insults have a glorious ring to them. Hearing my sweet, elegant wife shout "Cocksucker!" at the TV warms my foul, beastly little heart. Shitstain, lint-licking cootie queen, warthog-faced buffoon-- there undeniably ARE acceptable commonplace insults, simply because of the beautiful way they roll off the tongue. But dumbass? Not if you mean it as an actual insult meant to wound. No siree.

Call someone a fopdoodle. Or the unimpressive byproduct of a bowlegged whore whose only qualification for producing even such a loathsome example of humanity was an affinity catching the stray misspent sperm from passing truckers. Either one takes more thought, but what you spend is what you get.

Even simple adjectives. There are few greater insults than "Normal" or "Boring" or "Pathetic" if you make them ring true. Even simply looking slightly above someone's eyes and saying "To speak with you demeans me. I do not hear you." gets some pretty fantastic results. No need for yelling that someone is sexually active. Simply tell them truth of your opinion. If they are a coward, call them one. Have reasons and examples to support it. Offer to make a power point, or devise an illustrative play starring sock puppets.

The best part is, if you use an insult with which the recipient is unacquainted, from the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli resounds that great and glorious chime of "you're too stupid to understand the insult, but you know you've been insulted."

For how much more can man ask?

The reverse, sadly, is true for most slurs. As everyone's favorite N word (nerfherder, clearly) is bandied about, it makes the speaker seem like the window-licking, fetid scrapings of the stagnant scum that forms a skin across the shallowest parts of the gene pool. Use words that have real, abrasive substance. 

"Stupid" is better than "gay" because stupid has a direct and powerful meaning, while the other means a bunch of things, but mostly sounds like you're subtly inquiring about the sex object preference of the addressed while simultaneously announcing that you are indeed stupid.

Most of the -isms fall in this category. Is there some wiggle room? Sure, but if you believe it, you're still the human equivalent of the fecal slime that accumulates around the mouths of gas station toilets and cannot be removed with even the most ardent bleach and scrubbing.

Now, you say, surely these problems have existed before!

Yes. I'm aware. Shakespeare had his high points when he wrote sonnets, The Lion King, and the comedy about how dreadfully defective are the minds of horny teenagers, but such gems as "fat guts" and the dismal stream of penis-length insults are set solidly at his doorstep. Chaucer was a big fan of dropping a "C" word that I'm omitting because I think it would get me in trouble with the wife(although it was more of a "Q" back then. The problem is not new, even among the greats. But the prevalence of the problem has reached untold heights of ecstatic enthusiasm.

The solution? Simple. 

• Watch shows like Archer. Less Adam Sandler. Meditate carefully upon the nature of your dislike for your fellow man. 

• Stop watching pewdiepie. Go to https://www.reddit.com/r/insults and read. 

• Watch some classic videos like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSEYXWmEse8 and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHWEZ_IjcSk 

You will like the way you insult people. I guarantee it.

The summary: Don't just say "ass," insult with class. Sonuvabitchretardjerkpunksnotnosedgianttwerpscumbagdickheadassholebastardpenisbreath