Anthony Bourdain's suicide

So, celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain committed suicide.  It's hard not to include him in the ranks of famous deaths more closely associated with rock stars.  That is to say, people maniacally driven by their chosen passion.  Talent seems to eat itself, sometimes.  It becomes inescapable, until one chooses the most impossible escape possible.

Talent can be consuming.  For the people enjoying the fruits of the talent, all they see is the good it brings.  But talent is all-consuming.  It has ferocious demands.  You can't escape it.  You can't walk away.  In fact, anytime you see a case of someone walking away from talent, it's the story of a true survivor.

Suicide always seems incomprehensible on the other side.  How could they have possibly chosen to do that?  Especially when it's someone famous.  People assume famous people have achieved the dream.  Dreams can be nightmares. 

Suicide is something I've thought a lot about over the years.  For nearly fifteen years.  The world is an unfriendly place.  I like to think, sometimes, if I just get to fulfill my dreams...But then something like this happens, and it's a reminder all over again that dreams can be nightmares.  It's an awful thought.  But you need someone who understands, and sometimes that's impossible.  It's awful to be caught alone in this world.

While everyone else mourns Bourdain and finds his decision inexplicable, or uses the opportunity to advocate suicide prevention...I can't help but have other thoughts. 

A to Z 2015 - Hollywood Minute "Genesis"

Something-something-something Zola makes a movie called Genesis, which is about Eve.  It's animated and Zola sings and as such it's everything Tim loves about her.  And it's a good movie, too, which deconstructs the idea of the princess while at the same time telling a biblical story without being particularly biblical about it.  Except, of course, because it is biblical without being biblical, it has a hard time finding any appreciation, from either audiences or critics.

Then again, you should know that Tim has an overly active imagination.  Zola did not actually make Genesis.  It's in fact a version of a story Tim himself would writer later, after seeing Hollywood Minute.  This is part of the fantasy.  The only movies in this whole sequence that make any difference at all are Hollywood Minute, Fall of Troy, and maybe Little Green Men (just because).  

...The truth is, Tony Laplume (the author) realized he was no longer interested in doing this year's challenge the way he originally conceived it, and this was before the month actually began.  As you may or may not know, his mother passed away at the end of March.

So here's what the idea was, pulling back the curtain:

Joe and Zola and Hollywood Minute are analogues for (500) Days of Summer.  Which is to say, Joe is Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zola is Zooey Deschanel.  At various points in this would-be chronicle of their careers, the actors Heath Ledger and Kirsten Dunst (the latter usually in tandem with Sofia Coppola, who was the model for the director Penner) were also to be substituted where appropriate. 

Which is to also correlate (to date):

• Albatross = The Patriot (making it a Heath Ledger movie)
• Bounty = Ned Kelly (making it another Heath Ledger movie)
• Child's Play = Our Idiot Brother (making it a Zooey Deschanel movie)
• The Dauphin = Marie Antoinette (making it a Kirsten Dunst/Sofia Coppola movie)
• Equinox = Looper (making it a Joseph Gordon-Levitt movie)
• Genesis = Noah (making it an Emma Watson movie)

And later movies already referenced:

• Heroes and Demons = The Virgin Suicides (making it a Kirsten Dunst/Sofia Coppola movie)
• Impulse = Candy (making it a Heath Ledger movie)
• Little Green Men = Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and/or Mars Attacks! (making it a Zooey Deschanel movie and/or a Natalie Portman movie)
• The Savage Curtain = The Dark Knight (making it a Heath Ledger movie, although the idea was to also mix in The Phantom of the Opera)

I also sketched in:

• Rascals = Elf (making it a Zooey Deschanel movie)

Now, I didn't make Fall of Troy synonymous with anything, mostly because I hadn't really been thinking about what the reunion project might be until I'd actually begun writing posts last week.  As it is, I love the Trojan War as a story.  If I were more clever, I would have done the whole challenge with that as my topic.  

Tim, by the way, is my fictional alter ego.  This was much more obvious from my perspective, as I've been writing Tim stories for the past few years now.  The bit about Tim killing Stephen King is actually a riff on a story I wrote recently, which references the incident King experienced in 1999 when a passing motorist struck him, which I crossed with The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (making it a Zooey Deschanel reference).  Hollywood Minute, this future relationship with Zola, and explaining away killing Stephen King as described in the original story, is the first time Tim has branched into his own life, which is to say, the whole thing became a fantasy concerning not Joe and Zola, but Tim and Zola, which is to say, Tony Laplume and Zooey Deschanel.

Which will clearly never happen in real life.

Going forward, I'm really just going to deconstruct yet further, because there is another layer that I had hinted at previously:

• "Albatross" (an episode of Star Trek: The Animated Series)
• "Bounty" (an episode of Star Trek: Enterprise)
• "Child's Play" (an episode of Star Trek: Voyager)
• "The Dauphin" (an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation)
• "Equinox" (a two-part episode of Star Trek: Voyager)
• "Favor the Bold" (an episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine)
• "Genesis" (an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation)

And so on.  I think going forward I'm just going to talk about Star Trek episodes.  Coming up with an episode for every letter of the alphabet and have the titles sound somewhat plausible as movies was itself a tricky task.  I learned "xindi," for instance, is not necessarily a name coined by the writers of Star Trek: Enterprise, but also the name of a Chinese flute.

One final piece of trivia concerning what this was originally intended to be: The characters were supposed to have first and last names.  Zola's was Zola Beck.  Which, the more I thought about it, the more I realized I more or less knew it from somewhere else.  Jolene Blalock (Star Trek: Enterprise) plays a character named Lola Beck in Starship Troopers 3: Marauder.  It only figures.

I like to talk Star Trek.  Half my first year doing A to Z was spent talking Star Trek.  So coming back to it will not, for me, be much of a problem.  And I suspect no one will much care my abandoning what I clearly was approaching tepidly at best, ultimately being completely uninterested in doing much more than I had settled into already.  The Fall of Troy bit was actually the most useful thing I've done this month, because I have been planning on writing a version of Troilus and Cressida for years, and this is the first time I've made any real headway on how to approach it.  (Not necessarily set in space, though, or in stop-motion animation.)

All of which is to say, tomorrow will be completely different.

A to Z 2015 Hollywood Minute "Favor the Bold"

Hey, let's face it.  Even though the usual scheme is to follow the movie careers of Joe and Zola outside of Hollywood Minute and Fall of Troy, which here would lead to a tepid discussion of Joe's Favor the Bold, you don't want to read about that.  You want to know about Fall of Troy.  And let's get the obvious out of the way, too:

Fantasy status of Joe and Zola in relation to Favor the Bold: Minimal.  It's not a bad movie, to Tim's reckoning, and would have led to some interesting talking points, if something else hadn't hogged all the attention.

Fantasy status of Joe and Zola in relation to Fall of Troy: This is when the fantasy ends, of course.  During the making of this movie, Zola and Tim fall in love.  Rest assured, just because you know the ending, doesn't mean the rest of the story isn't worth exploring.

Which leaves us here:

Fall of Troy 

We begin in live action as Cressida's father defects to the Greeks.  As this is discussed among the Trojan ranks, Troilus argues the merits of handing Helen over, ideally in the form of a trade, in order to facilitate the end of the war, when he sees: 

The face to risk it all,

against the ships,

to defy the fall. 

Their romance is instance and intense.  Here's where we switch to stop-motion animation, contrasting young lovers with the horrors of the battlefield, as mighty warriors clash in epic duels (particularly spotlighted are the brave Hector, fighting on the side of the Trojans, and the sullen Achilles, who sings everything as a hopeless ballad even though he wins all the time).  To make it all the more thrilling, of course, the whole thing is set in space, with the fighting taking place between single-pilot ships as they dramatically pursue each other looking for the best angles at which to fire (very much like a gunfight in a Western, actually). 

We are once again in live action.  When Cressida is forced to choose between loyalty to her father and her love of Troilus, she sings her own version of the first song: 

The face to risk it all,

against all hope,

to defy the fall! 

She knows as well as anyone that the Trojans were doomed all along.  She makes an impassioned plea for Troilus to join her, but he refuses, instead opting for one last assault against Achilles.  The movie ends with Cressida having decided to try and intervene, not on the side of the Greeks or Trojans, but on behalf of Troilus.  True love.

That's what happens in the movie.  During the making of the movie, Zola finds herself equally torn.  She has never seriously considered a romance with Joe before, and so making a movie with him again is the moment when she must confront the idea for the first time.  And in a weird kind of way, Tim undergoes the same torment.  Before writing the screenplay, Tim had never been in a position to actually meet Zola, and so he had still been clinging to the idea of the Joe/Zola fantasy.  Then everything changes.  True love.

A to Z 2015 - Hollywood Minute "Equinox"

It's worth noting that Joe never really became a reliable box office draw.  Every now and then it would seem as if he might be, but then an effort like Equinox would be released, which was not even strictly sold as a Joe movie so much as a must-see experience on a number of levels, and it still wouldn't be much of a hit.  Seriously, and Tim had every reason to care, too, not for the least because it was one of several movies that was almost a reunion for Joe and Zola, who would have been the third lead, the woman Joe comes across while he's on the run, not only from thugs but from a version of himself, played by veteran action star Clark Bridges.

As Zola explains years later, she'd already had her fill of movies like that, or thought she had.  Which might explain why The Fall of Troy is set in the future.  And is done in stop-motion animation.

Fantasy status of Joe and Zola in relation to Equinox: At first not very good, but getting better.

A to Z 2015 - Hollywood Minute "The Dauphin"

The best movie Zola appeared in (besides Hollywood Minute) was definitely The Dauphin, which was also one of her collaborations with Penner, a director who came from industry royalty but redeemed her reputation behind the camera after a disastrous debut in front of it (don't ask).

Penner, by the way, is the one Tim first approaches with the screenplay that will reunite Zola and Joe.

As their numerous collaborations imply, Zola and Penner became close friends quickly, trusted creative partners who could count on each other when other avenues closed to them.  Zola had been part of an ensemble for Heroes and Demons, but she was the clear standout.  This was early in her career.  Every actor does ensemble work at some point.  Sometimes it comes down to the merits of the project itself, and sometimes the director, and sometimes, because this is how it works, whether or not the actor has had general exposure previously.  It's a cruel game of novelties.

And yes, The Dauphin is a period piece, which is one way Zola and Joe's careers converge even before Hollywood Minute.  Stick a pretty girl in an elaborate dress, right?  But the thing is, she stood out in a genre that normally swallows actors whole if they're not careful by using all conventions against themselves.  In essence, Zola proved herself timeless.

Well of course.  Zola's daughter will one day view this movie and wonder, Is that what she was really like?  And Tim will say, She still is.

Fantasy status of Joe and Zola in relation to The Dauphin: A head above.

(By the way, the big reunion project is The Fall of Troy.  You know, Paris and Helen.  Troilus and Cressida.)

A to Z 2015 - Hollywood Minute "Child's Play"

Sadly, Zola does not get a lot of great movie parts, even though she's awesome.  Even Tim loses track of her film career after a while.  She starts appearing in stuff like Child's Play, where her role is completely insignificant, a complete reversal of where she'd been heading before Hollywood Minute.  Typical chauvinism.  She ends up on TV, but even in her own show (That's New!) she competes for screen time unsuccessfully with a significantly larger group of men against one female colleague who in fact doesn't have much to do with her.

That's about it, really.

Fantasy status of Joe and Zola in relation to Child's Play: Terrible.  Does even Zola realize she's in it?  Granted, the movie isn't actually all that bad, and Tim would have watched it for any number of other reasons, but in the future, when they talk, they don't talk about Child's Play.  Especially not around the children!  Okay, okay, so Joe definitely does, when they get together (amicably, all three of them), but the fun he's having at Zola's expense is out of love!  Really!

(And then, yes, Tim kills Stephen King.  By accident.  After a few years, they laugh about that, too.  Because the version the public knows about these events is a fictional account written by Stephen King's son.  No, not Joe Hill.  The other one.)

A to Z 2015 - Hollywood Minute "Bounty"

In the not-too-distant future, before he accidentally kills Stephen King (so far as his defense attorney claims), Tim becomes married to Zola, by the way.  Call this fantasy if you'd like, but that's what happens.  Tim is also the screenwriter for the movie that eventually pairs Zola and Joe again, years after Hollywood Minute.  He pens a full-blown musical, which incredibly, neither actor has done before despite exhibiting ample talent in that regard, Zola in particular.

But this is well before that happens.  As Zola dreams of working with Joe, Tim dreams of working with Zola, and the odd journey involves the making of Hollywood Minute, and dreaming that Joe and Zola will one day work together again.  Got it?

Tim spends a lot of time bugging Ozzie, his reluctant best friend, about these things.  Sometimes Ozzie has no idea why he humors Tim so much.  Maybe because he's morbidly interested to know how it'll all end.  Probably in hilarious tragedy, right?  Except even though life tends to work that way, sometimes it doesn't.  It's just that, life works in slow motion.

Joe's next big project after Albatross was Bounty, the movie where he began to realize what every actor knows: he's become a "type."  He's the young actor who's supposed to make historical dramas relevant again.  Except as Christian Fletcher, Joe is given very little direction, has no real sense of character other than to be solemn, and so his performance is listless, the movie flops, and his career instantly begins to flag.  Does anyone at all notice Bounty?  It's not even that it's a bad movie, per say.  As usual, lively Robert Speed injects vitality into it, as he does in another of Joe's films, Impulse (more on that later), and maybe he's even the inspiration for Joe's best performance, the instantly legendary Savage Curtain (more on that later, too).

Fantasy status of Joe and Zola in relation to Bounty: Retrograde.  No, actually Zola is a contrarian.  Ah, just like Tim.  She liked him in it.  To be clear, Joe is the third member of a fantasy love triangle.

A to Z 2015 - Hollywood Minute "Albatross"

One of Tim's favorite movies is Hollywood Minute.  In a different era it would have the same reputation as When Harry Met Sally..., acknowledged as one of the great romantic films of our time, a definitive statement on the vagaries of love and fate.  Except it isn't, which makes it all the easier for Tim to view it as a personal treasure.  He's made little secret of the fact that he loves Hollywood Minute in part because of lead actress Zola, who infuriates Tim by the end of the movie because her character ends up rejecting the one played by Joe, although it's not really rejection so much as realizing that they weren't meant for each other.  (Rest assured, Tim couldn't really hate Zola.)  Except Hollywood Minute is so important in both their careers, they maintain an association that for Tim is easy to drag into the world of fantasy, where that happy ending really did occur.

And so he envisions their careers as a form of destiny leading to that moment where the distinction of fantasy no longer applies.  Because everything points back to Hollywood Minute, and not so much how it ends but where it leads.

Joe's first big success was Albatross, in which he was not the star but the up-and-coming young star intended to shine in a supporting role.  All that maddening calculation that went into engineering his breakthrough kind of backfires, because even though it's a hit, no one associates it as his hit.  To remember that he was in it at all is to realize that Joe was not considered important enough to play the lead.  Besides, he dies well before the end of the movie.  Bummer.  On to the next one, right?  

It's always been a favorite of Tim's.  He was a fan of Joe before Albatross, and after Hollywood Minute he had all the more reason to keep the rest of Joe's movies in mind when he wanted to watch something, but it's one he doesn't have to force himself to watch for the sake of watching, which he has to admit isn't always the case.

Fantasy status of Joe and Zola in relation to Albatross: Neutral.  Or maybe, it's what caught Zola's eye, too?  So not neutral.  Getting ready... 

There Are No Secrets On Betazed

Deanna isn't even in Starfleet the first time she meets Will Riker.  He's come to Betazed on assignment, and she's asked by her mother to be his personal liaison, help him become acquainted with the planet, keep him out of trouble.  The trouble, it would seem, would stem from Deanna's mother herself, whether in mind or body far too much for the uninitiated to handle, and even for those who have known her for years.  But it's more so that he won't notice everything else that's wrong with the planet.

Which is to say, everything.

To put it mildly, Betazed's best years are behind it.  By the time it was awarded membership in the Federation, it was a planet in cultural decline, so in fact the only reason it petitioned in the first place was to try and recapture some of the old glory.  Because there are no secrets on Betazed, and this has become a problem.

You see, Betazoids are empaths.  They can read and project thoughts at will, speak through each other's minds, and generally get along with a level of intimacy that would be unsettling on any other world.  Deanna's mother is the prototypical Betazoid.  As the leader of the last of the great houses, Lwaxana Troi took it upon herself long ago to do everything in her power to reverse the decline.  She lives in defiance of the truth, and is happy to do so, by the way.  After all, there are no secrets among Betazoids.

Which is why Deanna's father was human, totally devoid of all Betazed's gifts, the reason Deanna herself can only sense emotions rather than thoughts (although among her own people she remains perfectly telepathic).  The idea, her mother quickly seizes upon, is to build on the initial attraction Deanna can't possible hide from her concerning Riker.  It's obvious to everyone, even the other species Betazed has made a state policy of enticing to visit and if at all possible stay forever.

Yet Deanna hasn't just fallen in love with Riker, she's made a critical decision.  She is going to leave Betazed forever.  This is the opposite, actually, of what her mother hoped to achieve, the idea being to make it better, easier, for people to stay.

Yet, more and more, they aren't.  The younger generations have taken all the wrong lessons from what their elders have tried to accomplish.  They're forgetting Betazed.  On a world like this, memory is everything, and losing anyone is to lose a part of everyone.  Lwaxana Troi especially.

Fortunately, she has a few tricks up her sleeve.  Betazoids are among the cultures that still believe in arranged marriages, and Deanna had hers in order a long time ago.  She's just experimenting, or so her mother believes.  All that's about to happen is harmless, really.  Nothing to worry about at all.

If need be, Lwaxana Troi will rescue her daughter, and if she can't dissuade her from this career in Starfleet that is suddenly more interesting than even Riker, then she will follow Deanna into the stars.  She's been there before.  What could possibly go wrong?

She doesn't attempt to keep any of these thoughts from her daughter, but Deanna is constantly distracted, the kind of girl who concerns herself with ideals more than reality.  What kind of Betazoid is that?

Maybe there ought to be some secrets after all...

#657. Christmas Blogathon of Doom!!! returns

The Christmas Blogathon of Doom was something that happened last year.  It was participated in by folks like Briane Pagel, the ubiquitous Pat Dilloway, Andrew Leon, Vanna Smythe, and Lara Schiffbauer as a shameless and innovative way to promote creative projects.  At the time, you may or may not recall, we thought the Mayans had doomed us all with their poor calendar-making skills.  We're still here (or perhaps we're someplace else and we're just waiting for M. Night Shyamalan to explain), so I figured that was excuse enough to do a reprise.  That and I wanted a reason to write a story that occurred to me the other day...

The Snowman

I don't know what we were expecting at the time.  I'm sure I knew then, but too much has happened since.  I'm rattled.  I'm pretty sure I'm going to die.  And how these things often seem to go, it all seemed so innocent at the start... 

Jimmy, Lucy and I were just some kids playing in the snow.  Even kids get cold after a while.  They remember that they're outside in the middle of winter.  We ducked into this antique shop and had a look around.  I don't remember the name of the place.  Maybe it's just as well.  God knows what else lurks precariously in its apparently harmless trinkets of years gone by. 

The hat, the stupid hat, the ridiculous top hat.  It was out of our reach.  We should have kept it that way.  The shop owner, who didn't have anything better to do, had been watching us.  He had a musty odor.  He asked if we could use some help.  Probably he thought we were trying to steal things.  I'm sure Jimmy did, but that was no longer important after what happened.  Lucy eagerly accepted the hat.  She looked adorable when she put it on.  I didn't realize how cute she was at the time.  I probably would have married her. 

We walked back out into the gusty air.  It was flurrying.  I said we should make a snowman.  I should have kept my stupid mouth shut. 

By the time we were done, I found myself looking at the hat that still sat perched on Lucy's head.  I should have just been like every other boy, nursing a childhood crush on the girl I was lucky enough to call my best friend.  But I was looking at that stupid hat.  I said, "Why don't we put it on the snowman's head?"  And so we did. 

The snowman came to life.  It began to dance and sing.  Jimmy and I actually joined in, and then so did Lucy.  For one brief magical moment, the world was exactly the fantasy you can only really believe in when you're young. 

And then, just as childhood itself is always threatening, the looming awareness you can only fight if you contradict everyone else around you, the real world reared its head.  The snowman turned toward us.  And then he ran away.  

He ran so fast that it was all we could do to keep him just in sight, keenly aware that our boots were not at all like our summer sneakers.  Jimmy was laughing, Lucy giggling, and I'm sure I had a huge grin on my face.  We thought this was the greatest development yet.  How were we to know that the snowman would so quickly develop a mind of its own, or that it would be resentful that it owed its whole existence to a fluke, or that the hat had once belonged to a serial killer? 

That's the explanation for the Snowman Murders.  It was actually a snowman.  The snowman.  The explanation no one would believe except the lunatic fringe.  When Jimmy died, I didn't believe it myself.  When I was holding Lucy in my arms, the years having passed and her having become really a great beauty, I started to believe.  I didn't want to, but now I had to.  And it was all my fault. 

The snowman is coming for me, isn't he?  Perhaps this is how it will finally end.  If I'm lucky.

#622. Write...Edit...Publish: Haunting

Denise Covey's Write...Edit...Publish is rolling around again, which means it's story time!  This month's is celebrating Halloween, which is tomorrow (just in case you are a ghost). Without further adieu, here's my story, which clocks in at 1,194 words:

The Other Side

For convenience sake, we will identify our subject today as Le Novo.  He once had a different name, but that was when he was still among the living, as the living.  Then he died and came into the rest of it. 

We're not concerned with Le Novo's life before his death, because as far as this story is concerned Le Novo was only concerned about his life after death.  It would be so much simpler if this weren't the case. 

My name is Pilot, which is to say that it is my name now, much as Le Novo's name is Le Novo now rather than before. 

 It's the name I have come to adopt.  Names don't mean as much here as they did on the other side.  You'll get used to it.

It was my task, as you might imagine, to shepherd the young Le Novo, as it were, into our way of things.  I'm afraid I made a mess of things, but in my defense my subject made it extremely difficult.  It happens, more than you'd think. 

The problem Le Novo had was that it was not as easy for him as it is for others to let go of his life before death.  Life on that side is spent entirely consumed with the fear of life on this side.  Sometimes this leads to extreme trauma in the transition.  It's not a matter of letting go, because death will do that to you, but of the few times when the transition of memory doesn't work as well as it should. 

Le Novo was still very much attached to his life before death.  He was attached to his family most of all, and all the things he'd known so well in life, the mundane things like where he used to enjoy sitting, or the bed he found so comfortable. 

Sometimes when this happens, this flaw in the transition of memory, it's because of the way death occurred, an imprint violently committed to the mind regardless of which side the individual is on. 

As far as I was ever able to tell, Le Novo died peacefully in every sense. 

And yet he could not tear himself away from his desire for the other side.  Some people, even the ones who fear this one so fiercely, live their lives on the other side with as intense a desire for this one as Le Novo had for that one. 

I'm telling you all this because of course Le Novo found the loophole back there.  He went back to the other side.

This is always a bad idea.  It's the basic truth of our existence.  It's our one rule, you might say.  You break it at your peril, not because of any punishment that will be inflicted upon you, but because of what it will do to you, without fail.  It's the dire inevitability, like death is on the other side. 

But try as I might to convince Le Novo of this, he would not listen.  What else could I do, then, but grant him his wish? 

It will never be the same, going back.  Only once every third millennium does someone experience an authentic resurrection.  Anything else is exactly what I'm about to tell you about Le Novo now. 

He went straight for his family.  Because he was intangible, this was as fruitless as you might expect.  You can see the other side from this one just fine.  Most of the time this is good enough.  You watch life the way they watch television.  It's the same thing.  For the desperate, for those like Le Novo, they believe they can have something more.  And yet it's impossible. 

Le Novo spents months trying to convince himself otherwise.  He learned to manipulate material objects again.  Never organic.  That's the loss from the event of death.  Once sundered from the body you lose all contact with it, all its most treasured sensations.  When a cup or a set of keys or some homework turned out to be somewhere unexpected, that was le Novo's doing. 

His despair grew.  How couldn't it?  He became frutrated.  The family moved away.  He couldn't follow.  He remained anchored to the house.  It's familiarity that makes the whole thing possible.  You can't form new attachments, from this side to that, even if you go back.  That's no longer the point of your existence.  There are greater wonders. 

Years, decades passed.  Le Novo stayed in the house.  He could no longer bring himself to move on.  He had to believe his family would return.  It only felt right.  They wouldn't abandon him like that, his memory.  How could they?  Didn't they know what he'd done for them? 

They would be back.  He wouldn't leave.  He couldn't. 

Except they never did.  He wife died.  His children died.  His grandchildren died.  None ever came back.  And yet Le Novo never left the house.  How could he? 

There were new occupants, new families.  None of them familiar.  They all caused Le Novo considerable agitation, and he was not shy to show it. 

He couldn't communicate with any of them.  He couldn't communicate with his own family.  Why should he bother now? 

One day, however, a medium was brought to him, someone who could bridge the gap between sides, at least for a little while.  Callard Bowser was the last hope of the current occupants.  They had consulted plenty of charlatans.  Bowser was real.  She told them Le Novo's real name, when he'd lived there, how long he'd been since he returned. 

She helped them talk together.  or rather, she talked to Le Novo and then relayed what she heard. 

Le Novo explained his heartbreak.  He told Bowser how he appreciated the brief moments where he found something familiar.  He explained how he understood that it wasn't the new occupants' fault.  But he couldn't help himself.  That was no longer under his control. 

And it wasn't under Callard Bowser's, either. 

This was about the point where I thought it was stepping in again.  There are too many like Le Novo, too many who fall into this trap.  Some of them are more unreasonable about it than he was.  I talked him out of this loop.  I had to occupy a living soul in order to do it.  Thankfully, because I have experience with these things, and am not nasty about it, it's a mutually beneficial relationship, one I can employ when necessary.  Sometimes the living soul is aware of it, and sometimes it isn't. 

As gently as I could, I discussed with Le Novo the possibility of coming back.  It was always an option, I said, as long as Le Novo himself embraced it, the way he'd stepped back to the other side in the first place. 

Of course, there's an entirely different version of this story that would send chills down your very bones, but then, you no longer have any. 

And that's exactly why I tell you about Le Novo now.  As a cautionary tale, a reminder of things you already know.  And a warning not to do it yourself. 

It's better for all involved.

#606. Write...Edit...Publish: Moving On

The Armchair Squid seems determined to involve me in the blogging community.  He's already got the Cephalopod Coffeehouse I've been enjoying for months now, and now he's alerted me to this writing bloghop, Write...Edit...Publish (WEP).  This month's theme is moving on.  In a roundabout way, the following story follows it.  See if you can tell me how in the comments.  (814 words.)

Bessie

The cow who was not a cow, more like an extrapolation on the concept, sat there mooing.  

The cow's name was Bessie.  She was looking at a statue that reminded her a great deal of herself. 

This was appropriate because the statue was after all fashioned as a tribute to her.  The thing was, Bessie had a lousy memory.  Her contemporaries forgave her because they adored her.  It should be noted that the statue was not a religious totem, and that Bessie herself was never intended to see it.  There was an idea at one point that it would be unveiled at a surprise party with Bessie as the guest of honor, but then the goat who would one day become the Golden Goat, who was sometimes called Dillon, was recognized as an idiot, and those plans fell apart. 

Bessie had recently returned home after a long exile.  The fact of the exile was not peculiar to her, but rather a dictate of the...Dictator of the Galaxy, who was an extrapolation of a dog.  When the Dictator realized that many of the subjects of his great realm closely resembled creatures on an insignificant planet known as Earth, he'd ordered a large sampling of them to visit.  Such are the whimsies of fate that the Dictator himself ended up becoming an exile there, too.  Some blame Bessie, others the common mischief of Boo.  It is not wise to question matters of that regard. 

Standing not far away from Bessie was a human, an old farmer by the name of Kentucky Joe.  "Kentucky Joe" was not his real name, and is not even close to it.  He never even lived in Kentucky, but rather somewhere deep in Camden County, Missouri.  And speaking of the whimsies of fate, Kentucky Joe had never had a cow on his farm until he acquired Bessie. 

(As to how that occurred, this was the result of a bet the cow lost to Boo.) 

The old farmer was still having a difficult time adjusting to his new surroundings.  So far he had been forced to ride an absurd progression of animals, the last of which and most alarming was a horny toad, or so he called it.  The horny toad was in fact a tree frog, who had in turn lost a bet to a turtle.  The Dictator does not concern himself with gambling, because he himself has a weakness for roulette and the number 23. 

When she noticed Kentucky Joe looking at the statue, Bessie let a sigh loose.  Sooner or later she'd have to tell him something.  There were so few humans here.  Even the ones who visited usually left on some ridiculous quest dreamed up by the Dictator, who had the attention span of a gnat.  She wasn't at all concerned that Kentucky Joe would be drawn up in something like that, though.  As far as she could tell, the only thing he was capable of doing was initiating riding all kinds of weird creatures (as everyone knows, only horses and seahorses are supposed to be treated like that) and working on increasingly feverish projects.  Taken off his farm, the old farmer was just out of place, which is not what Bessie would ever say about herself.   

She was at home anywhere.  Except here.  Staring at her statue.  It was unnerving.  And Kentucky Joe only made it worse.  He kept looking back and forth between them, even though it was plainly evident that they were exactly alike.  The Dictator had a thing for statues.  She suspected that he was trying to send her a message, manipulating everyone into this exact moment.  Since she couldn't remember anything else about it, that seemed to be the logical assumption.  Maybe she was just being paranoid. 

The old farmer somehow came up with an idea to fashion a small scale replica of the statue.  He found some goat milk that had come from Dillon, and set about the task.  Except he soon had the idea to make it bigger, and began to bargain with the goat for more milk, which the goat did not appreciate.  Goats most appreciate leafy greens, and least appreciate when you stop giving leafy greens to them.  If you want your kids to eat leafy greens, have them visit a petting zoo, or a farm.  Kentucky Joe's farm is free for the taking, by the way, and it has goats, one of which is Dillon's kid (no kidding). 

Bessie was not beset with the appallingly lunatic spectacle of watching the old farmer carve a statue of a statue that was in her likeness, and she was no closer to learning why the original had been made in the first place.  Typically, the Dictator was on yet another of his mindless excursions. 

This was why, even though cows don't moo anywhere but on Earth, she did exactly that.  Again.

#437. WRiTE CLUB and new blog

Hey, so I'm going to be participating in DL Hammons' WRiTE CLUB.  DL's one of those inspirational bloggers who's also one of those aspirational writers, and he's been doing this WRiTE CLUB for two years now.  I figured I was already doing Martin T. Ingham's Shootout and had just released Monorama and have no idea how to promote myself, so I'll just get myself out there with stuff like this and see how it goes.

I've also launched a new blog, and it's called Tony Laplume and yes, it will be totally about me as a writer and I hope that will help solve some of the problems I've been thinking about recently.  Maybe yes maybe no but Blogger doesn't charge for these things, so it can't possibly hurt.

It's also worth noting that Michael Abayomi is participating in his own writing challenge.  Have a look at that.

Anyway, saw the movie Evolution last night, which was something I was interested in when it was originally released in 2001, but never got around to it.  Yes, I sometimes support things I have not technically personally supported.  It's directed by Ivan Reitman (and yes, was dismissed at the time as a poor effort to recapture his Ghostbusters mojo) and stars David Duchcovny, Julianne Moore, Orlando Jones, Seann William Scott (and actually features the onscreen origin of his bird imitation that amused me so much in The Rundown), and minor roles for Dan Ackroyd and Ethan Suplee (whom you might remember from My Name Is Earl).  As I thought back then, I was amused by it.  Evolution is no great contender for the greatest film ever, but it's worth a look, definitely.  It's basically a spoof on the scientific community as well as the academic community (and yes, it was also dismissed at the time as Duchcovny's half-hearted attempt to cash in on his X-Files fame without actually doing X-Files) and could possibly today be mistaken for a spoof of Prometheus, some ten years early.

#435. A Stroll Around My Head

If you poke around this blog enough, you may stumble on the fact that I've got a couple of books in print, each of them self-published (as well as a short story in an anthology).  I haven't plastered Scouring Monk with images of the covers, mostly because the covers aren't terribly exciting, and I guess I suck at marketing, much less providing a coherent direction to readers trying to figure out why they should bother reading the blog in any effort to know who Tony Laplume is, besides someone who loves movies and stuff.

I published The Cloak of Shrouded Men five years ago, and have sold maybe half a dozen copies (and that's probably being generous), and in that case can it really be said to be published at all?  I'm not really good at promoting myself, and really not good about networking, because the people who really inspire me are creators who aren't looking to make friends with some anonymous bum in Colorado.  My favorite social activity is watching movies in the dark with strangers, and I'm otherwise a comedian whose only stage has been a bookstore, torturing the ears off coworkers, and besides don't really like talking so much as writing, and mostly about the things I'm passionate about.  I don't do conversation well, even at the exchange of a computer screen.

My writing tends to feel a little exclusive.  I don't write so that you can immerse yourself in a narrative so much as in someone else's mind, their experiences as they think about them more than how they actually experience them.  I wrote Shrouded Men as a superhero story where the superhero tortures himself over his failures, bad relationships, and nihilistic revenge against those who didn't share his crusade, destroying everything around him, basically, and then calling it a day, hanging up his cape, and letting the reader decide what the hell just happened.  I wrote in a number of parallels to stories I love, or were influenced by at the time, and besides family members the one outside reaction I got said it reminded him of City of Heroes, an online game that I didn't and still don't see any direct relation to in the pages of the book other than the fact that they both feature superheroes.  I wonder if he even read the book.  I'm not kidding when I say that it's basically Watchmen as an internal monologue from Rorschach (with more complete sentences).  I should note that it isn't literally Watchmen, because at the time I started writing it, I had never read Watchmen, and by the time I finished writing it, there's no way I was writing about anything else but the mad crusade of Cotton Colinaude, the Eidolon (a name I came across in a Hart Crane poem, "Legend," which should one day rightfully take its place in the book's pages), who gains and loses scores of allies, but most of them are already in his past by the time the story begins, with only glimpses of his erstwhile glory days sprinkled throughout.

Last week I published Monorama, and unless I start learning, I will probably sell as many copies, and maybe by the time Yoshimi is published, if Hall Bros. Entertainment ends up liking what it reads, I will start selling a few more books.  Monorama is a collection of esoteric short stories, mostly in a science fiction vein, but in the same basic style as what can be found in Shrouded Men (this is exactly what I referenced a few weeks ago, when I went out of my way to potentially alienate some of the folks who might have cared from my time writing here at Scouring Monk).  I figured I might as well make it available, in case more digestible chunks of this kind of writing may go down more easily.   


I've been a lot less active in my blogs the past couple weeks than usual, even here, certainly since the grind of A-to-Z, perhaps because all that activity is finally catching up with me, or I'm more depressed about being jobless again than I thought I was, or I'm depressed that I still don't really have a significant amount of readers, even if I keep telling myself that I don't care, that the act of writing does not demand the act of reading, because I want to be able to make a living on my own terms, especially as it seems increasingly that I maybe can't do it on anyone else's.

Act of writing does not demand the act of reading...?  I'm an eager reader, maybe not a fast one, but an eager reader all the same, and I have been all my life, and I still feel as if I've only read a quarter of what I should have by now.  If I could make a living reading, I would.  Some people do that, and they do so grudgingly, either as submission readers or as reviewers, and because almost no one actually reads and most publicity is self-publicity in this version of the world, most readers never really know what anyone else is reading.  I guess that's one reason to care about Good Reads, or wish that I was back at least in the break room at Borders, where some people still did this crazy thing.

If I had the ambition, I would absolutely transform this blog into a record of everything I find interesting and would love to share with everyone, and perhaps that's something I will still do, or perhaps create a new blog and try to have a go at it (this one currently mixes "mouldwarp" in the URL and Scouring Monk in the title, and never the twain do they meet).

Anyway, as a writer and as a person and as a blogger, I guess I may have some improving to do, not the least figuring out how all those identities merge.

#420. Horses (Possibly Flogged)

I've been writing a lot lately.  When I say that, I know there are some readers who are under that general impression of me, but what I mean is that I've been writing a lot at Sigild V.  That's my rather enigmatically named writing blog, where I write things and publish them to a fairly indifferent public.  But I don't mean to sound gloomy.  I write a lot anyway, so regardless of whether it's read or not, the point is, I like writing.  These things just happen to be available should anyone be foolish enough to be interested in them.  Several weeks ago, I completed the twelve-part "Who Killed Iron Joe?," which ties in with my Space Corps saga as well as Seven Thunders, the book I'll be writing a little later this year.  I followed that up with "Back from the Dead," another twelve-part story that deals with superheroes, as does my novel Cloak of Shrouded Men, which I will be making a greater to inform theoretically curious readers about soon, including an excerpt (you'll also note that my recent expanded archiving efforts include more labels, including one that highlights all the previous times I've gone on about it).  Both of these were done a chapter a day for twelve days.

Now I'm working on "Roadkill Cafe," a story I began earlier this year and am now going to be completing.  It's about humans and their relationship to animals (and sometimes flies), mostly cats and dogs (but sometimes foxes), and is sort of a light metaphysical fable, because that's the kind of stuff I sometimes write.  I've written several variations on a similar dog story (and if you explore all those links I provide you on the right, you might find one version of it, though it was never completed), but I'll be happy when this one's completed.  It's another twelve-part story, but has already gone well beyond twelve days (by several months), so it's just twelve chapters.  I kind of figure I should look for publishers a little more than I do (the Insecure Writers Group would love to hear more), but for now, Sigild is what I need.

I'm still writing "Star Trek '12" there, too.  I'm thinking of concluding the "DC Decades" project following "Roadkill Cafe."  I think I had a reader or two interested in that.

I'm still working on the Star Trek Fan Companion over at Fan Companion, too.  I'm still plugging away at episodes of Voyager, still in the second season, still trying to bring a fresh perspective to the franchise, maybe make a few things clearer than they've been (if you don't believe that, then you should read this review of "Threshold").  I'm still hoping that interest in these Star Trek thoughts will find an audience.

Comics Reader has an audience, and I think it's growing.  Anyway, I wish I could devote more time to it.  I'm currently slogging away at Essential X-Men Vol. 2, where I recently discovered the Factor Three epic from Roy Thomas may be an unacknowledged inspiration for X-Men: First Class.  Such things to discover!

And yes, I'm still doing poetry at Epistles from the New Fade, where I'm making a strong push toward a hundred poems, after some lulls in activity recently.  Thirty to go!

#418. Hub City, Scouring Monk, Yoshimi

While adding to the Scouring Books archives at Hub City, it occurred to me that all that work to list the contents of my library, a task I'd been neglecting for months, probably should also be reflected on the Reading List page, which made me turn once again to Scouring Monk's own archives.  Except I was reminded that until recently I didn't have the capability to names posts here (something that was corrected in a very timely manner just before A-to-Z in April).  Which led to many hours titling some four hundred posts.

So yes, I'm my own editor, and I waste a good amount of time editing my family of blogs.  But I have fun doing it!  I'm just insane enough to even consider making an archive page for Scouring Monk, with a list of all my entries, because labeling can be so inadequate a system.  (Yes, I'm crazy.  My mother did not have me tested.)

Anyway, some of this is to say I've been working at Hub City, even though I don't write about it as much here as some of my other blogs.  I've been making steady work at my Reading List, and there I write about those books and subsequent thoughts on those experiences, because I love reading, even though it sometimes seems the only books bloggers care about are the ones their friends are writing.  That's fine and all, but there's a whole wealth of literature out there, both old and new, and if that's not supported, it's that much more unlikely that a wide audience will ever discover new talent.

Which is not to say I'm above doing the same kind of shameless self-promotion so many of my fellow bloggers do (both for their and their friends' works).  I'll be talking about some of my previous manuscripts in the coming weeks, and hope by the end of it to have some concrete news about the publication of Yoshimi, now that Hall Bros. Entertainment has provided its contributors with a schedule update.

Hope to keep you sufficiently amused!

#413. Scouring Scribe

Yesterday I concluded "Who Killed Iron Joe?" and The Assassination at Magnumtown, two halves of the same story, part of the tapestry that is the Space Corps saga, a project I've worked on for two decades.

Space Corps began life as a bad knockoff of Star Trek and evolved from there, sometimes kicking and screaming, always assimilating other influences and interests, until 1998, when I first envisioned Seven Thunders, which became a story that would pivot around the framework of the often-overlooked War of 1812.  If you're asking right now why anyone would bother to care about the War of 1812, or how it could possibly inspire a story worth your time, then you, too, have fallen victim to the notion that American military history falls either under the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, WWII, the Vietnam War, or the War on Terror, or otherwise it's vaguely irrelevant.

This being 2012, and you haven't heard anyone loudly commemorating the War of 1812 like they were last year for the Civil War's 150th anniversary, you might better understand the lack of respect and general awareness of what exactly the War of 1812 meant.  Simply put, it's my contention that without this conflict, America as we know it today wouldn't exist.  It was a generation removed from the Revolution, and everyone was wondering if there was enough inspiration to impart a new generation with the ideals of the Founding Fathers.  The War of 1812, in case you didn't know, was also fought against the British.  "The Star-Spangled Banner" was written during this war, the White House burned during this war, and, and the legend of Old Ironsides came from this war, too.

The politics of the war, which arguably sprang from the politics of every president after Washington, led to the conflicts of ideology that made the Civil War inevitable throughout the century, because no one was interested in addressing the issues that would have prevented it.

Anyway, so I shaped Seven Thunders around the framework of this conflict, and lived with it for many years.  I shaped many other Space Corps stories in the meantime, and shaped a great deal of history, and most of the time, I lost sight of the fact that the central Space Corps story still revolved around the same conflict I'd envisioned in Seven Thunders, but only sometimes understood, the conflict between humans and the Danab (there's a vicious twist to this conflict involving the nature of the Danab that will make for a really good moment in Seven Thunders, so I'm reluctant to spoil it here).

So I started to circle back around to it, and when I finally decided that I was going to finally write Seven Thunders, and had a whole blog dedicated to stories, that it wouldn't be such a bad idea to write a little preview of the bad blood that rests at the heart of this conflict.  It's like Native Americans, the state of Israel, and JFK all rolled into one, is what "Who Killed Iron Joe?" could be summarized as (again, to be found most conveniently on this page).

It's also something of The Iliad, which is a story I've read a great deal about in the past few months (visit Hub City for more details), and came to greatly admire its offbeat structure.  There is not much actual resolution in "Who Killed Iron Joe?" but a lot of emotional resonance.  I tend to write that way a lot, but the story was also meant to be something of a mystery, which was something I was interested in doing after the A-to-Z challenge, when one of the bloggers brought it up.  I don't write a lot of mystery, once with a Star Trek story and again with Yoshimi, at least in its basic structure (Yoshimi is my forthcoming book, and you can read a bit more about it here, which will also give you a better idea of what kind of writer I am), so it's always interesting to try something out of the ordinary.

(And anyway, I wrote The Assassination at Magnumtown to serve the same function as all those tales that explain the rest of The Iliad, like how Achilles died and the war actually ended.)

"Who Killed Iron Joe" was a twelve-part, daily challenge for me, and I'll be doing it again with "Back from the Dead," which involves superheroes.  Now, I write a lot about superheroes at Comics Reader, but perhaps more notably still, my existing (self-)published work also concerns superheroes.

I don't do a lot of publicity for The Cloak of Shrouded Men, partly because it was published in 2007, partly because that edition features typos I'd like to forget, and partly because it's hard to market superhero fiction that doesn't have pictures with it.  And yet it remains one of my proudest accomplishments.

It is also agonizingly cerebral, as is most of my fiction.  I determined at some point that cerebral fiction isn't exactly everyone's cup of tea (which is why Yoshimi is the least cerebral I've managed to make any of my novels), yet I am proud of what I did with it, beyond a shadow of a doubt.  It's the kind of superhero story that every comic book writer tries to do, but instead of the kind of extended run most writers only hope to get, making a statement about the career of the characters they get to handle for a few years, I did it in one story, the epic highs and equal lows of a vigilante who tries to undermine the ineffectual system that has stifled him for years, sometimes at his own consent.  He's Batman if Batman weren't written as an NFL quarterback, with Superman being his best wide receiver.  The Eidolon's wide receiver is Godsend (how has no one used that name yet?), and they have the kind of relationship that explains everything that happens to him, and why he goes off the deep end.  Literally.  He loses his mind, develops split personalities, and causes a Trojan War.  Anyone who's familiar with Watchmen will understand a lot of what happens in this book, but then, where Alan Moore is interested in sensation, I dive deeply beyond the surface to examine motivations, failures, triumphs, and moral ambiguity of the kind Ozymandias could only dream.  Imagine if Rorschach was in charge of how everything turned out.

Anyway, so yeah, I've been trying for years to write comic books, and that's half the reason why I wrote The Cloak of Shrouded Men, and why I'm now writing "Back from the Dead" (start reading it here), about an equally complicated world of superheroes which should hopefully be compelling to read.  That's what I'm always going for, something to stop and make you think.  My writing style tends to be peppered with a lot of thoughts anyway, but they're designed to open a conversation.

Got any thoughts?

#411. First loves, Survivor, Space Corps

I'm making an unofficial entrant in the First Loves blogfest, for those who are taking part in that:

First Movie
My family has watched the original Star Wars films for as long as I can remember.  As a result, it's impossible for me to select any other movies but A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi.  I have no doubt that prolonged exposure to this saga shaped me in ways I still have yet to understand.

First Band
Hootie and the Blowfish must stand as my first and still favorite band.  In the general public their music quickly went out of fashion, but the current success of Darius Rucker as a country artists suggests that maybe it was that odd little name all along (Darius, for the record, is not Hootie, nor are Mark, Soni & Dean the Blowfish).  They were always Southern-fried, but they were also one of the more universal acts to emerge from that era, and their catalog of songs remains one of the most cherished collections I have in any creative medium.

First Book
Thanks to a good friend of mine, I discovered Jerry Spinelli's Maniac Magee early on in grade school, about a boy who becomes something of a legend while trying to make a life for himself and struggling to fit in.  It remains one of my most treasured reading experiences.

(Noticing a pattern yet?)

First Person
Gosh, who finds this one easy to select?  My first person outside of my family that truly made an impact on my life has got to be Jonathan Lawless, the aforementioned friend who introduced me to Maniac Magee.  He was a transfer student I think in second grade, and was the first friend I made after all but losing all the friends I'd originally made in school, and we remained pretty close until life finally took us in different directions.  We remain in touch, but like everyone else I know, there are many states in between us.

***

I called it.  Kim won Survivor: One World.  She made it far more difficult than she needed to, and it was Troyzan who called her on it, and she had no answer, and Jeff pretty much ignored it at the reunion.  But then he pretty much ignored Kim, too.  She deserves the win, but she doesn't get a lot of respect for how she did it, relying heavily on alliances and two-facing and a personality so blandly likable she might as well have appeared in The Avengers.  She's the evil version of Amanda, who did this kind of game while allied with stronger players than Kim kept around, and she was actually able to win.

***

For those interested, I'm working on another daily challenge, completing the twelve-part Who Killed Iron Joe? at Sigild V, the run-up to Seven Thunders, the big Space Corps story I've been working toward since 1998.  WKIJ? is not so much heavy sci-fi action or big concept so much as an intimate look at some of the influences of the big events that will take place later on.  I'll be following it with an unrelated superhero story, Back from the Dead, and then finally concluding Roadkill Cafe, and then I will begin writing Seven Thunders.  Y'know, if you care.

#404. Comics, Poems, What Comes Next

Okay!  So the A-to-Z Challenge is officially over, and business can return to normal here at Scouring Monk.

Some of it is business as usual.  For instance, Epistles from the New Fade, my own personal challenge of a five blog with one hundred new poems, continues, now with more rhyming!  So please check that out if you thought my writing was worth checking out in April.  It continues on a pretty much daily basis.

Comics Reader also continues.  I've started reading comics on a more regular basis (you can read some thoughts on that here), but this is probably the spin-off blog with the most regular activity, which I've maintained for more than a year.

I'll be starting a new Space Corps saga over at Sigild V, twelve installments of a story that serves as a prequel to the next book I'll be writing, Seven Thunders.  I will still be working on the "Star Trek '12" project as well, because I have many years to touch on before I'm finished.  (Speaking of that kind of project, if you read this Comics Reader post, you may also be interested in the "DC Decades" project I've postponed at Sigild, just one of many hopefully fascinating stories waiting for you to discover.)

I will also be starting a new feature here at Scouring Monk, aimed squarely at all the new followers I got from the challenge, which will be known as Vantage Point, covering a number of artistic mediums but most certainly including movies, and also TV, comics, music, and books.  I figured I made a certain impression for expectations, and it really wouldn't make sense to just continue as I'd been doing before April and simply link to updates from my other blogs.

In the vein, I've got some thoughts on Survivor: One World, something I talked about in March, when I endorsed Troyzan and Kim as the most likely winners of the season.  Well, Troyzan's gone now and Kim gone mercenary, turning on her own surefire alliance to throw in with a more random if numbers-rich female voting block. To say the least, I respect her far less now than I did at that time.  She may still win, but I will no longer be particularly happy about it.  There are some other options still in play.  I may actually be rooting for Kat now, but we'll see how long she sticks around.  Chelsea, the one with the conscience, may prove more interesting as a possible winner, too, and perhaps more likely than Kim if they both make it to the finals.  How about Tarzan?  He'd be a classic spoiler if they forget to actually eliminate him.

And professional wrestling!  Readers who may exist from earlier times know I wrote about wrestling all the time.  I'm a big fan (check out Fan Companion for proof).  I'm glad CM Punk is still WWE champion, and that Daniel Bryan is his next PPV opponent.  It's a good time to be a fan, actually.  Lots of interesting things going on.  Even TNA seems to have gotten its act together, turning Bobby Roode into a legitimate champion and making it interesting to see who may finally defeat him, if it actually is James Storm, his one-time Beer Money mate.

Anyway, to prove I'm not a cultural heathen, I'll also remind you that I love books, too (Hub City).  I'm still working on my Homeric marathon.  Tell me Achilles wouldn't recognize Brock Lesnar.

#394. excerpt from Yoshimi

Here's another excerpt from Yoshimi, within forty pages of the conclusion, as things have reached their endgame and our girl is drawing ever closer to her final confrontation, within the halls of a private academy:

     Ten minutes crawled by.  Most of my food, and there had been very little to begin with, was still present and accounted for, and I saw Turner kiss Cat.  Maybe I was more inexperienced in such matters than I thought, but it didn’t look like the first time.  Maybe that made my friend a skank, I didn’t know, maybe just a good actor.  At any rate, Turner got up soon after and I followed.  In the hallway, there were a few other students milling about, and I awkwardly smiled at them, but never lost sight of Turner.  I found myself thinking about the Scimitar again, and shuddered at the grimness of it.  Maybe it was just that Turner didn’t seem worthy of such drastic measures.  I actually tapped his shoulder to get his attention, and he spun around.  His eyes were cloudy, like he was still thinking about Cat.
     “You’ve got a lot of nerve,” he managed to say, and then sucker-punched me.  “We knew what happened to him.  What, did you think he was the only one you had to worry about?”
     “It occurred to me,” I said, striking back.  Despite his bravado, he was still distracted.  Kamal suddenly appeared in the hallway, and Turner was just surprised enough to completely lower his guard.  I scored another quick knockout victory.  “Fancy your timing, friend-o.”
     “You talk funny,” Kamal said.  “Would you believe we have a detention room?  Meant exactly for occasions like this, like a juvenile lockup.  Not a dungeon, in case you were wondering.”
     “I wouldn’t feel sorry for him if it was,” I said.  “Wish I’d known earlier, though.  Might have saved Corry from some potential agony.  I’m still not sure these goons deserve to be caught in the crossfire.  They seem kind of pathetic.”
     “Most of their week is spent attending classes,” Kamal said.  “Their attention has been dulled.”
     “Glad mine hasn’t,” I said.