#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.

#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!

#364. Blog Updates, Bluewater, Yoshimi

#364.

I've got a new poem up at Epistles from the New Fade as well as a bonus "Quarter Bin" column at Comics Reader, focusing on Robin, which I took the measure of sharing on Facebook, hoping for a little extra readership, y'know, to justify writing this kind of stuff on the Interweb when there doesn't otherwise seem much purpose without, y'know, significant readership.

But sanity is not defined by the perception of others.

I should also note that I've delivered a second comic book script to Bluewater Studios, publisher of the Wrath of the Titans comics that helped inspire the second Clash of the Titans film.  Bluewater is a company I've tried getting published with in the past, with a short story accepted in an in-limbo Legend of Isis anthology.  Thanks to financial concerns in the modern economy, a lot of things changed from the time it was accepted to the present.  Bluewater started focusing its attention on pop biographies, for one thing, to help stand out from the pack.  That's what I've been submitting to them, one on Neil Gaiman and the new one on Russian billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov.  If these get published, they might be the foot in the door I've been looking for.

Examiner.com keeps asking me to contribute more material, but there's so little readership, or interest in what I write for them, that there's very little point to "gaining experience" with them unless I truly feel motivated.  Last year I was in a somewhat better position to go see movies and write reviews for them, but I can't justify the same thing in 2012.  So if you wanted an explanation for my lack of activity, Examiner, that's it.

I'm still waiting to hear back from Hall Bros. Entertainment on the Yoshimi manuscript.  I have to admit that I'm a little concerned that A.C. Hall has once again done a soft revolution on me, and decided against continuing commitments to his extrapersonal literary endeavors, just like what happened with Dead Letter Quarterly nearly five years ago.  When I keep reading Facebook updates about how busy and fulfilled he feels at work, and what he's doing with his own projects (and it's scary enough that 75% of all the things HBE has published is either by A.C or his brother), rather than how he's finally getting through all the Untold Tales of the Past submissions that the brothers were deluged with last fall, I can't help but wonder.  The catch this time is that he's got a contract with me that states if we don't play, he still has to pay.  I don't know if I'm just being paranoid, but this is my literary future, and I'm justified in being a little paranoid.  A lot of things have fallen apart on me.  I would really like this to not be one of them.

Yeah, we'll see.

#303. Sigild V, Comics Reader, Jabroni Companion, Warrior

#303.

Some of the recent activity from around my blogs and somesuch:

Just Imagine Tony Creating...Spider-Man 3 from the Sigild V short story blog. This one's the conclusion of three entries that feature a version of what I would've done with the three Sam Raimi movies, given the same general premises but with an increasingly divergent result. The first is basically an origin story that only brings Peter to becoming Spider-Man at the end. The second retains Dr. Octopus but continues the themes and plots from the first installment as well. This conclusion brings Green Goblin back as the primary foe, includes the famous death of Gwen Stacy, and suggests a possible continuation with Kraven the Hunter.

Stars be my destiny from the Comics Reader blog. This is my ode to James Robinson's Starman, maybe a decade and a half late. The link helps explain why.

Jabroni Companion #22 from the Fan Companion blog. Here I continue my series talking about professional wrestlers (topics this time include AJ Styles, Brock Lesnar, Booker T, Scott Steiner, Lex Luger, and Too Cool). In the past, as readers are apparently continually rediscovering, I've written about Star Trek, as well as movies. Which leads us to:

Warrior is the best movie of the year, my latest article for Examiner. As you can tell, I really liked the movie. Over at my Facebook account, A.C. Hall, from the world-famous Hall Bros. Entertainment, publishers of my upcoming book Yoshimi, chimed in and agreed with my modest assessment. Not too bad!

#301. Reading List: Bright Shiny Morning

#301.

Just submitted a story to a Glimmer Train contest. One slight problem here is that I submitted the same story to Hall Bros. Hopefully everything'll sort itself out...

Next on the Reading List:

Bright Shiny Morning from James Frey, a writer who was publically hosed by Oprah a few years back. This book was his comeback, and notably did not receive near as much attention as the inciting material, which is a real shame, because true literary fiction deserves to have trumpets heralding its arrival. It appears this really is one of those works.

#286. Villainy, Yoshimi

#286.

That's the cover for Villainy, the new anthology from Hall Bros. Entertainment. It's being released on June 9th. This is relevant because I've got a short story included, "Last Ride Out of Liberation," a sort of hard-boiled noir, which should be fun to read. And when I say "short" story, I really do mean "short." But still, should be fun.

The other bit of relevance is that HBE and I have just signed a contract for Yoshimi, a book that will be released next summer. It's the story of a girl thrust into the world of maturity, with samurai swords, a tale of vengeance, a mad dash around the world, and a love story, too. But it does not have robots. Yet.

#279. Fan Companion, Comics Reader, Sigild V, Hall Bros, Ecce Homo

#279.

Figured I should also mention a little of what I've been doing in my family of blogs. Every Thursday I update the Fan Companion (where I've been counting down my 500 hundred film favorites since last fall) and Comics Reader (where I've gotten [forty-five] creator Andi Ewington to sign up as my first official Blogger follower thanks to my hearty recommendation of his graphic novel in the 2010 QB50). I've been steadily working at Sigild V, writing and posting new stories about as regularly as I did with the poetry cycles I've done from 2007-2010. I've been hard at work at a sequence called Lost Convoy for the past few weeks now, posting new installments as the story has blossomed, and it continues to do exactly that. I've got a second act planned that will expand the story, and still not even get us to the point where our lost survivors are reunited with the rest of the fleet, not to mention barely mentioning much of the apocalyptic context!

But beyond that I've just posted a handful of short stories ("Bound by Blood," "The Insomniac's Dream," and "Monkey Palm") I wrote last year, several of which were rejected by my pal A.C. Hall for one of his Hall Bros. anthologies, though not too many sour grapes, since I got a story called "Last Ride Out of Liberation" included in the upcoming Villainy anthology, and even selected as Ace's editor's pick, which I'm terrifically proud of.

Have I even mentioned that I finished writing Ecce Homo in the final hours of last Friday? I'm also really happy about that. And so begins the long process of getting the darned thing published. Hey, Ecce Homo, have you met Finnegan, your brother in that struggle? But seriously, I worked on that sucker from October to last month, and while I spent long periods of time not actually writing, it was another revealing experience at what it takes for me to write a novel, and I'm probably more proud of this one than either of the other two (but I like those, too). Hopefully the world really will get a chance to judge for itself.

#264. Hall Bros. Entertainment, Ecce Homo, Moxie, John Morrison

#264.

It's been more than a month since I last posted here! I've completed several books since 10/14, but I'll get back to that later in the week. Today I'm just gonna shoot the breeze a little. I don't know if I mentioned this already, but I got accepted into a Hall Bros. Entertainment anthology, which was pretty awesome. Work on Ecce Homo has been a little spotty of late, partly because of a trip to Maine two weeks ago. I was able to belt out five chapters in one day immediately before that, however, and have done a lot of story development for the remaining half (at least), which to me is just as good as writing (though writing is pretty good, too), given that I'm still trying to get Finnegan published. I don't know if I had done so already last month, but I might as well mention that I've sent it off to a couple of publishers, continuing a year-long effort to find a home for it.

I'm also interested in writing about Moxie! I'm in the preliminary stages of a book proposal that'll cover people's opinions about the oldest and most obnoxious more-or-less original taste soft drink in the country, which happens to be featured in my home town of Lisbon Falls, ME, both at the Moxie Store and the annual Moxie Festival. The working title is This Book Has Moxie!, while I hope to set up This Website Has Moxie! and other tie-ins as they become appropriate and/or relevant.

Really excited for the apparent push John Morrison is getting. Dare I hope for a WrestleMania main event? Also really happy that Mr. Anderson is getting recuperative time off for his concussion, glad that it's being taken very seriously, very publically. And you can't possibly blame the man for this injury.

...But, as I said, I'll be back with more later in the week.

#253. Modern Woe, A.C. Hall, Paperback Reader?, Mr. Anderson

#253.

I recently completed the "official" tally for Modern Woe, at a hundred poems, but I recently learned that a "lost" poem was posted at the Fan Companion in error, so that makes it 101, and then I'll be writing one more, "Being 30," to complete the "Pulling 30" sequence, after I reach, well, 30 years old, next Wednesday to be precise.

So that's pretty awesome. My adventures trying to convince A.C. Hall to publish me in his new venture weren't completely for naught. I decided I liked writing the style I'd adopted for the two attempts so much that I will probably be doing more of that in the future. My latest one, Bound by Blood, can be found at the Comic Book Resources forums, where I post as Tekamthi. I don't get there often, unfortunately, but recently figured it'd be good exposure for my writing.

I may start writing for Paperback Reader again soon. Bart Gerardi's long-standing comics site recently converted to Wordpress, and I've been mulling going back for a few weeks now. I already like Wordpress, because that's what Lower Decks uses (where I'm currently posting the Fan Companion simultaneously, which is only about eleven Star Trek films away from completion; I'll be working on my 500 Film Fan Companion afterward).

Now that RVD is no longer TNA champion, Mr. Anderson is in a good spot to finally get the big belt. I hope it happens.

Summer Slam looked like a really good PPV, so I'm looking forward to seeing that when it hits DVD. Chris Jericho's set is due about the same time, so I'll have some fresh wrestling to enjoy.

Did I mention how glad I am that Daniel Bryan is back?

#247. Fan Companion, Modern Woe, Prod Oasis, A.C. Hall, Wrestling

#247.

The Fan Companion is certainly charging ahead full steam, in case you were wondering (and not reading!!!), while Modern Woe chugs along to a hundred (67 and counting). Soon I'll be launching another series of poems within that one dedicated to philosophy, following the recent "Coyote, Trickster" set. You can thank Fred Van Lente and his Action Philosophers comic for that.

I picked up an issue during a binge yesterday at Bargain/Escape Velocity Comics in downtown Colorado Springs. By "binge" I mean I got forty comics, but they were twenty-five cents each, so it wasn't too bad, and I got a lot of great stuff while I was at it.

I'm still contemplating ways to break into a professional writing career, which is like a second job, one I've had since 2004, after graduating from UMaine. If I actually chronicled every attempt, it would make me look quite foolish indeed. But I keep myself sane by working on wholly personal projects in the meantime, which I sometimes try and adapt for public use as well. That's how I came upon Pacific Rim and Prod Oasis, E.N.G., prequel comics for a sci-fi creation I've been working on for fifteen years. Also, I think I want to do a comic based on Sparx, a somewhat obscure DC character at this point.

But as I said, I'm always working on ideas.

I'm also in the curious position of submitting stories to a former writing partner of mine, A.C. Hall, from the aborted Dead Letter Quarterly days, which is nearing three years of age (strange enough to say). He and his brother rejected my first story, "Insomniac's Dream," even though to my mind it fit perfectly (if by "perfectly" one assumes the linkage to "my mind," which hardly ever seems in sync with the rest of the, er, world) with the anthology theme they'd concocted.

In wrestling news, I think things are going fairly well, a slow development of things I've written about in the past. John Morrison is still making his case for superstardom, Mr. Anderson is making himself a TNAdiot, and Bryan Danielson (I really wish he'd've worked out in WWE) hopefully gets to join Desmond Wolfe soon.

I went through a recent spurt of watching WWE DVDs covering old promotions, including the AWA and ECW. I'm looking forward to picking up the new Ricky Steambeat set, and am really pumped for the Chris Jericho one being released later this year. I've been waiting for that one for a long time now.

Anyhoo, soonish I'll be updating the blog with my latest Reading List book. Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games has been amazing.

#141. Cloak of Shrouded Men Editing, A.C. Hall, Paperback Reader, Books, Wrestling

Well...I suppose updating once a month is better than...nothing?

Anyhoo, Cloak of Shrouded Men has kicked and screamed through its final revisions (I hate that stuff! even when it produces necessary and beneficial changes!), meaning it's that much closer to being published via iUniverse, which I can't be more excited about. I keep entertaining myself with all the possibilities of how great people are gonna think it is. I'm so happy for myself! Still haven't heard back about The Jingle Jangle, but I can be patient sometimes, really! Though I really hope to hear positive word on it...

One way or another, I'm still writing. A.C. Hall, a fellow columnist at Paperback, has invited me to contribute a story for a fiction anthology his other haunt, Stumblebum Studios, will be putting out, and based on the theme, I've cobbled together something about a time-traveling Nicola Tesla, whom I last encountered in Christopher Nolan's superb The Prestige (to see my ideas of good movies, be sure to stop by the Observation Lounge at Lower Decks, which has now completely segued from a Star Trek site to a general genre lair, which I've become comfortable with; I'm working on a flashbacks feature for Lost, the first thing I'll have done in relation to that site since a 40th anniversary Star Trek story last fall, the first in a potential series, if I have the time). And I think I'm closer to writing a poem worthy of 9/11 (after all those anniversary pieces were lost in the Great Crash of '05) and the Iraq war, to be called "'Cause You Want to Believe She's Infallible." I can't wait to find the time...

Speaking of Paperback Reader, the recent return of a past contributor, along with a site redesign by operator Bart Gerardi, has me thinking again how much I appreciate my ongoing work there. It's made me that much more engaged in the landscape of comic books, and given me a regular platform to write about them, even if my reviews have slowed to a trickle, though the weekly column persists. I was set to write two reviews, and I've been on the computer long enough now, this evening, but the column only seems to command those thoughts more and more, now that my commitment to 52 is over (I reviewed every issue of that breakthrough weekly DC series). If you can't find me here, chances are you can always find me there!

Or at work. Sometimes, it seems that's what I do, besides eat and sleep. But I read, too! And at the bookstore, I keep finding more things I won't be getting around to reading very soon (I've been stuck reading William Least-Heat Moon's River-Horse for months now). But I'll get more into that later.

Another thing I'll be returning for is thoughts on the new WWE draft (begun the night Vince McMahon "died"). But I'll leave with this thought: at this year's WrestleMania, John Cena-Shawn Michaels was an instant classic. And this was definitely a year to have something like that. But, as I said, more thoughts in a few days...

#138. A.C Hall, Poetry, Comic Books, Cloak of Shrouded Men, Paperback Reader

Okay, okay...Am I at the right blog? Yes! Okay! Safe to continue!

Now that last entry's...unpleasantries are past us, let's move forward, shall we? There may be guests. Fellow Paperback Reader contributor A.C. Hall moonlights at another comics site, Stumbebum Studios (I don't get that, either), where he writes a column called Ring Psychology (still lost, Ace, which is something I've been callin' ya, bud, in my head; at least now it's out there). Several months ago, he came 'round with a few writing prompts for a few of his friends, to use for the column, and among them was one that asked those friends to reimagine the concluding arc of The Matrix. This week, Ace included my version, which was one of the few responses I still remain proud of. If you liked it, too, that's why I'm writing this post, because I probably owe ya, in case you followed that link and found your way here and wondered if there was anything actually worth reading.

Sometimes there is.

Sometimes! And I'm not even speaking of the regularity, or lack thereof, of the actual blogging on this blog. If you review the archives (and brave ye those waters, if you must), you'll discover that when I began, I pretty much stuck some slappy things every days at this old Monk.

I think now would be a good time to apologize for some of the things I'm saying, because I'm saying them funny. I don't do that. Much. You can find poetry at the Scouring Monk. I won't apologize for that, not on your life, my new and good friend. Anyway, speaking of poetry, while I was home, fretting over Midtown shipping matters you might discover in my own column, I sculpted a new poetry collection out of the material available on my parents' computer, where I wrote most of my formative work upon leaving the college workshop. This one ended up being called Card Games. But you aren't really interested in that at this time, are you? Ah, well, I'll get you another time.

I wrote up that Matrix plot basically around the existing material for Reloaded and Revolutions, and maybe that's sometimes clear and maybe sometimes it's not. I hope Ace uses my write-up for the RoboCop prompt, because I like that one even more. But I'm not always basing all of my ideas on other people's ideas. My spanking new ComicSpace page, which you can find here, boasts about three original comics projects I've been working at for a couple of years now, Bandit, The Astrals, and The Conformists. If you'd asked me three years ago which one I'd prefer and were most eager to pursue, it'd have been Bandit, no question, and it wouldn't have been just because, at that time, it was the only one of the three extant. That one's got the longest story. The Astrals mythology has been expanding since its original proposal to the aborted Cabal from my Digital Webbing days, but it's a story that's more easily contained and thus might be easier to introduce first. The Conformists is a concept of characters more than anything, and I love those characters, but the more I think about them, the more I wonder if they have a specific story to tell as well. I have other concepts, one that the boys behind the Death Lurker Saga have in their court, others sprung from other prompts. Many of my favorite ideas come from prompts, actually. Don't let anyone tell you that you can't come up with something good just because someone asked you before you thought of it yourself. That's the story behind Lost, after all. In my earlier years, I wasn't quite as good at it as I would become, but I've really come to value the method.

But I'm still just a hack who isn't actually being published. I'm editing my first novel at the moment, woven from three acts written during successive NaNoWrMos. It's called The Cloak of Shrouded Men and I'm going the indy route, self-publishing. It's called taking fate into my own hands. And I was sure I was done the story, too, but I'm come up with a coda, which I may include in the volume, a most appropriate conclusion to the affair, much as I discovered a new beginning a few years ago.

And did I mention writing for Paperback Reader? Y'know, that's something I'm constantly struggling with. You may have come here after having read something I wrote, but you've got to understand, my experience with my writing is that very few people actually end up reading it. A decade ago, it would have been because I didn't show it to anyone. Now, though, now I just don't know. I do know that I've been writing a weekly column for nine months now, and I've not once gotten a response, beyond my colleages, from it. I'm constantly thinking of pitching the whole thing in. Why bother, right? Well, maybe because if I'd never written for Paperback, not a single review, not a single column, Ace'd never have asked me about those prompts, and you would've never come here. Strange kind of way, how things happen.

Well, things'll keep on happening, one way or another, and I will continue blogging away at the Monk, and I will add more friends at ComicSpace, and someone will read what I write, and I will be published, one way or another. I will tell my stories, and everything will sort of work out.

But yeah, you came here for The Matrix?