What ho?

Not much ho, actually. Let’s see…

HE JUST SMILED, AND GAVE ME A VEGAMITE SANDWICH

Sent my editor in Australia an email yesterday asking what was up with further payments for WARLORD OF ERBEROS, and how the Jeff Webb art book I put together for him was coming. I also mentioned I hadn’t gotten a comp copy of THRILLING MYSTERIES IN SPACE #4 as yet. This morning I found a link to a site where I could download TMIS #4, but he didn’t respond in any way to my questions about, you know, that trivial money stuff.

Look, it’s not like I’m not aware that every writer in the history of the universe has had problems, at some point (usually at far more than one point) getting paid for his work. And I’m also aware that the smaller the amount of money involved, the harder it seems to be to pry it out of the hands of those who owe it to you… Steve Jackson once went into a screaming fit over the phone at me about cutting me a check for around $45. So far Jonathan, the Australian guy, hasn’t thrown any hissy fits with me, he’s just remarkably non-communicative on the subject of amounts and time periods.

So it could be worse, but, well, you know. Money is good, especially now, with no more Unemployment and no job as yet. I’ll have to keep after him, and I hate that. The Japanese believe that part of being honorable is not only paying a debt, but not making the person you owe remind you of the debt… you’re supposed to keep it in mind yourself and remind THEM of it, if necessary.

Pity this particular Australian isn’t more Japanese in his attitude.

Oddly, there are two editors I can think of who have never given me any kind of problem over money… Nye Wilden at CAVALIER, and the anonymous Mr. X, the guy who owns and operates the Website Which Must Not Be Named. I just find it a bit ironic that the editors who pay me for writing pornography have never given me a difficult time over payment. But then, it’s… well, aggravating, I guess… that under my porn writer pseudonym, I actually have several hundred fans who look forward avidly to new stories by me being posted. (Or at least, so it says in the emails I get over there.) I can’t get anyone to read my legitimate fiction no matter what I do, but the X rated drivel… wow!

I guess that’s just the way the world is, though.

MAY BE THE LAST TIME, I DON’T KNOW

Well, I tried to register for my Unemployment check early this morning and it half worked… which means, I got to register for one week, but not the second (they pay you two weeks at a time). That actually makes sense, as they let me register for, and presumably will send me, a check for the week leading up to the meeting I didn’t go to last week, but apparently, since I didn’t go, my benefits are suspended thereafter.

So it looks as if I have one more week’s check coming (around $160) and then I’ll be broke. Given that I have no clue when or if I’ll have more income, I really can’t spend this money on ANYthing but necessities… which means a family restaurant trip this weekend re: my grandmother’s birthday is one I will not be able to attend. (I feel just terrible about that. I generally enjoy my grandmother’s company so much.)

However, I am looking forward to getting picked up and taken out to my brother Pat’s place to watch the Bux game with the rest of the family on his big screen TV. Yeah, it’s only an exhibition game but it should be fun to check out while hangin’ with my homies. Pat is the successful one in my generation; he has a very very nice house. I should remember to call him sometime this week and ask if he’s going to be cooking out for the get together; I have some Italian sausage in the freezer I could bring for his grille, if so.

But I’ll probably forget.

Paul can’t go to the get together because he’s working Friday night, which sucks. He’s not a huge football fan, anyway, though.

Hey! This is a really boring blog entry!

Haven’t heard anything about the email I sent off to Accent. Meant to talk to Chad about what I should do to get the ball rolling there this weekend, and then forgot. (I do that a lot.)

I won $6.50 last week; got three numbers on one of my Lotto tickets. Whoo hoo!

Trinity of Eyesicle.com, who alarmingly enough turns out to live right here in Tampa, gave me a nice plug on her blog last week, which seems to have increased my traffic slightly. Y’all should go over and check out her stuff. She’s quite funny sometimes. She’s ALSO pretty goddam gorgeous, which is a good thing, since it means she can’t possibly be attracted to me. Otherwise, my life might get complicated, since she’s smart and funny and kind of a head case and says she loves my writing, making her so totally my kind of girl. But, as I say, fortunately she’s drop dead gorgeous, and so can never do anything but love me like the brother she has never had. Whew! Dodged a bullet there.

Actually, she has Robyn Pollman’s blog listed on her blogroll, so for all I know she’s the insane Mrs. Pollman’s bestest buddy ever, and if so, I expect her to loathe me just like all Robyn’s toadi… er… friends, do. But that would make me sad. Trinity seems far too classy to hand around with a rodent like Robyn.

EVERYBODY LOVES ME, BABY, WHAT’S THE MATTER WITH YOU?

There’s this scene in Broadcast News where Jane (portrayed with laser like intensity by Holly Hunter) has to confront her boss (I don’t know the name of the actor who plays him), a guy named Paul, and tell him he’s just made a catastrophically bad decision. She finds him in a room, talking on the phone, and drags him off his call and takes him to the side and tells him, very bluntly, that he’s made a mistake, she tells him explicitly and in detail what the mistake is and she inarguably and irrefutably shows him how wrong he is, concluding her presentation by saying that she feels it’s her job to point this out to him.

He blinks at her a few times and then, in his soft, suave, diplomatic way, says rather placatingly, “All right, that’s your opinion. I happen to disagree.” Jane doesn’t back up a step. She bites down hard and fires back immediately, “It isn’t opinion.”

Now her boss is kind of stunned; doesn’t this woman know he can buy the ground she’s standing on and have her torn down? People simply don’t talk to him like this, especially his own damn employees. Finally, obviously both shocked and rather annoyed at this intolerable impertinence, he looks at Jane and says “You’re just absolutely right… and I’m just absolutely wrong?”

Now, most people at this point would be looking for a way to bail the hell out of this confrontation and save their asses, but once again, Jane doesn’t even flinch, she just looks at the asshole and then nods her head once, firmly, without losing eye contact.

Now her dickwad of a boss (who, by the way, is indeed completely and totally in the wrong) takes a breath, and says, very softly, very dangerously, “It must be nice to always think you know better… to always be the smartest person in the room.”

Jane just looks at him, and then her face kind of sags (it’s a wonderful acting job by Hunter) and in this painfully sincere whisper, she responds: “No. It’s awful.”

I don’t know why, but I think about that sequence a lot.

Anyway, I finished Conquistador by S.M. Stirling, wrote a review of it, and sent it off to my editor at JoeBobBriggs.com. Maybe they’ll even post it. So far they haven’t posted any of my three previous reviews. On the other hand, they did send me Conquistador for free, and the hardcover price on it is $23.95, so hey, that ain’t a bad deal for about four thousand words of typing.

Having nothing else to read, I picked up that anthology of Dean R. Koontz short stories Mel loaned me again, and read through the second story in it, “The Black Pumpkin”.

I love Dean R. Koontz. I really do. You know why? Because he completely validates my existence in every way. I mean, honestly, I’m incapable of really judging the quality of my own writing because, obviously, I have a bias… sometimes I really think I’m hot shit, other times I’m sure that everything I’ve ever written is complete garbage.

One thing I’m certain of, though… I write about five hundred times better than Dean R. Koontz.

So if editors keep rejecting my manuscripts, and Dean R. Koontz is a billionaire, well, guess what… it’s not MY fault. THEY’RE morons.

And if millions of people in the world will pay actual money to buy Koontz’s crap and read it, while I can’t even get friends or relatives to read my stories and novels on my website no matter how I beg or plead, well… see above.

But let’s look at ‘The Black Pumpkin’. Just so you see I’m not just making this stuff up.

Brief synopsis: a kid goes off with his family (dad and older brother) to buy pumpkins at Halloween. At the back of the pumpkin lot, there’s this old guy who carves jack o’lanterns. The kid gets a really creepy feeling off this very sinister old guy and the jack o’lanterns he’s carving, but the kid’s older brother, who is a complete prick, grabs the nastiest, meanest, scariest looking jack o’lantern and takes it home. The old guy tells the kid, and the older brother, over and over again that they can pay whatever they want for the jack o’lantern, but they will get what they pay for… or, he sometimes says, they will get what they deserve. Naturally, the prick older brother guffaws and gives the old guy a nickel, and ignores the kid when the kid tries to tell him that the old guy and the jack o’lantern are evil. Of course, he doesn’t see the way the sun came out from behind a cloud, shining down on the entire scene… “but did not touch the carver himself. The light parted around him as if it were a curtain, leaving him in the shade. It was an incredible sight, as if the sunshine shunned the carver…”

The prick older brother goes off with his jack o’lantern, and the carver then tells the younger kid that in the night, that jack o’lantern will turn into a horrible monster and give everyone in the house exactly what they deserve.

The kid and his father and brother go home. The older brother puts a candle in the jack o’lantern. We get some more exposition, in which the older brother bullies and humiliates the kid in a cruel but kind of dull and completely unimaginative way, and we find out that the father is a politician, and both he and the kid’s mom are nasty power hungry people who love the prick older brother because he’s athletic and good looking but loathe the sensitive younger kid because he’s weird and nice.

Night falls. The jack o’lantern, as advertised, turns into a horrible monster and kills everyone, except for the little kid. Now, Our Hero has hidden a knife in his bed because he knows what’s going to happen, although no one would listen to him. When the pumpkin monster confronts him, though, he drops the knife because it’s obvious to him it won’t hurt the thing. The pumpkin monster tells him he’s going to get what he deserves, just like everyone else in the house… and then says that since he’s a good boy, what he deserves is his freedom, which he now has, because the monster has slaughtered his prick brother and his crappy parents. The pumpkin monster says he hopes the kid grows up to be a creep like his parents and brother were, though, so one day he might be able to take another shot at him, and then vanishes.

That’s the end of the story.

Now, to me, that seems like something a 12 year old might write and hand in for an English assignment, and I hope to God if one ever did, the teacher would put the little bastard in therapy immediately. But as far as being a good example of anything at all… writing in general, the short story form, fantasy, horror, whatever… oh my God. This is a truly truly appallingly bad piece of drivel, and trust me, you guys haven’t even read the actual prose. I was going to type in a few more examples of this horrendous tripe, but, well, it would be tedious and make me feel kind of shitty about writing, and I’d rather continue to enjoy the process. So, let’s just kind of analyze the overall plot and story structure instead.

First, Koontz shows the wonderful subtlety that is perhaps the paramount quality he possesses as a writer, by presenting us with a character who is extraordinarily nuanced and three dimensional… the creepy old pumpkin carver. Koontz does a marvelous job of presenting this character in an enigmatic and mysterious way, so we don’t know precisely what’s going on, and can feel a sense of intrigue, of growing terror and unnamable dread gathering slowly around us. After all, it’s not like Koontz simply comes out and tells us that this guy is horribly supernaturally evil or anything, by doing something really stunningly blatant and obvious like, oh, I don’t know, having the fucking sunlight part around him to leave him in shadow, or something. And furthermore, it’s not as if Koontz then really hammers his plot points home by having this old guy actually tell the hero that the evil pumpkin monster is going to come to life and slaughter his whole family. Oh, no. A really rotten writer who doesn’t know anything about crafting a really scary horror story might do all this… say, that 12 year old in 7th grade English glass I mentioned before… but Koontz is the modern day master of the macabre! He understands that ambiguity, and atmosphere, and especially, the unknown, are the keystones to true horror, and he’s written a masterpiece of subtle and understated terror here.

Koontz is also a wonderful plotter. One of the things that the very finest and most talented writers always try to do is to misdirect and surprise their readers. Such literary craftsmen make you think one thing is going to happen, and then suddenly produce a plot twist that leaves you breathless. Koontz is a master of the textual pump-fake, and he’s brilliant at coming up with surprise twist endings. After all, it’s not like in this story, he had an obviously evil character tell the hero right at the start every last goddam thing that was going to happen, after which, every last goddam thing the evil character said came absolutely true. No, no. A really shitty writer might have done that. Koontz knows better.

Another key element of good fiction is in depth characterization… the ability to create three dimensional, detailed, and nuanced characters that the reader really cares about and can comfortably repose belief in. We can see here that Koontz has also mastered this aspect of writing. Our hero, Tommy, is good and sweet and kind and brave. We know this because, well, his parents are assholes and his older brother is a prick, and Tommy doesn’t act like them, so, well, he must be good and sweet and kind and brave, despite the fact that at no time during the story does Tommy do anything except act afraid of a pumpkin carver and a jack o’lantern, get beat up by his older brother, steal some cookies from the kitchen, muse about what meanies his parents are, try to put out a candle (unsuccessfully), cower in his bed while a horrible ogre slaughters his entire family, drop a knife on the floor when the monster comes after him, and then stand there while the monster lectures him tediously on good and evil.

Characterization on the wicked pumpkin carver, the prick older brother, and the asshole parents is even more brilliantly accomplished. We know the evil pumpkin carver is wicked because sunlight won’t touch him and, well, he TELLS Tommy he’s wicked. We know the older brother is a prick because, well, granted, he acts like one throughout the story, albeit in a truly boring manner. We know the parents are assholes because they’re really snobby with their caterer and Koontz throws in a paragraph about how all they want is political power.

And then they all DIE, and the pumpkin monster says they DESERVED it, so, of course, they MUST have been rotten.

Koontz, like all great writers, also understands that the most satisfying resolution to a story is one in which the hero triumphs against all odds by performing in some really exceptional fashion… either accomplishing some feat of physical heroism or derring do, or by doing something clever and unexpected to outwit whatever adversity he is up against. Koontz comprehends that if you’re going to have a happy ending to a horror story, or, really, any kind of adventure story featuring an exciting, violent conflict, it’s necessary for the reader to feel that the hero has earned his success, through hard work or superior guile or study or intelligence or SOMEthing. Nobody would have watched McGYVER if the lead character had simply gotten incredibly lucky week after week in escaping from various deathtraps. No, what made that hero popular was that he thought his way out of danger and outwitted his opponents, and we like that. It makes us feel better about being sentient, to watch someone use their intelligence to emerge victorious over the most daunting opposition. We all also want desperately to believe that we live in a fair reality (although we don't) where justice naturally occurs, and therefore, we like stories in which the hero actually earns his happy ending, and deserves it, and obtains it through personal merit and hard work, rather than simple blind luck.

And in this short story we can clearly see this element in play, as well. Koontz handles this with remarkable deftness, showing us just how incredibly admirable and competent his young hero is, as Tommy fails to persuade his brother that the evil jack o’lantern is, in fact, evil, then gets beaten up by his brother, then fails miserably to put out a candle, then hides in his bedroom while a monster is killing his entire family, and then just stands there while the same monster basically decides not to kill Tommy, because Tommy is ‘a good boy’. He is, apparently, the most thoroughly useless and utterly incompetent ‘good boy’ since the prince of Swamp Castle, but, never mind that.

Anyway. I have so far read two, count them, two, short stories by Dean R. Koontz, and I am deeply gratified by both of them. I have spent much of my adult life opining that Dean R. Koontz was a spectacularly bad writer without ever bothering to read any of his writing, and now that I’ve read some of his writing, it is absolutely wonderful to discover that I’ve not only been correct all along, I have actually been being generous in my assessment of his talents.

I may never be a successful professional author, I may never make a living from my writing, much less millions of dollars. But it is deeply gratifying to know that I am undeniably a far, far better writer than one of the most popular and successful professional authors in the modern world.

RULES OF THE ROAD

In one of his many invaluable essays on life in Hollywood, Mark Evanier described his first meeting with legendary TV comic and icon Milton Berle. Upon being introduced to Uncle Miltie and shaking hands with him, Mark, who is a pretty witty guy, blurted out without even thinking about it, “Wow, I didn’t recognize you in men’s clothing”. According to Mark, this soured Uncle Miltie on him from that point forward, because Mark had broken Rule Number One When Hanging With Milton Berle, namely, Never Be Funnier Than Milton Berle.

I’m reminded of that anecdote now.

Recent experiences at Electrolite being pretty much entirely similar if not completely identical to my previous experiences at Uppity-Negro.com and TampaTantrum.com, I thought I’d take the time to extrapolate whatever wisdom there is to find in the whole mess. Here’s The Deal, as far as I can see:

If you want to make friends and influence people when you head out onto the blogging trail, at least, as regards your posting comments on other people’s blogs, you MUST NOT:

Rule E comes mostly out of my experiences with Aaron Hawkin’s Uppity-Negro blog. He gets a lot of female posters and like any of us male geeks would be in that admirable position, he is thoroughly whipped by them. If a new reader comes along and does anything whatsoever to offend the babes on Aaron’s blog, that new reader can expect a cold shoulder from Aaron roughly the size of the Greenland glacier. I don’t really blame Aaron for this; for a male geek, positive female attention is a jewel beyond price, and if I ever had any women posting to my blog who weren’t related to me by marriage, I’d most likely dance and sing like a puppet on a string when they cracked the lash, too.

I should add to this that I’ve learned, from Electrolite, that one Must Not Be Whimsical, Oblique, or Overly Geeky When Posting To A Big Important Political Marketplace of Ideas Type Blog, because those guys just have no time for Theodore Marley Brooks or Cornelus van Lunt references, regardless of how amusing or entertaining you and some others may find them.

Now, I am posting this to point out that while these may be the universal Rules of the Road on other blogs (and as far as I can see, they are, indeed, pretty much universal) you can ignore them here. I don’t care if you:

Oh, and I like geeky references and would just adore whimsical, cleverly elliptical posts to my comment threads, although I suspect I’d get annoyed if someone started posting a whole lot of Harry Potter-speak here, just for one example.

If there is a universal rule on this blog, it is quite simply, Do Not Be A Bigger Asshole Than The Blogger. In fact, if you can avoid it (and most of my small number of regular posters avoid it with style and panache) Don’t Be An Asshole At All. I am quite a big enough asshole myself to supply all the assholiness necessary for any blog, and I will continue to keep this blog well furnished with stupid remarks, doltish mistakes, whiney rationalizations, and defensive recriminations by the ton lot, there can be no doubt. You need bring none of your own asshole nature with you, I have plenty and am always willing to share.

THE INEVITABLE DISCLAIMER

By generally accepted social standards, I'm not a likable guy. I'm not saying that to get cheap reassurances. It's simply the truth. I regard many social conventions in radically different ways than most people do, I have many many controversial opinions, and I tend to state them pretty forthrightly. This is not a formula for popularity in any social continuum I've ever experienced.

In my prior blogs, I took the fairly standard attitude: if you don't like my opinions or my blog, don't read the fucking thing.

Having given that some more thought, though, I'm not going to say that this time around, because I've realized that what this is basically saying is, 'if you don't like what I have to say, tough, I don't want to hear it, don't even bother to tell me, just go away'.

And that's actually a pretty worthless attitude. It's basically saying, 'I don't want to hear anything except unconditional agreement and approval'. And that's nonsense. This is still a free country... for a little while longer, anyway... and if you really feel you just gotta send me a flame, or post one on my comment threads (assuming they actually work, which I cannot in any way guarantee) then by all means, knock yourself out.

Unless your flame is exceptionally cogent, witty, or stylish, though, I will most likely ignore it. You do have a right to say anything you want (although I'm not sure that's a right when you're doing it in my comment threads, but hey, you can certainly send all the emails you want). However, I have an equal right not to read anything I don't feel like reading... and I'm really quick with the delete key... as various angry folks have found in the past, when they decided they just had to do their absolute level best to make me as miserable as possible.

So, if you don't like my opinions, feel free to say so. However, if I find absolutely nothing worthwhile in your commentary, I will almost certainly not respond to it in any way.

Stupidity, ignorance, intolerance... these things are only worth my time and attention if they're entertaining. So unless you can be stupid, ignorant, and/or intolerant with enough wit, style, and/or panache to amuse me... try to be smart, informed, and broad minded when you write me.