I ran home to grab something for lunch. While there, I glanced out the living room window and saw a man darting from house to house, stopping at each door, in a FURTIVE and SUSPICIOUS manner.

A minute later, Demon Dog (our resident evil English cocker spaniel) launched into a barking frenzy at our own door. I peeked out the kitchen window and saw THIS:

Or something similar enough to render any slight dissimilarity irrelevant.

Turns out, he was delivering phone books.

For future reference, if you have occasion to enlist a door-to-door representative for your company or organization, THAT GUY is perhaps not the BEST candidate for the job. Just sayin’.

(Image from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, 2003 version.)

I’ve done my fair share of I-told-you-soing in my day, but it’s no fun to know everything when you like the people who had to get screwed over to prove you right.

There currently is a throwdown taking place at C.J. Redwine’s dojo between some scurvy pirate of questionable sexual preference and Wally the Wonderful and Wise Were-Platypus.

I believe the following compromise will satisfy supporters of both camps and put an end, once and for all, to this terrible conflict.

Read the rest of this entry »

After much soul searching, I have arrived at the conclusion that both “serious” things I tried to write in 2009 are unqualified failures, unsalvageable, and will never see the light of day. The first (which some of you may remember as the Interactive Web Story) because I was in love with the concept but couldn’t produce two stories that lived up to the promise of the concept. The second (typically horrendously titled Beyond the Burning Moon) because I had some sort of mental lapse and decided it would be a good idea to follow some popular writing advice that is fundamentally at odds with my nature.

To wit: “Power through! Get it written! Everything can be fixed in revision!”

I have determined, actually, that last bit is a lie, at least in my case. Powering through, churning out a daily word count regardless of the quality of the words in question, and getting it done under the pressure of a schedule resulted in a draft that contained few complete sentences, huge gaps in logic and continuity, one chapter in which I couldn’t tell whose point of view it was supposed to be until the last couple of paragraphs, and a million other problems. EVERY SINGLE WORD would have had to be rewritten. In other words, it would have been like starting over from nothing, only without the excitement of a new project and Cool! Surprises! because now I’m locked into “fixing” a mess, retreading old, sewage-flooded ground rather than actually writing. When powering through just so you can say you’ve “finished” results in a huge piece of shit, it’s not something that can be “fixed.” All that can be done is get rid of it before the stench sinks into everything else and no amount of Febreze can disguise it.

Know that seething resentment that bubbles up when someone at work or in your family screws something up and you have to go along behind them and clean up their mess, wasting your time and energy because they didn’t have the decency to do it right the first time? That’s how I feel about this story. It makes me angry because somebody half-assed it and now I’m expected to do it over again.

I think it’s probably counterproductive to continue jabbing at a story that makes me angry because I will never be able to give it the kind of attention it deserves.

Ergo, I have given myself permission to abandon it. Sorry if you were looking forward to it, but I assure you with the utmost sincerity, if I ever managed to force myself to finish it (which was looking pretty doubtful), it would have fallen short of even the lowest expectations and, by virtue of being The Thing I Have To Get Done Whether I Like It Or Not, would have prevented me from writing anything new, different, and better.

In the meantime, I have moved on to something I actually care about and am invested in. And if it takes a week to get the first page right and three days to make that one analogy work and a month to make that setting come alive, that’s how much time it will get because (a) when what came before is sound, what comes after is a hell of a lot easier and (b) I will do this right the first time so revision is a matter of copyediting rather than a nightmare of thousands of wasted words.

Don’t worry, I’ve learned my lesson (seriously this time) and am no longer entertaining process-related advice from any source, and I have a squad on hand to smack sense into me in the event of another such mental lapse.

A couple of things happen when someone utters the above question. 

The first thing is that everybody in the vicinity will stop what they’re doing to help look for the missing booger, as if someone lost a contact lens. Or a child. Truly, it is a rallying cry for the civic-minded.

The second thing is that, if you happen to be in possession of food at the time of the aforementioned utterance, you will (a) reflexively examine your food, (b) discover any number of characteristics thereupon that could, with very little imagination (or even a negative quantity of imagination, in the case of oatmeal), be construed as boogerlike, and (c) lose your appetite for all food forever.

Because you can always count on me to turn booger-contaminated lemons into lemonade, keep an eye on the late-night infomercials for details regarding my revolutionary new weight loss system. For six convenient payments of only $19.95 (plus S&H), a specially trained LostBooger SlimQuik consultant will be delivered right to your door and stay by your side until you reach for something to stuff in your face, at which time a program customized to meet your personal needs will take effect. Options include The Sneeze™, The Dig-and-Flick™, The Hork-and-Spit™, and MANY MORE!

And I can GUARANTEE your complete satisfaction with my patent-pending LostBooger SlimQuik system because I’m not just the creator—I’m also a victim client.