Geoff Wisner

Just wanted to send a quick shout out to the awesome Geoff Wisner…who was kind enough to mention me (and my story “Command Performance”) in a recent post on his blog A Natural Curiosity 

He also covered the other cool stuff in issue 102 of Transition Magazine…out now!

...the movie would have been MUCH better with this guy in it...like I'd requested...

I wrote a movie.

“Big deal,” you are saying, because…

a) you are my friend (or enemy) and already know that I wrote a movie

or

b) you don’t know me…but do know that most everybody around you (and perhaps even you yourself) has written a movie (or is working on one…or has an idea for one).

Anyway…when they (the infamous they…who are responsible for most maladies) went and made my movie, I wasn’t thrilled with the way it turned out. (I wrote a dark indie crime drama…the “director” tried to turn it into a lame American Beauty knockoff…and mostly succeeded)  

...you think your cat was bored...

You can watch the trailer––that’ll give you a good idea of what I had in mind…and then you can read the reviews, and that’ll give you an equally good idea of how it all turned out (my favorite was on Yahoo Movies under the heading “Sucked So Bad” …So boring, the actors were bored, I was bored, my cat was bored.  And when someone’s cat is bored…well…) 

So I rewrote it as a novel…

…and guess what?

I wasn’t thrilled with the way that turned out either.  And this time it was my fault.

Why?  Well partially because it was supposed to be a movie and movies are different than books.  But mostly because in the time between I’d changed a lot as a writer.  Grown in some areas…Grown-up in others.  So the things that I was obsessing about at 28, don’t really grip me the same way now that I’m 36.

However, I still had 300 pages of text…and being the frugal chap that I am, I wasn’t about to let it go to waste.  So I did what any mercenary hack would do…I mercilessly hacked it into a fairly substantial number of short stories.  I changed POV from 3rd to 1st (and even 2nd) in some areas.  I changed names.  I came up with new lead-ins and gave some of them endings.  And do you know what?

It worked.  A good chunk of them have seen publication.

Here’s one I’m particularly fond on…called Chickens that came out in the Sep/Oct Issue of Thuglit (and it’s all about how you shouldn’t throw things…or people…away).  Enjoy.

…warning though…it’s not for the faint of heart.

...it's free...but I'm accepting donations...

So…while I spend most of my time trying to grind out genre fiction with soul…occasionally one of my short stories will turn out more like one of those pesky “literary” things.  

I’ve never really bought those distinctions …just because you (as the creator) brand something you write as literary, it doesn’t make it literature…of course saying it’s commercial, doesn’t mean anybody is going to buy it either.

At any rate here’s one of those…it’s called “Light” and it’s up in the current issue of Oddville Press (page 10)

...Cameron and Bigelow reenacting their favorite scenes from "Love Story"...

There’s been a lot of talk about how Oscar™ contenders James Cameron and Kathryn Bigelow used to be married and now they’re up for the same Big Gold Doorstop™ …and isn’t that cute and who are you wearing on the red carpet and blah blah blah… 

I’m not a huge fan of The Academy Awards™ (my sense is that if you get to wake up every morning and do what you love, then that’s enough of a prize)…I am, however, a big fan of both of those directors and have been for years.  My guess is that Cameron will get the Giant Naked Man Paperweight™ for director (for his work on Avatar…and he deserves it.  He’s probably the greatest living film director––as innovative in his way as Kurosawa or Hitchcock, and vastly superior to his overpraised contemporaries like Martin Scorsese or David Lynch), but The Hurt Locker will likely take the top Hood Ornament™   

...you know you want it... (...oh wait, it already says that right on the poster...dammit!)...

I haven’t seen The Hurt Locker yet.  I’m sure it’s great, but with being broke and having a nice TV (bought back when I wasn’t so broke) it takes a lot to get me into a movie theater these days…basically it takes Avatar.  So I’ll be better able to comment on Bigelow’s film after it comes out on DVD…but in the mean time I wanted to draw your attention to a movie called Strange Days. 

This one was directed by Bigelow from a script by Cameron (and Jay Cocks).  It takes place in the final hours of the 20th century (back when that still sounded like the future…barely), and tells the story of Lenny Nero, an ex-cop turned dealer of black market memory chips, and the conspiracy he uncovers…think Chinatown by way of Philip K. Dick on crank.

I highly recommend checking this one out if you get the chance.  I won’t ruin the plot for you, but there is one scene that I’d like to reference.  Lenny (like all good broken heroes) has a problem.  He’s totally addicted to the memory chips he peddles…especially to ones of his own involving his ex-girlfriend, Faith (played by Juilette Lewis).  At his “rock bottom” moment, his best friend Mace (Angela Bassett) finally confronts him about his addiction––destroying his chips while telling him that “Memories are meant to fade. They’re designed that way for a reason.”

...ok this isn't from the film...it's either from Total Recall...or is a pic of the Governator on the can...

I’ve been thinking about that quote a lot lately.  Not just because the desire to escape into another body/form/persona is a huge them in Avatar, but because as I mentioned in previous posts…social networking and Facebook in particular can (for some…like me) become a crippling addiction.   And while it might not be as far out there as it is portrayed in Strange Days…maybe, just maybe Facebook and the like is just what Cameron and Bigelow were warning us about.  That those strange days would find us after all…just a decade late.

Like me you have probably noticed that every time you turn on the news or log on to your email you see another story about some billionaire who smacks around a little white ball on a vast expanse of green that is not used to grow food for people, or as a park for inner city children (or for obese suburban children who play too much x-box), or left as a forest like it probably should have been to start with, and how this billionaire has taken a break from whacking that ball around that immoral waste of land for a while and this stunning the nation…it’s a tragedy!  

You also read about how this billionaire, who you have probably never met…and who almost certainly doesn’t give a shit about you, went and stuck his wee wee into a few places that got his wife (who you also don’t know) very upset.  And ohh…don’t forget about the children…the poor poor billionaire children.

How many of you know all the people who live on your street?  Or the people who live in your apartment building?  Or the guy who picks up your trash?  Those are the people in your life…not some billionaire who can hit a ball with a degree of accuracy.  If that ball somehow cured cancer, or advanced the rights of the marginalized or oppressed then I might let it slide…

But anyway, as you’ve been glued to the news about Tiger Woods…here are some facts that you probably already know and are ignoring about Tigers and Woods

...I was going to put a cute picture here...

Tigers:  Right now tigers are on the brink of extinction.  Estimates put remaining wild populations at somewhere between 5,000 and 7,400 and shrinking.  That means that the entire planetary population of wild tigers could fit on the damn Staten Island Ferry!

Of the 8 species of tigers, only 5 still exist AT ALL.  This is the result of poaching for exotic (and useless) folk medicine and fur as well as illegal big game hunting, and loss of habitat.  Loss of habitat is more than just losing a place to live.  As tigers are pushed out, their groups begin to fragment, and as a result the gene pool shrinks and thanks to inbreeding (ours as well as the tigers) fewer and fewer healthy cubs are born each year.

Woods: Thousands of acres of forest are cut down each second…EACH SECOND. Thanks to this deforestation, scientists estimate that we loose 50,000 species every year…poof!  gone forever.  Indigenous people are pushed out of their lands, as are animals (see above), the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere rises and the oxygen goes away.  Because of this 50% of the world’s flora and fauna is thought to be vulnerable to extinction in the near future.

...progress...

And don’t give me any crap about the strides the timber industry is making to replenish the forest.  A seedling is not a tree (despite the “literature” on the subject) and a field of genetically identical trees is not a forest eco-system.

So enjoy your news about the billionaire and keep ignoring the tigers and the woods…at this rate your children and grandchildren will have a planet’s worth of open space to whack around little balls…and no pesky animals to get in the way.

All right, for the literally dozens of you that that have been following this blog…you’ve probably caught on that just about every week I post a link to an old story of mine that’s floating around somewhere on the web.  

So I’ll drop any pretense of trying to say something else about it, and just flat out ask you to take a look if you haven’t already.  It’s called Dinah and was originally published in the tragically short-lived webzine Eastern Standard Crime (edited by Geoff Eighinger) and then found a home at Christopher Grant‘s excellent A Twist of Noir.  Where he was kind enough to say “How many times in the last handful of Interludes have I said that I wish I had written that? Count Dinah in that category.” 

Here’s and excerpt:  She barely looked fifteen.  A couple of yellowing bruises and old cigarette-end shaped scars on her arms told me all I needed to know. Damaged, didn’t begin to describe her. It was like she’d been ground to sand, stuck into a blast furnace and come out the other side as glass––only to get shattered to a million pieces and ground back down.

…oddly enough people have told me it’s a rather uplifting story…but you have to get to the end to know that.  Take a look if you care to.

Eureka!!! I have distilled the essence of Story!!!

I’ll admit it…I’m a total fiend for research.  The conventional wisdom is “write what you know.”  The problem I’ve always had with that is I want to write about stuff I don’t know…so the onus is then on me to get to know what it is I need to craft that story and craft it well.

When I was writing my (as yet unpublished) short story “You Never Knew My Heart,” I read something on the order of twenty books about the Later Day Saints religion, history, and cultural currency, as well as specific tomes on Mormon Fundamentalism from both distant observers and first hand participants (pro and con)…and that was for a 22 page story.

And you know what?  I loved every frickin’ page of it…it was only after I’d gotten through so many memoirs about what it was like to live as part of an FLDS community that I had the history down pat, and began to recognize people from other memoirs, that I knew I’d absorbed enough of the material to be able to write compellingly from the perspective of someone raised in that somewhat alien culture.  So much so that some (not all) of the people who’d read it said they weren’t sure how they were “supposed” to feel about it (especially the rather grim ending).  I guess that was my fault for thinking that they were interested in drawing their own conclusions about it…rather than me for having written it.

Nog: Why are those guys down there locked in those boxes? Gort: I think they call them cubicals

So, as I started work on this new book––with its focus on a group of parallel hominoids, and their paleolithic society/technology––it dawned on me that I’d be facing a mountain of research that would make all that, as well as the parasitology books that I…ahem…ingested for Nightlife, look like a Post opinion sidebar.  I’d already dug deep into human evolution (through book, documentaries, and my trips to the museum), as well as got a start on “getting into the headspace” of the radical environmentalism of the supporting characters (by ordering books, and reading stuff on the internet that has probably got Homeland Security reading this blog entry…Hi, guys!  Thanks for upping my view count!).

But when I got to the point where I began to investigate stone-age technology, a curious thing happened.  While trolling Amazon.com, I found a book on how to make paleolithic tools, weapons, clothes and even shelter.  Just what I needed.  Only one problem…it was sold out.  But wait!  There’s a Kindle version available.

A Kindle version.

A KINDLE VERSION!?!?  of a how-to book on caveman tools?  

...available in Kindle, Nook, and eReader versions...(rock not included)

It was totally insane.  And then it hit me, the fact that I’d found a book on the internet was totally insane!  That there even was such a book was kind of mental when you think about it.  

And then it hit me.  We are so used to looking at the the life of our forbearers as being unbelievably hard because they don’t have things like Kindle’s and the Internet.   That we’d be miserable at the difficulty of it all.  And that is probably (definitely) true about most of us who were conditioned to function in a highly-specialized industrial society.  But that doesn’t mean that it was a hardship for them.

Think about it.  Using the internet, and driving a car, and navigating the subway would be difficult for a temporally displaced caveman.  But is it for you or me?  No.  Why?  We are genetically identical, after all.  What it comes down to is that we now “speak a different language” in a way when it comes to how we interact with the world around us.  

So for a thought experiment, imagine being born into a paleolithic society where you can find edible plants as easy as you find them in the Fairway (without first having to slave away eight or more hours at a job you hate), or throw an atlatl dart with the same accuracy that you drive a golf ball (or a bowling ball), or where you can read the signs in the sky as easy as you read these words.

So easy a caveman could do it?  And you could have too.

...jingle bells, jingle BANG!!!

So the weather channel is forecasting a butt-load of snow for NYC…not sure I believe them considering that they said we’d be buried in the white stuff this weekend…and we didn’t get a flake

But with that in mind I’m posting a link to my short story “Bullets Under Glass” (originally published at A Twist of Noir).  As you can see by the photo, there is a nice blend of violence and snow globes…enjoy.

...I will now inspire a generation of trench-coat wearing, D&D playing nerds to think they are me...mwhaa haa haa!!!

I’m on The Watchlist?  What does that mean?

When I realized I’d been put on The Watch List my first thought was that I was being tailed by some shadowy government cabal (similar to The Division as featured in my story “Hazardous Material“) or that creepy masked guy from Watchmen…and as cool as that might be in the fantastic worlds I like to conjure up in my imagination, I’m much happier that The Watch List turned out to be a regular feature of the blog What to Wear During an Orange Alert. 

I guess the creator of that blog thought enough of my story “Bloom” (now up in the current issue of JMWW) to mention it along with the other things he’s reading at the moment.  ”Bloom” is one of my more “literary” stories…told in 2nd person.  

It’s great to know that it’s found an audience of one at least (past the kind folks who published it, or course).  For a writer like me (or any writer, really) to know that you are being read is the greatest compliment.  So thanks What to Wear During and Orange Alert…feel free to watch me any time.

Hermit, J.D. Salinger died recently––not that this is news, I’m sure.  However, I was in a used book store this weekend, and there sitting on the shelf was a copy of Catcher in the Rye.  With over 65 million copies in print, that doesn’t qualify as even a coincidence.

...this is they only way you are EVER going to get me to read Salinger...

Sorry if this comes off like tap-dancing on Salinger’s grave, but I’ve always loathed that book.  I realize that stating my low opinion of such an enshrined tome once again opens me up for all manner of “you just don’t get it” style comments usually reserved for when I mention my distaste for The Beatles.

Well, I’m sorry group-thinkers, but I just can’t find anything of value in the tale of a whiny, trust-fund dipshit.  It doesn’t help that the book has inspired countless smug, know-it-all writers to inflict their judging prose on the literary landscape.

Anyway it looks like (finally) I’m not alone in my distaste.  This is from a New York Times article by Jennifer Schuessler entitled “Get a Life, Holden Caulfield”: “

...wonder what his favorite quote was...

The Catcher in the Rye,” published in 1951, is still a staple of the high school curriculum, beloved by many teachers who read and reread it in their own youth. The trouble is today’s teenagers. Teachers say young readers just don’t like Holden as much as they used to. What once seemed like courageous truth-telling now strikes many of them as “weird,” “whiny” and “immature.”  “I had a lot of students comment, ‘I can’t really feel bad for this rich kid with a weekend free in New York City.’ ”

[said former public school teacher Ariel Levenson] Julie Johnson, who taught Mr. Salinger’s novel over three decades at New Trier High School in Winnetka, Ill., cited similar reactions. “Holden’s passivity is especially galling and perplexing to many present-day students,” she wrote in an e-mail message. “In general, they do not have much sympathy for alienated antiheroes; they are more focused on distinguishing themselves in society as it is presently constituted than in trying to change it.”  Today’s pop culture heroes, it seems, are the nerds who conquer the world…not the beautiful losers who reject it. [Another teacher]  recalled one 15-year-old boy from Long Island who told her: “Oh, we all hated Holden in my class. We just wanted to tell him, ‘Shut up and take your Prozac.’”

At this point you are either with me…or you are lamenting the “dumbing down” of American youth.  Well maybe this is one example of the Y-generation “wising up.”

...in a fair world...the real classic

Anyway, back to the used bookstore…sitting (in no small irony) directly under Mark David Chapman’s favorite book was something I could relate too.  A yellowed copy of Melvin Van Peebles’ A Bear for the FBI.