Day in the Life #13923: I apparently only have room for one creative endeavour at a time, a mild break-up with Goodreads, and miscellany

BLOT: (13 Jul 2015 - 09:20:30 AM)

Day in the Life #13923: I apparently only have room for one creative endeavour at a time, a mild break-up with Goodreads, and miscellany

Some days are the kind of days that require glasses of extra strong tea with extra sugar, and today is some of those days. I feel hung over and exhausted, though have no reason to feel as such, and it is mildly annoying to know that the day will likely be spent recovering from some fictional last-night that would have earned the suffering.

Speaking of fiction, I have been trying to write. I say, "try", but generally would consider myself as having successfully written a decent fictional story that manages to combine my love of meta-fiction, weird fiction, and Alabama into a workable tale. I have written stories before, rough things that often were full of error or hid their inconsistencies inside of being very short. This is the first time I sat down wanting to write something that I was sure other people would read, and could appreciate. Could talk about.

The story is called "Night Showers", and deals with a writer's investigation of an Alabama town's urban legend about twenty people committing suicide one night back in 1917. As he explores this, he starts moving on with his life, and then it gets kind of weird. The title meant something different in earlier drafts, and now is kind of kept as an artifact, but I like it. I'll include a sample of it, below.

I am giving this story "two weeks to stew" and then I will sit down and do another read through, and then I will try and find out where/how to get it published. In the interim, I have two other stories I am working on, both set in the same rough part of the world as "Night Showers", though they are unrelated to it. And those three will be a start, or a finish. Time will tell.

The downside of this is that other creative projects, such as Doug Talks Weird, have taken a back-seat. I have been scripting episodes and doing research on them, but haven't got far enough long to really record any until at least this Friday. I want to try and build up a small stockpile of possible topics, and then try and do something weekly for about 10 weeks. After that, I'll figure out where I want to go from there. I just need to sit down and get those 10 out. If I can get it episode 13, I think I can consider it a full project, especially if I can keep improving the quality throughout those 13. After that, maybe we'll look at a second season of 13. Could be fun.

Possible/Probable topics for episodes I have planned:

• Weird Fiction and Religion
• What the hell happened to Cthulhu at the end of Call of Cthulhu (aka, a look at Lovecraft's anti-humanism)
• Is "The Horror at Red Hook" a story worth reading (which will be a discussion about HPL's racism versus story-telling)
• Either Ramsey Campbell's "Patterns" or "Cold Print", or both
• Reggie Oliver's "The Dreams of Cardinal Vittorini" (with a tie-in to some related topics)
• The Black Brat of Dunwich
• Fred Chappell's "The Adder"
• The Unspeakable versus The Unspoken
• Leiber's "A Bit of the Dark World"
• Maybe something by Willum Pugmire?

There might be something like a round-table via Google Hangouts thing on Lord Dunsany, and maybe I will record and discuss my talk about HPL and his science horror, and that will be a good start to the whole shebang.

Speaking of things dealing with reading, I think I am going to be having a mild break-up with Goodreads. I like the website, and will continue to keep posting stuff to it, but for the past 18-months, I have posted book-reviews and tracked my reading lists on it, and not on my own homepage. I think it is time to bring back my reading tally to my site, and to prioritize posting my book (and movie, and other) reviews, here. I'll post them to Goodreads, too, at least shorter versions of them, but this site needs some love. I've let it rot a bit.

I think that wraps it about up. I have a review/discussion of the indie horror movie Resolution coming up, maybe today. Keep an eye out for that. As for the rest, I don't know. Let's see what bubbles up, here. On to the story sample.

Me in 2015

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"Night Showers" Sample

"Would your mom like me?"

"Of course, why wouldn't she?"

"Don't know, I just want to know if she would. What would she like most about me?"

Marie and I are behind The Gulp, sat down on some old deck chairs Wendy keeps out there for smoke breaks. Marie occasionally smokes—one time when I came over to hang out with her, she giddily put about half-a-pack away—but is trying to stop, seems to be embarrassed by the addiction, like she woke up one morning with it as a character flaw. She still likes to take the breaks, though, and so when I showed up to grab a coke on the way to Henshaw's for another of our long rambly talks, she asked me to join her.

"Your eyes."

"Get out, loverboy, you've been reading too many sappy paperback romances."

"You gave those to me to read, woman, and I haven't, yet. Plus, Mama likes people's eyes. You wait and see. She'll eat yours right up."

Marie smiles, but she's fidgeting enough with her fingers I get the feeling that getting her away from the table might be good to cull her cravings. We walk a pace down the road, towards the old movie theater.

"You texted saying you have been having dreams about naked girls in the woods?"

"Naked girl, singular. Let's not act like it is a syndrome. And 'girl' is wrong, would be better to say female. Sometimes, it is out in the pine trees. Sometimes out in a clearing. Sometimes in a large house, but I can hear the trees creaking in the wind outside. Each time, it starts with me waking up on the ground, laying on my back, and then standing up, and seeing her across the way. Speaking of across the way, when will Charleen's reopen? I need some cleaning supplies."

"You might want to buy them from us, because Quik-By's closed."

"Since when?"

"Since last January, had a big sale after Christmas."

"I bought photo frames from Quik-By just a week ago, talked to Charleen. Couldn't have been closed then."

"If you are talking about those tacky frames you still have in your backseat with old bridge art on them, you bought them from Wendy. I remember her giving you a deal because no one else wanted them. I think this heat is getting to you."

Antioch's sizable heat makes the town look like a sleepy little village out of a Ray Bradbury story, bright and empty. Cars stretch out on either side of the road, betraying occupants in the buildings, but the owners only rarely make an appearance, and then mostly as shapes walking in the distance—up far enough way that the sun off the sidewalk makes a mess of the air between us and them—trying to get to better places, meaning places with air conditioning. A few of the shimmering shapes turn and wave. We wave back. I am not precisely sure to whom.

"You were telling me about sex dreams."

"They are not sex dreams, you vixen. Ok, so I wake up, stand up, and there she is. Each time, she starts out as a little naked baby on a deep red blanket. As I walk towards her, and I always walk towards her, haven't once chosen not to in these dreams, she gets bigger. Older. A few feet in, she is maybe a toddler. Then school-aged. Then a teenager. Then older still, but no precise age. Turns out the blanket she was on was a dress—because now she is wearing it—and she is as white as moonlight, her hair still the color of ink. Her eyes are strikingly green, her lips a shimmering purple. Every time, she sings to me, different songs, only the songs are so quiet that I taste them more than hear the lyrics. At some point, most of the way across to her, I look down where she was and she's gone."

"Gone."

"I usually wake up. Only last night, hands came around from behind and covered my face, blocking my sight, and I could smell the honeysuckle on her fingers and feel her pressing up against me. I have her hands in mine, and though they are soft and warm and gentle, I cannot budge them. I go to talk and she giggles and shushes me, and I feel sharp teeth bite into my ears and fur press against my back, and then I woke up, like I had run a race."

"You know what this means?"

I stop to look at her. She has a look in her eyes that suggests that she has a dozen dirty jokes going on underneath. We are mostly back to The Gulp at this point, and she leans against me and kisses me. "This means you are psychic. My sheets are red, and your witch powers are trying to get into my bedroom. I don't blame them. I am hot, you know? August hot."

The fact that this is our first kiss goes unmentioned, as does the implication of her suggestion. Her break is over and I feel like I need to say something to mark the occasion.

"Turns out your suggestion to call on the old post-mistress, Mrs. Harrison, got me nowhere. She talked about her aunt, and her aunt thought it was some sort of sex-cult thing. Conversation went on too long after that. People belong to many sex cults around here?"

She winks at me and bites her lip with a little puppy dog face before going inside. Another gentle rumbling brushes up against my feet.

OTHER BLOTS THIS MONTH: July 2015