reflections on writing: Permanent Crescent

Tags

memoir, meteor mags, Moon, Patches, permanent crescent, reflections, self publishing, writing

The Moon is about to die, and it’s all Mags’ fault. Join a hell-raising space pirate and her indestructible calico cat as they confront a lunar death cult whose alien leader plans to take his revenge on humanity by destroying Earth’s ancient satellite.

Permanent Crescent was the story I worked on while also putting together The Second Omnibus, so it bears the responsibility of setting the tone for what comes next. It was fun to write and took about three months based on notes I’d compiled throughout the year.

The first scene I wrote was a nice way to open the floodgates for writing, but it ended up on the cutting-room floor. You will never read it! I also drafted scenes which got heavily revised in terms of their points of view, tenses, and even which characters were involved. Hardly any scene survived in its original version.

As you probably know, I don’t believe in writer’s block. Even when I felt unsure about what direction to take for the story, I figured, “What the hell? Let’s wing it and see what happens!” Eventually, the results of that “anything goes” approach got ironed out into a single story.

After trying things a few different ways, I settled on three points of view to tell the story: the hero, her nemesis, and my standard third-person omniscient narrator for the series. I felt multiple POVs were necessary to convey the ways in which the hero and the villain are similar in their general attitudes but intractably opposed.

By letting both the protagonist and antagonist tell parts of the story from their unique perspectives, I hoped to draw parallels between the ways they perceive their world and their situation. Some hints are obvious, such as the way they both refer to “vermin”, but with each considering the other to be the vermin. Similarly identical phrases and judgments are woven into their narratives.

Several scenes are written in first-person present tense, which I rarely use. In Permanent Crescent, my intent was to use that POV to create a sense of immediacy, to put the reader in a moment where anything might come next. In Mags’ first-person scenes, she mostly abandons her conventions from the first two omnibuses where she wrote in a journal or a letter. This time around, she speaks more directly to the reader, and her only epistolary contribution is a journal entry from 1966 where she gives relevant background about developing artificial gravity.

Getting all that sorted was a world of fun, but writing the story took me to dark places involving crime, cults, and the human (and feline) condition in general. At some point, I realized I wanted Mags to narrate a few scenes in a pulpy crime/detective style. So, I re-read the entire Criminal series to get that flavor and tone in my mind.

Permanent Crescent also reflects my feelings about the kind of urban decay I’ve lived in or visited many times in my life. The descriptive scenes about lunar cities are basically me writing about neighborhoods I’ve had the misfortune to experience. If I had to pick one song that sums up everything about that, it would be Spinal Tap’s Hell Hole.

I was a bit disheartened to discover an anime series has already blasted the Moon into a permanent crescent. It’s getting so that you can’t even blow up the Moon without someone else having done it first!

I don’t know what “Assassination Classroom” was about, but they trashed the Moon.

Finally, I should mention how hard I tried to do the actual math for launching Patches out of a space cannon. I read a ridiculous amount of articles and papers about the problem, most of which were beyond my grasp. I tried multiple times to get scientists to help me, to no avail. I even created a spreadsheet full of formulas to do the math. At last, I needed to admit I had no idea what the hell I was doing.

But one way or another, we were launching Patches from a space cannon, and we damn well did it. If anyone wants to email the solution to me, I’d be thrilled.

Good luck with your next story, and pick up a free PDF copy of this one before it gets collected in another omnibus!

Happy Talk Like A Pirate Day

Tags

memoir, pirates, talk like a pirate

An updated version of this essay appears in the second edition of Virtually Yours: A Meteor Mags Memoir.

Curse me for a papist, you bloody bilge rats! I almost forgot it’s Talk Like A Pirate Day! But what does it really mean to talk like a pirate? Is it mastery of the word “argh” and a few catchphrases from Treasure Island?

I think it runs deeper than that, deeper than aping some romanticized Disney version of the so-called Golden Age of Atlantic Piracy. It even goes beyond the English language, as thievery and butchery on the high seas have been around for as long as people have had ships. We can’t forget the pirates who kidnapped Julius Caesar, nor the Irish pirates like Grace O’Malley, nor the Somali pirates who are probably out there right now looking for their next score. Not a single one of them talks like Long John Silver.

Talking like a pirate requires getting inside the pirate mind. This goes beyond any one language or any single period in history. Once you understand who the pirate is, talking like her is almost an afterthought. So, who is she? Let me give you eight insights.

1. She’s poor. No one rich ever became a pirate. Stealing at sea is primarily an activity undertaken by those who have nothing of their own. Piracy is not a cute ride at an amusement park, nor a lark, nor an afternoon adventure. Piracy is a desperate response to desperate times by people whose very survival depends on taking for themselves—by force, if necessary—the resources they need to survive.

2. She’s out of work. Some of you might be thinking, “No rich people? But didn’t wealthy nations of Europe hire pirates?” Indeed they did. When an empire issued a “letter of marque”, it granted authority to one or more ships to go fuck up some other country’s shipping and entire economy that depended on shipping. But because that had an official permission, it wasn’t considered piracy. It was “privateering”. Strictly legal—at least in the eyes of the nation who issued the letter of marque.

Many pirates were at one time or other “legal” privateers. But if, for example, a war ended between two nations, the privateers were out of a job. There they were, alone, adrift at sea, with their income source vanishing into thin air. They were unemployed, and they needed to survive. All they had was their ship, their skills, and their willingness to work together to stay alive.

Also, many pirates around the world were fishers who weren’t catching enough in the off season to support themselves. Their income dried up, but they still needed to eat, and they had boats. At that point, taking some shit off another boat starts to sound like a good idea.

3. She’s been abused on the job, and she didn’t like it. Besides unemployment, the greatest contributor to classical Atlantic piracy was abusive work conditions. Not having a job truly sucks, but sometimes having a job is an even greater hell.

Many of the Atlantic Pirates around the turn of the eighteenth century were part of a labor rebellion against horrific conditions on military ships. They had been whipped nearly to death over minor infractions and lived through extreme cruelty at the hands of deranged officers. Many who became pirates were people who couldn’t exactly walk off their job, since their job was in the middle of the bloody sea. So, they simply took over the ship through violence.

Often, the previous captains were flogged or imprisoned or thrown to the sharks. And in their absence, a new kind of law took their place.

4. She’s an anarchist. Once the abusive captain was gone, what sort of order prevailed? A collective order, agreed upon by every member of the crew. In this new order, the captain was not an almighty authoritarian figure but served at the whim of the entire crew.

And the pirates created their own code, their own social order. They drafted articles of their piracy and signed them, including provisions that allowed for choosing new leadership, pensions for the disabled, and humane working conditions. Everyone got a share of the spoils, and unlike today’s CEOs, the captain took hardly more than any other crew member. Authority was de-centralized, democratic, and set to chart a course no national government could control.

5. She’s evil. Despite understanding piracy as a somewhat justifiable reaction to harsh economic and labor conditions, let’s not romanticize. Many pirate crews traded in captured slaves who were even less free than the pirates. Many destroyed settlements and slaughtered people who were no better off than they. Many committed atrocities that rivaled those of the very institutions they had rebelled against. Though much of a pirate’s life appears admirable through a certain lens, much of it is deplorable.

6. She knows she has not chosen the easy path, but she celebrates it. Classical pirates had a toast: “To a merry life, and a short one.” They knew they had escaped horror only to embrace constant danger, and their days were numbered. The pirate had no illusions about living forever, unless she was the religious type. To become a pirate was to accept impending death as the outcome, and vow to live life to its fullest until that unfortunate end. No one parties as hard as those who know they die tomorrow.

7. She’s a professional sailor. If you don’t know your mizzenmast from your poop deck, then you aren’t ready to be a pirate. Very few, if any, people besides professional sailors ever “fell into” piracy, despite what romantic fiction might want you to believe. Your typical classical pirate was either ex-military (Navy), or ex-privateer (government-sanctioned), or both, and many other pirates were fishers out of work in the off-season. All of them knew their vessels and what it took to survive on the open sea.

8. She’s tough as nails. The pirate is a survivor of horrific conditions I hope you and I never endure. She’s lived through physical torture, emotional trauma, extreme deprivation, malnutrition, mutilation, and the most brutal storms this godforsaken planet can throw at her. Do you still wonder why she gets into the rum a little too often? I don’t.

I’m sure I left something out, but if you remember these eight things about what it means to be a pirate, then I bet you can talk like a pirate any day of the year, regardless of your language, culture, or era.

Happy Talk Like A Pirate Day! If you’re craving more awesome pirate history and want help finding awesome books about pirates, see my Library of Female Pirates.

Those demonized by the rulers of society as the common enemies of mankind, she suggested, were heroes to the common sailor.

One major reason was how the outlaws organized their ships… How did they manage to be “precisely just among themselves”?

What did justice mean to those whom the law sought to “bring to justice” by hanging?

—Marcus Rediker; Villains of All Nations, “The New Government of the Ship”, 2004.

it’s a dry heat

Tags

flood, memoir, poems, poetry, rain, writing

After twenty years in Phoenix, I thought I had seen it all. The monsoon season that peaks around August in Phoenix had done some terrible things to me. Once, I got caught on my bike in pitch-black night in a combination dust storm and rainstorm that was like a sheet of mud pouring right out of the sky.

Another time, I was trapped on my scooter in the middle of flooded streets, and cars and busses were trying to get past me in the dark, splashing massive waves against me, and I was pretty sure I was going to die before I got back to my lightless, powerless apartment to see if my cat was okay.

I guess at some point you just accept death as an option and keep going.

Tucson’s monsoons this year started earlier than I recall those in Phoenix rolling in, but they are no less violent. Last week, I got caught walking home from the store by a dust storm that turned the entire sky brown. Two days later, I got caught walking in one of the most insane rainstorms I have seen in twenty years. The big drops of sprinkles started in, and it wasn’t even minutes until I thought I was going to be knocked off my feet by the wind and drowned in the deluge at the side of the road. Cars and busses were pulling over because drivers couldn’t even see. By the time I made it home, I was drenched from head to foot.

So, Tucson monsoons surrounded by mountains and lightning, here is a poem for you. Now please stop trying to kill me.

The Flood

Grey mountains perforated the
underbelly of a great cloud
that admitted no horizon,
until nothing held back the rain.

City streets drowned, and vehicles
lost their way, taking with them
drivers, children, and families,
until no one held back the rain.

The entire valley filled with
rolling, churning torrents darkened
by earth and history of earth,
until no rim held back the rain.

No mortal knows what lies beyond,
where only floodwaters venture.
The deluge keeps her secrets well,
and she never forgets the rain.

This poem now appears in Meteor Mags: The Second Omnibus.

Reflections on Writing Dekarna Triumphant

Tags

dekarna triumphant, memoir, meteor mags, reflections, writing

An updated version of this essay appears in the second edition of Virtually Yours: A Meteor Mags Memoir.

In the recent stories Antipodes and The Martian Revolution, things have not gone according to Mags’ plans and desires. In Dekarna Triumphant, she runs into trouble at the South Pacific station she founded back in Small Flowers. Mags thinks she has the situation all under control and expects Dekarna and the baby reptiles will be part of her personal army, but that rug gets pulled out from under her, and Mags must battle a fearsome nemesis whose rage is completely justifiable.

The resultant story is an ass-kicking freakshow full of brutality, but with moments of descriptive natural beauty.

With The Martian Revolution, I had an absolute blast returning to the heart of the series by featuring Mags, Patches, and Tarzi in a series of violent, vulgar, comedic action scenes. But after that, I felt emotionally drawn to the plight of my evil space lizard and how she rages against it.

I love how Dekarna is so remorselessly evil but is all about her babies! I love how she would stop at nothing to protect and feed her young, but she is the last reptile you want to mess with.

I think that’s why she makes a good villain for Mags, because Mags is the same way—just a more mammalian version. Mags would happily bulldoze a billion people into a ditch if she thought it would save her cat. Dekarna would do the same for her babies.

Finding that heart of the heartless reptile really brought her to life for me. I also empathize with Dekarna’s quest to be free and happy. She has been used and abused by everyone in her life—from her former commander to Meteor Mags—and every time she almost achieved freedom, some other asshole came along to enslave her. It reminds me of trying to make a living in my twenties. All I wanted was to be free.

That’s Dekarna’s life in a nutshell, and I wanted to give her a story where she was, at last, completely free. Free, unleashed, and totally fucking evil.

In the confrontation, Mags faces defeat. While I love it when everything goes Mags’ way, struggling against overwhelming odds and sometimes failing makes for a more compelling story, especially in an ongoing series. I’ve often felt that many of the early stories in the series made it too easy for Mags to get what she wanted. Though they are fun adventure tales, the dramatic tension isn’t very heavy. It wasn’t until the tornado in Blind Alley Blues that Mags really began to confront enormous, high-stakes problems she couldn’t entirely overcome. And that is where, in my opinion, the series began a major improvement.

So, I was a bit shocked by the reaction when I told a member of my workshop group that Mags would be totally defeated in this episode. The response was, basically, “You can’t do that!” I have never in my life heard anyone get so angry over one of my plot decisions.

It didn’t upset me or sway me, though. I mean, The Empire Strikes Back would have been a much less significant film if everything went great for Luke Skywalker at the end. Instead, his secret base is destroyed, his training is interrupted before he gets any real skill, his best pal is kidnapped and frozen, his scumbag nemesis turns out to be his dad and kicks his ass, he gets his frickin’ hand chopped off, and he falls to his doom.

Now that’s a story!

So, no, I didn’t change my plans for Mags’ defeat. But the angry reaction to those plans made me happy. It made me happy to know that someone else in the universe loves Mags so much that merely the thought of her being defeated would upset them! Because you know what? It upsets me too. Every time I throw a dramatic monkey wrench into Mags’ plans or write her into awful situations where she suffers pain and loss, it upsets me.

I think it was Alan Moore who said that no matter how much you love your characters, you must do horrible things to them. But that advice doesn’t make it any easier to do. I go through a whole range of emotions when writing about Mags’ struggles, including anger and sadness.

The emotional payoff for me comes when she triumphs, or is rescued by her friends, or maintains her (mostly) unshakeable attitude of rage and defiance even when the odds are against her. I like seeing what she’s made of. I admire her strength—not just her physical strength, but her emotional and intellectual strength—and I believe her qualities are best illuminated when she faces the greatest challenges.

I confess that in this episode, I intentionally “painted myself into a corner” by writing Mags into a situation she could not possibly escape. I did it on purpose, to make things more dramatic, but it was not a decision that made the writing any easier! That was okay because both Mags and I needed a challenge. But the result was that I eventually had the entire story written except for half of one scene, because I didn’t have a clue about how to get Mags out of what happened to her.

One of the recurring themes in the series is how Mags’ rash and reckless overconfidence gets her into trouble she can’t escape without the help of her friends. So, confronted with an insurmountable obstacle in writing this episode, I asked a friend for help. I explained the situation to her, and we brainstormed ideas for about half an hour. At the end, we had come up with an idea so bonkers, so absolutely insane, that I knew I had to write it. Even though I had my doubts about the idea, I couldn’t not write it!

Anyway, I wrote it, loved it, and the rest is future history. But like Mags, I needed the help of a good friend to make it happen.

Dekarna Triumphant is a kind of Empire Strikes Back ending to what will be the second omnibus collection of stories. It concludes a story cycle that began after The Battle of Vesta 4. In my reflections on Battle, I explained how that story essentially wrapped up all the ideas I originally had for the series when I first started writing it seven years ago. I mentioned how completing that story left me with a solar system where anything was possible, and I was looking forward to indulging my imagination with subsequent tales.

The twelve episodes from Hunted to Extinction through Dekarna Triumphant represent three or four years of playing in those fields of imagination, taking characters in directions I never originally planned, incorporating different narrators and narrative techniques, exploring the consequences of what the early stories established, introducing new concepts and characters, and bringing additional depth and growth to old ones.

And you know what? I loved every minute of it. I had a lot going on in my life that I was unhappy about, but writing the adventures of Meteor Mags and Patches was always a pleasure. I hope you enjoy their stories as much as I do, and I look forward to writing more. In the meantime, I’ll be putting together the second omnibus.

Childhood Reading: A Memoir

Tags

books, memoir, reading

A month ago, I mentioned the reading group I joined in kindergarten. Mom recently saw that post, and we compared memories.

One reading program I recall with mixed feelings. It was part of the St. Louis County Public Library’s summer schedule, and I participated at the Daniel Boone Branch where I later held one of my first jobs as a “page”, sorting returned books and putting them back on the shelves.

That job was noteworthy in my teenage years not only because I worked with one of my best high-school friends, but also for being the time when I met Pete the janitor. Pete was also the library’s bouncer from time to time, since he was one of the few male employees in a sea of middle-aged and elderly ladies, and he wasn’t afraid to step up to disruptive patrons and tell them to knock it off or get the hell out.

As a page, I often stayed late after the library closed to chat with Pete in the parking lot. He must have been twice my age, and he turned me on to all kinds of 1970s rock bands. Some I couldn’t find in the library’s collection of vintage, vinyl records, so he let me borrow them from his personal collection. They blew my mind.

Pete was one of two guys I knew like that as a teenager. The other was Jim, who worked as a waiter on the same graveyard shift at the Denny’s restaurant where I got a job as a dishwasher right after graduating. Jim was a huge Led Zeppelin nut with an impressive collection of bootleg concerts on vinyl he let me borrow. For a brief time, I got into going to record conventions because of him and discovered all kinds of awesome live bootlegs for Zep and other bands.

But years before all that, the library had a summer reading program where kids would commit to a goal of reading 100 or more books, enter the authors and titles on a postcard-sized paper, and take it in to get a stamp or a star sticker. Staff tracked every kid’s progress on larger cards that were on display, and there was some reward for kids who read the most books.

I don’t recall the prize because I never once won that contest. After a while, I realized it was impossible, despite my voracious reading habits. I was competing against kids my age who were reading books entirely chosen from the youngest reading levels in the library, short books about Seeing Spot Run and other engrossing topics.

Meanwhile, I chose books from the adult-level science fiction shelves and college-level nonfiction books about animals, space, and history. They took a lot longer to read! So, if you looked at the cards in the library, I was a total loser. I accepted that as my fate and kept reading what I wanted to.

In sixth grade, my teacher created an advanced reading group for a handful of students in his class. I don’t recall all the kids’ names, but we read stuff way beyond a sixth-grade level, including Mutiny on the Bounty and at least the first two books in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy. If I recall correctly, we ran out of time to finish Second Foundation, but I read it on my own.

That teacher was James Schwab. The group was one of the best things to happen to me in elementary school, and Mr. Schwab remains one of the greatest teachers I ever had. He knew I needed more advanced material to engage my mind, and he provided a supportive environment in the reading group, clarifying things, answering questions, and helping us find our own answers in the adult-level books.

Mr. Schwab was one of the kindest, most trustworthy adults I ever met, and I constantly asked him questions about how the world worked. For example, I noticed that if I had salt crystals on a metal spoon and breathed on them in the cold, my breath fogged up the spoon except for tiny circles around the salt. Why did that happen? What was going on? Who could I ask but Mr. Schwab?

It turns out he didn’t know the answer, and he told me so. He also suggested we do some research on it.

I was accustomed to adults who always acted like they had all the answers, and even by sixth grade I had come to suspect that many adults had no idea how anything worked. They only wanted to preserve the illusion of their authority. Mr. Schwab was one of the first grown-ups I ever met who would just flat-out admit that he didn’t have a clue about something but would also take an interest in discovering with me what the answers were and could guide me in my quest to learn.

Somewhere around that time, the school district contacted my parents to inquire about having me skip a grade, based on my test scores. My parents declined the offer. For many years, I was angry about that decision. I was beyond bored with lessons targeted at my grade level, and I believed that skipping a grade would have put me in more intellectually challenging classes where I would feel more engaged.

Later, Mom explained to me that she felt I was mentally ready to skip a grade, but not socially. I’ve never been happy about that, but she might have been right. I would have been in classes with people hitting puberty a year before me, with all my elementary-school classmates a year behind me. My social skills were admittedly underdeveloped at that age, and they have always lagged behind my other skills.

On the other hand, maybe being in a grade that better suited my early cognitive development would have also improved my social development, since I might not have been so bored and angry about being bored in every single class all the time. We’ll never know, will we? What I do know is that I absolutely hated high school, even in the “advanced college placement” classes I took in my later teens, and I was perpetually getting in trouble for my rebellious attitude.

My high-school experience totally turned me off from college after graduation, even though I could have received a scholarship for a free ride to at least one university just based on my test scores. By high-school graduation, I had more than enough of dim-witted adults trying to force me into their molds and make me memorize meaningless stuff, then write nonsense about it.

Not all my teachers were bad. Mrs. Michelle Rodgers, my first guitar teacher, is forever an angel in my mind for demystifying music in general and the instrument that would become my reason for living for more than twenty years. Mr. Dave Jenkins, my speech-and-debate team coach, was so awesome that I have always considered him more a friend than a teacher. Mrs. Judy Buschmann and I had such great conversations about literature after her class that I was constantly late to my next class. I gladly ignored all scolding for being tardy if it meant I could talk to her about art and writing and critical thinking for a few minutes longer.

Mrs. Buschmann also founded my high school’s first Writing Center, a room full of computers in the late 1980s equipped with WordPerfect software. She enlisted me to be her assistant to help kids my age brainstorm, compose, and write their papers for various classes. It was so long ago that I don’t even bother putting the experience on my résumé anymore, but it undoubtedly informed my future as a freelance editor who helps people develop and publish their books.

So, thank you to the teachers, librarians, and other adults who helped me expand my literary and musical horizons at a young age. Life ends up being about so much more than what you expect as kid, or your standardized test scores in school. Sometimes it boils down to what inspired you and who encouraged you along the way to discovering your future.

Reflections on Writing The Martian Revolution

Tags

martian revolution, memoir, meteor mags, reflections, writing

An updated version of this essay appears in the second edition of Virtually Yours: A Meteor Mags Memoir.

My recent story about the Martian revolution in 2030 is a fairly quick read at only 16,000 words, but it took six months to finish. I’ll tell you a bit about what happened along the way—both the challenges and successes—but let’s start with the two main lessons I learned.

First: The more moving parts you have, the longer it takes to assemble the machine. When plotting a story with two or three characters in a limited setting, you have fewer things to keep track of. Seven years ago, I used to crank out first drafts over a weekend, from 5,000 to 15,000 words long. They took a lot longer than that to revise, but most of the first drafts went quickly.

Those were simpler times in The Adventures of Meteor Mags and Patches. Episodes had only three to six main characters in only one or two settings. Plus, I was free to make up things as I went along, because so much of the “universe” was unexplored, and I could invent unresolved plot threads on the fly to set up stories I wanted to tell in the future.

As the series progressed, it encompassed many more characters and settings, and those dangling plot threads needed woven into the fabric of everything we already knew about Mags’ life and her solar system. When writing about any event or character, I needed to bring my internal continuity editor on board to make sure I hadn’t contradicted any previous facts in the more than 300,000 words of established history.

Plus, I chose more ambitious settings as I went along. I started with what you might call “stock footage” for the early stories: things I’d seen in movies and comics that I basically stole or used as blueprints. But after boiling those stolen bits in my own kettle of ideas for a few years, they became a stew with a flavor all its own.

As a result, I sometimes needed to step back from writing the story and return to planning—which leads me to the next lesson. The suggestions I’ve given other writers for years once again proved their usefulness. Finding renewed success with so many of my basic methods reinforced my confidence in publishing them for a wider audience.

In My Life as an Armadillo, my recent book about writing and workshopping, I assert that writer’s block is a myth, because you can always write something—and I give suggestions about the fundamental, foundational pieces of writing you can do behind the scenes to overcome any feeling of being stuck.

I needed to take my own advice a bunch of times for The Martian Revolution. I reached points in the narrative where I realized I had not fully developed my own understanding of a setting or character. I needed to step back and write about those things “off the record”, behind the scenes. That empowered me to come back to the main narrative and write through several scenes and character-driven moments from a deeper understanding and keep moving forward.

Not that I wrote it all in order, from start to finish. Instead, I started from a series of scene synopses built from several thousand words of notes I’d compiled while writing earlier stories that led up to these events. From the scene summaries, I picked whichever I felt most emotionally drawn to when it was time to write.

The challenge of that approach is that you end up whittling down the unwritten scenes to the ones you feel the least emotionally involved with. But that helped me discover, as it has in the past, what it would take to get me emotionally involved in those scenes. After all, if I am not captivated by a scene as the writer, what hope is there of involving any readers?

To get to the emotional core of some things, I did a ton of exploratory writing and description of characters—not just physical descriptions, but about their true motivations, their likes, dislikes, strengths, flaws, histories, relationships with and feelings toward each other, even things that remain unspoken in the narrative but formed a subtext for my own understanding of these characters.

All of that takes time, and no one really gives you credit for doing it as a writer, just like no one gives you credit for studying an instrument for years and practicing for untold hours after giving a great concert performance.

But it wasn’t like I spent every day of six months working on one story. I published the previous collection (The Singing Spell) in October 2020, but then I needed to move at the end of January and didn’t have a place lined up. So, I packed all the stuff that would fit into a rented 10×10 U-Haul truck, threw out everything else, and drove to another city a couple hours away. I hoped for the best, but total disaster was also a possibility.

The resultant upheaval of my life made it difficult to focus on my story, so I decided not to worry about it. I found solace in writing about something every day. During my week in a hotel, I used my mini-tablet and wireless keyboard to type thousands of words of ideas for the next couple of episodes. During the subsequent saga of three weeks with no Internet in my new place, I revised and edited the collection of essays about writing and workshopping that became the book I published in March 2021. Sometimes I just wrote letters to friends to gather my thoughts.

Plus, my neglected blog needed a shot in the arm, and I had a million things to do to get my new life started and reconnect with my clients. In the meantime, I let The Martian Revolution simmer on the back burner of my mind, and every now and then I felt inspired to make more notes about it or write a scene. Those notes and the extra time proved helpful when I got around to finishing the first draft in mid-March 2021.

I never saw this as being “blocked” as a writer. It was more of a question about where to direct my writing and editing energies on any particular day during a series of life challenges that disrupted my groove. It helped that I had multiple ongoing projects to choose from, some of which were more analytical, some of which were more creative and free-flowing, and all of which were in various stages of development from brainstorming to hammering out a final draft.

Maybe that is the third lesson. I often meet writers who are struggling with a single work, and they feel disheartened when they run into obstacles in their life or with the story itself that prevent them from making progress. But if you have a few irons in the fire at the same time, you can usually find one that strikes your fancy on any given day. Not everything in the universe depends on your finishing your current novel or short story when you have a few of them to tinker with at once. Having options gives you freedom, and having options you truly care about means you can always find something to write.

glass octopus

Tags

glass, memoir, octopus, Patches

My sister sent me a couple of octopus-related housewarming gifts after I got to Tucson a few months ago. One is this adorable glass octo from the Ukraine or something. The packaging had Cyrillic writing all over it. Basically, it’s the same letters in the Russian alphabet, which is fitting because the telepathic octos in my fiction series started a band with a tribe of lost Soviet space monkeys. This glass octo now lives under the monitor for my work computer, next to the cute Patches memento my art teacher made for me back in 2013. Yes, there is a solar system where mutant octopuses, space monkeys, and outlaw cats can all be friends and rock out in a band—at least for as long as I have anything to say about it.

Update: My sister says you can find the creator of this glorious glass octopus and many other creatures at etsy.com/shop/miniatureglass

Of Mars and Moms: A Memoir

Tags

comic book blogs, memoir, mom, mothers day, quarterly report, writing

It’s the week of Mother’s Day, and I’m currently working on a new story about a couple of moms, so this seems like as good a time as any to tell you that Mom occasionally drops by this blog to see what I am up to.

No, she doesn’t much care about comic books, experimental poetry, or the violent, profane fiction I torment the rest of you with on a regular basis. But she does care about her boy who has long since outgrown boyhood and is rapidly approaching his 49^th birthday. So, I’d like to give some credit where credit is due.

This blog wouldn’t exist without Mom. Besides the fact that I wouldn’t have been born without her, she helped me get a jumpstart on reading at a young age. I was way into superheroes and dinosaurs by the time I hit kindergarten, and if not for Mom’s infinite patience with reading dinosaur books with me when I was a child, I wouldn’t have been conversant about stegosaurs and pachycephalosaurs while I was still in pre-school.

As a result, my kindergarten teacher must have thought I was some kind of child prodigy, because I was enlisted into an advanced reading group that deciphered complexities of the English language such as “See Jane run” while the rest of the class had nap time. Let me assure you: I was no prodigy. I only had some advanced reading comprehension, and a decent memory of things I’d read—both of which eventually served me well in slacking my way through high school.

Besides dinosaur books and basically any book about animals, space, or history, I had a youthful passion for comic books. That love did not diminish in my teenage years! But by then, times had changed.

In the mid-1980s, comics experienced a cultural shift. No longer were they relegated to the magazine racks of convenience stores and drug stores. Shops dedicated entirely to comics appeared, and the publishing industry responded by creating “direct market” titles meant solely for distribution to those shops. You might take comic shops for granted now, but they were a pretty big deal at the time.

When I was old enough to legally have a job, I picked up a gig as a golf caddy on the weekends to make a few bucks. The work itself truly sucked on a Saturday morning, but some of the old golfer guys tipped me nicely, and I’d leave the place with cash in my pocket. I wasn’t old enough to drive, so Mom would pick me up.

Our first stop? The comic shop. While Mom patiently waited, I discovered series and back issues that to this day remain among my all-time favorites.

Those reading experiences undoubtedly shaped me and influenced my future as a writer, editor, and that apex (or possibly nadir) of human evolution we call a comic-book blogger.

Mom, if you’re stopping by today, thank you for putting up with learning how to pronounce all those dinosaur names back in the 70s, for making sure I always had plenty of books and comics to occupy my mind in the 80s, and for encouraging me to keep exploring my creativity all the way into the 2020s.

You rock!

holiday memories, music, and misbehavior

Tags

central hardware, christmas, christmas music, memoir, Nexus, opening presents early, raccoon, radio, Radio Shack, sister, stereo, voices of walter schumann

image from a Worthpoint.com listing

My most idyllic holiday memory, other than reading comic books from Gramma’s garage, is of curling up inside a fuzzy blanket or afghan my grandmother crocheted, staring at the twinkling lights of the Christmas tree, and listening to music. I felt warm, safe, and peaceful, and the music and lights together were magic.

My family was far from wealthy, but we had a bomb-ass stereo system. When Dad worked as a manager for Radio Shack, he put stereo equipment on layaway—which somehow made it less expensive—and applied his manager discount to it.

The resulting tuner, tape decks, graphic equalizer, and speakers in our living room—complete with a pair of stupendous headphones for private listening and eardrum damage—were one of the great joys of my childhood. During summers, snow days, or any other day my sister and I had “off” as kids while Dad was working, we danced around the living room like maniacs to the radio or cassette tapes. Looking back now, I guess Dad copied a lot of the tapes on a cassette deck at work. We also had a dual-cassette deck at home, wired to the receiver, so my sister and I could record songs from the radio any time we wanted—or even combine them into mix tapes!

What music piracy looked like in the 1980s

Yes, it was a time of lawless piracy. My sister and I caused the collapse of the music industry. It was us. Us, and our bad-ass tape deck in the living room.

I don’t know how Mom put up with us. She might have been happy we were entertaining ourselves instead of fighting or pestering her. I don’t doubt my sister and I were a handful. I nearly electrocuted myself, set the house on fire, broke the car, got in trouble at school, and would talk at Mom so much that she would have to tell me to shut up so my sister could learn to talk, too! My dancing on the couch was the least of Mom’s worries.

I will not incriminate my sister in any other childhood crimes, especially because many of them were my ideas in the first place. Like when I was seven and she was five, and I cut her hair in the backyard when my parents weren’t paying attention. It… did not turn out well. That one’s on me!

But one day, at the end of her wits with my sister, Mom blurted out, “You’re as dumb as your brother!” It became one of my family’s longest-running jokes. So, maybe we were better off indoors listening to the radio under closer supervision.

My sister recalls that when no one else was home, she sometimes cranked up the stereo and sang to the wall like she had a concert audience. I recall that Mom and Dad used to go on “dates” to a store called Central Hardware, which was probably code for “Let’s get out of this house for an hour before our children drive us insane!” I loved my parent’s date nights, because I could crank up the stereo speakers and ROCK OUT. I would play shit so loud that when Mom and Dad pulled into the driveway, they heard the music from inside the car.

I still love listening to music at an unreasonable volume. Granted, the music has changed over the years. In the mid-80s, my family wasn’t listening to John Coltrane’s Interstellar Space or BongRipper’s Satan Worshipping Doom. In fact, the songs I most associate with my dreamy, twinkling holiday light memories are a ridiculous number about how farm animals talk, and a minor-key ballad called “Fum, Fum, Fum” on the same album.

If this party gets any merrier, we’ll need to be institutionalized!

Besides music on a cold winter’s night that was so deep, my other favorite holiday entertainment was trying to discover my presents. One December, after my parents left the house for Central Hardware, I convinced my sister to take part in my evil schemes and swore her to secrecy. Under the tree, armed with a sharp blade and Scotch tape, I sliced open the tape on the wrapping paper on our presents so we could see what they were. The most noteworthy gifts were a pair of phones, which I taped back together with meticulous precision.

The laugh was on me. On Christmas morning, we discovered my sister and I weren’t just getting two phones. We got our own phone line! In the mid-80s, that was a big deal.

Over the years, I spoiled many surprises and became adept at re-wrapping opened presents. My parents lied to me about Santa, and I lied about being surprised about what Santa brought me. I figure we’re even! But the gift I most treasure spoiling came to me in the year when my entire wish list consisted of issues of the comic book Nexus, from which this blog takes its name.

I’d read many Nexus issues thanks to my high school pal Brian who was also my gateway to punk rock, but I didn’t own many of them. So, I made a wish list, and I imagine it was related to Mile High Comics, which became a large mail-order back-issue distributor in the 80s and ran ads in my favorite Marvel books.

Cue another December and a night when I had the house to myself. I snooped everywhere! At last, I found Nexus in a nondescript cardboard box on the back of the upper shelf of the closet in the room my father used as his library and ham radio shack.

I READ THEM ALL. But not at once. My parents never left the house long enough to read all the first fifty issues of Nexus. Over the course of a month, I stole every spare unattended moment to pull a few issues from that box. I read them under my blankets or behind other books, keeping them out of sight until the next time my parents left, when I could put the comics back in their not-so-secret place and get the next few issues.

Maybe I was a horrid child for spoiling the magic of Christmas. But no holiday gift ever brought me as much joy as those illicitly obtained copies of Nexus, and when the day came to officially open them, I could not have been happier to add them to my collection.

Due to the vicissitudes of fortune, I have been separated and reunited with Nexus several times. Every time I read the series, I love it more. But I’ll never forget the thrill of reading Nexus when it was forbidden, when I wasn’t even supposed to know it was in the house. The stolen moments I had with it were intensified by knowing I would soon need to hide it—and quickly.

Speaking of hiding and the holidays, today’s final exhibit is a vintage raccoon radio from Radio Shack. I named mine “Raccy”, ponounced RAK-EE in case you are from Italy or something. Or Racky, if you are from Indiana.

image from a Worthpoint.com listing

Raccy was my boy. Even before I hit puberty and began a life of totally abnormal sleep patterns, I liked to stay up late. I cuddled under the blankets with Raccy and listened to the radio implanted in his torso. He was basically a cyborg with a black, box-shaped radio inside, and the station tuner and volume knob were his cyborg nipples.

At that age, I didn’t think of myself as a nipple-tweaking animal rights violator who might be crossing the lines of acceptable cybernetic and interspecies relationships. Truth be told, sometimes Raccy was the only person I had to talk to. Most holidays, he was the only one who would stay up with me until midnight and beyond. He snuggled with me in the car on the way home from church-related holiday gatherings after dark. He got tucked in with me. He hung out after everyone else had gone to bed, so long as I listened to him quietly under the blankets.

I’ve stayed up until midnight to welcome the New Year many times, but the first time I remember doing it was with Raccy. It was just me and him, listening to pop songs as the countdown grew ever closer, wondering if we could stay awake long enough.

More than once, we did.

And on that note, enjoy a musical holiday season and have a happy New Year!

The Secret Origin of Donny

Tags

donny, jimmy, memoir, meteor mags, Ypsilanti

An updated version of this essay appears in the second edition of Virtually Yours: A Meteor Mags Memoir.

One of my favorite supporting characters to write in my fiction series is Donny. He’s uncouth, rough around the edges, blue collar, likes to fight, and sometimes says off-the-cuff, offensive things despite generally having a good heart. He’s a fun character when I need comedic relief, and he’s almost always played for laughs. Occasionally, he says something really wrong, learns a lesson from it, and grows as a person.

But Donny wasn’t cut from whole cloth. I spun him out of fond memories about a real-life Donny. Though I lost touch with the real Donny decades ago, I think he would be happy that his fictional namesake is a bad-ass musician and a valued crew member with hilarious scenes on the rock-and-roll adventure of a lifetime.

The fictional Donny combines the real Donny and his cousin Jimmy. I met Donny and Jimmy around 1998 in Ypsilanti, Michigan. I was twenty-four and had my own apartment in a five-unit building on the edge of town where rent was lower compared to living near the college. Donny and Jimmy were fourteen, and I met them because Donny used to hang out with the even younger kids who lived next door: Dennison (literally the son of Dennis) and his little brother Jack. These kids were always playing in the yard and riding bikes up and down the street—as kids do—and I was often in my yard working on some visual art project that involved messy painting, or just playing guitar in the sunshine.

Kids are curious about that kind of stuff and ride by to check it out, so I got to know them. Then they found out I had a pet python who ate mice, and they wanted to see that, so I ended up spending a lot of time entertaining the neighborhood boys. My embarrassingly simple apartment was, to them, some kind of treehouse or clubhouse with a wildlife documentary, an art exhibit, and a killer soundtrack. And why not? At age forty-seven, I’ve accepted that part of my brain will always be fourteen and see my living spaces as exactly that.

To be fair, they entertained me, too. Donny and Jimmy were hilarious! They had the kind of insane tales of reckless adventure, injury, and embarrassment that working-class midwestern boys thrive on. I should know, since I was one and probably, at heart, will always be. But it wasn’t just stories and jokes. After Donny and Jimmy had dropped by a few times, they invited me and my girlfriend to meet their family in the trailer park down the road and hang out for an evening.

My girlfriend—who had endured a couple surprise visits from Donny and Jimmy, rolled with the situation, and found them as hilarious as I did—was beyond awesome and handled the evening with grace and aplomb. She dressed up extra cute for that night and was a hit with the girls and wives there. After a tour of the trailer, which was basically some rooms and a hallway, we ended up drinking cheap American lager and playing cards with the adults and teens all night long. It was a chain-smoking, midwestern good time, and I don’t think either of us will ever forget it.

Somehow, Donny and Jimmy—at age fourteen—acquired a piece-of-shit Datsun that they took on wild rides through the nearby fields. They would come over to my place after their hell rides and tell me Datsun stories. They were trying to learn to power shift it, because the clutch was broken. And what fourteen-year-old has money to replace a clutch?

That fucking Datsun. We laughed so hard about it.

One day, Donny came over with this idea to write a song about the Datsun. All the kids knew I played guitar, so he brought lyrics. I will never forget them. “Datsun. It’s a good car. It’s a fast car. DATSUN! DATSUN!”

That was it! I threw together some riffs and recorded it on my old cassette-based Tascam four-track. We did another song which was something like Donny’s imaginary wrestling theme song: Daemonic Don. He pronounced it “Die-monic Don”, and that cracked me up. You’ll find a nod to that in the Meteor Mags story Old Enough. I assembled some distorted, drop-D riffs. It came out surprisingly well, and Donny loved it.

In 1999, I moved from Ypsi to San Diego. For a little while, I tried to keep in touch with the kids by sending them postcards. I’ve long since lost their addresses and can’t recall their last names, if I ever knew them at all.

But a few years ago, when I needed a name for a supporting character, I remembered Daemonic Don and his cousin Jimmy, and I thought it would be fun to channel my memories of those two teenage hellraisers into that character. They also inform more than a little bit about the adolescent character, Tarzi. The way those characters’ dialogues bounce back and forth with their older but equally reckless and so-called “auntie” Mags has a lot to do with my imagining how Donny and Jimmy would chat with me as their older guy neighbor—a role that ended up being somewhere between an adopted big brother and an uncle.

I think I filled a role in their lives because I was into all kinds of art and music, and so obviously not like their parents. They felt comfortable just being themselves, asking awkward questions about adult life, or making off-color jokes. In that sense, it wasn’t all that different from hanging out with the people I was in bands with or worked blue-collar jobs with at the time. I think the boys liked that I talked to them in the same no-bullshit style as I did with my friends. I know I always appreciated that in adults when I was a teenager. At that age, you want to be talked to, not talked down to.

Even if you are stripping the gears out of your Datsun by trying to power shift.

It’s a good car. It’s a fast car. Datsun.

Anyway, I doubt I will ever hear from Donny and Jimmy again, but I like to think they’d enjoy knowing they inspired one of my favorite supporting characters and might even enjoy reading his adventures. Hell, if those two were here right now, they’d probably be pressuring me to plug in my baritone guitar and write a new theme song.

And I would do it.

Come on and Give It to Me: A Ragman Memoir

Tags

Batman, Brave and the Bold, comic books, dad, DC Comics, joe shit the ragman, memoir, ragman, ragpicker joe

When I was a kid, Dad had a term for people who looked disheveled and messy: Rag-picker Joe. Eventually, I discovered it was a mild version of “Joe Shit the Rag Man”. Maybe Dad picked it up in the Marine Corps. It’s listed on a site of Marine slang, and Dad was a Drill Instructor in the early 1970s, when this phrase seems to have been at the peak of its popularity.

Rag-picker Joe made regular appearances in my childhood: sometimes as me when I couldn’t get my shirt tucked in or my cowlick to lie down, and sometimes as random people on the street seen from a car window, or someone in a retail store. Rag-picker Joe was everywhere.

In the summer of 2019, while looking through my late father’s personal effects, I found papers about a family tree that seemed to be the work of Dad’s mom—my grammy, who died in 2005. I’m sure it was her distinctive handwriting.

Back in the mid-1980s, I asked both sets of my grandparents for any information they could contribute to my junior-high genealogy project. They gave me next to nothing to go on, so I suspect Grammy gained additional information over the years.

Reviewing her notes was how I learned that Rag-picker Joe was not just a bit of slang. He was one of my ancestors.

I forget his last name, but his first name was Joseph, and he was from enough generations ago that I didn’t even bother to figure out the great-great-great or however many greats it was. His occupation of record? Ragman.

If you don’t know what a ragman is, don’t feel bad. I didn’t know either, and I had to look it up. A ragman collected what we might think of now as junk or scrap, and even bones. I don’t know why people would buy bones, but I assume it was either for their nutritious value (soup stock, perhaps?) or for their household utility as material for buttons and knife handles.

The cousin of Joe Shit the Ragman was the Bone man, and these nearly extinct characters from more than a century ago went from town to town, supporting themselves on what meager coin they could make from selling other people’s cast-offs and throwaways.

Bleak as it sounds, the rag-and-bone man was a mobile thrift store and scrap yard, and he was “upcycling” before any of us invented hipster words for re-using old garbage. I imagine that being a ragman required Joe Shit to be a salesman, and no song expresses that rag-selling energy as well as Rag and Bones by the White Stripes.

Sell me that old junk, baby. Come on and give it to me!

In the fifteen months that passed since discovering the ragman of my childhood was part of my family, I have often wondered if Dad ever put that connection together. I wonder if he knew Rag-picker Joe was his great-grand-uncle or whatever it was. Did he know this bit of information when I was a kid, when he used Joe as an insult on a regular basis? Or did he, like me, have an epiphany about Joe when he saw Grammy’s research?

I also wonder about things the genealogy documents didn’t tell me but seem apparent from reading between the lines. If you go back just a generation or two beyond my grandparents, my family tree is full of immigrants who came to this country and survived in abject poverty, somehow, even if it meant carrying bones and rags from town to town in a fucking wheelbarrow.

It upsets me to see our national attitude and policies becoming so obviously anti-immigrant and anti-poor. But this isn’t the first time. This always happens in our country whenever our economy is disastrous or when people feel threatened. Anti-immigrant and overtly racist attitudes flourish in times of economic trouble. The rich pit the middle-class against the poor as enemies, and the rich get richer. These aren’t mysterious ideas any longer; they are statistical conclusions verified with data from more than two centuries of U.S. history.

I only bring it up because I think of Joseph, my distant relative, a man who died long before I was born. A man who died before he became a piece of slang in the urban dictionary. A man whose station in life was used as an insult, even though he was family. A man who must have lived at the absolute ass-end of society, but somehow survived to be listed in my family tree.

In memory of Rag-picker Joe and Joe Shit the Ragman, I’ll share with you the complete issue of The Brave and the Bold #196, where Batman teams up with Ragman.

I had this comic when I was around seven years old. Coming back to it forty years later reveals why I loved it so much. The prose from Bob Kanigher could use a little editing for adult readers, but his captions are more fun than most prose I see in novels these days, and Jim Aparo’s artwork is in fine form here.

This is obviously a comic for boys and, though I was a boy once, I would not recommend it to adult women due to the short shrift the women characters get here. None of them pass the Bechdel Test. They only exist as motivating plot points for male action.

This issue also has some too-convenient plotting in the way that serious injuries take exactly as much time to heal as the plot requires. Is that how it works when falling out of a window? I should fall out of the motherfuckers more often. In spandex.

Also, the re-cap of Ragman’s origin is pointless filler and stupid. Getting electrocuted with other people does not give you their traits. That’s the lowest rung of idiocy on the ladder of superhero origins, right below “Holy shit, gamma-ray exposure makes me bad-ass!”

Actually, gamma rays kill you. I’d prefer that authors stop insulting me with bogus reasons for powers, and instead tell me a story about an awesome character who has powers.

For these reasons, I wouldn’t put this issue in my list of all-time favorite comics, but it’s a cool time capsule from the late 1970s at DC, and it stars one of my ancestors.

Now let’s see how my great-great-grand-uncle Joe Shit the Ragman teams up with Batman to kick all kinds of ass.

Collector’s Guide: The Brave and the Bold #196; DC Comics, 1983.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

Secret Holiday Origin of Mars Will Send No More!

Tags

christmas, comic books, garage, gramma, holiday, memoir, origin, vacation

Every geek has their own secret origin, a time when the world of comic books magically came to life for them. I’ve never changed into a costume in a phone booth, but I did transform into a mutant in a garage many times during my childhood vacations.

My family lived in rural Missouri for many years. My parents’ families mostly lived in small-town Ohio back then. In most Decembers of my pre-adolescent years, Mom, Dad, Sister, and I packed our bags to drive roughly ten hours north and spend Christmas with the families.

Mom’s parents had a detached garage off their modest but cozy three-bedroom house. The backyard had trees, a bench swing, a small garden, a clothesline. To get to the garage, I walked along square, concrete tiles with black pebbles in the spaces between. A waist-high chain-link fence separated the small path from the driveway. A wooden door opened into the darkness of the garage, which at that time of year was always cold. When the moon was up or the back porch light was on, I saw my breath.

The garage possessed a unique scent. Grampa smoked cigarettes in there and framed pictures at his work bench. Dust, sawdust, stale cigarette smoke, and mold. Dampness, but frozen. It’s not the bouquet you might associate with happiness, 25 years later – unless you were also there with me to turn on the dim light, squeeze between the cars, and approach the ramshackle shelves on the far wall. Those shelves held every comic book my grandparents had purchased for their four children from the 1950s through the 1970s, and some that Gramma still liked to follow in the 1980s, like Conan, Dr. Strange, and Mike Grell’s Warlord. She always called them “funny books”, whether they were funny or serious.

Every year I dug out a new section of the stacks – hundreds, maybe thousands of books. Some years, I excavated completely unknown buried treasures. Some years, I found an issue I’d read before: a copy of World’s Finest #147 featuring Superman and Batman, or Tales of Suspense featuring Thor, Iron Man, or the Human Torch. With a year between visits to Ohio, it was like meeting an old friend. Early issues of X-men and Spider-man sat under so much dust and time and disuse that I sometimes got sick. I had pretty bad allergies to dust and mold at that age but zero qualms about risking my health to read those books. I would take an armful back inside the warm house, find a comfy spot to curl up, and be absorbed for hours. If the adults wanted to stay up late and play Euchre at the kitchen table, I might even make two or three trips to the garage!

Some of those books wouldn’t interest me now as an adult reader, but many have stood the test of time or have such intense nostalgia value that they’ve appeared on this blog. I regret that I wasn’t able to buy the collection when it was sold in the 1990s. It didn’t sell for much, considering how many decades it had been exposed to the elements. The books weren’t in great shape. But even a collection of Fair to VG+ vintage comics is a wonder to behold.

Those books took my mind on so many adventures and fantasies as a kid, and you can’t really put a dollar figure on fuel for your imagination. But these days, if the nostalgia becomes too acute, I can find most of them at My Comic Shop.