It’s No Game

There has been a lot of playing around the last couple of days, and some yelling on the phone as well.  Why would one be yelling on the phone?  Because there’s someone on the other end who isn’t listening, that’s why.  That’s all short-term nonsense, however, and I expect things to go back to some semblance of normal by the end of the week.

Or a black hole will open and suck me into another dimension.  Anything’s possible at this point.

There’s been a lot of thinking going on between writing.  Most of said thinking isn’t about the new story, because I know what’s happening with that, and since I’ve mind mapped the story and I know the ending, all that is required is getting the middle parts written.  I’m into the sexy bits now, and while I’m only doing a thousand words a night, it’s fun getting into that stuff.  Right now I don’t feel like doing more than a thousand a day, but the end is already in my head, and I’m guessing that the totally erotic stuff happening now is going to be good for another three, four thousand words.

There’s the nagging feeling that I want to get into another story, a different story, soon.  I know I want to edit Replacements so I can get it ready for publishing, because the writing’s complete, it only needs a cover and some polishing and then it’s off to be self-published for fame and glory.  Sure, that’s why I’m a starving artist, don’t you know?

Beyond that–well, I’m thinking of getting Couples Dance out and starting the work on that as well.  Despite my emails I’ve heard nothing from the publisher that wanted a look at the manuscript, and I have to guess they’re either not interested, or they’ve went belly up.  Now that story, it’s a strange one.  If I can get that published alongside Replacements and Her Demonic Majesty, that’s three out of the four titles I set as a goal for this year, and it means there is still the possibility I can make Number Four happen before the end of the year.

There is the feeling, though–I want to do something science fictiony again.  Yes, I have science fiction stories that I could either write or edit for publishing, but I want to get back out into space.  I want to do something that is adventurous.  I don’t know why I’ve had this feeling kicking me about the back of my mind of late, but when I’m looking at the desktop of my computer I see my 3D rendering programs, and I want to get into one and start playing about with ship designs and the such.

I want to jump back into the sci fi game.  I want to do something that’s fun–maybe a bit of space opera wrapped up in some seriousness.  I want to do it and keep it “short” and see if it touches my mind.  I even have a character that would be perfect for this sort of story–

Maybe it’s time to pull her out and give her a run at the readers.

 

Whispered Conversations of Nothingness

Made it through the long weekend without incident.  Weather was cool and rainy, and there wasn’t a lot of eating.  I don’t have relatives in the area, so I stayed home.  The new week continues onward, as does life.

I was going to write yesterday, but you know how you get distracted by one thing, and you can’t walk away from it because it’s so shiny?  Yeah, it was like that yesterday afternoon.  I was working on a design for this school that will play a major part in a story I’m developing, and the more I put things on the map, the more real the place became.  Not to mention it takes a long time to put walls in place, and set up and model buildings, and lay down paths . . .

You get the idea.  Getting a world built is a lot of work, and there are times when that work gets in the way of something else you should do.

Still, there’s always time to write, and I was going to–until my right eye started burning about seven-thirty last night–

I get this every so often, where my eye will get irritated by something (still have no idea what I did), and then it waters and burns, then it starts to gunk up, at which point I have to clean it out, only to have it enter the same cycle about fifteen minutes later.  I’ve tried to write before when that happens, and it’s harder than hell to do anything when you’re wiping at your eye every two minutes, or you can’t even see out of it because it’s nearly closed up with something leaking out of one corner.

So I gave up trying to write.  I really gave up trying to do anything, because it was far too hard with my eye as it was.  Therefore it was time for bed . . .

I shouldn’t say I gave up on everything, because I was running a scene through my head, and I wanted to work out what a couple of characters were saying.  This is something I do, taking the part of my characters and working out dialog which, in turn, will help me with a scene and with what’s happening at some point in the story.

But this scene wasn’t for something that would appear in a hypothetical story a year from now.  Oh, no:  this was something from a few years down the line in the history of a couple of characters.  This was a talk between two women, in private, sitting in a pavilion on the edge of a small meadow as the sun is sinking behind them.  It’s quiet, they’re alone, and they’re discussing a subject one of them knows well–

Death.  And how one must sometimes kill.

I sat there in the dark, on the bed, feeling the cool outside air trickle into the room, hearing the light patter of rain on the stones in the back yard, and I worked out their conversation.  I spent maybe fifteen minutes taking their parts, talking out their feelings, their ideas, their concerns.  I knew who their were as I spoke, and as I started to lay back, I was still speaking one of the character’s parts, my voice growing softer as my eyes started to close . . .

It’s not every night you can take your characters to bed with you.  At least you’re never really alone at night when you’re a writer.

Tales Beyond the Table

With the latest novel out of the way, it was time to get into another book and getting some information together for someone to design a cover for said story.  There wasn’t a lot to do–well, maybe I’m being modest, because there was a lot of hunting for information, and a bit of cutting and pasting, to get the final document in order.  As it was, I passed off about two thousand words of useful information–I hope.

So that’s off to the printer, so to speak.  Probably going to get into another edit tonight:  I want to shape up Replacements, and there’s a chapter I need to write to have the story make a little more sense–I’m putting in some dumb character building, I know, why do I need that shit?  Because I do, that’s why.  The story will get edited, then I’ll put in another requests for a cover . . .

April will see a lot of work towards publishing.  But I’ve got other things going as well.

In the last week I’ve had two role playing games reviews published.  These aren’t new reviews, and they aren’t new games; I originally published them on another site a few years back, and sort of let them sit.  Since they weren’t doing much in the way of traffic, I offered them to someone to post on their site after I gave them a bit of a polish, ’cause lets face it, I see mistakes much better these days.  If you are interested in reading the reviews, the are for the games Diaspora and Eclipse Phase.  Enjoy.

I don’t game much these days.  Actually, I don’t game at all; it’s been a couple of years since I’ve done any serious gaming, and while I’m always ready to jump into something, I’ve encountered the problem of either not finding a game I like, or not finding a group I like.  Both can be a problem, because if you are in a game that’s not your style, or you’re gaming with assholes, the urge to play goes right down the toilet in short order.

Yet I still pick up games now and then.  Why?  Simple answer:  they can be fodder for ideas.

There was a time when the games I ran were my stories.  Trust me:  run a role playing game every other weekend for two years, and you’ll develop a sense for story, for metaplots, and for characters.  You play in their world, but you make it your own:  you build most everything off the structure, then make your cast of characters, direct the action so your players have something interesting to do.

I did this for a couple of decades, and it helped me understand what sort of work it takes to be a storytelling.  I prided myself on my games, and I pride myself on the tales I write these days.

As for these games I still buy . . .

One can find inspiration from anywhere.  One of my first completed long stories took place in a game universe, one that I knew intimately   It could be argued that I was writing fan fiction even though the character throughout the story were entirely mine, but I won’t argue the point.  It was a good exercise for me, and my only regret is that this particular story is lost to me, vanished on a hard drive failure.  Doesn’t me I couldn’t rewrite the story from scratch today, because you always remember your first novella . . .

I hear you out there, however:  so you’re still buying game to steal ideas, is that it?  Inspiration can come from anywhere, as my muse Erin would tell you.  If you find something in a paragraph of a supplement that gets the mental gears cranking, then good for you, because working your imagination is a great thing–maybe one of the greatest things a person can achieve.

Besides, Quentin Tarantino has found inspiration this way for a couple of decades, and some call him a genius.

I already am one, so the calling should come easy . . .

Uptown Saturday Write

We come to this place in the sun, there local that I call “Breakfast”, and I express my thoughts for some to read.  Today I tell you that I’m on the last chapter of my work in progress, Suggestive Amusements, and if I’m exceptionally lucky, I’ll finish the story tomorrow.  If not, I’ll finish it Monday night, but in the next three days, rain or shine, hot or cold, the first draft is complete.

I look at the text card in Scrivener that’s going to be Chapter Eighteen, and I know what’s going in there; I’ve seen it for a few months, and I’ve been waiting to get to this point for many weeks now.  I know, with Scrivener I can just write when I feel like it, I don’t have to do everything in sequence.  Scrivener makes the writing experience like making a movie:  as you film all your particular scenes when you are on the right set or location, you can write your scenes as the need arises.  Need to write the last chapter now?  Do it.  Need to add a scene that makes sense?  Do it.  Scrivener liberates you to do that–

If you so want.  I don’t.  I’m too old school, in that I have a beginning, a middle, and an end, and I do them in that order.  Which is not a bad thing  to do for a first draft, because there were things I did in the last few chapters that have minutely changed events in the last chapter.

If I didn’t want until the end to write the end, I’d have to rewrite.  I hate rewrites.  Best to write it correctly the first time.

Chapter Eighteen is on tap for this weekend.  Three thousand words, put it a little over the seventy thousand word line, and finalize it with the big finish.  But . . . that’s not all.

I’ve decided to write an article today.  I’ve passed off a couple of my old game reviews for a friend who runs another site, and he’s posted one, and will likely post the other in a few days.  A long time back I promised him an article, so today is a good day to write said article, and it’ll be a far better usage of my time than playing Facebook games when I’m not word slinging.

I don’t know if this article-writing thing is going to be something I want to get into all the time.   My friend was asking about the possibility of doing a few articles on spacecraft propulsion systems, both real an imaginary, and I was like, “Well, yeah, I could do one of those . . .”, but the brain often says what the fingers can’t deliver.

However, I’m going to be in a lull for a bit.  I’ll be waiting on a book cover, and I’ll find myself mostly editing throughout April.  With that in mind, writing a few articles to keep the brain sharp might not be a bad idea.

If nothing else I might just entertain someone with what I have to say.  Or piss them off.

Isn’t that sometimes the same thing?

In the Glen of Semi-active Awareness

Oh, such is the aftermath of sleeping with the Luna Moth.  I make it through the night without waking at some ridiculous time of the morning, but the next day forces you to deal with the hangover for many, many hours.  It’s never fun; in fact, it can be a dangerous thing when you’re out on the highway surrounded by idiots–as I’ll be this afternoon.

At the moment I’m trying to analyze business intelligence software–always a fun thing–and write this.  I’m sort of failing at both ends, because my body is revolting against me, saying, “No, you can’t make your fingers move that way, because it feels funny to us.”  Also, these companies don’t want to give me a quote on their software:  the want me to try it first.  I don’t want to try it, I just want to know how much of my money you’re going to take.  There is no “try”, there is only, “How much, Bunky?”

Since I didn’t write anything last night–I was on Skype with my therapist, and by the time that was through I was inching into ten PM territory–I did polish up an old game review and sent it off to the guy who’d asked me about them the other night.  Yes, I found some errors; yes, I did rewrite part of it because it felt very clumsy in some areas.  Mostly I rewrote things because I know how now to tell the same tell better, and I want to see things looking nice and shiny before I send them out into the Interwebs again.

One of the things I’ve seen over the years is how good some of the stuff I wrote three, four, five years back is today.  It’s not perfect, but it’s readable in a good way.  I still get ideas across; I still manage to make the right points; I still manage to let what passes for “my humor” present itself upon the page.

What I’m saying it the writing was good, and it was something of which I am proud.

In fact, I was just looking over another review I did in 2011, and while there are a few issues here and there, I have no problems with it.  Sure, a clean up is in order, and I might have to correct something were I to republish it because a few things have changed since the original publication, but it’s not as if I need to perform massive triage to get it presentable.  It is . . . good.

If the two reviews I sent in are deemed worthy, them I’m probably going to send a few of these other things that I penned.  I’m also looking and publishing some–wait for it–new articles, because I’d once made the promise to do so, and I should follow through, should I not?  I was even looking at some research material because that’s what I do, even if I don’t want to write.  But since I likely will, the reading came in handy.

The plan is to finish Suggestive Amusements this weekend or early next week–but that doesn’t mean I won’t write something else in the meantime.

After, every little bit helps.

Options of Light and Darkness

The end is approaching.  Not that we should be sad about that, because the end I mention is the end of my current work in progress.  The penultimate chapter has started, and people are talking about what had happened up to this point.

This is the chapter I’ve been thinking about for a while, so it came easy to setting up the meeting between Erin and–lets call her one of her bosses, a member of the upper Goddess echelon that has come to sit with Erin and find out just what in the hell is going on.  I’ve imagined the conversation for some times, and when I was writing last night the idea was coming out on to the page well.

We’ll see where it goes tonight when I continue Goddess Chat.

There was something else going on while I was writing, however, because if nothing else, I multitask like mad.  I was chatting with someone I know, someone who I’ve written things for in the past, and whom has enjoyed my writing.  As I was working through my chapter I was also working through a discussion of some articles I’d written some time back, and the comments that came my way were sort of like, “Hey, you ever going to write any more of these?”

There was a time when I was writing a lot of different things.  For a while I was doing game reviews on another website, and writing a few articles for another site, all of which occurred while I was blogging and working on my first completed novel.  It was a lot of fun, and it helped me develop my talent as a writing, and even more as a researcher and editor.

But all good things come to an end, as it is said.  I was doing all this writing when I was “between jobs”, as the saying goes, and I had a lot of time to put pen to computer.  Then I found a job, I had to move, I had to find time to write while I had spare time, and with spare time at a premium, I found that if I wanted to work on my stuff, I had to cut other things out of my life.

Ergo, no more articles.

But there is another saying:  nothing that dies ever stays dead.  True, they might only say that in the Marvel Universes, but there is some precedence for that in the real world as well.  When I started thinking about the stuff I’d written once, it made me realize that, hey, that stuff was pretty good, and it was a lot of fun to write.  And I was reminded that, at one time, I did tell this person that I’d write them another article . . .

Today I pulled out something I’d written nearly two years ago, a game review that I’d put up and sort of left.  I read it, edited it, and sent it off to the person I was speaking with last night, ’cause I told him that reviewing Science Fiction type role playing games is a good thing to do–and there are probably people out there who’ll want to read them.

Does this mean I’m back into doing articles and reviews for other people?  Hard to say.  After all, Jean Grey hasn’t popped up from the dead again–

Yet.

Mayhem Most Marvelous

Two chapters to go in Replacements, and it’s surprising how easy it’s been to reach this point.  It’s helped a lot that the last couple of chapters have been very easy to edit, with only the need to change a few things, and adding a phrase here and there.  It’s easy to see that when I wrote this on the first pass, I knew what I wanted to say in these later chapters than I did in the first.

But then I had a better idea of where I wanted the story to go by the time I’d finished the first couple of chapters.  It only makes sense that when I reached then last three chapters, I didn’t have to think about what I was going to write–I only needed it written.

In working this last chapter tonight, I realize that I should do something to the story.  There’s an event that happens at the end, and it takes place in something five paragraphs.  Which makes me wonder:  can a truly horrible event be summed up in under a hundred words?

Why not?

The event that happens, while needed, is not that important that if you never saw it happen, the omission would ruin everything.  If anything, the short scene–the whole chapter is about fourteen hundred words–shows how the person who’s become Olivia will do just about anything to get her way, and while she may feel sorry about what she did, that doesn’t mean she wouldn’t do it again.

In a way, the character who is Olivia is something of a psycho.  She’s kicking ass and burning bridges left and right, and what pisses her off is not the possibility that one may have picked up something strange about her–it’s that she’s enjoying her new role as department head and secret mistress, and woe be to anyone who steps on the toes of her Ferragamos.

I may have given it some thought in the past, but Olivia is probably one of the most screwed up characters I’ve ever done.  She’s not crazy in a Hannibal Lecter way, but once she figures out that she can do pretty much as he pleases, she talks about screwed people up as calmly as she would discuss what sort of polish to use for her pedicure.

When I used to run my World of Darkness Vampire game, there was one character who used to put in an appearance in just about everyone’s game, because when it came to the World of the Undead in Chicago, she was right at the top of the heap of room-temperature bodies.

She was old, powerful, and sometimes referred to as the person who was the historical Helen of Troy.  Since she was so old and powerful, people liked to play her in a very over the top manner, with a lot of histrionics, and beating of breasts.  She was this Amazonian vampire Wonder Woman who no one in their mind would ever cross, because she would hold out your maybe-beating heart for you to see if she was of that mood.

Naturally, I had her show up for a few secessions.  When the players meet her, what do they get?  A very short woman, about five foot without heels, somewhat dark, olive tone skin, black hair, dark eyes, and a physique that might lead you to believe she could lift her body weight–if she were lucky.

This was the same character, the old vampire killer to end all killers.  And she looked like you wouldn’t notice her twice if you ran into her at a local Micky-Ds.

I was questioned about why she looked the way she did.  I was able to justify her appearance on that fact that if she really were from Greece, circa 1,000 BCE, then the whole idea of having a six foot tall plus woman running about the city was ludicrous.  Skin tone, hair, eyes–pretty much the standard for the area.  If she’d been a real lady before turning bloodsucker, then manual labor was totally out of the question, and she probably wouldn’t have had a lot of toning or muscular definition.

But when she–well, I, since I was playing here–spoke, she was calm, has great manners  never once raised her voice or threw a tantrum.  I was ready for that, too.  ”If you’re a poseur badass,” I explained, “you have to constantly show everyone so they don’t forever.  If you’re a true badass, though . . . you never have to show anyone what you can do.  They just know.”

And . . . they’re never bothered if they have to kill everyone in a room if they don’t get the first lesson.  You should have known, you dumb shits, that you don’t mess with Death in High Heels . . .

That’s the way Olivia is shaping up.  Killing people is just a thing, and if it’s gonna be done, then get it done.  She’s turning into a sweet badass without having to tip her hand to everyone.

She’s pretty sweet.  I should write more like her.

 

Call From the Far Stars

No writing last night.  I actually ended up playing with a program that lets you build three dimensional models, since I’m thinking of trying to use stuff like this to do story illustrations.  I’m not an artist, but I could use this to model things that I’ve always wanted to model–like ships that will spend most of their time in space.

That was something I wanted to do a couple of years ago, when I was starting up a role playing game called Diaspora that tried to put a little science back into science fiction.  The game didn’t last very long–a couple of sessions, max–and the setup took longer than the number of sessions played.  There were solar systems, ships, characters . . . all of that lost to time now.  Well, not completely lost, but for the most part it’s all vanished.

The one thing I wanted to do very badly was create a model of the ship that the characters were using.  I didn’t know my modeling tools then–and I still don’t–but I was able to create a diagram of the ship, which is somewhere on my computer, I just have to find it.  Still not the same as seeing a model in three dimensions, but it was okay.

I get drawn to space all the time.  I like games that take place there, and a few of my stories end up going in that direction.  Well, not always space, but other planets and other places.  That’s where my science fiction takes me.  Even when I’m still on Earth, it’s not always the Earth we know.  I mean, you have an imagination, so why stay here when you can hop into the next dimension and have fun there?

When I wasn’t playing with software yesterday, I was thinking of a story.  Yeah, I know:  surprise!  The story is one that’s been bouncing about in my head for a while, one that takes play inside my Transporting universe, and it’s a chance to show people a little about how the government of the future use Cytheria’s and Audrey’s abilities–hey, they still have to work some times–and what they can do when they’re turned loose to go all psycho psychic on people who are trying to kill them.  It can get ugly fast.

But there’s one scene I kept paying in my head . . . they have to meet a ship which is on its way to where they are suppose to go as well, and they have to take a really small, and really fast, message sloop to catch up with the big ship.  When they finally rendezvous with their ride, they’re about 175 light years from home, and maybe 10 light years from the nearest star system.  They’re standing in the open hatch of their sloop, nothing between them and the vacuum save for their skin suits, and they are able to have a few minutes alone in the Deep Black, not losing their minds as people in another universe might, but marveling at the sight of the naked universe.

This is what I try to convey with my writing:  a sense of wonder, and how it’s viewed by my characters.  They don’t realize that their world is marvelous, because to them, it’s what they’ve always known.  But we don’t know that, and seeing the world through their eyes is, in itself, a thing of wonder to behold.

Is this where I’m going?

Maybe it is, because I need to stand and spend some time with the stars as well.

But First, A Gaming Interlude

If you’ve read this blog for any period of time, you’ll know I’m a gamer.  So imagine my surprise when I found another blogging writing about her love of the game.  Head on over to The Tilting Windmills and give it a read.

The Fooling Around Before the Storm

After returning to The Undisclosed Location from the soul sucking hole of hell that I call a job, I had dinner, and . . . relaxed.  It was time to fool around, not do anything writing related.  Because I know what’s coming:  work, then the drive home, then dinner, and relaxing.  By the time I get on the computer, it’ll probably be about 8 PM local time, and I can finally dig into the journey that will be Harper Voyager.

I figure I’ll have my package together and polished by Saturday afternoon, so as soon as I feel comfortable that it’s ready to go, it goes.  I’ll update my Author’s Page on Facebook, then play the waiting game.  I figure, at best, I won’t hear anything until after the first of the year.  Before that probably won’t be good news.  But after the first of the year . . . yeah. I can see that happening.

Since I was resting last night, I caught up on some news, and contacted a couple of old friends that I hadn’t seen for a few weeks, because editing takes up a lot of your free time.  I listened to music, which is no different than another night, because without music, I’m only half there at the computer, and my mind needs something to help churn the waters of my imagination.  (Notice I didn’t say “chum”, because I don’t believe I have sharks in my mind.  Not yet.)

I also caught up on a few game supplements   Even though I rarely game these days, I have a ton of games on my external drive.  And there are probably a dozen supplements and core rule books that I haven’t read through.  Again, writing takes away from your free time, particularly when writing isn’t you main source of income.

I didn’t do a very in-depth read of the books; it was more like, skim, skim, skim . . . oh, there’s something interesting.  It’s a routine I’m used to, because you stop and get the stuff that jumps out at you.  I can spend three or four days going over a book this way–especially if it’s one of the books for Eclipse Phase, which have great writing, incredible amounts of information, a lot of wit, and comedy you can’t find anywhere else.  (Read about Momo von Satan and the Chewy Gristle Commentary Hour, and tell me if you don’t laugh.)

One of the games I went through last night, though . . . I need to dig into it a little more.  The author and developer gave some rather particular reasons for developing the game, and the more I thought about it, the more a review of the game seemed necessary.  And when that review comes, you’ll see it here.  It’s been a long time since I’ve written a game review:  it should be interested.

But that’s for later . . . this weekend comes the real work.  Package, edit, upload, click, hope:  such is the mantra of today’s writer.  Oh, don’t forget wait, which hasn’t changed for writers for, well, a long time.

Everyone wants to buy the next masterpiece, but they certainly take their time that your book is it.

I can wait, though.  I can wait.

Of Late I Dream of Beta Quadrant

Today is one of those Fake Tuesdays:  the ones after a three-day weekend that pretends it’s a Monday.  And it feels that way.  It feels long, slow, and tiring.  It feels like one of those days where you want to stay in bed and sleep the day away.

It was a little like that yesterday as I returned to The Undisclosed Location.  The traffic wasn’t bad, but the time felt way off.  It was alternately sunny and gloomy, and when I stepped out of the car, it felt like I’d entered a steam bath.

Then I drifted off to sleep–and woke up at 3 AM.  Lay in bed until the alarm went off, hoping against hope that I’d doze off and get a little dream time in.  Nope, not a chance.  The motto of The Undisclosed Location is, “Never Give a Sucker An Even Break,” and guess who is playing the role of The Sucker?

Needless to say, keeping my mind focused on something for long is a bit of a struggle.  The mind feels like swiss cheese, and the body feels a little cold–probably caused by, as someone mentioned, a combination of low blood pressure and stress.  It doesn’t matter:  the brain is feeling like it needs a road trip, and the body is saying, “Wait . . . I thought you were flying?”

As usually happens when I get bored or tired, my mind starts wandering to different things, different stories, different ideas.  I haven’t been all over the place as I often am, but the mind keeps slipping away to another place–

Somewhere about thirty thousand light years distant, to be exact.

For some reason, I’m going over the plight–well, sort of semi-life–of a character I once made for an aborted Star Trek role playing game–one that I’ve often referred to as the worst game I’ve ever played.  I loved the character, and the history I created for him, but if I were given the choice of going back in time and gaming with the same bunch, or having a body part gnawed off by a rabid squirrel, I’d take the latter option.

There was a time, however, when I wasn’t doing anything between sessions of dealing with idiots and munchkins, and given that time I wrote.  I don’t want to say what I was doing was fanfic, but it was.  Or maybe I was just writing history, since my fanfic didn’t involve my character getting involved with any green women.

But I’ve been drawn back to this limited story, not just yesterday, but today.  I think it was because I was looking up something that ended up in a scene, and it got me thinking about what I’d written a couple of years back.  I know that nothing I wrote back then was worth a damn, but it gave me a little bit of peace, because it helped me deal with the fact that I was gaming with hyper-spacial doucherockets.

Will I do anything with this work?  Probably not.  Maybe take it out and read it, cringing here and there when I come across a bad line or three.

Still . . . it’s on my mind.  Can’t tell you if that’s good or bad.

Dreamers and Demons

So many strange things today.  Let me tell you, I didn’t want to get out of bed, because of the things my mind was showing me last night–

See, the last few weeks I’ve complained that I haven’t seen many of my dreams, that I can’t remember them.  So, as I was dozing off last night–or, I should say, trying to doze off–I was repeating a mantra that I was going to remember, going to remember . . .

Remember I did.  Oh, boy, did I.  Can’t tell you a lot of the detail, but it seemed to consist of (a) being with some woman I’d never seen before showing porn in a classroom full of middle school kids, (b) doing very detailed measurement of certain areas of her body, (c) finding out she was a cop, and lastly, (d) hooking up with her partner and riding shotgun with him as we took some suspect down to a river, left him belted in the car, then went full-on murderball on his ass as we drove the car into the river and let him drown.

Yes, good times had by all!

That was disturbing.  I mean, yeah, I helped smoke some guy in a rather horrible way, and even though it was in my dream, it seemed that, and the sex stuff, was a rather strange way for me subconscious to remind me of–what?  Just want the hell was it telling me?

So into work . . . and I discover, to my embarrassment, it’s the birthday of H. P. Lovecraft.  One of my favorite writers, and here I was completely forgetful that just over a hundred and twenty years ago he was born.  He and his demons, his racism, and his talent.  He was the first horror writer I read, and it was through him I eventually got into Stephen King.  Lovecraft also, in his own way, pushed me into role playing, as Call of Cthulhu, Second Edition, was the first role playing game I bought.

Lovecraft was a guy with a lot of demons.  It seems like anyone creative has some ifrit on their back, and that sucker is constantly flappin’ it wings so it can keep you wrapped up in bad mojo.  This guy laid it all out for everyone to see.  He was a crazy, misogynous, racist dude who wrote crazy fiction–and spent a hell of a lot of time encouraging other writers to keep at their craft.

I posted a happy birthday for him–like he’s going to see it, right?  Well, maybe a Deep One will see it when they check their wall; these days you can never tell.

No sooner do I get that posted that I learn Tony Scott, director and producer, brother of Ridley Scott, jumped to his death yesterday.  He drove out to the Vincent Thomas Bridge, climbed the ten foot fence that’s suppose to keep people from leaping, and went over the side.  They found a note in his office, so it wasn’t a spur of the moment thing: it was something he thought about, and planned.

And executed.

I’ve seen these demons as well; they are the darkness of your life that tries so hard to consume you.  Even today, after decades of fighting them, learning to keep them at bay, they are there, waiting, sort of watching with their yellow eyes, knowing that every so often I’ll slip up, and let them in.

This last time, I did the right thing; I spoke with people, I got help.  Too many don’t.  Too many are consumed.

Gotta fight the darkness.  Never let the demons win.  Gotta stay with your dreams, even when they are strange.

Strange beats dead any day of the week.