Rich Ristow

UFO Antho Kickstarter Campaign

2011-09-20T19:55:00.001-07:00

So, here is the Kickstarter campaign a potential publisher wants, in order to do the UFO poetry anthology Barry Napier and I would very much like to do.

And, for the record, the guy reading the excerpt of one my poems pretty much kills it. It's the first time I've ever heard anybody read one of my poems without me cringing, as a result.

Submission Guidelines are here.

ahem.

2011-09-20T19:28:00.000-07:00

The retail work is going terribly. That's all I'm going to say at the moment, in order to stay out of whiny-spleen-venting territory. I've pretty much worked eight days in a row, much of that getting up at 3 or 4am.

Yawn

2011-09-14T17:00:00.000-07:00

The last few days, I've wanted to quit Wal*Mart for the second time. Beyond the usual host of personal reasons, (um, not my intended career path that I went to grad school for) it's just been a hectic time, with everybody on edge and becoming pissy and snappy at a drop of a hat. My store recently remodeled into a supercenter. When I left freelancing and went back to retail a few months ago, it was with the understanding, of sorts, that I'd likely get shuffled back into the department manager mix. Well, I was lucky to get the helm of a new meat department contingent on the supercenter re-openning. Today was the store's official grand re-openning. Approximately 5,232,921,009 things basically had today as a deadline, as people from the corporate end of things were going to inspect the store after ceremony. (Don't ask). A lot of the product actually didn't come in until last night. Which means, despite the stress of the deadlines, I had to get up and go to work at 3am, this morning, and I didn't leave the store until 3pm today. If you think that's bad, my boss hasn't had two days off in the last two months, it seems.

Blight -- 23 Days Without Medication

2011-09-04T19:26:00.000-07:00

Previous installment can be read here. Buying the ebook can be done on Kindle or Smashwords, for 0.99$.

Five Months Later, and …

23 Days Without Medication

As stress relief, Floyd Cervenka desperately wanted to masturbate, but in his oven, a severed head laughed at him. At first, Floyd didn’t know whether it was a hallucination, or if somebody had put it there. If he retreated from hysterics long enough, he could rationalize it. He had not slept in 72 hours. Over the last three days, he had done nothing but eat peanut butter on white bread, and he drank about five bags worth Shop & Drop instant coffee, black without any sugar or creamer. He had also drank about a case of Lo-Carb Creature. It was Floyd’s idea of acting responsibly – IBSL was threatening foreclosure again, and he had a lot of work to do and a lot of money to earn.

Most of it consisted of consulting Gray’s Anatomy and his own, personal copy of the DSM-IV-TR and The People’s Guide To Pills. A medical website was paying five bucks for each medically adequate definition of drugs, illnesses and body parts. The work was so profitable, Floyd was afraid to go to bed, thinking that he’d wake and it would be claimed by somebody else. Then, he would be back to writing search-engine-optimized Botox articles for $1 each.

Before hearing a high-pitched cackle from his stove, he had taken a break from the upper arm’s brachial artery. He was surfing the net for naked girls, specifically for a brunette with tattoos. He was about at settle on a link that suggested, Nerdy Girls Need Hard Loving! That’s when he heard the cackling. Other noises were hard to describe, and the closest Floyd could manage was phlegmy cough after sucking helium.

When he opened the oven door, he dropped his coffee, and then he slipped on the subsequent puddle, once he tried to back away. That’s when he came eye-to-eye with the severed head. It didn’t look normal, though. The skin had turned a twinge of blue, and the eyes were only dark cavities. Still, they blinked. Often. The head’s mouth was drawn into a wide, brown-toothed grin.

Like many times before, Floyd sought to prove it wasn’t real, that this was just another hallucination or a left-over figment from one of his all-to-vivid dreams. He got to his feet and walked over to the oven. Reaching in, he grabbed the head by its gray-streaked hair . Instead of his hand going through an immaterial head, the thing’s hair felt greasy. He tried to raise it to eye level, and the thing slipped out and smacked face-first against the floor. Still, it didn’t stop laughing. Floyd stood over it and stared down at it for a long while. He kicked it, slightly, and it rolled.

“Don’t you ever stop laughing?”

The head slightly rolled over to face Floyd. It winked an empty eye cavity. Then, it stopped laughing for a moment. “OF COURSE NOT,” it rasped. Then, it went back to its phlegm-filled cackling.

Floyd gritted his teeth, and then, he lost his temper. Bending over, he grabbed the head by its greasy hair and flung it against the wall. When it didn’t stop cackling, he grabbed a broom from next to his fridge and started beating the head with the straw end. That did nothing. Floyd really didn’t want to do what he did next, but he felt he had no choice. He reached into his pocket for his phone.

“911—what’s your emergency?”

“Somebody is pulling a prank on me.”

“Oh Christ—Floyd, you’re not supposed to call 911.”

“Fuck you. There’s somebody fucking with me.”

“Have you taken your medications?”

“No, but that’s not the point.”

The dispatcher, a woman, sighed. “Please hang up, and only call this number when you have a real emergency.”

“This is a real fucking emergency.” He stared down at the laughing head.

“No, it’s not. Take your meds, Floyd.”

“Here,” he said. He put his flip phone next to the laughing head. “Hear that?”

“Hear what?”

“The laughing?”

“Floyd, I’m going to hang up, now.”

A sneer broke out across his face. Again, he stared down at the head. The empty eye sockets squinted, and elaborate crow’s feet spread out across the thing’s temples, merging with the four major brow creases. “Oh, fuck you.” Floyd opened the kitchen cabinet above his sink and started throwing glasses at the laughing head. “Fuck you, you fucking fuck!” When he ran out of glasses, he started flinging plates.

“FLOYD! You still there?”

“Where the-goddamned-else would I be? Ulan Bator?”

“Floyd…”

“You know,” he held the phone at arm’s length, “I HEAR MONGOLIA IS JUST FUCKING SNAZZY IN THE SPRING TIME!” He brought the phone back to his ear. “You hear me? Or will I need to start reading the copy I sold to snazzy-planet-dot-com last week?”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean? Do you need help?”

“Do you think I call 911 for the scintillating conversation?” He breathed deeply. “If so, I‘m so far from scintillated right now. If scintillation were a boulevard in Ulan-Fucking-Bator, it would be…”

The woman dispatcher sighed. “Alright, I’ll send somebody over.” Then, she hung up.

Floyd grabbed a forty of Jersey Reserve Malt Liquor from his fridge. He sat on the floor, crossed his legs, and uncapped the bottle. He took a sip and stared at the laughing head. However, fatigue mingled with his caffeine crash, and the alcohol just made it worse. He fell quickly asleep, resting his chin on his fist.

When he woke, somebody was nudging him with their wingtips. Floyd looked at the foot, and then upwards. He saw a black man in a Khaki trench coat staring down at him.

“Oh,” Floyd said. “Detective Johnson, it’s right,” he pointed. However, the laughing head was gone. “Oh.” Floyd clamped his eyes shut for a moment. “Oh, fuck.”

“That’s all you got to say?”

“Trell, it was here just….”

“You know what? I don’t know, and I don’t care.” He turned and strode out of the kitchen. “I have so much more important shit to do.” And he left.

Wearily, Floyd stood and returned to his computer. All the high paying medical writing jobs were gone. Floyd took a sip of malt liquor, deciding that he desperately needed to get drunk.

Unintended Retail Hilarity.

2011-08-31T05:58:00.000-07:00

Assistant Manager: Are you consumable?

Me: No, I'm meat!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

In retail, sections of the store are broken down into zones, sections, and departments. The wording will likely very by company. However, like any job, words become jargonized. While the above sounds EXTREMELY silly to most people, the translation is actually this:

Assistant Manager: Are you [part of the] consumable [section]? [Section being a part ofthe store containing many departments]

Me: No, I'm [part of the] meat [department, which is not part of your section. Therefore, leave me alone; you cannot pull me off task to complete whatever bullshit note the Store Manager gave you.]!

Blight -- Prologue

2011-08-28T17:32:00.000-07:00

I'm thinking I'm going to start serializing some fiction for just the hell of it, just for kicks. Instead of writing something new and getting horribly behind, I'm going to start with something already finished, and then post an update every Sunday. This will give me time to write something new for this purpose, once this story has been completely gone through. Of course, if anybody's interested the whole story is here on Kindle for 0.99$.

Prologue

There were five men in tuxedos sitting in the front row, and Floyd Cervenka thought that was strange for a town hall meeting. The back of their heads looked exactly the same: jet black hair, combed straight and greased down. Besides those men, there was the usual smattering of senior citizens – all of whom had fallen asleep already. This week, however, he realized he was the only journalist in attendance. He sat there, pen poised, ready, and pointed at a blank page in his composition book.

Only, Floyd had nothing to write, at first. Monmouthside Height’s town hall meetings were banal to begin with. Mayor George Gurley spent most of the time talking vapidly about a being a “friend of business” and how “Conservative times needed conservative solutions.” Floyd gritted his teeth and raised his hand.

Mayor Gurley just scowled at him for a moment. “What?”

Floyd tapped his pen against his blank page. He held up a thick packet of new ordinances. “So let me get this straight. You’re going to raise property taxes, cut the funding for the library, defund the free clinic, and give hefty rebates to the real estate management industry?”

“No.” Gurley’s scowled deepened. “Those are austerity measures, and I’m creating a business capital incentive…”

“Bullshit.”

“All industries. Realty is just one …”

“And doesn’t the Gurley family own about a third of this town, anyway? So that means, by raising my property taxes, your family is going to pocket…”

“That is uncalled for. I could sue you for slander.”

Floyd grinned. He looked at the small group of sleeping senior citizens snoring around him. “Go ahead. Do it. Imagine the headlines: Slumlord Sues Local Whistle Blower. Certainly would call some attention to Gurley & Sons, Inc.”

Mayor Gurley turned to the five men in tuxedos seated up front. The whole time, none of them turned to face Floyd. “Pay no attention to him. He’s just a local whack job.” He turned back to face Floyd, again. “One who’s had a very long history of delusional mania—like the time he thought aliens had infiltrated our school board. He picketed for weeks on that one. Plus, there was the time he was caught masturbating in the…”

“Fucking hell,” Floyd said. “You’re going to bring that up?”

“Why not? Plus, three years ago, you once claimed inter-dimensional aliens took over the Monmouthside Republican Party.”

“Yeah? And?”

“You are just a crazy liberal. Like other crazy liberals. You were sued for unjust defamation.”

“That’s not important. You’re clearly trying to…”

“Have you taken your medications today?”

“Yes. But that’s none of your damn business. I asked a legit news question. Bringing up my mental health history is skirting the question.” Floyd tapped his pen against his composition book again. “So, answer me. How much of my property taxes will go into your family’s pocket?”

Mayor Gurley’s face flushed deep red. “How do you expect to revitalize this shithole of a town, if I can’t raise capital to…”

“Ah,” Floyd stood from his metal fold up chair. “You’re not denying it. Wonderful.” He made his way to the back of the hall, but before leaving, he stopped and turned around. “One thing. Who are the fucktards in tuxedos?”

None of the five men turned to face him.

“And why,” Floyd said, “are they wearing tuxedos? Seems a bit odd—even for business men.”

“If you must know,” the Mayor gripped the edges of his podium. “They represent a large financial company that’s relocating here.”

“Great.” Floyd rolled his eyes.

“I’m glad you…”

“That’s sarcasm, asshole.”

Floyd left the meeting. He didn’t see any reason to stay. After all, he had what he needed – the open meetings law required this type of monthly meeting, with all the newly passed ordinances available to the public for comment. Floyd figured he’d go back to his cubicle and leaf through the packet, before writing another scathing editorial.

He walked two or three blocks, seemingly not paying attention to the dilapidated houses around him, as well as most of the boarded over store fronts. However, once he returned to the Monmouth County Messenger office, he was slightly taken aback.

Desks, chairs, and computers sat on the curb. Floyd was surprised the computers were not stolen already. Somebody had nailed slabs of rotting plywood over the door and the storefront window. Floyd looked up, and instead of seeing a business marquee, he only saw chipped, white brick. He glanced around, not knowing what to think. Then, the boarded over door opened.

His boss D’Wayne Washington, a very fat African American man in a grey suit waddled out. He held out an envelope.

Floyd took it. “What’s this?”

“Everything I owe you, plus severance.”

“Why?”

D’Wayne shook his head. “You know the thing about the newspaper business and the Internet?”

“But…”

“Floyd, I’ve been losing money for two years, now. My credit’s gone. I have no advertisers. I’m sorry, but I’m bankrupt.”

“Aw, shit.” Floyd looked at pavement. “That sucks.”

“You don’t have to tell me.”

“I know.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t warn you,” He said. “I tried everything. I wanted new investors.”

“So, what are you going to do?”

“Move to Newark,” he said.

“Now, that is desperate.”

“A job is a job. I’d take one in Camden if it meant getting paid.”

“Well, best of luck with that.”

“Thanks.”

D’Wayne turned to reenter the boarded-over office. “Now, I have to finish moving stuff out.”

“Before you go.”

“Yes?”

“What about my health insurance?”

“It’s paid till the end of the month. I can get you the COBRA paperwork?”

“I can’t afford COBRA payments and pay my mortgage.”

He turned. “Floyd, I’m so sorry. I really hate that I’m doing this you. Especially now that you have your shit together, finally…”

“It’s okay. I’m sure I can find some sort of writing job with benefits somewhere.” He paused for a moment, slightly unsure of what to say. “Thanks for the steady work, though.”

They shook hands. Once he got home, he noticed a thick letter waiting in his mailbox. Floyd assumed it was just junk mail. Later, Floyd would regret not opening it immediately. A company called Interstate Business Savings & Loan (IBSL) had bought his mortgage off of First Garden State Trust.

Needfire, and ... Um, Whatever Happened To That Pound Chapbook?

2011-08-27T16:09:00.000-07:00

For the foreseeable near-term future, Needfire Poetry will be going on hiatus at Belfire Press. This is something that Jodi Lee and have talked about, and we both agree that it's for the the best. To put it frankly, my personal life is a mess right now. It has been for years. However, the problems have accrued like this: my mother's failing health was always a distraction, but there was something a little bit more afoot.

I have a mortgage, and my wife and I got that mortgage at the peak of the housing bubble, when everybody was telling us to "Buy, buy, buy!" Problem is, I was a full-time-for-part-time-pay college adjunct back then. The thought was: after only a few more years of adjunct hell, I could finally land a full time position at least at a community college. That never happened, and out of financial need, I went to Walmart in late 2008. The housing bubble burst ... and now my wife and I have been constantly fighting off foreclosure, especially since our mortgage was sold by our lender to a predatory group of douchebags. So, now it's 2011, and the mortgage nightmare has never gone away. Which leads to one other place: online freelancing. I spend a lot of time doing it, partly because there is just so much debt that I have amassed, and I am constant need for cash just to keep creditors from coming after my wife and I. Actually, 90% of my freetime behind a computer is spent trying to squeeze nickels and dimes from the internet.

And so, that dovetails into The Ezra Pound/Ghost Chapbook that has seemingly taken years to put together. Forget about the circumstances/drama with the original publisher. The chapbook was then going to be published through Needfire, but the bad economy necessitated cutting it from the line up. Then, I was going to create a digital ebook/print chapbook imprint for Needfire, but after the ongoing financial problems I'm having, that seemed like a very bad idea. So, that leads me to right now. The book is clossally late. I still wish to do it, and I'm still going to try very hard to, soon, once the dust settles a little at work.

But, that also brings me back to Needfire going on hiatus. Jodi and I both agree that it should and will be revived at some point. However, it will be once everything is sorted out, and I can come back to running a imprint when I can devote much more time to it without freaking out about how up the air everything regarding my home is. Until then, my personal time will likely be spent either writing my own material or finishing off prior obligations like Pound.

Also, there's this UFO poetry anthology that I promised Barry Napier I'd help him with. Just in case anybody's curious, that book is his baby. He's the lead, and I'm just sort of an assistant -- we haven't really talked at length, but I think I'm helping with the slush. There may be some skullcracking -- ahem, I mean editing -- going on there, too. So, it doesn't really conflict with the reasons why Needfire is going on hiatus. But, more on UFO book a little later.

Wind, Rain, Thrown-Out Back, and Meat

2011-08-27T16:05:00.000-07:00

So, just got off work. Hurricane Irene is set to romp around the Jersey Shore for a bit. The past few weeks I've been settling into the reality that my mother has passed on. I was "officially" promoted at Walmart since coming back, and I've been training at a store on how to set up and run a meat department. However, during all of that, I threw my back out and was in pain for quite awhile.

Dropkick Murphies -- Amazing Grace

2011-08-02T20:57:00.000-07:00

I was not a fan of this version at first. However, I realized something. It starts with the dirge-like bagpipes, before moving into more energetic territory. That's really a lot like coming to terms with grief.

The Wit And Wisdom Of Josephine Ristow

2011-07-31T21:30:00.000-07:00

When You have a long term relationship with somebody, you are bound to have several special inside jokes that only you and them understand. With my wife, there's always the gay lion "Oh, Rar!" thing we use from time to time -- and it came originally from South Park. There is one thing that has been on my mind the past few days. It's something my mother once said to me when I was like 9 years old and she was teaching me how to ride a bike, when we lived in England.

"You only get one mother! Any other after me will be made out of plastic!"

We have laughed hard, her and I, over that line for more than twenty years. Why we found it so hilarious would be hard to explain. It had something to do with me being lazy and not wanting to learn how to ride a bike. That day, she also threatened to cook me plastic pork chops, and everything else she could put the word "plastic" in front of. It is, of course, a very perceptive statement on many levels, but she said this long before she ever really thought of her own mortality. So, in the wake of her death, I find myself the need to repeat those words again:

"You only get one mother! Any other after me will be made out of plastic!"

A Few Random Thoughts.

2011-07-30T20:48:00.000-07:00

--It's hard to write anything after the post about my mother. Then again, she would want me to move on. And, I'm actively trying to do that. Still, in the days ahead, there's the viewing and Catholic funeral service to attend.

--As part of being a better son to my father, I think I'm going to actively start doing something I always wanted to do. Get several days worth of audio out of him, in the form of recorded interviews. It really took me quite awhile to realize that the circumstances of my family and my upbringing are not "normal" as compared to the average American family. Also, it's an excuse to spend more time with my father.

--I plan to save up mTurk earnings to by a slide scanner on Amazon. There are literally hundreds of slide photographs and my parents' house from the Azores and all the other places my family has lived.

--I returned to walmart, and after only a few weeks, they have already promoted me. I will manage a newly created Meat department. Commence with the silly puns, in T-Minus five, four, three....

A Eulogy for My Mother

2011-07-29T19:38:00.000-07:00

My mother turned 69 a week or two ago. That means, she was born towards the end of World War Two. She grew up in Trenton, New Jersey, as a third generation Italian American. Her mother's family came from Rome. Her father's family was Sicilian. As she grew up, she came to love to love Elvis Presley -- although she never actually owned any of his records until later in life. She also loved The Beatles, Richard Simmons exercise tapes

Among the many things to do, she loved to dance. This was something I was reminded of on nearly a weekly basis, especially that she had once danced on television's American Bandstand. My father loved to dance too, especially with her. Once they met and started dating, they became high school sweethearts -- even attended prom together. She used to scold my lack of rhythm by pointing at her thighs and proclaiming, "These legs danced on Bandstand! What do you mean you don't know how to dance? It's in your genes, boy! Your genes!"

My mother and father had a courtship that lasted several years. It even persisted across state lines. For a time, my mother lived in South Carolina. Eventually, they married. My father did his Masters degree at the U. of Maryland. He took his first job at a predominately African-American high school in innercity Washington, DC during the racial tensions of the 1960s. He was the only white guy in the whole school There, he was considered a federal employee. After watching my grandfather struggle as a steel worker, through strikes, low pay, and an abysmal pension, he decided he wanted to pursue a career with the federal government. There, he saw stability. He was eventually hired as part of the Department of Defense Dependent Schools.

The first job took my mother and him to the Azores, a Mid-Atlantic island chain that is Portuguese territory. My sister, Catherine, was born there. The time in the Azores didn't last long. Eventually, my mother and father and sister moved to the Philipenes and the now defunct Clark Air Force Base. In 1970, my older brother Paul, was born. Eventually, the family moved back to DC for a year, and eventually, they moved to Germany as my father's career in the federal government progressed. My family moved to several different bases in Germany. I was born at Bittburg Air Force Base. From there, my family moved to United Kingdom.

During this time, my mother patiently put up with the globetrotting, the constant moving, and living in other countries. She was mostly a housewife during this time. She began to perfect her ability to cook, which was an amazing talent of hers. Her travels around the world also allowed her to try things outside of her comfort zone, meaning she moved beyond the Italian American fare she was used to, trying nearly everything. Her ability and prowess behind a stove or oven was well loved by every who knew her.

But, secretly, my mother wanted to be more than just a mom or a master home-cook. She began taking night classes from the University of Maryland on the military bases in Germany. Ultimately, she graduated with Bachelor's in Education and Social Work. This need for self enrichment countinued much later into her life. During the 2000's, she completed a Masters Degree conferred jointly by The University of North Carolina At Wilmington and East Carolina University. But, that's also getting ahead of things a little.

After my family left the United Kingdom, we moved to Bermuda. It was there my mother began her elementary school teaching career. She started with no experience, reasoning "I am a mother--that makes me a natural teacher." And she was that, a natural. And she loved this job throughout the years, as it took her to jobs in Belgium, The Netherlands, North Carolina, and New Brunswick, New Jersey, after my father retired. She was an exceptional teacher of children, both her own and others.

My father retired from the federal government in 1997. His last assignment was London Central High School, near High Wycombe, in England. During the 1980s, it was the same area my family lived in. At the time, my mother and father bought a house there. The plan was to return there, sell it, and move back the United States. At the time, I was at West Virginia University finishing my Bachelors and first masters degree. However, since my father claimed that he had "Dragged this poor woman all over the planet," he deferred the choice of where to go next to her.

My mother took a job in Jacksonville, North Carolina aboard a marine corps base. After a year or two, she turned down a reassignment to Iceland. She stopped working for DODDS and left the federal government, teaching at a semi-rural North Carolinian school. Essentially, my parents were growing old together, and their desire had always been to retire at the Jersey Shore. So, they moved to Ocean Grove, New Jersey. My mother took work in New Brunswick and commuted. My father lived as a working retiree, adjuncting a few classes.

In 2008, my mother developed a persistent cough. Her doctor at the time claimed it was related to asthma. He didn't order any chest X-Rays, and he prescribed an medical inhaler. It didn't work. One day, she became very disoriented at school. It got so bad, that her coworkers had to drive her home. She went into the hospital soon after. The earlier diagnosis of "asthma" was wrong. Deadly wrong.

Tumors were found in her lungs. They had spread to brain and her spine. The diagnosis of "asthma" had lost her valuable treatment time. In terms of cancers, her diagnosis started at "Stage 4." My mother had long given up smoking, and her type of cancer actually had nothing to do with tobacco at all. It is largely thought and alleged that industrial pollution, care of the United States Marine Corps in North Carolina, may have had something to do with it. However, this allegation is hard to prove. Yet, there have been a high instance of cancers related to people who have lived or worked around the land the Marines use in Jacksonville, North Carolina.

Her health was a steady decline from there. She took that decline as the fiesty woman I always knew. She hardly ever complained. She never asked for anybody's sympathy or pity. Most of all, she kept up her independent spirit as long as she could. However, to the people who loved her, the effects were very noticeable. It got much, much worse, as time moved on. During the last six months of her life, she became bedridden. Dementia set in. She lost the ability to move. She passed away yesterday, July 28th, 2011, at 3:15 pm. Her breathing became extremely labored to the point where her body gave up.

But, honestly. If she were here, right now, she would ask everybody to not remember that part of her life. If she were in perfect health right now, she would demand that you sit down so that she could cook you something -- whether it was her beloved meatballs and spaghetti or an exotic dessert she had just thrown together "on a whim."

My mother was a vibrant woman. She would not want to be remembered as somebody who suffered. And, she did suffer, although she tried very hard to not show that to other people. Rather, she would want to be remembered as somebody who lived. Most importantly, she would want everybody who loved her to continue living, to love life, and to eat something. Essentially, we can mourn her passing, but I think we must be grateful that she enriched our lives. We were lucky to have known her.

Rest In Peace, Josephine Ristow

2011-07-28T12:52:00.001-07:00

I miss you, Mom.

Design

2011-07-22T22:33:00.000-07:00

In my perpetual cash strapped times, I'm often stuck wondering how I can make money. Lately, that thought has focused on what skills I have that could possibly earn a buck or two. So, in the regard, I'm actively thinking of posting low-cost, bargain priced graphic design "situations wanted" ads at places like fiverr.com.

But let me be clear. I am a graphic design hack. My specialty includes spotting good stock photos or public domain art and putting fonts on it. I don't actively "create" art. I use what I can find, and I "edit" found art. However, this is why I created a different blog called Rich Ristow Designs. It's meant as an online portfolio while I seek design work. Want an ebook cover done for you for only $20? Unique blog headers for $5? I can do that. Why am I so cheap? I can give you something unique while relying on stock photography and public domain work. I draw or paint nothing new.

More Thoughts on mTurk

2011-07-21T20:13:00.000-07:00

Once you get to know how to use certain market place or freelance content agencies, it gradually gets easier to jump from one platform to the next, once work availability slumps. However, I have realized that you just cannot jump headfirst into anything and immediately make a lot of money. Anybody who says otherwise is probably scamming you.

Birthday Blues

2011-07-21T20:10:00.001-07:00

So, my aunt bought some lobster, and we had a dinner. Jenny made peach cobblers. Only, my mother is getting to the point where she's having trouble chewing and eating. She couldn't even wake up long enough to get out of bed and into the wheelchair, with assistance. Recently, her speech has been slurred, and it's still managing to get worse. All of us tried not be too depressed. All in all, that was my mother's 69th birthday.

Forecasting the Future: I Will Be Depressed On Sunday

2011-07-15T20:25:00.000-07:00

This Sunday is my mother's 69th birthday. Jenny will be making peach cobbler. I work till 4pm at WallyWorld. We'll go over and sing happy birthday to her with my father, sister, and aunt, but this isn't so much a birthday party as one would expect.

Dead Silence -- It Doesn't Suck!

2011-07-15T19:59:00.000-07:00

The problem with a lot of American horror films these days is this: a lot of gore, a lot of effects, but not so much emphasis on character, ambiance, or atmosphere. In this regard, I was pleasantly surprised by Dead Silence. To be honest, I only bought this film because it was in the two-dollar bin at Big Lots.

The Good:

The monster is genuinely creepy looking. It's a thin old woman puppeteer, and according to the DVD extras, she's a Broadway veteran. In short: a seasoned actor who knows how to act through facial expression, and she does it rather well.

The movie is thick on atmosphere. Sure, a lot of it is horror cliche that is old and well used: mist, woods, puppets, dark set lighting, lightning, etc. However, even well-worn imagery can be effective in the hands of a talented film maker.

Mark Wahlberg is playing out of stereotype. Wahlberg strikes me, sometimes, as the white Ice Cube -- not in hip hop and rhyming (Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch still make me want to ram an icepick through my ear), but in that Wahlberg seems at home scowling and looking mean. True, that was definately not the case in The Lovely Bones, but that's also a Peter Jackson film and an exception.

The landscape looks a lot like West Virginia, and I have a soft spot for mountains and woodlands.

The ending may be contrived for "shock," but it's one that's decently executed.

The Annoying:

Mark Wahlberg is playing out of stereotype. His character seems annoying, to an extent. It don't mind that he's softer spoken, but there's something about the character, the way its written, that's just milquetoast.

The plot is a little convoluted at points. But, then again, this is a movie about an old woman that will rip your tongue out, if you scream.

The Bottom Line.

Enjoyable. Not the greatest horror movie written, but certainly not the worst. There's enough here to keep a viewer engaged without descending into levels of MEH!

A Few Thoughts on mTurk

2011-07-12T04:04:00.000-07:00

As a freelancing platform, Amazon's Mechanical Turk is easy to malign. There are countless microtasks there, and many of them only pay $0.01. Of course, some of those tasks are easy, ala "Boobs or no boobs?" image moderation for message boards. In the realm of writing, however, there are a lot of tasks that grossly underpay and undervalue writers. Take, for instance, requests for 1000 word articles that only pay $2 or less.

Of course, mTurk really isn't the culprit, here. It's only the third party marketplace. The people undervaluing work are the people posting jobs there. It's a lot like faulting a newspaper for posting classifieds for services. Those classifieds are paid for, and the newspaper takes no responsibility (to an extent) for the want ads posted there.

However, the true answer for mTurk is this: in order to make it lucrative, you have to know how to find jobs you can do quickly and that pay well (collectively). This includes taking umpteen qualification tests. Even more, it comes down to effective searching too. So much of today's net reality hinges on finding and using the right keywords while searching. In many cases, I've always found that using actionable verbs are usually better for finding work.

Still, I haven't found a way to break even 5$ an hour. So, the platform is more of a hobby than true worksite, for me, at least.

Google+

2011-07-11T21:29:00.001-07:00

Yes, I'll try it out. After all, I left wordpress to have a blogging platform closer to my gmail.

David Lynch and Cinematic Poetry

2011-07-10T20:57:00.000-07:00

Back when I used to edit poetry often, there was a stock line I often used with writers, as I tried to help whip work into shape: Stop writing like a prose novelist and start speaking through a language of imagery. It's an old truth, basically. If you approach poetry as if you're trying to write a short story, the result will more than likely always be prosaic and wordy. To further illustrate this concept, I would often say something else like Novels are like Martin Scorcese films, and poetry closely resembles the work of David Lynch.

A lot of people do not necessarily understand Lynch, and that's because they are approaching his movies the same way they would a Scorcese or Ron Howard production: expecting a linear narrative to neatly tie things together. One often sees the same with novels, unless you're reading something deliberately post modern or avant garde.

Still, Lynch is fundamentally a poet working in a cinematic medium. Much of contemporary free verse -- even the non-experimental stuff, speaks through a series of images and metaphors. It's the "show, don't tell" aspect on steroids. A contemporary poem stretches down the page on how it lays out it's images within a sequence. Lynch practically does the same in movies. Consider this very short film he did as part of the Lumeire project:

The meaning of the clip is not readily put together the same way Scorcese or Howard would lay something out. Many experience this same sense of confusion through reading poetry, too, especially with work that tends to be more surreal than naturalistic, like, say Garcia Lorca or Pablo Neruda. But then again, Lorca or Neruda are not Hemingway, and nor should the reading experience be expected to be the same, either.

Rammstien versus Choral Music

2011-07-08T21:37:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Mike Allen for pointing this out to me. A bit of fun:

Fernando Pessoa Before The Age of Alts

2011-07-08T19:54:00.000-07:00

Fernando Pessoa has the rare distinction of being several notable people within a national literature. He wrote in Portuguese, and if you discount Brazil as, well, Brazil and not Portugal, he collectively stands along side Luis de Camões as one of the greatest poets -- or in this case, group of poets -- Portugal has produced

Simply put, Pessoa wrote under a number of assumed names. Each of those names and surrounding body of work has not only a garnered their own reputation, but each "poet" has their own identity in not only subject matter, but in poetic form. The genius of this, though, is that he took pains to even differentiate how each of his aliases used language.

Still, there's one rather mundane way Pessoa was ahead of his time. Each of his created poets also interacted with each other, through "letters" and other public written means. In short, this must have looked like an act of creative schizophrenia when he was alive. Presently, this sort of thing is more common than what one might think. Look at any messageboard with trolls. Sometimes, people have a tendency to create alts for a variety of reasons, but usually to gin up a flame war and controversy, as a way of demanding attention to some sort of book promotion. In my experience, this typically happens at high trafficked places, and in horror, that would be the Shocklines message forum. Then again, I haven't seen it happen in a year or two, but I haven't been hanging around message boards all that often, as of late.

So while Pessoa's poetry wasn't necessarily post modern, the splintering of identity in the poet himself was actually well ahead of its time.

The New Landing

2011-07-07T21:38:00.000-07:00

So, I am fond of using a metaphor when talking about my mother's terminal illness: it's like walking down a spiral staircase and coming to series of landings, each of them is a significant point of no return. (There is no treatment to make her better, and this is a matter of hospice).

The new "landing" on that staircase is this. My mother mostly doesn't recognize me or my wife anymore. My brother and his daughter came into town as of late, for July 4th. My mom looked up from her bed, at the both of them and asked, "Who are you people? Why are you standing over me?" That is, at best, a translation for words that cannot really be approximated or understood, totally. This is a case of tumors effecting how her brain functions, which also slurs her speech and makes it hard to really understand, at times.

I normally don't cry at this sort of thing anymore. All I tell myself is: "At least she's not in a lot of pain."

Speaking of eReaders

2011-07-05T20:36:00.000-07:00

Mine broke on the second day I went back to Walmart. It was also my cellphone. It makes me realize, however, how much a gadget has grown to shape and guide my reading habits. Incidentally, the amount I have read in the last week and a half as taken a steep drop...

Poetry and eReaders, Part II

2011-07-02T19:49:00.000-07:00

Last year, I wrote four long poems that were collected into a chapbook called Four Murders.* At the time, I was very interested in how eReaders and cell phones displayed poetry and constantly mucked up a poet's deliberate lineation. The screens, I posited, were too small and the poet had no control over the way they can be displayed.

Turns out, the lineation problem is an easy fix, if you take tablet computers like the Galaxy, iPad, or Xoom into mind. If the reading screen cannot cannot accommodate the lines as they are written, you can just tilt the tablet into a landscape view -- more often then not, that fixes the problem. So, what I once thought was a terrible problem can actually be fixed easily. This does not hold true, however, for most dedicated eReaders (as in: not a tablet).

*It was once limited availability through KHP Publishing. Now, since KHP has gotten rid of its webstore, Jerrod/SD Hintz/Karen Koehler decided to up it Kindle for 0.99$.

What To Write Next?

2011-07-01T21:15:00.000-07:00

Part of me thinks I should really start writing about Bermuda again. This crest alone gives me a few ideas: (it's from the island's flag)

It's My Birthday, And I'll Whine If I Want To!

2011-07-01T20:29:00.000-07:00

So, I am now 37 -- which is okay with me, because I already thought I was turning 38 this year. The way I look at it, I just gained a year. So, on my birthday, I

Slept in and slept off a hangover.
Looked for freelance work and didn't find any.
Called Walmart and Asked to be on the schedule this week
Whined to myself about missing Convergence this week
Went to my parents for pizza and ice cream cake.
Felt a little sad, as my mother was out of it
Felt a little sad, because perhaps I shouldn't have planned go to Convergence this year anyway. This is likely going to be my last birthday where my mother is alive.

How To Edit Poetry

2011-06-24T21:30:00.000-07:00

It seems like only other people's blogs or message boards move me to write about poetry these days. This is something I posted on a message board frequented by both writers and editors:

There are several ways to edit poetry correctly, and it depends on the form that is being used. Metrical verse requires different set of gloves because the syllabic nature of the line, plus modern metrical poetry use of "substitutions." Plus, it also changes with the type of “form” that has been written. You wouldn’t edit a sonnet the same way you would a villanelle or sestina. Free verse is rather different construction altogether. However, lets just run with that, since it’s most of what people write these days.

The biggest misnomer about Free Verse is that is formless and anything goes. That is far from the truth. However, when you are confronted with editing free verse, there are a couple of fundamental things to look for.

1. Wordiness. How can the poem be edited or rephrased for more economical uses of language. This is roughly the same when you're editing fiction and non-fiction prose. Consider:

The sun is a bleeding in the sky.

vs.

The sun bleeds in the sky.

Both are saying the same thing, but the second option is more concise. Since poetry is a language medium, you do have to consider the sonic qualities at work. The second option is a valid edit because it keeps the sibilant "s" sounds as the first.

2. Noun and verb choice. Even if you're a sprawling poet like Allen Ginsberg or Walt Whitman, poetry is still mode of writing where language is highly compressed. If you're looking at free verse poetry document, pay special attention word choice. "Sprint" as opposed to "run." And so forth. The key to descriptive writing in poetry and prose usually comes down to good nouns and verbs.

3. Look for adverbs and adjectives to cut. Unlike marketing writing and "why buy" language" adverbs and adjectives stand out as "extra-fluffy" in poetry. You can largely red line most of it out, while going back to trying to strengthen nouns and verbs.

4. Make punctuation and grammar consistent. Creative uses of grammar are frowned upon by nearly every poetry editor I know or have worked with. Look beyond the line and how lines fit together as grammatically correct sentences. This is considered the norm in poetry editing. However, there are notable exceptions out there. Usually, it consists of pulling out the punctuation completely. Some poets, influenced by Asian formalism, sometimes will only use a dash, or a comma -- whatever it is they're doing, it has to be consistent. In most cases, an eye to normal grammar will suffice.

5. Discourage the poet away from the little first person "i." Poetry editors HATE that and reject it with relish. EE Cummings could get away with it, but not every body is EE Cummings.

6. Try to help the poet either write better metaphors or find a way to cut them out completely. The most common of these are anything that compares sometime to the moon or flowers. It's so overdone, they've become poetic cliches. And, they've been poetic cliches for such a long time, Shakespeare even made fun of them in Romeo and Juliet. Writing metaphors can be tricky prospect. Anything that sounds silly on a first read is usually a bad sign.

7. Look for ways to make the imagery as vivid and concrete as possible. Free Verse, thanks to poets like William Carlos Williams, is often a way of writing by using the language of imagery. As mentioned earlier, imagery is always best rendered through specific nouns and verbs, not adjectives.

I More Than Likely Will Not Be Attending Convergence.

2011-06-23T21:01:00.000-07:00

Well, the depressing professional fallout continues. A scheduling snafu kept me from Stoker Weekend in Long Island, where I was slated to speak on a few panels. Now, I'm coming to the sinking realization that I will not be attending Convergence in Minnesota, either, where I was scheduled to give a reading and speak on a few panels.

Basically, the economy sucks. Freelance writing isn't paying the bills anymore (I have made $30 this this week,) and I literally cannot afford the plane ticket due to the current snail pace of freelancing. No quality work, no quality pay. It's all part of the reason why I seen no choice but to return to the retail rat race.

Not to mention, my mother keeps on getting worse. In the time I was out of the country, she seems to keep getting frailer. She's now a body with emaciated limbs. That shouldn't be surprising. I spent the day with her today, and she mostly slept. All she had to eat was one bowl of cereal.

I do not believe in God in the traditional sense. However, I'm starting to take the impossibility of going to Minnesota as the world/nature telling that it's a positively bad time to go. My mom may not have a whole lot of time left. This will likely be her last July 4th. Never mind that recently she couldn't remember my name. I should also count myself lucky for two other reasons. I was able to go to Bermuda, recently. And my mother didn't pass while my wife and I were out of the country.

I Have Peed in a Cup

2011-06-23T17:00:00.001-07:00

Which means, I took the drug screen, signed the tax forms, and go back to work at WalMart starting Saturday.

Blight Review / The Perils of Kindle

2011-06-20T22:48:00.001-07:00

I should be upfront. As everybody knows, there are certain perils that come with self publishing. Only four years ago, obvious POD books could be a kiss of death to an author. However, with the rise of eBooks a newfound credibility has cropped up. Blight and Johhny Comes Lately were my two cracks at doing the Kindle thing by myself. Turns out, no matter how hard you work, you still need at least the services of a good proofreader.

Blight has some typos. Lesson learned. Hire a freelance editor (which I'm in the process of doing). For example, Jerrod Balzer gives the story a good review, before pointing out the blatantly obvious....

Back From Bermuda

2011-06-20T22:32:00.001-07:00

For me, returning to Bermuda was a strange experience. I felt a little bit of nostalgia, but not terribly much. First, I only spent three years there in the 1980's, and second, it had been so long, I hardly recognized the place. Sure, the geography and the climate were the same, but most of what I knew was gone. The house I lived in was still standing, but much of the naval base was bulldozed. So, the place seemed familiar, but only slightly. I'll likely expound on this later, as I upload some photos.

It also gave me a lot to think about. Next month, or in August, KHP/Skullvines Press will be releasing my 80,000 word short story collection about Bermuda. I haven't written about the place in years. New seems like a good time to generate a new collection of novellas/novellettes about the place. I'm also thinking of perhaps starting a flash fiction blog, as a way to use a lot of the photos I took.

Oh, Well.

2011-06-06T20:37:00.001-07:00

As it turns out, I was scheduled to be part of two panels at Stoker Weekend in Long Island. A scheduling snafu has it conflicting with my trip to Bermuda. So, I'll will not even be in the country. It sucks ... because, well, the two panels were on poetry. If I could reschedule the trip to Bermuda, I would. However, it was paid for by somebody else as a way to celebrate my wife's entrance into a Fordham's PhD program. And, the reservation cannot be altered. So... one of the biggest horror conventions of the year, or sub-tropical sun with my wife? There's an easy answer to that....

And I Will Be Returning To Wal-Mart

2011-06-04T20:03:00.000-07:00

Sucks. Sometimes, in the name of being married, you have to do certain things you absolutely do not want to. For me, that means returning to WalMart. When I left, I thought I was onto the next big thing in my life: freelance writing. However, certain realities change, and change rather quick. The nature of freelancing is unstable, but even more -- there's the issue of health insurance. When I first left, my wife was working for a University, and we had great benefits. Circumstances change, however. My wife is going into a PhD program in the fall. We don't have health insurance ... and, thus, I go back to WalMart. I don't now what round two will entail.

The first time I worked there, I took the job to get out of the grind of adjunct college instruction. The two years that followed consisted of trying to play the "Climb The Ladder" game. This time, there's none of that. It's not about a retail career -- it's all about health benefits and steady cash that can be supplemented by freelance writing, and nothing much more than that.

Blight -- Soundtrack

2011-06-03T20:49:00.000-07:00

So, because Blight ended up being an unmarketable length of 15k (so what is new in my world?) I have uploaded it to Kindle and Smashwords with Nook to follow soon. Waiting for the uploads to process. For fun, here is that story's soundtrack -- music I listened to while writing it:

We Are Not Health Care Professionals

2011-06-01T10:49:00.001-07:00

So, when you have a relative -- in my case, a parent -- in hospice, the tendency is to think, "OMG! She's about to die!" All. The. Time. I think it's just human nature. So, just a week ago, my mom was talking in a very scrambled, non-linear way, often referencing people who were not on the room, but pointing and laughing at these non-existent people anyway. Not to mention: her phlegm-coughs were scary sounding by themselves.

Well, oxygen was brought in. And finally, for the first time this year, the air conditioner was turned on. So, things have calmed down a little bit. The irritability and delusions have quieted a bit. The point is ... when you don't know what the hell you're talking about half the time, everything always seems much more dire than it possibly may be. Of course, what do I know? Not a whole lot when it comes to these matters.

Cruise to Bermuda

2011-05-31T21:04:00.000-07:00

I have a trip to Bermuda coming up, and it's going to be weird to say the least. In my life, I have rarely had a chance to return to an overseas location where I lived -- once I had moved to West Virginia, that is. The closest thing to a "return trip" involved going back to the UK multiple times. My father was at the end of his Federal career and needed to sell the home he and my mother owned in Buckinghamshire. (A house I lived in when I was 7 ... after my family left the UK for Bermuda, my parents continued to own the house and rented it out). So, he took his final posting in England to facilitate that. By that time, I was in college flew over every year for Christmas until my dad retired in 1997.

Bermuda will be an interesting visit for a number of reasons. After I left grad school and needed time away from poetry, I returned to horror fiction -- after 10 years of, basically, ignoring its existence. Bermuda is where I started writing fiction, essentially, for publication, and it is the location of a very fat book due out from KHP / Skullvines Press this summer.

My guess is essentially simple: much will be different, and much will be the same. I'm going to try like hell to make it out to St. David's island, where the navy base used to stand. My other goal is to take approximately 12,893,221 digtal pictures.

Hrmph.

2011-05-30T19:13:00.000-07:00

Due to economic circumstances, and a need to pay a really screwed-up mortgage (while fighting the bank), it looks like I just might have to go back to Wal*Mart.

Another Quick One.

2011-05-30T10:01:00.000-07:00

Not going off of an actual program template, but sometimes cover design seems as easy as picking a good detail from public domain art and picking a decent font, and coordinating the fonts with a color within the detail. This took about ten minutes or less to do. A few minor glitches, though. But still ... not as labor intensive as some might think....

Many Things All At Once

2011-05-29T18:37:00.001-07:00

Well, my Mom's health is getting to the point where she needs oxygen. I wrote a post the other day about it, which I promptly erased because I thought I was being whiny. It was basically about not being sure how much I should actually talk about my mother on a blog or to other people.

But, here is where it's at, at the moment.

Dementia
A gargling cough
A lack of mobility
Struggled Speech.

In the mean time, my struggles against my mortgage holder are still ongoing. We (my wife, father and I) managed to get the state of New Jersey involved in an official compliant. In the mean time, I am seriously thinking of returning to Walmart, at least part time. My wife left her job in order to prepare for her PhD program at Fordham. Only thing: she had our health benefits. We need more money, but more importantly, we need some sort of health coverage, especially since I used to take aderall for my ADHD, and I have largely been unmedicated for several months.

2011-05-29T10:37:00.000-07:00

More of myself trying to learn photoshop....

Silliness rather than madness

2011-05-26T10:54:00.000-07:00

Well, sometimes, I do have to resort to this sort of thing (while at my parent's house)....

Paul Park -- Ragnarok

2011-05-26T04:55:00.000-07:00

Paul Park's Ragnarok sets off conficted feelings in me as a reader. It's a poem Tor.com published online, and it's available on Kindle as a $0.99 read. As a lover of science fiction, horror, and fantasy, I feel that I should be grateful whenever an established writer makes a serious attempt at writing poetry. As a lover of poetry, the poem itself does not leave me impressed. It leaves me wholly unsatisfied.

Ragnarok is a meant as a post apocalyptic tale told in heroic verse. By heroic verse, Paul Park is not using metrical verse found in Homer, but more of the alliterative type seen in the Old English version of Beowulf (See the Heaney translation)and the sagas of the vikings.

Paul Park has a facility with language. That's the one thing I did enjoy about Ragnarok. He takes alliteration and uses it masterfully as an organizing poetic principal. For example:

There was a man, Magnus’s son,
Ragni his name. In Reykjavik
Stands his office, six stories,
Far from the harbor in the fat past.

That's just the inter-lineal alliteration. Paul Park also works his sonic groupings in such a way that sounds from one line also work with the line that came before. All of this is very well done.

So, what's my problem? It's not with the story, but it's largely a case of poetical aesthetics. I get what park is trying to do here. He's trying to juxtapose a post-apocalyptic time with the "heroic" dark ages. However, it doesn't work -- or, it doesn't work for me, at least.

It goes beyond the use of alliteration as an organizational principal. Park even mimics the modifiers used: "Far from the harbor in the fat past." Present-day idioms seem mismatched to me with this type of versifying. So, as poetry, this sounds far from contemporary. In a way, it makes the whole poem read rather stiff and stilted. As a result, the language seems contrived, not natural.

And this is a shame. Park clearly has the ability to work with language on a poetic level. His use of line organization demonstrates that -- the lines seem like, UM, lines ... not prosaic sentences arbitrarily chopped into lines, which, unfortunately, is a rather common problem in "science fiction" poetry.

Here I Ramble: Hard Thinking, Hard Realizations

2011-05-24T18:44:00.000-07:00

Of the course of one's life, there are the things you want to do, and the things you can actually do with finite time and resources. Sometimes, the two just don't agree. It's another thing I've had to realize over the past few months. At the moment, most of my time is spent behind this keyboard, furiously pounding out for-pay work that mostly doesn't bare my byline. Also, I still have to deal with serious illness in my family. Granted, I don't deal with it on the daily basis that my father has had to, but there have been times when I have had to drop everything I had planned. I'm not complaining. Not in the least ... after all, it's one of the (many) reasons why I left Walmart to pursue a life of working at home. If my family needs me, I don't necessarily have to call out or face the repercussions as doled out by a managerial supervisor. But, this economic reality (as mentioned a few posts backs) has really made me reevaluate my long term plans ... like when it comes to pitching and editing poetry anthologies. Still, there is a lot left to consider. However, I have been thinking about my priorities a lot recently. Before being an poetry editor, before being a fiction writer ... I am a son and a husband. Still, where those thoughts lead is still unclear.

My Dad, My Mom

2011-05-21T22:19:00.000-07:00

My dad's kidney stone surgery was a success. He no longer complains about feeling "kicked in the side."

My mother, today, called me "Boobie." Its an endearing term I've heard most of my life. It also tells me that she is somewhat "there." Only, that was followed by her seemingly thinking that it was the middle of the afternoon, and we needed to go to J.C. Penny's to buy me shorts. It was 10pm, and I was over there to give my father a pile of documents regarding something else...

Bryan Smith -- Rock and Roll Reform School Zombies

2011-05-18T22:03:00.001-07:00

To me, at least, Bryan Smith's novels are a lot like the trashy horror movies of the 1980's. They revel in being "horror" and do not try to be anything other than that. The 1980's connection is extremely prevalent in Rock and Roll Reform School Zombies. This book has a definate affinity for films like Return of the Living Dead, which Smith actually references towards the end of the book. Also, for anybody who lived through the 1980's, there was always that Tipper Gore lead abomination called the PMRC. Satanic metal cults were all the rage on the news, too. A reader can easily see Smith's love for the time period and music, too, as that shines through.

Zombie novels have become trite and predicable. This novel slightly stands apart, because it's not as overtly "end of the world-ish" as a lot of the titles you might see from -- say -- Permuted Press. In short, this book is what it is -- bloody, gorey, zombified fun at the expense of fundamentalists.

Another Day

2011-05-16T05:19:00.000-07:00

So, today my dad goes in for kidney stone surgery. That means my wife and I go over and hang out with my mom for the day.

A Futile Attempt To Cheer Myself Up

2011-05-13T23:20:00.000-07:00

Two Ways I Just Killed Some Stress

2011-05-13T19:17:00.001-07:00

Because of obnoxious writing habits (aka writing stories greater than 7.5k, but less than 20k in length), I think I'm just going to slap this on kindle in a few weeks and call it a day. And I'll likely use the one with the halftone circles ... after fixing a spacing problem along the edge.

The Last Few Days Have Been Extremely Tough and Trying

2011-05-13T18:33:00.000-07:00

And that's all I'm going to say about it. I could vent ... but little good it will do.

Edit To Add:

It's the usual volatile cocktail of suckiness. 1) The never ending issue with my mortgage has gotten me down, 2) I've been having serious money trouble (again), and 3) although I've come to terms with my mother's illness, the "hospice" aspect of the new situation has me down, especially after spending all of Thursday with her -- but, that I'm not going to get into details about.

Now, For The Other Parent

2011-05-08T11:29:00.000-07:00

This is just a sign of getting older, both for my parents and for my wife, brother, sister, and other relatives. This morning, we were going to have a big brunch with family to celebrate mother's day. It didn't happen. My father went to the ER complaining of side pains. As it turns out, he's passing a kidney stone.

More Playing Around With Photoshop

2011-05-08T00:14:00.001-07:00

Chris Bowsman -- A Life On Fire

2011-05-07T20:18:00.000-07:00

Lets just say that with Chris Bowsman's A Life On Fire, I just submitted the following five-star review as a Kindle customer:

Gerald has trouble distinguishing between reality and something far worse. His wife committed suicide, and he's struggling. Quite often, psychological horror is used synonymously with serial killer fiction, or "quiet horror." Both descriptions do not apply here. Gerald's mind is a loud and chaotic place, but he's hardly Norman Bates. Bowsman has created a truly sympathetic character and a truly engaging story.

Descending Plateaus

2011-05-06T20:18:00.001-07:00

So, my mom is out of the hospital today. I feel like a schmuck for not visiting her ... felt ill, and she does not need germs, both of the real or imagined variety. (Imagined--as in it's possible that I just had severe pollen allergies today) I'm not sure when I will get the next "Oh my god!" call about her health.

There's one thing to realize, when it comes to living with a relative's severe cancer. It's not the same, for everybody. So, the treatments that may have worked for other people will not necessarily work for my mom. Even if the cancer is of the same type, it is never exactly the same from person to person.

For example, my mother was diagnosed back in 2008. Her initial diagnosis covered tumors both in her brain and in her lungs. Back then, it was "inoperable" which is not "terminal." In short, they couldn't cut the tumors out, but they thought they could manage it. This meant a lot of chemo, basically. Plus, my mom has had two rounds of whole-brain radiation. The second bout of whole brain radiation (Several, several months ago) adversely changed her cognitive abilities. Plus, her multiple medications have lead to some damaging side effects. For awhile, she was suffering and in pain, partly due to degenerating bones in her spine. She also lost the ability to walk, due to blood clots in her legs.

And that brings me to my point, which is the following metaphor. This whole process is like walking down a stair case. Death awaits at the bottom of this staircase. However, while descending this stair case, somebody with my mother's condition will stop along the way. Consider it as reaching a landing in that staircase and hanging out for awhile, before descending another level.

The recent hospital stay and discharge is just another landing stop on the journey to the bottom. Only, this landing is very close to the bottom. Before my mother went into the hospital days ago, her home situation could be termed as "managed care." Coming out of the hospital, the descriptor is now "managed hospice care."

She's dying, basically. She had a do not resuscitate order put in place at the hospital. Only, we don't know when she'll reach the bottom of that metaphorical stair case. Could be tomorrow, could be next week, could be three months from now. We (my family) do not know. However, if I look back at the last three years, I can pick out the milestones of how she's gotten progressively worse.

Edit to Add:

She's not in a coma, or anything like that. Her cognition comes and goes, lately. Sometimes, however, it can leave in the middle of a conversation.

Notes On Health Care

2011-05-04T18:21:00.000-07:00

Saw my mother today. She slept most of the time. However, here are a few things that struck out at me.

If you are a doctor, and you have never seen or met with a patient before, the first words out of your mouth do not need to be, "You do not have long to live" when you walk into a hospital room for the first time. The absurdly bad taste and Dr. Gregory House-like rapport would normally be quite funny in a dark way. However, that's on television, not in my mother's actual hospital room.
If you are a research/university hospital, and her lead physician says certain procedures are a waste of time. Listen to the guy, especially if the research hospital is located in New Jersey, and her lead physician works for a world-renowned cancer research organization in New York City.

Blight

2011-05-03T21:55:00.000-07:00

Blight. That's the name of the story I'm writing right now. It's well over 10k and it will be getting into novella territory very soon, if it's not already there. I don't have a publisher for it. The above "cover" is me just fiddling around with photoshop and stock photography. However, the subject matter is something I know rather well. I really wish I didn't, but I do. It's a seldomly executed type of story I would call: Economic Horror.

Of course, there is no such sub-genre of horror. However, consider this real life story. Back at the end of the housing bubble, my wife and I moved out of a one bedroom apartment in Asbury Park, New Jersey. We bought a nice, two-level condo in Brick Township -- not a gleaming metropolis, by any stretch. At the time, I was still piecing together part time college teaching. I was even teaching two classes at Rutgers, at the time. The idea was that I was slowly paying my academic dues and angling for a full time college teaching job somewhere.

It never happened.

I was always fed a line of bullshit. The years kept grinding on, and I was going nowhere. At the time, I also had undiagnosed ADHD and sleep apnea. It killed my professional life. Also, I was becoming resoundly bitter too. People tend to become very shocked when you tell them college teaching is a job that will systematically keep you destitute, no matter how many classes you piece together. Over Christmas and the summer, i was not making any money. Hell, I even took a job at Walmart out of financial desperation.

Around this time, my wife and I started to get behind on our mortgage payments. We were made promises over the phone from our lender, but these were promises they never followed through on. At one point, the even tried to deny making those promises, and I was dumb enough not to demand that those promises be set down in writing.

We tried everything. We went through HUD's mortgage counseling, and we tried to get a Refy over "making home affordable." However, that program is a toothless waste of time. Because, if Obama and the Democratic party do not stand up to the GOP and organized banking concerns, the mortgage crisis will never end. Did I say "making home affordable is toothless?" Yes, I did. As far as I can see, nobody is holding the mortgage lenders accountable. Consumer protection efforts are always under attack from the right, and if the GOP were to get ahold of more power, they have already promised more banking deregulation. And that is a really shitty proposition.

Trust me, I know.

It's not as if the banks are all that regulated now. So, consider this. My first mortgage lender promised to refinance our loans, so that the month payment could drop. Only, they dragged their feet. Then, while promising to refy -- and constantly fucking up the paperwork -- the first lender sold our mortgage to somebody else.

This new lender -- lets call them something fake, like IBSL -- drags their feet on the refinancing. The countinue to fuck over the paperwork just like the first lender. Finally, the refy goes through. My wife and I breathe a sigh of relief. A few months go by, and then -- wait for it! -- we get a suspicious letter in the mail. The new lender has decided to jack our payments back to the original amount.

So, we got pissed! How could they do that, after all, we had a refinancing contract! Well, in the eyes of the lender, they are holding up their end of the bargain. After all, they are technically not changing the monthly payment amount. They're just escalating the escrow payments, claiming that the price of "mortgage insurance" has gone up.

So, thanks for nothing. My wife and I are back where we started. The bank has no real interest in helping us. In fact, after we did some digging, we found out that our mortgage was bought by a predatory lender -- an outfit that has no interest in actually servicing mortgages, but rather finding ways to put people into arrears, so they can foreclose and claim the property. Essentially, they have found a loophole around a "fixed rate mortgage."

My wife and I never asked for this. We tried to do the right thing. We tried to play by the rules. This second mortgage lender wasn't even the financial company we originally got our mortgage with. They came to us, uninvited and unwanted. And they want my house. Fuck them. We're fighting back.

However, the financial instability that has marked my life for the past year and half to two years is back, with a vengeance. Add to this the situation with my mother's health, and things seem bleak. Only, all this means, for the near term, is more paperwork, more complaints through governmental agencies, and finding a way to survive.

In the mean time, I'm channeling this long-running frustration into genre horror fiction (featuring severed arms, legs, and Pigs-In-Tuxedos). Even if Blight is never published, at least writing it has been -- so far -- somewhat cathartic, even with an ending that's going to be less than happy and hopeful.

CIty of Caterpillar - Maybe they'll gnaw right through

2011-05-02T19:52:00.000-07:00

City of Catepiller is currently the soundtrack to the novella I'm writing, especially this song. What's the novella about? A crazy, insane writer in New Jersey who is fighting off home foreclosure. No, it's not autobiographical. Although, I know a little bit about both insane people and and about less-than-honest mortgage servicers.

Out Of ICU

2011-05-02T19:43:00.000-07:00

My mom has been transferred out of ICU and is now in a regular hospital room. That by itself is a good sign. The initial prognosis held up. A new tumor developed in her brain. It was hemhorraging, which was causing her lethargy and disorientation. There was some complication to her blood thinner medication.

Meanwhile, while I have long come to terms with the idea of my mother's eventual mortality. The details of all of this are still a bit much to deal with. Today, I went to visit her with my wife. She seemed so much better than yesterday, in terms of being awake and being cognizant. Half an hour later, I realized that she had something like dementia. In that: she was not making any sense, and she kept trying to get up and go home. The hospital has rigged motion alarms to her bed, which will alert nurses to her trying to get up and walk out. Her trying to walk could lead to her injuring her self, since she has absolutely no strength in her legs, and has also been afflicted with neuropathy.

Funny, But True!

2011-05-02T00:03:00.001-07:00

Saw this on DailyKos.

Kafka The Musical

2011-05-01T23:49:00.000-07:00

This week's BBC Radio Play of The Week has shades of speculative fiction. David Tennant (Dr. Who's 10th incarnation) plays Franz Kafka.

The Story:

Kafka's father complains how Franz doesn't make a lot of money with his writing. He suggests his son should write a musical, and has even gone so far as to set up a meeting with Grossman, a musical theatrical producer. There are subtle and not-so-subtle references to Kafka's body of work, as well as his biography.

The Verdict:

Seems a very uneven as a comedy. Still, it's interesting. Not good, and not god awful. Just interesting. That is not necessarily a stunning endorsement.

Hitchhiker vs. Hitchhiker

2011-05-01T20:03:00.000-07:00

No offense to Mos Def, but the most recent movie adaptation of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was a little bit underwhelming. There are likely many reasons for this, but I tend to think the most culturally obvious reason is the best. Hitchhiker is a thoroughly British creation, from the style of humor down to Arthur Dent's desire for a cup of tea to sooth all things sucky. Once the "Britishness" of Hitchhiker is diluted, it loses its charm. For this reason, the BBC adaptation was and still is the best visual version of the books and original radio broadcast. Think of it this way: how lame would it be if Hollywood decided to put Americans into Harry Potter? It just wouldn't be the same.

Life With A Somebody Else's Cancer

2011-04-30T21:44:00.000-07:00

My mother was first diagnosed in 2008. Since then, she has developed multiple tumors in her lungs, brain, and spine. Sometimes, I suspect I'm not being told all the gory details. But then again, I ask myself, how much do I really want to know those gory details?

However, the point is this: you get so used to "Emergency phone calls." You get so used to dire outlooks and grim prognoses, that part of you begins to wonder. It's like the "cry wolf syndrome." You begin to think that it will get better -- because, after all, it always does. Only, quality life suffers. I can tell you, without a doubt, my mother is not the same vibrant woman she was in 2005.

Then, the rug gets pulled out.

My mother is currently in the hospital with bleeding in within her brain.

If you subscribe to a religion, pray for her.

If you are agnostic or an atheist, keep her in your thoughts.

EDIT TO ADD: It's a hemorrhaging tumor, and a relatively new one. She's stabilized, but still in ICU. Nobody knows the long term outlook yet.

City of Catepillar

2011-04-26T20:11:00.001-07:00

Amazing what you have in your iTunes for a LONG time and not know it. Love the discordant "Post-[insert genre name]" instrumentation.

How To Buy Leisure Books While Respecting The Dorchester Boycott

2011-04-23T08:56:00.000-07:00

Forgive the content mill-ish title. Anyhow. Major mass market paperback house Leisure Books/Dorchester Publications has been in a death spiral for some time now, owing money to both their authors and a number of creditors. Recently, they have engaged in a number of shenanigans, like selling ebooks they no longer hold the publishing rights to.

This goes beyond horror, including also mystery and romance mmpb writers. A lot of writers haven't seen a royalty check in eons, and Dorchester as a whole has been dragging their feet on legally returning all publishing rights back to their rightful owners. In short, Leisure Books / Dorchester publishing has become as reliable as a some of the more fly-by-night print on demand small presses (like the one operated by notorious psychotic crank from just outside ofChicago, who lives in his grandmother's basement, cannot string a coherent sentence together and has a record of stalking mid-list and successful horror novelists). Yes, Leisure Dorchester has gotten THAT bad -- possibly even much more toxic, since a fall from grace is involved. For further information on why Dorchester/Leisure needs to be actively boycotted, further information can be found on Brian Keene's blog, as well as the Boycott Dorchester FaceBook page.

However, there is one major loophole to the boycott that needs pointing out. There is a way to buy Leisure Books' novels and collections while keeping your hard earned money out of their hands. First, lets go through a few caveats, first. If you really, really, really have to buy that Tim Lebbon paperback, do yourself and the author a favor. Go to their blog and website and see what is in print, what is out of print, and what is slated for reissue. Brian Keene, for example, recently signed a contract with Deadite to bring most of his back catalog back as trade paperbacks and ebooks. So, most of his books can be bought with him earning a royalty off of the purchase (if not now, then eventually).

Some Dorchester authors, however, have not been as fortunate as Keene, in terms of obtaining a rights reversion. So, there may not be any reissues in the near or immediate future, both on paper and in e-ink. Plus, there may be older titles, say from Dennis Etchinson or Rick Hautala, that have been actively out print. These books can still be bought, if you must absolutely have them.

Go visit your local used bookstore. The used book business is fundamentally different than the local Barnes and Noble. These businesses buy books off of readers for very little, mark the price up slightly, and then pocket all the profit. True, there are no royalties that go to the author, but none of the revenue goes to publisher either. On the surface, that may sound exploitative, but it actually isn't. Used bookstores are usually not thriving business at the moment, and you will not see their owners driving Bentleys anytime soon. Besides, used bookstores offer an extremely valuable cultural service.

First, it saves books from being pulped or crammed into a landfill, offering a novel a second, third, fourth or fifth reading life. For this reason, used bookstores are cultural repositories. For example, in a particularly good used book store, a shopper can leave with Sarah Pinborough titles, the collected poems of Anne Sexton and a number of titles of the decline and fall of Rome -- while spending under $20 total. Traditional bookstore frequently purge and pulp their lingering inventory to make space whatever bullshit New York City marketing geniuses think will sell!, sell!, sell! (Usually with abysmal results, too). Typically, used book stores also sell items that are long out of print -- want to find Robert Bloch novels?--here's where you go.

Besides, used book stores are a dying breed, unfortunately. Ever since the economy entered a vortex of shit in 2008, a good number of them have been going out of business. If you factor in online shopping and the rise of ebook, it's made it a lot harder many to stay afloat. I'm only going by observation in my part of New Jersey on this, as I've noticed the numbers here dwindling every few years.

So, if you absolutely must have a Dorchester/Leisure paperback, buy them at used bookstores. After all, the authors won't be getting the money either way. (Which is why you need to buy their reissues, if they have them). However, your local used bookstore also needs both your support and your patronage. This is just another reason to shop at one.

Mahmoud Darwish -- Who Am I Without Exile?

2011-04-22T20:43:00.000-07:00

So, what is read even less than contemporary Asian poetry in traslation? Contemporary Arabic poetry in translation. With that in mind, the late, great Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish...

Yang Lian & Miyazawa Kenji

2011-04-21T04:56:00.001-07:00

every tree beats against you

like a poem's wounded tributary

~ Yang Lian

The phenomenon called "I"

is a blue illumination

~ Miyazawa Kenji

Both of these poets remind me of something sad and slightly depressing, when it comes to poetry. America is a country where the cultural value of poetry, collectively speaking, is very low. Foreign poetry in translation is valued even lower. If we follow the race to the bottom of the ignored arts, then Asian poetry in translation is even lower than that of contemporary Europeans.

This might sound erroneous to some. After all, a reader can visit Barnes and Noble and see a variety of haiku anthologies in translation. If a reader is lucky, they can find a New Directions volume of Li Po or Tu Fu. Plus, an apt student of prosody would point out how classical Asian verse fueled the great American modernists like Pound and Williams. Still, there is relatively little or no attention paid to Chinese or Japanese language poetry from Twentieth Century going forward.

Both Kenji and Lian are great reminders that Modernism/Post-Modernism were not just American and European phenomenons.

Getting To Know Torchwood

2011-04-19T15:42:00.000-07:00

I've watched about four episodes of Torchwood's first season. The verdict: MEH +, which means... not impressed, but I plan to keep watching and give it more time. Essentially, some shows -- especially sci-fi -- are rarely great in their first season. There's still a project of sorting out characters and creating a greater mythology to tap into. The above referenced cyberwoman episode seemed to me as a desperate attempt to cross Dr. Who with Star Trek TNG's The Borg. Seemed a little stale in execution.

The Most Horrific Poem Ever Written

2011-04-19T08:58:00.000-07:00

Paul Celan's "Todesfuge" as read by Galway Kinnell. Not my favored translation, but I would never tell Kinnell that ...

Jeffrey Thomas -- Rat Kings

2011-04-17T22:00:00.000-07:00

Theodor Adorno once famously wrote, "Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric." It's an idea that has long moved beyond Adorno in many ways.

Still, to shift the idea from poetry to genre horror fiction for a moment, extrapolating the thought is quite interesting. After all, how does one write horror fiction about the Holocaust? After all, the writer doesn't really have to do anything to make the subject of organized genocide any more disturbing or frightening. It's real horror without the writer putting any effort into it. Plus, the subject matter can get really tasteless rather quickly. In the hands of lesser talented writers, the Holocaust becomes cheapened--even as a flagrant, and talentless way of pulling at the reader's heartstrings. After all, it cheapens the real and historical evil and relegates it to "monster of the week" status.

So, it's always good to see a writer handle the material effectively. At least, that's what I thought when I recently read the Jeffrey Thomas' story "Rat Kings" in his collection AAAIIIEEE!!! (Granted, while I do greatly respect Thomas' work (what I've read so far, at least), I have to be the first to admit: that book title leaves a lot to be desired).

"Rat Kings" is the sort of story where the central monster is meant as a metaphor. Also, its also the sort of story that doesn't settle on mildly being deceptively ambitious. This is, essentially, a story that takes place next to massive graves, once the Germans have lost the war and the British have forced concentration camp guards to deal with the left over bodies. So, in many ways, "Rat Kings" holds nothing back. And still, it accomplishes what it sets out to do while still keeping the focus on character voice, growth and dynamics.

Andersen Prunty -- My Fake War

2011-04-17T11:27:00.000-07:00

Andersen Prunty's My Fake War reads like an absurdist's response to the George W. Bush decade. It's a story about Saul Dressing, a fat and middle aged public library employee who is drafted into the United States of Everything's army. He is sent to a small unheard of country to provoke, and then declare, war. Only, when he gets there, Saul meets a lizard man named Bob. Eventually, Saul returns home on a flying robot that farts out flames -- only to find that his draft officer has taken up living in his house.

Essentially, this ebook starts out goofy and remains goofy all the way through. One can easily get a sense Prunty has a philosophical and political underpinning at work, especially with how the ebook ends. Still, as fun as this book is, it doesn't have some of the resonance of Prunty's other work.

There's an ebook version, and an Eraserhead Press print version too.

Wedding

2011-04-16T21:22:00.001-07:00

So, I went to my cousin Stephen's wedding today. In a sign of getting older (3 and1/2 years from 40), Stephen is my last cousin to get married. In short... likely the last relative of my mine to tying the knot.

Nothing big to report, other than it was fun, I ate too much, and limited myself to only three Heinekens. Oh, and I had to dance ... against my will! I have no rhythm, and my slow dancing skills have not progressed beyond junior high. It was also good to see my mother out of her house with a smile on her face -- even if in a wheelchair.

Nathaniel Lambert -- The Horribles

2011-04-16T07:21:00.000-07:00

When it comes to genre fiction, writers often walk a line of explaining too much or too little about a monster's or villain's back story. Unfortunately, this usually comes at the price of the story's focal point: the lead character. Thankfully, Nathaniel Lambert skips this problem completely.

The Horribles from Grindhouse Press tells the story of Sheldon, an agoraphobic recluse. At an early age, he witnessed the brutal murders of his parents at the hands of strange bikers. As a adult, he is eventually forced to face those bikers again ... only, they're not exactly human. The story is a personal arc, of sorts, focused more on how Sheldon must change once he's forced out of his house by circumstance. Some readers may feel unsatisfied with how the mythology of the monsters is largely unexplored, but then again, this is Sheldon's story, not the bikers.

Long Day...

2011-04-14T16:46:00.000-07:00

Financially, this week has been a disaster. Not a lot of work. Lots of threatening phone calls from bill collectors.

Spent most of the day at my mother's helping take care of her. Besides a bit of wheezing when she sleeps, you can hardly tell she was rushed to the hospital a few days ago. Still, with a long term diagnosis like hers ... it's not saying much.

Her previous cancer medications gave her blood clots in the legs. And now, she can't walk. So, a good bit of my time there is spenting lifting from the sofa into her wheel chair, or lifting from the wheel chair to, or to, or to.... it's exhausting.

Horror Poetry: Why The Hell Would You Want to Write That Shit???

2011-04-13T20:16:00.000-07:00

While at Walmart, I started writing many things that I just never finished, due to be tired all the time and then being distracted by my mom's ongoing health situation. At one point, I was seriously thinking of writing a book about the use of the macabre in poetry -- a how-to writing book. I'm not sure if I'll ever get back to it. However, here are the first couple of pages....

Simply because you want to—that should be a good enough reason by itself. Poetry allows a certain level of creative freedom fiction cannot afford. A poem does not have to live and die by narrative rules, and you do not need to follow the rhetorical strategies found within an essay. Of course, you can employ both, but a successful poem can create its own system and rules, so long as one iron clad commandment is met: it has to work, successfully, on the page, and claiming that it needs to be read out loud is a cop-out, just like hiding behind “but it’s how I feel” is the mark of an amatuer. This is why good poetry can run from ancient alliterative narrative, like in Beowulf to Shakespeare’s rhyming pentameter and more post-modernist work, like what one would find in Charles Olson’s body of work. No one system of prosody is superior to another, especially if you take the different shapes and forms as different types of tools to be used. No self-respecting carpenter would ever suggest that every job can be completed with only a hammer. This is why no serious student of poetry should ever dismiss fragmentation over rhyme, or language abstraction in favor of metrical lines. Sure, some poets, like Marilynn Hacker have spent a career writing formal verse, while more experimental poets like Ron Silliman have spent their time pushing the boundries of language. This is not an argument against specializing in a certain type of poetry. Just like a carpenter would never do every job with a hammer, a very skilled cabinet maker wouldn’t take issue with somebody who spends most of their time working with a lathe. Craft is craft. And a craftsman can recognize solid workmanship, even if it is outside their day-to-day relationship with their own favored set of tools. In short, the vague sense of “what is poetry” can open a whole new universe of writing possibilities.

That freedom, however, comes at a very high price. You will not make money. If you want to make a living writing, try writing novels or non-fiction books. Zombies and how-to essays sell. Poetry does not. In fact, writing poetry will likely cost you money. Pay-to-enter book contests are common, and a lot of journals still do not take email submissions. You will not be compensated very well for your work, and in many cases, you will only be paid in contributor copies. So, enter into this proposition carefully, with your eyes open. Most of all, you should know one other truth: while most of society does not take contemporary poetry seriously, poetry labeled as “horror” or “speculative” will be taken even less seriously. Pursuing a career as a poet is to actively consign yourself to obscurity. So, the question comes again: why the hell would you want to write this shit?

Simply because you want to—that should be a good enough reason by itself. Plus, there is no rule disqualifying poets from writing fiction, or essayists from dabbling in playwriting. When it comes down to it, writing is writing. Craft is craft. Yet, before wading into poetry for the first time, there are a few myths you should get out of your head.

1. Poetry is about emotion, and I have feelings!

Um. No. Journaling has positive therapeutic value. If you are writing for a personal sense of catharsis, good for you. However, keep it to yourself. Decorum changes quickly, once you seek to place that work in front of a reader. Writing a poem complaining of a broken heart may elicit a pat on the head from a loved one, but a potential editor or reader really doesn’t care how you came to terms with your mother’s cancer, or how you got over being dumped in your freshman year in college. Editors and readers don’t care about you; they care about the words on the page. If the quality of writing is not there, then they will stop reading halfway through. If you are writing because you are in need of therapy, then seek a therapist, not a poetry editor. This is not to say “confessional” poetry is all bad. Many poets have successfully written about their personal lives, but their facility and creativity with language keeps their work from being purely navel-gazing drivel.

2. Post-Modernists Have Killed Poetry.

Crock of shit. Pure and simple. People who make this claim usually do not widely read poetry. Metrical poetry is alive and well, and it is still being written and published. There is a theory that politics swings like a pendulum, back and forth, left to right. The history of poetry has done the same. The ascendency of free verse was met with profound skepticism. Then, it became the prevailing norm. During the Reagan years, the formalists pushed back, hard. Then, other poets pushed back against the formalists. Then, a journal like Fence comes along, claiming to try and straddle the line between the two. Yes, there are l=a=n=g=u=a=g=e and oilipo poets out there, doing crazy things with the English language. At the same time, formal and metrical poets are still doing their thing to. Both are not going away anytime soon.

3. Academics Have Killed Poetry

Also a crock of shit. However, there is something important to keep in mind, here. If you are going to spend most of your time writing poems, and not hammering out the zombie or vampire novel mass market paperback houses want to consider, then you will have to find a day job. Many poets are also English teachers, both in high school and in college.

Because poetry doesn’t sell as well as zombie or vampire fiction currently does, there are not a lot of major presses into publishing it. In fact, beyond some of the large New York City poetry publishers like Graywolf, Ecco, or Pengiun, a bulk of poetry is published by college and university presses. The reason is quite simply one of finances. University presses are often run by faculty and poorly paid graduate students. The university itself often helps with funding. It helps minimize the loss poetry can accrue.

Also, most importantly, see point #2. English teachers and college professors are not pointy-headed avant gardists; they are also not conservative minded formalists either. College English departments are filled with a vast array of different types of poets and teachers. Visit an English Department sometime, and you will say a vast array of political and aesthetic disagreements taking place.

4. There is No Such Thing as “Horror” or “Speculative” Poetry

“Genre” sometimes is just a word that describes content or subject matter. It doesn’t describe the over all aesthetic, shape, or form of the writing itself. Dracula, House of Leaves, and The Shining are all considered horror novels, but they are all profoundly different in how they are written. Yusef Komunyaakaa, Langston Hughes, and Reginald Shepard are/were a considered “African-American poets,” but none of those writers are alike either. Go through every genre label you will find on book flaps, from Feminist Poetry onwards, and you will find the same thing.

Horror is only a word describing subject matter. The claim that there is no such thing as “horror poetry” is asinine at best, as it turns to blind eye to literary history. Christopher Marlowe wrote “Dr. Faustus” in verse. Shakespeare wrote “Titus Andronicus,” a play full of rape, dismemberment, and cannibalism, in verse as well. I have yet to find one happy, non-tragic, non-mortified poem about the halochaust, disease, or any the darker aspects of humanity. Death is often the subject of poetry as much as love is.

Sure, you will not see a lot of good poems about zombies or vampires, but in terms of pop culture, those are relatively recent imaginative constructions. It’s largely untapped territory for metaphor. Give it time, and it will come. Many who argue against the mere thought of “horror” poetry argue also that there is a lot of really crappy poetry floating around the internet. This is nothing new.

Theodore Sturgeon once noted that “"Ninety percent of everything is crap." Science fiction, itself as an intellectual institution, should not held accountable for the countless trees slaughtered in the name of silly robots or swaggering starship captains. Shitty writing exists, and it will continue to exist as long as human beings pick up pens or furiously pound on keyboards. But, you cannot hold imaginative territory and metaphoric possibilities accountable for the sins of talentless writers. “Horror” will exist as long as human beings feel dread, fear death, have incomprehensible nightmares, and commit terrible crimes against each other. The Old Testament and other works of scripture were first set down thousands of years ago. Utopia has never come, and it likely never will. Unstanding humanity also requires understanding inhumanity.

Writing “horror” is another way of engaging in life. So what if there is a lot of crap out there? I would wager writers like Harlan Ellison or Phillip K. Dick or Kurt Vonnegut never stopped, looked at all the poorly written space opera, and said, “You know what? Not today, there’s too much garbage being published as science fiction. So, I’m going to write about sexually repressed teens at a boarding school. That will earn me respect.” So, it all comes back to one mantra.

Why horror? Why write poetry? Simply because you want to— that should be a good enough reason by itself.

Spermbirds

2011-04-12T20:19:00.000-07:00

In all my time in Europe, I regret never seeing this band live....

Andersen Prunty - Zerostrata

2011-04-12T18:01:00.000-07:00

If you read, lets say, Bradley Sands, Carlton Mellick III, Gina Ranalli, Cameron Peirce and Anderson Prunty all at the same time, you will likely notice that there is no one way to write or define bizarro fiction. Resently, however, I realized that Prunty tends to be one my favorites of the Bizarro crowd. I think that, once a reader peels back the multiple levels of absurdity to Prunty's writing, he's working from some level of emotion or real actual humanity. In a strange way, Prunty's characters seem more human at a basic level than parody pastiche.

At least, that's how I felt after reading Zerostrata. It's a story about a guy named Hansel Nothing, who returns home after a long while. It's often referred to, throughout the story, that he previously was in hell. His mother is constantly popping pills with a cat attached to her head. His absentee father is a wannabe super hero, and his brother hardly leaves the basement. In the back of the yard, there's a tree house called "Zerostrata" -- and it comes with all the nostalgia that a childhood relic would bring with it. Along the way, Hansel meets Gretel Something (who runs through the neighborhood naked) and well, life begins to take on a new meaning. In its own special way, Zerostrata is a coming of age story. As stated earlier, once you peel back the silliness, Hansel is grappling with adulthood and what it means to be an adult. And, honestly, there's nothing bizarre about that.

Never Stops Being Alarming

2011-04-12T08:41:00.000-07:00

... And my mother is back in the hospital again.

EDIT TO ADD: My father drove her up to Sloane last night because of coughing up blood. Now she's back home with a medication change.

EDIT TO ADD: Largely thought to be a ruptured capillary in her lungs, due to coughing. It was either that, or an infection hiding under one of her tumors. Doctors are juggling her medication...again.

Wayne Hixon -- Vampires in Devil Town

2011-04-10T20:49:00.000-07:00

In a world where slutty vampires, paranormal romance, and Harlequin Nocturne (tm), have taken taken ownership of a lot of classic horror tropes, it's good to read Wayne Hixon and Vampires in Devil Town from Grindhouse Press. This novel returns some edginess to the concept of "vampire," and reinvents the term in an extremely fresh way.

Note: I got it for $0.99 on Kindle.

Karen Koehler -- Ouroboros

2011-04-10T08:43:00.000-07:00

Ourboros is a tight novella that has its foot in Asian folklore in one moment, and American hitman-noir at the other. A mysterious hitman named "O" remains at the center. He's cruelly effective, partly because he's a host to a dragon-god. Of course, as noir typically goes, "O" takes on a job that turns out a little more than what it seems. However, while that aspect of the plot construction has been done before, it's a staple of the genre. Koehler excels at making it her own, which makes Ouroboros quite a unique read.

Juxtapositions

2011-04-08T11:33:00.000-07:00

My brother has all of the artistic ability in my family, which makes me jealous. I wish I could draw. However, I have been trying to teach myself how to design book covers. Because of SEO and content mills, finding a good tutorial online is a little hard. (Sometimes, it's like finding good articles about writing: a lot of "you can do it!" fuzzy-wuzzy feel-good bullshit, but nothing telling you the actual nuts and bolts).

So, I have been relying on my training as in poetry to guide me. That may sound like fuzzy-wuzzy feel-good bullshit, but there's an actual point there. People who have extensive training in how to write contemporary prose are fo

cused more on writing sentences and paragraphs. People who have extensive training with poetry tend to think in terms of constructing resonant, striking and original concrete imagery. Two things often used in writing poetry are juxtapostion and parataxis. Simply, putting two images together and letting each other resonate off of each other. This is often seen in the "real" prosody and construction of haiku and other asian forms. So, with that in mind... here was a crack at a chapbook cover that will likely not be used. The idea was something that could go through a photocopier and be used for a side stapled pamphlet.

How To Spend A Day Not Working

2011-04-07T18:51:00.001-07:00

Woke early. Went to my mother's. (I'm not going to get into how stressful that can be). Had no internet connection (which is okay ... as I'm there to care for my mom, not to ignore in the name of earning money). Set up my computer in the living room as my wife made lentil soup. Tried to start writing a new novella about mysterious severed body parts showing up the Jersey shore. Couldn't concentrate, because, after all, I'm not there to write, per se. Called it quits and watched this with my mom and wife (it's actualy good!):

Will I ever stop abusing parenthetical marks? (No!)

Rico Slade Will Fucking Kill You

2011-04-07T10:09:00.000-07:00

Rico Slade Will Fucking Kill You is brilliant satire. Bradley Sands takes aim at the artificial construct of "masculinity" as perpetuated by the entertainment industry and does not relent. This novella is a rare piece of absurdity that remains funny on every page and in every paragraph.

Prime Directive for 2.99

2011-04-07T04:50:00.000-07:00

Amazon's Kindle.

Smashwords

A poem this long has to be broad and deep, and Prime Directive is both, examining fatherhood and son-hood and their avatars-creation and destruction-in many ways, but most powerfully through the astigmatic and revelatory American lens of Star Trek. It’s also a page-turner, a rare virtue in poetry.” - Joe Haldeman, author of The Forever War

Cohabitating and Marriage, Belgian Style

2011-04-02T21:49:00.000-07:00

For research purposes, in terms of a story I'm writing, and access for later:

Belgian laws for romantic cohabitation. Same sex couplehood is legalized.

Belgian laws for Belgian citizens and non-citizens marrying within the country.

2 By Mina Loy

2011-04-02T18:18:00.000-07:00

Mina Loy was of the same period as Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams. The years have not been kind to her, as she is largely forgotten and is only a footnote now in poetic modernism. Still, she deserves a place by both Pound and Williams, as well as T.S. Eliot, as one the greatest American poets of the early twentieth century.

Minor SEO Writing: Depression Quotes

2011-04-02T16:30:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, SEO writing is awfully banal to write. Other times, it's an interesting challenge. Here is an example of what filling an order can sometimes look like. The order was simple. The word "Depression Quotes" had to be used four times... once as the title and three times in paragraphs. For whatever, reason, this couldn't be used -- the submission system bounced it back, and in some writing interfaces, resubmitting will trip their plagiarism automated-bot (since it already has a record of it word for word in the system). No biggie. Not the greatest bit of writing, I confess, but I was only out of ten minutes worth of wasted time writing it.

Depression Quotes

Misery loves company—the phrase has been used so much, it has become a cliché. However, it does not change it from being both true. In times of depression, people seek comfort in knowing they are not alone. Yet, a sympathetic friend or clinical therapist may not always be available. This is when some people turn to literature and find depression quotes. After all, a good piece of fiction or poetry allows a person to feel empathy towards the writer. As a result, this often helps with their personal struggles.

Over the course of centuries, many writers have grappled with depression. For this reason, knowing where to look may prove difficult to the uninitiated. Still, there is one genre of literature that may prove useful. In twentieth century American poetry, there was a group of writers called “The Confessionalists.” These writers include Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell, John Berryman and W.D. Snodgrass. Each of these poets grappled with their emotions in unique ways, and they often built up their own personal mythologies.

An interested reader will find depression quotes throughout much of their work. As a result, these writers helped change the course of American poetry. Before them, most verse centered on elevated themes, and these made the resulting literature inaccessible to the common reader. Confessionalism brought poetry to a level many readers could emotionally relate to. Now, decades after their deaths, many poets now write like Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton.

Reading will never cure clinical depression by itself. However, coping with it requires dealing with it outside clinical therapy. Developing a list of depression quotes can help with troubling emotion on a day-to-day basis. To this end, confessional poetry can help

Brian Keene's Fade To Null

2011-04-02T13:13:00.000-07:00

Typically, some stories use circular structures for one of three purposes: 1) to show absolute futility, 2) to demonstrate some sort of unified, cohesive, but non-linear dream logic, or 3) a mixture of points 1 & 2.

Brian Keene's Fade To Null (in Unhappy Endings) employs point #3. It also taps into a tradition often seen in short fiction. It reads like a nightmare narrative, in that it displays a variety of surrealistic images -- for insance, a squirming eyeball-on-a-tentacle that makes noise without having an actual orifice. Yet, short stories that rely only on jarring imagery are usually not well crafted. Keene, after all, has a point. The center of the story has Alzheimer's patient and is elderly. The surreal imagery is a product of a brain that isn't functioning, and the circular nature of the story makes it horrific.

And the circular nature only works due to use of subtlety. Quiet often, it a narrator came out and said, "And every other day was the same thing," it would be heavy handed. The structure of the story is more of a cinematic loop, where the ending words are often cues that signal something very similar to the beginning.

Edit To Add: Holy shit, I was just cruising around amazon and saw Unhappy Endings listed for sale with a price tag $289.23. I still can't wrap my head and genre small press collectors.

Nook vs. Kindle: Page Turning

2011-04-02T08:51:00.000-07:00

My first ereader was a Sony, but I quickly wanted something more, partially because I wanted access to ebooks only available through Amazon/Kindle. So, I recently obtained a 5 inch tablet phone with Android's operating system. I downloaded both the Nook and the Kindle tablets and set to reading.

Here is one petty gripe while comparing the two reading experiences. The Kindle For Android app shifts blocks of text to the left or right with a finger tap. Nook For Android gives the reader a little animation of a page -- as a sheaf of paper -- turning. I find this aspect of the Nook's app mildly annoying. After all, I read ebooks because I want cheap access to written content, not because I want to "feel good!" about reading. If I wanted the comfort of seeing a real page being turned, I would go to my bookshelf and pluck out a volume of a real book -- one with pages made from tree pulp.

Prime Directive by Bryan Dietrich

2011-04-01T10:13:00.000-07:00

Bryan Dietrich is unique in the great expanse of the American poetry, as his work straddles a line seemingly no other poet has be able to walk. He revels in genre culture as a man who truly loves it, but he can also see through the eyes of an academic. As the result, he plays with genre tropes with a greater eye towards contemporary culture. Yet, he is also a skilled poet with an eye towards language. Simply put, he is the best poet science fiction, fantasy or horror has to offer. It is for this reason that I am extremely proud and happy I could help bring out his book length poem, Prime Directive. Sure, I may think it's awesome, but you don't have to take my word for it. Here's the legendary Joe Haldeman:

A poem this long has to be broad and deep, and Prime Directive is both, examining fatherhood and son-hood and their avatars-creation and destruction-in many ways, but most powerfully through the astigmatic and revelatory American lens of Star Trek. It’s also a page-turner, a rare virtue in poetry.” - Joe Haldeman, author of The Forever War

Olson

2011-03-31T20:44:00.000-07:00

Avant garde, post-modernist poetry can be either brilliant, unintelligible crap, or pretentious slop. Unfortunately, most of it is pretentious slop ... but then again, most poetry written is pretentious slop, to take Theordore Sturgeon's law into a new age. However, questions of poetry always comes down to one rule: message is irrelevant--first and foremost, it is always about the sound of the language. It's true for a great work if trochaic meter, like Poe's "The Raven," or something as sprawling as the work of Charles Olson:

Why Haughty Established Freelancers Can Be Annoying

2011-03-31T10:15:00.000-07:00

I periodically stuff the terms "freelance writing" and "content mill" into Google and Bing, partly because I am constantly looking for new streams of revenue. As mentioned before, I need to constantly diversify my income. However, there is an annoying tendency that usually occurs high in a lot of search results. It involves the usually vitriol and mudslinging between established freelancers and the people who write for content mills.

To the professional freelancers, SEO-based internet content providing is a source of information pollution. Many internet content providers, on the other hand, make the same mistake self-published novelists make. Since they do it, the believe it is new, revolutionary, and they are out to upend the old guard. Meanwhile, they can be a little tone deaf and egotistical, believing that their content mill writing is of much more cultural significance that it actually is. I have long since grown tired of this debate, so I usually skip it altogether. (Although, it does make for good point-and-laugh material once the mud and insults start flying).

As in any argument, there are valid points on both sides. Typically, the older freelancers try to point out how compensated SEO content cheapens the written labor pool. This is true. Content providers retort with, "that's just the way the professional world is changing." Unfortunately, this is also true. However, there is one thing that really annoys me about the older professionals.

Due to cloudsourcing and technological advances, there is now a glut of writers online. You cannot argue that these people need to live and work by outdated views of what freelancing actually is. Some seasoned professional can make $800 an article writing magazine features. Unfortunately, because they do it, tapping into a decade or more of professional contacts, many mistakenly that other people can do the same. Only, it doesn't work that way anymore, especially if you are entering the freelance market right now, in the middle of a cultural paradigm shift.

It is a lot like a newspaper reporter from the Woodward and Bernstein era getting bitchy about the current state of journalism jobs, while complaining that new writers need to do exactly what they did in the 1970s. Only, print journalism, and print media as a whole, is dying an agonizingly slow death, and it has been hemmoraging full time positions every year. (I know, because I can't find a job).

This is not a simply reduced argument of "SEO writing is great!" It is not -- try writing twenty 200 word articles that uses the word "Botox happy" four times each. It's enough to make you want to ram your face into a wall, repeatedly. Yet, it pays -- and in this shitty economy, many newer freelancers have no choice but to accept it, smile, write it, and then take the money to go buy groceries. That reality, however, is what a lot of older, established freelance writers fail to realize.

Incorrect Approaches To Freelancing

2011-03-30T20:10:00.000-07:00

So, as one feels their way through this brave new world of microtasking and cloudsourcing jobs, there is one way to approach work that is counter productive. This is something I have discussed with my wife, at length.

Basically, with the rise of the Internet and more legitimate freelancing opportunities, one often has to gauge their time and whether or not that time is being monetized correctly. However, I do not believe in gauging everything by an hourly rate of pay.

Wage-rates are the domain of traditional work, and when you set at home most of the day, drinking coffee and writing $4 articles about the function of a urethra (for medical websites!), punching in and out of a time clock is an inadequate metaphor. You're a freelancer, after all -- technically every hour can be "on the clock." Plus, not all tasks pay the same. I have written a $15 article in five minutes, once, and a more complex $5 anatomy article in 45 minutes.

So, converting to a variable hourly rate, just for gauging one's level of productivity, is not really helpful. So, I have chosen to look at the day as a whole. How much did I make today? Versus How much did I make yesterday?

Thankfully, those daily totals are starting to improve again --- after a really shitty past two months.

Home Healthcare

2011-03-29T21:41:00.000-07:00

I just spent all day with my mother. It reminds me of how frustrating it is to want to kick cancer's ass, but really, there is nothing you can do... except tell the person you love them.

Bat For Lashes.

2011-03-29T21:08:00.001-07:00

Stuck On Covers

2011-03-28T21:48:00.000-07:00

One Possible Design (Grayscale is on purpose)

Another Possible design, but with the text needing centering away from the edges.

Concentration Camps, Excluding Germany

2011-03-28T09:00:00.000-07:00

As an outsider, living in Europe can sometimes feel like living in a haunted house. This could be, perhaps, said for any landscape with a brutal history -- only sometimes, the people living in that landscape seem a little numb to the ghosts around them. And by ghosts, I don't mean whispy boo-monsters. I mean "ghosts" in a kind-of metaphorical sense.

Sometimes, when a person has lived in a location long enough, they become numb to their history. This is especially evident in the American southeast, in places like The Carolinas, Georgia, and so on. However, to an outsider, these "ghosts" become painfully evident.

This is something I know rather well, having grown up as an ex-patriot. Every place is new to me, and I have no "home" in a traditional sense. Still, this role of history is something I have been seriously considering as of late. For both nostalgia and research-for-writing, I have often looked back at my life in Europe. Specifically, at everything I missed while being a beer drinking and punk rock loving teenager. Sometimes, you find out things that you well didn't know.

Case in point: I was accutely aware of the history of Holocaust in Europe. When I was very young, my parents took me to Dachau as a "tourist." What I saw there has long since stayed in my mind. I had since returned to Dachau much later, with the same horrifying response to the imagery.

Still, even visiting Dachau will never give a person a full understanding of Nazi atrocities or to the extent those war crimes were spread across Europe. In the years since, comfortable in my home in New Jersey, I was shocked to find out how much so. Concentration camps were never just locations within Germany. There were others located closer to the countries I lived in, like Breendonk in Belgium, as well as one in Amersfoort, The Netherlands.

History can never be reduced to gross generalities. True, one should never forget, but also, one should never make the mistake of understanding the pervasiveness with which it touches everything.

Adventures In Freelancing

2011-03-27T22:06:00.001-07:00

So, as has been noted elsewhere (typically, my Facebook and my old wordpress blog), I used to work at Walmart. Actually, two years of my life were spent in a New Jersey store that was in the process of becoming a super center. Working for this retail giant was particular complicated for me. I am a extremely left of center, and I hated the times the made everybody sit through their anti-union propaganda. Yet, even more, I felt like I was in a holding pattern most of anything. I was routinely getting passed over for promotion, even though for both years, I had "Exceeds expectations" evaluations. I seriously had no future there; in fact, the only reason why I ever took a job there was simple: it was stable, and trying to string together part-time college teach work was not. After all, that was roughly 10 years of my life.

So, I left Walmart the first real chance I could get. A lot of my writer friends told me specifically how I could set myself up as a freelance writer. It involved starting with low-pay micro-tasking and cloudsourcing jobs, and then slowly building a list of independent clients. That list was supposed to ween me off internet content providing. So, I sent some writing resumes out, and I get into a number of these companies. Money was good. Very good. I was managing to nail down $100 to $150 a day. I quit Walmart with a smile, and I have worked at home ever since.

Only, it's not a happy ending. Self-employment comes with a lot of risks, ones I seriously didn't take into account. In a way, working for yourself can be compared to investing in the stock market. You hit a good stock, and everything is just great -- great returns on investment and so on. Then, one day, that stock goes to shit. If its all that you've invested in, you are SCREWED. This same dynamic works for self-employment. If you sources of income are not diversified, you are essentially setting yourself up for whole lot trouble later.

In my case, I was writing for a well known and much-derided (by clueless, snobby professionals with their career long since set up and stabilized) content farm. Since I don't want to trigger an email alert, lets just call them Dee-Ess. Everything was fine; I was too busy cranking out how-to articles to really spend time diversifying my work load -- then, over the course of a few months, their content pool dewindled severely. They recently went public with an IPO, and so they decided to take the opportunity restructure. That's their right; after all, they are a business, not a social services agency. However, for me, that has made the last few months extremely hard. The financial security my wife and I were returning to was completely ripped away. No money for groceries, and bank account balances in the negative. I was actively thinking of returning to Walmart, defeated; only thing is, they claim to be hurting in this economy, and they have slashed hours. That likely also means a hiring freeze has been put into place.

I bare no ill will towards Dee-Ess. I plan to still write for them from time to time; however, I have since moved on. Yet, I am now in the position of trying climb out of yet another financial hole. This means a number of publishing related ventures I was trying to set up have gone on hold. As for my sources of income--they are diversified. Yet, it takes a few months to get all of those pipelines primed and flowing.

An Albatross "The Revolutionary Politics Of Dance"

2011-03-19T06:47:00.000-07:00

If Spazz and Charles Bronson got into disco!

Two Belgian Flags

2011-03-18T22:23:00.000-07:00

The Flag of Wallonia (Top). The Flag of Flanders (Bottom):

(I'm wondering if the yellow fields are similar on purpose. I think the Wallonian flag is a more recent invention)