What ever happened to that novel, anyway?

Perhaps you may recall the novel I started way back in November of 2006 for National Novel Writing Month. Tentatively called "Throne of the Living Dead," and later "Gun Dead," it was subtitled "A High-Firepower Melodrama in XX Parts" (with "XX" a number dependant sheerly on how many chapters I had written), and well on its way to living up to the name. Guns, zombies, gore, cheesy action... and just a hint of cheesy romance.

That was then. And, really, that is now, too.

See, I encountered a problem. The zombies ate my brain. Well, not really, though you might debate the point. It wasn't even that, three months after I started, I fell in love. You always hear about how artists and writers must suffer in order to achieve true greatness. And, of course, my suffering (more or less) ended when I met Marisa.

Still, I don't think that accounts for what is now going on two and a half years of what amounts to writer's block.

Much like her, I've hit a wall.

I just can't write. Not fiction. Not screenplays. Nothing. I can get my work done, throw together the occasional bit for a freelance gig, but basically, when it comes to my Creative Writing side, I'm just plain stumped. I've tried new novel-centric software, since Final Draft always helped my screenwriting. I've tried rethinking the novel into a script - movie or graphic novel, take your pick - I've tried just plain picking up what I have written and staring at it.

Nothing.

It's killing me. I want to write. I want to edit. I want to finish a first draft and move on to rewriting. I still fantasize that someday it might become one of those limited edition horror novels I collect.

But I can't do it.

I think my mistake was leaving the structure open-ended. If I felt like writing a new chapter, I could just change the number (see "XX," above) of parts in the melodrama. But as you might expect, I had good parts, bad parts, some plain awesome stuff and some stuff not worth the paper it was inkjetted on.

So I kept having ideas, and I think somewhere along the way, the law of diminishing returns kicked in.

Add to that my dubious skill, plus the various time constraints of the past couple of years (see previous post), and you have a recipe for writing disaster. No time to pick up the laptop and start writing, and on the rare occasions I do have time, I just come up empty. It's all in my head, I know it. I just can't do anything about it.

Long story short (too late, I know), that's what happened to the novel. I always gave some thought to turning it into an online novel, posting a chapter at a time on a blog. I have the sad feeling that, despite my success with Dead Hunt, this thing is going to end up unpublished even if I do finish.

But I think it has some entertainment value, if not much literary value, so I keep hoping. And staring at the screen.

The very definition of frustration

I had a dream last night.

In my dream, I came up with a pretty good little short story, or fragment thereof.

As I've said many times, I'm a very momentum-based writer.

The problem was, in my dream, I couldn't write the story down. No matter what I tried - pen and paper, getting a hold of a computer - I kept getting interrupted.

So there I was, roaming the streets, reciting this fragment rhythmically to myself. The whole thing was done, and I was reciting it over and over again.

Only, I never got the chance to set it down.

I was confounded by friends who couldn't lend me their computers, by reporters with questions for their copy editor, you name it.

Meanwhile, I could tell I was drifting closer and closer to waking up, and getting more and more desperate.

Of course, eventually, I woke up. And now I can't remember more than bits and pieces, the rhythmic sing-song of the piece. But not the actual words, nor in the right order.

As I drifted awake, Marisa said something - probably the time or something - and I distinctly remember muttering under my breath as I came awake, "Great, now she's talking to me."

It's sheer agony. I tried so hard - in my subconscious - to remember this piece, which I swear was genuinely full of potential, and of course I can't put it together now that I actually can sit in front of my computer, in relative peace, and write it down.

I want to scream at the top of my lungs, "Everybody just shut up and leave me alone!"

But, since I can't remember what I so badly wanted to write when everybody shut up and left me alone, I'm writing this instead.

And thinking of the eight hours I get to spend on the road today, alone in the peace and quiet, with this stupid little jaunty tune in my head, trying to remember the damn words.

Sigh.

Editor's note: I do have a few more blogs for you - haven't forgotten them in the recesses of my mind. Just been busy. Watch for them sooner or later. Probably later.

Eloquence and envy...

My old classmate Blakeslee has a song called "Opiates and Envy," but this is probably a little different.

This is a writer's lament.

Well, assuming it's fair after assorted journalistic endeavors, a college degree and a direct-to-DVD movie to call myself a writer.

Sometimes, as a reader, you hit a passage in a book or story that just sucks you in. Just insists you must, must read more.

Perhaps he scarcely cares for fame, though he will do his full duty. He has lost both wife and child and finds himself the last of his line. He goes on a difficult mission down the ridge of South Mountain, where he lacks adequate support, and he does not come back.

It's a wonderful feeling, if occasionally costly (in terms of tracking down, say, the full-length biographyof someone mentioned fairly briefly in another work).

This is Douglas S. Freeman, the famed Civil War historian.

His two claims to fame - besides Douglas S. Freeman High School and Freeman Hall at Richmond University, of course - are his seminal biography of Robert E. Leeand its follow-up, the magnificent Lee's Lieutenantsabout the Army of Northern Virginia's subordinate generals.

(Blatant off-topic mention: The University of Richmond, home of Freeman Hall, is also the alma mater of brand-new Oakland Raider Arman Shields.)

He is alloted a glorious day on Groveton Heights, and then he has a narrow escape at Sharpsburg. After that, at Fredericksburg, there is a wound, an affecting interview with Stonewall Jackson, and the long, long silence.

Where was I?

Oh, yeah, Lee's Lieutenants.

Let me tell you why I love this book, for more than just its fascinating history.

I love it for the writing. Not just the overall scholarship and eloquence, but for the little bits. The little moments, phrases, expressions that draw you in, as a reader, and make you - demand - you read more.

With them, under Jube Early, he goes to the Shenandoah Valley, and there, at a moment when he did not know the battle was lost, he leaves unanswered the question whether he would have realized fully his promise as a soldier.

Why the envy?

Well, obviously, as a writer... I hate this man. Well, not really. For one thing, he's dead. For another, it's not so much hatred as...

Envy.

See, I often say that there are few things quite so pretentious and cutthroat as a college creative writing class. Of which, I might add, I survived more than a few, with the psychological scars to prove it.

But one thing I never quite got the hang of, was why writing need meaning. Could writing as entertainment not serve its own purpose? That being, of course, to entertain for entertainment's sake?

This, perhaps, is why my fiction so often got shredded in workshops. But the point is, my writing was often aimed at bringing out an emotion in my readers, something visceral and fundamental.

Be it fear, laughter, love, whatever.

As the army enters Pennsylvania, this new major general tries to relieve the concern of his young wife that the Lord will not bless the Southern cause if the Confederacy does more than defend its own territory. He knows, as a trained soldier, that a whole-hearted offensive often is the most prudent defensive. The campaign must be fought. So run his letters. Then, abruptly, they stop.

And one of the best ways to do that, I've found, is an eloquent turn of phrase. You can capture a character in an action novel in a well-crafted paragraph, and make you care in that moment whether this man or woman lives or dies over the course of the next 500 pages.

It's one of the reasons Ice Stationis my favorite action-fiction novel. Matt Reilly makes you care about his characters, even as he blows them away a few pages later. A quick phrase, a paragraph, even a short chapter, and you want to see one soldier survive even as another dies.

Freeman's work, though historical nonfiction, has that essence. That way of catching your eye, exciting your mind, making your heart race just a little faster.

Ramseur has the promise of something dearer than military distinction. One day, when a battle is in prospect, he hears that the crisis is past and that the baby is born. More than that he never learns.

Remember Starship Troopers when that voiceover keeps asking, "Would you like to know more?"

That's what a great phrase is, that voiceover that makes the answer "yes."

Freeman does it over and over again in Lee's Lieutenants.

And yes, as a writer slogging through Novel No. 1, I'm jealous. In so many ways.

Editor's note: If you're curious, every one of these quotes was from the introduction of the Dramatis Personae that opens the book. That's right... they're not even from the meaty part. The descripions are of, in order:

• Samuel Garland, killed at South Mountain
• Maxcy Gregg, mortally wounded at Fredericksburg
• Robert Rodes, killed at Third Winchester
• William Dorsey Pender, mortally wounded at Gettysburg
• Stephen Dodson Ramseur, mortally wounded at Cedar Creek

Making the most of it

As my favorite Sheryl Crow song, "Soak Up the Sun,"goes...

"It's not having what you want, it's wanting what you've got."

This has never been a concept easy for me to grasp and make work. I guess for many people, the grass is always greener.

But I think everybody has something they'd love to be better at, the just lack the fundamental talent.

I don't mean playing quarterback in the NFL. I mean something more attainable in a way - something probably that at least one person you know, maybe several, can do, but you just can't.

I don't mean hard work, either. We can't all bake like Jin, but most people can at least cook something decent. Hell, even I can make cookies.

I'm talking about a gift, even a low-rent version, that you just don't have. But wish you did.

Marisa, for instance, loves music. Loves it. But she can't sing. Not a note.

Well, one note. But that's it. The same note, every note of every song. It's endearing. But also bad.

(Editor's note: Hee. I initially typed "Bust" instead of "But" in that sentence "But she can't sing." Paging Dr. Freud...)

For me, the frustration stems from my fundamental lack of art talent. I can barely draw stick figures and cartoon munkees.

I think very visually. I mean vivid, sharp images I can see in my mind's eye like they were projected on a screen.

But I can't get those visions onto paper. Not with my hands. Not as drawings.

I think that's part of the reason I write. I have a good imagination, some decently inventive (or not overly derivative) ideas and yes, a certain way with words.

The thing is, as a fiction writer, I find my great failing is that I often cannot find exactly the right/write way to describe what I see in my head.

Either I wind up spending way too much time violating the "show, don't tell" doctrine, or I can't quite make the words explain the picture to my own satisfaction.

You can't imagine how frustrating that is, to see something, and just not be able to describe it satisfactorily.

Or maybe you can, if you have a similar talent disparity.

I think that's part of the reason I got into screenwriting - it's a way I can describe my vision without worrying about the perils of prose. It's a medium in which I sort of have to "tell" and not "show" what I see in my head, because I'm giving the director cues as to precisely what I envision.

Sure, he'll interpret my vision in his own way, and craft his own vision, but the point is, that's a style of writing that is well-suited to my particular skill set.

On the other hand, right now, I'm working on my first novel, and there are times it ranges from what I regard as wonderfully entertaining - my stated purpose in writing - to complete and utter crap.

The thing is, the further I progress, the more I find myself imagining it as a graphic novel, rather than one of the limited edition horror books I collect.

I can see the comic-book-style panels in my head. I can envision them drawn, inked, lettered. I mean, see 'em like I'm reading the book.

But I can't reproduce them. Somewhere between brain and hand, they fall apart.

And somewhere between brain and keyboard, they lose something, or at least, they do in my mind.

You can script a graphic novel.I would imagine I could do that, and try to find an artist. I have a friend who wrote a comic book series.

But my vision can be so specific sometimes, I could almost storyboard it instead of scripting it.

I can't draw it, though. And that's the damnable, frustrating part.

Don't get me wrong, I love to write.

But I can see things so clearly, it makes the flaws in my writing even more apparent to me.

And some days, when I can't find the words, I could cry.

I think that's part of why I've been blogging more lately. I have so many thoughts running around in my head, and the blog - the blog isn't a visual thing for me, so I can just write, without that layer of frustration.

I can enjoy writing. Some days, trying to make that novel work is agony.

So yeah, my fourth wish, my fourth wish would be talent like this. Or this.

Meanwhile, I hack away.

Speaking of horror novels...

I went back to my NaNoWriMo novel today. Just to add a couple of sentences I thought of for no apparent reason while yawning my way through the commute home.

It was the first time I've gone back since I finished (victoriously!) in November.

I've got way too much to do, and I'd sort of told myself I was putting "Throne of the Living Dead" ("A high-firepower melodrama in 50 parts...") on the shelf for six months or so while I got some other projects done, and then I'd go back to it...

Maybe even to try and write another 50,000 words next November (I'd have to change the number in the subtitle, I suppose). I don't know quite how I'd format it so I wouldn't cheat on the NaNo word counter, but I sort of said "I'll burn that bridge when I come to it."

I mean, since it's episodic, I could just keep the new chapters in their own file.

But I get ahead of myself. I just wrote about 35 words tonight.

I was thinking, more fantasizing, that I'd see how much it would cost to get the thing vanity-published, just for kicks - my buddy Renaldo, author of the now-defunct Ron's Modern Life and professional LFH satirist - managed to put his up on some site where you can buy a copy of his '05 NaNoWriMo novel for $99 or something like that.

Maybe I'll Google my way into finding out more.

Be kind of fun. I mean, I suppose the writer in me thinks I should try to get a real publisher first, but the writer in me also sort of acknowledges that no real publisher is going to go for this bad boy without some serious, SERIOUS work.

But it did become a labor of love. And maybe I will start posting episodes here. Just for you. Well, and me... and my little fantasy world where the whole thing sound as good when someone else reads it as it does when I do.

Addendum!
To be fair, I should probably hype Renaldo's novel, "Tales of the Sea Vampire," which is available via Lulu for the low, low price of $99 per paperback copy.

Get the jokes ready...

OK, apologies for the previous whiny post. I realize there are probably a lot more important things in a lot of your lives than collecting little books about sports teams. Guess I need to up the meds or something. Just in one of my moods, between paying the bills, a bit of a tiff with a co-worker (quashed, but still) and the pressure of a date, too much work... You know. It was just sort of the last straw.

Thus, venting.

Anyway, I thought I'd make up for it with a bit of a more interesting and informative, slightly less whiny post. No, it's not Civil War day. Though I'm plotting a post on the quotes of Gen. George Pickett. ("General Lee, I have no division...")

It sort of ties into the date, which went well - my definition of "going well," I think there's going to be another one - because the young lady I went with chose a restaurant she likes, and a cuisine I'd never had:

Ethiopian.

(Insert joke here.)

That's right. Ethiopian food. And it was darn good. Lot of vegetable, beany-type side dishes. And the fascinating thing: You don't use utensils, you eat with your hands. And the bread they bring you, which isn't bread so much as a kind of tortilla, for lack of way of explaining it. A soft, flat bread, but lighter than a tortilla. You tear it in pieces and scoop up the food.

The place is called Makeda, in nearby New Brunswick (home of Rutgers University, or at least most of it).

I got some kind of spicy lamb chunks in brown sauce (yeah, I have no idea what it's called or what exactly is in it) and if it wasn't as spicy as the menu suggested - a good thing on a date, I suppose, avoiding chili-breath - it was still very tasty.

And the sides... boy, y'all know I'm not normally one for vegetables, but one was made of split peas and spices, in a kind of mush (not the best of words, I admit) and the other was split lentils and spices and really, really delicious. Bean/pea type vegetables are some of the few I like, and these really were tasty. There's ginger in the lentils, and something that reminded me of vinegar, a kind of tanginess.

My date (a vegetarian) had that lentil dish as her main course, and I was almost jealous I didn't get it so I could have more.

Almost, I say, because by the end of the meal I was stuffed. Reminded me a bit of Indian food, though I couldn't exactly explain why, but you know how when you get Indian food, it just fills you up with all the meat and vegetables in thick sauce? Like that, you know.

And undoubtedly, it's all healthy, too. It just seems like it should be.

(Insert politically incorrect joke about fat Ethiopians here.)

Tonight, at a Super Bowl party, I just killed my diet, though. Wings, subs, beer, the first dessert I've had in a while outside of tiny slices of cake...

I get no more bonus points for the entire week. All the way through Thursday. It's going to be Mookie Monkey Salad Week, that's for damn sure.

This Weight Watchers thing is really working, though. It may be water weight, but I'm down nine pounds in three weeks. So I've lost most of the holiday weight. On to the weight I gained back last year.

Progress update:
Holiday max-out: 235+
Current weight as of Friday: 226
Last year's post-liver issues low: 213
Pre-Jersey weight: 204
Doctor's recommeded weight: 200
Goal: 199
Fighting weight: 185
Ideal weight: 165
High-school weight: 148

It's all about points, baby. Life would be so much easier if I could chart my "time" points online and be able to allocate them to whatever I want. I'm so freakin' busy, I think I took on way too much extracurricular stuff. I can't even find time to do things I want to do; hell, I can't even find time to do things I have to do.

Sigh. Maybe I need a schedule. Monday Mookie Movie Night (read: HorrorTalk review night; I've got two to do...), Tuesday and Wednesday Project Nights, Thursday Hockey Night in Hillsborough, and so forth.

I'll have to think about it. My horror reading is suffering, my Blood Bowl figures remain unpainted, I'm behind schedule on my Strat-O-Matic hockey league, the Raiderfans.net magazine still isn't done, my book project is in infancy, my November novel I swore I'd get back to is untouched, and the list goes on and on. And did I mention those HorrorTalk reviews?

Double sigh.

I did it!

"Throne of the Living Dead: A high-fire melodrama in 50 parts" clocked in at 53,690 words this morning, ahead of the Nov. 30 deadline, making me officially one of life's winners!

What I'm going to do with it, I don't know. But I did it. I wrote a (short) novel.

I find myself thinking, given the structure, that it would make a great series of blog posts. After all, when I say it's in 50 parts, I mean it.

Before I do anything with it, though, I have to revise it and touch it up. I think I've put enough effort in, and it has become such a good thing, that it deserves at least that much extra work. I mean, at the very least, a spell-check. And figuring out if I've got stalactites and stalagmites backward.

But before any of that, I'm going to take a nice, long nap. And probably not write anything serious for the rest of the week.

(So, until next time: I did it! Munkee win-ded! Yay! Yay! Yay!)

Too... much... work...

Between NaNoWriMo and stuff I'm doing for HorrorTalk and Raiderfans.net, plus my "real" job and all the other stuff I have to do, I just haven't had time to do much here.

Hang in there. It'll get back on track, eventually. I'm more-or-less on pace for NaNo, so keep rooting for me!

Today's episode of insomniac opinion theater...

OK, between the insomnia and NaNoWriMo, clearly I'm in the mood to spew something out.

So let's open with a shout out to T-girl, who wandered over from Boobs, Injuries and Dr Pepper, one of my regular blog-reads. (For those who've never been, it's like the Mother of All Not-A-Mommy-Blogs.)

Anyway, earlier in the insomnia, I was perusing the blogs I read regularly, including the aforementioned BIDP (I can't bring myself to just call it "Boobs" like some others do). And there was a big firefight over an off-color joke - which, it must be said, made fun of rich white people - that led to someone dropping the dreaded "r" word.

That's right. Racism.

OK, everybody, before we go on, y'all take a look at that photo over on the right there.

Done? OK, let's begin.

Without rehashing my rant of a response over there (even though that's what got T-girl here), I just want to offer up some more of my feelings on political correctness.

See, for those who don't know me, I'm an adopted Vietnamese Jew of mixed racial background, raised in redneck rural Pennsylvania.

Which really means one of two things: a) I was destined to be the most politically correct person in the world; or b) I was destined to be the most politically incorrect person in the world.

I think you can tell how it turned out.

So one of what I suppose you could call my defense mechanisms is humor.

After all, I get to tell both the Asian jokes and the Jewish jokes.

And it doesn't help that I'm a redneck at heart, too.

I mean, I'm like the Jewish equivalent of the Mormon porn star from "Orgazmo " ("I'm a bad, bad Mormon.")

You know, like when I've got a mouthful of ham-and-cheese omelette at a family gathering, and I'm like, "Mmph? What? Why are you all looking at me?"

(For you goyim, no cloven-hoofed animals, AND no mixing milk and meat.)

And then there's the Asian in me. After all, nobody complains when the stereotypes are good things.

You know, you never hear black (African-American, etc.) men complain when everyone assumes they have big penises and can dunk a basketball. And you never hear Asians complain when everyone assumes they're smarter than all you white folk.

Hey, Jimmy (God rest his soul), the only black kid in my grade, did his part. He was also the only kid in the grade who could dunk. And when the guidance counselor read off the qualifications for the NAACP scholarship before we took the PSATs, when he got done, Jimmy looked around and yelled out, "I won!"

And I did my part. After all, I finished first in my class. But that was sort of to be expected. I'm Asian. And I was voted "class brain" in 8th grade. (As I once pointed out to my friend Dave before our 10th reunion, I was NOT voted "most likely to succeed." That was his problem.) And let me tell you something, part of the reason I was class brain probably was the same reason Willie Horton helped cost Mike Dukakis that election back in '88: Pigment.

The ethnic humor does backfire from time to time. I always joked I was the only Asian in my class whose parents didn't own a Chinese restaurant (because hey, June Yen's parents, they owned a Chinese restaurant). So at the reunion, when they insisted I wear my nametag, and I snarked, who are people going to think I am, the other Asian? The class president went around introducing me to people as June Yen, "post-op."

Strangely, since the joke over on BIDP involved rich white people and country clubs (and black people, thus the race card was played), earlier tonight I heard Alec Baldwin remark that, at the height of the AIDS crisis, someone told him that if you could get AIDS from gripping a golf club, we'd have a cure by now.

So what's wrong with making fun of the rich white people? They get all the other advantages, we can't bust their (golf) balls?

(Yes, I realize some of my relatives are rich white people. I look like the waiter snuck into the family photo. Me and my cousin, Jorge. Everybody else, Eastern European Jews. You should see me trying to wear a yarmulka over spiked Asian hair.)

I realize I'm doing exactly what I didn't plan to do, and repeating some of my jokes from my BIDP comment. But hey, this is good material.

A few years back, at my last job, I got invited to lunch at a country club by some of the upper management at the paper. Needless to say, I went. So one of my buddies was ragging on me about selling out to The Man and kissing up, and I was just like, dude. I'm a Vietnamese Jew. When am I ever going to get another opportunity to see the inside of a country club?

Without carrying someone else's golf bag, that is.

By the way, I don't mean to suggest that because someone black complained about the joke, that all black people lack a sense of humor. Just that one. I mean, I work with three black women, and the other night, one of them remarked that we were working like "Hebrew slaves." I asked her if she meant because I was Jewish and she was black. That cracked her up.

So maybe humor is subjective. But I think we can all agree, as the comedian Mike Binder once said, when you're on a plane being hijacked, never, ever raise your hand and ask for the kosher meal.

Oh, and for me, the argument at BIDP was over when somebody pointed out the girl who was claiming the moral high ground could be found dancing nekkid at some Web site I couldn't find.

Speaking of moral high ground, to borrow and embellish a joke from Don Imus:

Remember the 2000 election? When all the Florida Jews accidentally voted for Pat Buchanan in that hanging-chad debacle? And they all felt really, really bad.

Well, maybe they'd feel better to know Pat Buchanan also had a relative who died in the Holocaust.

(Wait for it...)

An uncle fell out of a guard tower.

(Rimshot.)

Completely off topic, and yet kind of on-topic, at work the other day, the subject of ethnic slurs came up, vis-a-vis an Eastern European. So I was looking up lists of ethnic slurs online, trying to see if the particular one under discussion, well, to paraphrase Inigo Montoya, means what he thinks it means.

And I couldn't find it, but I did find that "monkey" is an ethnic slur toward black people. I knew that. In fact, it led to a rather awkward moment a few years back when I was waving the Rally Monkey I used to take to games (don't worry about the waving; stuffed monkey). So I'm waving the monkey after a fight, and I realize the Flyers' then-enforcer, Donald Brashear (the one in the fight) is black. Oops.

(One old joke about hockey is that it's the last sport for middle-sized white guys.)

Anyway, so we know "monkey" is an ethnic slur against blacks.

Well, in one of the glossaries I found, it listed "mookie" as an ethnic slur against blacks as well.

Great. And I named my stuffed monkey Mookie.

I swear it had nothing to do with black people. I just think Mookie's a cute name. I used to call my (now ex-)fiancee Mookie, and she was a white, Catholic suburbanite. Hope that's not why she left.

To come full circle, I'll bet her bleepity-bleeping-bleep of a father is in a country club. And he hated me because I wasn't white, or so I was told by people who knew him. Heh.

Links:
• Mookie Wilson, the Met
• Mookie Wilson, the defunct band
• Mookie Wilson, the name

Finally, for those following my NaNoWriMo adventures, I'm almost at 10,000 words - 1/5th of the way there! - and I still haven't figured out how to work in a munkee.

Campers vs. zombies! Scientists vs. zombies! Soldiers vs. zombies!

Death! Mayhem! Sex! (Not in that order. Yet.)

Plus, a Viking or two for good measure (the Norse explorer kind, not the Minnesota-football kind.

And maybe an Indian (the Washington-football kind, not the Bollywood kind).

Food porn, technical difficulties and beyond!

Today's story is about blog-vergence, as it were.

Stewie came up to visit for the (as usual, dreadfully crowded and disorganized) Chiller Theatre convention the other day. We do this from time to time, despite the fact that every time we go to Chiller, we vow it's our last.

However, this was the first time the Stew's been up since we began our blogstalking misadventures, and thus his first opportunity to meet his Bizarro World alter-ego, The Lesley.

Me being the adventurous soul that I am, I figured, why not get as many of my favorite blog-types together as possible?

So I ordered some desserts from Jin. That's them up at the top.

And, might I say, after months of sadly pondering the photos of her "food porn," when I finally got to eat some, it was worth the wait.

There were raspberry brownies, berry crumble bars, the famed mint "Oreos," peanut butter cookies and more. Munkees like berries!

The Lesley got the nut cookies, Stewie got the molasses cookies, and me and the Stew pretty much scarfed down as much as we could on the weekend.

The co-workers got the rest (as pictured above), and while it's true that journalists will eat anything, there were many spontaneous remarks of "delicious!" and a few obscene words muttered my way by those trying - and failing - to watch the calories.

Frankly, not being a regular sweet-eater, I ate so much I felt thoroughly bloated, so was forced to share, lest it go to waste. I don't think I'll eat anything with sugar for at least a few days, if not weeks.

But for those of you with a sweet tooth, order something from Jin. Tastes as good as it looks. (The food, I mean; can't speak for Jin.) And she ships!

So, the blog-vergence total:
• Stewie: Present
• The Lesley: Present
• Me: Present
• Jin: Present, in the form of dessert
• Real: Present in spirit, at least

Not bad, for a get-away day lunch.

And now for a few asides, blog-related:

First of all, I've been experiencing technical difficulties for days, so this is the first I've actually been able to post. I apologize for the delay in food porn, though you may not have realized what you were missing. Blogger apparently had some issues, then there were some issues on my end, which were of course solved by the magic of writing to tech support. As soon as I hit the send button, presto! Everything worked again. Of course. Ain't that the way of the world?

Second, as some of you may realize, in about 14 hours (give or take), it's National Novel Writing Month. And I'm going for it. That may result in a reduced amount of blogging for November. Of course, every time I say, "hey, I'm going to be busy, don't mind the lack of postage," I wind up writing like a dozen posts in a week. But really, if I've got to churn out something like 1,750 words of fiction per day, and work, and sleep, and eat, etc., there may not be a whole lot of time for other pursuits.

But, as is the motto of my novel-writing adventure, "What the hell, you only live once." So I've got to go for it. Apologies in advance.

We have a sponsor!

Come on, "Days of Thunder" fans, you know the lines... after you look like a (and I quote) "monkey f***ing a football," you get yourself a sponsor!

Well, an unofficial sponsor... that's right, my Barber Foods coupons finally arrived! So I'll be trying out some new flavors and types of their delicious chicken products very, very soon!

Now, does anybody know how to make that picture link to their Web site, that's the question...

Vacation update: For the curious, yes, I've done absolutely nothing pretty much since Mom & Dad left yesterday, except work on my reviews and sit on the couch and stare at the TV. I actually managed to do some laundry for my trip... and watch "The Mummy" not once but twice on TNT. Plus watch "The Mummy Returns" on DVD.

And, at Mookie's insistence, I've watched the better parts of "Curious George" (the ones with George, obviously) three more times.

Oh, and sometime soon, I've got a story to tell about the Yankees game and coincidence. Remind me.

Vacation, all I ever wanted

I'm on a much-needed vacation this week. So there probably won't be much posting.

My schedule, as planned, and thus far partially carried out:

SATURDAY:
Morning: Sleep. Afternoon: Edit Stewie's latest HorrorTalk review. Evening: Go to Philadelphia Flyers preseason game. Late-night: Do nothing.

SUNDAY:
Morning: Sleep. Afternoon: Do nothing. Evening: Go to Borders to use "personal shopping day." Late-night: Do nothing.

MONDAY:
Morning: Sleep. Afternoon: Watch "Curious George" with Mookie. Evening: Dinner with Sari at Newark's excellent Spanish Tavern. Late-night: Do nothing.

TUESDAY:
Morning: Sleep. Afternoon: Lunch with parents. Evening: New York Yankees game with Dad. Late-night: Watch (taped) finale of "The Contender," season 2.

WEDNESDAY:
Morning: Sleep. Afternoon: Lunch with parents. Evening: Do nothing. Late-night: Do nothing.

THURSDAY:
Morning: Sleep. Afternoon: Do nothing. Evening: Do nothing. Late-night: Do nothing.

FRIDAY:
Morning: Sleep. Afternoon: Do nothing. Evening: Fly to Oakland to cover the Oakland Raiders game for Raiderfans.net. Late-night: Munkee on a plane.

SATURDAY:
Morning: Sleep in Oakland. Afternoon: Do nothing in Oakland. Evening: Drink in Oakland. Late-night: Drink in Oakland.

SUNDAY:
Morning: Sleep in Oakland. Afternoon: Cover Raiders' game with the Cleveland Browns. Pray for win. Evening: Write article in Oakland. Late-night: Fly back to Jersey on the red eye.

As you can see, there's an awful lot of "do nothing," which can be interpreted as watching TV, watching movies, reading, eating, drinking, playing video games and watching more TV.

Somewhere in there, I gotta write some HorrorTalk reviews of my own.

Yeah, I'm probably the only guy in the world who's gonna chase "Curious George" with "Deadlands: The Rising" and "Rape is a Circle." What can I say? HorrorTalk's a genre site. And I've got a very obvious inner child.

Completely off topic, it's 14 days to "Mortal Kombat: Armageddon," which is my most-anticipated video game of the year. More than "Jaws Unleashed," more than "Madden," more than "Smackdown vs. Raw," more than anything. I love, love, love MK, and this is the MK to end all MKs.

By-by-by, by-by!

When I work on my various projects, I've noticed I use a few different names. Perhaps you've noticed, too.

I was thinking about it, and for those wondering, here's the deal:

My journalistic byline is just my first and last name. I use that for all nonfiction/journalism pieces, including my freelance work.

But my freelance work often has nicknames, because most of it is Web-based, either for HorrorTalk (where I'm "The Hitman") or Raiderfans.net (where I'm "Ace," like here, short for "AceRimRat"), and those sites both sort of started out as forums with anonymous pseudonyms.

In fact, I still use my Hitman nickname on HorrorTalk without my name, but that's going to change with my next review, because everyone else is switching, or so it seems.

And then, for "Dead Hunt," I used my full name for the credits, first-middle-last. Why, I was asked?

Well, to differentiate my fiction-type work from my journalism-type work, really.

(The joke: The two Asian guys involved both use their full names, and not a one of them is an Asian name... Six names, nothing Asian whatsoever.)

But I digress. Point is, I like the idea of sort of separating the two.

The reason I bring it up - well, the reason I bring it up is because it was sort of on my mind, and the reason it's sort of on my mind is I'm working on a pair of other projects, and I was thinking about what to put on them.

One is a short fiction piece I'm submitting to a magazine. That was easy - full name, since it's my fiction work.

The other is a longer, freelance nonfiction project I'm discussing with a company. (No details to go into yet, it's still just a discussion.) I found myself wondering if I should use my journalistic byline or my non-journalistic byline. On one hand, it's a nonfiction piece, that leans me toward my journalism byline. But it's completely unlike anything I've done before, more or less - it's not a newspaper thing, or a magzine thing, or a Web journalism thing. And that leans me toward my more, um, "exotic" byline (if that's the right word).

Funny thing is, I don't use my middle name for anything. I use my middle initial on things like checks and credit cards, but I hardly ever use my middle name. I don't even much like it, though it's not that bad, and I do enjoy being named for my great-grandfather(s).

At least I have one, though. Neither of my parents does, which is probably why they gave me one.

If it's important, I'll remember it

The downside of blog-as-diary/journal is that sometimes I think of things I want to write here at inconvenient times (such as, say, on my commute home) but by the time I get to a computer, I've either forgotten what I wanted to write or gotten distracted... and forgotten what I wanted to write.

For instance, there was a father's day-type thing I was going to write, sort of a tribute to my Dad. I had it all plotted out on the drive home, then I got home and had to do something, like pee, and by the time I booted up the ol' computer...

Poof. Gone.

Then the other night, in bed, dozing, I thought of a post - just a few random points/thoughts for the day.

Then I dozed off. By the time I woke up...

Poof. Gone.

So while you've been deprived of a few blogs by a combination of forgetfulness and work exhaustion, you've gotten this one.

Almost a fair trade.

I've been hacking away at another Web project this weekend: The Raiders Research Project.

It's probably only of interest to you Raiders fans out there - do I actually have any among my readers? - because what it is, is a compilation, or the beginnings of a compilation, of lots of random Raiders information. There are lineups, there are NFL Europe allocations, there's other stuff. And it's all just beginning.

Of course, it's also the rantings of an anal-retentive/obsessive-compulsive fan, so it's not exactly for the masses.

And I can't Web program for squat - believe me, y'all should be as grateful for Blogger as I am that this looks the way it does, forget those fancy blogs like Stewie's or Crystal's or some of the others in the ol' blogroll - so it's an ugly, ugly looking set of info.

But it's the research contained therein that's the selling point, and I'm quite proud of my efforts so far. I hope justly so.

Good news on the Silver & Black front: I've completed my Raiders media guide string - I've got every one since 1970, now that I won the '73 on eBay. Now on to the '60s and the postseason - I've got a few, but not them all.

This is Dave's fault - he managed to land every single Flyers regular-season media guide ever (that's going back to '67-68, when the Flyers were part of the Second Six in the NHL) and that sort of inspired me onward. And cost me a fortune.

Random movie review: "The Alamo" is every bit as dull as critics said. Skip it unless you're a big fan of history, or from Texas. Patrick Wilson, a fellow Carnegie Mellon alum, is quite good. The rest, I could take or leave.

But if there's one thing "The Alamo" got right, it's the recent trend of long-ass movies, and I don't just mean the "director's cut" versions - so many movies clock in at two hours-plus these days... I think in some cases, that's good, and some bad. It gives movies based on novels some extra depth - which is always my complaint with movies based on books. Take "Jurassic Park." The book is an excellent bit of science/action fiction. The movie is a big chase. Not a bad flick (it's in my collection) but nowhere near what the book was. Longer movies, more depth, more character, more interest.

And sometimes, unfortunately, just more time in your life you'll never get back.

What to make of the trend? I don't know yet. Horror and action movies aren't known for being lengthy and full of character development.

Watched a bunch of movies today, doing laundry (still not done, damn five-hour dryer), but I didn't finish the CW book I'm working on, "The Army of the Heartland," by Thomas L. Connolly, about the Confederate Army of Tennessee. That slightly irritates me, because a) it's a bit dry; and b) "Book of the Dead," the third book in Preston & Child's Pendergast Trilogy, is out and in my grubby hands, and I want to get to it. I've only been waiting like an entire year.

But I can't read more than one book at once. I just can't. I get confused, and forgetful, and if you think that's not a problem, you should've seen the father's day post I should've written.

A quick DVD summary, from my recent first viewings:
• "Munich": Excellent. Very, very tough to watch. Bloody, heavy, but important. And none of the schmaltz that occasionally invades even the serious Spielberg (i.e. the bookends of "Saving Pvt. Ryan"). Very powerful. Also long as hell, but worth it.
• "Skyhigh": Fun Japanese flick from the director of the most excellent "Versus." Chicks and swords are always good times.
• "Mr. and Mrs. Smith," director's cut: Almost as disappointing as the underwhelming theatrical cut. Pretty people, some good lines, some great action, but just somehow unimpressive. I wasn't impressed with the theatrical cut when I saw it, but I heard the DC was a little more smooth, a little more raw, so I went for it.
• "Alive": More foreign fun from Ryuhei Kitamura, but this one didn't make nearly as much sense. But man, the dude makes some excellent movies, just for the imagery and chaos and combat. I preferred "Skyhigh," and prefer "Versus" to both. But still pretty slick. And for "Versus" fans, a little more Sakaki-vs.-Sakaguchi action.
• "Underworld Evolution": Also disappointing. I enjoy the original "Underworld even if it is more style than substance (much, much more). But this one didn't have the style OR the substance. Promising start, then all downhill.
• "Stay": My buddy Anthony loaned me this one and asked me if I could figure out what it was about. Hell if I know. I was completely baffled. Movie made no sense. That's the problem when you mess with reality in a movie - it's like, what's real and what isn't? (No jokes, Lesley.) But in the end, if I read it right, 90 percent of the movie is pure, 100% bullshit. At least it was only an hour 40.

If you're wondering why I'm tossing some little summaries up here rather than writing big ol' reviews for HorrorTalk, well a) most of those movies aren't horror; and b) do you have any idea how long it takes to go through all those features and write the review? Some of those are 2-disc sets, and I might get to the second disc (which in some cases includes a second VERSION of the movie) sometime in 2007. I don't review as much as I should, but I don't review everything I see, either. And frankly, the movie most likely for me to review would be "Underworld E" and I just don't feel like sitting through it again right now. Just too much of a bummer.

I recently bolstered my undersea adventure DVD collection (to join "The Abyss") by picking up three little flicks:
• "Below": An underrated little submarine ghost story written by Darren Aronofsky (who did that movie about drug addiction everybody liked so much but I've never seen and can't remember the title of) and directed by David Twohy (who did "Pitch Black" and whose flicks I generally dig).
• "DeepStar Six": A crappy full-frame DVD for a frankly crappy movie I bought more for sentimental value than anything (see below).
• "Leviathan": About the third copy of this I've owned. It's the same movie as DS6, just better.

I've always liked undersea flicks, and this goes back to the late '80s, when a buddy and I desperately wanted to see DS6 (which has some awesome cover art) when it hit the new release shelf at the local video store. (This is back when Bloomsburg didn't have a Blockbuster or anything, just the (late, lamented) local place called Hollywood Video before the chain existed.)

But DS6 was always out.

So we must've rented every other undersea movie we could find (including "Abyss" and "Leviathan") while we waited until the day one of us went into the store and - lo and behold! - DS6 was there.

And boy, when we saw it, were we disappointed. Certainly wasn't worth the wait.

Which brings me back to "Underworld E" and my upcoming preorder blind buy of "Ultraviolet." Thank God Anthony lent me "BloodRayne" before I had to buy it.

Dr. Uwe Boll must be stopped. The only result of his marginal improvement from truly godawful movies ("House of the Dead") to generally hideous ones ("Alone in the Dark") and then a backslide to "Oh, dear Lord" country ("BloodRayne") is that his movies have stopped being so bad as to be funny in their awfulness. "HOTD" may have been the worst movie I ever saw, and could have spawned a drinking game if it had any consistency whatsoever - though it's ridiculous whipsaw inconsistency is part of its charm. But "BloodRayne" just sucked. Bad. So bad, the studio couldn't even get a cover quote from David Manning - the DVD box says something at the bottom like "Exciting action!" with no attribution, which means the studio put it there because it would've looked bad to leave the box blank.

This is a flick with a literally bangin' Kristanna Loken sex scene and it still wasn't worth watching. And the hair. The worst collection of hair in the history of cinema, I'd guess.

Bear in mind, this movie has a cast that includes Sir Ben "I won an Oscar for 'Ghandi'" Kingsley, Michael "Reservoir Dogs" Madsen, Loken from "Terminator 3," Matt Davis, who was good in the aforementioned "Below," Michelle "Resident Evil" Rodriguez, Michael "Eddie and the Cruisers" Pare, Meat "Rocky Horror" Loaf and the jackass who's stunk up the joint in every one of Boll's movies.

I might point out, "AITD" had Christian Slater, Tara Reid (who at least kept most of her clothes on) and Stephen Dorff.

What, does Boll have compromising photos of everyone in Hollywood? How the hell does the guy get these casts? Did these people not SEE "HOTD"? Do they not know ANYONE who did?

Hell, Boll's first film, the straight-to-cable "Sanctimony," had Cap Van Dien from "Starship Troopers," Jennifer Rubin and (again) Michael Pare, plus the hot blonde chick from the beginning of "Club Dread."

I mean, this guy gets a couple million bucks to make a video-game movie every couple of years, and he's making Paul W.S. Anderson (who started the VG-specialist trend with "Mortal Kombat," "Resident Evil" and "Alien vs. Predator") look like Orson freakin' Welles.

I don't know the exact budget for "Dead Hunt," but it sure wasn't a million bucks. Wasn't even $100,000. And it's better than all Boll's movies put together, I swear to God, except for the Slater factor and a couple of bangin' sex scenes (Loken and Davis, plus Van Dien and the hot blonde). And when I say better than all his movies put together, I realize that, mathematically speaking, anything times zero is still zero, but you know what I mean.

A couple of random shoutouts, while I'm insomniac'ing and hopped up on caffeine waiting for my laundry:
• A congratulations to my pal Triple-M, who I know reads this even if she never posts comments - she got the new job she's been looking for, at the paper she was looking to get to.
• A get well soon to the aforementioned Lesley, who's got a bad case of something besides the long-distance luv.
• And a few congratulations to the aforementioned Stewie, who was crowing on his blog with good reason about "DH" and other matters.

Munkee roll call:
• Mookie, who has his own Mini-Mookie, thanks to eBay.
• AeroPasquale, from AeroPostale
• Mini-Monkey, the New Jersey Gladiators' mascot
• Rally Monkey, official and from Anaheim
• Flyers Rally Monkey, who I wave at games
• Green Flying Wicked Monkey, who doesn't actually have any wings to fly
• Bonsai Munkee, liberated from the Hallmark store, who grew his own prehensile tail
• Neon Green Upside-down Monkey, who has his own a prehensile tail
• The cool evilmunkee action figure Stewie gave me - scary evilmunkee!
• My bestest munkee bookends ("Big munkee sit. Little munkees puuuuuuuullllllllllll!")
• Two other sets of munkee bookends, not quite so nice
• Two strings of squeaky munkee Mardi Gras beads (girls love 'em!)
• One giant munkee World of Wonder poster (yay!)
Did I miss anybody? I think not.

OK, I think my laundry's almost done, and I'm pretty sure I'm officially delirious. So let's call it a night.

Mood: Goofy (can't you tell)

Have you noticed I'm a very momentum-based writer? This was going to be a short little post, then I got on a roll with the random thoughts...

Do you know what time it is?

It's time to celebrate the 1-year anniversary of this here blog!

That's right, I've been doing this for a whole entire year.

That post-a-day thing sure fell by the wayside, but I'm pretty proud of myself for lasting this long.

What's changed, besides me getting older?

Not much - and that's both good and bad, I guess. This blog has sort of evolved from a random diatribe into a sort of odd little diary, I guess, and I don't know if that's really a benefit or not.

It probably hasn't done much to broaden my audience. I went from talking about things like Civil War generals' names to basically indulging my inner munkee, and I never really turned rambling stream-of-consciousness into anything more coherent.

There are some days I think of giving up on the blog, but I'd rather post a little less frequently and still keep it up, because I think my few readers do enjoy it, or at least I flatter myself to think so.

I'm still writing for HorrorTalk (less frequently) and Raiderfans.net (more frequently), so there's still plenty on my plate when I'm not at work.

The movie isn't out yet, but should be out sometime this spring or summer - and after all, the movie is what inadvertantly started the blog, so there's something to look forward to there.

My first post was about the theme song Justin Timpane wrote for "Crawler," another Timewarp movie that should come out this year. And oddly enough, it was just last week that I got to hear a potential theme song for "Dead Hunt," thanks to JT.

So I guess the more things change, the more they stay the same.

The screenwriting thing hasn't advanced much - I sent a pitch for an old script to one company, but they didn't bite. I haven't quite found the time/inspiration to get cracking on some other projects. Part of that is my usual sort of lazy apathy, part is that I was very busy at work in the second half of last year, and part is the various health problems I've had this year.

The health problems are generally all better, or at least to the point where I'm used to them or they don't bother me so much, and so that's been a relief. When doctors toss around words like "progressive neurological disease," it's a bit of a buzzkill, you know?

But that's all in the past, more or less, and I'm 31 now, and rather more used to my 30s than I was a year ago, when it was all novel and I was sort of feeling old.

(These days, a few more of those annoying white hairs, several fewer blond ones.)

I haven't accomplished many of the goals I keep setting out for myself (such as joining the gym) but on the other hand, I'm still getting out and about - even on the occasional date - and I'm feeling a lot better about where my life is.

Pharmaceuticals help, which is maybe not the best solution, but if it works, I'm going to go with it, at least for now.

In short, I guess I'm content. I could use a little more adventure in my life, but on the whole, it's not so bad. It's a tough comedown from the excitement of last winter/spring with the filming, and a tough recovery from the stress of running the show at the paper in the fall/winter while my boss was on active duty. But I'm OK. I'm still here, still having fun, still enjoying my life, still being glad to be alive.

One day at a time, I'm avoiding the depression. One day at a time, I'm enjoying life.

One post at a time, I'll keep on writing. I may be crazy, but I'm stubborn. And it's pretty darn cathartic, too.

Thanks for accompanying me on this odd little journey through my life. Hope you'll keep enjoying and keep reading, and before we look around, it'll be another year.

As someone I used to know once said, may it be rich in all that's good. For all of us.

And the munkees.

My Dr. Frankenstein moment

Something very cool happened to Stewie recently: A review he wrote for HorrorTalk was quoted on a box cover for a movie called "Fear of Clowns."



(Ask Aric about it, he's the resident expert.)

Anyway, Stewie is thrilled to death, and he has good reason. Because if anyone on HT is deserving of this kind of thrill, with all due respect to the site's other fine members and reviewers, it's him.

I can say that with confidence, because I'm his editor.

Here's the thing: By day, I'm a copy editor. (Well, by night, but you know what I mean). And being a copy editor means I do a lot of line-editing and headline writing, but one thing I don't get to do much of is work with the reporters. And while it's not necessarily something I'd want to do on a full-time basis, it's something I've always wanted to try.

And I ended up trying it with Stewie. A while back, in the interests of professionalism, HorrorTalk's various reviewers paired off to edit each other's reviews - the better to get grammar and spelling right, etc.

So Stewie and I, being buddies, paired up; and we made a deal - I'm a professional editor, and he would have to deal with my icy professionalism, and in exchange, I'd do everything I could to help him achieve his goal - which was to become a better writer/reviewer, the kind who gets his name on a DVD box, among other things.

Understand a couple of things here: First of all, Stewie is not, by trade or training, in the business of words. Whereas, I am, on both counts. And HT has a stable of excellent reviewers, and there is no offense or disrespect intended toward any of them in this post. I can say that without false modesty because, well, I'm one of those excellent reviewers.

But here's the thing: Stewie, once upon a time, wrote a dreadful review. Really dreadful - he'll admit it, he's his own worst critic. And he got called on it by a reader. And that may have been the best thing that happened to him. Because, for whatever reason, Stewie decided he was never going to be embarrassed like that again. And he set out to become the best reviewer he could be.

And he did it. Stewie is, for my money, the flat-out, hands-down best reviewer on HorrorTalk. Let me reiterate - HorrorTalk has plenty of damn fine reviewers. But if I had to pick one, right here, right now, it would be him. (Lest you think I'm completely full of it, let me point out, I still think I'm a better writer than him. Insert grin here.)

The best part is, I was part of that journey, that transformation, that he went through. It took years, thousands of words, and plenty of notes back in forth in different colors and increasing levels of bold fonts. And it's been one of the greatest experiences of my life.

One of the greatest. I swear to God.

Let me explain.

If there's one character trait that defines Stewie when it comes to movies, it's enthusiasm. Stewie loves what he loves, hates what he hates, and isn't afraid to shout so to the rafters.

He's fair, and that's clutch.

But when I started working with him, he had no voice.

And a voice is what makes a writer.

Look, writers learn and (hopefully) improve every day. I'm still learning - I'm twice the writer I was before "Dead Hunt," and I owe Don Dohler and Joe Ripple a lot of that. They had the experience that I didn't, and they used it to teach me.

I tried to do something similar with Stewie. I tried to use my own experience, my own training, to help him find his voice.

That's not always easy. Because every writer has a different voice, and mine is not Stewie's. But in the beginning, the only way I could show him how to find his, was by showing him mine.

That sounded far more perverse than I mean it.

But after four years of college in a creative writing program, three scripts, countless newspaper articles and so forth, I have what I'll call a mature voice. That is to say, while it may grow and change over time, the basic structure is there. It is what it is, and it is mine.

The problem with working with Stewie in the beginning is that we have some definite similarities in voice, but some very fundamental differences.

My reviews are very journalistic. Objective, precise, clever, but ... detached, maybe? Cold? It's my style - they read like they're written by a newspaperman, which is, after all, what I am.

And while the beginning stages of my partnership with Stewie involved elevating the level of his writing, the danger I often felt like I had to skirt was that I didn't want my voice to rub off on him. I just lacked the training or technique to be able to teach him without using my own voice as an example.

(OK, I'm going to pause a moment to make it absolutely clear, this is not intended to steal Stewie's thunder or horn in on his glory. On the contrary, I want you, my dear readers, to see what he went through to get to this point. This is a tribute - to him, not to me. We now resume our regularly scheduled posting.)

We'll fast-forward a bit, though, and get to the point that was really rewarding for me: The point where Stewie really began to find his voice.

At a certain point - and I always edit him with the caveat that the name atop the review is his, and thus the final call on any point of dispute is his - he began to stand on his own two feet. That is to say, he began to stand up to me.

In the beginning, he more or less had to take my word for certain things, and when I offered him suggestions on word choice or phrasing, he usually accepted mine. No more.

One day, more or less, he began to be able to say what he wanted to say.

It came in fits and starts, and sometimes he needed help, and sometimes he'd get mad at me, and sometimes I'd get mad at him. Let me tell you, two stubborn people, communicating without the benefit of inflection via the Internet - oy!

But more and more each review (I almost said "each day," since he is undoubtedly the most prolific of our reviewers!), he began finding the words to say just what he wanted to say, just what he meant.

I stopped being a teacher and really began to be an editor - a collaborator. And Stewie had found his voice.

And I love his voice. I love it. I know I'm biased, but I think he brings to the table exactly what a great reviewer should.

• He tells you what he thinks.
• He tells you if a DVD is worth watching or not.
• He tells you in his own way, in his own style.
• He tells you with eloquence.
• He tells you with enthusiasm.

You can really feel the love Stewie has for movies in his reviews. And they're damn funny. But thorough. And fair. And all the things a good review should be. But this inimitable style, this inimitable voice, that's become, to many parts of the horror DVD world, the voice of HorrorTalk.

And that benefits all of us who put our own reputations on the line with our words at that site.

There's an irony in that, in Stewie's crowning moment, Lionsgate quoted exactly one word. Because the thing about Stewie's reviews is that you have to read them. They make you want to keep on reading. I don't even have the words. The "je ne sais quoi" that is what elevates man above the apes, is what elevates Stewie above the common reviewer.

And to think, I knew him when.

He gives me plenty of credit - maybe more than I deserve - and while I appreciate the thanks, unquestionably, the rewards of our partnership go far beyond a thank you or two, a favor, the editing he does for me.

The reward I cherish the most is seeing what he's become, knowing what he had been, thinking about what he will become - and smiling all the while.

Stewie is one of my best friends - our friendship extends far beyond HT, far beyond our writing together, far beyond our carousing. There are many things I thank him for, many reasons I am grateful each day that I know him. But this post isn't about that. That's for me and him. And maybe Freak.

This post about something special. Someone special. A reviewer who set out to become the best reviewer he could be, and did it.

Enjoy the DVD box, Stewie. You earned it. I would know. I got to watch from the best seat in the house.

Links:
• Lionsgate Horror
• "Fear of Clowns"

And, on a lighter note:

• Random gross anatomical fact of the day: McDonald's Shamrock shakes come out the same color they go in: Bright freakin' green. I knew I gave up fast food for a reason. That's what I get for indulging myself.

• And finally, the Ling-Ling moment of the day: (Ling-Ling, as in "Drawn Together.") So Cyndi Lauper put out an album recently called "Body Acoustic." And on it, she does covers of her own songs in remixed fashion. Of course, she does a version of "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun," her biggest hit. And she pairs up with a Japanese pop group called, of all things, Puffy AmiYumi. It's two girls, Ami and Yumi, and in that respect, I suppose, not too different from the Twins (see earlier post). But the Ling-Ling moment comes when Ami and Yumi sing the chorus - I should pause to point out a Ling-Ling moment is my new way of describing when something so ridiculously stereotypically Asian happens that I just have to cringe for my heritage. So the chorus is "Girls, they want, wanna have fun. Girls. Wanna have..." And Ami and Yumi, in their little Asian accents, sing, phonetically: "Girs, they wah, wa-ah have fuh, girs. Wa-ah have..." That's right. They can't pronounce the "n"s and "r"s in the damn words. And we wonder why people make fun of us.

Going for the silver (and more)

Boy, the way the Winter Olympics are going for the U.S. team, you'd think they're being coached by Dr. Heimlich.

Today, Sasha Cohen apparently fell not once, but twice, with the figure skating gold on the line. Bode Miller, last I checked, is still oh-fer, and one of the X-Gamers hotdogged her way right out of first.

And let's not get into the hockey team. The only miracle this time around was that they won a game (against, I believe, that noted hockey power Whogivesafuckistan). Oof. That's going to leave a mark. When the best thing you can say about the U.S. performance is that the Canadians will be more upset that THEIR team imploded, well, they care more, too.

It's kind of sad. I like rooting for the underdog (a Japanese figure skating gold?!) and anybody in any sport where there's a real good chance of a NASCAR-esque disaster (bobsledding, luge, ski jumping, etc.). And well, the curling's just entertaining, even if it makes absolutely no sense and the players scream like Monica Seles while essentially bowling on ice.

But I'm a patriot, too, and I always want the Americans to do well. And I suppose they are, in a way, being tied for third in medals (and tied for third in golds) last I saw. But still, in most of the glamour events, that gagging noise you heard was an American favorite finishing somewhere below the success equivalent of the Mason-Dixon line.

Let's get one thing straight - I'm not talking about the "happy to be here" Americans, the ones who are second or third on the team and whose idea of winning is just getting off the plane and into uniform. I'm happy for them - that's a lesson I learned as a kid, when I knew somebody who knew somebody whose sister came in last in her Olympic event, or something. I said that had to suck, and my friend said, oh no, they were delighted, she was just happy to be IN the Olympics.

And now that adulthood has crunched the snot out of some of my childhood dreams of grandeur, I certainly understand that winning isn't everything - especially if the only way you're going to win is natural disaster or a whole lot of other people's failed drug tests.

So I'm happy for those people - the archetypal Jamaican bobsledders, as it were.

But if you're everywhere, like, say Bode Miller - whose face was on every magazine this side of GQ and Playgirl (and maybe it was there, too, I don't read either one, they just sounded like good examples)...

Where was I?

Oh yeah, Bode Miller. Who got all the attention and has won Jack and Shit. And doesn't seem to care, one way or the other. Not very inspiring, on the slopes or off.

Of course, the choke job of the year might go to the Italian figure skaters who just soap opera'd the hell out of each other. You know the ones. They came out of retirement to compete, and he dropped her at the end of the short program, killing their medal hopes. She actually stood on the ice GLARING at him. I mean, looks could kill, he'd be dead. They didn't look each other in the face until they were actually on the ice for the long program. I actually stayed up to watch to see if she's slit his throat with a skate blade. But they made up afterward. I wasn't sure whether to be happy for him, or just kind of disappointed she didn't go postal.

Not the most egregious disaster, but certainly the most entertaining.

This is going to be a two-themer today, so consider this a transition. I know, that whole switching gears thing usually results in anarchy, but I was surfing the ol' blogroll today and realized I was going to write an overlong comment on Aric's blog.

He wrote about how he got paid for an article he'd written for a major genre magazine, and it really made him feel like a "real" writer.

And I was thinking about how odd that was, considering he's written (and directed) two horror films.

But I guess it's because he considers himself a filmmaker, and that's part of the job, and this is more like journalism, and so it's something out of the realm of his "regular" gig.

And that got me thinking some more.

See, I'm the opposite. I'm a journalist for a living. I've worked for four newspapers, been published in all four, and freelance for two Web sites which, while they don't pay me, put my byline out there in front of a large audience. So does that make me a "real" writer? By Aric's definition, yes.

But to me, that's not a big deal - it happens all the time (not so much now that I'm an editor, but still...). It's part of my regular gig.

On the other hand, "Dead Hunt" really will make me feel like a "real" writer when it finally comes out. Because that's what I've always wanted to do, and never done, write creatively.

Part of it, I'm sure, is because my very expensive and handsomely framed degree is in creative writing (I framed it, like a doctor, but not to prove my credentials - to hang over my desk to remind myself that I should be writing something when I'm not). And I've never had any fiction/poetry/etc. published. Just newspaper articles. And while having your byline in a major regional - or even major metro - newspaper is nothing to sneeze at, like I said, it's part of the job.

The movie is something else entirely. Call it validation, of all the money my parents paid for that degree; call it vindication, against all the people who ripped my stuff to shreds in college and my own underachieving nature.

But I guess in the end, what makes you feel like a "real" writer is... whatever makes you feel like a "real" writer. Aric and I are just coming at it from opposite ends of the spectrum.

Of course, he's still ahead of me. He's got a check in hand.

Links:
• Torino 2006 on NBC
• Choking, in sports, Wikipedia-style
• "What Makes a Real Writer?" by Susan Taylor Brown

I was thinking of changing the title of my blog to "Just a little munkee in a great big world," but I'd like to maintain some shred of dignity, or maturity, or some -ity. Plus, my pharmaceuticals are working. Or maybe that's part of the problem.

Catching up with...

I had a cassette when I was younger called "Catching Up With... Depeche Mode."

Since I haven't posted in a while, I figured it was a good theory.

What am I up to?

Well, first off, I wrote another column for Raiderfans.net, about the hiring of new Raiders coach Art Shell. Well, he's really the old Raiders coach. But he's one of my favorites.

• Glory Days


I also read another book. This one's a short one, on an odd little battle of the Civil War that featured some folks from my home state of Pennsylvania, from Coal Country, not far from where I grew up. They built a mine - "hah! a mine!" - under Confederate trenches during the siege of Petersburg, Va., and BLEW IT UP. An interesting little book, and one of the few (yeah, there are about three on some battle you've never heard of - that's Civil War history for you) on this Yankee misadventure. Yeah, they blew up the battle, too.

Speaking of growing up in rural Pennsylvania, I've been (like everyone else) cracking jokes about Vice President Cheney shooting some poor schmuck while hunting last week. You know, what's the big deal about shooting somebody hunting? I'm from redneckville. We got the first day of hunting season off from school. I'm not kidding. Hey, I took the extra day on the end of Thanksgiving vacation. No complaints.

But really, every year, there's pictures of a dozen kids in the Sports section, holding up their first buck/doe/etc. And a picture on Page One of some kid holding up his first relative. Accidents happen.

But what really gets me is that when the dude he shot got out of the hospital, he APOLOGIZED to Cheney. Sorry, Mr. Veep, sir, I shouldn't have gotten my face in the way of your shot.

Wait.

Look, if my best friend SHOT ME IN THE FACE, I'd kick the crap out of him. And we've been friends since we were 6 years old. I'd smack him upside the head.

And if the vice president of the United States shot me in the face, I wouldn't apologize. I'd tell him I expect to be Ambassador to Someplace Warm.

But hey, the guy only gave what, $3,000 to the campaign? Lucky he didn't give $1,000, or it might have been buckshot, not birdshot. (The difference between birdshot and buckshot, you ask? The difference between walking out of the hospital a few days later - heart attack and all - and a closed-casket funeral.)

So that's what I've been up to. Now we're caught up.

Links:
• The Battle of the Crater
• The Coal Region of Pennsylvania, including Columbia County
• Dick Cheney
• The CASH Hunting Accident Center
• The Huffington Post, for the conspiracy theorists (two senior citizens, guns, booze, two women who aren't their wives...)
• Texas hunter education

I might point out Centralia, my home county's part of Coal Country, home of the world's most impressive underground mine fire. It ate the town. I still remember calling the government for my local paper's FYI Guide to ask which of the half-dozen residents would be mayor this year. Centralia is apparently, something of a tourist attraction now, to be visited. We locals, on the other hand, drive through AS FAST AS WE CAN. I remember stories of people going outside to go to work and find the street had swallowed their car. I remember the little kid who went out back to play, and his older brother heard him screaming and rushed onto the back porch to find him dangling from a tree root over the Inferno after the back yard fell into the earth. They eventually eminent domain'ed the entire town. Except the stubborn holdouts who wouldn't move because they'd grown up there, their parents had grown up there, etc. That's Darwinism, folks. And certainly not intelligent design.

A writer who doesn't like to write?

Over the past few eons, Renaldo, Stewie and (sort of) Lesley all wrote about these moleskin/moleskine notebooks.

No, I don't know which is the correct spelling. No, I'm not mocking whichever one of my above blog-colleagues misspelled the darn thing. I've been editing too long to not realize there's all kinds of chaos when it comes to spelling, particularly if brand names are involved. You know, like Ping-Pong, the trade name for what most of us call, well, pingpong. The not-trade-name.

So whether it's moleskin or moleskine, or whatever, the point is, these three are into cool little notebooks used by famous people to write down famous things.

Which got me thinking.

Well, that and getting up way too early this morning due to various misunderstandings and obligations.

So before I take a nap, I find myself with something to write about.

Writing.

Handwriting.

Not handwriting, like penmanship, handwriting, like writing stuff down by hand. I've been scribbling notes all over a piece of paper this morning (see "obligations," above) and that brings me full circle to moleskin(e) notebooks, because I don't use a notebook (except to actually take notes, such as, say, when playing D&D, or Madden 2006, or if I'm at a presentation or class or something, or when covering something journalistically).

These guys clearly like to write things down in these special notebooks, emulating the great writers of yore.

I, a writer (or at least I fancy myself one), hate writing things down.

No, not true. It's not that I hate writing things down, it's that, when I write (such as now, or on my columns or reviews), I never physically write.

I type. I do all my drafts/notes/etc. on a computer. This one, in fact.

So if I had a moleskin(e) notebook - and believe me, reading my colleagues' blogs, the temptation is there to buy one - it would just be, well, a nice blank notebook.

I can only think of about four things I regularly write stuff down for, and the only thing I've recently bought any kind of notebook for is my D&D game - so I can track hit points, etc. - and I would never use such an impressive notebook on any of them. That's not sarcasm, that "impressive." I'm impressed by any fancy, literary-type thing. It's just that I would never use it. I have nothing to write in it - I would want to write my drafts, my notes, my poetry, etc.

But I type all that. In Word.

Why is this?

I think there are a couple of reasons.

First, as you may have realized, I'm something of a stream-of-consciousness kind of writer. You here, my blog readers, see what I'm like basically off-the-cuff. (As opposed to my fiction, say, which goes through drafts and revisions.)

And frankly, I type a helluva lot faster than I write. And when I'm done, I can read my typing, even if there are typos galore.

My handwriting, especially when rushed is, to put it charitably, bad.

Heck, even as a journalist, I use a recorder (or type, in the office) rather than relying on my handwriting to take notes. That's right, I'd rather trust double-A batteries and cheap-ass technology than my own penmanship.

(Aside, the first "C" I ever got in school was in third-grade penmanship. One of only three Cs I got in my whole academic career.)

Second, well, wait, second was the handwriting quality.

Third, everything's on the computer. I can lose little slips of paper with stuff jotted on them. Sure, knock wood, I'm relying on my computer to avoid having problems (like the time I lost all my e-mail when Entourage crashed last year). But the point is, having it all here, where I can call it up, beats having to find it in my disorganized life.

Fourth, revisions. Like I said, I don't revise this blog. But I revise my other work - and it's easier to hit delete and cut-and-paste than it is to rewrite all kinds of stuff by hand. Especially when (a) your handwriting sucks; and (b) you think fast and write a lot slower.

Anyone who's ever seen anything hand-written I've revised could tell you, I've got stuff scribbled in between lines, I've got stuff in the margins, I've got stuff along the sides, upside down, crammed in wherever.

Not a pretty picture. Certainly not worthy of a moleskin notebook. Or even a moleskine one.

Links:
• Modo & Modo, makers of Moleskine (!) notebooks
• Moleskine, Wikipedia-style (note the reference to moleskin; this isn't clarifying for me)
• Moleskin, Wikipedia-style

Nap time!

And you thought you were the only one!

Somedays, I think I can count the number of people who read this blog on one hand. Not that there's anything wrong with a single one of my "regular" readers - in fact, they're all pretty excellent people - and many fine bloggers in their own right.

But as a writer, I guess I harbor a secret, hidden desire for a larger audience. Who doesn't think of Wonkette, for instance, and say... "Now THAT is a major-league blogger!"

My own father reads Wonkette more often than he reads this, I suspect.

But every once in a while, someone randomly stumbles across the blog and joins in the fun, and that always warms my heart. The Patron Saint of Smart Mouths, for instance. Imagine, a religious icon, here!

And then, once in a while - or in this case, once - there's a real jaw-dropper.

Like when Stewie happened to be checking the e-mail for our Web site, DonkeyHat, which is probably the fourth-string e-mail for both of us (the Bret Engemann of e-mail, as it were...), and he called my attention to the first and only e-mail I've gotten at DonkeyHat.

And the first and only blog-related e-mail I've gotten from a complete stranger.

You know who it was from? An executive at Barber Foods!

They somehow found my first post about their delightful Chicken Cordon Bleu (and before my recent mention-in-passing of their tasty frozen yumminess).

And they agreed with me - that coupons are in order! OK, I wrote back a month after they wrote, but hey, they wrote nine months after I posted, so I'll be watching the mail!

That's right. I'll endorse your product, right here on this blog, in exchange for money and/or coupons! I've embraced my adopted homeland and the capitalism it stands for with open arms.

And in celebration of attracting my first bit of corporate attention, I'm posting my first-ever blog pic!



That's right: Mookie J. Monkey and I are ready and waiting to endorse your product!

This message brought to you by Barber Foods' Chicken Cordon Bleu, now available in convenient family six-packs! Chicken, ham and a tasty blend of cheeses for the whole family!

(Oh, and companies: I've added an e-mail to my profile. That way, you won't have to wait for me to meander through three other e-mail addresses. Mookie's ready and waiting! No vegetables, please.)

Links:
• Bret Engemann, ex-Raider, and his adventures in Europe
• The lighter side of endorsements
• And the darker side

I was thinking that now that I've learned to post pictures, I could participate in Half-Nekkid Thursday, but I'm thinking I don't need to see that, and neither do y'all.

But there may yet be more pictures. If, now that I have my Foley-Belsaw Institute Model 200 Key Machine - a crucial tool for a growing field! - I can hang on to all 10 fingers. I cut my first key by code today - yes, it opened the lock! - and I've still got 'em, so so-far-so-good, eh? Almost done with the basic course! I'd finish tonight, but the damn machine's so loud I'm afraid I'll wake the neighbors.

Random Super Bowl prediction: I want the Steelers to win, but I think the Seahawks will. Seattle, 27-21. (And no, since the Raiders aren't in it, I don't really care - I'm basically going to enjoy the party I'm going to, and hope for a good game.)

I can't really lose as far as allegiance, though: I'm rooting for Pittsburgh, because I went to school out there and I admire the Yinzers' spirit (and it would be tough to root for an old AFC West foe in the Hawks), but Seattle quarterback Matt Hasselbeck (my prediction for MVP) is the son of ex-Raider tight end Don Hasselbeck, part of the Raiders' Super Bowl XVIII championship team.

Random Hasselbeck trivia: Don Hasselbeck, who blocked an XP in that Super Bowl, had two sons, Matt and Tim, who both went to Boston College to play quarterback and wound up in the NFL. And while Matt is getting all the attention this week at the Super Bowl, Tim may be less famous than his wife, Elisabeth, that crazy lil' conservative from "The View" and a former "Survivor" sweetheart.

(Yes, I've seen "The View." It's usually on at the car dealership when I take my baby in for service in the late morning. That's better than when the male equivalent was on - that was even creepier.)