I’m off to beddy-bye now
chest still tickles some
I’m off to beddy-bye now
chest still tickles some
Tag Archives: writing
I’m off to beddy-bye now
chest still tickles some
Protected: part 2
Protected: part 1
Ugh. Is it rude to mark a person’s resume, correcting the spelling, formatting, and grammatical errors? I’d love to grade some of these for an English class.
We have three really horrid resumes in our ‘for review’ pile…seeing as these are programmers, I’d like to think that they could run it through a spell-check or something. I’m tempted to grade them, and put red marks over the errors, so that they could find a gig somewhere else without the embarrassment. It’s not like English is a second language for them, either. (Those seem to come in formatted correctly… even if it’s the same ol’ Microsoft word ‘resume wizard’ style.) Maybe they had someone type the sheets up, and not proof ’em?
Protected:
Noir
This is the city: a soot-covered graveyard of a million vanished dreams, with fifty-story headstones rising from the dirt to cast gray shadows on the spirits of the damned; a rat-infested sewer where the law of survival was to kill them before they can kill you, and don’t look too close to what’s on your plate because you may not like it; a gaudy, unwashed, flabby old hooker with a thousands faces, none of them presentable; a prison whose dingy corridors I’ve walked for seventeen long years, trying to sweep just a little of the scum and garbage off the streets… my name’s Kowalski, and I carry a broom.
Horror Writing
I’ve been thinking lately about horror, and about how best to create it in the course of telling a story in some medium. I’ve been aware of this for a while but it’s only recently that I’ve been articulating it to myself. So I thought I’d write it down now while I’m thinking about it again.
The most potent forms of fear are internal. It’s not the adrenaline panic of being ambushed or pursued. It’s the fear your own mind creates out of an ambiguous situation. When you’re alone in a dark house and you think you hear a noise, the fear you feel is what your mind comes up with out of that ambiguity. There’s nothing objectively wrong or threatening. It’s your own mind that threatens you by attempting to map a coherent pattern onto incoherent data.
In role-playing games, I’ve seen this work…especially on the very excitable. Let’s say that you have assembled a set of clues to a mystery. You’re sitting there at the table and nothing in particular is happening, so you’re sifting through these pieces of paper and trying to put it together. Suddenly, you make a connection between the clues and you have a realization. It isn’t spelled out anywhere. There isn’t a sentence you overlooked that explains the mystery. It’s just that you’ve made the connections and suddenly an explanation appears in your mind that’s frightening. You start to panic a little, and you wave your arms or say something to get the attention of the other players, and you start babbling, trying to explain what you’ve just realized. That terror, that sudden vertiginous feeling of plunging into the dark heart of a mystery is a tremendous sensation. It works because you scare yourself, not because the referee scares you outright.
I got an inkling of this idea a long time ago, when I was in high school. There was news of a tropical storm, and the newscaster explained how storms are named alphabetically starting at the first of the year, so the first storm is named something that begins with A and then the second begins with B and so on–Anna, Bartholomew, Cheryl. And I thought: what if you were watching the news and you heard about a tropical storm named Wanda. And it’s just another storm, no big deal, but then you realize that means it’s the 23rd storm of the year, and that’s a weird and terrible thing that there have been so many.
If you want to scare someone in a story, I feel that it’s best if the audience makes a realization that the characters don’t. This may be because you’ve been privy to information they haven’t witnessed, or simply because you’re thinking about things in a way they aren’t. So the story gives you A and B, and you put them together and get C and that’s what scares you.
Good horror storytelling is all about C, I think. I need to cook up a good spooky Halloween story.
The Monkey brain edibility probe is now on the market, disguised as a ‘healing massage device’. don’t believe it.
The Jiffy-pop Apes are simply using your desire for comfortable scalps to thier own advantage. Don’t succumb! Next thing you know, you’ll be showing your nipples to complete strangers. Settle on boobypops instead.
Just you wait, you’ll see… but then it’ll be far too late for me to help you.
Maybe it’s time to call in the anti-primate revenge squad… sadly, humans are primates too. I wonder if the kittens in capes can possibly make things right?
Moonflower in rain
Gentle water caresses
Let me be your cloud
going to bed.
Sweet dreams, LJ folks.
I’m off to snoozeville.
side note – ahhh!! My baby is past the trouble she was having. 🙂 I’m hoping this means her other symptoms will refresh too… better sleep, less anguish. 🙂
“They say no one will ever rhyme ‘purple’
But I say that someday, those who usurp will!”
oh, and my best rhyme for orange is doorhinge.
I keep it on my foot.
It always comes to rescue me,
when something goes…kaput.
got a big load of code cranked out, and been thinking about 20,000 leagues under the sea in the background. I wonder if I’ll dream about being aboard a sub, playing a turtle shell classic guitar to my sweetheart. Not bad.
*watches a giant squid swim past*
I’d better go electrify the hull.
Goodnight!
ponderings
Half the time I have something to write about I can’t figure out how to go about doing it. I’m not in the “writing” mood right now today, however, I am in the “having something written” mood, so I just can’t please myself. I just sat for about 20-something minutes trying to decide if I was gonna write anything or not, listening to Atom Heart Mother…I know it was twenty something minutes cause the song just ended…and trying to talk to myself in (cue freaky organs…) Crazy Anne Heche Speak like Celestia.. Sometimes I even understand what I’m saying. I’m not gay, nor am I crazy, though… just fun to simulate a fake self-language, in the style of hers.
This afternoon I was sitting in my chair, minding my own business, when out of nowhere I hear this quick pung! (midway between ping! and pong! I’m thinking). I have no idea what caused it, but I know it leapt from the parking lot outside…well, I think so.
Last night, after my sweetheart went to bed, I went out and bought groceries at Publix and purchased there a single unit of my favorite hard-to-find fruit. ( like others more, but it’s rare when I see these.) A pomegranate. I’ve spent the better part of today with my treat, picking out one tiny seeded juice sac at a time, sucking it through my teeth to get all luscious bits, and spitting out the seeds. I love pomegranates. This is my first in quite a while. I can’t seem to find them ever at the green grocer, or Winn Dixie, probably because I’m the only one who likes them. I suppose if we have to invent seedless grapes and seedless oranges… It’s too wet here to grow them locally, but they’re tasty.
Interestingly, the French word for pomegranate is grenade.
I may have a little kitchen experiment tonight, because I’ve stumbled upon a Middle Eastern/Turkish recipes website. I think I’ll make myself a slightly modified aijet beythat. That’s sautéed hard-boiled eggs (new to me) with butter, cinnamon, white pepper, paprika, and salt. It looks good!
raindrops tapping on the window
I’m sitting here writing perl code and looking out of the window. The whole sky is this dull, uniform grey, it’s raining, and I’m thinking “wow. Rain is bizarre. Seriously! It’s stuff falling from the sky. If it were anything else except for water falling, there’d be mass panic. I mean, to get up into the sky, you need a big honking plane or a helicopter or something. It takes effort. It took humanity a few thousand years to get from ‘ug, sky big’ to balloons, and then another few centuries to planes. It takes work to get up there. Anything in the sky is serious stuff.
Apart from a lot of water, which we accept with complete equanimity.”
Now this wet, thick air is moving in over the city… enveloping the entire town in a wet, thick embrace, and mist is condensing on the outside of my window, since it’s maybe 10 degrees cooler inside than out. It’s a day which makes me pine for bed, the comfort of my love’s arms, soft talk and easy sleep.
Side note. When I was 13, my age *was* my shoe size.
Flipping through a book of maps
I come to rest on one of a land not so far from here, a place I’ve never been.
The location has a simple name, one that might make a good one for a pet.
I can see the home of the one I care most for, near the bay, not so far from a lighthouse.
I touch that point on the page, and feel the pulse of my finger there
beating, my heart-rate pressing in slow beats over her city
the tip warming with blood and love, I raise the pointer to my lips and kiss it softly,
imagining that she’s there, a tiny amoeba inside a ridge of my fingerprint.
my hand brushes along the page,
tracing a footpath along the beach with her
walking with shoes off watching the sea lap the shore.
a place where we would warm a bench, play horseshoes.
she could point out the old barn
the big tree in the field
a friendly horse or two
the place where she sings sometimes with her friends.
the sky is gray there, now
air getting cold, wind kicking up
I give her my jacket and my arm
the feeling of her close to me is better than anything else imaginable.
Everything I see reminds me of her
how she’d react, what she’d say
expressions, sounds, scents and emotions.
She touches every cell of my being, permeating, lightening me.
My baby’s going to bed, and I wish her the most healing night possible.
I’m going to hit the sack and read, myself… maybe I can develop some characters for the next story coming.
In other news, I just got an email about an apartment that I was looking at going up for sale. Who knows, maybe I’ll become a homeowner sooner than I thought.
Goodnight.