Why I'm Scared Of White People

So my reading -- you know about my reading, right? Here's what Joe Clifford, the guy running the thing, says:

It's a brutally honest piece about violence, ignorance, and racism, a dangerous topic, and Sean doesn't shy from illumining his own prejudice and weakness, his own part in the play--but just as importantly, he does not apologize (as so many writers in his spot might do) for the same in others. In short, it's a gritty, real, and raw story about American, urban living in the modern age. I am proud to have him read at Lip Service West. (And you should come, because he's right: he fails to bring 10 people, I take the thumbs. Them's the rules. He knows that going in.)

Lip Service West
Friday, August 12
5512 San Pablo Ave. Oakland, CA
7 p.m.

There will be wine and cheese and hot dogs and such things as well as a solid line-up of writers performing edgy autobiography -- this actually is an enjoyable event.

Anyway. Speaking of race and violence, I just put things together, and I realized one of the reasons white people scare me. Aside from Goldman-Sachs. Yes, I am white, but I'm fucked-up white -- my mom was raised by an ama, spoke Tagalog before English, and had the physical habits and mannerisms of a Phillipino. Since I have fetal alcohol syndrome, I have epicanthic folds in my eyes, and have been mistaken for Asian more then once. I grew up in a community that was primarily African- and Mexican-American, and a lot of my speech patterns and mannerisms come from there. I get called everything from 'rice boy' to 'mister man' to 'funky nigger' when I step out of my door.

In other words, yeah, I'm white, but I am under no fucking obligation to be a goddamned example of whiteness, okay?

Anyway, white people creep me out. It's true, and I need to get over it, but there are reasons.

Good reasons. Don't-go-in-the-attic-reasons.

The subject of UPC codes on books came up in one of my email discussion groups, and I just got a full and massive white person flashback. Everything fell into place and I understood why I don't just think of white people as people who tend to be pink-to-buff, but as a group.

A conspiracy.

It started when I was a kid. In my school, whites were very much in the minority, and there was a filthy little trick the administration played in order to increase racial tension enough to mandate regular beatings for the vulnerable.

There was a series of classes, one for each grade, that was designated as being for 'bright' or 'advanced' children. Which meant any white kids who weren't regarded as actively defective, and any non-white kids who actually were bright.

Yes, I was known to be bright. Bright the wrong way. They did not want to encourage that shit.So the only white kids in my classes? The other losers. That's what made them stand out. And I was the biggest loser of them all -- or, rather, the skinniest and weirdest.

I saw the kids in the advanced classes, and they seemed as though they were all together, a unit, and somehow even the other white kids in my class were part of it. I was white, but I wasn't one of the White People.

Events occurred, and junior high, high school, and all along I still feel as though I'm outside of this thing -- but I also know that I'm the kind of person who's prone to feeling this way. How could there actually be a White Thing?

In high school, this white guy named Marty sits in front of me in math, and tells me just the craziest shit I've ever heard a human being say out loud and expect to be taken seriously. There are lasers burning invisible UPC codes into people's foreheads (Marty ruined zebra labels for me), and that lets the government control their minds, and everyone's history is on file with a computer called The Beast, see, like the Beast in Revelations, and...

I mean, he went ON. He did not stop. And every word was crazier than the last, and he insisted that he'd learned this science fiction shit in church. Which I knew was bullshit, because come on. There is no way you'd go to church and hear stuff that was, well. Obviously, transparently false. Nutty.

At that time I was working at the Point Richmond Child Development center, and one of the instructors there invited me to attend her fiancee's baptism. It's always a little hard when someone targets you for conversion -- it's a compliment, but a terrible, stupid, embarrassing compliment that's impossible to receive gracefully.

When I show up for the baptism, I'm first taken aside to attend Sunday School, and that's where I get a shock. All the biggest assholes --

Okay. Black dudes? Generally, one fight. A lot of the time, they'd even act as though they were friends with me afterward, which confused the living fuck out of me. The bad ones?

Black girls and white boys. Black girls would actually hurt you, cut you, do tricks with bobby pins that left blood blisters, and they'd look right at you while they did it, faces cold and mean. It was important to them that you know they didn't like you and they wanted to hurt you.

White boys were just too fucking dumb to live. Stupid, mean, and looking for another white boy they could safely pick on. And every bad-news white boy I knew was in that Sunday school classroom. These were the shitheads who had beat on me for years, just pounded on me until I got scary and they stopped, and here they were talking about the Prince of fucking Peace, and the Love of Christ, and you know?

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!

They were so glad to see me. Real warmth. Whether I got a beating or a cookie depended entirely on how these thuggish sluggish meatloaves related me to their favorite fairy tales. This is a human trait that always inspires me with genuine revulsion.

Anyway, that guy Marty from my math class was there. And he had not been shitting me. All of them were spouting off about how the Wankel engine had been predicted by the Elders of Zion and so on, all of them just radioactive with mutually-reinforced self-approval. So pleased with their lunatic beliefs that they just glowed.

Anyway, after spending an hour listening to these poorly-crafted hominids congratulating themselves on being compassionate, humane, and altogether Christlike, we adjourned to the...

Fuck it. You had to call it a theater. It had theater seating, and a huge glass tank behind red curtains on a stage, and it was dark except for the stage. The preacher came out and began an extensive sermon, one dealing specifically with the yawning mouth of Hell and the torments awaiting the unbeliever.

He was preaching to me.

He had clearly been informed that I was coming, and he addressed himself directly at me, going so far as to point at me in order to punctuate such words as 'sinner.'

How very nice, I thought to myself. As my eyes grew accustomed to the lighting, I was able to look around me and see...

... them. The White People. All the pale folks I seen in school, the ones who had nice clothes and nice lunches, who played together. The ones who had hit me, kicked me, threw stones at me, called me faggot. The girls I had crushes on. The ones on the inside of the White Conspiracy.

All of them, looking at me, smiling hopefully, faces shining in the dark.

Touched By An Imbecile

The fun thing about this technique is that it opens up all kinds of color possibilities for the images if I get the chance to do them as large-scale prints.

The missus is visiting her mom, so I decided to take advantage of her absence and indulge myself by pacing through the house in the dark instead of sleeping. (If she was here, she'd make me turn on a light.) Well, I got an idea so brilliant it impressed even me. I swear to God, I'll be able to retire on this one.

I want to do a TV show called Touched By An Imbecile. You'd get a group of regular old idiots -- you know, like the kind at work, or the ones who have a hard time telling you where the C-clamps are? No one so slow that you'd feel bad about making fun of them, but none of them so smart that it's a good idea to let them drive and vote and stuff. The kind of people who 'feel truth in their heart.'

So we'd give them a van, and have them go around the country and show intelligent, well-educated people that their so-called 'smartness' is just something they put on to avoid facing their basic humanity, and that all it does is keep them from seeing the magic in life. Fun and hijinx will naturally ensue.

Then at the end of the season, the van, with the cast in it, will be driven into a crusher. People will be able to bid on-line for the right to trigger the crushing mechanism a little at a time, and they will be given the option of having their name and image flashed to the people inside the van so they know who's killing them.

Most smart people don't have a lot of money, but if we do this we'll get pretty much all of it.

Ten Things I Learned From H.P. Lovecraft

What the heck. Let's see what happens if I post a few lists.



Please note that these lessons were learned both directly and slantendicularly.

1. A story in which fantastic elements are mingled with realism must be constructed with as much care as if it were a hoax -- and it's possible to utilize many of the same techniques.

2. Don't make horrible statements in public, then repudiate them in private years later. Make your apologies as quickly and loudly as possible.

3. It is possible to say deep and profound things about life and character in fiction while seeming to avoid those subjects. Through prose, pacing, mood, and imagery, the writer may be illuminated as clearly as if by description and incident.

4. It's not enough to be a decent husband. You also have to be persistent.

5. Fantasy is a legitimate and enhancing aspect of reality. A fantasy may not be an expression of reality -- but it is a real fantasy, occupying a real place and function in life.

6. Try and be at least a little bit healthy. Don't kill yourself by eating nothing but shit.

7. Art is an excellent basis for friendship. Nothing cements a relationship like shared creative effort.

8. The universe is without volition. There is no purpose given to us by an outer source. It is our responsibility to find our own purposes, since we're the ones who need and value them.

9. Our perception of the universe is pathetically limited, and the closest thing we have to a real sense, one that connects somewhat directly with objective reality, is mathematics.

10. Monsters are our friends.

Sleazy Elephant

"I meant what I said, and I said what I meant. An elephant's sexually adventurous, one hundred per-cent."

Yesterday Pharyngula posted a link to this video. I did not watch it, nor should you. It's an instructional video showing how to masturbate an elephant properly. Perhaps I'm over-reacting here; just knowing that video exists has forced me to revisit a traumatic experience. To my eternal shame -- though I know it's not my fault -- I have borne witness to deviant elephant sexuality. It was far from pretty.

Look, let's be serious. I am pro-zoo, but there are some animals that simply do not belong in a zoo setting. You look at the elephants in their pen, and it's hard to avoid the idea that given the size and nature of their confinement, what you're seeing is the equivalent of making a small group of people live in a goddamned bathroom. Elephants are long-lived, wide-roaming and highly intelligent. It's no wonder that they'd get a little crazy after being forced into a small enclosure for years.

I remember when I was a kid, some lunatic at the Oakland Zoo decided it would be a good idea to put a baby elephant into the children's zoo. While it was behind bars you could reach and pet its head. Which meant that it could reach out with its trunk and pet you. I was enchanted, of course, and the elephant seemed to take a shine to me. I spent a long time talking to it, scratching its head, letting it put its trunk around me.

But when I thought it was time for me to move on, the elephant thought otherwise. It grabbed my arm and stuck it in-between its trunk and its little baby tusks, and it would not let me go. Poor thing must have been lonely, but it was a curious position for me. On one hand, there was a sense of being deeply complimented. My love of animals made this an experience to be remembered and relished.

Still, it was a bit uncomfortable to think that my new friend could easily break my arm with his nose. After a while some keepers came. One distracted the elephant with apples while the other two pulled me loose. I came out of it feeling sad for the elephant, who must have been very lonely.

A few years ago, I went back to the Oakland Zoo with the Hon. Richard Talleywhacker and his son, who was a toddler at that point. The zoo had changed drastically since I was a child, and all for the better. The vast majority of the animals seemed to have been properly housed, and there was a general lack of that prison-camp atmosphere that can make a zoo one of the most depressing treats life has to offer.

Until we got to the elephants.

We wheeled the slumbering Young Master Talleywhacker up the ramp to the elephant enclosure.

"Should we wake the kid up?" I asked.

"Give him a few minutes," Richard said. And then I saw something that made me very glad that innocent child had his little eyes shut.

If your life is anything like mine, from time to time you find yourself staring helplessly at some abomination, muttering, "Please be a hallucination. Please be a hallucination. Please..."

It never is. Hallucinations are nowhere near as weird and appalling as reality.

"Richard," I said. "Is that actually fucking happening, or are my eyes bad?"

"Dude," he said. "Oh, dude. That ain't right."

"God-damn."

At first glance I thought one elephant was pressing its head against the ass of another elephant. Which was true. But where was its trunk?

Where was its trunk?

Oh, noooooooooooo!

Elephant A had its trunk firmly and fully inserted up the ass of Elephant B. I mean all the way. All-the-way.

Thanks to the internet, I can tell you that an African elephant's trunk is five to six feet long and weighs up to four hundred pounds. Now that is what I call a serious butt plug. I mean, an elephant's ass is pretty roomy, but still. And what the fuck do you even call that act? A Serengeti Steamer? Naso-annilingus? Man, I wish I knew Latin.

I had to wonder if either of those pachydermatous degenerates was my childhood friend. As I said earlier, elephants are long lived.

As we stood there, stunned, things got worse. Elephant A pulled its shit-crusted trunk (Dude, I wanted to scream, that's your nose!) s-l-o-w-l-y -- sensously! -- out of Elephant B's asshole. Oh, that was bad.

And then, again, it got worse. When the tip of A's trunk finally saw the light of day, it was clutching a steaming lump of something green. Which A then popped into his mouth.

And then, chewing thoughtfully, he went back for more. He was actually reaching up the other elephant's ass so far he was able to grab the shit while it was still green. It made me want to floss.

"See," I said. "This is exactly why prison reform should be America's number one social issue."

That broke our horrified paralysis. Gently wheeling the babycart around so as not to awaken the slumbering infant, we silently went on our way.

Cross Your Fingers...

Why is this man smiling?
Tune in tomorrow and find out!

Well, I typed a whole bunch of words yesterday but the five most important to me were 'the end' and 'to be continued.' After four years I've finished what I think is probably going maybe to be if I'm lucky a solid version of the first volume of the damned novel. The first chapters of this version are dated July 3, 2008 and the current draft is just over ninety-four thousand words. I've got a suspicion that the Monday night mob are going to tell me that some of it seems rushed and that I need to describe the settings more thoroughly.

Even if they don't, I still think that's the case. But I'm done enough to be able to look at the whole thing. I went through it and read each fiftieth page and thought about what had happened over the course of those fifty pages that had led the characters to this moment in the story. The manuscript is three-hundred and thirty-two pages long. It's a novel, all right. But is it a good novel?

Keep your fingers crossed.

One question that's starting to concern me is whether or not I should serialize the novel on-line. I'm not at all concerned about potential loss of individual sales. What I'm wondering is whether or not it will affect my chances of selling the book to a publisher. Gonna have to do some research.

Anyway, I'm going to let it sit for a while and focus on art for a couple of months before going back and doing a line edit, and then I'm going to be giving out reading copies.

(By the way, if anyone is interested in being a reader please feel free to let me know; put The Ghost Rockers into the title of your email and I'll get back to you -- the first ten people are in.)

After I get feedback on those I'll do one last edit and start looking for an agent. And while I work on those edits I'll also be starting to get into the next volume -- by developing one while finishing the other I'll be able to keep the continuity tighter.

The novel is very thoroughly plotted from the events leading to the end of the next volume on -- but the immediate future of things is entirely up in the air. I have no idea what's going to happen next -- which is another reason why I'll be working on that issue at the same time I'm reviewing the previous events.

It's a pretty odd piece of work -- it's hard to tell if it's a roast fantasy with a buddy soap opera stuffing or a confessional autobiography frosted with horror. There's a good bit of social realism and some fireworks and a few decent monsters and some tunes and fried egg-cheese-and-bologna sandwiches for Pete's sake.

Boy do I hope it doesn't suck. I mean, anything this big and loud and ridiculous -- it is just five inches to the left of being one of those things with a map and a glossary, if that, all kinds of ghosts and creatures and historical anachronisms and so on -- so of course it sucks.

But does it suck properly?

A Quick Progress Report

Just to start off, tomorrow night I'm going to the reception for the latest issue of the award-winning Milvia Street magazine. They used four or five pieces of mine, depending on whether they published one or both of the hyeanodon drawings. Here they are! I'm pretty sure they gave Bluehive a color page but we shall see.

This one actually turned out to be my first print sale. The missus's dad was staying with us and when he saw the large print of this he wanted to buy it. I'm letting her handle the financial side of things...

This is one of a series of drawings I did for my sister's aborted website. She wanted a retro look so I obliged.

So I decided that since the novel was going awry and it was getting harder and harder for me to do anything but visual art stuff it was high time for a little tough lovin'. The rule is now a thousand pages-I-mean-words a day. Every day. Creatively I'm a sprinter, not a marathon runner, so this kind of rule is hard for me to stick to.

But I've been doing okay so far. I topped 70,000 words this morning -- for you non-writers, that's a respectable length for a novel, one of those big fat bestselling rat-smashers runs about 100,000 words -- and I can see the end from here. I can imagine being done with this draft inside of a month. We'll see, but it's possible.

As for short fiction. My tough guy dinosaur story for David Byron isn't talking to me -- I should have finished the damned thing in one go. Note to self -- knock out the rough draft to a short story in one sitting if at all possible.

But the story I'd planned to give to Milvia Street was three times longer than they'd publish. So I sent it off to Rob and it's going to be in Swill. This suits me fine -- it's one of the best things I've written and I really, really like the idea that Ellen Datlow, editor of horror half of the Year's Best Fantasy and Horror will get a chance to read it. It's called Hate Her, Hate Her, Tribulator! and it wasn't until I'd finished the second or third draft that I realized it was a deal with the Devil story. Instead of the usual approach where the point is to come up with a twist on the fulfilled wish (there is one of those but it's not the center of the story) I show how the devil-character, the Tribulator, is destroyed by culture shock. It also features very, very jaundiced views of both of my romantic relationships -- something I didn't know I was doing while I was writing it.

Oh, it is a mean little unit.

Which means the creepy/funny SF bar story I'd written for Swill is now free. I'll do a rewrite this weekend and get it of to Mr. Byron to compensate for the loss of the story I'd promised him before.

So I need to come up with something for Milvia Street and something for Monday Night. One piece is going to be about my first three clear memories -- bedwetting, agnosticism, and a doberman attack. The other? I'm hunting for inspiration.

I'm putting off scheduling a print day for my art until I'm done with the Anomalocaris canadensis piece. Yesterday I spent some time studying Illustrator techniques for handling color rendering. One that looks interesting is to use the gradient tool to lay in rough tones, then convert it to a gradient mesh and refine it. So that's the tack I'm taking. Soon as I get this posted it's gonna be time to pick some colors and start laying down gradients...

Speculative Biology of the Limbus Part One: A Desperate, Pathetic Plea for Thoughts and Inspiration

Another linoleum cut, this one based on a dried piranha I picked up at a flea market.

I'm asking for some inspiration regarding a certain element of the novel. Even if I don't get any response I'm sure that just laying it out will give me a chance to think about things in a different way.

So here's the official Spoiler Warning! If you might want to read the novel at some point, be warned that you're getting inside information here. My own thought is that if knowing this stuff ruins the reading experience for you than I haven't written a good enough book -- but others are more sensitive to these things than I am.

One of the most difficult aspects of writing the novel has been the ongoing process of conceiving the... Well, in this story it's a facet of the afterlife but you can think of it as Fairyland, Oz, Middle Earth, the Enchanted Forest, the Monster Zone.

It's called the Limbus. I chose the name after searching randomly through the dictionary. I needed a name for the place between life and the real afterlife, the place where souls got a chance to let go of their attachments to life before moving on.

Later I found out that in Medieval theology the Limbus was a place between Heaven and Hell, while in biology a limbus is an indeterminate area of tissue between two organs. This was interesting because if you put those two concepts together, well, that's what the Limbus is in the novel.

(For the record, my official position is to deny the existence of souls and the afterlife and any type of Easter Bunny stuff at all. My honest position is a lot spookier and more complicated and will be the subject of an upcoming essay.

But for the novel I'm proposing an unusual version of life after death that plays into cultural expectations and messes with them at the same time...)

Anyway. The Limbus is just a part of the natural world, of the cycle of life energies that extends far beyond our perceived existence. And it originated as part of the Earth before it grew into the Limbus.

It started out as a farm in Florida and the first sign that it was becoming something other than a patch of land was when the living things both plant and animal began to change.

In the Limbus organisms can change shape to match the desires and fears they have for their bodies. This notion was originally in place to allow for some metamorphoses on the parts of the lead characters but then I realized that if that was a natural law of the land it would affect the plants and animals in the Limbus as well.

Another aspect of the Limbus is that time passes there much more quickly than it does on Earth and the difference in rates is continually increasing.

I put those two things together and realized that I had inadvertantly dunked chocolate into peanut butter and the result was an environment where Lamarckian evolution (a discredited model of evolution based on the idea of purposeful change) would take place while the characters were watching -- where the ecology as well as the species would change drastically over the course of the novel in a way that would support the story.

So here's the question: What kinds of animals would evolve out of the population living on a subistance farm in Florida in the early eighteen-hundreds?

I'll post further information on the environment next time but here's a taste of what I've got down so far and frankly I'm thinking my imagination is a bit lame.


A hill of monstrous animal bodies joined together in a single mass as though they’re devouring each other or are locked in coitus or both. Pressed in between a wingless rooster ten feet tall with scimitar spurs and a hog with the legs of a racehorse and jaws like an alligator I see a familiar shape. It’s human. I wonder if it’s someone I know.

And:

Then the sound of a branch snapping came from the woods. I looked over and saw that a tree was shaking; the motion died. Then I saw a treetop pull away from me. There was another snap and the tree lashed back into place. I saw something reddish-brown in the treetops.

As I got closer I could hear chewing sounds, see more of the animals. I shouldn’t have approached them but I could not for the life of me figure out what they were. They had the heads of cattle, horns neatly curled in front of their ears. A beautiful dark roan with white bellies and white stripes at the haunches, they were six feet at the shoulder with another three feet of neck; their backs sloped sharply, rear legs distinctly shorter than their forelegs. Long tufted tails whipped at insects; they looked like cows trying to be giraffes.

I stood still and watched them feed, wrapping their long prehensile tongues around small branches and pulling them loose from the tree. There was a surge in the music and I snapped back into consciousness and started backing away.

There was a snort from the brush in front of me, deep and powerful, and a clot of dirt and grass arched through the air. I’d been looking up and the bull was close to the ground. Built like a pig with a narrow muzzle made for grubbing in the dirt, it was far more massive than the cows, thick neck holding a head easily two feet across. One horn hooked down below its jaw and it dug it into the dirt and threw another clod into the air. The other horn curved out and forward, more than a yard long. The bull was sideways to me; it glanced at me, arched its back and shook its head.

And:

“Just give me your story, son, and I’ll decide if I think you’re lying. But half a moment.” He stuck the fingers of his free hand in his mouth and whistled loud, one short, one long, one short. I heard the sound of something big galloping towards us.

It was a dog, a fox-faced yellow dog the size of a quarter horse. His long bushy tail curled up over his back. He had a saddle and blanket on its back but no bridle.

And:

The watercourse was broken up by huge boulders and overhung by trees. They had white trunks and broad hand-shaped leaves, their trunks almost hand-shaped as well with a broad mass laying on the ground and fingers a couple of feet thick thrust up from one edge, the opposite edge rooted in the ground. I had no idea what they were; some kind of sycamore?

And:

Something that looked like a dragonfly with soft droopy wings and a body loosely dangled between them was working a cascade of tiny pale-yellow blossoms on a tree; it was at least three inches long and as bulky as a mouse. With a buzz and thwap it was dropped from the air by a beetle as long as my hand and as thick as a cigar. It folded its wings under their green cases and began to loudly munch the nectar-eating dragonfly.

And:

As I got in the water I noticed the water-skimmers at the water’s edge. Like the other insects I’d seen this trip they were oversized, too big to skim the water. Instead, they stuck close to the shore and waded. I’d bet real American dollars that there was some extra oxygen in the air if the bugs were getting this big.

And:

The Deacon’s new dogs didn’t look the same as Tap. One had a saddle, one loaded with gear, they were gray as ash with just a sandy hint of yellow over the ribs. They were longer and rangier than Tap had been, easily six feet at the shoulder but still narrow enough to straddle, their fur sleek and close to the body. Their paws were broader, the toes spread wide as if for gripping, and they had the easy lope of a Rhodesian ridgeback.

But it was their demeanor that had the real difference. I didn’t look in their eyes, didn’t look directly at them. They returned the favor and pretended I wasn’t there. They weren’t interested in me at the moment and I knew better than to approach animals of that temperament. They had the vibe of a bad Doberman along with the skittish wildness of a wolf cross. They were one-man dogs — for as long as that man could maintain dominance.


So there's a taste of it. I'll have more on the environment tomorrow. Yeah, this is definitely a fantasy novel -- but there are aspects of it that I'm treating as if they were Golden Age science fiction, where an admittedly unscientific premise is given a dose of rigorous speculation...

What the hell am I doing, anyway?

The Damned Novel, part Three.

Here's one of the original images that I composited for the scratch draft cover. I'll probably recreate the whole thing in color for the next reader's draft.

Things were getting more and more awkward, more and more cumbersome. What the hell was going on? Characters from myth began showing up and just standing around, blocking the flow.

And whenever I tried outlining it just kept me from being productive. It didn't work. Nothing added up properly -- lots of individual scenes worked and they didn't go anywhere.

So I decided to take a break from writing and printed up what I'd done and passed it out to the writer's group and some pals of mine.

But the manuscript was too cumbersome. I split it in half, had the halves bound separately at the copy shop.

And while neither was an entirely complete story, the two halves each had their own distinct narrative line with a solid start and end. The second volume was weak in the middle but the first actually read like a novel.

I was writing a trilogy. God help me, a fantasy trilogy. Tolkien casts a long shadow.

To Be Continued...

The Damned Novel, part Two.

So as I worked the novel became more and more autobiographical. I lost sight of what I was doing and started to think I'd finished it long before that was the case.

And the writing was a bitch. As I mentioned in the first post, I found that if I was writing other things it screwed with the novel. And I'd frequently get to a place where I was stuck, had no idea where to go next. My mom, Zoe Bishop, died during this time and that didn't help in the short run.

As an aside, after her death I helped my sister and her husband clean out her house. And when I saw her work space I realized that she was a serious writer-in-training. She never told me... That was a bit of a shock.

(Rest in peace, Mom. Next weekend when the missus is out of town I'll get a pack of Kools and some Budweiser and toast your memory.)

As I struggled with the story I found that a good way to get past the sticking points was to just have something happen. It was the old Chandler approach -- if things get dull have two men come through the door with pistols.

Not only did that give the individual slow spots a little excitement, it also gave me questions. What is that snake thing? Who's the Deacon? How does the Limbus work? What is the anatomy of a soul?

Questions are the heart of story. What if? Why?

I also began sticking figures from classical and Scandinavian mythology into the works on a similar basis. And when I did that they insisted on bringing the other characters from their dramas with them. The novel began to drift away from autobiography into fantasy.

And the damned thing kept growing...

To Be Continued.

The Damned Novel, Part One.

Here's the retitled cover of the

first reader's scratch draft.

" The first time I saw Lulu and Willy I thought they might be twins, two skinny little white kids dressed all in raggedy black with so many rings in their ears that you could have hung them from a curtain rod. The only difference between them was that her hair grew down in a greasy fringe that hid her dark eyes while his hair was swept up in a bulb like an onion.

They were sitting on the sidewalk on the mall with an empty quart-sized yogurt container on a piece of cardboard in front of them. There was a dollar sign, an arrow, and the word ‘for’ on the cardboard, the arrow pointing to a red circle with an inhaler sitting in it..."

It started out as a horror novella about a garage band's haunted album. When I took it into the writer's group, I was told that the reality and the fantasy were both fine but they didn't work together.

I'd set it in Santa Cruz in the mid-Eighties and used an airbrushed version of my younger self as the point-of-view character. As I worked to fix the problems in the novella it turned out that I couldn't ignore my own story in favor of Lulu and Willy's. What started as a sort of punk rock M.R. James piece was twisting in my hands.

See, during the time the story is set in, my life was...

Well, it was nuts. In every sense of the word. I had everything happen to me from mental illness -- which, depending on your belief system either did or did not include a classic Whitley Strieber-style abduction experience -- to losing my home and winding up living with a bunch of junkies for a month. If you meet me, ask me about the Hell's Angel with cocaine psychosis who thought I was a deaf mute -- whenever he heard me speak he thought it was the Devil speaking through my mouth... That situation came close to getting ugly.

Let's just say that my life started demanding a place in the story.

To Be Continued...