Tumblr

I’ve been off fiddling with Tumblr for a little while now, and thought I’d finally mention it here and point you there.

I like it because sometimes I don’t have time to type a long blogpost, but DO have time to post a photo or video or something. At the moment, I do that to Facebook. But what if someone doesn’t HAVE facebook? Besides, I like things to hang around and be easily viewable for longer than a day, and on Facebook that isn’t the case. I like blogs as scrapbooks and journals.

so. It’s: peterdamien.tumblr.com

And since I’m always busy, I’m sure it’ll be JUST as active as THIS blog has been of late. Thee be warned.

Me and Logic

This was originally the bulk of an e-mail I was going to send to that nice boy Ed Pahule, then decided that actually, it was something I wanted to put here and keep it for future reference (incrimination?)

the context is, I want to write a story about a 50-foot-woman, but there are a couple of engineering difficulties with growing to fifty feet, and since I can’t solve them — and won’t just ignore them and hope no one notices — I can’t write the story. This is me explaining to Ed why I can’t just ignore ‘em.

—

As for the 50-foot-woman…well, I can’t “forget logic” and reality and just write it, because then I have zero interest in it. Then it’s just rehashing the original “Attack of the 50 foot woman” film which….you’ll hate me for this…..I hated. Plus, what I write has to hold up to examination.

I’ll give you an example that you didn’t ask for. The one Pixar film I dislike is CARS. And not just because it’s got fuckin’ Larry-the-Cable-Guy in it. What I dislike is…it doesn’t work. If you start asking questions like “in a world populated only by cars, who hung all those pictures on the walls? Why are the Cars sentient and aware but Bessie the road-asphalt-machine ISN’T?  And questions like that. And ultimately, the only way to answer those is “I dunno. Who cares? It’s JUST a CARTOON.”

Well, that’s a failure for me. If you examine a film like Wall-E, or UP, there is no such failure.  There are fantastic things you know couldn’t really happen (a house couldn’t float away held up by balloons) but those just require suspension of disbelief. But in Cars, they ask me to suspend too much. So it’s unsatisfying. It’s the one Pixar film where you have to explain something away as “just a cartoon.”

Likewise. i write a 50-foot-woman story with no logic or realism. First off, I’m uninterested. Second off, if anyone questions the details,I have to defend it with “I dunno, I hoped no one would notice…c’mon it’s just for fun, it’s just a story” which is a failure on my part entirely. And third, I’ve just rehashed the original, which I don’t care to do. There are ways to bring logic and realism and attention to detail into stories without losing the fun, the fantastic, and the excitement, and if my writing career is and will be built on anything, it’s on that.

And if this seems like a long tedious answer to a small comment…well, it probably is. Sorry. Now you’re probably wishing I’d e-mail LESS.

If I have a defining thing I ask myself, it’s this, and I mean this seriously: Where’s The Poop?

This is something intelligent that people as diverse as Guillermo del Toro and Ray Harryhausan brought to films. The world has to WORK, the monsters have to WORK. Guillermo was pointing out that in a Godzilla film, there should be gigantic piles of Godzilla dung around Tokyo. Everything should WORK and be plausible and useful outside of the immediate, instant context of the story you’re writing.

This is something I’ve long since believed, and was glad to see reinforced by people I admire, like del Toro. It’s part of why I so dislike 99% of all high-fantasy stuff. There’s no disease, poverty, starvation, weather problems, poor people, early death, STDs, issues with horses, etc, etc. I’m not saying that every story has to be full of nothing but grim-grim-grim death death death. Just that, somewhere in the background — even if it doesn’t appear in the story in any major way — it HAS to WORK. Even if it’s just in your head. A fine example of this is Terry Pratchett’s stuff, where it all WORKS, the world works, and on top of a fairly rough world full of all the problems I mentioned (you know they’re in there, even when they aren’t mentioned overtly) he tells funny stories.

It’s the same reason I read nearly zero super-hero comics anymore. It doesn’t hold up. It’s absurd, and it tries to ignore its own absurdity and pretend its serious…and it fails.

So would I read super-hero comics more if they were extremely realistic and serious? Maybe, if they did something interesting within that context aside from being grim and ugly. But then, I’d also read more super-hero comics if they were extremely absurd and happy with it. It’s why I loved Alan Moore’s SUPREME comic, which was a blatant copy of Superman and allowed him just to talk about Superman throughout the ages. The first thing he did was bring back dopey stuff like a Krypto the superdog type of character. Good. That was fun.

Still. Even beyond that, the stuff *I* personally love to write about is on the logical end of things, at the end of the day. It provides a challenge, but not an unbeatable one, and you can still tell a fun story around it.

writing methods & me

Here’s what I’m puzzling over right at the moment:

On the one hand, I have really shied (that doesn’t look right. Shyed is worse, though.) away from writing on a computer, because I lose the attachment to the work and control of the language. On the other hand, I could use some of the speed. PARTICULARLY if I’m about to write a novel, and I am. I’m worried that, handwriting, I’ll go so slow I’ll lose it (like I’m in the process of losing a short story), just because life has conspired in its insidious and well-meaning way, of slowing me down unbelievably.

But I’m worried worried if I type, I’ll end the novel and feel too disconnected to want to touch it again. That’s one thing I’ve really gained since I handwrite all my stories. I finish them and care about their quality and what happens to them. With typing, too often, I was just on to the next thing. I don’t want to gamble and write a novel on the computer and get to the end and have no interest in it.

On the other hand, it’s been almost precisely a year since I’ve been only-handwriting my fiction, and I’ve learned a lot. And it’s been YEARS since I’ve attempted a novel. I’ve learned a lot there, too. Some discipline, for one thing. So it’s a gamble that I might take and find it pays off.

On the other hand, I HAVE written a story by typing just recently, and one of the first things that happens is, I lost control of the language. I don’t care for that at all, and I don’t want that in a short story, OR a novel.

But there IS the matter of speed. I’m so slow at the moment, it’s literally too-slow-to-write. The water stagnates before I’m…um. Well, I didn’t think of an END to that metaphor. Before I’m eating tacos, the water has stagnated, and all the Toucans have flown the coop. There’s your mudderfuggin metaphor.

Where was I?

Oh right. Making tea to fuel the Peter Damien Patented Pondering Engines.

I think we’ll nip into some of the fancy fancy teas that Kristine sent me from the Tea Festival. Let’s see what we can make…

Love & ?

A haunting dream

Last night, I had an intensely vivid, real dream.

I remember the last time I had something similar: I was about seven, living somewhere in the world, and it was before christmas. I dreamt that I had gone downstairs and there, under the tree — unwrapped, as is the way of dreams — was the most magnificent train set I’d ever seen, just WAITING for me. (in waking hindsight, of course, I knew i had no interest in trains, not really, not hugely, and so it must have been all dream). i woke up and rushed downstairs, so convinced by the reality of the dream and the happiness therein, and was crushingly disappointed to find out that it had only been a dream after all.

It was like that, but no train set. in my dream, I kissed my wife and kids good-bye, took my travel bag and my denim coat, and boarded an airplane. It was a small plane (when I dream of planes, they’re always small, very-nearly-seaplanes. this isn’t tough to figure out, really). I was heading to england.

the plane stopped for a layover in Elko, Nevada, where i got off and went and spent a bit of time with friends, catching up. Then, worried I’d missed my flight (I couldn’t read my flight ticket. My wife, who was in elko as well, could) but realized I hadn’t, got back to the plane and flew on. Arriving in England, I disembarked from the plane into a place which was manifestly not the National Art Gallery, but served that purpose in my dream. I wandered the place, looking at paintings and sculptures and enjoying myself no end, then went down a great set of stairs and out into a cobblestone square, heading for the busy-ness of London.

And then I woke up. When I woke up, I realized that for the first time in ages — since a fluke when he was quite small — Nathan had let me sleep entirely through the night. I had woken up because I was ready, not because of him, or the alarm.

I awoke melancholy and haunted by the dream. It’s a bit more inexplicable this time, more complex an emotion than missing a train set. Haunted not because I’m not about to take a trip to London but because, I suppose, the dream is not real, and I’m saddened by it.

Love & Cinnamon black tea

…and then what?

I don’t talk about writing too often here, because…well, there’s so many places on the internet with so many people talking about writing that I just don’t need to add to it. But there’s something I thought about last night that I want to put down.

I’ve been working on this long short story for a little while now. I’ll call it “Red” here, which isn’t the title, but will do. It’s a hard story to write, because it’s really pretty brutal in places (and beautiful and sad in other places). It’s also hard because I keep having to go days and weeks between writing. (life, moans Marvin the Paranoid Android. Don’t talk to me about life.)

I keep chugging away at it. Last night, I did three pages. And then headed to bed. And as I headed to bed, I realized something.

The story just hasn’t caught on fire for me yet. I’m not swept away in a magical tide of “omigod this is amaaaaazing” or anything. But…I know what happens next. And I know what happens after that. And each individual scene is coming across okay. If they were really bad, I would stop and re-work, as is my way. So there’s no fire, but there’s no stoppage, and…I know what happens next.

And so I’ll just keep writing. I’ll write the next bit. And then I’ll write the bit after that.

It’s how writing works some days. Many days, perhaps. You’re just laying bricks. You don’t have an epiphany with each brick you put down, and some days you may not really want to lay bricks but…well, you don’t hate it, and on the whole it’s a good job. So you just keep putting down bricks. And maybe tomorrow, something will be slightly different and make this the coolest job in the world.

Writing, I mean. Not brick-laying.

Although brick-laying might be pretty cool too.  I’d be rubbish at it, though.

Anyway, that’s my thought. Nothing magical or world-changing, just a thought.

…

I then got up from bed, went back into my office, and wrote the first paragraph or two of a short story I meant to start back in November, but couldn’t get on with. I like the first two paragraphs. They set tone and character for the story. So when the longer story, “Red,” gets too much and I need a break, I’ll step away and work on this other one. It’s not a bad way to work.

Love & Lady Grey

Off you go, 2010

So. Tomorrow, I have to start remembering to write “2011″ on checks and things. This is a pain in the ass. I can barely keep the day’s date and the month straight, without the year changing on me.

But looking back, let’s review a little bit…

2010 was a turning point year for me. I’ve never had one like it. In 2010, I continued a shift which had already been occurring, well away from my science fiction roots and into my horror (and non-genre entirely) areas of interest. I also discovered, as the year progressed, that this area of my life had roots too. What did I read when I was young besides SF, after all, but Goosebumps and Tales from the Crypt? So it was not totally out of the blue.

My writing shifted entirely to handwritten in 2010. This was not on accident. It slowed me down and forced me to focus on the words, on each scene. It meant that I began writing stories I cared about, rather than just flinging things down and getting on to the next project. This year, I’ve written less fiction than ever before…and all of it (even the duds and stinkers) have been better and more useful than any other year, for as long as I’ve been writing.

(they’ve also been the hardest to sell. They aren’t genre, or aren’t clearly genre, and are sometimes long and unwieldy character pieces. I love them, but they’re tough.)

This year, in July, my oldest son, Zach, turned 3. And in March, Nathan was born. I love them both and am glad to have them, but they have wrecked my ability to work (and yet, not really. They make it harder, but that makes the work better when it comes, if you ask me)

2010 was a year I watched better films than ever before. I discovered amazing films like The Devil’s Backbone and Let The Right One In, 28 Days Later, Blair Witch Project. Amazing films. I also discovered Hayao Miyazaki (I had seen Howl’s Moving Castle years ago. This was the year I began watching everything else.)

In 2010, I wrote one short story which is, I think, really, really good. It’s frustrating, in that it seems to have transcended what I can write, so that if I re-read it, I just despair about my later work. That’s fine, though. It happens. I’m really, really proud of it. It’s called The Dark to End All Nights, and I’m awfully proud of it. I said that twice, but so what?

In 2010, I watched some fine TV shows. These are, as usual, the fault of the nifty Kristine Williams . She is unerring in her TV suggestions, and so I always listen. So in 2010, I got to watch Doctor Who, Warehouse 13, Leverage, and Wipeout. All summer shows. Ironically, when fall came around, I’d been watching TV all summer and now needed a break. We stopped watching TV for the most part when the fall season started up. Go figure.

Late in 2010 was also when I learned how to, for the first time ever, really write comic scripts. Thanks to my wife, Renee, I began working with the tremendously talented Nicole Swimley on comic sort of projects. We haven’t done much (to be fair, she has, you know, a JOB and I have KIDS) but it’s been fun so far. I never wrote a script to my satisfaction before, and now it’s like a small wall busted and I get how to do it. It’s wonderful. I have lots of scripts to write in 2011.

And short stories.

And novels.

And articles.

It all fell apart toward the end of 2010. Zach no longer naps during the day, and Nathan is sleeping unsteadily at night (and has suddenly become extremely clingy to me). Lack of sleep and busy holidays meant that I had, for most of November and December, stopped reading, stopped writing, stopped watching anything, stopped SLEEPING (the cause of it all), and completely fell apart at answering e-mails. Really rough. I think it’s on the up-slope, though. Or at least, I hope like hell it is.

…

My New Year’s Resolutions?

I want to write more. I want to get more done, more often. I have too many ideas in my head, and it frustrates me how slowly I get them out. I want to produce more work. Maybe somewhere in there, I’ll transcend myself a little bit and do something really, really good.

I need to submit more. I just don’t send stuff out enough. In an ideal world, I’d have an agent to whom I gave my stories and who dealt with it. But then, in that world, the agent delivers my stories to publishers riding a unicorn. So I’ll send out my own stories.

I want to read more. I read too little in 2010. It was just too frenetic and out of control a year, good though it was in places. The days of five-books-a-week are long, long, long gone…but I want to read more than I do now.

(and a side note to this, I want to get all my books cataloged somehow. Into Goodreads and then printed off, perhaps. It’s not like the collection is going to get SMALLER, and I’d better get it sorted before it gets to be too much more)

And I’d like to exercise more. I don’t drive, as I’ve said before, and in days of yore, I walked everywhere, all the time, and was in great shape. Now I don’t leave the house, because of the kids (I can’t take them out much, because of the weather, and where we live. There are NO SIDEWALKS and a clusterfuck of a busy road right outside).  so. More walks, more runs, and so on. My metabolism, normally a nuclear reactor, is slowing down (cause of, you know, aging) and I’d like to be in good shape when it quits on me.

And now, my pie-in-the-sky resolutions. Everyone should have a couple that are nearly unbelievable.

1) I want to write and finish a novel I’m happy with and send it out into the world.

and

2) I want to run a marathon.

There we go.

And that’s the end of 2010, at least as far as this blog is concerned. I’m going to go have some more tea now.

“The last pot of tea of 2010, you mean, Pete?”

Hell no. It’s only 4:00 in the afternoon. I’ll have a couple before tonight. But in honor of the year ending, I’m going to make them really excellent end of the year pots of tea.

Love,
Pete

The 15-song-meme

This is an old internet meme, but I just came across it and thought, well, why not. Here’s how it works.

1. take all the songs on your iPod and put them on shuffle.

2. write down the first 15 songs that come up no matter how embarassing

3. post them.

So I did. And this is the list:

1. Signed, Sealed, Delivered I’m Yours – Stevie Wonder

2. Nemo – Nightwish

3. You Rock my World - Michael Jackson

4. Dancing in the Night – Rolling Stones

5. Sahara – Nightwish

6. Criminal - Eminem

7. One – Metallica

8. One Day – KT Tunstall

9. Bones – The Killers

10. The Four Horsemen - Metallica

11. Anon: Hodie 2 – Monastic Choir of Saint Benedict

12. Family Portrait – Pink

13. Electric Head: The Ecstasy (part 2) – White Zombie

14. Super-Charger Heaven – White Zombie

15. Dead Babies (live) – Alice Cooper

…

Not a bad list. Not totally accurate, since I don’t have the entire music library on my iPod, just the stuff that I’m likely to listen to (there is no feasible mood I could be in that would make me listen to Garth Brooks, so he’s not on there, for example).

And there we go. Time permitting, I think I have one more post in me before the New Year, but until then,

I remain,

yr. friend,

Lord Dr. Peter Damien Tzinski (sr.) (esq.) (jr.) (wtf.) III

Pineapple Upside Down Cake

A long time ago, in the early days of Men, the Elves forged rings of power. Nine of…

…no sorry.

A long time ago, when I was a kid, every year for my birthday, my mom would make a pineapple upside-down cake. This is because I love pineapple upside-down cake a lot.

On the whole, I don’t get it anymore, for no particular reason. Today, my sister made one (belatedly for my birthday). I haven’t had one in years and wondered if I’d still like it.

I do. Oh yes.  It was pretty fantastic.

…

A Christmas wish sent to me had a spelling auto-correct problem. Someone wished me a Prosperous New Year, and somehow it got switched to Preposterous New Year. I liked that a lot. So I wish you all 2011s that are preposterous, hopefully in good ways.

…

I like listening books, so I’m going to list the books I got for Christmas. I got other things (a new fountain pen! it’s lovely! and ink!) (and TEA! I didn’t even know there WAS such a thing as an Earl Grey White tea) (after fighting a Balrog, Earl Grey returns later as Earl Grey White)

Ahem. Books.

Guns, Germs, and Steel - Jared Diamond

Haunted Legends – short story anthology edited by Ellen Datlow and Nick Mamatas

The Gun Seller – Hugh Laurie

He Is Legend – short story anthology edited by Christopher Conlon

Best New Horror 15 – edited by Stephen Jones

A Century of Horror, 1970-1979 – edited by David Drake

The Authoritative Calvin and Hobbes – Bill Watterson

The Indispensable Calvin and Hobbes - Bill Watterson

Dracula – Bram Stoker (I already own a couple copies, but this one is a gorgeous edition)

Sandman: The Kindly Ones – Neil Gaiman

…

I’m probably forgetting something, but that sounds right enough. Other lovely things that arrived in the house were a trio of Neil Gaiman-written kids books, Doctor Who series 5, Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, Brutal Legend, and stuff stuff stuff.

And now I’m going to go be exhausted, but happy, and have a cuppa tea.

Oh, the cup of tea will be had in a scarily heavy mug from Anthropologie which has a big letter P on it and is lovely. My sister got me that, with a bag of loose leaf Earl Grey White inside. So yes.

Right.

May you have a preposterous new year.

Freakshow, baby

While I’m ranting about stuff, let’s talk about some TV channels. A&E, TLC, Bravo, Animal Planet, and so on. Those sort of channels.

They drive me nuts. They are entirely filled with programming which can, essentially, be translated into “omigawwwwd  lookit these FREAKS can you believe this??”

Short people! People with too many kids! People with too much body weight, too much stuff in their house, too many drugs in their system, too many animals. Pick something, and there’s a show about it.

And my problem isn’t actually with these people. These people have issues and they need to be adressed…it’s with the networks. It’s creepy and trashy and insulting, the freakshow attitude — straight out of an old carnival, complete with the moaning, thrashing geek in the cage — rather than, say, examining and considering these people. It’s pure ego and freakshow, and it pisses me off.

It’s tabloid garbage, it’s Jerry Springer material. It’s mean-spirited and disgusting and it drives me up the fuckin’ wall. If it has to be on TV, it would be done as a thoughtful examination of the causation and solution to these problems. And not just “dis fat man?? he got lots of dogs!! omigawwwd! dis girl had a baby when she was way young dat hella tuff yo!”

It’s insulting, to the people who have these myriad problems in real life, to the people who try to help them, and to the viewers sitting at home. They should be watching better. I don’t see that as elitist even remotely. It’s like someone saying “you shouldn’t have to eat that. You should be able to eat THIS, this amazing dish. You’d love it and it would be better for you. I’d love for you to be eating this.”

Instead, the channels shovel creepy shit.

And you can learn all about my views on this and more matters on my new show on TLC when I plan to travel the country on a unicycle, shooting heroin into my eyeballs and dealing with my lingering issues with pogonophobia while smacking people who had made these TV shows with a baseball bat.

Or, possibly, I’ll drink some tea, bitch on an internet blog, and then get on with my day. I might do that instead.

It’s not chickening out. I mean, this is a really good pot of mango black tea. I’m just saying.

[one wee edit done, to fix a sentence toward the end for clarity. high ho.]

“Now I’m not a racist or anything but…”

“[insert snide, ignorant, appallingly racist remark.]“

If I had a dollar for every time I heard that, more or less, I’d be wealthy enough to walk around with a baseball bat, smacking people in the head and then pay off my bail.

Ignorant racist remarks drive me nuts. I don’t care who they’re about. Whether it’s against Muslims, Arabs, Jews, or the Minnesota-particulars, the Somalians and the Haitians (because we have a huge community of Somali immigrants in Minnesota and of course, dontcherknow, they’re just over here lazing about not learning our language not working can’t drive they don’t smell like proper Minnesotans do, etc. The nice people saying these things never consider that, hm, possibly why they don’t “go back where they came from” is they aren’t immigrants, they’re refugees.)

I have a second sore spot for racism against Haitians, because it’s huge, blatant, accepted, and really not noticed. It puts me up the wall, the portrayal of Voodoo in pop culture. Then again, it’s rarely on purpose, and I think intent is as important as action.

(I’m about to try and say everything I think and am infuriated about in the next comic I hope to write, which has a cranky old Voodun priestess in it.)

All of this cranky ranting is brought on by a really wonderful article over at Cranked. Where they are not only funny, they’re frequently razor-sharp.

5 Ridiculous Things You Probably Believe About Islam

Go read. It’s a wonderful article.