Tuesday, May 31, 2011

The Really Inconvenient Truth

Well it’s been too long since I last did a blog post. I’ve been busy as hell lately and haven’t had the time to really to any thing fun. Even when I am working I am working on other things, like solving global warming, or rather the melting icecaps. Yes I figured out how to end the melting icecaps while I was at work. Lets get started on this craziness.

Q. First who are the people that bitch about the icecaps the most?

A. Rich people, actors and Al Gore.

Q. What do all people on earth need in order to survive?

A. Water! Duh.

Q. How to most people drink water now?

A. From bottles!

Q. So, what do rich people who drink bottled water have to do with it?

A. They drink expensive bottled water and some of the most expensive bottled water is-- Glacier Water!!!

See all the rich people of the world drinking their, glacier water is shrinking the damn ice caps. So they come up with these crazy campaigns telling us, the poor and meddle class, it’s our fault. Yet they keep drinking their water and keep and the caps keep melting.

To fix the problem is to stop these rich sumbitches from drinking the damn water. To do that we have to stop making plastic and glass bottles, so rich people who want to drink glacier water have to find a damn glacier and lick it.

I’m just messing around ,and for the record, I am one of the people who thinks global warming is bullshit. I could really go into why I think it’s bullshit, but I don’t want to. I will how ever point out that there are other studies that show that it is. For years I believed it was due to global shifting. At least that’s what I said in high school and I still don’t know the real name for this theory. Trust me, I was happy to find other people who thought the same thing. It deals with the earth rotating very slowly end over end. It’s weird, but there is science behind it.

There is also the studies that show that the earth was always hotter then we know it and has been heating up since the last ice age ended. There have since then been a few mini-ice ages, as some people call them and that has helped keep us humans alive. So in theory, to help keep humans alive longer we need to be a bit further away from the sun or have another ice age… or a mini one, seeing that we are used to having it our way.

Thing is I fall between the two ways of thinking, because there is stronger evidence behind these two theories then there is for the current media driven one. Not that I really care either way, if it is due to people then we are too set in our ways to change. I can’t help but think that people only want to blame the human race for what ever it is, as a way of trying to keep hope that there might still be a way to prevent it. Because lets face it, we can’t stop nature, but we can stop people. So by making it human error we think we can still fix it.

So, yeah, I wasn’t really going to be going into a lot of this. I just wanted to type about something. I have lots of things I need to get back to doing. Writing, drawing, panting and working. As far as the next book I will be working on goes, I have the outline written out. I don’t know how I feel about the timeline or the ending, but these are factors I feel will fix themselves when I am writing the damn thing. I may think I know who the main character is now, but betting him to the page may show me something I didn’t see before. So long for now folks!

Wednesday, May 25, 2011

It's a Mess, Charlie Brown!

Well the world didn't end and now I am working on a new book. So my math was off, 2 + 2 = nothing, because numbers are an illusion to give us feeble mortals a method of keeping track of other illusions and the robots have yet to let us awaken from our sleep, to see the true nature of, um, nature.

So as I embark on writing another book, as always my mind thinks back to ‘07 when I wrote my first book. I had started in late April of that year and it took until late June or early July to finish it. At the time I thought it was the greatest thing I had ever done, all 94,530 words of it. Sadly it still remains the longest thing I have ever written, but also, what I think of as the most piss poor thing I had ever written.

Yet, as someone who longs for their first love and wonders what could have been. I too long for this story and wonder the what could have been. I sit down to edit it at times wondering if I can salvage the story, or even make a story out of it. During writing I changed all most all the original ideas I had had about the book, I took the dark ending and lightened it up, I even rushed the ending so as to keep people interested. I had a weird idea about the zombies that I only hinted at and would elaborate on more if the book did well and I wrote a second one. I had crazy things in it such a girl on girl rape and a revenge rape with a gun. So yeah, sounds like I may have been on drugs(I wasn‘t). I recall I killed a character off with out even saying how, he was just dead, turned into a zombie and a few miles away from where he originally had been.

Even taught I don’t think that book will ever see the light of day, it did teach me something: It takes time to write a book. Before that I never once thought it would take so long to write a book, in it’s first draft. It also taught how to set up goals when writing. When I wrote that book every night I made sure I would write at the very least 2,000 words. Sure some nights I would let myself get by with being short a few hundred words, but not much and I would always try to make that up the next day. I only took two days off from writing at that time.

So what happens now? Well much like that book and it’s plot jumping around I am going to jump to another subject in this post that has come to mind. See during writing this I looked up my very old writing blog, to make sure I had the year right. Despite having lots of stuff to say on that blog, most of it is very poorly spelled. Worse then what your seeing here. That’s one reason I will not go through and try to edit my first book, so many horrid spelling errors. Yet I’ll still work on the short stories I wrote from around that time, like Rude. They are short and the editing can be done fast and not remind me of how much of a moron I am.

The thing I want to now talk about and what I think I wanted to talk about when I started this blog post, damn getting sidetracked, is spelling. As I have pointed out before, I didn’t receive the best education and I dropped out of college. My spelling is years behind what it should be and my grammar is also behind, but I don’t think as much as my spelling… Er, getting to the point now…

So how much does spelling play into writing?

It seems that there is two different schools of thought.

*Spelling is very important to writing, even if you have a great idea, you can kill it with your spelling.

*The idea, the story, is far more important then the spelling and grammar. That stuff is the job of the editor.

Right now I don’t really fall into either slot. Why? Well if you spell as bad as I do then you want to be in the second, but I am also aggravated when I read something full of errors. So I have yet to make up my mind. I guess I have to say I lean towards the second more, but I do think the writers need to do their damndest at making sure they don’t put the editor through hell.

Now let’s see if I can blow your minds, I am not going to name names, but these two schools come from two different big name writers. One I have had the chance to ask him directly his thoughts on the subject and the other I gathered from a book, about writing.

So here is the question I want anyone reading this to ask themselves:

Does story come before spelling or does spelling come before story?

Thursday, May 19, 2011

It's the End of the World and I Need Something...

Well this may be the last blog post I post. I’ve heard that the world is coming to an end on Saturday and well I have to be honest, I’m not prepared. I thought I would have had more time, now I sit with no money and two guns that need ammo. Yes, I need ammo. I have first aid kits, water, canned food and other such things, but no ammo. How could I have bought a new fishing reel, knowing that I would be calling on my marksmanship so soon?

Thing is, that crazy guy is right, the May 21 is the end. I know he is right because the CDC is getting us ready for zombies. Not that they think that zombies are really going to happen, they are just trying to get us ready for the end as well. There is an unspoken war going on right now, yes it’s real, Al Qaeda had dirty bombs set up by North Korea aimed at us, these dirty bombs will kill two-thirds the US populous.

I’m sorry to say on the 21st it will not be Jesus making his way through the clouds, but rather a disease ridden bomb aimed at your home town. Yet this isn’t the worst part, see the rest of the world is in on this as well. So to keep us from attacking back, China is deploying EMPs over all major cities of ours. This way we can’t launch nukes so easy and it’s also going to let this virus spread. Yes your car will not work and even if it did, the hospitals could not help you now. No power. With no power, people will riot. Bringing them out into the streets they will spared the virus much faster. At this point we will wish it was zombies we had to fight off, not living humans. Scared and sick living humans.

The thing is not all of our nuking will be put to an end by the EMPs. No, we can launch some still yet, but they will not hit their targets. Thus setting off a world war that will only last the matter of a few hours, as more nukes and other dirty bombs are dropped worldwide. At this point I am not above saying that all this mixture of viruses, bacteria and radiation will ultimately make a zombie like creature somewhere in the world. The good thing is we wouldn’t have to worry about nuclear winter, seeing that as of right now more and more scientists are disproving this old train of thought.

Now, if your lucky to be alive after the short war, there is another thing we may have to worry about. All this surface activity may cause the plates to shift and thus set off volcanoes and earthquakes. The last of the lucky will die during these events, because the earth will shift even more. The world will be pushed a few inches away from the sun, making it a colder place to live. The rotation will slow down, our days will have 32 hours in them rather then 24. This will be hard on those who are alive, as their mental state will start to slip. I think lots of people will kill themselves at this time. The world will only have a handful of people left on each of it’s landmasses.

The world as we know it, will no longer be. I’m sure in time humans will die out due to the high levels of radiation. Still I wish I had some Ammo. It sounds like it’s gonna be one hell of a show.


*You may be asking yourself how do I know all this for sure, I did the math: 2 + 2 = end of humanity.

Saturday, May 14, 2011

Dead Dead West

Fellow eastern Kentuckian and zombie writer, Jason Thacker, is getting published… Again. Being a Kentuckian or a zombie writer as well, I feel the need to post about this news. He isn’t just getting a short story published, but a few novel. A zombie novel by the name of ’Dead are Alive’-- here is his blog post here.

First of I want to congratulate him. Not that I am sure that he reads my blog, but that is what twitter is for, but this is covering my butt on here as well. I have to say I plan on getting this book when it comes out, not because he is from Kentucky or that it has zombies, well yeah the zombies but not on the zombies alone. I think it’s good to support authors from your local area, but seeing as I am poor, I have to be picking about who I support. Thing is, I was published alongside Jason in ‘First Time Dead 2’ with the story the ‘Hungriest Zombie’. Which is one of the stories I really enjoyed and I enjoyed the story before finding out he is from only a few miles away from me. It’s corky, well written, has heart and had me pulled in. So yeah, I am going to read more of his stuff, also it’s a zombie western. Which is just kick ass. I have loved the idea of zombies and westerns for some time now, well after playing ’Gun’ For the Gamecube a few years ago. In fact I have wanted to write a zombie western type thing before.

So to make this post a bit longer, I want to touch on something that seems to happen to all writers at some point, an idea being used before you get the chance to do it yourself. Some get mad, some even go as far as violence (verbal mostly) and some, like myself, just try to deal with it. But dealing with it is hard. It’s hard because there isn’t much you can do. Lets list the options to an author in this situation.

Toss out the idea, so no one will think you’re a copycat.
Write the damn thing and get called a copycat.

Now I know that list is long and you may need to sit and let this news sink in for a moment, but we must push forward here. So as you see there isn’t much you can do, and either way your getting called a copycat. Yeah, I know I said you could toss it out so people wont call you a copy cat, but if you ever repeat your idea, people will say you just stole it or wanted to cash in on it. I once had the idea of superheroes during a zombie filled post apocalyptic world. I assume, unless I don’t make it as a zombie writer and a writer of other fiction, that you know there are tons of zombie superhero type things out there. So for the sake of this lets say I do go with writing this idea. Well there is a long list of things to pick form here.

Read the subject, so if my idea close to it I can plead ignorance.
Read it and change my ideas biased on what was done before as to not repeat.
Read it and give up if it’s too good.
Read it and think you can do better.
Not read it as to not let it influence you in any way.
Not read it so you truly are ignorant to the “original”.
Not read it so you don’t give up on the idea.

So yeah, that list is a bit longer then the other and the fact is it feels way longer when your in the situation. In fact both list feel longer when your in the situation. Truth is I don’t think there is a right or wrong answer. I’m sure there are people out there that think there is a right answer, but let them think that. I’m sure they may have been in the situation before and went with an idea they didn’t care much about and must support their decision. I say, bah to that. I don’t think there is much wrong with backing out of things, but at least admit it.

Then again, there is a lot of bravery to push forward. Or arrogance. See it never ends, so I say go with it. People will think what they think and you can only do what you can do. In the end if no one sues you, or uses some sort of violence on you then your in the clear. Critics seem to hate things anymore when it comes to movies and books, so as long as you don’t think you can’t write no bad, then just go with it. Either it will suck or it won’t.

Long story short, Jason broke past this, from what I understand and stuck it out. Now he has a book coming out. Writers should all take note of it. I hope the book does well.


Side note, sorry if parts of this seem weird, I’ve been watching Bones while writing this. I really need to try reading some of those books.

Wednesday, May 11, 2011

The Drive

There are a few reasons I hate working. One being that I don’t have time to write when the ideas strike me. Today I was stacking tons of Gatorade and organizing a really messing aisle and came up with an idea for a post apocalyptic story. Whether it be a short story or full novel, I don’t know. So I just noted the idea and went on working. Then the need hit me. The need to write. From that idea to other ideas I have been thinking about for a long time, I just wanted to type something out and sit locked to the keyboard hours on end locked in a battle of words and ideas.

See the thing is, if I don’t act on that feeling right away I miss out on so much. The main thing I miss out on is the drive. Let me elaborate about it. See if I can write when I get this feeling to write, then I get the drive. What the drive is when I can’t stop myself from writing. Now this can last anywhere from a few days to a few months. Two ways it works, either I wake and write or I write before I sleep. Either way, it’s fun as hell and it makes me crazy. Honestly I wish writing was that easy all the time.

I know a lot of people think writing is hard because of the lack of ideas. That’s just not that case for me. I don’t mean to brag but it’s not. I have tons of ideas, it’s just figuring out a way to make them work. I have an alien story in mind, it’s been there for about three months now. I have more zombie stories then I’d care to think about. I have a ghost story in mind and tons more stuff just locked away. I just haven’t had the drive. Not that I can’t write without the drive, it’s just more fun to write with the drive. I’m a man of quick results and when I am working with a speed much faster then my normal speed then I get results even quicker.

Also the drive helps with depression, better then Prozac did. Yes, the drive feels wonderful and though it keeps me up, when I sleep I feel rested. It’s truly the best.

Now that I know all of you are just wondering how the Gatorade went, it went well. I even got praise for it. I’m almost sure they have to praise me, but despite that I think it looked good when I was finished.

Saturday, May 7, 2011

MOVE!

Well it seems work gets right in the way of blogging and most other things. Like staying up, yeah I don’t get to stay up late anymore, I head to be around eight. Eight, I haven’t gone to bed at eight sense I well was eight. So there is a lot of things that I have wanted to blog about, but just haven’t had the time to do so. Also I don’t know if I can do at work stories or not. So for now I’ll just stick with what I am sure I can talk about.

So I was out the other day, just looking at food, when one of those weird human traffic jam things happen. You know, when the aisle is empty and then suddenly it’s filled up, traffic coming from both ends. Well I am trying to keep myself out of the way, sense I am just looking. I’m facing the shelf and behind me to my right is an older couple looking for something or other and they just can’t seem to find it. Behind me and to the left is a man looking at an assortment of thing. Seems to me that he is doing much like myself just looking. Then suddenly there is this guy, mid-forties or so comes racing down the aisle, darts between the guy to my left and myself. No he stops right behind me. Standing there making noses. So I move over a bit thinking I didn’t give him enough room to get through. He starts yelling-

“MOVE! MOVE! MOVE!” At the older couple.

Now my back is to them, so I can’t see them all to clear. But I can see the older man just glare at this guy and then go back to looking for what ever it is they are looking for. So the yelling keeps going on. Until the guy to my left stops him and tells him that he is being rude. The rude guy then says in a slurred, man child voice.

“I’m retarded, I can’t help it.”

Thus people move out of his way as he races on through the store. So here is the thing, I don’t believe for one second that that man had any mental disorders other then being a moron. In fact this is behavior that I see a lot as of late (last year or so) when ever I go out. Now I have been around severely mentally challenged people before, ones who would act like that, but other people had put them up to it. The fact is they don’t seem to know they have a problem. But it seems that there is a new breed of suddenly retarded people cropping up every where.

By that I mean, I have seen these people out for years, they act like nothing is wrong. They talk normal, they are a bit of assholes. But for the most part they seem mentally fine. In fact I worked at a restaurant and some of them would come in, pissed about the price of the food and pissed they could not buy food with their food stamps. Again, not making fun of people who get food stamps, I understand the importance of this government service. Normal assholes, suddenly acting like they are shitting themselves challenged. Also, the wife and I was out eating when I saw the food stamp guy, he was shitting on himself.

Anyway, my point is I think most of these people watched the same 20/20 special, about how this guy pretended to have a mental illness from a work related injury and had it last for about two years or longer, I don’t recall. So my best guess is that they either want more movement money or they just want to be rude to people and get away with it.

Now I know some of you might be thinking, how can I be so cruel, people with mental illnesses can’t help it and I’m not a doctor who can tell if these people are truly ill or not. True statements, but I have to work with my gut on this one.

So to finish the story off, as I was leaving the store there also was mister rude, who walked to a car, cell phone in one hand, a bag in the other. Opened the door, pulled the seat forward, put the bags in the back seat, put the seat up right, got in and buckled up and then drove off. No other people with him.

So you could walk away from this and say that I was wrong, if you want to. But as far as a sudden outbreak of mental illness attacking only a select few people who happened to have been rude assholes to begin with, seems like fiction to me.

Monday, May 2, 2011

Hold the Rape, Please

So I start work at Wal~Mart tomorrow. It’s some what of a depressing idea to be heading back to work, but all in all I know I’ll grow used to the idea sooner or later. I also woke this morning to find I have been sent a rejection letter, or rather a disqualification letter about a short story I had submitted a few weeks back. It was disqualified for a rape scene that takes place in the story. At first I was taken aback at this statement, I had recalled in the guidelines for submission that “we could let our sick little minds run wild” or something along the line to that. So I checked out the guidelines again only to see the part that I saw every time I have looked at those guidelines yet somehow kept over looking. “Keep it R-rated”.

Now I know what your saying, there is rape in R rated movies. That is true, but the rape in my story is like that you would find in the unrated dvd of the movie. It’s a very violent rape that implements using the woman’s own blood as lubrication. I let my sick little mind run wild and I didn’t spare the details. Maybe had I not gone into many details about the act, it could have went on to be my second story in print. Sadly I fear that I may have made a bad impression on the publisher, I don’t know and I too much of a chicken shit to just come out and ask. I’d be willing to remove the rape form the story, or at the very least just imply a very gruesome rape had happened.

Anyway, I will get onto the subject that I wish to cover in this post. People getting angry at publisher for rejecting them. See I never understood that, I have always taken rejection as a good thing, a thing that lets you know what areas that need improvement. Like with my rejection today, it was my fault, I wrote that story just for that anthology, I should have followed all the guidelines. What did I learn this time around? Follow the fucking guidelines better next time. I have no desire to send the publisher upset e-mails, telling them that they are wrong and I am right type of deal. What is the point of that?

I’ll admit there was one publisher that I, to this day stay mad at, because of their rejection letter. Out of all the people that ever rejected me this publisher sat out to not be helpful at all in their rejection, but to be as harmful as they could be. From calling me retarded to saying that my parents must have been morons for letting me think that I could ever write. Now a letter like this, I can understand getting upset at. I just never told them to fuck off like I should have. In the end I feel I give them the best fuck off that I could, I don’t even let people know the name of their small publication. With no word to mouth, and their higher then you rejections, they will not be around much longer.

As far as a normal rejection goes, I have never had a problem and I don’t see why other people do. In my mind you should always be nice to publishers, I mean if you’re to much of an ass to them they might just remember your name and pass you up the next time you try with them.

It really does bum me out that I didn’t make it in the book. I mean it is going to have the most kick ass cover art also. That’s just the way life is and the way the writing world works. You can either learn from it or let it destroy you.

Sunday, May 1, 2011

Some old Junk

So now I have a job. Reason of me not working much over the last two years is stuff to do with a bad heart. No real point into getting into details, just I got sick of sitting around, I need to live a little. Also I am tried of being fat over the issue. I had lots so much weight before I found out I was sick. I was almost down to my weight I was when I was in high school. Which is something I have been seeing a lot lately, how small I was when I was in high school. That’s because I have been going through lots of old things. Ah, see what I did there, I just segued into the topic I have been wanting to talk about for days.

So many things I can go on about, laugh about and cry about. Stuff mostly from just a little over five years ago, but some over ten years. Like when I was trying to make comics for my friends when I started college, just like for shits and giggles. No one really liked this one.


Yeah, seems a little tasteless. I mean I used all two of my brain cells to think this sumbitch up. So yeah, lots of old pictures and lots of old ideas. Ideas, that oddly enough still linger in the back of my mind. Old letters and pomes, old letters and pomes that put pride into my ego. What I mean about that is that all the hard work I have done to educate myself after high school shows strongly. I mean there are things that I now have trouble reading, because all the misspelled words. I should scan some of it and upload it up here, but due to embracement and laziness I wont do so.

See after high school and sometime after dropping out of college is when I decided that I would go through with trying to achieve my secret dream, writing. Why I kept that dream secret I don’t really know, I guess fear of failure. So I increased my reading and started giving myself spelling words. Yeah, I gave myself spelling words and every three days a spelling test. This too I kept private, I think maybe my dad had woken up one night and saw me doing my test on the computer. He may have been the only person to know at the time. I’m sure before that they all thought I was on the computer all night looking at porn or something, nope just learning. To this day I am still working on my grammar and to keep in mind that grammar isn’t spelled grammor…

I think the message I want to leave behind after I die is, just work at it and you can go far. I don’t know if I will go far, but I have made a big step in learning that you can’t just not help yourself. There is no guarantee that the education your getting or are going to get (for my readers under the age of four) is much of an education. I wish I would have thought about teaching myself spelling while I was still in school. I wish I could have shoved it into the faces of the teachers that told me I lacked any ability to learn. Only thing is I feel they would want to take credit for pushing me to learn rather then excepting that I chose to learn because what I wanted out of life required that. Just like when I really focused on learning to read in the seventh grade, because I wanted more out of my video games, mainly Resident Evil. Tasty zombies.