I mentioned my Old West send-up of Fifty Shades of Grey. She called me 'cis transheebic' and a 'white male wampooger.' I'm not an academic, so I can't tell you what the phrases mean, but they sure sounded bad.
What set her off? I can't say. We were discussing a broken parking gate on our building, then I said something about a new 'Fifty Shades' movie and plugged my book. Boom! Out comes the verbal artillery.
Here's a trailer for my tale about a murmuring woman, a railroad tycoon, and a secret place where dreams come true provided you dream real different. Is it worth calling a fellow, 'transheebic?' You decide.
While not a woman, once I had no money but a room to write. Now I have money—or my wife does, but California is a community property state—but no longer a room. Since I began my office reorganization, output on my latest book has fallen sharply. I never needed much of an excuse to procrastinate, but this has gotten silly. Last month, in order to compel me to complete the reorganization, I threw out my old desk first. Such a deed rendered me a prose orphan, with no comfortable spot to type.
I am a creature of place. Where I write is important. I'm not a coffee shop author, or one of the muttering territorial playwrights at the public library. I live somewhere. In that place is a space where I wrote two books, countless short stories, animation series pitches, TV animation scripts, acres of marketing copy, jokes for a stand-up comic, essays, and over a thousand blog posts. Since my self-imposed disruption, I'm not writing as much. I'm not happy at day's end for overcoming inertia and cranking out some pages. I can't find a stinking place where I'm comfortable sitting for hours on end and writing.
Yes, the answer screams out: buy your damned desk and be silent!
But a part of me really enjoys cursing the darkness as opposed to lighting a candle which is a fire hazard with all these papers lying about.
Pardon my use of a line from my Lovecraftian novel, Hallow Mass. But TrueAchievements tells us that dark, video game Call of Cthulhu will be stepping into our dimension sometime this year. Developer Cyanide's trailer teases us with a tale of a detective entering shadowy realms as he attempts to solve the murder of an artist and her family. For consoles and PC, Call of Cthulhu is an RPG-investigation game slated for release in Xbox. Dry ice not included.
Everything must begin somewhere. And in the United States Marine Corps, my enlisted tour commenced with yellow footprints. Drawn on the asphalt of the recruit depot with heels close together and toes angled out to 45 degrees, they are where I, along with seven other guys from our suburban Chicago neighborhood, stood to begin military service. Then we marched somewhere, boxed up our clothes and mailed them home, coming to the realization that our new life would be different from drinking beer behind a bowling alley.
The Vietnam War was winding down, at least for the United States, though the North Vietnamese would launch a huge attack against South Vietnam toward the end of March as we conducted infantry training at Camp Pendlelton. (In September, now a Private First Class, I would find myself in an Army hospital called Camp Kue on Okinawa, sharing a ward with American advisors who'd been wounded helping the South Vietnamese forces stop the communists.)
In 1991, I visited the footprints on a vacation to San Diego with my girlfriend. (Now My Fine Wife or MFW.)
In 2002, I stood on a hill in Vietnam called Con Thien with a Vietnamese guide who told me about the obliteration of his village by B52s, bombing the NVA advance.
But on a Friday night, January 14, 1972, I stood on yellow footprints. Oh, right before we boxed up our clothes, this happened:
(The following scene is rather accurate, except there's no C&W music. Just buzzzzzzz.)
Book Horde: What to Read in 2017: January Buddy Read Book Horde's To-Read Pile It looks like snow is headed my way but that's perfectly fine with me because I ...
A few 2016 hours remain here on the West Coast, but I'm going to bed before the ball drops, as is my habit these days. All the best, party pleasantly, and we'll chat again next year.