IN WHICH I REASSURE HREDZAK ABOUT MY BOOBS!

One Hredzak has kindly taken the time to repair to Amazon to pan my silly book about bondage pirates.  I am fortunately beyond the point in my life wherein I thought that silly books about bondage pirates were things that needed defending.  They sort of rise and fall on their own innate qualities.  Nor am I going to make a meal out of the fact that Hredzak (Monsieur? Madame? Let's say Monsieur, why not, let's throw a little testosterone around) that Monsieur Hredzak rendered judgment after reading the first chapter.  This be the Internets, and it be a wild frontier where you shouldn't sally out in public if you're not prepared to get your ego bruised.  

Nay nay, I am here for one purpose and one purpose alone.  A mission of mercy, one might say. Monsieur Hredzak, you need not be worried that I suffer in the least from a deficiency of boobs.

I assume that this assurance is necessary based on the following statement in the review:

Perhaps if this author was a big-boobed femme, I mighta enjoyed the kidnapped lead.

I confess that I do not see how an author's boobtaculosity or the lack of it really relates to an enjoyment of a book.  But if that's all that's bothering you, I can save the whole situation right now: I am, and have been from age twelve, rather upsettingly well-endowed.  Many and many a time I have wished that I had the ability to fit myself into a sweater without the assistance of a stretching apparatus and a buttered shoehorn, but such is not the case.  My knockers precede me into a room, in all their splendor.  I burst shirt buttons when I breathe too heavily.  I knock small children unconscious if I swing around too rapidly.  I have got boobs to spare, is what I'm trying to get at.  

Or are you upset that I didn't dwell enough on heaving bosoms and ripping bodices in the chapter you read?  In which case, guilty.  But I did include an actual honest-to-god ripped bodice in part three, out of respect for the fomula, if that makes any difference.  

Right, that's quite enough of that.  Time, I think, for a nice cup of tea.

Different strokes. 

PS- I don't have any drawings of boobs, I'm afraid.  Here, have a bunch of owls for no good reason whatsoever.

THE THIRD TRANSPORT IS AWAY


Well, that's THAT.  I don't know about you, but I emerge from the last stages of writing a book like I've just been on a week-long bender, wondering where my pants are and why I have a funny taste at the back of my mouth.  Now begins a two-week period of compulsory detox so that I can take care of life admin, reacquaint myself with that very excellent thing called food, and purge my body of any remaining poisons by drawing dinosaurs. A LOT.  After that, I believe there are some pirates who require attention.

GONDOR MAYBE ACTUALLY NEEDS SOME ANTIDEPRESSANTS

SO.  I have this thing where every now and again my brain sort of flips around backwards, just kind of sloshes to and fro in my skull until everything is a bit frothy and weird in there, and in that state, my brain spawns plans which are, by any definition, deranged.  I mean like ten degrees off the nutty chart, right, like sixteen kinds of bananapants batshit, but of course my vision is skewed at the time so I'm all, oh hell yes it's brilliant brilliant BRILLIANT!  Like Wile E. Coyote buying an Acme Suckomatic or your standard mad scientist trying to conquer the world with flying robot hamsters, only the consequences are less cartoony. 
 
The person who usually slaps me out of it is, of course, my best friend Jules, who has a level of tolerance for bananapants wackery that must be experienced to be believed.  Sometimes, though- not often but it happens- I manage to brake before I go off the cliff and make a big mess that Julia will have to help me hoover up.
 
All this to say, I guess I am not going to go through with my genius plan to go cold turkey off duloxetine and just, like, tough out the withdrawal.  It's an appealling thought because I would like please to quit it with the psychotropic medications so I can be smug and superior about their non-importance in my life ("Gondor has no antidepressants!  Gondor needs no antidepressants!").  But the list of symptoms for abrupt discontinuation reads like a menu of terrible, everything from "electric shock sensations" to tinnitus and seizures, so, you know, maybe...just...not.  I've already experienced what happens if you miss your dose of magic pixie dust for a couple of days- for me, it means staggering around limp and half-asleep with a head full of molten lead, and nights of sharp-vivid-horrible dreams- but I thought that I might as well take the plunge, knuckle up, something something combination of metaphors, and just get it over with.
 
Lost my nerve this week and made the appointment to get the prescription renewed.  Le sigh; no knuckling up today.  On the plus side, hopefully this means that my head will remain sufficiently intact to finally get this bloody manuscript done.  So nobody send out the constabulary if there is no action from me for a while.  I will be locked in the BennyCave, popping the damn wretched pills and staring malevolently at a wall of text, making bad things happen to non-existent people, with Buckminster at my side wondering just what on earth she did to deserve me.
See you on the other side.  

 

THINGS I WRITE ABOUT WHEN NOT WRITING ABOUT GAY BONDAGE PIRATES

Research topic list for Book the Next includes:

 

  • Toad licking.
  • Thermoelectric effects.
  • Canadian-made exploitation films circa the 1970's.
  • Lichtenberg figures.
  • Edible insects, with a focus on zophobas moria, more commonly known as the "superworm."
  • Depression.
  • Gospel singing.
  • Norweigan vocabulary.
  • Lesbian pulp fiction book titles.
  • Prison wine.

 

And this is why my parents will never read any of my books.

Buckminster, alias The Management, continues to be completely unimpressed with my frivolous behaviour when I could be playing "The Siberian Tiger and the Mystical Flying Doom-mice" with her.  She has entered her box to let me know just how disappointed she is.

The things I do for you.

ON PEOPLE, AND WHY SOME OF THEM SHOULD BE PUNCHED IN THE FACE

Another day, another dollar, and another lurid set of headlines about women being held in sexual captivity for more than a decade.  I hope what we all hope, of course: that the three young women in Cleveland receive all the time, help, space, understanding, and love they need to do whatever the hell they want to do with the rest of their lives.  But I think of all of the similar cases which are no doubt unfolding RIGHT NOW, all over the world, and I sit here grinding my teeth to powder.  You too?  Good, good.

If you upturned a city, any city, and whacked it on the backside, an appalling number of hideous secrets would tumble out of basements and rental apartments.  

I am not speculating here.  My day job (which is Lawyering, in case you missed my previous rants on the subject) involves a lot of snooping around into other people's business to prevent them from getting away with horrible things.  I can't go into details because of confidentiality and blood oaths and the fact that I'm secretly a member of an elite cadre of lawyer-ninjas sworn to eradicate the jerks of the world, but Jupiter, Vishnu, Mohammed, and Christ, do I ever see a lot of casual cruelty worked into the fabric of everyday life.

The worst things I see are usually directed at the old and the mentally ill.  If children were treated the way my colleagues and I see the mentally ill treated on a daily basis, there would be such a hue and cry that the seas would boil.

The unfortunate thing about Lawyering, besides the necessity of spending fourteen hours in a swivel chair at a stretch trying to decipher account statements from 1987, is that you are sworn to do things like uphold public order and keep the Queen's peace, instead of punching people in the face.  Sometimes the temptation is very, very strong.

YOU ARE DISAPPOINTING YOUR CAT

Got out the last round of edits to Shell Game today, which meant I could finally get back to researching drought-tolerant crops and human mutations, in preparation for Mission the Next.  Of course, all this relentless productivity has me kind of chained to my computer for twelve hours at a time.

How does my roommate Buckminster, AKA The Management, feel about all this?

In a word, unimpressed.

I do not neglect my cat for the computer, I promise you.  One aggravated "Mew" from the other room and I am flying catwards to administer worship.  But Buckminster does not like waiting, not even for the length of time it takes for me to launch myself across the apartment at full speed.  And I can't just play with her before I start working, because all play-related activities (including laser tag and her all time favourite, "The Bengal Tiger and the Mystical Flying Doom-mice") happen only when Buckminster is good and ready.  Dangle a catnip toy in her face if her inner feline rhythms have not reached the play cycle, and she'll be all:

 

I have a feeling that I'm going to see "Can do better, must try harder" in my next performance review.

 

WE AIMS TO PLEASE WITH UNICORN FIRE

Nice person on the Internet (there are such things! the universe is not quite lost) recently had occasion to ask me if I had ever written about a magical unicorn.

I had not, but attempted to oblige her.

Nice person referred to this concept art as "disturbing."  I mulled this over and concluded that any disturbing element in the picture was doubtless attributable to a deficiency of gay.  I accordingly made modifications.

There.  Sorted.

SHUT UP, PIRATES ARE AWESOME

Doing the final edit on Shell Game now, before it goes to the printers.  It is a bit of a mind trip to work on something like Shell Game after The Ghost and the Machine.  One minute you're researching PTSD and railway systems, and looking up Napoleon's influence on the sugar beet industry to try to figure out whether ordinary Austrians had jam in 1838.  The next minute, you've heaved all of your reference books out the window and are gleefully inventing the sexual practices of an imaginary aristocracy.

I've had such a goofusly huge amount of fun over Shell Game, and yet there's something that keeps hitting me whenever I go back to it.  Whatever else can be said about Shell Game, it really, really is a remarkably silly book about pirates.

Gay pirates.

I'm not going to apologise for that- either for the silly or the piracy.  (And certainly not for the gay.)  Silliness has an important place in the ecosystem; it helps to counteract self-importance and pomposity.  The real sin, to me, is not silly but boring.  I've done my best not to be that.

And piracy?  It's a concept as hackneyed as all sin, but let's face it, all of the themes and concepts and images that resonate with us were old long before our time.  When I read, what excites me is old ideas turned inside out and made new again, or twisted around so I have to re-examine what I think I know.  I get snarly and sarcastic if I can guess the ending of a book from its first page, but I would be just as bored by a story that contained nothing familiar, nothing that bridged the distances between the author and me, nothing that made me feel that she wanted to invite me into her world and show me around there.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, but...pirates?  Gay pirates?

A while back, there was an author who was worried about whether his pirate book would sell, pirates being such a hackneyed concept and all.  So he wrote a little poem for the front page, addressing it to potential buyers:

 

TO THE HESITATING PURCHASER

If sailor tales to sailor tunes,

Storm and adventure, heat and cold,

If schooners, islands, and maroons,

And buccaneers, and buried gold,

And all the old romance, retold

Exactly in the ancient way

Can please, as me they pleased of old,

The wiser youngsters of today:

So be it, and fall on! If not,

If studious youth no longer crave,

His ancient appetites forgot,

Kingston, or Ballantyne the brave,

Or Cooper of the wood and wave,

So be it, also!  And may I,

And all my pirates share the grave

Where these and their creations lie!

 

Translation?  GO AWAY HATERS I HEART PIRATES FOREVER SHUT UP THEY'RE AWESOME.  The author?  Robert Louis Stevenson.  The book?  Treasure Island.  

 So there.  

 

GRUMP GRUMP GRUMP

Some days?  Some days should just not exist.  Some days should just go away and put their heads in a bucket and stand in the corner for a million years while thinking very hard about what they've done.  Yesterday was like that.

 

Why yes, yes that IS a picture of me summoning a mystical crayon doomsnake to devour yesterday, symbolically represented as a box.  So glad you asked.

Fortunately, it was not a powered scooter

So on the subway today, I was accosted by a little old lady who began trying, in all seriousness, to ram her walker into my legs.

It is difficult to frame a socially acceptable response to this kind of thing.  Especially when the little old lady in question is giggling happily as she attempts to break your shins.

Did I mention that she was giggling happily?

Because she was totally giggling happily.

Fortunately, I am no amateur in the art of evading sneak attacks (I am a lawyer, lawyers make people unhappy a lot, unhappy people sometimes attack, QED) and I executed the one move in my playbook guaranteed to put a stop to shenanigans of this kind.  I shot up the nearest set of stairs.

She seemed a bit peeved but she recovered well, lurching towards a couple who were waiting for a nearby bus and slamming her walker into their innocent thighs.

The giggling followed me out the subway door.

 

 

Paper will save you when the apocalypse comes

The Ghost and The Machine launches this week, as a book with actual pages and things.  Or as a computer file which can live in the depths of your tablet devices, humming innocently, until you wish to embark on an exploration of the strange and twisted entity which is my imagination.

Now, I am sympathetic to those who prefer to keep all of their reading material electronically compressed.  I become more sympathetic every time I move, and have to lug countless crates of Penguin Classics and foreign language dictionaries up and down sets of stairs.  There is a secret underground brotherhood of movers who have sworn to assassinate me and burn all my Greek lexicons on my own grave.  

But what with the apocalypse looming and all, I thought it appropriate to remind you that there is a very compelling reason to keep accumulating books on paper.  Namely, paper books have so very many uses as survival gear.  

 

 

Observe the effortless transformation of the paperback into a zombie-repelling torch.  You could try to do this with a tablet, I suppose, but good luck trying to get the flame to catch, and good luck trying to hold a machete after globs of melted silicone run all over your fingers.

 

Survival is all mental, they tell us.  What better way to improve your morale and bolster self-confidence than to don a fetching chapeau?  Side benefit: The vaguely military appearance of your BookHat will cause other survivors to rally instantly under your banner.  You can then send them out on scouting expeditions, use them as cannon fodder, and/or steal their stuff.

Other survivors will not rally to your banner if you attempt to make a hat out of a tablet device.  They will look at you quizzically and ask why you have an e-reader stapled to your forehead.  Whatever you answer, they will edge gently away.

This one is so obvious that I blush to mention it.  When the apocalypse strikes, you want to be surrounded by things that you can quickly layer into a mighty and impenetrable fortification.  Books good building material, tablets not.  I rest my case.

CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF ZOMBIES

I talk a lot about zombies with the woman who cuts my hair.  This is, in part, because the woman who cuts my hair grew up in the Soviet Union and has a lot of childhood memories that involve shooting rifles or kicking people in the face.

It is also because zombies have become the great equalizer, the one touch'a nature makes the whole world kin, the mystical bridge between Geek and Non-Geek.

Zombies have become mainstream, it appears.

All of a sudden it has become socially acceptable for adults to discuss their zombie readiness programs or debate about the merits of machete vs. shotgun.  This is very odd.

Of course, I have always been ready and willing to do that kind of thing, but I am also the person who spent a good part of the last month constructing giant prehensile claws out of an old umbrella so that I could wear them to work.  I do not consider myself a good core sample of the typical modern consciousness.

And why zombies?  Why not dinosaurs or pirates or the Trojan War or manticores?

People are so very strange.

But it means that I can talk about zombies with the woman who cuts my hair.

Which is better than nothing,

Take that, Romeo.

Way, way back in the mists of antiquity, when I was but a little Benny, there was a computer program called Klik & Play.  It was purportedly produced by Clickteam but in fact (as I learned after much research) it was forged in the depths of Hades by a maddened cabal of satanic hellsprites, for the sole and exclusive purpose of driving me out of my ever-lovin' mind.

The idea was that Klik & Play empowered you to make computer games of yowah vewwy, vewwy own, using pre-produced sprites and backgrounds.  And dark magic.  I am assuming about the dark magic part because no matter how much I raged and fumed, I never managed to make anything except a mangled gamelet in which a cartoon female with implausibly large breasts wobbled halfway across the screen and then dissolved into pixels.

(Why was my protagonist a cartoon female with implausibly large breasts?  Because I couldn't figure out how to change the default sprite to the spaceship and why, pray tell, would you leap to such unwarranted conclusions?)

If you yourself rejoiced in a copy of Klik & Play as a child, and so manipulated the dread contraption as to create the equivalent of Gabriel Knight or Psychonauts, then please feel free to shut up about it and never tell me ever.

Anyway, I say all this because I have decided to be the Pie Devil.

See, Klik & Play shipped with a number of demo games, designed to show us what WE TOO COULD ASPIRE TO MAKE with the cursed thing if we had ten years and a few graduate degrees in computer design to spare.  These were not what you would call inspired, with two exceptions.  There was one which had a doughnut as a protagonist, which I believe was a gaming first.  The other was a Donkey Kong clone, itself nothing to spasm about, wherein Romeo had to rescue Juliet from that most dreadful of perils, a series of platforms and ladders. 

But the antagonist, O, the antagonist...

Well, LOOK at him.

The Pie Devil's function in the game was to hurl down confectionary at his Veronan nemesis with the regularity of a metronome, accompanying his calorific onslaught with the battle cry, "Take that, Romeo!"  The Pie Devil was not one of your modern villains.  He did not agonize over his place in the world or share tortured memories of his miserable childhood.  Oh no.  Oh, no.  The Pie Devil hurled pie, and the Pie Devil hurled it well.  

Now, would not modern society be improved if you knew that any moment, someone could appear on a high structure nearby, screetching and throwing down deep dish bumbleberry tarts?  Indeed yes.  Destiny calls.