Right Up To Ceiling

Serial Jen is FINISHED.

End result: The final day for submission is the 3rd. It’s now the 1st. That leaves me with a couple of days for proofing. Anyone wanna’ read it? The maximum word count is 18,000. I came in at 17,894. Man, I’m reaaaaaaaaaaaaally pushing it.

Oh, and as usual, my titles suck, so if anyone has any ideas for what to call this story about a anime-styled, cranky ghost hunter going after a child serial killer, please feel free to contribute as whatever you come up with will probably be several orders of magnitude less sucky than my own attempts.

Also, my FFX characters are approaching deity status. Just doing the final levelling up, all stats almost completely maxed out, final game time just crossed the 142 hour mark with still a few more hours to go. The final boss who took me nearly a half hour to kill the first time, will go down in less than a minute now. Ah, the power…

In other happy news, this afternoon, I’m off to pick up my shiny, new, didn’t-cost-me a thing X-Box so that I can start properly reviewing X-Box games. The girlfriend is also ecstatic because it looks like odds are very good she’ll end up drawing a series for a favorite writer around the house, Serena Valentino, she of Gloom Cookie fame. Any comic geek/goth freaks reading this will know what I’m talking about.

Back to gaming. And comics. And writing.

Life is good.

Blogging Before Sunrise

I feel like a damn farmer or somethin’…

I think the girlfriend finally has her sleep cycle figured out. She operates on Martian Standard Time or something, because it seems that she prefers to be up for 20 hours and then go for an eight hour sleep cycle. This is fine, on Mars, where the day is probably 28 hours and it means that she’d have a regular waking up and sleeping hour, but here on Earth, it means that we have a tendency to rotate bedtimes, going to bed in the morning, gradually creeping to an afternoon bedtime, then an evening one, then a late evening one and so on. We got up at 4 am today.

If the blog hasn’t been updated recently, it’s because of two things; working on the start a business issue and, of course, Grand Theft Auto III. But to address the issues one at a time:

No Senor, I Am A Hardworking Local. Que Habla Espanol?

MOM finally decided to take me in. That is, the Ministry Of Manpower. After MOM constantly told me that my submission wasn’t quite acceptable, I went up to my room and did my homework again. Actually, that’s a lie, the girlfriend did, as I’m utterly hopeless with business plans and so she went the extra mile and reworked an existing 10 page template we’d borrowed from a friend and upped the page count another 15, throwing in graphs, business figures and a bunch of other stuff beyond my comprehension. So we visited MOM again yesterday morning and this time MOM liked it and took it. Then MOM said I’d be notified about it in a while and to please go to my room. MOM then stamped my passport till the end of February, so it looks like I get to stay for another month thanks to the good–if tediously bureaucratic–graces of MOM. Guess we’ll just have to wait now and see whether this business thingy actually gets off the ground now…

How Do I Kill Thee? Let Me Count The Ways: Burning, Shooting, Stabbing, Bludgeoning, Running Over You…

You know you’re playing a video game for far, FAR too long when you’re sitting in a cab, see another car go zooming by and suddenly have the urge to take control of the wheel, steer the cab into the other lane to overtake and pass the nice shiny new car, then block it, jump out, throw out the driver and jack his car so that you can drive like a maniac over the elevated freeway and see if you can jump it across the river and into the boardwalk for a Unique Stunt Jump Bonus.

Home stretch on GTA III now. All the side missions are done, so it’s just a matter of finishing the ACTUAL game. Of course, the big problem is that every time I go into The Cave, I see Grand Theft Auto: Vice City staring me in the face, so the madness may continue for some time, which I will probably be killed for.

Darwin Was Right:

The stupidity of my cat amazes me sometimes.

I mean, he’s an animal, so it’s granted that he’s not going to be mathematically simulating the atmosphere of Jupiter using fluid dynamics equations, but STILL… You’d think he would at least only eat things that were actually edible.

I believe at the moment my cat is suffering from Anal Trauma, at least that’s what I’m calling it. It’s a condition where the cat develops a superstitious fear of the litterbox when defecating because he associates it with the pain. The reason he experiences pain is because he’s in agony when he actually defecates, but his little feline mind associates that with the box. NOT with the fact that he went and ate a handstrap for a cellular phone.

YES. Zero ate the little wrist-wrap hand thingy that was tied to my cellular phone.

The level of stupidity involved in this amazes even me, and I’m a moron.

It started when I noticed while grabbing my phone that I wasn’t feeling the sensation of the strap against my hand. When I looked at it yesterday, I noticed that it had been cleanly bitten through. I had seen Zero playing with my phone before, and even trying sometimes to contentendly gnaw on said strap, but after having left the phone out in the living room at bedtime, I guess he seized this as an opportunity to finally ingest the tasty morsel.

I didn’t know this, of course. I just assumed that he bit through it and played with it somewhere, batting it under the couch or something. At least until the girlfriend walked into the other bathroom, trying to figure out why it was stinky and realizing that Zero had once again gone into the shower stall and had left his package, INCLUDING largely intact strap.

Any cat owners out there who know how to stop an incredibly stupid cat from eating things that are clearly NOT food? I thought he’d have enough common sense to only eat things that could actually be chewed into pieces, but apparently he’s trusted that we, in our human wisdom, will save him from his own mental retardation. I think if Zero went to cat school, he’d be riding in the short bus, if you catch my drift…

I feel sorry for his poor little kitty colon, trying unsuccessfully to digest that…

It’s Not That It Needs Work, You Just Suck.

A couple of days ago, as a favor to my friend Ching, I read someone’s short story.

Perhaps it is professional pride. Or ego. Or just being nitpicky, but it annoys me when people (Particularly locals) get it into their head that because something is not involved in Science or Math, it must therefore be drop dead easy, and anyone can do it. These are the same kinds of people that think that Harry Potter is a get-rich-quick scheme, and that the only thing required to make that same amount of money is to have the patience to sit down, not hanging out with friends in bars or restaurants, and just crank the damn thing out.

I say all this because it seems that Ching’s friend has the exact same opinion.

She tells me that this friend of hers that she’s not THAT close to, just one day up and decided that he wanted to write a book. Apparently he had some publishing experience when he was 12 or 14, and based on that glowing assessment, has, after a hiatus of a decade or two, decide to get back into the writing game. So he asked Ching to look at his story. I guess she mentioned me, and he decided that he wanted a glowing report from a “fellow professional” and asked that I looked at it. So I did.

And regretted the entire affair.

I won’t paraphrase what I said. Instead, I’ll just the throw the e-mail I sent to Ching in its entirety right here:

I really don’t know if I should comment on this story. For the most part, it doesn’t work for me. If he wants me to, I can do a line-by-line edit and point out what I see as the difficulties, but to be completely honest, I think the story is nasty, somewhat pretentious, and entirely too self-centered on the writer himself, going “Look at me! LOOK AT ME!” and not the story itself. In general terms:

This is not the WORST story I’ve ever read. I’ve seen stuff a lot more problematic than this in my creative writing classes. But Darren should find a critique from someone who’s more interested in “literary stories” that concentrate more on cleverness than technique, because he seems more interested in being clever than writing well, and I’m on the opposite end of the spectrum. I dunno… you read the story, see what you think… Myself, I think he’s got a long way to go before he writes the kind of stories that I like, but I make the disclaimer that I’m a simpleton that slums in “Genreville” and not a Literary Writer. Though I would still contend that he’s no Gabriel Garcia Marquez either, and HE’S a fabulous “Literary Author” who’s style is easy AND fun.

And, as Forrest Gump would say, “That’s all I have to say about that.”

Life is like a bad writer. The plot generally sucks most of the time.

The Bedtime Blog

Real quick, ’cause it’s nearly 10 am, which is past my bedtime.

I did NOTHING interesting or think anything interesting today. Yesterday I read a monumentally bad, bad BAD short story by someone who arbitrarily decided he wanted to be a writer and get a book published with no previous literary experience. To be fair, the person was Singaporean, and they tend to believe that anything not in Business or Science is easy. More ranting about that and what makes bad writing when I wake up.

Other than that… Had friends over. Subtly observed behavior of friend’s new boyfriend and the verdict is, “That homey’s all right. He be chillin’ in da hood.” At least it’s a nice change of pace because he seems like a normal guy living in a normal world instead of the usual high drama or economically high powered characters I’ve known over the last few years. I forgot that the people and stuff in the middle comprise the vast majority of the universe and this was a pleasant brush with it once more.

And the mindless domination of Liberty City in Grand Theft Auto III continues. I’m finally getting around to playing this game again, but, as usual, obsessive compulsive disorder combined with the dreaded Gamer’s Pride kicked in, and I won’t let up until I get 100% completion of the game which involves numerous difficult and/or tedious side missions. To date, I have rescued 421 people in the paramedic mission. A horrifying figure, because it’s nearly more than I’ve killed. Still, I’m, working hard on that body count, and with any luck, my young, malleable mind can be evilly influenced by this game and then I can go out, kill someone, and take no responsibility for my actions as I blame it on the game, the media rallies around me, and I talk about it in tearful recollection on Oprah, only to stop when she hugs me and I fight to find a breath hole in the midst of that massive cleavage.

God, I sure hope I don’t dream of that when I go to bed…

The Trial, Lah…

For those of you unaware of my incredibly pretentious literary reference, The Trial was a novel by the master of paranoia, Franz Kafka, and “Lah” is the useless tag word that Singaporeans stick on the end of their sentences. Lah.

Mostly I titled this post this way because I currently feel like I am in a Franz Kafka novel surrounded by little yellow people.

Yes, yes, I know that is an incredibly politically incorrect thing to say but at the moment I am daunted and mightily frustrated by the bureaucratic machine that, until I came here, I had thought to be the figments of imagination of a mad genius and not something that could possibly exist in reality in such an exaggerated form. Then I got over here and realized that Kafka had been playing it down.

The plans which are currently being foiled by the Powers That Be (Who require three copies, signed, in color coded paper, with appendices A through G attached here, here, and here, but not in copy three which is for administrative purposes, unless appendix D is signed here, in which case you need appendix D iii, and an additional copy for the appendix D iii processing department, which will require you to fill this form, as well as get sub-appendices… ah, you get the idea…) are to make myself once more nice and legal. It seemed simple enough; start a business. You own it, you work with people you know, you call your own hours, and you don’t have any idiot manager to blame except yourself, a much more acceptable–if somewhat scarier–proposition.

However, over the course of the last few weeks, the Easy-To-Use, Standardized-And-Universal-Format that is supposed to be so easy to fill out and process has been subjected to repeated submission, usually rejected because whoever we are dealing with doesn’t agree with the way it was filled out, even though it was filled out as per the instructions of the LAST civil servant I saw, who told me that this was what I needed to do for an acceptable form when he/she rejected it after I followed the advice of the civil servant previous to that.

So it would seem that this incredibly standardized, universal system of form filling and processing is highly subject to individual interpretation, and whatever advice one duly authorized civil servant gives can be automatically, arbitrarily countermanded by the next one. This could be due to any number of reasons from they don’t like the look of you, to they don’t like the person who gave you advice last time and are inflicting their office political war on you, to they just got rejected at the last government run Social Development Unit party (“Breed! Be fruitful and multiply! That’s an order!”) and they’re not having a good morning so they don’t see why you should either.

Having just spoken to my blogless friend DangerGene Whitlock (Whose baby is due in two weeks! Go Gene!) he presented an interesting solution to help circumvent this problem.

Start taking names.

This, apparently has worked for him in the past. The theory is that if you take the name of the person who is dealing with you, this will trigger the genetically in-built paranoia that is characteristic of Singaporeans in general and civil servants in particular who are Always Watching Their Ass. It will ensure that they try not to be too “creative” in advising you out of sheer hostile whimsey. The pay off comes when you deal with the next person and they give you the completely contradictory information. Now you cite the name of the first person, ask to take the name of the current person, and ask if there’s some way to corroborate with management between this diametric opposition. Now the Always Watching Their Ass behavioural paradigm is kicked in as they realize that a meeting with management to deal with the discrepancy is going to cause untold amounts of trouble for them personally and profressionally, and so they wisely decide that having a bit of bureaucratic fun at your expense is simply not worth a, at worst, dismissal and, at least, boring lecture about administrative ethics, so they usually just let it go, and the always reliable human need to not make life difficult for others if it means you pay for it too prevails.

Bureaucrats. Just. Plain. SUCK.

Meow! Meowmeowmeowmeowmeow X 14

Not just a few minutes ago we were walking back home from a domestic kind of dinner, she carrying a ring light bulb, me carrying a four step ladder we had to pick up so we could replace the burnt out kitchen bulb with the new one.

Just before we turned the corner to our street, we were greeted by the sight of a group of cats, most of whom were vaguely familiar as regulars around the area. The weird thing is, they all ran towards us, some of them mewing, some of them making low noises, others just staring. They all gathered around and stared at us, but none of them would let us touch or pet them. Nor however, would they go away.

I was mildly amazed when the girlfriend took count and revealed that fourteen of the little bastards had surrounded us. It was just like that moment in that Stephen King movie, Sleepwalkers, except that we weren’t demons in human form and the cats weren’t trying to kill us and rip us to pieces and Madchen Amick wasn’t screaming in the background about being raped by a half-dead demon, but other than that it was exactly like that. Exactly.

I have no idea of what, if anything, this means.

Game-u Show-oo! YOSH!

When I’m not having nightmares, I’m having bizarre afternoons.

Yesterday I helped out my friend Amelia with what’s called a “Promo”, short for promotion. This particular promo was kind of pseudo commercial meant for networks and advertisers for a game show called “Chain Reaction.” It’s a sort of a low-budget affair that relies on groups of people running around with cheap cameras. I was one of those people.

The premise of the show works like this: You have two hosts, in this case, some Korean-American named Christian and a local girl named Claudine. They were the usual sort, very pretty to look at, nice teeth, sociable and all that. Christian was the “hoster” and Claudine was the “runner”. I’ll explain in a second.

First the they had to locate two people who would act as “Team Captains.” What this consisted of was just running around the street, in this case, East Coast Park on a Saturday morning, asking people, “Hey, you wanna kill a few hours and be on a game show?” If they agreed, then there would be a sort of “coin toss” question. Whoever answered it first and correctly would get to make the first move.

Now here’s where the actual show begins. Christian went up to a vantage point. We found a garden/dining rooftop area on one of the restaurants on the restaurant strip that looked out on the beach. With the two team captains, Christian then presented them with a series of questions. The captain would pick one question, and then would have to look out onto the vista of the beach at all the people rollerblading, dogwalking or singing “Kumbaya” with their fellow Christians on the guitar, and pick someone that looked like they might know the answer to the question. That’s the basis of the show, first impressions. Once the team captain had someone they thought was capable of answering the question (Example, a beer question. Hey, maybe that guy sitting at the table with a huge pitcher of beer might know the answer…) Claudine, who had a radio mike linked to Christian at the roof, had to follow his directions and go run over to the person selected and ask them if they wanted to play. If they said “No,” the chain was “broken” and the question was turned over to the opposing captain who also had to pick someone. If they wanted to play but got the wrong answer, the “chain” was broken again, and same principle applied. If the selected person got it right, then they formed a new link in the “chain” and had to go up to the vantage point to join the team captain who’d correctly picked them. This went on until a chain of five people had been formed, at which point the host asked each individual a question, and they ALL had to get the right answer in order for them to win the $5000 which would be split five ways for $1000 each.

Nice, in theory.

In reality here’s what happened.

First, it was a promo, so there was no prize money. Second, this is Singapore, so they aren’t exactly the most extroverted people in the world. This is an island where people at a “Blur” concert politely clap and remain in their seats, and where people on the street see a camera and go out of their way to avoid it. They do NOT like public appearances here, let alone acting up. Third, this is Singapore, so unfortunately it always seems like the women are the informed, educated ones, and the guys are just silly dorks that constantly say “Ah?” whenever meager brains can’t process the incoming information, which is 9 out of 10 times generally.

Are you smelling the doom yet?

Anyway, after meeting at McDonald’s for breakfast and a recap of who was doing what, we were off. I was thrown my little Digital Video cam (It’s a Sony!) and was assigned to Claudine, the runner, who or more or less had to endure my droll, off-the-cuff observations of the people, landscape and her hair.

Things fell apart shortly after that.

We did manage to locate team captains. We wanted a girl and a guy. We found a shy local girl named “Valentine,” and couldn’t find any local guys at all that could speak, let alone knew what the hell we were saying to them, so in the end, opted for white bread again, and found some Brit with a cute Asian girlfriend named Heather, whom Christian immediately started hitting on, even though she wasn’t a part of the show. Amelia was already starting to feel the pressure, but then she knew the pressure that was coming. Trying to get a Singaporean to appear on TV and be lively and spontaneous is kind of like trying to get the Pope out for a night of nacho and bowling. It didn’t help that most of the so-called easy questions were difficult for most people to answer.

So once the team captains were selected, we went for our first completely random and spontaneously chosen link in the chain, who, due to lack of anyone at the time having the guts to appear on camera, turned out to be the British sister of one of the other camera men, who had tagged along just to see some of the fun.

She randomly plucked herself down on a bench that was conveniently easy to see from the rooftop, and then she was randomly selected by the team captains, after said captains were told, “Pick her.”

Then Claudine and I randomly ran over to her, with Amelia as the unobtrusive “friend who just happened to be there” at the bench, and Claudine asked her the question, which our pre-planted, pre-briefed, randomly selected contestant spectacularly failed to answer. (It was, “Name the author of the Harry Potter books”) and Amelia was trying to whisper without her lips moving, “J.K. Rowling. J.K. Rowling…” and accidently ended up answering the question, so we had to inform our random contestant of what the answer was, coach her on how to spontaneously search the tip of her tongue for the answer, then go for completely random take two.

It went on like this for most of the morning. Amelia was a real pro. She ran around in happy-go-lucky desperation trying–and usually failing–to find people willing to play. One guy even went so far as to say ‘It’s my Saturday, leave me alone,” without even breaking stride when Amelia came up to him, which was totally amazing to me, because Amelia is really cute, and most guys give her the time of day without her asking for it. On my side, I had a very typical Singaporean encounter when I was hanging with Claudine, smoking a cigarette while Amelia looked for more random contestants to brief beforehand. Some kid on bike came up to us, seeing the crews with the cameras and boom mikes and said “What TV show is this?”

Claudine said, “It’s a game show. Wanna’ play?”

In true Singaporean fashion his eyebrows narrowed, probably imagining the money involved and he asked, “How much do I get if I play?”

I could not help rolling my eyes at this.

Claudine explained that it was promo sort of thing, and that for now, he’d get a voucher for a DVD or CD at HMV, and when the kid realized that no money was forthcoming, said something like, “Uh… I’m seventeen, I don’t think I can appear in this without parental consent,” and then promptly biked off to the periphery of the shooting activities to watch and try to appear in the background waving at people.

Niiiiiiiiiiiiiiiice…

Amelia found more people to feed answers to, nearly all of whom were girls. The guys were just hopelessly shy, or maybe just plain hopeless. One point, we thought we’d a really bright and energetic pair of guys who looked really interesting with their somewhat punkish hairstyles and gleeful smiles and Amelia proceeded to interrogate them.

“Hey, do you want to appear in a game show?”

“Yes!”

“Great! We need your friend to say no, and you to say ‘yes,” can you do that?”

“Yes!”

“Okay, could you just stand over there?”

“Yes!” He didn’t do it and continued to smile.

“Okay, just move over there, right?”

“Yes!” Same reaction.

“Do you speak English?”

“Yes!”

“Do you not speak English?”

“Yes!”

“Where are you from?”

“Yes!”

At this point a whole bunch of similarly cool friends showed up, and they all started chattering amongst themselves. In Japanese.

“You’re Japanese?!?”

“Yes!”

“You don’t speak English, do you?”

“Yes!”

Amelia looks at me with a helpless, “This is so fucked!” sort of smile on her face.

Some guy that DOES speak English shows up and explains that this is a tour group of Japanese students who is going back to Tokyo tomorrow. Amelia explains the situation to him, he translates, and the whole group starts saying, “GAME-U SHOW-OO! GAME-U SHOW-OO! HAI! HAI, HAI, HAI!”

The translator explains that they ALL want to play.

I’m cracking up at this point.

Amelia comes up with a plan, since we haven’t had people refuse to play on camera yet, so she tells him to tell them that they need to say “No.” He translate and they start saying, “No! Hai! No!”

Amelia plants them all over by a tree and tries to get them to sit down naturally. They’re all saying “Sit-u! Sit-u!” and not doing it. Amelia gets down on her haunches. They imitate. She tells them to sit in a circle. They start saying “Sit-u circle-u!” and get in a perfect, not very natural looking circle, all on their haunches. I decide to not help matters any by shouting out Japanese words I picked up from anime, like “Yosh!”

“YOSH! YOSH, YOSH, YOSH! HAI!” they reply.

“Mobile Suit Gundam-u!’

“Ah! Gundam! HAI!”

“Akira!”

“HAI!”

“Tetsuuuuuo! Kaneeeeeeda!”

“HAI!”

Amelia is just about ready to kill them and me. She grabs Claudine and tells her to go over and ask them if they want to play. Claudine rushes up to them and says, “Hey, do any of you want to play a game?”

“YES, YES, YES!”

Now Amelia is going to cry.

After more translating, the students finally get it and start dropping all these “Sumimasen!”s and Claudine trys again. This time they’re all smiling, waving their arms in denial and saying “NO, NO, NO!” while laughing all the while.

Later on Amerlia has completely given up on any male that looks Asian and is sticking with the white boys. Things are getting desperate. Every person willing to play who has been able to answer is an educated Chinese girl, the men are all hopeless. Christian the other host has now switched from hitting on Heather the girlfriend of the other team captain (Who has been eliminated by this point anyway) to Mary, some Chinese Baywatch girl in bikini, white shorts and rollerblades, who was picked as a contestant. Amelia finds another white guy, really enthusiastic, seems to be Dutch or something, he can’t speak English to save his life, or at the very least, seems to process English in some obscure Dutch fashion that requires him to repeat the question, then go off on some existential tanget about despair and suicide with a smile on his face. Whatever.

Some other white guy goes biking towards us.

Amelia literally throws herself in front of the bike, arms held up, and screams “DO YOU SPEAK ENGLISH?!?”

“Uh… yes.”

“HELP ME OUT WITH THIS GAME, GODDAMMIT…”

“Ooookay…”

So we get all the people up there, the chain has been formed. Christian is going into OTT American Gameshow Host mode and is probably scaring some of the girls with his seemingly cocaine-inspired antics. All of the contestants have been briefed and the answers fed ahead of time. We get our carefully planned, completely scripted, totally spontaneous and improvised reaction shot of all our happy winners. Amelia is just about ready to sleep for a week.

Later on, we’re back at my place, having coffee, we’re both relating the day to my girlfriend, and all I can think over and over again is the same thought that’s been bugging me for the last few years in this biz.

Anyone who says TV is glamorous don’t work in it.

Game-u Show-oo! YOSH!

My First Nightmare In Years

The thing is, I normally don’t have nightmares. The vast majority of the time, I don’t even remember my dreams, and when I do, they’re of the largely prosaic, real world sort, where I do exactly what I would do in real life, with no variation from that, like the incredibly boring dream I had where I watched TV and it was all reruns and bad commercials. I’ve only ever had a couple of nightmares before. One was where I was running around with a bunch of marines in a mountain compound that had been taken over by Aliens from the movie of the same name. The other was my infamous Con-Goat nightmare that Karen Chow still believes is one of the more original nightmares she’s ever heard of (But then it’s hard to discount red-eyed, cannabilistic billy-goats that can kill a squad of professional soldiers in nothing flat ordinary).

But this dream… this may be the single bleakiest, creepiest, most depressing dream I’ve ever had in my life.

Maybe it’s because I’m a writer, but my dreams tend to be entire stories with developing plots and such. This particular dream was horribly, vividly real because I spent the entire time trapped in my own point of view, with no third person scenes.

The dream was about the end of the world and evil.

It didn’t start out that way. The beginning of the dream was innocent enough. There was some kind of convention, or reunion of some sort, except that the criteria for going seemed to be that you had to be connected to me somehow, ’cause the vast majority of people who attended this thing were familiar faces from elementary, Junior High, Highschool and university, along with cousins and other people I’m related to. This gathering was taking place in what I can only describe as an arcology; a more or less completely independent, self-sufficient complex capable of sustaining itself no matter what happened in the outside world. It was kind of like a more serious, souped version of West Edmonton Mall; part hotel, part garden, part shopping district, part office complex, all indoors and interconnected with no need to actually step outside.

The theme of this gathering was the 40′s. Although people weren’t actually required to dress in the attire of men and women during the 40′s, quite a few people did, and it added to the atmosphere of the big band music, waiters with pencil mustaches and white dinner jackets with little black bow ties and swingin’ rhythm that seemed to surround the area.

At first, this dream was a lot fun. I saw people I hadn’t seen in years, was catching up with them, even complimented some of girls on their happenin’ clothes, and showed off my cat, who, for some reason, was not terrified of humans the way he is in real life. There was even a big gala dinner with people arrayed at this massive, continuous table that was in the shape of a “U” stretching around the length of colossal ballroom space. Wine, champagne, the low murmur of conversation, jokes, laughter, and the band, also in dinner jackets with the slow crooning of the horns providing a pleasant but unobtrusive aural atmosphere. This gathering/convention thing was for the long haul, apparently intended to span the length of a few weeks, because more people kept flying in, and there would be a big, cheery greeting for them in the main hall, a huge space with a massive staircase and modern art installation in the middle of the room. More people arrived, more fun was had, and overall the mood seemed to be one of pleasant reminiscence and being amazed at the fortunes or failures of the people who had shown up.

That’s when the first hint that end of the world had arrived began to make itself known.

It started with very concerned people talking about what was going on in the news. People were watching the TV and it seemed that on the Outside, things were taking a turn for the homocidally wrong. Murders were sky-rocketing, at first with people who knew each other, usually family, then turning to friends, and eventually total strangers tearing into each other for no apparent reason. On top of that, there were confirmed though still not-yet-understood sightings of… things. Vaguely humanoid in shape, usually not with any kind of similar appearance to each other. They were killing people too, and far more effectively than the people were, but usually disappeared once the slaughter was over.

I remember in the dream watching one of these CNN reports with a bunch of other people, some of them still in their 40′s regalia as the anchorman cut to a scene of tower rooftop that was being shot from a helicopter. From that distant vantage point, looking down, a door burst open, and a small crowd of people–some of them spattered in red, I’m assuming it was blood, though I don’t know who’s–came running out in a panic and scattered around the rooftop of this office tower. On their heels came something black and furry. Those are the only details I could make out, because it was so fast. It had arms and legs, and seemed to be about four feet taller than anything else near it, and it proceeded to first start ripping into someone it pounced on, then another person, and another, and finally it started ripping limbs from people and taking what was left of the screaming, struggling victim (rather like a spider with all its legs torn off) and throw the rest of the body off the building. When it was done, it simply loped back into the building and everything was still.

Needless to say, we were all horrified.

The report went on to say that when the police and SWAT arrived at the building, there was no more trace of the creature, only its handiwork, a long, endless spectacle of slaughter that started on the ground floor and went up, floor by floor to the roof.

On top of this, the report cut to another story saying that the homocidal psychosis was escalating, and that, for some reason, certain people, or even locations were immune to this epidemic. They advised that anyone who was “safe”, or had found a “safe” location was to remain there, because authorities were at a loss to explain–let alone cure–this global phemonenon, and so everyone, for the sake of themselves and those around them, were more or less ordered to remain where they were.

Of course, the complex that we were staying at seemed to be one such location.

There were a LOT of upset, even hysterical reactions to this as the days passed. People were worried about their families, some of them left and were never seen from or heard from again, they just wanted to get to the airport, fly back to their loved ones or whatever. My cat continued to be incredibly friendly and affectionate with quite a few people, although for some reason, there were certain people who just freaked him right out and he would hiss at them. One of them was an old classmate of mine from elementary and highschool named Shawna. And I started hearing voices.

At first I thought that was the onset of the homocidal psychosis that was sweeping the world, but the voices assured me that wasn’t the case. They explained to me that this was it, this was the apocalypse and the that the end of the world would be brought about by humanity itself. No fire, no ice, just blood. It was the darkness in the human heart, magnified to murderous proportions, and that if the fear or anger or hate was sufficiently large enough, it could be worked on, augmented, and eventually turned into a need to kill that would only end when that person was killed him/herself.

There were, however, “sacred” areas, locations which some deed of compasion, nobility, or sacrifice had occurred that tend to shield the effects of this murder-wave, though it could never completely block it out. It did, however, tend to reliably repel the agents of evil that had physically manifested on gone out into the world to participate in the murder-plague. But in the end, it was up to the people to resist or give into the compulsion to kill and humanity, in that respect, had failed its own judgement was being corrupted, one heart at a time, to kill each other off, something it could far more effectively than any rapture from on high.

This kind of information was something that most of the people (Except the die hard Christian or Catholic types) not very seriously, though they had to agree that the arcology seemed relatively untouched by the murders or beasts that were running rampant around the rest of the world, so on that note, they more or less didn’t feel the need to leave. There was food, there were gardens, electrical generators, we had everything.

We stopped watching television when we turned it to the news station one day, and all we saw was the camera knocked on its side, and there was the anchorman, in the distance hanging limply off his chair while something small, gray, with yellow, pupil-less eyes, sat on his chest, eating at his face and occasionally darting its head around as if expecting a bigger animal to come back for its kill.

It’s no surprise that despair, fear and sadness were everywhere by this point. There were suicides. Some people just figured there was no point in postponing the evitable and didn’t want to kill anyone or be killed themselves, so they just took pills, jumped off high objects or electrocuted themselves in their hotel room bath tubs. My cat, for some reason, as one of the only animals in the complex, was given its own room where he would take visitors who came to pet him and be soothed by him. Except for Shawna who he just feared and from every time she showed up.

Out of curiosity, a bunch of people banded together and decided to go outside to see what was happening around the outside of the arcology. From the windows, we had occasionally seen the lights of cars and even helicopters that were headed for the building at night, probably because they could see the lights, but none of them ever made it. There were even a few buildings, office towers mostly, that could be seen to have lights burning in them in the dark, and would switch on and off as if someone, or some people were moving from room to room, so some of the more charitable people in our arcology decided maybe we should try and offer help. After all, our food supply and water were virtually unlimited and our building was “safe”.

I went out on this little jaunt because I was sick of being cooped up, and besides, those little voices had so far assured me I was one of the “safe” ones, and I hadn’t yet experienced any urges to kill.

Huge, HUGE mistake.

It was daytime. Sky was gray, a white haze with no sun visible anywhere. The streets looked like an ancient warzone, dead bodies everywhere, but all of them killed in very physical ways, stabbing, bludgeoning, even tooth marks and limb decapitations. Some people were throwing up, and some of the girls in the group wanted to go back, but didn’t because that would entail being alone, or in a small group, unlike the 20 of us that had gone out.

I think it was my friend Lucas who first pointed it out. He was looking around, and then he said something like “Oh fuck…” and pointed to a building. At first it looked like someone had been burned to death and literally slammed against the wall of the building and left there like a squashed bug. But then it started moving. Crawling, like spiderman down the building and dropped down in front of us.

Two things became apparent at that point, it was huge, and it wasn’t human.

It was very slim, and was probably about 7-9 feet tall, it was hard to tell, because it moved on all fours, with this dark, crispy skin, and its arms and legs were hideously long, like spider legs. Its head was a mess. Imagine someone who has been repeatedly kicked and bashed in the head with a baseball bat. That’s what this thing’s face looked like.

It jumped and landed on one of the people in our group as we scattered. That guy died screaming as it bit into his throat and blood started gushing out. We managed to get back into the van we’d driven out, only after we lost six more people, bringing our count down to 13. Not a great number.

And then people finally started to turn.

It began with Shawna. That’s when we started wondering if maybe Zero knew something that we didn’t.

It was HIDEOUS. I was with another old school mate, Lonnie or something, and we were hanging out in what was the security room of the arcology, a wall of closed circuit TVs looking in on all the rooms and major areas of the place. Shawna was wandering around inside the abandoned grocery store with some other guy. He went off to go and pick at some food (He was throwing all this stuff into a shopping cart) and on the TV, we saw Shawna just stop walking, and break into a grin that looked completely WRONG. She reached over beside here where there was a special on some kind of steak knife and just plucked one off the rack and unpackaged it. Then she walked up to the guy, the knife held point down, stood behind him, and drove the knife, up to the hilt, into his back a couple of times.

Lonnie and I just watched open mouthed.

The guy wasn’t dead. In fact, he even managed to stumble away, and we watched on one closed circuit tv after another as he tried to navigate through store with all that blood coming out of his back. I’m just thankful we didn’t have sound, because from the way his mouth was open, I’m sure he was either crying or screaming. Shawna followed him casually, would slash at his leg or arm, let him hobble away a little more, move in and do it again. He finally got to the end of this aisle where there was nowhere to turn–not that it would have done much good anyway, he was more or less crawling by this point, and his blood was everywhere–and he was on his back, his mouth moving up and down, probably begging. Shawna, with that giant, rictus grin on her face just walked over to him, looked down at him, then put the knife on his chest and ground it in with her foot. She knelt down and started stabbing repeatedly, and we watched until his limbs stopped moving.

She stood up, knife in hand and walked away.

She noticed one of the cameras tucked away into the corner. She walked over to it, and looked up at us, eyes wide, unblinking, that awful grin on her face. Her mouth didn’t open any more, but from the way her shoulders were heaving up and down, it looked like she was laughing. She took the knife and wiped it across the side of her face, doing that over and over again, lauhing at us, grinning, while the right side of her face became streaked with blood.

It took a bunch of people to eventually take her down and throw her into a cell in the arcology dention center. She spent her days standing in the middle of the room screaming. She wouldn’t eat, wouldn’t sleep, just screamed and tried to grab at anyone who walked by. I didn’t get involved, I never wanted to see her face after that.

That’s when we all realized that whatever protection we were receiving from the arcology was either fading, or the strength of the murder plague was now too strong to be completely blocked.

There were a few more incidents like that. I don’t want to get into them, they were all about as bad as that, and the one I really didn’t want to see was my friend Godfrey, who more or less devised a way for the environment and security systems to do his dirty work for him. Automatic shutters trigged on people as they walked through and stuff like that. That was a pretty big blow for me when Godfrey turned.

Also, it seemed that Zero, my cat, was a good Geiger counter for this. We learned after a while once he started to dislike someone, that’s when they were probably on the road to going homocidal, so we all paid regular visits to him to see what he thought of us. A few people that he freaked out over even did the decent thing put themselves into exile before the urge to kill hit them. Others had to be contained in the arcology detention center or thrown out. It was just down to a handful of us now from the hundreds that had originally come here.

The things started to arrive at the arcology too. Not the real big killer things, those were still repelled, but the less mobile, more scavenger-ish ones started to manifest in the building.

I was walking down a hallway with my friend Joey. We got to a part of the hotel complex that was abandoned, all the doors open, and I heard this ugly, urgent whisper that droned on, “I want it I need it give it to me give it to me it’s mine it’s mine give it to me I want it I need it…”

At first Joey didn’t hear it, but as he strained his ears, finally he got it too.

In the hallway, from one of the hotel rooms, a bloody arm reached out.

It was as if someone were lying on their stomach and trying to grab something just ahead of them. All we saw was this arm, streaked in blood, grasping around aimlessly as the whispering grew and grew.

I didn’t want to get involved and told Joey we had to get out of here NOW. Joey despite being the veteran of millions of horror films wanted to check it out and I refused to go with him. I turned around and walked away even as I heard his footsteps descend into the hall. I heard him scream, we never saw him again, and no one went into that part of the hotel anymore.

This kept going on. Somehow, my father ended up in the hospital area of the arcology after an injury, but one of our friends was a doctor and he was in intensive care, hooked up to life support. While I was there I saw my brother and some of my cousins playing around with the power supply to his life support and he started talking to me about how this was the way, and everything was so simple now, he didn’t understand why he didn’t get it before, and he was trying to figure out a way to slowly raise the current being applied to our father to kill him. He wanted me to help him.

Fortunately, I’ll never know what happened after that moment when we were staring each other in the eye, because my girlfriend woke up and jolted me out of the dream, and I was just glad the whole thing was over.

I hate having dreams like this. Fortunately, they only seem to happen every few years.

The Agony Of Rewrites

So today, among other things, I’m rewriting a story. Tightening it up, seems to be the standard term these days.

Some writers think this is a joyful activity. Others would rather throw themselves naked into a swimming pool filled with double-edged razor blades. I think I fall somewhere in the middle; I’d rather jump fully clothed into a swimming pool filled with double-edged razor blades, but at the same time, it’s a necessary and occasionally enlightening experience.

The story in question is one called Photographic Memories, my attempt to do a slower paced, more lyrical, character study. As usual, there are tons of extra “bits” written in that are more or less unneccessary which I never notice until someone else points them out for me, usually to much embarrassment on my part when it’s revealed that something that took 12 sentences to convey can actually be done in ONE. Time for the ol’ writer’s dunce cap during moments like that. This is the story with the lesbian in it that I’m thinking of giving to the Canadian anthology in lieu of the Jen short story which I have categorically decided to not take to the isle of Lesbos, even if it is all expenses paid, first class.

It’s been “critted” (Writer slang for critiqued) over the years (Oh yeah, it’s, like three or four years old) and for the most part the critiques have been helpful and aside from a few obvious errors, most people have generally liked it. Although my newest online forum group, a bunch of people who call themselves “Inkies” (Big side note: Oldest established writer’s group online, only two ways to get in, you “audition” with a sample, or prove you’ve been previously published; I submitted my literary agent’s website and my On Spec credited and schmoozed my way in…) have looked at it, and again, while the crits have favorable (And EXTREMELY helpful, because they all pick up nitpicky grammatical, narrative, structural and stylistic errors that casual readers would miss) the one woman who seems extremely supportive of my writing had to regret to inform me that this was one story of mine that she was surprised to see she didn’t like, on the grounds that she found it a bit too meandering, and ultimately, didn’t accomplish the goal of telling the story it set out to.

This, of course, is extremely disappointing to hear.

It’s the writer’s ego thing. I’m reminded now of one writer on another forum who started a MASSIVE month’s long flame war when he said (FOOL! FOOL FOOL FOOL!) something to the effect of “Be blunt and honest, I’ve got a thick skin.” Unfortunately for him, the other writers took him up on this offer, and gave him exactly what he asked for. They were trying to help him, they pointed out the numerous weaknesses in his style, plot and characterization (Or distinct lack thereof, it was TRASH) and the thick skinned writer who demanded blunt honesty turned on his critics and started attacking them, calling them everything from “Little Girl Writers” to, in the case one helpful commentor, an outright bitch.

This did not endear with him with said writer’s community. Since then, new policies have been instituted that allow forum members to rate posts. If you get a negative score, your post is automatically deleted by the system.

He has many deleted posts, usually rated with Flame, Troll, Uninformed, Misguided, Off-Topic, or Profanity.

But it was pretty eye opening, because here was this guy, who wanted to improve his writing. And here were these people who, as he’d asked, unmercifully told him how to do it. The next thing you know, he’s defending every single weakness in his text, usually with the ringing endorsement, “But all my friends and an English teacher I showed it to said it was GREAT! Besides, [insert famous Science Fiction Writer's Name Here] does it, he’s WAY worse than I am for it!” When that peerless bit of logic failed to make a dent in the reasoning of his commentors that’s when he resorted to the still higher plane of contemplation that involves questioning the integrity of one’s mother. Amazingly, these gentle retorts didn’t change the minds of his readers and make them love him, his writing, and want to be his best friend. The traitorous bastards got upset and slammed him for making them use up valuable time to help someone who clearly only wanted to be told he was genius and couldn’t deal with it when people wouldn’t play along.

Hey, there was a point to all this, wasn’t there?

Oh yeah, the fact that this person I respect doesn’t like this story.

Sigh…

Occupational hazard. And inevitable. When you invest that much emotionally into something, it’s always going to hurt at least a litlte when someone says “I don’t like it.” You just have to remember that they’re not saying “I don’t like you,” grit your teeth, and try–much, much harder to say than to do–to look at the piece objectively without all the heart and soul and wonder if it needs more work. And of course, it always to remember what Stephen King once said; take 10 people. Show them your work. If all ten people are saying different things, then you can safely ignore them all and just do whatever the hell you feel like. But if 7 of those 10 people are all hitting on the same thing–be it praise or damnation–then chances are you’ve got something on your hands, and it’s up to you afterwards to decide how to proceed.

I do still respect her criticism. I’m sure there are valid points to it too, which I may need a few other people to comment on, because so far this is the first negative criticism I’ve received on this story, which was a bit suprising. I’m still tightening up the story, deleting and rewording those extra bits she generously pointed out. And my style is as solid as ever, she didn’t have any problem with the writing, she still loves that, believes it is detailed and evocative, she just believes it suffers from major structural problems. I’ll have to look at that later, I suspect. In the meantime, I’m going to do the lame brain thing; that is, clean it up, prepare it for submission, and send it off to see what the anthology people think.

Like I said, at least it already has a lesbian in it.

Run Forest! Ruuuuuuuuuuuuuun!

Inspired by a conversation I just had with the girlfriend over coffee:

I remember from the very first moment I heard those immortal words, “Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna’ get,” that it was just dead plain wrong.

The real saying should be, “Life is like a box chocolates. You get a little map inside that marks out each flavor and where it’s located in the box, along with a complete listing of ingredients and the address of the manufacturer for customer inquiries.”

Which got me to thinking: If you had to take that famous line and stick it in other movies or give it to other celebrities, what would end up happening?

Seinfeld:

Jerry: Chocolates in boxes… I mean.. what’s up with that?

George W. Bush

George: The presence of chocolates in Korea represents a clear threat to the Asian region. And that is why we must mobilize to invade Iraq as quickly as possible.

Star Trek:

Spock: I find the comparison of life to a box of chocolates to be highly illogical, Captain.

Arnold How Do You Spell His Name:

Arnie: Liife is liik a bahx ahf tem-min-nah-tors. Nooo! Way-te! Ah can do dis! Mr. Cam-rahn, please, gif me anah-der chaance! One more tay-ke, pleaaaase!

Rocky:

Stallone: Life is like boxing chocolates. I am da law! Adriaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan!!!

Marlon Brando:

Marlon: hamshgm box shmofl exmemuffle chocolates zmplf… No one understaaaaaaaaaands!! Arrrgh! (Begins to cry and pound fist into ground)

(Followed by a $20 million cheque and an Oscar nomination)

Rebel Without A Cause:

Dean: These chocolates are tearing me apaaaaaaaaaaaaaaart!

Star Wars:

Yoda: Like a box of chocolates, life is. But beware the dark chocolate…

Luke: Is the dark chocolate more delicious?

Yoda: Delicious? Thicker, creamier, yes. But not more delicious. Yeeeeeees, mm… yess….

The Matrix:

Morpheus: Unfortunately, no one can be told what the box of chocolates are. They have to eat them for themselves.

Neo: Whoa. Sweet…

Lord Of The Rings:

Elrond: The box of chocolates must be cast into the fires of Mount Doom. Mr. Anderson.

Frodo: My name… is Frodo!

(Okay, that last one was two jokes. Sue me…)

My First Non-Girlfriend Link!

Okay, so it’s a close personal friend of mine, but still! I don’t sleep with her, that’s gotta’ count for somethin’, right?!?

Look, look, looky! Look what she said about me!

“about bloody time! “shoeless” wayne santos finally has a blog! thrill to the adventures of this bitter, cynical (yet still hopeful) bastard, livin’ and lovin’ in singapore…and working, sort of…and writing…and playing GTA III…and cracking LOTR jokes…hey, where are you going? don’t pretend you don’t know what i’m talking about. go to his blog already, you big nerd!”

I would like to state for the record however that I am not a big nerd.

I’m a skinny one.

And if you want to find out who Karen Chow (She of the endless wit) is, she has a pseudo blog on her own snazzy website that you can find here.

I like Karen. She was my funky, insane Chinese friend. I first met her in Creative Writing Class. She was wearing a straw hat, knee socks and carrying a violin. It all pretty much went downhill from there, because I was the only one in the class sufficiently geeky enough to not be viewed a threat, and thus, friendship was inevitable. Now she’s doing great and someday I’ll be sitting around back at her place, quoting “Merry Christmas Charlie Brown” along with the TV while she stares in awe.