Stop The Madness

Of my sucky titles.

I’ve already gone and plunked in a few pages of the new short story, brilliantly titled, for the moment, Serial Jen, because it’s about a serial killer and it has Jen in it. In the future, one thing all literary critics will agree on is that Wayne Santos couldn’t come up with a decent title if you put a pen in his hand, directed him to a large, 100 foot glowing sign that says, “Your title is War And Peace, copy that down exactly” and told him to follow the directions. He’d still end up calling it Fight Book.

I think I’ll just pay someone to come up with titles for my stories. I’m totally hopeless.

In other news, nearly 12 hours after the pathetic love offering was put on the altar, it was finally noticed. The couch has been officially barred as sleeping destination today.

I did however manage to take a good, tedious chunk outta’ the concept proposal/treatment that is supposed to be written for Nadya. The only bit left is the outright lying where I describe what the show is supposed to look/feel like (IE, “treatment”) and gloss over the fact that there will be power black outs, leftist chefs that push their theories of Marxist cooking, and small dogs that like to go wee-wee on the chicken breast. It’s all about the glamour, folks…

Also of note is wondering why Nadya is so excited about this project that she would SMS me to discuss it a little roughly around the hour of midnight on Valentine’s day. There could be much speculation about this, but I prefer to think she was just bored, since I’m no egomaniac, and she doesn’t seem like the sort that would find me terribly amusing anyhow. Her idea of a good time is a wild adventure with the beautiful people in some urban fantasy of glitter and luxury. My idea of a good time is sneaking up behind people in Mark Of Kri so I can grab them by the neck and repeatedly bash their heads against a stone column until said head falls off in a satisfying, wet “plop.” This is not the ideal match for even a casual friendship.

Have now been officially awake for over 31 hours. At some point, sleep will throttle me like a studious serial killer, and I will have the privilige of playing Dead Or Alive Extreme Beach Volleyball, the X-Box polygonal extravaganza that is all about realistic physics on bouncing breasts. I have already been informed that the game designers thought of everything; it is possible to play the game with only one hand. It was inevitable, ergonomic masturbation had to be on someone’s agenda…

I have also been told that the Deep and Involving Gameplay is so engaging that players will jerk and spasm when a ball is spiked towards them. My only reply to this upon hearing it was, “I hope that’s the only reason you’re jerking and spasming when you play that game.”

Someone will now probably want to kill me when he reads this and brings the game over later, but then if I can’t drop little gems like that upon the public, why bother calling myself a writer? It’s all about the versimilitude, man. The realness. The raw, genuine exchanges that happen between guys that talk about CG babes, in real time, with zoom and camera rotation functions.

I think the biggest irony of all is that when I first heard of this game, I wanted it immediately. Most serious gamers I know laughed at me. In a twist of fate, said serious gamers were the first ones out the gate to get their mitts on it when it was available in Singapore, so I feel gooshily vindicated, though I won’t be playing it one-handed.

Vice City Is My Bitch

Yep, after neglecting the girlfriend for days on end running guns, running drugs, running people over, Vice City is at long last my town. Once again, my obsessive compulsive gaming disorder just wouldn’t let me walk away from the game without getting 100% completion, an act of supreme tediousness, but with large, LARGE payoffs, like the AH-64 attack helicopter, or the Rhino tank. It was a good game. One of the best I’ve played in years. I get on my knees and worship at Rockstar’s feet, for a game like this shall not soon grace a console again.

Which means that it’s time to start working on other things.

No, not games.

There’s the question of employment. I suppose I’ll have to schmooze off friends (Are you reading this, people?) or troll through the magazines once more and churn out turgid reviews for Cleo and Her World. Sigh… it’s a living, I suppose.

Me: So, tell me why you prefer to have your armpits unshaven.

Militant Lesbian: IT’S A STATEMENT AGAINST THE FASCIST, PATRIARCHAL REPRESSION FOISTED UPON US BY THE GENETIC DEFECT KNOWN AS MAN!!

Me: Couldn’t get a date for the highschool prom, huh?

ML: FUCK OFF!

This sort of thing will never appear in my author’s bio.

And of course, there’s the ACTUAL writing.

The third novel Suzy & The Shifters (Originally the first novel was going to be titled that, but then my agent and the publisher both had misgivings, as they felt it sounded like a cheesy 50′s band and I said, “YEAH! COOL ISN’T IT?!?” And they began to seriously question my credibility, thus we have Shift for novel one. Suzy & The Shifters works better as an anthology title anyway, since it is about Suzy and her various shifter friends) is still waiting for completion. I’m in no big hurry, because novels one and two have yet to see the light of day, but I’m pretty sure it’ll come to pass eventually, and I can stop being an obnoxious, pretentious wannabe novelist and be a pretentious, obnoxious novelist. The Suzy unicorn short story is nearly done. The Jen serial killer story has more or less written itself in my head. The Canadian Anthology open spaces has rejected my Suzy story, but they said they liked the way I write, so they’re breaking their own rules and asking for a third submission, since the submission date has been extended to April. Since they liked Jen so much, I guess I’ll just crank out the Jen serial killer story (SOMEONE! HELP ME! I SUCK AT TITLES!) and give them that. In other writerly news, Flashquake.com, the website that publishes stories of 1,000 words or less, has told me that they’re considering Famine & Pestilence Go To Dinner and to sit tight for the final result. Anyone who hasn’t read it, just e-mail me and I’ll send you a file, since I think I’d get in trouble with them AND my agent if I start posting stories here.

Ah, and then there’s Nowhere…

This is going to be fun. The first issue is nearly done. I have to wait for the girlfriend to finish up her four issue mini-series with an American Indy comics company, but once that’s done, she’ll pencil issue one, possibly do the cover, and then we’ll shop it around to the various publishers and see if there’s any interest. I sure hope this doesn’t turn into one of those things where the comic comes out before the novels do. Then EVERYONE would accuse me of pulling a Gaiman to a ridiculous degree. I think it’ll be a fun title. We’ve got two Elf brothers, one a super-cool assassin type by the name of Fenoril, and his younger sibling Judas, who is sarcastic, video-game and geek-movie obsessed spellcaster (Remind you of anyone you know? Of cooooooourse nooooot…) who’s ultimate battle cry when conjuring up fireballs is either “SO THERE!” or “Shooooryuken!”

Then there’s the popculture junkie/amazon Cheryl, who learned everything about the world of man through cable television (When she gets angry, she screams “Kaneeeeedaaaaaaaa!!”) and C, the vampire chick who prefers taking her blood in ice, 7-11 style with the paper cup and protective plastic lid on top, straw included. I think it’s going to be utterly deranged since we already deranged Scottish bands with songs like The Bitch From Ipanema (Opening lines, “Tall and tanned and young and lovely, that BITCH from Ipanema she dumped me, and when she told me we’re done, I went and screamed Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgh!”) the infamous One Dollar Man, a deranged Chinese merchant (“I sell you good gun! One dollar only! No find gun like this for one dollar, but you, I sell you, one dollar! Buy gun, stupid white man, I sell cheap!”) and Spanky the Ouija Monkey (“Spank me or I’ll kill you.”). Oh and a clone of Jesus running around, hooking up with frat parties and break dancing on the pool or cheating at chugging contests by changing the beer to water as he drinks it.

“Chug, chug, chug! Jeeesus! Jeeesus! Jeeesus! GO!”

The arc of the story has more or less been figured out. In a perfect world, we’d tell the entire story in about 100 issues or so, with three major arcs. We’ll see whether we can make this happen or not.

Oh well… anybody looking for freelance work?

I Know What I Wanna’ Do When I Grow Up:

Work for Rockstar Games. They have the FUNNIEST radio commercials I have ever heard in my life. They’re comedy geniuses…

I love GTA: Vice City. I really, REALLY do. Particularly now that I don’t experience system crashes and game freezes anymore. The scope of this game amazes me. And the fact that I can gun people from a helicopter then jump out of it, run into the offending house with colt python and start shooting survivors just adds to the coolness. Hey, they’re drug dealers, so it’s all good…

Still stuck in gaming mode, though I see the end sometime within the next 50 or so hours. Currently trying to put out fires. Yes, you jack a firetruck then run around dousing out flaming cars. Unfortunately, just when you do that, flaming people come out, and then you have to douse them too.

This wouldn’t be such a problem if they did the Buddhist monk thing and quietly burned in front of you so you could line up the firehose and nail them with it. Noooo… they have to run away from you screaming “AAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH!!!!” and you have to chase them down the street and try not to run them over. This is harder than it seems.

Oh yeah, yesterday morning while munching on a McRatlands breakfast, a rat fell from the sky. It was the most amazing thing; I think a bird just decided it didn’t taste so good or something but the damn thing just hit the pavement not more than a few feet away, and I think it had already been partially eaten. Mother nature is cruel indeed, but not quite as cruel as a rocket launcher aimed at the middle of a night club dance floor with your motorcycle already warmed up for the big getaway afterwards…

Dear God, Stop Me From Killing Again! Naah, It’s Too Much Fun…

Grand Theft Auto III finally bit the dust earlier today.

Grand Theft Auto: Vice City begins, and it is already exponentially cooler in one major way:

THE EIGHTIES!

It’s like being trapped in a psychotic version of Miami Vice, oh my GOD, I love this game so much… The nostalgia trip alone of hearing “Billie Jean” and “I Wear My Sunglasses At Night” on a virtual radio with a DJ intro and everything was enough to make me drive the car to side of the road and listen in a fit of nostalgic apoplexy…

It’s all there, man! The neon, the pastel colors, the tasteless clothes, I feel like I’m 12 again except now I can shoot and run over the people who were so much cooler than me. AND I can now say they look like dorks and people actually agree with me! WOW! VIDEO-GAMES ARE A MIRACLE! A MIRACLE!!

This is so rad. This is totally awesome! Only a nimrod would, like, say this is grody, and if a nimrod says something is totally grody, it’s like, gag me with a spoon fer sure, what do they know? They’re nimrods to the max…

Must return… Hookers in dire need of fatal beatings…

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…

Saturday Night’s All Right For Fighting. And Rioting. And Arson. And City-Wide Conflagrations. And Drive-by Shootings…

I think the real world should be more like Grand Theft Auto III.

For the uninitiated, GTAIII is one of those video games that the traditional, down-home, “can’t-we-all-just-get-along” moral majority keeps blaming for everything from the rise of anarchy to the alarming staleness of bread in French restaurants. It more or less rewards your acts of impulsive destruction like causing 12 car pile ups, beating up people randomly on the street, or shooting at pedestrians with a sniper’s rifle from roof tops. But life would be so much more gosh darn interesting with this kind of happenin’ lifestyle. I’d wake up in the morning, throw a taxi driver out of his cab, run an old lady over with it, take her money, crash it into a traffic light, get out, throw another guy out of his station wagon ’cause he dared to listen to rap music in my presence, start up a fist fight on the street, wait for the paramedics to show up then lob a few grenades at their ambulance while humming “Kumbaya” and top it all off with a relaxing drive around the city before going to the junkyard to trash my car because of the dead body in the trunk.

The only thing I’d be missing is Joe Pesci as my best psychotic friend and life would be sweet…