The Cynical Neo-Pagan

This morning during a writing break, I was speaking with a fellow writer, Loreen H., about how it was the New Moon, and my plans to write a "prosperity check" to myself for $1000 with "from selling short stories" on the memo line. And blog about it.

"Wow," she said. "I think you're the most cynical Pagan I know. Not spiritually but on the surface, you're almost like an atheist. ...Sort of like some pony-tailed professor atheist."

"Well," I said, "It's a side effect of wanting to be a Neo-Pagan Thomas Aquinas. I suppose if I were being honest, I'd really write, 'Being Able To Say a Variation on "Ha! Where is Your Goddess Now?!"'"

Our mutual friend, Jai, added, "And the universe will oblige you."

So. I've written my check, and now I'm going to forget about it until next new moon. We'll see if my acceptance level goes up (which, all things being equal, I'm not expecting).

I feel myself becoming more spiritual already....

Random News

On the dream front:

Nothing much to report other than they've been too sexual for me to comfortably write about on my blog. Okay, and on occasion I've woken up wondering, not exactly "What was I dreaming?" so much as "Why did I dream that?" I prefer the dreams of sexual tension to be about rising water and overflowing swimming pools. Although now that I think about it, I suppose being in a production of MacBeth on a floating slab of rock in the middle of an indoor moat might count.


On the writing front:

I've been using Scrivener to trim down the short story I've been working on. I've got a plot, and ... I have a feeling the story as it is plotted will receive critiques like "too slow," "not enough action," and "I get the feeling that characters were working toward something, but I couldn't figure out what it was."


On the house front:

It's that time of year when I want to do things to the house. Like rip off the roof and add a second story, or install a greenhouse along the (long) south side of the house. The latest house longing is to replace our outside patio cover with one that will actually be rainproof and extend the concrete patio about three feet south and west. Oh, right, and install that labyrinth I designed eighteen months ago.

Ah well, at least I have propagated some rose canes from the pruning I did earlier.

Left Turn Rant

I don't know what it is about Eugene motorists and left turns. It seems every time I'm crossing the street (at a crosswalk with a light), there is someone turning left on an apparent trajectory to run me over.

There's nothing quite so stimulating to the fight-or-flight response as the headlights of an oncoming car.

Afterward, the driver gives me a friendly wave and mouths a "Hi." This does nothing to temper my autonomic desire to vaporize his car with photon torpedoes. A lot of photon torpedoes. I can only imagine what's going through these peoples' heads: "Oh, I know you thought I was about to plow into you with five tons of metal, but, see, it was joke; I didn't really mean it. So, um, Hi!"

It's enough to make me want to walk around with photocopies of pages from the Oregon Driver's Manual covering the laws yielding to pedestrians. I think I'd slap it onto the side of their car as they coast by.

Sigh. I suppose there's other laws about using an electromagnetic pulse gun to fry the chips in their car's engine. ("Oh, I made your car stop advancing on me while I was in a crosswalk. Nothing personal. Hi.")

We Are the Stuff of Dreams...

I dreamed I was MacBeth. I think it started out as being in the play. The play was set in a dark stone castle, and there was a moat on the inside of the building, making a square around the perimeter of the main hall. I and another actor (dressed in medieval clothing) were on a square slab of rock floating in the inside moat, delivering our lines. I had a split sense of saying my lines as an actor, and also being MacBeth with an awareness of the play's script.

But then I became "Young MacBeth." The dream was slightly confused, because as a Young MacBeth, I was on a beach with a bunch of Vikings, and we were all standing there in the middle of the night with torches. I was wearing white homespun breaches and a jerkin (as were most of the other Vikings) and we were having a spiritual moment around some standing stones. I think there was chanting.

Applied Writing

Reminding myself that a strong protagonist, when faced with a situation that threatens something they cherish, reacts with action, not moping.

Early March Nightmare

Mostly nightmares last night. Starting around 2AM I kept waking up and drifting back into the dream-plot....

Part One:

The dream was in Gotham City, sort of colorful and bright.
I was Batman (Adam West, not any of the more modern ones). The Joker (or possibly The Riddler) had just been elected mayor of Gotham City. One of the first things Mayor Joker did was declare me a vigilante and persona non grata at city hall. The setting became more dark and Tim Burton-esque. Commissioner Gordon had to work for the Joker, but was also helping me out on the sly. In the dream he was less statuesque and shorter than the actor who played him in the campy TV show. He put on a black trench coat and set out to warn me that The Joker was going to trace the Bat Phone line (obviously, some of this dream plot has been borrowed from the show).

There was a sudden shift in the dream's point of view... and I heard a voice saying, "The government always targets the poor. They put turtle urine into the drinking water and deny them healthcare. I have a vague image of the Joker in a water treatment plant.


Part Two:

I think Commissioner Gordon walked onto a beach were a commercial was being filmed. Or else it was a beach wedding. My recall is a little muddled here, and I have an disconnected image of sea foam or else whipped cream (or bridal veils?) in my head. At some point some guy is swimming in the ocean, and sea-monster-shark-stegosauruses come out of the water and eat him. I think there was more than one kind of monster. They were fast, stealthy, had scales or rough skin, and loped about on four legs eating people. I guess they could swim, because they came from the sea. Some had short triangular heads (with shark mouths), some had bony club heads. Somehow, the Joker (or his government) had sent them.

Monsters appeared all over the world and began eating everyone. Commissioner Gordon left the beach. By now he had a white trimmed mustache and spoke with a light British accent. Monsters rushed off of the beach and into the surrounding brush to stalk everyone. Around here, the dream got its own soundtrack: staccato violin and string-section "danger lurking in the bushes; you know it's right in front of you, HA! it's really behind you and now your head has been chomped off" music.

Somewhere around here, the lighting got very dark and noir. English Commissioner Gordon was attempting to lead his children through the dark and rain-slicked alleyways of Gotham City while monsters were popping out from behind corners and up from sewers.

Society adapted to the rampaging monsters by building thick, stone walled houses -- which the monsters crashed through in order to eat the occupants. So people built buildings honeycombed with empty rooms. The dream became video-game-like in the imagery -- I watched from above as though looking at a kind of architectural drawing of a house -- as monsters with battering ram heads galloped down long narrow hallways, crashing through walls into little room after little room. Somehow they sensed the cowering occupant holed up in the the last room; quaking as the sounds of thudding stones grew closer.


Part Three:

By this time I had woken up and returned to nightmares several times.

And then I was Arcosanti.

I think I might have had a sense that I was dreaming. I remember looking at The Vaults and thinking that for once I was visiting an Arcosanti not wildly at odds with its real location and state of construction.

I was speaking with Mary Hoadley, who was a site manager when I lived there. I don't remember all of our conversation, but I think I had just moved back to Arcosanti for something like the third time. I said, "I'm sorry; I keep coming here by mistake. If you need a computer consultant, maybe I could visit for a few days once a year."

I don't recall her response (if any).

... and then I must have woken up for the seventh time that morning....

Writer Bug

Just write.

That's what I tell myself.

The other half of that is that I have to have something to say, something that interests me, some destination I can aim my words to.

I think that is what makes January and February (and March) so difficult for my speculative fiction -- my interest is directed inward toward mundane, banal things. So I blog; in the days before blogging I probably wrote bad poetry. Am I a post-pupating caterpillar dreaming it's a writer? In winter, as a writer I feel like a butterfly in a chrysalis, waiting for the seasons to turn so I can break out and expand my wings. I can feel the first stirrings.

Sort of. So for now, it's back to the drafts and the words written last night.

Café John Fantasy

The weather was clear today and I'm waiting for the full moon to rise over the wooded suburban hills across the way. Today was the sort of day for buying potting soil, weeding, pruning stray rose and rosemary canes, and sprucing up the walkways and retaining walls. It also was a day for minor electrical maintenance on the house.

On days like this my thoughts turn to Café John. This morning I took a rag and some cleaner and scrubbed and polished the glass top of the plastic wicker table. (Later Mark put some torn-out electrical wires on top, so I had to clean it again.) Then I swept off the cracked concrete patio and wished it was a little bit dryer out, so that I could bring out the indoor-outdoor carpet and not have moss grow on it.

My fantasy is to go out some morning when it's not too cold and write, pausing only to sip tea or partake of a small morsel, while soft music plays in the background. In a perfect little world, someone would bring me savories on a clever little arrangement of plates. But I have to prepare it myself. The bees buzz in rosemary and lavender, and the roses add their scent to the breeze. And then the useless creature hobbles over and meows for attention.

I used to have a gazing globe, green and perfect; but it exists only in memory.

I write, away from power cords and the internet.

And then the tea is cold, or the Neighbors with Loud Trucks return, or the battery icon on the laptop displays one less bar and anyway it's time to run some other errands. I find myself, garbed in polar fleece and jeans, and not in a velvet bedroom jacket and white silk cravat. I gather the empty plates and retreat to the kitchen, where the other dishes are waiting. My writing is done.

But for a moment I was somewhere else, somewhere elegant, where writers are sustained and supported by a garden of sensual herbs, the promise of clean crisp linens, and hot porcelain.

John Is Writing!

John is Writing! Let's help him! Roll the dice for the number of pages he's produced! Uh oh! There are obstacles along the way...

• Caffeine! Come to me, sweet ambrosia of inspiration and fill me with the frisson of creativity. Let the fountain of words flow from -- oh damn! Mark drank the last can! Before you head out to the store, your dentist is on the phone....


• Dion Fortune Because every story, especially if it's a fantasy with magic, needs the slightly goofy but completely thorough magical theories of a quaintly racist 1930's English Mystic.


• The Twin Towers of Tolkien Sclerosis and Not Enough Details (because it's so clear in The Author's head it doesn't need to be on paper). See the teeny-tiny crack between the two towers? The Author (and the manuscript) need to fit through.


• The Dictionary of Obscure Usage, chock full of words like mantis (not the bug), dolmen (not quite what Stonehenge is), transmigration (not when geese fly to the sex-change clinic every spring), sortes (dicing with fate), triptych, pistols, and meniscus. Doesn't everyone read this book before they go to bed -- I mean, meniscus is in The Joy of Cooking...?


• Mystical! Magical! Science! Or was that Scientific, Magical Mysticism? In any case, the characters are working in a world where even rubber bands have Deep Mystical Meaning. Very likely that eclipse is a Message From Deity, even if the characters are measuring discrepancies in Mercury's orbit during it. C'mon, what did you expect from a guy with his own portable Aubrey Holes? Roll die: 1-3 Go back to Dion Fortune.


• An Alien? At least we think it's an alien. It might be a human in a latex suit. Or it might be a houseplant. There's also a possibility the alien is really The Author. Lose a turn for inscrutability.


• Egypt! Or at least A Pyramid! Because ancient Egyptian things rock. Especially hieroglyphs (from Greek words meaning "sacred" (from hiero) and "carvings" (from glyph)). Go on, you know you want to put a necklace on and say "Almighty Isis (Isis, Isis, Isis...)." In a pinch, replace the Pyramid with a Really Big Spaceship. Oh wait... that's been done, hasn't it? Lose a turn trying to turn a towel into the headdress the Sphinx wears.


• The Lost Chord Blame Sir Arthur Sullivan for this one. The Author won't go quite so far as to have his characters discover The Lost Chord that Opens the Spaceship, but they will have a Mystical, Magical, Science Moment while playing their rubber band guitars and singing. Almost obligatory. Roll die: 1-3 a Certain Sound Engineer throws a mixing board at you - lose a turn. 4-5 You duck and the board sails over you. 6 - Go to Mystical! Magical! Science!


• Tea It's Time for Tea! Really. It will help. Roll die: 1 - What The Author really needs is a Pepsi, go to Caffeine! 2-4 Ahh! Steaming Ceylon Goodness! 5-6 Lose a turn reminiscing about the now gone tea salon -- where writing, scones, ennui and that certain je ne sais quoi fleet through the air like a forgotten chanteuse's melody...


• Silly Hippies Or maybe aliens? They are The Author's equivalent of horny teens from a summer slasher movie. Lose a turn laughing at their antics.


• Wikipedia Because it's absolutely essential that the sexual exploits between wasps and orchids be lovingly and accurately detailed as a metaphor in the story. Roll die: 1-2 Lose a turn; 3-4 Go back to The Twin Towers. 5-6 Go back to Dictionary of Obsure Usage.


• Gathering the Lost The weary protagonist (or perhaps the protagonist's weary Dreamer love interest) must be sung home. Go back to The Lost Chord.


• Chocolate. There's nothing that can't be solved with just a teeny-tiny, itsy-bitsy, little chunk of chocolate. Followed by another. Now where was that stash again? Roll die 1-2 Found it! Chocolate is anti-oxidant, you know. 3-4 There's none to be had in the house for love or money. Go to Gathering the Lost. 5-6 Go to the store for more; lose turn.


• Second Life Research! The Author really needs to understand the mechanics of addition while exploring the metaphysical and spiritual aspects of his six foot four, muscle-bound, 30-something avatar. Because the virtual can be spiritual! Lose a turn.

...Okay, back to the game...

Soapbox: Prosperity Checks

Lately I've been thinking about Prosperity Checks. They really bug me because they strike me not only as superstitious twaddle, but as greedy, superstitious twaddle. I get angry and sad when I hear about Neo-Pagans espousing them.

For those of you who don't know what a Prosperity Check is, the idea is that within 24 hours of a new moon, you take a blank check, write down a dollar amount, write yourself as the recipient, and endorse the check with either "The Law of Abundance" or "The Universe." You can write down on the memo line what you're receiving the money for, if you want. Then you're supposed to forget about the check and let the universe do the rest.

And this is supposed to be a spiritual practice. I'm not sure if this is because spirituality is about coaxing cash prizes from the Divine or if legal tender is how Deity shows heavenly favor.

The web sites that talk about this sometimes cite Jim Carrey as writing a 20 million check to himself and getting paid that sum for The Cable Guy. Gee, let's see, a single alleged instance of this working for an actor who'd already made millions in previous movies. Yeah, that's proof this works.

Now, I'm not going to say that making a list of priorities isn't a bad thing; and there's something to be said for being clear in your mind what you want -- but having clear priorities is only the first step. As Starhawk once said, "In order to heal the world, we have to know what we value, we have to know what actions to take, and we have to know what structures to create."

For a while, I thought I might write a Prosperity Check and on the dollar amount line write in "Snake Oil Mongers Revealed as the Frauds They Are," signed, "The Law of Just Rewards." And I'd visualize angry mobs with torches. But then I thought, Hey! Let's try another Scientific Experiment With a Data Point of One!

So, next new moon, I'll write a check to myself for $1000 and on the memo line "From selling short stories." Because, after all, elegant words telling a cool story about an interesting character isn't enough to convince periodical editors to buy my work. I need the new moon and a funny check to help me.

And if I receive the usual 99% rejection slips between March 15 and April 14, then it's that stupid Prosperity Check's fault.

Writing and Updates

Mark had a good time skiing this weekend. I stayed home and wrote. I've been writing (which is good because for most of December and January I couldn't seem to get up enough oomph to do so). I'm usually a "seat-of-the-pants" writer. Outlines are frustrating to me -- so this time I'm trying an outline. It's mostly fun, although I often get a feel for my characters by sotp writing. What the outline is good for is showing me the weak parts in the story.

I also went back and took a look at some of my non-fiction. I think what I have is a manuscript on Neo-Pagan Theology that started out as a book and ended up as a pamphlet. Okay - it probably started out as self-therapy. It was written in a sustained moment of peke, and, unfortunately, the bitter humor is more bitter than humorous. There are some good bits in there, and I have to decide if what I want to say is worth the time to clean it up for a paper-publication, or if I should winnow out blog-sized excerpts and time-release it to the blog.

On other fronts...

Second Life ... is fun. I'm trying to limit my time there. Current project is scripting markers for Aubrey Holes -- my script has a bug, changing the value of llSleep is somehow changing how the script calculates a position. It's weird, even changing the sleep value from 10 to 10.0 seems to make a difference (so I'm suspecting some kind of floating point overflow error).

On the shoulder front: I can now shampoo my head with my left hand, which is an improvement. Still have to stretch all the time, though.

Writer's Block

Lately it's been hard to write. Rather than blog about not writing, I guess I'll actually write a short story or something.

Philosophy of Art

Scene: Saturday Morning. John is under the weather with a stomach bug and is soaking in the bath tub.


Mark (surveying the living room): "All of our food containers are filled with craft supplies."

John (lathering his hair): "Because Art is the Food of the Spirit!"

(pause)

Mark: "No, Cleanliness is the Food of the Spirit, (pause) and my Spirit is Oppressed."

Starlett and Moose

... we join the dream in progress, as the dreamer has been waking up every three minutes for the last hour...

It's the Muppet Show! With our very special guest star... I don't know who -- maybe Brooke Shields? She was tall, she had straight dark brown hair falling to her mid-back, and she wore a very revealing, red, push-up dress. (Pause to figure out where the phrase "You can show the fruit, but not the stems" fits into this dream and deciding that it's an earlier fragment ...) She obviously has breast implants.

Scene: The guest star dressing room. There's a desk in the center, with a kind of wicker bamboo couch next to the door. Because this is The Muppet Show, the wicker couch is also a lion (the bamboo canes move to make the lion's head). The guest star is talking with another Muppet -- this is a dream amalgam Muppet, probably voiced by Frank Oz. He's also tall and slender (kind of like Beaker, kind of like Gonzo), furry (like Ralph) and is a Moose.

Moose has come to Starlett's room to say "Hi," and to deal with the lion couch, which doesn't like being sat upon and keeps trying to eat Starlett's purse (I think). Moose and Starlett are former lovers, so there's that awkwardness.

Starlett: "Hi." (The camera angle is set from behind, below, and a little to her left; in other words, in such a way that the red scrap of cloth covering her torso looks like it's slipped in a Wardrobe Malfunction kind of way.)

Moose: "Hi. Um, I've come to fix the couch."

Starlett: "Oh. You've changed; it looks good."

Moose (staring straight at her breasts): "Uh, you, too."

The scene ends with Moose tripping over something and getting stuck in the lion couch.

(Break)

It's a Muppet Show Music Video scene. Starlett and Moose are walking along the beach, leaning into each other in front of the sun. Scene of them floating in the reeds of an estuary and sunning on the banks. Mandatory Muppet "Lovers Running Towards Each Other From a Distance" scene, which is followed by, "Bandaged Up Lovers Riding a Side-by-side Bike Through the Cobblestone Streets of Some Quaint European Village" scene (I think there were also canes involved...). All the while some 1960's style big-band with saxophones, trumpets and a banjo is playing while Starlett whisper-sings a love song from a Ranklin-Bass Christmas special.

(and then I woke up for the twentieth time this morning and just got up...)

Back to Submissions...

Alright. Sent out six manuscripts today. I have to remind myself when I receive many rejections (especially within 48 hours of each other) that A) I send manuscripts out in batches, so it's reasonable to expect rejections on batches and B) I sent twelve stories to WOTF before placing.

And, having re-read some of my manuscripts, I'm pleased with my own cleverness.