Magen Cubed's Blog, page 50
January 12, 2011
Experiments in fiction and terror
A long long time ago a musician, writer and atomic vaudevillian by the name of The Reverend Civilian offered to do recorded readings of my stories for my own fun and/or profit. He wanted to tell psychedelic fiction with my work as a foundation. A basic outline of a narrative for a joint production, to layer with weirdness until he created something new and interesting. Maybe not "good," you see, because good wasn't really the point. Good is subjective. He just wanted to do something interesting.
This was the result. A recently re-discovered mp3, the audio reading of Single Singularity. From what I hear there's supposed to be more where this came from…
Single Singularity, by Reverend Civilian
January 11, 2011
You should buy this book. No. Really.
From Post Mortem-Press, the third in a series of horror and fantasy anthologies:
An Anthology of New Horror Horror Fiction
Beyond the obvious traits that separate humans from other animals the most basic difference is our awareness of our own inevitable death. Animals live their lives blissfully unaware that each passing day brings them closer to their ultimate demise. Humans, however, have an innate fear of death.
Ten authors provide their unique perspective of death. Whether death comes from the supernatural, Mother Nature, the hands of another, or in a manner beyond simple description, each tale provides a glimpse into the manner of death. Each story has its own Means to an End.
This is my second anthology publication. It features Ain't No Grave, which is currently being adapted by comix artist John David Brown (Facebook, Flickr) to be published later on in the year. The ebook is $4.99 and I talk about dead people and the apocalypse (kinda). You can't go wrong.
Buy the Kindle edition now at Amazon, or pre-order your copy today at Post Mortem-Press.com.
January 9, 2011
New Interview, The Battered Suitcase
My interview with The Battered Suitcase Blog was published today. It's my first interview with a proper blog/publisher, and I'm quite pleased that Fawn Neun from Vagabondage Press gave me the chance to discuss my work. I was going for the tone of a witty, endearing and incorrigible scamp, but stopped short at blowhard, I think. Oh, well. You should read it anyway.
January 8, 2011
It came from my notebook: Harold Tan from Flesh Trap
There was a girl on the closed-circuit television behind the counter of the Grab-N-Go, wrapped in white bandages and electrical tape beneath her tattered gown. Behind the counter Harold Tan didn't see her, leafing instead through the pages of his magazine and waiting for his shift to end. There were beautiful women there, lying across sterile floors and black bed sheets. They had faces smudged by heavy makeup and bruising, swollen eye sockets and cut lips, bandaged at their joints in braces or cupped by steel pegs to replace amputated legs. Harold squirmed in his plastic folding chair, trying to ignore the erection swelling against his button-fly. He licked his dry lips and turned a page.
…
On his way to the restroom to replace the bag in the trash can Harold was stopped by the sound of the door chime tinkling softly, followed by the gentle patter of feet. Harold rolled his eyes.
"Can I help you?" he sighed, walking back to the front counter. There was no one at the door or between aisles. "Hello?"
Leaning over the counter on the tips of his sneakers Harold looked around the store for the tops of heads peeking above shelves, and received no answer. The closed circuit monitor fuzzed into nothing and Harold shrugged. He set about his closing duties, placing trash bags in all the cans and cleaning the employee bathroom. A sudden low groaning noise stole Harold's attention, leaving behind the sink cleaner and wool pad on the counter. Careful steps led him to the rack of potato chips by the beer cooler, peering around the other side and finding nothing unusual or out of place.
"You know what?" Harold said to no one. "Fuck it."
Abandoning the restroom he dragged the three bags of garbage from the store room and out the back door to the alley behind the Grab-N-Go. The pavement was slick beneath his hi-tops as Harold hauled the trash behind him to the sliver of light coming between the building and the dumpster at the mouth of the alley. The girl on the closed circuit television was there, a stripe of shadow against a gray burst of street light. She was skinny in the hips like a boy, one of his porno models in a cheap white party dress and plunging neckline, strips of gauze and electric tape crisscrossed to cover bruises on her arms and thighs, pressing her breasts together under her blouse. Beneath the elbow her arms were amputated and healed in thick scars and a wrapping of hospital bandages crowned her head, obscuring one eye and part of her nose in blood-and-dirt smeared bindings, the other eye blackened with bruises. The sight brought Harold up short like a blow.
She opened her mouth and let out a sound like television static and for it Harold gasped with a step backward. He dropped the bags and his feet skittered across the greasy concrete, unsure of his footing when she took a step toward him, bare foot and silent. Hot panic worked through Harold's arms and stomach, working in his groin in sick thrill. She came to him, mouth open to drool, her dress transparent around her hips and breasts as to outline the pink of her nipples and slit between her thighs, both wet in invitation. It made Harold's heart thump greedily, throat dry as the girl got down to her knees on the dirty ground, mouth damp like her good eye when she blinked in a lazy flutter of lashes. Harold reached down with cautious fingers, combing through the hair sticking from her halo of bandages. She leaned into the touch like a cat and he stroked her for it, enjoying the way she rubbed her stubby elbows against the front of his pants, kneading at his groin like a content house pet.
"Did somebody leave you like this?" he rasped. He let his fingers slip into her sweaty hair, between the bandages to rub circles into her scalp. Spit ran from her mouth in a thick string as she drooled against his pant leg, eager like a panting dog. For it Harold sucked a breath between his teeth, hardening against his fly. "Okay. Okay, I'll give you what you want, Baby, no problem."
January 7, 2011
Let's make the mountain
Me as Nurse Chapel, modified for Star Trek XI.
I come from a family of nerdy people, doing nerdy things.
I have been to Comic Con. I have cosplayed. I have spent late nights up on Livejournal at party posts. (If you don't know what that is, you have a better social life than me, good sir.) I have written fanfiction (Oh Magen, bite your tongue!) and yes, I have been in flame wars. My high school career was comprised largely of flame wars, and from the ages of 15 – 18 I was banned from most reputed comic book and anime message boards of the day.
Why do I mention this? Because I come from fandom. I am a fan. I have a collection of action figures in my bedroom and I wear buttons and pins professing my love for Cthuhlu and Spock. I flail my arms on my couch every week for the latest episode of Supernatural and retweet everything Misha Collins does. (Note: No matter what you hear on Livejournal, I'm not stalking him. I just happen to admire him a great deal. Honest. One day I hope to be shoving scripts through his mail-slot with lovely little notes and promises of expensive European beer, but that's neither here nor there.) Being a fan brings a sense of community. Under every rock on the internet is a group of like-minded people, who feel the way you feel and love the things you love. You can talk about storylines and meta, swap theories and (gasp!) even fanfiction.
It's safe. And you know what? It's fun. I've had a better time sitting on the grass with a stranger in San Diego talking about TV shows and movies, or sitting in a coffee shop with a friend discussing video games and anime, than I've ever had in a bar or at a club. Keep your grown-up pursuits and give me a damn comic book instead.
As a writer, I'm supposed to look at writing clinically. It's a business, because writing is my job. I should exist in a vacuum of market trends and profit margins. I should write things that will get an editor's attention and earn me a nice royalty check. I should be worried about the bottom-line. But at the end of the day, no matter how many articles I read (and sometimes even write) on the business of serious writers, I can't shake the tethers of my inner fangirl still tied tight around my ankle. It makes me want to write things that people enjoy, that people want to read. That people talk about and draw fanart for and, evil of evils!, even write fanfiction about. I want to write things that gather people around them in a sense of community.
And this is where I start to wonder why I'm working on a novel, and not a web serial.
Some of my favorite stories over the years have been web serials. Be they serialized novels or comics, there's a sense of excitement that comes with them. Wondering week-to-week what happens to your favorite characters or to their world. Talking about it with other readers, maybe even finding a message board or a Livejournal community or a DeviantART group dedicated to it. It creates a sense of urgency and community, if you can pull it off. And if you can pull it off well, it can be a really beautiful and wondrous thing. To me it feels truer to my own experiences as a reader to publish this way. It just makes more sense. You can set up your own space for it, you can interact with your readers, you can make it exactly what you feel it needs to be. You can really own it.
I'm not saying that my novel is going to be the Next Big Thing in serialized fiction. I don't know if anybody even wants to read it, outside of the handful of writers, editors and artists I know online. I just know that the closer I get to the end of this project, the more I find myself trying to look at it as a reader. Maybe it makes me wide-eyed and naive, but there it is. I try to look at it the way I would any book, movie, TV show or serial I'm invested in. Is the format too clinical? Does a novel feel too detached? Would it be organic to read as a serial? I'm starting to think that it would.
And the idea is actually exciting.
Flesh Trap: The web serial? I guess we'll see.
January 4, 2011
The New Year brings fortitude with the famine
Magen's Road Map for Existing in 2011
I want to read more. Not reread the piles of stuff that's on my bookshelf or best sellers or what people keep telling me to read because it's fashionable and I'll look good doing it. I want to go out and find new things to read. I want to raid book stores and secondhand shops. I want to find weird things about butchers and mermaids and three-ring circuses that nobody's ever heard of and read it because that what interests me.
I want more piercings. I'm tired of feeling like I have to cover up my piercings to have Respectable Day Job and blend into the crowd. I'm tired of looking like Nice Girl. I'm not Nice Girl. You're not going to be seeing her around her anymore.
I want a tattoo. I say this every year, then I shuffle my feet and find excuses. I don't have the money, I don't want to get something I'll get bored with, I don't really have to have a tattoo. Blah blah blah. I have a design in mind and in May I'm going to do it. End of.
I want to wear whatever I want to wear, however I want to wear it. I'm throwing out my high heels and bright colors for high-waist skirts, tuxedo jackets and combat boots. I really don't care what I should be wearing. I really don't care that men find spikes and studs and straps unappealing. That's the joy of not dating men: I don't have to listen to them.
I want a job that doesn't make me feel like crap. Day Jobs suck. Nobody knows that better than me. I'm just tired of feeling like I'm stuck working for the same violently stupid people who would torch their employees just to make a buck if they could manage it. The economy sucks and I need a job, but I don't want to let myself get trapped this time. You can't get anywhere working for people who don't value you as a human being.
I want to live better with others. I just want to associate with people with my best interests in mind. I'm so tired of fair-weather friends who lie their way out the door at the end of the day. I don't need you. You are baggage. Don't think for a moment that my life would be poorer for your absence.
I want to write things that I care about. I want you to care about them, too.
I just want to do better than 2010.
January 2, 2011
Growing out of the House of M
In a magical time known as 1996, I was living in an old white farmhouse with wide porches and tall fences. The house used to belong to the town of Boyd, a little speck on the map in the Middle of Nowhere, Texas, where the house served as the office for the power company some thirty years before my family moved from the city to the country. This house is not important.
I was nine-years-old at the time, moved far away from my friends in the city. There was nothing to do in Boyd. The town was a stretch of road called Main Street with an IGA grocery store, a Texaco station, a video store, a city library (kept in a double-wide trailer on the other side of the train tracks) , and a lawyer's office. There was only one lawyer, and she handled the business of the entire town. I remember this because she handled a custody dispute for my parents, and I used to amuse her two-year-old son while he played in the kid-container at her office. We had to make our own fun in Boyd, and while other kids were running around and climbing trees, I chose to live in comic books.
More specifically, I lived at the House of Ideas. Batman was boring and Superman was a whiner in blue-and-red tights, and DC Comics was full of angst and dark days. Marvel Comics was where I spent most of my time: Spiderman, the X-Men, Silver Surfer, Daredevil, the Avengers and all the rest. Shiny ideas wrapped in bright costumes, justice and social advancement sought through fantastic adventure. You know the drill. I was nine and this was the best game in town.
My favorite character was Dead Pool. The Merc with a Mouth, red-and-black spandex-clad designated Pain-in-the-Ass of Cable, Wolverine, and anyone else who Dead Pool decided to throw rocks at. But my most favorite, my most beloved, my most cherished character of all time was Pete Wisdom. I still love Pete Wisdom.
This is the reason why.
From his Wikipedia page:
Pete Wisdom was initially created by Ellis and drawn by Ben Dilworth, in a pitch for "Electric Angel" for publisher Trident Comics. Wisdom was an angry young Essex man, with the power to summon electricity. Ellis said at Toronto Comicon 2005 that the character is based on Jack Regan from The Sweeney. [1] Later, at Marvel, Wisdom formally debuted, his first appearance was as an agent for the British covert organization Black Air in Excalibur vol. 1, #86 (February, 1995). Thereafter he left Black Air and joined the X-Men-related Excalibur team, where he would meet Kitty Pryde.
The pair starred in the Pryde and Wisdom three-issue miniseries, which introduced Wisdom's sister Romany, as well as his father Harold, a retired Scotland Yard inspector. Soon after, Warren Ellis became the 'plotmaster' of X-Force – Ian Edginton was the actual scripter. Pete Wisdom would fake his own death and resurface some time later to a shocked X-Force. He next appeared in New Excalibur scripted by Chris Claremont. Originally, the series' mandate was to explore the fallout from House of M in Britain.
In November 2006, Pete Wisdom also starred in a six-issue limited series titled Wisdom under the MAX comics imprint. From May 2008 to July 2009 Wisdom appeared as one of the main characters in the series Captain Britain and MI: 13.[2] [3]
Nobody remembers Pete Wisdom. It's understandable. He was a lesser-known character from the assorted collection of X-Men cousins, Excalibur and X-Force, making appearances in various alternate realities such as House of M, Ultimate and Earth-9586. He didn't have his own cartoon show or movie spin-off, and didn't even get his own mini-series until Paul Cornell gave him a brief run involving fairies and a Skrull John Lennon. He's a spy, a loner, a traitor, a conspirator. He's the guy in the dark suit in the back of the pub who smokes too many cigarettes and knows all your secrets, and is willing to do business with you if it plays into his favor.
Pete made fun of Charles Xavier and wore eye-patches to pick up chicks. He wasn't afraid to poke fun at the cliches and catch-phrases that were being recycled by his costume-wearing associates, even as he kept a tight hold on the pain he wore on on the edges of his trench coat sleeves. Over the mother whose death he felt responsible for (murdered by a spree-killer while waiting at the window of her home for Pete to visit when he had no intention of showing up) and the untold number of people he's killed in the service of ugly faceless intelligence organizations. He's done things that would make Xavier's fold of costumed adventurers cringe, but he owns up to it, and makes up for it, in his own way. One day at a time, with every mission, every deal struck to quietly further Charles Xavier's dream of peaceful coexistence in the face of overwhelming obstacle.
Pete Wisdom does the right thing, even if he takes the hard, ugly way around it. He takes risks. He accepts sacrifices. He's always looking at the big picture and he's not afraid to get his hands dirty. Pete smokes, drinks, makes jokes at everyone's expense and claims to hold no loyalty to anyone, even when he's working in the background to help them. And as a child, stuck in a tiny town with nothing to do and a head full of shiny super-humans and grand ideas, I loved him for that.
For years I drove from little towns and across big cities to the comic book store, where the guys behind the counter knew me by name. Every month I came in they pointed me to the latest issue Pete was in, eager for the smell of new paper and fresh ink. I devoured every page, from the good days of Warren Ellis' Excalibur to the not-so-good and the outright crappy, and kept every issue I ever purchased. Pete made me want to write comics. He made me want to write about tarnished characters with strong backbones and even smarter mouths. He just made me want to write, even if I was a girl and girls had no place in comics.
He made me want to write and prove everybody else wrong.
I don't know what's happened to Pete now, fallen to the wayside under the wave of new titles and story arcs. I don't keep up with mainstream comics anymore. I didn't become a comic book writer either, but that's okay, because I still keep all my Pete Wisdom comics. They're in a big box under my bed. Some are newer, purchased to replace issues fallen apart of old age or lost in moves. Some are original prints, smelling like summers sitting on my wide porch reading comic books. I still take them out and read them every so often, because they remind me why I wanted to write and why I do what I do.
And that's why I still love Pete Wisdom.
December 31, 2010
2010: A year in review
Ah, New Year's Eve. Back already to rear your ugly head, I see.
This is not a time for diet schemes and high expectations for me, so you'll find none of that here. I know a lot of people who use New Year's to get drunk and lament body-fat ratios and ex-boyfriends, but that's not really my speed. So while most people will be out getting hammered in the streets waiting for balls to drop and bars to close, I'll be at home with my notebook and my pajamas, drinking tea and watching the Adventure Time marathon on Cartoon Network. Why? Because I'm an old lady in disguise, of course.
That and I have a bottle of good tequila in my cabinet. Renditions of Bon Jovi's Dead or Alive and Dean Winchester impressions may or may not follow. But that is neither here nor there.
On that note, I'll just leave this right here.
2010
Total stories completed: Twenty-seven.
Stories that I can show in public: Ten.
Total stories sold: Six.
Favorite story: Molly's Entropy, At the Heart of Mina Jones
Biggest accomplishment: Appearing in two anthologies, and being accepted to appear in two others in 2011; appearing in a printed book for the first time; putting together my first ebook chapbook .
Coolest thing: Organizing The Summer Sessions.
Proudest moment: The amazing people I've met along the way, and all the positive feedback and support I've received. I know we're all supposed to write for ourselves and feel good about the work we do regardless of how it's received, but knowing people are out there rooting for you helps.
Goals for 2011
Finish Flesh Trap. Begin plotting the follow-up. Tear hair out. Repeat.
Finish more flash fiction. Try to submit/published more regularly.
Make more headway on my next chapbook project, Seven Days of Casey Way.
Practice, practice, practice.
December 29, 2010
It came from my notebook: The train
The letter from your father leads you to a train. It's at a station you don't recognize, in a side of town you don't remember but at a platform that memory tells that you've seen somewhere before, maybe in a picture or a magazine.
You pack an overnight bag and smoke two cigarettes as you read the note twice over, analyzing the lazily looping script and the coffee rings crinkling the edges. Your father tells you he's sorry that he's left your mother but that he's gone away for good reason, to an address in Bakerfield where he's holed up. He wants to come, because you're his son and he loves you and when you're ready, you'll need to find him. There's much he must tell you.
You remind yourself your father is a liar. Then you remind yourself that your father is dead and drink a cup of black-tar coffee and you don't sleep, too busy rubbing the tired from your eyes to be tempted by the bed. Holding the letter, postmarked on the 16th, you tell yourself that you know better about things like this. In fact, you swear it, like you swore to your mother that you'd burn the damn thing when you found her crying in the kitchen, reading it twice with mascara running down her face.
"I'll fix it," you told her. "Whatever it is, I'll fix it."
"You have to destroy this," she said, clasping your arm like a bony vice. "Please. Just don't read it, whatever you do."
So maybe that makes you a liar, in your own way. Still you pack your bag and buy a train ticket, even though you swear you know better about that too, handing money to a heavy-set woman behind sweat-smudged glass. Her face is barely discernable from behind six months of handprints, except for dark plum-colored lipstick and eyes like a basset hound. You tell yourself not to expect anything and get on the six-thirty train headed east for Bakerfield. Before the train departs you leave a message on your mother's phone, explaining how you're going to go away for a bit. How you're going to get to the bottom of this and how you'll be home in a few days, and how she shouldn't worry, just take care, you love her.
When you hang up you pray that your lies don't choke you anymore than they already have.
December 28, 2010
In these moments
Everyone carries a room about inside him.
– Franz Kafka
I've been a little quiet lately. The holidays bring it out in me. For many people this time of year is full of parties and get-togethers, airports and car rides, bags packed and unpacked and packed again full of new things to bring home. I find this time to be good for staying in, going through my notebooks, and taking a night or two with a cup of tea and making assessments.
This year has been no different.
Wait, no. Let me rephrase that: This year has been spectacularly awful. Truly one of the worst I've seen in quite some time. Sure, there have been some good things. Some good people, some good moments, a few little victories and plans seen through til the end. A lot of other things have also blown up in my face in a catastrophic blanket of smoke and ash. I learned some, gained some, and lost a great deal more. Job-problems, money-problems, health-problems, car-problems. Bad relationships, bad friendships, bad bad bad. Because of this, I find myself pausing longer than usual, assessing, reassessing, reconsidering goals and plans for the future.
2010 was such a failure, I'm ready for it go. In fact, I'm anxious to see it bow out. Closing one door, opening another, and locking 2010 away where it belongs. Out of sight, out of mind.
I've been going through my closet, my desk and drawers, reevaluating the trinkets that fill my shelves and living spaces. I'm getting rid of everything I don't need, every scrap of cloth that no longer fits or useless knick-knack I've outgrown. I'm getting back into healthy habits, exercising better, eating better, feeling better. I'm going over notebook entries and scribbles, half-born ideas and loose associations, trying to consolidate things I feel I need to say into things worth publishing. I'm submitting to every magazine who will listen to me, showing stories to every editor who will hold still. I'm reinventing myself, a little every day, with every story I finish, every reader I gain, every piece of clothing or bit-and-bob that doesn't have a space in my life anymore.
And I think I'm doing a pretty good job so far, actually.
So far I'm slated to appear in two 2011 anthologies. I have one short story scheduled to be printed online in February and I'm waiting on responses from four other magazines for later on in the year. Within mere desperate, itchy, joyous inches from finishing the coherent, cohesive, rewritten and retooled type-written draft of Flesh Trap, I've now developed a solid plot for the follow-up novel. I know, I'm an idiot, but that's not the point. I feel like I can finally put my anxiety over these characters to bed, now that they will have the personal resolution that the ending of the first novel fails to provide by its very nature. With a solid end-game in mind, I can finish work on this novel without it feeling so incomplete. And going into the new year, that's what I'm most excited about.
2011 will be better.
It has to be.
