Dylan Charles's Blog, page 23

Movie Review: Prometheus

When I was younger, I was absolutely obsessed with the Aliens movies. Well, correction: I was obsessed with Alien and Aliens. The other two movies were of such questionable quality that I’d rather pretend that they never happened.

It was one of the first bits of horror I watched growing up and it had a deep and affecting impact on what I consider scary. The alien in these movies is not something to be reasoned with. It’s not evil. It’s just a very well-designed killing machine; incapable of re...

I Want to Go to There

This is Mars:

Stolen from NASA

Ever since I was little, I’ve wanted to go into space. Most of the science fiction I grew up with was all about how awesome it is to explore space. I read space books and I watched the Star Trek and I fed my imagination on final frontiers and strange new worlds.

I’m less interested in the physics and the engineering behind it all. I’m more interested in exploration, discovery, experiencing something new. Because HERE there may, in fact, be dragons. We know so littl...

Illuminating Blogger Award Nomination

I have been nominated for a blogging award called the Illuminating Blogger Awardby the Food Stories blog.

For those just stopping by to see my now-award-winning blog, I generally write about horror, writing,pop culture and living in Boston. I also shamelessly plug my book any time I think someone new is reading.

I hope that I continue to write entries like the one that earned me the nomination and I hope ya’ll continue to enjoy reading my blog.

-D-

Waking Up

For the last two or three months, I feel like I’ve been aimlessly drifting. Writing has fallen by the wayside. Exploring has fallen by the wayside. When I’m not working, I’m in the apartment, getting nothing of note done. Simple, slow patterns of doing and thinking nothing. It’s the listless boring existence that quietly extinguishes creative sparks and nullifies all drive to do something, anything, that taxes my brain.

I just come home, have a beer and go to sleep. Wake up, go to work, come h...

The End: Entry X

And that’s it.

I have now written ten blog entries in a single day. And they weren’t small entries neither! So no complaining that you were shorted on portions.

If there’s anything that I learned about this whole process, it’s that it wasn’t stressful enough. What I really need to do is twenty-four blog entries over the course of a single day.

That would be the best thing to do.

But first I need a month long vacation from blogging. I’m out of ideas and I have suspicious pains in both of my wrists...

Departure: Entry IX

More and more lately I’ve been wanting to get away from things. I need to see some different sights. Not even new sights. Just different ones. I see the same stretch of Mass Avenue every day. I see the same few blocks every day.

The other day, during my North End excursion, I was just glad to see a new part of the city for the first time in a month or two.

At this point, I just want to take a commuter line to the end of the line and see what’s there. I mean, not just any commuter line, because...

Bitter Old Man: Entry VIII

There comes a time in your life when you realize that you’re older than you are younger. Where the idea of kids on your lawn is intrinsically andmaddeninglyupsetting. Where you really just don’t understand why kids these days don’t just hike up their goddamn pants and stop wearing them so low. Where recent music all sounds the same and it all sounds bad.

For me, I hit that point when I was 20. So you can probably imagine how bitter and worn out on youth I am now. Even when I was in college, al...

Going Native: VII

In the last couple of months, I’ve felt like I’ve become more…embedded into Boston than I have been in the past.

Part of that is the baseball experiment. If you can converse with people about the local sports team, that goes a long way to making you feel like you belong. Several times, I’ve had an actual conversation about the state of the Red Sox. Granted, that’s mostly consisted of a conversation laced with expletives and head shaking, but still, it counts.

I’m starting to feel like I’m a par...

Gratuitous: Entry VI

One of the things that I’ve always worried about with my writing is a prevalence of gratuitous violence. I never try and pack in the violence into my stories in an attempt to increase interest. Any violence in my stories is there because I feel it’s necessary for one reason or another.

If you’re uncomfortable reading one of my stories, it’s probably because I want you to be uncomfortable. I try and keep the discomfort to a mild level; say, the level of chewing on tin-foil.

As I discussed in an...

The Private Fears of Dylan Charles: Entry V

I don’t fear ghosts. I’m not scared of demons. I don’t worry about haunted houses or secret burial grounds or the wrath of God.

I don’t fear giant spiders or big snakes or saying “I do believe in Bloody Mary” three times to a mirror in a darkened room.

I am not scared of the boogeyman or gremlins or alligators in the sewer.

I do not fear the Tarot or Ouija boards or witches riding their brooms during the reign of the blood soaked moon.

My fears are, for the most part, based in reality. I fear a l...