Charles Martin's Blog, page 45
November 8, 2012
eggs
24 pages of achingly bittersweet awesome from everyone’s favorite bassist from the psychedelic rock band, The Gentle Art of Floating - Eric Gorman.
$4.00
September 22, 2012
Keep the Home Fire Burning
It’s been an up and down year for us at Literati Press. The spring saw the biggest sales in our history, summer saw a series of major setbacks that derailed our plans for the rest of the year, but fall seems to be bursting with opportunities to expand our brand in new and interesting ways. It’s hard to know what to make of it all, but that is the plight of a small publishing company, always at the mercy of the winds.
Knowing that there will be crests and valleys, it is important to foster a strong local community to serve as the padding for an inevitable stumble on the way to fortune and fame. When you call a small market home, like Oklahoma, it is tempting to focus solely out of state since that is where the money and the industry awaits. I have certainly pointed more of my time and resources to national promotional trips, but working on side projects at home like signings and small conventions, or lending a hand for nonprofit arts activities like the Oklahoma Comic Creators and IAO‘s Writers Forum ensure that your network of peers and readers remains healthy and vibrant. Like any sport, playing at home is energizing because these are the people who want you to succeed. They believe in you, not just as a writer or as an artist, but as a person.
So, if you are part of a small press or other art collective, don’t just draw in anyone with talent. Look for those that are hungry to make a difference locally and abroad. Don, for instance, is taking on more of the touring responsibilities and working with the other fine folks at the Oklahoma Comic Creators to organize meet and greets in an effort to congeal our growing community of writers and artists. Halo is getting into all kinds of trouble down in the DFW area, popping up in group shows such as Vinyl Thoughts where she can continue stoking interest for her upcoming book, “Serial Kitty.” Marty is playing shows at shops, venues and living rooms as he toils away at Frozen Naked Man. Eric’s band,The Gentle Art of Floating is about to release an album, which will only help sales of his upcoming “eggs” omnibus.
It all helps and certainly beats sitting at home with twenty boxes of freshly printed books and no idea how to sell them.
Los Angeles and New York might be where The Man stashes the brass rings, but if you set a deep anchor at home, when the storms hit, you will never drift too far from shore.
Also, I finished painting the outside of my house this week. Make a happy noise!
August 30, 2012
The Lost Illustrations of Deviants
Here, in their entirety, are the deleted chapter head illustrations for the novel “Deviants”. Upon further reflection, they are a bit more blue than I had originally thought, so its for the best they were taken out. Even so, I think they are hilarious, so enjoy. Also, sexual situations involving stick figures, be warned!
August 27, 2012
Childish Things That Make Me Smile – To Go Boxes
I work at a restaurant, and we are obligated to draw on to go boxes with a sharpie. I have been meaning to refine my shoddy drawing skills, so I have undertaken a wide-scoped guerrilla art project. I normally just let the creations flutter off into the universe stuffed full of pizza and destined for trash cans after, ideally, inspiring a chuckle or two. I particularly liked today’s batch, so I am posting for posterity.It is entitled “The Great Loves of a Meager Skunk”.
Translation for those who can’t read my chicken scratch:
1. Her eyes blazed like electrical storms, devastating and wondrous. She loved him, she denied him, and loved him again. A manic cycle that finally broke, but not with calamity and tears, but with a tragic sigh.
2. He knew at once that she was too good for him. The pearled oyster among the bottom feeders, a beauty of grace and defiant charm. He won her by surprise and a silver tongue. It was one night and she startled and disappeared. He smiles warmly when he remembers. Maybe she does too.
3. She was, is, and will always be a dancer. Even after she passes beyond the flesh, she will twirl among tombstones and haunt her lovers in the same way all cherished memories do, a gracious and profound sadness at the fleetingness of true beauty.
4. She was unwinnalbe. She loved so many, but would be owned by no man. Perhaps, had their paths crossed sooner, he could have had her for more than one divine evening. But that will have to be enough.
5. What did it mean? Probably nothing, almost certainly nothing. But it was intense, desperate and cut to the soul. They parted with delicate simpers, like they had fooled a schoolmaster.
6. He spent so many years wondering the labyrinth of her mind. So lovely, so vibrant, yet endlessly tortured. He held a tireless faith that love would save her, but, in the end, he emerged from the labyrinth defeated. And in marched the next soul hoping to slay the monster within.
7. She was the first. She wanted him to love her. He wanted to love her. He left because she had no future. In years to come, scores of women would toss him away for the same reason.
August 20, 2012
Lost Illustrations of “Deviants” 2
August 13, 2012
On Free Will
I have a God complex. I assume that most writers do, even those who write for the Lord – or some such higher power. I am not, in most facets of my life, a particularly controlling person - or at least I don’t think so. When it comes do the reality I create in my mind, I rule with an iron fist. I would rather kill off an entire story, and with it hundreds of innocent imaginary lives, rather than let it derail in a direction that displeases me.
This is the joy of playing god.
And yet I have had characters make choices that are not satisfying to me personally, were not what I intended when I breathed life into that character, yet I can not bring myself to forcibly correct.
This is free will. Though my characters are creations within my own mind, though their decisions are really my own, there is a branching out that happens in the course of a story where the characters begin taking over. The stage is set, the conflict is underway, and the decisions begin happening organically, rather than strictly abiding by my carefully constructed outline.
It is a weird and thrilling sensation. It sometimes leads to unexpected triumphs or tragically inevitable failures.
Playing god to a people burdened with free will is intoxicating once the creation begins spinning on its own, careening awkwardly towards calamity and/or greatness.
This obsesssession was partially to blame for my irreparably damaged relationship with the Christian god. I could not hand over even partial control of this creation to a third party. This was a dance between me and my chosen people.
And, in the midst of this dance, I have seen my beloved creations love, sacrifice, sin, betray and kill – all without my blessing. I allowed it to happen because I acknowledged that it needed to happen for my world to make sense, for my world to be perfect. This does not absolve me of guilt. In fact, it makes me all the more guilty because I was not willing to soil my creation in the slightest, even if it meant saving the lives of millions.
This is the joy of playing god.
- Charles Martin & Will Weinke
August 12, 2012
Lost Illustrations of “Deviants”
In the original manuscript of “Deviants”, there was a series of crude illustrations that didn’t test particularly well, Will thought were distracting and demeaning, but I thought were hilarious. They were meant to go at each chapter head, but were ultimately trimmed out of the book. Since I’m the one that does most of the blogging, I decided to share these little works of wonder weekly in a series I like to call, “The Lost Illustrations of Deviants”.
August 8, 2012
Clap Your Hands, Say Meh
Marty’s got himself a blog at the Shawnee News-Star discussing music and other insanities. You should read it, subscribe via the RSS feed, say nice things in the comment section and make him feel like a valuable edition to the music criticism community – cause he is.
August 7, 2012
Dear Wicked Hotel Chain That Demolished the Bowling Alley In My Home Town,
How dare you. Do you realize what you’ve done?
Not only have you callously nuked away the sole means of relatively wholesome hijinx for this one dead horse town, you’ve also incinerated what small part of my
childhood I have set aside as deemed worth holding on to. Which ain’t much, friend.
Nevermore will I haunt the dirty, dimly-lit chambers in search of powder cheese nachos and double fried pig-burgers (a cheese burger topped with bacon and coleslaw).
Nevermore will I inhale the aroma of white trash feet and Keystone Light and sweaty sex and that special….bowling alley smell. Is it the balls that make it smell that way?
Perhaps the pins? Guess we’ll never know, will we?
Do you know how many adolescent boys and girls you have just flat out ROBBED of their first potential sexual experience? The Rocket Bowl was makeout central in its day. Now our children will have to get their strange kicked out somewhere else. Like a cemetery or a schoolyard. Behind the Winn Dixie will work in a pinch, but come on.
Those places just don’t have the same…character. That kind of thing is important for milestoneslike that. It helps you paint the memories more vividly.
Never again will a thirteen year old boy drunk on Mad Dog and Kool Aid set fire to one of the outside dumpsters with a package of Black Cats. Never again will the same teenage drunkard pour out shitty colonge onto the parking lot in the shape of a pentagram and light in on fire. Calling out to Satan or Motley Crue or some random Dungeons & Dragons entity.
You don’t even have pay-per-view porn in your rooms.
It would be worth it, maybe, if you at least had some good gonzo action available. Something Like “Bang Bus”
before it got all commercialized.
Thanks for nothing.
- Mer Whinery
