Joshua Alan Doetsch's Blog, page 8

Where you from?

There is a writing exercise you might try over HERE. It takes a George Ella Lyon poem, “Where I’m from,” and turns it into a sort of advanced ad-libs, where by you fill in some info and describe the places/people/events that formed you. My attempt is featured below. If you try your hand at it, post the result in the comments. I’d like to see where you’re from.

-WHERE I’M FROM-

by Joshua Alan Doetsch

I am from the goblin roads, by the bog, where early A.M. mists tickle hands hanging out passenger windows, a thousand degrees colder than the surrounding summer night—from Dunkin’ Donuts coffee and the grinnin’ skull-bead bracelets my mother makes for me.

I am from the house with the shrieking-turquoise garage door, the tropical biosphere interior, impossible anomaly of the Midwest—waxen, Vincent Price sideshow bedroom—glamour photography by dad. From the wooded, backyard deck, the iron fire pit, listening to audio fiction, punctuated by coyote calls that sound like the second, fifth, and ninth steps of going insane.

I am from the whispering leaves, the groans-by-night corn.

I am from Jack O’ Lanterns picked fresh from the patch, at Great Grandma and Grandpa’s farm and playing card games by candlelight through tornado warnings, from my father, Mark the Magician; and my mother, Renee the Potter; and my brother, Nick the Pirate; and my sister, Danielle the Scream Queen—and every cross-hatched eccentricity—Bradford to Bradford—Doetsch by Doetsch.

I am from photographing gators in the Glades of Ever and walking ghost tours in Key West, which is really Cayo Hueso, which is really “Island of Bones,” which is really full of t-shirt shops and frozen drinks.

From the prayers to St. Anthony to find all things lost and the chewed stubs of the whole carrots left out for Santa’s reindeer the night before.

I am from the Catholic cross, the confessional, the Body and Blood. And then from the rum prayers, the happy macabre, the sugar skulls that hummed voodoo hymns to me on every Caribbean pilgrimage.

I’m from October Country, Chicago’s shadow, and Ray Bradbury dreams remixed—pumpkin pie and double-decker pizza that was divine until the restaurant owner was knifed by her son.

From the great grandparents, Lord and Lady of the Patch, who contrived a big sleep of exhaust, in a car in a parking lot—when their minds and bodies began to go—together forever, and the other great grandma, Mima, who was a writer, who told me to write, who died while I was away, waking to our van surrounded by bison in Yellowstone.

I am from inside my head, where I hang it all so prettily upon my hueso walls.

Meanwhile, in Latveria…‏

“Excuse me, Doctor…uh…Doom? Can I have a moment of your time? I’m calling from Mothers Against War, Anguish, Hellaciousness, Anger, Hate, and Atrocity.”

“Mawahaha!”

“Yes, that’s us.”

The Lion Shave

So…this is what happens when you have a miscommunication with the pet groomers. I give you Raven the cat. A few years ago, a lunatic took her eye. Yesterday, I took her dignity. Be forewarned, the footage you are about to see may be…disturbing.

Melville’s ALIEN

So I got bored. I fiddled with technology and my pizza cutter until I stumbled upon a device that cuts holes between worlds. I sliced a shinning trapezohedron into the air and entered a parallel dimension where Herman Melville wrote Alien. Here’s the first chapter…

A L I E N

by Herman Melville

“In the vacuum, no one can detect your exclamations.”

—Anonymous

CHAPTER I.

Loomings.

Call me Ripley. Some years ago—never mind how long exactly, cryo-sleep and genetic cloning memories fuck that up—having little or no money in my account, and less and less holding my toes to the earth, I thought I would take off again and see the Outer Rim. It’s a tic of mine, to feel gravity squeeze my spleen, cutting off the circulation. Whenever I find myself grinding teeth in my mouth; whenever unease hatches in the damp, dripping nest of my soul; whenever I find myself pausing in the warehouse, suddenly trapped in the exo-coffin of my Caterpillar P-5000 Power Loader, and it is all I can do not to hurl a four-ton crate through the wall and rampage through the streets in my steel skin—then, it’s high time to get off world as soon as I can. This is my substitute for a noose and a drop. With a flourish, the melodramatic throw themselves off cliffs; I quietly take to the ship. No surprise there. If they’re honest with themselves, then most everyone has felt, at one time or another, the way I feel when looking up at the stars.

Weyland-Yutani Corporation is a city unto itself, or a great coral reef—commerce surrounds it with her surf. It’s an ecosystem. Like coral, it looks passive enough at a glance, but look closer and see the different species of coral colonies going to war, spitting up their stomachs on each other, digesting each other in time-lapse combat. All these star-gazers.

Circumambulate the hypnotic spiral. Offices, board rooms, cubicles—repeat. What do you see?—Posted like gargoyles in every available space, thousands upon thousands of company men slow-choking on their ties. Some chat, some type, some crane their necks, on lunch breaks, for the tiniest skyward peek. They are all star-starved, pent up in windowless rooms—smothered in suits, shackled to desks, nailed to the planet.

Listen. Engineers complaining to HR about their shares and the bonus situation in the contracts they already signed, for the runs they already made. They always do. No content for the mal. You’ll get whatever’s coming to you. Up above, the super-suits take higher and higher offices, getting as close to the vacuum as they can without spinning away. They reach for the stars the way needles reach for north, never touching.

You could leave the Company. You could head into the country, find some wilderness—barely spoiled. There might be magic in it. But it’s not outer space. All meditation heads into the stratosphere. I want to go where prayers go, mingling with ancient radio broadcasts for ever. I want to kiss all this bullshit goodbye.

But here is an android. He desires to give you the most courteous, capable, and efficient assistance—to carry out any tasks you find distressing or unethical. I avoided them—these synth-mucoused, milk-blooded mannequins. You wouldn’t find me on a crew with one. But you would find me on a crew—up and away—away from these offices—sky—there is not a drop of sky here! Why is almost every healthy child with a healthy soul, at some point crazy to get on a spaceship? Why on your first voyage as a passenger, did you feel such a mystical vibration when breaking atmosphere—like being born—or when first told that you and your ship were now out of sight of your planet? Why do we throw all our gods up there? It has to mean something. People used to feel the same pull towards water, gazing into rivers and oceans, but I think it’s because they saw the sky there—a phantom within graspable distance.

Now, I say I go into space whenever I get the shakes, but I never go as a passenger. Vacations are expensive. They make me moody, feeling like a fifth wheel, and I don’t sleep well. I don’t go as a Captain or a Cook. Never needed the honor; never liked the kitchen. The food up there is shit anyway.

No, when I go off world, I go as a lieutenant warrant officer. True, I have to take orders. But when the damn Company runs everything, who ain’t a slave? Tell me that. Even space-captains have to answer to Mother. Passengers don’t get paid. I do. Take little satisfactions where you can get them.

I go for the solar winds, the motes of meteor dust, the smell of sulfur and fire and time that draws me down the tube of a billion miles of terrific acceleration. I thought of the hug of centrifugal force as I punched in my particulars. The program called Providence collated and drew up possible assignments. On my way home, I kept glancing down at the printout:

commercial towing vehicle ‘The Nostromo’

crew:  seven

course:  Earth to Thedus (round trip)

I can’t say why the Fates—the computers and company men—put me on that course, when you consider all the possibilities of the cosmos spread out—a trillion comedies and tragedies—but when I think back on it all, and the part I played, free will feels like the delusion of autonomy in the middle of an event horizon.

At home, I faced the last overwhelming weight holding my last little toe—my daughter Amanda. I didn’t know how to tell her about all the marvels out there, about my everlasting itch for things remote. I did not know how to explain the effect the stars had on me—how when I’m out there, I want to be here, and when I’m here, I want to be out there. So instead, I kissed her forehead and promised to be back for her eleventh birthday. Tucking her in, I sang, “You are my lucky star. You…lucky, lucky, lucky, lucky, lucky.”

Then I picked up the case containing Jones, my cat, and the tears fell before I even closed the door. Back then, I used to cry over such things. These days, my blood is a bit more corrosive.

Ever get that feeling?

Sometimes, I suspect that writing/storytelling is being homesick for a place that does not exist.

Scrivening Open the Sleeping Mind

Last post, I type-jabbered about twitter fiction as a writing exercise. Tonight, before bed, let’s you and me lay the lowdown on another goody-goody habit I’m getting back into.

Follow along.

First, set up a writing station—the closer to your bed the better—could be your computer, laptop, a pen n’ notebook, or the Etch A Sketch you stole from that orphan (I prefer a keyboard because my typing fingers can still go click-clack when the rest of my mind/body isn’t functioning).

I’ll wait while you set up. Never mind the silhouette at the window.

Now…SLEEP!

But keep this thought in the back of your lizard brain: when you wake up, you will go straight to that writing station. Do not hesitate. Do not wait to wake up. Do not stretch. Do not crawl out of bed—LEAP—do not pass GO, do not go to the bathroom—do not grab breakfast—go to your station as quickly as you can while still half asleep.

This takes practice. You might have to do it for a week or more before you get conditioned into stumbling to that writing station without realizing it. You might forget a time or to—hit the bathroom—wait too long in bed—wake up too much. Don’t worry. Go through the motion anyway. Program yourself.

Once at your station, WRITE. Scribble or type as fast as you can. No thinking. Leave your editing brain off. You are literally on a race, seeing how long you can outrun your waking mind. You might get a sentence or two. You might get a paragraph. Eventually you will stop. You will be awake. You will really-really-really need to pee. The exercise is over.

So why are we doing this?

Your subconscious is bigger and smarter than you. Give it your lunch money.

We are trying to access your sleeping mind. That sucker is powerful. It is bigger than the rest of you. It is a glowing, cosmic, comic book MacGuffin, and you are a super villain excavating the forbidden tomb of your skull, and once you get a hold of that thing, you are going to work some nefarious hullabaloo!

I’m starting the exercise up again because my inner-editor has gotten too pushy during first drafts. I need to let that go and let spontaneous things happen on the early draft page.

Save those scribblings—in a file or in that notebook. Come back to them a week later, months later—it’s like looking at something a stranger wrote. A lot of them won’t make sense. That’s ok. The idea is to be in better touch with your sleeping mind. You may find the occasional gem, a story idea or weird turn of phrase or metaphor you might not have otherwise achieved.

Keep practicing. You’ll get more conditioned. You’ll get to that computer while closer and closer to sleep, and curiouser and curiouser things will come tumbling out.

Here are some examples of mine. I’ve only edited for spelling and punctuation (which tend to fly out the door during this).

Fred never had the thing that all Fred’s should have. Its absence in his life was a loud cicada whining for that mating that will never happen, not  before his wings shriveled up.




The tunnel did funnel and the tunnel did chunnel all the way to Rome. The bats never dream of the moon beams that scream, and the teaming shadows seam to wither hither go!




That is the way she goes. Down and up but never in. That is the way she flows. Smooth and clear, but always running, rushing, smoothing the stones of her soul. And what she chases or what chases her, none of us may ever know.




There’s a moon over the town. But that’s a lie because the one in the sound is the real one. The sky’s a fake. Conmen come in all sorts of revenue brackets. But the seagulls chant incompressible ear porn on salt winds and I can’t help but think back to the time that the peg-legged girl gave me that bit of advice during the pillow talk.




Eat a pie and watch my eye as I tell you a tale of how you will die. It ‘s not true. Don’t worry. I’m just a fibber who makes very, very good pie.  And it’s made from magpies.  I catch them with a spoon. A wicked, wicked spoon, brings them to their doom, and then I make magpie pie. And that is all I care to say on death…but let us talk more on the subject of pie. Pies are round. No beginning and no end…and yet…they run out. This proves that immortality is not infinite. It can be eaten. It can spoil and go bad.

Strange Love or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Twitter

So.

Life has been a burgoo of strange/wonderful/painful/exciting/frightening/unexpected complications and crossroads.

[REMINDER: Fill in revealing details HERE. Or just ask my one-eyed cat. She's heard it all.]

I’ve been under the sway of intense mood swings lately. That’s not me. Not usually.

My moods are steady. “Distant” and “detached” are not quite the right words…but they might be second or third cousins to the right word. I’m usually the other end of the barometer—people say things like, “You’re stressed too? We’re doomed!” I have my own peculiar set of triggers—we all do—but a lot of the day-to-day (and even not so day-to-day) stuff, that sets many people on edge, rolls off me like water droplets.

Not so, lately.

I know people that swing on these moods. Tempestuous as they get, they seem practiced. I’m not. I’m stumbling like a toddler with an assault shotgun—doing all of those predictable things (even indulgent blog posts!). Part of me is present, going through it. Part of me is removed, fascinated, watching myself play with these new, terrible toys—figuring out which bits might be useful for writing fiction—shouting out commentary.

“Wait, you’re not really going to do that, are you? That is so cliche!”

My instinct is to be outwardly pleasant.

I can’t tell if this is adding new depths to my personality…or just undermining me.

Right. I’m done with it for now. Time to kill the little darlings. Time to get back to  shop talk, the craft, the laboratory.

140 Characters In Search of a Story

If I was training someone to write video game text, I would have them write twitter fic. These are stories in 140 characters or less. It’s a sort of narrative haiku in prose. More than the finished product, it’s a good exercise. Write one twitter story a day. It strengthens certain muscles, tightens economy of words. Cramming a story into an impossible space is a logic puzzle. It teaches problem-solving skills. You’ll find a way.

It is all about using the spaces between words, the implied story, showing dots and letting the reader imagine the connections. Want an example? Ernest Hemingway wrote one:

For sale: baby shoes, never worn.

See that? He gives you six words and lets you do all the heavy lifting. But I know what you’re really asking: “Hemingway wrote twitter fic nearly a hundred years before twitter was invented?”

I can only deduce that Hemingway forced Nicola Tesla to take him back in time so he could punch out a T-Rex—igniting a most unlikely bromance and a series of adventures through all time and space. It’s the only reasonable assumption.

Back to twitter fiction. Write one story a day. I’m starting up again. It’s like doing writer crunches. In game writing you have to learn to make do with limited space and arbitrary constraints. Making do is nice, better still if you can reconcile—make the limitations your own—use them to force a line of thought more creative than you might have conjured on a limitless canvas.

Get a twitter account. Check out the #vss hashtag to see what others are coming up with and post your own. You might find it addictive. It’s a level of instant gratification that writing does not often allow.

Not sure how to start? Try summing up a novel you’ve read in 140 characters. This is also a nice way to jot down ideas you have for larger stories. The advantage here is that the note is already put into narrative form—I find this sometimes gives the idea a certain amount of pent-up velocity when I come back to it. If jotting a story note is like planting a seed—shaping that note into a micro-ficiton is like planting that seed in a packet of nutrients and miracle growth.

Here are seven examples of my own:

She broke up with me at recess. I worked so hard – it was so good, my valentine. The coronary arteries were perfectly to scale.




My doctor told me what to do. He said: “Oo ee oo ah ah ting tang wala-wala bing bang.” I then realized I was suffering a stroke.




Clutching flowers and Hallmark card, Oedipus fingered empty ocular cavities in the blind dark. Worst. Holiday. Ever.




You can hear it nightly. In the flat over the arcade, a dwarf plays sad plastic kazoo nocturnes to a crumpled photo of her.




Exiled for not choosing sides, he roams hospitals, watches kids flatline to glimpse Home opening for their tiny souls.




Venereal. 100% lethal. Palpitation. Pain. The tyranny of a sex drive. The living apocalypse had come to the zombie kingdom. They moaned.




“You look so familiar,” I say. “Yeah…you’ve been screwing my wife,” says my new dentist, holding something sharp. The sedatives take hold.


This Way to the Egress…

Also, happy birthday, Vincent Price, you magnificent bastard!

Bird Brains

Someone recently compared me to a bird. I’ve kept a few as pets over the years, so I understood the metaphor. Birds in captivity are problematic when sick. They don’t like to show illness. It’s a survival instinct to avoid looking yummy to predators. Even if tame, even if they adore you, the instinct is so strong. Unless you know what to look for, a bird might not show any sign of ailment until they are quite far along. Sometimes you won’t know a bird is sick until it falls over in its cage.

Bela Lugosi’s Picture Pages

Yesterday, I had both the Bauhaus “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” and the theme song to Picture Pages stuck in my head. Round and round they whirled. A snag. A fray. The threads got tangled in my boiling brain…

The bats have left the bell tower

The victims have been bled

Time to get your crayons and your pencils

Bereft in deathly bloom

Alone in a darkened room

You can play with Picture Pages

Fill your day with Picture Pages

‘Till Bela Lugosi does another Picture Page with you

Made Me a Shadow in the Shape of Wonder

Rather enamored of these lyrics lately…