Darren Endymion's Blog, page 15

Is This Week Over Yet?

This has been one of those weeks you almost wish you could do over, but wouldn’t for fear that it would turn out the same way.

Ate too much over the weekend. Not only did I gain weight, but since I’ve been eating a lot better, my stomach rebelled at the grease I put into it and decided to torture me for it. It (and the later effects, if you know what I mean) kept me out of work and in bed for two days, and I pretty much never call in sick. This was probably the second time in a year.

Over the weekend I was building a puzzle with my friend and lurching over the puzzle table. Your head is heavier than you think, and my neck started hurting. I went to my weekly chiropractor appointment, got a massage, got my adjustment, went home, rested, and cooked dinner. I was merely reaching upward to a shelf for some spices when I heard this enormous crack in my neck/middle shoulder. The pain was instant and fierce. Its getting a lot better, but I may have to see if my chiropractor can see me tomorrow to un-break whatever went out of alignment.

The worst part is that on Tuesday night, my beloved cousin called to tell me that my aunt, her mother, still my favorite aunt despite the distance and years, is succumbing to cancer and probably has less than a week to live. I haven’t seen her in years, but she’s delirious from the cancer and treatment meant to keep her out of pain. Her sister (my mother) died this past January, also from cancer. My grandmother will likely have to bury two of her daughters in one year, and I cannot imagine her pain.

I’m trying to put that aside because it’s too much all at once. I’ll watch a sad movie over the weekend and allow myself to use that to launch into the true grief I am suppressing just to get through the week.

It makes you appreciate your life, no matter how crappy you think it is. However, it really is affecting my ability to do much more than sit still, eat light, not cry, and dive into book after book in an attempt to make myself feel better. I heal quickly, so next week will likely be better. I’m usually okay bitching about inconsequential junk, talking about how irritated or upset I am, but it’s usually surface pain. I’m actually very resilient. Deeper inside, I’m very hard to rattle or even touch. This latest is bad. My mother was in her mid 50s, and my aunt is only slightly older. It’s way too young.

I’ll be okay; I always am, and I’d rather my aunt not be in pain anymore. But in the meantime I’m on damage control, and this is likely the last I’ll write of it here until after everything is over. Sorry for the downer, but if you can take anything from this, just be happy for the time you have with your loved ones, and with the time you have on this earth. Every moment, no matter how stacked with day-to-day irritations, is precious and beautiful. We should appreciate it, no matter what.

Thanks for reading.

Not Today, Folks

I’m gonna be all over the place today.

I spent the weekend with my dear friends celebrating a late birthday and we ate a whole lot. I’ve been afraid of meatloaf for years. As I’ve discussed before, my mother was a terrible, awful, wretched cook. Her meatloaf was like my grandmother’s goulash — a weapon of mass disgusting. My aunts and uncles suffer from the same curse. I don’t know how far back that curse goes, but all I can assume is that our line was cursed by a troll for stealing its gold brassiere or something. What a troll would have to do with cooking is beyond me, but I’m working with very little wit at the moment.

My mother’s meatloaf had gray gelatinous-like bits hidden inside,  which I assume started life as oats or something. When I was young and didn’t know any better, I wanted her to teach me how to cook. She never did…and I’m incredibly grateful for that. This weekend my friend made meatloaf and it was so good that I would have had seconds. I discussed my mother’s gray porkchops as I raved about the yummy meatloaf, and my friend’s wife almost crapped herself. Apparently, she’s making me non-gray porkchops some time soon.

My mother worked off instincts and her own mother’s tutelage. She should have followed a goddamned recipe. I have been afraid that I am working with the same familial curse that plagues my mother’s side of the family and not trusting my instincts. My ex taught me a few things about how to cook, and that was great, and I learned to not be intimidated, but still doubted my instincts.

My cousin called tonight as I was teaching myself how to cook and shred a chicken boob, and she was telling me how she had to unlearn everything taught to her about cooking. We talked for a while and she told me that my instincts were pretty good based on what I was already doing. I chatted with my ex and he echoed that sentiment.

That being said, I got a few tips and tricks…but there is one thing I won’t try again any time soon because it was so good, I lost all sense of control or dignity. My friend tried a new recipe this weekend, and I’ve pasted a similar one below (check out all this woman’s stuff. Pad See Ew to carnitas to other yummyness). I ate SO much. My friend included green onions, sauteed white onions, roasted garlic, and apparently sixteen gallons of oil. (He followed a different recipe than the one below. While it was good, I recommend following the one I’ve linked to. Your stomach will thank you.)

The recipe (this woman is amazing): http://www.recipetineats.com/cheese-garlic-crack-bread-pull-apart-bread/

I ate enough to where I felt sick, even the next day. My friend made a version that was infinitely greasier than what this recipe calls for, so check this one out and try it. Then move over to the  carnitas or Pad See Ew (my advice is to avoid substituting hoisin sauce and using regular soy sauce instead of the sweeter stuff. Mine was too sweet and required some adjusting to get it to the right flavor. http://www.recipetineats.com/thai-stir-fried-noodles-pad-see-ew/)

During all this I didn’t trust my instincts and the food I was making for tonight turned out…okay. But I got a bunch of new cooking tricks to try and I can’t wait to do so.

I don’t know where I was going with this entry, honestly. My cousin didn’t call to give me cooking advice and encouragement, but rather to deliver some pretty devastating news. This…cooking and babbling and not thinking about it is how I’m dealing for now. I should be better off by Thursday.

If anyone read this far, take from it the links I posted here and try pretty much everything this talented cook Nagi has to offer.

Work Issues: How Not to Choke a Bitch

I have worked in Corporate America for the majority of my employed life, and to steal a Star Wars quote, “You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.” Scum rises to the top, with very few exceptions, and you just have to work with that. But then you occasionally have to deal with the backbiting colleagues. I was promoted to the lead of my team, right under our supervisor, and had to deal with a whole lot of resentment. Now I essentially evaluate everyone’s work and hand it back to them on a monthly basis. The resentment skyrocketed, and that’s to be expected. Within reason.

However, our manager recently moved on and we got a new one. (For clarity, the hierarchy from bottom to top goes: grunt, senior grunt, lead grunt, supervisor, manager, director, upper management). One of our team members is funny, engaging, personable, smart, and friendly…but he’s the laziest son of a bitch I have ever met, to the point where he not only drags himself down, but he’s detrimental to the team. He gives our customers wrong information, he chooses only the easiest tasks (when that alone can get you put on corrective action), if you can’t 100% prove that he’s done something he will just close it out and pretend he has done it, he takes two hour lunches, and so on. Our previous management has let him slide or wasn’t aware of how terrible he is, and he has learned to use his smarts and our supervisor’s distraction to avoid detection.

His quality is terrible, and I’m constantly marking him down for it, consulting with my boss as I do so. So, Slacker went to the new manager (who knows nothing about him) and complained about me, saying I’m playing favorites and being unfair to him. He said the same about our supervisor. The new manager called him in, another third party who doesn’t do the same job as we do but wants my position anyway, and a friend of mine. I didn’t hear anything. Waited a couple weeks and still didn’t hear anything.

And this is what I’m getting at. I knew what was being said. I knew what slanderous crap was being flung in my direction. Therefore, I wanted to choke a couple of bitches. I let it bother me. I thought about it at night. And then I stopped myself. I’ve been through worse. I’ve dealt with worse. I’ve fought down managers, supervisors, and people who had direct control over my job and never once had to choke a muthafuka out. So, I just thought about what I did then and what I was (or was not) doing currently.

I’ve got so much steel in me that I should set off metal detectors. However, after a health scare a couple years ago (you know what killed the little girl from Poltergeist? I had that and almost died), I realized that there are more important things in life than fighting a bunch of inconsequential assholes at a job, and I still believe that. The steel in me relaxed. But it’s still there. And I realized that there’s a point after which it’s not rolling off your back, you’re being taken advantage of and walked over — and (possibly worst of all) it’s becoming detrimental to your non-work time.

So, I went to the manager, told him I knew what was being said, and asked if he had any tips or tricks for me. I offered to take him through the way I select cases to evaluate them, to teach him anything he needs, and to go over anything previously done. Essentially, I offered to be completely transparent. I have nothing to hide and everything to back me up. I argued for the promotion of someone who talked a little crap. Then I held a team meeting and went over everything I offered to with the manager (who made an appearance in my meeting). I met with the team in groups of threes, saying I knew there was talk and I wanted to end it and offer my time to them should they have any concerns. I gently confronted those who were talking the crap and prodded them for more information (got nothing from the shit talkers).

And you know what happened? The manager told me essentially that they found no merit to the claims and that they weren’t being considered. And then he implied that I should look into taking over the team from our supervisor when he leaves in a few months. That bears repeating: There was a complaint. I handled it with honesty, directness, and transparency. And they are talking about promoting me.

THAT’S how you refrain from choking a bitch. You use that maturity, show that you have nothing to hide (which they never checked, by the way), you professionally confront the people involved, and you take care of it. Then you plan to become the shit-talkers’ boss and fire them for being incompetent assholes. YES! How’s THAT for steel, bitches? *cackling madly, running off into the night*

What’s Your Needful Thing?

Tonight I started the audio book for Stephen King’s Needful Things. It was published in 1992, and I probably read it around 1998. I remember liking it, but there were so many characters that I wasn’t able to keep them as straight as I wanted to. Two years ago I listened to the audio book and there was little issue. Both times I loved every second I spent with those characters. This time looks to be filled with more love and less confusion.

The essence of the book is that this new shop, Needful Things, opens in a small Maine town, and the proprietor has everything you could ever want, no matter how base or inane or worthy. However, you pay a price, usually a small cash allotment…and a favor. A small prank. The pranks seem relatively innocuous at first, but the repercussions are far reaching and devastating. And the interweaving insanity is a delight and a horror to behold.

What Mr. King has done is create an entire town of new people (save for Ace Merrill, the bully from The Body/Stand By Me, and Alan Pangborn from The Dark Half, and a few references to previous novels like Cujo and The Dead Zone.) Each of these characters is so deep that they have flaws, enemies, and a secret obsession which draws them into Needful Things in the first place. Juggling that many characters and their fully fleshed out personalities and flaws and hatreds is astonishing to read. It’s wholly entertaining, but anyone wanting to be a writer would do well to read this book and see a master at work. And his sense of humor! When describing one of his characters he wrote, “The lady’s face had all the charm of a snow shovel.” *cackle!* I love that line.

For example, (and I’m sort of fudging the details here on purpose) two women in love with Elvis lust after the same picture of The King, but one snatches it up first. The other starts hating her friend, but eventually buys sunglasses that belonged to Elvis. The painting and the glasses make the viewer/user experience full sensory immersion into the world of Elvis. The bitterness between the friends grows, even as each woman spirals deeper into this tactile daydream. And they have their pranks to perform, even as someone unrelated to their squabble is playing pranks on them.

Another devoutly religious (but ultimately pretty fake) woman gets a petrified piece of Noah’s ark that mentally transports her to the legendary ship itself, giving her a religious epiphany each time the holds it. Another boy just wants a rare baseball card. Another woman just wants relief from her crippling arthritis. The pranks escalate, as does the mood in the town…and the violence.

But, it makes me think. What would my Needful Thing be? What’s my basest desire? What do I want more than anything? A relationship with some imaginary character? With a celebrity? A typewriter/computer that works from my thoughts without all those word blocks and the messiness and limitations of the flesh? (an item which Mr. King explored in The Tommyknockers). An effortlessly beautiful body and face…or a boyfriend with them? Money?

Furthermore, what shape would these take? A novel featuring me as a main character which, when read, is immersive like The Neverending Story was supposed to be, filled with romance and adventure? A picture of Brenton Thwaits or whatever hottie I’m currently lusting over? One that transports me viscerally to his bed? *schoolgirl giggle* Said magic typewriter/computer? Magic pills that give me the looks and body I’ve always wanted (turning me into Kellan Lutz, essentially)? It’s like looking into the Mirror of Erised from Harry Potter, but with violent, terrible consequences. And it makes for an amazing book.

And the most frightening thought of all…what would I DO for my Needful Thing? What’s YOUR Needful Thing? And what would you do for it?

Lessons from Activity

So, remember a while ago when I said that the aftermath of the A-Z blog challenge made me surprisingly active with the writing? Well, it continues.

Yeah, nobody is more surprised than I am.

I’ve made an outline and am forming a concordance for the more involved stuff I’m writing, not because I’m trying to write some epic beast of a novel (though that would be fine) but because I’m dealing with two different made up cultures and need to keep them straight — from religion to family histories to court rivalries to who I plan to kill. (In the story. The way things have been going at work, I feel that I should clarify that. Haha.)

I have yet to finish the whole synopsis, where I fill in the skeleton, but I already have a few sections written and even the skeleton made me think and come up with new stuff. I thought that interrupting the flow to do the A-Z thing was disastrous. I thought that I had messed it all up irrevocably and that this story would end up on the back burner and that I would return to it in time.

Perhaps.

At the same time, I’m making notes for two other stories in my head, both of which will be actual novels (rather than the whopping two short stories I have produced in the last two years). One is another wolf book (for anyone who might have read the first, you can thank Taylor for that. He’s a noisy, needy guy and he’s screaming at me to get on with it.) Then there’s the super hero thing I have talked of often (and somewhat tiresomely, I am sure). They are wondering what I’m planning to do with them. I know their enemy and that allows me to form something. The rest is opaque, so that may not be next as I always thought. We will see.

Not only that, but my current publisher sent us a list of the anthology calls for 2016, and several of them sound like fun. At 10,000 words max, if the idea is good and can be contained, they are fun to do and very easy. As my very dear friend and collaborator said, “We can breathe 10k words out.” ‘Tis nothing.

However, there are priorities, and that’s the current novel.

I don’t know if it was the A-Z thing and its lack of popularity or if I just got sick of myself and decided to DO something instead of talk about it for once. Either way, it’s getting results, and that’s the important thing.

Months of Halloween Begins!

Ack! I forgot that it was Monday already. I ended up spending the weekend at my friends’ place and ate my own weight in veggies, Willy Wonka candies, and amazing food my friends made. It’s the first of many weekends that will be spent similarly, as we have started our annual Months of Halloween where we watch horror movies, try new movies, and eat a whole lot.

We watched seven — yes, seven — horror movies. We watched Honeymoon (very good, on Netflix streaming now), The Unborn (okay but with a talented or beautiful cast, sometimes both), Evil Dead remake (bloody, gory, and great. I own it and traumatize my friends with it often), The Bay (awesome, featuring isopods. I think I like it more than is normal), The Last Exorcism (funny at first, then just good. People were pissed at the abrupt ending, but watching it I don’t know that it could have ended any other way), It Follows (very entertaining, occasionally frightening, and it sticks in the mind after viewing), and the remake of The Town that Dreaded Sundown (creepy, good almost-remake, and pretty entertaining).

We ate freshly made vegetarian lasagna, Thai food, a veggie tray the size of my torso (which I was responsible for eating half of), spaghetti bake, and a breakfast of eggs, bacon, biscuits and gravy, and hash browns.

Apparently, I will be eating nothing over the week to prepare for the massive weight gain that seems inevitable given this trend of lazing on the couch, eating, and stuffing my mind with terror, gore, and buckets of fake blood. Oh, and we built part of a puzzle.

I love Halloween.

Well, THAT sucked

So, I enjoyed most of the entries of this recent A-Z blog challenge, even if very few seemed to get much attention, but I had forgotten how exhausting that challenge is. It’s different from writing a story or a diary or something from inside that you make up as you go along. It’s a series of different subjects requiring research, pictures, and time. Lots and lots of time.

I did no other writing during that time. So, all that work I was lamenting not being able to get into got kicked to the side once I made the commitment to this blog challenge.

As with the one I did last year, I was hoping that it would be a learning experience, that it would teach me writing habits, get me to write every day (or at least six days a week). Unfortunately, all it did was exhaust me and make me want to go for weeks and weeks without writing so much as my name. I glare at keyboards as though they contain scorpions and daggers…

But not all the time. In fact, I finished a section of writing on that project I’ve been working on. I made notes on the next wolf book — in no small part because of a recent review posted on Amazon in which the woman said she came to Amazon to buy the sequel, thinking that it had been so long since publication that there HAD to be a sequel, only to be disappointed. The irony is that I don’t really check reviews anymore unless my publisher sends them out to the writers, and those are usually only the review and critic sites.

So, it sucked. It was hard. It produced almost no new followers and garnered very few likes. It was darker than I had thought it would be. I enjoyed it for itself, and it was tiring, and looking at what I’ve done since then, in just the last few days, I can’t help but think that it wasn’t a failure.

And maybe if didn’t suck as bad as I thought.

Z = Zodiac Killer, A to Z Blog Challenge

For my last day of this A-Z blog challenge, I have (unwisely) decided to tackle one of the most famous unsolved serial killer mysteries of all time, second to Jack the Ripper. Of course, this is a badge I have pinned on it, and is definitely arguable.

Anyway, these entries are best kept smaller, and there is just too much information out there to make any significant dent or insight into this decades old killer. However, when you get to the bottom of this entry, you will see that my other word choices were sadly lacking. Not only that, but the mystery intrigues me.

So, here’s a terrible summary of sorts and lots of conjecture — probably amateurish and infantile, but still possible. Enjoy!

The Zodiac killer was a serial killer active in the late 60s and early 70s in northern California. Four women and three men met their deaths by the Zodiac Killer. His killings were so random and the scenes atypical, no sign of a struggle, usually a walk up and kill job, no chance for the killer’s DNA to get around (to be examined decades later…hey, I watched Cold Case Files, people.) That being said, they did have a sketch of him. Sometimes he was hooded and usually killed everyone there, but some victims survived and this sketch was made.

The Zodiac Killer wanted poster and composite sketch.

Unfortunately, he looked very plain and nondescript. Unless…

Frank Grimes was the Zodiac Killer?! He wasn’t just Homer’s enemy, apparently.

Levity aside, in a case not unheard of, but rather rare, this killer named himself through a series of cryptograms he sent to various newspapers. Whenever I think about this, I think about the book Red Dragon by Thomas Harris. Francis Dolarhyde, the killer in that book, thought of himself as the Red Dragon, but because he bit people when he killed them, the media dubbed him the Tooth Fairy. Can you imagine this huge, psychotic, strong killer calling himself the Tooth Fairy? No. He threw a tantrum and killed someone to get the negative press erased. It would seem that the Zodiac Killer was aware of this proclivity of the media to name serial killers (well before Red Dragon was published) and so decided to name himself.

However, out of the four cryptograms the Zodiac Killer sent, only one of them has been conclusively solved. They looked like the picture below.

One has to wonder if they were all real cryptograms or if the killer, who said that they would lead the cops to him if they could be figured out, was full of shit. Think about it from the poetic angle, however lame and pretentious. The killer said that they would give away his identity and lead to his own capture if they were deciphered, but only one out of four has been cracked. What if the Zodiac Killer just put in random symbols and letters that would never make sense, as if he was really saying, “You’ll never catch me.”? What if the deciphered note was to give the semblance of order only so he could send three others that were essentially telling the cops that he would never be caught? I suppose that’s as plausible as saying that this man created a code that hasn’t been cracked in 40 years. It wouldn’t be too far out to think that he would put something with the semblance of syntax and order to fool people.

But serial killers don’t usually work that way, do they? The serial killer ego is a force to be reckoned with. Think about Dennis Rader, the BTK killer, who wrote letters taunting police rather like the Zodiac Killer. In fact he went dormant and was lured out by his ego when a newspaper ran articles calling him out and insulting him. Through a dialogue carried out in publication (think of how Dolarhyde communicated with Lecter in Red Dragon if you’ve read or seen it), the police convinced Rader that they couldn’t catch him if he sent them a diskette with his writings on it. Of course they actually could and caught his ass that way.

And here are the Zodiac Killer’s stats. (Clicking on it should make it readable)

So, I’ve been all over the place with this entry, from Jack the Ripper to the Zodiac Killer (ignoring his two copycats) to BTK to the fictional Francis Dolarhyde. But serial killers have that psychosis that links them, an ego, a desire to be recognized for their “work”, usually to transform themselves through their sickness and to be feared, to have power, and sometimes to get caught. How else will people know what geniuses they were (so they think)? Was the Zodiac Killer of this sort? Or was he just a sadistic killer, the 60s version of a troll, teasing police with the promise of a message that was really, “Fat chance, bozos.”? In any case, we may never know. There are suspects, plenty of them, but a frustrating inability to test them, as some of the suspects have died and the others are possible but the resulting evidence isn’t conclusive.

Essentially, we may never know.

— So, that concludes my A-Z blog challenge. Wooooo hooooo! Since I usually post on Mondays and Thursdays, this entry will serve as the end of one and my typical Monday entry. See you on Thursday!

Alternate letter considerations: Zealot, zesty nachos

Y = Yog-Sothoth, A to Z Blog Challenge

Yog-Sothoth is a cosmic entity in the Cthulhu stories of H.P. Lovecraft. This mythology has been adhered to, added to, altered, and now serves as almost a communal literary playground where anyone can play as long as they play by the rules. What rules? Only a disciple of Yog-Sothoth would know. I’m not trying to serve up some cosmic bullshit…yet.

Artist’s depiction of Yog-Sothoth which I stole from Wikipedia.

Essentially, Yog-Sothoth is at the end and the beginning of all time and space, yet he cannot seem to intrude on our reality. Rather, he seems to hover menacingly at the end of our universe, to watch beyond time, and to do things which might destroy our fragile minds were we to be privy to them. He knows all and sees all.

Possibly, this is because he is supposed to be made up of eyes, or as Alijah Billington wrote, “great globes…the protoplasmic flesh that flowed blackly out…” and was a “hideous horror from outer space…spawn of the blackness of primal time, that tentacled amorphous monster…”

Another artist’s rendition.

Strangely enough, the first time I became aware of Yog-Sothoth was through Stephen King’s short story Jerusalem’s Lot, a prequel to the first King novel I ever read, ‘Salem’s Lot. In the short story (available in the compilation Night Shift), a man comes to a town called Preacher’s Corners in 1850 and becomes aware of his family’s connection to the shunned town of Jerusalem’s Lot where terrible things have gone down and which is now deserted. In the climax of the short story, Yog-Sothoth’s name is mentioned in an evil turning of the world which takes place in that town in response to that which had come before.

Yog-Sothoth was the grandfather of the much more famous Cthulhu, a deity supposedly worshiped by cultists. He is part octopus, part man, and part dragon.

With a face and attitude like this, one can only assume that Cthulhu’s mother was Gwyneth Paltrow.

In fact, this celestial being is famous enough to have made an appearance in South Park at (you probably guessed it) Cartman’s behest.

Yog-Sothoth and Cthulhu are prime examples of exceptional monster making. They are mysterious, dangerous, and their powers and purposes are ill-defined. This is not through any lack of imagination or design, but rather because I am certain that Lovecraft knew one vital fact about making horrific monsters — the less we see, the more effective the monster is. Think of this — which Nightmare on Elm Street movies are still scary? I can tell you that they are probably 1, 2, and 7. The second movie had a great many problems, but the first two movies were in the time when Freddy rarely showed his face, or if he did, he was hidden in the shadows. It was the suggestion of Freddy’s horrible face, his evil, and that he came from the dark and you could never quite see all of him that made him that much scarier.

When we see something full on, when we turn the lights on it, it loses its mystery. That lumbering beast in the corner is shown to just be your coat and jeans thrown on the back of a chair. The terrifying skeletal hand of some creature scraping against your window is actually just a human serial killer cutting your screen. By shedding light on these unknown situations and shapes, they lose their ability to scare us, their amorphous terror is defined.

Yet, with Yog-Sothoth, even when we see him, we don’t know what he is. He’s not some great Kaiju erupted from a dimensional rift but which still looks like a sea creature. He’s not a great dragon like Smaug, who can burn or eat you in a moment. He’s…nothing we can know. And that makes him terrifying.

Think of this: you’re walking to your mailbox at night and see something hunched over run past you. You shine your phone’s flashlight on it and see some large dog carrying a discarded bone in its mouth, its eyes glowing in the sudden light. You recognize it, and you may be frightened by it, calculating how long it will take to get back to your door, but in that moment of defining it, it loses that initial thrill of terror.

But what if your flashlight runs out before you can see the shape? What if you see only a protruding bone in some sharp teeth, and hear something growling, slowly shuffling toward you? That unknown is much scarier. And that’s the brilliance of Lovecraft, and the effectiveness of Yog-Sothoth and Cthulhu.

Alternate letter considerations: Yoga, yodel

X = Xanth, A to Z Blog Challenge

I’ve talked at length about Piers Anthony’s Xanth novels before. They started out with a good premise — every person born (or conceived) in the land of Xanth is born with a random magic talent, ranging from boring (making sonic booms), to the absurd (peeing different colors), or the strong (generating of storms, turning someone biologically into any creature) to subtle and devious (speaking to any inanimate object, or the enhancement of any perceived trait, including traits the caster possessed herself).

Map of Xanth. Yes, it’s supposed to look like Florida.

The strong lead this land, as only someone with strong magic (a Magician or Sorceress) can be ruler of Xanth. This has been known to change in times of need (as with the Mundane Wave described in Night Mare), when the kingship came down from amazingly strong kings and queens to a woman with no control over her talent (she changes gradually from beautiful and stupid to normal to hideous and brilliant), to a horse, a night mare.

In the early days of these novels, the talents and the plots were very good and very inventive. The Magicians and Sorceresses, the nearly powerful, even the lame ones were exciting and interesting. As the series progressed, one a year for the last 38 years, they lost some of their fresh perspective and some were quite lame. The problem is that the characters age and breed and the world grows.

List of the good Xanth novels with covers and some amazing art.

I think the problem is that, in the second novel, the source of all magic bestows on the main character Bink a gift — all of his descendants will be of Magician or Sorceress level. Since most of the novels follow his descendants, the author, once amazing and possessing of a formidable imagination, has just run out of ideas. Don’t get me wrong, you don’t lose talent like Piers Anthony’s. I just think that, within the framework of this novel and world, that there are few talents left to be found of a strong enough sort to be one of Bink’s ancestors.

Bink’s family tree.

The series was a lot of fun…but then there were the puns. I departed from the series around book 19, though I read up on the plots and talents in subsequent books, gaining no urge to return. The puns started to become overpowering in book seven, but the plots were still good. In the next book, an entire chapter was so filled with puns that the editors cut it out. But the plot was about a barbarian warrior with a healing factor who is pitted between a good magician and a bad magician with a half demoness as their object of contention. It was really a good book.

Crewel Lye…even the goddamned title is a play on words. “Cruel Lie” which is a part of the novel.

Around this time, the story elements started to break down. One of my favorite main characters, Dolph, with the ability to change into any creature — magical or other, possessing their powers — met up with Marrow, an animated skeleton from the world of nightmares. He gets betrothed to spunky Electra and annoyingly elitist Nada Naga. That love triangle plays out with the introduction of the Adult Conspiracy — a conspiracy from the adults to keep kids in the dark about sex — and the end of the good times was born. Then there was an obsession by Dolph with women’s panties and the series as a whole started becoming similarly obsessed. It wasn’t until one of my favorite characters, the mischievous Metria, a hilarious and uncaring demoness who could never get the right word and would go through a list of synonyms, got a soul and became boring that I was officially done with the series.

On the whole, it was a good series until it jumped the shark. I have several of the novels after the ones I mentioned here, and I may read them some time. The early ones, even with the puns starting as early as the second novel, The Source of Magic, was still very good, if somewhat sexist. My favorites are Castle Roogna, which I just finished again, and Night Mare, which I just started again. They both involve magic wars with sirens, gorgons, normal humans, zombies, harpies, goblins, illusions, magically grown trees, Magicians and Sorceresses, and so forth. They are amazing, inventive, and an attest to the author’s amazing raw talent (whatever he has done with it in recent years).

Piers Anthony. A kind man and a great mind.

Piers Anthony also wrote the Incarnations of Immortality series, which is worth reading all the way through the seventh book, And Eternity. I will always respect the man, and be amazed by him. Once upon a time, I even wrote out the skeleton synopsis of a fan fiction which would find out where the series went “wrong” and how the characters would “fix” it. I read that skeleton recently, laughed, was impressed by my suggestions, and put it away, never to see the light of day. Still, my memories of my time in Xanth are ones I still treasure, and they have shaped me as a writer and imaginer in more ways than I can tell.

Alternate letter considerations: X-men, xenophobia, xylitol