Josef Matulich's Blog, page 17

Ignore what the Lady Mime Says: I’m not Dead

In the nineteen-eighties and early nineties, before I became the dour man-in-black with a handlebar mustache you see in my profile pictures, I was a mime. I was goofy and loose-limbed and adept at falling down on all sorts of surfaces. I even had rainbow suspenders. Though not working enough to support a middle-class lifestyle, I could earn as much as ninety dollars an hour. Not bad for a long-haired, silent leaping gnome. I became an extremely minor celebrity in Columbus Ohio.

Toward the end of my career, I was approached by a young woman who wanted to perform as a mime, but with her act being informed with the light of her Christian faith. I didn’t exactly register how that was going to be done. Still, I gave her what advise and encouragement I could.

The upheaval in my life at that time, along with the increasing number of pains in my back and joints, dulled my enthusiasm for performing. Slowly, the jobs started drying up. It wasn’t just that my normal contacts began to forget me. The aspiring lady mime had begun to tell my former clients that I had left town, or even died. That were her actions illumined by her faith.

Now I’m primarily a writer, I have learned by the mistakes of my former occupation the importance of reasonable and sustained self-promotion, because otherwise the people who might buy your stuff will think your dead. So here I am, telling you I’m not dead.

My first novel, Camp Arcanum is a horror/comedy about sex, magick and power tools. It has been available on Amazon and B&N since March 2014 to modest sales and very satisfying reviews. My publisher, Post Mortem Press, was confident enough in it to contract its sequel, Proserpina’s Bower. That will be available May 2015. If you’re in the market for a couple of smart, funny books, I know where you can get them at a reasonable price.

And I’m not dead.

“Must be off!”

I have been fighting off the plague for the past week or so: some flavor of bacterial bronchitis that had pushed my wife to the edge of pneumonia. As you might guess, this cut heavily into my creative input. This morning I sat down with my tablet to draw a little cartoon I’ve had in my brain for a while. Technically, not excellent, but I taught myself a few techniques while doing it. Enjoy!

Date Night Ending in a Flaming Car

Once again, Kit and I took a day off together to drive up to Amish country in Berlin Ohio. This time it was a Monday, so the various shops were actually open when we arrived. We started at Kit’s new favorite fabric outlet, Zinck’s. where we filled the trunk with inexpensive fabric, notions, and trim. The Amish may be dedicated to a simple, godly life, but they loves themselves some capitalism. Kit and I wallowed around in it for a while at the antique mall, then had an early dinner at an Amish diner with constantly piped-in Christian music.

I did not burst into flame and the pulled pork sandwich was delicious.

We hit a few other places: emporiums for Victorian goods and garb, concrete yard animals and a magic shop. By a strange coincidence, the magic shop owner was a business acquaintance of Kit’s who had been at The Alley before. As he only infrequently came into Berlin from his home over an hour away, it was only the luckiest happenstance that he was there when we were. We three had a chance to discuss our work with Greenlawn Abbey, where the famous magician Thurston is buried and we at the Alley assist to raise funds for rehab.

Our conversation on the dark country roads back home covered two topics: How events come together sometimes to make good things happen against all odds; and Why the Hell our phone navigator was forcing us to take a route home that had us passing every sheep, cow and horse in Northeastern Ohio. About fifteen miles north of Johnstown, we got an idea why we were where we were when we were.

I passed a rather large truck stopped in the oncoming lane. Something yellow was sprayed behind it for a few yards and a small car was stopped in the debris field.

Oh yeah. The hood of the car was crumpled.

And smoking.

It took me a few seconds and about fifty yards to realize that this was a car on soybean truck rear-end accident which had just happened moments ago. I made an awkward three-point turn and pulled up behind the car. I put on my hazard lights to make sure no-one came up behind us and contributed to the accident. I stopped several yards behind it, since the engine had finally caught fire. In spite of Kit’s concerns, I walked towards the burning car. She called 911.

In my adolescent daydreams of superheroics, I would have torn off the door and dragged the driver to safety. Instead, I stood just outside the driver’s open door, assessing.  The driver was alone in the car, slumped over the dash and the remains of the steering wheel. I played out the odds of him having a spinal cord injury versus the guarantee that he would become fricassee in a burning car. A woman was there beside him, another passer-by who stopped, urged him to get up and out of the car. Kit joined in the encouragement as I stood ready to do…something. Fortunately, a local firefighter also stopped, expended his personal fire extinguisher to slow the fire, and stepped in to pull the driver clear of the wreck. The steering wheel evidently was not folded on top of his legs as it first appeared.

The firefighter dragged the injured driver down the road to examine him. I, at least, provided the light on my hip to help examine him. Another local firefighter did a more complete exam as he radioed for assistance. Apparently, in that county, the entire fire/paramedic force is volunteer and just wanders the roads looking for this sort of thing. The driver of the grain truck just stood by, looking more bewildered than anything else. He was an older gentleman, a little taller than myself, with a grey handlebar mustache. I hoped no-one would get us confused.

Kit and I assisted some: Traffic control and hauling the injured further from the vehicle on another passer-by’s horse blanket. By then, the car was completely engulfed in flames and burning steadily. I quipped to Kit: “I promised to show you a good time” which I’m sure caused some consternation amongst the other drivers stopped to see the wreck. At that point, the firetrucks were arriving and we were taking up space, so we left.

It was a quiet drive home after that. When we arrived, we unloaded and Kit went off to bed. When you’ve spent a date day together driving and shopping, nothing can top a burning crash with soybeans.

Kit and I

Halloween Season for a Horror Guy

Got up at six am. with the urging of my black cat, who desperately needed fed before imploding. After the proper rituals to appease the Cat Gods, I settled down at the laptop to check my emails and Facebook. My slow, grinding campaign to get Camp Arcanum reviewed garnered me three responses this morning out of perhaps three dozen queries. Not all of those were positive, but the statistics are still better than those for my days of dating.

I got onto Facebook and found that the Wicked Library had just posted their latest Halloween Special which included one of my flas fictions stories “Head Full of Worms.” I then and there listened to the podcast and enjoyed it immensely. You can catch it here:

http://www.hipcast.com/podcast/H8F4GMTk

Nelson and Maddie knocked out of the park again.

Yesterday, had been an early day. We hosted Dana Turtle from Good Day Columbus at The Alley, spending three or four hours playing dress-up and broadcasting inserts for the morning show. Both Dana and his cameraman Edwin were fun and the dynamic between the two characters has me inspired for future stories.

Unfortunately, we will not be putting up our Halloween castle again this year. The last two years, the weather has been too bad to be leaving large expanses of sail-like plywood in the front yard to catch the winds. This year it is simply a matter of time. Both Kit and I have been spending every spare minute at our costume shop; we will not even be done with the last customer before trick-or-treating closes down tonight. But we will be giving out candy to kids and grown-ups alike tonight and doing some make-up work for our patrons besides. Not a bad way to celebrate Halloween.

Of course, we will have a few offerings set out for our dear departed tonight when the veil is thin. For a change, Kit picked up some Gack, one of Alyssa’s favorite things for play therapy. Probably a few shots of Scotch or gin for my parents, and a Smorgasbord for the Dead set out on our mantle for everyone else on Kit’s side.

So, Happy Samhain to all today whether you see it as a time for costumes and dress-up, or a time of monsters and mayhem, or the night when the veil between worlds lifts enough for loved ones to brush by for a visit.

What our Super Powers Should Be.

When I was a boy, I wanted to be a super hero. I daydreamed myself into a tragic lonely life where I was the last of my kind imbued with magickal powers in battle. Others admired me as a lone wolf beyond the reach of humanity but always there to save the weak and down-trodden. Sometimes I was an elf and my blood had the power to transform animals into intelligent companions who fought at my side. Other times I built spaceships and crusaded across the cosmos.

For a while, I imagined myself as ten feet and made of steel. Occasionally, the giant me had four arms. He could type and drink coffee at the same time or put a sasquatch in a death grip. A ten-foot tall four-armed steel giant didn’t have much in the way of friends, or love, or rooms he could walk into without damaging the ceilings with his head, but that ugly, scary thing was a hero. Whatever the universe threw at him, the giant would triumph. Then he would wander off to his lair to be noble and mysterious and stoic.

I spent a lot of my youth being noble and mysterious and stoic, never grasping from the outside it just looked like a spindly, little weirdo was deservedly being ignored. The moment of truth never came, where only I could step forward and defeat evil with my amazing abilities. Slowly it dawned, that even in a world where super heroes and villains fought, they couldn’t go at it all the time. Long stretches between battles weren’t just skipped panels in a graphic novel. That was your Life.

Being a lone wolf, a cypher which no-one had any compulsion to solve, was not mysterious or romantic. It was effectively doing nothing with a limited time on Earth.

Instead of firing laser bolts from his eyes, a hero could learn to read others from the unwritten language of their faces and carriage. A noble and mysterious being would even care about what they saw and speak up.

Instead of bearing a hide of titanium-steel, a hero could learn to withstand all the slings and arrows of modern life without bitterness and without letting their pain flow down hill.

A hero might not be able to punch his way through a wall, but he could carry his weight.

I’d like to think I do okay with those powers, but I still have that lonely and mysterious lone wolf thing to live down. I can summon snark at the speed of lightning, making light of a situation as others are busy casting darkness. And I do have the real life super power of disappearing in a crowded room,

Look away as I vanish into the shadows.

My Horror Selfie

As a novelist and screenwriter, my favorite playground is the Venn diagram intersection of the horrific and the comedic. I find find many hilariously horrifying things coming through our vintage & costume store. When a crocodile purse with an attached baby crocodile arrived at The Alley, I knew I found the perfect prop for my Horror Selfie. You can see it by linking over to the site set up by the Horror Writers of America to promote the reading and viewing of Horror. My face and Percival the crocodile purse certainly qualify for that.

http://horrorselfies.com/

Telecommunications Shenanigans

I have been wedged solidly into the Twenty-First Century as one might squeeze a buttered gerbil into an aspirin bottle. Naturally, there is a good deal of squirming and squealing and the uncomfortable position at the end has feet and tail tips in the most delicate of places.  There can be some comedy to it, of course.

Two weeks ago, I was standing at the microphone to start my reading at Context’s Flash Fiction Competition. I blew into the mike as a test and my smart phone on my hip went “whirr-BLEEP!” The timing was so close that it appeared that the signal from my lips travelled down the mike stand, skipped across the floor, climbed up my pants leg and lodged in my phone. I was a bit surprised; the three people that ever called me knew where I was. I discovered that what the phone announced was that I had won a free book from one of the other publishers at the convention.  I had entered the drawing in the most Nineteenth Century of ways: pencil and paper in a goldfish bowl. The publisher responded with a text message at the most comedic of moments.

I silenced my phone and went on to win the Pro Division of the flash competition. Thank you very much.

This last week I was approached through a Facebook group to be interviewed on my first live podcast. All I needed was to learn how to Skype. I did download the software and even tested it successfully. That means I stole a headset from my son’s X-Station and called my wife at her laptop.

Beside me on the couch.

I achieved something through modern technology that normally could be done simply by raising my voice. Still, last week I logged onto Zombiepalooza Radio to be interviewed about witches in genre fiction, per my novel Camp Arcanum. It would have gone fine except severe thunderstorms knocked the podcast off-line. Twenty-first century communications technology was trumped by Perkunis the Thunderer. I am set to appear again tonight in just a couple of hours. I just hope phones and livestreaming video isn’t effected by locusts

Wordslinger Shootout Round#15

I’m sorry that I’ve seem to miss the last round since I was eliminated; it’s not really fair to the others who continue on. As it is, I think the last bracket was a forfeit due to one of the author’s being unable to complete another story in time. This week we have Andrew Nienaber and Peter Salomon. Their secret ingredient word is “spawn” and if you don’t think that doesn’t give an opportunity for some icky body horror, you just don’t know these guys. As always pop on over, vote and comment to have a chance to win a valuable prize.

 

http://kennethwcain.wordpress.com/2014/09/21/wordslinger-shootout-round-15/

Bird of Omen

I found a dead hummingbird on the sidewalk of my office building Monday morning. It is embarrassing to admit how much the sight of an emerald-green corpse the size of my thumb affected me. After all, there are people in the greater world being raped, murdered and beheaded on a regular basis. There is something about something so rare and beautiful dying from a headlong impact with the window of a bastion of corporate America that has a whiff of augury.

Normally my bird of omen is the hawk. Many times, I have been considering a plan or idea and a hawk will appear as if Nature were giving me a thumb’s up. Most often, this a sparrowhawk. These little raptors have a magickal habit of hovering in mid-air while looking for tender mousies in the grass. That’s probably why they are called merlins.

There was one incident last week which I hope is a true omen of good luck. I was talking to my friend Sheldon about a project I had been working: a horror/comedy screenplay about killer squirrels. I had gotten halfway through it when I was shown a pitch trailer for Timur Bekmambetov’s “Squirrels”. If the director of “Wanted” and “Abraham Lincoln – Vampire Hunter” was working on the same theme, mine would be dead in the water. But I had done some checking and found that there had been no activity since last summer. As far as I could tell, the project had gotten as far as the pitch trailer and no further. As I was driving along, Sheldon told me that he thought I should just buckle down and finish it, no matter what.

I was passing the MaConnell Arts Center at that moment. A large Red-tailed Hawk was standing in the front lawn. As far as I could tell, it was eating a squirrel.

Wordslingers Shootout Round# 13

Though I was eliminated in the last engagement, I want to support those who continue to compete. This week Andrew Nienaber and James Chambers go to the word processors with the writer’s prompt “lucky”. Pop on over and vote early, vote often.

http://kennethwcain.wordpress.com/2014/09/11/wordslinger-shootout-round-13/