Drugs Give You Superpowers? WTF???

A common complaint I hear concerning The Seven Habits is that Bosley’s ability to travel through time implies that drugs give you superpowers.   The first time I heard this, I was a little shocked. It never occurred to me that Bosley’s portion of the story would be interpreted that way.  Mainly due to that fact that I never saw his travels as a superpower, or even any type of “gift” for that matter.   Being pulled through the Eye of Aeons, as I saw it, was a curse if anything.

To begin with, the process is extremely painful. Chills race through Bosley’s body despite the sheen of sweat glistening on his skin and he’s wracked with waves of nausea while simultaneously feeling as though he’s starving. Within seconds, the true pain hits. Bosley describes it as feeling like millions of tiny fangs ripping and shredding nerve endings that have been exposed after the skin has been peeled away with a paring knife. So it’s not exactly a pleasant experience.

On top of this, these travels have done a real number on his mind. Since time no longer exists as something linear, the man is never entirely sure what has already happened and what is yet to come. Past, present, and future are one, big, messy blob. He says he thinks this is because the human mind wasn’t made to simultaneously exist in multiple planes of existence, which sounds about right.

But it’s not just how the Eye of Aeons affects his memory; he’s also been thrown into a world of moral quandaries.  One of the reoccurring themes is the ambiguous nature of morality and in Bosley’s tale he struggles with concepts of right and wrong constantly.  He’s forced to reassess every notion he’s ever held about right and wrong, to find justifications for things he never would have done before that Eye opened.  And it drains him. He even states a time or two that he’s wished it never would have happened to him, that he could be just an ordinary guy doing ordinary things. Since he can’t control these travels, however, that choice is no longer his to make.

The true superpower in the book, I think, is the transformative power of love. Bosley is a very self-centered person. He’s politically incorrect, vulgar, abrasive, and arrogant.  Nothing else is as important as his own inner world. Even his search for enlightenment is fueled by self-serving interests; as he says in one scene, he is trying to rebuild his ego from the ground up so he can have everything he’s always wanted, but was too afraid to ask for.

This changes when he’s set down in Ocean’s consciousness and literally walks in her shoes. For perhaps the first time in his life, he’s really able to understand and share the feelings of another.  Unfettered by sexual attraction or thoughts of romance, his love for this young girl is simple and pure. He only wants what’s best for her, to protect her from a lifetime of suffering, fear, and heartbreak.  There’s absolutely nothing in it for him, no ulterior motives or personal rewards. And yet he completely alters the course of his life in an attempt to help her.  He becomes selfless.

Do drugs give you superpowers? I think not. Compassion and empathy, on the other hand….

Welcome To Hell

I am pleased to announce the launch of a new project, a post-apocalyptic web serial entitled Welcome To Hell.  The plot is unfolding as I write each chapter, so it's still a little early to say exactly where the story is going; however, I can promise that it will be a dark and gritty tale of survival set in a world gone to hell.   They'll be no zombies in this one as I don't feel the story needs them... the human species can be monstrous enough when their backs are against the wall.

Chapter One has already been posted and the second chapter will be up soon.

Follow the link below, check out the page, and make sure to follow it so you'll be the first to know when a new installment has been uploaded.  While you're at it, also feel free to share the page on Facebook, Google+, StumbleUpon.... whatever social media site you prefer.  Any and all help with getting the word out is appreciated.

CLICK HERE TO ENTER HELL

Brief Memories of The Roxy & What's Wrong With Hollywood Today

I used to love going to the movies. The small town closest to the even smaller town I grew up in had an old, one-screen theater called The Roxy. Tickets to the shows were around a buck and for a couple dollars more you could load up on hot, buttered popcorn, cold cola, and gooey Milk Duds. The seats were ancient and barely had any stuffing left. You could feel each and every spring hidden within the vinyl; they pressed into your spine and ass like some medieval torture device and your knees were practically pinned to the row in front of you, ensuring you couldn’t escape. The floors were always sticky, the draped walls with their art deco sconces smelled musty, and sometimes rats scurried through the aisles, scavenging popcorn. But none of that mattered once the lights dimmed and the screen turned that particular shade of blue, letting you know the previews were about to roll.

If there was a movie I really wanted to see – Poltergeist or The Last Starfighter, for example –the week passed excruciatingly slowly. But it was always worth it. I went to the Friday evening showing of Fright Night and loved it so much I was back in line Saturday. And again on Sunday. When E.T hit town, the lines stretched down the block, rounded the corner, and made it almost to the public library. When I was very young, my aunt Connie, my sister, and I all went to see a mummy movie called The Awakening; after the show, while my sister was brushing her teeth before bed, I crept into her room and scurried beneath her bed. I waited just long enough to know that she hadn’t went to sleep yet and slowly raised my hand up over the mattress. Lorrie screamed so loudly my parents probably thought she was being murdered. They came thundering through the house and even though I knew I was in big trouble for scaring my sister, I laughed so hard that I was doubled over and rolling on her floor. Good memories (at least, for me… Lorrie might claim otherwise).

I still love movies, but the theater experience has changed. It’s not the same anymore. And I don’t think it’s simply because I’m older now. For that was the real power of movies: reawakening the child-like wonder and amazement in all of us, no matter what our age. This is a topic I’ve put quite a bit of thought into and I’ve come to the conclusion that there are at least three basic things wrong with the film industry today.

The Bar Has Been Raised Too High

A lot of money is funneled into film production these days, which means movies need a strong showing at the box office to simply break even. No one likes going into the red, investors doubly so. So the pressure is high for every big budget release to be a blockbuster. As a result of this, studios have become skittish. Wary of taking a chance on anything fresh or original, they stick with formulas in an attempt to cash in on an existing fan base or lure people to the theaters with nostalgia. So we’re bombarded with prequels, sequels, remakes, reboots, re-imaginings , and silver screen treatments of boob tube classics. To add even more pressure, people have to be selective with what they see. For a family, a night at the movies, including snacks, can run close to a hundred dollars. If I’m shelling out as much as they charge for a ticket and popcorn, it has to be something I really want to see on the big screen. It has to be worthy of being larger than life. And there’s very few films lately which fit that bill.

The Stars Have Lost Their Twinkle

Don’t get me wrong: I know we live in a celebrity obsessed society. How could I not? But it’s different now. Actors were originally called “stars” because they were elevated so high above everyone else. They had a distant, unobtainable quality to them, like American royalty, and people would flock to a film for nothing more than the names on the poster. The obsession with fame, however, has changed. Now, we can tune in every week to watch a so-called reality show about the ins and outs of a celebrity’s daily life. We get tweets, status updates, and paparazzi reports covering the most inane details. If Brad Pitt farts as he’s leaving a restaurant in Greece, the entire world knows about it within minutes. Movie stars are stripped bare for all to see, relegating their once lofty heights and showing them for what they truly are… ordinary people, just like you and me.

The Magic Is Gone

We’ve all heard the phrase “the magic of Hollywood” and know exactly what it means… but is it truly still there? With the advent of DVDs, the film-loving public has been inundated with bonus content and special features. We are told in great detail how stunts and effects are accomplished. We learn all the little tricks of the trade, incorporating industry jargon such as green screen into our everyday language. This is akin to a magician sawing a woman in half and then inviting the audience to stick around after the show so he can explain how the illusion was accomplished.. Which also violates the first rule of the magician’s code: never real your secrets. Even worse, sometimes this “bonus content” is released before the film even hits theaters, being shown as television specials in an attempt to create marketing buzz. In this situation, we’re being told how the trick works before we’ve even had a chance to scratch our heads and try to figure it out for ourselves. Which, in my humble opinion, diminishes that child-like wonder and amazement even more.

Thoughts on Apocalyptic Organ Grinder

With the release of the Hydra edition of Apocalyptic Organ Grinder coming up, I've had my head in that world quite a bit lately. For me, it’s an intriguing place to be. I like the way the crumbling skylines of Old World cities rise above the forests, the abandoned buildings overtaken by unchecked growth. I like the history this world has, the traditions and customs that have sprung up over a century and a half.  I’m fascinated by the burgeoning settlements and tribal villages hidden within the wilderness.  The new edition allows me to explore this world in a little more detail and it's also got me thinking about another book. Not so much a sequel as an exploration of characters who were referenced in Organ Grinder but whom we never actually met. But, as usual, I digress. This post wasn't meant to be about a planned future book, but the one which already exists.  So without further ado, here are a few random thoughts concerning the novella. 

The Gabriel Virus:  In the book, the Gabriel Virus is released upon an unsuspecting world by a cult hell bent on ushering in Armageddon.  One of the symptoms of the virus is that it causes large, pus-filled blisters to form on the skin of the afflicted. If the blister ruptures, new blisters will form anywhere the pus touches (which is another way the disease is transmitted).  This symptom was inspired by a chemical called CET. When I was 19, I worked in a chemical plant which produced the stuff.  It started as a foul-smelling concoction we brewed in reactors until it became a slurry; next we ran it through a centrifuge to extract the liquid and used a scraper to turn the remaining solids into a powder which was then loaded into drums for shipping.  Every part of this process was dangerous.   If the liquids got on you, you got softball-sized blisters filled with noxious pus which would then cause other blisters to form if there was any seepage. During centrifuging, gasses would escape if you opened the sight glass and those gasses would also cause the blisters.  And yes, the final powder form would cause blisters as well.  The shit was hard as hell to contain; even operators who had nothing to do with the production of CET started getting these blisters, causing management to take increasingly drastic control measures. By the time I left the job, a special room housed the centrifuge and we were required to wear what we referred to as "marshmallow suits", which were the exact same things the CDC uses when working with Level IV pathogens.  Before leaving the room, a mixture of water and bleach rained down upon us while another coworker scrubbed our entire bodies with a long handled broom. The suits never left the enclosed production area… and yet other workers continued getting the burns.

Tanner’s Sweeper Uniform:  While patrolling the areas around his settlement for the infectious carriers of the Gabriel Virus (derogatorily known as Spewers), Tanner Kline has to take precautions to make sure he’s not infected.  He wears a Tyvek suit with duct tape sealing the gaps between his gloves and boots. This was also inspired by my chemical plant days.  Before going to the marshmallow suits, this was our standard attire for working with CET.  The only difference is that Tanner wears a particle mask, whereas we were required to don full-face respirators.  Which, of course, means that I could often be found walking around and breathing super heavily while humming The Imperial March from Star Wars.

Lila:  In the novella, Lila is a huntress for The Tribe of Clay (or, as Tanner would say,  a Spewer). She is strong and brave, honors the traditions of her people, and lives as one with nature.  However, her heart simmers with hatred of the Clearskins (a derogatory name for the Settlers), which also makes her extremely volatile.  She was partly inspired by my all-time favorite Doctor Who companion, Leela, and her name is a vague homage to that character.  The spear Lila carries is adorned by a serpent coiled around the shaft.  This came from my days as a practicing pagan. I’d made a ceremonial pipe from a length of bamboo and Fimo and decorated it with a clay snake coiled around the stem.

The Title: I like the title for this book because (like The Dead & Dying), it has dual meanings.  On the one hand, the organ grinder can be thought of as a machine which chews up human organs and spits them out as something entirely unrecognizable from what it started out as. This is shown in Tanner’s surreal nightmare sequence when he sees hearts, lungs, pancreas, and kidneys falling into a meat grinder. However, there’s also the more traditional definition of "organ grinder": someone who plays a barrel organ. The barrel organ has a pre-programmed song which is played when the grinder turns a crank.  In my mind, both Lila and Tanner are barrel organs and the society they live in is, in fact, the grinder. Their actions and reactions are dictated by societal fears and prejudices, which is their "song".  As events symbolically turn the crank faster, the tempo increases until it reaches the final crescendo.  

Oral History:  The novella begins with a fairy tale Settlers tell their children, explaining how the world as we know it came to an end.  Originally, I had no other oral history sections planned.  But as I worked on the tale, I realized it was important to provide some backstory which would further explain why these two societies had such fear and mistrust of one another.  To maintain a balanced perspective, I chose to have half of the history related by the Settlers and the other half from the Spewers’ point of view.  My wife, son, and I used to live way out in the middle of nowhere; it was a twenty minute drive to the nearest paved road and even further to the closest town.  We lived with my mom, stepdad, and younger siblings in an old farmhouse which had been converted into a duplex.  At night we’d sometimes sit around a bonfire, listening to Native American lore from a CD my parents owned.  It was these experiences which led to the cadence and style of the Spewers’ oral tales.

APOCALYPTIC ORGAN GRINDER

On sale June 17, 2013 or pre-order now

Reflections on Swann Street

The other night I took a walk.  The air was cool and crisp, causing me to button my Artful Dodger jacket all the way to the neck, and the city was as quiet as it gets around here.  Down by the train yard,  boxcars boomed like thunder as they were coupled together and somewhere off in the distance sirens wailed.  I was on my way to the corner store for a pack of smokes and, since we are moving this weekend, was looking around the neighborhood with a critical eye.  I passed the alley where a drunk guy came at me one night, brandishing a 40 ounce malt liquor above his head like a club;  I passed within a block of the apartment buildings that had been shot up not too long ago, victims of a drive-by shooting that luckily ended without bloodshed or loss of life.  It seemed like every other house had a pit bull chained in the yard and the dogs’ barking echoed off the surrounding buildings, making it sound as though I were surrounded by a vicious pack.

As I got closer to the corner store, muffled strains of Southern rock drifted through the air, but this was to be expected. The music came from the LST Club.  The windowless building leans to the left so badly I was actually surprised it remained standing after last year’s dericho turned our town into a post-apocalyptic wasteland;  a faded sign informs passersby that it was established in 1945 under the name Granny’s and that its current acronym is an abbreviation for Lynn Street Tavern.   The LST is a private club with a reputation for violence and I always cross the street before passing it because you can never tell when a scuffle will spill out of the front door and onto the street.  It’s always seemed a bit ironic to me that people who've spent their entire lives paying their dues now pay monetary dues so they can obliterate that past entirely.  But I digress….

The store I was heading to is catercorner to the LST Club and just across the street.  It sits at a four-way intersection, a block or two from an abandoned house that was riddled with bullets, and a stop sign is posted just outside the front door.  Between the beer and sweet wine sold at the store and the LST Club, many a drunk has held onto that stop sign for balance as their bodies purged alcohol saturated stomachs.  So many, in fact, that the sidewalk surrounding the sign has been stained with a Rorschach pattern of old vomit.  The store’s employees have a way of dealing with the mess, however;  they take bags of potato chips and cheese curls that have gone stale and crunch them up, covering the puke entirely.  The chips absorb what they can overnight and in the morning birds flock around the stop sign, carrying away the evidence to waiting nests and keeping the sidewalk clean.

The store itself is deeply integrated into this neighborhood.  It seems as if there are always people hanging around inside, swapping stories about who has recently been arrested, who’s been paroled, and whose ass deserves to be kicked.  The first week we lived in this neighborhood, I walked into that store to discover a young guy with a busted nose and split lip.  He was bleeding all over the counter and floor, despite the wad of paper towels the clerk had given him, but this was no big deal… just another night on Lynn Street.  At the this store, you can buy what I've always thought of as a meth-kit;  it’s a brown paper bag which contains everything you need to smoke meth, bundled together for one convenient price.  You can also place some bets in under the counter gambling and, despite the Health Department ban, someone is always smoking cigarettes. When you get there a few minutes before closing, the lines are always longer.  People sway and stagger, their arms loaded with six packs, malt liquor, and little bottles of Bootlegger Jack, desperate to get what they need before it’s too late.

Walking back home, I chose to cut down the alley, which is what I usually do. In a neighborhood infested with drunks and tweakers, this may not seem like the smartest plan in the world, but I have my reasons. For one, the alley butts up against a state cop’s backyard on the far end;  but there is also always enough litter and garbage lying around that I could easily find a makeshift weapon if needed.  Thankfully, it’s never come to that but I like to be prepared, just in case.

When I was almost home, I remembered the young girl I’d seen one evening.  It was about 3:30 AM and she was standing on the corner, directly across from our building.  She couldn't have been older than fifteen or sixteen, but she was draped in a flowing, white wedding dress and was dancing in circles in the heart of a redneck ghetto.  Another time, we were sitting on our second-story porch when a guy we’d never seen before decided to give us an impromptu stand-up comedy routine from street level.  I remember one of his bits involved Wilford Brimley doing a commercial for crack and the guy had us near tears by the time he moved on.  But moments like that are few and far between around here.

We’re moving this weekend and I can’t imagine that I will ever miss this place. In all honesty, we should’ve been out of this neighborhood long, long ago.  It was only meant to be temporary, somewhere with cheap rent where we could get our finances back into order before moving on with our lives.  The first month we lived here, our car was broken into twice and when my wife called the police, the dispatcher responded with, “Well, that’s what you get when you live on Swann Street.”;  that should have told us something then and there.  I’ve got this sarcastic suspicion that Swann is spelled with two Ns to ensure the street isn't mistakenly associated with a thing of grace and beauty…  but that’s just me.  

I’m ready to say goodbye to the condemned buildings (and the ones which, by all rights, should be condemned) .  I’m ready to walk through a neighborhood without constantly being on guard, making eye contact with other pedestrians long enough to nod an acknowledgment, but not long enough to be considered a challenge.  I am ready to leave this all behind.  And not a moment too soon.

Covers for Books I've Never Written

When working on a new book, sometimes I need to stop and think things through for a bit.  If it’s something I plan on independently publishing, I’ll often work on a mock-up of the cover art as I turn things over in my mind.  However, as most authors can attest, some books just kind of fizzle out.  Maybe the timing for that particular work wasn't quite right and it will be revisited in the future or perhaps the initial excitement for the project waned.  Or, as is most often the case, I simply get swept up in another idea.  Because of these parts of my writing process, I’m left with a handful of covers for books I never actually finished writing.  Perhaps some day I really will come back to some of these ideas. Perhaps not.  Regardless, some of this left-over artwork is shown below, along with a brief description of what the book was to be about.

I started Albatross four years ago, but never really made it that far into the story.  It was intended to be a web serial with eventual print run once the plot had run its course.  The story centered around Albert Ross, a man charged with caring for his terminally ill mother.  Caretaking can be emotionally and physically exhausting at times and I wanted to set a character in that role who was ill-eqipped to actually handle it.  To exacerbate matters, his mother was to be a mean and spiteful old woman with a persecution complex who took some sort of sick glee out of pushing her son’s buttons.  This was to be a novel of human darkness and would not have ended well for any of the characters involved.  While working on this blog post, I found that the original chapters are still out there on the web.  Any interested parties can check it out here 

Drug Slaves of Satan was an attempt to write a horror novel in the style of a 1930’s propoganda film.  Drawing from inspirations such as Reefer Madness and Devil’s Harvest, I’d wanted to throw in a supernatural element as well.  The story was to center around a clean-cut, all-American teenager whose older brother was pulled into a world of sex, drugs, and black magic.  When the older brother was found sliced to ribbons in a dumpster, the younger boy begins to emmulate the behavior of his deceased sibling in a misguided attempt to figure out exactly what happened.  This is one I may very well return to at some point, perhaps with a different title though.

A Feast of Fools: The Cannibal’s Cookbook was to be a novelization of my short story Cooking With Grace.  The novel was to be told entirely through letters, emails, articles, recipes, and transcripts.  The short story (which followed this formula) was to be the first chapter in the book and the book was going to be a collaboration with my wife.  To further expand the story, I’d actually set up email accounts for every email address referenced within the original short story.  These accounts were then equipped with auto-responders.  Anyone curious enough to send an actual email to the addresses in the story would then get a reply from the character they were emailing, which I thought was a great way to expand the universe beyond the pages of the book.  I’d also planned on doing webisodes of a cooking show where I would be masked and playing the role of the serial killer/cannibal, which I think would have been a lot of fun.

The Curse of the Walking Dead was to be the first book in a series of Victorian-era steampunk novels featuring detective Bastion Folks.  Some of the characters from this book have really stuck with me over the years and I’m positive I will be exploring them in different works.  The most intriguing of these is the novel’s antagonist who goes by the moniker Lady Entropy.  Born into the upper-class, she turned her back on her country after her father was suspiciously killed while on an expedition funded by the Queen herself.  Vowing revenge, Lady Entropy’s sole purpose is to bring the government to their knees, even if it means destroying citizens in the process.  She is very prim and proper, given to wearing white, lacy dresses with lace-up leather boots, and her parasol is never far from her.  In one of my favorite scenes from what I’d actually written on this one, a laborer who has incurred her ire kneels before her.  Using the tip of her parasol, she lifts the man’s chin so he is looking directly into her eyes.  A lever on the parasol causes a spike to shoot out of the tip and into the man’s throat;  as she withdraws the weapon, the umbrella-portion deploys, shielding her clean clothes from the spray of blood which follows.  To date, Lady Entropy is my favorite villian that I’ve created.

Godhammer.  I have a feeling this one would have come to around novellas-size.  It was to be a dystopian tale, set after a series of events had crumbled the infrastructure, permanently changing the United States as we know it.  The madman who seizes control blames organized religion for every problem the old world knew and outlaws them all.  In their place, he calls for new religious orders which causes cults to spring up left and right.  The vast majority of the population has aligned themselves with one cult or another since that is the easiest way to gain supplies and protection.  Those who have not pledged their allegiance to a faction are bombarded with propaganda from the various cults and in a world where there is no regulation of the recruitment methods things can go bad very quickly.

Vigilante Messiah was to be a story about a homeless man and possible paranoid schizophrenic who finds a Jesus outfit in a dumpster behind a costume shop that’s gone out of business.  He lives in an old, burnt out church on the outskirts of the city, between the railroad tracks and the riverbank.  After witnessing a woman get brutally killed, he returns to his “home” and starts a fire in a rusted fifty-gallon drum to keep warm through the night.  The fire, however, turns into a flaming pillar from which a voice booms out instructions.  The voice tells him that he is the avatar of Christ and the second coming is at hand;  he must go out into the world and cleanse it from evil, freeing the demon-possessed souls of thieves, rapists, drug dealers, and pedophiles.  There is a damn good chance I might come back to this one as I really like what I've completed on the book so far.

The Bugout Bag of Holding is one of those books where I don’t really know what I want it to be.  I know it’s a tale of a terrorist attack on a city.  I know it involves a prepper who has 72 hours to find her way out of said city, thus securing her safety.  I just don’t know in what world I want it to be set in.  My initial thought was in our world and the title would come from the fact that the protagonist would be an avid role-playing gamer.  However, I've also toyed with a different idea.  In this one, the world is similar to ours in a lot of ways;  however,  it would be set in a Dungeons and Dragons style reality where those campaigns were part of their history, much in the way Vikings are a part of ours.  The city would be urban and there would be a fusion of magic and technology at play with the prepper protagonist being a half-elf.  When this cover was created, I was still thinking the tale would be set in our world and if the woman in the gas mask looks familiar then you probably know her.  It’s none other than Joy Killar, who’d graciously given me permission to use her image.

How Film Appreciation Changed My Writing

In my twenties, I thought for a while that I wanted to direct films.  I had a bevy of equipment:  8mm cameras, projectors, screens, a film splicer, video camera, editing deck, and titler.  During my freshman year of college, I was still torn however, unsure of whether to pursue a degree in film or English, so I chose electives which would be an introduction to both.  One of these classes was Film Appreciation. We would meet in the college’s theater every Thursday and the first half of class consisted of a lecture, after which we’d watch a movie which best exemplified the topic currently being studied.  We watched everything from Singing in the Rain to The Terminator to Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. 

The topic which stuck with me most, though, was Mise-en-scene.   A French expression literally meaning “placing on stage”,  mise-en-scene is the art of composing a shot.   Before this class, I’d never given much thought to why particular props or actors were located where they were.  I’d just accepted the reality of the scene and flowed along with the plot, never realizing the subtle details at play.  In film, for example, things near the top of the screen usually carry a heavier weight and are thus more important than things at the bottom.  I can’t remember the film we watched as an example, but there was a scene with an argument between a man and a woman in it.  

When the scene began, the man was at the top of a staircase, glaring down at his companion, who stood at the bottom;  he controlled the argument at this point and had all the power, causing the woman to cringe at the bottom of the stairs (and thus, the screen), making her even smaller than what she already was.  Eventually, the woman had enough.  She charged up the stairs as he stormed down them to meet her.  Now they were both in the center of the screen and the argument was fairly balanced, each person making their point but no one really having dominance in the exchange.  Eventually the woman gained the upper hand and, uncertain how to proceed, the man stomped down the stairs, intent on leaving the room.  The woman, however, was having none of it.  She remained at the top and verbally controlled the argument, yelling down questions which flustered the now-powerless man at the bottom of the screen.

This, of course, was just one of the techniques we discussed.  We also learned how downward movement in film represents death (which is why it is raining in so many death scenes), how props can be used to both physically and symbolically isolate characters from one another, and so on. 

In the end, filmmaking proved too expensive for me… I simply couldn't afford all the things I required to create a world.  And, in all honesty, my passion for creating a story with words far outweighed my desire to create them with images.

These two interests, however, ended up merging.  I took what I’d learned about mise-en-scene and often apply it to my written works.  For example, there’s a scene in Apocalyptic Organ Grinder where the two antagonists (since I’m not really sure there is a protagonist in this book) are so close to one another their noses are nearly touching.  The scene is set at night and in the background, a torch burns in the darkness, filling the small gap between them.  This was meant to show the conflict raging between the characters, connecting them by something that can be all-consuming if left to its own devices.  At the end of Shadow of the Woodpile, Bobby was perched atop the massive mound of wood while Detective Maxwell and his parents stood below.  There are other examples of mise-en-scene in my work, but I think these will suffice.

Does anyone notice or even care that I apply film techniques to the written word?  Probably not.  But I’ve come to realize this is part of my personal style and I felt like writing a blog entry, so this was it.