New News: I have time on my hands. There. I've said it. I haven't done anything with this account or my LJ in years. I think I'll start throwing shit at the walls again and see what sticks.

Old News: Updates to Immaculate Savior and Pretty Tea Party are slow. I've started a new work schedule and have branched out to writing other things. The chapters are coming along bit by bit though. Ch.3 of Immaculate Savior is very 'topical' you might say.

About Me

I live in a small town in California. We don't have a university, just a community college which I attended for seven years while I worked. In that time I changed my major from music to art to english to psychology to business and information technology. After all that, and 130 units later, I walked away with an A.S. in Accounting and an A.S. in Info Tech. (Cue Sound Effect: Wah Wah Waaaahhhhh!) Note: An A.S. is a two year degree, nothing to write home about.

When I was younger I wanted to get a degree in psychology and study night terrors. One reason was because I had them all the time and even trained myself to have them at will. They are fascinating and also very, very, scary. If you are unfamiliar with them, they are dreams where you are paralyzed and you feel an unexplainable fear or evil presence. In these dreams you might also hear a droning or whooshing sound, voices talking, feel a vibration or waves of energy in your body, or be dragged through the air against your will. There's an interesting article on wikipedia if you would like to know more. The fact that I always knew that I was dreaming while I was having them did'nt make them any less scary. Unfortunately, because of their perceived 'mystical' nature, night terrors are rarely researched with a hard scientific approach.

The horror. I took two creative writing classes in community college. I have never seen a sorrier collection of broken people, even in my brief tenure as a telephone psychic. There was the painfully oblivious DnD nerds with their crunchy, masturbatory wish fulfillment, the born again christian psychos writing hate tracts, the walking wounded molestation survivors, the doddering old men whose stories went absolutely nowhere, there was me, don't even get me started on the teachers, and then there was James. I call him James because I can't remember his name, but he was a freak. James had a degenerative neuro-muscular disorder that left him mostly paralyzed in a wheel chair with little control over his body. It was tragic, really. Except that, well...he liked to write rape fantasies. Yes. Even more disturbing was the fact that everyone cheered him on and told him how good of a writer he was because he was 'conquering' his disability. And James would just flounder limply in his wheel chair, head cocked back, his face contorted in something like a smile and go, "ah...ah...ah...ahh". Yes, ladies and gentleman, it's a beautiful, heart warming tale of one man's struggle for self actualization. Perhaps Hollywood should make a movie about him. Tom Hanks or George Clooney could play the role.

I might start a character profile on this page about all the freaks I've met. It could be my very own bestiary of psychological disorders. My own Freak Folio.

I stopped writing story fiction years ago. On occasion I would write poetry or very short fables similar to the ones that appear in Soushee's Story. Mostly I wrote business communications and technical documents. I got the spark back and started writing stories again this last summer. Making the transition back to doing a narrative has been awkward. It shows in my sentence structure and punctuation but I'm slowly finding my voice again. I am blessed though to have a family that speaks their mind. Upon reading my stories they will usually ask, "Where did you dredge up this crap?" Lucky for me I'm not the fragile type.

About My Writing

The Pretty Tea Party

I got the idea for this story from those creepy child actors you see on commericals and movies. The ones that talk and act like adults but they still have baby fat and their baby teeth. It strikes me as disturbing and kind of tragic. I wonder what's really inside of their little heads. Or what their family lives must be like.

Paeia, the main character of this story, is a little girl of around 8 or 9 years. Except for some all too brief moments she is always play acting. Her superficial interactions with others and her adventures with her 'playmates' are her way of dealing with her hidden emotions. I don't mean for any reader to fully empathize with her. She is supposed to be cruel, cold, and vengeful. But she is also determined, clever, and very imaginative. I hope I am writing her well enough that the readers will be interested in what she does and maybe cheer her on once in awhile. I also draw on alot of demonic and fairy folklore that the Forgotten Realms setting has'nt really fleshed out much.

Immaculate Savior

Salvatore is such easy fodder for parody that I probably just reinvented the wheel in writing this one.

My introduction to Drizzt was through reading the Dark Elf trilogy. I really enjoyed it and I still do. Then I read the other stuff. It went from 'not so bad' to 'eh' to 'what is that smell!'. Drizzt and his companions' fates are tied to corporate marketing interests. Salvatore does not own these characters but must write them if he wants to share in the profit being made from his creations. I can smell the hatred. After reading the hunters blades trilogy I firmly believe that Salvatore hates what he does. He probably hates his readers and maybe even himself as well. He can write a fairly entertaining comic-book style story when he wants to but the hunters blades trilogy was one of the most sickeningly fascinating hack-jobs I've ever read. You are a sad, sad man, Salvatore. Oh well. The latest books were probably ghostwritten anyways.

Heaven help me, I've got four more chapters planned for this one.

This story got more hits in 24 hours than Soushee's Story did in four months. At least I have the satisfaction of knowing that all the people who immediately hit the 'back' button on 'Immaculate Savior" will never get the image of that first sentence out of their minds. Ha Ha Ha Ha Haaaaa!

Soushee's Story

This is the one that got me out of my writing slump. I love it dearly but it's a train wreck. My original concept for this story revolved around a boy who lives in a fantasy world (eg. The Forgotten Realms) but lives his life day-dreaming in his own fantasy world. His entire world view is built around the stories his mother told him as he grew up in a garden paradise. These stories are'nt quite like the ones other children grew up with which leads to some interesting clashes with 'reality'. I did'nt want to write about someone who was a great fighter or mage, good or evil. Soushee is forced by everyone he meets to perform a certain role in a living story he can't accept. In order to save his soul he has to be a subversive force against everyone, good or bad. He learns the art of seeing the story he is in and reworking his role so that he can escape in one form or another. Hence the title, 'Soushee's Story'.

I drew alot of allegory from the garden of eden and the fall of lucifer when I conceptualized where I wanted to take this story. I thought the dark/light elf dynamic had alot of unexplored territory. Maybe I have'nt read enough canon material but Vhaeraun(spell?) seems more like a third world dictator than a true force of evil. I wanted to write him as this shadowy grasping hunger that always covets what is most precious to others and tries to steal it away to where the light can't touch it. Not someone who just steals your land and your golden candelabra.

I chose to use present tense because I thought it would help convey Soushee's frame of mind. Time does'nt work the same way in his little fantasy world; fragments of the past and future tend to bleed into his present. It opened up some new creative avenues for me at least. A few people have told me it just does'nt feel right though.

I experimented with some odd sentence structure. I think I was going for some kind of subtle effect, the thread of which I must have lost, regained, or switched several times. Note to reader: I'm Sorry.

There are parts in the story and overall concept that I'm very proud of. The presentation is very horrible though as evidenced by the number of people who choose not to read past a certain point. Despite the advance material I've already written, I won't be updating this story with a continuation until I rewrite it from the ground up and ditch the aimless philosophizing. (It's embarrasingly bad.)