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Apologies

Due to life events, I have been inactive for several years. I have finally transitioned to a position where I am no longer working 80 to 100 hour work weeks. However, it will take some time for me to re-plot my incomplete works as well as re-edit my current works.

However, I will eventually finish them. Only death or disability will stop me from completing them.

Sources of Inspiration

Comedy

(1) Dr. Demento - The infamous radio personality is the alter ego of Barret Hansen. Dr. Demento was popular in the 1970's and 1980's and had a cult following to this day. While working for KPPC-FM and later for KMET in Los Angeles, Dr. Demento put together radio skits and songs such as "Boot to the Head" and "Kinko the (kid-loving) Clown He discover Weird Al Yankovic, Larry Groce, and repopularized old acts such as Stan Freberg satirical recordings, Napoleon the XIV's "They're Coming to Take Me Away, Ha Ha" and Bobby "Boris" Pickett's "Monster Mash." He is the American version of Monty Python save for the fact that he did not do movies.

(2) Monty Python - The greatest British comedy group ever to grace the earth. Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, and Michael Palin (no relationship to US Vice Presidential hopeful Sarah Palin) put together some of the funniest television skits and movies of all time. If you do not know about the Spam skit, Dead Parrot skit, Argument Clinic, Matt the Knight, and the French Taunter from Monty Python's Holy Grail, the song Always Look on the Bright Side of Life, and the song you can't say fck on the radio, go to Google's Video search engine and start watching.

(3) South Park - Cartman is living proof that fat asses still rule. After watching this, I was very careful not to anger one least they plot to drop me in a vat of hot lava or worse - Cartman only arranged for the death of Scott Tenerman's parents, grinding their flesh into a bowl of chili, and make him look like a douche, because Scott had to trick Cartman into buying pubic hair.

(4) Government Accounting - As an accounting major, I had to suffer through government accounting. All the other accounting system is based upon some aspect of reality. Government accounting was invented by monks keep in isolation, constantly being bitten by rabid gerbils as a test of faith. Once you taken the class, you know why every government in the world will remained effed up until end of times.

(5) Government Bureaucrats - No explanation required.

(6) My Job - As an forensic auditor/white-collar crime investigator, I quickly learned that the "criminal mastermind" is an extremely rare creature that is more a product of a Hollywood screenwriter's imagination than realty. From my experience, when most people embark on a "life of crime," odds are that in 99-percent of cases, they just gave themselves a "self-induced lobotomy" rather than enact a cunning plan. All acts leave some trace that an experience investigator can follow. Therefore, I do not care how good at being invisible your bad guy is, in the end, the bad guy will find his nemesis right behind him or more likely, in front of him waiting with a "pair of handcuffs." Therefore, if your lead is a "criminal" or "rebel", happily ever after will involve a lifetime of dodging the authorities.

(7) Hazard Warning Labels on Consumer Products - Prior to the warning label, how the hell do consumers know that the Barbie Doll I gave my five-year-old daughter could be so dangerous, even without the Chinese-added lead-based paint. After reading the labels, a part of me wants to actually try it out just to see how much it can hurt.

(8) Statistics - In an uncertain world, there is a certain comfort one can find in statistics. For example - being mentally retarded is defined as being in the bottom quartile of humanity with respect to intelligence. Thus one of of every four adults is retarded. When I am bored, suck in the middle of a group I loath, I try to figure out who is the one in four among us who is retarded.

(9) College Professors - Now that I have graduated and joined the real world, I am envious of the college professors of my youth. Where else can you get lifetime job security and teach young impressionable mind to believe in something so illogical that if it was not taught in the university, you would believe it to be the mad ramblings of someone locked away in a padded room at the psychiatric ward? When I retire, I plan on developing some outrageous theory such as whacking people on the head with the mallets from a retired Chucky Cheese's "Whack a Mole" game can improve our educational system. They will beg me to teach and I get to play a game of "Whack the Students."

(10) Hooters and Strip Clubs - Having patronized and making friendships, among other things that I must keep quiet about, with girls from both, I have realized that my standards had not changed since the day I opened my first Playboy magazine. I have lost count of how many girls told me that they wanted respect. Hello. The only job with less respect is working at "Hot Dog on a Stick." One of my ex-girlfriends, a stripper, use to tell me that she became a stripper to regain her lost dignity after working two years at "Hot Dog on a Stick." As for Hooters, the food might be good, but I go to see the girls do the YMCA dance and sing "My sister blank is drunk and horny and going to get laid." Girls, if you work at these places, the only real justification is the tips. Do not say, "I do this to prove that a woman can be as strong and successful as a man."

(11) Years Working in Loss Prevention - I worked three years as a loss prevention specialist for a major retailer. I have seen just about every idiotic scheme poorly executed. It is a cardinal fact that when people decide to commit crimes, they give themselves an instant lobotomy. Forget Sherlock Holmes or CSI. Finding criminals is so easy. Just look for the idiot whose head swivels more than that of your typical junkie prostitute trying to act natural. I actually had one idiot rub lemon juice on his face and hand in a vain attempt to make himself invisible to the security cameras.

(12) Life - If you cannot find the absurdities in life, do the world a favor and end your existence as a product consuming organism. Having no sense of humor is ground for performing retroactive birth control.

Drama

(1) My Ex-girlfriends - The sex was great. The drama...nearly cause me to drink myself into a stupor. These girls have more overacting in one fingernail clipping than multi-year run of Spanish telenovelas. Age and experience now make me contemplate the question was the slight chance at human reproduction with these girl worth the sex and headaches. I am so thankful the condom held otherwise I will be repeatedly banging my head into steal plate in an attempt to dull the pain.

(2) The Old Testament of the Bible - In the first five books of the Bible you can read about murder, rape, incest, legally banging your brother's wife, and a thousand other disgusting acts all approved in the name of God. I like old "Smite your enemies, rape their women, and salt their fields" kind of God over the newer "I love you - you love me" kind of God. If I did not know better it sounded like the New Testament God was channeling Barney the Purple Pedophile Dinosaur.

(3) My grandmother's Old Romance Novels - After my grandmother died, I cleaned out the stuff from her house. For some reason I held unto the romance novels. Fate, and an idiotic driver with a few too many beers, landed me in the hospital for a week. One can only watch so much daytime television so my brother grabbed a box of books to rescue me from pending insanity. They happened to be my grandmother's books. I read them and found out that the only difference between these books and the script for your typical pornographic film is the terminology. Instead of saying 'fck' or 'cum all over her face', grandma's old romance novels said 'celebrating love with physical vigor' and 'releasing one's life essence upon her visage.' The lesson - If you phrase it right, you can make almost anything sound respectable.

(4) My Teenage Years - I have already told my five-year-old daughter that any mischief that she is contemplating, I have already done. As a survivor of adolescence, I have dealt with just about everything a straight male can encounter save for my underage girlfriend being pregnant or getting an incurable STD. I do not need imagine to figure out how to place young characters in trouble...just pull up some old memories.

(5) New Radio - Let us say that fact is often stranger than fiction. I have heard stories about behavior so outrageous that I had to believe it was fabricated. However, I must report that yes, humans can be such idiots.

Pet Peeves

(1) Pen Thieves – I worked eight years in retail and had countless pens stolen from me because folks were too EXPLETIVE DELETED to return my pens to me.

(2) Folks who can’t even bother to review their favorite FanFiction.Net stories. We don’t ask that you review every story you read or that you deliver a lengthy, critical review. Just one or two words like Thank You or even, Too OC can help an author develop his or her craft.

Pat Squared’s Tips to Writers

Who Want to Write Well

(1) Repeat this mantra – There are no such things as natural born writers and storytellers. Writing and telling stories are crafts and like all crafts, they require years and decades of intensive practice before anyone can claim to be a master.

(2) Read at least one great literary work per month. No, what you read for school (Unless it’s part of the reading list for a MFA program – If you have to ask you are not in one) DOES NOT COUNT! This is not pleasure reading, but rather an in-depth analysis of how the author dealt with certain literary challenges. You will find yourself learning how the pros did it.

(3) Be able to sum up the plot of your story in the point of view of any main character in a single sentence of 15 words or less before writing. If you can not, your story will be aimless and 99.99 of the time aimless is bad!

Example

Fire Nation prince must capture elusive Avatar to regain lost honor. (11 words)

If you recognized this as the premise of the Nickelodeon cartoon Avatar - The Last Airbender from Zuko’s point of view then pat yourself on the back.

(4) From that single sentence, be able to further summarize the story from each major character’s POV in no more than 1-2 paragraphs.

(5) Your villain is just as important as your hero! If you can not turn around and rewrite the story from the POV of your villain, your story is flawed. Think of hero and villain as the yin and yang of your literary universe. Even Darth Vader needed some motivation beyond destroying planets with the Death Star. His story was interesting enough for Lucas to write Episodes I to III.

(6) To advance further in your story, your protagonist (hero/anti-hero) must make a series of irrevocable choices that bring some significant level of sacrifice, suffering, and hardship to move closer to his or her goals. As humans we value things by how much we suffer to acquire them – The pain your mother put up with during labor is why she did not strangle you as a temper-tantrum throwing two year-old. Take this to extremes for your characters.

(7) Make the goals urgent (at least in the mind of your characters) enough for the character to drop everything they were doing and focus their efforts to achieve that goal.

Example
Zuko (Avatar - Last Airbender) can not assume his rightful place as the crown prince of the Fire Nation and earn his father’s love without delivering the current reincarnation of the Avatar in chains to his father, Fire Lord Ozai.

(8) Pile more and more crap on the character.

Example
Zuko (Last Avatar) encounters Commander Zhao who interferes with his hunt for the Avatar. Zhao captures the Avatar and Zuko must get a well-guarded Avatar out from Commander Zhao’s custody. (Blue Spirit Episode)

(9) All must seem lost for the main character.

Example
Fire Load Ozai declares Zuko and Iroh to be traitors to the Fire Nation and sends Azula, Zuko’s sadistic sister and fire bending prodigy to hunt down the pair. Now Zuko and Iroh are in a hostile land, the Earth Kingdom, surrounded by enemies on all sides. (Avatar - Last Airbender - End of Season I, Start of Season II)

(10) Plot out the entire story before posting up the first chapter. Nickelodeon does not just spend millions of dollars and risk millions of more dollars of precious air time some vague ‘Asian-theme cartoon about some Avatar’. The writers and producers plot out every episode and spend lots of time and money on research before even drawing the first cell so their story comes to life. While you are not putting millions of dollars out on one of your projects, you can at least invest a little time to make sure your stories flow from the beginning.

(11) Do your research. If you are writing your tales in a Chinese-Japanese inspired universe, make sure you learn what you can about Chinese-Japanese culture, myth, customs, and language. With the internet, all you have to do is to go to () or () to find articles and web pages on virtually any topic. Don’t go regurgitating up every detail, but you want to capture and internalize the essence of the universe in which you are placing your characters.