Meyow!

I know it's mean--and she'd probably rip shit on my writing too--but Kellen Rice's Twilight reviews are deadly funny. Check out her take on the Midnight Sun travesty here.
This was my reply to Kellen's threat that she will never write another article:
Kellen, I'm sorry to hear that you won't be writing any more. Would you like me to send you a care package? I'm pretty broke, but I think I could gather up some crackers and juice boxes and stuff.
Actually, I really hate myself for how much your reviews of Twilight crack me up. I haven't read it yet, but the one paragraph that I read from your "how to write a bestseller" article left me feeling a tad queasy, like I'd eaten some overly sweet candy. And I keep thinking that if I were an undead 100 year old, I would not want to be hanging out with high school students. They would seem...oh, I don't know...a tad immature? Like I was a perv for wanting to boff someone young enough to be my great-great-grandchild? Or as a friend of mine said, you'd more likely be at the bar saying "for the love of God, here's my ID. I'm 100 years old! Just give me a damn beer already!" rather than hanging around the high school trying to get a date to the prom.
In all fairness, at the age of 14 or 15 I probably would have loved this series. But being far closer to 45 the appeal of such things has lessened considerably.
And read here for her article on how to write a best-selling book. I am going to do all these things when I write the next book. I'm changing everything that was done so far. But mostly I am going to do this:
(Free gift--contains a real, actual, genuine paragraph from Twilight!!!)

1. Abuse the thesaurus (correct word usage optional; purple prose is a must). If you want to ‘spice up’ your writing so that it sounds just like Meyer’s, a handy thesaurus is key. Then you too can write glorious and dazzling (and dazzlingly glorious) passages like the following:

He lay perfectly still in the grass, his shirt open over his sculpted, incandescent chest, his scintillating arms bare. His glistening, pale lavender lids were shut, though of course he didn’t sleep. A perfect statue, carved in some unknown stone, smooth like marble, glittering like crystal.

If you do not have at least three modifiers* for every noun, you’re doing it wrong. Some authors like George Orwell (1984, Animal Farm) have rules like “Never use a long word where a short one will do” and “If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out”, but since Stephenie Meyer is apparently the golden standard for writing young adult literature these days, it’s probably best to ignore Orwell and follow her example instead.

* Bonus points if you use the same modifier multiple times in close proximity of one another. Good examples of words to use this way include “chagrin”, “murmured”, and “chuckled”.

The second most important thing I will remember is this:

5. There should be no plot. Even though you may think that rising action, climax, falling action, and character development are important in a novel, they’re not. Instead, focus on the perfection of the male hero. If your editor forces you to write a plot, make sure it’s just another opportunity for the hero to save the heroine.

Yes, I will do it just like this. My vampire will change from a bloodsucking megalomaniac sociopath from beyond the grave to being HAWT! And then I will have ectoplasmic vomit all over my head when my co-author pukes on me.

As I said, in all fairness, I haven't read the books. But if that is an example of what I would be writing, it's probably just as well. Because reading it made my teeth feel loose.

Lily in the Third Person

This is a writing game where you write about your day in third person. The original concept can be found here.

"Oh crud," said Lily. "I have been off work for three and a half hours. I need to sleep but my damn fibromyalgia has flared up and I'm so sore. Oh, if only I knew a few massage therapy students that needed a victim to practice on."
Lily had promised her mother that she would come over at two o clock and stay with her father so her mother could get out of the house for a while. Being a diligent daughter, Lily knew this is something she really needed to do. She hoped that her body would decide to go to sleep soon, or decide to be good and awake, but either way, that her muscles would stop hurting. Fibromyalgia sucked big donkey dong, there was no two ways about it.
Still, Lily was in a fairly good if somewhat anxious mood. She was looking forward to her son coming home from college tomorrow for the Thanksgiving break. Lily hoped that she would never end up having a stroke like her father had, and become a burden to her son. Of course Lily's Dad hadn't planned to have a stroke. That was the kind of thing that happened to other people's families and you felt sorry for them. It wasn't supposed to happen to your family. Four years after the fact, Lily still found herself feeling that way.
Lily remembered the last time she had seen her father up and walking around without help. It had been his 68th birthday and he had come to visit her and her son. They had made apple-smoked chicken bratwurst on the grill and Dad had been very happy. Lily wondered if Dad remembered that day. His short-term memory was no longer very sound. At least he still knew who everyone was. That was something to be glad of.
"Life is a cash and carry world--you pay as you go," said Stephen King's character Mike Anderson in Lily's mind. "Sometimes it's a little--mostly it's a lot. Sometimes it's all you have."
Truer words were never spoken, Lily thought as she sipped at her Light Vegetable soup. She hoped that one day she would be able to permanently improve her eating habits enough to lose 100 pounds. She wasn't addicted to anything--except food. And that only got bad when the low periods of self loathing came.
"Ain't nobody's perfect," Lily thought. "And if anyone is, show me the nearest cliff so I can lead the sucker off it to their doom!"

The way things change

This comment is a response to this story, which you simply must read.
Yes!!! Doomsday cold-war style sci-fi. One of my favorite forms of writing. I spend many of a night of my young life lying awake worrying about being nuked or dying horribly due to biological warfare, or simply being erased by a neutron bomb.
Now that I'm an old curmudgeon with fibromyalgia to pain my muscles, I often lie down on the dilapidated couch that serves as my bed and say "go ahead--nuke me now!"

Edgar Allan Poe

One of the members of Vampire Freaks asked which was our favorite Edgar Allan Poe story. Here is what I said.

Too many to choose just one. But I'm particularly fond of the beautiful, melancholy poems, particularly "Alone" (which I greatly relate to) and stories such as "Ligeia," "Berenice," "Morella," and "The Fall of the House of Usher." Also, I learned to read at a rather early age (four) and at the age of six I got ahold of my father's Edgar Allan Poe book, and the first story I read from it was "The Premature Burial." Whether people believe this or not, this awakened some nasty past-life memories for me that I didn't know how to deal with at that age. But in spite of the nightmares it invoked, I fell in love with the horror genre at that moment.

I think that one thing that surprises people is the fact that that Poe also wrote some comic pieces. One series of stories followed Madame Psyche Zenobia and her little dog Diana. Stories such as The Sphynx are a parody of the very genre that Poe became identified with. So while he is well remembered for his macabre works, I feel that he was a more versatile writer than the average person knows.

The Great HPL

This is a post that I left on a forum at Vampire Freaks where the person was asking which of H.P. Lovecraft's stories was our favorite. The author of the post said:

Anathema6205 wrote in TalesFromTheCrypt
November 12, 2008, 09:46am
[cult status]
Posts: 19

Master of the Macabre

Alright, everyone has at least heard of this master of horror. He's on a whole new level of macabre.

H.P. Lovecraft.

Metal bands write songs based on his stories.
There's movies of them.
He's Stephen Kings' idol.(and any other aspiring horror writers, for that matter)
There's so many people that have taken his ideas and molded them into something else.
Built upon them; like the Cthulhu mythos, to name one.
He has a cult following bigger than Tim Burton.

Which stories do you like the most?
Which ones chilled you to the bone?
What adaptations have you seen or heard of?

Edited by: Anathema6205 at November 12, 2008, 09:48am

lilystrange said:
He's one of my heroes as well. I use several of his creations in my book.

One of the more chilling stories was actually a collaboration with C.M. Eddy called "The Loved Dead." But of stories written strictly by Lovecraft, while they're all excellent, "The Dreams In the Witch House" stands out.

Most of the film adaptions of his works have sucked in my opinion, but one, a 1965 adaption of the Dunwich Horror (I believe) was called "The Shuttered Room." I think I liked it because it was atmospheric rather than gory, which seemed more true to Lovecraft's vision, as he did not write gore.

I imagine that you may have read Stephen King's short story "Crouch End," which was inspired by Lovecraft's work.

Lovecraft was inspired by Ambrose Bierce. Almost everyone knows Bierce's story, "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," but he wrote so many others. I think if one really wants to know Lovecraft, one must read Bierce as well.

Art is Delusion

This is a response I made to Mastery-Mystery's striking short-short piece, "Ninja Boy and the Clouds."

Tragically funny! That really is what an imaginative person is given to feel like in this society.

For instance, my family is dreadfully proud of me going to nursing school (feh!) because it will "make me into somebody." The fact that I've published a book is a "cute little diversion." My mother at least would prefer that I didn't publish another one because it distracts from "more important things," but she puts up with my madness as long as I continue "real" pursuits, such as the damn nursing school.

And now my nit-picking comes into place. About my comment, not his work.
"Amusing" would have been a better choice of words than funny. I often find myself amused (or bemused) by things that I realize are not actually very funny. There's sort of a helpless feeling that goes along with it. My thought generally is that fate/the powers that be/the Universe has a cruel sense of humor. Or that a deity such as Loki is playing a prank on hapless humanity. And I ponder the thought by Calvin of Calvin and Hobbes that the Higher Power "is mean or it's arbitrary, and either way, it gives me the creeps."