IS THERE ANYONE WHO CAN JUST TELL AN ORIGINAL STORY?

16 11 2016

I do appreciate your attention, but the fact is that there are so few of you visiting me, you can’t pose a threat if you are offended. Moreover, if I were to incriminate myself, you people would not present as credible witnesses for the prosecution.

May I? Okey dokey.

Brexit and Trump and The Backlash were predicted years and years ago. Culture steers politics, and guys? We’ve been in a stultified, petrified, freeze-dried culture for years. Whazzhemean?

Give me a new idea that caught fire in popular culture in the past ten years. I’ll wait.

It’s been a decade of vampires or zombies, or Judd Apatow’s smirking half-improv movies, or self-referential fan-service reboots, or Explodey Old Action Franchises Parts 5.

We’ve been watching, listening, playing, doing the same things for how-many-years and whenever someone has something new, it either drops off the earth or is scorned as idiocy.

Example: The Juggalos. A group that considers itself a great big family of people who just want to shock people with homegrown, Halloween rap music, professional wrestling, and cheap bootie. Hah! What a buncharoobs! They won’t have that kind of vulgarity at Cocachella, and certainly not at Burning Man (that’s how we know Burning Man actually had something going, because the rich people co-opted it)!

Example: The creative paralysis called JJ Abrams. How did one man’s vision get control of not only Star Trek and Star Wars, but set the tone for all other major productions? His style of shakey-cam, blue-lit quirky action heroes can be found on every damn channel. This is like the 1970s only having George Lucas writing and directing Star Wars, Star Trek 1 – 6, and Indiana Jones, and having ILM create “Charlies Angels”, “Hart To Hart”, and “The Six Million Dollar Man” franchise.

Just as business as usual kept going in American politics with Obama (oh yes it did, guys, or did we send any bankers to Guantanamo or Iraq?), that same gritted-teeth durance went into consuming entertainment. That DC movie was not so good? Maybe they’ll get it right next time. That new group sounding like anything else on your iTunes feed? Meh, it’ll do.

It’ll keep your mind off of the war and the oligarchy and what your neighbors hung on their porch.

Pissed off about it? Grab some punk rock or angry rap, read some Bukowski, and drink a Pabst, thanks 20th Century!

We do not have a language for our values. We got comfortable and took it for granted, then leased it, and then sold it.

chuck

This is the Western World’s Premier Underground Satirist. Think On This.

 

You want to know the big difference between music of the 70s and 80s and today? The artists didn’t use it to sell commercials.

Except DEVO and they did it as a big meta-satire.

Even before the Alt-Right, there were artistic clues of seismic discontent. Micropress and self-pub starting taking all the revenue. “Bizarro”, “Weird”, and religious-themed fiction appeared en mass, and would never have gotten attention from TOR or Ballentine. None of them would have gotten shelf space if it weren’t for micropress.

Why Lovecraft? Because so desperate for a new idea that we went back almost a century.

Yet these touch our imaginations, our adrenal glands, and our amigdala. Does anything speak? Does anything touch our hearts?

Who has come forward to just tell of any broken, gutsy dumbass who made good?

IS THERE ANYONE WHO CAN TELL A STORY? NOT PREACH. JUST TELL AN ORIGINAL STORY?





TNT Network Horror Contests and Some Ideas For Stories

16 11 2016

The contest: Ten Finalists get $1000. Winner gets $20K and presumably has their story presented on their reboot of “Tales From The Crypt”.

The ideas:

Raymond Cass was one of the first people to take a tape recorder into haunted houses to record spirit voices. This presentation has some meh examples of Electronic Voice Phenomenon, but can get you in the mood.

Sheer Terror has one of their lists of stories that are supposed to have happened in Real Life, but you can tell a bunch were just made up, but a few ones have potential.

HOWEVER, every Halloween the readers of Jezebel.com send in Real Life stories, and the finalists have a higher ratio of believably creepy ideas. Jezebel has been doing this for years and past years’ contributions are also really good.

 





In Totally Insulated, Unrelated-To-World News, I’ve Got Another Novel and…

10 11 2016

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…I’ve gotten to 13K words in NaNoWriMo.
You all know NaNoWriMo. It’s my first time. I needed some sort of boost, because I’m two novels behind in my Five Year Plan, which ends in December. I’d be needing Beta Readers to give me critiques. Would you like to read the draft?
So far, having a deadline’s been working pretty well. Due to genetics and upbringing, I am suspicious of any sort of organized “fun” activity, but this is working out.
This novel is a sequel to my Stoker long-listed novel “The Flesh Sutra”, which is set in 1890s San Francisco and contains body horror, Tantric sex, ruminations about romantic love, and a dysfunctional relationship between two increasingly powerful mystics. Would you like to be a Beta Reader?
This new novel has a working title “The Flesh Frequency” and is set in 1971 San Francisco.
Weird Stuff count so far:

  • A Jim Morrisson/Brian Wilson analog has his soul imbued in his last recording, to have that recording duplicated over-and-over, so that he is doing the same song over-and-over until his torment goes multi-Platinum.
  • An antiquarian who likes young flesh realizes what coins and lovers have in common, and molds so medallions of smelted gold upon his own body.
  • An aspiring Satanist steals the wrong body and discovers enlightenment is infinitesimally different than death.
  • The protagonist has to choose between a passionless existence and a greater meaning placing all humanity at risk.

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  • Remember Olivia? One word: sokushinbutsu

I have to get to 50K by the end of a holiday month.
Would any of you good people like to be a Beta Reader?

Header photo courtesy of this rather interesting story.





Building A Believable Plot, Then Selling It To “Apex Magazine”

4 11 2016

Building a Believable Chain of Events in Your Novel

 

Bite-size Special: What makes an Apex story?








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