Archive for the 'Writing' Category

Twitter, ShatterCity and Sprawl Crawler

Published on 24 April, 2009 in Internet, Life, News, ShatterCity, Writing and tweeted. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

I’ve been plugging away at my two new projects, which makes me sad because I so often ignore this one.  My blog has become a tweet repository.

I have just over 200 followers on Twitter now. Some of them bots or SEO hacks, but mostly genuine people who don’t see to mind me cursing, bitching and giving Office Coffee the finger. I still have to explain twitter, and the twitter connection to my facebook status, since people assume that I am on facebook all day. I’m not.  I’m blistering my thumbs on my BlackBerry all day.

My two top tweeted words? Not counting “blip” or “fm” (from blipping to tweet, which I used to do often). “Fucking” and “Internets”. Hence, the new catchphrase craze that’s sweeping the fucking internets: “Fucking Internets”. There’s a project in this.

Speaking of projects, I will discuss two of the two projects that are in the works. I will do this now.

ShatterCity: Once destined to become a local sprawl crawler, where people of the Mid-Hudson Valley could find out what the fuck is going on from there to here to there again. Well, I decided that ShatterCity wasn’t a very good name for that, cool as it sounded one morning at 3am, where many things sound much better than they really are.

ShatterCity is now going to be a literary experiment. An ongoing novel with many characters, stories and authors. Mixing and mashing their way through some very strange, dark city.  I’ve begun to invite some folk and I’m working on a bible for it. I think at the very least, it should be some fun.

SprawlCrawler: This is now the local Sprawl Crawler. See what I did? Clever, eh? It’s designed to be a local portal of things happening in the Mid-Hudson Valley, complete with a classified section, social network and all sorts of strange people sharing all sorts of strange things. I’m hoping that it winds up being mildly succesful, and that it gets used by those strange and interesting people of this region.

Oh, let me add: Fucking Internets.

AB

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Made of Meat

Published on 5 March, 2009 in Featured, Micro-Fiction, What the...? and Writing. 0 Comments Tags: , .
This entry is part 10 of 13 in the series Micro-Fiction

Stefan slowly paced in the kitchen, waiting for Maria to get home from the store. He was starving. Starving! He knew that if she did not get home soon, he would begin to fade and waste away.

Another hour passed. Starving! he even said it aloud to the cat, in case the cat was wondering about the pacing. “Starving!”

The cat just looked away.

Stefan decided that he might want to stop talking and pacing. He was wasting valuable, precious energy with his movement. He didn’t know if he could make it.

He didn’t know if he could make it.

Starving!

The cat tasted filthy, but nourishing. Maria’s parrot, while not as meaty as expected, was delicious. When the mailman came with the bills, magazines and a box of mail order pears, Stefan lunged.

Thin slices of the mailman, a second helping actually, sizzled in the frying pan. The aroma of bacon wafted through the door as Maria opened it.

“My god, Stefan,” she whispered in shock. “What have you done?”

“Look,” he shouted, hoping that he was sounding rational. “You left three hours ago for the groceries. Three hours! I Was starving. Starving! And it occurred to me, that this is all just meat. The cat, the bird, the mail man… All just meat!”

“But… but Stefan,” she said as she slowly backed towards the door. “You’re a vegetarian!”

This is not a true story. Yet. Give it time!

AB

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The Pope of Rock ‘n Roll: Divine or Diva?

Published on 25 February, 2009 in Micro-Fiction and Writing. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .
This entry is part 9 of 13 in the series Micro-Fiction

It wasn’t everyday that you got to meet the Pope of Rock ‘n Roll.

Elvis Buddy Hendrix had been standing in line for hours, almost a full day, just for the opportunity to see the top of the pointed hat of the sainted Pontiff of Punk, Monsignor of Mosh, Bishop of  Black Metal, etc. etc.

As the drum beat started, the crowd surged, a roaring scream of excited approval. Lighters were lit and held aloft, votives to the God of Rock’s earthly ambassador. The bass line started, and the screams grew louder. Women, and more than a few men swooned as the opening riff was played on the distorted guitar.

“Are you ready to rock?” echoed a voice from the massive P.A.

“Yeah!” screamed tens of thousands of die hard fans, Elvis among them.

“Then put your hands together for the one, the only… Pope Axl-Maynard Hetfield the II!”

Insanity. People were being crushed against anything that people could be crushed against. Lighters were dropped, and in a few instances where they were Zippo style lighters, small fires broke out on people, to be mostly put out by sweat and the loss of oxygen created by the teeming mass of fandom.

“Hawya duun?” the Pope said into his microphone. The screams must have pleased him, because he followed with an “Awright!” He started to sing, incoherently, the opening lines of the song that had been building for the past minute. Then he puked into the waiting, adoring fans being crushed against the stage. They recieved his whiskey laced vomit as if it were communion. He then opened the fly on his white jeans and blessed the crowd with his piss. He mumbled the half-remembered chorus into the microphone, was hit with an empty water bottle and a thong, and then stormed from the stage screaming obscenities.

As the riot began to be quelled by the teargas throwing members of the Swiss Guard, Elvis fought his way towards an exit, choking and coughing as he thought about how this would always be the greatest day of his life.

I get a fever, you get weird shit.

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Gorillas in the Midst

Published on 15 February, 2009 in Micro-Fiction, What the...? and Writing. 0 Comments Tags: .
This entry is part 8 of 13 in the series Micro-Fiction

The jungle stank of gorilla shit and burned paper. The sun was setting, beams of light streaking from the horizon between the thick vegetation and illuminating the haze around the small cabin. If the gorillas were still around, they made no sound.

Ted picked through the ember-edged sheets of paper that had mostly survived. Every so often, his hand moved too quickly and ignited the sheet, forcing him to try and stamp it out against his sooty chest, or abandon it to the flames.

Part of him was wishing that the jungle would just burn down, but it was currently too damp.  The rain from that morning had drenched the region, and even the air itself was saturated with water.

It didn’t matter. The papers didn’t matter. Recent events had pretty much rendered them pointless.  He supposed that the new papers he would be writing when he returned to civilization, would be even more groundbreaking. Assuming he wasn’t laughed out of the sciences.

He supposed that, in a way, it was his own fault.  He had taught them how to smoke.  He had taught them how to drink. He had taught them how to appreciate really shitty pop music.

He had taught them how to be assholes.

I wrote this last week in my sleep. I’ve been staring at it for an hour now, and have no idea where it was going. So, it ends here.

AB

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In Which Work Resumes and I Steal This Device From Sleepjunky Again.

Published on 13 January, 2009 in Ill-Literati, Jedi Jesus, WordPress and Writing. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

I took a fuck-off day from work yesterday. It was nice. I woke up, took Angela to school, came home and wrote for a good chunk of the day, did some behind the scenes work on Jedi Jesus for some more of the day and did some serious thinking.

I need more days like that. More time like that.

So, the news is that I have successfully mashed ComicPress with k2 (the main theme on this site). There is still some clean up to do, but the comics appear where they should and the navigation mostly works the way it should.

Also in the news column, is that I have resumed work on the comic. Yes, I have the first two pages of the second story arc roughed out. I’ll bring it to work to finish the pencils, ink, color and scan. First page should be up in a week or so. There’s some ret-con going on, as I’m going to do away with some of the references to pre-existing Star Wars characters.

So new comics soon. Very soon. Maybe some Bad Napkin Art too.

And I haven’t forgotten that pod-cast project. Just been difficult to organize, but I think that’ll be coming together shortly as well.

Okay. It’s about bed-time.

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Of Comets and TP

Published on 22 December, 2008 in Micro-Fiction and Writing. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .
This entry is part 7 of 13 in the series Micro-Fiction

I was going to write a micro-fiction, but my brain seems to have gone into stand-by mode. I can’t think of a fucking thing that doesn’t involve comets or toilet paper.

What does that say about me? Other than the fact that I need sleep.

Back to work tomorrow. That should be interesting. Whole lot of things to talk about there. Nothing I care to talk about. Or think about. This job is slowly sucking away what I have left in my poor diseased head-meat.

I would like to see my boss come out of the bathroom and say “Hey! There’s no toilet paper!” And then have a small chunk of comet streak out of the sky and smite him down with the wrath of billions of years of momentum and icy-firey doom.

And then I would look down at what was left of him in the crater. And I would throw the toilet paper down in the hole and say: “Well, I don’t think you’ll be needing this anymore.”

See what this has done to me?

Maybe something good tomorrow.

AB

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A Regular Realization

Published on 10 December, 2008 in Micro-Fiction and Writing. 0 Comments Tags: , .
This entry is part 6 of 13 in the series Micro-Fiction

At some point, between the steady sound of traffic and the silence of sleep, he was hit with the realization that he just wasn’t happy.

The side of the bed that his wife once occupied was empty, and though he was glad to rid of the miserable bitch, the emptiness resonated with an ache.

And he knew that in the morning. He would wake up, drink coffee and shave with a lit cigarette dangling from his lower lip.

He would listen to the news, none of it good these days, and then get in his car and drive to the soul crushing office where he worked. He spent forty hours a week trying to think of ways to get out, or at the very least, get numb enough to not care that he was in a place that he hated.

He would finish his day and make his way home. He would stop at the usual place for his coffee, drink half of it as he finished the ride, and the other half over whatever dinner he had chosen to microwave while he watched mindless television programs.

He looked at the clock by his bed. It was late. Time for sleep. And as he drifted off, he came up with a hundred ideas–some of them new–to make tomorrow different. To make some amazing changes in his life before another year was over.

And like always, the ideas faded with the sound of the traffic as he was wrapped in the silence of sleep, his last thought was that tomorrow was another day.

Always, tomorrow was another day.

Great. I think I bummed myself out. What a way to get back to the Micro-Fiction, eh?

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