Holy crap, I’ve been doing this for four years.
Category: Pulverbatch
Story Hacks: Fourth in a Series
Most magazines pay by the word, but sometimes even doubling up on your adverbs won’t help you break that magic-million mark. How else can you fill the pages you’ll need to pay down that Porsche? That, dear wreater, is why Gutenberg invented the dream sequence.
Ooh! Dreeeeam sequence!
Some authors choose to “reverse-engineer”* one of the many sober, objective dream interpretation books on the market. If one wants to symboblize a penis, for example, one could use a snake, a pencil, a toothbrush, a remote control, a key, the letter I, or any of thousands of vaguely cylindrical objects we encounter every day. After all, our formative years were spent around lots of penises! Am I right? I’m right.
Of course, interpretative books with scanty indexing may require significant work to find the right symbiology. As we should know by now, work is the opposite of writing! Instead, google “dream journal” and grab about two things from every result you find. Don’t forget to change the names–unless you forget on purpose!
To help you get started, here are some useful common elements:
- Uncles
- Running but not going anywhere (isn’t that scary? It’s scary!)
- A hunchback
- Your mom
- This one house you went to but now it looks completely different
- Freud seriously said your mom
- Nudity
- People who are also other people
- Freud was like the Tupac of his generation, kids
Once you’re published, your consumers may pay a lot of attention to your dream sequences. If they don’t like what they find there, remind them that it’s just a dream! It doesn’t mean anything! Except hilarity! If they claim that you’re just writing nonsense to pad your word count, point out that it is way deeper than them, and that they just don’t get your symbliography. It’s true.
* Translation: “drive backwards.”
Today’s Hack in a Nutshell: Nothing you can “wrighte” is “wronge!”
Today’s Anacrusis will be late because the one I was going to put up is just too awful. Too awful. I couldn’t inflict that on my readers.
Here it is!
C H I L I J O H N
– – – –
“I was told we’d be noncombat!” shrieks Lester as he presses up against the trench wall. Phosphorus shells scream and gob-smack.
“That’s right,” Chili John nods, “you’re the civilian component of Operation Wombat.”
“Oh, that’s much better,” Lester says. He looks relieved.
“See that metal-plated monstrosity over there?” Chili John points. “That’s the Tomcat. Your job is to carry some fuel to it–here, use this top hat.”
Lester scrambles off with the crude naptha. Moments later, he and it are splashed all over the ironside, burning happily.
“You’re a bad man,” chuckles Moon.
“Stop that,” Chili John snaps.
I saw the Neo-Futurists doing their show Too Much Light Makes The Baby Go Blind last Saturday night, courtesy of Unstoppable David Clark. I am going to see them again next weekend, at the 2:30 matinee on either Saturday or Sunday. Tickets are $25-$28 and you, you personally, had damn well better come with me. We can get a 10% discount if we scrape together ten people.
The Neo-Futurists are fucking amazing.
You can find all this out by going to their website, but because other humans are apparently lazy about clicking, here’s what happens: there are five performers and thirty (original) plays. They do, or try to do, all thirty plays in sixty minutes. They’re microplays. You understand why I am smitten.
The thirty plays may happen in any order, because they’re numbered and the troupe will do whatever number they hear the audience yell out as soon as the previous play is over. They also swap out 1d6 plays every night and replace them from a larger pool, so by this Saturday it might be a completely different show from what I saw.
As if this wasn’t enough, there is a seven-item checklist that I personally keep for determining whether or not any given show qualifies as performance art. The list is as follows:
- A person under a black cloth hood doing something ridiculous
- Giant diapers
- Performers dancing in the aisles and trying to get audience members to dance too
- Large pictures of female genitalia
- People eating money
- A man rubbing his nipples with an expression of fiendish glee
- The throwing of raw meat
And I shit you not, the version of the show I saw included six of those seven items. And it worked, because they were completely self-aware and loved it and laughed at themselves. They made metahumor work on stage. This is a feat akin to picking up litter with the pointy part of the Chrysler Building, and I’d only previously seen it done by the pre-Intel Blue Man Group.
I am completely serious about you coming with me to the show this weekend. Call or email me if you want me to add you to the possible-group roster, and I’ll tell you by Wednesday whether we have enough people. If the show sells out they’ll buy us pizza. I’m serious about that too.
Ian, I wish you could have been there. David Flora, the Neo-Futurists are from Chicago and they do this every week up there, you bastard, why haven’t you seen it yet?
I made myself wait two days to write this up because I didn’t want to rave and gibber and then be embarrassed when the high wore off. I’m raving and gibbering anyway. If you’re in Louisville, you need to come see the show.
For the record, this is Combat Week! on Anacrusis.
Combat Week!
I am waiting for familiar resolve
Got the first search referral for “thinspiration” today. That story is currently the #113 Google result for it. Think I’ll get any mail?
I’m not sure whether it counts as irony that I only realized this morning that “Me and Mia,” one of my favorite songs ever, is about, um, ana and mia. Ted Leo should enunciate better, and I should listen harder. It’s a vicious song.
What the hell, B button.
Everyone’s a-tizzy about the controller for Nintendo’s next console. By “everyone” I mean “all my friends are nerds.” In case the article I linked is still down, allow me to summarize for you:
- it’s a TV remote
- with a thingy that goes in it
The general reaction is positive. It’s new and different! It’s not the ten thousandth attempt to recreate the Dual Shock! You move the whole controller to move things on screen! (Yes, lovely, and check out the front end. That’s an IR panel. Want to know what happens when you point it straight down?)
My reaction is not positive, and this morning I remembered why: I am one of a rarefied set of humans who have actually played a video game with a remote before. That’s right. There was, for some time, in my living room, a Philips CD-i. I tried to swing a katana with it. I directed a claymation man through an Egyptian sewer. And, though I’m not ungrateful to Bruce for letting us play his video games, the fact of the matter is that its user experience
STOP READING HERE, MOM
sucked a dog’s penis.
Metaphorically.
You didn’t stop reading, did you, Mom? Sorry.
Oh, today I’ve officially written two years’ worth of Anacrusis. That’s a lot!
Some days you think you’re just yodeling down the pipe, and some days you get a powerful response and moving discussion and people caring and kind words.
Should have saved that one until tomorrow. Now the next story’s going to be a letdown.
Earlier entry explained
Almost my entire extended family on my mom’s side–the Dixons & Company–went to the Ohio Renaissance Festival as a crew of pirates, in full costume and character. There were forty-one of us. Some of the grownups started drinking at nine in the morning. The Dixons don’t actually drink very often, but when we do we are Catholic about it.
They knew we were coming, but I don’t think they were quite prepared.
There was a lot of shouting and ARRing and attempting to sing shanties to which we had managed to learn about one line each. The first of many attempts to break into song came as we crossed under the portcullis to enter the festival proper, and it went like this:
“Well the ship set sail with a lusty crew
ROLL, ME HEARTIES, ROLL
The hmm a grr and rum da dum
ROLL, ME HEARTIES, ROLL
And they all got something mumble barnacles
ROLL, ME HEARTIES, ROLL
ROLL, ME HEARTIES, ROLL
What’s the one about the cabin boy? Let’s sing that one.”
I am not kidding when I say costume and character, either. We all had handmade outfits courtesy of my aunt Lea and my cousin Jerusha, plus jewelry, flintlocks and cutlasses. Sneakers were not permitted. We were the crew and wench-brigade of the Slime Dragon, under command of Cap’n–no, Adm’ral!–Lice. When Queen Elizabeth I made a personal visit that afternoon, she was quite impressed with our display of fealty.
There were vague-but-fervent plots of mutiny and assassination all day, but–just like with real pirates–it’s tough to stay on track with drunk ringleaders. It was like the world’s least-organized LARP. I just tried to keep afresh of the prevailing wind, and I gave some money to the poor stage juggler after he endured a good deal of the crew yelling that wasn’t handling enough blades.
It should be noted that this was not a spontaneous occurrence. In addition to an extraordinary amount of planning and effort by my uncle Jeff’s family, we have a shared pirate-story canon as documented by multiple home movies dating back to the late Sixties. Though those scurvy dogs were also led by a Cap’n Lice, yesterday’s crew was missing several key members and had gained a number of new ones. It also seemed to be rooted in a different time and place. Perhaps this (sea-based) Cap’n Lice was an ancestor of the later lake-based one?
Anybody who wonders why I became a drama major and a role-playing nerd doesn’t have far to look for an explanation. The same goes for my fervent belief in art as commons and shared creativity. And pirates. My family is amazing.