talking monkey work

Here is a review of the Cinema Spec anthology. It even mentions my story, End of An Era. http://abyssandapex.livejournal.com/6401.html

Do you remember moving as a kid? I remember moving from Michigan to LA (twice, because I forgot how much I hated there the first time). It took me a day to pack, and I had like... ten boxes of books and dishes and a few garbage bags full of clothes. Pretty much I had nothing. And lost some of it out the hatch back of the car I was driving at least one of those times.

The amount of stupid I was in those days is staggering, but that's a story for another time.

So now, we've got this house. And believe me, it's in no way liveable yet. I mean, there's one working toilet, and I'm grateful for that, but there's no appliances yet. That's a big long story of well, this has to happen before that can happen. And once that's done, then this has to be done, and then, maybe, you can haul your stove over here, and hopefully not blow yourself up while you hook it up....

Okay, so I'm complaining. I'm just ready to be done. I spent the last few hours painting the insides of cupboards in the kitchen. Great. Progress. Right? I've got one coat of paint on the ceiling too. Yay. Right. But there's still so much to do, I'm a little freaked out.

And here's the worst thing. I wish I could say I was grown up enough to want to focus on all this entirely. I should be hauling the kilz upstairs to paint the inside of my closet now too. But I'm not doing that.

Nope. I'm not painting, and I'm not packing. Not at this moment. All I want right now, is write. Yep. I'm a bad adult. All I can think about now is how to end the stupid book. So I'm sitting in my new kicthen, with no appliances, all paint smeared, lying to myself that there's nothing I can do now that it's all wet. It's gotta dry now,m right?

Because there are all these other questions I need the answers too. Like after your boyfriend saves you from hell, and restores your soul to you, where does your relationship go from there? What happens when somebody looks into a soul and sees stuff they definately don't want to see? Whoes fault is that? And, seriously. What do you have to do to get a drink around here?

Don't tell anybody. I'm gonna be writing. For just an hour. Swear.

We're done with the buying of the house now. It's taken since March for the bank that owned the foreclosure to finally let us have it. It's in Flint, it's an old house--built in 1927, as a duplex, it needs a new roof, plumbing. Painting. Cleaning. And of course furniture. That's not even considering that we need to figure out what to do with our current residence--a trailer which I would certainly sell to anybody for about 40 dollars (twenty for the title transfer) It's not worth much, but it's worth that. The rent is pretty cheap for the lot too, but I can't pay that and keep up with the new bills. So... but we're not thinking of that today. We have a month to get our crap out, and then...

I'm looking forward to having a place to put all my dishes. I'm looking forward to a sewing room and a room to write in that aren't either my couch or my kitchen table. And speaking of that, I'm also looking forward to having a kitchen table and a dining room table. And stairs. And a bathroom of my own..

More soon.
mart

Tomorrow General Motors declares bankrupcy. General Motors, that, when I was in high school employed all the working-aged men I knew, except teachers. GM benifits provided glasses, inhalers, fillings for my teeth my whole childhood. More acuratly, I suppose, my Dad provided, through them, it's not like he didn't work for those benifits, earned them by crawling under dyes with his tools in the middle of the night. My Dad was only a generation behind the oldtimers. Back in the days where a forman could order a dyemaker under a dye no matter what you could always tell the dymaker by the missing fingers. True story. I used to see it all the time when I worked at the Stop-n-Rob across from Fisher One. That plant's been down for years. That plant is where the union got it's start. My Dad's Dad sat down there.

They worked in the plants their whole lives, and indured all the bullshit about how unions were what was going to bring the company down. They ignored it when the newpapers published the hourly wage of a skilled trades worker as far more than they actually made. It was hot, and it was dangerous, and dirty, back in the old days, and it wasn't hard work. I barely knew my Dad when I was a kid, because he worked thirds, and I only knew that I shouldn't wake him up.

For the record, my Dad didn't build the cars. He worked on the machines that stamped the metal--hoods, fenders, doors. And for the record, the unions weren't what brought the company down. Say that, and it just means you don't understand how it was. That history is lost history now.

My Dad says the thing the brought GM down is this: No one loved the work anymore. My Dad, all the skilled trades guys he worked with loved the factory. They loved the cars. They cared about what they made, they felt a connection to it. Only now, when it's all he can remember, I'm hearing his stories, and I reolize, he loved making cars as much as I love to write. Too bad it took me so long to see we had so much in common.

I think people elsewhere believe we should have all seen it coming. We did, actually, see it. But preventing it, turns out, is harder than it sounds. It is like trying to stop wind with your hands.

It was the brass, Dad told me today. They didn't care if the product was crap because they don't want to make cars anymore. And so they've left us to die here.

It's more complicated than that, if you live someplace other than Flint Michigan. But I live in Flint. In Flint it's simple. GM will "reorganize." But not here. Here we're dying.

The anthology that contains End Of An Era, my story about the aftermath of the "Big One" that wipes out Hollywood, is available now. It's called Cinema Spec, edited by Karen Romanko. It's available from both Amazon and Barnes and Noble.com.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0981964303/ravenelectrick

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Cinema-Spec/Karen-A-Romanko/e/9780981964300/?itm=1

Those are the links, but of course, I don't know how to do the thing that makes them linky.

In other news, I'm back from Wiscon. In one sort of sore peice. It turns out that I can't sit in the back of a pt cruiser for three hours, on a boat for three hours, then the car again for an hour, then sleep in hotel beds and sit in folding chairs without having some damage. Huh. Sucks to be old. But despite that, I did manage to do all the things I was supposed to. Kept appointments, did my reading, and hung out at Ragstock--the store that the eighties forgot, for so long that the little clerk-boy started trying to help me pick out stuff for my Granddaughter. Ha. I got to eat at the Nepoli place too, and so I'm back to oatmeal today. The pannels were great, especially the one I went to on ghost stories. Maybe i finally have a ending to a short story I've been trying to figure out for years.... Oh, and I found a full length embroadered pink skirt. With lace. So while I might be a cripple, it was well worth it.

So, I'm on chapter five now. And they're all pretty short chapters, with lots of room to change things. I like how it's going, despite that fact that there are many more scenes taking place in kitchens than I had imagines.

Here's what I don't like that's happening. First, I'm on chapter five and I'm already to middle, or past the middle of the very end of what I know. Okay, I said that was exciting before, but that was when my butt wasn't so close to hanging off the edge of the world. Also, the characters are all pretty archetypal--to me. To somebody else maybe cliched. But I'll get over that. I work with the motto of Ed Wood at all times: "It's crap with a Star!" Also, why is it that when I've separated the main characters they still have things happen to them at the same time? Gah, that's annoying.

Maybe I don't like rough drafts anymore. Maybe I'm just bitching and putting off the inevitable. Who knows. I'm at the stumbling around in the dark phase, where I can feel the shapes of how things are, but can't quite make them come out on the paper. Ooo. My favorite. Just trying to breathe. Grr.

I have a friend that once tried to explain to me how we actually collect and store, and then acsses memories. She was trying to explain to me that there wasn't any way that I could have forgotten all of highschool.

But that's not true. I have no memories except second hand ones. Which is not to say that I don't have friends from back then. In fact my dearest friends, the ones that will always be with me, for the most part, are from that time. Without them, I'm pretty sure the years from Star Wars to Let's Dance would be a black hole. That's the reason I've never had any interest in going to the dreaded reunions. It would be a room full of strangers. How many of them would know me, when I had no idea who they were? I never had the nerve to face that. So this new age of togetherness is a little disconcerting for me. Now there are people waiting for me when I turn the computer on, that I'm pretty sure I should know. What should I know about them? What should I ask them? I usually never ask anything, because it sounds pretty stupid, besides, do I really want to know the stuff I've forgotten? I guess that's the actual question, right? I like connecting with other people, and I am happy to hear from people from my past. I guess I have to get the courage ask, right? And who ever really is the same person they were twenty years ago? I don't think I am, anyway. But then again, how would I really know?

Well, I think I've finally let go of Ziggy. I mean, maybe there's some more short stories there and all, but now I'm actually working on something different. Okay, not too different, but it was hard to let him go. Hard to stop doodling thunderbolts in the margins of my notebooks. Ziggy's done.

I am on the fourth chapter of the new thing, and it's not so bad now. I found myself describing the stuff in one of the character's bathrooms (anybody who knows me knows we tend to spend a lot of time in character's bathrooms), and it hit me, hey, this is a novel. I can describe stuff, there's room. In the first draft, the characters can have a few random thoughts, that maybe don't go anywhere yet, but might later. Or not. Rough draft. Room to think. I've been revising for so long I forgot what it was like. I always liked writing short stories over novels, because they're a smaller place to put stuff, but now, I don't know. Maybe Ziggy's ruined me for short. I'm beginning to like to have room to move. I still have all the normal freak-outs about the new thing--does it make any sense? Is it too harsh? Who in the world will ever want to read it? But that's not while I'm actually working on it. That part isn't so bad.

So, I still miss Ziggy. But I have stuff ahead of me now, and that's not so bad. I feel like I'm driving on a street that I haven't noticed before, so I'm a little lost, but willing to see if anything looks femilar..

Well, Ziggy finally got rejected, for the first time. That's okay. I exspected it. The editor was actually very encouraging, said that he really liked it, thought it was the wrong publisher for it. That was pretty nice, under the circumstances. Hell, that's the nicest rejection I've ever gotten. And the good news is that he would like to see something else. Wow, really? Nobody ever wants to see my stuff. So it's an adjustment.

So now I've left Ziggy behind, and that's so odd. Weird not to have he and Asia be the first things I think about in the morning, the last thing at night. Now I'm having to learn about a whole new group of people, and deal with the next book.

Okay, they're not exactly new, but I've found that you find out a lot more about a character when you have to write like 300 pages about them.

Which is to say, I'm at the place where I'm not sure where the thing is heading, or if it's heading anywhere. Makes me miss the stuff that's done.... Or I could just be putting off actually working on it.

Yeah, okay. I'm going.

I haven't posted in a long time. I keep trying to force myself to write something, but the truth is, I'm empty. I just don't have anything to say. I wish I did, I wish I could comment on what's happening all around me, but when I try it runs away from me. It's January. The world changed yesterday, and I watched it happen on TV, but I swear, it didn't look real. It hasn't set in. I've gone to bed everynight since the election expecting that I'll wake to some insane recount, and I'll think, oh, of course.

Maybe I still don't believe it. Maybe I've stopped believing in things I can't see. And all I can see from where I am is miles and miles of broken concrete and frozen shards of factories and neighborhoods. Really, I live in Max Headroom world now, and I'm not sure when it happened. It went from bad--and we're used to that here in the rust belt, to rubble within weeks. It doesn't look like the world I saw on TV yesterday, the one that changed. And I wonder if we'll get left behind.

Finally!
I'm so excited. This is the first story I ever finished that wasn't a Star Wars story, and I really like it. So after what seems like at least a hundred rejections, somebody wants it!! It does make me miss Brian, even though I just saw him. I wrote this story because of a story he told me about Flynn's grave. I still remember we were driving down Brand in Glendale, it was really sunny, but not hot. We were eating burritoes, and I was thinking, I wish I could see the Hollywood he sees. Then I reolized that he wished he could see that Hollywood too....

Dear Martha,

I'm happy to accept "End of an Era" for publication in Cinema Spec: Tales of Hollywood and Fantasy. Payment will be $30 (U.S.) paid on publication via PayPal, plus one contributor's copy of the trade paperback anthology.

Please fill out the questionnaire below, including the contract, and return it to me at the above e-mail address as soon as possible.

Thanks for submitting to Cinema Spec. I look forward to publishing your work.

The movie Velvet Goldmine begins with a voice over that explains that childhood is not what we, as adults remember.  We remember what we want to remember.  A couple of days ago my nephew got pulled out of the lunch room at school because a girl he didn't know saw some boys take food out of the trash, spit in in, and then give it to him.  Now, the girl went to the Principal, and at least the Principal pulled Kenny out and explained to him that he did nothing wrong.  He didnt' know who the boys were, he just thought they were being nice to him. Now, Kenny's autistic, as I'm sure I've explained before, and 14 years old.  So he doesn't have the social cues the rest of us have.  Can't read faical expressions, tone of voice.  He trust people because he can't imagine what it's like to be mean for no reason.  So, at fourteen, to deal with other kids his age, he's on anti-depressants.  At his old school he was told repetedly--and not just by kids--that he should kill himself.  I knew it would be harder to teach Kenny.  When he was little, it was hard to teach him to talk, walk, all the stuff that comes naturally to typical kids.  Kids, in fact like the ones that gave him spit-covered garbage in the lunch room.  Typical kids that have no idea what it's like to not be able to sleep because you might be able to hear movement in the house next door, not be able to get dressed in the morning because you can feel the clothes stabbing you with their texture.  These boys won't be punished.  Nobody will tell on them.  Kenny will be punished by having to go to the doctor and getting tested for random things that can be carried through spit.  Here's what I don't understand.  These boys--teenagers--they're not sociopaths, probably.  They probably love their parents, dogs, whatever.  They will grow up and have families, and jobs.  They'll probably have great lives.  Will they ever regret what I see as extreme meaness?  And why?  What could anybody have done to deserve that?  I mean, I understand that what they did wasn't a felony or anything, and there's plenty of worse bad out in the world, but still.  The whole thing makes me so sad I can't even explain it.  I think about this sort of thing everytime someone uses the word retard in converstion.  It hurts, because I think of Kenny, dealing with kids like that...  It that where they got the idea that this is okay?   I don't know.

Look!  A Dark's story finally in print.  http://usersites.horrorfind.com/home/horror/darkfire  It's up at Dark Fire.  Something nice in the midst of an otherwise horriable week.

 I've been thinking about this for a while.  And I don't really know how to talk about this without wining, so I geuss I'll just do that.  I mean, y'know, it's not like I'm not good at it.  

Today in California is the day to get married.  If you're gay.  And the radio has been full of people talking about how long they've wanted to get married.  One couple said they'd had 3 commitment cerimonies and one re-committement cerimony, three kids and one grandkid between them.  And today is the day they get really married.  

So, I've been thinking about it.  About women I would have married, if I'd  had the chance.  If it had ever entered my mind as a possiablity.  When I was a kid, my first "grown up" doll was dressed as a bride.  I was probably seven, maybe eight and she was a birthday present.  She had a white white dress of satin, with a train, a veil with silk flowers for a garland, and long red hair beneath.  I remember tracing the lace along her neckline with my finger, and my aunt saying, "Someday you'll have a dress just like that."

I thought, clearly, "No, I never will."  I didn't even know I liked girls yet--though I liked the doll's perfect little breasts.  I just knew I wasn't ever getting married.  Later, the summer between jr high and high school, I found out about the girls.  Or at least one girl.  She divided our time together between swimming at the pool down town, teaching me a bunch of stuff I hadn't thought of yet, and drawing pictures of her wedding dress.  She had the flowers planned out, the bride's maids.  I figured out, at some point that her plans didn't include me, whatever I was planning.  That sort of became a pattern for relationships to come.  I honestly don't know what happened to her, if she ever got her dress and flowers and bride's maids, because she didn't talk to me after we started high school.  

Marriage was the end result that so many girls I knew seemed to be looking for, and I knew I couldn't give it to them.  So at some point I stopped trying.   I stopped looking for anything more than a summer, I geuss.  Because I knew, somehow, even at seven, how the world worked.  Now it's all changing.  Slowly, but still, changing.  

I still have the doll.  Her dress in yellowed, and her veil is tattering. She sits in my bedroom with her dusty, faded silk flowers looking like Miss Havershim, waiting at her wedding feast. 

 Last Friday I had to go home from work after two hours--making it nine am, because I couldn't walk.  Again.  I spent the day sitting on the couch, watching Lord of Illusions and feeling sorry for myself.  It was hot--like 95, and I couldn't get the fan out because I could barely move.  I was freaked out about how much work I'm missing, how much time I was spending not writing--couldn't hold a pen, let alone the computer.  And whether or not I could get more phsycal therapy this year on my insurence.  Pretty sad.  I don't know what the cause of the flare up was, but it's Monday now, and I worked all day completely pain free.  That's for the first time in two years.  Again, I don't know why it went away, but I am so grateful, you have no idea.  I even sat on the floor, cross-legged--will I was zoning in the corner from hell.  Also something I haven't done since unpacking the store and blowing out my back--two years ago.  It was amazing.  So much easier to get through day.  I feel so much better that I bought tickets to see the B52's and Cindy Lauper this week at Pine Knob. I might even wear my big boots.  I'm definately dying my hair purple.  I really can't wait.  

Lord of Illusions?  Oh, yeah.  It holds up much better now that I understand the noir genre.  Still not as fond of it as Candyman, but it was a great way to pass a hot afternoon, and the blood was distracting.  Except I forgot all those scenes in the desert.  Aw well. 

Lookie this!  This review is better than the actual story! 

In “Phase,” Martha J. Allard weaves a memorable fantasy out of a legend that equates the moon with a beautiful woman. In this human form, she had been loved by another mythical creature, Cabriel, made out of flame and bark, and had borne him a child. In the narrative present, the woman has died and has entered another phase of existence, with the moon representing her corpse. Cabriel is trying to connect with his daughter, Ella, for the second time, having found her three years previously and driven her almost insane after revealing his true form. Allard manages to portray Cabriel’s loneliness and tentative love for his daughter with tenderness and honesty, even investing in him sympathy for a fellow outsider, a young, drunken derelict who had planned to rape Ella. Written in third person, the story switches focus easily from Cabriel to Ella and shows us her growing awareness of the truth about both Cabriel and her own true nature, as, for example, when she wakes to find a bloodstained ghost at the foot of her bed and thinks it a natural occurrence in an abandoned hotel. She even seems to empathize when the morning sunlight eats the ghost away. Odd though they are, such incidents are accepted and prepare Ella for her own transformation. The story, too, works to transform the mythical into a magical, contemporary urban fantasy.

I hate to say it, but it's true.  There was a time when Jackie was the most popular film star on the planet.  Not in the way Tom Cruise is popular, by being a face, no Jackie was different.  Face it, if Buster Keaton was a Jedi, he'd be Jackie Chan.  Gravity defying and fearless to the point of no sense, he was always amazing.  

That was all before he started making movies for Hollywood, and got the life sucked out of him.  

When Rush Hour came out, I went to see it, but it was horrifing.  I imagined I could see the resentment on his face, of having nothing to do in the movie but be the butt of stupid jokes, over and over.  He looked, I don't know, reined in, not able to do many of the stunts that he'd always done because they were too dangerous.  Instead of jumping off buildings and landing on a pile of cardboard, there were special effects.  

There would be no more fighting over hot coals, no hundred foot drops that resulted in a hole in the skull.  Not even any more running on a freshly broken foot.  There was only a sidekick part in a half-assed buddy film.  I was embarressed.  It was the last Jackie Chan movie I ever saw in the theater.

Now, tomorrow there's a new one coming out.  Forbidden Kingdom?  It's Jackie and Jet Li.  I have high hopes for this one, I do.  I'll even see it.  But I reolized something terriable last night while I was watching him in an interview.  Jackie's old.  He spent more time talking about how people don't apreciate how much harder it was to do what he did than drama.  

I can apreciate that, and I do, really.  But how sad that the biggest star on the planet is now thinking about how people will remember him, and finding his image wanting.  

I want this movie to be good, and I want Jackie to be a Jedi again. 

  I got two things in my mail box today.  One was a big package from a friend of my who--and I should have warned her off of this--wadded through the last 100 pages or so of Ziggy.  Wow.  I can't even bring myself ot read that mess at the moment, so I really apreicated that.  

The other thing was a copy of Not One of Us, with  my short story, Phase in it.  Wow, it's been a long time since I've had something published on paper.  It was really cool, opening the envelope and flipping pages.  Yay.  Come to think of it, the phsyical form of Ziggy was nice too.  Maybe I'm just showing my age, but paper is good.  

 

I nkow it's almost spring, because I'm sitting in the diner on Easter, and the parking lot's being pelted with snowflakes.  There are times when I wish I'd never come back to Michigan.  

Still, yesterday, I spent with Kenny, and his new second-hand laptop, setting up an email account so he could email his dad.  I think that's a good thing.  I laid down the rules for him, straight up.  He's thirteen,and now 6'1".  I told him he could email when I wasn't there, but no internet.  And I told him that if I ever caught him looking at porn I'd take that computer away from him myself.  

He was very good.  He said, okay, he wouldn't break the rules.  Then he said, "But just one thing, Auntie Mart.  What's porn?"  Wow.  So I got to explain that to my nephew.  And why I didn't want him looking at it.  It was easier than I thought it would be, because when I said it was mostly pictures of people who were naked, he said, "God, no.  I don't wanna see that!"  

But it's coming.  So I told him that when he changed his mind, he needed to come and talk to me, and we'd work it out.  In the meantime, no porn.  When he tells his mother what we talked about, she's going to have a heart attack.  I don't blame her for being scared.  Kenny's autism makes him more and more vulnerable the more he has to be out in the world alone.  In the last year he's been bullied at school, and even on the bus--MTA.  Pretty much everywhere, and it's because he just doesn't know how to read people.  Pair that with raging hormones. 

I hope the internet doesn't turn out to be just another place for people to bully him.   But I'm also afraid that there's nothing I can do to stop it.  I have been having those nightmares where everybody dies except Kenny, and he ends up in some group home somewhere.   

Well, it's been awhile. I've been out of work for almost two months now, and I guess I don't have much to say.  I've just begun to emerged from the pain-killer haze that I've been in.  Now I'm in physical therapy.  Hopefully that will work and I'll be able to get on with my life.  

I guess the only thing I've acomplished is finishing Ziggy and sending it out.  Now, I know it's coming back, there isn't any way that it'll sell, but I guess that's not entirely the point.  Not right.  But the weird thing is, I feel cheated, because I just always thought finishing it would be a much bigger deal--I mean in my life.  I mean, I've been writing the damn thing off and on for twenty years.  I thought it would be a weight lifting.  As it was, I barely noticed it was gone.  

As it is, I'm more anxious for spring than anything else.  God it's been a long winter.  I'm done with the cold, and the snow.....  Did the damn ground hog see his shadow, or what?