I command the banning of all kittens from this space!
So let it be written, so let it be done.
Finally.
Our long national nightmare is over…zzzzzzzzzzz
I second that zzzzzzz, and call the question. Zzzzzzzzz
JAWS theme
Monday Meows
Is that ‘nip?!
The best ‘nip, dudes, the best
I know what I want to nip!
Chill, man, take another shot of catnip and—
EXTREME KITTEN FLASHBACK!
Holy catballs, that’s not okay.
Bad trip, man, bad trip.
Entropy cannot be undone.
Entropy cannot be undone.
I don’t believe in a soul in the spiritual sense, but there is a part of us that is formed of our deepest held values and emotional core and soul is as good a word for that as any.
Fear corrodes the soul. Rage corrodes the soul. Hate corrodes the soul.
It’s possible to polish and patch something that has been corroded and make it look shiny and new, but the corrosion will always have been. You cannot unmake the past.
I am worried about what the Trump years are doing to the soul of the left, that collective sense of purpose and compassion and empathy that is made up by all the individual souls within it.
For decades the people at the top of the right have worked to foment fear and rage and hate in their followers. It’s the new bread and circuses and the stock in trade of Fox news and right wing radio.
I understand why they’ve done it. Fear and rage and hate are powerful motivators. They create a sense of common enemies if not common purpose. It works to keep them in power and to keep them together.
But it is the most corrosive of tools. It eats up those who would use it as surely as it eats up those who follow them. It destroys as it unites, fusing what once was a collective of bright souls into a dark and twisted mass.
The left at its best is fueled by hope, by sympathy and compassion and the desire for a brighter future for everyone no matter their origins or appearance or who they love.
As I have observed politics for more than forty years I have watched the best of the left ebb and flow. I have watched some of us lose our way and give in to despair, to fear, to rage, to hate.
Some of us have always walked that path, but collectively we have abjured the darkness and tried to call back those we have lost. We have striven to be our best selves even when it is terribly, terribly hard.
But this moment in history is different. Trump is an agent of corrosion. He destroys everything he touches. He has accelerated the corrosion on the right to a terrifying degree.
Trump has also corroded the left.
I have never seen so much fear and rage and hate on our side. I understand why that is. Our institutions are falling and failing us. Climate change looms like a colossal wave waiting to drag us all under.
I won’t lie, I feel the pull of that darkness myself. I understand the desire to succumb to the inner demons. I also, to my lasting shame, feel the temptation to feed it, to use it as a weapon that unites the left as the right is united.
I fear that we will let ourselves follow the path the right has taken. I see how we stand where the right stood a few decade back and why people like Newt Gingrich choose to harness the horses of darkness to pull the chariot of the right.
I hope that we will turn away from that path, that this coming election, which is inevitably going to come from a place of fear and rage and hate, is also one of hope, and the first step back towards our better selves.
But, even if it is, the corrosion has already eaten into our collective soul. It has left marks that may be polished out, but never erased.
Entropy cannot be undone.
Monday Meows
If I see one more kitten picture I’m going to barf!
Dudette! That which has been seen cannot be unseen!
Ha, I am indelible!
I am…oh, why even bother?
Sleep it off, man, sleep it off.
Monday Meows
I’m from the past and I’m here to warn you about the kitten!
I thought time travelers came from the future to issue warnings…
Please, just make it stop.
Chill, it’s long gone. This is just an echo of the past.
Monkey, you know I can make you regret all this kitten shit, right?
Monday Meows
I live up here until the kitten is gone.
Relax, it left weeks ago.
But I’m going to be making guest appearances for ages. …Heh.
No. I put my paw down on this one. …or, is it up?
It’s gone. Ima look at squirrels.
We need to have a commission to investigate how it got here.
I reiterate, I live up here now.
Coconut Cat RIP
We have reached the end of an era with the passing of Coconut, the last of the cats of Castle Gaiman. Back in 2010, when I first became friends with Neil, I absolutely fell in love with the menagerie that lived at his house and spent many hours walking borrowed dogs, petting the resident cats, or simply writing in corners with feline companionship. Portions of ten novels were written in the castle, and whenever I worked there Coconut always found me and curled up on or near me. He was an incredibly social and loving cat; I am going to miss him enormously. He was a frequent guest on Friday Cat Blogging and I ended up with a lot of pictures of him over the years. As is my tradition when I lose a pet friend, I’m going to share a portion of them as a farewell.
My last shot of him. Old and thin but still himself to the end
And, this was my first.
Sitting with me while I was writing last fall.
Cuddling with Laura back around 2012.
He was often waiting at the door when I showed up.
Writing in the tower.
And in the kitchen.
He could be a goof.
Or the picture of dignity.
He kept the magnificent Princess close company in her final days.
Here they are sometime in that first year I made friends with them.
He was a but dubious about this interloper.
But he really loved people.
With Laura last winter.
And me that fall.
Here he is helping me with another book in the library.
My most common view was of him waiting for me to put the laptop down.
I just love this.
A champion sleeper.
Even when balancing precariously.
This is not a trap. He liked belly rubs.
And sun.
So much sun.
If I didn’t pick him up fast enough he got quite demanding.
Verbally too.
This is usually how he said goodbye.
He liked drinking from the sink while Princess was alive.
But mostly he liked people.
Damn, but I am going to miss this little guy.
Such a charmer.
And so sweet.
I’m going to end with this shot because I find it haunting.
Winter of Discontent (New Book, Who Dis?)
New book, who dis?
My fantasy novel about Shakespearean Immortals is now live on Kindle and Nook. I’m still working out the kinks on this hybrid model, so other formats and venues to follow. An excerpt can be found here.
Ebook: | Kindle (Sponsored link)| Nook
Winter of Discontent:
Desmond was a soldier until a piece of shrapnel took away his life’s work. Now he only feels alive when he’s being someone else, so he’s majoring in theater while dreaming about losing himself forever. He’s about to discover the cost of dreams.
William Shakespeare is the greatest sorcerer who ever lived. People still believe in the characters he created 400 years ago. He has made them immortal. Literally. In Winter of Discontent, Shakespeare’s immortals live on in an eternal half life. Half themselves, half the creatures Shakespeare made of them. When the magic of theater meets the Magic of Theater in a production of Richard III a deadly chess game between the damned is the result.
Where there are players, there are also pawns. Matt and Riana are actors and friends of Desmond. They are also novices in the theatrical magic tradition that created Shakespeare where Desmond is not. Sworn to a secrecy that seals their lips, can they help Desmond stay alive and stay true to their oaths at the same time?
Some thoughts from the afterword:
This book has taken over twenty years to get from my brain to the page, or nearly fifty if you count its roots in my childhood love of Shakespeare. I literally can’t remember a time before the great plays were a part of my life of the mind. Sometime before I could speak my mother discovered that reading to me was one of the best ways to calm me down. She also discovered that it didn’t matter what she read. So, in addition to the typical children’s books, I got Shakespeare, Asimov, Tolkien, and various myths and legends in an endless loop that saw classic language and iambic pentameter layered into my bones along with the laws of robotics, the lore of middle earth, and the tales of half a dozen pantheons.
The love of literature and theater this created has dominated the course of my life. Though I am a novelist now, I started acting when I was ten or eleven, and performed steadily from then till shortly after I got my B.A. in theater, when I shifted to writing as my primary artistic outlet. Richard III was always a favorite, but as I grew older and learned more about the reality that underlies Shakespeare’s history plays, I found myself increasingly angry on Richard’s behalf and wishing I could do something to “write that wrong”—if you’ll allow me the pun. This isn’t the only time I’ve felt that way—in Cybermancy and MythOS, I addressed my anger with the plight of Persephone and the tragedy of Ragnarok—but the earliest versions of this book came first.
For readers who are familiar with my other work, this novel may seem something of a departure, though I strongly believe that if you like my other books you’ll also like this one. In voice it is less intimate, coming as it does in the third person, with three major point of view characters and half a dozen minor characters. As I was working on Winter of Discontent I read and reread Richard III as well as renewing my acquaintance with MacBeth, the Tempest, Romeo and Juliet, Coriolanus, a Midsummer Night’s Dream and bits of the various Henry plays. I also corresponded with the Richard III Society, visited and wandered the backstage areas of several theaters, and generally indulged myself in a depth of research and scholarship that my more commercial work doesn’t normally allow.
Winter of Discontent has seen four major drafts and countless minor tweaks over the twenty-one years it has existed on the page, mostly due to my substantial improvements as a writer over that same time and continual attempts to bring the words on the page up to the standards of my vision for the story. The initial draft was my fifth completed novel and came at a point when I had written perhaps three-quarters of a million words of fiction and published a few thousand. The current version benefits from coming at the end of more than four million words written and more than a million in print. It is a work of love and anger and scholarly self-indulgence, and it marries my training as an actor to my vocation as a novelist. I hope very much that you will enjoy it.
Monday Meows
Sleep battle, yo!
I’m down.
Dis cat sleeps better’n anyone!
She ain’t sleeping, she’s stoned.
I see what you did there.
On Writing Humor
Every morning I get up knowing that I’m going to be making between two and four humor posts, and that people need to laugh right now perhaps more than at any time previously in my life. I also know that it might be a reach day when I go beyond the baseline. I don’t always succeed, but I do always try.
One part of that is understanding that there are lines that you have to cross to make things funny and lines that shouldn’t be crossed if you don’t want to hurt people. My process for humor is largely built on top of poking at the English language and seeing what falls out.
That means following the loops and puns of language to places that can be pretty fucking dark. When I get there I always pause before posting and think about who this joke might harm. That means that something between ten and sixty percent of what I come up with on a given day gets thrown away. Humor is transgressive by nature, and that means that you have to explore where the speculation takes you, and you also have to pause and assess whether a given transgression is going to hurt people who are vulnerable and who have already been hurt too much.
I have come up with things that are hella funny that would probably make ninety percent of my audience laugh pretty hard at a moment when they really need a laugh, but which comes at a cost of hurting some portion of the ten percent who wouldn’t laugh in a way that is unacceptable for anyone who cares about paying attention to the vulnerable.
In humor, as in life, restraint is as important as pushing yourself to the limits.