Tuesday, July 14, 2009
A Bottle of Port on MicroHorror.com
My flash fiction story, A Bottle of Port, has been accepted and published on MicroHorror.
Monday, July 13, 2009
Will Write for Chocolate
Let me come out and admit this transgression of mine upfront. I can’t really hide it much longer. I am not a webcomics kind of person. I know, I know, I’ll turn my nerd badge in at the nearest precinct station. Feel free to tell me what a jerk I am - most people I know have already done it once or twice before.
Webcomics seem to be one of the most polarizing concepts to have ever hit the Internet. I have friends who swear by and will waste unknown amounts of time defending this webcomic or that one, praising an artist for coming up with quirky new strips and lambasting the ones who aren’t funny or don’t produce at proper speeds. I’ve actually seen people I know get into real arguments over which strips they read and which ones they think are garbage, insulting friends with dissimilar tastes. It all seems rather strange to me.
I’ve read a few, and despite some being funny (Achewood, Sinfest, Penny Arcade, Perry Bible Fellowship and a few others) I’ve never really found myself hustling over to a website moments after waking to see if an update has been posted yet. On discussion forums I find myself not even checking out the threads dedicated to webcomics because I will always be undoubtedly the farthest behind in terms of being up to date.
I’m perennially behind on most things, be they books or movies, but for webcomics I sometimes feel like it’s for the best that I don’t try so hard. I can barely even remember characters’ names. That’s how bad I am with them.
One comic I do find myself going back to on a semiregular basis is Will Write for Chocolate, a weekly strip written and drawn by Debbi Ridpath Ohi that deals with the lives and careers of a motley group of various writers living under the same roof. You’ve got your nonfiction freelancer, your poet, your childrens’ book writer, each character bringing something different to the strip.
There’s a lot of chocolate, too, which is never a bad thing.
The reason why I like this comic despite my usual ambivalence to the form is rather obvious. Like stand up comedy, comic strips appeal strongest to audience members who can find something in the material to identify with. Will Write for Chocolate deals completely in the humor (and often agony) of writing, touching on topics like rejection, self-doubt, short attention spans, the distracting power of the Internet and the often confusing pain that comes along with starting a new project. It deals in something I already have a vested interest in, instead of trying to entice me with jokes I only half understand.
Ridpath Ohi also does magazine-style single panel comics unrelated to Will Write for Chocolate, which she posts on her sister site Inkygirl. One in the ever changing rotation deals with a hungry literary type trying to decide on a restaurant, weeding them out by recalling misspellings and grammatical errors on their menus. This is funny to me because I have done that several times myself.
I’m glad I’m not the only one.
Webcomics seem to be one of the most polarizing concepts to have ever hit the Internet. I have friends who swear by and will waste unknown amounts of time defending this webcomic or that one, praising an artist for coming up with quirky new strips and lambasting the ones who aren’t funny or don’t produce at proper speeds. I’ve actually seen people I know get into real arguments over which strips they read and which ones they think are garbage, insulting friends with dissimilar tastes. It all seems rather strange to me.
I’ve read a few, and despite some being funny (Achewood, Sinfest, Penny Arcade, Perry Bible Fellowship and a few others) I’ve never really found myself hustling over to a website moments after waking to see if an update has been posted yet. On discussion forums I find myself not even checking out the threads dedicated to webcomics because I will always be undoubtedly the farthest behind in terms of being up to date.
I’m perennially behind on most things, be they books or movies, but for webcomics I sometimes feel like it’s for the best that I don’t try so hard. I can barely even remember characters’ names. That’s how bad I am with them.
One comic I do find myself going back to on a semiregular basis is Will Write for Chocolate, a weekly strip written and drawn by Debbi Ridpath Ohi that deals with the lives and careers of a motley group of various writers living under the same roof. You’ve got your nonfiction freelancer, your poet, your childrens’ book writer, each character bringing something different to the strip.
There’s a lot of chocolate, too, which is never a bad thing.
The reason why I like this comic despite my usual ambivalence to the form is rather obvious. Like stand up comedy, comic strips appeal strongest to audience members who can find something in the material to identify with. Will Write for Chocolate deals completely in the humor (and often agony) of writing, touching on topics like rejection, self-doubt, short attention spans, the distracting power of the Internet and the often confusing pain that comes along with starting a new project. It deals in something I already have a vested interest in, instead of trying to entice me with jokes I only half understand.
Ridpath Ohi also does magazine-style single panel comics unrelated to Will Write for Chocolate, which she posts on her sister site Inkygirl. One in the ever changing rotation deals with a hungry literary type trying to decide on a restaurant, weeding them out by recalling misspellings and grammatical errors on their menus. This is funny to me because I have done that several times myself.
I’m glad I’m not the only one.
Friday, July 10, 2009
Dealing With Criticism
Most people who write, assuming they share their manuscripts with non-family members and/or people in a position of power over them (agents, editors, publishers, etc) have tasted rejection to one degree or another. Some neophytes handle it well, resending manuscripts that have been rejected to another publisher in the hopes of a better fit, or taking well-intended advice and working on yet another draft. It took me quite a while for the sting of rejection to fade into a simpler, gentler sense of overall disappointment, but it was worth it, as now I no longer have to wait for responses with my breath held, fear the dominant emotion when I pull the return envelope from my mailbox.
You win some, you lose some, and anything more than just the word “no” scribbled on a piece of notepaper as a response is going to teach you something. That’s how I see it.
Some of us don’t have the same perspective. Some of us take it personally and feel insulted or humiliated. Some of us fire back poorly thought-out rebuttals or slander those who’ve rejected us on social networking sites. These are all very bad reactions, but considering our newness and lack of critical success most recipients, if they even pay attention to our ramblings, are apt to simply roll their eyes at us and forget we even exist.
When it’s an established author, things are a bit different. The stakes are higher, reputations are tarnished and business ties can be broken. Bad press for a well-known author can be very, very bad.
When I read a less than stellar book review, as a reader, I tend to not pay too much attention to it. Either something in the review catches my eye and, despite the poor marks in some areas, I’ll pick the book up or I’ll find myself nodding in agreement, not interested in the novel at all. I rarely think of the authors involved. I’m sure it’s far from accurate, but my imagined response to a bad review for an author is about as dramatic as a middle fingered wave at the page before slam-dunking it into the garbage. Over and done with. They’re published authors. They’ve got agents, contracts, royalties. They don’t care about what the reviews say, right?
I have a feeling my initial impression of how the higher echelons deal with criticism was further off than I thought.
Alice Hoffman is a writer with thirty years of experience in publishing. She’s incredibly well known. You would think that she’d be the prime candidate for playing it cool in the face of criticism, right? Not really. Seems last month, after the Boston Globe’s reviewer Roberta Silman gave her a somewhat lackluster (though not entirely negative) review, Hoffman took her vengeance to Twitter.
Twenty-seven irate tweets in response to a review that was, in some places, complimentary. Silman even explains that one of Hoffman’s previous works is one of her favorite books, an accomplishment I’m sure is not easy considering the sheer amount reviewers/writers (Silman is a fiction writer as well) read in their lifetimes.
I’m starting to believe that anxiety is the great equalizer. We’ve all got it, from beginners to professionals, and we’ll never be able to shake it completely. How we deal with it is the most important thing. I follow, as closely as my short temper will allow, a two-fold strategy to criticism. First, never take it to heart or assume the person criticizing is making an intimate attack. Second, never respond with anything but a gracious thank you, and only in the case of manuscript critiques or peer review. Don’t succumb to the childish urge to retaliate. It’s a decent strategy, and I think I’ve done rather well with it. If I ever get to the big leagues I’ll have many opportunities to test my technique there, though I suspect it’s a rather universal idea, well suited to most situations.
What to do, then, if you’re an author and you’ve been given low marks by not one but multiple reviewers? What if you can’t bite your tongue or shrug it off? What then? What did mystery novelist Brad Meltzer do last year when ARCs of his latest, The Book of Lies, were heavily panned?
He didn’t write twenty-seven irate Tweets.
Despite the astounding amount of bad press, most of which he has collected for me right here, I still want to take a peek at his novel, just to see what kind of prose this author could have come up with.
And this, I think, is the whole point.
You win some, you lose some, and anything more than just the word “no” scribbled on a piece of notepaper as a response is going to teach you something. That’s how I see it.
Some of us don’t have the same perspective. Some of us take it personally and feel insulted or humiliated. Some of us fire back poorly thought-out rebuttals or slander those who’ve rejected us on social networking sites. These are all very bad reactions, but considering our newness and lack of critical success most recipients, if they even pay attention to our ramblings, are apt to simply roll their eyes at us and forget we even exist.
When it’s an established author, things are a bit different. The stakes are higher, reputations are tarnished and business ties can be broken. Bad press for a well-known author can be very, very bad.
When I read a less than stellar book review, as a reader, I tend to not pay too much attention to it. Either something in the review catches my eye and, despite the poor marks in some areas, I’ll pick the book up or I’ll find myself nodding in agreement, not interested in the novel at all. I rarely think of the authors involved. I’m sure it’s far from accurate, but my imagined response to a bad review for an author is about as dramatic as a middle fingered wave at the page before slam-dunking it into the garbage. Over and done with. They’re published authors. They’ve got agents, contracts, royalties. They don’t care about what the reviews say, right?
I have a feeling my initial impression of how the higher echelons deal with criticism was further off than I thought.
Alice Hoffman is a writer with thirty years of experience in publishing. She’s incredibly well known. You would think that she’d be the prime candidate for playing it cool in the face of criticism, right? Not really. Seems last month, after the Boston Globe’s reviewer Roberta Silman gave her a somewhat lackluster (though not entirely negative) review, Hoffman took her vengeance to Twitter.
Twenty-seven irate tweets in response to a review that was, in some places, complimentary. Silman even explains that one of Hoffman’s previous works is one of her favorite books, an accomplishment I’m sure is not easy considering the sheer amount reviewers/writers (Silman is a fiction writer as well) read in their lifetimes.
I’m starting to believe that anxiety is the great equalizer. We’ve all got it, from beginners to professionals, and we’ll never be able to shake it completely. How we deal with it is the most important thing. I follow, as closely as my short temper will allow, a two-fold strategy to criticism. First, never take it to heart or assume the person criticizing is making an intimate attack. Second, never respond with anything but a gracious thank you, and only in the case of manuscript critiques or peer review. Don’t succumb to the childish urge to retaliate. It’s a decent strategy, and I think I’ve done rather well with it. If I ever get to the big leagues I’ll have many opportunities to test my technique there, though I suspect it’s a rather universal idea, well suited to most situations.
What to do, then, if you’re an author and you’ve been given low marks by not one but multiple reviewers? What if you can’t bite your tongue or shrug it off? What then? What did mystery novelist Brad Meltzer do last year when ARCs of his latest, The Book of Lies, were heavily panned?
He didn’t write twenty-seven irate Tweets.
Despite the astounding amount of bad press, most of which he has collected for me right here, I still want to take a peek at his novel, just to see what kind of prose this author could have come up with.
And this, I think, is the whole point.
Monday, June 29, 2009
My Debt to Michael Jackson
Most children of the 80s have been reeling these past few days. I’m no exception.
The Gloved One was not only a modern-day mythological figure to us, he was a constant fixture in our lives. Before the allegations of child molestation, before Bubbles the Chimp, before the skin-bleaching and gobs of cosmetic surgery there was Michael Jackson, Legend and Childhood Hero.
For some of us, the Legend stopped at pop culture icon. My boyfriend, in particular, saw him as this. He dressed up as him one Halloween at least two decades ago, in the legendary black and white Billie Jean getup. I still haven’t seen the photographic evidence of this. I imagine it’s rather hilarious.
I remember Michael Jackson for these reasons and a few more. I owe him for more than just infectious songs, slick dance moves and bizarrely entertaining arcade games. He was a huge part of making me who I am today.
My habit of scaring myself silly goes back years and years. I suppose the origin of this came about in my fourth year, with the first album I ever owned. It was Thriller, and my parents bought it for me. I played it constantly on a little red portable record player I carried everywhere I went throughout the house. I played with the record player mostly in my bedroom, listening to books on mini album starring She-Ra, He-Man or Gremlins characters, but if I had to go downstairs for long periods of time I’d unplug it and cart it along with me. My little red record player predated the iPod nearly twenty years, but it served the same purpose and I loved it with all the ridiculous intensity that I reserve for my digital music today. It was, in a way, a lifeline that has changed form and tweaked function over the years but has never left me.
Thriller was my first glimpse of adult musical taste. I was a hyperactive child, very impressionable, and I had a habit that continues to this day of remembering things and refusing to let them leave the chambers of recent memory. I replay things I hear, over and over, tormenting myself with them until they take on a life of their own.
That album played in my brain long after I would lift the needle, and one song in particular gripped me so hard that I couldn’t get rid of it even when I wanted it to. It was a hip, catchy tune that to most people was simply a cute song with a cute video that played off of the then still somewhat new zombie motif. What it did to my poor, spongelike pre-kindergarten brain is something in itself out of a horror movie.
It grabbed me, invaded like a vengeful ghost and took residence inside my mind, refusing to leave or give me any peace. Even when I unplugged the player and went to bed, even when I left it downstairs and out of sight in an attempt to alleviate the terror, it played on in my head, filling me with nightmares that jolted me awake in the middle of the night, unable to get a grip on myself. I was just a child, new to nightmares and unsure how to handle being so afraid. I just let myself become even more scared by constantly thinking about what it was that frightened me. It’s a habit I continue even now, and over the years have become even somewhat proud of.
I have to say, now that I’ve thought about it, that Jackson was really just the matchmaker between fear and I. Fear came not in his voice, but in a voice that over the years I grew to adore, a voice that belonged to a man I would consider to be one of the greatest assets to horror as a genre we may ever see.
It wasn’t the melody to “Thriller” that scared me, nor was much in it the lyrics. It was there in Vincent Price’s ridiculously terrifying soliloquy, a so-called “rap” that featured references to rotting corpses, tombs, hellhounds and ghouls. It was capped by a laugh that, every single time I heard it, dropped my internal temperature several degrees.
My fear of this man’s voice grew to the point where I would come running, down the stairs or through several rooms if necessary, to lift the record player’s needle before the track could even come on. I would stand there with my hand hovering over it as “The Girl is Mine” finished playing, yanking the needle up and going back to whatever it was I’d been doing. I just couldn’t handle it any longer. It scared me too much, stayed with me too long, invaded my sleep.
Eventually, as I grew older, I began to crave that feeling of terror. I needed it. It motivated me somehow, and I sought it out. I found it for a while in DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince’s “Nightmare on My Street,” a song about and featuring Freddy Krueger, a horror movie legend that my parents diligently strove to keep me away from. It was frightening enough, and freaked me out so long as it was on B94’s top eight countdown, but once it was gone its memory didn’t haunt me the way “Thriller” did.
So I returned to the album of my early childhood and fell in love with it, and to this day I listen to its title track once in a while to remind myself of my early frights. Having long ago become enamored with the films of Vincent Price, the soliloquy no longer fills me with cold fear. Instead, it feels humorously comforting, like listening to your grandfather tell a ghost story in front of a fire at a family cookout. It feels warmly familiar, comfortable.
I don’t think I would have gone on to become a person who enjoys being scared, and through that desire a horror writer, without having been jolted by this song on a daily basis. I would have, I believe, gone on to become either someone who writes overly serious literary works or sappy garbage, if I wrote at all, and where is the fun in that?
And now both of the men who introduced me to such delicious fear are gone. While the world mourns Jackson’s passing, all I can think about is that goofy song and the lifelong influence it’s had on me and how grateful I am that it had such a profound impact.
Thank you, Michael Jackson, for the amazing album that was Thriller, and for all of the nightmares it bestowed on my preadolescent brain.
The Gloved One was not only a modern-day mythological figure to us, he was a constant fixture in our lives. Before the allegations of child molestation, before Bubbles the Chimp, before the skin-bleaching and gobs of cosmetic surgery there was Michael Jackson, Legend and Childhood Hero.
For some of us, the Legend stopped at pop culture icon. My boyfriend, in particular, saw him as this. He dressed up as him one Halloween at least two decades ago, in the legendary black and white Billie Jean getup. I still haven’t seen the photographic evidence of this. I imagine it’s rather hilarious.
I remember Michael Jackson for these reasons and a few more. I owe him for more than just infectious songs, slick dance moves and bizarrely entertaining arcade games. He was a huge part of making me who I am today.
My habit of scaring myself silly goes back years and years. I suppose the origin of this came about in my fourth year, with the first album I ever owned. It was Thriller, and my parents bought it for me. I played it constantly on a little red portable record player I carried everywhere I went throughout the house. I played with the record player mostly in my bedroom, listening to books on mini album starring She-Ra, He-Man or Gremlins characters, but if I had to go downstairs for long periods of time I’d unplug it and cart it along with me. My little red record player predated the iPod nearly twenty years, but it served the same purpose and I loved it with all the ridiculous intensity that I reserve for my digital music today. It was, in a way, a lifeline that has changed form and tweaked function over the years but has never left me.
Thriller was my first glimpse of adult musical taste. I was a hyperactive child, very impressionable, and I had a habit that continues to this day of remembering things and refusing to let them leave the chambers of recent memory. I replay things I hear, over and over, tormenting myself with them until they take on a life of their own.
That album played in my brain long after I would lift the needle, and one song in particular gripped me so hard that I couldn’t get rid of it even when I wanted it to. It was a hip, catchy tune that to most people was simply a cute song with a cute video that played off of the then still somewhat new zombie motif. What it did to my poor, spongelike pre-kindergarten brain is something in itself out of a horror movie.
It grabbed me, invaded like a vengeful ghost and took residence inside my mind, refusing to leave or give me any peace. Even when I unplugged the player and went to bed, even when I left it downstairs and out of sight in an attempt to alleviate the terror, it played on in my head, filling me with nightmares that jolted me awake in the middle of the night, unable to get a grip on myself. I was just a child, new to nightmares and unsure how to handle being so afraid. I just let myself become even more scared by constantly thinking about what it was that frightened me. It’s a habit I continue even now, and over the years have become even somewhat proud of.
I have to say, now that I’ve thought about it, that Jackson was really just the matchmaker between fear and I. Fear came not in his voice, but in a voice that over the years I grew to adore, a voice that belonged to a man I would consider to be one of the greatest assets to horror as a genre we may ever see.
It wasn’t the melody to “Thriller” that scared me, nor was much in it the lyrics. It was there in Vincent Price’s ridiculously terrifying soliloquy, a so-called “rap” that featured references to rotting corpses, tombs, hellhounds and ghouls. It was capped by a laugh that, every single time I heard it, dropped my internal temperature several degrees.
My fear of this man’s voice grew to the point where I would come running, down the stairs or through several rooms if necessary, to lift the record player’s needle before the track could even come on. I would stand there with my hand hovering over it as “The Girl is Mine” finished playing, yanking the needle up and going back to whatever it was I’d been doing. I just couldn’t handle it any longer. It scared me too much, stayed with me too long, invaded my sleep.
Eventually, as I grew older, I began to crave that feeling of terror. I needed it. It motivated me somehow, and I sought it out. I found it for a while in DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince’s “Nightmare on My Street,” a song about and featuring Freddy Krueger, a horror movie legend that my parents diligently strove to keep me away from. It was frightening enough, and freaked me out so long as it was on B94’s top eight countdown, but once it was gone its memory didn’t haunt me the way “Thriller” did.
So I returned to the album of my early childhood and fell in love with it, and to this day I listen to its title track once in a while to remind myself of my early frights. Having long ago become enamored with the films of Vincent Price, the soliloquy no longer fills me with cold fear. Instead, it feels humorously comforting, like listening to your grandfather tell a ghost story in front of a fire at a family cookout. It feels warmly familiar, comfortable.
I don’t think I would have gone on to become a person who enjoys being scared, and through that desire a horror writer, without having been jolted by this song on a daily basis. I would have, I believe, gone on to become either someone who writes overly serious literary works or sappy garbage, if I wrote at all, and where is the fun in that?
And now both of the men who introduced me to such delicious fear are gone. While the world mourns Jackson’s passing, all I can think about is that goofy song and the lifelong influence it’s had on me and how grateful I am that it had such a profound impact.
Thank you, Michael Jackson, for the amazing album that was Thriller, and for all of the nightmares it bestowed on my preadolescent brain.
Thursday, June 25, 2009
The Responses Come Rolling In...
I ended up with several beta readers for Teahouse, and one common theme throughout the novel (amongst several others that I’m not touching upon until revisions are underway) was that the story seemed to be a rip off of one or more rather well-known J-horror films. While it’s true that I wrote this as more of a nod to Kurosawa Kiyoshi and Shimizu Takashi, I think I may have overdone it.
In the end, the need for a Asian characters and locations isn’t as necessary as I once thought it was. In fact, now that I can look at the manuscript with a bit of critical distance, it feels to me like the teahouse was merely a set piece, and I’m not too pleased with that. I do feel that, even done with the best intentions, the story as it is written now is only going to come off as Japanophilic nonsense, and possibly even somewhat plagiaristic.
So, back to the drawing board. Where to go now?
Some of the characters will be easy to change or replace, either by renaming them and changing passages about their features or backgrounds, while some may have to go entirely. The story as it is now is rather elastic, and I think it will survive all of the cutting and rearranging, though I’m still not certain what direction I want to take it in just yet.
I think what this story actually needs is a bit of definite location. A bit of local flavor, perhaps. I don’t know just yet.
It’s a bit disappointing to find out that the story you started off with isn’t the badass piece of amazing literature it felt like in your head, but it was also somewhat expected.
In the end, the need for a Asian characters and locations isn’t as necessary as I once thought it was. In fact, now that I can look at the manuscript with a bit of critical distance, it feels to me like the teahouse was merely a set piece, and I’m not too pleased with that. I do feel that, even done with the best intentions, the story as it is written now is only going to come off as Japanophilic nonsense, and possibly even somewhat plagiaristic.
So, back to the drawing board. Where to go now?
Some of the characters will be easy to change or replace, either by renaming them and changing passages about their features or backgrounds, while some may have to go entirely. The story as it is now is rather elastic, and I think it will survive all of the cutting and rearranging, though I’m still not certain what direction I want to take it in just yet.
I think what this story actually needs is a bit of definite location. A bit of local flavor, perhaps. I don’t know just yet.
It’s a bit disappointing to find out that the story you started off with isn’t the badass piece of amazing literature it felt like in your head, but it was also somewhat expected.
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
The Odd Things We Need
I’ve always been an incense burner, or at least since my adolescent years. I fell in love with the stuff early on and it never let me go. During my teens, I had a rather large collection of it. There was incense for relaxing, incense burned for specific scents (coconut and other fruity concoctions) and incense I needed while I read or wrote.
Burning incense while writing was always a big deal for me. It helped set the mood, and I often found myself more able, or at least more eager, to cultivate new ideas while sitting inside a light, perfumed cloud.
There was one incense I loved more than the others, one I bought from a head shop in my hometown that sold handmade jewelry, tie-dyed clothes, Spiritual Sky oils and (according to the older kids who always seemed way cooler than I) pot. Once the head shop changed ownership and the merchandise was rotated, I could no longer find it there, and over the years I forgot the name of it. All I could remember was that it came in either a purple or dark blue box, in small quantities, and it smelled unlike anything else I had ever had. I burned it as much as I could while I had it, and once it was gone it seemed to be gone forever.
Every time I found a place that sold incense, I’d look for it, but the only thing that came in a blue box like that was Satya Sai Baba Nag Champa, a wonderfully-scented (and possibly the most well-known here in the States) stick that I enjoy to this day but isn’t, sadly, the incense of my teenaged memories.
I found it, recently, while browsing an online incense shop. There are photos for each listing, and I carefully scrolled through, trying to find a match to that old rectangular box of memory. And there it was.
It’s from Padmini, and it’s called Spiritual Guide.
I have a stick burning right now, and all the old memories are coming back. The trashy horror novels with half-naked vampires on the covers, my obsession with Dell Abyss titles, the notebooks I’d scribble obsessively in and carry around on my person as if escorting a precious artifact from one danger-filled location to another. I was such a dork, and it was such a wonderful (if strange and occasionally painful) time.
I’m going to be working my ash-dusted wooden burner overtime today, just to overload myself on nostalgia. Perhaps I’ll write 3500 words of bloodsucking narrative today in celebration, as well.
Burning incense while writing was always a big deal for me. It helped set the mood, and I often found myself more able, or at least more eager, to cultivate new ideas while sitting inside a light, perfumed cloud.
There was one incense I loved more than the others, one I bought from a head shop in my hometown that sold handmade jewelry, tie-dyed clothes, Spiritual Sky oils and (according to the older kids who always seemed way cooler than I) pot. Once the head shop changed ownership and the merchandise was rotated, I could no longer find it there, and over the years I forgot the name of it. All I could remember was that it came in either a purple or dark blue box, in small quantities, and it smelled unlike anything else I had ever had. I burned it as much as I could while I had it, and once it was gone it seemed to be gone forever.
Every time I found a place that sold incense, I’d look for it, but the only thing that came in a blue box like that was Satya Sai Baba Nag Champa, a wonderfully-scented (and possibly the most well-known here in the States) stick that I enjoy to this day but isn’t, sadly, the incense of my teenaged memories.
I found it, recently, while browsing an online incense shop. There are photos for each listing, and I carefully scrolled through, trying to find a match to that old rectangular box of memory. And there it was.
It’s from Padmini, and it’s called Spiritual Guide.
I have a stick burning right now, and all the old memories are coming back. The trashy horror novels with half-naked vampires on the covers, my obsession with Dell Abyss titles, the notebooks I’d scribble obsessively in and carry around on my person as if escorting a precious artifact from one danger-filled location to another. I was such a dork, and it was such a wonderful (if strange and occasionally painful) time.
I’m going to be working my ash-dusted wooden burner overtime today, just to overload myself on nostalgia. Perhaps I’ll write 3500 words of bloodsucking narrative today in celebration, as well.
Tuesday, June 2, 2009
I Wish I Hadn't Paid for Eighty-Eights and Heartbreak
"Sometimes people write novels and they just be so wordy and so self-absorbed. I am not a fan of books. I would never want a book's autograph." - Kanye West
I really don’t think he’s the right person to be speaking out against self-absorption. All the same, I’m glad now that I bought most of his albums used.
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