Fear, Vorpal Blades, and Scary Youtubes

The Sunday Rant, by Jeremy D Brooks

appx. xx words

This week has been plagued by self-doubt. I opened up the Mojave MS no fewer than a dozen times, and probably typed 500 words. My heroes are traipsing across the desert from scene 1 to scene 2, and they have some character development to do along the way, but it's re-a-a-ally dragging and I'm not enjoying writing this part. I keep getting the sick feeling that it's not a good story. But, as we've discussed ad infinitum: a successful author gives himself the freedom to suck at the first draft. I may pick up Seattle Pizza, my other full length attempt, and plug away at that. Contrary to what I've said, I'm beginning to think that bouncing between two big projects like this may work for me, maybe...putting each down for a month or so keeps me interested in them both, albeit one at a time.

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I did, however, break new ground: I started an outline for a new horror story, and it had a kind of rythm...so I built it out into a poem, did a couple of revisions, and sent it off to 42 Magazine. As I've mentioned, I don't know squat about poetry. Mostly, for me poetry sits in that weird space in the world along with Jackson Pollock and string theory: I kind of, sort of understand...but not really. Apparently, popular poetry doesn't rhyme and does weird stuff with the page layout. Mine didn't follow either of those non-rules, and probably reads like Jabberwocky and may be, therefore, unpublishable. But at least I can say I tried to publish a poem.

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I'm usually a few years behind on music trends. I found the Dresden Dolls just this year, and their two members have long since split off into solo acts; same with Elysian Fields. I downloaded some Jonathan Coulton last year after seeing some clips of him performing "re: your brains" at PAX 2007. Here's another one of his called Creepy Doll...if you're into horror and haven't listened to re: your brains and Creepy Doll, then, well...then you haven't listened to them, I guess. But you're missing the fun.

Also, a new clip from Amanda Palmer called Oasis. I like Amanda Palmer for the same reasons l like Dresden Dolls: creepy, brooding, fun, off-center, really kind of emotionally stripped-down music. Amanda is one of the victims of the latest tiff between Youtube and Warner Brothers, whereas the two companies couldn't reach a revenue sharing agreement, and Warner pulled any official  video clips with their music from Youtube, and Youtube is muting the audio tracks on any videos that WB didn't pull, but might give WB some publicity that Youtube doesn't approve of--say, a baby dancing while a Madonna song plays on the television in the background. Petty. Anyway, there are still a few of Amanda's clips that survived, and here is one she just released, and may be pulled soon. 

WARNING: This clip is guaranteed to be offensive to many people; it was banned by almost every media outlet in the UK. If you are likely to read a T-Shirt printed by T-Shirt Hell and get so mad that you fire off an indignant email to their CEO, you won't enjoy this clip. The point of the song is to sacrasticly look at sensitive topics, so if that ain't your bag, don't click. Otherwise...I think it's brilliant vanguard sarcasm at it's finest.