Candy's Man

I just wanted to say...

Candy's Man is up at 3:AM. Magazine, that is. Ha ha.

Tomato Art 2

I am not an animal, he declared.

I am two tomatoes.

Tomato Art 1

Ugly is the new beautiful in this artfully rendered shot of two purple calabash alien tomato fetuses, male and shemale.

Yay Me Woohoo

As I predicted several months ago, July has arrived and with it two short fiction sales. Hoodyhoo!

First up - Eating Cooks and Magic Rings, to be published in Crow Toes Quarterly. This is a Middle Grade fantasy about a girl, her little brother, their sorcerous father, their duplicitous cook, and the surprising creature who flies through the kitchen window one day. Crow Toes Quarterly is a slick kids magazine with excellent production values and equally excellent tastes in fiction, if I do say so myself. This is my first sale in the Middle Grade market and hopefully bodes well for my future designs upon Young Adult fantasy.

Next - Candy's Man, to be published in 3:AM Magazine. Candy visits the man who murdered her husband and finds he isn't quite what she imagined him to be. 3:AM is another surprising find. High quality with tons of content and a hip style (much hipper than me), this is what an online magazine should be.

For the full list of my published and to-be-published fiction, you know what to do.

Peeple R Stoopid

Here is the amazing story of Charlie Brown and the German pilot who decided not to shoot him down.

I know, I know, if it had been Snoopy, the Red Baron would have blown him out of the sky. Feel free to make your own jokes.

That' s not why I'm posting this. I'm posting this because I received this story in an email. At the bottom of the email I found this inspirational observation:

THIS WAS BACK IN THE DAYS WHEN THERE WAS HONOR IN BEING A WARRIOR...THEY PROUDLY WORE UNIFORMS, AND THEY DIDN'T HIDE IN AMBUSH INSIDE A MOSQUE, OR BEHIND WOMEN AND CHILDREN, NOR DID THEY USE MENTALLY RETARDED WOMEN AS SUICIDE BOMBERS TO TARGET AND KILL INNOCENT CIVILIANS...HOW TIMES HAVE CHANGED.

No, all they did was wear their uniforms while murdering 6 million Jews. All they did was plunge the world into a war in which 50-70 million people died. Lest we forget...



Ah, those were the days.

Say Can I Have Some of Your Purple 'Maters?

Yes, I've been eating them for six or seven days now

Haven't got sick once.

Prob'ly keep us both alive.

Predictability in Stories

One thing in the life of a writer is predictable - rejection.

And one type of rejection is predictable - the "predictable story" rejection.

But I sometimes wonder what is a predictable story. Some stories are perfectly predictable. The Notebook is predictable. You know, as soon as he walks into the room with his demented wife, not only is she going to become lucent and remember their love, she is also going to very quickly forget and become a hostile stranger. That is the inevitable nature of the tragedy, but the fact that anyone with half a brain could predict what would happen did not in any way diminish its enormous popularity or the dramatic impact of the story.

Too often editors reject stories for being predictable, when that story could not be told without somebody guessing what would happen. It's just not possible to write a truly, universally surprising story. Did you guess that Odysseus would make it home and kill the suitors? So did I. My brother guessed, within ten minutes of the start of the movie, what would happen at the end of The Sixth Sense. Did you?

You also have to wonder when that predictability check box gets checked. Does it get checked on page one, or does it get checked on page thirteen of a sixteen page story? When is something predictable and when is it inevitable? It's a fine distinction.

My suspicion is that editors, especially editors of Big Important Magazines, use  predictable , along with  seeing a lot of (fill in the blank) type of stories recently and  just bought a story like this to give themselves an excuse not to publish a story. Because if they published every publishable story that came across their desk, there wouldn't be room in the magazine for the big names who bring in the subscriptions and retail sales.

Nobody predicted this would be easy.

Some Days the Conspiracy Theories Just Write Themselves

So now the plane that broke up in air actually bellyflopped on the water at a high speed. Only earlier today, an almost identical article stated that the plane struck the water vertically. I do wish they would get their lies straight.

The article states that the life jackets were not inflated, indicating the passengers were not prepared for a water landing. However, it takes several minutes, even at a rapid descent, for a plane to drop 38,000 feet - plenty of time for the passengers to prepare for a water landing, and plenty of time for the pilots to issue a distress call.

We are told neither of these things happened.

And do you recall the earlier reports about a flurry of signals indicating a cascade of mechanical and electrical problems leading to complete failure? If this happened as originally reported, how did the pilot manage to bring a plane with complete mechanical failure in for a water landing? If instead the flurry of signals indicated failures after the plane hit the water, why didn't the pilots make a distress call? Do you recall the report from a pilot of another plane in the area, of a bright white light falling for about six seconds?

Taken together, what they are reporting today makes no sense. Therefore, something is either being left out, or something is misrepresented.

But I will point out that there is another case of an aircraft making a rapid dive toward the water without issuing a distress signal. That aircraft was Egypt Air Flight 990.

Now let me crawl all the way out on that precarious limb of conjecture. There is a Hollywood depiction of a very similar incident. Completely unintentional, I'm sure, but revealing. It occurs in the movie "The Incredibles." Perhaps you've seen it. In the movie, Elastigirl, Mrs. Incredible, is flying a government Lear jet when her plane is attacked by surface-air missiles. (Now you know where I'm going with this, but please do follow along.) Pilots will tell you that her pilot jargon is quite accurate in this emergency situation, indicating that the writers had researched what pilots (probably military pilots) are taught to say when fired on by a friendly force, since civilian pilots should never have need of such information. Should.

We know what they are taught to say, but what are they taught to do? I'm sorry I don't have a source for this, as it comes from a documentary I saw many years ago. In this show, they were talking about what a pilot in Vietnam would do to try to evade a SAM. The best solution, it was discovered, was to... drumroll please... put the plane into a steep dive.

That's exactly what Elastigirl does. She puts the plane into a steep dive, so fast the kids don't even have time to put on their seatbelts (or inflate their lifejackets) and they end up weightless and flying all over the place (see Vomit Comet). She dives the plane toward the ocean while releasing countermeasures, then pulls up hard at the last second... bellyflopping the plane on the water at high speed. Then, incredibly, the plane keeps flying, more missiles come in and blow it up.

I'm not saying this is what happened to Air France or Egypt Air, only that what you see in The Incredibles is very similar to the reported flight paths of both these disasters. The only things missing are A. the distress calls and B. the missiles. In both cases (if the reporting is correct), the pilots initiated manuevers as though they believed they were under attack. In both cases, the pilots failed to issue a distress call. This omission of the distress call is what is called in the sleuthing business "the curious incident of the dog that failed to bark in the night."

Interestingly, the FAA and NTSB have never released the radar data for Egypt Air Flight 990.

Things to think about.

Have You Seen My Pussy?*

When will the celebrity slaughter end?

R.I.P. Mollie Sugden, aka. Mrs. Betty Slocombe on the long-running British comedy Are You Being Served. She is one celebrity whose passing I will truly mourn.

* If you aren't familiar with the show, Mrs. Slocombe is always worried about her cat, which she refers to as her pussy. In one of the funniest scenes in all of television, the staff is asked to remain in the store after closing. Mrs. Slocombe is, as always, concerned that her cat will be worried if she doesn't arrive home at her usual time. So she calls her neighbor on the telephone and asks him if he would, "Go around to my door, peep through the letter box, and tell me if you can see my pussy."

Pure comedy gold. And blue and purple and pink.

Party Time

Today is the 101st anniversary of the Tunguska Event. Scientists would have us believe a small comet or meteor detonated over the Siberian forest on this day in 1908, when the truth is a UFO exploded when its warp core went critical and generated a microscopic black hole. The resulting explosion created a rift in the space-time continuum, which allowed malignant entities from another dimension access into our world, and that's why everything has gone to hell in a handbasket ever since.

The Media Michaelpalooza

Since everybody else is paying tribute, I might as well chime in.

I loved Michael Jackson - when I was seven, and he was with the Jackson 5. But ultimately, I needed music with a bit more backbone and soul, so I moved on to Elton John and never looked back.

When Thriller came out, I lived too far out in BFE to get cable, but I saw it in the common room at the dorm one day and I remember being completely blown away, thinking, Jesus that was stupid. This is what the media and the world is creaming over? We're doomed.

Turns out I was right.

John Bonham, why did you have to die?