"The War On Christmas" Explained

New Furniture

I got my new bedroom furniture delivered yesterday.
I didn't have room/use for the chest in my bedroom, so I just had them put it in the guest bedroom for now.
I'm heading to Home Depot today to buy a washer and/or dryer.
I've decided to go with the simplest short-term solution, which is to buy a new washer and just put it where the old one is - if worst comes to worst, I'll throw some money at the delivery guys to get them to put in the extra effort to lift up the old washer and haul it out.
If there are any deals on dryers or washer/dryer sets I'll get a dryer as well.
There's nothing I can do to change the laundry set up that wouldn't involve someone coming in and doing some amount of electrical or plumbing work - even if I did a ventless dryer I'd still need to have the wiring done to bring a dryer inside the house.
Maybe at tax/bonus time I'll see about getting some work done to change it all, but for now, just getting a washing machine is the priority.
I had joked about just buying new clothes every week rather than getting a washing machine ("Hey Jon, I like that shirt." "Thanks, you want it? I'm just going to toss it after I wear it today."), and while it was a joke, I did actually buy a bunch of new clothes yesterday, but that was just because I needed some new stuff.

I Never Get Tired Of This

Q & A

I spent most of the day in a class yesterday, and, as is bound to happen, at various points the instructor and the assorted other presenters paused to ask, "Does anyone have any questions?"
Whenever I hear that, there are some default questions - mostly culled from movies, TV shows, and other pop culture ephemera - that immediately spring to mind, but which I can never bring myself to ask.
So, with that introduction out of the way...

Goofy/Inappropriate Questions That Jon Will Never Ask:

I've got a question; you're crazy.
Yeah, I have a question; how dare you?
What is the Matrix?
Who. Is. Darkman?
Is this real life?
(Channeling Annie Lennox) Tell me...whyyyyyyyyyy-y-yyyyyyy-yyyy-yyy?
O rly?
WHOSE RESPONSIBLE THIS
How old are bears?
How'd it get burned? How'ditgetburned? HOW'DITGETBURNED?
Yes, given that I've been cheated, and been mistreated, my question for you is "when will I be loved?"
As a follow up, as Ms. Franklin once asked, "who's zooming who?"
Who does your nails?

*Sigh*

Yesterday I did a pretty big load of laundry, as I hadn't done laundry since Thanksgiving.
After the machine stopped, I went down to transfer the clothes to the dryer and noticed an odd smell in the bathroom (where the washer is located), and that the clothes seemed considerably wetter than usual.
But, shrugging it off, I hauled the extremely heavy load outside to the shed attached to the back of the house where my dryer is located.
When I was buying the house, I found the laundry set up rather strange and inconvenient, but the house had enough other things going for it, so I decided I could live with it, not realizing just how much of a pain in the ass it was going to be, and since that time I've kept my unconscious mind working in the background to try to find a solution to my laundry quandary.
In any case, after finishing with the clothes I decided to wash some towels. While I was upstairs I heard a noise that made me say, "That can't be good," but it went away before I got around to investigating. After the washer had stopped I went to the bathroom to transfer the towels to the dryer and found that the bathroom was full of smoke and the smell of burning electrical components, and that water level inside the washer had not gone down at all.
A quick Googling showed that the two most likely causes for a washing machine not draining were a clogged hose or a problem with the drain pump motor.
It seemed unlikely that the a clogged hose would fill a room with smoke and the smell of a burned out motor.
*Sigh*
Further Googling showed that drain pump motors aren't terribly expensive, and I supposed that, after a comedy of errors, it might be possible to replace the motor with Scott's assistance, but I decided to rule that out immediately.
The idea of calling someone to repair it isn't especially appealing either, considering how much it would likely cost and the fact that the washer is probably at least as old as I am, so who knows how long it will be before the other components decide to give out.
So that leaves me with the option of buying a new washer, which, beyond the obvious issue of cost comes with some challenges.
For one thing, it seemed like the washer is too big to fit through the bathroom door, looking as though it was first put in place, and then the bathroom was constructed around it.
I did some measuring, and it seems that the washer will fit through the door, but it won't fit past the toilet, which would mean having to lift the thing a few feet into the air and actually carrying it out the door, or else removing the toilet and then reinstalling it after the new washer is put in place.
I'm not sure that I could find anyone willing to do either of those things without paying a lot of money.
(In the alternative, I suppose I could pick up a Sawzall and cut the thing up, which might be sort of therapeutic.)
One of the potential solutions to the inconvenient laundry set up I've considered for a while is knocking down the wall between the two back bedrooms and turning the whole works into a large master suite with a walk-in closet and a larger master bath, and turning the current - very small - master bath into a laundry room. Not only would I no longer have the inconvenience of having to haul clothes outside to dry, I wouldn't even have to haul them downstairs to wash them.
And while I'd be losing a bedroom, from what I've leanred about real estate from watching HGTV and talking to my Realtor, going from four bedrooms down to three has little to no impact on resale value, and adding a nice, modern master bath would actually provide a boost. The loss of the old master bath wouldn't matter much either, as the construction of the new master bath would mean no change in the current number of bathrooms in the house.
Also, having convenient laundry facilities has to count for something.
Barring that ambitious option, with the smaller, modern versions, there is enough room in the downstairs bathroom for a washer and a dryer, and while I'd still have to carry laundry up and down the stairs, that option still would be more convenient than the current set up.
The only problem there is that there's no way that I can see to actually vent the dryer from there, and beyond that, the bathroom isn't wired for a dryer.
I can afford to buy a new washer, but since I can't really afford to have the work done that would actually improve my set up - and there's still the issue of removing the old washer - I have a hard time bringing myself to do it.
And, while there's nothing wrong with the old (and I do mean old) dryer, if I'm going to buy a new washer, I might as well buy a new dryer at the same time.
But, again, I hate to spend that much money just to return to the status quo.
So I'm kind of at a loss as to what to do.
Should I get the old washer repaired? Try to find a way to remove the old washer and just buy a new one? Buy a washer and a dryer just so that I have matching appliances, even though they're located in completely separate areas? Bring in a contractor to give me an estimate on what it would cost - or determine if it's even possible - to put in a vent and outlet for a dryer in the bathroom? Get an estimate on my more ambitious renovation plan? Or, given that there's room for it, see what it would cost to have washer and dryer hook ups put in the back bedroom? Aftet all, it shares a wall with the guest bathroom - and, in the mostly-unused closet, the master bath - so it would be relatively easy (though not cheap) to make the necessary plumbing changes. At most I'd be losing a closet and a little bit of space in the bedroom, but it's just me here, and maybe down the road I could afford my more ambitious plan, or find some other solution.
Thoughts? Suggestions? Offers of donations to help me pay for it all?
As far as what else has been going on since last I posted, I've been trying - and failing - to do some drawing, and I've yet to get back to working on reviewing and editing my novel. Verizon gave me free HBO and Cinemax for three months, so a lot of my time has been spent watching movies (and softcore porn).
On the Saturday after Thanksgiving I went to the Room Store and bought some bedroom furniture, as I've gotten tired of keeping all of my clothes in the closet and not having a proper mirror. It was a pretty good deal, but I had to make some changes to it in order to make it work.
The deal was $900 for a bed, the dresser, and the mirror, and a free nightstand. Of course, I didn't need a bed, just the dresser, mirror, and nightstand. I thought about buying it anyway, and just moving my current bed into one of the other bedrooms, but then I'd have to buy a new mattress set in order to make it useful. The salesman told me that I could substitute another nightstand for the bed, or the matching chest. I opted for the chest, figuring that I could put that in the guest bedroom, and that having another dresser was more useful than having another bed.
Naturally there were no delivery windows open close to that date, so I won't be getting it until this Saturday.
Oh, and I never mentioned that I had Thanksgiving dinner at Jamie and Casey's house, along with Scott and Stacy and the kids, as well as some friends of theirs. Well, I did.
Anyway, that'll do it for now.
Seriously, I'm open to any reasonable suggestions for solving my washing machine problem.

A Self-Indulgent Walk Down Memory Lane

Now that I’ve posted the novel, I wanted to give a little background on its main character, Fontaine, as well as her world, and how she came about.
During my senior year in college I had been reading Heavy Metal magazine pretty regularly. For those of you who don’t know, Heavy Metal is a magazine that primarily publishes adult-oriented illustrated science fiction/fantasy stories, in addition to other types of stories. A lot of its content is culled from the underground comics scene and from European comics. At the same time, Penthouse magazine was coming out with its own line of adult comics (“Adult comics so good you’ll read them with both hands!”), featuring works by some of the leading talents in the comic mainstream who were taking advantage of the adult format to write and draw stories that the major comic companies wouldn’t touch.
(The quality of Penthouse Comics was hit or miss. Mostly miss.)
It’s no secret that I love comics, and that I’m kind of partial to porn, so it’s hardly surprising that it occurred to me that, as a hopeful creator, maybe I should jump on the bandwagon, as I figured it was a slightly-less competitive market than the mainstream comics or science fiction and fantasy markets, and that it would be as good a place as any to get my foot in the door.
After all, Neil Gaiman used to write for the UK version of Penthouse. Hell, Neil even wrote a Cherry story.
With that in mind, I came up with an idea for a character who would suit the tone and style of either Heavy Metal – which, while not actually being a “porn” comic featured a lot of sexual content – or the fledgling Penthouse Comics, which had content ranging from the serious to the silly, and I called her…Savage Scarlet.
(Yes, we’ll get to Fontaine)
Savage Scarlet was my idea for a sort of porn spoof of She-Hulk; she was a model who was granted superhuman strength – along with a superhuman physique (particularly in the boob department) – as the result of metabolic changes brought on through the overuse of assorted cosmetic products and procedures: breast implants, collagen and botox injections, liposuction, chemical peels, tanning beds, etc.



Artist's conception of the artist's conception of Savage Scarlet.

The idea was to engage in some mild satirical commentary on our image-obsessed society, and the depiction of women in comics (Image Comics was just coming to prominence at the time and was having a major impact on comics in general), and was intended to be rather light-hearted and more similar in tone to, say, Little Annie Fanny than something more hardcore, like Wendy Whitebread: Undercover Slut.
The only problem was that, beyond the basic idea for the character and some general ideas about what I wanted to do with her, I couldn’t really come up with any material for Savage Scarlet.
Still, I liked the idea of putting together some sort of adult-themed comic suitable for Heavy Metal.
Then one night I was watching TV and flipping back and forth between two low-budget science fiction movies. One was called Nemesis, and was about cyborgs living in some post-apocalyptic future, and the other was called Circuitry Man, which was set in another post-apocalyptic future.
What I found interesting about both of them was they were both rather sexually-charged, and they both prominently featured some ass-kicking women.
Circuitry Man in particular featured a woman who worked as a bodyguard, and there was one scene in which her sexual appetite got her into a spot of trouble. There was also a scene featuring a rival bodyguard, who, while riding in an elevator with her boss – also a woman – unzipped the fly of her male co-worker and reached in with her gloved hand.
Take those seemingly minor elements, the overall goal of creating something suitable for Heavy Metal, consider that at the time I was a walking idea factory, and throw in the fact that one of the comics I was reading at the time was Catwoman (with art by Jim Balent, who was actually pretty talented and had yet to go off to…err…follow his dream of producing a comic that “empowers women.”), and you had the seed of the idea that grew to become Fontaine.
These are the elements I was working with: women filling roles that were traditionally considered masculine roles (bodyguards, thieves, spies, crime bosses, adventurers), women who were as sexually active as any male filling those roles (James Bond, etc.) without being presented as or considered “sluts,” some sort of post-apocalyptic future, and gloves.
Yes, gloves. I originally envisioned a world in which essentially everything was a computer and special gloves served as the interface. Eventually I largely abandoned the notion.
Oh, and there was one other element I wanted to include: hot girl on girl action.
Lots of it.
Why? Well, if you have to ask the question, you’re never going to understand the answer.
So I gave some thought to how to explain the sexual dynamics of this world I was building, and thought, “What if men are in short supply?” That led me to come up with an explanation for the lack of men – a mysterious period in which birth rates dropped precipitously and in which the children that were born were overwhelmingly female, known as the “Generation Plague” – and how that might impact society. That led to a system of polygamy – one which was unlike polygamy as typically practiced – which led me to conclude that the complicated dynamics of this system would make family names problematic, which was resolved by assigning family numbers, which most people ignored for everything but official purposes, as the population of this new world was small enough that even relatively common first names were typically distinctive enough for most people’s purposes.
And that’s when the name “Fontaine” occurred to me.
As an aside, for me, the creative process seems to be a combination of following an initial idea to a logical conclusion and a kind of “revelation.” I usually don’t feel as though I’ve made up the details and histories of the worlds and people I create so much as I feel that these things are revealed to me.
(For the record, I don’t believe that there’s an external source for the ideas, but the manner in which I conceive of them simply feels like revelation.)
The oddest instance of this was the time I had a dream in which I was watching some movie on TV, and one of the stars – Pernell Roberts, of all people – actually stopped what he was doing, turned to look at me, and explicitly told me what to name a particular character whose name I’d been struggling to come up with.
As for all of the sex going on, the idea was that this was an extremely liberated society that had – partly out of necessity, partly out of a loss of the sense of the importance of history and tradition – abandoned a lot of the old ways of thinking and the mores of the past. However, there was also the idea of the more things change, the more things stay the same, and notions about gender constructs and roles and behaviors that shaped this new world. As women stepped up and started filling the roles that had previously been defined as male, there was an extent to which they started exhibiting the behaviors associated with those roles. It certainly wasn’t intended to be a treatise on gender politics, but there were some notions that I wanted to explore.
Further, some of the roles that women began to fill weren’t just the socially-acceptable roles of police officers, or politicians, or whatever, but also the roles that cater to the baser aspects of human nature. Thus you would have women becoming crime bosses, and pimps, and pushers, and thieves, and…well, you get the idea.
Anyway, once I had a name, I conceived of how she would look. Bearing in mind that this was well before the Matrix movies, I decided that in this sexually-charged world modesty would be a thing of the past – and the past was something most of the people in this world seldom thought about – and that in addition to a lot of exposed skin, what was (at that time) considered strictly fetish-wear would become the fashion. So I was picturing skintight latex.
I went to the old drawing board, grabbed a piece of paper and a pencil, and set to work, and for the first and only time in the history of ever, I actually hit the nail on the head the first time, drawing a picture of Fontaine that looked exactly as she looked in my head.
(That picture has been lost to the ages in the course of moving more than a half a dozen times.)
Having already decided to invert a lot of conventions, I decided to go a step further and make Fontaine something of an oddity in her sex-crazed world: she would have no particular sex drive of her own.
The notion suited her personality, and I thought it made for an interesting contrast. Fontaine was an exceptionally beautiful woman in a world filled with exceptionally beautiful women, and she would be the object of desire for virtually everyone she met, but wouldn’t feel any desire for them.
Toss in some aliens, and a sentient Internet – at the time, the World Wide Web was just beginning to achieve any sort of critical mass – and I had what I needed to write the script for my first Fontaine story. While darker and more action-oriented than Savage Scarlet, I wanted to keep the high sex content, and so the first story was kind of silly, focusing on Fontaine being hired to recover a group of teenage boys who’d been kidnapped and held as sex slaves by an especially libidinous woman.
So, with script in hand, I picked up some Bristol board, grabbed a pencil and a T-square, and set to work on laying out the panels for the first page.
Then it was on to drawing in the first panel on the page, a shot of the futuristic skyline of the New New York (this was before Futurama, too) with its massive towers reaching miles up into the sky.
And that’s when I discovered the problem.
For the life of me, I couldn’t draw that skyline. It just looked like crap. So I skipped it, and moved on to the next panel, in which I did a decent job of drawing a mostly-nude Fontaine getting dressed. But as for the details in the background? Yeah, not so much.
Most of my life I’d focused on drawing people, and I’d gotten pretty good at it. But things? Buildings, backgrounds, etc? I couldn’t do it.
I tried. I did everything I could to try to acquire and develop the skill, but it just wasn’t happening.
And so, like Savage Scarlet before her, Fontaine was eventually abandoned, along with my hopes of ever being an illustrator.
After some months, however, I decided that I liked Fontaine too much to let her rot in the dustbin of abandoned ideas, and decided that I would bring her over from the realm of illustrated storytelling and into straightforward prose.
I decided to make the sex a little less over-the-top, but it remained a major component.
Of course, as with all creative endeavors, I only worked on developing Fontaine in little bursts before deciding, “I suck, and shouldn’t bother,” and abandoning the whole thing before finally deciding, “Okay, maybe I don’t suck,” and starting the cycle again.
Around 1995 I wrote a short story which introduced a lot of elements of Fontaine’s history, showing some of the things that shaped her into the cold, amoral, adrenaline-addicted, irredeemable narcissist I love so well, and I submitted it for publication.
(I may still have that story on a CD somewhere, but for all intents and purposes, it, too, is lost to the ages.)
I didn’t do much with her again – other than drawing the occasional picture – until I was living in Tucson and wrote another short story, which, upon second and third reading, I decided wasn’t very good.
I then started on another short story, which started expanding and was threatening to become my first novel. Before I could finish it, I moved to Virginia, where I went a couple of weeks without my computer, and by the time I had my computer and could sit back down to write again I totally forgot where I was going with the story.
I looked through it while writing Blood Drift, and while I still liked a lot of what was there, I still didn’t know where I had been going with it, and since that time a lot more has been “revealed” to me, much of which contradicts what I’d written. Still, the basic core idea is interesting, and I may have to revisit it someday.
In the meantime, I’m still looking for more feedback on Blood Drift, and steeling myself for the inevitable wave of rejection slips that will follow if and when I submit the actual finished product for publication.
And that’s more than enough about that, I guess.
I’ll be back at some point with a shorter, more typical post.

Limited Time Only?

Hey, remember when I used to post entries here on a regular basis?
Yeah, I don’t either, but anyway, I’m back. Did you miss – ah, who am I kidding?
As noted in a previous entry – with swearing – and confirmed by the graphic on the right, I successfully met the challenge of writing 50,000 words in 30 days for National Novel Writing Month.
Writing that, of course, is what ate up most of my time for the better part of the month of November.
So now that I’ve finished that (sort of; more on that in a bit), I can get back to posting my usual canny, incisive, and endlessly fascinating observations.
Or, you know, the usual boring crap.
Before I do, however, I’ve decided that I’m going to share the fruits of my not-quite a month’s worth of labor here for everyone to read.
What you’re going to read (or, more likely, aren’t going to bother reading) is a very rough, unedited first draft. It’s probably rife with typos and continuity errors, and I’m sure that there are places in in where I restate – incorrectly – something that I stated earlier. Also, there’s not much in the way of formatting, so it might not be the most readable document from that perspective.
(And it might be unreadable in general.)
When I hit the 50,000 word mark, I found that while the story as envisioned wasn’t complete, I was actually at a pretty good stopping point, so, given that I was feeling kind of burned out, and also given my general laziness, I decided that, having met the terms of the NaNoWriMo challenge, I would stop where I was. After all, what remained of the story could probably be easily expanded into a second novel of roughly the same length.
While there are a lot of stories still to be told about Fontaine and her world, it was my thought that, with the cliffhangerish ending, this particular novel would be the good start to a series, with the next book picking up where this one leaves off.
Of course, the question of what I’m going to do with the thing naturally arises. Unlike previous NaNoWriMo efforts, I feel pretty good about this one and actually think that it has a chance – however slim – of actually getting published. If I want to try to get it published, is it suitable, as I think it is, to be the start of a series? And if it’s not, should I then bring it to its original intended ending, tacking on another 20,000 words or so before attempting to publish it?
So that’s where you come in. I want feedback on it. Does it feel too incomplete, even as something with an intended sequel? Does it work as is? Does it suck huge donkey balls, leading you to conclude, as Dr. Zoidberg might say, that my writing is bad and I should feel bad?
Give me honest feedback. Forget that you like me, and tell me what you actually think. Or, in the alternative, forget that you don’t like me and tell me what you actually think.
So that’s the purpose of posting this raw, unedited copy here. I want to find out first of all if it’s suitable as is – with editing, of course – or if it needs more. Then I want to know if it’s something worth setting myself up for rejection over.
So, that’s why I’m posting it here.
If/when I decide to try to get it published, I’ll probably pull it down. And if/when I get enough rejection slips to decide that it’s not worth trying any further, I may self-publish via the Web (in which case I expect all of you to buy at least one copy, and I don’t want to hear any “But I already read it when it was free” nonsense. The same holds true if I get it published, by the way.)
In any case, here it is:


Blood Drift

RE: Superman: Secret Origin #3

To: Dan DiDio, Geoff Johnns
Subject: RE: Superman Secret Origins #3

Dan/Geoff:

You know how Hallmark makes those greeting cards with the little chip in them that plays music when you open the cards? You should totally incorporate that technology into Superman: Secret Origin.
That way, whenever Lois appears, you can play these wacky, goofball sound effects that will finish the job of hitting the readers over the heads with how "zany" and "screwball" it all is.

xoxoxo

Jon

P.S. The scenes introducing Rudy Jones, showing him to be a mooch, or a leech or a parasite, if you will? Brilliant foreshadowing, and not at all over the top.