Final piece of the puzzle comes from the king of the Fragments of Shadow, Christopher Simmons who sometimes writes so elegantly it’ll make your heart spin in your chest. Need proof, just click.

So I went into this wanting to write something to continue the tradition of showing why we can’t have nice things every time he lets us blogsit. But I can’t do it. I don’t have the intestinal fortitude required to write something more vulgar than Chuck, and I’m just not a very funny person. So here we are.

And that’s precisely what I’m going to write about. Flinching. Here’s what I started:

The grease paint was the worst part. It got everywhere, in every nook and cranny. I’d scratch myself a few days after a shoot and my hand would come back with blue or white under the nails.

You’d think it would be more fun to be Horny the clown, but let me tell you, it was hell.

Making those movies took a lot out of me. Getting that red liquid latex off the tip of Lil’ Horndog was…

Now, see, that’s where I get stuck. Horny the clown grosses me out, and I flinch. I look away from the story. I don’t know if it’s a matter of self-confidence or self-discipline, but I fail.

Sometimes It’s OK to Look Away

Don’t get me wrong, sometimes you should look away. It’s important to stare intently, but sometimes, it’s too much. Or it’s not right. Seriously, does anyone even want to read a story about Horny the Clown? And am I really the person to unleash that fresh hell upon you? I doubt it. Chuck (Wendig or Palahniuk – is there something about the name “Chuck” that creates a certain mindset?) could make it awesome if he didn’t hate clowns so much.

If the idea isn’t right, or at any rate, isn’t right for you, by all means, drop the keyboard on the ground and step away. Hunt for some other, more appetizing prey or climb another mountain or whatever metaphor gets you through the day.

Commitment Issues

There are some things we maybe shouldn’t write about. This isn’t about censorship, but there are things, different for each of us, that are verboten. Some people can’t deal with horror that involves children. For some it’s rape, or depression. We all have our buttons. But if you choose to chase that dragon, follow through. Wishy-washy language, avoiding the dirty or uncomfortable parts of the story, that shit shines like a beacon to readers. Caitlín R. Kiernan wrote a very disturbing story about necrophiliacs called “San Andreas,” years ago. She told a panel at Dragon*Con that the story kept her up at night. She felt dirty writing about the characters involved. But she showed it all, every disturbing facet of what they did, and created a story that still squicks me out to this day.

She harnessed her own feelings of distaste and horror and channeled them, transmuted them into a form the reader could feel lurking behind the words. It can be therapeutic to delve into your issues and pin them, bleeding, on the page. And often, those stories are the most powerful. Would Gregory House be such a captivating character if Hugh Laurie didn’t have his own demons of depression to draw on? Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark? This is “write what you know” in the realest sense. Your passions, your fears, are the truest thing you can put on the page.

So don’t look away.

The penultimate blog entry comes from the Mighty Doyce Testerman, who’s a great writer and, let’s be honest, is too cool for school. His most excellent blog can be found by clicking right here.

Story time:

My home office has a closet with two big sliding doors. Those doors are
entirely mirrored, which may not be the kind of thing that HGTV approves of,
but screw ‘em; my office isn’t that big (“you are standing in a 10′x10′x10′
room — there is a goblin sitting in the corner at an old and battered
desk”) and the mirrors keep it from feeling too cramped. I like em.

But my daughter? My daughter loves them.

Even though she has exactly the same closet doors in her bedroom, my office
is where she comes when she wants to “do something in the mirror”; it’s her
stage. I don’t mind, because this increases the amount of time she’s in the
same room with me, and I don’t plan on having any regrets about how much
time I spent with my kids when I’m on my death bed.

I do kind of mind the stuff she brings along with her.

A couple weekends ago, she was… well, I didn’t know what she was
doing, but things were accumulating on the floor around her mirror stage.
Toys. Bits of dress-up clothing. Bits of regular clothing. Pieces of paper.
Drawing tools. More toys. Loose change.
Photos. Books.

Once I noticed this, I turned my attention to the action in progress.
Kaylee would come into the room with something new, position herself in
front of the mirror in an appropriate manner, and then use the thing
(whatever the thing was) that she’d brought into the room with her. And
people? She used the hell out of the thing. She’d put that thing
through its paces. She posed herself with it, talked to it, talked about it,
made funny faces that incorporated it, and generally manipulated it in every
logical or illogical way that she had at her disposal. (All while watching
herself in the mirror, of course; Narcissus is nothing compared a five-year
old.)

(Caption: She’s a little TOO good at faces like these.)

When she had utterly exhausted the Current Thing, she set it on the floor
and headed out of the room to find some New Thing to bring to the Mirror
Stage.

“Kaylee,” I said, once I had deduced the pattern of events.
“Big kids put their things away when they’re done playing with
them.”

She stopped in the doorway, her hand resting on the frame. Her head sagged
to her chest. She sighed a great and long-suffering sigh.

“Daddy,” she explained to her dear, senile parent. “I’m not playing
with them. I’m trying them out.”

Come back and talk to me about it a few days weeks later, and my
response is likely going to be something like “That? Yeah, it’s pretty cool.
It’s alright. It’s fine. Whatever. Hey, lemme tell you about this new
awesome thing.”

It’s kind of crazy, but it’s also a really great time to be inside my own
head — there’s a kind of frantic, creative energy blasting away accumulated
crud and reluctance and exhaustion and general negative crap like some kind
of jet-propelled brain drain-o. Brain-o.

It’s cleansing, is my point. Shut up.

Listen: I’m not advocating working on a hundred different things and never
producing anything. Fuck that; that’s just wrong — you do need to
finish most things most of the time, and yes: most of those wacky little
projects aren’t going to end up as any kind of finished product, but I don’t
think that’s always a bad thing. Those things, even if they don’t
end up all pretty and finished and tied up with a bow, aren’t gone.

Those little bits of dress up clothing and toys and drawing supplies are
still scattered around the Mirror Stage in Kaylee’s mind (and probably in my
office) — she may not play with the Thing the same way ever again, but its
use has been exhaustively explored, and that has given her a better
understanding of the Thing itself; grants her a level of familiarity and
mastery that means she can pick it up again, later, and integrate it into
something new. Something Better.

Maybe that reintegration never happens some of those passion projects of
mine. Also fine; I probably don’t want every little momentary
obsession to find its way back into a finished project, but even then I
don’t consider the unused bits to be some kind of waste.
Aside from anything else, that half-project reminds me how fucking
great it feels to be energized by what you’re working on –
gleeful, babbling, excited, and totally not giving a damn if you bore your
friends to death talking about it, because man it is so awesome.

It’s about feeling five years old again, standing on your own personal
Mirror Stage and playing with some Thing just because; because it
feels great when ‘what I’m doing’ is totally in tune with ‘what I want to be
doing’, and you don’t care if your dad can see you making faces at yourself.

I cling to that feeling — it’s a fire I can huddle around on the days when
the words are coming hard.

And maybe, on one of those hard days, I’ll find just the bit I need laying
in my pile of Old Things — something that wouldn’t even be if I
didn’t act like a five year old sometimes.

Now it’s time for a little game-related pulpit-pounding from gamer and game writer extraordinaire, Matt McFarland — his Livejournal can be found over here, and demands your eyeballs.

Game Balance is a Myth.

THERE I SAID IT.

OK, in fairness, I’ve been saying it for years, now. And when I say, I’m talking about a pretty narrow set of definitions and circumstances but fuckit: I SAID IT. It’s a myth.

Before we get any further into this, I’m talking about table-top roleplaying games. I’m not talking about the kind of “roleplaying game” that you play with a console, and I’m not talking about that one game that’s all massive and multi and made by “lizards” or something. I’m talking about good old fashioned, as-god-intended, sit-round-the-table-and-roll-dice-and-it-doesn’t-matter-what-color-or-how-you-talk-to-them-they’re-random-and-you’re-falling-for-recall-bias gaming.

Yeah. Growl when you say it.

Kidding aside (and because I can’t keep up this Wendig-esque level of being all cute and sarcastic — seriously, Chuckles, how do you do it? It’s the beard, yeah?), when I say “game balance is a myth,” I’m being both honest and deliberately baiting the listener. I’ve worked in RPG design for a number of years. Obviously you have to give some consideration to game balance. It’s just that a lot of companies do it wrong, and a lot of fans do it even wronger.

When most folks talk about “game balance,” they mean something I have a hard time describing without starting to froth and talk in the hyphenated sentences like up above there. They seem to mean, “Could two characters be placed in a total vacuum, like a white, featureless expanse, and have exactly the same chance of killing each other? ‘Cause otherwise, it’s unbalanced!”

Yeah, horseshit. Several things wrong with that mindset. First off, and perhaps most obviously, if we remove any details from the situation and assume a true “all else is equal” kind of scenario, we have completely removed any utility from the exercise. Shit, that sounded like something out of a White Wolf book circa 1993. Let me try again. Ahem.

When the fuck would your characters be fighting in a white, featureless expanse?

At that point, you’ve removed the GM from the scenario. There’s no setting anymore (must not make a D&D crack…damn!). There’s no backdrop. There’s no context. And in a roleplaying game, as opposed to a video game or a minis game, context is really important. I’m not (just) talking about fruity things like theme and story and motivation, I’m talking about giving me, as the player, to have a reason to look at this situation and say something other than, “So sodding what?”

If the situation in which we’re talking about “game balance” is entirely artificial within the game, then why, as a game designer, should I be taking it seriously?

Second, you’re talking about a fight. When I’m writing kewl powerz for RPGs (that’s the official spelling, according to my sources), I also up the ante a little when I’m writing a power where the only application is combat. I’ve come into conflicts with game developers in so doing, because I’ve seen a very prevalent attitude that if it’s fighty, it should be less effective for the money (put a different way, combat-related stuff is seen as somehow “more powerful,” and thus should be “toned down”).

I personally don’t buy that, because my experience has been that a comparatively small percentage of game-time is actually spent in combat. Now, obviously that depends on what you’re playing, who’s running the game, and so on. Some games reward near-constant fights, because it’s the only way to gain experience and “levels,” meaning that only by killing kobolds can my bard learn more songs (seriously, what the hell?). But for the most part, combat isn’t the main focus, and even when it is, how much player-vs-player really happens?

(Note: I’m reliably informed that in some LARP venues, player-vs-player is a common occurrence. Again, that ain’t what I’m talking about, and I don’t have the experience LARPing to comment on what may or may not go on with those degenerates.)

But back to the hypothetical white room. I have to assume that this attitude about game balance comes from our war gamer heritage, and in a war game, or a minis game, or a board game, or a card game, hell yeah you want the rules to be “balanced.” You want everyone to have the same inherent advantages provided by the game itself, and for only the skill of the player and the luck of the draw (or roll) to be potentially uneven.

That doesn’t work in an RPG, and I’m pretty sure you can see why — the goal isn’t to win. It’s not to beat the other guy. It’s to do something collaboratively. That’s why games that trade on storytelling over mechanics beat you over the head with the “Golden Rule.” It’s not (always) to cover up the shortcomings of the system, it’s to make the very simple point that the system is secondary to the story.

Actually, you know what people sound like to me when they complain that a given power is “unbalanced” with respect to another? My son is, as of this writing, two years old. If my daughter (five years old) has a dish of ice cream, he has to have that ice cream. It has to be the same flavor and, more importantly, the same amount. If she has tortilla chips, he has to have them. It doesn’t matter that he might get a different treat, one that he likes better. It doesn’t matter if he’s been snitching food from my plate and has actually had more than she has. What matters to him is that right now, on the immediate face of it, everything is balanced.

He’s two. He’s got an excuse. We, as adults, should be able to look beyond the immediate details and see the bigger picture. To wit: A friend of mine played a mage in my ongoing Changeling: The Lost game a while back. To listen to some folks, you’d think that would suck for everyone, because mages are “broken” or “unbalanced.” But everyone had a great time, because the Mage player kept in mind that her character was interacting with other characters, not the dots on their sheets, and that the point of the exercise was to experience the story, not one-up everyone.

I’ll cook it down for you: If everyone’s having a good time, the game is balanced.

Third up is Maggie Carroll, who should probably be made a saint because she’s married to Rick Carroll and hasn’t yet strangled him with a lamp cord. Even beyond her sainthood, though, she’s a good writer and a compelling thinker, so when you’re done here hop on over to her site, Morphematics.

So. This is a guest post. On the Wendig’s blog. Should I feel like I’ve become a finalist for the Wendig Bowl? Should I secretly hope there’ll be Jello wrestling? Naked Jello wrestling? Should I, in my heart of hearts, lust after Dan O’Shea’s back hair? Should I print off the post listing me as a “winner” and add it to the Voodoo Shrine o’ Chuck I’m brewing in my closet under the stairs?

Probably not.

… There’s something wrong with me.

But we don’t have time to open that bag of cats right now. There’ll be fur and hissing and claws. And no one wants that.

At least, not this early in the day.

Onward, upward, and all that jazz.

Yeah. I Read.

Most of what I’ve been reading lately is ebooks. They’re easy to obtain. They’re easy to store. They’re easy to carry: thousands of books can fit on my 8GB micro chip that slides neatly into my smartphone. (I won’t mention which one here, since Wendig bows to Our Apple Overlords, and I’m with One Of The Other Guys.) Suffice to say, they’re convenient, they’re ridiculously portable, and you can get them from the convenience of your favourite online store, directly downloaded to your computer and for far cheaper than a hard copy would run you at Chapters or Barnes & Noble.

But ebooks lack something: physicality. And while that’s their whole point, there’s something infinitely satisfying about holding a physical object in your hands. It’s ephemeral. It’s visceral. The smell of pulp and glue. The whisper of page sliding on page. The weight of it. The angles. The edges.

Not strictly needing electricity to read it.

And I missed all these things. So I did something I haven’t done in years: I went to my nearest public library and got me a brand spankin’ new card.

My first order of business was to rack up with the novels. I’m permitted 18 at a time, so you bet your motherfuckin’ ass I borrowed 18, and put myself on a waitlist for about a dozen highly-popular others. I read fast and retain about 85% of the info given. I devoured that first batch and kept going back for more. Jim Butcher, Christopher Moore, Robert McCammon, Val McDermid, Dennis Lehane. A visit to the library quickly became a biweekly thing.

Enter the Kid

Somewhere along the way, Rick convinced me to take Jason, my nearly 5-year-old son, with me. I thought, sure. Why the fuck not? I made sure to get him his own library card when I got mine, so let’s go take out some books for him! That first visit was awesome. We got seven or eight books he really enjoyed as bedtime stories, and got to play with the toys in the kids’ library. All around, well worth the trouble of convincing him the library monster wouldn’t eat him. (Not really, he doesn’t have much in the way of imagination due to his disorder.)

But somehow, me saying “I’m going to the library; they have some books in for me” turned into “Okay dear. I’ll tell Jason to get his shoes.”

Now, I don’t really mind so much, but occasionally, he’s a handful. And the parent of a highly-energetic, ASD child does not have an easy time coming up against the stonewall disapproval of a librarian.

SHHHHH!

Last week, I stood at the counter to check out my books – I only rotated six out of my everlasting stack, so it wouldn’t take that long – and Jason really wanted to go downstairs to the children’s library to play with the blocks and choose a couple of books. I told him to wait for Mommy, I’d just be a minute. He ran out to the stairs anyway. So I called for him to come back. He was about, oh, 15 feet away, so I didn’t have to raise my voice all that much.

I still got a scowling librarian telling me to run after him instead of making noises with my mouth.

“We’ll hold your books here at the counter while you run after your son.”

I ignored her, called once more, and sure enough Jason came back. Grumbly, to be sure, but back he came. And I continued ignoring the frown of disapproval said librarian gave me.

Because, you see, there are two ways the scenario could have played out.

Scenario A: I do as she suggested, and chase after him. He immediately thinks it’s a game, like he does every time I’m forced to chase him, and starts running down the stairs while he laughs his ass off. I get frustrated because he’s a slippery little bugger, and far quicker than I am. I finally catch him at an estimated 2 or 3 minutes later. He’s in trouble for disobeying. I’m pissed off that I had to chase him for so long. He doesn’t get to go to the children’s library, because we don’t reward bad behaviour, and he doesn’t get his ice cream treat when he gets home.

Scenario B: I continue training him to respond to verbal commands, make him choose to come back instead of inadvertently turning it into the chasing game from hell’s seventh layer. I get my books. Jason gets his visit to the children’s library. And when we get home, he gets his ice cream.

Everyone’s happy.

Except, apparently, the librarian.

“But Mrs. Carroll, this is a library.”

So?

I hold books in esteem, but going to where they’re housed in mass quantity does not mean I view it as a sacred space. Unless I’m badly mistaken, no druid laid the cornerstones on the eve of Midsummer when all the stars were in the correct alignment in the heavens. No priest blessed and consecrated the steps leading up to the non-fiction section, and no technoshaman sent a benevolent organizational daemon into the online catalogue.

Books are not some distant god to worship. They’re friends. They’re occasionally enemies. They’re informative and entertaining and evocative and innovative. Or boring and confusing and disturbing. Hold them in esteem. Be fond of them.

Don’t fucking worship them.

And don’t worship libraries either.

Stepping into a library should invoke a sense of excitement, for all the worlds you’re about to visit. You shouldn’t live in fear of a scowly-faced crone with frizzy hair coming down on you with all the righteous wrath of the wronged (say that three times fast), finger to lips and a SHUSH ready to fire.

This is a library.

And I say again, so?

I wasn’t being obnoxious. I wasn’t yelling at the top of my lungs. I wasn’t even disturbing anyone else, because it had just opened and no one else was there. I called out to my son, to make sure he stayed where he needed to stay, in my line of sight.

And I got shushed.

Frowned at.

Chastised.

People wonder why no one goes to libraries as often as they used to. Well, this is it right here. Or part of it, anyway.

Libraries are too quiet. Too mysterious. Too sanctified and exalted in our heads. Can’t have the iPod up too loud – past like, 3 – because it’s dead quiet in the place and we don’t want to bother the person browsing the books three aisles down with the rap and the hip hop. Can’t go with a friend, because conversations above a whisper are too loud. Can’t bring your kids, because they stomp and laugh and need to be reminded to stay in one place.

I’m exaggerating, of course.

Or am I?

Libraries are not sacred spaces. They’re not houses of the hallowed. And they’re certainly not places of worship.

They’re places of knowledge and education and entertainment. Places where discourse and discussion and socialization could and should occur. Places to hold in high esteem, perhaps. And most definitely places to enjoy and have fun.

They’re not churches.

Can we stop treating them like they are already?

Next up is one of the queens of transmedia, an empress of the ARG: Andrea Phillips, whose awesome blog — Deus Ex Machinatio — is worth your clicky-clicky.

Pssst. Over here, kid. Yeah, you. You looking for the Wendigator? Too bad for you, he’s off getting his “personal effects attended to” or some shit like that. But lucky for you, he gave me the keys to the kingdom.

So I’m here to bring you into the 21st century, where we have robots that vacuum your house and little machines that can pop out a fresh loaf of bread on demand and magical fabrics that never wrinkle–

–what do you mean we had all of that stuff in the 20th century? Shut up. No, you shut up.

Ahem. Moving on. Mr. Wendignation over here talks a lot about paper publishing. Booooorrrrring. I’m here to tell you that if you’re writing dead text in the year 2010, you are missing out, amigo. Allow me to introduce you to the rich buffet of carnal delights known only to we writers who work in transmedia.

First up, you may be asking: Yo, WTF is transmedia? I’ve answered that question at tiresome length before, but for our purposes, let’s say it’s telling a story to an audience by embedding it in the communications channels they’re already using. It’s a pretty crap-ass wonky definition, but it gives us something to go from. Stop looking at me like that.

It’s like this: If you’re writing for transmedia, you’re using Twitter as a vehicle for narrative. Or YouTube videos, or blog posts, or Facebook, or the real world, or even — when you get really good at it — all of those things at the same time

Transmedia writers have all the fun. All of it.

You know what’s never, ever happened to me as a transmedia writer? Rejection! Nope, I’ve never, ever received a transmedia rejection letter. That’s because there is no gatekeeper for the internet. You wanna tell a story on Twitter, set yourself up an account and let that bad boy rip. Write up a script, grab a video camera, and get that fucker shot and up on YouTube your own self.

It’s the Wild, Wild West out there, complete with the steampunk mecharachnids. Anything goes! The only thing keeping you from crazy, even unprecedented kinds of innovation and experimentation is how much time and effort you’re willing to sink into your hobby and/or career.

Sure, you might not get an audience of thousands for your work, especially not right away. But there’s no guarantee your pwecious wee widdle novel is ever going to see the glowing faces and eager hands of a paying reader, either. Not to be harsh, but… the odds are not exactly stacked in favor of that in the first place, sweet cheeks.

As for non-paying readers, well… Raise your hand if you’ve spent a year or two (or five) on a novel, and then sent it around to your super-enthusiastic friends and family members, and afterward it was Never Spoken Of Again, like you’d demonstrated your infection with some kind of skin disease and nobody wanted to make you feel bad. It’s sure as hell happened to me.

…Oh, is it just me, then?

Look, if you’re working in transmedia, you’re generally working in shorter bites, so you don’t have the same sense of laboring long months in isolation with nobody but you to love your work. You can spend a quick day, or even a week, working on a piece of story, and then you can plop it out in the big wild internet and see what happens.

There’s no guesswork. You set up some Google alerts, you watch forums and chat rooms and Tweets, and you see exactly what the audience’s first reaction is. If the reception isn’t great, then you know right away. You can adjust the future flow of the story to have less of that and more of this instead. You can get better faster.

When the reception is great, on the other hand… It’s… unimaginable. It’s like a choir of angels caressing you with their feathers in a soft, fluffy cloud while little kittens with wings bring you delicious sweetmeats and rainbow-tailed meteors streak by overhead. And plus you are simultaneously high on ecstasy and also cocaine.

OMG, you guys, this one time I murdered a character and our audience was so heartbroken over it that they folded hundreds of origami cranes and delivered them to our office. There was this one time they said they were so scared they couldn’t sleep. When they said they cried for hours. When they laughed so hard their boss came to see what they were doing.

When’s the last time you got such a powerful reaction from your audience?

It’s possible you actually did, but the nature of flat fiction isn’t to share the experience, which means you, the auteur, can’t eavesdrop and see whether you had your mojo on that day. Transmedia is built to be talked about. When you’re in the groove, you hear about it. Sweet, sweet instant feedback, the writer’s ultimate drug.

Now, I’m not saying that you should all abandon ship and leave the Wendigorium a sad, empty shell of a blog. Dude’s got some great things to say about words and characters and all of that technical jazz. But if you’re tired of slaving away on something that might never see a reader to love it, if you think maybe, just maybe, you’d like to try your hands at this whole transmedia thing…

Try it, kid. You’ll like it.

Okay. First guest post of the day comes from Doctor Dan O’Shea, Esquire, who is going to take the opportunity to dunk my hand in a cup of warm water while I sleep. Metaphorically. I mean, not literally, I hope. Now I’m worried I’ll wake up at night and find him there, leering over me, an incubus on my chest. Anyway, listen to him preach to you of the Second Way. Dan’s website is right over yonder: Going Ballistic.

Let’s start with the mind maps, shall we?  I’m not even sure what they are.  I mean OK, El Chuckbo left me the keys for the day, so of course I took a look down in the basement, and there were some strange colander-looking things over in the corner near the empty cages, head-shaped doohickeys with the EEG leads sticking out and wires and shit all tied into USB plugs, so maybe that’s got something to do with it, but the floor was littered with used condoms and slick with KY Jelly, and the walls were covered with weird Cabalistic scrawlings, so who the hell knows?

But you’ve been listening to the sermons for years.  Sermons may be too gentle.  The rantings. The Hitler-at-the-Reichstag, podium-thumping indoctrinations.  Mis en place and all that shit.  The thou shalt not write until you’ve got your outlines and your synopses and your mind maps all lined up spiel, the whole Magisterium of the Wendigo dogma.  And it’s worked for some of you, I’m sure.  We got little Wendigist Brown Shirts spread out over the entire internet on their there-is-no-god-but-the-outline-and-El Chuckbo-is-its-prophet Jihad, and they are cranking out copy and filling up agents inboxes and posting their reverberating vee-vill-have-order-und-zee-literary-trains-vill-run-on-time screeds on their blogs.  And good on ‘em.  Live and let live, says I. If it works for you, have at it.  But I’m not talking to you.

No, I’m talking to the rest of you. Hiding in your attics, tapping out copy on your used Smith-Coronas, afraid to plug the laptop into the network lest El Chuckbo’s storm troopers drag you off to the camps for some “re-education.”  Come closer, children.  Gather round.  Relax.  Grab a juice box and hunker down on the floor. It’s OK.  The Chuckster’s not home.  Let me whisper a word in your ear.  Chaos.  Sweet, sweet chaos.

You see, there is a Second Way, and that way is anarchy.  Stand up, boys and girls.  Strip off that overcoat of outlining.  Drop the baggy pants of synopsis to the floor.  Tear away your to-do list shirt.  Peel off those mind map panties.  Now dive in to your story naked.  Feels good, doesn’t it?  The unplanned words against your skin? The dimensionless freedom?  Up, down, forward, back – you can go wherever you want, explore whatever springs to mind.  And there will be false starts, and there will be dead ends, and you will skip happily down garden paths only to find yourself entangled in confused brambles.  But you will find your voice at the end of it, your characters, your story.  And for some of us, it is the only way.

I’ve tried, children.  The outlines, the planning, all of it.  I mean a novel?  It seems like you have to, doesn’t it?  How can such a huge wilderness be conquered without a map?  But where others have found the story to be a marvelous beast that they can bridle and saddle with their planning tools and bend to their will, for me it is a marvelous creature that can live only in the wild.  For me, it dies in captivity, or just lies in the corner of its cage, a dispirited gelding staring sullenly at the gawkers beyond the bars, barely a glimmer of the animal light left fading in its eyes.  It can’t be broken; it can only be followed in the wild.  I have to live with it, in its element.  I have to learn its secrets in its world.  I’m not saying it’s the only way.  I’m just saying it’s the only way for me.

And it may be the only way for you.  Or maybe you need the outlines and synopses and mind maps.  Or maybe you need a little of one and a bit of the other.  Or maybe you have a Third Way. Or a Fourth.

I’m just saying it’s OK.  Whatever gets your story on the page, that is the One Way for you.

One last word, children.  Right now, you’re all warm and fuzzy.  You’re thinking, hey, this is the preacher I’ve been looking for.  Mr. Permissiveness.  Mr. Go Forth and Do Whatever The Hell You Want.  Now I’m gonna harsh your mellow.  Because there is one point on which Father Wendig and I are in complete agreement.  Complete agreement because it is inexorable, inescapable and singular truth.  You’ve got to write.  Every damn day, or near to it.  Because that’s what writers do.  Talk about it if you want, blog about it if you must, but unless you’re actually DOING it, unless you’re actually forcing yourself to crank out some copy, then you aren’t really a writer.  You’re a dilettante, a poser, a fraud, a fake.  Word count is the One True God.  Because without word count, however it is achieved, there are no scenes, no chapters, no novel, no story.  Sorry, children.  However you slice it, it’s still work.  Approach it the way you want and with the tools that suit your hands, but if you aren’t breaking a sweat, if you’re back doesn’t ache, if there aren’t days when you look at the three furrows you’ve managed to scratch into the unforgiving soil of a back forty that seems to stretch to infinity, then you’re doing it wrong.

No go and sin no more.

Today’s post is by Guy LeCharles Gonzalez.

First, a sincere thank you to Chuck for letting me play on his blog in his absence. I’ve never met him in person so I’m still not convinced he’s human, but if he does turn out to be a robot in disguise, I will happily bow to our new robot overlords and declare, “Well played, Google. Well played.”

Second, my definition of a blog: It’s the Internet, Stupid!

Third, I’m a firm believer in “When in Rome…”, and having a chance to let loose in #TerribleMinds mode is fucking awesome!

Preliminaries out of the way, here’s my two cents on the future of the blog.

GET A CLUE!

I’m a big fan of The Cluetrain Manifesto, a book published back in 2000, that was born online as a digital manifesto in 1999.

(Yes, 1999; back when the Internet was AOL, newspapers still existed, and the eBook celebrated its first anniversary. Oh, what, you thought eBooks were new? Can I interest you in a nice bridge to go with your ignorance?)

If you haven’t read it yet, do so.

Seriously, go ahead and click. The whole book is online for free, and unless you’re reading Chuck’s manuscript (assuming he’s not just lying robot scum sent here to demoralize human writers with his ridiculous ability to blog every. fucking. day.), it’s probably better than whatever you’re reading now.

(Yes, that includes this post. STFU.)

It’s the only book about the Internet that’s worth reading, because most of the other ones that have been published ever since are crap rehashes of what Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger had to say way back then.

Back then, in 1999, before blogs really existed and AOL ruled the Internet.

Today, blogs are everywhere. Like assholes and trolls, they’re everywhere and everyone has one. (Or is that vice versa?)

The Huffington Post is a blog.

The Atlantic is a blog.

The NY Times has a bunch of blogs.

CNN wants to be a blog.

Even William Shatner has a blog. (Very loosely defined.)

Shatner’s on Twitter, too, which is a “micro-blogging” platform. It’s like a blog on training wheels, for bloggers too stupid or boring to put together a compelling paragraph or three, and social media gurus who don’t like dealing with people all that much.

Ev and Biz clearly had no idea the monster they were creating.

GET A BLOG, YOU FUGLY BASTARD!

There was some talk last year that Twitter and Facebook (a social network that has blog-like capabilities) had killed the blog, but here we are on Chuck’s blog, so clearly that’s not true.

Blogs are here to stay (except for HuffPo; I’d love to see that thing disappear quick and take TMZ with it) and every writer should have one. Why?

Because only ugly writers don’t have blogs.

Seriously.

Think about TV newscasters for a second. On the National level, you have to be attractive or covering politics in order to avoid doing stories on restaurants with health code violations and on-the-scene reports from hurricanes. Ugly people get stuck on local newscasts in small towns people are trying to escape, and eventually end up behind the camera or becoming journalists.

Except there’s no journalism jobs any more because of, wait for it… blogs.

Unknown writers who blog get noticed, attract an audience, and steal well-known writers’ jobs who were afraid of blogging.

Unknown writers who blog have a better shot at getting published offline than unknown writers who don’t, too.

The old days of submitting short stories and articles for prestigious journals and magazines, building your clips to impress an editor who hates you and would rather be writing their own stories are over. Most of those journals and magazines are now gone or moved online and don’t pay jack shit; and the ones that do pay, only pay writers who’ll drive traffic to their site.

Writers who blog. Pretty writers.

But like Chuck said, “If you’re going to be exposed, then expose yourself.“

Get a blog, write a post at least weekly, and — this is the really important part — read other blogs that interest you and interact with them.

Because the future of the blog is already here.

And here.

And here.

Today’s post is by Amy K. Nichols.

I hope you’re eating something while you read this. In fact, why don’t you go get something to nosh. Something like yogurt, or a raw egg. Go on. I’ll wait

…

All good?

Okay. You chow down while I tell you a little story.

A long time ago, at a university far, far away, I dabbled in theatre. Nothing serious. No holding of skulls aloft and Alas Poor Yoricks. I left that up to the drama majors. But every spring my uni put on a musical; and being a musician, every spring I auditioned. I never tried out for the lead roles where I’d have to sing by myself in front of hundreds of strangers. No, I was happy with a chorus part. One of many. Singing and dancing to support the leads. I loved the costumes, the music, the camaraderie with my fellow chorus members.

Good times.

Well, except for that one time.

We were in the final rehearsals for H.M.S. Pinafore. If you’re familiar with the show, I was one of Sir Joseph Porter’s Sisters, Cousins and Aunts. If you’re not familiar with the  show, it doesn’t really matter. What matters is you understand that the rehearsals were intense. We ran through the show beginning to end, dressed in practice costumes, performing our hearts out while the director sat in the empty auditorium taking notes. Nothing stopped the show. If the set fell down around us, we’d keep going.

I stood in the wings, stage left, wearing a bustled skirt and drinking a Sprite. The other Sisters, Cousins and Aunts and I whispered to each other while we waited for Josephine to finish her solo. I heard the piano cue our entrance, took a quick sip, and put my can on a shelf before sashaying onto stage.

There was this one guy in the cast, playing the part of a sailor. I didn’t know him well. Only that he was a musician and he seemed nice enough. He was tall and lanky with mussy hair. Sometimes he made this weird noise back behind his nose, like he had something stuck there. A marble, maybe, or a magic bean.

Anyway, I smiled and sang and twirled about that stage until the time came to exit again. A brief hiatus this time, stage left, where I grabbed my can of Sprite and took a swig.

Only when my tongue had pressed the contents of my mouth back beyond my soft palette did I understand that the substance coating my tongue was not Sprite.

Fascinating thing, swallowing. Did you know swallowing happens in three phases? The first phase, called the oral phase, is voluntary. Meaning we control the chewing and the movement of food toward the throat, wherein the second phase kicks in. That one’s called the pharyngeal phase. This phase is involuntary. According to Wikipedia, “for the pharyngeal phase to work properly all other egress from the pharynx must be occluded—this includes the nasopharynx and the larynx. When the pharyngeal phase begins, other activities such as chewing, breathing, coughing and vomiting are concomitantly inhibited.”

Translation: Once stuff gets past your soft palette, it doesn’t matter what the involuntary third phase is called, because whatever you’ve swallowed is going down.

And at that moment, with the piano pounding out the cue for my next entrance, I realized that the substance slinking past my tonsils was snot.

Not just ordinary snot, either. I’m talking loogie here. Make that loogies, plural. Thick, gloppy ones, cold and slick. Slick like yogurt. Slick like egg whites. While I was on stage, an entire loogie fraternity had somehow slid into my Sprite can and had loogie throw-down. And even though I couldn’t see them now that they were passing through my esophagus to my stomach, I knew — just knew — they were green.

I stumbled a little, one hand covering my mouth, the other swirling the Sprite can, feeling a remnant loogie slosh in the base. I set the can back on the shelf just as the Cousins, Sisters and Aunts shuffled me back onto stage.

I danced and I sang (sans smile) as I weighed my options. Which was better: keep things down (things being loogies!) or throw things up, thereby having not only a second taste of snot, but this time having it mixed with puke? Oh and also, whose snot did I just swallow?!

The weighing of options didn’t last long. The music stopped and the confused cast watched as the director walked from the auditorium to the front of the stage.

“Are you okay?” he asked me.

I whispered in his ear what had happened.

He recoiled. I nodded.

“Go do whatever you need to,” he said.

I assured him I was okay and rehearsal continued. But as soon as the song ended, I raced my bustled butt out the theatre back door and yacked all that loogieness into the grass.

Later, when my gag reflex had settled and I’d rejoined my fellow cast members, I asked if anyone knew who may have used my Sprite can as a spittoon. One friend commented she’d seen the sailor-guy (the one with the magic marble bean stuck in his sinuses) in the wings, stage left.

Figures.

So what did this teach me about life? Two things.

First of all, it taught me there are people out there, even seemingly nice people, who will spit loogies into your Sprite can when you’re not looking.

And second, it taught me that sometimes you just gotta keep dancing, even if you’ve just swallowed someone else’s snot.

How’s that yogurt tasting now?

Today’s post is by Laura Stone.

(It should go without saying, but hey, I’ll say it anyway, that this entire post is going to be filled with NSFW words.)

Is it surprising that a former good girl loves to fucking cuss like a sailor? Probably not. And when I say good girl, I mean I was a bible-carrying, pray for your soul, cry for lost kitties, casseroles for the hungry kind of good girl. Fuck all of that now, I learned the joy of expressing myself, and I owe it all to a couple of guys I worked with at a comedy club who had the most impressive collection of porn I’ve ever witnessed.

Grannies squatting in cake? They had it. Fairies with huge tits (are there any other kind of lady fairy?) getting banged by grasshoppers with giant cocks? Yep, the whole series. Perhaps you wanted to find a hairy-assed hillbilly in a Tweety-bird shirt and shower shoes getting slapped in the face with an elephantine scrotum. Issue 4 or 5? I ask because Issue 4 has the bonus pull out of a toothless hairy-assed hillbilly, and she’s sucking down a jar of pickle juice in a KOA Campground. H-O-T hot.

These guys I worked with delighted in corrupting me with this stuff. They had never encountered someone as naïve as I was back then, someone who had never developed a taste for anything salacious. I was the “oh my heck” and “gosh darnit!” kind. I eventually got over my red-faced shame for running away in tears at the first flash of a magazine I’ll just call “Granny Gash” — because that’s what it was called — and learned that this shit is hilarious.

That was your warning, by the way. We’re just going downhill from here. Oh, yes, there is always going to be a lower level to which you can sink.

There’s a great line in Sophie’s Choice, where Stingo remarks about Sophie, “She could say ‘fuck,’ but she sure couldn’t do it.” I could do it, eventually; I just couldn’t say it. Not until it became a job requirement. These guys were determined to break me out of my shell. I actually got a bonus the first time I used the word “cunt.”

And it’s not about just inserting some “fucks” and “god damns” in sentences. There’s an art to really getting this shit perverse. Anyone can make a dick joke, it’s easy to throw in a fart joke, but it takes an artist to really sell you on cunt. Chaucer popped off both a fart joke and a tale of cunnilingus while the lass hung her nethers out of an open window within ten sentences of Middle English.

And it’s not just there for the sake of being dirty, that’s no fun. These people piss, shit, fuck, and fart as character identification. How kick ass is that? The uptight priest in the Miller’s Tale likes to pretend that people don’t behave that way, and they gleefully show him what he’s missing out of life as a result of his stodgy behavior. This was one of the first times that people were shown for all of their characteristics, and not just the romanticized should-be’s or religious flaws.

It’s not easy to transform a foul-mouthed character into someone you can cheer for, but it can be done. And dammit, it should be done. If you’ve got a story about a band of misfits that come together to fight a fleet of fire-breathing dragons that are destroying the world as we know it, all of them aren’t going to have the same qualities. And we all know that dialog is how we show who these people are. You’re not going to have the cold-hearted alpha male that inevitably joins in tell people to “Hush up.”

When the whiny, skinny teenager with a handbook on weaponry (Arms and Weaponry, d20 supplemental volume 3.5) who continually interjects with “Yes, but on page forty-seven it indicates that the left armpit is the weakest point for attack,” Alpha-male is going to demand that the kid not only “shuts the fuck up” but that if he doesn’t, he’ll “jam [his] fist so far up [teen's] ass that any spunk [he] shoots off into a lonely night will be 10W30.”

In this story the alpha male used to be an auto mechanic, you see. Dirty knuckles, because who has time for a wash up when the world is crashing around your shoulders? God, you’re prissy.

The first movie I was cast in was as a woman who was eventually named at AFI “The Most Offensive Movie Character Ever.” Thank you. And you simply cannot have a movie about vampires and the misfits left behind to fight them without some dirty words. How dirty? None of my lines were allowed in the RED BAND trailer, that’s how foul.

“This whole town’s locked up tighter’n a five year old’s poonany.”

“You only swing on the vine? Or do you lay on the rug? Cuz honey I got a clit like a thumb and a tongue like a lasso that can rope and wrangle your sweet little cunt button.”

It’s a family movie, is what I’m saying. When you talk about pushing your colon inside out as a pick up line, that’s just something that Grandma can enjoy alongside you, you know?

Now, those lines were there to shock, obviously, but the real trick was getting people to stop groaning long enough to actually care for this filthy trailer whore. Spoiler Alert! When she done gets herself kilt, the survivors take a moment to reflect on how nice that skeevy trailer whore was. Lonely tear, then back to staking some vamps, yee haw!

(Blood on the Highway, on Blu-ray in Europe, US release by Time Warner in March. Buy three! If only to marvel at my ginormous rack and impressive gun collection.)

Instead of describing your character as “a whore,” why not make her a “cock gobbler?” Instead of calling some guy a jerk, and douchebag doesn’t seem to apply, how about “choad-licking spunk bucket?” I’m just giving examples here, use your own words. Especially if they’re “that felching meat curtain of a dickhole jizzcup.”

When I’m talking with people about “LOST” I don’t refer to a certain Season One character by his name or features, it’s too run of the mill. But if I say “the dirty rotten sisterfucker,” you know I’m talking about Boone.

Well, now I feel like I’m twelve years old, and not really putting any intellect in this. We need to get Shakespearean on this ass, am I right? Sanctimonious pricks, sodding arse buckets, leaking scullions, pyhoreic cuckolds! Nothing like being able to insult someone without them really knowing if you have, and I’m assuming here that the person you’re insulting isn’t as smart as you. Never get into a verbal sparring match with someone smarter than you, trust me.

Verbal sparring is an old traditions called “flyting.” You’re a dirty rotten, turkey trotting, egg sucking, blah blah blah. That was my dad’s favorite. But this ain’t your daddy’s blog, is it? We’re not going to go soft (yet brilliant) like Oscar Wilde with his ‘A dowdy girl, with one of those characteristic British faces, that, once seen are never remembered.’ That shit won’t help you in a street fight. As soon as you get your handkerchief to your nose to sniff at your opponent, you’re getting an elbow to the eye.

Modern flyting is all about the yo mama joke. The “let’s just get off of mothers, yo, I mean, I just got off of yours.” And please, don’t pull out the old ones, the wheat thicks, the sat around the house, get creative with that shit. “Yo mama’s so ugly they press her face in dough to make gorilla cookies.” You don’t just come back from that, it takes at least a minute to recover. A good response can be low belt, like mother-fucking and scatological triumphs, or high brow with character assassination. And if your opponent has actually fucked horses, all the better. [ed: the "gorilla cookies" line is one of my favorites -- rah-rah Sanford and Son!]

I’m getting a bit off track here, so let me wrap this up before I devolve into a steaming, corpulent, pulsating mat of spooge and pubes. I like profanities. I like it when people can slip in some clever or just truly sick words into something. Everything is so PC, so calculated in the media these days, it’s just delightful to find some truly rank shit out there.

A loving tale of Bert and Ernie fisting where the author has no idea that they’re fucking nuts for writing that in the first place. The blog of a German woman who believes herself to be married to the Berlin Wall (no, really, it’s a true story) and reveals her first love in explicit detail. (A fence near the house where she grew up. A whole new way to look at “riding fences.”) Or when someone on Saturday Night Live messes up and lets a muttered “fuck” slip out on national television. God, I love that shit.

Those little releases of tension we let fly are not just hilarious at times, they’re necessary. Saying “Gosh darnit!” when you stub your toe just doesn’t help heal your hurt like a string of “mother fucking toe jamming cock ring bull shitting CHAIR!” will.

Remember, Ned Flanders ended up in the psych ward for not swearing.

And if my love of dirty words makes me perpetually 12, then I say pass the head gear and join me at the bus stop with your Trapper Keepers, kids.

Mark Twain said it best: “If I cannot swear in heaven, then I shall not stay there.” A-fucking-men.

Today’s post is by Aaron Dembski-Bowden.

“I’m done reconfoobling the energy-mo-tron… or whatever.”

Bender, Futurama

As writers, we’re often told not to underestimate our readership. That seems very wise, no? It’s almost Zen, in a way that means we’re all equal, all similarly conscious and intelligent, and in a way that shows I’m using Zen in a sentence without really knowing what it means.

But, see, we’ve also all been online. Something about the internet magnifies people’s personalities and proclivities, making stupid opinions stupider, wrong perceptions wronger, and argumentative assholes both more argumentative, and more sphincterishly puckered.

Or does it? Maybe that’s what people really think? Maybe this is the babbletalk from their truebrain spilled directly into existence without their mouth or shyness blocking it with a sensefilter.

And I say this because, well, I like some really dumb shit.

I read a lot, and like to think I’m not being underestimated by authors. But the truth is, maybe I should be. I’m an average white male 25-40, and my only distinguishing characteristics are that I’m ruthlessly talented at what I do, and I’ve had much more sex with way hotter girls than anyone else currently drawing breath on Allah’s wonderful world. But still, when push comes to shove (and shove comes to a breadknife in the unguarded spleen) I think I’m fairly dumb.

I like some whacky shit, as long as you don’t take it too far. See, a lot of people do take things too far. I think it gets them off.

If you take the red pill, you will sit through two sequel films of various Australian black guys no one cares about, all shouting at bullshit each other in shitty rooms while metal sea monsters fly at them for reasons that may or may not be tied into the nature of reality.

Or you could take the blue pill, and abandon this trainwreck while it’s still cool and thought-provoking, and the effects aren’t yet overdone.

You see, my enthusiasm is a fragile, precious little pumpkin. It goes mouldy and splats with the merest hint of pressure. I don’t want the precious icons of the Sci-Fi and Fantasy universes explained to me in intense detail, because I won’t nod along and think “Yes, yes, how fascinating.” I’ll get bored. Worse, I’ll instinctively find flaws in the explanations, because I’m not an idiot. Is your life enriched by the fact that you now know the Death Star’s hull is made of Quadanium steel? The answer is no, because the factoid you just absorbed is pointless and stupid, albeit true in the minds of a million assholes who sweat when they eat.

So what’s this thing about? Instruments of Destruction is a cool name, and all I seem to be doing is hating on sci-fi fans and the obese – while casting aspersions that the two demographics have some significant overlaps. Well, I’ll tell you why we’re here, if it’ll finally shut you up.

We’re here to discuss the four greatest weapons in the history of movie-making, and assess the impact they’ve made on those around them. There would be five, but frankly, I don’t owe Chuck that big a favour.

Given the fact these are weapons, you can imagine that the impact they’ve made on those around them is little more than turning those folks into blood-coloured mush. And you’d be right to think that. That’s why they’re awesome.

Ladies. Gentlefools. This is the whacky jazz that I like.

Shit is about to get real.

4. The Three-bladed Sword.

It’s a sword that has three blades, and, like… they could fire out of it. It’s a sword that shoots swords. If you don’t like that, you need to watch less Footloose and learn about awesomeness.

The Sword and the Sorcerer was a shitty film that I hated even when I was a tinier version of the excellent soul I am now, but in all honesty, it’s difficult to raise any objections to a weapon that shoots versions of itself like spears of sweetness.

But even so, it’s low on the list.

3. The Sick Stick

In terms of sheer hilarity and real world application, nothing beats the sick sticks from Minority Report. You jab a baton into some guy’s neck (or his balls, for extra laughs), and he dials God on the big white telephone. Really, what could be better than a pokey stick that makes people chunder?

Oh, man, the things I’d do with one of these. The lives I’d ruin. The tender moments I’d fuck up. The kids I’d scar for life.

The arrests I’d resist.

2. The Lightsaber

Oh, so I’m being too obvious, am I? You know all about how these things work and you think you’re hot shit? So lightsabers have blade shroud emitters and cycling field energizers and focusing crystal activators and a bunch of other shit that is so magically important?

“No, please. Do go on.”

I don’t care. I don’t even dance vaguely close to the edge of giving half a fuck. So what does a flux capacitor in Back to the Future do? I don’t know, it… regulates the capacity of fluxes, I guess. Typing that sentence is literally the most thought I’ve ever given it, because I just don’t care. I don’t give a shit. It makes a sweet-ass car made of silver junk go back in time, and Michael J. Fox was a cowboy. Isn’t that enough? What more do you want?

If you try to explain stuff too much, you fuck it up. Let’s take pseudoscience to Spider-Man, shall we? Does it benefit him?

No, it doesn’t. Now Spider-man is in a wheelchair, all because you gave a shit about fake science. You took it too far.

A lightsaber is a sword made of awesome laser jazz that does the coolest sound ever when you turn it on, wave it about, hit stuff, or turn it off.

Name one other weapon that is as much fun to turn on and off as it is to actually kill a guy with it. I bet you can’t. And that’s why lightsabers are awesome.

Sbsssssh. Vwmmm. Vwm. Vwmmm. SKISH. SKISHSKASH. Shhhhhhhhhhhhp.

And lastly…:

1. This thing.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking: “You don’t even know its name,” and “That’s not a weapon, it’s a piece of shit.” Well, fuck you. Fuck you the first time, because it belonged to this guy:

“My mantits are windows.”

And fuck you the second time because this gun was awesome.

My first experience with this weapon was trying to fit it into my Optimus Prime toy’s hands, when I was, like, 6 or something. This was a challenge for some truly heartbreaking reasons that still haunt me to this day. Things initially went wrong when the gun didn’t fit the little plastic fists, and had to be held at a weird angle, so it looked like Prime was shooting 45 degrees to his left. I recall sitting there on my parents’ living room floor, holding the box in my hands, staring in heart-wrenching disbelief at the picture… then looking up at Transformers on the TV… and in both media presentations, Prime was holding the gun normally and not like Jason Meyer, the kid down the street who cried all the time and drooled on himself.

The bad times continued when, in robot mode, Prime’s fists were detachable and about the size of Tic-tacs. The box could literally have come with a warning: ‘Caution – You will lose these tiny bastards totally fast.’ This combination of flaws – a fuckup duology, if you will – meant that for the very few seconds I owned both fists before inevitably losing them, Optimus Prime couldn’t shoot for shit, and Megatron got away.

Then Prime’s hands fell off, and although I was able to come up with a convincing storyline to cover this development, it was a contributing factor in why I preferred Star Wars toys.

So why is this gun so great? Because in the Transformers animated movie in 1986, Optimus Prime used this gun to kill – actually kill – Decepticons. As in, I was 6 years old, and my cartoon hero flew through the air, machine-gunned several of the bad guys into actual robotic graves, murdering the shit out of them with punishing-ass laser fire.

As the scene unfolded, I felt myself feeling strange, new sensations. I had no idea what to say to girls, but I knew with fierce intensity that I had to see (and indeed, feel) dem titties. I tried to call my parents to ask for some juice, but my voice was nineteen octaves lower, and I accidentally demanded a beer.

My balls hung pendulously from that moment on, and a beard sweated out of my cheeks in mere moments.

Because of this gun… I was a man.

And that’s why it’s the greatest weapon ever in movies, and people who think Wolverine’s claws are better all smell like bat piss.