Those kind of angels. Brr.

As for “go shithouse on your ass,” no, I don’t know that that means, but given that angels can blow apart cities with but a blow from their heavenly trumpets, I’m inclined not to ask pesky questions.

What I’m trying to say is, it’s time to conceive the fourth annual Nerdtivity.

Don’t know what a Nerdtivity is? Click the pics below, and enjoy the tales.

So, that’s what I’m talking about. A nativity scene crafted from whatever Nerd Detritus and Geek Debris I can find lying around. Right? Right.

I know, I’m not the only guy doing this. I think I’m the only one calling it the “Nerdtivity,” though, so I get some kind of imaginary pop culture points for that, right? Points I can cash in after I die, like when I win a bunch of Ski-Ball games in a row and want to buy a GI Joe decoder watch or some shit? Yeah.

What goes into a good Nerdtivity scene? As the angels did command, let us ponder.

You Need Yourself A Jesus

“So it was that the tiny messenger brought a new robot baby in a dirty cooler covered in cockroaches. The robot couple decided to name their baby ‘Meatface’ as an irony, because robots do have faces but they have no meat on those faces. The baby was born, a robot nativity, and lo, it was rad.”

Obviously, the whole point of a nativity scene is The Jesus. I mean, you don’t get a nativity without A Jesus being born.

Oh, and I know. I’m going to Hell. I get that. Let’s all hold hands and jump together.

What I’m saying is, you need some figure to stand in as the Jesus proxy. In the first Nerdtivity, I have some surly teen Jesus (one of the “Homies” line of vending machine toys) known as the Baby Jeebus, with his mother, Curlerhead, and his father, Jonny Stoveblock. In the second Nerdtivity, Jesus is actually doublefold (“And lo! Hark! The Nerdy Angels sing! The Nerdtivity was not just one child, but two! The mother, Angela Scarsboro from Queens, New York, was proud of her little geek babies. And Ape Sapien was there, not that he was the Dad but he has gills, and gills rule. And it was awesome.”). Third Nerdtivity was a dirty robot baby in a filthy Wall-E cooler. So, yeah.

This year, I dunno. Part of my troubles with the Nerdtivity is, I’m doing this awful thing called “growing up,” which means I have less cause to go out and buy toys. I want to, but fuck, you can only play with your Star Wars figures so many times in your diapers before the neighbors wonder what’s up. I mean, I guess I shouldn’t do it on their porch? Whatever. Fuck them and their cats.

Either way, the Jesus really isn’t the centerpiece of the Nerdtivity — I mean, thematically, sure. Everything orbits around the little sonofabitch. (I’m not calling Actual Jesus a sonofabitch, so everybody just settle down. I’m speaking of Fake Plastic Geek Jesus. Otay? Otay.) But physically, Baby Jesus is appropriately small. He’s the nucleus of this nerdy cell. Everything swims around his tiny form, his mote of dorky potential.

Painting With Pop Culture Shotguns

“Lo, but God knew that sometimes, chumps get out of line, and chumps need to get eaten by a monster that looks a bit like a lump of dung covered in shoe leather. So God invited the Rancor Monster to eat the chumps who get out of line. And it was good.”

What I’m saying is, consider your source material.

…

Wait, hold on. Am I drunk yet on gin martinis?

…

Yes. Yes, I am. It just happened. Like that! *snaps fingers* I started wondering, “Hey, are those my lips that I can no longer feel?” And when that question hits, it’s Wendigtime in Drunktown. (Or Drunktime in Wendigtown? I always get that wrong.) Ring the bells, bitches.

Where was I? Yes. Source material.

From the earlier aforementioned (welcome to the Department of Redundancy Department) geeky nativities, you’ll see a few different approaches. Some guys focus on one particular Sacred Nerd Property. Your Doctor Who Nerdtivities, your Star Wars Nerdtivities, whatever. Me, I like to spray wantonly, the dribs and drabs squirting far and wide. You’ll note a number of geeky pop culture properties represented: Wall-E, Avatar the Last Airbender, Star Wars, Sealab 2021, Battlestar Galactica, Homestar Runner, blah blah blah. I also throw in other random shit: chickens, tractors, dice, and what-have-ye.

So, it’s valuable for the Nerdtivity to aim far and aim wide. Just for color. For variety. To rep-ruh-zent.

Holy shit, I’m getting loopy.

Man, this is fun. I should blog-on-booze far more often. Of course, like all things when drunk, it’s probably more fun for me than it is you. I’ll click on over here tomorrow when sober, and I’ll marvel at the sheer nonsensery of the whole thing. Hieroglyphics, umlauts, poop stains on the walls. I think it’s brilliant, and it’s just muckity-muck.

My wife just said, “If they just didn’t have a laugh track, I’d totally watch that show.”

Go ahead. Name the show she’s talking about. Name it. NAME IT.

Okay, moving on.

Are You A Size Queen?

And now, a reading from the Book of Aphasia: “Two robots did descend from the celestial highlands, and they had male and female robot parts, and they could bang these parts together in a most hellacious clamor, but that was all. It was merely a plug-and-socket, and it was a lifeless coupling.”

This blog is going downhill fast. I’m losing cogency. Is cogency a word? Fuck.

What I’m saying is, the size of the Nerditivty matters. First, you have to get yourself a nativity set. The sad, blasphemous part is, you’re gonna have to strip out the Jesus and the three wise and all those little crazy bastards, because you need to fit in your own bullshit. And, even then, you need to utilize various sizes of toys in your Nerdtivity. Little dudes, medium dudes, big dudes.

Why? Christ, I dunno. Variety is the spice of life. Also: nutmeg.

I guess what I’m saying is, you need an excuse to use a giant Rancor Monster.

Man, the Rancor has a kind of pinched butthole face, you ever notice that? He looks pretty much retarded, that guy. Like someone bashed in his face with a shovel when he was fresh out of the Rancor Vagina. You know what’s weird? I remember reading the Star Wars novel, and I recall some line about how the Jawas and the Sand People were related somehow, like maybe the Sand People were basically birth defected Jawas or something. But that’s probably not true. I made that up in a fever dream or something. Is it true?

Downhill fast.

Dude, You Need Some Fuckin’ Wise Men

“But Lando’s groovy capture of Emperor Palpatine would not be enough, Fat Joe knew. He needed a blood sacrifice, because them’s the rules. So he called on Lando who betrayed his buddy from Sullust, Nien Nunb. They stabbed Nien Nunb in his flappy-skinned fish face, and he died, and it was good.”

I don’t even know who you people are anymore. Three of these things, and I’m good to go. I can barely type. Whenever I try to type “drunk,” I type “drink.” I have to keep going back and fixing errors.

Get off my lawn!

You need wise men, is what I’m getting at. You need a bunch of dudes standing around, being all wise and shit. I have some Homestar Runner figurines in the first, and in the third, some Homies. In the second… uhh. Shut up. I don’t think I actually put wise men in there.

My eyelids are numb. I just went to itch one, and I could barely feel it.

Gin is great. I’m rocking the Tanqueray. With the limes? The little fancy limes? What the fuck is that called?

Rangpur?

Rangpur limes?

Are those real?

Are the Tusken Raiders retarded Jawas?

Where are my pants?

You need some fucking wise men.

What About The Backdrop? What About The Backdrop, Motherfucker?

“God knew that a Nerdtivity was always risky, for nerds are a volatile bunch. And so he said, ‘Just in case this kid gets uppity, we’re going to need to give him some bird flu, and fast.’ So he got A Giant Mosquito to bring a little taste of bird flu to the manger. And it was good.”

I say that you need to think about the backdrop, but I’ve punked out on the backdrop three years running. It’s just my goddamn dining room. How’s that for creative? I should do like, a night-time sky or something. And for the record, it took me three tries to type “night-time.”

Another quote from my wife: “He looks like a kid-toucher.”

Go ahead. Guess who she’s talking about. GUESS.

My wife is awesome, because she says things like that without me prompting her. I mean, sure, I have  a gun to her head. Shhhhh. Don’t tell! It’ll be our little secret.

GIN.

Sweet gin.

Maybe for a backdrop, I could do some kind of swirling supernova shit. Some kind of of aurora borealis. What’s a nipple? An aureola. What about an aureola borealis? Glowing nipples, smearing nuclear milk across the night-time sky. Hah! I typed that in one go this time, you sumbitches. Yah!

GIN GIN GIN GIN GIN GIN GIN

“Vermouth vermouth vermouth vermouth vermouth vermouth vermouth vermouth vermouth vermouth vermouthvermouthvermouth!”

I think “drinking and blogging” sounded like a better idea when I started. Don’t get me wrong. I’m having a blast. But you poor fuckers are buckled in. I’m sorry. This is a train wreck. Let me take a few minutes to cry to myself like a little girl, and see if we can’t get this horse a-kicking again.

…

No, probably not. MORE GIN.

What I’m saying is, the Nerditivity has a special place in our annual tradition here in Der Wendighaus, and tonight is the night when I figure out what the hell will go into such a delicate (read: clumsy and slapdash!) project. I may have to suck it up and buy one or two more small toys to go into the manger this year. Not sure.

I encourage you all to get drunk and blog — no, no, I mean, I encourage you all to come up with your own Nerditivities this year. Except, when you do, you have to pay me five dollars. Because it was my idea! My precious! Trademark! Copyright! Patent pending! GIN! Muh! Nnnngh!

*passes out*

Why macro?

Someone asked me that this weekend at my high school reunion. They’d seen my images, my photostream — a high school reunion these days is essentially just “Facebook Live!” — and they asked, “Why macro?”

I found myself providing the easy answer:

“I… don’t know!”

I know how I got into it. When my wife and I got married, we were trying to have a sensible and small gathering, in part to control costs, in part just so we could remember the day and not be crushed beneath a tidal fist of stress. So, in order to wrangle costs, we opted not to have a photographer. Most photographers were in the “thousand dollar plus” range, and that seemed like something of a scam. So, instead, we decided to aim for practical: we’d spend a fraction of that on a fairly nice camera (non-DSLR, a Canon Powershot S80) and then have someone (in this case, my sister) take shots. Moreover, we’d have the camera to take on the honeymoon and to just have around to forever capture our ever-rushing cascade of wedded bliss.

Thing was, the S80 had something called “macro mode.”

I had no idea what this even meant.

So, I started playing with it.

And I just couldn’t stop.

(By the way, that’s pretty much every young teen’s masturbation story in a nutshell. “I had no idea what it meant, so I started playing with it, and I couldn’t stop.”)

(That image was an early experiment taken with the S80. It also led me to Love The Waterdrop. I like that in the drop you can just see the peak of our roof and the blur of the chimney.)

I upgraded my gear less than a year ago, and now I’m rocking out with a Canon XSi, and I went ahead and got a macro lens to go with it (Canon EF 100mm f/2.8). It instantly upgraded my shots by dint of it being a DSLR. It was a little trickier on the learning curve, but it handled shots with aplomb. Before, I was maybe using 1 out of 10 shots, at a 10% rate of success. Now, I figure I’m at about 20-30% success. Which still means I have an insurmountable junkyard of old photos collecting digital dust on a 1TB harddrive, but so it goes. Sometime, I should go back and fidget with them, see if I can’t make something good out of a handful with Photoshop.

Still, the DSLR lets me take shots like this:

Which is just silly that I can get that close. Those tiny mantids were just born. Just born. Some of them are still smooshed-up little worms. They’re maybe twice the length of my pinky nail.

That still doesn’t answer the question: Why macro?

A digression, first. It’s funny to me, because I never knew my father was into photography. I should’ve known — we always had cameras around, and he always took photos, but a lot of the time it was something he must’ve done on his own, because I don’t remember him having the camera that often. And yet, he passed away, and what do we find? Boxes of photography.

And some of his photography is plainly an effort to get closer, to see the world from a different angle. Compare these –

.

Dad’s are on the left, mine on the right. Not entirely different images. Had he a camera with a macro lens, our images might’ve been all the more similar. It shows in other photos, too — the way he photographed our whitetails is the way I photograph the dogs. When he took a snap of a rose, he got deep, as deep as the camera allowed.

Of course, we still haven’t answered the question.

The reality is, I don’t know that there is an answer. Not a good one, anyway.

I like that worlds exist that other people don’t see.

I like that there exists a hidden layer, and that the right equipment gives you the chance to reveal it.

I like that I can see the facets of a praying mantis’ eye, or the tiny fringes on a delicate mushroom, or, like above, a spider working his silken thread as I hover above. I can see worlds turned upside-down in waterdrops, I can dwell within rust, I can walk amongst fields of frost, I can dance through the eye of a needle.

I can get a face full of Nien Nunb.

But again, I still don’t know that this answers the question. And I don’t know that I can.

Or, rather, that I even want to.

Some things beg to remain unexamined.

And yet, here I am, feeding you baby birds my wisdom. Ground up in my meaty gizzard and regurgitated into your eager mouths.

You may have noticed that I tak pitchers wid my camera. I have a Flickr photostream, and there I deposit an unholy number of images, some good, many less than good. At present, I have almost 2500 photos up, with almost 700,000 total views. Well over half my shots are macro shots, and at some point I’ll probably do a post on how-slash-why I take so many goddamn macro images, but that’s a chat for another day.

Today, it’s all about how taking photographs has improved my writing. And, further, why you might want to consider putting something like this into your toolbox. It’s not a tool that will sit at the top — no, at the top of the toolbox you need your word processor, your mind mapping device, your handgun, and a baggy of peyote buttons. But, you might think to bury it down in there somewhere for those days when you need a different perspective.

So, okay. How has photography helped shape my writing?

No-Mind: Blissful Thoughtlessness

When I’m out there, kneeling in the wet grass or trying to shove my camera lens up some poor arachnid’s pooper, I enter a Zen, empty-headed state where I don’t have a thought in the world (cue the joke that suggests I’m always a bliss-faced empty-skulled ass-ape). I don’t know that it’s the flame-and-the-void or anything, but I zone out. It’s damn near a fugue state. I’m surprised I don’t wake up with blood on my hands and a wretched array of images burned into my camera’s memory card.

Here’s the thing: writers need to find ways to disconnect. As noted the other day, concentration is a finite resource. You need to find things that don’t ensnare your thought processes like butterflies in a net. You need something to let those butterflies fly free so they can cause typhoons in Tokyo and kill thousands of innocent people. Or something. For me, this is photography (and, increasingly, Photoshop). Yes, I can achieve it with video games and light reading, but sometimes those imprint on your mind, which is a no-no — further, they’re not necessarily constructive deviations, either. I’m not against them, not at all, but I do recommend finding something that rocks double-duty.

No-Mind recharges your batteries.

It cleans the blackboard. Tabula rasa. Let the chalk play while your mind rests.

The Visual Engine

Writing is an interesting act, because in the strangest way, you’re painting with abstraction. You’re actually using an invisible brush and dipping it ideally in the brain-paints of your readers, and from there, seeing what picture emerges — stranger still, it’s a picture you’ll never get to see. They see it. In their heads. But it’s a work that is experienced differently by everybody, and you’re frozen out of that process.

Point is, writing engages the visual mind. It has to. Yes, some of writing lives in the internal world, but even there, it stimulates visual response in the readers — something is going on inside their heads, whether images writ large or mere flashes of images or just spots of color and light. We don’t read and have a marquee of bright words scrolling across our heads. We read and interpret into image.

Some of the most engaging writing has a cinematic feel, by which I mean, the writer captures visuals in an interesting way — not necessarily a direct way, but a way that speaks to the visual mind.

Writing this way requires you to flex a sometimes-hard-to-find muscle. You know how you do a new exercise (riding a horse, playing baseball, strangling somebody with your crushing thighs) and your body awakens pain in places you didn’t even know had muscles? (“Why does my hair hurt?”) It’s like that. You need to stimulate muscle growth in a place you maybe didn’t know you had muscles.

Photography will stimulate the visual mind. By hooking your brain into this channel, you’ll start to think more visually. On one level, this is practical. If you want to describe how something looks, it can’t hurt to have a reference photo. On a deeper and stranger level, photography captures a moment in time, and lame as this may sound, it captures a feeling, too. Writing shouldn’t just be about how something looks, but how it feels, too. The photo stimulates an abstract response, and you can grab a hold of that abstraction and translate it into your work. Which leads to…

Managing the Imagination

Your imagination is your greatest tool. In it lurks all your madnesses: dragons and murders and lost loves and seas of fire and distant lighthouses and betrayals and so on and so forth. The imagination isn’t just about the things you conjure up raw, though. It’s about the relationships you draw between disparate things. It’s about the connections nobody else sees. That’s the writer’s biggest magic trick: the drawing of those connections. Any asshole can write about unicorns and high school break-ups. But only the masters can connect unicorns and high-school breakups. Or something.

No, what I’m saying is, metaphor is one of the biggest tools in your toolbox, and using metaphor can be both visual and abstract. You can probably think of times you were reading something, and you had one of two reactions: “Holy shit, that is a clumsy and incomprehensible metaphor,” or, “That metaphor is masterful and I think I just wet my trousers.”

Photography will stimulate your metaphor gland. It’s like a shock right to the mind. A tiny spark, a little current, and it’ll get the gland secreting the juice you need. It’ll help you draw the connections — you’ll look back over your photos, and you’ll think, “You know what that reminds me of?” It doesn’t mean you’ll necessarily use that instance in your work, but it keeps that gland juicy.

Mmmm. Juicy glands. Bzzt. Yeah, baby. Do it again.

Vignettes and Storyboards

Photos will also help you to stimulate story. Not just description and metaphor, but full-blown story.

Heh. “Full-blown.”

…

Shut up.

What I’m saying is, you take a look at a photo, and suddenly, you hear the thundering gallop of hoof-beats, and damnit if they’re not coming closer. That’s the story, and it’s about to trample your ass. Sometimes, that’s how how it is. It doesn’t happen with every photo I take. It maybe happens with 10% of them, but that’s just one more source of inspiration.

Take a look at the photo here. The chicken and the tractor? It inspired a piece of flash fiction, “Lethe and Mnemosyne,” which I have posted over at Jet Pack.

It can be an accidental thing. I took this image just for shits and giggles, and the story came out of it. But you can also do it with greater purpose. Imagine taking snaps at a junkyard or an antique store, and seeing what kinds of crazy stories you get going. Monkey with cymbals meets vintage junker Pontiac Streamliner. Go!

Further, if you’re so bold, you might use a series of images as storyboards — continuous images bound together with the common thread of the story’s throughline. In fact, were you so inclined, you might do what I have not and check out something like Hitchcock Mobile Storyboarding for the iPhone. And, were you so inclined, you might let me know your thoughts. Thanks for spending the money, guinea pig! My gratitude is endless! Sucker!

Conclusion?

Try it. Doesn’t matter what kind of writer you are. You’re weird. All writers are; don’t think you’re different and “normal.” Pfah. The tools in a writer’s toolbox are sometimes concrete and other times abstract. This is one of the abstract (re: weird) ones, and if you try to rock the photo-mojo, let me know how it’s voodoo do you.

Your camera doesn’t need to be of superb quality. You have a cell phone, I’m sure — if you don’t, I’ll ask why you’re reading this site at all, Brother Esau, shouldn’t you be milking a goat or something? That cell phone likely has a camera, so check it out. Take candid photos of strangers. Get down in the grass and take shots of the micro-world that lives there. Snap a snap of the weird things you find on the side of the road, or of the strange things someone might paint. It’s a visual record. It’s a shock to your metaphor gland and your visual muscle. It’s tickles your story cortex. Try it. You might just like it.

I put up a new index page at terribleminds[dot]com. It looks like this, just in case you’re too lazy to click over there:

Do you hate it? You probably hate it. I can already see some things about it that I don’t like. It’s a bit busy, for one. For two, it doesn’t actually speak to the motifs of this page right here (though, it may eventually in the mythical redesign that lives in the dripping caverns of my skull). For three, it has too many fonts, which I think is some kind of cardinal sin against design. I might be making that up. I know that, in putting objects on a shelf, it’s good to have three things. But three fonts, I dunno. I’m living on the edge over here. Teetering on the precipice.

I do like the photo. It’s one of the handful of photos of mine that I really dig. I should do that as a post, sometime — note those rare photos I genuinely like. Most earn a squint and a modicum of disgust. Hrm.

I also like the inky-stainy bits. I used to chew King Hell out of pens (er, still do if they get near my mouth; thank Christ the iPhone doesn’t taste very good), and would often have black-stained teeth, or fingers, or pockets.

I open the floor to you, humble readers. Is it crap? Is it gold? Is it golden crap, shat from the gilded bowels of King Midas hisownself?

I got into photo-snapping not because photography had ever interested me. It didn’t. It was an arcane mystery, an occult language.

Then, an interesting thing happened: I was able to dupe a lovely lady into marrying me (my hypnosis over her still holds strong!), and in the process of planning a small, toned-down wedding, we decided that it would be silly to hire a photographer. Wedding photographers demanded that we tithe to them our blood and future children, and it was cheaper instead to actually buy a reasonable point-and-shoot camera to do the trick. So, the Canon S80 entered my fumbly hands.

It wasn’t long before I learned to love the digital camera. We’d had digital cameras before, but none of them really wowed me that much. The S80 was robust. It took beautiful shots, and it had a macro mode — and, those who know my stream know that I am a giggling whore for macro mode. I love the tiny worlds, the miniature places, the secrets hidden in grass and rust and bug-eyes. Before too long I was kneeling in mud trying to get waterdrop shots or look deep into some firefly’s butthole or something (it glows, it glows).

Then, onto Flickr.

Over time, it became clear that taking photos was a visual way into my stories. I’d gotten deeper into screenwriting, and using the camera helped me think visually and frame my work in that context. The camera became a writer’s aid, strange as it may seem.

I had a few shots hit big. One of my fog shots has 100,000+ views all its own. I got blogged. People seem to like one of my landscape shots. I got a fog snap onto some BBC site [damnit, can't find the link]. I got into a charity photo book about MS. A shot ended up in an online Napa Valley travel guide. And so on.

Not long ago, I became the proud owner of a Canon DSLR with requisite macro lens.

Photography is still a hobby. I think it always will be.

But, it seems high time to start trying to make a little scratch off of them. Maybe it won’t work. Maybe it will.

So, I’m soliciting you, The Intertubes, for your wisdom.

What’s the best way to sell my work? Should I put together a book and sell the book? Prints? Where? How?

Of equal importance: would you buy one or more of my photos?

Help me, Internets. You’re my only hope.