Apple-Obsessed Author Fella

Author: terribleminds (page 426 of 449)

WORDMONKEY

Blue Eggs From Bitch Chickens (Or, “Scenes From A Farmer’s Market”)

I fucking love the farmer’s market.

It’s not just that I’m some kind of food snob. It’s not just that I’d rather think local and eat local and support the little guy farmer over and above the aggro “big agra” executive. It’s not just that I like playing a game where I tally the number of Suburus, designer dogs, yuppies, hippies, old folks, and strollers.

It’s that sometimes, crazy shit happens at the farmer’s market. Maybe it’s something in the air. Maybe everybody’s goofy on rhubarb. No idea what it is, only that it is.

* * *

He’s the Honey Man, but also, the Egg Man.

(Coo-coo-ca-choo.)

The guy’s a ninja with his bees and bee-hives, and he’s got every type of honey you could imagine. Clover, wildflower, blueberry, knotweed. It’s the knotweed that’s most interesting and most complex: it’s thick and dark and tastes like scorched molasses (er, except, in a good way — it’s like the espresso of honeys). But he’s got the honeycomb and the bee pollen and all that shit.

But, as noted, he’s also got eggs.

His eggs are sublime. Farm eggs are like eggs pooped out of chicken-shaped angels. You get an egg from the grocery store, it’s fine, it’s suitable, it does the trick. But you don’t know real eggs until you’ve had one straight from a healthy itinerant chicken — the whites are whiter, the yolks are a sun-bright orange instead of a sad ochre, and overall the eggs just taste more… well, eggy. (This is the truest thing I can say regarding meat from healthy, well-bred livestock. It always tastes like the thing it already is, only moreso. Pork is porkier. Beef is beefier. And so on and so forth. It’s like the flavor volume goes to 11.)

Point is, the Honey Man, he also sells eggs, and this is why we dig him.

He’s a quirky dude, this Bee Guy. Ex-Marine. Ex-chemist. Built like an M1 tank. Teeth like a busted-ass jack-o-lantern. He frequently wears cut-off denim shorts so cut off they might as well be Daisy Dukes.

He’s a good guy, though. Quick with a story and a chat. Friendly as anything.

I went to the farmer’s market yesterday.

There, sitting at his booth is his girlfriend. Attractive. Maybe in her early 40s — and he’s in his 60s, I’d guess. She’s hay-blonde, and doing something that I thought blondes only did in books or movies: twirling her hair around her finger and staring blankly at nothing. I try talking to her, but she just calls for the Honey Man, and by “calls for” I mean, “lamely mumbles his name so he can’t hear her.”

Then I hear clucking. I look over and next to the table in the back is a big chicken cage where the Honey Man — acting as Egg Man — brought some chickens. The chickens begin to freak out. They’re chickens, after all, which pretty much means they’re dicks. Stupid dicks, at that. The fact you can lop a clucker’s head off and he’ll still live for days is a sign. Any creature whose only true need in this world is a barely-functioning brain-stem is not high on the intelligence list (though somehow Snooki still got a book deal).

See, the Egg Man, some the eggs he sells are blue. Not robin’s egg blue, but rather, a blue-gray hue — pretty, but you wouldn’t hang them from your ears or anything. Even still, the guy gets a lot of questions: “What kind of animal lays the blue egs?” as if he’s got a secret dodo farm off of the Turnpike. Thus he decided to bring in two of his hens since they’re a unique lot — the “Araucana” chicken.

Well, these two hens are, as noted, being dicks.

So, Egg Man storms over, grabs the cage with both hands, and gives it a violent shake.

CLANG CLANG CLANG.

Then he yells — loudly, in a farmer’s market full of sensitive yuppie-types and their delicate progeny —

“SHUT UP, YOU BITCH!”

And a chill filled the air.

Everyone paused. The bakery lady in the booth next had a look on her face like she just saw a circus geek bite the head off a poodle. People either stopped to stare or instead chose to hurry past.

It was awesome.

I don’t know if he was mad at the hair-twirling girlfriend and was yelling at her via her proxy, the exotic chicken. I don’t know if he just had some momentary PTSD. Maybe he’s just pissed off at chickens.

God knows we remember what happens when I got mad at a chicken.

Egg Man then took the Araucana out of the cage and brought over this gnarly-footed lion-maned chicken to coo and burble in his denim-clad lap. Then I bought my eggs, chatted for a while, and went on my way.

But I love that moment where he dropped — in effect — a turd in the otherwise serene punchbowl of the farmer’s market. Blue eggs from bitch chickens.

You don’t see that shit at the grocery store.

25 Things You Should Know About Storytelling

1. Stories Have Power

Outside the air we breathe and the blood in our bodies, the one thing that connects us modern humans today with the shamans and emperors and serfs and alien astronauts of our past is a heritage — a lineage — of stories. Stories move the world at the same time they explain our place in it. They help us understand ourselves and those near to us. Never treat a story as a shallow, wan little thing. A good story is as powerful as the bullet fired from an assassin’s gun.

2. Effect Above Entertainment

We love to be entertained. Bread and circuses! Clowns and monkeys! Decapitations and ice cream! A good story entertains but a great story knows that it has in its arsenal the ability to do so much more. The best stories make us feel something. They fuck with our emotions. They make us give a flying fuck about characters and places and concepts that don’t exist and won’t ever exist. The way a story stabs us with sadness, harangues us with happiness, runs us through the gauntlet of rage and jealousy and denial and underoo-shellacking lust and fear (together, lust and fear may stir a “scaredy-boner”) is parallel to none. Anybody can entertain. A juggler entertains. A storyteller makes us feel something. Makes us give a shit when we have no good reason to do so. Fun is not the last stop on the story train. The storyteller is master manipulator. The storyteller is cackling puppetmaster.

3. A Good Story Is A Good Story Regardless Of Genre Or Form

Segmentation. Checking off little boxes. Putting stories in the appropriate story slots and narrative cubby-holes. Is it a sci-fi TV show? A fantasy novel? A superhero comic? A video game about duck hunting? An ARG about the unicorn sex trade? We like to think that the walls we throw up matter. But they’re practically insubstantial, and once you get them in your mouth they’re like cotton candy, melting away to a meaningless slurry. Good story is good story. Those who cleave to genre and form — whether as teller or as audience — limit the truth and joy the tale can present. Cast wide and find great stories everywhere.

4. That’s Not To Say Form Doesn’t Matter

Story is also not a square peg jammed in a circle hole. Every tale has an organic fit. The medium matters in that it lets you operate within known walls and described boundaries.

5. Stories Have Shape, Even When They Don’t Mean To

You put your hand in a whirling clod of wet clay, you’re shaping it. Even when you don’t mean to. Sometimes you find a shape the way a blind man studies a face. Other times you know the shape at the outset and move your hands to mold the tale you choose to tell. Neither way is better than the other. But the story never doesn’t have a shape. A story always has structure, even when you resist such taxonomy.

6. The Story Is A Map; Plot Is The Route You Choose

A story is so much more than the thing you think it is. I lay down a map, that map has a host of possibilities. Sights unseen. Unexpected turns. The plot is just the course I… well, plot upon that map. It’s a sequence. Of events. Of turns. Of landmarks. The story goes beyond mere sequence. The story is about what I’ll experience. About who I’ll meet. The story is the world, the characters, the feel, the time, the context. Trouble lies in conflating plot with story. (Even though I’ve done it here already. See how easy it is to do?)

7. On The Subject Of Originality

The storyteller will find no original plots. But original stories are limitless. It’s like LEGO blocks. Go buy a box of LEGO bricks and you’ll discover that you have no unique pieces — by which I mean, these are the same pieces that everybody gets. But how you arrange them is where it gets interesting. That’s where it’s all fingerprints and snowflakes and unicorn scat. Plot is just a building block. Story is that which you build.

8. The Bridge Between Author And Audience

The audience wants to feel connected to the story. They want to see themselves inside it. Whether as mirror image or as doppelganger (or as sinister mustachio’ed Bizarroworld villain!). The story draws a line between the storyteller and the audience — you’re letting them see into you and they’re unknowingly finding you inside them. Uhh, not sexually, of course. You little dirty birdies, you.

9. But Also, Fuck The Audience Right In Its Ear

The audience isn’t stupid. It just doesn’t know what it wants. Oh, it thinks it knows. The desires of the audience are ever at war with the story’s needs, and the story’s needs are, in a curious conundrum, the audience’s needs. You read that right: this means it’s the audience versus the audience, with the storyteller as grim-faced officiant. In this struggle, fiction is born. The conflict of audience versus writer and audience versus itself is the most fundamental conflict of them all. The audience wants the protagonist to be happy, to be well. They want things to work out. They want conflict to resolve. The story cannot have these things and still be a good story. Good story thrives on protagonists in pain. On things failing to go the way everyone hopes. On what is born from conflict and struggle, not merely from the resolution. The audience wants a safety blanket. It’s the storyteller’s job to take that safety blanket and choke them with it until they experience a profound narrative orgasm. … did I just compare storytelling to erotic asphyxiation? I did, didn’t I? Eeesh. Let’s just pretend I said something else and move on.

10. No Tale Survives A Vacuum Of Conflict

Conflict is the food that feeds the reader. It’s a spicy hell-broth that nourishes. A story without conflict is a story without story. As the saying goes, there’s no ‘there’ there. The storyteller has truly profound powers, though: he can create conflict in the audience by making them feel a battle of emotions, by driving them forward with mystery, by angering them. The storyteller operates best when he’s a little bit of a dick.

11. The Battle Between Tension and Release

Tension is how you ramp to conflict, how you play with it, how you maneuver around it, how you tap-dance up to the cliff’s edge, do a perilous pirouette, and pull back from the precipice. You’re constantly tightening the screws. Escalation of tension is how a story builds. From bad to worse. From worse to it can’t get any worse. From it can’t get any worse to, no, no, we were wrong, it’s still getting worse because now I’m being stampeded by horses that are also covered in burning napalm. But it isn’t just a straight line from bad to awful. It rises to a new plateau, then falls. Having just witnessed it, birth is a great (if gooey) analog. Each contraction has its own tension and release, but the contractions also establish a steady pattern upward. Some have said narrative arcs are sexual, ejaculatory, climactic. True, in some ways. But birth has more pain. More blood. More mad euphoria. And stories always need those things.

12. Peaks, Valleys, Slashes And Whorls

It’s not just tension. All parts of a story are subject to ups and downs. Rhythm and pacing are meaningful. A good story is never a straight line. The narrative is best when organically erratic. One might suggest that a story’s narrative rhythm is its fingerprint: unique to it alone.

13. In A Story, Tell Only The Story

The story you tell should be the story you tell. Don’t wander far afield. That’s not to say you cannot digress. Digressions are their own kind of peak (or, in many cases, valley). But those digressions serve the whole. Think of stories then not as one line but rather, a skein of many lines. Lines that come together to form a pattern, a blanket, a shirt, a hilarious novelty welcome mat. Only lines that serve the end are woven into play. Digressions, yes. Deviations, no.

14. Big Ideas Do Well In Small Spaces

The audience cannot relate to big ideas. A big idea is, well, too big. Like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. Or Unicron, the giant Transformer-that-is-also-a-planet. (I wonder if anyone ever calls him “Unicorn,” and if so, does that irritate him?) You must go macro to micro. Big ideas are shown through small stories: a single character’s experience through the story is so much better than the 30,000-foot-view.

15. Backstory Is A Frozen Lake Whose Ice Is Wafer Thin

Backstory in narrative — and, ultimately, exposition in general — is sometimes a grim necessity, but it is best to approach it like a lake of thin ice. Quick delicate steps across to get to the other side. Linger too long or grow heavy in the telling and the ice will crack and you will plunge into the frigid depths. And then you get hypothermia. And then you will be eaten by an Ice Hag. True story.

16. Characters Are The Vehicle That Carry Us Into (And Through) The Tale

The best stories are the stories of people, and that means it’s people — characters — that get us through the story. They are the dune buggies and Wave Runners on which the audience rides. Like Yoda on Luke’s back. Above all else, a story must have interesting characters, characters who the audience can see themselves in, even if only in a small way. Failing that, what’s the point?

17. Villains Have Mothers

Unless we’re talking about SkyNet, villains were children once upon a time. Which means they have mothers. Imagine that: even the meanest characters have mothers, mothers who may even have loved them once. They’re people, not mustache-twirling sociopaths born free from a vagina made of fiery evil. Nobody sees themselves as a villain. We’re all solipsistic. We’re all the heroes of our own tales. Even villains.

18. Heroes Have Broken Toys

Just as villains see themselves doing good, heroes are capable of doing or being bad. Complexity of character — believable complexity — is a feature, not a bug. Nothing should be so simple as unswerving heroism, nor should it be as cut-and-dry as straight-up-malefic motherfuckery. Black and white grows weary. More interesting is how dark the character’s many shades of gray may become before brightening.

19. Strip Skin Off Bones To See How It Works

A story can be cut to a thin slice of steak and still be juicy as anything. To learn how to tell stories, tell small stories as well as large ones. Find a way to tell a story in as few beats as possible. Look for its constituent parts. Put them together, take them apart. See how it plays and lays. Some limbs are vestigial.

20. Beginnings Are For Assholes…

The audience begins where you tell them. They don’t need to begin at the beginning. If I tell the story of a Brooklynite, I don’t need to speak of his birth, or the origins of Brooklyn, or how the Big Bang barfed up asteroids and dinosaurs and a flock of incestuous gods. You start where it matters. You start where it’s most interesting. You begin as late in the tale as you can. The party guest who comes late is always the most interesting one. Even still, it’s worth noting…

21. …If You Jump Too Fast Into Waters Too Deep And The Audience Drowns

Jump too swiftly into a narrative and the story grows muddled. We have to become invested first. Go all high-karate-action and we have no context for the characters who are in danger, and no context means we don’t care, and if we don’t care then we’re already packing our bags in the first five minutes or five pages. The audience always needs something very early to get their hands around. This always comes back to the character. Give them reason to care right at the gate. Otherwise, why would they walk through it?

22. Treat Place Like Character

For setting to matter, it must come alive. It must be made to get up and dance, so shoot at its feet. It has a face. It has a personality. It has life. When setting becomes character, the audience will care.

23. Always Ask, Why Do I Want To Tell This?

Storytellers tell specific stories for a reason. You want to scare the kids around a campfire. You want to impress your friends with your exploits. You want to get in somebody’s pants. You hope to make someone cry, or make them cheer, or convey to them a message. Know why you’re telling it. Know what its about — to you above all else, because then you can show everybody else what it’s about. Find that invisible tether that ties you to the story. That tether matters.

24. It’s Okay To Bury The Lede

Every story is about something. Man’s inhumanity to man. How history repeats itself. How karate-ghosts are awesome and how you don’t fuck with a karate-ghost. But you don’t need to slap the audience about the head and neck with it. The truth of the story lives between the lines. This is why Jesus invented “subtext.”

25. Writing Is A Craft, But Storytelling Is An Art

Writing isn’t magic. Writing is math. It’s placing letters and words and sentences after one another to form a grand equation. Writing is the abracadabra — the power word made manifest — but the story that results is the magic. That equation we piece together tells a tale and the arrangement that leads to that tale is where the true art lies, because it takes an ice scraper to pretense and throws an invisible-yet-present tow line from present to past. Writing is craft and mechanics. Storytelling is art and magic.

* * *

Chuck Wendig’s book about writing and the writer’s life — CONFESSIONS OF A FREELANCE PENMONKEY is available now! Buy for Kindle (US), Kindle (UK), Nook, or PDF.

How To Tell If You’re A Writer

Are you a writer? You’ve no good way to tell.

I mean, this isn’t THE THING. You can’t just cook up the end of a coat hanger and dip it into a petri dish full of your blood. This shit’s not in your DNA. It’s in your soul.

Where it lurks like a worm at the heart of an apple.

Even still, you might be saying, “Dear Charles Q. Penmonkey, please tell me — what are the signs that I’m actually a writer? What crass, profane augury will present my ink-spattered destiny like a horny alpaca revealing its blood-engorged alpaca cloaca?”

I can help. Even though my name isn’t “Charles Q. Penmonkey.” Oh, also, alpacas don’t have cloacas. Only birds have cloacas. And Lindsay Lohan.

But then again I’m pretty sure she’s some kind of coke-brained sea bird anyway.

What I’m trying to say is, you’re just not sure if you happen to be a really truly honestly pinky-swear cross-your-heart motherfucking bonafide writer? That’s okay. I can help.

Look for these signs. They should stand out like turgid, necrotic erections.

You Proofread Everything

I proofread anything that crosses in front of my eyes. Diner placemats. Menus. Cereal boxes. The letter your Mom wrote me after I banged her sideways outside the closed-down Jamesway just past town. I remember reading a Chinese food menu some years ago and I was like, “Ha ha ha! Bef! Crap cakes! Sting beans! Ohh, haha, stupid language barriers, your comedy knows no bounds.”

But it goes beyond that, too. I’ll judge anything on its merit as a written story.

I’ll read a fucking classified ad and be like, “They could’ve trimmed the language there.” “Awk-ward!” *rolls eyes* “Oooh, poor word choice.” “Where’s the conflict? I mean, seriously. What is this? Amateur karaoke?”

Your First Friend Was Imaginary

Writers and storytellers live inside their heads. Our mindscapes are equal parts “desert oasis,” “distant moon prison,” and “comfy recliner.” But where it begins is with imaginary friends. I didn’t have just one. I had a whole unruly cabinet of the babbling invisible bastards. My cousin and I would act out these stories where we were constantly in contact with non-corporeal made-up motherfuckers — mermaids and morbidly obese people and crazy farmers and the list goes on and on.

Sometimes I think writing isn’t so much the need to tell stories as it is the need to lance our brain-blisters over and over again so that the multiple personalities have a place to go.

Of course, it doesn’t end when you grow up…

You Hold Conversations Between People That Don’t Exist

I literally do this when I’m in the shower (no, calm down, it does not involve soapy Onanism): I talk to myself. But not in one voice. In two. Or three. Some folks sing. Me, I host entire stage productions of dialogue sessions there in the shower. And these are characters who are currently in — or who will one day find their way into — my work. This isn’t healthy. If I did this in public, I’d be stoned. And not the good kind of stoned where I’m like, “Dude, that cloud looks like Jimi Hendrix giving birth to a rabbit,” but rather, pelted with unpleasant pebbles by suspicious townsfolk.

Writers don’t just talk to themselves. They talk to a cast of characters invented out of straight-up nothing.

You Are An Ink-Stained Notebook Whore

Me, I was always leaving pens in my pockets. Pens that got washed. Pens that, when washed, would explode and splurch ink all over my pants, as if I urinated the stuff. Oh, I also chewed the unholy shit out of all my pens like a rabid terrier. (Ahem, still do.) And it’s not just pens. Notebooks! So many notebooks. Some blank. Many filled. Heaps and piles and pyramids of notebooks. Some day they will excavate my home and find me — and seven dead cats — beneath them.

And I don’t even have any cats.

Writers are collectors. It’s not just about the pens or notebooks. We collect other books. Or iPad apps. Or technology in general. Or ancient Balinese facial dildos.

What, just me?

Whatever.

You Suspect Non-Readers Of Treachery Against The Human Race

John Waters — director, writer, weirdo, and all-around human kitschmaschine — famously said, “If you go home with somebody and they don’t have books, don’t fuck ’em.”

Writers hate non-readers. You are our enemies in this world. We refuse to believe that information can be conveyed in any other way besides books (or movies, or comics). We see you, we think: “Is he a Reptilian? If I were to go over there and rake his face with this salad fork, would I see greasy scales waiting underneath?” It’s like in ingrained distrust. A deep, soul-born hatred.

“You don’t have books? Then you are dead to me.”

It’s nonsense, of course. But whoever said we had to be right about the crazy shit we believe?

Your Brain Is Tuned To Some Mad, Intrusive Frequency

Earlier today, I saw this tweet from Will Hindmarch, fellow penmonkey:

“Back from the doctor’s again, where inspiration struck in the waiting room, as it sometimes does.”

It does! It does. He’s totally right. You know how sometimes you end up getting accidentally subscribed to e-mails or snail mail that jacked you onto some invasive list? “Jesus, why am I getting e-mails from the Fainting Goat Association Of Slovenia? And I keep getting shoeboxes of anthrax from some unnamed source.” Writers have been accidentally subscribed to this constant stream of ideas. We are bombarded by them, like protons fired at our mind-cores. (Pyoo! Pyoo!) We can’t shut them out. No way to tune out the inspiration except to clobber ourselves over the head with a skull-crushing boat anchor.

I think it might be why writers secretly drink so much. To dim the frequency.

You Know How You Would Do It Differently

Watch a movie. Read a book. Page through a comic. If you do this regularly and say to yourself, “I would do this differently,” and then proceed to tell whoever is nearest — wife, child, dog, stranger on a train, Darkseid — exactly how you would do it “your way” (translation: the right way), then hey, guess what? You. Writer.

You Are Attracted To Mates With Health Care

Everybody has their own metric of attraction. “Nice eyes. Firm lips. Legs from here to heaven’s door. A set of breeding hips like the shoulders of a Brahmin bull. A vagina that looks like a majestic pink peony.” One’s own axis of attraction can go to more abstract lengths, too. “I like a guy who’s nice to puppies.” “I like a gal with a little rough-and-tumble in her.” “I LIKE TO BANG DRAGONS IN THEIR DRAGON BUTTHOLES.”

Writers, though, we can smell health insurance on a potential mate the way that other animals can smell pheromones. It’s like Drakkar Noir or bacon grease: in its presence, we cannot control ourselves. “Hot dang, Dave, this chick I’m dating? I think she’s the one. She’s got such a low, sexy… deductible.”

So, if you’re out wandering in a mall and you suddenly find yourself tumescent whenever you pass someone who is clearly fortunate enough to have health care, then you better check thyself forst you wreck thyself. Because you might have a long and unfortunate penmonkey career ahead of you.

Your Desk Drawer Contains The Following:

Flask full of alcohol. Altoids tin full of some kind of illicit-but-not-illegal pills. Fountain pen. Other pens. Mechanical pencil. Random notebook pages full of useless dream transcriptions. Highlighters. Permanent markers. A mix tape from 1996. Beer caps. Wine corks. iPhone charging cord to an iPhone you may or may not own. Lint that smells of flopsweat. Lip balm. A favorite paperback with a hundred dog-eared pages and a thousand underlined sentences. A Hemingway buttplug (the beard tickles!). Post-It notes containing terrible ideas. A handgun. A noose. A little satchel containing all your hopes and dreams as a writer.

You’re Drinking Right Now, Aren’t You?

It’s okay. I won’t tell anybody. As long as you pour me a glass.

You Fucking Jolly Well Write, That’s How

You know how you can tell if you’re a writer? You write. Maybe not every day, but often enough where it’s a dominant activity, a thing-you-do rather than a thing-you-really-want-to-do. You write not because you have to but rather because you want to so bad you feel like an asshole not doing it. You know you’re a writer because whenever you’re doing anything else, you’re thinking about writing the same way a guy thinks about sex or an addict thinks about whatever drug or monkey gland he’s hooked on. You’re a writer because, even now, the first thought going through your head is, “Holy shit, I should really be writing.”

Your turn, cunning linguists. What is it that makes the writer a writer?

* * *

Chuck Wendig’s book about writing and the writer’s life — CONFESSIONS OF A FREELANCE PENMONKEY is available now! Buy for Kindle (US), Kindle (UK), Nook, or PDF.

Transmissions From Baby-Town: “Send Sleep, Vodka, And Bacon”

*PSSSHHcracklehisss*

“– you hear me? The stuff’s everywhere — black tar — came pouring out of diapers — could lay shingles with this stuff OH GOD HERE COMES MORE OF IT –“

*kkkkpsshhhhfsssss*

“– haven’t slept in days — seeing things — cherubs with wings, but not like out of a greeting card but like out of the damn Bible — so many eyes — fiery swords — chubby cheeks –“

*weeooooFSSHHHHcrackle*

“– think they’re cute but they’re deadly –“

“– energy levels low, rations dwindling –“

“– everywhere you go it’s always there watching waiting peeing –“

“– alert, alert, this thing’s got witch nails, it killed Samson, merciful Jesus it killed Samson! –“

“– we thought we controlled it, but no, no, it controls us! –“

” — such hubris, we thought we understood the parameters –“

*KKKKFSSSHHHHHBSSHHHH*

“– OH SWEET SID AND MARTY KROFFT IT’S CRYING AGAIN WHICH MEANS ITS HUNGRY — “

” — send sleep — vodka — baaaacon –“

CARRIER LOST

The Littlest Penmonkey Beseeches You

The baby is well.

He’s covered in the acne of an 8th grade math nerd.

He’s still trying to tear off his own face with his komodo claws.

He still looks like we enrolled him in Baby Fight Club.

He sometimes smiles. He likes dancing to the Beastie Boys. His poop has transitioned from the foul black hell-slurry to something that looked like swamp mud to something that looks like deli mustard.

He’s good. And we’re pretty good, too. I mean, no, we don’t sleep for shit. And we’ve learned that the most elemental functions of human life are precious — eating, showering, your own bathroom needs, they’re all second to the baby. He’s like a power-mad deity, this kid. He’s suddenly been dropped into the universe and placed not at its periphery but at its golden nougaty center.

The biggest issue I’m wrestling with is finding time to write and blog. It comes in fits and starts.

Anyway, the thing is, being “new parents,” we are of course on the receiving end of buckets of unsolicited advice, so I figured, why not just lie back and think of England? Why not go with it?

Thus, here I am, flipping the switch from unsolicited to solicited.

Hit me with your best shot. (No, not shit: the baby’s already doing that, thanks.) Best advice for parents with a newborn — double points if it’s advice that goes toward helping this penmonkey still monkey with his pens. I know you parents have collected wisdom stored up in your brains and it yearns to have the cherry popped. Pop it. Break the seal. Rupture the fontanelle. Let it all spill out.

And thank you in advance for doing so.

Oh! And happy Memorial Day.

Penmonkey: Bonus Content In The Form Of Tasty-Ass Wallpapers

CONFESSIONS OF A FREELANCE PENMONKEY is available now.

In the meantime, why not nab some awesome wallpapers done in support of the release by the ever-awesome Amy Houser? Check ’em out and download away:

BIZARRO MONKEY: 800 x 600

BIZARRO MONKEY: 1024 x 768

BIZARRO MONKEY: 1600 x 1200

WHISKEY MONKEY: 800 x 600

WHISKEY MONKEY: 1024 x 768

WHISKEY MONKEY: 1600 x 1200

WRITER’S PRAYER: 800 x 600

WRITER’S PRAYER: 1024 x 768

WRITER’S PRAYER: 1600 x 1200

Flash Fiction Challenge: “The Unexpected Guest”

You may note that, oops, last Friday, I didn’t post a flash fiction challenge.

It’s not because I don’t love you. But rather, because the timer on my wife’s uterine oven went off prematurely, signaling that the brownies we thought were still baking were now ready.

Which means our son was born two weeks early.

So, getting a flash fiction challenge up was not on my “to-do” list that day.

BUT WE’RE BACK. After all, the baby’s out, so he’s pretty much on his own now. What? Tough love, baby. It’s a hard world. I duct taped a little spear into his rubbery hands and painted him up like Braveheart.

He’ll figure it out.

In the meantime, let’s sign up a hot tasty new flash fiction challenge, one with a little extra juice on the line in the form of FREE E-BOOKS.

The Challenge

Flash fiction, 1000 words. The subject?

An unexpected guest.”

Interpret that as you see fit.

Any genre is apropos.

You have one week. I’ll want all entries done up and linked to here by noon (EST) next Friday (6/3/11).

You know the drill: write it on your own blog, link back to here if you’re so kind, then drop a link to your blog here in the comments section of this very post. Ta-da!

The Free E-Books

Assuming we have more than 10 entries, I’ll pick my favorite 10 out of the bunch. Those writers can have a free copy of either IRREGULAR CREATURES or CONFESSIONS OF A FREELANCE PENMONKEY in PDF, Kindle, or Nook format. Just make sure to have your tales in under the deadline.

And that, squids and squallops, is all she wrote.