…Because Someone Has to Sort out Eeyore.
I’ve been asked by Christina L. Rozelle, author of The Truth About Mud (the second-longest story in my troll anthology), to post “Why I Write.” If you have blog-hopped here from there, thank you for coming. If you have hopped here from elsewhere, please hop on over to the link above. (Not now! Sheesh!)
Of course, there are lots of answers to Christina’s question — a different one for every day. A month ago I might have answered glibly, “Because it’s fun to wantonly use adverbs,” and run away — figuratively, of course, since my ass was firmly planted in this chair and it was hot, so my elbows were hopelessly stuck to the desk. (They still are.)
Here’s me, showing my panties to a cabbage
I started writing (actually printing) as a four-year-old, when I made up stories about the family that lived in my closet — the closet I shared with my little sister. In that family, everyone had their own room, even the Mommy and Daddy (why should they have to share, after all?) and a sock doll named Eegie and Tuffy the cat. (Who, it must be noted, had the biggest room.)
Today, I could say I write to bask in the glow of reviews (which, frankly, are few and far between, possibly due to my habit of aggressive non-promotion). Yesterday’s new Hyperlink from Hell reviews, my first on Amazon UK, included such head-swellers as:
“The cleverest piece of fiction I’ve ever read.”
(and)
“Somewhere in the multiverse there is a version of me who hasn’t read this book. I feel sorry for her.”
A couple of days ago, if asked why I write, I might have said “Because writing and reading are comforting” and referenced my novel-in-progress, Riding the Bull, the sequel to the above-lauded (and larded) book. In RTB, a character relates this quote, from A. A. Milne’s Piglet, in The House at Pooh Corner:
“Supposing a tree fell down, Pooh, while we were underneath it?”
“Supposing it didn’t,” said Pooh after careful thought.
(See? Comforting!)
Here’s that same character explaining why she became a psychiatrist:
It’s partly thanks to Pooh and Piglet—and lonely, depressed “Eeyore” the donkey—that I became a psychiatrist. I made a list of promises to my mother before she died; the first was to “Take care of Daddy.” The last was, “And if nobody fixes Eeyore, Mommy, I’ll sort him out.”
I was six. I still have that list, and everything’s checked off but Eeyore.
So I write because it’s comforting, and to make things right.
I also write because I’m kinda smart (the Internet says my IQ is 134, so it must be true!), and because I’m kinda dumb (too befuddled to be a waiter, for example; I really admire people who can do that), and because it’s fascinating — to me, at least — to see those two sides of me duke it out on the page. (This is not a pretty spectator sport; it’s hard to see exactly what’s going on — kind of like two bulldogs fighting in a bag.)*
My brain works, when it works, in mysterious ways. I am a curious sort. Just yesterday I was wondering if anyone else’s panties suddenly, irrevocably roll down when they stretch, yawn, or sneeze — and the median age when people give up the valiant fight and start wiping from the front. So I write to explore the gap between the odd way my mind works and the way individual readers’ minds work. I want to know if anyone “gets” me, I guess. (And if they do, I worry about them. I really do.)
But mostly I write for the money. I sold one book this month, so far. In Germany. I made .30 Euro. (Methinks I’ll buy a pony…!)
Or maybe a donkey.
I guess I must write… because it’s fun. Nothing else comes close. (Except, of course, painting pictures on a closet wall.)
*Please do not worry about the bulldogs. They aren’t real.
Peske’s “Little Girl in Red Dress” courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
Other illustrations are Ernest Shepard’s drawings for A. A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh series.
Who Gives a Crap?
(Please bear with me; there’s a method to my “psychic shit” madness!)
Some of you know that I jokingly fancy myself a media psychic. That is, some strange, very specific things have happened on TV, online or on the radio not long after I thought or dreamed of them. Truth is, I’m almost 100% sure that they are coincidences — but they are freaky, nonetheless. I’m not claiming causation in either direction — just correlation.
Here’s one example: I had a nightmare, in which I was walking behind some friends in a supposedly haunted house. They were all spooked, but of course I was whining about not believing in ghosts and how stupid it all was, when I was grabbed by the clothes on the middle of my back — as if by a giant hand or maybe a grappling hook — and yanked backwards, twenty or thirty feet across the room. This scared the living shit out of me and I woke up.
That evening I was washing dishes and decided to turn the TV to a channel I never watched. I went back to the sink, but turned to look at a commercial — which was a scene from a new movie: the scene from my dream, exactly.
Oftentimes, I wake up with a strange word or sentence in my head, and that turns out to be meaningful during the day. Remember Quid Pro Ho? But these days, since I injured my arm and sleep with it in a sling, I wake up thinking “Careful… careful…careful.” Because, if I move just wrong trying to get out of bed, the pain is faintingly sharp.
This morning, my first thought after “Careful… careful…careful” was about toilet paper. That’s not so surprising; after all, what do you do first when you get up? Pee. But today, sitting there, I started pitying the forests of the world, and wondering if there was a really sensible alternative to toilet paper — one that wouldn’t use more precious resources, such as water, or cause worse environmental and public health problems. I wished Turkish plumbing was better, so we could flush toilet paper instead of it ending up in landfills. There, poor people are exposed to the unspeakable as they try to salvage something to sell to recyclers — thus spreading filth, and possibly disease, far and wide. So I started wondering if composting toilets compost the toilet paper, too, and next thing you know I’m off the john and online to look it up. “But first let’s just check facebook…”
where we find this, the original sit-in, for “Who Gives a Crap” toilet paper:
So, do I think these coincidences happen for a reason? No. Can I make them meaningful? Yes. For example, I can pledge to give all my 2014 profits from the paperback version of “Hyperlink from Hell” to the charity that “Who Gives a Crap” toilet paper supports with 50% of their profits: WaterAid. Their mission is to “promote and secure poor people’s rights and access to safe water, improved hygiene and sanitation”, worldwide. What better charity could my toilet-obsessed ghosts support? What other books have parts dedicated to poo? (remember Part Two: Shit with Wings?) I’ll also set it up so that anyone who buys the paperback in 2014 gets the ebook for a discount (for free, if I can manage that).
For those who don’t live in the US, here’s the global page for Wateraid, which will take you where you need to go, in case you’d like to make a direct deposit. For the holidays.
If you are lucky enough to live in Australia, you can do even more. You can really give a crap, because “Who Gives a Crap” toilet paper can be delivered to your door.
Quid Pro HoHoHo!
Secrets-of-the-Universe
John Collier’s
“Priestess of Delphi”
Question:
What does someone do with the time someone intended to spend putting up decorations, cooking, etc., when one has a bum arm and is forbidden to do any of the above? (Put up a tree? I can’t open a f&cking tuna can! I can’t yank the Band-aids off my own ass, the ones covering my two-a-day injection sites!)
Answer:
Someone finally joins Quora, and contemplates the secrets of the universe in question and answer form. (Someone also gets her husband to open the f&cking tuna. The tree? Ha ha ha ha ha… And the Band-aids will fall off eventually. Probably into the toilet. Clogging it up. You think Band-aids can’t clog up a toilet? We once had a plumber accuse us of flushing so much dental floss that it clogged the pipes. We did not flush dental floss. Not even a single strand. Someone did, though. But who? When? And did they cackle maniacally while they did so? Could they see the future, or know what damage that floss would wrought? We will never know.)
So, I probably won’t be asking or answering a lot of questions over at Quora, because this is the kind of question I want to ask:
“Who flushed all the f&cking dental floss, and why do I care that the plumber believes it was me?”
Mostly, I will be skulking around Quora like a one-armed, Band-aid-buttocked Bandit. It is my way. But I wonder how the inhabitants of planet Quora would answer Jimmie’s Secrets-of-the-universe questions, in Hyperlink from Hell. Remember this? It’s Jimmie’s lament that, given the opportunity to ask God anything he wanted, he’d wasted that golden moment:
I’d blown my chance to ask Al some gritty, secrets-of-the-universe type questions, like “Why do flies always buzz around the center of a room?” or “How can blind people tell when they’re done wiping?”
Well, You can’t just ask them, can You?
I’m deadly serious. Wipe that smile off your face. And while you’re at it, I could use some help in the bathroom.
No, no; not that.
It’s just…
I can’t floss my f&cking teeth.
The Masses need Glasses
Dear Universe,
This post was meant to be about author J.A. Konrath.
Well, not about J.A. Konrath, himself, more about this blog post of his, called “Zen and the Art of Bitching“, which reminded me of this part in Hyperlink from Hell where God starts bitching about all the lazy, ungrateful humans who sit on their asses and blame Him for their troubles. That is: they want Him to do everything; they won’t take responsibility for their lives. You know, like people who won’t wear seatbelts and blame Him for not deploying the airbag, as they sail through the windshield and into Intensive Care. If they’re lucky.
So, naturally, I ended up on YouTube watching this apologetic book trailer for Blinders Keepers, a book I’d never heard of by an author I’d never heard of, either. (I may be the last in the universe. I usually am. Damn You, Universe!)
I checked out the book’s blurb, on Amazon:
Collapse, chaos, confusion, rioting, looting. And that’s the good news!
America is coming apart and the President can do nothing to stop it. But 23-year-old Noah Tass has his own problems. Stuck his entire life in the hayseed capital of the Bible Belt after his father abandoned him 18 years ago, he has no future, all his friends are losers, his job is a dead end, his mother is stark raving mad, and his sister is a meth head stripper.
It was time to bail! Time to strike out a new path, to discover America, and kick start his life. Noah leaves Missouri and for a year truly experiences the adventure of a lifetime. But the country is one big loony bin and he ends up in the sock puppet theater of contemporary American life, inhabited by a deranged blundering president, brutal agents of the ATF, FBI and NSA — men who kill first and ask questions later — and an underground of wild and wacky but endearing freaks who are trying to overthrow the existing order.
Blinders Keepers is social-political satire in the tradition of Jonathan Swift, Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller, but revved up and spit-shined to take on the historic new levels of absurdity and dysfunction of the 21st Century. It is one young man’s laugh-out-loud struggle to survive the epic disintegration of the American Dream.
Next, I downloaded the sample to My Precious (Kindle), because I can’t afford to buy any new books until, like, 2045, and I started reading it. And that’s when I realized the title (Blinders Keepers) had special meaning to me. Because when I read this sentence:
“As I stand before this great body and look at the faces of those who have dedicated themselves…”
I saw this, instead:
“As I stand before this great body and look at the feces of those who have defecated themselves…”
So this post is about needing glasses.
Now… who can I blame for that?
Doctor Pooh
Dear Universe:
Someone wrote a post, somewhere,
Where it was, I do not care.
I wasn’t in my underwear,
(Because I do not wear it)
The post was asking everyone
The favorite line they’d writ, bar none,
But I was lazy; I said “Screw it.”
(“I’d much rather talk ’bout Pooh lit.)
There. Now that it’s perfectly obvious that a poet I shall never be… How about that Winnie the Pooh? Huh? Am I right? After all these years, I’m still lovin’ the Pooh, which rhymes with Who, which reminds me that Doctor Who just turned 50 (the special’s tonight!) — but like The Doctor himself, that’s neither here nor there.
So, here’s the thing I‘m gonna ask in a post somewhere:
“What’s your comfort book?”
Makes sense, right? Books for every occasion…
Feeling happy? (Any book for you)
Feeling grievous? (Harry Potter, read two)
Feeling angry? (Catch-22)
Feeling anxious? (Only Pooh will do)
Need convincing? Read this, from The House at Pooh Corner, wherein Piglet asks:
“Supposing a tree fell down, Pooh, when we were underneath it?”
“Supposing it didn’t,” said Pooh after careful thought.
Anyone out there unfamiliar with the real Pooh? If your experience is limited to Disney, or indeed any cartoon version, I pity you. (Take one Pooh, and call me in the morning.)
I, myself, have two tattered volumes from my childhood: The House at Pooh Corner and When We Were Very Young. I borrowed them from my folks’ house and never took them back. Like Pooh with a honey pot, I was greedy and couldn’t bear to share. Not sure why I didn’t grab the lot. Maybe I couldn’t find the others. Maybe my greed would only take me so far down the path of petty criminality. Maybe I just got stuck in the door on the way out.
Oh, bother! Why did I tell you that? (I’ll chalk it up to Pooh Confessions.)
Well, if we’re talking Pooh confessions:
If you’re feeling fretful, too,
Cuz you can’t go to the loo,
Do what I do, read some Pooh,
(Yup, just grin and bear it.)
Review: “Bottling Farts,” by Donald Rump
Yay! Book reviews are back! It’s The Instant Review Challenge, book 9!
A reminder: The Instant Review Challenge is just me, downloading ebooks, reading them, and writing reviews for Amazon — all in less than an hour. But not just any ebooks. I’m reviewing the books written for J.A. Konrath’s challenge to write, edit, format and publish a story, complete with author-generated cover… in 8 hours. And while I’m explaining things: Did you guys know that so many of the Challenge books would be erotica? I’m too em-bare-assed to review that, so I’m not gonna. (Sorry.) Is it getting hot in here?
Here’s the cover for today’s featured book, which is $.99 at the time of posting, 
and my review:
Flat-out Flatulent Frivolity!
I must admit to being disappointed, at least at first. Despite its no-nonsense title and serious cover, Bottling Farts utterly fails as a self-help book for chemical warfare aficionados of the survivalist persuasion. Between me and you, there’s just not enough “How to.”
But then, maybe the world doesn’t need another How to Weaponize Your Farts manual. So it’s a good thing. A nasty, smelly, naughty, not-for-kids good thing. I suspect the author, Donald Rump, is all of those things, too.
So if it’s not a how-to guide, what is Bottling Farts?
If you think a story about farts-as-mind-control is funny, it’s flat-out flatulent frivolity.
If you’ve got the urge to see a naughty kid give an odiferous adult a whiff of his own medicine, it’s the gas.
Butt… butt…
The ending stinks. Also the middle.
Stinks so good.
(5 smelly stars)
A(nother) Tin Soldier Story
This week, Critique Circle’s blog is featuring me (!) in their Authors’ Spotlight series. A unique writers’ community, CC has played a supporting role in raising my firstborn novel, “Hyperlink from Hell.” Please check out my cheeky post over there, “Critique Circle: My ‘Single Parent’ Support Group.”
(Full disclosure: The following is an unsolicited, shameless plug, for which I get paid nothing whatsoever): Critique Circle has been one of “Writer’s Digest’s 101 Best Writing Websites” four years running, so if you’re a writer looking for a great critique group, you can read about CC — and join, too, for free — at critiquecircle.com.) If you do join, drop me a note over there anytime. I’m the “critter” known as “Lindymoon.”
Meanwhile, in honor of our growing local tortoise population, here’s a reprise of one of the more popular posts, replete with updates:
“A(nother) Tin Soldier Story”
The good news: The toilet in my front yard is gone!
The bad news: No one knows where it went, or what it’s doing now.
(The worse news: as of today, there’s another toilet out front. No shit.)
Not losing sleep over that, but it did get me wondering: What happens to all those “things” that come into our lives, and then go? What’s become of them? Is there a story in it? A Tin Soldier Story?
You remember The Brave Tin Soldier, right? It’s the bittersweet tale of a toy soldier who is lost, then found, then reunited with his lady love (who really deserved her own story) and then…
But that would be telling (someone else’s) tales. How about one of my own? It could be about the tortoises we’ve rescued over the years. Some were plucked gingerly from country roads, where (intermittently) whizzing traffic would surely have made a dent in their survival rate. Did you know that tortoises hiss, like snakes? Well, they do. And they aren’t fond of finding themselves suddenly airborne and deposited on the other side of the road — a destination they’d planned on getting to in half an hour or so, and where they’ll have to wait ages for their own lady loves, with nothing to do but fret about how they look.
(Tortoise rescue update: Yesterday, my better half rescued another one. It’s not the first to roll down the hill and land on our driveway, like Jack and Jill with built-in body armour, and probably won’t be the last. Now it’s back munching wildflowers, with a view of the sea. I imagine it humming the tortoise equivalent of “The Sound of Music.” We’ve noticed baby tortoises up there, too. Unbelievably cute. Probably humming backup.)
Turns out, tales of tortoises make me fret. How about a different tale — a tale of loss and regret and a squandered chance for redemption?
A story about Rosie.
Once upon a time, my mother and I were sorting through old boxes of old things in the old house, and we came upon an old stuffed doll. The doll had a plush body and hood, as if she were wearing a permanent pink snowsuit. She had a rubber face and a chewed-off nose. When I took the doll — which I had no recollection of — into my hands, I had the urge to sniff her. So I did. She smelled musty and sweet, like old chocolate. To my great surprise, I suddenly blurted out, “Rosie!” And as I hugged Rosie tight, my mother said, “Oh yeah, that was yours when you were little.”
What a wonderful reunion, right? Bet you think I still have her, that we’ll never be parted, that we snuggle up on long winter nights when my husband’s out of town.
Nope. I have no idea what we did with her, but I can guess. I must have cherished the moment, then tossed Rosie onto the heap. I truly regret that, but she was a doll, not a tortoise.
Still, I can’t help wondering: Where is Rosie now? What is she doing?
Maybe there is a story in it.
If Miss Jane Austen Came to Tea… (a poem, yours free with rant and video)
Before the rant, let’s rave:
Now we rant:
Dear Miss Austen,
Why, why did you write “Mansfield Park”? And why did I suffer through it? All the way to the end?
Because you tricked me. You tricked me with your other books. You used Persuasion against me, appealed to my Pride and Prejudice, my Sense and Sensibility. So I guess you could say (if you were alive, and boy would you look old) that I’m a fan of your other novels — despite your suppression of oppression, your dismissal of many aspects of real life, of current events in the world outside Society. You know, silly little things like war, and slavery, and more important stuff like going commando, and just where everyone was having a poo, and what they used — or didn’t use, ewww — for toilet paper.
But man! Mansfield Park?
True, some of your trademark wit and insight percolates through its peat-like pages, but it’s purveyed solely by the narrator, and that’s a pity. No witty repartee between the sexes? No misunderstandings to wring our hands over? No pent-up passions worth roto-rooting for? (OK, they’re there — but so pent-up they’d need colon cleansing to relieve them.)
For characters to root for, our choice is between a few good-natured-but-slightly-frivolous theater lovers, and sanctimonious rumps. Sorry, I mean “frumps,” and by that I mean “Fanny” and her male counterpart, Edmund, for whom — despite the fact that they’re first cousins and he thinks of her as a sister — we are expected to wish wedded bliss. (I know first cousins marrying was not unusual, then — but you set up the union as undesirable based on the fact they were cousins and thereby upped the “ewww” factor, and then just said “never mind!”)
Every scene-worthy event, every pivotal plot point worth watching in this novel is played offstage. The reward for plodding through the whole thing was to have the loose ends tied up in an anal afterword, in drier prose than bogged down the previous (seemingly thousands of) pages. Eventually, we are told, Edmund realizes he might as well give good cousin Fanny a righteous poke.
But I forgive you, Jane, not just for dishy Mr Darcy’s sake, but because I see parallels in the universe of my own novel, Hyperlink from Hell. I had my reasons for hiding what was really going on, and for (literally) turning off current events in the book — but only readers can say whether or not I was justified, or successful. I hope so, and hope I’m not a hypocrite. Or hypercrit, as the case may be.
So far, so good. Reviews are raves. I’m still waiting for the Hyper rant. And no one is using its pages for toilet paper — not yet. Not until it comes out in two-ply paperback. It’s still an eBook. (Ewwww.)
It’s marvelous that, 200 years later, your books are still around for me to rant at. So in honor of you, Miss Austen, I have penned a little poem.
(Gentle readers, please read this upwind, then tell me why I am full of shit about Mansfield Park. Change my mind.)
If Miss Jane Austin came to tea,
I wonder what she’d think of me.
She’d see right through a mask, or three,
Of paltry pride, pomposity,
And focus, with her Eagle Eye,
On satire, madness, custard pie.
And when her slated wit had done,
And I, slumped down, the Trodden One,
Raised to my lips a quiv’ring bun,
Miss Austen, with a little nod,
(Tapping a foot, neatly shod),
Would smile and ask me, “Hon?
“You sure you need another one?”
And meanwhile, all about us lay
Humanity in disarray,
A battle here, and slavery there,
While we ate buns without a care
And pondered scandals close to home
(With just a passing nod to Rome).
A Tin Soldier Story
The good news: The toilet in my front yard is gone!
The bad news: No one knows where it went, or what it’s doing now.
Not losing sleep over that, but it did get me wondering: What happens to all those “things” that come into our lives, and then go? What’s become of them? Is there a story in it? A Tin Soldier Story?
You remember The Brave Tin Soldier, right? It’s the bittersweet tale of a toy soldier who is lost, then found, then reunited with his lady love (who really deserved her own story) and then…
But that would be telling (someone else’s) tales. How about one of my own? It could be about the tortoises I’ve rescued over the years. Some were plucked gingerly from country roads, where (intermittently) whizzing traffic would surely have made a dent in their survival rate. Did you know that tortoises hiss, like snakes? Well, they do. And they aren’t fond of finding themselves suddenly airborne and deposited on the other side of the road — a destination they’d planned on getting to in half an hour or so, and where they’ll have to wait ages for their own lady loves, with nothing to do but fret about how they look.
Turns out, tales of tortoises make me fret. How about a different tale — a tale of loss and regret and a squandered chance for redemption?
A story about Rosie.
Once upon a time, my mother and I were sorting through old boxes of old things in the old house, and we came upon an old stuffed doll. The doll had a plush body and hood, as if she were wearing a permanent pink snowsuit. She had a rubber face and a chewed-off nose. When I took the doll — which I had no recollection of — into my hands, I had the urge to sniff her. So I did. She smelled musty and sweet, like old chocolate. To my great surprise, I suddenly blurted out, “Rosie!” And as I hugged Rosie tight, my mother said, “Oh yeah, that was yours when you were little.”
What a wonderful reunion, right? Bet you think I still have her, that we’ll never be parted, that we snuggle up on long winter nights when my husband’s out of town.
Nope. I have no idea what we did with her, but I can guess. I must have cherished the moment, then tossed Rosie onto the heap. I truly regret that, but she was a doll, not a tortoise.
Still, I can’t help wondering: Where is Rosie now? What is she doing?
Maybe there is a story in it.
Toilet Karma
People:
All my life, no matter where I’ve lived, I’ve assumed there were two kinds of people in the world:
- People who leave their old toilets in the front yard, and
- People who do not.
All my life, I’ve believed I was number 2. But people, that has changed. There’s a toilet in my front yard… and IT’S NOT MINE!
That makes 3 kinds of people, people! And that will not do!
How, how did we come to this lowly state?
Toilet Karma, that’s how.
Let me just back-up a bit — to last week, when I took a walk. Our neighborhood is a mixed one, which here (on the Aegean coast) means “rich folks’ dead-eyed summer villas interspersed with villagers’ honest, lively, chicken-friendly houses.” Sort of a squalid-splendor-meets-splendid-squalor sort of thing.
On my 27-minute walk, I saw 1 cemetery, 8 dogs, 15 cats, about 100 chickens (I lost count), 4 cows, and 3 yard toilets.
3! And not 1 of them had been made into a planter.
Naturally, when the Great Fisherman Boo came home from fishing, I gave him the bad news, never knowing that…
Wait. I’m plunging ahead too fast. Telling, not showing. I forgot the dialog:
Lindy Moone: “I saw three toilets today.”
The Great Fisherman Boo: “What?”
Lindy: “Three! Toilets! In people’s yards!”
The Great Boo: “What do you want me to do about it?”
Lin: “Well, can’t you..? No, no, I suppose you can’t do anything. You can’t even say anything. I just wish they’d at least throw them in the Dumpster.” (Here is where I tell you that we don’t have individual, weekly trash pick-up like most places in the States. We have shared Dumpsters, like the ones apartment complexes have. There’s one in front of our house, emptied daily.)
Boo: “The Dumpster. Yeah.”
L: “Yeah.”
B: “I’m gonna take a shower. You need to pee first?”
Fast forward 2 days, to when I spy the toilet. In our front yard. Next to the (emptied) Dumpster.
Lindy: “Did you say anything to anyone about the toilets?”
Boo: “What do you think? No.”
Lin: “Did you see the toilet? By the Dumpster?”
B: “Yeah.”
L: “The trash guys didn’t take it.”
B: “Nope.”
L: “I guess it would mess up the truck, huh?”
B: “Yup.”
L. “F&*:(!”
B: “I’m gonna take a shower. You need to pee first?”
People: the toilet is still there. That makes 4 toilets on our street, and there is only 1 conclusion to reach:
There are 3 kinds of people in the world:
- People who leave their old toilets in the front yard,
- People who do not, and
- People who need people to remove someone else’s toilet from their front yard.
And I am no longer number 2. I am number 3.
Belly-up! 
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