Sorry?

As you may have noticed, it's been about three weeks since I've posted anything. And guess what?

I'm not really posting anything today, either. Just this general acknowledgment of my own suckiness.

This is not a great time of year for regularly producing new content, between work and Christmas and Thanksgiving. I'm hoping to get at least two or three more blog posts in yet this year, but no promises.

In the meantime, if you're really wanting to read something I've written, there's always Lindworm.

Currently I'm prepping for some changes in the New Year, so stay tuned for more info about that, and also about Christmas sales!

Sorting the Seeds (Or Depression: An Analogy)

I’ve talked about this story type before, mainly in the context of shameless self promotion, but lately I’ve been thinking about what a good analogy it is for depression.

(Sometimes you try to write literary analyses, and you end up with angst-prose instead.  Deal with it.)

They give you an ocean and a teaspoon. They make you a lumberjack with a blown-glass ax. And you just feel trapped.

It’s not about saving a princess, this set of impossible tasks. You don’t get anything when you’re done, except for getting to be done, except you’re never done. You try and you try and you never get anywhere.

Some days I feel like Sisyphus, and my entire self is the rock I can’t roll up the hill.

I’m just so tired of being tired.

Imagine this.

You’re sitting on the floor surrounded by birdseed. You have to sort it by type, and you can’t do anything else, can’t even breathe, until it’s done. But all the seeds look the same.

Imagine this.

You’re sitting in a garden with a bowl full of rose seeds, and you have to plant them based on the color of the flowers they will someday produce.

Imagine this.

An ogre tells you to sort six bushels of chaff, and you don’t even know what chaff is. (You don’t even know what a bushel is.)

This is how it feels when your brain betrays you.

There’s some monster living in your head, demanding lonely monotony that never ends. And you want to be the hero but you can’t be till you’re done, and your heart is filled with unlimited chaff.

I am so sick of being trapped inside myself.

And maybe it’s bad because I’m bad, because don’t all the good guys have helpful ant friends?

Or maybe it’s hard because I am the ogre myself,  and also the prince, and possibly the damsel in distress.

So I sort and I sort the stupid seeds, and all I’ve ever wanted is just to be free.

It's been a long week

No regular blogs today, guys. Sorry. I've been really busy with some other things, including work on my latest poetry book, Small Scars, which should be available by late spring.

The post that was supposed to go out today was about fairy tales about tailors, so keep an eye out for that in the near-ish future. I'm afraid things are going to get a lot less regular here with the holidays approaching.

So today I'm just going to remind you that I'm publishing a book on Patreon, which costs $1/month to access. I'd really appreciate it if you could all take a look at the site and consider supporting me; I'm not going to claim that it's a great literary masterpiece, but I'd like to think it's worth more than the two or three bucks it would cost you to read it.

An excerpt from the chapter that went up today:

“Can we trust him?” Davey nodded, looking slightly sheepish. “I don’t know. But I think—it is more thoughtlessness than cruelty, isn’t it? Maybe he’s just noticed. I think he means it when he says he’s sorry.”

“So do I. But that just makes everything worse, doesn’t it? When it all goes wrong?”

“Why would it go wrong?”

“Because everything always does.”  

And that's all, because I took a four hour nap today and I'm still in desperate need of a full night's sleep.

Literary Fiction, Commercial Fiction, and Why YA Fiction is the Best Fiction

I think I was sixteen before I dared to venture into the teen section of the bookstore, which was always full of vampires and suicide and other unpleasant things. I’m twenty four now, and I haven’t made my way onto the adult shelves yet.

I don’t particularly want to.

It’s not like I’ve never read books meant for adults. I’ve done all the classics, read books people recommended, grabbed interesting things off display shelves, all of that. I’ve read plenty of adult fiction, and some of it has been good. Maybe a lot of it. But there’s one overarching problem that keeps me from moving on to the next section of the library.

Categories of contemporary fiction can basically be described as: children’s fiction, teen fiction, commercial fiction, and literary fiction.

Notice how I’ve divided the adult fiction into two distinct parts. And you all know what I mean. You’ve got your cheap paperbacks, which are sometimes good, but more often low enough quality that you can tell more time and money went into marketing and overproduction than into actual writing. And then you’ve got your “future classics,” which are all high-quality books full of metaphors and flowery language and a lot of Literary Significance, which ultimately tend to be about professors cheating on their wives, blonde girls dying, etc.

I don’t want to walk into a bookstore, examine my options, and make a choice between literary and commercial, because they both kind of suck. I may have spent a significant portion of my life studying literature, but mostly what I’ve learned from that is that while literature is good, capital-L-Literature is more a way for middle aged white guys to feel good about themselves than anything else. And commercial fiction can be a lot of fun, and sometimes it’s really good, but sometimes I want something with more substance, you know? And literary fiction only really provides “substance.”

There aren’t really rules for young adult fiction. Or maybe the rules are just opposite from the ones you get in adult fiction—you have to have both. Because kids aren’t about to put up with all that fancy, literary crap, Actual entertainment is mandatory. Sure, I find the occasional crappy commercial book in the YA section of the library, but you never get straight up I-Wrote-This-So-High-Schoolers-Would-Be-Forced-to-Read-It-in-50-Years Crap, and most of the cool stuff has actual meaning, too.

So if eternally reading about teenagers is the price I have to pay for a combination of fun and substance, well, you know where to find me.

Donkey Cabbages

I’m a little confused about how I read this story in the first place. I know it didn’t come from my first straight-through reading of the complete works of the brothers Grimm, because I remember being really excited to find it again when I did that. And I know I didn’t find it on the internet, or any sort of adult-oriented fairy tale collection, because I remember reading it at my great-grandma’s house; there wasn’t internet there, and I hadn’t ventured beyond the children’s section of the library yet when she was alive.

So the question, here, is what kind of children’s book of fairy tales contained this bizarre piece of fever-dreamage?

As far as I remember, this was my first introduction to the word “ass.” My childhood was often plagued with accidental cussing. It wasn’t until I said things in public that I realized they had alternate meanings. Children’s historical fiction in the early 00s did not shy away from the use of “bastard,” guys.

Anyway. The story.

We start with a young hunter.  He’s nice to a mysterious old woman in the woods, so you know what’s coming next.

She tells him where he can find some birds carrying a cloak. Shoot the birds. Take the cloak. Take the bird that you shot. Take out the heart. Eat it whole. Congratulations! Not only do you have a magic wishing cloak, but every morning from now on you’ll wake up to find a gold coin under your pillow.

(Weird side note: the eat bird heart, get gold coin thing shows up in other stories, too, and at some point I’ll probably do an in-depth analysis of why that is, or something, but I was already supposed to post this fifteen minutes ago, and I’ve barely started writing it, so we’ll do that some other time.)

Hunter travels. He ends up at a castle, as you do, and meets a creepy old lady, and a beautiful maiden.  I know it can be hard to tell sometimes—no wonder these poor fairy tale kids end up in so much trouble—but this creepy old lady is an evil witch, not a powerful fairy in the woods.

Naturally, the hunter falls madly in love, and he and the maiden hook up. Maybe he thinks this creepy old lady is the good kind. Maybe he thinks the maiden is too cool to be in cahoots with the witch. Who knows? Anyway, he should have seen it coming. I swear, it’s like Samson and Delilah levels of stupidity up in here.

They give him something to make him throw up, and someone really needs to have a talk with the Grimm brothers about the digestive system. Either that, or magic bird hearts are like gum, and take seven years to come out the other end. Because our boy vomits up the heart, and because she’s disgusting or desperate or the greediest person in all of history, the maiden goes right ahead and eats that puke heart. No more gold for the hunter. Lots of gold for the witch and the maiden.

(Really interested in how this heart thing works, btw. I mean, you wake up every morning with a gold coin beneath your pillow, right? But this leaves so many questions unanswered. I assume if you pull an all-nighter you don’t get any gold that day. But what about naps? Could you, say, feed the heart to your pet cat to fully maximize your gold intake every time she falls asleep?)

Is this enough for the witch? Of course not. She wants the cloak too. Proving she isn't entirely sucky, our maiden asks, hey, isn't all this money enough? But the witch is all like, no, of course not, so, Delilah-like, the maiden goes to her boyfriend again.

She spends a lot of time sighing deeply.

“Honey,” he says, “what’s wrong?”

“I just really wish I could go to Garnet Mountain, where all the jewels grow,” she tells him. “But I’d have to fly to get there, and obviously that is not an option.”

“Hey babe,” he says, “I gotcha covered.”

Leaving aside the whole thing where jewels apparently grow on mountain tops, I should probably clarify that the magic wishing cloak is specifically a travel wishing cloak. So he puts on the cloak, wraps her all up, and wishes them away to the mountain.

And then, because Evil Magic, he falls asleep. Girl takes the cloak and wishes herself home. Hunter wakes up, finally sees the light, and boy is he pissed. Now, in her defense, the maiden stranded him on a mountain covered in living jewels, so, like, she gave him a fighting chance here, right? Dude could be set for life.

But does he fill up his pockets? Of course not. No, our guy just goes stomping down the mountain for a while, until he reaches that “have to fly to get there” part of the climb, and then he takes a fake nap to eavesdrop on some giants until he figures out how to get off on the Magic Cloud Express.

Some floating later, he’s back on the ground, and he’s really hungry. So he finds some cabbage. Then he gets turned into a donkey, which is why you should never eat your vegetables, kids.

He’s so hungry, he doesn’t even care that he’s a donkey now. He just keeps eating cabbage. But then he eats a different kind of cabbage, and suddenly he’s a man again. This is where he gets the Idea.

He grabs a whole bunch more cabbage, makes a fancy salad, throws on a disguise, and goes back to the castle where Delilah lives.

It’s possible he missed his calling with this whole hunter thing, because the guy makes a mean salad. Like, as long as you don’t mind becoming a donkey, forget all those Michelin stars and crap—this is the dream chef.

Everyone goes nuts for the salad. The witch, the maiden, and some random maidservant are promptly turned into donkeys.

(btw, I know the text used the word “ass” to describe the donkeys several times in the first version of this I read, but let’s all take a moment to be grateful that they didn’t translate the title as “Ass Cabbages.” Like, things could have been so much worse.)

So everyone is donkeys. Dude pays a miller to watch the donkeys for a while. Tells him to beat the witch donkey thrice a day, and feed her once, shout out to my baby brother who loves the word “thrice.” The maiden donkey gets three meals and zero beatings, because someone’s still in love with his Delilah. The servant girl gets one beating and three meals, which is like—okay. Come on, man. This girl did not hurt you. No one even mentioned her until salad time. It’s bad enough you got this innocent person turned into a donkey, now you gotta beat her too?

You deserved to get your heart and cloak stolen, man.

The witch donkey dies under this treatment, and then our hunter feels bad and gives the other two the good cabbage to turn them back. Our poor innocent servant girl immediately disappears from the narrative again, hopefully to get a better job with no witches and no salads. Beautiful maiden apologizes, tells him where his cloak is, and offers to puke the bird heart back up.

Hunter takes the cloak, lets her keep the heart, and marries her, which is, frankly, a bad idea all around. Dude already knows he can’t trust her. Also, turns out the witch was the girl’s mom, so, like, honey. Really. Why are you hooking up with the guy who had her beaten until she died? Sure, she was a wicked witch, but she was also your mom.

Whatever. If there’s one thing fairy tales are consistently awesome about, it’s the power of forgiveness. We all live happily ever after. Stay tuned for some fun with tailors next week.