Idea Monkey

When some jamook asks me this one (thereby revealing him/herself to be a person who has about as much imaginative muscle as a head of lettuce), I always smile prettily and answer, "Schenectady."

And when the jamook looks at me quizzically, and scratches head with hairy hand, I add: "Oh, sure. There's a swell Idea Service in Schenectady; and every week I send 'em twenty-five bucks; and every week they send me a fresh six-pack of ideas."

                                                                             Harlan Ellison, regarding the question

Every writer gets asked the question.  Even the least of us, even those of us who are still being paid pennies per word and publishing in the smallest of the small presses, the micro-presses, hell, the nano-presses.   Every writer gets asked the question.

"Where do you get your ideas?"  

I do not hold to the notion that there are no dumb questions.   That idea is borne out of some bogus, squishy touchy feely concept that everyone is equal and no one is better or smarter or faster than anyone else, and therefore every question is a good one.  Please believe me, it ain't so.   And the asker of the question is almost invariably someone who wishes they were a writer, but has no prayer of ever being a writer, because if you gotta ask the question then you sure as hell ain't ready for the answer, which is that ideas are far and away the least important component of any creative endeavor of any kind.   Ideas are a dime a dozen, they are common, they flitter about like a swarm of mayflies.   The idea doesn't matter, it's how you execute it, your strategies and tactics (sound familiar?), how well you capture the beating of the human heart that must be at the core of every story.   Writers, good honest writers, spend a lifetime learning the craft of turning workaday ideas into actual art, and it's damned hard, and frustrating, and the most interesting part of the craft, and what we most want to talk shop about.  (Or, as Chaucer put it, "The lyf so short, the craft so longe to lerne."  Chaucer did not have spellcheck.)

But no.  They want to hear where you get your ideas.

Okay.  I get mine from Idea Monkey.

Some writers, they got a muse.  I got a monkey.    He lives in a little cage in the center of my disordered mind, and when he gets riled up, he hops around and screeches and throws stuff out of the cage, like zoo monkeys throw their poop.  (Hey, Craig, great metaphor for your work!)((Yeah, shut up.))

Idea Monkey doesn't keep a schedule.   Idea monkey throws ideas at me in the shower, in the car, at work, in class (I probably shouldn't admit that one), when I should be attending to a loved one.   Idea monkey is insistent; he wails and hoots and shrieks and will not be ignored.  Sometime he starts up in my dreams, sometimes he interrupts me in the middle of a movie, sometimes he drags me away from what I really ought to be working on.  In short, he's a pain in the ass.

And are they even good ideas?  Mostly they are not.  "Hey!  Hey!  How about a vampire with dentures?"  Really, Idea Monkey?  "I know!  I know!  Truman Capote was secretly an assassin on the payroll of the CIA!"  Oh, Idea Monkey, that sucks.   "Fine!  Here's one: a haunted tacklebox!"  Idea Monkey, that's stupid.  "Wait!  You'll love this one!  This guy, his butt is an interdimensional gateway, and he takes this dump what never ends, and it's a living sh--" Idea Monkey!  Stop it!*  "One more!  One more!   These two guys want to kidnap Bob Stoops, except they get tangled up with a bunch of white supremacists and a guy with a stolen shark, plus also there's a former Soviet honeypot spy and a narcoleptic sheriff!"  Idea Monkey, that's . . .

That's . . .

A stolen shark, you say?

A narcoleptic sheriff?

Hang on there a second, Idea Monkey.  You might have something.









*You may think, as I did, that this is the worst idea ever.   In the the history of human ideas, positively the dumbest.   And I thought I could write it as satire.   Except.   Two months ago while playing around on Netflix to see what horror flicks I might watch for Halloween, I came across a film called MONSTURD.    I do not make this up.   Satire is dead, because reality outpaces it.

A Few Words About Birthdays

I'm supposed to be past the age where I give tinker's damn about birthdays, particularly my own (although if I wish to be around to see a few more of mine I must take care to not forget the birthday of the missus) but my attitude is that, for most people, birthdays aren't all that until you run out of them.  Well, not me.

I mean, yeah, they're great when you're a kid (at least theoretically; see below) and there are a couple of milestone birthdays that are alleged to be the bomb as you leave childhood behind: 16, 18, 21.   But then the milestones aren't such groovy ones.  Dirty thirty, oh lordy look who's forty, so on and so forth.  We're supposed to have this sense that after, say, twenty-five or so we've crested, and it's all on the downslope after that, and birthdays simply become signposts whizzing by on the way down to that long dirt nap.

Well.   Maybe so.  But you won't hear it from me.

See, Death is out there.   Stalking me, like that famous figure from John O'Hara's "Appointment in Samara".   Sooner or later, he'll catch up to me.  Sooner or later, I'll have had my last meal, my last really good roll in the hay, listened to my last song, read the last finely-wrought sentence, and then . . . Well, who knows?  I'm like Hamlet on that one.  "To sleep, perchance to dream?  Ay, there's the rub."

In the meantime, though, every birthday marks a marvelous occasion to raise two middle fingers to that grim reaping hardass.    My birthday is April 11 (double April Fools, sez I) and on that date every year since I was old enough to understand this stupid mortality crap, I have seized the opportunity to flip death the biggest bird I can manage.   Screw you, dark angel!

Of course, it's purest bravado.   I'm just as afraid of dying as anybody, or at least of dying painfully.   I don't want to go out like one of those schlubs from those godawful FINAL DESTINATION flicks.   (Speaking of, isn't any sequel to that movie lying through its teeth?  What part of 'final' do they not get?  "FINAL DESTINATION 14: WE REALLY MEAN IT THIS TIME!)  I actually want to die wide awake, in full possession of my faculties, old and in bed.  I mean really, really old.   Two hundred years old, if I can manage it and if modern medicine will just get its act together.

But in the meantime, yeah, go sit and spin, Death.   Made it to another April 11,  so take that, you killjoy you.

The worst birthday I ever had was my twelfth.   I was in the Boy Scouts at the time, and we had a jamboree campout scheduled the weekend of my birthday.   My birthday present (a record player from the nearby TG&Y) was sort of whisked before me as I was herded out the door for the campout.   All I wanted to do was hole up in my room and play every record I owned (I must have had, I don't know, a whopping three.  One of them probably a Hall and Oates lp.  Saints preserve us.)   But no, instead it was a weekend of incredibly lame activities, in the cold, beginning with burned pancakes in the morning and cold hobo dinners in the evening.  (I know there are digressions sprouting up all through this like dandelions, but I have this weird idea that there's no way kids could call those foil-wrapped culinary concoctions 'hobo dinners' anymore.  Too insensitive. )   And when I say cold, I mean it.   A late cold front plowed through the night before the jamboree, and our night there, it got down to around 8 degrees.   Yay.  Happy birthday to me.  

My best birthday?   Aw, man, that's tough.   My 18th was pretty good.  A hotel room with a bunch of friends, it wasn't as lame as it sounds.  

My 21st was spent at the old Bobo's restaurant in Stillwater pounding down two-for-one margaritas, which led to me and the missus . . . well, that's really none of your business.  (Okay, we sang silly Tears For Fears songs on the walk home.  There,  you happy?)

On my 40th, I finally got around to making a grendel.   This is a drink that was invented by Marillion, one of my favorite bands back in the eighties, and it was kind of a rite of passage for those who wanted to be allowed to hang with the guys in the group.   If you could knock back a couple of these and remain upright, you were in like Flynn.   It's an expensive drink to make, which is how, on the night they were signed to EMI Records, they were almost dropped from the label the very same night when the label reps got the bar tab.   Seems buying several rounds for all in the Friar's Club nearly put the label in the red.  I know making a few for my good friends damn near bankrupted me.

Next year?  Hell, who knows?  Maybe I'll get a wild hair and take up scuba.   Fifty's coming.   Maybe I'll get an even wilder hair and take that trip to Antarctica I've long threatened to do.  

Flipping off Death the whole way.

Interim Post

This is not my birthday post, that's coming later, but I just had to post the back copy matter for what is possibly my next novel  (God willing and the creek don't rise).


The novel is on the desk of a publisher as I type, and I have high hopes for it.  Here's the summary I wrote up:


Long Under Darkness concerns the longest day of Bobby Dickinson's life.   When he wakes up one fine summer morning at the Jersey shore, all he wants is to survive the most boring vacation ever with his new wife and her parents.  By the time the day is over, it will be all he can do to survive period.  Bobby, and the entire human race, is now caught in the crossfire in a war between old gods and new, where belief is a bullet and genocide a way to even the arms race.  Faced by savage sea monsters on one side and murderous angels on the other, the bloodletting wrath of Loki and the last pagan gods behind him and the righteous fury of Metatron and the armies of heaven before him, survival is the only thing on Bobby Dickinson's mind.  But it will fall to him to be the most unlikely savior humanity ever had . . . with a little help from a certain Prince of Darkness.


I just reread that this morning, and it had me grinning ear to ear.  Man, I gotta tell ya'll, there are times when I'm convinced that making stuff up for fun and profit is the best drug anyone ever cooked up.   I love my weird little Pirates of the Carribean meets Dogma meets Godzilla novel.  And the fact that someone might pay actual coin for it?  Who says this ain't the best of all possible worlds?


So, fingers crossed.   This one's got a chance.

Conquering Time

"Time past and time future
Allow but a little consciousness.
To be conscious is not to be in time
But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,
The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,
The moment in the draughty church at smokefall
Be remembered; involved with past and future.
Only through time time is conquered."

         

                                           T.S. Eliot "Burnt Norton"

Only through time time is conquered.   God, I love that.   That Eliot guy, he could scribble a line or two, huh?   But while he meant something different from what I am taking from the poem, I hope he'd understand.   Approve?   That's asking a bit much.

Eliot wrote here of the blessing and grace of experience, of the Platonic outside-timeness of god, and probably a ton of other things I am wholly unequipped to rattle on about.  Probably "Burnt Norton", like most great poems, is about several things simultaneously, working on some quantum model where all things exist at once.   That's what all the best literature does, what every writer worth a pile of commas strives for.   And most of us, 99.9% of us, never even sniff that marvelous, ambiguous all-ness.   It's a strange and futile pursuit, this writing business.  A monstrous ego required to even attempt it, a sure humbling awaiting those who do.

But I digress.  (No, really, Craig?)  What I come away with from Eliot today, lately, is a heightened appreciation of time.  Mainly because I haven't any.  Well, that's not entirely true.   But I do have to fight for it more, carve it out, steal it.   Of all the aspects of returning to school as an older fart that I'd underestimated, I think this was the one I'd undervalued most.

Gone is the time for just farting around.   Gone is the time to snatch the Playstation away from the daughter to blow an hour or so playing Madden.   Gone is the leisure to get lost on a Wiki-crawl.  (You know, you start reading one entry in Wikipedia, click on a link, click on another, and an hour later you realize that, while you began reading about the Beatles' WHITE ALBUM you've somehow wound up on an article about the Boxer Rebellion.)  But most of all, gone is the time to read for pleasure.

Of all of these, only the last really stings.  This has happened to me once before.  A few years back, in 2006, I was diagnosed with a charming little disease called keratoconus.  What this is, it's a thinning of the corneas, which, owing to fluid pressure in the eye, allows them to bulge outward.  Think of a bubble on the side of a thinning tire.  This causes no end of vision problems due to refraction of light into the eye and loss of lens acuity, and less than a century ago would have ended in total blindness.  Strictly speaking, keratoconus is ideopathic, meaning no one knows what causes it.  Some, like my doc, think that it's not helped by things like gas permeable contact lenses, which I was urged into as a youth because I was a heavy reader.   This is what we mean by irony, folks:  contact lenses meant to help me read may have ultimately contributed quite heavily to my loss of the ability to do so.   The gas permeable lenses scored and carved my corneas as they bulged out, and did so in such a fashion that by the time I felt any pain, the game was already over.   One unfortunate side effect of keratoconus is that sufferers of it normally have an extremely high pain threshold where their eyes are concerned.

Anyway, glasses wouldn't work at all for me, nor would any of the dozen or so contact lenses we tried.   By mid 2007, I was having difficulty wearing any lenses at all due to the pain and the torturous light sensitivity.  This meant I muddled through work and took the damn things out the instant I could.   Which in turn mean no extraneous reading for me.  I'd have the occasional good day, wherein I'd greedily gulp down one of the thousand books I'd been meaning to get to, but those became rarer and rarer, and by 2008, a corneal transplant was necessary on my left eye.  (As I told my wife, "I see with dead people."  Yes, I am weird.  Thought we'd established that.) ((Okay, I'm weirder than that.  At breakfast one week before the operation, I told my wife, "You know, whomever I'm getting my cornea from is probably just having a cup of coffee like us."   She thought I was being macabre, but the truth is the thought was seriously, spiritually humbling.))

Long recovery, eighteen months, but my ability to read increased, which means that I gradually got back the joy of reading for my own pleasure.  My gratitude at this cannot be overstated.

So why the hell give it up again?

"Only through time time is conquered."

I'm sacrificing a couple of years now in the hopes of buying more time down the road.   With some, but not much, luck, the degree I'm earning now will allow me to step away from the workforce earlier by allowing me to earn more sooner.   The equation is simple.  I have a wife who has said, basically, once we have a set figure in hard savings, then I'm free to walk away from the 8 to 5 world.   Now, it's a big figure, but not unobtainable (nor even unobtanium; screw you, AVATAR.)  Plus, I'll get to sneak some lit courses in as electives, so it ain't a total wash.   But yeah, selling time now to buy more later.  Conquering time through time.  Surely not what Eliot had in mind, but I'll take it.

Of course, if I get up really really early Sunday, I might could read some of the new Stephen King . . .

Halloweens I Have Known

What was the worst thing you've ever done?   
I won't tell you that, but I'll tell you the worst thing that ever happened to me . . . the most dreadful thing . . .
                         Peter Straub, GHOST STORY

I love Halloween.  Just flat stinkin' love it.   I love the costumes and the customs, the scares and the storytelling, the sense that we're celebrating the dying of summer and facing death in a metaphorical sense.   It is hands down my favorite of holidays, coming in way ahead of Independence Day and Christmas.

Part of it because I love scary stories.    I think some of that comes from hating and dreading them as a kid.   I was the biggest ninny that ever walked the earth.   You never saw a more nervous,  more easily spooked kid than me.    Once, at one of the model airplane club meetings my father used to drag me to, I made the mistake of flipping through a Reader's Digest coffee table book on the paranormal and unexplained, and couldn't sleep for days.   Stigmata!  Alien abductions!  Bigfoot!   Cattle found bled dry!  Ghosts!   Holy freakin' frightfest, Batman!   I was, I kid thee not, petrified.  Because I believed all that crap.   Every last bit of it.   Alien vampire bigfoot ghosts stalking the heartland, preying on cows and virgins?   Oh yeah, I bought it.   I was, as a kid, the target demographic for The Weekly World News, only I had virtually no discretionary income.  ( And no, Fantastic Four comic books were not a discretionary item on young Mr. Wolf's budget.)

Slightly later on, I remember walking past the original New American Library paperback cover of Cujo and practically losing my mud on the spot.   I wasn't thinking 'rabid dog', I was thinking 'demon', and as far as I was concerned, demons could get you anywhere, man.   They didn't have pesky rules like werewolves and vampires, except maybe that they couldn't walk on sacred ground and anyway my mom went to a Science of Mind church, which I suspected did not exactly count.

I was such a weenie.  We're talking mondo super-weenie.

So how did I go from being such a Nervous Nellie to eating this junk up?  How did I go from being tormented by a convenience store paperback display to loving such mild and timid fare as Hellraiser, The Exorcist, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and The Thing?

Probably poor parenting (hi, Mom!) but I also suspect it was that old psychobabble about conquering your fears by diving into them.  And boy, how I've dived in.


I quoted Peter Straub above for two reasons.   The first is that I love epigrams, can't pass 'em up, and those two sentences are among the best to ever open a horror novel.  The second is that he nails exactly the appeal of such a ghoulish holiday (and genre, really, since every day is Halloween for us scary writers): the playacting out of dreadful things brings its own comfort, as if when we imagine the very worst, we inoculate ourselves, in the barest degree, against the very worst.  It ain't true, of course, but the things that comfort us don't have to be true, we just have to think they are.   (See, for instance, practically every pop song ever written.)  Sharing the darkness helps to drive it back some.

And plus also, there's this: as the Bears sang, fear is never boring. 

Never.

Hope your Halloween wasn't.   But then I would hope that, huh?

In With The Old . . .

Well, no, not that old.  But certainly not the wet behind the ears spring chicken I was the last time I set foot on a college campus nearly two decades ago.  That guy, I look back on him with equal parts fondness and astonishment.   Impudent little whelp, but his heart was in the right place. 

I'm Craig Wolf.   So was he, but he was the earlier model, kind of dopey, very naive, full of fire and sure that he was going to be The Next Big Thing in horror fiction.  Stephen King, watch your back.   Armed with a typewriter (anyone remember those?) and an attitude.  That sort of thing. 

I'm the more recent issue: maybe a tad wiser, a little softer and greyer, certainly more jaded and aware of the sharp corners of the world.  And plus also, as a certain politico says, I am quite positive that I better taste in beer now.

Some things to know about me.  I'm married, have been for going on twenty-one years, with a daughter about to turn seventeen.  Which means my college career will be winding down to a long delayed finish about the time hers starts up.  I'm a published novelist and short story writer (the novel and a short story collection are available at Amazon.com, and here endeth the hype) albeit through the inky-dinky presses, with a couple of very close calls with larger houses.  Hope, like the Dude, abides.   I had a corneal transplant not so long ago, and the other cornea is close to crapping out, so with luck there's another transplant in my future.  Being who and what I am, I can't help but think there's something a little cool walking around with stitches in your eye.  Talk about body modification!  And finally, I work for Oklahoma Gas & Electric (the evil electric utility, except we're not all that bad) in customer service, answering emails and backing up the call center in regard to our marketing programs.  I am my department's resident oddball.  After a stint in pest control and working for two evil insurance companies, I feel I've moved up a step in the world.  

And now I'm going back to school to finish up the degree.   Why now?   Well, it happened almost by accident.  Certainly the time seemed right, seeing how we know the first corneal transplant is going to stick, and seeing how we seem to be past the worst of my daughter's run-in with a nasty thing called pseudotumor cerebri, and also seeing how my employer will foot much of the tab.   But most of the big decisions in my life have been made on a hunch, and I'm just playing this one like the rest.


Upon completing my BA in liberal studies with an emphasis on mass communication, I hope to be in a position to move into corporate communications at OG&E, which would put me in a nice place and enable me to use my writing skills more.  So that's one thing I have now I didn't have before: a goal to work toward.  I gotta have goals: the end of the story, the end of the novel, the next espresso martini. Without goals I am a ruin, a wreck, adrift and listless.


I have another blog, the infrequently updated Raving and Drooling.   It's a little more, um, unrestrained.   Also more aimed at rambling on about the books and music and movies I love, and on writing, and on whatever raging rants seize me.   Here I'll stay more focused (gee, like this post, Craig?) on my experience going back to school now that I'm all growed up.


Except I'll never really grow up.