Interesting

Since I was a kid I knew how to get my mom to shut up and stop yelling at me. I just called her a bitch. Now I don't think that my mom is a bitch most of the time - or most of the time that I was calling her one, but I knew that it made her so mad that she would resort to THE SILENT TREATMENT.

Besides the fact that THE SILENT TREATMENT was accompanied by her kicking me, I usually came out pretty well. For a blessed 20 minutes I didn't have to hear her yapping or complaining and asking questions or historically revising certain things that still bug me (no I did not give her permission to read my mail. Yes, she was the nasty lady that yelled at the kids when they were playing outside and I would have been a pariah anyhow but to be the son of the Evil Mrs. Lieder that Always Yelled at the Kids for Playing Outside was not fun. And no, it had nothing to do with my own problems with Jon Knopke and no she was NOT defending me against this bully since I was perfectly capable of defending myself against that Polack - well until I broke his hand with my head in 7th grade and then we got along fine - isn't being a male fun?) and that was nice.

I was actually thinking of this last night because she hung up on me when I told her to stop asking stupid questions (yes, this makes me sound like an asshole but the question was "did you just say goodbye when you picked up the phone? Why did you say goodbye? No I heard you, you said goodbye? Why did you say goodbye? I know what I heard?" and I was trying to cook something and lacked the patience to explain slowly and with great emphasis that I said hi, not bye with the requisite fifteen-hundred repititions before I'm believed) leaving me to eat in peace.

The weird thing about THE SILENT TREATMENT is that she always thought that it was a punishment. That's about it. Nothing else.

Stupid Writing Tales, pt. II

Ok, so I wrote a paragraph last night. Yes, a whole paragraph. Basically I named a character with the same name as one of my longest unfinished novels (40K and going) - the 1940s small town one where I know the ending, I know more or less what's going on, and I don't know how to end it (damn Nanowrimo for giving me an easy excuse to abandon the thing) and I realized that this character that I have in this book is the grandson that the protagonist of the other book is writing a letter to. I figure that since I already self-plagiarized by giving a character a dismembered finger, I might as well go all the way and make it into a "sequel" (but with different characters and many years later) and I felt so good about that breakthrough that I celebrated by

watching a Law & Order rerun on TNT and going to bed.

Well I feel good about myself. Better than last night where I wrote more but I felt like I was writing shit the whole time (or worried that i was writing shit. If I feel like I'm writing shit I just relax and have fun and keep going.)

Tune in for the next episode of "Tim's Writing Career and Other Pathetic Specimens"

Interesting article on Zarqawi

The Short Violent Life

I always wonder about these biographies of mass murderers and my reaction to them. I usually find that I'm most disturbed by their initial killings - the times when they kidnapped someone or shot a co-conspirator. The mass murder might just be too big to contemplate, but the little one-on-one murders tend to disturb me most of all. Like with the AUM cult in Japan and how they murdered witnesses and prosecuting attorneys and followers breaking away as opposed to the mass murder with the nerve gas. Or the Charles Manson cult where they first killed off a few people that were getting too close and killed a guy because he would open up his house to them and let them stay, but he wouldn't join them (more accurately him and his large inheritance would not join them.)

Even Hitler's execution of the brown shirts and his murder of the newspaper reporters at the early part of his chancellorship can give me bigger nightmares than the Holocaust. Maybe it's because in all cases, there is a feeling that someone is trying to stand up to an unstoppable force and that they have a chance to stop them in their tracks - only they find themselves tied up and dead in a ditch somewhere. Or it's just the personal angle. No, I think it might be the individual trying to stand up to something that will turn out too big for anyone to really handle without bloodshed.

Good

http://www.duotrope.com/

A little more comprehensive that Ralan - especially in the case of literary fiction.