heaven is a greenhouse.

Lourdes

Lourdes was large, a heavyset woman you might say.

She was a collection of rolling hills, sagging fruit, anxieties, insecurities and aching joints that called out into the wilderness—but she hadn’t always been that way. No, no. Years ago she had been a beauty, in fact, had been one of the most desired women in the entire city, and believe me, she took advantage of it. She had her choice of lovers, a chorus of suitors, and she was very rather indiscreet about the whole thing: she had tasted everything from fur-clad rebels who spit sorcery at the sky to rich and refined platinum-nosed moguls, the kind that felt no qualms, none at all, about eating endangered species from fine white iron plates set with semiprecious stones.

Susanna remembered when she was child, everyone in her class, everyone in her school, already knew about Lourdes’ reputation. But Lourdes just laughed and skipped on, enjoying love and enjoying lovers, enjoying fresh flesh and life and everything simple and silver under the sun.

Even now, beneath the excess fat and the crow’s feet, you could still see that beauty, still see who Lourdes had been, still see her struggling like a ghost screaming to break free from her age and anger and do it all again, enjoy her youth and beauty for a second time.

start a band called The Typographical tErrors. all song titles and lyrics are to be mispelled and have exceptionally poor grammar. our debut 7" single will be "Eats, Shoots n Leves." it will be in 7/8 time and feature a dulcimer, a glockenspiel, and a kazoo. it will also have a three-minute guitar solo full of mistakes. the singer should sing out the letters of the notes in the guitar solo as they are played. the guitar solo should be completely inept and full of mistakes.

thank you houston, we're The Typographical tErrors!

there was thunder on her lips
there were oceans in her eyes
there were churches underwater
as she watched the ship sink.

she turned her head and laughed
the sadness was an inspiration.

Collaborative Novel 2

So I think a theme is coming together for this collaboration. It's going to be about a televangelist over a couple of decades who experiences a Jim Bakker-type financial disgrace or a Ted Haggard-style sex scandal. No one in this collaboration will write as him. Everyone will develop separate, wildly different characters who all happen to have some connection to this televangelist. They should all have perceptions and opinions about this preacher throughout different periods of his life, both during his rise, after his fall and possibly during some type of redemptive legacy.

There will be a few rules:
1. All narratives should be in the first person.

2. All characters need some kind of connection to this preacher, even if its just someone who has seen him on TV once or twice.

3. Anything your character says/does/believes in regards to this preacher can be completely repudiated by another character/author with a different set of opinions/facts.

4. Other than that almost everything is up for grabs. If you wish to write multiple chapters with multiple characters, I encourage you. If you wish to write multiple chapters with the same character in different decades, I applaud you.

I think I may start it off as a reporter writing a story on the preacher and his family before the fall. Jessica has claimed the character of his mother. If you need ideas for characters or perspectives, you could write as his wife, as one of his kids, as all of his kids, as one of his ministers, as a federal investigator, as someone going on talk shows claiming to be his gay lover, etc.

I'm especially interested in people far from him--people in the audience at his sermons or people who see him on TV or his critics in the media--lives and stories that are only tangentially related to his. Hell, you character can just have a silly pop-culture conversation about him with a friend, with the rest of your character's story/life having nothing to do with him. The fun part will be having all these wildly different opinions and 'facts' about the man, like say if one person kills him off then another can always say it was just a Weekly World News tabloid story or something. You may think he's a saint, you may think he's a crook. There is no truth to this man, only what we can imagine for him.

I'll try to get the first chapter worked out by the end of the month, hopefully. If you have any ideas or would like to contribute, I would love to hear from you.

Collaborative Novel

Actually that last post made me want to do exactly what the geniuses behind Terror, Terror, Terror aren't doing. Would anyone like to contribute to a collaborative novel like the kind imagined in the first paragraph? We will truly harness the 'power' of 'the internuts' this way. I guess we can figure out kind of the shape of the story before we get started but leave a lot of it chance and chemistry.

Anyone interested?

Terror Terror Terror

These guys are looking to harness the 'power' of the 'internet' to publish a collaborative book. No less than 60 authors have contributed. What a novel idea, right? What a wild chance to experiment with varying styles, voices, characters! Hell you could write a book about a single event witnessed by 60 different characters each with their own voice, their own interpretation, their own life. You could write a multigenerational tail of the vast and varied experiences of human existence. This is new! This is novel! This is exciting, and suprising, and furiously original!

This is not what they are doing.

No, the men behind this book have wisely decided to make it an antiterror novel. The premise? Well, its an action novel, thank god. An action novel about "a moderate Muslim [that] takes a stand against the radical terrorists. He hires operatives from the West to terrorize the terrorists." Utter and total brilliance. Move over Jason Bourne, stand aside Jack Bauer, get out of the way whoever that guy in XXX was. This actually kind of sounds like the plot of Munich, but you know, shitty.

Here's the best part: the title of this book is Terror, Terror, Terror. One just wasn't enough, apparently. The subtitle? The Solution to Muslim Terror. I think that maybe they think pretty highly of their premise. I wonder about their political orientation, what their agenda is with this book. Gee...

Back to it being a collaborative novel. The whole thing is available for download in Microsoft Word. All 187 manuscript pages. You can add whatever you want. This is your chance to be an author. You can change the course of the plot, you can change the course of history by adding your two cents to the greatest novel ever written. Ever. By anyone. Ever.

Need ideas? Here are some:

exadore: you should just start adding ridiculous shit

phil: that's basically my plan but i want to get a feel for how ridiculous it already is, although the idea sounds hilarious

exadore: you should end it by having everyone die. and then they wake up and it was all a dream and its really 1985 and america is great and reagan is wonderful and 9/11 never existed. hallalujah! shalom!

phil: hahahahahaaha

exadore: that would be sweet if you did that. i would laugh forever

phil: do they just accept whatever anybody adds in?

exadore: i don't know, but they said you have to tell them where you added stuff so they don't have to hunt through the whole manuscript for it. i guess they never heard of 'track changes' in word. so you could probably just add whatever wacky shit you want wherever you want and not tell them

phil: hahaha. i love the internets!

exadore: like have the president eat a fucking baby or something for lunch but just have it be totally normal. or replace every instance of the word 'freedom' with 'cervical cancer'.

phil: well with the magic find/replace feature of MS Word, that's quite simple!

exadore: indubitably!

But don't expect to get paid for your genius efforts. "All author royalties will be donated to charity earmarked for use after the next terrorist attack." What charity is that one? And does it need to wait for a horrible hypothetical attack on America to do any good? Couldn't you just like, donate the author royalties (if there are any at all cause who the fuck is going to buy this thing, especially since its already free on the internet) to like, the Red Cross or something? Habitat for Humanity? The Tsunami Fund? No? Ok.

If anyone actually does this, I will give you money. Please comment or email me and let me know. exadore@gmail. I will pass out crisp single dollar bills like you were a stripper or something.

Have fun kids!

Terror! Terror! Terror!

the raging sea of idiots.

those old diamonds don't bleed for me anymore.

My story "Anna Was an Acorn" has been accepted for publication by Eyeshot. Kindly read it and tell me how much you love it and me and those little muffins I baked for you that time when it wasn't even your birthday. You never did thank me for those. So you owe me.

Thank you and goodnight.