Planting Evidence: How Atmosphere Can Improve Your Writing

Pondering Bones

Stealing Reference Material

The bridge was a tunnel of chain length fence. It rattled with every step, a giant slinky bouncing. Waves rippled through the diamond patterns. Industrial lights swung from their hooks. My goggles turned them into spirit orbs, ghosts of urban explores who’d fallen through the gaps. With a GoPro mounted to my helmet, I struggled to maneuver around them.

The miner’s cap was heavy enough already, the camera made it dig deeper into my scalp. It hurt, but nothing chafed like the breathing mask. Tracing my muzzle, its straps cut right through a cushion of facial hair. The apparatus recirculated this morning’s coffee with every breath.

Seventeen stories beneath me, the river raged. This rickety structure was all that kept me from diving into it. I threaded my fingers through the rusty wires, incase the boards weren’t up to the task.

When a swarm of mayflies filled my headlight, I knew I was getting close to the other side. Something gleamed up ahead. It took a moment to recognize the grated treads of a step. The stairway felt even less secure than the bridge. Stretching for three city blocks, it creaked back and forth with every step. My oxygen tank slapped against my back. My bolt cutters hammered against my thigh.

Buried under all this gear, I was feeling claustrophobic already, the sewer pipe at the top of the staircase only made things worse. Someone had lined the mouth with glass. Brushing it aside with the bolt cutters, I leaned in. There was a crunch beneath my kneepad. The path sparkled before me. The last guest must have excreted shards on his way in. From elbow pad to kneepad, I bore the brunt of each of them. My palms pressed the walls, while the oxygen tank scraped the ceiling.

Unscrewing the vent, I lit the basement on the other side. There was a bed of nails waiting for me. Someone had taken a page from the Home Alone school of building security. Too bad they didn’t realize the sewage vent made the perfect platform for an intruder to stand on.

Hopping off the makeshift step, something crackled beneath my boots. There were grains of salt as big as pebbles sprinkled around the entrance. Someone sure didn’t want any of those spirit orbs getting in.

The room was hot and clammy. Sweat trickled into my goggles, pooled at the bottom of my mask, and dripped down my breathing tube.

Chemical stalactites hung from the pipes. Paint chips rolled off the support beams, wedged into cracks in the foundation. The concrete lining the walls had turned to gravel. Twinkling in the air, fibers spilled through a gap in the ceiling. My beam stretched all the way to the roof, where there was a flutter of panicked batwings.

An unholy trinity of toxins were in the air: asbestos, lead, and radon.

Scanning the walls, florescent tags glowed in my beam. There were no words, no gang signs, only esoteric symbols. These ones were unlike any of the charms I was familiar with. There were none of the traditional spiral hands, helms of awe, or grand pentacles to ward off demons.

These symbols were far more intricate, patterns stretching from the floor, up the brickwork, arching over the ceiling. They had impossible symmetry, resembling the complex exoskeletons of marine life, like corals growing on the wall. Their spray painted tentacles didn’t stretch toward me. They stretched away.

This wasn’t a protection spell. It was a binding.

Ever the Boy Scout, I reached into my satchel. With the flick of the wrist, my extendable baton doubled my arm span.

Looking Up

The tentacles led to a spiral staircase. I had some good material, but the footage I’d come for was somewhere up there. The climb did my back no favors. The GoPro forced me to go up hunched over. This put me at eye level with the rusted bolts, rattling with my every step. I felt compelled to push them in every time I looped around.

Half way up, I heard a creaking, followed by a loud crash. Looking down, I saw the stairs collapse beneath me. I ran the rest of the way. Hitting an edge, my helmet got knocked sideways. Sparks flew off my oxygen tank. Nearing the top, I spotted a row of hypodermic needles with their points ready to stick me. Kicking them away, I slid onto the ground floor. The last step fell out from under me.

“A little redundant.” I addressed the facility, “If you didn’t get me with the glass or the nails, what makes you think you’re going to get me with another trap on the floor? If anything you should be trying to get me from…”

It occurred to me to duck. There was a twang. A trip wire snapped. A jackhammer came down on the GoPro, knocking the helmet clean off my head. The light tumbled end over end into the dark. The pummeling pendulum whooshed back and forth.

Jabbing at the dark with my baton, I tried to follow the trajectory of the helmet. I spotted a faint glow. The helmet must have gotten some air before it hit a wall. It cast just enough light to let me see my goggles fill with cobwebs.

Dusting off the helmet, I screwed it back on. I couldn’t help but smirk, thinking about how cool the footage was going to look. That’s when I saw that the floor and the ceiling were covered in the same coral markings as the basement. These florescent tentacles lead toward an empty corridor.

I spoke to the facility, “Your traps say, ‘Go-go,’ but your symbols say, ‘Stay-stay.’”

Someone exhaled beside me. I turned to find a shirtless emaciated figure. His frame was all ribs and hips. His skin was pale enough to glow. His cheeks were littered with cysts. His nose had been broken, the bridge curved like a face in an abstract painting. His eyes had sunk in. The pupils were washed out, nearly gone. When he opened his mouth, a layer of skin streaked across his lips.

He looked to the extendable baton, “Is that your probe? Are you an alien?”

Anticipating my response, his boney shoulders shifted back and forth between fight and flight.

I cocked the baton back, “It is, and I am.”

I put my money on flight. Lunging at me, he bet against the odds. With one swift blow, I called him. He went down like a house of cards, waving his arms, fluttering to the floor.

Blood spurt from his temple, shooting across my boot, painting it red. Then it did something unexpected. Dripping down my toe, the blood left no sign that it was ever there. Running around my ankle, it merged with the other droplets, swirling with the magnetic pull of mercury. Ignoring a dip in the floor, the blood seeped upward along the tentacle patterns. A serpent with a long red tail, rounding the corner into the corridor, weaving from crack to crack. The blood wanted me to follow.

A strange calm came over me, as if the sight of animated blood was soothing. Turned out the encounter had me huffing down the oxygen. I’d have to ease up if my supply was to last through the night.

At the end of the corridor, the blood snake slipped beneath a pair of black doors. I knocked. There was an echo. Whatever was on the other side of this threshold was massive.

The doors creaked open, revealing a field of candles, a vigil the size of a hangar. Stepping into the room felt like walking onto the cosmos. There were no boilers, no vats, and no aircrafts, just a vast garden of light.

Whatever the facility was built for, it had been repurposed. Spinning around, I took in all the footage I could.

Mesmerized by the candles, it took a while to realize there was something wrong with the walls. From a distance, the brickwork appeared to be made of nothing but headers. Stranger still, the courses between them were stacked in intersecting lines, not the strengthening patterns common to buildings of this height. Approaching the wall, I saw that it was riddled with holes and rivets. Not holes, but sockets. Not rivets, but teeth.

These were not bricks. The walls were made from skulls. The facility had been converted into a grand industrial charnel house. There were too many skulls to count, more than enough to account for every missing person in the state’s history.

Wind swirled around me. The candles flickered in a circular pattern, spiraling out to the walls. The room quaked. The skulls rattled. I feared they’d come crashing down on me.

A chorus of voices boomed, “Who dares disturb our slumber?”

The force knocked me to my knees. Candles jut through my fingers. My legs were drenched in a puddle of wax. Struggling to my feet, I gulped. “Drew Chial, aspiring author.”

Their teeth rose and fell, “Why have you contaminated the purity of our domain with your presence?”

“Purity?” I muttered, “Did you see the guy wandering the corridor? You lot must have a lax definition of purity if–”

The room quaked.

I cupped my hands over my mask, “I needed reference material.”

“Reference material for what?” The walls echoed.

I tugged at my breathing apparatus. “A blog entry on how atmosphere can enhance a writer’s scenes.”

“What is this atmosphere of which you speak?” Their voices rang.

Brushing off my knee pads, I raised a finger. “I’m glad you asked.”

Alas with a pipe

Creating Atmosphere on the Cheap: The Ed Wood Method

As a former script reader, I can’t tell you how many screenplays I read that had zero description of their settings. The most the screenwriters would give me was: EXT. CEMETERY – NIGHT, then it was straight to six pages of dialogue. As far as I’m concerned, that’s a radio drama with faces. Film is a visual medium. Give your audience something to look at.

Learning a scene took place in a cemetery, my internal set designer just slapped something together.

Sliding blue gels over the lights, he cranked up smoke machines, dumped dry ice into every nook and cranny. He called for cardboard headstones and Styrofoam angel statues. Teamsters nailed shanty mausoleum facades together. The night sky was reduced to stage lights glowing through black sheets of cheese cloth. The clouds were just colored clumps of cotton.

The landscape my internal set designer threw together was serviceable, but it lacked fine details. It had all the atmosphere of Plan 9 from Outer Space. That’s why I call this the Ed Wood Method of story telling, because it forces the reader to come up with a slapdash backdrop that brings down the value of the rest of the production.

Cemeteries are scary, but you can’t just set a scene there and expect instant fear from your reader. You have to earn your audience’s anxiety by setting up the ambience. Show us something that doesn’t immediately come to mind. Something that tells us you’ve been there, that you know the lay of the land. Something that sets this cemetery apart from all the other ones.

Presenting Skull Head

Working for Your Atmosphere: The H.P. Lovecraft Method

H.P. Lovecraft had a talent for staging scenes, warping entrails into pagan symbols in the Antarctic snow, dressing lost cities with tomes of forbidden knowledge, glyphs that hinted at what was coming. He littered The Mountains of Madness with all kinds of evidence, long before letting the reader catch a glimpse of the dark presence.

Lovecraft was an architect building tension, mounting dread. He left empty spaces in his cavernous ruins, dark places for his readers to fill with nightmares. Rather than burn his audience out on confrontations with creatures, he chilled them with atmosphere.

Lovecraft’s favorite word was “indescribable.” He’d lead you to the terror below, describe its tendrils in a blur of movement, and leave you to put the rest of the pieces together. He knew that the best horror stories were a collaborative effort between the writer and the reader. He knew that the audience’s imagination was not a screen to present events, but a canvas filled by the reader’s interpretation.

Lovecraft isn’t known for dialogue or characterization. By all accounts, he was sparse on both fronts, but he was a master of description. Give him a house and he’d fill the walls with rats. Give him an attic and he’d fill the air with things swimming on sympathetic vibrations. Give him a cave and he’d fill it with the remnants of a lost civilization, and the very creatures that did it in.

Angry Skull

Building Your Story on the Atmosphere: My Method

When a premise escapes me, I’ll write a description-centric story. When it hits a wall, I’ll describe the scenery. When I’m all out of life events to reference, I’ll mine the places I’ve been. The narrative that opens this blog is a combination of spaces I’ve seen urban exploring. I grafted the chain length fence from St. Paul’s Island Station Power Plant onto Stillwater’s Tall Bridge. I linked a sewage pipe from White Bear Lake to the bowels of the Walker Art Center. I borrowed the dilapidated ceiling from an abandon apartment complex.

I think of these pieces as studies, like list poems, they’re workouts to keep the creative juices flowing. If I have nothing to say, I’ll just interpret the details of something. It might seem like a waste of time, but it keeps me writing. This method is a great tool for chiseling a sculpture out of writers’ block.

Sometimes atmosphere building can develop into plot structure. The combined settings reveal the stages of a journey. They compel me to go back and plant more evidence along the way.

Angry Alas

I Dare You: a Challenge for Writers

In Screenwriting 101 we weren’t allowed to write dialogue for the entire semester. Speech was a story telling crutch, the professor wanted us to build up our descriptive muscles.

He tapped a dry erase marker against his palm. “Every week I want you to go somewhere you feel out of place and write about it. I want you to exit your comfort zone and enter the great unknown.”

The first week I downed two pints of Guinness and stumbled into the Church of Scientology to get myself a free personality test. After learning I was depressed and in dire need of an audit, I begged my way into their bathroom. The tester waited outside the door, just in case I wandered off and started taking pictures. I already had all the mnemonic negatives I would ever need.

The next week I explored the deadly Mississippi cave system, where local gangsters hid during prohibition.

The third week I went to a lesbian bar called π. Turned out, I wasn’t all that uncomfortable (not for the creepy reasons you’re thinking). They played good music, had an inclusive vibe, and welcomed me into a dance off.

Every week I added new wings to my memory palace, finding new venues to play out my little dramas. I found the perfect dark alley to stage my crime scenes. I found a water tower that looked like it was built by the Knights Templar. I found a seedy night club, complete with its own bondage dungeon.

I dare you to do the same. Go exploring. You don’t need to find an abandon asylum to get the job done. If your true fear is social situations, get into one. Your alienation will make you a better observer. You’ll notice things others take for granted.

Think about all the aspects of your location that you couldn’t come up with on your own. The ones you had to be there to see, the ones that have the potential to make a setting feel unique. This should teach you which details are redundant and which ones are essential. Don’t let your descriptions read like police reports. Don’t overwhelm your reader with an orgy of evidence. Plant just enough to give them a bad feeling. Their imagination will do the rest.

Have a jaw

For more writing tricks, check out: Eavesdropping Advisory for a method for stealing dialogue from rude people, and On Sherlocking for reading the subtext in body language.

The Lookout Tower (Audio Short)

The Lookout Tower

Ever have that dream where you’re alone in a lookout tower with nothing but prairie in all directions? How about the one where a horde of rude people invade your land? This dream journal entry is about what it feels like when the world holds the next Woodstock on your personal space. Listen as a drum circle turns into a rave, and our hero is forced to retaliate.

The Facebook Bait-and-Switch

How Facebook’s changes have made it tough for an author to build a following.

The Facebook Bait-and-Switch

Introducing the Facebook "Pay" button the only way authors can reach anyone
Introducing the Facebook “Pay” button the only way authors can reach anyone

In the past, Facebook provided a great free service for authors. Allowing us to create fan pages to reach our readers, it let us keep separate accounts for our friends and families. Choosing to “Like” our pages, audiences got updates on projects, saving our other accounts for personal status.

As brick and mortar book stores crumbled at the feet of e-readers, social-network-self-publishing seemed like a viable option. Author pages became a yard stick for agents to measure the worth of a client. Traditional publishers changed their contract criteria. Now it wasn’t about how many awards a writer had won, or how many short fiction collections they’d been featured in, it was about how many smiling icons they had at the bottom of their profile page.

Social media gurus preached, “The keeper of the publishing gates will look at how many followers you have and judge you accordingly.”

We thought we were paying Facebook, by keeping the social network relevant. As far as we knew, money was exchanging hands. Advertisers were paying to reach users outside of the ones who’d “Liked” their product, while we ground along winning ours one by one.

When we shot trailers for our books, Facebook was where we premiered them. Our revenue came from iBooks and Amazon, but Facebook was where we made our sales. Not limiting us to 140 characters, we filled our elevator pitches with the details that gave our stories meaning.

Writers put everything they had into their author pages. Some used them as a substitute for a blog. Why not? Instead of linking readers to an off site destination, Facebook could make that connection. Livelihoods depended on what they were offering.

Facebook gave authors a broad reach, then they chopped off our arms. Why? So they could sell us all prosthetics. They hooked us on a free service. Made it crucial to our business, then made us pay for what it once was.

It’s a classic bait-and-switch grift.

The Facebook Bait-and-Switch
The Facebook Bait-and-Switch

In the span of a month, my posts went from reaching half of my followers, to five percent of them. Rather than entice me with membership only features, they’re charging for ones they used to give away for free.

Why not pay? Because I don’t trust their brand. I could shell out the cash to reach 100% of my followers, but next month they could throttle me back and ask for a larger chunk of change. I’m just building a following, I haven’t even tried to sell anything.

Recently, I wrote an article on how the hate group leader Fred Phelps accidentally struck a blow for gay rights. Despite having nothing to do with the type of fiction I write, I want all of my followers to see the piece. Still, I’m not going to pay to boost it.

I’m not going to pay Facebook to promote my author page either. Why, because I want to represent myself on social media, finding readers through a direct connection. I don’t want to depend on an impersonal algorithms recommendation.

I’ve considered abandoning my Facebook author page in favor of posting on my personal one. It’s a broader audience, a few friends with shared interests are among them, the rest are relatives, classmates, and coworkers. This is a temporary solution that might cost more “Friends” than it gains. I’ve already written about getting flack for it.

Embracing Facebook’s monopoly on networking, we let it step all over us. While social media gurus still sing its praises, this author has been priced out of it.

Face Palm

Authors should consider which social media plates to spin and which ones to let come crashing down. It’s hard enough to balance life and work with writing. Social networking can eat up even more of that time. You need to be selective about which services you invest in.

At this point, I’d tell new authors that building a following on Facebook is like building your house on sand.

Fred Phelps: An Ironic Legacy

This post comes with a trigger warning. Discussing a hate group and their leader, I had to chronicle what they’ve done. For those of you who come to my blog seeking writing advice, short fiction, and memoir entries, an article on Fred Phelps might seem off topic. I’ve met the man on two occasions, and as a commentator on trolls, cyber bullies, and internet culture, I felt compelled to weigh in.

(Thanks to Achilles Sangster for providing many of the photos featured throughout, check out his blog here)

Fred Phelps: An Ironic Legacy

No, this wasn’t Photoshopped. Back in 2001, I met Fred Phelps
No, this wasn’t Photoshopped. Back in 2001, I met Fred Phelps (photo by Achilles Sangster)

In America, 17 States now allow same-sex marriage. The constitutionality of gay marriage bans are being challenged. Media pundits, who once built followings on anti-gay rhetoric, are losing their sponsorship. Efforts to deny service to gay people under the guise of “preserving religious freedom” are being vetoed left and right.

There are many heroes in this new era of civil rights: plaintiffs who brought unjust laws to the supreme court, students who formed GLBT groups, actors, musicians, and sports figures who outed themselves. Still, few have swayed the court of public opinion as much as one man.

Reverend Fred Phelps, the founder of the Westboro Baptist Church, the group responsible for the infamous God Hates Fags demonstrations.

13 years after my first encounter with Fred Phelps, so much has changed. 2 years ago, my home state of Minnesota shot down a gay marriage ban. Last fall, our first same sex marriage ceremonies happened.

We made this progress, despite the best efforts of people like Phelps, or perhaps because of them.

Continue reading Fred Phelps: An Ironic Legacy

Let Lucid (Audio Short)

Let Lucid

Ever realize that you were dreaming and decide to call your subconscious out on it? Did that free your imagination, or cause conflict? Ever call your dream decorators credentials into question? Ever get lucid and criticize the landscape? Ever interpret one of your nocturnal visions from within? This dream journal entry is about those meta-fiction moments of clarity. Listen as a dreamer takes control of his own nightmare.

This work of flash fiction is part of my Dream Detective series. To read the others Click Here.

Viral Envy

Why writers shouldn’t succumb to Viral Envy. Why bloggers shouldn’t try to become BuzzFeed, and why getting everyone’s attention is a waste of your time.

28 Drews Later
28 Drews Later

There’s a condition going around the writing community, with the power to debilitate an author’s creativity. Systemic of the internet, the higher our public presence, the higher we’re at risk. Inflaming our sense of rejection, it weakens our ambition. Its chronic symptoms, attack artistic momentum. Advancing into its final stages, it has us questioning why we fill our pages.

The warning signs a writer suffers from it include:

* An overly harsh response to lighthearted links.
* An open disdain for their Facebook feed.
* A history of Twitter fits.
* An outright dismissal of the value of social media, even if their careers depend on it.

The condition is called Viral Envy. It occurs when a writer is stricken with jealousy for over shared items of poor quality.

As avid readers, we know good writing when we see it. We are mavens of our selections, curators of our content, stewards of the written word. Our reading lists are hard venues to get into. We seek the best compositions for dinner party conversations. We seek sources to cite in our arguments. We seek eloquence to challenge our intelligence.

Despite every passing fad’s persistence, we’ve built up a resistance. We have an immunity to the whims of the community. We’ve been inoculated to the link they’ve baited. No sensational headline is going to steal our time. No slideshow will make us work slow. While our friends treat captions as the height of conversation, we see viral content as a sign of the world’s descent.

It offends our intelligence to think that journalism is dead, that editorials reign instead, that clickbaiting is the new norm, that tiles full of tiny articles are a threat to the long form. Blogging our deepest thoughts, we see Buzzfeed black holes as competition. Every lunch hour, every commercial break, we’re vying for reader’s attention.

When a viral video of models making out, contaminates our feed, we fight the urge to say, “If you like watching two strangers kiss for the first time, then you’ll love pornography.”

We’re tired of logging onto the lowest common denominator. Comparing our efforts to these shameless campaigns, we’re shocked to see them do so much better. We covet their comments, lust after their “Likes.” We’re ashamed to want their shares. We’ve got a bad case of viral envy.

Is there a cure?

Weakening their immune systems, some writers become part of the problem.

Zombie Portrait 4

Why Going Viral isn’t a Good Goal

The pathology of a web published pandemic is to spread. It’s simple, light, airborne. Readers pass the link along without analyzing it on a molecular level. Attribution rarely leads back to patient zero.

Viral content is indiscriminate. The infected are never targeted based on their tastes. Its made to spread to the most eyes, not necessarily the right ones. It doesn’t care about building relationships or reader loyalty. It’s a quick shot to the stat counter, at the detriment of regular subscribers.

Moving quickly through the brain, thought viruses are easily forgotten. The net is littered with the pus of these so-called phenomenons. The infection passes too fast to leave traces it was ever there. Audiences will find a treatment for their boredom, but not a lasting cure.

If your goal is to self-publish, you want to develop a readership, not coax wayward netizens out of a few clicks. Viral content rarely leads to a second outbreak event. Developing antibodies, the infected’s concentration is inoculated against repetition. Memes, macros, and microorganisms plague the net. Everybody’s been exposed. Everybody’s gotten over it.

There are a lot of things you can do to get the Internet’s attention, but they don’t always translate into sales on Amazon. Ask yourself: am I writing with my own voice, or one I think the world wants to hear? How will this animated Gif get me new readers? How does this captioned vid cap further my career?

Wait, hold on, my word processor stopped scrolling. Great, now I’m getting the pinwheel of death. Let me just poke around on my computer. Ah, here’s the cause. Turns out the Photoshop file with all my “Least Interesting Man in the World” posts was still open. It’s a play on Dos Equis’s Most Interesting Man in the World campaign. They’re self portraits with captions like, ‘I don’t always approach women, but when I do it’s to ask for the WiFi password.”

Now where was I?

There’s a pitfall I’ve watched writers fall into. To compete with the internet they become everything they hate about it. Having built a blog around a one note joke, they try to sing a different tune, but no one wants to hear it. They can’t find a publisher for their long form manuscript, but they’ll get a pilot based on their one good quip. Remember “Shit My Dad Says?”

Do you want your writing career to be a joke-a-day calendar, or the kind of coffee table book that makes guests question your sense of humor?

The cost of going viral, is that everyone gets sick of you.

Wait, hold on. Sorry, it’s happening again. The side bar is stuck in the same position. What is it this time? Oh, looks like I didn’t close my search through my best #YouKnowYoureAWriterWhen tweets. They’re like Jeff Foxworthy’s You Know You’re A Redneck bit, but writer-centric. I’m compiling them all for a collection.

Now, what was I saying?

Zombie Portrait 3

Don’t let Viral Envy Win

In these uncertain times writers have to do whatever they can to get their audience’s attention. The trick is keeping it. We all want to be relevant, but no one wants to come across as desperate as a Simpsons episode with Twitter references sprinkled in.

Shameless writers try to boost their search engine optimization by pumping their articles full of popular terms. Misdirecting traffic with mere mentions, these cynical inclusions piggyback on famous franchises. They figure, if Hollywood can bank on nostalgia, why can’t bloggers?

Wait. There’s a buzz at the door. I think I might have to sign for something. My Chinese hook up got me early access to a hoverboard prototype. This baby won’t hit the streets until 2015.

Damn, that wasn’t it. It was just a Boba Fett helmet with a Ghostbusters insignia etched into it.

Wait, hold on. Now I’m getting a call from my seamstress. We need to schedule a time for me to get fitted for a top secret cosplay garment. Not to spoil the surprise, but Ben Affleck will be wearing the same thing in Batman vs Superman (keep checking this site, bookmark it, tell all your friends).

Sorry about that. Where was I?

Zombie Portrait 2

The Viral Jackpot

In the process of building a platform, many writers become full time bloggers. The potential for validation is higher. More posts means more possibilities. This is a gambler’s fallacy, this notion that one of our annual entries is bound to hit the viral jackpot. If only we could win the literary lottery, then we’d be a household name for sure.

It’s sad to see so much creativity energy go to these desperate self promotional tactics.

Wait, hold on, the green light of my webcam has gone off again. This has been happening ever since I wrote the article on how to increase your web traffic by baiting the NSA. There, I put some tape over it.

Where was I before we were so rudely interrupted?

I’ve watched begrudged writers berate their followers, dissing the discourse, trolling for tell offs. They’d run out of ways to get attention. Their positive energy was depleted. The cost to their time had led to few benefits. Their growth stagnated. They called bullshit on the whole enterprise and the lot of us for feeding into it.

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t understand. Hopefully, I’ll know when to politely duck out of the spotlight before I let this happen.

Zombie Portrait

Don’t you hate it when bloggers fill their posts full of links to try to keep you on their site? On an unrelated note: my other articles on over branding and compulsive marketing include:

Begging for Hits
How to Get More Hits by Baiting the NSA
Every Little Hit Counts
Gimme Some Truth
Carnival of Goals
Over Branding Continue reading Viral Envy

I’d Become the Lake (Audio Short)

I'd Become the Lake

Ever dream you could fly, only to realize something else was happening? Ever believe you’ve soared above your problems, only to realize you’re still in the thick of them? This dream journal entry captures the horror of that sudden realization. Listen as a dream trades places with a nightmare.

This work of flash fiction is part of my Dream Detective series. To read the others Click Here.

Lagging Behind (Audio Short)

Lagging Behind

Ever have that dream where you’re following a herd of deer across the city; the one where they lead you from the maternity ward to the cemetery? No, doesn’t sound familiar? How about the one where you’re struggling to keep up with your own peers? The dream gives you the perfect vantage point to see them accept their degrees, tour good homes, and enjoy extravagant wedding ceremonies.

In this dream journal entry, the two themes intersect. Listen as the deer devoir the future. Lag behind the herd as they chew on life events. Witness the nightmare of every millennial, the terror of every man child struggling to fly their way out of never never land.

This work of flash fiction is part of my Dream Detective series. To read the others Click Here.

Dream Detective: Flash Fiction about Dreams and Nightmares

It took a lot of restraint, preventing myself from calling this article "Drew Detective"
It took a lot of restraint to prevent myself from calling this article “Drew Detective”

Earlier this week, I made eight images inspired by the opening title sequence for True Detective. Not knowing what I’d do with them, I settled on writing a short story for each one. Due to the abstract nature of these collages, I decided to make this collection of flash fiction about dreams, pairing the ones I can remember with the right picture. This collection is dark, funny, and more than a little personal.

I invite you to play dream detective, to find the nuance in my nightmares, to surmise my subconscious. If you’ve ever had a dream like one of these, I’d love to hear about it in the comments. Continue reading Dream Detective: Flash Fiction about Dreams and Nightmares

A Modest Proposed Bill

I should front load this post with a big fat disclaimer. I’m not sure who it will offend more: its intended targets, or the backhanded villains of the metaphor. At the risk of being controversial, allow me to make a proposal for Arizona. If you legislate the right to discriminate something like the following will happen.

A Modest Proposed Bill

Left and Right

There’s a powerful lobby imposing a sinister agenda on my family. They want to restructure our classrooms, make trouble at the drinking fountains, and put different tools in our teacher’s hands. They want to indoctrinate my children into believing their lifestyle is normal. When my family, with our traditional values, points out the error of their ways, we’re accused of bullying. We’re signaled out for our beliefs.

Running a mom and pop restaurant, I’m in charge of hiring. Since I can’t ask for certain personal details from our applicants, I have to check for all the signs: how they shake hands, the way they’ve tied their tie, and what direction their belt buckle is facing. I can’t have these types of people handling our utensils, going limp on our corkscrews, cutting their fingers on our can openers.

Tending to our garden, we hire our share of day laborers. I’d hate to find I’d invited one of them into my home. They’ve got their own way of doing things. Call me old fashioned, but I shouldn’t be expected to have to support their decision.

I’m, of course, referring to left-handed people.

I’m trying to bring my children up right, as in right-handed. I don’t want them to come home with stories of awkward encounters at the pencil sharpener. I don’t want them in the same class as the kid with the spiral notebook line down his wrist. What if my son comes home asking why his friend has two writing pads? Suddenly my son is ambidextrous-curious. Pretty soon he’ll be asking his coach if he can try on the special glove at baseball practice.

As a small business owner, I don’t want Uncle Sam telling me how to run my kitchen, making me stock up on special tools to enable heathens. I will not be made to embrace your alternative knife style, or your choice to fillet. Adam and Eve knew with which hand to cleave. It’s not my fault that your perverse hand orientation has you looking at the metric side of the measuring cup.

Playing in the backyard, I shouldn’t have to tell my children why one of the gardeners has a queer way of using our hoes, pruners, and potting trowels. Watering with the wrong hand is simply unnatural, yet I’m the bigot for pointing out something that’s factual.

Scissors

This bias against traditional right-handed values is nothing short of discrimination. These lefty leftists are using tolerance to take away the rights of righties. Demanding special treatment, they want us to shift door knob placement. They want us to redesign desks so the boards align with their twisted viewpoints. The government claims to uphold the constitution, but when it comes to religious freedom, it seems like the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing.

In the United States, all pillars of society are under attack. Changing traditional marriage, husband’s offer the wrong hand to their wives. Infiltrating the boy scouts, they teach our sons a left handed hand shake. In our courts, they swear on the bible with the limb they use for libel. Mainline churches are put upon to serve the southpaw over the north when they give communion.

Invading our calendars, they claimed August 13th as their day, soon they’ll want their own parades. Even as I type this, there’s a lefty occupying the oval office.

I’m drawing the line down the center of the road. I’m an American, I drive on the right side of the street. Changing gears, I define traditional leverage as the bond between one hand and one minivan. On one side I turn the ignition, on the other I flip the bird.

I’m tired of these people getting stuck at the checkout counter, stretching the cord for the pen attached to the credit card machine, clogging up my subway turnstiles with their two left feet. I’m sick of scraping their boomerangs off my rooftop, because they don’t know how to throw them right. I’m sick of my tax dollars going to ER visits, for frequent power-saw accidents.

Sorry if we don’t want them in our restaurant, but they nudge the other guests as they bite into their croissants. Sorry if my country club doesn’t swing that way. We hold our putters the correct way. Sorry if we don’t welcome them into our neighborhood, but we had a show of hands and voted for the public good.

Yes, I check my children’s friends for ink on their palms. Children are impressionable. I forbid mine from listening to Cobain, McCartney, or Hendrix because of the way they held their guitar picks. I won’t let them watch anything starring Tom Cruise, not for his religious views, but for the way in which he ties his shoes.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t care what you do in the privacy of your own home, but don’t go waving those reversed digits in front of my kids. Keep your left-handedness in the closet with all your wrong facing garments.

Cork Screws

I’m proposing a bill to protect my right handed values by allowing me to post this on my shop window:

WE RESERVE THE RIGHT TO REFUSE SERVICE TO LEFT HANDED PEOPLE

I’m doing this because Left-handed people pose a substantial burden on my sincerely held religious belief. They challenge my faith every time they make a mess with dry erase markers, flip the contents of a clipboard, or change the screen orientation of a video game.

Does the bible not teach us that, “A wise man’s heart is at his right hand, But a fool’s heart is at his left.” Ecclesiastes 10:1-3

The good book is quite clear about the lord’s preference.

“And he shall set the sheep on his right hand and the goats on the left.” Matthew 25:33

There’s a reason the Angel Michael sat at God’s right and Lucifer sat at his left. There’s a reason left-handedness was considered sufficient evidence that someone was a witch. It was seen as a mark of the devil. There’s a reason Catholic schools used to whip pupils into right-handed values.

Here they want to spit in the face of our cultural heritage and our tradition. They want special treatment for their perverse preference. They want to change the way I run my staff promotions, seeing as how they’re decided with an arm wrestling contest.

There is no furtherance of a compelling government interest to impose left handedness on my business, to make fashion designers invert zippers, to make banks change the placement of pens around deposit slips, or to make tech companies shift the number pad to the other side of the keyboard.

Instead of laying on the right guilt, rallying against “right privilege,” lefties should work to improve the way they trim the hedge. There are options, they don’t always have to feel marginalized at the margins. Left hand conversion therapy is filled with positive success stories. All you have to do is let God convert you into the person you were meant to be. Rather than live a life of sin, have you tried being a righty?

Can opener

(Special thanks to http://lefthanded-problems.tumblr.com and the hashtag #LeftHandedProblems on Twitter for inspiring many of the references here)

If you haven’t been following the news out of Arizona (or Kansas) then all this might seem like it came out of left field (so to speak). I rarely take stands on polarizing issues, but I decided to write this to put one into perspective. If you support legislation that would deny rights to gay people, please reread this story, because it’s how you sound to me.