Spiritual Cramp

How come I can never go to sleep at the same time each night? How come when I wake up by alarm I always feel miserable and exhausted? It wasn't like this back when I was doing overnights, sleeping during the day, and waking up at ten pm for work. That was the one benefit of working graveyards.

You can now pre-order my short story collection, My Heart Said No, But the Camera Crew Said Yes! Do it here: www.rawdogscreaming.com/myheart.html

Here are some descriptions of haunted houses:

From The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson-

Chapter 1 (omnipresent POV)

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

Chapter 2 (third person limited POV)

No human eye can isolate the unhappy coincidence of line and place which suggests evil in the face of a house, and yet somehow a maniac juxtaposition, a badly turned angle, some chance meeting of roof and sky, turned Hill House into a place of despair, more frightening because the face of Hill House seemed awake, with a watchfulness from the blank windows and a touch of glee in the eyebrow of a cornice. Almost any house, caught unexpectedly or at an odd angle, can turn a deeply humorous look on a watching person; even a mischievous little chimney, or a dormer like a dimple, can catch up a beholder with a sense of fellowship; but a house arrogant and hating, never off guard, can only be evil. This house, which seemed somehow to have formed itself, flying together into its own powerful pattern under the hands of its builders, fitting itself into its own construction of lines and angles, reared its great head back against the sky without concession to humanity. It was a house without kindness, never meant to be lived in, not a fit place for people or for love or for hope. Exorcism cannot alter the countenance of a house; Hill House would stay as it was until it was destroyed.

From Hell House by Richard Matheson:

It stood before them in the fog, a massive, looming specter of a house.

From "Terror in the Haunted House" by Bradley Sands (from My Heart Said No, But the Camera Crew Said Yes!)

Black-wearing men wheel out a house that is just a little too large for a miniature and just a little too small to be a house. Six stories of pure trial and error, an ungainly spire growing out of its roof that really should be checked out by a doctor, a fog machine that won the Regional Spelling Bee with “doom for asthmatics,” grass that has been overgrown ever since accepting a contract put out on the readers of Better Homes and Gardens―this is what awaits Crispin on The Price Is An Unspeakable Agony.

Also, I have been having trouble connecting with experimental poetry lately. I take a class where it is often workshopped. It is tough on me. This is my theory of experimental poetry:

1: It is not narrative-based. Instead, it is written with the intention that the language/words/rhythm will trigger emotions and memories in the reader. Unfortunately, it does not work like this for me.

2: There is no clear POV. No protagonist or multi-protagonist. No I, you, he, she, the man, the woman, the mongoose. I feel like a POV is a key that opens a door for me. Without POV, a poem remains inaccessible to me.

3: It is often entirely composed of predicates and devoid of subjects.

Also, I came up with a phrase while revising a particular letter entirely too many times: "Revision is the most essential nutrient for typos." Eh...something like that. It was better when I came up with it. Now I'm paraphrasing.

Also, The &Now Awards Anthology came in the mail today. Looks good. I have a story in it. You can buy it here: www.lakeforest.edu/press/lfcp/&now/awards.html. Or here: www.amazon.com/Now-Awards-Best-Innovative-Writing/dp/0982315600

And this just in! Mel Bosworth reads things. This time, he reads my prose poem, "The Time Traveling Giraffe is on Fire."



Thanks, Mel!