Sunday, May 18, 2008

Something new

I've been fighting my muse recently.

I have four projects begging to be novels. One is in rough draft form and I've only skimmed over it. Another is a sequel to my recent novel "Hell to Pay". One is a short story I'd like to make longer (going into the realms of Sci-Fi) , and finally this.

Aristid is the story I came up with one night while playing D & D. It was one of those moments when you make up a character and suddenly EVERYTHING came to me. Out of the stories I'm contemplating, this is the one that might write itself. I created a comic of it years ago and tried to find a home for it with no success. So using issue one as an outline, I'm playing around.

Here is the first page:

Chapter 1

My birth was eventful for my small village. Rumors surfaced of my mother dancing in the forest with devils and strangely shaped animals under the full moon. Her pregnancy, devoid of any local man, was faced with fear and dread.

Ripe with birth, she stumbled through the village. No one helped although they all saw her huddling and huffing with the pain of my delivery. The local church bells rang in warning, a three bell melody where the third bell’s tone off — the tempest warning.

They watched her go to her small straw house on the edge of the woods. They followed her like wolves tracking a screaming injured horse and surrounded the house.

An old woman passed through the crowd, slow of gait, withered with age, and covered in a funeral shrouds. She passed them into the house where my mother lay and midwifed my beginning.

My cries blended to my mother’s final breaths and I came into this world. The old woman’s clawed hands my only salvation. After ritualistically cleansing me, she blessed my mother’s passing. Then walked out and presented the angry townspeople with what they feared most.

They say I looked normal except for the horn buds jutting from my scalp.

The villagers had exchanged their farming implements and labor tools for weapons and torches.
The old woman lifted her milky eyes to the local clergy and shouted a long stream of curses that ended in my name, Aristid. The priest simply pointed and my captors claimed me in my first hour of life as my savior had hers ended. They say any plow shears used that day, reused in the fields, caused the grain to decay and the soil to refuse to grow. The flails, speckled with her blood, caused madness in those who consumed the flour.

How different it would have turned out if I had a normal childhood.

I traveled the backroads wrapped in the chains of swaddling. When I arrived at my destination they left me to the darkness, perched on a stone slab, in hopes that animals or exposure would claim me before the High Father’s decision did.

The High Father stood command over the churches vast power, and if for the sympathy of his young daughter, Elisabeth, I would have been lost.

Yup, rough draft.

The story is about a half demon boy, raised by the church to be a super weapon during their crusades, turning against his training and his upbringing when it turns on him.

Dare I say an Anti-Hero story.

This was the intro for the comic . . .

Honor, Truth, Fidelity.

This day I betrayed it all. All that I was raised to believe, the very aspects that would have destroyed me if I had not struck. Do not sorrow for my tears, they are simply a byproduct of the freedom that I have never felt.


Tell me what you think.

Friday, May 16, 2008

Those that have walked the path before us

It's been a long happy week.

As I set here writing, wondering if certain people (yes, Denise) will be offended at my use of the phrase hand job in the previous work (Gary, stop smiling), and drinking beer (a nice Sam Adams Summer Ale) I think of those beers from long ago that I miss like hell.

RattleSnake Ale was one of my first microbrews I discovered while very young. It looked like a handpainted bottle imported all the way from New Orleans. The taste was bitter like Heinekin, the smell like a southend skunk (people used to look at me and ask what I was drinking after popping a top), but had one of the smoothest finishes of a beer I ever had. I only found this brew at one liquor store in Wichita, they stopped carrying it and said the supplier stopped shipping it in. I thought about ordering a case of it direct a while back. After a very long search on the internet, I found the brewery. Unfortunately, life has a way of throwing a roadblock or two in. Then the hurricane happened. Now, the link on the internet is long gone and the clear glass painted bottles are a distant pleasant memory like the lingering taste of a kiss from a forlorn lover.

Zebra Beer was a nice surprise from BeerFest. Most of their products were made with fruit, but the standard Zebra beer was a rich lager with a great caramel finish. Here's what I found online:
In May 1997, the three owner-executives of Madcap Craftbrew & Bottleworks, Inc., were attempting to define the position of their product, Zebra Beer, in the brewing industry. Zebra Beer was offered in three varieties: Zebra Peach, Zebra Raspberyy, and Zebra Lager. The recipes for the beer had been handed down from the great-great-great-grandmother of the owneres, and establishment of the brewing company had been a family dream for generation. The beers had won a number of prestigious awards for their flavor and quality. Industry conditions, however, made it difficult to be successful as a craft brewery. Distribution was difficult to obtain, both at the distributor and the retail level. Numerous other microbrews and craftbrews were available, and competition was stiff. Industry analysts were forecasting an industry “shake out”. Sales had not lived upto the expectations of the owners, and they were faced with a decision to continue to position their beers as expensive craftbrews that generated little volume, or to re-position them as more mainstream ‘’super premium’‘ beers that generated more volume but required significant investment in promotion at the cost of gross margin.

Without change things become stagnant. There is nothing as awful as a warm stagnant beer.

B

Again damn it

My favorite park was busted again for acting like a bath house.

Check here for the usual suspects:
http://www.wichita.gov/CityOffices/Police/FieldServices/North/Prostitution+Page.htm

The park is at 3228 N. Oliver

And no, my picture will not (double negative, deal with it) be appearing here.

I guess the guilty are using Craigslist to not only seek garage sales but also for hand jobs.

B

Friday, May 9, 2008

My Inner Geek is laughing

http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/05/09/physics.nima/index.html

30 year old in top of physics field testing some of Einstein's theories.

Cool.

B

I'm an idiot

Yeah. Started a new book last night. In the dark with a single light, with a big thunderstorm overhead. My jeans fell off the clothes hamper, hit the cover, and catapulted some of my clothes around the room. Weird, yes. Supernatural, eh.

Needless to say, I was reading horror. Normally, I have a extremely strong tolerance to horror, read it continuously in Pratt in my small ex-Methlab house. Last night, lets just say I was a little unnerved.

The book Joe Hill's "Heart-Shaped Box". Winner of the Bram Stoker award last year and the son of Mr. Stephen King. Highly recommended if you like goosebumps that don't go away.

The kid is good.

B

Thursday, May 8, 2008

Angry thoughts from an angry man

I’ve got time to think and that makes me dangerous right now.

The ABC nightly news has a piece called record oil prices and they do it every night. Yesterday oil hit $123.53 a barrel with the national average of a gallon of gas increasing to $3.645.

Now I realize there are some that say, we’ve had cheap oil for a long time deal with it. Okay. What I have a problem with is the oil companies making billions and billions of dollars in a quarter, not a year, a quarter. Shell's first-quarter profit has soared to $9.08 billion and their CEO says it’s ridiculous.

I understand that the US is a wasteful country. People love their trucks, SUVs, and large gas guzzling vehicles. Ethanol was looked at to be the saving grace for fuel, but now it seems that everyone is blaming the food shortage on this. People, think of it like this. Corn used for ethanol is below food grade. It’s used for cattle. Now the farmers usually steep and boil the corn anyway. The ethanol companies are doing this and fermenting it also. It converts some of the starch and turns it into simple sugar converting that into ethanol. Now the process also converts a unit of Carbon Dioxide with every unit of ethanol produced. Carbon Dioxide is a greenhouse gas so this process needs to be captured and used in another process (soda pop, oil refraction, etc or scrubbed with algae).

Forgive me I’m going in several directions. Back to where I want to go.

Looking at the other issues: food prices, home foreclosures, unemployment; our basic needs are going through the roof and the middle class is becoming unable to support it. When a society loses its middle class, things get very ugly.

Think Russia before the Marxist revolution, think Germany before Hitler. When an affluent people loose their means, it becomes time for a revolution . . . and our leaders suck.

The Congress, Senate, and our God loving President have the lowest approval ratings in decades. The only thing they seem to be good at is finger pointing and arguing. Even the process of electing a candidate has become ridiculous.

So. Prove you can run a country. Get some ideas and make them work, or it’s the beginning of the end.

When a smug CEO of an oil company sets before congress and says, well we don’t make much money off a gallon of gas, and then changes his tune that we can’t change anything. Do what we do to terrorists. Because right now, the oil men are doing more harm to this country than the terrorists ever did. The next time an oil tycoon shrugs and smiles about the billions made in the LAST THREE MONTHS call in a Marine. On national TV (CSPAN) have the marine raise his gun to the forehead of these self made demigods and ask him once again what can be done to curb the price of gas. If the tycoon smiles and shrugs or even simply says “I don’t know” let the marine do what they do best.

Maybe that will be the start of the revolution. They are never pretty but neither is true change.

Sunday, May 4, 2008

Sundays and Samual Adams



Today was a great day. Without getting into the step by step processes of my life and the havoc that surrounds it, let's just say this afternoon I sat outside in perfect weather and sipped on a cold Sam Adams Boston Lager.








I love beer. Not quite the Homer Simpson or Peter Griffith affair (why am I using cartoon characters?) but I love the taste of beer. Domestics usually don't do it for me.


I graduated from BudWeiser U before I turned legal drinking age. I'm a bit of a beer geek. I like different beers, I like the good stuff.


Klaster - Klaster (Monastery) is traditional Czech lager beer brewed since 1570.
The beer’s unique characteristics come from fermenting and aging in caves dug in the rocks 60 feet beneath the brewery. Yum. The Dark beer is my favorite.


Sam Adams Summer Ale - Samuel Adams® Summer Ale is an American wheat ale. This summer seasonal uses malted wheat as well as lemon zest and grains of paradise, a rare pepper from Africa first used as a brewing spice in the 13th Century to create a crisp and spicy flavor and body. The ale fermentation imparts a background tropical fruit note reminiscent of mangos and peaches. All of these come together to create a quenching, clean finishing beer perfect for those warm Summer days.


Pauliner - Paulaner is a German brewery, established in the early 1600s in Munich by the Minim friars of the Neudeck ob der Au cloister. The mendicant order and the brewery are named after Francis of Paola, the founder of the order.Weißbier (literally translated as "White Beer," and so-called because it was at the time of its inception paler in color than Munich brown beer) is a Bavarian specialty brewed in which a significant proportion of malted barley is replaced with malted wheat. By German law, Weissbiers brewed in Germany must be top-fermented, making them ales.[1] Specialized strains of yeast are used which produce overtones of banana and clove as by-products of fermentation.[1]


Bass - Bass (pronounced /ˈbæs/) is the name of a former brewery and the brand name for several English beers originally brewed in Burton upon Trent at Bass Brewery and still brewed in Burton on behalf of InBev by Marstons. Bass is most particularly associated with their pale ale. The distinctive Red Triangle logo for Bass Pale Ale was Britain's first registered trademark.Pale ale is a term used to describe a variety of beers which use ale yeast and predominantly pale malts. It is widely considered to be one of the major beer style groups.


Those are a few of my tastes. There's more. Want to find out, invite me out to an old Chicago and I'll go around the world with you.


I started off telling you it was a wonderful day, then ended up giving a lesson in beer.

B