After reading the Kipster’s latest post and the attendant link to Modern Drunkard Magazine I think I’ll amend Item #1250 to staying drunk all week. Staying drunk all day lacks ambition. Anyone can be drunk all day. To stay drunk all week requires stamina and forethought.

Yes, that’s my email address on the right. Way down there. Above Meaningless Statistics. Just to make it easier to talk to me. Hopefully it still requires a tweak in order to use it. I’ve put spaces on either side of the @. I’m happy to get letters. Just a few words of caution –

1. I’m a lousy correspondent. I used to be very good at returning letters back when they required stamps and envelopes. No longer. I try to respond to every letter I get but it sometimes takes a while – a long while.

2. If I don’t know you include my name or some obvious reference to my galleries or posts in the subject line of your email. I get lots of spam and delete most emails from unfamiliar addresses unread. “Hey” or “How’s it going” or “Remember Me?” or “URGENT REQUEST” will all be ignored.

Happy Holidays!

Item #1249 – Publish a Coffee Table Book of Photos of My Friends

Pure vanity project here. Do a series of photos of my friends and family and publish a nice hard cover book of the results as a Christmas present for them. I’d be fine having someone else be the photographer. Some of those friends are much better photographers than I am.

Item #1250 – Stay Drunk All Day

I tried this for one of my birthdays years ago. It took me two hours to finish my first beer of the morning. The appeal of this idea these days is more in having the time to actually spend a day doing something that dumb and unproductive than in the actual drunkness.

Item #1251 – Cycle Around the USA

Basically that. Cycle around the United States. Start on one coast, cycle the small roads over to the other coast and head back taking a different set of small roads. I get the feeling that this couldn’t be done in one trip, at least not comfortably – what with seasons changing and all.

Item #1252 – Win the Lottery

Can’t really plan for this one can you? I buy the occasional ticket but I figure my odds of winning are lower than average. I already know someone who won.Statistically that shouldn’t change my chances but still …

Item #1253 – Run a Marathon

More to say I’ve done it than because I have any great attraction to running long distances. I’d probably want to run it somewhere exotic so I’d have somewhere new and different to look at.

Items #1254 – 1278 – Have Sex With …

No celebrities here. Friends and acquaintances. Some I’ve slept with before, most not. No names named. That would be tacky. (As if mentioning it on a list isn’t.)

Item #1279 – Build a Scale Model of New York

(or Tokyo or Paris or London). The city is just background. Once it’s built I’d fill it with model kaiju smashing it down.

Item #1280 – Make the Big Score

In other words, pull off a theft so big that I never have to pull another one again. Really the only kind worth planning.

Nizzibet and I watched a special on the Discovery channel a while back that told the story of a guy who pulled off one of the largest armored car thefts in history. $17 million dollars. He stole so much money that when it came to transfer it to another vehicle they could take it all and abandoned $3 million of it. And then his idiot accomplices made themselves obvious by buying houses and cars and living large throwing around lots of cash. Of course they all got busted. Such stupidity. It was embarrassing to watch.

Item #1281 – Publish The Call

Write it first. Duh. Or write it and draw it, since, as with all stories, I imagine doing it as a comic. The Call is a novel length expansion of The Call of Cthulhu by H.P. Lovecraft. It follows a trio of survivors of LeGrasse’s bayou raid in 1908 through the Great War and the Jazz Age to the rising of R’Lyeh in 1925. Romance, adventure, history, conspiracy, politics and madness. Always with the madness.

I don’t even want to think about how many pages it might run.

Item #1282 – Raise a Polydactyl Maine Coon

All of my cats have been strays – some abandoned, some escapees and others completely feral. All of my cats will be probably be strays. Why pay for some purebreed when there are plenty of cats out there that need homes? If I were to get any breed of cat, however, I’d want a Maine Coon. Apparently polydactylism is common among the breed so I’d look for that in my cat. A giant cat with thumbs. Purrrrrrrrrr.

Item #1283 – Publish the Boy’s Life Graphic Novel

Boy’s Life by Robert R. McCammon would be a fun novel to adapt to comics. Each chapter features some boys’ adventure idea – lake monsters, mobsters, secret Nazi menaces – wrapped in a story of growing up in the early sixties. The original novel is almost 600 pages in the paperback edition. The graphic novel would need to be at least as long to do it justice.

Item #1284 – Publish the Robert R. McCammon Illustrated Library

Produce illustrated editions of all the rest of McCammon’s novels and collections. This would include the ones that he’s decided to let go out of print.

Item #1285 – Learn to Hang Glide

This would be another one of those ambitions that gets less appealing the older I get. Still, if I happened to become wealthy all of sudden and somehow found a lot time on my hands, I’d happily take this up.

Item #1286 – Publish the B-Movie Monster Re-Imagination Project Theatre

This would be a series of comics (graphic novels) adapting a few dozen obscure and sometimes absurd horror movies from the fifties and sixties. The length of each story would vary according to the potential of the story being adapted. Killers From Space. The Astounding She-Monster. It Conquered the World. From Hell It Came. And the ever popular – many more. While a lot of these movies were horrible, only occasionally blessed with an interesting premise, I’m one of those foolish optimists who believes there’s at least one good story to be found in even the stupidest idea. I’d like to test out that optimism. And draw a bunch of goofy monsters of course.

Item #1287 – Publish Tintin at the Mountains of Madness

It would be fun to write and draw the thing as well but I’m not attached to that. There may be others who are better suited to the task. Herge’s style might look simple but many people have attempted it without managing to duplicate it. It takes work and practice to say so much with so few lines. To do the material justice I’d want the book to be standard size and length (60 pages?) and in color.

Item #1288 – Climb Mt. Everest

This used to be higher on my list (like there’s really a ranking system here) but as I’ve gotten older I get less interested in taking my lazy self to very cold dangerous places.

Item #1289 – Eat a Human Being

You know, luau style. Pit roasted and shared with friends. I know, the immediate reaction among polite people is to be disgusted and horrified. But think about it, there’s over six billion of the damned things on the planet. Why not eat a few of them?

I am little picky about this. I do have stipulations for the meat –

A. It be a member of the upper classes, preferably third generation or later. I know there are many more lower class folks around but if I’m going to eat a member of the dominant species on the planet I’m not interested in being halfway about it. I want to eat the most pampered and relaxed human flesh available. At the same time I can ever so slightly open up access to health and wealth for the lower classes by removing one of those that disproportionately consumes them.

B. It be young. I’m sure even rich people get stringy when they’re old. Might as well get it when its still relatively tender. This is for the luau. I’m quite willing to have older, stringier specimens smoked for jerky. Or marinated and stewed with a lot of vegetables. Nizzibet has a great beef roast recipe that could be modified for this.

C. It be male. It’s not my feminism talking here. It’s basic livestock thinning practices.

D. There is no D..

The biggest road block to fulfilling on this item is that killing another human being isn’t on my list. There are plenty of individuals that I wouldn’t mind seeing drop dead but I’m just not interested in actually making someone dead myself. I know, I know, big surprise.

Stories End, a Ramble

Warning! Long unstructured post without links to provide context! Read at your own risk!

I started thinking about this while reading The Stiff by Jason Thompson over

at Girlamatic. The Stiff is a webcomic telling a story of high school

romance and (apparently, possibly) zombies. It’s weird and disturbing with art that’s

a mix of cartoony and highly detailed. My only complaint with the story is

the names of the characters. They are in-jokes. Most (if not all) the names

are references to horror writers. Not modern big-name authors that the more

general public with immediately know; these authors are old school and

obscure modern; the authors that a horror geek would recognize.

And I’m a horror geek. Rather I was. The trivia and history of the genre is

all muddy in my memory banks these days. I remember that Dennis Etchison is

a well regarded author but I can’t remember what he’s written. Every time a

new character pops up with a familiar name the banks start trying to pull

out the accompanying data. The names all stick out like neon in the desert.

And, for a moment, I’m no longer in the story. And that’s a little annoying.

After getting pulled out the story a few times I decided that I would avoid

in-jokes in my writing. Deciding that I would avoid in-jokes in the future

prompted me to wonder why I’d included them in the past. I read a piece

harping that writers often included in-jokes to show how smart they were,

how much a part of a scene.

I don’t think that applies in my case. I’ve never run an in-joke, an

unauthorized character or a plot riff that required the reader knowing it to

understand the story. So why have the Scooby gang, Betty and Veronica,

Charlie and Sally Brown, Daniel Rivers, John Gerboth, Jonathan Grossman,

Eric Hanni and a variety of Lovecraftian horrors made appearances in my

writing?

It varies. When I’ve turned people I know into characters it’s usually been

because I liked them and thought they were striking, iconic enough to take

life in fiction. I’ve made fun of friends but never with cruelty intended.

Some of them were flattered, some amused, some didn’t think much of the idea

but have been good enough to remain my friends.

The Lovecraftian entities and aliens? H.P. Lovecraft, his circle and their

successors have created a dynamic “mythos”. Large parts of it are in public

domain. It seems a shame not to see what kind of use I can make of it.

The Scoobies? The Peanuts Gang? The Archie Crew? Why them? Sure, it’s been

fun when someone noticed the gag but that wasn’t the prime reason I’d use

the characters.

I wanted them to grow up. I wanted to give them lives outside the static

loop in which they’d they’d been trapped. Archie Andrews has been a teenager for sixty

years. Charlie Brown never reached puberty. Nancy and Sluggo, Richie Rich,

the Katzenjammer Kids, Lisa Simpson, Lil’ Orphan Annie and thousands more

are stuck in endless childhoods. I put them in Misspent Youths (mostly in

cameos, but some front and center) in order to move their stories forward,

in order to give their stories the possibility of an end.

What a really frickin’ odd reason.

It is the limits of a story that give it life.

Arthur pulls the sword from the stone as boy, becomes King of England,

creates the round table, marries Guinevere (sp?), sends his knights to find

the grail, and sees his kingdom collapse because of adultery and family

betrayal.

Robin of Locksley and his band of merry men defy King John and the Sheriff of

Nottingham, rob the rich to give to the poor, until the return of good King

Richard.

Beowulf fights Grendel, fights Grendel’s Ma and then gets killed by a

dragon. I think.

Sherlock Holmes spends a lot of time being smarter than everyone else and

his buddy Watson tells us all about it. Holmes gets himself killed by

Professor Moriarty at Reichenbach Falls. Except he doesn’t.

Calvin and Hobbes have ridden off into the sunset. The strip lasted, what, slightly over a decade? And then it was done. Bill Watterson decided that all the good stories were told.

And that’s for the best. Because there really are only so many good stories to tell for any character. Why go on beyond that point?

In many cases, once you’ve gone beyond the basic premise, you’ve got a different story –

Peanuts doesn’t work if Snoopy is a real dog and Charlie Brown gets older. How many dozens of times did Lucy snatch away that football?

If Calvin is still talking to Hobbes when he’s a teenager then he’s no longer a little boy with a big imagination he’s a head case who needs therapy.

Does anyone care whether Archie marries Betty or Veronica or Jughead? Whether Little Dot parlays her fashion sense into a glamorous career in the textile design? Whether Tintin slowed down with age?

I care about these things. Because these characters are people to me. Real people? Puh-leez. But certainly as real as any of those people who read the news on Fox.

And they’re trapped. Frozen in time and kept there by corporate interests that need them to stay frozen so they can license their lives.

This isn’t a rant for the Public Domain. That’s a different one. I support many aspects of copyright laws, disagree strongly with other parts. It’s an exploration. It’s starting to answer a question to myself.

The good news is: Tintin has escaped.

Hmm, now that I’ve mentioned it, what else would be on that list?

Item #1290 – Produce a musical remake of Horror of Party Beach. A musical musical as opposed to the original which is a movie with a lot of musical sequences. You know – where the characters break into song because they’ve fallen in love or they bought a cool dragster or they’ve just seen fish zombies eat a cop. Where the fish zombies serenade bikini babes before they turn them into dinner. I’ve got zero musical talent so directing the thing doesn’t show up anywhere on the list.

If I Ran The Circus –

More specifically, if I could run a comic book company, take the characters and shape their existences, which one would I chose?

Atlas of course. Because it was done so poorly the first time. And I’m such a genius that I’d know how to do things right this time around.

Just imagine what I could do with these brilliant concepts:

John Targitt, The Tarantula and The Destructor

Phoenix, Demon Hunter and The Scorpion

The Cougar, Tales of Evil, Vicki and Devilina

Ironjaw, Brute and Grim Ghost

Wulf the Barbarian, Planet of the Vampires, Morlock 2001 and more!

Oh yeah! Revamping Atlas. Number one thousand two hundred and ninety-one on my list of things to do before I die.