Mindstorm

A fearsome & fantastic journey to the heart of the Savage Id.

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Location: Invisible City, North Dakota, United States

Read my book, The Mind-Warp Era. It'll tell you about the real Lead--& his alter-ego, the true Rootboy covered with slime (the Savage Id). Partly a poignant memoir, partly a cosmicomic book, it relays the Id's adventures thru dark dimensions of funereal dread, with Timothy Leary as co-pilot. (The rumors of his death have been greatly exaggerated.)

Monday, May 17, 2004

random enumerations

Hoody, hoody, hoo, as Hoppy Harrington would say,

Yeah, & I'm still trying to be the world's greatest living science fiction author & better than the dead ones. It's hard, though (& I'm not talking about my Philip K. Fantasy here)--I've been at it 25 years or more, & a pro sale to an SF magazine yet eludes me. Sure, The Mind-Warp Era was published, but that was POD, & has barely sold. Ever since I was a Jung lad (though my Rootboy is the Savage Id) I dreamed of making my living tormenting my typewriter; ever since that A+ in an English class in the Invisible High (& all my highs are invisible). So when I went to the City of Night for college, I signed up in an interdisciplinary program, in order to study the genre. Guess what? The first thing I did, I got a Shakespeare comparison for. Then I tried to submit it to some of these magazines: form letter after form letter; The Tome finally published it--at 1/4 cent a word, & never sent me the check--though editor David Niall Wilson says he fondly remembers it as an example of "what [he] calls the truly surreal".

The original story, like the original Masters (yes, they gave me money to come back to grad school) was created exclusively while sailing the darkened seas in a great big submarine (you have to read the book to figure that one out). So there was the inevitable burnout; I wound up sailing the Bobo Boat after VADIS' boy-fiends deliberately conned me into drinking a bottle of vodka on top of 4 hits of acid--realistically, you can con a person on acid into doing just about anything; Rachel be damned. So basically, it was a fraternity setup, & what kind of girl (but she was a boy-chick) lives in a fraternity house? Alfalfa High, the Drug Fraternity.

Yes, there have been lucid intervals. Yes, the editor of Asimov's used to love my stuff, with his usual caveat, "it isn't right for us"--unfortunately, he left the magazine & took his love of my Dick imitation with him. So here I sit with a story his replacement rejected, & I was pretty upset about it over the weekend--not the rejection itself, but rejection in the form of a form letter; I mean, I'm sick & tired of being treated like an amateur, after a major institution gave me Special Honors for it--& buckadingdongs to continue my education. When I reread it last night, though, it became obvious from the creases that Sheila Williams had only read the first 2 pages--I'd committed the same kind of mistake as submitting a Heavy Metal song to a country station. (I'm a Heavy Metal addict from the planet Uranus.) So mostly it's a matter of, when are they going to legalize submarines for medical purposes? Once I have my U-boat, reclaiming my former glory should be no problem. Though I'm thru with submarine sandwiches (Scooby-doobie material interlaced with reactor fuel); I mean, the risk of cancer isn't worth it.

Mostly, I'm just going to send the story on. That's all I can do. No matter how futile it might seem. & all you girls with your sweet talk, you can all go take a walk--save for the most beautiful one of all, Bumble Bee Girl.

That's it for now. See you tomorrow.

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