I have submitted my story “The Tree Cutter” for consideration in indy publisher RedLemona.de’s “Hybrid Beasts” collection.

I’m extra excited because it’s a story that really hope you’ll read. And that scares me, because it’s a story that is completely true. Except for the fact that it never happened. This story is, at its core, all real experiences, emotions, and characters, and settings. It is, at its core, a memoir of my experience of my adult relationship with my father, his land, and our place in it.

With one hitch: All this takes place in story that never happened.

That’s the hybrid part, I guess. This story is an memoir written about an alternative present.

Here’s a sample:

When I came back to the front yard to carry on with the clean up my father had not moved, except to turn 180-degrees from the tree and stare wistfully up the hill again.

“I’m not sure why I stay here,” he said.

It was kind of a strange bomb to drop, given the fact that my daughter and I had stopped here on our way to our home a few days ago to escape the rain. And we’d been evacuated to the basement as the weather worsened. I tried to smile it off. My wife might have asked a question like that, I guess, because she had moved around her whole life, but my dad always seemed permanently rooted to his land. For me, stopping at my dad’s little valley to ride out the latest crisis was something of a habit. The crisis of the westward storm was only the most recent of the string of financial, emotional or vehicular storms I’d weathered in my parent’s valley.

“It’s good land,” I said, peaking at the swamped garden. “You’ve worked hard.”
He was swaying a little on his feet. His gristled back, baked a cinnamon brown from years of shirtless Augusts tending his plants and garden, twitched and pulsed as he swayed.

It’s a challenging and dangerous thing, to write about who you really are so brazenly. I do not envy memoir writers, theres is a truth-speaking that cannot be on spoke. But, I do think this is a good story, and I intend to honor the dreams that inspired it by helping it to find publication.

You can read the whole submission (and comment and and make suggestions, revisions, and etc) over at Red Lemonade’s Hybrid Bestiary.

The story is called “The Tree Cutter.” There really is a teepee in my dad’s backyard. There really are gigantic supercattle up the hill from him. I have no idea if it is safe to drink the water there anymore, but I do anyway. I really slept on a VW microbus in the summers. That bus is still parked there. Seriously: Read the story.

Every melon tells a story.

Was it plucked from the vine too soon? Or left to linger too long in the weeds? Does it carry the battle scars of youth into its plump old age or is its wizened skin pocked with fresh victories?

Our job, as those who carve the melon, is to slice away those scars. With each stroke of our knife we carve away another distortion, another half-truth, another falsehood from the melon’s purest essence, which awaits us at the fruit’s core. There, in fleshy pink, is the melon’s central core; the truth of its melonness.

It survives there not in defiance of its stories, but in celebration of them.

This is why we carve, my child. This is why we carve.

Perspective in blue jeans

It seems to me that the times when a man speaks out against injustice are the times that we should celebrate, not condemn that man.

A man picking at the scabs that have formed around the lesions left by an unjust attacker might not be pulling on the wound, he might just be healing it.

It would seem to me, that man, in any other time, and in any other context, might be called a hero.

He might be. If you’re brave enough to call him one.

Sports figures and supermen aren’t real. But warriors are.

May they always have the courage to soldier on.

April 27, 2012 \ Photo Attribution \ For Peter.

With Spoilers

Do: Create a fairly complex alternative or future earth society featuring amazing technology and an significant technology and wealth gap between those with the most and those with the least.

Do not: Fail to build a culture of the larger society that jibes with the smaller.

Do: Cast your entire story with entirely unlikeable flat characters, so long as there are one or two minor characters who are endearing, but equally as flat, to keep the reader interested.

Do not: Kill and or dismiss those characters early in the story.

Do not: Fail to really flesh those characters out beyond the most basic “good and pure” archetypes.

Do Not: Make hunting so easy! Even if you’re really really good at it, sometimes you can’t just go out and catch two rabbits and a fat squirrel just because you’re that awesome.

Do: Put your characters into grueling, fight-for-their-life situations where everything seems impossible and there seems to be no way out.

Do not: Bring that situation to an incredible climax with your heroes standing on top of a giant thanksgiving cornucopia surrounded by werewolf clones of their previously defeated enemies. I mean, really?

Do: End the story with a dramatic self-sacrifice on the part of one or both of the major characters.

Do not: Fail to pull the trigger on that self-sacrifice.

Do not: Suddenly turn your heroic bad-ass into a sniveling love-sick puppy dog.

Do: End on a cliffhanger so I have to read the next book, even though, really, who cares?

I have several reactions to the article entitled “Senate recall challenge by Compass is giving ‘Fitz’ fits” from the Sunday, May 13 Wisconsin State Journal.

While the authors try to present a balanced article, the fact is, this is an overt puff-piece for the status quo.

Why is a store owner or the operator of a local machine shop a “business owner” but an information worker and professional photographer like Lori Compass a “freelancer?” Running a photography business requires as much entrepreneurial effort as any other small business, and yet the local media and Fitzgerald consistently paints Compass’ business as a diminutive pastime cum amusement.

This is not the only example of the shameful the way the State Journal’s authors pander to Fitzgerald’s anti-woman agenda, taking every effort to point out “Big Ftiz’” continued misbelief that the Compass campaign could be headed by anything other than a female.

Compass herself put out a video response to the commentary, calling Fitzgerald’s comments “bizarre and a little-bit offensive.”

It is disappointing that the State Journal feels needs to dismiss the fact that Lori Compass is an intelligent, powerful and successful woman in order fit Fitzergalrd’s myopic and misogynistic world view.

Another disturbing tidbit revealed and left completely unquestioned by the State Journal is that fact that Fitzgerald seems to believe that the staccato honks of “This is what Democracy Looks Like” are somehow offering support to him.

Democracy looks like anything other than the government that the state of Wisconsin has seen under the terrible rule of Sen Fitzgerald. Would that I felt any compunction to spend my hard earned money on any Paleolithic publication made by staining the corpses of dead trees with toxic inks, you could consider my subscription canceled.

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In this photo from the National Library of Scotland, Soldiers in dungarees and helmets struggle to remove a fallen tree trunk from a river. The soldiers have little choice in the matter, but to do what soldiers do, and soldier. But the trees are kind of in the same situation of not having really any choice about what happens here. Although they are badly damaged, many of the tress in this photo are still alive, doing what trees do: treeing.

In my dream last night, I was told by a being whose face I cannot remember, that things were as they are supposed to be and that the oppression that you’re feeling right now is a part of how charge is inspired amongst as many people as possible.

On a personal level, it may feel like it’s all about you, but the reality is we are all part of a larger movement that will take that pain and sadness and channel it toward the undoing of a great wrong.

The question is: do we have the strength to turn that struggle into wisdom?

The being was wrapped in a brilliant golden light and was wearing a red ring set in dark gold.

This morning I found myself thinking of “Keep Going.”; specifically about there being two of everything in life, and that the uncomfortable and sad things in life are not about knocking you down, but teaching you to be stronger.

I think we’ve all learned to be a little stronger in the past few months, and I am proud to learn alongside you all.

Prussia was a historical region of central Europe that was fought over repeatedly. Some believe Prussia was home of some of very ancient tribes of Vikings.

There were, naturally, repeated attempts to conquer and convert the Prussians into Christianity, particularly following the alleged murder St. Adalbert at the hands of a Prussian spiritual leader. The exact records on this, like most records from the 8th century, are spotty.

Prussia was eventually conquered by the Teutonic Knights during the Prussian Crusade in the 13th century. Fast forward through centuries of religious and economic upheaval, and eventually, the Prussian region is divvied up between Poland and the Soviet Union.

Today: There is no Prussia.

So, what was all the fighting about? Well, in the case of the Prussians, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t for the adoption protestantism as an official state religion for the very first time, but that’s what we ended up with.

If you can’t see how this is connected to what’s going on in Wisconsin, (and the rest of the United States), you’re not trying hard enough.

The Nintendo 3DS has this feature where it can merge the faces of two people who are standing in front of each other. It’s a little strange and finicky, but it works sometimes, and the end results are… weird.

Like this picture of Gaia and her cousin Kyra merged, that looks a good deal like Kyra at age three or four.

I think that there is something really space-age about a pocket computer with three cameras that can combine multiple images to make composite image of pair of faces. I have been really impressed with the 3DS, as a Nintendo game system and fun toy for a six year old, it’s a really great experience.

I spotted a flake of cedar bark on the ground with a perfect hole in the middle of it. “Do you know what this hole is for, Girls?” I asked.

“Is it for making a bead?” Gaia asked.

“Yeah. That’s a good guess. But not this time.”

“What is for?” Kyra asked.

“When you hold this flake of bark up, and you look through the hole, sometimes its easier to see the fairies.”

The girls giggled and laughed, and took turns looking through the hole for the fairies until I found a second flake with a hole. Then they finished out the nature walk peering through the holes in the bark.

"When I see the fairy what will it look like?’ Gaia asked.

“I see one,” Kyra said. “It flicked right by over there.”

“What will it look like?” Gaia said. “I think I’ve seen one, too.”

“It won’t look like Tinkerbelle,” Jeni said.

“Sometimes they have a golden or a white light” I said. “When they trust you, sometimes you can see green. When they want to talk to you, they’ll be blue.” I said.

“I think I’ve seen a golden one,” Gaia said.

“I believe you have,” I said.

Iit has come to my attention that Part Three: Chaoskampf is now published in full on indy publisher RedLemona.de.

Today’s publication includes chapters 3.7, 3.8 and 3.9. These chapters contain action, adventure, drama, and historical data dumping. You will enjoy them. We finally get to learn more about Quan, the boy solider and about his relationship with the other Sions of Sugar Island. We take a tour of the Honey Acres Compound. We make a thin reference to the famous Finch Brothers– a band of cowboys from Lake Mills Wisconsin.

By adopting the organic technology of psionic implants, the Scions of Sugar Island carried their fight throughout the biotronic age, using their implants to give them one last self-evident right. They’d lost free speech. They’d lost freedom of press, religion, and even the pursuit of happiness. But they had one thing. They had freedom of thought. The implants, carried and worn by all of the true scions of Sugar Island, afforded the founders of the scion’s society the privacy of their minds. That, Cailean said, was the one thing that they’d managed to salvage, and that, he insisted, was the one thing that kept them from succumbing to the mind-numbing epidemic that had taken the lives and freedom of the people of the New City.

“While the New City of Sugar Island crumbles around us,” the wiry old man said with a spark in his eye, “The true Sugar Island has chance to rise again

I’m serializing my novel “Someone Liche You” on Red Lemonade over the course of the next few months. Most of it is available online right now. About half of it is yet to be uploaded. (I’m editing as fast as I can– and there’s a lot more to edit!) Eventually, the whole thing will be avaialble on demand and as a self-published kindle book.