RANDOM! Fruitcakes ...

You look like a fruitcake. These truly epic words of my brother are echoed as the first five words in my novel, although admittedly it makes no sense there. Still. I won't delete it unless someone makes me. 

What does it mean? It could mean a number of things to a number of people. It can be taken literally, as in, an actual fruitcake, or it could mean a crazy or eccentric person. I don't think I've ever used it that way. I prefer crackpot, but that's just me.

It started because I don't like to be cold. It could be that my inner crazy old lady is making her presence known prematurely because in the winter I wear layers and stay in my pajamas as long as possible. I think of it as a perfectly healthy form of hibernation.Yes, it's cold here in Arizona, relative to the summer anyway. Live here long enough and 50 degrees will feel cold to you too. Point being, when I'm at home in the winter, I wear layered pajamas. As often as possible. 

So at one point last winter, I looked down and realized that I had on colorful, mismatched socks, polka-dot pants, a striped sweater and a plaid shirt. I won't even get into the color scheme, but I can assure you, it involved pinks, purples, browns, blacks and greens. Even I was surprised. How the heck did I get this way? I had to tell someone, so I told my brother. And when he saw me, he was impressed with both my lack awareness and my subconscious wish to resemble a traditional Christmas cake that no one really wants to eat. Or was he calling me crazy? Hmm ... He did have that look in his eyes. Oh, wait, he always has that look. Like he thinks I'm stranger than him. The apple doesn't fall far from the tree, my dear brother. We are equally strange and its obviously our parents' fault.

I'm looking forward to being a crazy old lady. You can do whatever the hell you want and nobody judges you beyond the initial judgement. Maybe I did it on purpose. Maybe my amalgamation of colors, fabrics and opposite design was intentional. Could be. Or maybe I'm crazy.

Jess

“Once you can accept the universe as matter expanding into nothing that is something, wearing stripes with plaid comes easy.” 

― Albert Einstein

Dire story ...

Recently, I had particularly vivid dream. I usually forget my dreams within a few minutes of waking up. This dream, however, made an impression and I've continued to fixate on it, mostly because of the phrase "dire story."

I was being haunted by an onryo, or vengeful spirit. It was a girl's spirit, and she had initially been a friendly ghost, but had quickly turned malevolent for no apparent reason. She appeared everywhere I went, threatening, harassing, and generally scaring the crap out of me, even when I was with other people. In the last bit of the dream, I had learned her "dire story," or the story of her death, and knowing that, I would be able to force her to cross over into hell. I opened a door, and there she was, crouched on the ground and ready to come at me, dark fury in her sunken black eyes. That last sinister image is still seared into my mind. 

When I woke up, I was scared. I don't have many bad dreams, but when I do, they typically involve someone I love getting hurt, not a supernatural event happening to me. Then I was intrigued. I wondered if a dire story was a real thing or not. I got all the way to work that morning and then forgot the word "dire" and couldn't remember it for several days. Finally it came back to me when I wasn't thinking about it and I was able to search it up. I found an interesting game called "Dire Grove" about an abandoned town with a banshee problem, and some kind of series on YouTube called "mai dire story" which translates in Italian to "never tell story." I also found information about the dire wolf, which went extinct about 10,000 years ago, and wasn't really that interesting. It was the same size as a gray wolf is today, but about 25% heavier in mass. 

I'm a little disappointed. I thought it might mean something mystical if it was a real phrase. Like that the collective human consciousness had sent me a message. Or that I seen the sign of Koth during my dreaming and learned something about the afterlife. I guess technically either one of those could be true, and I'll have no way of ever knowing. 

In truth, I figured I had heard of a dire story somewhere else and it had shown up in my dream. But it's actually something original that my brain threw at me, and I think I will continue to develop the idea. How does knowing the circumstances of an onryo's death give you power over it? And how do you invoke that power? TBD ...

Jess

"It was the sign of Koth, that dreamers see fixed above the archway of a certain black tower standing alone in twilight—and Willett did not like what his friend Randolph Carter had said of its powers." ~H.P. Lovecraft; The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.

Yuu Watase

I ran across the works of Yuu Watase toward the beginning of my manga addiction. If you are unfamiliar with shojo manga, its basically really awesome comic books for girls. Tell me then, what self-respecting nerdy girl doesn’t have a manga-based compulsion? For several years several years ago, I spent all my free time either reading manga or watching anime. And for someone who has a family and two jobs, there is no free time. So, I lost a lot of sleep over it. I would be up for hours each night watching episodes of Bleach or looking for different manga to immerse myself in. My obsessive behavior is not something I’m especially proud of now, but in the long run I think it helped me immensely with my writing. And seriously, it could have been worse. I could have been addicted to painkillers or chocolate bars or crack, ... not that there’s anything wrong with that. You crack addicts do your thing.

Anyway, Yuu Watase is a nationally recognized mangaka from Japan who has written over 80 volumes of short stories and series. She usually writes shojo manga, and is known for her beautiful male characters, aka bishonen. Many of her stories have been adapted into anime or even television series. The anime series Fushigi Yugi: A Mysterious Play was the first of her work that I came across. Although it was an older style of character drawing, I was quickly caught up in the unique storyline and fascinating characters. After that, I sought Ms. Watase out. My favorite manga by far that she has written is Absolute Boyfriend. Truthfully, it made me laugh, smile, and cry. It begins with a young girl who is rejected after confessing her love. She later runs into a strange man on the street who offers her the opportunity to purchase the perfect boyfriend. She goes online to make her order, and voila! the perfect boyfriend is delivered to her door the next day. As you can imagine, all kinds of shenanigans ensue, and … well, I don't want to spoil it.

One of her series in particular has influenced the novel I’m currently writing. Ceres, the Celestial Legend, inspired me to write about the beautiful and otherworldly celestial maidens of Japanese myth, specifically tennyo. When the main character Aya transforms into a tennyo, she obtains many supernatural abilities such as flight, teleportation, telepathy, telekinesis, premonition, superhuman speed and more. For this she is relentlessly hunted, eventually captured and studied in a laboratory.  It isn’t a very happy story overall, but the plot is compelling and the romance wonderful in a frustrating, poke-your-own-eyes-out kind of way.

So my fellow otaku, there is hope for your addiction as well, assuming you want it. I still love manga but I don’t let it control me anymore. I need my sleep.

Please support Ms. Watase by purchasing her manga. Yes, it’s much easier to watch the anime or drama online, but you'll be missing out if you take that cowardly route. To fully appreciate her captivating art, it's best to hold it in your own hands.

Jess

“Even though you're not by my side, Night, you will forever be my first man, my Zettai Kareshi.” – Yuu Watase

A bunch of freakin' drivel ...

Don't get me wrong. I love me some great paranormal romance drivel. I expect it, to some degree, in most of what I read, because of the genre I am addicted to. However, when I pay $3.99 for a book with almost entirely positive reviews on my Kindle, I expect certain things, like, more than ridiculous drivel.

I don't want to name any specific books or authors, because as I said before, writing a book is hard. Not just hard, damn hard. The book that inspired me to write this is one I downloaded a few days ago and it's just awful. I was only 3% in when I realized it. The story went from cliché to unrealistic to annoying to the point that I started to despise the characters. I'll give you what I know so far: the female protagonist is the envy of every other girl when a gorgeous man with a British accent throws himself at her for no apparent reason and she refuses to go on a date with him because she doesn't know him very well. Seriously? I have a pretty high tolerance for these things, given the time I have invested in this genre and my gravitation toward self-published works, but this book is just too much. I'm actually getting pissed off as I read.

You know what would help? If all those kiss-ass reviewers out there would stop giving positive reviews that are undeserved. If something reads like it was written by a ten-year-old and has obviously had no editing, it isn't "amazing" or "incredible" or worth my time. Please don't tell me there are "no words" to describe how great the book is. Usually, I have to look for the negative reviews to find out if something is worth reading. Maybe the problem is that writing a negative review is a lot harder than writing a positive one. Not only do you feel bad, but you have to defend your criticism by giving reasons why it sucks. I prefer just to rate by star myself, although I've been thoroughly disgusted and thoroughly amazed enough to write a few reviews in the last couple years.

But I won't quit reading, or buying self-published novels, or complaining to my sister when they are crap. In fact, I will continue to read every pathetic excuse for a story I accidently buy. I have to keep reading because I am driven by the need to know what will happen next. So please, hurry up girl. Go on a date with that British guy and find out if he's a vampire, werewolf, faerie or demon. At this point I'm hoping for a serial killer.

Jess

"Read, read, read. Read everything - trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If its good, you'll find out. If not, throw it out the window." -- William Faulkner 

Synchronicity

Synchronicity sounds like some kind of Quincy mind power of Uryuu Ishida. In actuality, it's a far more interesting concept than that. You know when some seemingly random thing pops up, and then it pops up again and again? And when you think about it, its too specific to be a coincidence, but too bizarre to have any real significance?

Carl Jung, the Swiss psychologist who founded analytical psychology, developed the concept of synchronicity. According to my best friend Wikipedia, it's defined as "the experience of two or more events as meaningfully related whereas they are unlikely to be causally related." Jung considered these meaningful coincidences evidence of a collective unconsciousness that is inherited and shared by members of the same species. It's both intriguing and unnerving to think that we could all be connected at some deep, unconscious level. Think of the implications if a person could access or influence the human collective unconsciousness. If I were an evil mastermind plotting to rule the world, I'd definitely be looking into it. 

I've experienced several blatant examples of synchronicity in my life, the most recent being centered around a cosmic monster with a hard-to-pronounce name: Cthulhu. I'd never heard of it before about a year ago when my husband told me about a video game called The Call of Cthulhu. Later, I watched an episode of South Park featuring Cthulhu that mimicked "My Friend Totoro." It was seriously funny even though as a fan of Studio Ghibli I was a bit offended. Then a few months later, I downloaded a collection of stories by H. P. Lovecraft, considered by many to be the father of modern horror. I was surprised to find that he wrote The Call of Cthulhu in 1928. The story was rather short compared to some of his others, but was just as wonderfully horrible. 

And it continues. Just a few weeks ago my son was playing a different game where he had to fight the eye of Cthulhu. So the question is, what does it mean? What, if anything, is the collective human unconsciousness trying to tell me? Should I seek out and join the cult of Cthulhu? I'm sure there's worse things than swearing allegiance to an ancient evil octopus-faced beast. But as awesome as that sounds, I think I'll hold off for now and keep my options open. I've always had an affinity for Mothra.

Jess

"Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places." - H.P. Lovecraft