Tom Poakes & Russian Fairy Tales

I started working on a new drifter map today, this one about Tom Poakes, a drifting storyteller in rural New York State. Unlike the last one, this won't go into his personal life or anything like that. Rather, for each stop on his circuit there'll be the story he told in that town.

I've written two of the stories already, out of the ten or so I'll probably do. Lots of the story ideas and themes come from old folk tales, particularly Russian.

Years ago, back in mid-90's, I got this thick-ass book of Russian Fairy Tales and I was blown away by the stories in there. I mean, look, I'll readily admit I don't understand the finer points of Russian culture, but some of those stories are just flat-out weird.

I can't even think of a proper example because they all run together, but here's a short representation of pretty much every story:

A man and his new wife are farming one day when the wife decides to get rid of the man's daughters so she will have his inheritance all to herself. She captures Baba Yaga in a sack and forces her to conjure a bear to come at night and steal the daughters one by one on three consecutive nights.

Each night for two nights the bear comes and steals a daughter. On the third night the last daughter somehow contrives to switch places with the mother so that she gets taken instead.

The morning after, the man suddenly realizes what's been going on and he rejoices that he has his one daughter left. Then the bear turns into a prince and none of them ever have to work again.

And that was from the chapter called "Humorous".

So a lot of the stories I'm writing now are in that sort of vein. They're actually surprisingly difficult to write. You can't just write a regular story where stuff happens and there's a resolution. You have to purposefully write something amibiguous and anti-climactic.

On top of that, you need to constantly be on the lookout for an abrupt and hard-line ending. That's probably the hardest part.

"Well, the frog is about to get eaten by the fox. Man, if only he had some sort of magic shoes that he kept in his mouth; ones I'd never gotten around to mentioning but are integral to the outcome. A-ha! Done!"

The best thing to do, I've found, is once you've written the story, read it out loud doing your best Ivan Drago impersonation. Works every time. Try it with the example a few paragraphs up. Friday night fun at its best!

Complete Time-Life collection, here I come!

I should be receiving in the mail very soon the last book in the Library of Curious and Unusual Facts collection from Time-Life. I started getting the books in junior high/high school and I thought I'd gotten them all. But apparently I'd missed out on Vanishings.

Half the stuff I write on the site is probably based in some part on ideas from those books. And sometimes just reading them sets me off thinking about telling a story about some other unrelated thing.

I've never been a huge fan of fiction, unless the chapters are very short, and maybe that's partly because I've always had books like Feats and Wisdom of the Ancients hanging around. Or maybe I'm just a lazy reader, who can say?

The last piece on the site, about the drifter, came from an article about this guy in Odd and Eccentric People who used to walk a circuit constantly, and consistently.

People would know when he was about to show up based on when he'd last been through. I should look it up again, though, because I've forgotten everything about it except for the map they include which shows where he walked.

I thought it might be interesting, then, to expand the idea of the drifter's circuit out to a whole community of people who, though drifting, all sort of drift together and cross paths every so often.

I'll probably do a couple more maps about other drifters, I think five or so would be good. I actually started the whole thing wanting to do the compendium all at once, with about ten drifters and providing short bios for each, without maps.

I had the first one, Tom Poakes, started up when I realized I was writing more and more about Biscuit Dough instead. Then I remembered the drifter map from the book, started looking into the My Maps thingy on maps.google, and that was that.

Plus, when they're all done I can overlay them all on one map and have something useful; if maps of where a bunch of made-up drifters walked is something you consider useful.

OMG KTTNS!!!

Well, somehow a momma cat found her way into our basement and either gave birth or carried her babies down there. There's three of them; all of which have hate in their heart for me. Nevermind that I've set them up with a little shelter, a cat box and enough food for a small cat army. I am every time greeted with tiny hisses and miniature growls.

The mother is fairly cool; she hung around the house a bunch when she was pregnant, slept on our porch a lot, so I guess she figures I'm okay.

Right now we're unsure how to handle the situation. I mean, eventually they'll grow up and we don't need a basement full of cats. Humane Society is out, and our SPCA is no-kill so they won't take them; so we'll see.

Anyways, here's a coupla pics.


And here's the elusive mother:

Did I mention she's electric? Haha cat eyes reflect light!

Two awesome Post-it drawings

I used to draw all the time but, being as the studio space hasn't been cleaned out in a good long while, I've done exactly zero real drawings in about a year. The two below are about the extent of my output recently. Don't bother asking, they're not for sale. Unless you have $10 BURNING a hole in your pocket.

I didn't mean to all-caps "burning" up there, my pinkie slipped, but I think it adequately describes my tone.

Vertical bracket

I was at work today looking over a PDF when I noticed that the version of Acrobat I was using had a "Read Aloud" option. I hadn't seen it before but it turns out it will vocalize any and all of the text in your PDF, using a very poor quality computerized voice.

It reads acronyms as words, phone numbers as very large integers, and the pipe character ("|") as "vertical bracket", among other idiosyncrasies.

As I listened to about fifteen pages of documentation being read in this way, I was struck by the poetic quality of one particular passage:

Dedicated vertical bracket

Progressive vertical bracket

Forthcoming vertical bracket

Receptive vertical bracket

Realistic

I listened to it three or four times, and it never sounded less than genuine and meaningful. I realize it was just a screen reader, but the words made a strange sort of sense. I suppose there's not much point in analyzing it except only to say that, in a way, wouldn't we all like to be vertical brackets?

Top five English footballers with porn star names

5. Stern John (Coventry City) - That's not a nickname, his name really is Stern. His brother Strict went into the military, while his sister Permissive is "unemployed."

4. Nicky Butt (Newcastle United) - Haha, his last name is Butt!

3. Tugay (Blackburn Rovers) - You can tell me it's pronounced "Two-guy" till you're blue in the face. Your name is "Too-gay", dude, and it's awesome.

2. Steed Malbranque (Tottenham Hotspur) - Anybody named Steed is destined to either be in porn or play for Tottenham. The only difference is most people aren't ashamed to be fans of porn. Boo-ya!

1. Peter Ramage (Newcastle United) - The way Newcastle's defenders are playing this season, Ramage might be better off trying clear balls out of his own back half for a while.

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Well somehow I went from talking about the names to just slamming a couple of clubs. Oh well, go Arsenal! 3-0 over Bolton tomorrow! And they'll probably all be own goals.

You disappoint me, Ukrop's

Outside of Ukrop's (a fairly large chain of family-owned grocery stores in central Va., for anyone not from here) today there were these two people in wheelchairs asking for donations for the Wheelchair Olympics. Maybe. I don't know because I drove by them and looked for a parking spot by the next entrance.

But at the next entrance? Another two people in wheelchairs asking for donations for the Wheelchair Olympics. I don't have a problem with people in wheelchairs, I liked Murderball, but whenever there are people outside of a store asking for money or selling something or trying to fingerprint your kids (I'm looking at you, Kroger), I'd like to have the option of there being one entrance that is unblocked.

I ended up not going to Ukrop's at all because I wasn't in the mood to feel guilty about telling the Wheelchair Olympics people that I couldn't help them out with new spokes. Maybe I'll see if they have a website.