the Ninjapancakes.com READER

I just launched the NinjaPancakes.com Reader, which will present a new short-story every month. I'm starting it off with one of my own, "The Peasant's Child," which will be presented in two parts.

"The Peasant's Child" is an adaptation of Norse tale in which Loki saves the young child of peasant farmers from a vengeful giant. Set in southwest Virginia, "The Peasant's Child" is told my drunks and old men, who aren't quite sure of how things really turned out.

I'm looking for other writers who would like to have a story displayed for upcoming months. Email me at notjoelschneier@gmail.com!

Local

Just picked up Local by Brian Wood and Ryan Kelly. Fucking amazing. Twelve stories from different cities, all involving a girl named Meghan who just can't stop ditching one place after another. Hits home in many ways.

Here's a review from NPR: "This graphic novel in 12 short stories follows punky dreamer Megan McKeenan as she roams America. Each short represents a different year in a different city, as she takes odd jobs, gets into creepy relationships and lives the extended childhood of many 20-somethings. Though she often lies and gets into dodgy situations, Megan approaches people with the instinctive wisdom that only young wanderers have. Wood, author of the hugely popular comic DMZ, has created a contemporary ballad to the idea of the open road. It's both frightening and freeing to see how identity can be as fluid as location. Megan moves from state to state, dealing with roommates and dead-end jobs and looking for an existence that befits her intelligence and desire for authenticity. She's not a lost cause; she simply chooses, for personal reasons, to drift a while." --NPR - Best Graphic Novels Of 2008

Yukimo Mishima

Just started reading The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea by Yukimo Mishima. So far it's a fascinating book, but I've become even more fascinated by Mishima himself.

When the dust of World War 2 settled in Japan (well, I guess it wasn't dust so much as it was nuclear fallout), Japanese culture was very different. Many new writers and artists emerged in the wake of all this, and Mishima was one of the most prominent of them.

Mishima wrote many plays, poems, and novels during this period and some revere him as helping to define Japanese language-style in this new Japan. Anyways, one of his greatest literary accomplishments was The Sea of Fertility series, a tetrology (that's a ten novel series!). Mishima apparently profesized that he would die upon completing the series.

Mishima descended from a Samurai family. And if you are unfamiliar with Japanese history and the Samurai, when Japanese modernized in the nineteenth century the Samurai were excluded, and went to war against the new Japanese nation (please do not watch The Last Samurai with Tom Cruise to understand this). Anyways, it seems Mishima wanted to bring this back to prominence in the post-modern Japan. So in the 1960s he formed the Tatenokai (Shield Society), which was a group of young men trained in martial arts and sworn to protect and serve the Emperor of Japan.

Anyways, so when Mishima completed the last novel in his The Sea of Fertility series, he and the Tatenokai went into the Tokyo headquarters of the Eastern Command of Japan's Self-Defense Forces, barricaded themselves in the offices, tied the commandant to his chair, and read a manifesto to soldiers from balcony that was supposed to inspire a coup to return the Emperor to power.

Instead, the soldiers below mocked and jeered him. So Mishima went back inside to the office and committed seppuka, the ritual suicide of the Samurai.

Epic.

It's Not the Heat...

It's 110 degrees Fahrenheit outside today. It was just as hot yesterday, and the day before. Tomorrow's supposed to be just as hot. I've got this to say about Portland: this city has no idea what to do in non-mild weather.

This past winter there was a snow-storm that shut the entire city down. It was the type of snow that people hadn't seen the likes of in the Northwest since the 1960s. So of course they had barely any salt and one snow-plow that no one knew how to use. I thought it was funny actually.

Same thing goes for this heat. No one has air conditioning. My apartment included. The needle on my thermostat has disappeared. I wake up each morning to see a pool of sweat on my bedsheets. I'm taking three or four cold showers a day. A building on my street caught on fire and when the fire department arrived and started dousing the building with high-pressure water cannons I was jealous. I'm going to the grocery story as often as I can just to stand in the frozen-foods section. About one-third of all the buses are breaking down from over-heating. Last night I was wetting a face-cloth and giving myself a hillbilly sponge-bath. I finally made myself a pair of shorts out of some jeans (took a steak-knife to the canvass), and I find it amusing just how pale my legs are.

The coffee shop I'm in has smartly mounted some shades in their West-facing windows to give some relief, but it's ultimately to no avail. I have an Americano, a beer, and a glass of water beside my computer but still I can feel beads of sweat running down my back.

Speaking of my computer, I'm beginning to wonder if a metallic body is really such a hot idea...

Amidst all this heat I'm unemployed and pretty directionless. Applying to jobs. Going to interviews. Watching friends leave town. Forgetting constantly what day of the week it is. Waking up later and later in the day. Not knowing what the hell I want to do right now or where I want to go. The heat isn't helping.

Like last year, I think I'm getting closer and closer to the edge of chaos: that fine moment when inaction unexpectedly implodes on itself and a drastic action manifests. What that is I have no idea. And what I want is really too vague to make plans around.

I want to travel. I don't really want another job, more commitments, another month to pay rent, I just want to go. Throw my backpack over my shoulder and just fucking go. Somewhere. California. New Mexico. Arizona. Colorado. Toronto. Spain. Japan. Hit up friends. Sulk in shady bars. Sleep on couches and floors.

That's the only thing I want and yet it's just another romanticized notion too vague to put a pin on and will only look good and glorious in retrospect. Americana. Rodin. The Lonely Traveler. Ramble On. Not all who wander are lost. The patron saint of I don't know where I'm going but I want to go somewhere and see something and find something that will lead me to my inner being and show me my inner self.

Ah yes, that load of horse shit.

Well, I don't really want the romanticized crock. I'm not a romantic. Not in the least. There are legions of friends and family who can testify to this fact. I want the shit. I want the dirt, the debasing, demoralizing, horrifying, ugly truth of this world and the assholes who inhabit it. I want to see it for myself. Not for amusement, not for some voyeuristic perversion, but to know it. I want to know this world.

There! I found it. I found what I want. But once again, it's something too vague to put a pin on. Man, for someone who isn't a romantic, I sure know how to think it horrifically abstract and unreachable terms.

Here Comes the Wovel, from Underland Press

Several months ago I was sitting in a burrito joint in my neighborhood in Portland. While bored and waiting for my burrito to be ready, I opened up a copy of a local weekly paper. Inside was an article about a Portland-based publisher that was trying something no one else had done before: it was called a "wovel."

A "wovel" is basically a novel, serialized over the internet. Every week a new installment is posted on the Underland Press website, and the end of each installment allows to the reader to vote on the direction of next week's installment. This isn't necessarily a choose-your-own-adventure type of scenario. Sometimes the author allows the reader to vote on plot elements, what scene comes first, what type of weapon one character will use, et cetera.

Pretty cool, eh?

I thought so. So, me being me, I emailed them. A couple emails and a meeting at a coffee shop later, I was a part of the Underland Press team, along with Victoria Blake, the publisher.

Anyways, a little over a month ago a new novel launched, called Exit Vector, which is being written by a fun fellow named Simon Drax. It's early in the story, which I am helping to copyedit and post, but is basically about a young girl named Mori Kim Marr, a vodka-consuming, drug-scamming, rapscallion of sorts. After a bizarre occurrence at a seedy bar, Mori finds herself at the center of a battle older than humanity itself.

Check out the Underland Press website and the latest installment of the wovel here!

Tripping

(just found this piece, which I wrote over four years ago in Winter 2005)

“The windows are yawning,” Dan says looking at me, speaking in metaphors. This is the first time he’s tripped around me. Frankly, I’m disappointed.

We’re in my room. Sitting against opposite walls. Both staring out the windows into the trees bleeding reds and yellows, the grass lawns are pounding with green, and the sun is somewhere at the end of the earth shooting purple rays off the clouds to tint everything outside. Dan doesn’t see this, though. Fuck knows what he sees.

“I think,” Dan starts, “. . . . that you should shave your beard,” he says to the window. Not to me. I don’t say anything. I won’t say anything. I hope I’m blended into the walls.

I look at my watch. We’ve been doing this for three hours.

Light from outside is fading, and Dan’s face grows darker, contorted, grim. I move over a few feet. The unshadowed side of his face looks gleeful.

Bored, I take my shoe off and throw it across the room at his head. He catches it. Stuffs it in his mouth. Begins to choke. Takes it out of his mouth. Says, “Sorry, I don’t eat meat,” to it. Sets it down next to him.