Ralph Pullins

So as has become tradition, I would like to take the last post of the year and review last year's goals, and set new ones for the upcoming year. According to my last post of last year, I laid out the following goals: 1. Write a new book: DONE, though it wasn't the four novellas idea that I thought it might be, instead it turned out to be a middle grade sci-fi adventure story because my boys kept bugging me to write something they could read. It turned out better than I could have hoped and will eventually be a trilogy. 2. Find a home for Flagg : Er. This is still pending. Still pending. Still pending. Note: if you want to be an author, prepare to have every tiny shred of your patience tested, because nothing goes quickly, nothing is certain, nothing is ever final, and even now, I have no idea if the damn thing even arrived at its destination, let alone was read and considered.  Even still, I know the book is good, and will eventually find a good home, so there is that. 3. Have ...

Okay, so I'm not a reviewer, I have no desire to be a reviewer, and I suspect that my reviews don't mean shit to anybody, even if I wanted to write them which I don't. I hate writing reviews. However, I do owe several friends and colleagues reviews.  Since I genuinely have enjoyed their work and want to help share the word, and I know every little share makes a difference, instead of being a dick about it, I thought I would review a bunch of things I have run across recently as well.  Not new stuff, necessarily, but new to me, stuff that I have loved, books and music and other things, and maybe this won't be too boring, making everyone who comes here for the crazy stream of words and ideas just jump ship. Here goes: NOFX, "First Ditch Effort" I mean listen: first and foremost this is a NOFX record which means you pretty much know what you're going to get, which is a bunch of great, fast, polished songs.  These guys have been making killer punk tunes for a ...

Outside, in the streets of this city, in the fields of this country, in the hearts of our citizens, they are lighting fires, they carry their gas and their torches, they are wearing their masks, they are wearing their uniforms and they are carrying their shields, they are painting people with the brushes of their choosing and they are calling them enemy.  The flames roar over long-dead tinder, old threats and grievances dug up, taken down from the attic, where they had sat long forgotten, and they come with their fires to burn all that we have built, and the air fills with smoke and ash, and the skies are lit dirty red and orange.  They are coming. And in here, we sing, a bunch of lost kids, outcasts and freaks, discarded and unwanted, ragged and patched together, taped up, stitched.  In here we turn our faces to the ceiling and we sing. Because we are True Believers. Someday, they will come for us.  Someday, because we shout our defiance to those suits and devils.  We will not kneel, ...

I want to die laughing. I imagine it, this big final guffaw, watching a video of someone falling down or being attacked by a goose, just this terminal laughter, a giggle or a wheeze, that's the way to go out. We're all dying, just some of us faster than others, some are torn away and some drift off, but the destination is the same for each and every soul on this beautiful miserable planet.  Whether it be by accident or murdered by time, we are all on the same ride. I want to be taken away by the Death of the Discworld, like I imagine Terry Pratchett did, the classic hooded skeleton, blue fire eyes.  On the Discworld, you pretty much always get what you expect; the afterlife is what you believe it to be.  I imagine Sir Terry, wherever he ended up, laughing his face off, turning his brilliance on the world itself, holding a funhouse mirror up to distort images into strange shapes, recognizable, but seen from a different perspective. Godspeed Sir Terry. Mind how you go, sir. I wan...

You don't have to do anything you don't want to do.  All that shit you hate, all the working and the laundry and the oil changes and the lawn maintenance, the picking up of dog shit, the attending of weddings and godawful graduation parties, the dentist appointments, the trip to the fuckin' vet to get your beloved family pet put down.  You don't have to be a father, you don't have to be a husband.  You don't have to set your alarm, get up before the sun, you don't have to smile in the face of that asshole customer, the unreasonable bag of shit that insists that he told you that he wanted his dressing on the side, even though he didn't and he knows it and you know it, and, holy shit, this has ruined his whole fucking day, his week, his life.  He wanted low-fat ranch and you put on full flavor and now he hates you and everybody you love.  You forgot to hold the croutons and now he wishes you had cancer.  But you smile and hold your tongue, because the fuck...

There is this thing I do, where I take a feeling I have, or something I am thinking about or something that is bothering me, and I take that thing and I slice it up and I place it under a microscope, and I peer into it and there flayed on a  glass slide, lit from beneath, it looks all-important, encompassing, it looks monumental.  I do this, look at things too closely, examine them, analyze them, and see if there is some kind of truth to be found there, something to take away.  I blow these things out of proportion, make them into something huge, some awful monster and I drag it out and I slay it there in the light.  I am interested in finding out who I am, who really lies beneath all this junk that I have been carrying, here underneath all the armor and structures that I have built around myself for protection.  And I have looked, I have dug in the garbage, and so far all I have found is more junk.  New junk, that kinda looks a lot like the old junk. I am beginning to wonder:  what ha...

What follows is the prologue for a novel I have started but never finished, before my current project took over my writing efforts entirely.  I wanted to post this because I think that the perception is that these things come easily and whole, that writing is somehow easy for those of us that do it, that a certain measure of success with the craft means that it is all fun and games for us.  It isn't.  There are a lot of missteps and failures and garbage that has to come out before anything good happens.  Writing, if you take it seriously, is something that is shaped.  Made, rather than born, if that makes sense.  I will probably finish this someday, maybe next year after I get this current thing off of my plate.  This part came very naturally, but I found that the main text, the body of the story, wanted to fight me every step of the way, that nothing wanted to come easy.  Maybe I just haven't found the right voice, or maybe it just wasn't the right time for this one or wha...