HORRORS!

What, Dear Reader, could prompt such an emphatic headline?

Might it mean that I fell out of bed again? And again felt compelled to share my soul-searing embarrassment with Facebook, talk shows, and worse? I would do it, too, if even one other falling-out-of-bed survivor needed healing, closure, and a role model of hope. (Me!) That, and plug my gutsy, ghost-written book on the subject, titled Ouch!

Horrors!

Might this headline instead be one of the many brilliantly handled themes of the just-published Frankenstein’s Monster? What’s that? Ah! Apparently you, Dear Reader, are neither dear, nor a reader, at least not of the best sort of stuff. However, there is time to redeem yourself.

Horrors!

The distressing truth is that it’s been three weeks since my last blog post! You have undoubtedly been beside yourself with worry, so let me fill you in:

Most of you thoughtfully held my hand during my pre-pub panic. Well, okay, many of you. Some. My Aunt Ethelyn. Then pub date. Then forty-seven seconds of writerly ennui: Today is exactly the same as yesterday. Then a face-slapping, “You needed that” lurch into post-pub panic, which led to post-pub paralysis. Then, just when I was about to move on to post-post-pub publicity, my Internet died, taking my hopes, dreams, and landline with it.

And thus, my absence.

What I’d planned for your delight for November 1,  November 5, and November 14 were hysterical. Unfortunately they were so specific to the day that they would lose all meaning if used now. Which means it’s time for me to finish my game of Snood and start writing.

Horrors!

 

Frankenstein Quiz! Book or Movie?

The frontispiece from Mary Shelley’s classic, side by side with Boris Karloff in James Whale’s 1931 classic movie.

Everyone knows there are big differences between the classic book and the classic movie. 

But do you know what they are?

IMPORTANT!!!  
Please read this before taking the test.

This is my very first attempt at a quiz, as you will soon see.  It is not supposed to have advertising on it. It is not supposed to give you just a numerical total of your score, but to give you a link to come back here so you can get the cleverly phrased results. It is not supposed to aggravate you, Dear Reader, nor to make me shed tears of frustration. Unfortunately, it may do everything it is not supposed to do.

If there is no link to come back here, please take note of your number of right answers and then click here.

Now, after all the fine print above, if you dare…

Take this “what’s from which” quiz to see how big a Frankenstein fan you truly are.

And I thank you multiple times for your patience.

 

 

* * *

The DARK MAGICIAN

Lo! He riseth early in the morning, the DARK MAGICIAN, to pursueth the path toward sufficiency called the JOB. And, having arrived at the destination called the JOB, he walketh into the area common to all called the BREAK ROOM, wherein some merriment is sometime to be shared.

And Lo!—he prepareth to make the day’s brew of wakefulness called COFFEE. Eyes agleam with wickedness, he saith,

No sissy potion shall be made by mine hands!

Thus, with full knowledge, he createth an INFUSION like the impenetrable black of night, as dark as the MAGICK ARTS by which it was fashioned.

Thereupon the passage of time—Lo!—the INNOCENT COPY EDITOR arriveth at the JOB, full of good cheer at another day of chastising wayward verbs and inserting dashes willy-nilly. This innocent cometh upon the DARK INFUSION and asketh in delight,

Pray, tell! What be this?

And, being so innocent as to be foolish, the INNOCENT COPY EDITOR poureth a cup of the DARK INFUSION into her bunny flagon and then addeth the unsullied whiteness of cream to lighten the dark….

and addeth and addeth and addeth….  

for the darkness could not be lightened. It drew all manner of unsullied whiteness into itself and consumeth it and made it as to nothing. And so the DARK INFUSION remaineth as black as the MAGICK ARTS by which it was fashioned.

The INNOCENT COPY EDITOR, naïve of the evil ways of darkness, was eager to be about her task of chastising wayward verbs and inserting dashes willy-nilly.

And so she dranketh…

Now, Lo! and Lo! and Lo! once more, she danceth along the highways and byways without cease, stopping strange vehicles, lifting the cuff of her pant to show her ankle, and shamelessly begging:

Wilt thou read my novel FRANKENSTEIN’S  MONSTER? If thou pre-order it at Amazon, I shall be ever so grateful!

So shall she dance and flirt and beg until exhaustion overcometh her limbs and she droppeth somewhere on the highway or the byway. Though apparently senseless, she shall still be wakeful of eye and mind and purpose… 

And the INNOCENT COPY EDITOR shall twitch.

And the DARK MAGICIAN shall laugh.

Family Goo

Mission: Brave the wilds of Connecticut to visit my parents and assorted relatives.

Secret Agenda: Hand out photocopies of the Publishers Weekly review of Frankenstein’s Monster. (This only looks like a plug, but it isn’t. Really. My parents do not have Internet.)

Tactic: Get in as fast as possible and get out alive.

Route: 287S, 84E, 8N, and 44E. A three-and-a-half-hour journey that turned into five. I didn’t get lost going to visit my parents. I was just…making sure I wasn’t being followed. (Why… Hello, Dr. Freud. Did I forget today’s appointment?)

Music for the Road: O Brother, Where Art Thou? Also Modest Mouse’s Lonesome Crowded West and Dave Matthews’ Crash. (Doctor, there’s no need to start taking notes already. Besides, you know very well I don’t have a brother.)

Sustenance for the Road: Bottled water I forgot to drink and a bag of hard candy that I forgot to bring.

My Elderly Father: Very pleased to see me and very pleased to see the great review.

My Elderly Mother: Not at all pleased to see me, and no, I couldn’t spend the night on the couch in the finished basement, even after I promised not to pee on the rug.

Ambush: By an assorted relative who insisted that I spend the night with her.

POW Camp: My assorted relative’s house, which would not bother my allergies because she had put her very old, very long-lived cat to sleep only last week (just coincidentally, mind you). Therefore, the house was allergy-free, and I was to sleep there, and not on my parent’s cat-free couch in the finished basement.

New Mission: Not to die of wheezing because twenty years of cat hair and dander—ground into every rug, cushion, and other permeable surface—do not disappear after one vacuuming.

Tactic: Sleep with a bottle of antihistamine and, if still alive and coherent in the morning, tunnel under the electric fence and make a run for it..

Route: 44W, 8S, 84W, 287N. A three-and-a-half-hour journey that took three-and-a-half hours. (No, Dr. Freud, do not write that down.)

Music for the Road: The Best of the Call and Tom Waits’s Real Gone. (Stop it! I also had Weird Al Yankovich’s Running with Scissors, but it just wasn’t that kind of day.)

Sustenance for the Road: Found a Stop & Shop en route: Two bottles of Snapple Raspberry Tea, two bags of snack size Butterfingers, two movie-sized boxes of Mike and Ike, and two boxes of Frosted Mini Wheats. (Don’t ask. I said, don’t ask!)

My Husband and Son: Very pleased to have me home.

My Parrots: Very pleased to have me home.

Me: Very, very, very pleased to have me home.

Confession: My assorted relative really doesn’t have an electric fence

e-mail alert!

“There has been suspicious activity on your debit card. Please contact the bank immediately!”

I checked the account online. Given my fear of fluorescent lighting, I often shop by Internet. However, I know that the cute parrot toy I might buy online from The Cute Parrot Toy Shoppe might get posted under the parent company’s billing name of Megastore for Cattle Prods, Pesticides & Associated Products—cute parrot toys being an associated product. So nothing seemed amiss.

I called the number in the e-mail and was connected sooo quickly I honestly thought, Aha! The scam was the phone call itself! The scoundrels assumed that I would naively tell the “bank” all my financial info. I prepared to listen with keen and wary attention.

“Let’s review your charges,” said the customer rep. “Tell me if anything seems suspicious. $138.17 for Stop & Shop.”

“That’s mine. I always stop at Stop & Shop…to…um…shop.”

“$42.78 for CVS.”

“That’s mine.”

“27.11 for Dunkin’ Donuts.”

“That’s mine.”

“57.39 for CVS….$18.41 for Dunkin’ Donuts….$33.38 for Dunkin’ Donuts ….$29.13 for—”

“Enough!” I yelled. “I eat lots of donuts in between tranquilizers! Skip to the suspicious charge.’

The rep paused…It was a pause filled with smugness.

“$152.78 for Sears…for a vacuum cleaner. Do you vacuum, Mrs. O’Keefe? C’mon…Tell the truth and shame the devil.”

Shame the devil? Had Sister Mary Immaculate become a customer rep?

“I vacuum all the time,” I protested guiltily.

“Do you? We not only know that you regularly stop and shop at Stop & Shop. We also know what you shop for when you stop. You have never bought a single cleaning item in your entire life.”

“You can’t possibly know that.”

“On your last visit, you bought three pints of Death by Chocolate ice cream, a single Weight Watcher’s lunch, and some smelly goo for your toenail fungus. Think about it, Mrs. O’Keefe. How can we possibly know what’s out of the ordinary unless we know what’s ordinary?”

The voice was becoming eerily more nunnish with every word.

“We also know that you pre-ordered 2,237 copies of your own book Frankenstein’s Monster just to boost your Amazon ratings.”

Defeated, I admitted that the charge for the Sears vacuum cleaner was not mine—but I insisted that I’d been given a vacuum for my birthday two years ago—and that I used my birthday vacuum all the time.

“Of course, you do,” the voice said soothingly. “Donut crumbs make a mess.”

It was Sister Mary Immaculate! Shoot, now I had to go to confession. In the hierarchy of sins, lying to a nun is a biggie.

“This debit card has now been canceled, Mrs. O’Keefe. You’ll get your new one in five to ten business days.”

I won’t need it. It’s cash only from now on.

My Facebook Husband

I recently fell out of bed. I rolled right over the edge flat on my face and flat on my poor, already-wretched knees. After finally recovering from the exquisite pain in said knees, I felt exquisite embarrassment, the kind that could be shared only with close friends. So I posted it on Facebook. I have over 400 close friends.

This was my post:

Someone at my husband’s job scolded him for laughing at me. When he came home that night, he was quite vexed.

“I didn’t laugh at you,” he said, vexed.

“Yes, you did,” I said, squirming.

“No, I was very sympathetic and concerned. I asked how you were.”

“Then you laughed. You chuckled? You half-smiled?” 

“No.”

“It makes a better story if you laughed,” I said timidly, defending myself.

“The ‘better story’ makes me sound mean,” my husband said.

Coming October 2010

“I think fiction! I talk fiction! I write fiction!” (like Frankenstein’s Monster). “You knew this when you married me!”

“But now your 400 close friends think that I’m mean.”

“I’ll probably say more stuff like this about you,” I confess in advance. “But it’s okay. I won’t really mean them. It’s just to make me entertaining so more people will read me. It’s just my Facebook husband, not my real husband.”

“I’m still vexed.”

Wait till he sees what my blog husband does.

Prepping for the Paparazzi

I’ve waited a long time to be chased by paparazzi.

A lo-o-ong time.

Long enough to practice defense techniques. I’ve already broken the world’s record in how fast a hand can block a camera. There’s no category for that in Guinness. There should be.

With Frankenstein’s Monster coming out in two months (shameless plug), my waiting is at an end. And I’m prepped, I’m pumped—which, for a writer, means my fingers are ripped, ready to type up scathing comebacks like, “Yo Momma!”

I’ve also been practicing all the shocking things that celebrities do. I may not look like it, but I can party like I have a platinum library card.

My first step is to leak my own nickname before being plastered with something horrible. Once upon a time, we had the Lizard King, the Governator, and the Godfather of Soul. Now instead celebrities, especially celebrity couples, have a squishname. The ones in favor right now are “couple squishnames”—like TomKat for Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes.

TomKat is actually one of the best: It uses the actual beginning of each name. The combination is an actual word. And it reflects that the he in question and the she in question are actually thisclose. But dozens more squishnames, before and since, are forgettable (which is a clever way to hide the fact that my memory is shot).

Desperation on the part of the paparazzi, and of the media that then buys their close-ups of hands, has now forced them into shortening even single names. Perhaps they suddenly remembered that Jennifer Lopez has had a squishname all her own for years—J-Lo. But they never heard its natural musicality. All they saw were two syllables. So now we have things like R-Pat for Robert Pattinson of the Twilight movies. It’s as if his celebrity hair and his celebrity eyes have the magnetism of two separate celebrity beings. (Well, maybe they do.)

Then I heard proof that not even the bottom of the barrel was low enough for a squishname. I heard one so bad that it revealed the human soul clawing its way through the barrel and digging all the way to China.

Subo.

Subo!

Short for singer Susan Boyle. The world couldn’t handle three syllables and so shortened her name to two. Subo. It is so horrendous that even now somebody somewhere is “verbing” it:

“Subo a song for us, Subo!” 

I need a squishname quick!

Suggestions? I’m looking for something that screams, “Peppy, dignified, charismatic, humble, literary genius!”

Death Valley in New Jersey

We’re often not aware when we live in extraordinary circumstances. For example, a kid growing up on the Rivera doesn’t wake up and think, “Wow!!! I live on the RIVIERA!!!” More like, “Ho hum, another day, another turquoise sea.”

All this is prelude to the fact that there was a vulture outside my window at work. Mind you, not a huge, Death Valley vulture, waiting for me to gasp, twitch, then fall face-first onto the salt flats. Just a turkey vulture, three feet tall and with a wingspan of six feet. Ho hum. But I guess you probably don’t have one outside your window.

Photo © Peter Wallack

It’s not in the nearby woods—where, if it were, it probably would be circling overhead watching for something’s last twitch. Instead, it’s standing patiently on the building property, waiting for road kill. This is probably the vulture equivalent of dining out: the restaurant is swanky, but the service is slow.

Photo © Dori Merr

These birds are not attractive, as the picture here shows. (Yes, you’re seeing clear through that nostril to the other side.) It’s not their fault. No vulture has ever pecked its way out its egg, looked in a mirror, and said, “What a relief! I was sooo afraid I was going to be a cute fuzzy duckling.” More likely, it pecks out and says, “When’s breakfast?”

Which brings us to the vulture’s eating habits, which are not its fault, either. (And let’s face it, that’s the thing we really object to. Not their bald red heads.) Vultures just do what they’re meant to do. I only wish they would wear bibs while they do it. The bibs could have red piping around the edges, to match their little, mean-looking heads, with embroidered letters reading, “Time for Num-Num!”

Someone else in the office took note of our luncheon guest.

“There’s a vulture outside.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Last week’s was bigger.”

What’s the moral?

The last time I was at the ocean, I found my first sand dollar.  My immediate reaction was—GIFT! Like a baby would  say.  Not even a gift. Just GIFT!

Last week I visited Ocean Grove, New Jersey. I just had to find another sand dollar. Had to. Had to. Had to. I spent too much time scouring the beach—unsuccessfully—when all of a sudden I was smacked by insight:

You can’t look for a gift. A gift has to be given.

Not two minutes later, a woman passed by and asked if I wanted the sand dollar she had just found. This really happened. Really and truly. As soon as I gave up grasping at gifts, I received one.

What a lovely story! It has a beginning, middle, and end. It’s rich with meaning. And it’s true. Which means that after the story was told, the truth kept on talking and… 

I held the sand dollar close to my near-sighted eyes and saw it was badly chipped and had a ragged hole through the center. If I had found it myself, I wouldn’t even have picked it up. But trying to save the warm fuzzies of meaning, I gritted my teeth and decided that I would love my gift anyway with all its imperfections.

Ahhh…The smell of an overripe metaphor left out in the sun…

So, there I am. I have just made a grumpy, cold-blooded decision to love this very imperfect gift when—almost at that very instant—a very perfect sand dollar washes up on the beach right by my toes. And I found many beautiful ones over the next few days.

What’s the moral?

That the imperfect is good enough until something better shows up? That meaning can’t be imposed on everything? That you should never look a gift sand dollar in the…um…whatchamacallit?

Help! Please tell me what you think the moral is so I can get to sleep.

Why blog?

Because everyone else is doing it.

Because writers are expected to do it.

Because Sister Mary Immaculate said I had problems with peer pressure and she was right.