Testing something - disregard

This is just a test, will be removed shortly.

Okay - finally had some time to finish this up... (if you didn't read the first part, its in the post just below this one, read it first!)

The Baby: Conclusion:

Tom was at a loss for words.  It was the day he was supposed to be the first male human giving birth to an actual baby, and before he had even stepped in the shower he had gotten this call.  It didn't seem fair to him, and he thought for a moment she was probably watching from another place, hopefully a better one, and laughing at his failure already.  Tom took a deep breath, began to rub his forhead out of frustration, and said patiently, "Charles, why do I need to come down there?  This sounds like something I need to hear right now.  I haven't even showered."

"Tom....", there was a long quiet pause but Tom could still hear charles breathing through the reciever.  "Tom, look...You were so damn close, you had it all right you know - taking the notes from the way they cloned lambs, looking at the viability of actually implanting a womb into yourself, all those" before Charles could continue Tom cut him off, "I know I was right Charles, thats why I'm sitting here today with a 7 pound child in my belly and a portion of my organs removed or restricted."

"Exactly!" Tom replied sounding pleased as if Tom had made a connection that he clearly had not.  "You had it all right, except one minor detail.  That baby.....that...thing inside of you...it is in fact growing, we did catch a heartbeat, and it certainly appears to be a baby, even on all of our ultrasounds, but....but it isn't Tom.  Its something else.".   

Tom was annoyed now, as he was a Doctor and experimental scientist, he had done many things he wasn't pleased with over his long career, and he was all to familar with trying to deliver bad news to someone gently, and he knew thats exactly what was going on right now.  "Charles, what are you saying?  We've monitored this child for 9 months now, what do you mean its something else?".  Charles didn't hesitate to respond, "Tom.  Its not a child.  What you have in your stomach right now is a growth and malignint.  Its basically an oversized tumor, and if I'm right, removing it today via the c-section we had planned isn't going to help you at all.  I can't explain it Tom, but we decided to do some additional tests outside of the amniocentisis and your biopsy came back positive.  You have a cancerous growth, and its the damn thing we put inside you."

###############

Thats the end for now folks - please forgive my lack of actual medical terms but I was just trying to bust this out.  If I were going to pursue this, my idea is that it would be very twilight zone-ish, set in a world where all the women have been killed off for some reason, via a virus/genocide/or maybe never explained, and Tom is kind of a jerk scientist who unfortunately is the only person who has a shot of figuring out how to save humanity.  As we see in this rough version, he succeds (or thinks he does), but in the end it turns out that he shouldn't have messed with mother nature, and all he has is a gigantic tumor that looks and acts like a baby.  I like the idea of this thing inside him, put there by him, that is something far more sinister than a baby, but not taking it as far as the "It's Alive" movies.

Keeping it going....

A friend of mine recently sent me this IM:  

"come on andrew, lets keep up the posting on voltronx, i have an assignment for you today. Write a 1000 word short story inspired by this picture...http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/freeradicals/wp-content/uploads/2008/04/preganant-man-and-electrotherapeutic-device-006.jpg  "

What a cool friend!  A challenge!  So, without further ado, here it is:

The Baby 

The cheap radio clock that he had won at that stupid fair last year read "5:34 AM" in oversized red letters.  It was almost as if the clock was daring him to try and sleep.  "Come on, you've been watching me since I read 3:00 AM buddy, your 2 hours and 34 minutes in, you can't win" he imagined the clock saying to him.  "Fuck you clock" he said outloud to himself, and part of him hoped the clock was a little put off by the comment.  But he knew he couldn't sleep, not now, not today, not with so much riding on the line.  

He thought for a minute about everything he had done to get to this point and it made him a little weary.  Had he thought of everything?  Were his calculations, and in some cases guesstimations, correct?  This was no ordinary procedure and it was unprecedented to be using himself as a test subject.  But then again, how many guys would nominate themselves to be impregnated and to carry a baby to term?  Not many...even for the $15 dollar a month fee he was willing to pay them with the money he had left over from his first grant.  But none of that really mattered now, he was far beyond that point.  It was his cross to bare, and he had to prove to the world, no, he had to prove to her, that it could be done.

"5:37 AM" the clock read, and he decided it was time to forget sleep.

He put both arms behind him, and begun to push himself up and out of the bed.  He had had to do this type of manuevering for the last 3 months and while it was easier for him to do, it still never felt quite right.  As he stood, his right arm instinctivly went to carass his lower back to ease the aching, he had taken to calling this "morning atrophy", but no one seemed to find that as humorous as he did.  He had made it about 4 steps away from the shower when his cell phone started playing the theme song to the flintsontes cartoon, he loved that ring tone, it reminded him of another time.  He walked back towards the nightstand it was resting on and picked it up.  The phone was "old" by this point, a Nokia he had gotten for free 5 years ago, and even though everyone told him to upgrade he chose not to - it did exactly what he needed it to.  

"This is Tom" he said in an odd voice, trying to make it sound like he had just woken up, even though he'd been awake all night.  "Tom, its Charles, I think something is wrong..." a young and concerned voice squaked back though the Nokia.  "I don't have time for problems Charles, so either your messing with me which is not funny, or your being serious which is catastrophic" Tom said back, now rubbing his belly with great anixety.  "This is it Charles - this is our actual last chance to save humanity.  If this doesn't work, and with no women anymore, we're over Charles.  We're extinct - do you get it?" Tom was agitated now, and the tone of his voice had taken on a much darker tone.  
"Don't talk to me about the stakes Tom, I've been with you for too long to be treated like one of your new assistants.  Just get down here, then you'll understand everything".

#####

The conclusion to come in a blog post tomorrow or tonight, right now its back to real work for me!

Where the hell have I been?

Man - my last post was in July...that's just sad. So where the hell have I been? Caught up in the pile of bullshit we generally call life; work, bills, etc, etc. That doesn't mean I've forgotten the dream, if anything I realize now more than ever that if I'm going to make this happen, I have about 5 years left to make it a reality. So, to get going, here are some thing going on in my life now that I'm taking inspiration from:
1) I got the Acekard 2i and it really rocks. For those not familar, its a geek device that lets you run homebrew applications on the nintendo DS (or DSi in my case).
2) I saw Adventureland, and it really struck a cord with me. There is something about your late teens to your early twenties that really has an emotional punch in your system for the rest of your life. I think maybe I need to write something about my young adulthood days, and how it kind of all culminated to where I am now.

Since its a new year, I'll be making some new goals to make sure I keep this updated more frequently. Hope all is well with my 1 loyal reader, and expect an update soon-ish.

The saga continues...

Okay, so the ghost hunting is complete and I can say that we offcially found jack and shit. No EVP's, no video evidence, no paranormal activity, no nothing. So, the "real life" version of this story is a bust, but have no fear as I still am going to turn this into a screenplay! In the comments of my last post, my goog friend wrecks threw in the idea of the skeptical friend who dies in the end of the 2nd act, and thats a great addition. I also forgot the part about my new-age sister coming ove3r to perform a cleansing, and this really creepy set piece about this old woman dressed in all black walking by our porch one night at midnight (trust me, it was CREEPY). So, I have some writing to do, I'll try to get the first draft up in the next few days.

It's My Birthday (And a start of a great story...maybe?)

So today, July 3rd, is my birthday and marks the begining of my 30th year on this great planet. What am I to take from such an occasiion? Well, I'm no where closer to my goal of writing for a living, so I need to really step it up this year. I need to stop drinking - my body just can't hang anymore. If I have 3 beers, I can count on at least a full-days worth of horrible gas. If I step it up to hard liqour, I can plan on asshole-burnage by 10am the next morning. So yeah, its just not worth the pain anymore. And really, thats about it. I am loving my life, my family is great, and in general things are going well. But enough about my birthday, I know you don't give a shit about that. Lets switch gears to something much cooler - a REAL LIFE story thats brewing right under my nose, and could turn out to be the basis for a screenplay. Let me break it down for you in a matter of "set pieces" of events that have recently happened or will happen, and then see how we can leverage this into some fiction:

Set piece #1 - "The Reveal":
We hired a new cleaning lady, who happens to be super fine and is all into new-age stuff. One day I had a headache and she used her "healing touch" to make it go away, and it actually did - not sure if it was her touch or whatever, but was interesting that it worked. Well, yesterday she pulls me aside and tells me, "You have a pressence in your house. He likes to watch you guys, and I get the impression he is very very negative and bad for this house. I get chills here, and extremely bad vibes". She also told me that when she is in our basement, she gets a sense of fear that she has never experienced before.

Set piece #2 - "The Creepy kid confirmation":
What makes this extra weird is that my older daughter who used to sleep in the basement before we moved her upstairs, used to speak of "the shadow man" who would walk around in the basement at night. She never really said anything more than that, so I need to double check on if it was a "bad" or "good" shadow man, but the fact that she mentioned this years before the cleaning lady really creeps me out. Did I mention I'm a big wuss (who just happens to love horror films and the paranormal).

Set piece #3 - "Friends feel this too?":
To make this more interesting and to freak me out that much more, this cleaning lady is actually the 4th person to mention a pressence in the house, and especially in the basement. 1 friend in particular who used to stay at our house almost every weekend, often told me he was sure there was a ghost in the house, and it freaked him out. The other people are random friends who have told my wife or I at some point they believe there is a pressence in the house.

Set Piece #4 - "Freinds, or Enemies?":
This is true, and I'll spare you the gory details, but the friend mentioned above (who used to stay over all the time) was practically the 5th member of our family. Well, 1 day while my wife and I were getting ready to go out (and the kids were at their grandmas), he snuck into our house and waited in our basement while we were getting dressed/taking showers/etc. Once we had left, he wrote a very very intense and frightnight letter on my wifes laptop, assuming the character of, "The Gentlemen Intruder", and basically telling us that we should be more careful to lock our doors and that he would hate to see anything happen to our children. It was terrifying, and ended our friendship.

Set Piece #5 - "Lesbian Menace":
About 1 week ago there was a banging at our door. "BANG BANG BANG" - it was quite surprising because we never have random visitors - and because it was so loud and hard. When we answered our door there was a short round women standing there - in a plaid shirt and with a full blown mullet. She said "Is Barbara Carr here?" sounding very angry, and pacing on our porch. We told her that we had in fact purchased the home from Ms.Carr about 3 years ago and that as far as we knew, she had moved to Florida. The woman paced for a moment more, then ran off. Strange.

Set Piece #6 - "The Best Birthday Present Ever":
So tonight is my birthday, and an old friend is coming over to help me "investigate" the basement and see what might be going on. We plan to do some EVP work, minor camera work, and maybe a few other things. This ofcourse is going to be AWESOME, and even more awesome if we do in fact get some evidence. If not, at least I'll still be all creeped out and excited.

So, what we have here is a random series of events that all actually tie together nicely and I see some serious potential for a story. We've got the weird new-age lady basically starting it all by telling me about the pressence. We then have a series of flashbacks to a child in the basement, and the "shadow man" lurking in the darkness. We have random friends who confirm (either in flashbacks or not) that they feel it to - maybe one or all of them dying shortly thereafter? We have an extremely close frined (and probably huge role in the story) doing something unimaginable - was it the basement that made him do this, or is he the killer? We have a mysterious lesbian woman appearing at our house asking for the prior owner exactly 1 week before the activity seemed to increase. Why? What did she need? And finally we have some great scenes where the main character (me!) decided to take matters into his own hands and do some investigation. Some sub-plots are even there: How does the child fit into this? Does she know more about the entity then she is letting on? Maybe this goes back very far, and there is a mystery to unravel. I see this going 2 ways, (1) A straight paranormal flick with some red herrings thrown in (the crazy friend, the random lesbian lady) that has to solve some problem that has plauged the house for awhile. Or (2) A slasher style flick where you think its paranormal, but then turns out to be an actual killer preying on the family (but why?). Since these are all (so far) true events, I guess I'll just have to wait and see how it unfolds tonight...

Writing Exercise....

Okay, just a little late, but as promised here is a little writing exercise that I'm going to do and I would love it if you all would give it a try in the comments. Might be fun! So here is the deal: Think of a scene (a short one - just a paragraph or less), write it out. Then marinate on it, and write the same thing but in a different way. Marinate some more, then give it a 3rd try. Make sense? Good. Lets give it a shot, and we can all critique each other in the comments. Here's mine:

Attempt 1:
The forest is quiet, the only sound to be heard is that of a young owl testing it's "hoo's" and "ho's". There is a path through the trees, but its not an easy one to make out, obviously it hasn't seen heavy use in sometime. A young boy (age 8) is seen running through a dark forest - he has a look of terror on his face and is running very fast, but from what?

Attempt 2:
A boy, young and fit but wearing the tattered remains of clothes, runs down a path carved through broken broken branches and worn tall grass. Obviously frightened, he runs at a pace that only a child can, looking back at nothing and everything all at the same time.

Attempt 3:
The sound of his own barefeet against the dead grass and broken branches was loud enough to stir the animals. Loud enough to ring in the young boys ears as he ran. Loud enough, unfortunately, for the badman to follow through the otherwise dead silence of the forest.