SING A LITTLE BIT OF THESE WORKIN MAN BLUES

I love being a writer. I truly do. Everything about it, even the tedious things (a million emails I'm looking at you.). I also love my day job which is owning and operating the best damn tattoo shop in the world. But I have worked a ton of jobs that weren't so great. I've been a bouncer, a collection agent for Citibank, a youth pastor, a cook, a sunroom builder, a comic book shop jockey, and many, many more. I've been working since 2 weeks before my 15th birthday. I'm not complainin', just sayin'. I have worked all my life. Today you get the story of the first job I ever walked out on. I was 16, driving, and in need of a job so that I could put gas in said car so that I could keep on driving. So like most teens I hit the mall looking for a job. Low and behold I snagged a job at the Manchu Wok in the food court. They needed a dishwasher and I needed a paycheck so the two of us met in the middle and I was hired. It was a terrible job. I was the dishwasher, which is fine. I have gone on to wash many a dish in my life at all kinds of restaurants. It's hard work, but it's simple and because washing dishes kinda sucks it usually pays alright. Well, this job was really weird. First of all, I was the only non-Asian person working there and other than being shown where the sink was by the lady who was in charge NO ONE WOULD TALK TO ME. None. Not a person. Not the lady in charge, not the food runner, not the cook, oh hell no not the cook. Ever meet someone and know immediately that they do not like you? That was the case with me and the cook. He was smiling when he was talking to the food runner, then the lady in charge tells him I will be the new dishwasher (I am assuming. It was not in english.)and it looked like he had an attack of stomach flu. His face twisted into the deepest scowl I have ever seen. In a split second he switched completely. I wasn't concerned. I wasn't there to make friends with the cook. I was there to make money. I figured I would work hard and he would come around. Oh no. I took my station, washing the stack of pans already there. It was a deep three bay sink. One sink with hot soapy water. One sink with a disinfectant rinse, one sink with hot rinse water. The Manchu Wok was a food court chinese resturant where they keep the dishes of the day in hotpans out front. as the pans get low, the cook would make a fresh batch of whatever the item was then I would wash the wok and put it in the stack of clean woks for his use. The food runner would bring over the empty pans and stack them up on the counter beside the sink as he filled the new items. The first refill of something, egg rolls, sesame chicken, whatever, goes out. The cook is done with the wok. He screams something at me that sounds like a pterodactyl attacking a baby pig and hurls the hot wok at me and the sink. CLANG! He doesn't hit me, it hits the sink full of hot soapy water, splashing it and oil residue up on the rubber apron I am wearing. It's not enough to flip out on this old Asian man (seriously, he looked to be about 70), it's just enough to annoy the hell out of me. This happens over and over all night for all three hours I was working. Finally the shift was over. The lady came back and pointed at two bags of trash. "Take those out." I picked them up and took them out the back hallway to the dumpster. I kept on walking to my car. I didn't go back for my check. I went and found another job the next day. Worst job ever. And to commemorate it, here's some Merle Haggard for you.

THE DIVISION OF LABOUR AIN'T CALCULUS

Chores. You know, they aren't called chores because they are fun. I live in a house with 3 teenagers. Two of them are the fruit of my loins, the third is a new addition, a nephew of my wife. They are all "the kids" and all part of the household. No true differentiation between them especially when it comes to chores. Now we don't ask much of the kids. Do your own laundry, don't leave food in your room, pick up your crap, you know, simple stuff. Big chores we are willing to pay for. You mow the grass, it's worth $20 bucks. You move big trash up to the curb for Big Trash Day and it's worth a tenner. Not a bad deal. The only glitch in the system is the damn dishes. The Missus recently came to the conclusion that there was no reason the two adults in the house should cook and do the dishes. So now dishes are divided amongst the three. One unloads, one loads, one has a break in a weird rotating schedule that is flexibly adjusted depending on a multitude of factors. Here's the thing. Somehow, I have a 14 year old, and 2, count 'em TWO, 17 year olds who are incapable of loading the damn dishwasher right. It doesn't matter how many times you explain that the hole in the center of the dishwasher cannot be covered by a pot because THAT IS WHERE ALL THE WATER COMES FROM, they still throw something over it. That one pan will be clean as hell, but everything else is dry as a bone. And they will either cram everything in the dishwasher, stacking things on top of each other, cups inside of glasses, bowls inside of pans... Or more commonly they throw two bowls and a cup in the top rack and proclaim the damn thing full. This is with a sink overflowing with dinner dishes left. (This especially happens when dinner runs late and there is Buffy on Netflix to be watched.) Sometimes I swear they suck at doing this so that we will take it back just to have a clean plate to eat on. They don't know us very well. lol.

Pets back in the day.

I'm with my fellow Word Whore Jeffe in that while I remember pets I have owned in the past, I don't really have pictures.

There was Zeus, the rottweiler/lab mix. He was a good dog. Big and scary looking but sweet as hell. Minded pretty well unless he got free and then all you could do was send up a prayer for his safety cause he was gone. No looking back, just running wide open. He'd come back in a few hours and lay on the carport until he was let back in. lol.
I would probably still have him today. I moved into an apartment that did not allow pets so I had a friend take him for a bit until I could move to a different unit that did allow pets. It took a month and by that time he was living like a king in a neighborhood full of kids who would get off the bus and go get him and take him through the woods on adventures. Plus my friend had truly fallen in love with him so I left him with her and her husband.

Back in the day, when I was a wee child we had a dog named Tiger. She was a German Shepard mix. Wonderful dog. Sweet, protective. She was always there when we were outside, watching over us. My mother still tells the story of going inside to get something and leaving me in the yard. A moment later she heard me start screaming so she came a running. I was on the edge of the yard, standing there trying to get in the road and Tiger had me by the cloth diaper, holding me back. I was apparantly mad as hell about it, hence the screaming.
Tiger was a good dog, lived a long life and finally died of old age.

I've had cats here and there, but most of them were crappy. I am not a cat fan. Even the coolest cat winds up peeing in my laundry basket....the clean one.

I did have a 10 ft Burmese python named Abigail that I traded a tattoo for. She was beautiful, but very scary. A 10 foot snake is twice the size of my bicep all the way around. She's a 10 ft tube of pure muscle designed to kill things. I lived alone when I had her and I always thought to myself "If this snake decides to take you out while you hold her, what could you do?" Nothing....hope I could stagger outside with 100 pounds of snake wrapped around my face and convince my neighbors to call the cops instead of pointing and laughing.

Abigail went to live at the animal preserve outside of Cleveland Ga.

Now I have a house full of pets. 6 dogs, 1 cat, 1 bird, 1 hamster.

But this one is mine. His name is Cash and you have my permission to "awwwwwww".

PUTTING THE OOH IN THE OOH-LA-LA

I know this isn't a writing blog, it's a blog by writers and I think more than a few of y'all are writers yourselves.

So while this may be a bit short it will be an actual writing technique post.

Writing sex scenes.

Now, I'm not going to go into the specific tips and tricks such as pay attention to all the senses in the act of instead of focusing on just the sights and the sounds. Or using clever fresh words to describe things. (Slick being one of my faves) Or how using a lot of soft sounding words such as slick will make the scene flow. S sounds, C sounds, Z sounds roll off the tongue like....well, that's about enough of that. lol

I'm not even going to talk to you about varying the tempo of your sentence structure so that longer sentences build the tension, making it climb, building pressure as the sensations are spilled out onto the page for the eye to watch until you switch. Using shorter and shorter sentences. Quickening the pace. Moving faster. Doing. The. Deed.

Nope. Today I am going to speak, really quickly, on making the sex scene matter.

You should never write a gratuitous sex scene. Not even in erotica. If you do then you have failed. I know that sounds harsh but it's the truth. Sex is important and it means a lot of things. It can be a sign that your character is moving into a new phase of emotional growth. It can be a sign of healing. It can signify how damaged your character is. (Which is what George Pellacanos is doing in DRAMA CITY which I am reading now) But it should matter. It matters in real life and it should matter to your character and to your reader. It's not enough to write a hot scene, you have to make it serve a purpose in your character's emotional story.

There is a great book that I recommend if you need help writing that pesky lovemaking scene. It's by Stacia Kane and it's called: BE A SEX-WRITING STRUMPET.

See, here it is. Click HERE to go read more about it and where to get it. It's cheap.



She will put it all in perspective for you. LOL.

And that's all for me. Sum up, buy Stacia's book and make your sex scenes matter.

I had a great time at Con Nooga this year. Thank you to all the fans who came out to see me.

Til next monday Loyals and True Believers.