The Blog In Yellow

Last week I argued with a nurse about washing dishes and I realized two things. First, I was preparing for an all or nothing outcome. Either I was going to salt the earth behind her or I was prepped to have the same done to me. At my current job, I take care of three kitchens at a retirement home. The nurses help out but the lion's share of the work goes to me. I take pride in doing my best. The nurse, and others, claimed that some dishes were greasy or had food on them. Their solution? Add sud soap to the sink and soak the dishes. Sud soap can damage a sanitizing machine. I always soak the dishes in water which is strong enough to eat the grease and during the wash, two non sud soaps are added to the wash of 180 degree water. If they are still getting bad dishes, it's likely because the worker before me stuffs as many dishes as she can into the machine. I spread my dishes out to prevent this. On her part, my coworker is rushed more than me so I cant expect her to get it all. S...

I've noticed that stories based around Lovecraft's work have a weaker, almost fanfiction feel to them. Take Clark Smith's "Vultoom" which depicts a man trying to stop a ritual in which his wife will be sacrificed to a plant god. He kills Vulthoom only for his wife to replace the god. It sounds like Lovecraft, looks like him, but lacks the edge that Lovecraft has. It's like swimming in a lake, the outer edges you can put your feet on the sand whereas Lovecraft likes to rip you away with the tide.

When I first started researching, I ran i to this quagmire. I was researching all the gods, cults and characters of the Lovecraft universe. Everything down to the God's symbols was categorized. Now I'm doing that again but with the character's motivations and philosophies. I'm just killing time instead of writing or creating. I'm categorizing. I do it because I like it but at some point I need to put pen to paper and write. Why can't I do it? It's becoming a comfort zone quagmire. Why write imperfectly when you can categorize? So frustrating.

This is about me. I got home the day before yesterday and felt unbridled joy. I was alone and allowed to do anything I wanted. Anything. You lose that freedom when you go on vacation. I could go back to the formula I was so used to. I never felt so giddy in my life. It was as if I was on the weekend after school. The feeling was lesser the next day but I wanted to record that moment so I don't forget it.

This is the last of Chamber's stories that I'll go into detail. Only two connection popped up during my reading: a pallid knife, and the yellow eyes of the cat. Like I mentioned, Chamber's latter stories add less to the lore and seem to be cut from a different cloth. This baffles me as I would have loved to know more about the King and the world of Carcosa. Perhaps there is some hidden meaning behind the last few stories. It feels as if the King's lore is gradually being replaced by other stories Chambers wanted to tell. 

A manga that I read often was canceled today after nine chapters. It happens, the story wasn't original, neither were the characters. It was a retreading of something that had been written a dozen times before. And yet, I was looking forward to reading more. All writers and artists dream of someone asking "what happens next." I'm broken up about the manga because it served as a source of inspiration. With its cancelation came a disappointing end with issues unresolved. It leaves the reader unsatisfied and makes the "what happens next" a sour question rather than a hopeful one. This isn't the first time has happened. I've seen other stories killed off before their plateau. And then it makes me wonder "what about my story?" Is it good enough to rise above the waves of thousands forms of media being created each day? My premise isn't original, kids go to a monster magic school. I hear my inner critic saying "do try to be original....

I'll be on vacation with my folks soon. I've been reading about Lovecraft and his fondness for the century before him. He didn't appear to embrace the new century that unfolded with or without his approval. I feel the same about vacations.  I get stressed not being in a familiar environment which is compounded by being around strange people. Why can't things stay the same. I want a different environment but I want things to stay the same. Taking your home with you is a neat idea. Flying around with your house. It's not a Lovecraft idea but one of my own. It seems Lovecraft liked to stay in his Lovecraft Country rather than see the world. He let his characters explore the unknown world of the desert and frozen tundra. 

After spending several months in the land of Carcosa, I think it's time I visited Lovecraft country. Specifically, an unknown desert far from America. The Nameless City is considered to be the first of the Cthulhu stories. We see hints of what the Mythos would become in this story. There is the mystique of ancient ages and hints of forbidden knowledge, themes that would infect his other stories. A neless man dares to explore a forbidden city. Despite the warnings he ventures into the ruins and dives deeper and deeper into its mysteries. For my part, what is most interesting is the lack of names. No Cthulhu or Shub-Niggurath entities are listed. Even the crocodile creatures that inhabited the city are never named. This lack of names adds a mystery to the story and the reader ends up parroting the narrators questions. The story seems to be an analogy for Lovecraft's own attempts to dive into his imagination. He first foray into the unimaginable seems to have come up a bit short a...

I remember being a kid at Hollywood Video or Blockbuster looking at all the movie covers. Before cgi the video, and eventually DVD, covers were drawn by a skilled hand. These always stoked my imagination. What was on those videos that promised so much? The answer? Usually disappointment. The rare video that offered something new or a surprise was one in a thousand. You can see plenty of disappointment on Red Letter Media's YouTube page. But there was always that hope, that chance that you would find a video worth adding to your collection, or better still, a movie worth remembering. I can count on my fingers the number of rentals that were worth the hype behind the cover. That leads me to my own fear: the fear of my book not living up to the hype. You look at Stephen King's The Shining and the cover hooks you in. There's been a dozen covers for the book but the one that haunts me is this looking up picture of a hotel door with the words "redrum" drawn in a child...

The final story in Chamber's collection that has any connection to the King in Yellow. This story is made up of very short parts or chapters listed as: The Studio, The Phantom, The Sacrifice, Destiny, The Throng, The Jester, The Green Room, and The Love Test. I see a pattern of each story in Chamber's story of the themes around the King wanning away with each entry. This collection has the bare bones of what could be considered a reference.  For example, The Green Room mentions a character with a powdered face. This could be similar to a pale mask. But the analogies are so thin here that it's difficult to draw connections. 

While yesterday's class wasn't as enlightening as I'd hoped it would be, it did reignite one of my motivators: frustration. I call it frustration as it's not truly anger. It's more like a wildfire lapping at whatever is in the general area. And there is this general area of vagueness that I rage at when it comes to media. It's the same feeling I get when I want back the time I wasted on a bad movie or video game. Why did I give my time to that? I could have done something else. This vagueness comes from people who don't truly understand the subject they are talking about. Like Hostile Dimensions with its strange plot and waste of potential. Or a book that has a neat concept but wastes it to explore roads too frequently traveled. For me, it's this frustration at a class that taught me something I already understood. The issue stems from teachers who don't have a clear grasp on what they're trying to teach you or lack the tools to do it. I've o...

I rook a class about something I already understood. My local writing place, the Thurber House hosted a class today. This class was about how to write scenes. I know I did well because the class was impressed by my work during the first exercise. I guess I was pent up because the works I did in the two other works weren't as good, at least in my opinion. So I didn't share them. A girl wanted to read more of my work so we exchanged emails. Should I email her? I don't know. It seems too forward to someone I just met. She seemed a little nervous when we exchanged emails and I don't want to push it. I'm not sure if I should continue classes but refreshing yourself on things you've already learned is like adding a spit shine to a trophy. It's gross but it clears it up. 

Writing reminds me of taking art classes in highschool. When I draw I would push the pencil down too hard which makes it hard to erase later. Drawing is all about erasing and redrawing. But my autism likes pressure so I chew straws or I push down on the pencil for pressure. And what comes out is messy and hard to erase. Same with my writing, I latch onto ideas and it's like working with marble instead of clay. It's already hard enough to get myself motivated to get going on writing. I'm like a steam train, hard to start, hard to stop. I wonder if other authors fight with themselves because I always hear about the love of writing but never about how to motivate yourself. Maybe it comes with practice. Guess I'll find out.

I've finished my first outline. It's a scrawny thing, only three pages long. But at least it's done and I can start getting the work done. I'll be honest, putting that thing on paper was hard. Especially since it was incomplete it just felt so wrong. It's not perfect and I have to get used to that feeling sooner or later.

At the age of fourteen, Howard Lovecraft contemplated suicide. At such an age his mental health had deteriorated to a point where death was considerable solution. At the same age, maybe older, I also thought about suicide. School and life do strange things to people. All of us feel mental pain at some point but where I had therapy and drugs to turn to, Lovecraft likely had to bury these feelings or face the same fate as his father. Today I am much better, mostly because I take my medicine like I'm supposed to. But I wonder, if I had would my events of school been as bad? It wasn't all bad, I made friends and I graduated from college so I'm one up on Lovecraft. I tend to look back at life in either extreme good or bad lenses. The loss of his father and grandfather must have hurt him to a large degree. He describes himself as an old man at the age of fourteen. Most fourteen year Oods are thinking about girls or their future plans. What was going through his mind to consider d...

One of the pillars of Lovecraftian horror is the failings of human beings. It's no surprise given that his grandfather's financial failures and his father's internment in an assylum caused him to think in such a way. Many of Lovecraft's characters don't get to see the next day. Either madness consumes them or a cult or god arranges an "accident." Lovecraft's style focuses on the inability of humanity to overcome or barely survive their circumstances. It's a hostile, uncaring universe that sees humanity as but a blip on the grand scale of the universe. Lovecraft even planed for humanity's downfall by having us destroyed and replaced by giant cockroaches. What can a small human do against the pulls of the universe? Disease, disaster, death, one way or another humanity will fall in Lovecraft's fatalistic view of the world.

I want to do a review of the short story but since the game is fresh in my mind I figured this would be best. Of course the game takes it title from the story but how do you make exploration more than a walking simulator. In the 2010s a lot of games called walking simulators were published. Dear Esther, came out of no where and shook up the gaming world. It was a way to tell a story with little gameplay. A focus on story and narration led the player along a walking path that led to landmarks and to more narration. This design has been phased out in favor of games with more gameplay elements. The game promises a bit more with access to ancient runes, not mentioned in the short story, as puzzle elements to unlock rooms or block hazards. The game starts strong with the game framing the opening paragraph of the short story. A quote by the mad Arab, "That is not dead, which can eternal lie. And with strange eons, even death may die." Such a powerful line has become the cornerstone...

I had a dream I could remember. In it, I was at an opera. In the back I was taking care of two Russian royalty. The kind of tsar royalty before communism. They were so old that all that was left was their heads. Then things got weird, the kind of weird that's hard to write about. Nickelodeon was sponsoring the event to show off their new cartoons. Somehow I made it outside where an event was going on. One side event was midgets dressed as Mario question blocks were walking around waiting for people to hit them. They would quiz you, if you won, you got school supplies. I tried to hit one but fell into the mud. I don't know how Lovecraft would turn his dreams into stories but he must have dreamed darkly.

I've been recording my dreams, strange as they are. And I can't help but wonder at Lovecraft's mind when he dreamt the inspiration for his stories. He never goes into too much detail and that may be for the best. What nightmare created Nyarlathotep? What dream spawned Cthulhu and the like? 

A young man named Philip decides to sleep outside for the night after finding no sign of civilization. Being lost, he is surprised when a falcon swoops in to kill a hare. The falcon bears a collar and soon a young woman chases after it. Once Philip explains his circumstances, the woman offers him to stay at her place. But only after she says that it would take him centuries to get back to whence he came. A strange saying, but one that seems to harken to the work of Ambrose Bierce and his Citizen of Carcosa. Ive theorized that Bierce's character seems to be separated by time and is using distance as a metaphor. Perhaps that is same with Chamber's story. The woman blows a whistle and summons two men, Raoul and Hastur. Hastur...why does that name show up here? Hastur is likely the name of the King and the god of shepherds. The woman invites Philip to stay at her home Chateau d'Ys. The next day, Philip sees the previous men head off for another hunt. During breakfast he meets t...