I am tormented. The worst part of my torment is that it comes from my success so, maybe, that is the best part of my torment.

Nothing is ever official in Blinverted.

I wrote this nice little story from the point of view of a dog. I shared it in MySpace and it was a hit. I still laugh at certain parts when imagining what my dog is thinking and trying to capture it in words on a page. The problem, and reason for my torment (I might have already mentioned my torment in the title), is that dog's don't think in English.

I could create a doggie language (call it doggy freestyle?) using barks and growls but those growls and barks would still have an English translation. I guess it would, I mean, every other freaking language has an English translation.

Life is my greatest muse. No matter what happens from one day to the next, life just keeps on happening and for some reason (maybe because I am in so deep now) it all seems so blinverted to me.

To wit...

My good friend Mike Z, who has been my bartender and friend for four years now (man I drink a lot), lost his job on Monday. It wasn't an epic blowout where he was fired and the bar stayed open. The freaking bar closed down too.

The owner, Bob McMahon, is of the social elite of Tucson. The rent at Metro Grill was outrageous and he made a good business decision to close up shop as opposed to taking a loss or breaking even every month. He made a poor people decision though by not giving any of his Metro Grill employees any notice that it was about to close. Mike Z shows up to work and not even the managers were able to look him in the eye.

This has been one of my favorite days so it makes sense that I am talking about one of my favorite books. The Revolts is a story about alien domination, demon attacks and a nuclear holocaust on the planet's surface.

You know all the good parts of the Bible.

It is the middle story for the mythology I have on my mind. It is the story of creation from destruction. It is the sorrow that one must always beget the other. It is why this is a human tragedy and a divine comedy all in one spinning package.

I was born into a world where there was a means to destroy it. Every breath I take is a gift given by those with the power to launch such intsruments of death. Regular men who were born of this world and will pass away from it have the ability to destroy it during those two poles of life and death.

When I was a kid, it was so fun to wake up and walk to the nearest TV in the house and watch cartoons all morning. It was important in my life too as my first book turned out to be almost all about watching cartoons. So I was up this morning and it was too early for any sports and I was checking the network stations and the cartoons suck.

There was one where flying pigs shot bacon grease out of guns. ABC didn't even have cartoons on. Where's the Looney Toons? Where's The Littles? The Snorks, Smurfs and Rainbow Brite? The kids today get the Suite Life of Zack and Cody and bacon grease.

The lessons I learned from Jen X and Souldier is that makig a big movie with lots of actors and locations is very hard. I didn't think smaller would be any easier but I knew it would be a lot smaller.

And it was.

It was not an easy shoot, they never are. I had a clearer vision of what is possible and only heard my Dp, Darren, tell me one or two things I couldn't do.

That's not quite true. You really can film anything you want, it is the set-up time that makes things so hard.

When my wife and I wrote Beodog, we wanted to write a script that could be shot in one location in one day. Darren kept saying it would be two days so I rolled with that. then at the meeting last week, when he heard we had three set-ups, two upstairs and one downstairs, he started thinking we could get it done in one day.

Huh?

I have really come into my own as a writer in 2007 (not including the above title). It is the culmination of everything I have learned and written about since I started with a short story called Rut in my senior year of high school. Evrything I have ever written still means something to me.

I remember we had to read The Veldt by Ray Bradbury in my freshmen year of high school. The assignment was to write a story using those themes. What I wrote was for the most part forgettable, except for this part I wrote where a couple of kids fell out of the sky when their flying machine broke. One fell and was knocked out. The other landed on his feet but that caused even more problems. I remember I wrote that one of his kneecaps was ejected from his body by the impact of his two large leg bones.

2007 was the last real year of Bush. We are now onto the election. We now have an idea that a new leader is coming, that a leader is coming is the honest truth. Hope has returned. It started in Iowa when the youth said we want change. The old guard made a stand in New Hampshire and we are even Steven once again. The two party system at its finest. With no primary in Arizona, too few electoral votes for any attention, I only get one vote. I want change. I want hope. I want a year of suffering, the last of the Bush regime, to have meant something when we come to 2009. I want 2008 to be that bridge. Listen to me, I am already hoping. I am already changing.

It is an exciting time now. The old year is fading fast and the gleam in the distance is the new year gearing up for its run. There is talk of resolutions and change. Anything is possible, even to four day weekends in a row.

I have my first agent shopping The Disciples now. I have received some nice feedback from a critique and wanted to share that here in a way to fill up space and still talk about me.

This is a retread of somethig that someone wrote about me, I call that progress:

Well, it's on my computer in a red only file and I can't copy and paste it. I guess I could rewrite it but that is an awful lot of work for a little self-glorification.

I want to share an extraordinary story. It is about a man out of time and place. The man doesn't worry about such things when their is a hurting world in need of help. A world in need of love.

Craig Oliver, in the idealistic time of the 60's and 70's, enjoyed life to its fullest. During his own joy, he could not ignore the suffering of others. As a nation turned from idealism to greed in the 80's, Craig was hustling to gather materials for a great project he conceived. There was a need for medicine and education and hope in Southeast Asian countries like Thailand and Cambodia as thousands of displaced refugees were seeking safety from oppression.

It started when the Phillies lost their ten thousandth baseball game. It reminded me that Tool's latest CD was called 10,000 Days.

That CD is really good.

That was two 10,000's so I figured I'd write about that. Then I go to see the new Harry Potter and during the 20 minutes of previews, I see one from the director of Independence Day called 10,000 BC.

And there is your three. I don't think the Phils have 10,000 wins but that is just a hunch.

I have really lost interest in the Harry Potter movies. I did like the first three but in the last two that bad guy Valdemort has been lurking and it turns out those two have to fight to the death but there's seven books. Every time this Dark Lord messes with Harry, Harry beats him.