MonsterHearts 2025 – Day Twelve

Don’t Miss Posts.  This MonsterHearts, I’m also having one regular post a day, if you should prefer that kind of thing.  Just look at the posts before or after this one.

MonsterHearts is a 14 day event (named after a pervy RPG) wherein my writing group votes on a monster each day to include in a story concept.  As we march toward Valentine’s Day, the theme is supernatural romance.  This year, I’ve been trying to just use “edit” mode in MidJourney to iron out irregularities, even trying to make a legible title in the AI program.  While it’s cool you can now hammer the hands and text into shape, as opposed to just photoshopping what you need to fix, there are advantages to doing it the older way.  There’s a lot less control of where and how the text is placed, and what it looks like.  Surprised I’ve kept up the effort this long; looks like I’m gonna go all the way with it.  Although I did run out patience for getting accent marks into my name properly on this one.  I’m just gonna finish it out like this out of compulsion.

MONSTER HEARTS DAY TWELVE:  PARASITE

TITLE:  DAMNED MINNEAPOLIS

CHARACTERS:  Cleavon White: an Early ’90s Funk Musician, Komla Abasom: a Vampire.

PREMISE:  Parasite is the vampire category and I tend to not do straightforward vamp stories.  Early results in seeking a cover for this one yielded nothing but white people, and per Billy Martin’s most recent word on race in gay vampires, I banged on this one until they were black.  Now, to come up with a story that justifies the image, and is at all interesting.  Let’s see…

In the last days of Minneapolis funk, a drummer and keyboardist named Cleavon was part of the never-ending scene rotation, trying to form his own bands or dropping in on somebody else’s thing, and nothing was sticking.  The crossover with hip-hop was promising, but rappers could find success without the effort of a real instrumentalist behind them, and those projects also fell flat.

Mysterious businessman Komla said, “It’s all who you know,” Cleavon said, “I know,” and Komla said, “Get to know me.”  Soon he was able to get studio gigs for cool rappers, and reel in some dollars.  But music success wasn’t the only thing Komla had to teach.

THE HOOK:  This rap villain is here to make a killin’.  Komla liked repping rappers because their dangerous lifestyle added life insurance payouts to his revenue – and because nobody would question why the blood kept flowing.  But more sophisticated music moved what was left of his ancient soul, so he took Cleavon under his bat wing.  How far are you willing to go, funk man?

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Creativity Feels Like…

Do you know what’s going on in your mind, when you’re doing something creative?  Of course not, like, biologically speaking what’s going on in there is so complex that the best experts on the topic have kind of a glimmer about it, and the rest of us not even that.  But what’s it feel like?  That’s information.  Sometimes we can have a pretty good idea of how our minds are operating.  It’s a kind of data, if one that is inherently very subjective, and can be essential.

Marcus asked, what do you think is going on in your mind, when you’re being creative?  To get at that, we need at least a workable placeholder definition for creativity.  Narrow things down a lot, so we don’t have to write a five hundred page tome on the subject.  In his examples, he was not looking at art.  He was talking about problem solving.  One could look at any human task as a place where creativity can be applied.  Let’s say, it’s generating an idea for how to perform a task, that is at least new to you, in that moment.  You might piece it together from things long ago learned and forgotten, or you might just use observation and reason as a springboard to a novel approach.  The novel approach in that example is the creative act.

Going by this definition, creativity must involve something like originality.  It doesn’t have to be “pure” originality, just new to you at the time you’re resolving your task.  A huge reason this discussion is happening is the advent of “generative AI,” which has motivated a lot of humans to draw lines around what, if anything, could only be achieved by human beings.  I don’t have that emotional motive.

I have a different one, which is to defend humans that want to work with AI from abuse, but I’m going to leave that aside here, just to answer the question.  Because it is a question that has some interest when stripped of that particular argument.  I recently said that I am “throwing myself into creativity” as a way of coping with grim realities, but what does that mean?

I’m writing, doing writing exercises, and using AI art to illustrate ideas.  Some of these things are idle as games, some of them are chasing lofty ambitions.  To keep the controversy out of this post, we’ll ignore the AI art and focus on the writing.  And because the AI art has influenced my process for writing MonsterHearts and Spooktobers, I’m going to ignore those too.  Let’s just contemplate the long form prose.

When you’re writing a work of prose, there are many cognitive tasks involved, some disparate and some very intertwined.  How they are performed can vary a lot with the task, so I pretty much have to try and separate and simplify these.  Let’s restrict the scope of my analysis to “Coming up with the Concept,” which a lot of people seem to regard as the “most creative” part of the act.

Coming up with the concept can be that bolt of lightning that hits you out of nowhere, but that’s very unusual.  Most of the time, I’m starting from a desire to write a story, deciding what my goals are, and spitballing how I’m going to achieve them.  Some examples:

A long time ago, I randomly watched a cheap-ass 1970s anime and thought, in a fit of hubris, “I could do that!”  Not having to hand-paint celluloid and use film, animation has gotten a lot more achievable, but no, of course I cannot, as an individual, make a cartoon series.  Not without devoting my life to it, and having a lot more resources.  But in response to this dubious inspiration, I outlined a single season of an anime show, a parody of Star Blazers, Gundam, Macross – that kind of shit.  It was very fun and I haven’t forgotten the idea.  I still poke at it, from time to time.

Cognitively, what was going on there?  See a thing, feel “I could do that,” and then take the first direction with it that popped into my head.  In this case it was parody, which is deceptively easy to write.  Good parody is probably a lot more difficult.  I don’t think Weird Al bats a thousand with it, and he’s the expert.  But parody, like other types of art, is reactive.  I look at what somebody else did, do the same thing, but throw my own flavor on it – in this case, just highlighting whatever I regarded as absurd from those shows.  Plotwise, it was Space Battleship Yamato (1974) but transplanted into American culture in the ’90s – and what I remembered of being a teenager, since all anime characters have to be snot-nosed kids.

So I was consciously crafting a pastiche of previous art I’d consumed, and transforming it by using related experiences and ideas from my own life and culture.

Let’s look at Centennial Hills.  That was conceived when my husband and I first challenged ourselves to do a turbo writing event.  At that time we were aiming for fifty thousand words in three days, which I still have not achieved.  He did make the score, but doesn’t want to hurt his hands like that anymore, and we only turbo when we can line up four days in a row now.

I can no longer remember which of us came up with the idea to both use stereotypical UFO pilots in our stories, but we did.  Mine were grey and his were green.  His greenliens were amusing monsters.  My greyliens were inspired by a very sketchy and legendary youtube short called “E.T. 2,” in which a Communion-type alien comes to earth and gets wasted on alcohol and drugs.

That was classic dudebro humor – take something innocent and make it into the “adult” version, like making cartoons fuck.  I thought, what if I show both sides of that, to express my views about people, the way we really are?  Hence two aliens get split up, one having innocent misadventures with a little girl, and one falling in with crappy scumbags.

Creatively speaking, what was I doing here?  Um…  consciously crafting a pastiche of previous art I’d consumed, and transforming it by using related experiences and ideas from my own life and culture.  Much more elaborately than the anime, but still…  Is this all there is for me?

Let’s take a third idea, one I have not written yet.  In response to the unfortunate passing of David Lynch, and my husband’s aeternal lament that there is no new art for him anymore – that he long ago consumed all the art he was ever going to be interested in and now there’s nothing left – I decided to write “The Best Novel That Ever Existed” for this particular audience of one.  To do this, I’ve been looking at all the things he likes and dislikes about his favorite narrative art ever, seeing if I could derive unifying themes that could be deployed in an original way by yours truly.

But that’s kinda consciously crafting a pastiche of previous art I’d consumed, and transforming it by using related experiences and ideas from my own life and culture, isn’t it?  It’s going to be much more original than the other two, I think, but still… It exists in reaction.

But then, Marcus’s problem-solving creativity existed in reaction to the problem, yes?  Same thing?

I don’t know.  I’d like to bring in one of those “bolt of lightning” stories for comparison, but I easily forget the actual experience of those moments, and could not tell you what I was thinking during any of them.  The only one that comes to mind from recent years is when I wrote the lines, “This rhyme has no composure like a whack-ass thesis, Your boyfriend’s on macaque like a monkey rhesus,” and again, the moment literally happened when I was on the john, leaving no trace of its fundamental path in my memory.

Make of that what you will!  I’m done.

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MonsterHearts 2025 – Day Eleven

Don’t Miss Posts.  This MonsterHearts, I’m also having one regular post a day, if you should prefer that kind of thing.  Just look at the posts before or after this one.

MonsterHearts is a 14 day event (named after a pervy RPG) wherein my writing group votes on a monster each day to include in a story concept.  As we march toward Valentine’s Day, the theme is supernatural romance.  This year, I’ve been trying to just use “edit” mode in MidJourney to iron out irregularities, even trying to make a legible title in the AI program.  While it’s cool you can now hammer the hands and text into shape, as opposed to just photoshopping what you need to fix, there are advantages to doing it the older way.  There’s a lot less control of where and how the text is placed, and what it looks like.  Surprised I’ve kept up the effort this long; looks like I’m gonna go all the way with it.

MONSTER HEARTS DAY ELEVEN:  INCORPOREAL

TITLE:  MAD MALWAR3 GIRLZ ROOOL

CHARACTERS:  Colleen Crash: a Trans Computer Hacker Type, ANи1KA and M0NiK4: Sisters who also Hack, or Virtual Illusions?

PREMISE:  In some unimaginable dystopian version of our world, the most obvious con man and fascist thug in human history has convinced half of america he’s harmless and the other half that he shits gold, thus acquiring enough power to rewrite anything that was worth a shit in the place.  Within this impossible world of banal evil that is just so soulcrushingly tedious nobody would ever want to write a story about it, god it’s so boring, the only life and liveliness must come from hacktivists and gay weirdos.

THE HOOK:  Colleen’s best friends in the CYb4Rsp8s are the sisters ANи1KA and M0NiK4, altho there is some risk of the friendship blowing up because both sisters wanna get with Colleen.  Or are they even real?  Maybe they’re a cheap sex fantasy that escaped from her mind.  Maybe they’re cointelprobots, sent by the NSA to lure her into federal prison.  Or maybe, they’re a new life form, on some Ghost in the Shell type shit, wanting to bone Colleen into a Brave New World.

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Chaos Rules Everything Around Me

C.R.E.A.M. by the Wu-Tang Clan says “Cash Rules Everything Around Me.”  No, my fellas.  It is Chaos that reigns supreme.  I do think you understand that – it does get mentioned in your song, by synonyms.  Anyway, I’m feeling it tonight, feeling my religion, as I ponder the problems of our time and come back knowing less than before I started pondering.

The biggest problems that face humanity may be insoluble.  No resolution but the bitter end – which I don’t expect for some time to come, will not likely live to witness myself, so don’t get too bent.  But it’s a possibility – over a long enough arc an inevitability – so whoever is there to bear witness, I hope they can care for each other with a dignity that has eluded the masses of people for a long time.  Learn the lessons of Hellstar Remina.

But smaller problems than the apocalypse are giving me a case of the ass right now.  Take any one issue, think of a solution, and you can think of a thousand ways it can fail.  The nature of life is that everything angles for every advantage it can achieve until it undermines itself or is outmaneuvered by another angling life form or circumstance that throws the chess pieces on the floor.  Start over, if you can.  The same principle seems to apply to civilization.

One of the big problems that philosophy applied itself to, going back to the ancient world, was to decide what is the best society, and how it can be best achieved.  By the nineteenth century and early Modernism, this took the shape of various theories about the natural progression of history, of which Marxism was the most enduring.  I remember hearing a Rage Against the Machine song where lil’ Zacky said, “It’s the end of history,” and the commie rocka was not talking doomerism, more the idea that capitalism was entering the stage where it is inevitably defeated.  Lovely vision.

I’m pretty sure one or more of those old Modernist theories included the notion that this progression of history is cyclical – that societies come and go in a predictable way.  To that I say, maybe not all that predictable, but yes, invariably societies fall.  Political ideas and orders fall.  The idea that America was ever about freedom, that is rocketing into graveyard of history.  It’s sickening to see all of Orwell’s observations about totalitarianism coming to pass here – especially the inverted language.  Yell freedom while demanding servitude and conformity.  Seriously, fuck the USA so fucking much on that one.  Y’all fascists make me wanna puke.  Utterly beneath contempt.

Not what I was thinking about when I started this post.  Here it is:  when the fascist screws tighten on the internet, how will we communicate with each other?  When the police state algorithmically suppresses all leftist / lgbt+ / non-christian thought online, how do we stay in touch?  Social media is a panopticon.  Right now, the means to communicate “off the grid” are too elaborate for the average person use, in practice.  VPNs are controlled by businesses, which are all focal points of attack for fascists – systems that can fail.  Being based in Uzbekistan doesn’t make your VPN much safer; it just means the efforts to compromise it will be covert and illegal.  The dark web is grimy pedo murder city, no place to be, and involves some kinda weird technical knowledge just to get through the door, right?  Ya probably don’t want to answer that question if you know, heh.

Chain e-mails?  I’m told e-mail has terrible security.  Encrypted e-mails?  How does that shit work?  Could we get everybody on the same page in time to dodge the hammer coming down?  Will we be passing around secret media, thumb drives in brown envelopes?  What will we want to tell each other about, and how can we do so, in a way that minimizes exposure to a state run by murderous thugs?

Everything I can think of has failing after failing, exploit after exploit, and can’t hope to rival the reach of even the worst social media sites.  I’m not looking forward to this becoming a more significant problem than it already is.

One sliver of hope in that:  When corporations are the only law, competition between those corporations gives windows for some small amount of liberty.  For example, let’s say the fuckos who run bluesky decide they want to keep snatching all the business from non-creeps, and successfully resists buy-outs and government pressure.  Eventually they will become corrupted or fail, but in the meantime, it’s somewhere to be that isn’t run by the state’s biggest corporate allies.  The hand of the market giving us a favor, for a minute.  Maybe this keeps happening – we all just keep wandering from place to place, until our years in the desert are at their end.

It’s chaos.  The corporations would like to monopolize everything, fight to become Big Brother, but they’re still ruled by entropy, at the end of the day.  They eat each other, teeter, and fail from their own internal corruption.  We’re just fleas on the dog.

Anyway, for the time when Matt Mullenweg’s meltdown consumes wordpress and thereby Freethought Blogs, I hope you’ll all subscribe to my xerox’d zine, coming soon to the haunted and burned-out remains of a university near you.

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MonsterHearts 2025 – Day Ten

Don’t Miss Posts.  This MonsterHearts, I’m also having one regular post a day, if you should prefer that kind of thing.  Just look at the posts before or after this one.

MonsterHearts is a 14 day event (named after a pervy RPG) wherein my writing group votes on a monster each day to include in a story concept.  As we march toward Valentine’s Day, the theme is supernatural romance.  This year, I’ve been trying to just use “edit” mode in MidJourney to iron out irregularities, even trying to make a legible title in the AI program.  While it’s cool you can now hammer the hands and text into shape, as opposed to just photoshopping what you need to fix, there are advantages to doing it the older way.  There’s a lot less control of where and how the text is placed, and what it looks like.  Surprised I’ve kept up the effort this long; looks like I’m gonna go all the way with it.

MONSTER HEARTS DAY TEN:  DREAMER

TITLE:  M-74S

CHARACTERS:  Sra. Seagrave: a Bureaucrat of the Dream World, Sra. Grijalva: a Dreamer.

PREMISE:  Señora Grijalva is asleep.  She fell in love at first sight, as you do in dreams, with an elegant lady working the office of Dream Bureaucracy.  To have excuses to get back in line, get to her window, to see and talk to her again, she takes it upon herself to perform increasingly arcane bureaucratic tasks – getting licenses for her pet licenses, special ordering sub-certified copies of her passport application application, etc.  Heartless monster Señora Seagrave isn’t making it easy for her.

THE HOOK:  The last and worst form is M-74S, which needed so many stamps and signatures, Sra. Grijalva’s sleep is nearly at an end by the time she has it completed.  The form needs an extended private review by Sra. Seagrave, which is everything she’s been fighting for.

But as she wakes up, the world begins to disintegrate.  It feels like she’s dying, like she can’t make sense of anything.  Sra. Seagrave realizes the affection was mutual too late.  Or does she just seem like she does, because dreams forget their own rules as they draw to a close?

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Life List: White Cockatoo

Which white cockatoo?  Hell if I know.  Apparently there are a number of white cockatoo species kept in captivity.  I suspect the ones I’ve personally seen were sulphur-crested, but white cockatoo / Cacatua alba is possible as well.  They’re fairly large parrots, comparable in size to corvids, and among the more intelligent animals in the world.

Unlike corvids, parrots come equipped with some powerful tools – a beak and strong hands with two opposable thumbs.  These powers combined have them tearing up anti-bird spikes like some antifas going after hostile architecture, as well as opening trashcans – which, again, can help other urban birds do their thing.  Also famous for dancing to Backstreet Boys and screeching at horrific volumes when mildly neglected.

I sometimes watch one on yewchoob, owned by video game musician Hideaki Utsumi.  It’s not his most famous bird, but it shows up.  Very mild mannered and quiet, which suggests to me it is well treated.  The one time I’ve seen a white cockatoo in person that I can distinctly remember, it was doing that shriek – nearly identical to one I’ve heard in a smaller cockatoo species, the cockatiel, but a lot louder.  That was in a tiny pawn shop in downtown Everett, where I was buying a cartridge of the original Tetris for a newly acquired Game Boy.

That was twenty years ago.  I don’t see much of these birds.  But they’re pretty cool.  If any of you have cockatoo stories to tell, have at it in the comments.

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MonsterHearts 2025 – Day Nine

Don’t Miss Posts.  This MonsterHearts, I’m also having one regular post a day, if you should prefer that kind of thing.  Just look at the posts before or after this one.

MonsterHearts is a 14 day event (named after a pervy RPG) wherein my writing group votes on a monster each day to include in a story concept.  As we march toward Valentine’s Day, the theme is supernatural romance.  This year, I’ve been trying to just use “edit” mode in MidJourney to iron out irregularities, even trying to make a legible title in the AI program.  While it’s cool you can now hammer the hands and text into shape, as opposed to just photoshopping what you need to fix, there are advantages to doing it the older way.  There’s a lot less control of where and how the text is placed, and what it looks like.  Surprised I’ve kept up the effort this long.

MONSTER HEARTS DAY NINE:  MUTATED

TITLE:  MY LOVER IS A CYBER SLIME

CHARACTERS:  Ethaniel Sangaré: a Solarpunk Power Engineer, Houssain Horowitz: a Slimy Machine Boy.

PREMISE:  Surprise threequel to Laser Boys and Rose Gold, wherein the cybermetropolis destroyed many times over has come to flourish.  From the wake of the Rose Gold System escaping the control of Brycine Cybernetics and destroying the city, it also helped build the city anew.  Rose people formed a utopia, where photosynthesis provides all the nourishment and power needed by the survivors.  They found themselves with less aggression, fewer health problems, and a mild demeanor that lent itself to founding a new world based on peace and brotherhood.

THE HOOK:  There is always a seed of destruction within life.  Ethaniel Sangaré was a good rose boy working in power engineering, along with his lover Houssain Horowitz.  But Houssain fell into the oily black machinery that lurks beneath the sunny pink surface of the facility, and the machinery – originally designed by Brycine to infiltrate and augment human bodies – mutated him into an oily shape-shifting machine boy.

He has the power to separate into smaller copies of himself and re-merge into one, and uses this to make weird love to Ethaniel.  All’s well that ends well.  Oh, and he destroyed the city again, with slime or something.

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We Weren’t Abandoning You

There’s a notion, fueled by some careless rhetoric from blue state types, that we don’t care about helping protect the oppressed in red states.  As I reflect on that in this moment, we really weren’t.  Absolutely not.  The very fact we were trying to make sure the federal government was blue on top was specifically an effort to protect your rights.  It helps us as well, but it helped you a lot more – because that federal power was necessary to impose your rights on hateful state governments that argued prejudice is a state’s right.

State’s rights is the cry of those who do not have as much political power as they’d prefer, for their faction.  I find myself singing it from the rafters now, and that is, low key, an abandonment of you now.  Sorry about that.  I do hope that whatever rights we manage to protect in blue states, we can use those to help red state refugees when they need it.  I know Canada doesn’t want you.  They are absolute shits about USians trying to move north.  Not sure if Mexico would take US refugees, but I can think of some big reasons why they wouldn’t.

Point is, we weren’t abandoning you, back in the halcyon days of anytime before now.  But it might look more like we are now, as we scramble to secure our states’ rights to protect human rights from the fascist death machine.  I hope you won’t look poorly upon us for that, and I hope it benefits you as well, in some way, some day.

I’m too tired to find a better place to end this post.  May these motherfuckers devour themselves and vanish from the Earth in a puff of smoke.  May we all live to see a better tomorrow.

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MonsterHearts 2025 – Day Eight

Don’t Miss Posts.  This MonsterHearts, I’m also having one regular post a day, if you should prefer that kind of thing.  Just look at the posts before or after this one.

MonsterHearts is a 14 day event (named after a pervy RPG) wherein my writing group votes on a monster each day to include in a story concept.  As we march toward Valentine’s Day, the theme is supernatural romance.  This year, I’ve been trying to just use “edit” mode in MidJourney to iron out irregularities, even trying to make a legible title in the AI program.  While it’s cool you can now hammer the hands and text into shape, as opposed to just photoshopping what you need to fix, there are advantages to doing it the older way.  There’s a lot less control of where and how the text is placed, and what it looks like.  Surprised I’ve kept up the effort this long.

MONSTER HEARTS DAY EIGHT:  MINUSCULE

TITLE:  THE PERFECT ROSE

CHARACTERS:  Lidiya Volitsyev: a Little Old Gardening Lady, The Rose: a Horrible Human-Plant Hybrid.

PREMISE:  Surprise sequel to The Heterose are at It Again, wherein the spawn of Ricky Washington’s transgression against the natural order have gotten out into the wild.  But those seeds don’t turn into rose people unless grown just right, and there is a lot of variability to them.  Some are just a rose that looks kinda like an embryo in the wrong light, some are a disembodied hand surrounded by petals.  But the best gardener is rewarded with The Perfect Rose – that looks like a little lady.

THE HOOK:  Lidiya cares for the rose through the course of its life, and when it starts to go rosewild like its mother had with Ricky, there’s no hetero option on the scene.  This Rose learns to love the one she’s with, in age-appropriate ways during the course of her limited life cycle.  Good girl.

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Dreamposting: Ejection Seat

Ejection seats are things you only ever see in older media, like cartoons from my youth, or the even older war movie genre that influenced them.  They showed up in my dream last night, which -unusually- had a punchline.  Not much of a punchline, but we’ll get there.  It began as a dream about embarrassment and titties and the usual business, but evolved into a movie of the nebulous post-apocalyptic scifi dystopia common to cheap scifi in the ’90s.  Let’s say the stars were Gary Daniels, Billy Blanks, and Shannon Tweed.

Billy and Gary are new in town, part of a quasi-military organization that took over with no resistance because there was no local government.  Shannon’s people welcomed their new overlords, and she was showing Billy around town.  She kept getting pestered because she owed her boss a debt that could never actually be paid off, company store style, but muscle boy was a good distraction in the meantime.

The invaders set up bombs all over town for reasons, and had to use them with little warning to destroy the place.  There was just barely enough time for people to evacuate, and they did.  But Billy and Gary got held up past that last second, and needed to use these experimental ejection seats.  Something manufactured by their employer, but never tested.

Billy looked Gary in the eye and said something like, “it’s been an honor working with you sarge,” and Gary is all, “at ease soldier,” you know, tender affection.  Then they looked at the sky and pulled the lever.  It shot them up and away from the city.  Did the parachute open?  Did it get enough altitude to escape the explosion, and to catch enough wind to slow their descent?

Cut to a distant shot.  The ejection seat has disappeared from sight, and two fifty dollar bills are floating on the wind, away from their presumed crash and death.  Shannon gets the money, thinks, I’m homeless now, but this’ll help with my debt.  Her boss surveys the destruction of her city and sez, “you realize you owe me for this.”

Wocka wocka wocka, roll credits.

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