Here's a true one-of-a-kind item: a hand-written piece of perversion by yours truly!

Auction description:

In 1989, Ian McDowell (MORDRED'S CURSE, MERLIN'S GIFT, "Geraldine" in Poppy Z. Brite's LOVE IN VEIN) wrote CRAZY CREATIVE WRITING: STORY STARTERS AND WORD BANKS, a reproducable workbook for teachers of grades 1-4, which was published in 1995 by Carson-Dellosa, an educational pubilshing company based in Greensboro, NC. The book consisted of 30 "Story Starters" -- that is, the first paragraphs of stories, such as "Donna was in her room, playing a game on her computer. Suddenly, a big fat toad hopped out from under the bed and jumped on the monitor. "Give me a kiss, Cute Stuff," it said. "I'm a prince." The reader was then instructed to WRITE WHAT HAPPENED NEXT on the ruled lines following the first paragraph, and use as many words as possible from the provided "Word Bank" while doing so. Each Story Starter was accompanied by an illustration and 12-16 blank lines on which to write, as well as the aforementioned Word Bank.

I'm Ian and will stop talking about myself in the third person now. In the later 90s, I started pestering various professional writer friends to complete a page in one of my contributor's copies of this book. Quite a few complied. NEIL GAIMAN took the story of the Frog Prince described above. POPPY Z. BRITE took the story of Abe, the boy who'd always wanted to join the army, in a VERY perverse direction. Caitlin R. Kiernan wrote a lovely mini-story about Hannah, who woke up one day to find she'd turned into a horrible monster. Kelly Link wrote about Julia and her rapidly expanding cat, turning it into a mini-epic. Other contributors included Mehitobel Wilson, Phillip Nutman, Rain Graves, and Rachel Manija Brown.

The stories are short, but they're original pieces of fiction which will never be published anywhere (I'm pretty sure they can't be, as the begining of each story, the part I wrote, was Work-for-Hire and presumably still owned by Carson-Dellosa, who would not be pleased with the decidedly adult direction some of these authors took the material). Neil Gaiman's, for instance, is 150 words long, and like most of the other contributions, imaginative and laugh-out-loud funny. Each contribution is in the author's own hand writing. You can't have a more limited edition, or a more unique collectable (and yes, I know "more unique" is a barbarism) than this.

Here's a link to the item, which unfortunately isn't mine because it should sell for a mint! Ian's a pal, though, and this really is a nifty thing, so I thought I'd mention it.

In case anyone thought otherwise, yesterday's entry was just a bit of silliness; I do not actually judge my characters by the Mary Sue Litmus Test. As greygirlbeast pointed out in a couple of recent entries, the Mary Sue concept is stupid and essentially meaningless outside the context of fanfic. A reader commented on prime_liquor, "I love Lost Souls, but each and every character leans heavily on the Mary Sue level!" Well, maybe not each and every one -- the fun of being, say, Wallace or Ann escapes me -- but every writer puts varying amounts of himself into every character, especially the characters he likes best, and in youthful works like Lost Souls I think it just shows more.

I will say that my feelings about fanfic have changed drastically over the past couple of years. This may have something to do with not writing and publishing, or possibly just with gaining some kind of perspective on life in general. I still don't want to read fanfic or slash, and I still think anyone who would try to make unauthorized money from another writer's creations is a morally and creatively bankrupt scumsucker (hello, Potato Falls or whatever that stupid "controversial" fanfic novel is called), but it is now hard for me to recall why I once saw it as this huge invasion if someone liked my characters well enough to want to make up more stories about them and publish said stories on a free website where maybe 15 people would read them. The older I get, the more I realize that I have not always chosen my crusades carefully enough.

I still feel a certain aversion to the Internet (nothing in particular caused this; it just happens periodically), but I really do want to get back to reading my LJ friends list soon, as I miss y'all and am apt to wonder at odd moments, just to give a couple of examples, "What's txtriffidranch growing these days?" or "What Cthulhoid horror has greygirlbeast photographed on the beach lately?" My dad gave me a nice, new, comfy, not-yet-clawed-to-death desk chair, so I really have no excuse not to just sit here and catch up once in a while. Well, except for this damn catch in my back that still won't let go, but I'm trying to move around some and work it out.

Oh, and I think I hate growing tomatoes. More on that later.

faustfatale, a.k.a. my good friend and sometime collaborator Christa Faust, just sold her novel Money Shot to Hard Case Crime. Not only is Hard Case probably the coolest crime fiction line going; not only did they publish Stephen King's The Colorado Kid (which I loved, so suck my dick, ye "nothing happened" naysayers); not only do they have nifty old-school pulp covers ... aside from all that, Christa will be the first woman author they've published. They couldn't have made a better choice had they scoured the earth from pole to pole hunting for tough chick wordsmiths.

Speaking of books, I've been wanting to do a post about my recent reads including greygirlbeast's excellent forthcoming novel Daughter of Hounds and a business book about Emeril that was actually very interesting, but this will have to do for now.