Review of Midnight In The Garden of Good and Evil

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt
My rating: 4 of 5 riots

Though I took a few extended breaks while reading it, I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It accurately paints a portrait of a town as insular and isolated as Savannah, and while much criticism has been thrown its way regarding the "grotesque" characters, I did not find them objectionable or out of the realm of possibility. I usually regard first-person narrative as indicative of writers that have not found a voice of their own, however Berendt pulls off this perspective with aplomb; it is the very model of how first-person narratives should be constructed. The narrator is relegated almost solely to the role of observer. He is in a unique position among his subjects, that of Savannah outsider but defense counsel insider, and this generates much-needed tension in what would otherwise be a flat plot. Berendt expertly draws us along the events like the drawl from the loveliest of Savannah's Southern Belles. If you like the genre of true crime, then you will assuredly be as entertained as I was.

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Free Foo Foo

To celebrate 11 years of American Proto-Fascism, I'm giving away my ebook Foo Foo for free over the next 24 hours.

Use coupon code MT92H for a 100% discount off of Foo Foo!

If you pay full price, then the terrorists win.

Microfiction: Chang Ming

...He's alive...

The crowd pulsed through the narrow cacophonous alleys of the county carnival like blood in a vein, pumping in a furious circle, desperate to live in the chilly night. Thin, steel knives of clouds stabbed into the harvest moon as it hung oppressive, bloody, lifeless.

Shadows licked from between the carnie booths like fingers beckoning the locals, closer, closer, play the games and win the prize, guess your weight, win a prize, it's easy to win a prize. Sirens go off and the customers, like so many sheep, gawk in that direction. Their anxiousness is quickly overcome by boredom when they realize it's just a strong-man hammer game. The staccato click-rumble of dispensing skeet-ball machines compete with the rolling thunder of the balls as the players roll them back again, forming an organic white-noise rhythm of the unconscious.

...He's real...

Guns popped at the shooting gallery, and a jaunty, raucous tune filled that corner of the midway as someone hit the target over the piano, and the crude animatronic player, dressed in his red pin-stripe shirt, went through his jerky motions all over again.

A miasma of piquant odors lurked amongst the people like the masque of the red cholesterol death, a mélange of cotton candy, greasy hamburgers, fried Twinkies, hot dogs and cow patties straight from the livestock show.

...He's Chang Ming...

A motorcycle rumbled in dizzying donuts through its spherical cage, and the rider was hunched over the handlebars, wearing a grin that bespoke of the sheer madness that filled his heart. He defied gravity, but he defied the carnies, too, for he alone among them did not seem steeped in blasé boredom.

The yellow and red folk-art busking for Chang Ming had been carefully painted by an artist who had obviously never been to neither Paris nor China. Lines of elephants flanked Chang Ming, and the beast had been adorned in the armor of an ancient Chinese emperor, and it breathed fire onto terrified onlookers.

...The Elephant-Skinned Dog...

The fire-breathing elephant-skinned dog's real name was Patches. He suffered from the worst cases of halitosis and psoriasis that any canine should ever have to endure. He had come to the carnies six months ago, begging for scraps. They had teased the thing, both horrible to regard and smell, before recognizing one of their own and by the second night, Patches had a new home with the carnival. They carnies named him Patches because he still had a few swatches of hair. Last month he'd lost the rest of his hair and they put him on display.

"That dog's right ugly," one of the carnies had said.

Now his nights were a steel cage, with barely enough room in which to turn. People passed him in his dungeon, disgusted and jeering as they went, and to each he would give the same silent, desperate plea: take me home, take me home, take me home. Will you take me home?

The carnie on the mic echoed his own mantra, drawing customers, over and over and over to lure the suckers out of their curiosity dollar.

...He's alive...

...He's real...

...He's Chang Ming...

...The Elephant-Skinned Dog...

Copyright (c) 2012 Patrick Riot

Ghost of Cabin 664

I just published The Ghost of Cabin 664 at Smashwords. It's a (FREE) short story, inspired by Chinese ghost tales.

Chinese ghost tales are different than in the West. Usually, the ghost is traveling rather than haunting a specific place. More often than not, the ghost is seeking revenge for some injustice done to them in life, and only through obtaining that revenge can the spirit be put to rest. I used these themes within Ghost, setting the tale on a cruise ship with a ghost that is looking to correct an injustice.

Publishing this go-round was a lot easier than when I published Foo Foo, mostly because I had a template document already set up and waiting. Foo Foo took at least 8 hours to prepare for publication, and this round only took about 4 hours. I had one extraneous tab in the file and Smashwords spit it back out at me, but that was corrected easily enough and off it went into the Premium Catalog queue. We'll see how that goes, but I don't anticipate any problems.

Ghost has already garnered one four-star review, wholly unsolicited. It's an awesome review:

 There are some interesting things going on in this author's mind. All you have to do is read his profile and the author's notes to see that. It's great that some of those interesting things are making it onto the page. This story was enjoyable and well written.

I giggled incessantly. Interesting things, indeed! If you people only knew!

Life has been crazy. I broke up with my girlfriend for being a lying bint. Frailty, thy name is woman. Oh well, her loss. I'm better for it. I feel better about myself than I have in a long time; I feel liberated. I'd rather be single than be lied to, yaknowhatImean?

Besides, I've still got my right hand, and it doesn't fucking complain if we skip the foreplay.

My mom has breast cancer and is currently undergoing chemotherapy. She had a double mastectomy in April. This has put a damper on my creativity, but it has improved our relationship a lot. We're able to talk without snapping at each other, which is a plus. It's a shame that it took forty years and some fucked-up cellular divisions to make it happen, but I'm glad for it nonetheless. I've been cooking a lot of dinners for my parents and enjoying the time I've been spending with them.

My muse has been off crack-whoring in strange ports of call, but I think I've wrangled her ass back, and I'm hoping to produce some more words on paper very soon.

Cover, Me Matey

I've been working on a cover for a pirate-setting erotica book called Beneath the Jolly Roger by Andrea Trask and Blake Sinclair. It's been pretty neat working with the authors via Google Plus. G+ actually makes for a really nice collaboration environment, and we were able to settle on a basic design quicker than if we were bouncing emails around.

Foo Foo, Smashwords Adventure Part II

A few months ago I published Foo Foo on Smashwords. It took a month of waiting, but it ended up on the Smashwords "Premium Catalog". While this did not generate any extra sales, the extra potential purchase avenues are ones you want to be in.

Since, I have updated Foo Foo three times, correcting errors, and niggling the details as Tolkien would say. The updating process, provided your document conforms to the Smashwords publishing guide, is absolutely painless. While I haven't sold enough books to warrant receipt of a check from Smashwords (yet!), their online store is pretty awesome. It has a coupon manager you can use to provide discounts, which is really useful for promoting your work.


Smashwords also provides ISBN numbers for your books. That service alone is really awesome, and it doesn't cost you a dime.

Overall, as an author, I've been really impressed with Smashwords.

5 Riots

FreeMind - Software for the Writer

I've been working on an idea for a low-fantasy epic for several years now, but as of yet I've had zero success at actually spinning the idea into a story worthy of telling. I know it has to do with prostitutes, rat demons and redemption, but that's the big picture. The little picture has plagued me. The sheer volume of information that I've been collecting over these past four years have morphed in scope to become more epic than any yarn I could weave. I've had this problem with stories in the past, stories which have been tossed by the wayside because I couldn't figure out how to tell them effectively. It's like knowing that you want to drive from New York to LA, but you have no idea what roads you want to take, and therefore it's safe to say you'll be stuck in the Big Apple for the rest of your life.

Recently, I dug up my epic in an effort to revive my work on it. I beat my head on it for several days before realizing that what I needed was a mind map that would diagram all of my ideas in one centralized location.

For those who live under rocks, a Mind Map is a graphical representation of various ideas centered around a main idea. The ultimate objective for using a mind map is to hack a statue of David out of a block of intellectual marble.

I've used a variety of tools to create mind maps. Mind maps can get sloppy very quickly, and thus I've found pen and paper (and their white board equivalents) too limiting. I'm constantly erasing as I'm refining the ideas, or crossing out huge blocks of text. Note cards are satisfactory, but they do not suit the purpose of the early stages of idea construction, and the cards eventually hit a ceiling of unwieldiness. Software, therefore seems the best solution. Relatively infinite space, no unwieldy cards, easy editing.

I looked around at several software solutions, and the best I found, by far, is FreeMind. Within seconds of installing it, I had created the basic outline of my epic. By the end of the second night, I had compiled almost all of my notes into the map, and had become rather adept at using the software. I'd even taken the time to generate a nice story structure mind map, containing the 3-act, 5-act, and Monomythic story models and another map regarding my notes on mythology. All three maps are enormous, now, with text, images, links, etc.

The software is very easy to use. Creating a new sibling node in the map is as easy as hitting Enter, and inserting a child is as easy as hitting Insert. The arrow keys move you about in the map. Space bar collapses and expands nodes, allowing you to hide portions of the map that you don't want to see. You can use clouds to help organize ideas into visual clusters. You can hotlink nodes, or have them expand to sub-maps, draw arrows between nodes... It has all sorts of wonderful bells and whistles. For the writer organizing his ideas, the software is invaluable.

The very best thing about FreeMind, however, is that it is free.

It's not perfect, however. In my own mind maps, I will sometimes draw relationship arrows and note the relationship on the arrow itself. I can't find this capability in FreeMind if it exists, but thus far it hasn't hindered me overmuch. There's also some weird node-jumping by the cursor when you swap to a different program and back again, causing you to have to arrow around a bit to get back to the node you were working on.

Overall, I'd highly suggest FreeMind to, well, everyone. It's really helping me find that statue of David that I've been looking for, and I think it can help you, too.

 Five Riots, indeed.