Brutally Honest Dating Profile

***BRUTALLY HONEST DATING PROFILE***

There used to be a time where I would frown and pout at the idea of not having a girlfriend, especially one of celebrity status. Ridiculous, right? I think so too. At this point in my life, I couldn’t care less about the dating scene. I care even less than that about online dating. I’ve tried it several times with no success and I’m ready to say, “Fuck it, I’m done”. I have so little compassion for online dating that if I ever decide to make a profile for a place like OK Cupid, Plenty of Fish, E-Harmony, or any of those other sites, I’m going to take the Buzz Feed route and be brutally honest about all aspects of my life. For the sake of real life, I’m going to use my birth name instead of my penname. So without further ado, let’s get on with the Brutally Honest Dating Profile. It goes like this:

　

“Who is Garrison Haines-Temons? Most people don’t know, because they only see the surface of who I am: an out of shape and socially awkward man child with the worst case of allergies and the wrong answers to every socially acceptable question. If you’ve made it this far into my profile, I applaud you for not running away like a scream queen from a 1980’s horror movie.

The most common question I get asked by strangers is what I do for a living. If I wanted to be a funny guy, I could tell you that I work with impoverished children in the Democratic Republic of None of Your Damn Business. But that wouldn’t be the honest answer. The honest answer is, I’m an amateur writer who gets social security benefits for not only being schizophrenic and autistic, but also for having retired parents. I don’t go around telling people that because the person I’m talking to could either be a tea-bagging republican who judges poor people or a potential girlfriend who only dates men for their money and cars. If you’re going to judge me, do it on my character and not on my economic status. I’m sure I’m not the only one who thinks relationships are built on love and honesty instead of shallowness and greed.

What exactly is my character? The good news is, behind all of this social weirdness, I have a creative side to me. As I’ve said earlier, I’m an unpaid writer, but I also like to draw pictures of brutally violent warriors and take photographs of my toy collection and my animals. If there’s a creative project, I can get it done in style. For a while, I played the piano. I don’t do it much anymore, but the musical bug will come back to bite me soon enough.

What about my interests? Aside from expanding my creative outlets, I also love to watch professional wrestling, read books, and listen to heavy metal music. I used to play a lot of videogames, but ever since getting the shit kicked out of me multiple times by a lava dragon in Final Fantasy III, I’ve become too frustrated to continue that hobby. But I have to admit, videogames can be great creative fuel for when I’m writing a short story or heavy metal song.

You’ve made it this far into my dating profile without cowering away. You deserve a parade with confetti and marching bands. Now we’re going to get serious for a minute. I don’t have many pet peeves, but one of my biggest ones is people lacking respect for my introversion. You know the kind. They make small talk until the end of time, they always want your attention 24/7, they give you no breathing space or privacy of any kind, and they get pissed off if you call them out on their aggressive bullshit. If you’re one of these people who loves to smother your boyfriend with multiple texts, phone calls, and visits, then I don’t need you in my life. Every worst enemy of mine was someone who invaded my privacy and gave me no alone time to process my thoughts. Introversion may sound like an excuse to a lot of people, but it’s real to me and if you don’t honor it, you can’t be my girlfriend.

There you have it: Garrison Haines-Temons, bullshit free, nonconforming, live, and in color. Truth be told, I know not everyone accepts this kind of brutal honesty. In fact, I expect that most girls will see my profile and swipe to the right. That’s okay, though. I’m really joining this dating site out of protest and I really don’t need a relationship based on shallowness. Either you love all of me or you hate all of me. I don’t change for anybody. I don’t need to be told how to dress. I don’t need to be told what career to embark on. I don’t need to be told how to live life. I know what my life is about and I’m happy with my situation even though others aren’t. So what do you say? Will you give me a chance or will you keep pursuing your dreams of getting in the sack with Christian Grey?”

　

Now I’m actually curious as to how many hits this profile will get. I shouldn’t get too hung up on it, though. After all, I’m going into this thing with the ultimate “I don’t give a fuck” attitude. We’ve got ears, say cheers!

　

***DARK FANTASY WARRIORS***

With the additions of Autumn the parrot and Shadow the dog, it’s time to add yet another former animal of mine to the series. Remember Ottie-Doo from the short story of the same name? Like Autumn and Shadow, I don’t have any photographs of the elderly kitty. A drawing will have to do instead. And now that I think about it, Ottie had a lot in common with my current elderly kitty Smokey. Maybe I could use a picture of Smokey for a reference model. Hmm….

　

***COMEDIC QUOTE OF THE DAY***

“New rule: couples who make out in public have to bring a bucket for me to throw up in. I didn’t come all the way to Applebee’s to be sickened by your dry humping. I came all the way to Applebee’s to be sickened by the food.”

-Bill Maher-

Darkness and Crudeness

There’s a fine line between being dark and being crude. As someone who’s tried to experiment with the dark style all my life, I’ve crossed the blurred line several times in my career. No matter how many times I try to avoid it, somehow I keep crossing that border whenever I’m pumping out first drafts. And then I end up feeling horrible about it since there’s a slim chance I may have unintentionally offended someone. Offending people is good, but not when it’s unintentional. Here’s an example. There’s a short story in Foe vs. Blade called Choice, where an MMA fighter named Rachel Gustafson has an abortion so that she can continue to compete. When she finally has her next fight, her pro-life opponent Violet Smith compares her to Phil Garrido since abortion is allegedly the same as child abuse. Before publishing Foe vs. Blade, I removed that crude and unnecessary comment and replaced it with both fighters instead electing to go back to their corners. The DeviantART and Facebook versions of Choice still have the Phil Garrido remark, but that’s only because nobody pays attention to first drafts anyways. You can apply the darkness-crudeness continuum to your own work as well. For example, let’s say you’re going to make a joke about Cleopatra’s menstrual cycle. A calm and sensible person who still wished to be dark and offensive would phrase the joke like this: “Q: Why did Cleopatra use tampons? A: Because she was on her pyramid.” A crude and tacky person would phrase the seemingly innocent joke like this: “Q: Why did Cleopatra shove tube steaks up her fucking twat? A: Because the bitch was on her pyramid, yo!” The lesson learned here is that swearing is not always a good way to enhance your material. If all you have is swearing and no substance, you’re not going to survive the creative world. That’s why whenever I’m walking the streets of downtown Bremerton and I hear a random guy rapping about a woman “sucking a dick in less than a minute”, I cringe and try to get the hell out of there as quickly as possible. The only purpose swearing and other forms of darkness serve is to make the story realistic. There are people out there who use crude language, but when writing, try to capture it in such a way that it doesn’t completely make your audience’s stomachs turn. A good example of darkness used to perfection would be Tales From the Hood. Yes, the characters love to cuss, but whenever Bulldog yells, “Where’s the shit?!” your stomach is sore not from nausea, but from laughing. Leave the nausea up to Crazy K as he gets spun around several times on a torture table while watching black people getting killed, which is apparently what he’s been doing all of his life according to Dr. Cushing. Peace! I’m out!

　

***COMEDIC QUOTE OF THE DAY***

“One of the side effects for these diet pills is anal seepage. If you take this pill, I don’t care how much weight you’ve lost, you ain’t looking good in them jeans.”

-Jeff Foxworthy-

Synopses

Before I get started with the body of this blog, I just want to take a moment and read to you the synopsis for “Cody’s Army”, which I am currently 72 pages into. It goes like this…

“The sequence was familiar: Another jet hijacked to Lebannon. Once again America held hostage by fanatic rebels. And just to prove they meant business the terrorists dragged two innocent passengers out on the tarmac and shot them in cold blood. That’s when John Cody and his mone got on the scene. Their mission was to free the hostages. But Cody wasn’t going to stop there. This time he had to make sure it didn’t happen again. And there was only one way to do that. The hard way. The bloody way.”

If that doesn’t get you excited about reading a high-octane military thriller, I don’t know what does. Just from that synopsis alone, you can expect John Cody to be a literary version of Rambo. The reason I reposted that text verbatim is to make a point: it may be wrong to judge a book by its cover, but it’s nowhere near immoral to judge one by its synopsis. If you’re a potential author and you want people to be at least vaguely interested in your book, you have to hit them with something hard long before they delve into the first page. It’s called hooking them in and it’s not a new thing. Movies that don’t hook in their audience by the first five minutes are going to lose a lot of patrons. And when you write your synopsis, don’t worry about overselling your product. It’s much more practical to oversell something than to undersell it. If you’re advertising a dog turd to someone dying of hunger, you’re going to want to oversell it as tasting like a Butterfinger candy bar. Otherwise, there won’t be a sale. If you want an example that’s closer to my heart, let’s use a WWE example, particularly one starring Dolph Ziggler. When he gets thrown around the ring, he doesn’t just flop over like most guys do. He spins around and flies like a birdie just to make that hip toss look painful. Dolph Ziggler can wrestle a broomstick and make the broomstick look good. If you’re an author looking to get people excited about your book, be a literary Dolph Ziggler and oversell your product. Talk about the bloody and painful moments early on. People love blood and pain. Now if only I could take my own advice when it came to selling “Red Blood, White Knuckles, Blue Heart”. If you’re wondering why I keep mentioning my self-published book in my posts, it’s because I haven’t sold a single copy as of today. It’s pathetic, I know. One day, I’ll shut up about it forever. I promise.

　

***WRESTLING QUOTE OF THE DAY***

“CM Punk could burn an orphanage to the ground and he would still be popular with the fans.”

-Me-

Marketing Wizard

I’m an author first and a marketing wizard second. Actually, you couldn’t really call it second. Maybe third. Or fourth. Or one-hundredth. The last time I learned anything about marketing was when I was 14 years old and studying it in my freshman year of high school, where my brain was melting into a puddle of liquid shit on account of PTSD from being bullied. So naturally, I retained nothing from that class, particularly as it relates to advertising a product. The product I want to advertise is my self-published book “Red Blood, White Knuckles, Blue Heart”, which was written under the name Garrison Kelly. The most I’ve done to advertise this book is approve distribution on Lulu.com (my publisher) and start an ad campaign on Goodreads.com. That’s about it. Now I have to ask, where do I go from here? This is one of the dangers of being a self-published author: aside from posting advertisements on various websites, you’re not going to get much out of it unless you’re a marketing genius. Think about Christopher Paolini for a moment, the author of the Eragon series. He self-published his books and became successful doing it, mainly because his story fell into the right hands, Carl Hiaasen’s step-son. Say what you will about the clichés he uses, he is successful nonetheless. In fact, there are a lot of authors out there who use traditional publishing and become successful despite being piss-poor writers. I’m not saying Christopher Paolini is piss-poor, because I’ve never read his stuff before, I’ve just seen the movie. But you get my drift, right? Success is all about being in the right place at the right time. Or if you’re a glass-half-empty kind of guy, not pissing off the wrong people. I’ve asked various people on the web about what I need to do to market my book and I haven’t gotten a definitive answer as of yet. So now, I’m using this forum, my book blog, to ask you guys if you know anything about advertising and if you do, how far should I go? The easiest answer you could give would be for me to close my Lulu.com account and go traditional. It’s easy for you to say, but harder for me to do. To be a traditionally published author, you have to have the best agent money can buy and you have to send your manuscript to tons of companies. And most of the time, they’ll say “no”. Not because you suck, but because they’re just plain not interested. Lots of great authors go unheard and it’s all because editors at publishing companies simply don’t give a damn about them. So instead of spending tons of money sending out my manuscript to people and getting told “no”, I’m going to say “yes” to myself and use Lulu.com. If no one else will reward me for my hard work, I’m going to reward myself. The question now is, how do I reap these rewards and turn this book into a marketing machine? We’ve got ears, say cheers!

　

***THE NEXT BOOK***

If for some reason I don’t publish another post on my blog reviewing a good book, it’s because I’ve run out of books to talk about and need to read new material. The book I’m reading now is “Skin Tight” by Carl Hiaasen. The problem? I’m only 20 pages into it. Who knows? I just may burst through it all one day when the skies are cloudy and new age music is serenading me through the TV speakers. Look forward to a post about “Skin Tight”. It won’t be too much longer, I hope.

　

***LYRICS OF THE DAY***

“Back at school it never made much sense. Now I pay but I can’t pay attention. Teaching me the hardest lessons of my life. Too dumb to die I guess, but that’s the way it goes. Sometimes I must regress these. Sex, drugs, and violence. English, math, and science. Safety in numbers. Give me, give me danger. Well, I don’t want to be an imbecile, but Jesus made me that way.”

-Green Day singing “Sex, Drugs, and Violence”-

"Red Blood, White Knuckles, Blue Heart" by Garrison Kelly

All of this reading of quick novels had to lead somewhere. For me, it lead to me publishing my first book on Lulu.com under the penname Garrison Kelly. It’s an anthology of my best work called “Red Blood, White Knuckles, Blue Heart”. You’re probably wondering why I chose to publish under a penname instead of Garrison Haines-Temons. It has nothing to do with my need for privacy, though that would be nice. To be honest, the name Kelly is harder to butcher than Haines-Temons. Throughout school, I’ve been called “Hynes-Tea-Moans”, “Hainees-Tee-muns”, and a bunch of other weird names that are obviously a product of linguistic ignorance. I used to embrace the idea of having a page in my books that told people how to pronounce my name, but I opted not to since Kelly is a more attractive last name anyways. But if you still want to know how my last name is pronounced, here it is. Haines rhymes with “chains” and Temons rhymes with “Simmons”. I know it seems weird that the E in Temons would be pronounced like a short I, but trust me, that’s how it’s said. Temons is a very old Gaelic name. It looks strange, but it’s pronounced only one way. Same thing goes for the name McLeod. It’s not pronounced “Mick-Lee-Uhd”. It’s pronounced “Mick-Loud”. I chose the name Garrison Kelly because it’s easy to say and we don’t have to have a debate over how it’s said. You’re probably wondering why I chose to talk about my last name instead of the actual anthology I’ve published. The answer is simple: if you want to know what to expect from my book, go to the link provided and read either the description or the back cover. I’ll warn you right now that none of these stories, letters, and poems are intended for the squeamish. I don’t do TV-G stuff except for on very rare occasions. This is not one of those occasions. There’s a reason why there’s a TV-MA logo on the American flag book cover. And yes, that is my older brother with the knife in his mouth. I took that photo of James back in 2006 and thought he would make a great Waldo Spiegel, one of the characters in the book. You’re probably wanting the link right about now. Okay, here it is. Happy reading!

　
http://www.lulu.com/shop/garrison-kelly/red-blood-white-knuckles-blue-heart/paperback/product-20672921.html

Introduction

My name is Garrison Haines-Temons. I’m a 2009 graduate of Western Washington University with a Bachelor’s in English. Having said that, I didn’t actually become an avid bookworm until just before my final quarter of school. Up until that point, I preferred movies over books. My reasoning for this was that books took too long to read and I wasn’t known for my patience. Ever since I picked up “The Cleaner” by Brett Battles in June 2009, I was still impatient, but the only thing that changed was that I discovered that books dictate their own pace. The books I read in college had very slow paces due to their heavy descriptions and uninteresting subject matter. Therefore, I made it a rule to only read books that dictate a moderate to quick pace. If I have to spend five minutes on one single page, that’s a sign that I’m not going to enjoy what I read. If the author takes multiple pages to describe one single action, that’s another sign of a boring book. I’m not a fan of Stephen King’s work, I rest my case. Carl Hiaasen and Bentley Little? Those are a pair of authors I can lend my support to. This entire blog will consist of book recommendations to you, my wonderful audience, based on their pacing and genre. You won’t see too many multi-layered works here, because they tend to be slow reads that drag on until eternity. Genre literature is more my style. One last thing before I end this introductory post: impatient reading is a style, not a flaw. I heard someone say that and I couldn’t agree more. I’d like to thank the people who spread that philosophy as well as the guy who started that quote. Now then, let’s get started!
　

***COMEDIC QUOTE OF THE DAY***

“Drugs have done good things for us, I really believe that. And if you don’t believe drugs have done good things for us, do me a favor: go home tonight, take all your albums, all your CD’s, all your tapes, and burn them. ‘Cause you know what, the musicians who made all that great music that’s enhanced your lives throughout the years? Rrrrrrrrrrrreally fucking high on drugs!”

-Bill Hicks-