Gary-Stu

I spent a hundred years in the navy

The sexy siren is carrying my baby

I spent five decades in the marines

They all call me a fighting machine

I spent half a century in the army

No way could the enemy harm me

I spent ten years in the air force

I still don’t make sense, of course

I’m a Gary-Stu who’s lost at sea

Always carry machineguns with me

A battleaxe bigger than my body

Always imitated, but never copied

Except by those trying to make a buck

Make a fortune from negative luck

Put me in a videogame or paperback

I’m a macho man, genetically jacked

Everybody wants to buy my image

Everybody wants to laugh at critics

Everybody wants to look for tropes

Everybody’s given too much rope

Whatever happened to character depth?

Got slaughtered in a battle to the death

Everybody’s got their own little flaws

They don’t include too much brawn

They don’t include a nasty attitude

They don’t include a lazy aptitude

Three dimensional isn’t hard to achieve

All you have to do is make them believe

If a captain is going to be lost at sea

If a warrior is going to bleed, bleed, bleed

If a damsel in distress screams one last time

Put some reason in your fucked up rhyme

Middle Ground Between Perfect and Despicable

***MIDDLE GROUND BETWEEN PERFECT AND DESPICABLE***

The year 2014 was an…interesting one for me in terms of my writing career, but what it all boiled down to was two characters I created, both from separate stories. And now I feel like Agent Smith from The Matrix when he tells the main character that there’s a difference between Thomas Anderson and Neo. But instead of taking your mouths away, I actually want some input from my readership to see if I’m not alone in this. Being stuck on an island is no fun at all.

One of these two characters was Sitka the Nose Biter, the titular witch kitty from Poison Tongue Tales. Her positive traits were her cuteness and magical powers while her negative ones were her grumpiness and inability to trust even the kindest souls. She ended up becoming one of my most popular characters.

The other character could not be less relatable. Her name was Danielle Keyes and she was Terrance Coffey’s roommate in the American Darkness short story Wishes in the Night. Danielle’s gimmick was that of a Nightwish fan-girl who had a shrine of their merchandise and photographs in her bedroom while their music was playing too loudly for Terrance’s comfort. Danielle’s characterization went over like a fart in church, meaning none of my audience members cared about her.

To channel Agent Smith once again, “One of these lives has a future, the other does not.”

It was during 2014 that I struggled the most with creating relatable and believable characters and to some extent I still do struggle in today’s world. This whole time I’ve been rolling the dice with my characters and hoping I didn’t roll snake eyes. In other words, I had no idea what the fuck I was doing. My characters were either too perfect or too despicable with very little middle ground between the two extremes.

I recently got some advice on this topic from my lovely beta reader Ashley Uzzell and she said that good characters should have a mixture of positive and negative traits just like any other human being in the real world. Fair enough. But then the question becomes, what positive and negative traits will keep my readers’ attention and which ones will turn them away?

Let’s say I had a character who was generous with his charity donations, but also ate with his mouth open during banquets. Let’s say I had another character who was a good teacher, but also hated furry animals. Or another character who was a top-notch athlete in school, but had a constant case of flatulence. Do any of these characteristics sound appealing right now? Not to me, they don’t.

And then I figured, maybe the traits themselves should be relatable. Okay, I can do that. How about a student who is good at math, but suffers from depression? Or a politician who is good with words, but has panic attacks during heated debates? Or a dancer who is athletic as hell, but can’t reach her full potential because she smokes cigarettes? I like these characters a lot more! Maybe I’ve answered my own questions after all.

You can use your own flaws and perfections when creating a character too, which is why “write what you know” gets thrown around as liberally as it does. Granted, self-inserting isn’t a desirable technique since it makes the author look egotistical, but you can throw some of your own traits in with ones that are already there. Scott George, the lead character from my Floydian high school drama Silent Warrior, is my best example of this. He’s mentally ill, socially awkward, and introverted as hell. I’m sure most of us can relate to these things, and yet the flaws work perfectly within the narrative…or so I’m told. I’m not trying to toot my own horn or anything; I’m just looking for examples, that’s all.

But just because I’ve gotten my shit together with flaws and perfections, it doesn’t mean I don’t still roll the dice whenever I create characters for the public. Not everybody is going to be a winner. But then again, that’s why we have the editing and beta reading processes. It doesn’t have to be perfect the first time around. If it takes forever, edit forever. While I was writing for the Still Standing anthology, I had Aurora Styles (one of the authors) suggest that I give Llewellyn Xavier (formerly known as Michelle) a hobby of some kind to round her out. When Windham asks her how her chess match went, she dangled a king piece in his face and smiled as she said, “How do you think?” Teamwork, people! Teamwork!

It takes a village to write a novel…or a short story…or a poem. Those villagers include your beta readers, editors, and your own characters. You can roll the dice all you want with your characters, but eventually you’ll have to take the sleazy casino route and load those dice with little weights. Only then can you rake in the chips and cash them in for a big payday. Actually, being an indie writer isn’t a lucrative business, but there are other ways in which you will feel satisfied with yourself. If you can make just one person happy with your writing, you’ve done a great job. Even if the story is sad as hell and a major tearjerker, you will have affected that one person on a deep level and that’s the most satisfying part of the job, in my opinion. I’m Garrison Kelly! Even when you feel like dying, keep climbing the mountain!

***OZZY UPDATE***

Our little gray and white sweetheart is doing much better today than he was a few days ago. We still have to keep him isolated and medicated (which is coincidentally the name of a Seether album from 2014), but sure enough, he’s on the road to recovery. His wound doesn’t look as nasty as it once did and medicating him for it has been easy-breezy-lemon-squeezy. He’s going to make it! I know he will!

I Shouldn't Have Fallen In Love With Her

Valentine’s Day, Singles Awareness Day, VD, SAD, it didn’t matter what Alex McKenzie wanted to call it, because it wouldn’t change the theme of February 14^th: lovey-dovey ooey-gooey romance, something he knew little about. God, I hate this fucking day, Alex thought to himself. With the hood of his black My Darkest Days sweater pulled over his head, sunglasses over his eyes, and “Perfect” by, you guessed it, My Darkest Days playing in his ear buds, he was prepared for a long night of shopping at St. Vincent’s Drug Store.

He stepped past the automatic glass door and languidly walked up and down the isles looking for some sweet confectionary goodness to drown his sorrows. In his mind, that was the only thing Valentine’s Day was good for. Not for kisses, not for hugs, but for candy. The taste of a candy cane was much more pleasing to the tongue than a horny woman’s mouth. But candy canes were only a small portion of what he put in his shopping basket. Peanut butter cups, crunchy hearts, chocolate mints, mmm-mmm-mmm!

Alex had been shopping for so long that he lost track of time. He was so focused on the delicious candies in his basket that he failed to notice it when the clerk was calling him out. A tap on the shoulder was a better idea and it actually got Alex’s attention. He pulled the buds out of his ears and turned off his MP3 player before turning his attention to the clerk.

The clerk would have made the perfect Valentine to any lucky guy. Her raven hair flowed down her slender shoulders and her benign smile lit up just about any room she was. She may have been walking around in a clerk’s apron the whole time, but it looked good on her anyways. Her nametag read “Vicki White”, but Alex’s darkened eyes were focused solely on her gorgeous face.

“Hi there!” said Vicki in her excited college girl voice. “Can I help you find anything today?”

“No thanks,” said Alex in an uncaring tone. “I have everything I need right here.”

As the heartbroken shopper turned around to look for even more candy to stockpile, he was interrupted by Vicki calling him, “Sir!” and turned around again. She said, “We don’t allow our customers to conceal their faces in our store. It’s nothing against you personally. In fact, I kind of like that My Darkest Days sweater you’ve got on! It’s just that we’ve been robbed before and we want to make sure everybody visible to the security cameras.”

“Listen, sweetheart,” said the hooded customer. “If you think I’m not capable of paying for these treats, then we can go to the counter right now and I’ll buy them right away. I’ll be out of your hair for the rest of the night. I promise.”

“Sir, please just do as I say,” said Vicki while she maintained her sweet grin.

“No, you don’t understand.”

“What do you mean I don’t understand?” Vicki started to say in a flirty voice, perfect for Valentine’s Day. “I bet you look good underneath all of that! Come on, just humor me for a minute.”

From there the two got in an unintelligible conversation as Vicki tried to physically remove Alex’s hood and Alex tried to brush her hands away. In this somewhat playful struggle, Alex leaned backwards slightly to avoid being touched and his hood just slid off of his head. What Vicki saw took the smile right off of her face: a completely bald head with a surgical scar running from where the hairline should be to the back of his skull. The secret was further exposed when the now despondent customer took his sunglasses off and crushed them in his hands, revealing he had no eyebrows.

Vicki White held her trembling hands to her shocked face when she slowly backpedaled into the checkout counter without looking. “Sir, I’m really sorry about that. I was just following protocol. I had to make sure you weren’t suspicious.”

“Protocol, huh?” said Alex McKenzie as he paced up to the counter and dropped his overloaded basket on the scanner. “Did those security cameras get a good enough shot of me?” Vicki trembled in fear and couldn’t respond. “Did your paparazzi get a good shot of the scar on my fucking head? How about the fact that I have no goddamn hair on my head or face? That has to be the shot of the century right there! I’m sure some tabloid magazine will pay good money for that kind of footage!”

As Alex drew closer to her, Vicki sat down in the fetal position and planted her back against the checkout counter. The bald man continued his angry speech. “Brain cancer, sweetheart. Brain cancer. I’ve had it since I was a senior in high school. I’m 100% cancer free now, but I wasn’t back then when it really counted. I looked just like I do now except that I wore a hairpiece to my senior prom.”

He placed a tender hand on Vicki’s vibrating face when he said, “The girl I took to the prom looked a lot like you. Very pretty. No, she was drop-dead gorgeous. She was like an angel that descended from the heavens. Her jealous ex-boyfriend slapped me in the back of the head and knocked my hairpiece off. She saw me for what I really was: a cancer patient. She knew I could have died any moment and decided she didn’t want that on her conscience. So now she has something else on her conscience: breaking up with me the next night. Seeing me die would have been too heartbreaking for her. Seeing me lonely and humiliated, on the other hand, would have been JUST FUCKING DANDY!!”

Alex’s face was in Vicki’s as he stared intensely into her beautiful teary eyes. She was breathing heavily like she was fearing for her life. But as the ex-cancer patient backed up, he revealed himself to be just as harmless as she was, though he wasn’t done yet with his tirade. “Valentine’s Day: a day where we love each other and have mind-blowing sex until the sun comes up. Meanwhile, all the heartbroken single people can go straight to hell for all anyone else cares. I’m buying all that candy because eating is the only thing that gives me pleasure anymore. Sure, it’s not what everybody does on this special day, but it’s pretty damn good to me! So go ahead, honey-bunch: ring me up so I can get my ugly ass out of your store!”

Vicki grabbed onto the counter for support and gingerly pulled herself to a standing position with her legs shaking uncontrollably. She stumbled around the counter to the cash register and started to scan Alex’s items. Her hands were shaking as well and there were times when the price scanner didn’t register. She wasn’t scared for herself anymore. She was scared for this poor soul standing in front of her.

After scanning the same candy cane over and over again, Vicki finally got frustrated and threw it on the ground where it shattered upon impact. She breathed deeply while Alex was watching her with an angry look on his face. She said, “You say you’re 100% cancer free, right? Well, shouldn’t that be something to celebrate? By surviving that horrible disease, you showed your shallow-assed prom date that her stupid decision was all for nothing.” She wiped tears from her eyes with the back of her manicured hand and said, “You’re not ugly to me. You’re beautiful. You’re a warrior. Don’t let anybody tell you differently.”

Alex sarcastically clapped his hands and said, “Well, bravo for you! But there’s just one problem: I don’t believe a goddamn word you say. I think you’re just saying those things because you work in customer service and you don’t want to be fired. Either that, or you suddenly have the urge to feel sorry for me. You don’t have to give me sympathy, or even understanding for that matter. Just ring up my candy and I’ll be the happiest man on earth.”

Vicki picked up a package of peanut butter cups and said, “These are not good for you, especially if you’re trying to stay cancer free. I can’t in all good conscience sell these to you. Hell, I might as well give you a big ass carton of cigarettes to go with these.” A beat of emotional silence fell between them before she said, “But I can give you something else.”

“You had the chance to prove yourself to me and now you won’t even ring me up like you’re supposed to. That’s a hypocrisy if I’ve ever seen one. Seriously, what could you possibly give me right now that would show me how much you care, given the fact that I’ve got the world’s worst scar on the top of my head?!”

Instead of the sweet taste of chocolate and peanut butter, Alex McKenzie got the sweet taste of Vicki White’s lips and tongue as she pulled his face in for a deep, genuine, romantic kiss. Rather than feeling disgusted at Alex’s so-called “ugliness”, Vicki smiled her Hollywood smile for him one more time and whispered, “Happy Valentine’s Day!”

After a while of intense contemplation, Alex said, “Happy Valentine’s Day” back and properly introduced himself by his first and last name. It was only right that Vicki give such an intense kiss to someone she knew the name of. After all, there would be plenty more where that came from!

Kaz Berretta

Do any of you have the player’s handbook to Cyberpunk Version 2.0? If you do, you’ll see a quote from a solo named Morgan Blackhand (I always call him Morgan Handjob for kicks). He basically says warriors who walk around with heavy machineguns and big metal armor are stupid because they’re putting huge bull’s eyes on themselves. Apparently, cybernetic mercenaries are supposed to keep their work a secret from everyone else.

I bet Morgan Handout, or Morgan Handjob, isn’t feeling gutsy enough to shill his anti-heaviness philosophy to Kaz Berretta, one of the two main characters in my sci-fi movie script Say Goodbye. He’s a bounty hunter with thick metal armor and a mile long rocket shotgun. In the end, it didn’t matter to him what was in fashion that season, because he always brought the bad guys to justice and collected his pay. Kaz proves wearing heavy armor is only a hindrance if you actually care what people think of you. He couldn’t give two shits what people think of him. If they were scared, it was good for business. If they didn’t trust him, it didn’t matter, because he doesn’t need their help with that big ass shotgun.

But Kaz Berretta wasn’t just a blow-’em-up hitman for hire. He had a family to take care of. The main villain of Say Goodbye, a hog sorcerer named Zod, was supposed to be his highest-priced bounty yet. With that kind of money, poverty wouldn’t even be in the Berretta clan’s vocabulary. In fact, if they wanted to go to a Disneyland-style theme park called Fantasmic Land, goddamn it, they’ll do it and have lots of money remaining for other excursions.

Kaz would have been the father of the year if it hadn’t been for one small detail near the end of Say Goodbye. You see, he had a partner in crime named Ethan Stryker, who was a trench coat-wielding machete fighter. Ethan also had a family to provide for, a pregnant wife and an autistic child. Ethan didn’t always get along with his wife, so his wife turned to Kaz for comfort…and kisses…and hugs…and sweet monkey sex while Ethan’s son was secretly filming the whole thing on his smart phone.

And then when the Strykers and the Berrettas finally went on a vacation trip to Fantasmic Land and had a good time, Ethan saw the video of his wife having sex with Kaz. If you watch the show Cheaters every Saturday night like I do, you can imagine what kind of violence came about after the footage was seen. Unlike Cheaters, there was no shoving and faux UFC action. Ethan still had a machete and he went on a slashing rampage that took Kaz to hell with him…and other members of the Berretta and Stryker families that didn’t live long enough to be traumatized by the end of Say Goodbye. The bad guys lose, but then again, so do the good guys. It’s a bittersweet ending to say the least.

As a warrior, Kaz Berretta is a badass tank who loves to blow shit up. As a human being, he’s deeply flawed. These are apparently the two ingredients needed to make a likeable character. That means Kaz is more than qualified to be part of a future novel or short story with equal parts violence and drama. If I do use Kaz again someday, I might have to consider putting Ethan right next to him since they go together like burgers and fries. Their fighting styles and choice of combat clothing is different, but their tough mindsets are the same.

　

***LYRICS OF THE DAY***

“I haven’t cried since the day she left me, ‘cause that would mean that I admit it’s over.”

-My Darkest Days singing “Perfect”-

Barbie and Ken

When I was a kid growing up in Chehalis, Washington, commercials would constantly come up on TV for Barbie products and my mom would jokingly suggest that she should buy them for me. You know what my answer was? “Nooooooooo!!” Now that I’m an adult, it seems as though I’m not the only one who thinks this way. Somewhere along the leaden path, being called a Barbie or Ken doll became an insult. It’s constantly used as a slur against WWE Divas and any other female wrestler who happens to be skinny and pretty. Ed Schultz loves to refer to Sarah Palin as “Caribou Barbie” whenever she comes up in conversation. On the flip side, Erick Erickson once called Wendy Davis “Abortion Barbie”. So basically, this insult can work with anybody as long as they have something to attach the slur to, such as a profession, a hobby, or a belief. I don’t want you guys to think I’m actually using these insults on people, but somewhere along the way, some nut job out there could refer to Danica Patrick as “NASCAR Barbie”. Somebody could also put it out there that Bill O’Reilly is “Conservative Ken”. And yet another example could be that Mary Kay Letourneau is somehow referred to as “Statutory Rape Barbie”. I keep having to ask myself where all of these Barbie and Ken references come from. What does being a Barbie/Ken doll imply about that person? That they’re perfect in every way? That they’re plastic and fake? That they’re shallow? Or maybe there’s this stigma going around about how Barbie dolls are anatomically incorrect and that if somebody actually looked like one, they’d be fucking dead. Well, as far as I know, Danica Patrick can still walk around without breaking her ankles, so there’s no way in hell she could be “NASCAR Barbie”. You’re probably asking yourself what all this talk about girl toys has to do with literature. Well, the same thing could be applied to popular books. For example, someone could call Bella Swan “Vampire Barbie”, which would most likely be attributed to her Mary-Sue qualities. So is that what it takes for someone to be a Barbie doll? Mary-Sue attributes? I’d have to say so. If that’s the case, then the outside world is just one big doll house. But maybe if I actually ventured outside my room and into the real world to meet some of these people, it’ll be even less likely that a giant pink convertible will pick me up for a trip to the Silverdale Shopping Mall. People are Barbie and Ken dolls until you actually get to know who they are, all their faults, all their pains, and all their love. Maybe that’s why it’s so hard to be a writer: because we have to work so diligently to acquaint the reader with our characters so that they don’t become Barbie and Ken dolls.

　

***BUMPER STICKER OF THE DAY***

“Normal people scare me, but not as much as I scare them.”