June 2008 Archives

The weekend began on Friday the 13th, as we raced out of the house to meet my in-laws at the dock in Falmouth, Maine.  As co-owners of a nice 30-something-foot sailing vessel, they sail every other weekend out of Falmouth.  My father in law has been sailing his whole life, and is an excellent sailor - a fact that was proven out of necessity on this particular trip.  So many things went wrong on a small scale that it actually did become funny.  Once the bruises heal completely, we'll all laugh at this, I'm certain of that.

The highlights of the trip include: 

Other than those small mishaps (all of which were easily remedied) the weekend was perfect: nice weather all day Saturday, good conversation, good food, and excellent ice cream at the Booth Bay Ice Cream Factory. Looking back, there was much more good to the weekend than bad.  Honestly.  

Now that we've gotten that out of the way, here are the two biggies, omitted from the above list for dramatic purposes.  You can read on at this point, or simply watch "On Golden Pond" while listening to the song "Poop Ship Destroyer" by Ween. This is what happened:

Coming into Booth Bay harbor, the sun is shining, and all is well.  It is a beautiful day. I am sitting at the rear of the cockpit, watching the depth gauge (not really watching, just kind of zoned out and staring in its general direction).  My wife is to my right, and my Mother-in-law is at the helm.  My Father-in-law, the only one of us with any sailing experience, is standing at the front of the cockpit, facing backwards, reading from the nav charts to his wife.  I want to preface the following by saying that no one was doing anything wrong in any way.  In fact, as we were approaching the red buoy, which was to our right, Dad--in-law was reciting the "Red Right Returning" rule (which I love, as a fan of alliteration). Ever sailor knows that rule, even me, and I've only been a boat three times in my whole life. I'm hearing all of this, but not really paying attention.  The sun is out, and its so nice, and the gauge reads 38 feet. ... 30 feet. ... 25 ... 18 ...

I snap out of it just in time to yell "ten feet!" as the gauge dives to '10', and then the following happened all at once:

At this point, my father-in-law goes ass-over-tea-kettle backwards down into the hold.  My wife successfully dives to her knees, although much faster than she intended, and shuts off the engine.  Somehow I get a charlie horse on my right calf (still not sure how that happened).  Seconds later, we're all converging to see if my Dad-in-law is still alive.  It's quite a drop down there, with strategically placed things like counter-tops to break one's fall "skull-cracking" style.  Like some super-hero, he comes bounding back up almost as fast as he went down, and ignoring pleas of "are you all right?" he takes charge and gets everyone moving to free the boat.  The "respect-o-meter" went up a notch or two at that moment.  His arm was clearly broken, his hand was cut and bruised, and who knows what else was broken, sprained, or otherwise hurt. He was in the dinghy faster than Flash Gordon, and I was hoisting out the anchor.  He sped back to deep water, dropped the anchor, and we winched ourselves back off of the rock.  This was an amazing reaction: fast and clear thinking amidst what could have been a disaster.  As it turns out, the arm was not broken (though very bruised), and the boat did not sink.  The speedometer stopped working, but was okay after a reboot.  There was no sign of serious damage at all.  My wife barked up her knees good, and my calf had that inexplicable bump, but all said and done, we we're very lucky.  (note: for the sailors out there, there is a red buoy near Booth Bay that you should keep on your left while returning.  The various vessels that came out to help us all claim to have run aground there at some point themselves, so I feel I should point it out).

We celebrated our survival, and helped to calm adrenaline-aggravated nerves, by eating a large dinner of steak tips, shrimp, grilled cheese sandwiches, and hot soup.  There was some rum, too, but not excessive amounts. We unwound, finished the feast with Chocloate-Lover's Ice Cream from the Booth Bay Ice Cream Factory (which I recommend!), and then went to bed.  Of course, with all that food and drink, there were many trips to the head before saying good-night, and a few trips in the wee-hours of the evening as well. The worst was behind us.

... In fact, the worst was literally behind us.  It was in our dinghy, which was tied up to the port side, just under the overflow jets for the head unit.  And the head unit was full. All night, as we did out feast-induced business, we were pumping poop into the dinghy.

I woke up blessed: as a writer, I am now able to honestly use the words "poop" and "dinghy" in the same sentence.  Our sore-armed captain ended up being the foreman in a sewage removal exercise early on Sunday morning.  That was Father's Day, by the way. Happy Poop-Dinghy Father's Day!

So, a weekend sail turned out okay - major death and disaster was avoided, and we were lucky enough to have a weekend that we will always look back upon with a grin and a giggle.

On the surface, the story of Gabriele Caccini is a classic telling of the "Vampire Who Wants to be Loved." In place of the tired cliche of the vampire who wants to be human, however, we have a vampire who really is human: he's hardly a monster at all, obsessing more about love than blood. He starves himself to his own despair, allowing himself to feed only once a year in his quest to find the woman who can be both his victim and his lover. 

The story is told in an interleaved style, folding back and forth between Gabriele's past and present. In the past, Gabriele becomes a vampire, a development which causes him to lose his first love. In the present, he continues his quest for the woman who can survive to become his eternal bride. His repeated failures, both in the past and present, shape a character ripe with despair. Both tales are wrought with love, lust, and tragedy. Without giving away the ending, there is also a convergence of the plot that leaves the book well situated for a sequel (a planned sequel is evident in the title, so you can look forward to it). 

Now, vampire-romances are not my cup of proverbial tea, so I am no expert here, but I wasn't expecting to read a book about vampires where the vamps had such real weaknesses of character: self-confidence issues; not being able to fit in; unable to come to terms with their vampirism ... that kind of thing. I actually got irritated at the main character for not being bad-ass enough (I mean, come on man! You're four hundred years old ... grow a pair!). That may sound like a dig, but it is actually a compliment: any character that gets a rise out of me is a character written well enough that I'm thinking about them as a personality and not a plot mechanism. 

There were plentiful doses of sex to feed the desires of those looking for a romance fix, though these scenes were more civilized that you expect from a romance novel (well, than I what I expect ... and I admittedly don't read them). Overall, the clear and colorful characters are what makes  Gabriele Caccini: The Vampire Gene - Book 1 (The Vampire Gene) a book worth reading - and the silver medal that it earned.

Four-and-a-half Feathers from the Rooster King.  Pros: strong character development, well structured plot.  Cons: wussy vampire, too much romance, not enough horror.

What did I find? I found what everyone finds when they search for answers in a half-assed, non-scientific manner.  I found the truth.  The truth is: Women Read Naked.  Maybe just topless, maybe sans-pantaloons, maybe just with breast-revealing unbuttoned blouses, but for a 30-something married guy, that's more or less the same as being naked.

They were everywhere: students reading books while wearing sweaters so tight that it would be impossible for them to turn the pages without getting paper-cuts on their nipples; Women lounging in bed, their perfect pendulous prizes barely hidden by the fluff of the featherbed, a book spread sensually before them; Wonky-eyed women clutching an open copy of Cluck to their bare chests in wonton embrace. 

Now, I wasn't running a google image search with the parental controls turned off, using keywords like 'sexy nude women boobs breasts natural live xxx +book' (I tried but the results were too disturbing).  I wasn't searching porn sites or sleazy image galleries.  Rather, I was searching legitimate stock photo art sites, looking for images that I could legitimately purchase and use to lure browsers from those "other sites" to mine, in hopes that they'd take time out from their internet fetish-play fantasies and buy a book about zombie chickens. 

Now I know what you're saying.  You're saying, "did you ever stop to think that maybe the women reading books are all topless and hot because you're searching a stock-art site, which is populated with nothing except photos of models posing seductively, because those photos are designed for marketing folks like you, with the sole intention of luring people into buying decisions based solely on a libido response?"  Well, that is a distinct possibility, so I won't even criticize your use of an amazingly long run-on sentence.  However, I still prefer to draw my own conclusions, which is that women simply like to read in the buff. It's a much more concise explanation.

It could be that thing about the media, and sex, and money, but I think it has more to do with free will.  Isn't it nicer know that we're not complete slaves to the media?  isn't it better to pretend that sex doesn't sell? For example, this woman here, to the left, is:

I'm much happier with 'a'.  She's not wearing pants because she doesn't want to wear pants while she's reading such a fantastic book. In fact, it's unclear at first whether she's even wearing panties, but if you zoom way in using photo-editing software, you can see that she is (not that I did that, that would be creepy). Judging by the angle of the book, she's not even reading it: rather, she's contemplating how much she wishes she knew more people who read zombie chicken books, so that they could engage in wild sex parties together.  Again, this is free choice at work, and has nothing to do with my poor photo-editing skills.  Honest. It's all about her.  Further proof lies in the note, which clearly states, "To do: 1) read about zombie chickens, 2) go to a bar and pick up strangers who also also read zombie chicken books, 3) engage in wild, nude acts of giggling, tickling sex."**  A marketing guy would never make something like that up, would they?

This almost-scientific approach to research led me to wonder if the clotheslessness of female readers was due to comfort, temperature, or (as implicated above) uncontrollable horniness.  More painstaking research, wading through screen after screen of professional photos of attractive women (hey, it's a hard job but somebody has to do it), and I found the proof that I was determined to find:  a fully clothed but obviously lusty redhead reading my book.  Incontrovertable.  I mean, really.  Look at her:

Wow. If she's not about to take her clothes off, it's only because she doesn't really have to. 

So, to answer the question using perfectly invalid scientific method, women read naked because that's the way they like it.  End of story.

Need further proof?  If you are a woman, buy a copy of my book, and read it.  Feeling a bit constricted in that cotton? If you're a man, buy a copy of my book for your girlfriend and see if she takes her clothes off.***  If she does, ask her the same question.  Remember, this is for posterity, so be honest. 

* I did attempt to find real live hot, lusty women who were reading my book, but after abject failure I opted for stock art and photoshop.

There's some great stuff in the middle, including some astute observations of what's not good in the book.  I'm big enough* to recognize my own flaws, and appreciate the criticism.  You can read all about them here.  The end of the review finishes nicely with a recommendation to buy my book, which I always think is nice.  Hint!

No, I'm not crossing over into the second-best niche-horror-genre and writing a novel based on that awesome New Zealand film Black Sheep.  I'm talking about a real black sheep.  I have three (well, one of them is more brown than black) in my small flock.  While they aren't murdering zombie sheep (like in the movie), they're just as compelled to eat.  Thank god they crave grass and not brains, because these sheep are amazing.  I bet you didn't know this, but sheep possess the strength of ten elephants when there is grain nearby.  It's like a food-geiger-counter inside the sheep started to crackle and buzz as they get closer, causing their muscles to strengthen as they lose all sense of the world around them and dive towards dinner.

I'm not weak (male, 185 pounds, 2nd degree black belt, in my 30's), and I got pulled in half by two sheep this morning. Yes, as I type this I am indeed two halves of one person.  Hopefully I'll heal in time for lunch or my food will fall out of the seam.  This is what happened:

We have new lambs in our flock, which means they get herded very carefully to their pasture (which gets moved around the field every few weeks - right now it's at the faaaar end). There are two ring-leaders among the flock who, due to sheer maliciousness of will, try to go anywhere but where they're supposed to go.  The others will follow them if left unchecked, and it's very hard to catch a rogue herd of loose sheep, so these two ewes (we'll call them "asshole" and "bastard face" for the sake of anonymity) have to be walked on a leash, like dogs, out to the pasture. This is fairly routine--a routine that includes having a prize of grain in the pasture, as well as a small dish of grain handy in case one of them get loose.  This morning, in mid-sprint (picture a man just under six feet tall running in a deep-knee crouch while pulling two reluctant sheep who are only three feet tall), I ... dropped ... the ... grain. 

One of the sheep noticed.  It was the black sheep, a.k.a. bastard-face.  Asshole kept running, having spotted the end-game prize of grain.  Bastard face slammed on her super-human brakes and pulled full force in the opposite direction.  Now picture the man, running n a deep-knee crouch, being spun, drawn into the air like some cartoon, and being ripped in half.

I'm gong to go get some coffee, and some paper towels in case it leaks back out through the split.

All I can say is, "wow."  I'm honored.  This is the point where I try to thank everyone who helped, and the TV people have to turn up the music to get me off the stage, because I start blathering.

"Eric D. Knapp's "Cluck: Murder Most Fowl" is one of the best books we've reviewed so far on Odyssey Reviews. This tongue-in-cheek (or beak) work of brilliance will surely make you laugh. The writing is on par with the likes of Terry Pratchett. The story is brilliant, the writing unbelievably good"

NOTE: I'm uncertain why, but this only seems to work on Mac browsers. Which doesn't make sense, because it's just an LWP grab of an http stream, with some regex's to re-map relative paths to stylesheets.  I'll work on this some more... until then, get a mac, they're better anyway.

UPDATE: Fixed .. it was a bad regex that malformed css imports, which IE7 wasn't smart enough to resolve on its own.  It's fixed now.