Hi everybody! I am about to establish rapport by using exclamation marks, emotocons and CAPS LOCK! GET READY!!! :) :) :) ;) Did you feel the connection then? The waves of pure joy that eminatied from your computer screen like it was scooped out of a Chernobyl landfill? I know I sure did, and I hope my radioactive greeting has induced a happy little cancer on your heart you will call Mark Vickers.

Now, friend, I can call you friend right? Now we can get down to business. I am a writer, as you can see by my ability to both type and entertain. For the past month or so I've had this idea for a novel stewing in my brain. I have never written a novel. The most I have ever written on a single subjects was about 50 pages of notes for a fantasy world I created back in Jr. High. This idea, however, has infinitely more potential than The Boa Caves of the Washwillies.

My plan is two-fold. First, I am going to breifly outline the major plot events I have come up with. Then I am going to list some of the characters, some themes and my general direction. Your job is to respond, but not with any qualitative assesment (i.e. I think it's super or it sucks or it's a load of shit or I am now stupider as a result of reading your worthless thoughts you fucking smegma muncher), but with ideas. Basically, I want you to tell me why you would not pay money for the final novelization of this book. Because it's not finished is not a valid reason. I think the protagonists mother is boring is.

The second part of the plan is to help me actually write the damn thing.

Also, everything that I write here is copyrighted by me. It is my intellectual property and any comments made should be made with the knowledge that they may be used in my final story. So without further ado here is my story!

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I'll Write the Title at the End
by Mark Vickers

Our story takes place in the slightly near future in a large urban area. I'm talking about a large, soulless dump of a city that I haven't decided on yet. Houston is a strong contender.
Meet John Protagonist. John lives in a crowded apartment with Flash, a salesman at a local clothing boutique and self-professed pick up artist. John is a software designer for a company that specializes in compatibility software. They both have a mutual love of video games, and met at a regional video game tournament. Neither of them won, but Flash was new to the city and John was desperate to move out of his apartment. Eventually, Flash talked him into getting an apartment with him.
Now John is a kind of neurotic guy with about every sleeping disorder in the book. Insomnia, night terrors, sleep parlysis, you name it. This is exacerbated by the fact that every night it sounds like Flash is making a porno in the room next door. Turn out he is. Flash films every girl he sleeps with and is planning on editing them all together and sending the tape to a girl he dated in college that he was never able to get over as part of a massive revenge plot.

SEX

I've been told that I am very easy to read. It's true too, I am not good at covering up my emotions. The worst part is the harder I try, the easier I am to read. Something always just manages to sneak out: a twitching of the eye, a flaring of the nostrils, a subtle movement of my eybrows. One insignificant movement and suddenly my innermost thoughts feelings and desires are made public.

Perhaps that is why I'm not very good at staring at women. I've never been able to perfect the art of passing complete strangers and not letting them know you think they're attractive. If I stare at the ground to long, I look like I've got something to hide. If I stare outright, I look at a pig. If I try to steal glances, I shift my eyes to much and look, well, shifty.

I understand that this is probably making me sound creepier than I really am, but it is a real problem. I just want to know how to subconciously send the subtle message of "we should have Earth shattering sex right here on the sidewalk" without anyone knowing.

Ah, if only life were like porn. There would be VIP rooms in librarys, orgies would break out like musical numbers in a Broadway show, people would be choppy and pixelated, and everyone in Japan would be animated and raped by tentacles.

Unfortunately we don't live in a magical porn land where there are rivers of Astroglide and Vibrators that register on the Richter scale. No, we live in a consumer society, and sex is a commodity, one that we put considerable value on. Everything, including intangible emotions like lust and love have a dollar value.

Ascribing value is a necessary thing, for if we don't put a dollar value on something, than that thing becomes worthless. Granted, there are plenty of those Master Card moments that are "priceless" but we still spend money getting to that moment. Money is simply a means to an end, and by totaling the wake we can find the true dollar amount of those moments that we deem priceless.

And that is why, my friends, I never pay for porn.

The beginning

I'm the type of person who has read the first thirty pages of every book that's out there. Tolstoy? Yep. Fitzgerald? You bet. But reading the first few pages of a great work does not allow one to truly immerse themselves in the world that a great author can create. Call it ADD, call it independence of vision, call it laziness, all are correct.
Did I mention I have started at least 50 journals? I'd burn through the first few entries and then realize that my life is completely boring and stop, only to have something worth writing about come up and, three entries later, have my momentum destroyed by the ennui of everyday life.
But no more!
I have decided to join the online army of uninteresting knuckleheads with computers and start a blog. My own blog. But this will be no ordinary blog, no sir. This blog will include poetry I've written (because everyone just loooooves reading poetry) short stories, movie reviews, general rants about life, and enough humor to make you forget that you should probably be doing something more productive than surfing the internet and reading the blog of someone whom you more than likely only know tangentially, if at all.

By the way, my name is Mark, nice to meet you.

Now that we've got the formalities out of the way, why don't we start with a poem? This poem was inspired by a recent mushroom trip I went on before a Perpetual Groove concert. It's kind of hippie poetry meets Billy Collins.

The Electric Tower
Fear was an electric tower that grew from the grassy field,
it spoke in a strange language of crackles and hisses,
exploding all the while in waves of incandescent light.
I observed the man made edifice through the campfire,
Watched its steel bars undulate with the rising heat,
Organic in a movement that profaned the night sky.
Like all things we are vessels for energy.
Through us both it flows,
in its presence we crackle and hiss
but I am free to roam.
It is of the landscape of one place but I may be of many.
I may ride its electric cable as it snakes along desert highways and into homes,
across vast canyons and into the coldest depths of the underground,
speaking all the while a great multitude of languages.
But I am still so very small, my energy weak,
so I averted my eyes from this thing
that would be worshipped as God in ancient times.