Hell Week: Live the Good Life Now

Hell week is done. Over. Finito. You're survived. But the same can't be said for next week...

Next week brings ghoulish tales from our brains that raise the dead issues that will no longer lie in their graves. Such undead, revenant topics as the meaning of death, how to reanimate your dreams, and what to do if a zombie PC sends you spam.

Yes, next week we're doing shark stories. But we didn't have any Crypt Keeper puns about sharks, so enjoy the zombie puns.

Our clean-up story, Live the Good Life Now, works just fine as a piece of text, but since it's all a first-person monologue it's especially nice for this format. Having all the stories be this easy to record would be fine for us, but for the stories a bit limiting. There are only so many things that can be enthusiastically narrated and are still scary in some way.

But you'll hear more about that during NCAA Color Commentator week, or State of the Union Address week, or Othello Auditions week.

Hell Week: The Devil Went Down to Tbilisi

So this is my last day of work. For the past 2 1/2 years I've been paid to write about commercial real estate, and found a wee bit of time during the day to write about sea monsters and killer worms and such. (I somehow have at least three unrelated killer worm stories written. Look for Killer Worm Week sometime soon!) Now I’ll be listening to lectures on finance for two years, finding time to write about those beloved sea monsters and killer worms. Ooh, I got an idea! Sea monsters FIGHTING killer worms!

I’ll be in Rutgers soon, to pick up an MBA. It’s a major change, a total career shift from business journalism (where I've accidentally been for nine years) to the full-on business world. You interview enough people that aren't any smarter or savvier than yourself, and you start to think that you can do that stuff yourself. I’m hoping to actually make a positive contribution to the world through my future suit-wearing positions, and not just bathe in champagne, but if the worst-case scenario is bathing in champagne, then sign me up.

It hasn't sunk in yet. It still feels like I’ll be popping back into work Monday morning. Some time next week, I’ll pop out of my orientation session and scream “Holy hell, I’m a student again!”

Speaking of hell, The Devil Went Down to Tbilisi is my audio contribution for the day. After butchering the word Shochet a few weeks ago (which appropriately mean “butcher” in Hebrew) I looked up how to say Tbilisi properly. tee-BEE-lee-see. Say it quickly, it’s fun! I might start counting Tbilisis next time I play touch football. “One Tbilisi two Tbilisi three Tbilisi BLITZ!”

Hell Week: The Third Wish

Cross-promotional brou-ha-ha: the kernal of this site was planted back in 2005, when I recorded a few of my stories for NPR. They only took a few minutes to record, although a whole lot of prep time to get ready for the two minutes of recording. Reading a story out loud

The first story was entitled Persecuted, Banished, Shot, and because it's extant and recorded in a full-on studio -- I had a producer AND a tech guy helping out -- there's no need to do another take here. I list it on my cover letter when I'm sending out short stories and such. Google "Jeff Ryan NPR" and it comes right up. I do this every few months (okay, hours), for an ego boost.

Anyway, I sent one story off with the NPR cred, and the editor said he liked what I sent and the NPR piece, and wanted to publish them both. The anthology will be called Bound for Evil: it's about evil books. A fair amount of the anthology is reprinted, some from public domain sources. So I'll be listed in the same table of contents as HP Lovecraft, Ramsey Campbell, and Nathaniel Freaking Hawthorne.

Looked at my proofs today: nothing cringeworthy on my part, and clean from a proofreading perspective. I heard that Harlan Ellison, whose reputation has preceded him to the point of being kicked out of bars he never entered, rewrites every story that gets reprinted -- and Ellison gets a lot of reprints. So there's no such thing as the "original" or the "true" version of "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" or "Repent, Harlequin, Said the Ticktockman," since each time it was out it was a bit different, more in line with Ellison at the time of publication.

Today's tale, The Third Wish, will most likely get recoded as we go along with the Scares. It's a hell story, yeah, but it's got a genie in it. No point making a genie tag with one measly story in it, though. The tags (that Halloween one notwithsanding, which will get pleasantly plump aorund October) will only be there when there's a robust amount of content to link to. We envision them like little anthologies for the ear.

Hell Week: Abdurrahman's Hell

Today’s story, Abdurrahman's Hell, is set in Indonesia. Not that I say it in so many words. But survey ten guys named Abdurrahman, and nine of them will be standing in Indonesia. And given Indonesia’s poverty, a few of them are bound to be barefoot as well.

Jeff and I both try to set our stories in worldwide locations. Jeff, for most of the time he was writing these on a daily basis, had a list of every country in the world, and was trying to get a story for every country. (I don’t know if he still has that list.) Me, I’m just trying for world balance. One out of every six people live in China? Well, one in every six horror stories should be in China, then. On that statistical analysis, I’ve failed utterly, since at least two or three stories I’m writing each week are undeniably in America. Plus I’m vastly overcounting the werewolf population.

We’re writing and podcasting here to a (presumably) Western audience, which doesn’t know a whole lot about the rest of the world. I can hinge a story on the audience knowing what a Ren Faire is, for instance, but similar historical recreations in other parts of the world -- I don’t know of any off-hand but I think I’m safe in assuming they exist -- don’t have that casual familiarity with the audience, not to mention me. So these stories are essentially mostly American.

However, if a story doesn’t have a particular geographic anchor, I’ll move it to a spot on the globe where I don’t have so many darts. Anything with Catholicism is going to Latin America or Italy. Anything with technology’s going to Japan. It seems like once I week I’ll after-the-fact turn everyone’s name Russian.

Indonesia, as you may or may not know, has the world’s biggest Muslim population. No country in the Middle East gets that distinction. Second-biggest? India, also not in the Middle East. The billion-plus Muslims who are living a not-going-to-blow-myself-up-today life make few of the papers around here.

Hell Week: The Door to Hell

George Carlin, one of the holy trinity of comedy (Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor are the others, of course), said that everyone on the road driving faster than you is a maniac, and everyone slower is an idiot. We laugh, then the barb of his line starts releasing its poison, because the joke was really on us, not the rest of the world.

But it's easy to walk around thinking you're the only sane man or woman in a crazy world. Better than the alternative. We're kind of forced into deluding ourselves into thinking us sane all the time, because otherwise we'd back up against the wall and collect our knees in our arms and start the slow rocking that would be our exclusive occupation for the rest of our natural lives.

All this is a roundabout-t0-the-point-of-frequent-flier-mile-overload way of saying that I have finished reading the final Harry Potter volume. And now the societal burden for everyone to maintain a respectful silence for those who don't care about it or haven't gotten to the last page yet --that burden has shifted. (It shifted around 4:30 pm eastern central time, coincidentally when I myself finished reading it.)

The new burden is on those who haven't read it yet. The rest of us are now allowed to go throwing plot points around like beads at Mardi Gras, post lists of deceased characters like we were Martin Luthor and the world our cathedral door, and start snowballing sequel ideas that by their substance pull the curtain back from the last 200 pages.

Perhaps it's only me. Perhaps I have to reacquaint myself on the idiot/moron continuum. In the slim case I am wrong and it's not a requirement to cite the Hufflepuff vs Ravenclaw casualties, I'll merely say I enjoyed the hell out of a lot of this book, and it ends extremely well, and I'll be there in yah many years when Rowling decides to write something else.

Today's story, The Door to Hell, is one of mine, and for some reason I tried reading it like Truman Capote, and it stuck. I realize only now that I'm not the first one to commingle Tru and a demon: check out Peter Stormare's Satan from Constantine if you have any doubt.

Hell Week: Misdiailing St. Louis

Last night the crickets were out like Arsenal fans after one of the club’s twice-yearly wins. I kept wondering if the specific recording conditions I have set up would be adequate to stop their chirping.

There’s a quote from Walter Mattheau in Fail-Safe where he says that after a nuke, only the accountants and prisoners will survive – prisoners because of the concrete cells, and accountants because of the reams of paper insulating them. We might add podcasters to that list for the 21st century, hidden in closets among suits and shirts to muffle the ambient sounds of life. (I give podcasters better odds than the accountants. But prisoners are like the grenade in a game of rock-paper-scissors: no one’s topping them.)

Misdialing St. Louis will hopefully come to you without any background assistance from Jiminy or other non-Jiminy crickets. Unless I it a dead patch in the reading, where I crack an unfunny joke, at which point the crickets come in for the comedic effect. But I’m not worried about that: Sean wrote this one, so any dud jokes are his fault, not mine.

Hell Week: El Cielo

Saw a pair of movies with 24 hours of each other--Stardust and Bridge to Teribithia. The Hollywooded version of the former took away a lot of the traditional elements of fairy kingdoms -- like fairies, and talking trees, and dwarfs and elves, and basically anything a ten-year-old would giggle at for its lameness. Yet Teribithia has almost all of those elements, despite its book version not having any, AND it was the film that was made for the ten-year-olds. Could it be the fairy folk just decided that if they were getting kicked out of one movie they'd find a suitable home somewhere else, even if they didn't belong there?

Stardust is the closest any film has come to being the Princess Bride. It's no Princess Bride -- too many scenes exist but don't sparkle, and those that do don't demand Simpsonic recitation in ufll for the rest of your life. But there's a huge amount of humor in it, and it's timeless, and Mr. Weasley is a goat. While it does not have Chris Tucker or Jackie Chan kicking people in it, it certainly has its merits.

Teribithia is the sort of kids movie that's 60% bullies picking on the main character. (Kinda like war movies, I was going to say, but the comparision between kids movies and war movies is probably a post in itself, if not a sociology thesis.) I've seen enough of these movies to rewrite my childhood, so one incident of bullying now becomes the entire fifth grade. That one incident was actually Charlie Sheen from Lucas, but it's now my memory, not a Corey's.

The other 40% is the actual movie. About 6% of THAT is nargles and snuffaluffagi, yet this 6% is the only thing shown in the commercials. If you want an effects shot not in the commercials, you're in the wrong movie. The movie itself is fine, but it was marketed on a fly-fishing lure to attract the schools of Narnia-phile and rainbow-LOTR and [creative Harry Potter fish name] to bite. Bite they did not, but it would have been good for them if they did.

We start Hell week with El Cielo, which literally means the sky but figuratively means heaven. It's not exactly hell: it's the polar opposite, if I may understate the case. But you'll see where we're going by the end.