I keep listening to Ruby Don’t Take your Love to Town, both the original version by Kenny Rogers, and the cover by The Killers. Lately, I’ve been thinking about a reboot using some of the same words, but changing the narrator to a post-op transsexual talking to their spouse instead of a handicapped war veteran. No, not as a parody, but as a real effort to “reboot” the song. So anywho, this here is my first attempt at remaking the song:

You painted up your lips and rolled and curled your tinted hair
Ruby is that my makeup that you plan to wear?
I could take you dancing, just let me get my gown
Oh Ruby, don’t take your love to town

I know my Asian sex change has made you awfully sore
But I was dying slowly in the life I’d led before
And yes it’s true that I am not the man I used to be
Oh Ruby, you still mean the world to me

It’s hard to love a spouse when they’ve gone and swapped their sex
I never changed my mind on you, and don’t to be your ex
You’re still the one love of my life, the best I’ve ever found
Oh Ruby, don’t take your love to town

She’s heading out to see a man; I’m cryin’ on the floor
“For better or for worse” don’t mean a thing no more
And I know she had a husband back when she made those vows
Oh Ruby, don’t take your love town

Oh Ruby, for God’s sake turn around

I was 17 when I first got on the internet. My first internet account was a dial-up shell account, meaning that I ran all programs through a terminal. For you folks that got on later and only know the World Wide Web, you cannot appreciate what the Internet used to be.

It was a library. It was our public repository of knowledge, and it already had an amazing collection of articles and fiction. Using databases with names like Gopher, WAIS and VERONICA, one could find all kinds of articles. Or, if you wanted to talk to folks in the “forums” of the day, you used NNTP, which is also known as Usenet News.

This was all very complicated, and not at all user friendly, and when the next wave of engineers showed up with graphical browsing on the WWW network, almost all of us embraced it as being better.

At first, it was better. After all, HTML was so easy that even a brain-dead pot junkie like me could figure it out, and I can’t understand any other coding methods. (Well, aside from BASIC, and that’s a threaded language, where almost all programs are now object oriented.)

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Right, I’ll make this short and simple. I want to run a contest, with the prize being a co-starring role in the next vampire book. I’ve seen how my vampires are the most popular creatures in the Mystical World Wars setting, and I’m hoping that because people like them more, they will want to participate in this contest to become a part of the vampires’ world.

I am thinking of making online reviews the contest entries. People can post multiple reviews to make multiple entries into the contest. The same review can also be posted to multiple sites for the same effect.

The book in question will be a murder mystery musical, and it will find Lucas and the Colby triplets trapped on board a cruise ship, trying to solve a grisly series of murders to save their own necks.

My intention of having the contest would be to generate more review, and also to generate interest in my current readers to become more vocal fans. So if I only got five entries, I’d just cancel the contest and forget I ever said anything.

Additionally, I’m trying to gauge how many of you would want to get into a vampire book, so I’ll be watching the comments to see how this goes. If this posts gets high traffic, but few comments, there’s no reason why I should bother holding the contest.

You might wonder why I keep harping on getting new reviews, or on trying to get you folks to talk. Well let me show you a pretty picture:

Those lovely numbers are almost double my normal traffic this week, and they came because I got a whole bunch of reviews all coming in at the same time. Each review pulls down only a few new readers, but because there’s so many new reviews out, the trickles of traffic combine into a veritable flood.

Your reviews do that. That’s why I keep begging for them. And, if it might get you to write more reviews, I’d be willing to hold regular contests for co-starring or guest starring roles.

So, how about it? Do this sound like a contest you’d enter? Or is it like every promotion else I do, not even worthy of a meh?

It was my father I first talked to about my dreams. I wasn’t sure who else to approach, and it was such a strange problem to have. It’s just that I don’t remember the vast majority of my dreams. I know, most people don’t. We wake up recalling what we’d just dreamt, but within minutes the clarity and detail is lost.

Except, I had certain dreams that didn’t fade. The memories stayed with me, haunting me. They weren’t bad dreams, but I always felt like there was something important happening. Why else would I remember them?

But this isn’t why I’d come to him. The more recent problem was. I’d begun to experience moments that felt like I was reliving one of my dreams. I would have the exact same conversations, go through the same actions. Of course I already knew what déjà vu was thanks to Monty Python, and this didn’t seem right. I didn’t feel like I’d done the same thing. I felt certain it was my dreams guiding me.

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Last night on Twitter, I had a long ramble about my efforts to get feedback for my writing and rarely finding anyone willing to offer anything useful. Along comes a follower, @harmony0stars, who was
willing to go to the site and poke around. She was there less than two minutes when she said, “Hey, I don’t like this formatting with the indents and no line breaks.”

Aha! Feedback! And you know what? I’ve heard this complaint before. I believe I heard it the last time on Twitter…back when I’d last told people “talk, damn you!”

This reader proceeded to deliver the finest live review of Zombie Punter ever, and she had me smiling all night long because she really, REALLY understood the subtler points I was trying to make in the story. Other people liked it, but still weren’t as observant about the direction I was taking the story. Let me tell you, when a reader truly grasps the work that well, it’s truly better than sex.

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During the holidays, I read a lot about how some folks get really stressed out. There are a lot of attempts made at false cheer just for the sake of having  “the holiday spirit,” and there’s of course also a lot of depression caused by the gross over-marketing of the festivities.

I got out of that kind of celebration, and this year, I expect to have the most low-key holiday ever. Luche’s family will be coming to visit us, and we’re going out to dinner at the Platz. I’ve got a gift for my sister-in-law. But this was a pair of ear muffs that she’d been wanting after she saw mine, and I finally lucked out and found the vendor downtown again this weekend. I didn’t ask for anything, but I’m sure there’s a shirt or two for me. Luche’s mom uses every visit as an excuse to bring small gifts, so this will be par for the course.

We’ll share some food and celebrate each other’s company, and all of the rest of the holiday trappings are going to be missing. We don’t have a tree up, or decorative lights, and we don’t need them. For us, all we need are good food, good conversation, and maybe a little bit of yuletide cuddling. (Well, between me and hubby anyway. Mili might object to enthusiastic cuddling.)

If the holiday season starts to drive you nuts, and your family is getting on your nerves, just give yourself some space and think: you could be alone, cold, and without friends or family. You could be in much worse places than listening to your crazy uncle, or to your cranky in-laws.

And if that doesn’t help you to smile, have you tried imagining putting them all in a giant blender on puree? That works for me every time.