Jeff – Page 27 – Jeff Carlson

August 24, 2012September 21, 2012

I’m Back (And I Screamed Like A Girl)

Okay, we’re up and running again here at jverse.com. Hope you like the new site! There are still Photo Galleries to correct, Art Galleries and a Videos page to build, but the long, detailed slog to perfection may be long and detailed.

Instead of waiting, I decided it was time to pull the trigger.

Bam. We’re live. It’s a go. Thanks for coming. Please kick the wheels and press the buttons and let me know what you think… keeping in mind that the Videos, Art, and Photo Gallery pages ain’t all there yet.

Here’s my bonus fun for you today:

It’s a horror story, kids. Sit down and grab your flashlights. Here’s how it starts. We have two computers in our house. First there’s my laptop, which is virginal and pristine, never connecting with the net or games or any program except MS Word. It’s where I write. Second is our 2TB desktop PC, which is chock full of Angry Birds, mp3 action, and other goodies. It’s also the only machine with a printer, a Brother 2200 laser printer.

The Brother is a workman-like beast. It doesn’t do color. It churns out receipts and fat manuscripts for us because I prefer to line edit on hard copy. That’s right. What a Neanderthal. But I see things on paper that escape me on a screen, and I spend waaaay too much time in front of computers every day. It’s nice to take a print-out to the couch or outside.

Occasionally the workman-like beast is prone to jamming. Yesterday I tried to print a block of 50 pages and it hummed and whined and failed. Jammed again, I thought. So I opened the tray and reached in without looking. My eyes were on the prompt window on the computer monitor.

!!!!!SOMETHING SQUIRMED AGAINST MY FINGERS!!!!!

“What the hell?” I muttered.

I leaned away from the computer and glancing into the printer… where I found a wood beetle as fat as my thumb… AS FAT AS MY THUMB… skittering inside the paper tray with its nasty antennae lashing in confusion…

wood_boring_beetle — As Big As Your Thumb!!!!!!!

“Geeeeeeeeeeee!” I shrieked like a four-year-old Barbie, ripping my hand from the machine.

Fortunately, this desk sits in our living room. I yanked a handful of paper and bug from the printer, threw open the back door, hucked everything onto the patio, grabbed a spare shoe, and WHACK WHACK WHACKED the yellow mushy guts out of the foul beast. Holy crap on a stick does a wood beetle as big as your thumb have a lot of goo inside it.

Now the big question. How does something as big as your thumb get inside a printer that has no openings larger than a 1/8″ seam?

Could it have come inside a ream of paper as a larva? Grown inside our printer for days or weeks, dancing madly not to get sucked up into its gears each time I printed a file?

Rod Serling, are you there???

August 22, 2012

Any Station This Net…

Do you copy? This blog is going live again… My new web site is up. (Almost.) It’s up! It’s up!

April 24, 2012September 27, 2012

CENTRAL COAST WRITERS’ CONFERENCE

On September 21 – 22, Jeff will be an instructor at the 28th Annual Central Coast Writers’ Conference at Cuesta College in San Luis Obispo, California.

April 16, 2012June 15, 2012

AFTERWORD FOR “MONSTERS”

More from the LONG EYES Collection

“Monsters” must be the most disturbing piece of fiction I’ve ever written, and I say that as someone whose first novel opens with five billion people dead.

The heroes of Plague Year are murdering cannibals — the heroes! — but this story bothers people more. I think that’s because the protagonist of “Monsters” deliberately turns to evil. In the end, he chooses to walk into the darkness, whereas Cam and Sawyer and the other survivors of Plague Year have no other option.

I got this idea from a newspaper article, and, later in the story, the nameless hero reads about other mindless attacks both large and small. A lot of people are unhappy. Some of them try to make everyone else unhappy, too.

Why? What drives them to spread the misery instead of working to reduce it?

Sometimes I think it’s a failure of imagination. Many of us are short-sighted. We can’t see beyond our own immediate needs, and I think that’s incredibly sad. It’s also scary as hell. “Monsters” is upsetting, but it’s probably also the best story to emerge from my horror phase. Too often, life is horrific, and it’s hard to argue that “Monsters” doesn’t capture that feeling.