. . . wasn’t this johncullinan.net a second ago? Is it multiple personality disorder? Mid-life identity crisis? What gives?

No, nothing quite so serious. The change is mainly for professional reasons. I’ve already published in my “Clark Kent” life as John Cullinan, mainly in my role as a Unitarian Universalist minister (you can visit my “Rev. John” site here), and I plan to continue writing and publishing as a UU minister.

So, I’m keeping my real name (don’t worry, honey. Mom. Dad.), but I’m adopting a pen name for the world of fiction — partly for eventual marketing reasons, but mostly because it helps me keep my “stuff” separated. No big deal, really. I’m treating it as an open secret.

So where’s the name from?

Simple. It’s my initials, plus a surname from a few generations back in the family history (I’d tried several combinations with this formula, this was the first name that didn’t have the .com domain already registered — also very important!).

So, welcome to the “new” site.

I’m headed back to rewrite-land.

I’ve been following Chuck Wendig over at terribleminds for several months now. Each week, he gives his readers a writing prompt for flash fiction. This week, I decided to jump into the fray. The creative exercise is always good (and I’m banned from physical exercise for the next few weeks with a bum knee, anyway). Chuck’s challenge this week:

Your story will be titled: “The Fire of the Gods.”

And that’s it. That’s all I demand of you.

Well, besides the standard parameters, of course. The story must be under 1000 words. Post it at your blog (not in the comments here, or I may delete it), then link back so we can all see it.

Today, I took a break from manuscript rewriting and banged out a new short story. This exercise was harder than it looked. Here it is (first draft, no revisions). Not sure I ended up with what I was hoping for.

“The Fire of the Gods”

If you walk out past the chic end of town, you’ll eventually arrive at the graveyard of the status symbols, the place where the shiny toys of the upwardly mobile eventually go to die. It lies beneath the mobius strip of highway ramps leading away from the city.

If you’re brave enough to climb down to the feet of the towering, concrete pylons you’ll find amongst the broken cell phones and soiled Swedish furniture the village of the ones that time forgot – broken veterans and under-medicated ex-cons gathered around trash can fires.

Turn left from there and walk toward the shortest of the pylons. There you will find, his back turned so that the fires are out of view, Prometheus – still suffering after these many thousands of years. For a bottle of White Lightning, he’ll invite you to sit down with him.

“The myths all get it wrong,” he’ll tell you. “Bullfinch was a lying shit.”

Then he’ll take a sip from the bottle and set the record straight.

“Fire was humanity’s invention,” he’ll say. “The gods were too busy fighting with one another and fucking everything that moved to be able to have created anything so useful, so . . . beautiful. Back then, humans were a wiser bunch. They kept the secret only with a select few, who tended the mother flame and taught the rest a deep fear and respect for its power. But the minute human beings started putting their masterpiece to use, the gods grew jealous. They coveted. And they began to scheme their way into possession of fire. Continue reading →

I took the Jeopardy on-line test in January, only my second attempt at it and the attempt paid off. I was invited to an in-person audition at the end of the month!

Being a Jeopardy contestant was one of my “before I turn 40″ goals. Actual TV guestage may not happen before the big birthday, but I’ll take the audition invite as a consolation prize if not. The attempt is all.

Have you ever had a moment where you’re chugging along reading an enjoyable novel when you suddenly hit a brick wall in the form of a weird word choice? Not a wrong word choice — a weird one. The sentence is structured properly and is perfectly coherent, but there’s just this one word that makes your brain go all wrinkly.

I don’t think I’ve had the experience before last night, at least not in a way that’s still bugging me today. I was reading along at a nice pace in a novel by one of my favorite mystery writers, when I got to a sentence that read:

He looks nothing like his picture, she thought irrelevantly.

Irrelevantly? Okay, I get it: a frivolous thought, not particularly germane to the character’s current predicament – but what an odd descriptor. A perfectly acceptable adverb, and yet somehow in context of the sentence it was just . . . off. Not wrong, but not right, either.

Perhaps it’s just me, but it made further reading for the evening difficult. I attempted to move ahead, but my eyes were continually drawn back to this bothersome little word while my brain continued to get that wrinkly feeling, like I’d seen something vaguely disturbing in my peripheral vision, but I couldn’t bring it into focus by staring at it directly. I just could not stop looking at it — the reader’s equivalent of pushing your tongue up against a sore tooth just to see if it still hurts.

Irrelevantly? I scanned the word often enough to the point where it ceased to resemble English.

It was weird word choice so disruptive that it was the first thought that popped into my head this morning.

No, the first thought was, “Dammit, my teenager missed the fucking school bus, again.” But that was followed almost immediately by, “Irrelevantly?”

Now, all too keenly aware of what poor word choice has done to my own addled brain today, I fear I’m going to be paranoid about my own rewrites for the time being. What lexical train wrecks have I steered into without paying attention?

As if rewriting weren’t painful enough. Beware the weird word choice.

Chapter one of a new novel begun today. Rewrites on “Seraph” are still moving along, but I felt the need to spend some time on new material, as well.

I normally get really nervous about film adaptations of books. Hugo delivers. Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful. I was literally speechless for a half hour after it ended. Go and see!