Credit where it is Due: Part Two

*situation has been resolved, Thanks Phil---Mike

A couple of years back I worked freelance for a site called gunaxin.com. The arrangment lasted a couple of months, tops. In that time they published 5 articles I put together. Today, I was working up a resume with my writing experience and publishing history. So I went back to gunaxin.com to link those articles for said resume. They are all credited to some guy named Eugene Ritterspaugh. This is the second time since the end of the freelance arrangment that my work has been misattributed by gunaxin.com. The first time they had my articles listed as by admin@gunaxin.com. I sent an email to Phil and he assured me it would be corrected, and invited me to come back freelance again.

I was working on Never Saw It Coming at the time and honestly did not have the time to devote to writing for gunaxin.com.

Don't get me wrong, Phil was a great editor, a vitural anti-F-Bomb missile defense system and taught me alot about setting up a blog and formating posts for the right impact. He is an all around a great guy and gunaxin.com is a great place to go for a laugh.

But as a writer seeking to get my foot in the door, I need my previous work to be properly credited. So this week I will be reposting the articles I did for Gunaxin, here, so I can be assured that my work is credited to me. Check back this week, I'll have one up a day. Also, I jumped feet first into 2008 and finally set up a twitter account, feel free to look me up here.

Two Cents: Original Flash Fiction.

Author's note: Wrote this a little over a year ago in an effort to get over writer's block, stream of consciousness-style, while I was finishing Never Saw It Coming. It's largely unedited, unfiltered, pure and raw. There may be a few mistakes. Enjoy.

I left home today with plans on getting lost; To find a Honda Road, if you will. I drove, simply for the sake of driving for nearly 3 hours. A half hour into the excursion, I turned off the stereo. Honda can do wonderful things with a four cylinder engine.  I can do wonderful things with that four cylinder engine and a manual transmission. About one hour, forty five minutes into the trip, I was on an unfamiliar road in Western Vanderburgh County, not even sure of the name of it. I had that tachometer steady at forty-five hundred in fourth gear. This means I was going about sixty five miles per hour.

As I said before, unfamiliar road. My personal definition of a Honda Road is a twisty two lane road with little traffic.

A corner snuck up on me. I.E. the turn was sharper than it appeared. This alone, easily correctable, get on the brakes, don’t jerk on the steering wheel, down shift on the way out, you’re through, no problems. That’s how it should’ve went. The little matter of the apex of this sharper-than-it-looks turn resting on a land-bridge, or a small concrete span that covered a drainage ditch changed matters. The road surface changed, roughly, from asphalt to concrete. The bump and the road surface change was enough.

The back end of my Honda started to slide. At this point I noticed a freshly painted  bright yellow concrete abutment and a little white wooden cross off the slide of the road.

Somebody made this same mistake and died here.

I learned in every book I’ve ever read on the subject and through practice, in collision avoidance, never look directly at what you’re trying to miss. Human eyes are part of one of the most sophisticated guidance systems on the planet. In other words, your body tends to go where you’re eyes have settled. So I didn’t look at the little white cross or the concrete abutment, but believe me I knew where they where. I focus on a point away from the turn, where I want to go. I downshift, from Fourth to Second. Clutch in, clutch out. Off the brakes, on the gas. I feel the backpressure from the rpm spike through the car, through me. My little Silver Honda self-corrects from the slide, and I fire out of the turn.

I am not about to die. I do not get to experience side curtain airbag deployment, I do not have to explain to my insurance company why I was driving at twice the posted speed limit.

But my body reacted before my mind. My adrenal gland spit a measure of go-fast juice into my blood stream. In my bloodstream it’s found a way to my muscle structure and major organs. That full body tingle you feel after a good scare: That is a self-produced performance enhancing drug. Find a way to fire the adrenal gland at will and no athlete would ever shoot steroids again. I’m grinning with pupils dilated, nostrils flared, winding up through the gears with no more thought than breathing while sleeping.

A short time later I notice my car is handling a little mushy. My grin fades, I begin to look for the problem. It’s short search. I’m driving down a twisting two lane road, completely ignoring the center line, at a hundred seven miles per hour.

Time to slow down. Wasn’t ready to go home, pull over, light a cigarette. The world creeps back in, need to find a job, need to clean the house, got to go to the grocery.

Fuck thinking.

 I’m back in the car and driving again, closer and closer to the edge. As close as I can get to that fabled Zen-no-mind state without chemical aids. The leaves are turning. Red, gold and brown, I see but it doesn’t register. Late October, not too cold, windows down, radio off. Speedometer creeps higher and higher, I’m still heading west. I don’t know this road, but I do. Blind curves without slowing, downshift for the hairpins. Puffs of blue-white tire smoke as I stomp the accelerator again. Each turn, every shift, I leave the real world and its real problems further and further behind.

I don’t know and don’t care where I’m going, I’ve got a full tank and a fresh pack of cigarettes. The only thing at matters is out the windshield, the mirrors could fall off of my little silver Honda and I wouldn’t care. I’m not looking back, and they’re just extra drag anyway. I don’t think about the girl I almost gave up on, or whether or not I was right when I tried. I don’t think about my next car payment, I’m not even worried about getting the speeding ticket I richly deserve at this point.

The edges between the little Silver Honda and I blur, the steering wheel moves as easily as my fingers, I shift without thinking, I don’t even have to listen to the engine, let alone check the tachometer. I just know when to shift. The brake and gas pedal connect me to the tires, and the seat tells me about the road. Just drive, as automatic as breathing.

Hairpin ahead to the left, Truck in my lane. Too slow. I Am Not Slowing Down. I scan through the trees that would actually be quite beautiful if I stopped to look at them, no oncoming traffic, I dive under the truck, into the opposite lane at the apex of the turn, and I’m through. The road straightens out, and I push the pedal down. Over the wind and engine I hear his horn blaring. He’s probably flipping me off. I don’t look back, because he’s behind me, and therefore, doesn’t matter. The road forks off ahead of me, I go right, no idea how fast I’m going, but apparently to was too fast for the bird that couldn’t quite clear the windshield. I hit it with a thump and a spray of feathers. Too bad. Thousands more, quick S-turn, I fire through it. Death was waiting for me behind that concrete abutment on the side of that nameless road that no longer matters. Now he’s riding shotgun and looking to fill his quota.

I’m not thinking about Student loan papers or committing myself to more debt in a lousy economy. Heading back to school isn’t even on my radar here. Just drive, Keep Driving. The bird, now just feathers and meat, doesn’t matter at all. I’m not thinking about rejection letters or not getting called back. I’m not worrying about the roommate that doesn’t like paying his part of the bills or the neighbor that routinely lets her dog shit in my yard without bothering to clean it up. I’m not even thinking my dickhead ex-boss, Dan. He doesn’t seem to merit the kick in the teeth I’d love to give him for running his company into the ground and leaving twenty of us high and dry. I’m not thinking how we all poured heart and soul into his business and tried to make it work while he was taking long lunches and playing golf. I refuse to think about Rob and working with him for five years. Before we showed up that morning almost a year ago and found the doors locked. Dan hadn’t even given us a heads up. Before the bank foreclosed on Rob’s house and his bitch-wife left him the same day the status-symbol his and hers Beamers got repossessed. Before Rob kissed his pistol goodnight. Before we buried him, all of us quaking with grief, rage. The bitch-wife and Dan had the nerve to show up. I am not thinking about wanting to kill them.


The road ends in a T-junction. I have to stop. Indiana 69. The sign reads.ßMount Vernon
New Harmonyà

I take a left, because not thinking is growing tiresome. The road is straight and flat and I am driving too fast, no longer melded with the little Silver Honda. Near the red-line in fourth gear, I see a sign flash past. It reads Bellefontaine Cemetery. I stomp on the brakes and put the car in neutral, before cranking the wheel over and pulling the handbrake. My Little Silver Honda seems to enjoy the abuse. She spins around just over one hundred-eighty degrees, and billowing a cloud of tire smoke. I slam the shifter into first and stomp on the gas. The tires spin, throwing loose roadside gravel, chipping paint. I never would’ve done this to her a year ago. Not thinking about her not being mine next month.

If Death is still riding shotgun, he knows this place as his scorecard. Me? Nineteen years ago we buried my grandpa here. Two years ago, we buried my grandma beside him. Six months ago we buried Rob here. Alone. It dawns on me that I know this cemetery far too well. I park my little Silver Honda, and get out, it doesn’t take long before I find the big marble headstone with “Seals; John F. August 3rd 1919- July 19th 1990 and Mary V. January 15th 1924 to June 17th 2007.

The big marble rock has two pennies sitting on top of it. My dad left them there when we buried Grandpa, and he told how Grandpa always kept loose change in his left hip pocket. Grandpa was a wry man with a dry sense of humor. If someone offered unwanted advice or said something just plain stupid, he’d fish around in his pocket and give them their two cents back.

There isn’t a lump in my throat. I am not blinking back tears. I am not walking to the back of the cemetery, at the top of the little hill, under the big oak tree with it’s red-gold, brown and green autumn foliage. I am not stunned to see the grass hasn’t fully reclaimed the earth behind the stone that read Robert B. Kellerman; May 7th 1978- February 14th 2009. Tell the same lie to yourself long enough, eventually, you will start to believe it.

Rob was my best friend for nine years, He was my roommate in college, got me on with Dan’s company. We worked together, pulled off the impossible, bagged accounts together. We drank at Smitty’s on Monday nights, not watching the game. I don’t think about helping him move into the house the bank took. I don’t think about the breakneck drive to the hospital when his little girl came two months early. I won’t think about horseshoes and lawn darts, backyard cookouts. I don’t think about bachelor’s parties, his and mine, both of us stumbling drunk. At least he had the guts to actually go through with it. I won’t think about the speech I gave at his wedding reception, or holding the rings and pretending to look frantically for them at the altar.

I realize I don’t even know what the ‘B.“ on the headstone stands for.

I am not thinking about the gun under the driver’s seat in my car.

I look past the stone, to the little retention pond at the back of the property. A hand painted sign reads “Private Property, No Fishing.” and something under that I can’t make out. A great Blue Heron is stalking the reeds along the bank, blatantly ignoring the notice, and a Mallard duck chuckled a warning to it’s flock, somewhere unseen.

The heron stopped, still as a flagpole, watching something in the water, then quick as lightning, he’s swallowing some poor fish. Death filling his quota.

If the Heron had lips, I think he would’ve been smiling. Then he flew off.

I look down at Rob’s headstone, still not blinking back tears and I grin.

I reach in my pocket and fish around. Find two pennies, light myself a cigarette. I smoke it slowly, not sobbing like a little boy. Then I head back to the car. I reach under the seat, and notice a red light flashing on my phone. My gun in one hand and my phone in the other, I check my messages. Four missed calls, three new messages, all text, all from the girl I almost gave up on.

“Where are you? Call me.”

“Why aren’t you picking up? Everything okay?”

“We still on for tonight? Love you.”

I’m not crying. I’m not laughing. I am putting the gun back under the seat. Death will have to fill his quota elsewhere.

I text her back, because I don‘t want her to hear me like this “Yeah, still on, running a little late. See you in an hour. Love you too.”

I left the pennies on Rob’s headstone.

It was a stupid idea, anyway.

Credit where it is due.

If not for Timothy Zahn, I would probably not be a writer today. If not for his Heir To the Empire trilogy, My book probably wouldn't exist.

When I was kid, I was, like most little boys, nuts for anything Star Wars. I had tons of the action figures toy X-wings, TIE fighters, Y-wings even Slave I and the Millennium Falcon. My obsession didn't stop there either, with Return of the Jedi bedsheets and various other little childhood memories that lines George Lucas' pockets.

I remember making little Star Wars sequels starring those toys with my buddy Dan and a PXL-2000 in the back yard. A flooded drainage ditch was Dagobah. The weeds along the fence where we stood the Ewok Village play set was the Forest Moon of Endor. Earthworms and crawdads were horrible space monsters that menaced our intrepid action figure heroes. I even had a Endor Rebel trooper and a Boba Fett, whose heads popped off, that always managed to get decapitated by a lightsaber in those little movies.

Then, when I was 12, I felt like I should be growing out of those toys for boys. I packed most of my Star Wars stuff into boxes and put it in the attic. That same year, my mother took us on the yearly family vacation to Florida. She absolutely loved to eat at the Cracker Barrel. My brother, my sister and I, however, did not. It always turned into a fight. First, Mom would ask us if we wanted to eat at the next Cracker Barrel. We would all say no. Then Mom would get mad, scream at us to stop whining and we'd wind up eating at the Cracker Barrel anyway, taking an hour long pit-stop on what could have been a sixteen hour trip. Between my mom and my sister and their frequent pit stops, one of those trips between Evansville and Daytona actually took three days.

It was on one of those pit stops that I loathed, that I found myself browsing the gift shop at a Cracker Barrel. Not because I wanted to, but because my sister demanded that we look around. I think my little sister wasn't truly happy unless she was inconveniencing as many people as possible. While I was wandering around, moaning and moping, huffing and puffing, a Star Wars logo jumped out from a rack at me.

It was the cover of Dark Force Rising. At the time, I didn't know who Timothy Zahn was, I was a 12 year old boy, and I didn't read much outside of school. I was far more interested in riding my bike, video games and getting to Florida where I could spend a few days playing in the surf and sand and riding rides at Disney World, before being confined to Grandma's house for the last few days of the trip.

But here was a book-on-tape that I could pop into my walkman and listen to during that extremely long road trip. I would not have to listen to my sister whining, my brother deafening himself with Pantera or Metallica or whatever it was he had blaring on his own walkman. So I dug into my pocket and bought it. So the rest of the trip in the back of mom's Delta 88 was surprisingly pleasant. On the the return trip I picked up the other two books from the Thrawn Trilogy, and Dark Force Rising turned out to be a very wise investment, because Grandma snored...loud enough to be heard throughout her entire house. The headphones and Anthony Daniel's narration helped me block out enough of it to actually sleep those last few days.

About a month after that summer vacation, I wrote my first sci-fi epic. It was a blatant rip-off and had all the depth and complexity that a twelve year old boy could muster. Needless to say it was horrible. I wrote it out by hand in a half-used notebook from the previous school year. I still have it. A few years later, at 15, I began writing my first full length novel. I finished it by the time I finished my first year of college. It, too was horrible. I also wrote a 90-pages screenplay for a class taught by Patti Aakhus at the University of Southern Indiana. It was a little better. In the interceding years I had numerous false starts and I have page after page of half-formed ideas to show for it. Then, I started writing what became Never Saw It Coming. Tim Finnegan, Renee Williams, Maggie Gomez and even the Reverend Father Jonathan Blake became as real to me as Darth Vader, Luke Skywalker, Mara Jade and Grand Admiral Thrawn.

I loved them, I hated them and I killed a few of them. The process of writing hurt, led me to go to work tired and spent, to skip classes and forget plans with friends. I would not trade it for anything in the world. It had to be done.

I never would have thought to put pen to paper without first hearing, then reading Timothy Zahn's foray into the Star Wars Universe. I have trouble believing it has been twenty years since he guided me on my 'first step into a larger world'.

I can only hope that my stories have the same effect on someone out there.

From the "I wonder what took them so long." file

I just read from a (poorly) translated Norwegian newspaper's website, that the WBC, which stands for "We're Batshit Crazy" Westboro Baptist Church is planning a trip to Norway to stage their unique brand of douchbaggery at the funerals for the victims of Anders Breivik's shooting and explosives laden rampage. (http://www.dagbladet.no)

Mommy didn't hug me enough and Daddy hugged me too much.

Now, I usually shy away from ranting on the WBC. Mainly because they make it to damned easy. "God hates Muslims, God hates Ryan Dunn, God Hates whoever is famous and dead, God hates US Soldiers. God Hates <insert minority group here>"

I mean, seriously it's like being a coyote in a hen house full of deaf, dumb and blind chickens. There are literally too many ways to mock these assclowns.

Seriously, even the KKK counter-protested these idiots! How stupid and moronic to your views have to be to drive the paragon of inbred racist fucktardery to side with the ALCU against you?

Until now I've held off on mocking you. But that's all over now. Are you ready for it? Because here it comes:

Okay Fred, Margie, Shirley, I am very sorry that you're all crazy white trash hate mongering idiots and I'm exceptionally sorry for your offspring and followers, because they are apparently weak minded easily lead tools. But this is America, You are Americans. You have the right to free speech and to stand on street corners at yell your idiotic and backward views to anyone willing to listen. Even if you wish to disrupt the funerals of soldiers, sailors and Marines who volunteered to protect those very rights, even if you wish to protest the funerals of anyone with a certain level of noteriety that will get you a little bit of press.

But now you seem to wish to spread your message....what is your message anyway? You seem to hate anyone and everything that isn't a Phelps? Procreation through Incest only? Is that your message? I can't seem to figure it out. You shout extremely offensive things at the top of your lungs, then sue anyone who would presume to infringe upon your right as an American citizen to be a total fuckwit. It's in that Constitution thingie they keep in D.C.

would like you to go fuck yourself.

DING! DING! DING!

I think we hit it. The Phelps clan just doesn't want to work anymore. You're a nice lil' baptist church according to the US Government, so you don't even have to pay taxes. Nice racket...and here I though you were idiots....no you're just evil little beady-eyed zealots with creepy smiles.

I do hope you take your show on the road to Norway. Europe knows exactly what to do with hatemongering ideologues now. They only had to make the mistake of ignoring one, once. I hope the local police forces there are powerless to stop the enraged citizens there from pounding you into a fine red paste, just as they were powerless to stop Breivik's murderous rampage.

A word of caution to anyone that might find themselves on a flight to Norway with these Batshit Crazy morons, you may want to get off. That sort of toxic stupidity may be contagious in an enclosed area for a prolonged period of time.