Michael Montoure's Blog

“You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.” ― Anne Lamott

So a friend of mine asked me over on Facebook what life was like in the UW Early Entrance Program. I don’t talk about this much, mainly because I don’t want people to think I’m bragging. My wunderkind days are long behind me. But the experience itself is worth writing about, although I’m — not really sure where to start. All I knew was that my answer was going to be too long to post there, so here we are, and here we go.

The EEP was a curriculum designed to provide the equivalent of four years of high school in just one year, to fast-track you right into the UW proper. They only took about a dozen students per year, all between the ages of 12 and 15. Me, I was 15, so I just barely squeaked in, on my second year applying.

By then I’d already spent one year in high school — I’d skipped eighth grade to get there — and I desperately wanted out. (For one thing, my fellow students in the “advanced” English class in high school made fun of me for . . . having a large vocabulary? Okay, sure.)

Since the EEP was highly competitive to get into, they were really only interested in serious, hardcore academics who held their scholastic endeavors as their highest, most important goal. I was able to get in using my greatest talent, which is to say, charming people and telling them exactly what they want to hear. (I also tested well, which helped. But I was never the model student that I claimed to be, or that they wanted me to be.)

My parents didn’t push me into this, by the way, not at all. They suggested it to me when they found out about it, but they also made it clear that it was completely up to me to go after it or not, and that they would absolutely support me in whatever decision I made. I know this wasn’t the case for a lot of the other EEPers. (Yes, that’s what the staff called us. EEPers! Isn’t that cute? And maybe just a liiiittle bit dismissive? Anyway . . . . ) I know that some of the others were definitely there because of parental pressure, but that wasn’t something I had to deal with, and I will always be insanely grateful for that.

Now, I can’t speak for what the program is like now, of course, or even what it’s been like for most of its history. Just what it was like the year I went, with the faculty they had at the time.

So. What was it like?

It was a fucking crucible.

Take a dozen of the brightest students from all over the state. Poorly socialized loners, for the most part, none of whom had ever had to work very hard to get an “A” in their life. Kids who were used to being, academically speaking, Very Large Fish in their respective little ponds. Shove ’em together in a little building at the edge of campus with a sign out front that prominently reads, “DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY LABORATORY,” in case they don’t feel freakish enough already.

And to run the place, gather together a faculty who . . . . well . . . .

Here. If I had to give you one anecdote to explain the problem with the place, it would be this:

There was, in our little building, a large room set aside as the Student Lounge. One afternoon, a bunch of us were running around in there, making a lot of noise, you know — playing, right?

One of the teachers came in, looked at us in annoyed disgust, and snapped, “You’re all acting like children!”

I don’t think I actually said it out loud, but my immediate natural reaction was, “But — we are children.”

None of the teachers ever, ever seemed to quite grasp that. They seemed to fully expect that our maturity and our emotional development would match our intellectual development — that we were (or should be, at least), effectively speaking, miniature adults. Which was fucking insane. Our brains literally hadn’t finished forming yet, for Pete’s sake, not to mention that we were going through puberty.

How this could have escaped their attention is completely beyond me, but it did. They were all fascinated by the idea of these “gifted” students that they were studying, but entirely ill-equipped to deal with the reality of what we were like. I’d go so far as to say they weren’t interested in what we were like — just what they thought they could shape us into.

Not everyone makes it. I believe it was pretty common in those days for at least one or two students to drop out before that first year is over. I know we lost a couple, and there was one student in my year who left for a couple of months for a stay in a mental-health facility.

The curriculum was designed to break us. I don’t mean that they meant to leave us as broken individuals, although in some cases they certainly did; I mean this in the sense that you would break a horse. If you think I’m exaggerating, let me point out that the same teacher I mentioned above gleefully bragged to us, more than once, about the fact that there had been students who had bad enough physical stress symptoms from his classes that they had been hospitalized. 

Yeah. I’ve never had as strong a love-hate reaction to anyone as I did to this man. I wanted him dead and I just as desperately wanted him to like me and approve of me.

Anyway, for the most part, our emotional needs and our health aside, this approach was . . . largely good for us, and kinda what we needed? It was really hard to suddenly be getting C’s — and D’s and F’s — for the first time, for most of us. A lot of the students in my class would be in tears when papers and tests came back. But being forced to realize that while we might be special, we certainly weren’t unique, was a wake-up call I think we all probably needed. We were being graded on a curve against other students who were as smart as we were — or, horror of horrors, smarter! — and we were really being pushed and challenged for the first time. Which was good. Mostly.

But I still think they didn’t need to push us quite that hard. They were supposed to be preparing us for college, and maybe some of us went on to have the kind of rigorous, grad-school-bound academic career that they were preparing us for — and they made it pretty clear that if you didn’t plan to go on to grad school, then in their opinion, you were wasting your life — but for the most part, when that first Transition Year was over and we got out onto the “real” college campus — we found it much, much easier than anything we’d just gone through, and never again faced that kind of scrutiny, or pressure, or difficult material, or high grading standards. Which, for me, and for a lot of the others, meant that we didn’t take the rest of our college careers at all seriously, and just kind of blew it off. I never graduated. I’m sure I’m not alone in that.

(On the other hand, while I never got my degree, and didn’t have much use for most of my classes — being at the UW meant I had Internet access back in 1987, and that I was around at the beginnings of the World Wide Web, and so it accidentally gave me a huge head-start on my eventual career in web application development. So there’s that.)

And while they were supposed to be preparing us for college, they kind of dropped the ball on, in any practical sense, actually preparing us for college. Like helping us figure out how to choose classes, or maneuver the college bureaucracy, keep track of credits, plan out your major, anything. They just wanted us to be intellectually ready and seemed to assume we’d figure out the rest on our own. I mean, sure, you could go to them with questions if you had them, but they were perfectly content to just kick you out of the nest when they were done with you and let you either fly or fall. I rarely went to them with questions about how to navigate all this shit because I didn’t even know what questions to ask, for the most part.

But anyway, I’ve talked about one teacher in particular, but what about the rest of the staff?

Well, without naming any names — there was the program director, our distant monarch, who had started the program with her husband and seemed at a bit of a loss how to deal with all of us now that he was gone. We rarely saw her, except for those occasions when she would summon us individually to her office to lecture us about living up to our true potential.

Much like our English teacher, who we each had a mandatory one-on-one conference with every week, which was basically like spending the week knowing you were going to have to go to the Principal’s office. Authoritarian, overbearing, and a ridiculous stickler for things being done exactly her way — she drilled us over and over again, writing out her long list of punctuation rules from memory, and we were docked points if we didn’t have them exactly the way she phrased them. Boring and aggravating at the time, but to this very day you could wake me out of a dead sleep and show me a sentence and by God I’ll be able to tell you exactly where you misplaced a comma.

There was our physics teacher, who was such a stupefyingly boring lecturer that I’m having difficulty remembering what he even looked like and I had literally almost forgotten about him entirely until I sat down to write this, but who did give us some pretty fun lab assignments and experiments, so that almost (but not quite) made up for it.

There was our French teacher, who literally spent the entire first semester teaching us the sounds of French — what letters indicated what sounds, and precisely how to pronounce those sounds, how to hold your mouth and so on, teaching us what a “voiceless bilabial fricative” was before he would teach us a single word of the language and what it meant. Since I had taken French already in my one year in high school, I was bored to death at the time, but now I can still pick up any French text and read aloud from it with a pretty high degree of accuracy, and understand maybe . . . a quarter of it? So that’s an interesting party trick, at least.

There was our math teacher, and good Lord do I ever mean “teacher” in the loosest possible sense. He was a brilliant mathematician, but practically hopeless at explaining anything about math that he considered obvious, which was practically everything. He would write down a long equation on the chalkboard and say, “Now, from this, we can obviously derive this,” and write down another equation that looked completely different, and there were two or three of us who would nod and think, oh yes, of course, that makes perfect sense, and the rest of us would be like, wait a minute, what the fuck? And then he’d have to spend most of his lecture time explaining concepts he’d expected us to grasp immediately, and we were frustrated, and he was frustrated, and I don’t know if he ever got a chance to get through all the material he wanted to in his allotted hour.

He was a lousy instructor, but a pretty fun guy to be around, actually, and of all the teachers, he was the one who treated us the most like he thought we were people. He got along with us really well. Arguably too well. Midway through my year, he was quietly, privately asked to resign, for exactly the reason you might think a charismatic young teacher of underage students might be asked to resign. If you know what I mean. And I think you do.

At least he wasn’t fired, unlike our poor student counselor, who was “let go” late in the year — with absolutely no explanation to us forthcoming from the rest of the faculty, no matter how much the angry students — or even our angry parents — demanded one. It was an internal matter, we were told, and absolutely none of our business. I never did find out what happened for a fact, so I can’t say this for certain — but I have it on good authority from multiple reliable sources that he was fired simply because they found out he was — *whispers* — g-a-y. Not that I’ve ever heard even a rumor of any impropriety between him and any of the students. Just that fact alone was reason enough to fire him. Again, this isn’t something I can confirm. But it was the 80’s, and that sort of thing did happen.

Most of us, myself definitely included, had considered him a friend and a confidant, and he had been the one person there who seemed genuinely invested in our development as human beings, not just as scholars. He was someone we could talk to, who would always listen — not just about school, but about everything. And to have him taken away from us without explanation like that — well, it was a betrayal. There’s no other way to put it.

And for me, it was the last straw. This pretty much cemented my distrust of any supposed authority — authority in general, and definitely theirs in particular. We had all gone into the program with the understanding that they wanted to study our long-term academic progress and our lives over the years to come, and I have never answered so much as a single survey nor gone to a single reunion, because fuck those people.

Now, from everything I understand, the program is much, much different today — there has been a complete staff turnover multiple times by now — and I gather that now they take a more rounded, humanitarian approach, and they seem to turn out some pretty happy, well-adjusted kids. So if you have children you’re considering placing in the program now — I’m not trying to warn you against it! I have no reason to think there’s anything wrong with the program today, despite the fact that they burned their bridges with me years ago. I’m just saying that if you had been considered enrolling in 1986, and you didn’t, then, well, you probably made the right decision.

But . . . if I had my life to live over, knowing what I know now . . . . would I still make the same decision? Would I still have entered the program?

Well, yeah. Fuck, yes.

I don’t know how I would have made it through another three years of high school. Academically, emotionally, or socially. I don’t know how the rest of you managed it. I just couldn’t face the idea, but dropping out wasn’t an option — that was laughably unthinkable to me — so it was this or nothing, as far as I was concerned.

And while I may have had my issues with the staff — you know, maybe one or two — we students had something absolutely miraculous.

We had each other.

That was where I formed my first real, solid friendships, some of which last to this day. This was the first time I was around people who I thought actually understood me, who I could relate to. We were kind of going through hell, all of us, academically and personally. But for the most part, we had each other’s backs.

That experience, being with those people — that’s what made me who I am today. And I wouldn’t trade that for anything.

 

The post The Early Entrance Program (or, I Was A Teen-age Genius Lab-Rat) appeared first on Bloodletters.

Well, by the time you read this, another Crypticon has come and gone, and I’ll be missing it already. If you also miss it — or if you missed it entirely, if you see what I’m saying — why not keep the horror-related fun by joining me at SIFF, the Seattle International Film Festival, for some of their scarier-looking offerings this week? (See what I did there with the title of this post? Pretty clever, right? …. Okay, fine.)

Here’s the list of everything I have tickets for this week, and I hope I see some of your frightened faces there!

Wed, Jun 1, 2016

The Eyes of My Mother, 9:00 PM

Shoreline Community College Theater, Theater Building, 16101 Greenwood Ave N #1600, Shoreline, WA

“When a grinning lunatic attacks a Portuguese-American family living in a secluded farmhouse, it awakens dark desires in a young girl who begins to act on her psychotic impulses in this gorgeous, Lynchian horror fable shot in sinister black and white.” Home invasion flicks are kind of hit-and-miss for me, but this one looks interesting and arty. I’ll give it a shot.

Tickets here: http://www.siff.net/festival-2016/eyes-of-my-mother

Thu, Jun 2, 2016

Tag, 9:30 PM

SIFF Cinema Egyptian, 805 E Pine St, Seattle, WA

“Gonzo Japanese director Sion Sono’s latest starts when a busload of schoolgirls suffer a gruesome, darkly comic demise, sending the sole survivor into a nightmarish world of lake monsters, murderous wind, bloody weddings, and back-flipping pig men.” Oh, Japan, never change. Looks like a funnier version of Battle Royale. Can’t wait for this one.

Tickets and trailer here: http://www.siff.net/festival-2016/tag

Fri, Jun 3, 2016

Under the Shadow, 11:55 PM

SIFF Cinema Egyptian, 805 E Pine St, Seattle, WA

“Set in Tehran during the Iran/Iraq war of the 1980s, a mother, trapped in her apartment during the chaos and falling bombs, worries that malevolent spirits have taken possession of her daughter, leading to a bone-chilling horror tale of paranormal and real-life terrors.” Sounds clever.

Tickets here: http://www.siff.net/festival-2016/under-the-shadow

Sat, Jun 4, 2016

The Night Stalker, 5:30 PM

“This penetrating psychological thriller from Seattle’s Megan Griffiths (Lucky Them) features a spine-chillingly magnetic performance from Lou Diamond Phillips as death-row inmate Richard Ramirez, California’s notorious serial killer.” He managed to scare me in the trailer, so this one seems worth checking out.

SIFF Cinema Uptown, 511 Queen Anne Ave N, Seattle, WA

Tickets and trailer here: http://www.siff.net/festival-2016/night-stalker

Holy crap. I can only assume that, thanks to all the long overdue love and attention I’ve been spending on this website lately, my other website, Don’t Read the Latin, must have gotten jealous. Because I tried to log on to that site this morning, to look back at the tags on our podcast episode for the Best Horror of 2015 (because I’m doing a similar panel at Crypticon tonight), only to be faced with a page that was completely blank other than this error message:

Warning: require_once(/home/montoure/dontreadthelatin/wp-content/plugins/jetpack/_inc/lib/tracks/client.php): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /dontreadthelatin/wp-content/plugins/jetpack/class.jetpack-tracks.php on line 6

Fatal error: require_once(): Failed opening required ‘/home/montoure/dontreadthelatin/wp-content/plugins/jetpack/_inc/lib/tracks/client.php’ (include_path=’.:/usr/local/lib/php:/usr/local/php5/lib/pear’) in /dontreadthelatin/wp-content/plugins/jetpack/class.jetpack-tracks.php on line 6

Fun stuff, huh? And great timing! Since I want to be promoting Don’t Read the Latin at the convention this weekend. But, you know, fuck me, right?

Fortunately, I am an uber leet haxor and am diving straight into the code right now to try and fix this, since I can’t even get to the site’s WordPress admin panel right now.

How’s your morning been?

____

Update: Crisis averted! Man, I must be slipping — that took me almost ten minutes. Blowing away the malfunctioning plugin took no time at all — I’ll re-install a newer version and figure out what went wrong, but later, not today — but once I had the site back up, it had now developed a major layout problem. Somehow. The right hand column, namely, all the actual site content, was showing up under the left hand column. Not ideal. Took me a few minutes of fussing with the CSS to get things back to looking normal.

In conclusion — DRtL, daddy still loves you, baby, and I promise we’ll spend some quality time together after this weekend, but for right now, please behave, okay?

….. They just won’t let us have our heroes, will they?

When I was a little kid, I knew what a hero was — a decent person who saved other people, who knew the right thing to do, and did it. I knew dozens of fictional heroes, and loved their adventures, and I’m not exaggerating when I say that these stories and their values helped make me a better person.

But somewhere along the line, the idea of telling stories about decent people who did the right thing became — unfashionable.  Started to seem “unrealistic.” (As if realism was ever a legitimate concern with the kind of pulp fiction I’m talking about.)

It seems like no one wants to tell their stories any more. Not without bringing them down a little, making them flawed and tarnished. The 2009 Star Trek movie gave us a Captain Kirk who is a swaggering, hot-headed, arrogant dude-bro with no respect for women and no mercy for his enemies. On Doctor Who, David Tennant went out not with a bang but a tantrum, sacrificing himself to save someone, yes, but not before loudly complaining about how unfair it all was.

Man of Steel gave us a Superman who broke his enemy’s neck, and along with it, my goddamn heart. Batman v. Superman continued the trend, giving us Superman as a brooding bully who clearly doesn’t think humanity is grateful enough, and a Batman who’s a murderous psychopath who burns his brand onto criminals, when he’s not shooting them or blowing them up without a second thought. Batman, whose lore contains the rule that he never uses a gun.

And then today, there’s this:

Marvel Comics has started a storyline in which it is revealed that Captain America, a hero created by Jewish artists during WWII, has “actually” been a secret Hydra agent (read: “Nazi”) all this time. The editors assure us it’s not a trick, it’s not an impostor, it’s the real Steve Rogers.

If you’re not quite immediately grasping just exactly how shitty this is, you should go read this article, which argues the case very eloquently:

So let me be very clear: I don’t care if this gets undone next year, next month, next week. I know it’s clickbait disguised as storytelling. I am not angry because omg how dare you ruin Steve Rogers forever.

I am angry because how dare you use eleven million deaths as clickbait.

— On Steve Rogers #1, Antisemitism, and Publicity Stunts

And I’m sure, as sure as the sun’ll come up tomorrow, that this will get undone next year, next month, or next week. I know comics. Nothing is permanent.

So why, you might thinking, are people just overreacting so badly to this latest stunt to drive sales? If they’re just going to change it back in a few months anyway, what difference does it make?

It makes a difference.

Let’s say you’ve got a flag. Now, maybe you’re not a super-patriotic person or anything, but this flag matters to you — maybe it belonged to your Dad, or your Mom. Let’s say it matters to you enough to hang it out on your front porch for the Fourth of July.

Now suppose some asshole comes along, pulls the flag off its pole, throws it in a pile of dog shit, and stomps on it with his boots for good measure. Then looks up at you grinning.

. . . . Would you be upset? Why? Whatever for? You can just put the flag in the washer! You could even have it dry-cleaned — it will be as good as new!

Sure, it will. But maybe — just maybe — you won’t ever be able to look at it again without thinking about that asshole and what he did.

Let me talk a little about why this flag — excuse me, I mean, why Captain America — matters to me. And it all has to do with Superman.

See, when I was a kid, I never cared two cents for Captain America — I read DC Comics, thank you very much, and I can’t overstate how . . . central the myth of Superman was to me. It taught me that the only appropriate use of power you have over others is to use that power to lift them up. That formed a baseline for a code of ethics that I still hold to. Every time in my life I’ve put myself in harm’s way to help someone, it’s been because somewhere deep down in my brain, I felt it’s what Superman would do.

So that’s why, like I said, Man of Steel broke my heart a little.  It’s why I went off on a rant on Twitter when Clarke Wolfe said that someone on Instagram had threatened to kill her — yes, really — because of her opinion of said movie:

Some people say it doesn't matter that movies are making Superman darker, grittier. It does. Here's an example why. https://t.co/SvSkBtdNox

— Michael Montoure (@montoure) April 22, 2016

Imagine someone who idolized Christopher Reeve's Superman thinking that this kind of behavior is okay. Difficult to picture, isn't it?

— Michael Montoure (@montoure) April 22, 2016

We're no better than the heroes we aspire to. Superman is now, first & foremost, about using violence to solve problems. Not helping people.

— Michael Montoure (@montoure) April 22, 2016

It is dangerous and disingenuous to assume, as storytellers, that the dreams we let into the world have no effect on how people act.

— Michael Montoure (@montoure) April 22, 2016

I have consoled myself over losing Superman as an untarnished icon by telling myself, “Well, at least I still have Captain America.” Because I had grown to love the character through the Marvel movies. Here, at last, on the screen was the kind of hero who’s strongest power was his sense of decency, the kind DC didn’t seem interested in giving me anymore. A character who brought into battle not a sword, but a shield.

I bought into it. Literally. I own a couple of Captain America T-shirts, a backpack shaped like his shield, and a leather jacket replica of his uniform that simultaneously makes me feel slightly ridiculous and incredibly powerful when I put it on.

Today, I’m wondering if I’m ever going to put it on again.

This trend towards making all our fictional heroes all grimdark and violent frustrates me in general, but here’s why Superman and Captain America are the last goddamn characters you should be doing this to:

In 1998, a series of 60-year anniversary issues of Superman: The Man of Steel had the character inexplicably transported back in time to relive the plot of his first appearance and then battle Nazis in occupied Poland and the Warsaw ghettos Meanwhile, two young boys dream up an angelic protector in their time of need. Upon hearing their descriptions, and seeing a drawing of the character (who bears an uncanny resemblance to the as-yet unencountered Superman), their grandfather tells them that what they have created sounds more like a Golem than an angel. When Superman arrives to protect the ghetto inhabitants and fight back against the Nazis, the connection the authors wanted to make becomes apparent: Superman is a Golem, created by two young Jews as protection against the Nazis.

— Comic Books and American Cultural History: An Anthology, by Matthew Pustz

Superman as a cultural Golem — an idea created like the legendary Golem of Prague, a man created from clay to defend the Prague ghetto from antisemitic attacks and pogroms.  Interesting idea. If anything, the story of Captain America is even more like that of a Golem — with Steve Rogers as the clay that a Jewish scientist molded into a protector against the Nazis.

Look — these are ideas that matter. When you get to write the continuing official adventures of a character who has endured for decades and should endure for decades more — those characters aren’t yours. They belong to everyone. You’re just their caretaker for a little while.

And to try to do “fun, edgy, different” things with these character to drive sales — that’s not creativity, that’s not entertainment. That’s just vandalism. On a massive, culture-wide scale.

Another Crypticon is upon us! In fact, it is this weekend, May 27th-29th at the Sea-Tac Hilton Hotel here in Seattle! (I swear to God that I’m going to get better at posting these things with a little more advance notice. Someday. Today is not that day.)

( …. However, if you were on the Bloodletters Announcements List, you would already have seen this yesterday.)

(Also, this post should not be mistaken for last year’s Crypticon schedule announcement post, which you may have seen on Monday when I accidentally spammed all my social media accounts with a bunch of posts I was trying to archive. Oy gevalt. Anyway . . . . )

I always have a great time at this convention, but this time I’m especially looking forward to it. They’ve got such a great guest list this year. Lance Henriksen! Michael Biehn! Kane Hodder! Tony Todd! And Elvira! Freakin’ Elvira, people! And so many, many more.

I’m going to be on six panels this time, including two I’ll be moderating (Self Publishing and Found Footage), which is the most panels I’ve been on at a convention in a while, so this is going to be a busy weekend! To top it all off, in one of those panels I’ll be interviewing one of the guests.  This is going to be the first interview I’ve ever done! I’m slightly nervous!

Here’s my schedule for all you stalkers out there:

Pacific Northwest Horror Enthusiasts and Friendship Society

Friday | 4:00 pm | Alpine Room

Let’s get together IRL and chat. Danny Knightmare, Don Thacker, Gory B. Movie, Heather Marie Bartels, John M. Lovett, Julie McGalliard, Kaj-Eric Eriksen, Lorelei Shannon, M. Nessk, Matt Dinniman, Michael Montoure, Tony Kay

Kenneth Calhoun Interview

Friday | 5:00 pm | Location TBD

Kenneth Calhoun is a local professional makeup artist, whose career was launched by winning the 2011 Crypticon Makeup Competition. Some of the films he’s worked on include Jurassic World, The Revenant, and X-men Apocalypse. He is currently working on next year’s blockbusters at Legacy Effects.

Best Horror of 2015

Friday | 6:00 pm | Alpine Room

Let’s talk about all the great movies that came out last year! Danny Knightmare, Gory B. Movie (M), Ian Bracken, Michael Montoure, Ronnie Angel, Tony Kay

Horror’s Gatekeepers

Friday | 8:00 pm | Columbia A

Why do some people think they have the power to determine what’s horror and what isn’t? How is it effecting the genre? If you love splatter films, do you have to hate arthouse horror, and vice-versa? Don Thacker, Heather Marie Bartels, John M. Lovett (M), Matt Faure, Michael Montoure

Self Publishing vs. Traditional Publishing: Pros and Cons

Saturday | 1:00 pm | Columbia B

Amazon has made it so easy to publish your writing for the Kindle and other devices. But are there drawbacks? What should you know before you start? And is anybody but Stephen King still making money from traditional publishing? Katie Cord, Timothy W. Long, Jason Andrew, Satyr Brucato, Mark W. Coulter, Thom Carnell, Michael Montoure (M)

Found Footage: So Over or Evolving Art Form?

Saturday | 7:00 pm | Columbia B

The found-footage craze that started with “The Blair Witch Project” was exciting and fun…at first. Then we all got tired of shaky-cam. But is it done, or just evolving? Elements like smart phones, webcams, and security cameras are giving the genre new energy. Courtney Karg, Don Thacker, Gigi Guerrera, Jason Hawkins, M. Nessk, Matt Dinniman, Michael Montoure (M)

Great Double Features

Saturday | 11:00 pm | Alpine Room

Some movies just go together well. Heathers and Jawbreaker. The Ring and The Grudge. Labyrinth and Mirrormask. Let’s toss out our favorite potential double features and why they’d be great together. And what about the opposite? Are some movies just terrible together? Don Thacker (M), Douglas Willott, Jasen A. Mortensen, John Portanova, Michael Montoure

Hope to see you at the con! If you spot me in the hallways, or have any questions after my panels, don’t be afraid to come up and say hi! (I’ll spare you the “I don’t bite” joke here. Everyone in horror uses that one.)

Hope to see you at the con! If you spot me in the hallways, or have any questions after my panels, don’t be afraid to come up and say hi! (I’ll spare you the “I don’t bite” joke here. Everyone in horror uses that one.)

So I’ve been spending the past few days doing a long-overdue massive overhaul of my website Bloodletters. Installing and customizing a new theme so the site actually looks good on mobile devices, adding new plug-ins, deleting old ones I don’t use anymore, things like that. I am, in fact, still hip-deep in middle of all this work, so if you’re looking at the site right now and something seems hinky, that would probably be why. Just ignore it for now, things should settle down in a few days.

While I was at it, I thought, “I know, why don’t I go through my old posts and get rid of a few things that aren’t relevant anymore?” You know, announcements of limited time offers that had long since passed, invitations to “upcoming” events that weren’t so much up-and-coming as dead-and-buried at this point, and so on.

So I moved a bunch of these posts to the Trash, and then thought, “wellll, maybe I don’t want to get rid of them — maybe I just want to mark them as Private instead so only I can see them.” So I restored all of these posts and then started to do just that.

Then I moved on to other things, got up to get coffee, and noticed that my phone had popped up a notification of a Twitter mention:

@montoure What happened? Why the 3 year old spam?

— Sean Chitwood (@darkmane) May 23, 2016

I read that and thought, “What? What is he talking about — ?”

And then I had this sudden sinking feeling, and ran back to my computer.

Sure enough — once all those old posts had been moved back to “Published” status, something somewhere in WordPress’s tiny little nine-volt brain decided that meant that I had just now published them and that they were brand new! So it fired them all off to my connected social media accounts.

Yes. The exact same outdated posts I had figured that no one would be interested in anymore suddenly got spammed all over my Tumblr, Facebook, and Twitter. Cleanup on Aisle Six. I wanted these posts to just quietly go away. This is literally the opposite of what I wanted.

I then had to go through and tediously remove each one of those social media posts one at a time — because of course none of these sites have bulk management tools, who would need that?

I think I got everything. [EDIT: No, wait, I forgot about Google Plus. I just deleted those posts, as well. I’d like to apologize to my Google Plus followers. Both of them.]

Sorry for the confusion, everyone. And, umm, welcome to the mostly-finished new version of Bloodletters? Yaaay?

This is why I drink. Well — it’s one of the reasons.

____

(P.S. — If I remember right, it was also @darkmane who called my attention to the error messages that were showing up on this site a while back, too. Thanks again, man. At this point I owe you a free book or something.)

 

How much have I been ignoring this website, you ask? Here’s how much:

I’ve been aware for months now that some errant outdated WordPress plugin was barfing errors all over the pages here. Various people have mentioned this to me, and some weird combination of anxiety and apathy have kept me from actually doing anything about it. I finally just did, because one more person mentioned it, and that was apparently the threshold I needed to reach to tip me over into action. (Thanks, @darkmane.)

So, hey there, long time no see, huh? What, you may well ask, the hell is going on with me?

Hard to say. Part of it, sure, is still the same issues I mentioned in my last post (which was, Jesus, seven months ago). Part of it is that my burgeoning indie writing career hasn’t been much on my mind for a while — which is why I haven’t been doing any real new writing, or any real promotion, and that’s why my Amazon sales have more-or-less flatlined. So, therefore, my website where I’m MICHAEL MONTOURE, WRITER, has kind of fallen off my radar.

I don’t know. I mean, it’s not like I’ve stopped thinking of myself as a writer — I haven’t lost my touch, I wrote some new stories for my Halloween reading last year and they were very, very well-received. It’s just been kind of backburnered for a while? I intend to get back to it. At some point.

In the meantime, my creative energy has been going to other things. Don’t Read the Latin, my horror movie podcast with Jennifer Lovely, is still going strong (new episode goes up tomorrow morning!). Post-production has re-started on my webseries, Causality, and I’m getting back into my work on that. I’m continuing pre-production work on that Doctor Who fan film I mentioned finishing the script for, and if you want to keep up on news for that project, sign up for the mailing list at the creatively-named Doctor Who Fan Film Project website. (Maybe my future is in indie filmmaking rather than as an indie novelist? It could be. We shall see.)

Oh, and my last excuse — pardon me, I meant perfectly valid reason — for neglecting this poor little website is that having a website of my own just doesn’t seem as relevant any more? I’ve had this blog since 1999, but it’s been so seductively easy in recent years to confine my online communication to social media, despite the lack of ownership and ephemeral nature of such sites. Less effort to go where the people are instead of trying to get them to come here. Also, I’m just tired of looking at this site — the design seems hopelessly outdated (and certainly not very mobile-friendly). I’ve started a brand new blog layout from scratch, but . . . I haven’t touched that in months, either.

So that’s where we are. My efforts have been a little scattered, but I’m still fighting the good fight. You haven’t seen the last of me yet.

So, as I’m sure you remember from my last post — what’s that? You don’t remember my last post? Well — it was a while ago. You should probably go read that first and then come back:

“Always Working On The Wrong Thing: Guilt, Fear & Procrastination”

So, as I’m sure you remember from my last post, I’d been struggling with the fact that I haven’t been getting any real writing done, and that I was stuck choosing between projects — putting aside the amateur Doctor Who fan film script I wanted to finish, my two courses of action I was trying to decide between were a.) finishing the new original novel I currently have in progress, or b.) writing a sequel to Still Life so I’d have better start on having a series of books to promote.

Well, shortly after writing that post about the trouble I was having making that decision, the obvious answer just popped effortlessly into my head, complete and inarguable:

I was sad about not having a new book published to promote last year at Halloween. It would therefore be awfully nice to have a new book published to promote this year at Halloween. I can obviously finish the existing novel faster than I could write a whole new one from scratch. So, obviously, I needed to finish the existing novel. QED.

I was so relieved to have resolved this that I felt so much more relaxed, lighter, happier.

So naturally, I immediately sat down and finished the Doctor Who fan film script.

Look — I don’t claim to understand this brain, I just have to live in it.

The script is great, I couldn’t be happier with it. I think it’s going to be a fun, exciting project, and I think the end result is going to be great — I honestly think I’ve managed to come up with a story that feels suitably epic and yet well within my means to pull off. Not sure yet when I will be able to start actual production in earnest — I really should probably get myself a day job first — but I’m definitely looking forward to it.

Writing that script was about as effortless as writing gets, for me. So much of it already existed in my head — I’d been mulling over the scenes and dialog for years, so they spilled out onto the page like so many smooth and polished river stones. It’s still just a first draft, and there are a few tweaks I need to make here and there, but it’s a hell of a first draft.

Has that experience managed to put me back in the habit of writing? Yeeeeaahh, not so much, unfortunately. I still haven’t managed to pull off any “real” writing projects. (Any writing I can’t turn around and sell isn’t Real Art, you understand. At least, that’s what Capitalism tells me, and try as I might, I haven’t been able to unlearn that idea. So despite the fact that the script took just as much brain sweat, talent and craft as any other bit of writing I could work on, I still feel like I haven’t accomplished anything. But anyway.)

Recently, my friend and editor Elisabeth Knottingham approached me because she is also trying to get back into the writing saddle. You know, the one that goes on the …. writing …. horse. Look, it’s a metaphor, all right? I’d be able to pull one off with a lot more confidence if I’d been writing regularly. So anyway, she proposed that we come up with a word target and a weekly deadline for both of us to try to hit, and to hold each other mutually accountable. It’s not a bad idea. We both completely failed to produce anything last week, but we’re trying again now. We’ll see if we manage.

And since she asked me — half-jokingly, I’m pretty sure — if she could count her contribution to a long Facebook thread toward her word count, I’m declaring it now — I am totally claiming this post toward my word count. All 700 words of it.

Now to get back to work on that novel. Or maybe — well, Elisabeth thinks I should ease myself back to work with some short stories. So there’s another decision to over-analyze. I’ll let you know how it goes.

In ancient Rome, there was a poem

About a dog who found two bones

He picked at one, he licked the other

He went in circles, he dropped dead

— DEVO, “Freedom of Choice”

Okay, so you may have noticed that I haven’t started blogging regularly like I said I would. God knows I’ve certainly noticed that. And Not-Blogging may not have killed me yet, but I’m not feeling great about it, either.

This is symptomatic of a larger problem. As I alluded to in that previous post, I haven’t really been doing any real writing so far this whole calendar year. As you might guess, this is . . . . kind of messing me up, a little. I’m not doing the thing that I was designed to do, and that’s not the healthiest place to be in.

What’s the problem, here? Why am I not writing?

A good part of it is just . . . lethargy, depression, a general lack of energy and drive. That’s something I’m trying to work on, mainly with changing my diet and getting some damn exercise every once in a while. Slow progress, incremental steps.

The real problem is analysis paralysis.

Wikipedia defines analysis paralysis as:

. . . . the state of over-analyzing (or over-thinking) a situation so that a decision or action is never taken, in effect paralyzing the outcome. A decision can be treated as over-complicated, with too many detailed options, so that a choice is never made, rather than try something and change if a major problem arises. A person might be seeking the optimal or “perfect” solution upfront, and fear making any decision which could lead to erroneous results, when on the way to a better solution.

In my case, the decision that I’m constantly over-thinking is, which of my projects “should” take precedence at any given moment?

My actual current projects include:

This blog
My podcast (which is actually going well, largely because someone else is involved in it)
A funny (hopefully funny) urban fantasy thriller novel that I started two years ago that’s, I dunno, 20%-40% finished
Post-production effects work on a science-fiction webseries that finished principal photography two years ago

Projects that I’ve been thinking about a lot include:

A science-fiction comedy webseries
A found-footage horror webseries
A found-footage horror feature film
A sequel to Still Life
A light-hearted young adult superhero novel (or series of novels)
A new novel idea that popped into my head, like, two days ago, that I think has serious series potential
A Doctor Who fan film

That’s just off the top of my head. I’m sure there are others I’m not thinking of right now.

Let’s talk about that last one. That’s the one that I have the hardest time figuring out if it should be my highest priority or my lowest priority. On the one hand, it’s a project that I’ve been working on props and ideas for since I was fifteen years old, I have a tremendous amount of passion for it, and honestly, if I came down with a fatal illness tomorrow, not making that damn film would probably be my biggest dying regret. So, it’s a big deal, right?

But . . . .  The nagging little voices set in, telling me that it’s just a folly, that by definition I can’t make any money on it and so therefore it isn’t a real project, right? It’s not professional, and I should be working on something that will actually be part of my career. Okay. Fine.

On the professional front, the two big ones that loom over me are the novel-in-progress and the theoretical Still Life sequel. Two seemingly equally valid arguments bounce back and forth in my head:

You should be working on the novel-in-progress. It only makes sense to finish what you’ve already started before working on something else
You should be working on the Still Life sequel. All your research says that writing books in series is the key to self-publishing success. It only makes sense to work on the series where you already have one finished book under your belt.

Both of these make sense. Each argument perfectly counterbalances the other.

And so I end up doing nothing. I can’t make myself work on any one project, because whenever I’m about to, I think, “how can you be working on this when you have these other things to do?”

Something’s gotta give.

 

 

 

Look out! What’s that sneaking up behind you? Why, it looks like it’s another Crypticon, Seattle’s very own horror convention! And once again, I will be returning as a panelist, and if you’re going to be there, you should totally come to my panels, and if you’re not going to be there, then fine, I see how you are. Here are the deets:

Friday

PNW Horror Appreciation and Friendship Society

5PM Columbia A

“Come hang out with your fellow FB group folks. Say hi to old friends, and meet some new ones. There might be cookies!”

Kick-Ass Horror Films You’ve Never Seen

9PM Columbia A

“Are you sick to death of all the tired remakes and endless sequels? Come join this panel and unearth a world of great horror films that have slipped through the cracks! From old films to new ones, creepy to funny, disturbing to gory splatterfests! There is something for every kind of genre film fan!”

Saturday

Writing Horror: Avoiding the Pitfalls and Rocking the Story

5PM Columbia A

“No. Do NOT write that story about the mugging victim who turns out to be a vampire/werewolf /demon /serial killer. It seems like every story has been told and retold a thousand times, so how do you create something new? What makes for a good plot? How do you make your characters believable and not cliches?” (I’m the moderator of this one!)

Sparkly Vampires and PG-13 Horror: Genre-killing Crap or Horror Gateway Drug?

9PM Horizon

“OK, most horror fans can’t stand Twilight, and a lot of hardcore gore-hounds sneer at PG-13 horror films. But is it possible they’re influencing the next generation to become horror fans? Or are they just dead-end money machines?”

I look forward to Crypticon every year, natch, for the fun panels, great dealer’s room, advance film screenings, and hanging out with the friends I’ve made there in past years. But this year I’m especially looking forward to it, because I’m bringing Jennifer Lovely, my co-host on the horror movie podcast Don’t Read the Latin! (Which we’ve been doing for a whole year now, so if you haven’t checked that out, you really should!)

You might notice I have no panels scheduled for Sunday; I’ll still be around early on, but will be taking off in time to catch the 4:00pm showing of Valley of the Sasquatch at SIFF. I’ve enjoyed John Portanova’s previous work on The Invoking and The Device, so I can’t wait to check out his feature debut as a director.