Mehitobel Wilson: writer, reader, chronic curmudgeon.

Tomboy bombshell cowgirl; lover of funk, attracted to roadsides.

Besotted with spots.

Friend to sleaze.

Admirer of filthy films, fleshy steaks, Hong Kong rap, new felt and pocket-knocking 8-balls; prefers 10 gallons of hat and 4 fingers of Jack.

Procrastination here breeds urgency there. Urgency begets sharper fiction. The dream: hone it to a splinter, and sink it deep.

So I'm here.

Greed

I collect and hoard. I buy things quickly. I am not thrifty. I do not save money. I take the phrase "go for broke" literally.

There are two reasons for this. First, some people just collect. It's a compulsion. There are items which, in the distant past, I chose not to buy, hoping to prove to myself that I could indeed walk away. Yeah, I can resist things that my soul says I really must have, but I mourn forever. I should have gotten it, I say.

Also, I know what it feels like to have nothing. Three times now, I've ended up with nothing but the clothes on my back and maybe some crap in a knapsack. This has trained me to want things. I want them bad, I want them now, and I will get them: sure, I'll probably lose them eventually, but for the time being, I'll be surrounded with shit that makes me happy.

I don't earn the kind of money that a collector needs handy, so I just spend my food budget instead. This year, instead of hunger pangs, I'm having figure pangs. The figures that are coming out this year are so many and so fine that I have little hysterical crises about them. For the first time, I've given up the thrill of the chase for the certainty of ownership: I pre-ordered a bunch of stuff. That's slack and much less fun than the hunt, but I can't risk a sellout, because I can't pay aftermarket prices.

Sideshow's got Chaney from LONDON AFTER MIDNIGHT. (Sold out now.) They've got three nice figures in the Universal 8" Series 5. They've got goddamn Dwight Frye as Fritz from FRANKENSTEIN. McFarlane's got the Clive Barker's Lost Souls series. Movie Maniacs Series 5 has a foxy Candyman, a nice EvilAsh, and fucking Jaws, complete with Orca and half of Quint.

Hong Kong figure designer Eric So has ruined my life by sculpting a 6" Sam Lee figure, to be followed this summer by variant parts which will allow Sam to sit on a Labretta. We won't discuss the price of these particular items, now, will we. No we won't.

Let's not mention books at all.

The strange thing is that I've found myself reacting to mass-produced, readily-available items with a collector's panic. There's a coat I want, and a jacket, and a very ugly skirt, and I am all spastic because I don't have the money for them. I have to remind myself, these are in stock. These are not one-of-a-kind. These are not limited to an edition of 500. There are plenty of them, and what's more, they will probably go on sale. They will depreciate.

(All my figures depreciate too, because I don't believe in packaging. I treat them like sculpture. They are three-dimensional and I want all dimensions handy. REAL collectors would stab me in the heart for this.)

My priorities may be as skewed as can be, but goddamn, the glee I feel at the prospect of owning things that are simultaneously neato AND stupid is worth it. It's a life. Give me toys and books and leopard fur, and it's a happier life.

posted by Mehitobel Wilson at 11:32 AM

I'd like to take this opportunity to point out that the word "blog" bothers me. It is not a word. Okay.

Pool enables me to focus. The silence, the visualization, my bizarre (but necessary) stances, the feel of a perfect throw in my shoulder, the tiny rituals of pace, chalk, swivel, draw - it's both warlike and balletic. I love it. I play Crown 9 when alone (tougher spread off the break), 8 when with a good partner, and Diamond 9 when I'm teaching someone how to play or when I'm playing badly myself and need to realign my focus. I would dearly love my own table.

A friend of mine, a long-term email friend (four years) whom I've yet to meet because I'm too much of a lazy bastard to drive to any of his shows when his band tours, mentioned recently that he had a pool table in his basement. "Screw the show," I said, "I'll just come hang out in your basement!" And I meant it.

I still do, even though it dawned on me that one ought not sally forth to a stranger's basement - how many horror movies have I seen? Basements are abbattoirs! Table felt is absorbent! I'm just so wet-mouthed over the concept of a private, basement-dwelling pool table that I neglect such things as self-preservation. That may be the instance when focus becomes tunnelvision. (Pocketvision. Sighting down the cue. Oh, stop it.)

Focus:

I used to be athletic. There was ballet, in which I arranged my bod into a painful, elevated display, and then stood there until I thought the muscles would fall from my bones, pot-roast-style. When I was in high school, I ran cross-country. I was terrible at cross-country: I'd fucking win (team? What's a team?) Then I'd collapse, puking, while covered in some berserk rash from overexertion and dehydration. The team doctor pulled me because I wasn't smart enough to pace myself. I was incapable. I just went flat-out until the race was finished.

While in college, I was really into rock climbing - you see a theme here? First I held positions in order to be pretty, then I made myself really sick because I had to win, and then I latched onto cliffs (without such pussified devices as "harnesses" or "sense.") Let your leg down in ballet, you fuck up the aesthetics of a dance. Big deal. Lose your lead in a race, you lose the race. Who cares. Lose interest in the cliff, well, you don't get to just say "nah" and walk away.

You either finish, or you fall.

This mindset carries over into my fiction, too. I can only write well when I'm positive that I'll be able to see the story through. Any real chance of a ringing phone, a power outage, a neighbor choosing to have a party, prevents me from succumbing completely to story-brain. When I'm waiting for a phone call or a food delivery, I can't write: instead, I dick around with stuff like my Sam Lee web page. Finish, or fall.

I don't have my own pool table. Not having a table might be good for my brain-training. This way, I have to play in public. I have to play in the most popular bar in town, which also has a bank of 8' tables. It's the most distracting goddamn place possible for pool. (I love it as a bar, loathe it as a pool hall. As a bar, I love that everyone's there, dogs are roaming around under the tables and woofin', the Clash is on the jukebox; as a pool hall, all of those things SUCK for me. If you want to throw my game, play a Clash song, because I'll be wholly fucked then, lost in Clashy love.)

Right now, I tend to leave the tables once the joint fills up, because I'm too stressed by the crowd, by people jostling my cue or staring at my ass while I shoot.

But if I could ever learn to play well no matter who was bugging me, maybe I could learn to disregard distractions while I wrote, too. A story isn't a run, it's not a cliff, it's not a game. In order to be a better writer, I have to learn to fall.

Holy shit, that's scary.

posted by Mehitobel Wilson at 5:10 PM

I inspire horror in others because of my sheer lack of taste. Fashion sense? You know, I swear, I really do have it, but I ignore it in favor of stuff that I truly like.

Other girls read fashion magazines and played with dolls. I watched movies, movies, movies - and played with action figures. Take all female trash-cinema stereotypes (jungle sex goddesses, beach bunnies, Barbarella and her ilk, prison-flick chicks, chopper-flick chicks, etc.) and shake their clothes off (you know you wanna) and, well, that's what's on my damn floor. My vision of What A Chick Oughta Look Like has been completely formed by B-movies and pulp book covers.

Car Wash may well be partly responsible for my big red hair, my insane leopard fetish, and my weird attraction to mechanics: maybe it's not the mechanics I like, but the jumpsuits.I have my own jumpsuit, of course: it even has Smooth Lyle embroidered right on it.

These shoes? Despite my preference for cowboy boots, I desire these shoes. When I look at them, I don't think "stripper" or "disco" - I think rollerderby. I think chick-athlete exploitation flick. You know those very hip new blouses that consist of one (1) square of fabric that ties on, leaving your back and your ribs bare? I see those and I think, why, that's just the perfect shirt for a good chainsaw-killin'. Khaki shorts on men? They remind me of camp counselors, and that means someone's going to hang their heads from meathooks, doesn't it? Fake fur clothes (I have LOTS) remind me of many happy things - all the way from Tarzan to Mad Max to The Hills Have Eyes.

None of this is conscious. It's just what happens when you're more entertained by the sorts of movies that don't show up in air-conditioned multiplexes. Video killed the runway star: fashion "seasons" mean nothing at all to those of us that watch Sunset Boulevard, Ten Violent Women, and Black Christmas in a single night. "Trends" don't apply when your tastes - skewed as they may be - are more ingrained than your social sensibility.

So when you see me in a gorilla-fur jacket, I'm not going to a club, I'm just thinking about the movies.
posted by Mehitobel Wilson at 11:49 AM

Howdy.

It's hot and thick here today, and I'm woebegone. The next Gothic.net deadline is in 8 days, and though I have the articles ready, once I deliver them... I'll only have one issue to go.

Quitting Gothic.net is like breaking up: you know it's time to shed the lover because month after month it's the same exhausting crap, but you're really going to miss his friends. Chances are, just as with a breakup, I'm going to be on edge around my replacement. Take it, it's yours, I don't want it anymore - but we had some good times and kitten, if you fuck it up, I'll feed you your kneecaps.

But it had to happen.

The day after I resigned, I sat down to write fiction. Then I got up again. I really, really do need some time to just relax: no reviews, no hustling for contributions, no slogging through follow-up emails.

(No reviews! Lordamighty, I've been reviewing my head off for three years straight, now.)

I'll miss a lot of things about Gothic.net, of course. But I'm damp in the the mouth at the thought of reading older and non-genre books which I've not been able to touch due to deadlines. I finally get to catch up on folks like Chandler, McDonald, Stark, and Kersh; I get to play with O'Connor and McCarthy and Palahniuk and everyone else I've just plain neglected.

It's been three years since I've been in this position, eyeing this vista of freedom. It's not actually HERE yet, but it's so, so close. I wrote for too many magazines at once, I couldn't say no. And you may think, "You're complaining about that, babe? Get off it. We'd love to have all that work." Well, I know.

When it got to the point that I had to turn down anthology invitations because my NF pressures were too strong, I knew it was time to clear the decks. Fiction: I missed deadlines and declined others, thereby missing out on a number of mass-market anthologies. I was asked last year to do a collection, due out 2002. This year I had to cancel it, simply because I hadn't been able to write enough fiction.

That's bad, friends.

I loved the platform I had at Gothic.net for my Seeing Spots pieces, and I wish I'd taken more advantage of it. I could have had 24 pieces up there, and I only did eight, because I had no idea if they were even being read. Well, I shouldn't have cared whether they were or not. So I've brought my Spots here, and will continue to do them whether or not anyone's reading, because, at the very least, it keeps my fingers limber during the day so I can go home at night and make up vicious stories.

So, that's the plan.
posted by Mehitobel Wilson at 5:13 PM