So far the entire book has been build-up as we head to the inevitable confrontation between the powers of good (Will, Jim, Mr. Halloway) and evil (Everyone associated with the circus) and finally it feels like we’re getting somewhere.

Will, Jim, and Will’s father are all inside the library, which is where Dad hides out from the world. Mr. Halloway (Mr. H, from here on out) does a whole lot of talking throughout this section and, I have to say, I’ve read some of his speeches three or four times and I still can’t put all the puzzle pieces together precisely. However, the main idea is this: The carnival offers people the chance to be young or old, depending upon their desires, but this time travel comes with a price – your soul. Mr. H hypothesizes that the circus feeds on the souls of people, using them for their evil needs by promising them a return to their previous form “someday.” It’s all very deep, philosophical, and, quite frankly, Mr. H sounds like a raving lunatic throughout his numerous chapters of expositional monologue.

Amidst all this speechifyin’, the bad guy comes in to shake us out of our Philosophy 101 stupor by doing what bad guys do best – threatening the lives of everyone and then using a characters’ weaknesses against him. Mr. Dark has “the gypsy witch” put stress on Mr. H’s heart, bringing him to the brink of a heart attack, but not going over the edge – a concept that is fascinating, scary, and just plain cool. Once Mr. H is put under control, Mr. Dark begins prowling through the stacks of the library in search of his prey. It’s fairly standard villainy at first – “Come out, boys…I know you’re in heeeerrrreeee”, etc. But then Dark cranks it up a notch when he starts saying that he knows what will bring Will out of hiding – he’s going to go get Mrs. Halloway and take her to the circus.

He talks about how he’ll turn Will’s mom impossibly old – 200 years or more – and then release her, letting her go back to town, begging for help. She’ll approach neighbors she’s known for years, even Jim’s mom next door, but no one will recognize her and will run screaming from her corpse-like form. She’ll be left to wander forever, a barely alive husk of a person, tortured and alone.

Dude…that’s messed up.

Obviously things are really starting to heat up, so it should be fun to see where this story goes from here on out.

Just got an email from my editor at mental_floss (I wonder when that’s going to stop being so much fun to say). Aside from ordering up a couple more stories, he also told me that my first one got nearly 150,000 hits. Granted, I think I’m personally responsible for about 1/3 of those simply because I kept going to the site to make sure I wasn’t dreaming, but, still, that’s a lot of people checking it out.

Which, of course, means I have a lot to live up to now with my follow-up articles.

Which, of course, means I’m going to be lucky to get 1,000 hits this time around.

But, hey, if one big success means they’ll let me write a few bombs before finally realizing what a big mistake they’ve made, then I’m going to ride the wave as long as I can.

Keep checking back here for links to the new stories whenever they’re ready to go!

Recently I was toiling away in my cubicle, mindlessly realigning tiny little dots on a map, when the song Fred Jones Pt. 2 by Ben Folds came up on my MP3 player. As a big fan of this modern piano man, I’d heard the song many times before and always liked it well enough. But maybe it was because of the tedious, ultimately-in-the-big-scheme-of-things pointless task I was doing at the moment, that upon hearing it now the song finally sunk in.

We meet Fred Jones on his last day of work after 25 years at the newspaper. We don’t know his whole story, but there’s a definite feeling that he’s been forced into retirement, rather than choosing to go. He sits alone at his desk, his career packed up in what I imagine to be a banker’s box, waiting for someone – a security guard perhaps, maybe an HR manager – to escort him from the building. Meanwhile, his replacement waits in the hallway – “an awkward young shadow” – surely carrying his or her own banker’s box, ready to take over where the old man left off. Finally, his escort arrives and simply says, “I’m sorry, Mr. Jones; it’s time.”

There was no party for Fred. There were no rousing sing-alongs of “He’s a Jolly Good Fellow”. Why? Because “no one is left here that knows his first name.” And to everyone else this is just another day. Fred’s last day has as little impact on those around him as it did on his first day when no one knew he existed. He’s truly come full circle.

I think one of the most telling passages from the song is when life is compared to a train “where the passengers change/they don’t change anything/you get off/someone else can get on”. Because, really, unless you’re curing cancer, writing the Great American Novel, or running a country, most of us will never be remembered for our careers; we’re interchangeable pieces in the great machine. Perhaps more depressing, though, is the fact that what we do today will have little impact on tomorrow; “we don’t change anything” in the long run.

When Fred gets home, he tries to pass the time by painting a copy of an old photo slide he’s projected on a piece of canvas. Unfortunately, when he turns off the projector to view his work, the image doesn’t look right. I have a feeling that even if it were a stunningly accurate reproduction, it still wouldn’t have looked right to Fred on this day.

Fred’s world has come apart. He doesn’t know where he fits anymore. Just like the slide he uses as a template for his artwork, he used his job as a template for his life. When the job was there he could fill in the template and be satisfied with what he saw. Now, though, nothing looks right. His template is off kilter. His hand is unsteady. Nothing fits anymore in his world.

Perhaps the worst part for Fred, though, is that “he’s forgotten, but not yet gone”. He’s come to realize how little impact he made, how pointless his life has been, and now he has to live with that knowledge. One has to wonder how Fred will find meaning in his life. Or is it too late to find that meaning?

In the end, those last words from the escort haunt him.

And, “I’m sorry, Mr. Jones.”
And, “I’m sorry, Mr. Jones.”
And, “I’m sorry, Mr. Jones; it’s time.”

While I don’t know if that is the intention, it would seem that Fred’s obsession with these last words leads to him taking his own life. Maybe it’s time he go, not just from the job, but from his meaningless life. The song is left with such a sad, open ending that one can interpret it however he’d like, I suppose. I’d like to think that Fred wakes up tomorrow and finds something to fill the void. But I just don’t know…

I’m working my way through Something Wicked and really enjoying it so far. It’s taking me a while because life keeps getting in the way, but I read a little bit almost every day.

While I know this book isn’t necessarily one that is meant to be analyzed and scrutinized and other rhymes that make me sound like I’m in Grease talking about Greased Lightning, I sometimes have a hard time shutting off my English degree brain. For your lit paper you could easily talk about a range of topics including: anxieties about puberty and sex, the fears associated with approaching adulthood, Mr. Halloway’s mid-life crisis, you could make parallels between the novel and the real-life willful dismissal of children claiming to be in danger from predatory adults, etc., etc. But the main thing I’ve been noticing about Something Wicked This Way Comes has been the total lack of interesting, or even slightly developed, female characters.

So far, after reading about 3/4 of the book, four women have been introduced: Jim’s mother, Will’s mother, Miss Foley, and “the witch”. None of them are really what you’d call “role models.”

In Jim’s mom we have a widow whose relationship with her son is really unknown. I can only think of one moment between mother and son that give us any kind of clue what type of bond they have. We don’t even really know what kind of mother she is. Is she one who dotes on her only child, scared she’ll lose him like she did her husband? Is she too busy working and trying to make ends meet to worry about what her son is up to? She’s barely discussed and, again, I can’t think of any other interactions between mother and son that we have seen that give us some clue as to what their life is like.

While she isn’t much more developed, Will’s mom, Mrs. Holloway, seems to be almost the model of the 1950′s sitcom housewife – pretty, oblivious, naive, cheerful, and left completely out of the loop as to what’s going on around her. She knows her husband is depressed, but all she really does is try to comfort him by saying, “Oh, you’re not that old, dear.” Never mind the fact that he leaves their bed every night, sometimes not returning until dawn, so that he can go sulk around the mausoleum hallways of the local library. Yeah, that’s normal; everyone does that. And when Will and Jim become suspects in stealing Miss Foley’s jewelry, mom never even finds out because “it’s better if she not know.”

Miss Foley is an unmarried school teacher whose only real character trait is that she’s weak. She is easily overtaken by the wiles of the mysterious Mirror Maze. Then she welcomes a strange man/boy into her house, convinced he is her nephew. She is drawn inexplicably to the carnival in the early morning so that she can be changed into a little girl, only to then rat out her young students at the first chance she gets.

Finally, we have “the witch”, a haggard, blind, old woman who uses her supernatural powers to “hunt” for the boys in her giant balloon. I guess she’s somewhat lucky in that she has a general identifier – she’s evil. She’s not non-existent like Jim’s mom. She’s not Will’s mom – naive and intentionally kept that way by the men surrounding her. She’s not weak-willed like Miss Foley. She’s just plain evil and wants nothing more than to find the boys to help Mr. Dark with whatever nefarious plans he has for them.

As you can see, there aren’t any positive female roles in this book. Not that that’s necessarily all that unusual. There are plenty of “boys’ adventure stories” where there are few, if any, female characters. Most tween boys, whom I’m assuming is largely the audience for this type of story, don’t want to read about touching moments talking to mom – even if it is about shrunken lightning rod salesmen, men with tattoos all over their bodies, and carousels that make you age with every rotation. Boys want to read about boys and, if grown-ups are necessary for the story, those grown-ups should be men. They don’t have to be their actual father, like here; they simply need to be father figures. It’s a “He-Man Woman Haters Club” for sure.

While I can easily dismiss most of the milquetoast women in this story as simply void due to narrative need, the one I’m most disappointed in her lack of development is Jim’s mom. I’d love to know what her life has been like since her husband died. I’d love to know how she’s handling raising a rambunctious kid like Jim. I think it would have really added a lot, not only to the story, but the character of Jim for us to get a better glimpse into his life. As it is we really only know Jim from his interactions with Will, who, in contrast, we know all kinds of things about as the narrator prefers to spend most of the time inside Will’s cloudy head. I think this is one case where a few small, simple scenes could have really added a lot to the story and it’s emotional impact.

All that being said, as a pure adventure/horror yarn, I’m really liking Something Wicked. It definitely takes me back to my days growing up in a small, Midwestern town where the carnival coming to town was pretty much the only excitement we had all year. Thankfully there were never any witches in balloons, shrunken traveling salesmen, or time-warping merry-go-rounds. At least not that I know of…

It was an exciting weekend for me to say the least. My first article on mental_floss has been a pretty popular subject on the internet since it was posted Friday afternoon.

Last time I checked the article had been “dugg” 2545 times on digg.com. For those not in the know, digg is a sort of democratic news site where users submit and then vote on links to indicate if they are worth reading. As a link gets more and more popular it gets closer and closer to the first page of the website. And being on the first page means tons of exposure, as millions of people visit the site every day. It’s hard for me, though I’m sure not too hard for the folks at mental_floss, to tell exactly how many people visited the article, since obviously not everyone on digg votes (I know I rarely ever do when I’m browsing digg). But even 2500 is a pretty high number of eyeballs checking it out. Of course the great thing about the internet is, my story was being trounced all weekend by someone who took a screenshot of Keanu Reeve’s passport in The Matrix and found out that it expired on 9/11/2001. Ya gotta love it.

The story was also picked up by neatorama.com, reddit.com (where it has received 156 votes), and, according to a Google search, posted on many message boards and blogs all over the place.

My editor (*still giggling like a school girl*) sent me an email on Saturday and has asked for another map-centric article, so I’m working up some ideas as we speak.

I’m sure there are going to be plenty of metaphors for me after my next article – “lightning doesn’t strike twice”, “the sophomore slump”, “strike one”, “one-hit wonder” – so I’m trying my best to not get too excited about the success I’ve had so far. Here’s hoping lightning will strike twice, but in the meantime I’ll just be happy to know that my article was read and appreciated by thousands of people on the web. For my first paid writing gig, I really can’t complain.