The Sweet Up and Down

For the last--over a month--I've been living in Topeka with my fiancee Audrey. I've never really liked Topeka because for a capital city it seems really dirty and crime-ridden (and I'm not talking the politicians). Well, it's true. There's been like seven murders in seven months in Topeka and probably other stuff that I don't really keep tabs on because I don't want it to scare me. Audrey lives in a really decent neighborhood so I didn't fear for my life while I was there but we're anxious to move in together here in Lawrence. While I was in Topeka, I missed Lawrence a lot because I know Lawrence and it knows me. Although what canceled out my pseudo-hatred of Topeka was being with Audrey constantly. I was able however to be a part of the crime statistic in Topeka as my car was vandalized. When I went to get my tags renewed I discovered that someone had ripped off a quarter of my license plate. All they got was the last number but they also got the month and year on the plate and badly damaged the rest of the plate. I was mad because I loved that plate and I don't like the new ones Kansas has.

The commute to work in Lawrence from Topeka was a pain on my gas tank especially when gas prices hovered around $4.00 earlier in the summer. I didn't mind the driving because I like to drive but I didn't like leaving at 2:30 and the drive back after work was excrutiating because I just wanted to get back home to Audrey. But that's over now and within the next month, Audrey and I should be living together. While in Topeka I was pretty much incommunicado because while Audrey did have Internet, I rarely used it and it didn't work with my computer (although it could've). I used her computer mainly for email and social network checking but not much else. I tried updating my Born Loser blog but in late July I kind of let that go. My online writing became scarce and I worried that I would have trouble getting back into the groove of blogging.

I was right. I was able to figure out what to do with my new website but wasn't able to post anything because it's based on writing and other things I could really only do at home. Hopefully I can start getting it updated and get some people reading it like people do my Born Loser blog (which is moving over to my new website on August 15th). I finally feel I can start writing on it now so maybe writing this entry will get the juices flowing.

In other news, Crystal and I have finally worked out an agreement on custody for Cameran. We got it all done Tuesday morning and hopefully a judge will sign the parenting plan before the end of the week. Basically it says, I am the custodial parent, she gets him every other weekend during the school year, Christmas, Mother's Day and alternating birthdays and Spring Breaks. Plus June and July. I get him during the school year, Thanksgiving, Father's Day, one weekend of my choice in July and alternating birthdays and Spring Break. We split winter break and any thing else we have talk over and agree upon. There were also other things in there saying that both parents have to know where Cameran is at all times. Hopefully this will make everything easier in the long run especially when Audrey is permanently in the picture.

Until next time, I remain...
~Brian

I’ve purchased the domain name www.tauycreek.com. I’m not really sure why but I’m hoping to do some things on it with my writing, mapping, opinions and possibly even start my own webcomic. I’m still adding some things to it but I should be able to update in the next week or so. It just depends on what I want as my return post because I’m using my abandoned blog, Watch This Space. Hope I can keep it interesting because it certainly wasn’t before.

Until next time, I remain...
~Brian

I love the works of Charles Dickens. The first book I read of his was Bleak House and it quickly became something I looked at for inspiration. It was so well-written and gripping that I was able to get through it rather quickly. After that I read The Pickwick Papers, which was almost as good but seemed to come to a slow crawl at times before picking back up. I tried reading David Copperfield but I got a little more than halfway through it before I realized I didn't really enjoy it which is sad because David Copperfield is supposed to be one of his best. I've read Dicken's unfinished novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood and have attempted two times to read Martin Chuzzlewit. I am currently reading Little Dorrit, which I have attempted to do four times. I've gotten further this time because I've forced myself to trudge through the boring parts. That's the problem with Dickens. When something is good, it's good but all too often you get to a point where everything slows up, it all becomes dated or way too much time is spent describing a minute scene that may or may not be relevant. The reason Dickens has held up well since the 1850s is because when you get past all the characters with weird names and focus on the plot, it's very good and ahead of it's time. But Dickens is very dry. It takes a lot of discipline to read one of his novels which is why I started with Bleak House, I heard from several sources that it was the best of the best. And it was.

I'm going to write a prologue for a novel I'm going to write and I'm wondering if naming the main character 'Brian Taul' would be too egocentric. I can't think of another name and I'm tired of trying. I've never been good at naming characters which is why the names in Harter Union are based on real people (first names) and Kansas towns (last names). It just made things easier. In my upcoming Wilbur and Kolak, all the names have been nearly 20 years in the making so you can see how long it takes me to create original names. As much as I would like to call the main character Hiro Protagonist or Joe Everyman, I don't feel it adequately fits in with my style of writing. Maybe someday but not now.

On a side note, I need some computer help. I need to know if there is a way to take an image from the Internet, shrink it down into a thumbnail but when you click on it you open a new window with the image at full size. I know it can be done but I need to know how. I'm not computer savvy.

Until next time, I remain...
~Brian

Dear Friend,

Greeting, I am a teacher; recently a retired attorney friend of mine sent me a letter relating a very interesting experience, which I would like to share with you. I'll just quote his letter, for the contents are simple.

"A few years ago, a man came to me with a letter. He asked me to verify the fact that this was legal to do. I told him I would review and get back to him. When I first read the letter my client brought me, I thought it was some sort "off the wall" idea to make money. A week and a half later, we met in my office to discuss the issue. I told him the letter he originally brought me was not 100% legal. My client then asked me to alter it to make it legal. I asked him to make one small change in the letter.

I was still curious about the letter, so he explained to me how it works. I thought it seemed like a long shot. I decided against participating, but before my client left, I asked him to keep me updated on the results. About 2 months later, he called me to tell me he had received over $800,000 in cash. I didn't believe him, so I asked him for a copy of the letter. I followed the instructions exactly, mailed 200 letters, and sure enough, the money stated [sic] coming in. It started slowly at first, but after about three weeks, I was getting more mail than I could open in a day. After about three months, the money stopped coming in. I kept precise records of the earnings and in the end, it totaled $978,493.00!! I could hardly believe it. I met with my friend for lunch to find out exactly how it worked. He told me there were quite a few similar letters around, but this one was different, because there six names at the end of the letter, not five like some others. This fact alone results in your name being in far more returns. The other fact was the help I gave him, making sure the whole thing was legal, since no one want to take the risk of doing something illegal.

By now, you are surely curious to know what a small change to make, if you sent a letter like this one out, in order for it to be legal, you must actually sell something to receive the dollars in return. So when you send a dollar to each of the names on the list, you include these words: 'PLEASE PUT ME ON YOUR MAILING LIST", and include your name and address. This is key to the program. The service you will receive for the dollar you send to the six people on the following page is that your name will be put on their mailing list.

At the time I first got this idea, I was earning a good living as a layer [sic]. But everyone in the legal profession will tell you there is a lot of stress that comes with the job. I told myself, if things work out; I would retire from my practice and play golf. I decided to try the letters again, but this time I sent out 500 copies. Three months later, I had totaled $2,341,178.00.

Here are a few reasons a person might give for not trying the program:
*Some people think they can never make a lot of money with anything this simple
*Some are afraid they will be ridiculed for trying.
*Some dream of large sums of money, but do nothing to actually achieve it.
*Some are just plain lazy.
*Some are afraid of losing their investment. They think this program is designed to beat them out of a few dollars.

The system works, if you just try it! But you must follow the directions EXACTLY, and in less than three months, you will receive $800,000.00 GUARANTEED.

Keep what you are doing to yourself for a while. Many will tell you it won't work and will try to talk you our of your dreams. Please let me know of you success after it works.

The email blog I subscribe to has gotten a bit preachy. If she's not waxing poetic about her boyfriend, she's talking about the killing of a gay junior high student. While I don't mind bloggers taking time to talk about something they are passionate about or is relevant, I do care about what it is about. Recently she did a posting on her friend's mom who has cancer and how her daughter chopped off her pretty red hair to make a wig for her mom. That's real sweet, I know but one week later an update was posted that the PayPal account set up for the mom got thousands of dollars of donations, including a huge donation from a local radio station.

Now, this woman is an upstanding member of the blogger community so I have no worries that it's all legitimate but what about people who don't have the luxury of a popular online blogger? I've ran across other sites asking for help to pay for bills and all that but since it's the Internet and you can really only believe about 40% of what you read I'd rather just stick with an established, accredited charity. Maybe I'm kind of bitter because I wouldn't be able to get the kind of response other people could get so once again it all goes to the privilaged few.

For me, it's when you don't ask for money or something is when I may actually contribute. I may be in the minority for this but I have certain criteria you have to meet before I'll donate money or time for one person. But the point I'm trying to make is, just donate to a charity unless you know the person.

Until next time, I remain...
~Brian

I got an email from my online publisher saying they miss me. I wish I could publish things more regularly but it seems like once a month is all they're gonna get right now. The last thing I published was I-70 which was something I threw together one night. I'm currently working on Seven and The Cat Rangers.

Seven is the story of the Kazachov family living in a small midwestern town in the early Twentieth Century. I have a good beginning but I don't know how to make the story relevant. I'm having problems figuring out what the main plot of the story should be. The plot has went from a coming-of-age story to a horror back to a coming-of-age story with horror undertones and finally back to a straight coming-of-age story. I'm not sure I'm going to keep it that way because I leaning back toward horror story.

The hard part was really creating the family history. I wanted it distinctly Jewish so I had to do quite a bit of research of Jews in Russia but I had the honor of learning some of their wonderful language and using it in a story. I was inspired by Michael Chabon's Gentlemen of the Road which was a decent book but not really my taste for it was an adventure story. I've thought about making Seven an adventure story but, again, I can't think of a main plot.

The Cat Rangers has been a lot easier to write because I just have to write down my life back when I was in fifth grade. My friends and I started a club where we were a superhero police squad known as the Cat Rangers. Most things that happened in the story happened in real life and the names are of the real people and the names we chose for our alter egos. We all had a good reason for choosing the names. It was at this point in my life when I started to enjoy being outdoors and went from a pasty white kid to a pasty white kid with a farmer's tan. What I like is that I actually get to write both a kid's story and a superhero story and get to intertwine them, hopefully seemlessly.

I'm hoping to get The Cat Rangers done by the end of this weekend because I'm so close but yet so far. At least I'm working on these stories better than I'm working on my novel. I haven't written anything on that since early January. So of course when I do get these stories published I will post the links here so all may read them. If don't, I know where you live.

Until next time, I remain...
~Brian

This is my lame attempt to show that I am not really neglecting LJ. I am currently busy writing a lot of other which I will tell you about in due time. So enjoy this three-part yawn-fest I wrote several months ago.

I was looking through my scrapbook--yes, I have a scrapbook--and although it's not all that great--not a tribute to dead people and funny ads like my mom's--but it all is, or was, very special to me at one time. Several comic book covers are in there because they fell off the actual book decreasing their value exponentially. On the first page is a newspaper article from 1996 on a cemetery in the middle of Lawrence which is a little glimpse into what would become a hobby five years later. The second page has a Funky Winkerbean comic that started a story about a bombed post office. Since then Funky has gotten really depressing and it's quite sad now. There are also several--actually a lot--of Mutts comic strips which is actually a terrible strip in retrospect.

On page 14--I numbered them. Who are you to judge me?--is a drawing of Picasso, his bird and cat and a mouse done by an old friend Erik. I remember he did it in art class. His stuff was always 95 percent better than mine. I then moved away from art and focused on writing. Soon we come across an island nation we created together. Someday I want to use it for a story. There are way too many comic strips in here. Soon I moved the strips into a different book. Mutts is still a terrible strip on page 41 as it was on page 12.

After about page 50 the memories become more serious starting with an article on Phil Hartman, an actor who was murdered by his wife in May 1998. I also saved all the articles from my high school paper written by Emily, a girl I had a crush on. That ended horribly so we're gonna move onto a column by Dave Barry about The Blair Witch Project which is one of only four horror movies to be really scary to me. After that comes several articles on the 50th Anniversary of Peanuts and Charles Schulz's retirement. The cream of that is the article written by Calvin and Hobbes creator Bill Watterson about how much Schulz inspired him and millions of others. You turn the page and Charles Schulz has passed away...

To be continued...
~Brian

Well, after leaving MySpace pretty much stagnant since December I have opted to return to it. I felt it was useless just sitting there contributing nothing to society. Occasionally I would post obnoxious surveys or just funny things I found online only to delete them about three or four days later. I didn't really know what to do with it and even considered just erasing everything, deleting the pictures and abandoning it but there's a couple people on there I can't talk to anywhere else.

So I thought about what I could do then I needed someplace to publish the prototype first chapter of Seven. I didn't want to use my online publisher or LJ and I hate doing stuff like that on Facebook so I went back to MySpace. I decided that I would use MySpace to showcase some of my writing, more "artistic" stuff and other things that just wouldn't look right on LJ or incomplete things that don't deserve yet to be published online.

I don't plan on writing on MySpace as regularly as LJ or anything but if something pops in my mind that I need to get out but it's not quite fully formed I'll use MySpace. It's a good testing ground for the crap that seems to leak from my brain occasionally.

Until next time, I remain...
~Brian

I subscribe to an email blog from this girl in California. She mainly talks about sex and how people constantly make her mad. Lately however she has been rambling on about her new boyfriend and how life is actually getting better and how amazing he is. This isn't the same girl to whose blog I subscribed to. While I don't mind that she's more happy and her blogs aren't full of the dark side of life, the relationship stuff is really starting to annoy me and made me wonder why anyone would want to read endless diatribes of a relationship that they are not a part of. Once in a while is fine but all the time?

Then I realized that I used to do that. Not an entry would go by on MySpace that I didn't talk about my relationship. Sure I may have talked about something else too but then I would segue into relationship chatter. Maybe it was the novelty of me actually having a girlfriend who I loved and loved me back or maybe it was kind of bragging rights or, God forbid, the relationship was the only thing worth talking about. For whatever reason, the relationship was all I talked about. To anyone I bored with my endless yammering I apologize and I promise I will limit any relationship to once a month or less. I don't like reading it anymore than you do.

On that note, currently I am in a relationship but we've agreed to take it slow based on how past relationships have treated us. However, Saturday I get to meet her family but I'd visit Satan himself for free food. So still I apologize for any annoyance I may have caused you.

Until next time, I remain...
~Brian

Does this make you laugh?

How about this?

One more try. This?

I don't know if you chuckled and frankly, I don't care. According to an article in The Toronto Star, bashing comic strips online is becoming a growing fad. I joined the comic mockery department about a year ago making fun of the comic strip The Born Loser. For some reason, I really hate that comic strip.

I've been reading comic strips since I could read and almost immediately saw it as an art form. An art form that has systematically been bastardized by the standards set back in the early twentieth century. They are not given room to grow and when the original creator passes away, usually the strip falls into the hands of someone who may or may not pump new life into it. Sadly, for every long-running strip kept alive for nostalgic reasons, that spot in the paper could be used to showcase another strip that could be funny and original.

But I have continued poking fun at The Born Loser in a blog I started almost a month ago. I'm hoping to expand it and make fun of other strips I find and maybe, someday, continue the comic strip I created back in 1997. Also, there are other blogs out there I link to on mine that will also hopefully amuse you. I reccommend The Comics Curmudgeon and The Amazing Spider-Blog.

Also, some really good things have been happening lately. I'll let you know in a bit.
~Brian

I've been reading more and more online articles about this or that. I also end up reading the comments sometimes posted from people like on Yahoo or YouTube or on certain blogs. And, I am tired of this country's grammar going to Hell. You know, I'm all for free speech as long as it's spelled and punctuated correctly. Lord knows, I'm not perfect when it comes to typing and I'm sure I've made a mistake or two or three but this pisses me off:
"all i have say is DONT DO DRUGS OR END UP DEAD OR SICK so all have say be drug free that am going say"
This was taken from a comment posted on Yahoo! about if The Dark Knight (Heath Ledger's last movie) will be released (of course it will you idiots because it's not coming out until July and it'll make millions whether Ledger is alive or not). But you notice what's wrong with it?
1)no capitalization
2)no punctuation
3)it's phrased like a retard wrote it
4)he's 'yelling' at us
How hard would it have been to take time and write out:
"All I have to say is "Don't Do Drugs". Be drug free. That's all I'm going to say."?
One comment even dictated a long diatribe about honoring Ledger's honor by releasing Ledger's final film and the one he would probably be more remembered for. But instead of Heath he kept typing Keith. But enough rambling, onto the rules.

1. Use proper spelling. There is a difference between their, there and they're.
2. Use proper punctuation. You don't need to emphasize every sentence with exclamation points!!! Also, remember apostrophes.
3. Make sure you properly understand what is being talked about and how to spell it.
4. Take time to read over what you are posting and that it looks presentable. It doesn't have to sound like Hemingway but it at least has to look like someone who passed Kindergarten wrote it.
5. Don't just blurt something if you don't have an argument to back it up. I'm tired of seeing people write "You suck!!! Ditch the film!!!" Explain why I suck and why the film should be ditched. Then maybe I'll listen to you.

So that's it. Pretty easy? Again, I'm not saying it has to be a Pulitzer-prize winning comment but it has to appear like you have half a brain. I know when we're online people rush, punctuation gets abused and you don't quite hit that "shift" key as hard as you should but that's nothing a quick lookover won't fix before hitting that "submit" button.

Until next time, I remain...
~Brian