The Horror! The Horror!

Halloween. When the dead walk the Earth. Meanwhile, we have protests spreading wide across the country, facing down corruption and police brutality at every turn. But what really matters is OH EM GEE KIM KARDASHIAN AND KRIS HUMPHRIES ARE GETTING A DIVORCE AFTER ONLY TWO AND A HALF MONTHS OF MARRIAGE!

"The Horror! The Horror!" on FiveByFiveHundred.com

Wedding Bells Are Ringing? Ooh, That's Gotta Hurt!

First of all — congratulations to Andrew Sargent, one of my oldest friends in the world, and the newly-christened Mrs. Christi Sargent, on their beautiful nuptials this past weekend. Once I again, I apologize for forgetting my pants at the wedding. ...

That being said, I was hit with a stroke of inspiration during the traditional bridal bouquet toss at the reception, and so this week's Five By Five Hundred post features a sports announcer play-by-play of a wedding bouquet toss.

Or maybe it's just a horse race. I'm not really sure.

"And They're Off!" on FiveByFiveHundred.com

The Silk Spectre of Sex Still Looms

I have a strange relationship with cosplay. I typically find cosplayers to be somewhat annoying, and I don't understand the whole idea behind spending absurd amounts of money on making elaborate geek niche costumes to wear at conventions. That being said, I'm endlessly fascinated at the hordes of people who do feel that urge (and of course, I am entertained by some of the more ridiculous and hilarious costumes that are out there. You know, like BANANA WOLVERINE. Seriously, WTF? Also, hilarious and amazingly entertaining (you'll find my fascination/distaste/totally lack of comprehension for cosplay also sneaks into my full-length play True Believers).

This week's Five By Five Hundred was inspired by a few specific instances at New York Comic-Con this past weekend. First, that I felt weird about inadvertently objectifying women while I was there — some girl walks by dressed as Mystique, covered in blue bodypaint and wearing a tiny bikini top, I'm naturally inclined to look. But then I don't want to be a creep, like I'm just staring at breasts — although certainly my attention is drawn to them because of the nature and design of the costume because females in comic book/anime/pop culture are often scantily-clad and sexualized, and it's this whole crazy internal moral debate I have in my head over the course of 4 seconds (during which I am too busy mentally deliberating to realize that I'm still staring).

But I also saw some cosplayers who would get annoyed when people asked them to pose for a picture, or do any kind of interaction. This was also difficult for me to wrap my head around. Why would you dress up like Power Girl if it wasn't for some kind of desire for attention? And then I realized, that's the same argument used by men who sexually harass women on the street: "she's asking for it." But this particular question was not based in sexuality; hell, there'd be men dressed as Doctor Who that would be equally annoyed at posing for a picture (side note: Doctor Who cosplay appears to be the new Slave Leia at conventions).

Is it about the sex, or is it about the costume? Are these cosplayers objectified — or fictionalized? Well, that's where this week's post comes in. No solid answers, but I thought I'd provide some food for thought.

"She's Asking For It" at FiveByFiveHundred.com

The New Columbus Day

In honor of Columbus Day, I've compiled of other US holidays that, while currently nonexistent, could easily be seen as thematic cousins to our Columbus Day. Hooray Imperialism! (also, a very special NoPrize to whoever can figure out all of the specific dates and events referenced!)

"Rejected US Holidays" at FiveByFiveHundred.com

In Memory

2 years ago today, I lost my oldest friend in life to suicide. For my post on FiveByFiveHundred.com, I decided to look at these two years and how it's affected me. There's not much else to write about that isn't covered elsewhere, but it just serves to remind us that is life is precious, and no one's life "isn't worth it." Even two years later, Mike's death has a profound affect on me every day. Sure, I handle it better now — but suicide never goes away. It never gets better. So think before you act, whether you're experiencing your own feelings of self-harm, or whether your actions might have that affect on someone else. I miss you, Mike.

"The Stage or the Curtain" at FiveByFiveHundred.com

(If you're looking for some more not-so-light reading, I wrote a [fairly abstract and Beckett-esque] play about this as well. It premiered in Hollywood in April of 2010 — too late, of course, for Mike to have ever seen it. But theatre was his only real salvation in life, so maybe somehow, I can keep him alive on the stage, because I think that's how he would have liked it.)

[soundcloud url="http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/9404866"]

Guest Blog: Chess Motifs

I've been doing some guestblogging for Quirk Books, publishers of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and that soon-to-be hit Broetry (what you mean, you haven't bought a copy yet?!), and my first post is up today. It's a countdown of one of my favorite character types in pop culture/literature: the Chessmaster, that brilliant strategist who plays 50 moves ahead of the rest of the cast in the story, and always seems to have some grander scheme in mind that we as readers/viewers/audience can hardly even begin to comprehend. And they always know how to manipulate and play the other characters into going along with their plans, whether they realize it or not. We're talking Nick Fury, Ben Linus, Dumbledore, the Cigarette Smoking Man — you know the type. Check out the full list at the link below. Agree? Disagree? Let me know on the Quirk comments!

"Life Is A Game Of Chess: Top Ten Chessmasters in Pop Culture & Literature" at Quirk Books

@Horse_Ebooks: The Poem

@Horse_Ebooks is my latest obsession — a spam twitter account intended to sell, well, eBooks about horses. In order to avoid being deleted as a spambot (which it is), @Horse_Books tweets random phrases from...well, no one's really sure. Sometimes, they're obviously sample lines from various eBooks about horses. Other times, they're just little two-word bursts, like "Boating Needs." If you're really lucky, you'll get some brilliant non sequitur gem like "I wanted to make love to her like a crazed weasel. I wanted to make love to her like I was an aroused teenage boy at a drive" (Yes, that was not a complete sentence, which makes the whole thing that much more ridiculous and hilarious) I decided to scroll through the @Horse_Ebooks twitter account and compile a list of some of my favorite 2-7 word incomplete sentence tweets, and turn them into a Found Poem. It was a lot harder than I expected it to be — some of those tweets make no sense whatsoever, and are even hard to string into some kind of narrative logic — but I'm pretty entertained by the results, and I hope that you are too!

"The Collapse of the Theory of Evolution in 50 Themes" (yes, that title is a complete tweet in and of itself) at FiveByFiveHundred.com

(also — follow @Horse_Ebooks, because it's hilarious, and I guarantee it will brighten up your day)

Let's Kill Hitler M. Night Shyamalan!

It's a classic time travel question: if you had the ability to change history and travel through time, would you go back and kill Baby Hitler to prevent the Holocaust from ever happening? But then, what has innocent little baby Hitler ever done — could you possibly raise him in a way to stop him from ever becoming the monster that he does, without killing him? It's a great thought problem, but I propose a better idea: Going back in time to kill M. Night Shyamalan, around the time that Signs was released. Because if you think about it, you'd actually be doing everyone a favor — including M. Night himself. He would be the victim of a mysterious murder, and remembered as a young auteur filmmaker who died before his time. He'd be remembered for such greats as Signs and Unbreakable, and the rest of us would never have to suffer through such insipid crap as Lady in the Water or The Happening.

This week on Five By Five Hundred, I explore this exact scenario.

"I Kill Dead People" on FiveByFiveHundred.com

T-Shirt of the Dead: In Shocking 3D!

Apologies for missing last week's post on Five By Five Hundred — my good friend Moose got married over the weekend (congrats, buddy!) and between the bachelor party, the wedding itself, and the various in town for the same festivities, I kind of forgot that Monday was a holiday, and that I had a piece due. Whoops! Better late than never right?

My new entry for last week ('cause, ya know, I'm a time traveller n' shiz) was inspired by Fashion Week — and, more specifically, the fact that t-shirts and Facebook pages have all but replaced gravestones as the default memorials of our deceased friends. So it's a slightly surreal prose/poetry meditation on the fact that dead friends are now fashionable. But not like, wearing the skin of dead people — that's just weird, man.*

"We Will Become T-Shirts" on FiveByFiveHundred.com

*Unless you're some kind of Nordic Barbarian or something, in which case, well, to each his own, I guess. Who am I to judge?

Freshman Weekend; or, Beer Beer Sex Shots Shots Shots Shot Puke WHOOPS

Here's the thing: I'm 25 years old, just over 3 years out of college. I stay out late, I drink (and make) lots of beer, I work in the arts, and show up at my job most days in cut-off jean shorts (or "jorts," if you will) and a t-shirt. I don't feel that old — I'm not that old — and the idea of college doesn't seem like it's so far away. But biking from Harvard Square on Friday night, I discovered that college was indeed back in session, and that I have apparently become a jaded old man. It was the first weekend of college for many freshmen at Boston's countless universities. It was a beautiful night as well, so the frosh were out in droves, playing at adulthood by making lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of obnoxious (but incredibly fun) mistakes from which they will (one day) hopefully learn. "Freshmen Weekend," as I like to call it, is not that day. My bike route brought me past Harvard, MIT, Boston University, Northeastern, and Wentworth University, as well as plenty of off-campus student abodes. You know those 13-year cicadas? It was kind of like that.

So mid-bike ride (I swear, it was totally safe), I recorded this poem, which I then fixed up when I got home. Enjoy!

"Freshmen Weekend" on FiveByFiveHundred.com

Review: The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern

Heralded as "the next Twilight" (take that as you will), The Night Circus tells the story of a supernatural traveling circus at the turn of the 20^th century, and the many bizarre performers that inhabit this magical world — specifically, two young magician apprentices, bound from a young age to compete in a vaguely-defined duel to the death but who inevitably fall in love instead. Basically it's like LOST, but with a circus tent instead of an island — with pretty much all of its strengths as well as its shortcomings. I had the pleasure of meeting the author, Erin Morgenstern, at a lovely book launch party in Concord, Massachusetts (where much of the book is set — they had magicians and fortune tellers and everything! Also sesame chicken NOM NOM NOM). This is her first novel, and there's already a film adaptation in production (from the producers of Twilight, no less!). I'm sure the book, with its fantastical imagery, will actually do quite well, and I wish her the best of luck with it. For now, however, you can read my full review over at DailyGenoshan.com.

Review: "The Night Circus" by Erin Morgenstern on DailyGenoshan.com

The Night Circus is available Tuesday, September 13, wherever books are sold.

Thom Dunn the Buffy Slayer

I recently did some blogging for Dark Horse Comics in anticipation of the upcoming Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 9 comic book / Angel & Faith comic book, both continuing off of the original Buffy TV universe (because as anyone who knows me knows, I am fairly-to-extremely obsessed with the entirety of Joss Whedon's creative output. Man is the most brilliant dramatist of our time, no exaggeration). Check out the link for more of my thoughts on the Buffyverse as a whole — and, oh yeah, a brief anecdote about that time I armwrestled Joss Whedon (and won!).

#MyBuffyLife Guest Blog at DarkHorseComics.com

Me, totally armwrestling Joss Whedon. THAT'S WHAT
YOU GET FOR KILLING WASH, YOU BIG STUPID JERK!

Purple and Green is the new Black and Blue

How come so many supervillains wear purple and green as their primary colors? I ask this both from a story standpoint (those are probably the two colors I wear the most, but I try not to wear them both at the same time in such excess), and also from a cultural standpoint. What was it that caused so many comic creators in the Sixties to serendipitously dress their villains using the same color palette? Some kind of morphic field, perhaps? That doesn't make sense. But think about it — The Joker, Lex Luthor, Mysterio, the Green Goblin, Kang the Conquerer, even the Vanisher in his first appearance (pre-X-Force brain tumor/evisceration). Why purple and green? What is the reason?! Dammit, supervillains! Give me answers! In all of your convoluted exposition, this is the one thing you never revealed! Aaargh!!! Okay. I'm good now. Where were we? Oh yeah! Five by Five Hundred. Because that was the topic of my post today. I know there was a reason....

"The New Black and Blue" on FiveByFiveHundred.com

(5 x 500) x 500 = (7 x 500)

About two and a half years ago, the Internet Jesus himself, Warren Ellis made a post on his website proposing a different approach to (micro)-blogging, flash fiction, and e-publishing. While I'm not sure if the larger project ever took off, it served as a point of inspiration for then-fresh-out-of-college Thom and his need to write with some kind of purpose/frequency/plan. I threw the idea out to on Facebook and Twitter, and gathered a few friends (with some help from Brian McGackin) to begin the first wave of writers and what would become FiveByFiveHundred.com (a name which may or may not have been inspired by one Faith Lehane). Over the last two years, we've gone through a number of different writers (myself and Brian are the only two that remain of the founding quintet), each producing their own unique posts once a week, with the only rule being a 500-word cap. Poetry, flash-fiction, memoirs, serialized fiction; anything and everything (and sometimes very different work by the same writer week to week). We recently hit our milestone 500^th post (which Lisa McColgan was not aware of when she submitted a wonderful treatise on her stupid cat, Mephisto, as the 500^th post). Around the same time, we lost our Wednesday contributor, Melanie Yarbrough (who is hard at work on larger projects, hence her need to back out), and as we searched for replacements, we realized something: why keep the project limited to five writers? Other than the obvious numeric allusion of the title, we had nothing to lose by adding weekends to our little writing project. The website has received pretty consistent traffic during the week, but more content never hurts, and there are plenty of other talented writers out there who deserve to have their work shown on our humble webspace, plus we had enough interested contributors, so we went with it.

(We toyed for about a minute with upping the word cap to 700, in order to maintain the numeric allusion of the title, but decided to say screw it)

And so, starting this week (well, I suppose, technically starting this past Saturday): Five By Five Hundred now presents seven talented writers, one for each day of the week, each one producing up to 500 words of content on his/her given day. There's lots of great stuff coming out of the site, and with such frequent contributions, there's always something new. So check it out if you haven't already, and enjoy some fantastic flashfiction/poetry/humor/et cetera!

As a jumping off point for you (since there are, well, 500+ posts to weed through already), here are our top 5 (again with the numeric alliteration!) most popular posts:

• "My First Bar Friend" (Thom Dunn)
• "How I Would Rescue Anne Boleyn From Her Execution (Assuming I Had a Time Machine)" (Lisa McColgan)
• "On the Origin of Reese's" (Brian McGackin) (also found in Broetry: Poetry for Dudes, available wherever books are solid!)
• "Productivity" (Lisa McColgan)
• "How To Make Love to a Robot (or other synthetic objects with simulated intelligence and emotional responses)" (Thom Dunn)

And here's to five hundred more. People, or posts, I'm not really sure.

(Also this post totally clocked in ~500 words. NATCH. Booyah.)

Just Another Manic Monday (for a crazy lady)

For some reason, every awkward/terrifying/bizarre thing that happens to me when leaving work gets turned into a silly, traditional poem. Don't know why. Just run with it. There's this woman who walks up and down Massachusetts Avenue near my office, carrying a mirror out in front of her and admiring herself while she walks. I always just assumed she was insane (and that her vanity happened to be a side product of said insanity), and let her walk along her merry way, insanity and all. And mirror.

That is, until this past Thursday, when she assaulted me on my way to the train (on my way to the airport, on way to DC, on my way to another train, on way to Cadillac Carl and his Crimson Cadillac Company, on my way to Maryland for a wedding, on my way to a bus in New York City, on my way back to Boston. But I digress). "Liar!" she screamed, "You are liar! Liar! You bad! Evil Liar! LIAR!" etc., etc., with a bloodcurdling shrillness that was so wretched that it actually gave me goosebumps and left me shaken up for the next half hour. I don't frighten easily, but having a crazy Asian lady with a mirror run at you screaming "Liar!" like you just raped and murdered her family — well, that can be a little intense.

So naturally, I immortalized her madness in a poem. Enjoy!

"The Manic Mirror Maid of Massachusetts Avenue" on FiveByFiveHundred.com

Behold: The Cyborg Head of Stan Lee!

Clearly I've been pretty busy with this playwriting fellowship, writing and re-writing and writing some more. (I'm pretty sure I killed about 7 trees in the last 2 weeks. WHOOPS) And of course, as soon as I'm back to Boston, I'm immediately thrown back into the grind. As such, this week's post on Five By Five Hundred isn't a new piece of writing, per se; instead, it's a monologue from my play that unfortunately had to be cut (by no fault of its own, of course). Amongst the (many) other bizarre, larger-than-life characters featured in True Believers, there is one that stands above the rest.

Or, rather, rests on a wooden base with plastic wires and tubing, presumably for life support. Meet: The Cyborg Head of Stan Lee. Which is kind of like the Head of the John Baptist, or Pope Sylvester II's brazen head, except with more clever catch phrases like, "Stay tuned, True Believers!" and "Excelsior!"

"The Cyborg Head of Stan Lee" on FiveByFiveHundred.com

(And let's be honest: now you're REALLY intrigued by this new play I'm working on, right? Thought so.)

True Believers Staged Reading

The first public staged reading of my new play, True Believers, took place today at the Berkshire Fringe Festival, following two weeks of intense workshopping. The cast was as follows:

• Chad Mailer..........Ryan Marchione
• Billy Horowitz..........Joshua Ramos
• Ted Thompson..........Bill Shein
• Chloe Long..........Bethany Geiger
• Kt Watts..........Kristen Sparhawk
• Box/Ensemble..........Timothy Ryan Olson
• Calvin..........Hector Rivera
• Ensemble..........Clelia Sweeney
• The Cyborg Head of Stan Lee..........Himself

Special thanks to my director, Keith Bulla, and dramaturg/playwright mentor Laura Maria Censabella. Overall, the script seemed to be well received, and I made a lot of progress on it over the past 2 weeks, tightening the story and sharpening the edges. There'll be another draft coming up, so stay tuned to see where your favorite Comic-Con play goes next!

#1stWorldProblems: The Novel

Apparently Nicole Richie is a New York Times Bestselling Novelist. I'm sorry, I'm not sure if you heard me correctly. Nicole Richie is a New York Times Bestselling Novelist.

Upon discovering this fact, I took upon myself to read the debut novel responsible for awarding her such a distinction.

While it would be harsh and unfair to say that I regret this decision, I can confidently say that it was hardly a good decision. Next time such a thought crosses my scattered and impulsive mind, I implore you to stop me and question my poor decision-making skills.

In the meantime, I hope you enjoy my objective critical review of the novel over on DailyGenoshan.com.

Review: "The Truth About Diamonds," by Nicole Richie

The Internet: Giving Dumb People a Voice

I've been pretty busy writing and re-writing the script for my play True Believers, but we finally start rehearsals today, so I'm pretty excited. Despite the gazillion pages I've written/re-written in the past week, I knew I still had a post due for Five By Five Hundred. I ended up scouring the YouTube comments on my Glenn Beck/J. Jonah Jameson mash-up video and found one particularly vocal YouTube commenter, whose breathtaking (really, the only word for it) diatribe I mined to create the "Found Poem" that makes up this week's entry. It does go a little past the 500 word mark — but it was all too priceless to pass up.

Oh, and also, please note: I did no copyediting of any kind. I simply add line breaks for emphasis. The text appears entirely [sic].

I'd like to take a moment to thank the Internet for providing ignorance with a voice, and providing the rest of us with a constant stream of entertainment and funny pictures of animals.

"Race and the Internet, According to Hogwild19100" on FiveByFiveHundred.com

Things We Don't Talk About

Just a short post for today, as I've just started on the workshop for my new play True Believers. But I was able to find a little bit of time to knock out a quick poem for Five By Five Hundred titled "Things We Don't Talk About." It's about things. That we don't talk about. Like that.

"Things We Don't Talk About" on FiveByFiveHundred.com