Ology Magazine, published by Omnibucket

Robots! Rainbows! This issue has it all. Well, at least the two things we just mentioned.
We thought about making everything black and spooky and running a bunch of goth kid poetry to celebrate the 13th issue, but decided that would cause the styngian darkness our souls to bleed far too much and with our being fresh our of club soda...well it would generally be a mess. There are some new features that you have never seen before including features from Omnibucket's latest release "God's Acre". So what are you waiting for? Check 'em out, starting with some words from Issue 13's cover artist:

Iä! Iä!...Ianthul fhtagn!

Being known as "...the best thing in Canada..." by people who don't exist is a beast of burden shouldered by Iaian Greenson. Iaian, (pronounced 'Ian'), grew up arguing with adults who told him his name wasn't spelled like that. He hasn't stopped since. Iaian's paintings exist for the exact same reason that you're supposed to paint the walls of a nursery in bright, high-chroma colors; because it does something good to the brain, or something.

Dearest reader,

I'm almost 30 years old, white, tall, skinny, and wear glasses. I have a mathematics degree from a major Midwestern university. I can tell you about abelian rings, delta-epsilon proofs, algebraic coding, Markov chains, how to get a matrix into row echelon form, or how to integrate nested trig functions. But I also played in a punk band for seven years, met Bruce Campbell, Anne Rice, and some of the Misfits, ate pizza with the Ataris, and married a beautiful woman. I share this only because I want you to know that I like to be in the sun. I don’t hear strange voices in my head. I can read, write, and spell better than most of you. I am not socially awkward. I play and coach sports. I don’t enjoy sudoku. I can empathize with other humans. I don’t just see things in terms of black and white. I like to hang out in coffee shops. I cannot add or multiply large numbers in my head. Sometimes I get teary-eyed when my 17 month old daughter hugs me. I am not agnostic. I am attentive to nuance. I don’t mistake coincidence for irony. I enjoy, understand, and appreciate art in all its forms.

Please don’t be insulted if my assumption that you hold the stereotype I am exploiting is incorrect. From what I can tell though, this perception is even more pervasive than that of the gay art major. And I honestly can’t understand why; true mathematics is not about calculations. That’s just arithmetic, and no more interesting to me than probably to anyone else. Real math is about infinity, nature, beauty, uncertainty, interpretation, motion, creativity. I read a quote once a long time ago that has stuck with me, long after the name of the person who deserves credit was forgotten. She said, “It is impossible to be a mathematician without being a poet in the soul.” Trying to prove that there is no highest prime number is not much different from painting your masterpiece, writing a great novel, or composing the next great anthem. It is not a coincidence that many great mathematicians were also philosophers, from Plato to Bertrand Russell. Art, philosophy, and mathematics are different formulations of the same sensibility. And these disciplines, above all others, require the full range of human emotion, intelligences, and talent. The perceived dichotomy exists only out of ignorance and fear.

There is no such thing as a “math person.” The human genome has been mapped, and there is no more a gene for mathematics as there is one for driving a car or making a movie. There is no physical attribute that inhibits the ability to think as a mathematician or artist does. Only an openness and predilection for feeling the pulse of the universe.

Sincerely,
Craig Huhn

by Rebecca Brock (www.horrorhack.com)

Observations and Ruminations from the Professional Writers' World...

So I’ve been trying to think of something to write about for this, my very first column for Ology, and I’ve come up with a great big suckhole of nothing. And that, my friends, pretty much summarizes one of the biggest pitfalls of being a writer: those days when the spirit is willing, but the brain is weak.

Ah, yes...the ever-dreaded writer’s block. I’d say that the inability to think of something to write about ranks right up there with hearing that someone has published a story similar to one of your (unpublished) works. You want so desperately to sit down and get the ideas out of your head and onto the page, but as soon as you find the time to actually do it...nothing. Nada. Zip. Suddenly you feel the urge to scrape all the crud out of your mouse ball or clean out a desk drawer. Anything but acknowledge the fact that now that you have time to actually write, you can’t do it.

Or worse: you can, but you don’t want to.

Being a semi-professional (two sales, baby!), I’m still in the middle stages of my love/hate relationship with writing. I remember with great nostalgia the days when I couldn’t wait to get at my typewriter and crank out stories and novels. I lost track of time when I wrote, because I was watching movies in my head and transcribing them onto the page. I looked forward to sitting down and taking up where I’d left off the night before. I wrote because I loved the feeling of creating a world of my own design, and I was never paid for a single word of it. Most of my stories were never even read by anyone but me. I wrote because I had to write, because I wanted to write.

And then something happened.

I don’t know when exactly it hit, but as I passed out of my teens and into my twenties, I found myself writing less and less. I went to college and got a job and all of a sudden it’s ten years later and I can’t find the time or the inclination to sit down and work on a short story, much less a novel. I can’t even remember how to write a full length novel, and I wrote half a dozen of them before I turned twenty. They weren’t any good, mind you, but that’s beside the point. And the point is this: sometimes life gets in the way.
Yes, I know what they say about writing from life experiences and writing what you know and all that blah blah, but what if you’re stuck in a small town, struggling to make ends meet, getting most of your “life experiences” from reality TV and romance novels? What if you can’t afford to tour Europe and go on amazing vacations and live like royalty, storing up all that experience for the clichéd “Great American Novel”? What if you have to fight not just for the time to write, but for the energy to focus on creating characters and dialogue and structure?

I wish I had an answer for that, but I don’t.

Some smug bastards claim that there’s no such thing as “writer’s block”—you just sit down and write until something good comes out. According to them, you stick a figurative finger down the throat of your imagination until you vomit up some creativity. Easy peasy. No problemo. Except for the fact that you’re probably not going to be happy about what you’ve written because you’ve forced it out. Writing is not like taking a dump, no matter how crappy some books might be.

So what do you do if you’re blocked? What happens if your personal muse has got a fierce case of constipation and nothing’s coming to you?

You wait. You relax. You go see a movie. You read a book. You stare into space and bliss out. You raid the fridge. You walk on the treadmill. You do anything and everything you can do to get your mind off writing. And when a stray idea finally pokes its head out of its hidey-hole, you let it come out on its own.

Then you sit down and wait for it. And you keep believing that it will happen, that the ideas will come, that the words will be right there for you when you need them. You trust in the fact that you’ve written before, you’ll write again, and there’s nothing to worry about now. It’s no big deal.

It’s just writing, after all.

Look for more from Rebecca in future issues. You can contact her at pbwriter_at_hotmail.com

An illustrated storybook for adults, God's Acre's "stories within stories" will follow two children into a graveyard full of secrets to eventually unearth the lessons buried within.

Here's another preview...

Eudora’s growing anger is having no effect on her luck with rodent hunting. Perhaps that’s not quite true. It’s having no GOOD effect. Though she tries to focus, all she can think about is how infuriated she is with the children.

“Just think, that towns lady could have found them herself and talked with them! No good. No good at all!” Eudora is hoping that she has the rat cornered between a tenuous tower of interlocking, codependent pots and pans woven with other wares from her immense kitchen stock: Thick wooden cutting boards sitting perched like dominoes on piles of bowls leaning with cheese graters and all sizes of whisks; Butcher knives and cleavers riding up against the serrated edges of steak knives and balanced in the convex slopes of spoons and ladles, supporting a vast array of cookie sheets, stovetop grilles, salad bowls, and oven racks.

It is all wonderfully intricate. There is, however, no reasonable function for the connections because Eudora is simply unable to keep her mind on the task. Suffice to say that as a science project it would fail, though as a piece of abstract art, it is award-worthy.

As she crudely juts a fifth set of tongs between the slot next to the oven and adjacent cupboard, the sound of a disturbed windowpane hits her ears.

"AHA!" she announces as her head tilts up towards the kids’ room above. “Time to pay the piper.”

Immediately abandoning her trap, Eudora storms across the hallway and up the three turns of aged stairs to the second floor. She rounds the corner just as Norman opens their door to sneak downstairs. Her substantial size blocks the hallway, freezing Norman in his tracks. The look on her face is enough to preclude any attempt to explain. Instead, Norman says nothing, his eyes simply searching his grandmother for the next move.

“Isabel, stay in your room. You are not to leave until you are called for, understood?” she commands, never breaking the tense gaze between her and the young boy.

"Ow-kay,"she smiles, hopping over to her bed with her stuffed lamb, aware of the tension, but glad to be free of it. Eudora shifts to one side of the hallway, a gesture Norman knows as an invitation to get downstairs immediately.

To pre-order or preview God's Acre please visit www.omnibucket.com/godsacre.

Movie Reviews....of the future!

DaVinci Code II

This is the film that dares to ask, did Jesus and Satan have a threesome with Jezebel?
The answer is, of course, no.
Defining moment: Tom Hanks is shocked to discover that Leonardo DaVinci is neither a ninja, nor a turtle.

Superman Returns Some More

In an effort to keep Superman boring and gay, director Bryan Singer spends most of the movie following Clark Kent's journey to Blockbuster. Once there, Superman "returns" his copy of Brokeback Mountain.
Defining moment: "I wish I could quit you, Jimmy Olsen"

Lara Croft: Womb Raider

A crazed woman (Angelina Jolie) treks all over Africa and South Asia stealing children and remaking them in her image. Product placements by Titticotm breast implants and Hooker's Choice(tm) collagen, interrupt the action and hurt the suspension of disbelief.
Defining moment: The introduction of Lara's nemesis, The Priest (Michael Jackson).