Under Construction

Clearly this will be more difficult than I thought. There will need to be some procedural changes and potentially the purchase of a Pre Amp. Changes coming soon. Look for it.

The Guy Who Pays The Nickle

When I spoke about a nickle, I really meant metaphorically.

The guy who buys the bulk of my services is EP Blingermeyer, a guy who loves a thrill.  He bungie jumps, sky dives, kite surfs, runs, jumps, etc etc.  You get the idea.  He has extremely skewed luck, but it is so extremely skewed that when he is up he is able to get rich rediculously fast, but he doesn't keep it long.  Like me, he's fascinated by your world, but unlike me, he doesn't astrally project.

He physically goes there.  He'll take the bridge.  He waits for it to come at the break of day or at sunset, then rushes right backward toward Wonderbreadland and then half way through leaps off of it and into the nearest river.  Like TC did when he was escaping to home, once.  It messed him up quite well, you can only imagine what it did to EP.

It's a self fulfilling cycle, the more he does it, the more he wants to.  He loves the stories in your world, but also loves the venues where they exist; bookstores, plays, movies, poetry slams, museums.  You name it, he wants to experience it.  He's quite an affable fellow and has made several very good almost friendships.  Of course, TC was a native.  EP isn't and when he goes there, he's often forgotten immediately afterward.  He's a fictional character from your perspective after all.

TC tried to help once with a trick he read in a book about helping to invent a non existant person, but it didn't take.  You will never find a person who claims that EP Blingermeyer is a real person.  Though, your reality is strange enough that you might actually find an EP Blingermeyer.  Only it wouldn't be the one who pays me.

Most people who are determined to see the bridge on a thrill, I will, in fact, charge a few samoleans for my time, teach them how to see it, how not to get run over and more importantly how not to get eaten by whatever comes from the other direction.  Most people, most SANE people simply want to see a Sasquatch, or a troll or god knows what. 

That isn't the case with our friend.  So I charge him for it.  He wants details, precise details about what comes and goes, stray broadcasts, dropped artifacts.  He collects and catalogs all of them you see.  Its quite lucrative, even if I have no idea what he does with all the things he collects. One of these days he won't come back from your world. I'm amazed every time he does actually.  When he stops, I'll have to get a real job.

Call Me Rhombus

The New Podcast Owner Speaks

Check out this episode!

There Shall Be No More Sound Suckage

Podcast ownership is changing.

Many things are changing.

 

Including no more sucktackular sound quality.

Check out this episode!

How I Met Tom

The boy in the Graveyard Book didnt have a normal child hood.  But it gave him extraordinary abilities because of how he was raised.  He learned to become invisible and could see and speak to the dead.  Though if you ask him, he would likely have chosen his parents, despite all the good he had done.

I met Tom long before he met me.  You see, being raised in Wonderbreadland, with no magic was unbearable.  You can't live without magic and you can't live without dreams.  Its why the rest of Tom imported the dreams of someone else who was almost him as kind of a pace maker.

Let's just say Tom has seen what happens when most parts of a soul die.  Especially the dreams.  But where was I?

When the only place to find magic is in your head, you project outward, into realms that never were.  Far more good was done in places that you don't think matter, "not real" than you can imagine.   More than one kind too.  Word began...to spread.

But you can't leave the body behind.  Wonderbreadland land was a chain that corrupted him just as much as everyone else there.  I saw him once when he was twelve.  He sent a duplicate of himself to the Bayou.  And ....

:)

That's another story. 

But many years later, when I found him dripping wet and dry with sand on the bridge,  I knew right away who he was.   I told him the truth and helped him get home.  We stayed in touch.  He didn't really know me from Adam still, but a friend suggested a nome de gure.  And it stuck.

Hey, not all worlds echo throughout all creation like yours does.  But sometimes they do leak back.  Good thing too.

Perfectly decent human being.  Quite creative and capable.   One of the symptoms of escaping Wonderbreadland can be the inability tobself decieve.  Ever see The Invention of Lying?

Sometimes we have to lie to ourselves to try the impossible.   Ee need to.

Elsewise....

Elsewise our temple of clouds becomes a bowling alley.

Watch Pleasantville, you'll get it.

Later.

The Bridge in the Bayou

The name of the state changes from place to place.  There's a spectrum...no, strike that, there's a million spectrums, but the one that matters in this story is from what's real, to what isn't.  I know you'd like to think that your world is the most real that there is....it isn't.  There are more boring worlds, more ordered ones where there is no magic at all.

Think your world is boring? Imagine a world without rainbows or the wonder of a child's laugh.  There are worlds where that illusion you can tell yourself that there is a hidden power behind your life guiding you to destiny simply doesn't even have that much room. 

T.C. Ricks was born in your world, but he didn't stay there.  He was kidnapped at the age of eight and taken after stumbling into a Bridge, the famous Bridge of the Bayou.

In my world, like I said, stories are real things, that most folks don't acknowledge are real, but everyone knows are.  Your world is an awesome place, because you're safe.  What supernatural things there are hide in the shadows because they have to.  It helps you have more wonder and appreciation for stories than you could ever have if something came out and ate you with scales and fangs and claws that doesn't appear on National Geographic.

I know you disagree.  But I've lived in both worlds? Some of you can claim that, but most can't.  To travel to another world, you have to have a way to get there.  Some are physical, like a portal or a sled or a closet or a blue box....but most are mental.  Astral projection is a time honored method of moving from one world to another.  Hell, it happens every time you open a book.  What? You thought books were safe? Of course they're not safe.  Every time you open one, part of you goes to another place...and part of that place comes back with you.

But there are almost no physical portals in your world.  T.C. stumbled into one by accident.  There he was in Wonderbreadland.  That's the best name for it.  A very ordered place that seems mystical but isn't.  Everything is so safe, predetermined and ordered that you wouldn't know real magic if it went and bit you on the face.  T.C. got out, which is good for him, but it left him a little funny in the head.

Dreams are important things, a part of your soul.  You have multiple parts.  But different dead parts do different things to different people.  Some people lose their heart's....they're just....they have no kindness in them.  Least n unless they are kin, and really, that's just a kind of self interest.  True empathy requires heart, and some folks have none. 

Dead dreams are truly sad.  You can see a kind of shuffling that goes on in their lives.  But there is only so much broken heart a person can take.

The Bridge is kind of like one of your Mystery Spots, well known and the most obvious proof to anyone not an idiot that there are physical ways out of the world, it pulls back and forth like the tides on the moon.  Sometimes, when the stars are just right, it shoots straight on past your world and into Wonderbreadland.  That's where they came, and cut a hole in the bridge and stole T.C. 

Let me tell you....magic can kill, just by knowing it exists.  To touch it for so long but not be able to taste it is one of the saddest things you can imagine. 

It's an interesting thing, the Bridge, there among the misty swamps. I study it, sometimes warn folks away from it.  I'll charge a nickle when I can, but an empty window can be an opportunity.  It lets me peep into your rather interesting world and see an index of all the places the Bridge might go.

Greetings From Another World

Hello.  My name is Rhombus.  Rhombus Ticks.  Pleasure to make your aquaintance.

Greetings from another world.  I am not T.C. Ricks.  The official cover story was going to be that I "bought" the blog from him but its infinitely more complicated than that.  

You see I am what you would call a fictional character.   But I don't consider myself fictional.   I just consider myself more fictional.   Stories in my world are physical things.   There are far more fictional places.  My world is very close to your own, but not as safe.

English is a class more like typing.   And the only stories we have around are the ones that make our world work.  We have the catcher in the rye, and Harry Potter and Uncle Tom's Cabin, but nothing like Terry Pratchet or Jim Butcher or Elizabeth Moon.

Don't worry.  Tom is still around, just the part of him that died isn't there any more.   It's a sad complicated story and I will tell ot to you some time.  It involves a bridge and a changling.

But I thought I would introduce myself and say hello.

Hello.

I hope we can get to know each other.