It’s A DANIpalooza!

3ofakind Dani Brown

3 of a kind

released 04 January 2018, Morbidbooks http://www.amazon.com/3-Kind-Perverted-Little-Piggies-ebook/dp/B078SGMDNG/

You’re here for the notes, aren’t you? part of my new year’s not dealing with anyone’s shit and going to open up about my stress thingy…

I must warn you, I haven’t edited these and haven’t been sleeping so well. They’re in the order in which I wrote the stories, not the order they appear in the book…

Thr3 of a Kind
Author’s notes

Suburban Invasion
The best place to start is with the oldest story, Suburban Invasion. I completed this one in early December 2015. I wasn’t in a happy place. I was very stressed out, which was hollowing me out.

Typically, I would keep the vast majority of my own emotions and experiences out of my writing, except when I was inserting people I didn’t like into really terrible situations and that really had nothing to do with my emotions and more to do with wanting these people to feel the harm they were doing to me with no other means of carrying it out. My stress (and a lot of my problems) are caused when people cross over my boundaries (or my kid’s, I don’t take kindly to that).

The amount of stress I was under didn’t simply hollow me out, I wasn’t functioning very well. How I managed to hang on to the ability to write during the height of it, I don’t think I will ever figure out. I couldn’t even remember what music I listened to beyond black metal. I was basically trying to write, without my problems circulating in the story, an old throwback to my love of porn-lit and experimental writing (or the type of experimental stuff I hope to return to very, very soon).

Of course, people saw me trying to do something that required motivation as an invitation to cross the boundaries and make themselves the centre of my attention, present themselves or others as obstacles to me finding even a little relief. I was at the point where I could only shout “no”. And of course, that wasn’t heard.

So, I sat at my computer, wanting to write something. But something good and something that wasn’t extreme. I didn’t have any fresh ideas. Stress was sucking those in at that time too (it is only now, when I have a lot less stress that I’m able to think of this and have a lot of new ideas). But what I did have were lots and lots of notebooks, everywhere, with little scraps of ideas. I must have been routing around in a very old one.

I had an ex-boyfriend, the Miserable Prototype Hipster, and I recall him having nightmares about aliens coming to kill him. Whether or not he was attention seeking or actually believed it, I never found out. I didn’t really care to be honest, either way, it was annoying. He had a bit of a strange sense of humour and upon reflection, was a controlling arsehole. One day, he told me to write it down. So, I did, probably while hoping aliens actually would come and get him.

The aliens he described sounded like a pug or ET, they’re pretty much interchangeable to me (wrap a pug in a blanket and you’ve got yourself ET). I have a story where violent pugs from outer space crash land in suburbia. That’s what I focused on at the time.

Thinking of writing saw me through some very dark times. December 2015 wasn’t any different.

We Call Her Lala

I went into treatment for the stress I was experiencing. The doctor, upon finding out I write, suggested I start including the things that upset me in my writing to see if that would help. They can’t medicate me or really do too much for me as I have no difficulties asserting myself around people who respect me. I only get distressed when people are crossing my boundaries and I have asked repeatedly for the person (or people) to stop. Demanding that these sorts of people “fuck off” doesn’t get heard either or they come back in a giant wave of manipulation. Although I know I’m being manipulated, telling them to fuck off again and again has its own stresses. So does the manipulation.

This is probably one of the hardest sets of author’s notes I will ever have to write (with the exception of notes for “Middle Age Rae of Fucking Sunshine”). And I haven’t said much. Rest assured, I was thinking about it and trying to work through it in my head. If I didn’t like this story so much, it would remain unpublished to prevent having to think about it (and then it could surface in some sort of mental breakdown further on down the line).

Lala isn’t my problem. Board games aren’t my problem. But both were used to make me feel completely worthless. I think I’ll leave that there as I’m not ready to really talk about how bad both have made me feel or what exactly happened to make me feel this way. I’m at a place now where I’m sad that I can never be friends with Lala because of how she was used (she is the type of person I probably would like). I can play board games with my son, but I never was much of a fan to begin with. I still feel shit about myself.

The Practicalities of Body Swapping with a Slimmer Man

This one I wrote in September 2017. It sticks out amongst the stuff I wrote at that time as I was really focusing upon character development and the only thing about Rupert is his appearance. I think the reason for that is on some subconscious level he is Hot Tinder Guy. I know a lot of my characters are musicians and some aren’t as well developed as others. I don’t know much about Hot Tinder Guy beyond his name, what band he performs with (thanks Anna) and what he plays. And his hobby, which triggered a reaction in “hey, I used to do that too”.

Even chatting to someone, I’m not going to take it further until I know a few things about them. And I’m not going to say much about myself unless the person on the other end of the conversation opens up. Every time he would say something new, in my head, I was like, I used to be good at that, what happened? What happened to me? Where am I? So, I ignored it. Poor Hot Tinder Guy did try. I give him credit for that, but the trying itself, I’m sat here shaking my head at my laptop.

His mirroring was bothersome. I really do need to check my diary, I am a busy person and a single mother with very limited access to childcare. I’m sure he’s a busy person too, but he didn’t need to say it in the exact same way I said it. I think that was what put my guard further up, as well as his occupation. I have a history of dating musicians with symptoms of borderline personality disorder. One of the first things I look out for is mirroring as I’ve been down that road before. Twice. Neither with good results.

For whatever reason, Hot Tinder Guy, through no fault of his own triggered a major reaction. And the clip of him playing led me back to the music I used to listen to, before black metal. I can’t say I was ever fond of the band he plays with. I believe there were cannabis-induced conversations making fun of the guy’s lyrics when me and the friend I would listen to it with were too stoned to skip the song. The song itself did appear on a compilation CD I would listen to when I was high as a teen, that CD led me to Gary Numan, who is God. From there, I think I managed to work out all the other music I used to like. I suppose once he sent me the clip, I could have sent a picture of what I was writing at the time, but I think it was an especially brutal rape scene in “Ketamine Addicted Pandas” (those don’t go down well with musicians looking for a hookup/date/relationship with me). Or it had techno music and I didn’t fancy a lecture on various types of electronic music. Mean musicians are the why and how of listening to black metal in the first place (Miserable Prototype Hipster didn’t like the music I listened to because it was too mainstream, black metal seemed to piss him off the most).

I managed to get enough information about him for his name and a google search (by the time I was satisfied he had his own equipment, knew how to programme it and could function in that world by himself, he was fed up enough with not being able to get past my guard that he moved on – thanks PTS). Google didn’t just reveal his equipment. It had pictures. Of him. He is a man with weight that either bounces around from overweight to underweight and back again, or he lost a lot of weight. There weren’t any pictures of him being between weights. It was always one extreme or the other. I honestly have better things to do than comb google trying to find pictures of Hot Tinder Guy where he is between the two extremes.

I’m not sure where the eyes came from. I think I like the idea of interdimensional beings sending only their eyes to watch their puppet switch bodies with some random guy he picked up.

As Hot Tinder Guy seems to be the catalyst for figuring out who I was in the before, to get this straight in my head, I’m certain Rupert will pop up again. Maybe with a different name, maybe not. I like the name Rupert. It has a nice ring to it (for those unfamiliar with my writing, I gave an interview not long back explaining where the character names come from, check under the “press and pictures” section). I’ll at least develop the character. It isn’t like I know much about Hot Tinder Guy to base a character off him. His appearance though, or should I say changing appearance…

….I owe this guy a drink, don’t I? If our paths ever cross again, I’ll get him one.

Picture

I know this doesn’t imply I was ever good at drawing, but I was. one of those things stress took away from me. I’m practicing. It’ll be a long time before I can do my own book covers, but one day, I’ll be there again. And just below this image, you have me using phone photoshop for the first time ever…

Dani Brown

toenails

Toenails Author Notes

This book took me about two weeks to write. I started it the day I finished “Welcome to New Edge Hill”. As of writing this, I can’t remember the publication order and going on amazon seems like so much effort.

This was my reaction to writing something like “New Edge Hill”. My life still wasn’t great, but I was planting the seeds without drawing much attention to myself. That was important I didn’t draw any attention to myself. I didn’t want people to notice what I was doing. When people notice, they like to destroy. They like to ruin. The wrong sorts of people do. There’s lots of good people out there in the world. But I’m still repairing the damage from the shit storm that occurred during the writing of “Rae”. I’ve been meeting lots of nice people lately, both in real life and online, but the jerks still have a higher ratio. I knew nice functional people were out there. The thought kept me going through some dark times in the long ago, the times that lead me up to the point in my life that the shitstorm occurred in.

I wrote this book mainly while on public transport. To get to this vague resemblance of a job, I had to drop my son off at school as soon as they opened their doors for the day, take a bus to town and then take the train to the job. I was getting up at 5am to get in some writing. I enjoy spending after school hours with my son and any single mother will tell you about the endless chores (it never stops, the house is never clean, something is always broken, etc, etc) so I don’t often write once I’ve picked him up. I wrote this one directly onto my laptop as well, so any writing I would have done in a notebook while cooking didn’t happen. I would have been writing short stories in my notebooks in the kitchen.

Somewhere, somehow, while I was distracted with planting seeds, I developed a reputation for writing the extreme. There’s a lot of unfinished things and fragments that aren’t extreme, so it isn’t the only thing I write. I felt like I was going all-out with “Toenails”. It is nasty. But based on a very simple concept, “I’m going to write a book about a guy who eats toenails”. I could have gone anywhere with that. For the record, I don’t care if you chew your nails. I don’t have any advice for ways in getting you to stop. I’ve never done it myself. I’ve never had an opinion on people who do it.

I do enjoy writing the extreme. I like to see how far I can push things. Sometimes I shock myself. I always disgust myself. I’m prude and squeamish. It isn’t hard. I hope I made more than a few people feel sick with this one.

What was on my playlist? Same stuff as “Welcome to New Edge Hill”. Rival Sons, The Doors, Grateful Dead (I was trying to build the bridge between the before, the bad life leading to shitstorm and the here/now, stoners like Grateful Dead), Phish. Probably some Nine Inch Nails. I acquired a NIN hoody some time ago, probably in the early part of the bad life, when I still remembered what I liked. I had the hoody, I wrote a book called “Reptile” I obviously liked them. It was some time though before I stopped skipping over Skinny Puppy on my iPod and in my CD collection (I don’t own any SP merch). The usual black metal. Hope that helps.

Picture

Toenails. Morbidbooks, October 2015,