Category: Potato Moon

“Oh, hello, Something,” he said.

“Hi, Jakob,” answered Something, Woeisme’s older sibling.  Something was only ten, but already he seemed to be older than his own mother. “Were you going down in the woods tonight?  I’d be careful if i were you; maybe even put on a disguise.”

“Why?” Jakob responded with his typical lightning-fast wit, “Are the teddy bears having a picnic?”

“No – werewolves are having a Howl.”

Werewolves!

Would his beloved Bela (or perhaps, that should be his beloved Woeisme and her mother, his formerly-beloved Bela) be safe?  Would Edwood protect them? Could Edwood protect them?

“I must discover if they are all right!” he exclaimed, dashing into the forest on his way to the Sullen place.

Remembering Something’s warning, he used a clever Native American technique he had learned in the Boy Scouts, disguising himself as a tree.  In the distance, he could hear the Howling werewolves at their Howl howling long frightening howls as they Howled.

Hoping that he could pass the werewolves without dicovery, he crept silently along through the forest, near the path that led past the old Same place on its way to Sullen Manor.

Sullen Manor – the name had rung in his mind when he was a little kid reading comic books.  The only other manor he’d heard of was Wayne Manor, in his comics.  He used to imagine that Sullen Manor was the home of a hero who disguised himself as a bat and fought good fights and righted wrongs under the cover of night.

How naive he had been!

Suddenly, he realised that he was about to come to the clearing where the werewolves were Howling; that there was no other way to go through the forest…  He froze in place, hoping to wait, hidden, until they finished what they were doing and went away.

Soon, indeed, they seemed to be satisfied that they had made sufficient noise that no-one for several miles around could be sleeping peacefully, and began to wander away, some transforming back to human form as they did.  It didn’t surprise him very much that the biggest and meanest-looking werewolf turned out to be the high-school principal – he’d always thought he was a mean son-of-a-bìŧçh.

But, suddenly, he saw that three of the wolves were pacing purposefully, their eyes full of purpose, directly toward him!

They were sniffing the air!

Had their keen noses penetrated his clever disguise?

He stood, still as he could, though his foliage occasionally rustled as if a wind were blowing, as the three werewolves walked right up to his roots.

Again, all three sniffed carefully of this new tree on the edge of their meeting place.

The three seemed to come to a joint decision.  He stood in terror, wondering what they meant to do to him.

And then, as one, all three raised one hind leg…

Jakob Blaq sat on his porch, contemplating the potato in his russet hand. He could hear the sounds of the baseball game his father was watching inside, and his father’s shouts over the TV.

The moon shone down upon him, casting shadows on the potato that caused it to resemble a girl.  A very certain girl.  This certain girl happened to be Bela to whom he was not speaking at the moment.

“Bela,” he hissed.

The potato had captured her face perfectly.  “Bela, would that I could devour you as easily as this potato.”  Jakob lifted the potato up in front of the moon.  It blocked out the hovering orb.  She was vaster than the moon, was this potato Bela.  He took a bite.

“Great,” he thought aloud, “there must be something deeply symbolic with me taking a bite out of a potato that looks like Bela.”   He threw the potato behind him. A crash resounded resoundingly as the potato shattered the window. His father shouted from within.

Continue Reading “Potato Moon: Part 1 by Ariel David (and her dad)” →

For those who came in late: “Lady Sybilla” announced the publication of her very own sequel to “Twilight” entitled “Russet Noon.” She claimed that Stephenie Meyer had no copyright protection to her work (very wrongly).

Peter, in an absolute state of whimsy, decided that simply mockery wasn’t enough, and a long, sustained campaign of mockery is what was called for. So he decided to invite people to a gang-fang called “Potato Moon”.

And as Peter’s long-time stooge friend, he roped me into creating the cover for all of this, to help set the tone.

The story starts on Friday. You’ve been warned.

Well, she’s at it again, and this time, I’m going to have some fun.

Several months ago a fan whose name I’m not even going to bother to mention declared she was going to write and publish her own sequel to “Twilight” entitled “Russet Noon.” Recently she has put forward a new treatise explaining just why copyright is meaningless. The reason is—get this—“The origin of all characters is the Shared Mind, the only mind that truly exists. Our minds are all one single ocean of shared memories, fantasies, dreams, nightmares and visions.”

Citing Edward Cullen, Harry Potter and Anakin Skywalker as examples of characters who are merely “plugged in” to archetypes and thus have no originality and therefore no entitlement to legal protection, she goes on to assert, “Laws that attempt to privatize the ownership of characters operate based on a delusion of separateness that we all share in this matrix we call reality. But according to Eckart Tolle, author of The Power of Now, there is no such a thing as separate minds. There is only one Universal Mind and it is the source of all our thoughts.”

You can read the rest of this New Age tripe here if you’re so inclined.

Now the first thing that occurred to me is that there is simply no way that I’m taking any part of the rap for Jar Jar Binks. And then I thought, Y’know what? There is, in fact, a universal mind. A hive mind, if you will. It’s called the Internet.

So let’s unleash the hive on the concept of a sequel to the “Twilight” series.

Continue Reading ““POTATO MOON” Rising” →

…along comes someone billing him or herself as “Lady Sybilla,” who has announced the publication of (we’ll extend benefit of the doubt) her own sequel to “Twilight” entitled “Russet Noon.”

It staggers the imagination that Lady Sybilla might actually be a worse writer than Stephenie Meyer.  The title, however –which evokes images of a sun-baked potato–would seem to suggest that is so, as does Sybilla’s tendency to respond to controversy by using mangled cliches ( “bad publicity is better than no publicity;”  “controversy is the mother of popularity.” ) Then again, if her endeavor, which purports to tell the saga from the point of view of  the character of Jacob, displays a fraction of the fantasy put forward by her doubtless-soon-to-be-sued publisher, it could be pretty formidable.  Her publisher, the aptly named AV Paranormal, declared:

“When fictional characters become such an intricate part of the popular psyche, as is the case with the Twilight Saga, legal boundaries become blurred, and copyright laws become increasingly difficult to define. This is especially the case when actual cities like Forks and Volterra are used as the novel’s settings. Such settings are not copyrightable, as they are considered public domain. Similarly, the Quileute Nation is also not copyrightable, and neither are vampire or werewolf legends. Copyright laws protect writers from unauthorized reproductions of their work, but such reproductions only include verbatim copying. Characters are only copyrightable if their creator draws them or hires an artist to draw them. Stephenie Meyer herself borrowed a great deal from previous works dealing with these mythologies.”

While this point of view might be applauded by the “everything should be free to everyone on the internet” crowd, the wrongheadedness of these sentiments is staggering.  Vampires, werewolves, and the names of towns and Indian nations are public domain.  Specific characters are protected by copyright.  There is no blurred boundary here, no difficulty in defining it.  This is theft, pure and simple.    It should not be countenanced, and I have to hope a cease and desist letter is already en route if it hasn’t been delivered already.

You can read more here.

PAD