Rilaly's Blog
Simple Truths

I am a fiction writer, but I also write about things that go thump in the day.  In other words, my fiction is completely free of politics.  Early on in my writing career, I conflated the two.   I was a new student to the world of politics, and I was anxious to show the world what I learned.  I wanted the world to know I was one smart cookie.  After reading other HIGH profile authors with my political slant, and I realized that they looked like fools.  I realized it was tedious and self-indulgent.  I realized that story is sacred.  I realized that I would have to divide the Rilaly enterprise into two separate and distinct worlds.  Never the two shall meet, I decided from that point forward.

I also love music and other entertainment vehicles, and so did my characters.  My characters even loved the same form of music as I did.   ”Enough,” I said, after a through read-through.  Rilaly would be divided into three separate and distinct universes.  If I liked a song, an album, a movie, or what have you, I would write reviews on Amazon.com.  I would not use that in my fiction.  I learned the principle the esteemed rock band Offspring was trying to teach the world when they sang: “You gotta keep ‘em separated.”

My works of fiction can be found at:

http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/Rilaly

The fiction I write is usually quite different from the man I am in real life.  I write dark fiction that can be violent.  My stories are usually infiltrated by obnoxious characters, but I usually have one central character that is above the fray.  My writing follows the philosophical approach of the television show Taxi in one regard.  In that, you usually have to have one normal person among the lunatics to define the lunatics better.  If every character is obnoxious, it can be chaotic and less enjoyable.

I also don’t think that everything should work out in the end.  This has been seen by people like my wife as a detriment to my fiction, because she wants to see people happy at the end of the day.  She says that she doesn’t mind conflict, and violence, and mayhem, but she doesn’t like it when it doesn’t work out in the end for the characters.  My response is: “That’s life.”  Life doesn’t work out all the time for people, and for those that it doesn’t, it’s more memorable.  Having said that, some of the times life does work out, and a writer’s job is to tell people about those people too.

I also like accidental humor.  Purposeful humor is the humor that happens to the side characters, and it helps define your main characters better when you have them react to those idiots.  Accidental humor happens to your main character, and he deals with it in a way that confuses the reader, because the reader is used to the main character being infallible like we think we are, or we want to be.  Some of the times, we’re idiots too…accidentally.

I’ve tried very hard to hide my influences in my work, but some of the times that’s just plain impossible. John Irving, Stephen King, Chuck Palahniuk, Raymond Carver, Larry David, David Bowie, Mike Patton, and Ayn Rand influenced me. That is a few of them. If it was a comprehensive list, you would be scrolling down right now, and you would be gone…by…NOW!

I like to swear, and I like to see people get hurt on television…in fictional formats.

I laugh when people sit in bean bags and they pop. I mentally call them fat.

I exist on a diet that consists solely of creme brulee, and only drink the finest port from France.

There was a time when I thought Shaun Cassidy and Leif Garrett were the Zeus and Apollo of our world.  I did not list them in a particular order. I’ll never forget when Leif was on CHIPs. You would’ve thought I made a percentage of the appearance fee. I didn’t scream, but if my manly friends saw the way I acted they would’ve forever questioned my sexual orientation.  The fact that I was seven at the time wouldn’t have mattered.

Then there was Davey Jones on the Brady Bunch. I didn’t like the way Davey Jones smiled and shook his hair when he sang. I now demand that the singers I listen to maintain placid expressions or snarl and dress arty when they are photographed and filmed.

David Bowie’s real name is David Jones, but due to the fact that the Monkies singer beat him to the business, Bowie had to change his name. Great choice by the way. I didn’t care for the nickname Zowie you gave your son though David. That was a bit much. It was either that or Frank Zappa naming his kids Moon and Dweezil that started the trend of celebrities naming their kids stupid names crap that we have problems with today, and the celebrity naming crap provides a link (albeit circuitous) to Iran attempting to obtain enriched Uranium and yellow cake and the eventuality of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad gaining nuclear capability. Not many people know that. Nostradamus predicted it in his fifty first quatrain. The quatrain is little difficult to read, seeing as how it is in Old French, but it roughly translates to…”And a singer of a group called Coldplay will reproduce with an actress of phenomenal range named Gwyneth Paltrow, and the result of that act will be a child, and that child will be named Apple henceforth.” The scarier parts, and the parts we may not know about for many a year, occur in quatrains fifty-seven through fifty-nine. “Apple Martin Paltrow will become the much talked about twelfth imam, and she will initiate, in all of her furious glory, the final move to destroy America, Israel and the influence of the Western powers in the epicenter.”  David Bowie and Zappa are to blame for this, and no one will call them out because they are/were elitist celebrities with different colored eyes and weird teeth and poodle hair respectively.