There are a lot of new things up at Magazine of the Dead. You should check it out.

You should still be checking out Oprah Read This.

New Thirst for Fire is coming soon.

I’ve been drinking all day.

Seven of them

I am back. Full steam ahead and all that. I feel good. I am taking some time off work and building up my alcohol tolerance. It should be good. I got a nice rejection from a magazine that I could swear I never submitted anything to. I think I was rejected preemptively. That seems genius. Good for them, I say. I have to be stopped and they are the only ones with the balls to do it.

I want to run for office. Something big. Senator, maybe. Picture that: Senator Nathan Tyree. Would anyone vote for me? I couldn’t win. Not here. Kansas isn’t electing a LIBERAL who writes insanity from the gut and is open about being a depressive nut. Maybe Minnesota. But I don’t want to move. Plus, I’m poor. I drive a truck and can do carpentry, so I’m totally screwed.

Maybe I’ll run for President instead.

I finished something big last night.

Not much of anything

I’m not feeling very anything right now. I hate when I find this place. I had days of the manic phase – all the energy, all the moving, the strange joy and constant talking and weird ideation. Then, like clockwork, the depression that always follows. Sinking, trying to hit bottom and finally finding it. Then this. The nothing. The nothing is worst. I wish I could weep. I wish I could hate. Laugh. Scream. But I don’t have any need for those things now. It just is.

I’m not submitting now. It feels cleansing. I just write, then ignore it

Antichrist

I love movies. Very few films in the last decade have effected me as deeply as Lars Von Trier’s masterful Antichrist. I have watched this movie three times, and still feel that I need to see it more to fully understand all the nuances of it. This film stands alongside Visitor Q, Blue Velvet, Pink Flamingoes and Fellini Satyricon in my estimation. It is Hostel raped by Bunel’s Exterminating Angel giving premature birth to a bastard child. It stands above criticism. I cannot commend this film highly enough.

On another note: www,oprahreadthis.com is getting some good notice. It is my hope that someone will sue us over the defamation they will assume. Our writers have created great things. If you have not read it, you should.

I should have some big news soon. Thirst for Fire has bi things coming and there is another project coming o fruition.

Also this: God Bless You Matthew Broderick is a screenplay written several years ago by my friend Terry Doss and me. It is funny, sad, weird, a parody of 80’s teen comedies about a young man with mental illness. It is mostly monologue. No action, but a little nudity. It needs to be filmed (and could be done so for almost no money at all). Are you a film maker? Do you want to be? Email me at nathanctyree@gmail.com. I’ll send you the script. We can make a deal. It will be cheap.

Love to all
A

Oprah Read This

It is now 2010 (do we say two-thousand-ten or do we say twenty ten?). This is the year we make contact, right? It’s going to be another year anyway. There’s no denying that. 2009 was a load of bullocks. 2008 sucked pretty heavily. May ‘10 will change things. I’m not holding my breath.

There is something good to start the year:

Oprah Read This. Caleb Ross and some weirdo (me) came up with this idea for a web anthology. It is live. It has stories by Mel Bosworth, Chris Deal, Christopher Dwyer, Paul Eckert, Nik Korpon, Kevin Sampsell, xTx, and others. Each story features a writer (often behaving badly). Maybe someone will sue us. If so, see you in court!

Swine

I’ve had the flu, which has sucked. I haven’t been able to get out of bed in five days, but now that I’m out of bed I have good news (other than that chewing gum you like coming back into style). The Broken Plate (Ball State University Literary Magazine) is going to publish “Instructions for Dying”. That makes my muscle aches subside a bit.

I’ve been away

But now I’m back.

I have nothing to say.

I feel “middleaged”.

More later.

one year

Tomorrow is the anniversary of my mother’s death. I plan to take my dad to a bar where we can drown ourselves in cheap whiskey all day. I will not be online. I will not be. Whatever, I guess. Anyway, assuming I come out the other side, I will check back in with everyone on a better day

The Day of Bitter Retreat

The day of bitter retreat

Something about blood dimmed tide and rough hands
the sound of nattering insects and bone against bone
wet and thrush splatter as entrails fall free from open cavities
and and and and and and and and and and and and and and
more insistent rising, tides and undertow broken
like glass on a sandstone floor littered with sawdust and ash
the last of her lost in moaning wind and heat lightning
exquisite and rare against a cooling horizon that rushes
up at escape velocity to devour whatever shred of
memory remains. Is it bitter, the thing asks as the blood
runs like a naked river down its face and into the sand.

I See Imaginary Children

I get these obsessions. They overtake my writing, work their way in and force me. For a while it was Quetzalcoatl (to be specific, my own weird idea of what Quetzalcoatl should be like). That snake bird god thing showed up constantly in the things that I wrote. I’d star a story about a failing relationship and out of nowhere the beast would show up. Almost f his own volition.

Then it was crows. I thought about crows all the time, and everything I wrote somehow involved crows. It took me months to write that out. I had to expel the crows through the writing.

And alligators.

Now I am obsessed, controlled by alligators. Not a specific alligator. Not a real alligator. Rather this is the alligator; my conception of the perfect, god alligator. An imaginary alligator. It haunts my dreams. Even when I dream about something unrelated to alligators, the thing creeps in as an allusion.

Now, I know that we all (I guess) obsess about sex and death and that sex and death have a big role to play in writing, but my question is: does this happen to every writer? Do you all get weird ideas and obsessions that creep into your writing? If so, is this a good thing? How do you deal with it?

Help?