Nightmares & Dreams: Writing by Kevin James Miller
photograph by Daniel T. Miller
THIS WEB SITE IS PERMANENTLY DEDICATED, IN LOVING MEMORY, TO DEBORAH JEAN MILLER 1951 - 2002
(If you surfed over to this site wanting a copy of my remarks from Debbie's memorial service, and if these remarks are no longer below, e-mail me a request and I'll send the December 31, 2002 eulogy to you.)
ALL PHOTOS AND DIGITAL TRANSFERS BY DAN MILLER. IF I HAVE THE DRAWING UP THIS MONTH, THAT’S BY ME. KEVIN JAMES MILLER.
Kevin James Miller’s 70 published stories and
poems include “Stealing Klatzman's Diary" in PLOTS
WITH GUNS (edited by Anthony Neil Smith), "A morbidly
amusing caper with a Shakespearean body count,"
according to PUBLISHERS WEEKLY. THE CRAZY COLORED SKY
AND OTHER TALES is now available from Silver Lake
Publishing.
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06_06_UPDATE
Last time I spelled this name wrong: Ambrose Bierce. Sorry.
My 400-word letter about the Bush Administration NSA scandals was in the May 17, 2006 Chicago Tribune. This was not another horror short penned story by me, although ...
If you own an Elmhurst, Illinois Public Library card you can now borrow a copy of The Crazy Colored Sky and Other Tales by Kevin James Miller, from Silver Lake Publishing.
My poem “What Draws Near” will be in the 2006 edition of Mosaic, the anthology from National-Louis University’s Written Communications program. I’ll be at a reception to mark its release on June 19, on the NLU Chicago campus, at 122 South Michigan.
And if you want to buy a copy (and don’t you always buy copies of my stuff?) I’ll give you that information as soon as I can.
And now, continuing my homage to Ambrose B-I-E-R-C-E:
THE IMP’S DICTONARY
K is for Kooks, weird and a mix.
Clowns or killers? It depends on your picks.
Believe in Jesus, or Buddha.
Believe in Mohammed or Odin or Bob.
Believe in anything that will finish the job.
The job is to treat each human being like a human being.
So who cares what kooky story about prophets or saviors or nirvana or god-ish twilight or slack inside your head you’re seeing?
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05_06_UPDATE
(The reason why there is no image this month is that the file for that I brought with me to the library is just too big to upload to the webpage and I’m just too busy today -- -- Thursday, May 04, 2006 -- and this month to spend the time to correct all that.)
When I am writing this note and when I am posting are the same day, which is unusal for me.
Most of what I have to tell you about my writing, if you are coming here for the first time, I can tell you my goggleing “Kevin James Miller.”
At my teaching job, 80% of the work always seems to happen in the last third of the semester. The students doing well have only one thing in common: Listening to the guy hired to teach them and responding as if they are listening. The ones not doing well? Like every moment of every day has to be about “expressing yourself.”
Not a lot of value to the self if you feel compelled to express to everybody. When I buy a loaf of bread, feed my cat, empty the dishwasher, my ideas about the gangster movie I’m writing with Dave, the science fiction story I’m writing that will end with a cruel trick played on a policemen, my observation about how much George W. Bush is like the Jack Lemmon character in The Apartment (and Karl Rove like Cartman from SOUTH PARK) are all besides the point.
THE IMP’S DICTIONARY is of course a homage to Ambrose Pierce. Given how Stephen Colbert has been in the news since you and I last talked, it is important to remember this thought from ol’ “Bitter Pierce”:
“Satire stabs its opponent, apologizes for the offense, and then twists the blade in the wound.”
Moreover, for those of you from the School of Never Getting It, THAT, my friends, is GOOD THING.
THE IMP’S DICTIONARY
“J” is for Joke
One of the delights of this life
And when Coulter and Derbyshire and O’Reilly
And the slug that talked about a hitman for Moore
Joke about murder, guffaw about killing
Then the idea of a world without
These smirking barbarians would be thrilling
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04_06_UPDATE
A vampire tale by me, “My Blood Is Velvet, Oh, Iron Child,” is out now in the Spring 2006 issue of Night to Dawn. Contact information is Barbara Custer, P.O. Box 643, Abington, PA 19001, barbaracuster@hotmail.com, www.bloodredshadows.com.
On March 10 I learned my “Zimmerman, Captive of the Dar” will appear in the in the April issue of Aphelion.
On March 18, I learned my poem “The Fury of a Child Wears a Man’s Skin” was accepted by Teri Santitoro at SCIFAIKUEST. My poem will be in the August 2006 issue.
THE IMP’S DICTIONARY
“I” is for Intelligence
A word that is two
First, spies, wars, and such
Second, whatever brains are inside you
As the clock runs down on this sickly decade
Caring everything for the first and nothing for the second
Are precisely the blueprints of the mess we have made
[One more thing for this month. I sent the following to my siblings on 27 Mar 06. A few minutes previously I had sent this to Salon.com in response to an article that praised the HBO series The Sopranos, and trashed the new version of Doctor Who from BBC Wales, among other things complaining how it wasn’t like the re-make of Battlestar Galatica:]
You don’t get the appeal of the Doctor? I will explain
it to you in a moment. But first – Christ, I don’t
get the appeal of The Sopranos.
It has been years since I have had HBO. Pre-Sopranos.
The fad for Sopranos does not entice me to come back.
I love the great old gangster movies like White Heat
and the Paul Muni Scarface, but they had the proper
moral punctuation of their monstrous main characters
being violently destroyed at the end of their stories.
Asking an audience to invest emotionally in a
gangster main character episode after episode, season
after season is cultural depravity of a high order.
Please – no lectures about irony. Irony is a
masterpiece like Swift’s “A Modest Proposal.”
Neo-conservatives and professional media culture types
wallow in a moral sewer. Exhibit 1 is the Bush foreign
policy, and Exhibit 2 is the popularity of The
Sopranos.
And now, as promised, the popularity of Doctor Who
Explained:
The three-decades plus fan base of the
show is because the show is a love letter to the
British, bookish/academic eccentric, dressed up as
sci-fi pulp.
I love Doctor Who, and Jorge Luis Borges.
Imagine Borges not blind, with serial access to
multiple bodies, and English, and with a time/space
machine and you have the appeal of Doctor Who. No,
this is not that weird of a stretch. Read Borges’s
non-fiction work. He wrote often and well about the
evils of the 30s/40s Axis Powers. Many Doctor Who
stories are sci-fi/pulp re-imaginings of the defeat of
the Axis.
To compare Doctor Who to an equally fine show like
Battlestar Galatica makes as much sense as comparing
The Man From UNCLE to 24. There is a superficial
genre similarity, but both programs have such
radically different concerns on their mind that its
critically tone deaf to stack up THRUSH against
Chechnya terrorists or Cylons against Daleks.
[SEE YOU ALL NEXT MONTH!]
__________________________________________________
kjm
03_06_UPDATE
My science fiction/horror tale "Where The War Is" will appear in the anthology DREAM GOBLIN, edited by Alan Peters.
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Meanwhile, I’m still in Provocative Notes from Coscom Entertainment/Sultry Heat Publications and Amazing Heroes III from publisher/editor Gary Thomas and Mike Philbin’s Chimeraworld #3. You can still buy The Crazy Colored Sky and Other Tales from Silver Lake Publishing.
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STANDING OFFER TO ALL FILM STUDENTS AND INDEPENDENT FILMMAKERS:
You can have the film/video dramatization rights to any of my short stories for one-dollar. All I ask is an exchange of contracts in which would be stipulated that in the credits for your film/video would appear this text: “Adapted from a short story by Kevin James Miller,” and then the URL for this Web page.
And Dave, if you are reading this, this goes for you as well.
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THE IMP’S DICTIONARY
(and thanks to Ambrose Bierce for the inspiration)
H is for Hate
Sweet and Hot
Exciting, action-packed, ratings blockbuster
Everything loving and peace are not!
Oh when did we learn, when did we know
That all parts of our lives MUST always be
The best possible SHOW?
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02_06_UPDATE
First up: A great big thank you to Joe Cressman for the article about me in the Friday, February 03, 2006 Elmhurst Press. For the record, the photo accompanying the article was taken by my brother Daniel.
My “We Are All Lost in a Giant Eye“ will be in the third edition of Chainsaw, the "Bizarro" issue. This will be my third published story by set in the same fictional reality: A fascist, near-future America. There is also “Mr. Arnold’s Window” in Mike Philbin’s Chimeraworld #3 and the title story in “The Crazy Colored Sky and Other Tales” from Silver Lake Publishing.
You also should go buy Provocative Notes from Coscom Entertainment/Sultry Heat Publications which has my “The Drums and The Flute” in it and Amazing Heroes III from publisher/editor Gary Thomas which has my “Deep in Western Lands” in it.
To the student who approached me at work and asked why he “got” a “D” last semester, I said, ‘You did D level work.”
Here is the fuller story:
No student “gets” a grade from a teacher. Teachers recognize what grades students earned and just do the paperwork to make things official.
Here is the fuller story on you:
Your grades for the essays and the final were F, C, D, F, F, and D. My comment in my notes is, “Just huge problems following directions.”
Remember how you said you were going to have Draft 2 in for a certain essay for a certain deadline, and I said, “But you never handed in Draft 1,” and your reply was just to grin?
This is a world where smalltime and big time rogues and scoundrels of all kinds are bending and snapping the rules all the time all over the place to get what they want.
If you are not careful, if you drift or lose focus, you can end up believing that the rules never matter at all, ever, and the only thing that matters is your own convenience.
From now until the end of time, that is always wrong.
The Imp’s Dictionary:
G is for God
In your heart, in the sky
Always there for you in the clutch
And if He really was so exclusively
On YOUR side
You wouldn’t have to talk about it so bloody much
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01_06_UPDATE
Right now, you can buy The Crazy Colored Sky and Other Tales from Silver Lake Publishing.
Right now, you can buy my “The Drums and The Flute” in Provocative Notes from Coscom Entertainment/Sultry Heat Publications.
Right now, you can buy my “Deep in Western Lands” in Amazing Heroes III from publisher/editor Gary Thomas.
Soon, you will be able to buy my “Mr. Arnold’s Window” in Mike Philbin’s Chimeraworld #3.
The Imp’s Dictionary: F is for Freedom
F is for freedom, your only friend
Never surrender
What you are trying to defend
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12_05_UPDATE
[Press release sent to HELLNOTES on Sunday, November 06, 2005:]
Kevin James Miller’s “Mr. Arnold’s Window” will appear in Mike Philbin’s CHIMERAWORLD #3. This is the second of Miller’s stories that take place in a fascist, near-future America. The previous tale set in that reality was “The Crazy Colored Sky” which first appeared in the July 2001 STEEL CAVES, and will be the title story in Miller’s first anthology, coming soon from Silver Lake Publishing.
Epilog and Prolog: Yeah, like the last week in November, first week in December.
Holding the copies of THE CRAZY COLORED SKY AND OTHER TALES is like stepping back from a piece of furniture I just spent 8 to 10 years building. That’s how long it’s been since I decided to see what I could do to pursue a literary career.
And now I turn and face the task of … what, exactly? There are other stories of mine appearing in anthologies and magazines in the next couple of months. One keeps stepping up to the plate to keep swinging. Sometimes you don’t connect with the bat, and sometimes you do.
I assume at some point I’ll take another crack at a novel. For a while, at the start of this eight, ten-year period that’s all I was trying.
And maybe I was trying to leap to the moon before I learned how to walk to the end of the block without tripping.
Maybe I’m still learning.
Meanwhile, there is “SKY” to help my publisher sell, being a team player for the other anthologies and magazines coming out, and other stories to write.
This journey is just starting.
I hope you’ll come along for the ride.
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The Imp’s Dictionary
E is for entertainment
All your justice, all your war, and more
And out there in the real pricey seats
Is God, looking for the “THIS WAY OUT” sign
Over any, any door
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As of Sunday, November 27, 2005, The Crazy Colored Sky
and Other Tales by Kevin James Miller is available for
purchase at Fictionwise, Amazon, Barnes and Noble,
and the Silver Lake Publishing Site.
Send E-Mail to: kevinjamesmiller2001@yahoo.com
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