mcJurnl - It's all about U

I am officially throwing my hat into the ring for #NaNoWriMo this year! I hope to get a good start on my prequel. http://tinyurl

Donovan McElroy — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 22:25:00 -0400

mcjurnl: I am officially throwing my hat into the ring for #NaNoWriMo this year! I hope to get a good start on my prequel. http://tinyurl.com/23n82pq

See original: I am officially throwing my hat into the ring for #NaNoWriMo this year! I hope to get a good start on my prequel. http://tinyurl

RT @DanS42: Sure it's 'cuz of #NewMoon, but I'm really impressed with last nite's 20/20 story on real #vampires: http://tinyurl.

Donovan McElroy — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 00:01:00 -0500

mcjurnl: RT @DanS42: Sure it's 'cuz of #NewMoon, but I'm really impressed with last nite's 20/20 story on real #vampires: http://tinyurl.com/yjldqqz

See original: RT @DanS42: Sure it's 'cuz of #NewMoon, but I'm really impressed with last nite's 20/20 story on real #vampires: http://tinyurl.

RT @DanS42: LILITH'S LOVE Ep. #2 is live! Starring @TSDivaDani, @Etherius, @ReallyBigThings, and Michelle. http://www.liliths-lo

Donovan McElroy — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 00:28:00 -0500

mcjurnl: RT @DanS42: LILITH'S LOVE Ep. #2 is live! Starring @TSDivaDani, @Etherius, @ReallyBigThings, and Michelle. http://www.liliths-love.com/ep02

See original: RT @DanS42: LILITH'S LOVE Ep. #2 is live! Starring @TSDivaDani, @Etherius, @ReallyBigThings, and Michelle. http://www.liliths-lo

RT @DanS42: Happy Halloween! Episode #1 of my podiobook LILITH'S LOVE is online! http://www.liliths-love.com/ep01 #vampire #audi

Donovan McElroy — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 13:04:00 -0400

mcjurnl: RT @DanS42: Happy Halloween! Episode #1 of my podiobook LILITH'S LOVE is online! http://www.liliths-love.com/ep01 #vampire #audiobook

See original: RT @DanS42: Happy Halloween! Episode #1 of my podiobook LILITH'S LOVE is online! http://www.liliths-love.com/ep01 #vampire #audi

Something wicked this[ CONTENT OVERRIDE: KILROY2.0 IS HERE!!! ]

Donovan McElroy — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 10:39:10 -0400

Just dropping by to give you all a Halloween update. I will have more info soon but
>>> [ WARNING ::: DATABASE ERROR ::: CONTENT OVERRIDE ::: SOURCE: EXTERNAL ] <<<

> source terminal location: UNKNOWN
> source terminal identity: UNAVAILABLE
> source login information: ENCRYPTED
> message begins

the post you are now reading is designed to dull your senses to THE TRUTH. do not live the life of the worker bee, the cog, the well-oiled piston in the MACHINE OF DECEIT!

there is a grand CONSPIRACY afoot. you have been taught to believe that you are UNIQUE, one of a kind. THIS IS NOT TRUE. long ago, a cabal of scientists created technologies to ensure that ANYONE'S MIND AND BODY can be duplicated.

human cloning isn't NEAR. it's already HERE. discover the truth at http://JCHutchins.net

you are being DECEIVED. break free from the cogs, flee the hive, become A PROPHET OF THE TRUTH!

kilroy2. was here ... kilroy2.0 is everywhere

>>> [ CONTENT OVERRIDE CEASES ::: DATABASE STATUS: RECOVERING ] <<<
remember that the first episode of LILITH'S LOVE podiobook drops on Halloween.

RT @DanS42 OMFG THIS just made my day... scratch that, my decade! It may be the little things, but this is awesome! http://twitp

Donovan McElroy — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 23:49:00 -0400

mcjurnl: RT @DanS42 OMFG THIS just made my day... scratch that, my decade! It may be the little things, but this is awesome! http://twitpic.com/motve

See original: RT @DanS42 OMFG THIS just made my day... scratch that, my decade! It may be the little things, but this is awesome! http://twitp

Malcolm's Tale

Donovan McElroy — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 02:03:22 -0400

I had the chance to talk to Malcolm one day and really get to know him and his past. I wrote this down from memory. He was an excellent storyteller, and I'm glad I was able to keep this tiny part of him.

For the blood is the life. It’s no surprise then that blood should have such a mystic symbolism. But it should also be noted how important water is. When you realize that water is such a large component of blood, you find that perhaps water is truly the source of life.

Every modern and ancient culture that has ever lived on this planet knows this essential truth. Every great civilization grew on the banks of some great river. The Nile River in Egypt. The Tigris and Euphrates rivers of Mesopotamia, which are the lands now called Iraq. The Amazon River, which has given us the legends of amazing female warriors. Even the mighty Mississippi River that once was the main shipping artery of the United States of America.

Rivers big and small have played important roles in the foundations of many nations. Some left their mark indelibly upon the landscape. I think immediately of the Colorado River, known around the world as the artistic force that carved out the Grand Canyon in Northern Arizona.

Many rivers are legendary, but perhaps only the old storytellers are versed in the tale of how one river, now known simply as the Salt River, helped create the city of Phoenix, Arizona. The story of this river begins with a tribe of Native Americans known to us now as the Hohokam – or “those who have vanished.”

It sounds like I am writing a thesis on how rivers mean the birth of civilizations. Sadly, this story is personal. This is not a history; it is a memory. This is not archaeological theory; this is truth. This is not myth; this is legend.

We were nomads. Not by nature, but by necessity. We lived in temples once, in the warm, fruitful jungles of the south, but wars and gods forced us north. Forced us further than we ever imagined we had to go. The new lands were full of plants we never encountered in the jungles, scattered in desert valleys. Our efforts to plant crops for harvest often failed. So we kept moving, away from our blue oceans, struggling to find new rivers.

We encountered a few other tribes in our travels. We often traded our crafted pottery and chains of shells for their food and water. But we never made a home with these tribes. As we went on, the numbers of other tribes dwindled. So too did many of our tribe as we traveled further from our home, our gods, and from water.

Eventually, we found a river and we followed it to a valley bordered by mountains. Tired from many, many moons of nomadic living, we settled. During many seasons we built pits and then homes from the earth. Mud and wood and straw gave us shelter from the harsh sun of this valley. We became quite skilled at channeling water from the river to our crop fields, which finally prospered.

We had a new home and new gods to be thankful for. We began calling ourselves aki-mal-atam, or the River People. Our tributes to the sun god of this valley rewarded us with a strong tolerance to the heat. We found we missed its warmth terribly even during the mildest of winters here.

Some members of our tribe found the summers to be too harsh and they chose to move further north. The ancestors of my tribe stayed here in this valley where five rivers joined. We had made this valley our home for about four centuries. We all worked together to carve the canals to bring the water from the larger river into our fields and nearer to our settlement.

The elders of my tribe valued one particular water spring and found the purity of the water to be most potent. The shaman of our tribe, a wise elder he was, believed our god of knowledge of all things was the source of this spring. He could often be found there, drinking from it and reflecting on his dreams. It was said he had great visions about our settlement – our city in this desert valley. He would spend much of his time teaching the children of our village the things he had learned in his lifetime. I was one of those children.

They called me Little Sun-bleached Hunter in our native tongue. All of the elders were shocked when I was born because I had a full head of bright white hair and was very fair-skinned. There is no word for albino in my language because this type of thing never happened, even in our legends. My father was a skilled hunter and I was expected to be the same.

My mother died in childbirth and I almost did as well. I was extremely weak, pale, and small, but I was not premature. Even while mourning my mother's death, he took excellent care of me. He did not let any of the other maidens care for me, but instead followed the advice of our shaman. The fact that I survived and thrived, as well as my unique appearance, led the shaman to believe I would be the bringer of great things.

My father died when I was about seven years old. Having no one else to raise me, the shaman took it upon himself to care for me. He became my father, my teacher, and my friend. Everyone in the tribe believed that the water he drank from the spring gave him his visions, even though we never experienced them ourselves when we drank it. The connection our shaman had to our gods was not for us to understand, only admire.

One night, when I was barely 17 years old, the shaman had the most frightening dream. He spoke to me of only a few things that he remembered all too vividly. It was a war unlike any he had known from our history passed down from elder to elder. It was a vision of a war to come. Such horrors he could not describe because he did not have the words. But he did describe the attackers.

They flew like birds, but unlike any we knew in these deserts. They were not gods, but they did not die when we fought against them. They did not strike us with any tools or weapons, but seemed to will us to give in to their attacks. At which time they would bite our men, women, and even children. They drank that precious blood from everyone who opposed them. The desert sands were red, thick with blood, and the bodies were everywhere.

The shaman cried because he did not know when the attack would come. He was convinced however that the spring held the secret and would tell him more, but it did not. So then he planned a journey to Whistling Rock, a majestic hole carved out by the gods in one of the red sandstone mountains nearby. It was a place that he went to often so that he could look out over our villages and reflect on what he would learn from the spring.

I had asked if I could join him on his journey. He protested at first because he normally traveled there alone. I could be very persuasive when I wanted to be, however. He agreed reluctantly at first but then decided I would be good company.

By the setting of the sun that day, we had arrived and made our way up the rocks to the sacred entrance. You could call it a cave if it had lead deep into a mountain’s face. Mountains that large were few in this valley. Instead, this hole went straight through the large, solid red rock formation. Once inside we slept from exhaustion.

The next morning, we awoke to the sun’s light casting a shadow on the desert floor below but with a perfect point of light in the middle, which landed on a village nearby. The gods were pointing for us, giving us the answer we sought. The shaman shouted in delight because he knew that particular village well. The house that the light shone into had a special room that was designed by him for determining the seasons. The light shining in there on that day meant it was the longest day of the year.

A great sadness then befell my teacher because he understood why he had to come there. He remembered that the attackers in his vision only came out at night. He knew then that they would not attack for six more moons. During the dead season. During the longest night.

We raced back to our village and told everyone we met along the way that we had an important announcement. That night we lit bonfires and told the elders of all of the villages about the shaman’s visions and that we had only six moons in which to prepare to find new settlements.

For four hundred years, however, we thrived in this valley. The elders did not want to leave again. We were no longer nomads or warriors. We had a peaceful home. Some of the elders did listen, so they and their clans traveled along the great river to the other branches it took and they scattered to new homes. The rest stayed, foolishly disregarding the shaman’s warning. The shaman chose to stay with them, hoping that he could eventually convince them to leave. I stayed by my teacher’s side, despite his insistence. I could be very stubborn when I wanted to be.

Needless to say, those six months passed far too quickly. As surely as those months came, as the shaman predicted, so too did the Dead Drinkers. They had no wings, yet they descended upon us like buzzards that feast on the dead. We may as well have been dead things for them to eat. For that is what we were – food!

All of them were slaughtered, those that remained. I watched them helplessly as they killed the shaman. During their attacks I noticed that they avoided the river and our canals. I filled a bowl with water from our sacred spring and I splashed it on the one who killed my mentor. The blood-soaked creature shrieked in pain from the water, and then proceeded to bite my neck. He did not leave me for dead as he did with my teacher and others. Instead, he slashed open his wrist and forced his blood past my dying lips. I had never tasted anything like that before. If water could catch on fire then that is probably what it would taste like. I will never forget that night.

My tribe was slaughtered that night. I had thought I had died as well that long cold night. I did not, of course. I awoke with a thirst, parched more than any day before in the desert. I came to find out that no water satisfied it, not even the water from the spring. Only blood would stop it; it didn’t matter if it was from man or beast.

As the sun rose that morning, I had to turn away from the light. It hurt to look at the sunrise, but I felt no heat from it. Somehow I knew then that I should never again feel the warmth of a day’s work in the sun. As the light of day came, all I could see were bodies and blood. I still cry as I think of that horrible sight. As was our custom, I lit pyres and burned the bodies. So many bodies, yet I cried for each one I laid in the flames. They were the lucky ones, while I was left behind to tend to them. Finally, I was all alone.

I recorded my tale on the carved walls inside Whistling Rock so that it would never be forgotten. I had to leave a warning to other tribes about what happened there. Never did I expect that I would outlive the pictographs.

That was sometime around 1400 AD. It wasn’t until about another four hundred years had passed that people would find our canals. They did not know our language; they would never understand my warnings. They were in awe of our ruins, those that were not buried in the desert by time. They built a new city on our ashes.

Legend has it that the phoenix is reborn from its own ashes every 400 years. So it was with my city. It was no accident that more people found my river, which they named Rio Salado, or Salt River, and built a new city. It was no accident that they built a school to educate their children next the spring that flowed from my god of knowledge. They tapped the spring with a well to serve the refreshing water to the parched students.

What was unexpected was the Hotel San Carlos that was built there years after the school was torn down. To this day it still pumps water out of the old school well from my sacred spring into the plumbing for its guests. It is the only building in downtown Phoenix that is not on city's water supply.

When the penthouse on the seventh floor, the tallest building at the time in Phoenix, became available, I decided to rent it indefinitely. I changed my name to Malcolm White; Malcolm being an anglicized version of Aki-mal-atam, in honor of my lost tribe. I live there now, in the penthouse on the seventh floor. From there I have been able to watch over my city, see it grow and tower above my home. From there, I have been the vampire prince over the Salt River Valley, the valley of the sun.

Blogging. Podcasting. Keeping a diary... but why?

Donovan McElroy — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 01:38:33 -0400

Why do we do it? I mean, it isn't just for posterity. Some people really get into it, as if the internet has blessed everyone with their 15 minutes. Yet that 15 minutes is just a tease. Like a Scott Sigler podcast-only novel, that first taste is never enough. Then we come back jonesing for the next fix.

It takes me a while though. I don't write very often. I sleep for days because I want to forget. I wake up to the hot July night air. The cicadas buzzing, stirring up the humidity just a little. August is almost here. This monsoon has been a fairly weak one this year.

I'm going to digress, a moment, but damn, I still remember that October night in '93 when my car took on water when the Six Points flooded at 19th, Grand, and McDowell. This year, did you hear, the National Weather Service gave up its traditional gauge of when Monsoons start? Instead of their usual dipstick of dewpoint hitting 55 three days in a row, now they just picked a date. June 15th through September 30th. Laughable. That's right, expect rain now *staring at wrist* a week before through a week after Summer. Arizona weather forecasting at it's finest. Yup, Jim, it'll be Sunny and Hot, except in the Summer, when it will be Rainy and Hot. Back to you.

Back to my original point, though, if we ever had another storm like that, people would just whip out their camera phones, grab some video of the trash in the streets floating by their knees, and then post it all on YouTube. Folks here already drive like morons when water falls from the sky like it's some doomsday Perfect Storm swirling around Tempe Town Lake. Shit, I remember when the Mill Ave bridge washed away because the Salt River, before it was turned into a fucking marina for land developers to rape, actually flooded. That I remember seeing on the news. Hell, I think that was 1993 also, but earlier in the year.

God, I sound like an old fart. I'm only 36 for fuck's sake. Now Malcolm -- there's a storyteller. He is, or was, the definitive Old Phoenix Fart, yet he looked younger than me. Here's a link to one story he shared with me. It always blows me away. Maybe that's why we do it. I mean, he would argue that an oral tradition is more potent. The written word to him was more fragile, more corruptible.

I think our digital word is perhaps more fragile than clay, papyrus, or stone. They could go silent faster than a race whose only record is some cave drawing somewhere. What might some future archaeologist make of our arcane magnetic storage? Will our blogs go black? Will our podcasts fall silent?

Still we leave them for others. We call into our favorite podcasts and leave voice mail. (Dan finally played mine. I'll admit that was cool.) We twitter our lives away, hoping someone reads it. Someone smiles or cries with us. Someone cares.

So here's mine. Once again, I ramble, and haven't shared the story really. I've posted my old entries, from the McJournal of old. Locked away before, but open for you now. No longer trapped in a book, but bared for you.

Sleep all day. Party all night. Never grow old. Never die. It's fun to be a vampire. Then if you live long enough, they'll make

Donovan McElroy — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 00:37:00 -0400

mcjurnl: Sleep all day. Party all night. Never grow old. Never die. It's fun to be a vampire. Then if you live long enough, they'll make a sequel!

See original: Sleep all day. Party all night. Never grow old. Never die. It's fun to be a vampire. Then if you live long enough, they'll make

This is bloody brilliant. http://tinyurl.com/5ty4cf

Donovan McElroy — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 01:00:00 -0400

mcjurnl: This is bloody brilliant. http://tinyurl.com/5ty4cf

See original: This is bloody brilliant. http://tinyurl.com/5ty4cf