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Horror fiction seems to spawn more dumbass 'rules' than any other kind of writing, and one of the dumbest is the assumed 'requirement' of a twist ending, going all the way back to H.H. Munro. This story is also the result of a long rumination on how stories are sometimes scuttled or diminished by succumbing to such 'rules'.
There are times where I would keep three typewriters on a table, and I'd have three complete thoughts going. With computers, you make folders, files - I don't know about those things. I have sheaves of paper polluted with words and paragraphs. I found it a good tool for me. And it keeps your hands strong for guitar playing.
I'm in a funny position: I've been in one band in my life and that was with my brother. As incredible as that has been, I feel like I'm missing out a little bit on being in a real rock band - or how I imagine being in a real rock band to be. It's like being in a street gang: you all wear the same leather jacket or whatever.
Not that I feel like I have a lack of confidence, it's just good to stand up in front of people who don't really know what to expect. Am I going to say something? Am I going to sing? And often when I do say anything it gets a laugh, because everyone's already used to laughing. So I can seem like I'm actually a funny person.
If I can't do that at age 33, I'll probably never be able to do it. As you enter your thirties, things get a little more squiggly, with life spreading out in different directions. All of that makes me think that now's the time to do what you really want to do and not have that same type of youthful anxiety about every step.
Sometimes it's a little overwhelming to take on other people's stories, that's just the kind of person I am, maybe I'm empathetic to a fault, I internalize a lot, so it can be a bit hard sometimes, but I understand that that's what they need, and if I can do it, then I'll do it, but if I can't, then I'll try to take a knee.
Years ago, I thought up the name Queen...It's just a name, but it's very regal obviously, and it sounds splendid...It's a strong name, very universal and immediate. It had a lot of visual potential and was open to all sorts of interpretations. I was certainly aware of the gay connotations, but that was just one facet of it.
When I was lucky enough to be successful, I distanced myself completely from the whole thing of units and selling copies. I just wanted to keep everyone who comes to see me happy. I spend so much time after my shows talking to people who come from all over the world to see me. I'll go out and sign a picture and have a chat.
I'm a visual thinker, so I think of everything visually, first. A lot of what an issue will become for me starts with me thinking, "What's a great cover?," or "What's the splash image?," or "What is the title of the issue? How do I see the text?" I think about all of that stuff, and then the story comes out of that imagery.
I want my fellow citizens to wise up and stop falling for [war]. I try with my limited access, I'm not getting into Kabul with a camera, they're not letting me get into Benghazi with a camera. I do what I can with my flimsy American passport and a visa. The photos are a bit more heavy from Southern Sudan and Haiti and Cuba.
I gave it up three weeks before my black belt, foolishly. I got to my third brown belt and must have trained for 18 months but never went for it. I was nearly 18 and got this thing in my head about, ' Who are they to grade me?' Trying to be a rebel when I should have done it. It's my only regret, not going for a black belt.
I have a hard time with musicians who act like pricks because it just makes me mad. I just sit there and I go, 'You know what, dude, no matter whether you're in a band just surviving or you're in a bus playing stadiums, one way or another, you're still among the rare breed of people that are actually getting paid to do it.'
I played upright bass. I wanted to write great tunes, play the bass, be a band leader, and smoke a big funny pipe like Charlie Mingus. So I went out and bought the pipe when I was around 18 or 19 years old. You know even women smoke a pipe in Glasgow. I worked with Carla Bley and she smoked a pipe, which I find fascinating.
I'm always thinking about that young girl or young boy who doesn't quite know if their music, their messaging, their imaging, their voice is going to pop, if people are going to understand them. So I represent the other and those who feel like they don't even want to be normal. They embrace the things that make them unique.
Normal adult shopping is something I will never actually do, because it's no more possible for me to go shopping like normal adults do than it is for a man with no legs to wake up one day and walk. I can't miss shopping like you'd miss things you once had. I miss it in a different way. I miss it like you would miss a train.
I feel happy about the songs I've written. I'm a great lover of the craft of songwriting, and I sure admire it in other people when I see it - past and present. I feel comfortable with what I have accomplished. I feel happy to be able to work in that environment, and that I have a lot of songs left to be written, somewhere.
I practice really hard, every day. I started that about 13 or 14 years ago; it's a discipline now. But the writing is a whole other thing. It'll come from handling a guitar, mostly; thinking up little guitar riffs. I was born and raised a rock 'n' roll guy, and that's the rock 'n' roll ethic, at least through my experience.
The writing of the Beatles, or John and Paul's contribution to the Beatles in the late sixties - had a kind of depth to it, a more mature, more intellectual approach. We were different people, we were older. We knew each other in all kinds of different ways than when we wrote together as teenagers and in our older twenties.
I don't have any romanticism about any part of my past. I think of it only inasmuch as it gave me pleasure or helped me grow psychologically. That is the only thing that interests me about yesterday. I don't believe in yesterday, by the way. You know I don't believe in yesterday. I am only interested in what I am doing now.
The lyrics stand today (1980). They're still my feeling about politics. I want to see the plan. I want to know what you're going to do after you've knocked it all down. I mean, can't we use some of it? What's the point of bombing Wall Street? If you want to change the system, change the system. It's no good shooting people.
Performing with a hologram in a three-dimensional world feels somewhat strange. But you know, the experience of playing live in a room full of people is most exciting, it's something that the social media has not been able to recreate. There's some kind of intensity about it, something that the social media doesn't capture.
Do you really want to know why I'm doing all this goodwill, and why I'm an ambassador for Habitat for Humanity and why I gave a million to [relief efforts for Hurricane] Katrina? It's because I feel guilty about the huge hole in the ozone layer my haircuts created. It's my responsibility to right the wrongs of the Eighties.
The Queens Of The Stone Age have teamed up with multimedia wizard brain Liam Lynch to make the video for 'Burn The Witch' , a home-made affair that's just in time for Halloween. For the band, playing both the roles of cast and crew paid ginormous dividends, in the form of a video that cuts the heads off all contemporaries .
I play a little acoustic bass and a little guitar. In our house there are instruments everywhere, and I love picking them up and just noodling around. I pick up my husband's tin whistle sometimes. He's really proficient, but it's about the second most annoying instrument - after the banjo - if you don't know how to play it.
I know there's millions of problems in the world, but if you dwell on those, then you're going to be miserable. I think my meditation helps me to transcend and get beyond the grip of all the negativity and regenerate from within a more positive attitude, which comes in very handy when you're going to do 150 concerts a year.
I can totally identify with the younger kids. I'll never do what Jon Spencer did to me when I was 16, though. I made a tape with my friends and I put it onstage right near his mic stand by the pedal board and he pulled it out with his foot, kicked it to the center of the stage, looked me in the eye and stomped it to pieces.
As someone who has shot in most disciplines, I can tell the House that when one is lying on ones stomach in Bisley with a sling round ones arm to hold the rifle steady, it is hard enough to hit the target on the right spot even when it is obligingly staying still. Foxes do not stay still. They move with remarkable rapidity.
Performing is great, but you are exposed to all this extra stuff that you don't have to deal with when you stop. I'm getting used to it now, but it's kind of just the fallout. It's really weird. It's not a natural situation to be in. It sounds like moaning, because I know that's what I'm supposed to do, and I'm not moaning.
'Southern Accents,' I think that's one of my best, really. That would have been 1984, and I wrote that on the piano in the studio at home. I had a studio, and I just happened to be down there in the middle of the night. It was quite late, probably early morning, and I just started to play, and a song just started to appear.
Most records, you build from the drums and bass up. This one, we started with the vocals in Nashville and recorded them live with just the guitars and tried to make that complete and lovely-sounding without any adornment at all. I really wanted to get something with the vocal that I've never gotten before Armchair Apocrypha.
We brainstorm an idea and then we do flesh it out a little bit - we come up with a script, mostly to have beats and a sense of a story and a narrative arc. Often when we get into the space and onto the location, that changes and something we discover in the moment becomes the moment, becomes the story, becomes the character.
I've been trying to immerse myself in the narratives of other people. I try to not isolate myself as much. It is really hard. People that are sensitive, you just feel too porous sometimes. There's this inertia that sets in, and it's hard to get out of bed. I think knowing that other people go through it is really reassuring.
Meteorologists have the right perspective. They ground themselves in the current conditions (today’s highs/lows). They briefly acknowledge significant events of the past (record temps). And they keep an eye on the future (five-day forecast). Honor your past accomplishments, live in the present moment, and look to the future.
I'm kind of lucky in the fact that I can take something that's in my head and write it down, or I can listen to a piece of music that somebody else has written and try to tap into what the music's saying and just kind of follow that, you know. I mean, nine times out of 10, I'm just kind of following where the music takes me.
I have a former Baltimore City police officer's uniform and his robe and hood. He was the grand dragon, which means state leader. His day job, what paid his bills, he was a Baltimore City police officer, not an undercover officer in the Klan gathering intelligence, but a bona fide Klansmen on the Baltimore City police force.
It is always weird to be in the studio working on Christmas music in June and July, so we decorated the entire studio, we really did. We brought out lights, fake trees and decorated the place to get in the Christmas spirit. You'd leave the studio, and it'd be 100 degrees out in Nashville, but nonetheless, a great experience.
I really enjoy forgetting. When I first come to a place, I notice all the little details. I notice the way the sky looks. The color of white paper. The way people walk. Doorknobs. Everything. Then I get used to the place and I don't notice those things anymore. So only by forgetting can I see the place again as it really is.
What's been missing from digital music sales has been the possibility of added depth. In a printed package one can only include so many images and so much text - for example - but digitally it's wide open. For the most part at the moment we get less information for slightly less money - though we could be getting a lot more.
Probably the reason it's a little hard to break away from the album format completely is, if you're getting a band together in the studio, it makes financial sense to do more than one song at a time. And it makes more sense, if you're going to all the effort of performing and doing whatever else, if there's a kind of bundle.
I would say 'Bye Bye Love' is one of my favorite influential songs to this day, and ironically, they were so in sync with their harmonies that they sounded like one person. That approach to hearing and formulating harmonies stuck in my head, so when I joined the Eagles, my ear was trained to be able to hear a vocal that way.
I think recognition outside of Japan is amazing. I don't feel like that kind of thing would ever happen to me, as I'm not like those kinds of designers - I don't want to express myself in such a categorized way. I kind of want to be in the middle of the majority and the minority. I don't really want people to know what I am.
Human beings aren't meant to be solely consumers - eventually, something has to come out. Otherwise, I don't really see what the point of all that consumption is. The idea behind watching things and listening to things is that it stirs something within you, and hopefully that will stimulate you to then create your own thing.
There's such a currency to Led Zeppelin, or the members of Led Zeppelin. If I put it to you this way, on the run-up to the O2 concert, the only music that we played was music of Led Zeppelin - the past catalog stuff; that's what we played on the way towards shaping up the set list for that. But we played really, really well.
The whole Beatle thing was just beyond comprehension. When 'Help' came out, I was actually crying out for help. Most people think it's just a fast rock 'n roll song. I didn't realize it at the time; I just wrote the song because I was commissioned to write it for the movie. But later, I knew I really was crying out for help.
I was stuck in the feeling that one did not--was not justified in being alive unless one was fulfilling other people's dreams, whether they were contractual dreams or the public's dreams, or fulfilling my own dreams and illusions about what I thought I was supposed to be, which, in retrospect, turned out to not be what I am.
We have this yearning to know the answers to the big questions about space and why we're here; we can't evolve fast enough to figure these answers out on our own, but we can do it through artificial intelligence. But there's also some very scary downsides that could come if we don't put the right safety precautions in there.
Well, I never made a record to be in the Christian market. So when I made my record it was to exist in all of the markets. I grew up not really listening to tons of Christian music and if I did it was in the context of all the other music I listened to. So when I made the record I definitely had plans and visions and dreams.
I think the biggest fear is the fear of what a life devoted to God will cost. We love our stuff, don't we? It's the fear of the thought that maybe, just maybe, a life going all in for God might mean we would have to let go of some of our stuff, our way of life, our comforts. That scares people. I know it scares me sometimes.
If Jessica [Simpson] looks hot in something, I can definitely tell her that. But for me, out of the entire Simpson family, and out of all the Simpsons on the planet, and all the girls in the universe, the hottest one is the one I married. She could be sitting there in a pair of sweatpants and she beats out any girl in Maxim.
I work on words quite separately to music. They're both ongoing, and I don't ever feel like I'm working in a cycle in that respect, because it's every day anyway, no matter what I'm doing. Then I get to a point when I've collected together enough words that seem like they want to be songs rather than poems, or sometimes not.