FUQ

• Don't you mean FAQ? 

          No, that's for "frequently asked questions". I'm talking about frequently unasked questions. Things no one's ever asked me, but ought to.

• Where'd you get a name like "Lemora" from?

          It's an imperfect anagram of my hometown's name. In fact, that's a real street sign you see on my home page--I just switched the letters and inverted the colors with Photoshop.

          Funny story--I learned that Lemora is also the name of a thirty-year-old horror movie about a lady vampire. And "Dark Hunger" was a story I wrote about a lady vampire. But trust me; it's just coincidence. I've never even seen the flick.

• Where did you get a name like Belch Dimension from?

          "Belch" is because I enjoy belching. I can hold one for extremely long periods of time. "Dimension" because--well, I always thought it'd be a cool word to have in a comic book title.

• What is The Belch Dimension?

          If I had to quantify it, I'd call it Archie meets Batman with a dash of Tex Avery thrown in. It's me and the kids I grew up with as a band of teenage vigilantes in a small, crime-ridden Southern town.

After all these years, Betty decides to forget chasing after that fartknocker Archie.

 We fight crime and have wacky adventures. It's dark and gothic, yet at the same time exaggerated and absurd. Like life.

• Why do you draw stick figures?

          Because drawing clothes is a pain in the ass. Ever wonder why they never change clothes in cartoons? That's why I like the minimalist approach. Huge timesaver.

• How old are you?

          I'm as old as my nose and a little bit older than my teeth.

          I was born on September 13, 1975. You do the math.

• Have you lived here all your life?

          Not yet.

          I'm actually from Chicago. My family settled down here when I was five.

• How long have you been writing?

          Since fourth grade. But I've really only done it professionally since 1996--first as a journalist, and then as a freelance author.

• Does writing pay well?

          My first royalty check for Almasheol was a whopping $4.60. Shh. Don't tell the IRS.

• Where'd you come up with that title?

          Funny story. The original working title of the collection was "Barking Spiders". It's a slang term for farts, and I thought it would make a cool book title. Unfortunately, I discovered it was already taken by a kiddie poetry book.  I was kind of pissed. I wanted an original title.

          I recalled something I'd written four years before for a class at A-State. It was an unfinished poem I'd done in the style of Edmund Spencer’s epic, The Faerie Queene, with a sort of alternate-universe Belch Dimension cast of knights-errrant. In canto ten the traveling band of heroes, led by the hero Goldcrosse, come upon a dead, poisoned town called Almeshoule, where the only person they meet is a deranged sexton in a graveyard (really the Archmage, an evil magician, in disguise). "Alma" in Spanish is "soul", and "Sheol" is a Hebrew word. It means Hell or the grave. So I said...alma-sheol. Soul grave. A perfect, and original title, for a collection of horror stories. So that's the name I wrote down on the book submission form.

• How do you pronounce that word?

          AHL-muh-shol.

• You write a lot about college life. Did you go to college? 

         Hee-yeeeeaaah, I did. I hold degrees from Mississippi County Community College (1993-1995)--now Arkansas Northeastern College--and Arkansas State University (1996-98), in Jonesboro.

• Is there really a Clark, Missouri? Is there really a Clark College?

     Yes and no. There is a town called Clark in Missouri; it's a small community (pop. under 300), about three-fifths of a square mile, between the Middle and South Fork Salt River tributaries. I didn't know this when I first wrote "Eve Bade Adam Eat", where Clark first debuted, in late 1999; I picked the name in honor of half of the famous Lewis and Clark expedition before I discovered there was such a place on a map. Though I've borrowed a lot of real street names to lend authenticity, I've never been up that way, so I can't attest as to the validity of any of what I write. A lot of the geography in my version of Clark is completely made-up--based on both my hometown and on Jonesboro--or has a lot of liberties taken for effect. In other words, don't go looking for any restaurants or pubs that appear in my stories; you won't find them. Clark College is likewise entirely fictitious, but modeled after the geography of and people I knew at A-State.

• Where do you get your ideas?

          I write from life. I spent three years living on campus--the Seminole Twin Towers, room 755, give a shout out, yeah--so not surprisingly I write a lot about dorm living. I managed a store for about two months in the summer of 2003, so I wrote about that in a couple of stories. And I live in the Missouri Bootheel, so I write a lot of Southern settings...and when I want to describe a small town, I use the geography of my own world, all its people and its secret backroads.

          Sometimes it's a television show, or a song on the radio, that gives me an idea. Often times it's a really weird dream. Sometimes it's just something I see while I'm out walking that begs to be written--like, say, this. You never really know what'll set off the imagination.

• Why are your stories so full of blood and gore?

          Hey, I told you, I write from life. You want to see some real blood and gore, just turn on your local nightly news.

• Some of your stories have a lot of misogynistic undertones to them. Do you hate women?

          I love women. I just don't understand them. I find them to be very difficult creatures.

          I have never initiated any of my breakups. It's always been the woman who decides it's over and leaves me. And I guess that comes through in my work. Feminism has come a long way in giving equality to the sexes. Women have well proven they can be just as cruel as men.

• Are you a racist?

          No. I hate all people equally.

• Do you believe in giving gays rights?

          Absolutely. But I don't think a few lefts, jabs, and uppercuts would hurt either.

• Who are your favorite writers? Who are your biggest influences?

          Gellet Burgess and Roger Hargreaves were my two earliest influences. A lot of the early stuff I wrote used Goops and Mr. Men characters side-by-side with my own. These were the halcyon days before I knew the meaning of "plagiarism" and "copyright infringement". I also liked He-Man and all those superhero cartoons they churned out during the eighties. Later, when I was about sixteen, I discovered Stephen King. My first book by him was Pet Sematary . It changed my life. I think it really inspired me to start writing horror. I discovered Bob Dylan's music, too, about the same time; there's a lot of his influence on me there. In college I also came to like the works of Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, Dante Aligheri, D.H. Lawrence, and Kurt Vonnegut, to name a few. A lot of the humor in my work, especially the cartoons, comes from a wide range of sources--The Three Stooges, Bugs Bunny, Woody Woodpecker, Tom and Jerry, The Pink Panther, The Simpsons, John Kricfalusi.

          I mentioned Tex Avery earlier. He once said that in a cartoon anything's possible. I learned he was blind in one eye. I think that's what gave him his unique perspective on life--his lack of depth perception. It's why his cartoons are so weird and exaggerated and out there. I'm horribly nearsighted. Maybe that's why I see the world from such a skewed perspective.

The author, a lifelong glasses-wearer, makes a spectacle of himself. 

• Have you written anything besides stories?

           I've written Internet FanFic under the handle "Dr. Belch"--Animaniacs, Pinky and the Brain, Daria, Freakazoid.

          There are back copies of The Herald featuring my published work--two news stories and seven columns--in bound volumes in the Arkansas Room, Dean B. Ellis Library,  second floor, on campus. At least I presume they are there. I'm banned from campus because of my ongoing dispute with the paper, so I can't check personally. I'm a black mark in Herald history. I wouldn't put it past them to go as far as to conveniently lose about six months' worth of issues to make it look like I never worked there. I am damned with faint praise by a couple of my pieces buried in the Herald archives online:

http://herald.astate.edu/herald/archive/news/1004food.html

http://herald.astate.edu/herald/archive/opinions/1008ross.html

http://herald.astate.edu/herald/archive/opinions/0114nuty.html

...but you'll see none of my best work, the controversial stuff, and no hate mail. I do keep all my old clippings in my private papers, though.

•  You graduated college. That girl left you. Those doors are closed to you. Why don't you forget about them and move on with your life? 

          Would you tell a rape victim to "move on" knowing that the person who did it is out there waiting for another chance to do it again to them or to another victim? I find your thinking very insensitive. The Herald was an important part of my life once, and unless you sustain a massive head trauma that kills a good part of your brain, you don't just magically forget something that major. It was the biggest loss of my life. I've never really recovered. Those people took something beautiful and pure and free, and they perverted it with their hate and their left-wing politics and their lies. That is unforgivable. And I know they'll do it again to some other writer first chance they get, unless someone like me is around to keep the spotlight of truth shining on them. As long as certain evil people are in power at The Herald, I can't in good conscience rest. "Lest we forget" is my motto. And as far as Ashleigh goes, I will have her or I will destroy her--but  I can never forget her.

• Is that really you on all your book jackets?

          You mean do I really look like that? Yes. Sometimes I tie up my beard in a rubber band and I look like Capt. Lou Albano. Other times I trim it into a fork like Ras al-Ghul. As far as my jacket pictures go, I am reminded of the words of Abraham Lincoln to a woman who doubted him: "Madame, if I were two-faced, do you really think I would be wearing this one?"

• I see the word " Melaleuca" on all your books. What is that?

          It's a company out of Idaho Falls that I joined up with a few years ago. They bill themselves as "The Wellness Company" and sell a variety of products for health, beauty, fitness, and house-cleaning. I especially like the diet bars. I've lost about thirty pounds since college, and a lot of it was thanks to those babies. Melaleuca sells online and by direct mail rather than in stores, so you have to sign up as a client--at their website, or through a representative like myself--to fully reap the benefits. Most of their products are more concentrated and better quality that those on the supermarket shelf...often for markedly less. And you can get paid for touting, using, and selling Melaleuca products.   

• Will you be adapting any of your work for the big screen someday?

          Hollywood Writers' Studio, whom I've pitched to, is calling "Dark Hunger" "a surprisingly fun teen-horror novella that has film adaptation potential", and comparing it to Heathers , Mean Girls , and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.      You can read the full "Dark Hunger" treatment aqui.

 They say it has "potential as a horror film for young teen audiences, primarily girls. But it could also become a cult favorite with broad audiences". I only hope they don't butcher it like they do King's stuff.

     My real dream is to turn Belch Dimension into an animated series and do most of the characters' voices myself, but recently I discovered I'm losing my voice. I think it's due to exposure to road-dust and dehydration while out walking over the summer, doing research and taking pictures for my next book. I'm constantly hoarse and can't hit the high registers anymore. I'm hoping it'll pass.

• If they made a movie about your life, and let you pick the songs for it, what would you put the soundtrack?

Definitely "Asshole" by Denis Leary, blasting over the cred roll.

• Who would play you in the movie?

I'd get someone from Saturday Night Live--they sort of owe me one. Say, Adam Sandler, or Jimmy Fallon. Jim Breuer would be good too. He can just reuse his old Goat Boy costume.    

 

• I want to go to A-State and get into the journalism field, maybe work for The Herald. Any advice?

          Yes. Don't. Take up turkey farming instead.

Feel free to submit your questions/comments/gripes to Smoking Cat Productions, PO Box 2, Armorel AR 72310, or belchie@hotmail.com.