The killer awoke before dawn. He put his boots on. He took a face from the ancient gallery and he walked on down the hall …

Strange things happen inside a writer’s brain. It’s like we look at the world, and what we see and experience gets input into our brain, just like what happens with any other human being. But with a writer brain, these things  get chopped up, spun about, mixed in with some other stuff, and spit out into an entirely different form. It’s like there is a Frankenstein process that goes on in there. Sometimes the final output is more recognizable than others. Sometimes it’s morphed so much that even I don’t recognize the source, only to revisit something later and find it glaringly obvious. I can’t explain this. For instance, I have the flu, so I spent yesterday on the couch, looking at my art collection and watching Californication and the Borgias. And I woke with this image of a pack of feral postapocalyptic steampunky children with mohawks in my head. No idea where the correlation is there, or if there is any at all. But it seems I have some children to write down now.

Meh, who know? Maybe we’re all just bloody mad. I wouldn’t be terribly surprised -or terribly bothered- if some study came out that showed creativity is some sort of mental disorder.

Lyric snippet: If you don’t recognize this, we need to talk. JM. The End.

Photo: No clue. Another Pinterest discovery. The pin itself said ‘Surrealist Circus by Cape Cod’ but my attempts to Google this led me right back to Pinterest, and to the realization that there are apparently a LOT of clowns for hire in the Cape Cod area. If this is your ancient gallery of faces,  I really hope your day job is not being a clown. Clowns are scary enough. A clown that makes art like this would be, like, the scariest thing ever.