Mel C Thompson
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A crippled, anxiety-ridden, precocious, apostate youth minister leaves his ministry to become a motel desk clerk in a sometimes tacky / sometimes upscale tourist motel in suburban Orange County. He lumbers around in a full-length walking cast as his fragile leg-bones are resistant to healing. His unkempt red hair is down to his shoulders and his wispy, unsightly beard make him look like outcast hippie. In fact, he is a nerdy Philosophy student at...
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Like countless millions before me, I was quite fascinated with Eliot's "Wasteland," and his "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," and I sought to do a kind of tribute and parody of it. While I barely even quote more than a few words, here and there, from the poem, and while almost all of the work is actually "original," it seeks to bring the reader forward in history so that one could imagine Eliot traipsing the streets of Northern California after the...
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Many of these stories are perfect reading for Halloween, but they are also good genre fits for goth, punk, or those who like the more gentle side of horror. The work contains an assortment of vampire bats, angry pumpkins, insatiable zombies and a good sampling of UFOs. These short stories cover the range of paranormal and Halloween-oriented lore. There are mailbox ghosts, unemployed movie monsters and deranged poets taunting the world.The stories...
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Our protagonist hears from his friends in Costa Mesa that a kind of personality-cult leader is currently trendy among the higher social circles of Orange County. Because he views himself, despite his age, as an aspiring socialite, he insists on meeting the man who goes by the name Solomon Wedge. (The name is a hybrid of the Solomon of the Hebrew scriptures and the dangerous surfing spot off of Newport Beach called The Wedge.) Our socialite is not...
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Good luck meets an otherwise-doomed poet who was all but certain to perish on the streets of San Francisco. By sheer luck, he falls in with a group of poets whose psychological and physical illnesses almost mirror his own. For the first time in his life, he feels his entire person is understood. He begins to tell his life story and the stories of others he has known in short prose works which also double as poems. His works slowly begin to get published...
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In this fantasy, "the gods" allow the former Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev to go back in time to fulfill a wish that had been denied him when visiting the U.S. The original plot was the brainchild of a history buff who said to me on the phone one night that it had always bothered him that when Khrushchev visited the United States, it was determined that having him go to a place a complex as Disneyland was too great a security risk. He wished someone...
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Two desperate temp agency workers struggle to make rent in San Francisco. Their economic desperation drives them to specialize in working with clients who need short-term white-collar criminals to carry out their schemes. The perks are substantial, but the risks are high. Not only are the criminals being followed by federal agents, but the federal agents are being followed too.
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These love poems were inspired by my admiration for three people who had been, in the early 1990s, regular performers in the Café Babar poetry scene, but have since passed on. The book was inspired by my profound sense of loss when the news came in from Michigan that Dominique Lowell had passed on in June of this year, 2017, just four years after Joie Cook. Eli Coppola had left us back in the year 2,000. Each of these women had something that was...
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Instead of just publishing another volume of poetry, the author decides to tell the stories of the illustrious publishing personalties he met with and tell how they affected his literary life. In between the stories and descriptions of these publishers are assorted poems by the author which found their way into the publications these editors oversaw. It is more the story of a movement than a poetry book, although the author hopes that the poems themselves...
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Joseph Smith The Twenty-Fifth, a new Mormon prophet, emerges in Salt Lake City, much to the displeasure of the official LDS church. He brings with him a cadre of Apostles, not the least of whom are ones named Brigham and Jason. "JS25," as he is called by those close to him, like his predecessor from the 1800s, engages in polygamy, but with a twist. He doesn't have sex with his wives. The tale also features two men having problems with their dull,...
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A lust-crazed religious teenager is slowly driven to distraction by the hot babes that inhabit his evangelical, Texas youth group. Unable, due to his strict adherence to chastity, to have sex, and unable, due to his lack of financial status, to attract the top-shelf women he craves, he is forced into being the b-actor of romance awaiting a lucky break in the lottery of love. There is more than one surprise as the wheel of fate turns.The book was intended...
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Saint John, a bipolar saint with multiple-personality disorder, and his sex-crazed pagan priestess, Helen, have quite a romance going on. Athenodorus, a perennially-single island-resort owner, finds himself hosting Helen and John as their erotic, religious and accidentally-political adventures ensue. The island's doctor, Pantheonus, a physician with a deep interest in psychology, tries to care for and analyze John, the poet, prophet and madman, as...
13) The Story of "e"
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An angry, solitary Incel bangs out angry articles from his mancave apartment in Los Angeles. He rents an apartment from a gun-toting, old-world Russian. Roger, a sexist-but-progressive publisher employs Victoria-Elizabeth, a feminist journalist, to cover, among other things, the men's rights movement. Roger orders his reporter to give a neutral account of the manosphere, and she gets the inside scoop by bribing Incel with expensive wining and dining....
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Guilty Sinner has a problem with his homeland. His homeland could have been some version of Orange County in the 1970s or the Bay Area of today. It's an inhospitable place, an emotional desert, where only economic victory is rewarded and where no excuses are allowed for failure. It's a humorless, grim world. Guilty Sinner must flee and become a refugee, scouring the world for some place to lay his head, some haven from the economic concentration camp...
15) Winnipeg
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An American poet and tourist takes a nine-day trip to Winnipeg, Manitoba. Fueled by coffee, beer and sugar-laden desserts, he obsessively crisscrosses this mini-mega-city by bus; and, as he goes to every district he can cover in the time allotted, he takes copious photographs of everything he sees, but not for the purpose of publishing photographs, but rather poems. After he arrives home, he sorts through thousands of photographs and winnows the collection...
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Wage Slave is born deformed to a family of heavy drinkers. His mother is a paranoid schizophrenic. He is mentally ill and disabled, but he is can't afford good enough doctors to make his disability case, so he lives in the netherworld between unemployment and disability. The pressure of not being strong enough to lift himself out of poverty, and being labeled a malingerer unworthy of aid, finally drives him over the edge. When psychiatric treatment,...
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Sensei, a man accused of laziness, malingering, sexual misconduct, alcoholism, blasphemy and depression, wanders in a netherworld somewhere between modern Los Angeles and ancient Kyoto. He appears under many names and in many guises, and often belongs to many religions or no religion. He also seems indifferent to politics, long-term employment and monogamous relationships, leaving him open to the charges of agnosticism, amorality and nihilism. He...
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A naked Jain holy man is brought back from the ancient past, and a half-discredited Los Angeles Zen monk is transported from the future. They arrive at Joshua's military encampment just before he is to cross the Jordan and conquer the Holy Land. However, since no such destructive invasion, such as the one described in the Book of Joshua, ever historically happened, our myth has it that Joshua is lovingly foiled at every turn, but still ends up quite...
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You are always in some combination of medieval Japan or modern Los Angeles. At every turn there is someone leading you either to the highest transcendent state or into inexcusable vice, or some combination of both. In the final analysis, ancient Kyoto and current Santa Monica are one reality. Inebriation and iron-willed discipline are of one substance. Story after story carries you forward into questions that haven't changed for millennia and answers...