Tuesday, May 22, 2012

My Son Died

My 18 month-old son died this Monday, May 21, 2012.

He suffered a seizure that sent him into cardiac arrest. The cause is unknown. He was resuscitated after thirty minutes, but suffered catastrophic brain damage, which led to complete brain death. This began Friday. He was pronounced brain dead on Monday.

He was otherwise healthy and beautiful, and was at the park playing up until he crawled into his mother's lap and seemed to want to sleep. His head lulled more than it should, and that was that.

Here is a picture of him at our wedding in March. He is the beautiful one.

We signed him as an organ donor. Since he suffered asphyxiation, his organs are pristine. Furthermore, they are going into children.

His heart as I type is being sewn into a 2 month-old baby girl, his liver into a toddler, and both his kidneys into a 69 year-old woman. It is fair to say that my son today saved the lives of three people.

He is my hero.

Dastan Jerome Wheeler Trant
November 11, 2010 - May 21, 2012

 - Eric

Tuesday, May 15, 2012

Reviews: Some random thoughts

Reviews are a part of human existence. We care what other people think about us.

We are susceptible to the opinion of others, and that makes us uniquely human. So many things make us unique -- we are hairless, fragile, weak, uncoordinated mammals, and have only a rudimentary sense of smell that leaves us the laughing stock of all our mammalian brothers and sisters -- but more importantly, we excel in our ability to criticize, compliment, judge, and study everything around us.

We revel in our ability to analyze. There is the crux of it. We call it reason, and we flex our mental muscles against the strength of the lion, and inflate our genius until it crushes the bluest whale beneath its weight.

We are human! We are stronger, larger, and more brilliant than any living force on this or any planet in the galaxy! We are intelligent life, and none may be found elsewhere in all the universe! We are thus because we think!

I think. Therefore, I am.

We say this as a virus eats us, and if it could laugh, it would, but its mouth is far too full to smile.

Part of our brilliance is the ability to review not only God's creations, but our own. Such a pretty cloud, we say, when we feel like complimenting God. Or, if we are in a sour mood, we curse and say, Sky looks ugly today. Better not rain on the most intelligent and beautiful of all God's creations.

A dog never thinks that. A dog simply looks up, says, How 'bout that, and goes back to sniffing the world as we will never smell.

Which brings me, somehow, to the book review. Extrapolate this to any sort of review, but I will limit this to a book review.

Specifically, I will ponderize the negative book review, and the patronizingly positive review.

I will start first with the second, the patronizingly positive review, or PPR, as I shall now refer to it.

The PPR is this: it is flattery.

Not that we all don't enjoy flattery. You look fine in that dress, and size doesn't matter.

We all need that sort of PPR from time to time, as writers, as workers, as lovers and parents and children. Sometimes all it takes is someone saying, Good job, even when you know it wasn't. Sometimes, that little bump in your spirit will translate into a more beautifuller work down the road.

Good job becomes not a flattering compliment, but a goal.

Now you want to live up to that expectation. So you try harder.

There are negative points to the PPR, but I will not indulge in a negative review here.

Which brings me to the negative review.

Negative reviews make no sense to me. They are jib-jab thoughts aimed at the jaw of someone who did something they could not. Rarely do we see experts throw out negative criticism of their peers.

Why is it that giants in the field of writing do not crush new and inferior writers? It is simple, really. It is because they see no value in the negative criticism.

Superstars in any field get to top by ignoring the negative critics, laughing at the hecklers, and showing up when everyone says they should quit and go home.

I do not mean that constructive criticism is ignored. I mean that negative criticism is ignored. It has no value.

It also makes no sense, in a logical, Vulcan-Spock sort of way. Why would a person read a book they hate, and then feel compelled to write about it?

Books I hate get tossed half-read, if that much, often with a partial skim to make sure that yep, that book should have a white stripe down its back, as a warning to others.

True, I hate that book, but the next reader may think it's the best thing since the Missionary Position.

Anyway, there are my random thoughts on the book review, and reviews in general. I've been getting reviews on my current book, Out of the Great Black Nothing, and am looking forward to visiting Donna Hole next week for a formal review from one of my peers. I haven't sought out reviews, mainly because I am apoplectically shy about discussing my book.

My friends and co-workers are always asking me about my books and what I write. I answer quietly, quickly, and deflect the subject away from me, a technique I now shall demonstrate...

Any random thoughts on reviews, critics, or discussing your work? Do you believe as I do that negative reviews are inherently illogical?


- Eric



Eric W. Trant is a published author of several short stories and the novel Out of the Great Black Nothing. He is currently represented by Debrin Case at Open Heart Publishing. See more of Eric's work here: Publications






Thursday, May 3, 2012

10,000 Years from Now

They'll look back on us and say our greatest contribution was toilet paper.

They'll call us The Age of Oil, and say the internal combustion engine was the most destructive invention of all time.

They'll wonder why we went to the moon, came home, and never returned.

They'll marvel at our obsession with gunpowder.

They'll ridicule our notion of credit, and call us indentured servants to the financial engine.

Baffled, they will wrinkle their noses at our befuddlement of atomic energy, and call us monkey-minded scientists who had no clue what they had harnessed.

They'll call us disillusioned, mislead sheep, hypnotized by a media-entertainment engine that intruded every second of our waking lives.

They'll laugh at us. They will laugh and laugh, and when they finish laughing, they will pity us no less than we laugh and pity the caveman for his simple, hard-lived life, the life of an idiot who knew no better.

They will say we got what we deserved.

They'll read this post and say, That man Eric-something was a genius. Pity nobody remembered him.


- Eric


What else will they say? Positive thoughts, maybe, such as They were really tall back then, before the Great Extinction?



Eric W. Trant is a published author of several short stories and the novel Out of the Great Black Nothing. He is currently represented by Debrin Case at Open Heart Publishing. See more of Eric's work here: Publications

Wednesday, May 2, 2012

Zombie Sex and Hot Pistols

I took my son on his first pistol-shoot yesterday, at the local public gun range. He selected the zombie target, of course, and after he blew off the zombie's head, he then disabled the zombie's ability to reproduce.

And as he pulverized the zombie's man-parts, it got me to thinking.

My first thought was this: Do zombies have sex? Would a zombie couple have baby zombie children?

Like a good writer, I let my mind wander down that path, and another thought popped up: Would a zombie guy call it a stiffie? Get it? He's a stiff.

Does that make them necrophiliacs? Would a zombie nymphomaniac be a necronympho?

Still wandering and wondering along this forbidden path, methinks: I wonder what sounds the necronympho would make. Would she moan?

Of course she would moan. She would scream like crazy, wake the dead and all that fuss. She's a zombie. That's all she does.

So do zombie guys think zombie girls are always having orgasms, owing to the constant moaning?

Still farther I wandered and further I wondered, and methinks to meself: So if a zombie guy goes down on a zombie girl, does he eat her out? Literally?

Then I thought about what a zombie girl would do to the guy, and that brought me straight back to the reality of the gun range, and a screaming, bloody, undead target with a dozen 9mm holes in what used to be his genitalia.

And somehow zombie sex and hot pistols seem so logical a topic to ponderize together.


- Eric