Please fave the news article. How? I hear you ask. Look [here].

This issue’s letter is:

L

The deviant that is being featured and interviewed today is:

$wreckling

My name is Trevor, and my nicknames are Spike and Monkey. You're more than welcome to call me by any of the three, and I have also been known to respond to "hey you". I'm currently toward the end of my fourth year of college as an English literature major with a music minor. And...I like monkeys. I'm a bit of a music fiend, as any and all of my closer friends will tell you. I practically force music onto people.

I found deviantART back in 2005 or 2006 when some of my friends in high school joined to show off their art, but I've never been a visual artist, so I kinda brushed it off. However, I was into roleplaying, and so I'd often look at stuff on dA to use as reference material for my characters. By 2007 I'd gotten tired of not being able to find the stuff I had been using, so I finally caved and made an account. From there I ended up posting some of my writing, which led me to the lit community, which led me pretty much everywhere else I've been since!

This is actually my second username, and this username is based on two aspects of things that I've liked for a very long time. Obviously I like monkeys, but the lightning bit was something that I thought about including because I've always found lightning to be fascinating, as well as the fact that two of my favorite self-created characters have had some form of lightning to them. So when I made this username I was trying to consider that, and, for as silly as it sounds, I was trying to come up with something that I felt would be able to represent me over the course of a long period of time. I'm not the sort to stick to usernames from one site to the next, which has its advantages and disadvantages, but my previous username was very time-based, and so after a while it became a pain in the neck for me. So with lightningmonkey I'm trying to be a bit more true to myself as a person overall, not just true to myself in a moment.

The community is by and large my favorite aspect of dA. I have made many long term friends here, some of whom I honestly can't imagine my life without at this stage in time, and that is mostly because the community here is by and large very welcoming. When I first found my way to the greater community of the site, I was pretty timid about taking part, and so I lurked for the first few months before working into my comfort zone some, and this was aided by people constantly being welcoming and interesting, and if you've got the chance to just sit in chat for a while one of these days, I really recommend it. You'll see all sorts of things go on, and you'll see some great interaction if you find the right groups of people.

The RSS feed, but that's mostly just because I never use RSS feeds of any sort. There are some features I don't use regularly, but that's a matter of medium and preference. I don't use muro much because I'm not a visual artist, but provided you have a computer that runs it well, it does seem like a lot of fun to do. I'm not a big forum person either, so I don't get much usage out of that, but every now and then I'll wander into the forums and have some fun. I love the random deviant and random deviation buttons, I've found many a good artist that way, though I haven't had a whole lot of time to just sit and browse in recent past, so I don't use those much anymore.

I never really showed much interest in visual art when I was younger. I'm more of a visual art appreciator than anything else, in that regard. But to be honest, I think I've always been drawn to the English language as a medium, so writing has been pretty beneficial in that regard. I picked up reading and writing pretty quickly in comparison to most kids my age. My first spoken word, at 8 months, for example, was Albert. Not mama or papa, but Albert. I've been reading since I was 3 or 4, and for a large part of my life I've been buried in books. My elementary school's library ran out of books for me to read by my fifth year there. In junior high we had this friendly reading competition in the school library where you could take tests on the books you read to check your comprehension and keep a tally of how many words you read. By the end of my second year there I had racked up nearly 5 million words. So I can't say there was ever really a moment where I first became interested in writing as an art form, as it's something that I kind of grew up with.

.Lined with weeds, this ground
will lead me to Tripoli, or else Tobago
or the chair on the back porch
where grandma's been resting for weeks
and weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks and
the gramophone is on and broken, catch
that on your way to the yard. Try
not to wake her, either, and don't slip
on an apple once you're outside, that's how
she broke her hip in the first place.

The garden reminds me of you when the tree
was small and sprouting like an awkward teen
and you'd take apples from the older tree,
those small and withered ones, and string
them from the new branches until it grew
slant and sideways. You were those appl We inhale ashes, the skyWe inhale ashes, the sky

sinking around us as the earth drinks
deep from clouds. Eve is afraid
the sun has been eaten, and that
we will be eaten by the falling sky
so we retreat to caves as cumulus
teeth clench slowly, saliva dripping
into our view one drop at a time.
She and I watch the clear spit
fall faster, more beads breaking
on ground and leaves. Between each
drop is a small gap in time, pauses
followed by moments and pauses
and moments and pauses and
moments we think of escape
before another drop, another
moment. We are too afraid
to leave. "He is crying."
The words come from her, weighted
by cold and mist. It is a

That's a tricky question for me. I take a little bit of inspiration from pretty much everything I read, be it things I want to try or things I want to avoid doing, haha. Most recently, I've found Virginia Woolf's style of writing to be quite lively and personal in its experimentation, so I've been taking a lot from her works as of late. Isabel Allende is another example I love to cite in regard to writing I've sort of adapted into my own style. This is in terms of prose, anyway. My poetry is all across the board in terms of inspiration. Here on dA I am always happy to see things from `Amberlouie, `zebrazebrazebra, `Memnalar, `nycterent, `raspil, ~root-kite, `AbCat, and `CrumpetsHarvey pop into my inbox. There are many more than that, but these are the only examples coming to mind at this particular moment, I'm afraid. ^^"

The one big thing that bothers me around here is when people get up in arms over haiku being featured as DDs. I think that the mindset is that because they are small, they aren't worth having been featured and that something better should have been featured in its pace. This irritates me to no end, particularly when the haiku is really brilliant and thought-provoking. Haiku was an art form long before the internet, and I hope that someday or other people will remember that before commenting about how it doesn't deserve a DD.

As with other art forms, it's a matter of quality and preference. I have no problem with stamps being featured as DDs, provided that there's a good reason for it to be featured. (And I am perfectly content with "It's a funny stamp" being the reason for the feature, provided the stamp is still visually appealing. ) Things like ~Seiorai's Home, for example, are well worth the feature. Many stamps aren't simply text slapped onto a stamp background, but are rather progressive and detailed works on their own, and when serious time and effort goes into making a stamp impressive, you bet I think it deserves to be featured.

To Great Grandma1.
morning coffee
as she sleeps
I cry

2.
pizza and cake
and hospice calling
happy birthday

3.
as she passes
her light fades
full moon DismasStaring down on Golgotha
you saw fire, a hundred eyes
parchment blind and taunting--
you knew, clever thief, what came
after sunset, metal fingers
pierced through your hands
and tacked to an alder tree--

and you spoke, turned your head
left, toward the light, and shone
dagger teeth at the sun,
head in flames, skin dripping
from bones to the crowd's feet.

He knew you were beyond robber
as you drained from iron
pores, staining cross trunk
and dirt with blood. "Due
reward," you said, good thief.

He forgave you. At that moment
you saw the eyes of those
between life and Paradise, guidepost
for prisoners to come. The RaptureThe sky was on fire. A trail of clothes weaved a path to the safe house, a garter belt here, some pantaloons there, parlance for the ones who knew to flee. And he knew to flee. Some distance away from the path were birds and dogs, dead and dying as he ran toward the one dilapidated building left standing. The sky raged lightning and ash on him until he grabbed at the door and wrenched it open. For a moment, nothing but the sky.

He slammed it shut and closed his eyes. Nowhere to go. It was a brick sarcophagus.

I listen to a whole lot of everything. More common than anything else, you'll find me listening to female vocalists, though. I don't particularly know why, but I find the female voice more appealing to the ears than the male voice. There are some exceptions to this, though! For example, I love Interpol, The Whitest Boy Alive, Pouya Mahmoodi, GRANRODEO and Yusuke Kamiji. But for the most part, I really do tend to choose female voices. My long-standing favorite artist is Imogen Heap, and a few other of my personal favorites would be Kaki King, Namie Amuro, and Florence + the Machine. I do also want to make mention of Nujabes, who unfortunately passed away last year. His music is absolutely brilliant, though, and I really do recommend looking into his stuff if you're into chillout music.

If you ever wanna talk music, just leave me a comment, I love music talk! Also, if you use last.fm, add me!

I'm admittedly not a huge movie person. Part of that trouble is that I'm constantly aware of what the film's music is meant to do to the mind as the video is played, so I'm almost always sort of analyzing that when I sit and watch a movie, haha. I do still enjoy them a lot, though, particularly when the film score is well done. Some of my favorite movies ever would be Akira (though you really do need to watch it in Japanese with subtitles, the voices are much better), Drop Dead Gorgeous, Little Miss Sunshine, and Dogma.

The importance of the number 3 is that it ultimately is what keeps the human being in balance. The three significant parts of a human are mind, body, and spirit, and if any one is imbalanced, then all three are affected accordingly. Healthy mind will lead to a healthy spirit, and a healthy mind and spirit often lead to the want for a healthy body anyway, so they do tend to go hand in hand, but when one goes off balance the other two tend to go with it, which is troublesome. Totally unrelated, I really like the word troublesome.

Yes, I'd like to throw a at !GwenavhyeurAnastasia, with ^Thiefoworld and ^Athos-of-Light, and at the rest of you.

The day has swallowed uslibation bearers drunk
on wind and sunlight and
this darkness unsettles
as mirror light beguiles
in the sky as ants and
one false sun burns cold
in our eyes and blinds
the sky to tears of
blurred sand white

and we are dizzy with
grief for our loss of
the morning, star in
ocean depth and air
reflected in our chests
hollow like this sky
this unfamiliar

and we might sleep to
avoid our own fault
this sky without close
light without day with
outside and this touch

and this strange sensation
discomfort lack of want

and should that sky
return we shall embrace
lovers under an impossible
sign of mercy