Derek Kannemeyer
petal ridge
The Home of Derek Kannemeyer
Projects
There are invitations to collaborate elsewhere on this website, or just to play together:
1) At the PLAYWRITING tab, there's a piece which was written to be danced as well as acted.
2) Under LIGHT VERSE, there's an A-Z of unfinished LIMERICKS, and an offer to post readers' finished versions.
3) Inspired to try some animal quatrains? Check out the BESTIARIES (also filed under LIGHT VERSE) or the "Flap" quatrains (at PIC LIT) and give it a shot. No promises, but if you send me your best and I like them enough, I'll post them (crediting you) in the 2nd Bestiary folder.
4) And, yes, if you're an illustrator, I would at some point like to update "An Alphabestiary."
5) Then there's the PUZZLE PALACE. I've made up a couple of hundred word square puzzles. (The goal is to post five new ones a week.) Your task is to solve them!
Not all the projects in the PROJECTS folder will contain offers to collaborate, but some will.
(I will post more projects, eventually, than these initial three, and I'll also bulk up these three.)
1. Barracks Gap
Back in the aughts, the Barracks Gap project was my attempt at world-building. I wrote a lot of bits and pieces for it, in several different genres, and some of them have even seen the light of day. Most haven't, yet. It's here as I ponder how best to get back to it.
What is in this folder, at present, are just the world-building notes. No poems or stories yet.
What I'm most likely to add first are tales from the Cartoon Zone.
2.Song Lyrics
I don't have many huge regrets, but I do regret never having learned an instrument I could sing to. And not knowing how to write down the music for the tunes I've come up with.
I'll throw up some song lyrics. Browse them! An asterisk* indicates that its tune is set.
Any musicians looking for lyric writers? Or for songs?
3. Stalking Crawlrollies
This is the real passion project here. An epic Space Opera Nonsense Poem, begun back in the 90s, in anticipation of the centenary of Lewis Carroll's birth. The stanza form is from his "The Hunting of the Snark." But by epic, I mean that this poem is book-length. With lots of ancillary materials to accompany the main text.
I'm posting a brief synopsis, plus the entire text for Part One (it's in four parts), plus an outline, chaplet by chaplet, of the rest.
If this book had an illustrator, I'd have published it. I'd be delighted if a serious illustrator told me they were interested. But I might be even happier to crowdsource the illustrations. Want to do a page or two, and have me use it in a tradebook? Check out Part One!
I'm expecting to post Part Two here, at some point, but not the rest of the epic.. However, if you want to read the whole thing, or to consider collaborating on it, PING ME!
AN EXCERPT FROM CHAPTER VI of "STALKING CRAWLROLLIES"
The speaker is Doc, the sole survivor of the first mission sent up to the moon to confront and contain the Crawlrollie threat. She must now prepare Brown Unit to launch a second attack.
"Except—I survived. And I've kept coming back.
To learn who they are. How they think…
Crawlrollies, you see, are potential-style beasts.
They’re hatched by spontaneous collision.
Between (for example) a carload of priests
And the sneeze of a drunken Parisian.
But just what will summon them’s hard to predict.
We’ve known them ignore a stampede,
And then go bvok wild when a pinkie was pricked
And the nick barely too slight to bleed.
But what’s always true is that when they do show,
That instant, in stunning detail,
Imprints on our sensors a permanent glow
That coagulates as they exhale.
Wherever they go, they exude where they’ve been,
With aural and visual vigor.
The odorous, tactile effects—also keen—
Come in gusts, and at times are still bigger.
To them, death’s a memory, small of surprise.
Farragoes of former and future
Are their constant music; the now’s but a guise.
To us, they’re a wound—or its suture.
Those whom they’ve bruised are jarred out of time.
Quite higglepodgewise. To age slowly,
Or dream we’re seed pods in primordial slime
(A texture much like ravioli),
Or to hover near thirty, flighty and flirty,
Forever and ever, amen.
Or we’ve three year old toes and a middle-aged nose,
And a chin that’s a hundred and ten.
For my part, I chronoregressed a few years—
But I’m cured now, so that’s picayune.
You five, however, are special, my dears.
You’re cellular freaks. You’re immune."