lAURENCE CLARK, aka, Mrhappyink

 A technical writer by day, but at night, with the sounds of neighbors barking, dogs whining, caterwauling cats... caterwauling, airplanes at full throttle take-off, I'm a guy spinning yarns on a laptop on the back porch with his dog barking at everybody to shut the heck up!

As a child, and young man, I was obsessed with pulp-fiction stories featuring Doc Savage, The Shadow, Philip Marlow, Conan the Barbarian, The Call of Cthulhu, and equally so with novels by J.R.R. Tolkein, Robert A. Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, Ben Bova, Ray Bradbury, and so many others, and by the time I’d graduated high school, I’d read several thousand novels. It was from this obsession that I dabbled in writing over the years, with so many unfinished and unsent manuscripts collecting virtual dust. It took that truly eye-opening event of me turning 50 to finally ask, “Laurence Clark, what the hell are you waiting for?” (I sometimes address myself in the third person, author habit ;-). Since then, I’ve written two anthologies, and 2 novels, with ideas for 4 book series and hundreds of short stories.

When I first started on the internet (not going to say how long ago ;-), Laurence Clark quickly became MrHappyInk as my online avatar (back when everyone had one), and through it, I could express my innate sense of humor, a combination of my inner 12-year-old who thinks farts are funny, and what is often called, gallows humor (probably from my time in the Corps, but that’s another story ;-).

To describe it, my writing persona, we need a bit of Jungian psychology, namely Carl Jung's description of the trickster:

"An aspect of the shadow archetype, at least in its negative traits…. The trickster, obviously, is someone who deceives, often playfully, sometimes painfully. A very sexual archetype, it has the ability to change genders and play havoc with the hyper-rational personality and community. Examples of the trickster are Satan, Loki, and, in Native American mythology, the coyote, the raven, and the Winnebago trickster. The vampire is, in fact, a kind of trickster, able to change into many shapes, among them bats, wolves, spiders, butterflies, fog, or even a bit of straw."

So, basically, my writing persona, my avatar, my muse, although seemingly artificial, is a complex narcissist who revels in attention.

The design of the avatar combines MrHappyInk (and his familiar, Rrom, a sentient macaw from 51GT) with Kokopelli, a kachina figure commonly found on petroglyphs and pottery throughout the southwest (Kokopelli: KOKO, for wood, and, Pilau, for hump). Legend has it that the original Kokopelli was a trader from South America who announced his arrival by playing his flute. The hump on his back was his bag of trade items, and the feathers on his head were macaw feathers. As the story goes, this trader eventually became a kachina who represented luck and fertility.

The symbol beneath MrHappyInk combines a DNA strand with the Christian fish, the Darwin fish, and a UFO to illustrate my own particular perspective on cosmology and existence.

My thoughts on this are primarily influenced by my dad (who started me down this path of asking “Why?”), Carl Sagan (Contact, & The Demon Haunted World), Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologiae), Eric Beaubien (Ex Nihilo: The Universe Derived from Nothing, UFO Interstellar Propulsion Mechanisms, and Megalithic Engineering: Within the Capabilities of Ancient Civilizations), Bernard Haishe (The God Theory), and more recently, Christopher Langan (CTMU). This list is by no means exhaustive, but if it were more comprehensive, then I'd get bored, you'd get bored, and there'd be the whole listless staring and drooling on the keyboard thing....