Hello and good morning. It’s Thursday again, as I suspect you will already know, so I’m writing my old-style weekly blog post again.
Of course, I’ve been writing little, brief snippet reports on a daily basis to keep you all updated about how my writing is going. Or, like yesterday, I wrote one to let you know that I didn’t write fiction at all because I got almost no sleep, which is bad even for me. I just felt awful.
I left work as soon as I was finished getting things set for the payroll and sent out to the company, and I went back to the house and took two diphenhydramine (that’s the generic of Benadryl®). It did help me sleep a little in the afternoon, and then I woke up and got some food and relaxed a bit before taking another diphenhydramine before lying down for bed. I don’t know how truly effective my sleep was; the general consensus is that sedated sleep is not a good substitute for natural sleep, but it almost has to be better than essentially no sleep.
I had some odd dreams, or at least I had one odd dream, during the afternoon or night. This is unusual mainly in that I almost never have any dreams that I remember nowadays. This one was some manner of nature documentary about ocean-going predators, particularly “killer whales” AKA “Orcas” and—this is a weird part—large, oceangoing crocodiles.
As far as I know, there are no deep-water crocodiles, but the ones featured in my dream seemed more like mosasaurs, anyway. They were big and vicious, and there was “footage” of them attacking various large creatures in the ocean, but I couldn’t ever recognize the prey of either predator. Also, there was a voiceover, but I think it was my voice. Odd.
There was never really any scariness to it, because there were never really any human victims, but it’s a peculiar subject about which to have a dream. If MLK ever had a dream like that, I don’t think he made a speech about it.
It’s curious enough for me to have a dream that I recall, nowadays, even if the dream is boringly strange (though not, I think, strangely boring). I hope it means that I got a decent amount of sleep. Certainly, I feel better this morning than I did yesterday morning, but that’s a very low bar to clear—it’s certainly too low to limbo. It’s a bit like being more handsome than one of the zombies in Dawn of the Dead (although I’m not sure the latter is literally true of me).
I’ve not written on Extra Body since Tuesday, but that’s okay. I made pretty good progress on it the previous two writing days. As I’ve said, it’s basically reached novella length, more or less, as do many, if not most, of my “short stories”.
I don’t seem to have a knack for writing truly short tales.
I think my shortest story is Solitaire, which I wrote in one night, and which is also probably by far the darkest story I’ve ever written. Really, if any of my works should come with some manner of “trigger warning”, that’s the one. I was in a good mood when I wrote it—which I did in a spiral-bound, half-sized notebook I had with me. It was just an idea that popped into my head because, at the time, I tended to play a lot of solitaire (with real cards). I’m sure I’ve written about all this here before, so I’ll try not to rehash it.
I probably would tend to write shorter stories if I used such notebooks nowadays, but the base of my thumbs really gets sore when I try to write too much by hand. Anyway, to be fair to me, I wrote Paradox City by hand, after writing both Mark Red and The Chasm and the Collision by hand, and none of those stories are short. The latter two are novels, and the “short story”, Paradox City, was about sixty pages long, hand-written, if memory serves. It would arguably count as a novella itself, as would Hole for a Heart, I For One Welcome Our New Computer Overlords, and certainly In the Shade.
I was thinking maybe I should publish this latest story not just in Kindle format—which is what I tend to do with my “short” stories—but also in a small paperback form. I’m not sure if the price would make it prohibitive, but there’s no real shame in paperback novellas. Of Mice and Men (about 30,000 words long) was a paperback in the form in which I read it originally (twice in one day) when I was in junior high or my first year of high school.
Also, each “chapter” of The Green Mile was published as an individual paperback when it first came out, and those were shorter than most of my short stories. Mind you, that was Stephen King, so there was a ready market for the books, and there were no e-books back then, let alone for Steinbeck, so I may be giving poorly chosen examples.
I think I’ve said that I have the notion of writing HELIOS as a sort of serial light novel, in the style of Japanese light novels. Each volume would be longer than one of my short stories, of course, but I can try to keep them from getting prohibitively long.
Then again, if I’m going to write a series, I’m committing myself to a fairly long time writing the same story. On the other hand, Mark Red is also supposed to be a series—there are at least two sequels to it in my head. But no one has expressed any real interest in those, nor really in the first story, to be honest, so I haven’t gotten back to it.
I would love to get some feedback from any of the readers of my blog, especially if they have read any of my books, about what they would do if they were me (other than try to reverse whatever curse had made such a thing happen to them). Please, leave a comment below.
In other news, I’ve continued to work on the calculus course on Brilliant dot org, which is perhaps not the ideal way to review calculus, but isn’t at all bad, either, now that I’m doing it on my smartphone. I’m thinking of doing some other courses—maybe some reviews of basic physics, and of course, eventually, linear algebra and differential geometry to prepare me for greater study of GR—because taking more than one course at a time is the way one does things in university.
I haven’t really been reading any other new books for the moment. As before, I’ve had a hard time getting into any new fiction, which is depressing, but it’s a fact to which I’ve become resigned for the time being. Maybe if I weren’t working full time, I would find that easier; I don’t know.
If anyone out there wants to buy the movie options for any of my stories, and by doing so give me enough money on which to live for a while so I can write “full time” and so on, I’m open to the possibility! Ha ha.
Anyway, I think that’s enough for now. I don’t want to go on and on and on and on like I did last Thursday. I think that post was too daunting for most readers to bother trying to work all the way through it. So I’ll leave this post for now, with just a “Happy First Thursday of May of 2024”. Please try to take good care of yourselves and of those you love. And try to be charitable, even toward those with whom you have profound disagreements. Most arguments are ephemeral, and they are almost all about ephemeral things (even if they feel deeply important in the moment), so it’s foolish to sour your days and the culture at large with hostility and vindictiveness.
Maybe I really did get a decent amount of sleep!
TTFN